I curled up, seeking nonexistent warmth beneath the quilt. My hot-water bottle scalded the bits of me it was touching and left the rest icy. This was where, if I wasn’t very careful, I would fall apart. I had weathered the loss of my family, the transformation of my life with a stoicism I knew was dysfunctional. I’d stood dry-eyed through the funerals. But right now I could close my eyes and weep for the loss of my cat.
It was just that she slept on my stomach in winter, keeping off the chill. She had been tiny for a full-grown queen, but her purr would resound through the room like the Calmac revving up for departure. I’d have taken her to uni with me if I could. During the holidays she followed me everywhere, a little shadow with mad golden eyes. Even Harry, whose fondness for farm cats began and ended with their mousing abilities, had bestowed on her the honour of a name—Clover, or
Seamrag
in Gaelic. The luck of the farm.
Well, that one had come back to bite us in the arse. She’d vanished in the night last February, one eerie day before we got the news from Spain. I recalled the old man, standing like a statue in the barnyard a fortnight later, a red-letter bill from the water board in one hand, a broken tractor drive shaft in the other.
Aye, she’s gone. And taken with her the luck o’ the farm.
Gloomy old bastard. I balled up tighter, furious with him and with myself. I had maybe three hours before the grim routine of lambing season started all over again. I couldn’t waste good sleep time with useless thoughts like this. I couldn’t mourn a cat more than I did my brother, and I couldn’t…
I couldn’t go on.
It hit me with the force of revelation. What the hell was I doing, struggling to hold back the avalanche? I’d have given almost anything to help keep Harry king of his Seacliff acres. I’d ploughed my heart and soul into the struggle for a year. But the game was up. Surely selling now would be better than waiting for the bloody bailiffs.
For about thirty seconds, relief swept through me. I entertained a fantasy of Harry installed in a nice warm bungalow in Whiting Bay, playing darts with his cronies in the pub and revelling in his leisured golden years. Me, I was back in Edinburgh, cranking out my brilliant new linguistic model for my doctorate in between rounds of casual sex down in the Groat Market clubs.
The air castle fell. Harry, cut off from his ancestral soil, fell into a decline and pointed an accusing finger at me from his deathbed. I sat up, anticipatory pangs of guilt going through me. I ran my fingers into my hair. It was no good. No matter what the consequences, we were going to have to let the place go. All that remained for me to work out was how to break it to Harry. Well, I now had two and a half sleepless hours in which to do that.
The gale shook the house. It was a wild winter bitch of a night. Most likely I’d be digging sheep out of snow on my dawn shift. I caressed the patch on the quilt where Clover used to curl. A few black hairs still clung there. Grief and rage burned in my gut, bitter as the storm. Everything was gone.
Glass shattered somewhere off in the dark. I jerked my head up, listening. That was all I needed, for the wind to have broken a barn window. I’d have to get out there and patch it, or we’d lose another set of lambs to the cold.
The sound came again. Exactly the same as the first time—brief, deliberate.
Human agency, then. I threw back the quilt. Prodigal son or not, I didn’t really have to guess at the source. I knew every inch of Seacliff Farm. My nerves twitched out into the night, my body responding as if the broken glass had been my bones. Me, my mother, Harry, untold generations of us living and dying on this land… Two panes from the window at the back of the second-largest barn, enough to get a hand inside and undo the catch.
I surged out of bed. Heat blazed through me, a pure and perfect rage. God, it felt wonderful. I had a bloody burglar on my hands. He couldn’t have arrived at a worse or better time. I grabbed my dressing gown, shrugged into it over my pyjama bottoms and slammed out of the room.
In the hallway I paused for a second. Alistair’s gun cupboard was tucked into a corner of the landing. He’d always kept it conscientiously locked, and a good thing too, since his pride and joy had been a top-end hunting rifle more suitable to big game than the rabbits he’d needed to pick off around the farm. I’d never touched it. Guns, the distancing of predator from prey, had brought on half the horrors of this world. I called myself a pacifist and tried to act like one.
The cupboard was plywood. It yielded to one good kick. There was no chance of waking Harry, who slept like the dead in his bleak mausoleum of a bedroom at the far end of the house. The rifle came easy, sweetly to my hand. I couldn’t think why I hadn’t gone on an armed rampage before. Tucking it under one arm, I ran downstairs barefoot then paused for a second to push my feet into the mud-caked wellingtons I’d left by the back door.
The storm hit me the instant I left the porch, sideswiping me so hard I dropped to one knee before I could catch my balance. I got up, swearing. I was more likely to shoot my foot off with Al’s rifle than anything else. I didn’t even know if the catch was on, if it was loaded. Fighting through the wind-lashed sleet, I tried to rekindle my furies. It had felt so nice not to give a damn anymore, and already my workaday brain was trying to spoil that, to furnish me with reasons, with compassion. Who would come all the way out here to break into a barn? Suppose it was Kenzie, disgruntled after his sacking? He’d confessed to me a couple of weeks ago that he’d started using amphetamines to get him through the brutal schedule of lambing and his day job in the village. That must cost. Maybe he’d come back for our one remaining quad bike. God knew there was sod-all else to steal. Poor bastard, he’d offered me a hit of his speed, and I’d been sorely tempted…
Lightning blazed, and the outside security lamp on the farmhouse went out. Ditched into dazzled black, I hesitated then recalled that this beast of a weapon had a torch on it for night stalking. Many a time its beam had scared the life out of me, searching hungrily over the fields. I felt along its barrel till I found what I hoped was the right button.
Cold white light leapt from the sights. A thin, powerful beam, it illuminated one tunnel of sleet-filled air and made a target on the barn wall. I raised the gun until I could see the eastern window. Yes, the top two frames were gone.
Why hadn’t I brought the barn keys with me? Why, for that matter, hadn’t I stopped to put on a waterproof? My dressing gown was slicked to my skin, woollen deadweight. That made me good and pissed off once again, and I clambered into the barn the same way my intruder had done, grabbing the sill with one hand to haul myself up.
Once inside, I sat poised for a few seconds, playing the rifle’s searchlight around the blackness. “Who’s in here?”
Something rustled. I jerked the gun muzzle around, but the sound had only been the ewes Harry had put in here to foster our orphan lambs, shifting around in their straw. Their eyes with their eerie wrong-way-round pupils gave back the light of the torch, six green ovoids. Carefully I eased down from the sill.
“I know you’re in here,” I told the shadows. “I’ve had a shit day, and if you think I wouldn’t use this gun, just come out and try me.”
Nothing. All right, that was fine by me. I was in the mood for doing it the hard way. There were only so many places a man could hide in here. The hayloft would be a good start. I laid one hand on the rung of the ladder and froze, listening. A sound from the sheep pen again, but this time… I frowned, trying to work out what the tiny rasp had been.
Like nothing so much as the sounds I made myself on the many, many occasions when Alistair and his mates had set me up for a fright. A giant rubber spider dropping off the top of a door onto my head. Or—another favourite—a string wrapped round the handle of the spooky closet door so it would swing open as I crept down the corridor. Growing up with him had been hard work. I’d been too proud to scream like a girl, and my efforts to stop myself produced a strangled gasp very like the one I’d just heard.
I stalked back to the pen. There were a couple of hay bales piled up in the corner. The lamb I’d rescued that afternoon, obviously partial to trouble, had managed to squeeze itself in behind them. Its bony little head was down, its tail flicking in frustration. It shifted, and whoever was hiding there made another sound of muffled fright.
“I see my attack sheep have cornered you,” I said, tone conversational, hefting the gun. I
had
used it before, hadn’t I? Al had tried to teach me how to shoot. The kickback of the stock into my shoulder had knocked me down the first time, but he’d persisted with the lesson. Why had I forgotten? I remembered now. I let my finger curl around the trigger. “Come out and show yourself.”
The bales moved. The lamb, undeterred, tried to scramble farther in.
“Christ, why the hell is it trying to…
eat
me?”
I stepped back. Someone was crouched behind the bales. In the harsh blue-white torchlight, I saw a skinny lad about my own age, soaked black hair plastered to his face. He was trying to thrust back the lamb, which was responding to his efforts by catching his fingers into its greedy maw. The scene would have been funny at any other time. It was threatening to crack a smile out of me now, but I resisted. My heart was pounding, adrenaline spiking coldly through my veins. I had every right to shoot an intruder.
“It’s not trying to eat you,” I said. “It’s hungry. It’s trying to suckle. Stand up.”
“I can’t. It weighs a ton.”
“Just get hold of it and move it. You won’t…” I paused. What would a hardened burglar care if he damaged the livestock? But this one was clearly worried, his hands shaking. “You won’t hurt it.”
He obeyed. Once he had freed himself and got to his feet, I took him in. He was even less suitably clad for the weather than I was, in jeans, a thin T-shirt and the kind of jacket designer knock-off merchants would flog in the Edinburgh street markets until moved on by the police. He held a rucksack, similarly flashy and cheap, clutched in one hand.
“What’s your name?”
He lifted his free hand to shield his eyes. Distantly I noted that they were an odd shade of blue, almost violet in this light, their pupils constricted. He would have been handsome if he didn’t look near starved.
His frightened face became defiant. “Sean Connery.”
I tried not to roll my eyes. My studies in linguistics had given me a keen ear for accents, and I recognised his. Not Glasgow and not Islands. Something in between, from the long, deprived, desolate stretch of villages and towns along the road from Larkhall. His trashy outfit went well with that. You couldn’t reverse the trend, could you? You could force economic migrants off the land and into the cities, but when the cities failed them, they couldn’t go back to their farms. The farms were gone. It was a one-way system, and it dumped lads like this into suburbs, concrete-poured hovels like Newhall and Borough Mills, jobless and hopeless. There but for the grace of God…
“Your real name,” I said, less harshly. “You owe me that much.”
“Cameron.” That sounded real. For a second I thought he was going to hand me a second one too, but then he blushed angrily and looked down at his wet, muddy trainers. “Just Cameron, all right?”
“All right. For now.”
“Are you going to call the police?”
It hadn’t occurred to me. For one thing, I’d left my mobile upstairs by the bed. “In good time. We fix our own problems round here.” His eyes widened, and I replayed my words. Yes, I sounded threatening. A nutcase wielding private justice with a gun. Well, if he was frightened, so much the better. “You can start by picking up your feckless bloody lamb and putting it down by that
othaisg
in the corner.”
“By the what?”
“The…” I shook my head to clear it of Scotch mist. I was getting really frayed if I was dropping into Gaelic. It was Harry’s native tongue, not mine. “The sheep. The ewe. Put the lamb down beside her and give her a prod to make her get up. She’s meant to be feeding it.”
I watched while he clumsily did as he was told. The ewe lurched to her feet, and the lamb got the idea and went to work, butting her udder, absurd little tail beginning a satisfied swing.
“Doesn’t that happen automatically? The feeding thing?”
“It’s an orphan. It still smells strange to her. It’s a good sign that it’s sucking now, but of course it might still die from the cold wind blasting through the windows you broke. Did that occur to you?”
“No. I didn’t know there were animals in here. I…”
“It’s a farm. You might have hazarded a guess.”
“I’ve never set foot on a farm till tonight. I’m sorry about the windows, okay?”
“That’s all right. You’re going to fix them. You see those empty sacks over there? Take those and fold them up to fit the frames. There’s tacks and a hammer in the toolbox by the door.”
“Okay.” He glanced around. I saw the nervous twitch of his Adam’s apple in his skinny throat. “Have you got any plastic? Sheeting, or a plastic bag?”
“The wind’ll tear it to shreds. Use the sacks.”
“I meant… Wrap it round the folded-up sacks. That way you insulate and waterproof it.”
I stared at him. I wasn’t practical, I knew. Born and bred among farmers, I’d learned the basics of my trade, but I’d been like a seal on the rocks—awkward, everything always an effort. Going to uni had been my ocean dive. I’d found my element. And now here I was on the rocks again, missing the obvious. “Okay. Empty that feedbag into the bin. You can tear that up. Pull the hayloft ladder over so you can reach.”
He worked well for a displaced townie, doing at least as good a job as I would have myself. He only banged his thumb with the hammer once, and he took that quietly, exhaling and briefly clenching his fist. I was glad he had his back to me and couldn’t see how I’d winced for him. That wouldn’t have gone at all with the business of holding him at gunpoint.
“Right,” I said when the windows were sealed. “That’ll do.”
“Are you going to use it, then?”