Page 58 of The Secret Castle in the Highlands

He did take off like the other figure had the other day. I frowned. ‘I think it could’ve been.’

‘Why was he after my car?’ he muttered, striding towards the gleaming vehicle.

‘I don’t think he was,’ I said as I got closer to it. ‘Look.’

On the windscreen, perched behind one of the wiper blades, was a slim, brown envelope. ‘It appears he was leaving this.’

Mason eased the blank envelope from his car windscreen. ‘Hope it’s not a parking ticket,’ he joked, sliding out a sheet of folded white paper.

He opened it and I stepped up behind him to read. It was in a simple typeface.

Her heart discovered that she would ultimately love two men.

We reread the cryptic sentence.

‘Is that it?’ puzzled Mason, turning over the page. ‘There’s nothing else?’ He waggled the sheet of paper in the air. ‘Goodness knows what this is supposed to mean, but it’s my job to find out.’

‘Our job,’ I corrected.

Mason’s penetrating stare was back. ‘Yes. Of course.’

I didn’t know what this was. Maybe I’d almost kissed him because of these revelations about passion-filled family vendettas? Perhaps he’d been tempted to kiss me just for the thrill of it? I mean, it was a compelling series of events that had thrown us together.

Yes, I concluded, brushing aside any regret that lingered, staying as friends and associates was the best thing to do, keeping things professional for the sake of our research.

‘Come on,’ he said, breaking through my thoughts. ‘We’d better go back and close up your office for the night.’

Chapter Twenty-Six

Mason had said, as he’d left yesterday evening, that he was going to read up more on Port Starr around the time of the Highwayman and see if anything interesting came to light. Then he’d lingered by the doorway, saying he would text me with any news and drop by on Saturday.

I’d spent the rest of the evening sketching out and painting my impression of those beautiful roses in the carving I’d spotted on one of the bricks at McKerron Castle. I’d tried again to correct the highwayman’s chin and jawline on my portrait, but every time I did, I found myself almost painting Mason instead and decided to concentrate on the castle roses for now. Even though I’d taken only a couple of hasty photographs of them on my mobile, the fluttering, delicate beauty of the petals and the way their heads tilted together shone out of the screen.

Once my initial drawing was done, I’d set to work with my watercolours, sweeping the roses with blood-red strokes, defining the intertwined stems with bottle-green and capturing the thorns with sharp flicks of charcoal.

It really was a captivating piece. Whoever had so painstakingly melted and moulded that image into the McKerron Castle stone, possessed a real gift.

It was then that my phone pinged with a group text from my dad, including Caleb and Katie too.

Oh, good grief. What now?

I read it.

You will have heard me talking about a relative of ours called Lizzie Bishop.

She was a sister of our great-great-great-grandfather, Blake.

She was also employed as a maid with the Lapley family a good couple of hundred years ago.

She was treated terribly by that family, especially by that Augustus or whatever his name was. The poor girl was worked into the ground at The Hawthorns.

So much so, that she died at the age of nineteen from pneumonia.

Having our dad open up like this was a fascinating and unique experience. He was always a disciplined person, reining in any emotion. The only times I could recall seeing him like this were when I appeared as the donkey in my school nativity and then again when Caleb’s basketball team won the regional championships when he was a gangly fifteen-year-old.

Dad’s text continued:

I hope you understand why we didn’t say anything or make a big thing of the family rivalry. I suppose we just assumed it would settle down with the newer generations coming through and the Lapley family leaving Port Starr.