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‘Oh, really, Rhona.’ A line creased Alister’s brow. ‘Will is married, he doesn’t need any nonsense.’
‘You’re funny.’ She gave him a playful pat on the arm.
‘In all seriousness, watch what you say to Will. He’s a pleasant enough chap but he’s very friendly with the Mathesons.’ Alister flicked Judy a loaded look.
A cloud drifted across the sun in the cool breeze, casting a shadow over the lawn and the studio.
‘I remember.’ Rhona rubbed her arms at the drop in temperature. A weight pressed on her chest with a faintly nauseous sensation. She’d been thirteen when the war started. Curled under her blankets, she’d waited. When would the click on the front door come? When would they be back from the hospital? Rain hit the windows and branches tapped the panes. She hated being home alone. When they finally came, she’d peered out her bedroom door. Mum and Dad led a bruised, swollen and wrecked Arran into his room.
‘Go back to bed.’ Mum’s eyes were puffy and red.
‘What happened?’
‘Calum Matheson attacked him.’
Calum Matheson? Arran’s friend. The tall quiet boy she’d crushed on for over a year.
Tears had soaked her pillow.
Now any mention of the name Matheson was greeted with vitriol and tension clouded the air like a noxious gas. The shop at the ferry port had been out of bounds since Rhona returned to the island. Calum’s mum worked there, so they boycotted it.
Rhona let her eyelids drop and she sighed. Even then she’d had a knack for picking the wrong kind of guy. Maybe teenage crushes didn’t count. ‘I don’t know the Mathesons now anyway, so it’s not like I could say anything one way or another.’
‘Awful people,’ muttered Alister. ‘Calum was a bright boy at school but such a temper and what violence. Now he’s a money grabbing so-and-so, buying properties left, right and centre.’
‘I hate him,’ spat Judy. ‘I always said we should have pressed charges when we had the chance.’
‘I thought it’d be enough punishment living with what he did. Apparently not. He’s only got more arrogant,’ Alister said.
‘Hasn’t he just. I see him sometimes when I go to Tobermory, swanning about on his phone, making himself look important. The whole family have got so up themselves. Anne used to be a nice woman but after Calum,’ Judy screwed up her nose, ‘hurt Arran, she wouldn’t accept her perfect son had done anything wrong. The sun rises and sets on him as far as she’s concerned.’
‘And as for Ron,’ said Alister. ‘Looks like a thug. It’s easy to see where Calum got his violent streak.’
A thug? Harsh way to describe him, but such was the Matheson effect. A rotund semi-bald man with tattoos became a thug. Calum looked nothing like him. Did he? He was skinny and dark-haired. But in sixteen years, he could have beefed out and lost his hair too. Rhona wouldn’t know him if she saw him.
‘Didn’t he get married a couple of years ago?’ Rhona rubbed an insect bite on her arm. ‘Or am I thinking of someone else?’
‘Calum isn’t married,’ said Judy. ‘Looks like the man about town if you ask me. Strutting around putting it about all over the island, I expect.’
‘There’s no one who’d have him,’ said Alister. ‘Everyone knows what he’s like.’
‘Most women can see right through that kind of smarmy man.’ Judy picked up her palette knife and made some sharp movements on the canvas.
Rhona raised a considering eyebrow. Calum hadn’t looked smarmy at school. His face had been covered in terrible acne; he’d hidden more than strutted. She’d mooched along to the football club with Arran hoping to catch a glimpse of him. But he was never there. Was he too shy to show up in case people laughed at him? She’d dreamed of being the one to tell him it didn’t matter and she liked him for the boy inside. She cringed. Thank god, she hadn’t. The boy inside had turned out to be much worse.
‘I’ll have a shower, then I’ll call Will.’
As she smoothed conditioner over her hair and brushed it through, she recalled bumping into Will a few weeks before. He’d been fascinated by the island’s archaeology. He must have a question about that.
Once she was dry, she slipped on a pair of belted navy culottes, flattening them over her hourglass shape. Her white, scoop-necked t-shirt pulled taut across her chest and she grimaced, grabbing a cardigan, so she could cover herself in case Will had developed the superpower of looking down phone lines.
‘Hi, is that Will Laird? It’s Rhona Lamond. I understand you want to talk to me.’
‘Ah, hello. Yes, I do.’
She held the phone away while he gushed with pleasantries and chatted about the weather. He sounded super cheery but when would he get to the point? ‘Now, I need your advice,’ he said. ‘In a purely professional capacity, of course.’
Finally!
