Highland Secrets (English Edition) (5 page)

After a nice long shower and a quick sprint past the door of the ad
jacent room that was still open, I changed into a pair of faded jeans and a plain white t-shirt the following morning. I didn’t see any reason why I should wear elegant business clothing. I may have been in what was without doubt an extremely elegant house – if you ignored the sex parties – but this house would be my home for the time being and I preferred to wear comfortable clothing at home. I didn’t put much effort into my hair either. I just tied it together by braiding it. Who did I actually want to impress here? A host who arranged masked balls to provide his friends with bed bunnies?

I followed the smell of coffee into the kitchen, which was downs
tairs right next to the front door. Shocked and embarrassed, I remained standing in the doorway. I felt ashamed and started to feel breathless when I saw the two blonde women sitting at the large dining table, which was at the center of the modern white kitchen. The blonde girls looked at me in bewilderment when I didn’t say hello or approach them. They didn’t know what I had seen. If they had known, then they would most definitely be just as embarrassed as I was.

“
Ms Sand, please take a seat”, requested the housekeeper. She looked at me fleetingly and gave me a motherly smile, but somehow I got the feeling that her friendliness was just superficial. When she turned away, I noticed how she had a frown on her face and pressed her lips firmely together. I pulled one of the six chairs from the table and sat opposite the two women. They gave me a brief look and then returned to their excited chatter.

I was able to infer from their conservation that they wanted to extend their stay in
Dunvegan by a few days before ending their round trip on the Isle of Skype and travelling on to Glasgow.

“You haven’t fallen in love with him, have you?
”, said the woman with short hair and she gave her friend a serious look. She shook her head, but the uncertain look clearly showed that she wasn’t convinced of it herself.

I rolled my eyes in thought. This is exactly why I would never engage in
this type of sexual liaison. I was far too scared that I might develop feelings for somebody and that it would not be reciprocated. I wouldn’t want to do that to myself again. Even after more than six years, I was still fighting against the feeling of humiliation and the deep empty hole that was left inside me from Aidan’s betrayal. This was the man who I gave everything to both physically and emotionally and who was supposed to be there for me and not to hurt me in such a way that made me unable to trust another man years later.

“Are you sure
, Kathrin? Because if you do still have feelings for him, it might be better if we leave immediately”, interjected the short-haired lady.

The housekeeper mumbled and put a plate with poached eggs in front of each of us and poured coffee from a glass jug into our cups. I made out as if I was ignoring the conversation, but I was eagerly awaiting the response from Kathrin.

“I’m sure, Mel”, she drawled and emphasized the name of her
friend which acted as a warning. She gave me a speculative glance and I made out as if there was nothing more important in front of me than the breakfast.

I chewed the delicious food and gave the housekeeper an appreciative nod. “Very good”, I praised the eggs and poured milk into my coffee. I would have preferred tea, after all I was British, but maybe coffee was the drink of choice in Scotland. So I took the cup and had a sip.

“Ok fine, another two days”, replied Mel and gave me another look. “Are you also on holiday here?” she now wanted to know from me.

“No, I’m here on business.”

Both women lifted their eyebrows in amazement. “On business?”

“Yes, I shall be restoring the paintings”, I said proudly.

“Not everybody is here to have fun”, said the housekeeper interfering and put a newspaper in the center of the table. She pointed to an article on the front page of the Dunvegan morning post.

Kathrin gasped loudly. “
Dunvegan ripper has found his second victim”, she read with a shaky voice.

“Let me have a look”
, demanded Mel and she moved the newspaper towards her. “The Dunvegan ripper has struck for the second time. Passers-by found the mutilated body of a young girl yesterday evening. Like the victim before her, she was also a tourist. The body was found close to the woods of Dunvegan. She had similar injuries to the first victim. Her throat had also been cut and her face and genitals had been mutilated. The investigating authorities are still remaining tight-lipped.”

“How awful”
, groaned Kathrin and Mel nodded in agreement.

I wasn’t able to suppress a worried gasp either.
Dunvegan was a picturesque place and something so incredibly evil didn’t fit here. Even though I saw the article lying directly in front of me, I still couldn’t believe that something so horrifying had happened in Dunvegan.

I could tell from Mel’s facia
l expression that she wanted to rethink her decision to stay here longer. I was feeling exactly the same. I felt a little uneasy and didn’t know exactly how I should deal with the fact that I knew there was a murderer somewhere in close proximity.

“Don’t they have any evidence yet?
”, I said broaching the subject again and looked at Molly the housekeeper questioningly.

She lifted the corner of her mouth and shook her head. “People in the neighborhood are saying that the victim had been tortured for a long time before she died.”

I rubbed my upper arms to get rid of the goosebumps that had formed there and swallowed hard.

“How creepy”
, added Kathrin.

“Tortured
. I didn’t want to imagine how bad it must have been for these women.”

“
Hmm, all the women were young little things like her. They probably just wished it would all be over in the end”, added Molly and looked meaningfully at the rest of the group. From looking at the ashamed faces, I could tell that I wasn’t the only one who was sick to the stomach.

“
Do you think he’ll be asleep much longer?”, asked Kathrin minutes later and she had a glow in her eye as if she was dreaming and which really wasn’t fitting with the shocking newspaper article. How was she able to repress the memory of this article so quickly? For my part, I decided not to leave the estate on my own for now.

“The
man of the house left about thirty minutes ago”, said the chubby housekeeper and this time her smile seemed to be genuine. Only it wasn’t a friendly smile, but a contented smile.

Her husband came into the kitchen
, gave his wife a warning glance from under his squinted eyelids and then looked at me. “Ms. Sands, how would you like it if I were to show you around a bit and then show you the paintings you will be restoring?”

Relieved that I would be leaving the kitchen and getting away from the women whose nakedness was still plaguing my thoughts, I nodded happily and thanked the housekeeper for the breakfast upon leaving.

I followed Alfred into the large hall where he was standing and he turned towards me. There was a twinkle in his eye when he gave me a brief glance and smiled. He then beckoned for me to go past him so that I could go up the stairs in front of him. When I looked back over my shoulder, I could not but notice that the old lean butler was staring at my bottom. He blinked in embarrassment when he noticed that I had caught him.

He was such a
letch, I thought to myself and laughed inside. I couldn’t get angry at him though. I still considered it to be a compliment when a man found me attractive even if he was old enough to be my dad.

When we walked past the door through which I watched Kathrin and Mel with
who I now knew was the man of the house last night, I felt my face go red. I turned away feeling ashamed. Nobody knew that I had stood here and seen everything, but I was still ashamed about it because I knew what I had done. I shouldn’t have allowed myself to remain standing there. And even though I regretted that I had watched and I considered it to be very wrong, the memories came flooding back and made me feel aroused.

I took my mind off it by musing over what the butler wanted to show me here upstairs. I was convinced th
at there were only bedrooms on the top floor.

Alfred
opened the door to the right of the bathroom and let me go in ahead of him. “That was the professor’s favorite room”, he said seriously and I understood immediately why that was.

There were paintings all over the walls: Portraits, still
lifes, landscapes. I looked at the pieces of art in amazement and my heart was pounding. Whenever I got the chance to look at paintings, I was always overcome by inner excitement and joy. Old pictures appealed to me in particular. I actually love everything that’s old; cupboards, houses, books … All these objects are windows to the past which us individuals do not completely understand. They tell stories about people who haven’t existed for years. Observing them was like being able to share a part of their lives despite the centuries between us.

“Mr
. MacLeod purchased most of these paintings from flea markets. The family has owned a few of them for a long time and a couple of them he painted himself.”

Alfred stopped in front of the painting of a middle-aged woman and pointed at it. The woman had dark flowing hair that came down to her back.
She was painted in a side portrait and she was looking off into the distance in a dreamy, yet sad state. She was sat on a park bench in a flowery summer dress with her family in the background. Even though she was smiling in the painting, she looked wistful. The whole picture had a melancholic atmosphere and it was as if the artist had felt sad when he painted her.

“Mr
. MacLeod painted this after his wife had already left us. She often sat on this bench and watched the fountain. He probably wanted to keep this memory of her”, explained Alfred and he seemed a bit dejected himself.

I took a closer look
at the picture and had to agree with Alfred, even if the woman in the painting seemed to be wistful, she also looked lively and full of love. It was as if the painter had cut her out of her life to keep her in this piece of art for ever so that she could never be forgotten.

“This is probably the painting that
will give you the most work”, said Alfred and pointed to the portrait next to it. I tore myself away from the woman on the park bench and as I glanced at the adjacent picture, any last drop of melancholy disappeared. I gave a loud and alarmed groan.

“What has happened to this painting?
”, I thought to myself, because it made me so angry that somebody had treated the work of an artist in this way.

The portrait was of the professor
. He was younger than how I had known him. He was about the same age as the woman on the park bench. Maybe late fifties. Even though the painting was not that old that it needed restoring, it wasn’t in good condition. It was definitely not in its original state anymore. An ugly, black mark covered the right half of the professor’s face. It looked as if somebody had thrown dirty water over it and the color had spread in large and small drops over half the painting. I was disturbed by the obvious mistreatment of this work.

“Who was it?
”, I enquired angrily.

“The professor himself. It was on the day his wife was diagnosed with breast cancer.”

I suddenly understood the frustration and anger which had led to him destroying this painting. He must have felt completely helpless. You feel alone and lost when you find out that you will lose a person you love. Maybe he even thought it was his own fault. I wasn’t surprised at this reaction at all. I also wasn’t able come to terms with what happened to me because I didn’t want to believe that it was true when I was told that both my parents  had not survived the train accident. Part of me had hoped that if I got angry enough at them and had destroyed enough to make them angry at me that they would come back. But they are not coming back. Never. I had been left alone for a large part of my life.

Tears weld up in my eyes as the memories came flooding back. I wiped them away and thought about the professor. I only knew him as a quiet,
calm and reserved man, but he was often serious and thoughtful too. And he had had a big heart. The fact that I had known him would help me when reconstructing his face.

Alfred
also took me to see the library, the living room and a study. After that, he left me to my own devices. I went to my room and picked up the suitcase with my working materials.

After I had found out that the professor had not thrown color at his painting, but just
dirty water that had probably come from a cup which he had used to wash his brushes, I felt at ease and I started setting up everything I would need to remove the damage caused by the water on the small chest of drawers. I had just finished what I was doing when the door opened from behind me. I turned around curious to see what was going on and saw those royal blue eyes. My heart started to beat faster and I had butterflies in my stomach.

“How unexpected it is to see you here after
you disappeared so quickly from my masked ball yesterday. I have to admit that I didn’t expect you to be my father’s student.”