We are about to plunge into the thicket of trees that ring the loch on this side. A fringe of dark pines. Some of them aren’t native; they’re Norwegian imposters, planted after the war. They’re much denser than the local Scots pine, and when you’re among them all sound from the outside world seems to be muffled. Not that there are many sounds here, beyond the occasional cawing of the birds.
On my good days, I persuade myself that I love these trees: their glossy needles, the cones that I collect to keep in bowls around the house, the warm, green Christmas scent of the resin when you walk among them. On my bad days I decide they look funereal, like sinister black-cloaked sentinels.
We are out of sight of the Lodge now. Completely alone. I am suddenly reminded that though I’ve worked alongside this man for a year I know almost nothing about him. This is definitely the most time I have ever spent in his company – and quite possibly the most we have ever spoken to one another.
I’m not sure he speaks to anyone. Early on, I kept expecting him to ask me if he could use the Internet: to send an email, perhaps, or check up on friends and family on Facebook. But he never did. Even I check in with friends and family every so often. ‘Your mam worries about you,’ my dad said, at the beginning. ‘Stuck in a place like that all on your own, after everything you’ve been through. It’s not right.’ So I try and go back every few months or so to put her mind at rest, though the experience of re-entering the outside world is not one I particularly relish.
But Doug never seems to leave the estate unless he has to: taking guests into town to visit the shops, for example. I made the mistake of mentioning him to my mum, the lonely existence he leads. Of course, in true parental style, she was worried for me.
‘He could be anyone,’ she told me. ‘What’s his background? Where does he come from?’
I told her the one thing I did know, that he’d been in the Marines. This did not reassure her in the slightest. ‘You need to goggle him, Heather,’ she told me.
‘Google, Ma.’
‘Whatever it is. Just promise me you’ll do it. You need to know who this man is … I can’t sleep for worrying about you, Heather. Running off and leaving us all behind just when you need your family about you most. Not letting us help you like we want to. No word for days, weeks. I need to know that you’re safe at least. Who you’re working with. It’s not fair, Heaths.’ And then she seemed to check herself. ‘Of course – I know it must sound awful, me saying that. What happened to you … that was the most unfair thing that could happen—’
‘All right, Ma,’ I said, not wanting to hear any more. ‘I’ll do it, I’ll google him.’ But I didn’t, not then. Truthfully, the thought of it felt like a betrayal.
Of course, when my mum asked me what I had found – I could tell it was one of those things that she wouldn’t give up on, a terrier with a bone – I reassured her. ‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘I looked. There’s nothing there. You can stop worrying about me now.’
There was a pause. ‘I never stop worrying about you, pet.’ I put the phone down.
The truth is, she’s right. I don’t know anything about Doug. Just what the boss hinted at during my interview, that his background made him well suited to the job – particularly seeing off any poachers. When he was asked to take his pick of the cottages he chose the one furthest from anything – at the bottom of the flank of the Munro, with no sheltering trees, with no view of the loch. It’s unquestionably the worst of all of them, which would suggest he chose it purely for its position. I understand the need to be alone. But the need for even further isolation within this remote wilderness makes me wonder exactly what it is he is trying to distance himself from.
‘Where are we going, Doug?’
‘Just a little way now,’ he says, and I feel a leap of trepidation, a powerful urge to turn and start in the other direction again, back towards the Lodge. Instead I follow Doug as we tramp further into the trees, the only sound the squeak of our boots in the snow.
Up ahead of us I see the first of the waterfalls, the small wooden bridge that spans it, the pumphouse building a little way further up. Normally it would take us only ten minutes to get here. But in these conditions it has taken the best part of half an hour.
I see the big impressions of Doug’s boots in the snow on the bridge, where he apparently stood the first time, looking down. There are no other footprints, I notice. But then there wouldn’t be. This snow has been falling for hours. Any other tracks – including those of the dead guest – will have long ago been obscured.
‘There,’ he says, pointing.
I step warily onto the bridge. At first I can’t see anything. It’s a long way down to the bottom, and I’m very aware of Doug standing just behind me. It would only take a little push, I find myself thinking, to send me over. I grip the chain rail hard, though it suddenly seems very flimsy in my grasp.
There is a moment of incomprehension as I stare into the void. All I can make out is a lot of snow and ice gathered in the ravine.
‘Doug,’ I say, ‘I can’t see anything. There’s nothing there.’
He frowns, and points again. I follow his finger.
Suddenly, peering down among the rocks, the great pillows of fallen snow, it appears below me like the slow emergence of a magic eye image.
‘Oh God.’ It’s more an exhalation of air, like a punch to the gut, than a word. I have seen dead bodies before in my time, in my old line of work. A greater number than the average person, definitely. But the horror of the experience never leaves you. It is always a shock – a profound, existential shock – to be confronted with the inanimate object that was once a person. A person so recently thinking, feeling, seeing, reduced to so much cold flesh. I feel the long-ago familiar swoop of nausea. At medical school they told us it would go away, after our first few. ‘You get used to it.’ But I’m not sure I ever really did. And I am unprepared, despite knowing what I have come to see. I have been ambushed, here in this place, by death. I thought that I could outrun it.
It almost looks like part of the landscape now: I think that is partly what helped it to blend in. But now I can see it, I can’t believe I missed it before. The corpse has a kind of dark power, drawing the eye. The lower half of it is covered modestly by fallen snow, though the shield of the bridge has protected the top half of the body. The skin is a greyish blue, leached of all blood and human colour. That hair too, spilling behind the head, might just be more dead weed, such as those that poke obstinately through the snow in places.
There seems to be a great deal of skin, in fact. This is not the corpse of a person who came out dressed for the elements. The cold would have killed in an hour – less – if nothing else had. Or someone else had.
I see now, looking harder, the halo of blood about the head: rust-coloured, covering the rocks beneath like a peculiar species of lichen. There is a lot of it. A fall onto rock. That could have been the thing that did the killing, in itself.
But I can see that it is more complicated than that. There is an unmistakable necklace of darkness about the neck. The skin there, even from this distance away, looks particularly blue and bruised-looking. I know very little about forensics – barely more than someone with no background in medicine. My old vocation was in saving life, not examining the evidence left after its loss. But you would not need to be an expert in the field to see that something has compressed the skin there, injured it.
The face … no, I don’t want to think about the face.
I turn back to Doug. His gaze is a blank; as though there is no one behind his eyes. I take a step back, involuntarily. Then I get a grip of myself.
‘I see it,’ I say. ‘I see what you mean. Yes.’
We must wait for the police to arrive, to make their judgements, of course. But I know now why Doug wanted me to come and take a look. This does not look like an accident.
Three days earlier
30th December 2018
EMMA