Vee: Lost and Found Read online

  David Roberts was born in Aberdeen and brought up in Lanarkshire. After attending Stirling University, he taught English in Argyll, Galloway and the Scottish Borders. This is his first novel.

  Vee:

  Lost and Found

  A novel by

  David Roberts

  First printed by CreateSpace in 2016.

  Available from Amazon.com, CreateSpace.com, and other retail outlets.

  Available on Kindle and other retail outlets.

  Copyright © David Roberts 2016.

  Cover copyright © Chloë Holwill-Hunter 2016.

  David Roberts asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

  Contents

  1 Mhairi

  2 Alastair

  3 Two Knights, a Book and a Maiden

  4 Auntie Vee

  5 The road to Applecross

  6 Fallen Comrades

  7 The Green Racer

  8 The Rover

  9 Colouring-in

  10 The Pipeline

  11 No News

  12 Continental Breakfast

  13 Stretchy Jumpers

  14 A Museum Visit

  15 Such Good Boys

  16 The road to Ullapool

  17 Making Sticks

  18 A Fragile Thing

  19 Bikers

  20 Paperwork

  21 A Wedding and a Honeymoon

  22 A Strange House

  23 Downhill Racer

  24 Lochinver

  25 Anteater Assortment

  26 The road to Lairg

  27 Two Dragons

  28 The Receipt

  29 A Sentry at the Gate

  30 Knights Errant

  31 Night Intruders

  32 Gloomy Memories

  33 The Letter on the Mat

  34 The Cave

  35 The Maltese Falcon

  36 The Return

  37 Riverside

  38 Fire and Steam

  39 A Question Answered

  40 Three Kind Men

  Acknowledgements

  The Scots Gaelic name Mhairi is pronounced Vahree.

  1 Mhairi

  She looked and the mirror looked right back. Yes, she was presentable.

  The brown leather suitcase (middle-sized) had been packed the night before, of course. It’s called “being organised”. She had considered taking the largest of the cases but it was awkward to lug around the stations; and it was only four or five nights so a couple of changes of clothes would really be enough.

  She thought about Jamie and smiled, remembering the picture he had drawn for her on the Christmas card. It was her, in a red dress. She was smiling there too, and there was a big box with a ribbon, and some sort of animal. The card was in her bedroom drawer upstairs, kept when all the rest were being thrown out. There would be another card this year. It was wonderful, being his auntie. But to be there with him all the time, to be a mother to him or just someone like him…

  She stopped herself on this familiar path and looked across to the kitchen. The draining board and worktops were clear and the back door locked. The living room was tidy with the wireless unplugged. The fire was laid and ready to light on her return. This was important: you don’t want to have to start cleaning out the fireplace when you arrive back to a cold house- and an empty house in Gairloch would be cold in late August.

  It would be a long day, this August Monday in 1936, but she should be in Oban by late afternoon and they would be together again, all of them. The journey itself- the bus, the train from Inverness, and the final stint by bus again- well, you just had to put up with it. And it would be light enough to read and there would be a lot to think about; a lot to look forward to.

  She checked her purse was in her pocket, made sure the latch was on the sneck and picked up the case. Definitely the right one. Then, with a slight nod as she caught herself fleetingly in the hall mirror, she clicked the door shut and headed off to the bus stop.

  2 Alastair

  Bundalloch 2014

  They were standing still, the two men. They had walked round the north side of Loch Long from Conchra, a distance of about five miles and were heading for Dornie. But it was not the tiredness that had made them stop.

  Alastair was first on the scene because Tom was always seven or eight paces behind. Perhaps it was a seniority which came with age: over forty as opposed to under forty. It certainly wasn’t fitness or a desire of one to walk slower or faster than the other. It was simply an arrangement which had evolved over the years they had walked together. They were close enough to talk, without feeling a need to do so. For the moment they stood together, looking down.

  The deer lay next to the stream with its back legs sticking out at an unnatural angle, its belly ripped open. The head was still beautiful, the large black eyes still in place, surprisingly untouched, though the gloss was gone. Alastair wanted to look away, to move on but that would have made no difference. Like driving past the scene of a road accident, one glimpse was all it took to fix the image and horror of the thing, like a screw boring into you.

  When he did move on, stepping over the stream, he could feel the thing still working away inside him, an almost physical sensation, bringing something to the surface again. It seemed to be happening more often now, for some reason.

  It was a memory of a place like this one: long grass in tussocks on boggy ground, standing water and flowing water. Alastair saw himself, younger, rod in hand. He felt himself put the rod down at the base of the rock before beginning the short climb. Even some of the footholds had stayed with him, unaccountably: the impression his boot had left on the black spongy earth in a cleft. Why would anyone remember that? He watched himself reach the top and straighten up. To the south, hidden from view by the hills, was Campbeltown. To the north was Tarbert. The only decent view was of Gigha and Islay out to the west. Far away he could see the white speck of a ferry.

  As if a bystander to his own experience, he saw himself standing on the rock, looking down. He saw a flash of metal in the grass fifty yards way and made his way towards it. With a stick, he turned it over. It was the clasp of an old purse, with the remnants of the bag attached: leather, with a red lining. When he moved it aside he could see, half hidden beneath it, something that looked like a cracked white stone, round in shape.

  That was the moment, he knew now, looking back. That was precisely it: the moment he knew there would be two bodies there. He watched himself step back and mark the place using a dead branch to point to it. There was no need for him to look more closely. That would be a task for someone else.

  “You look thoughtful.”

  It was Tom’s voice.

  “You always slow down when you’re thinking.”

  Alastair smiled. “Well, thinking’s all it is. You needn’t worry about just thinking. How far is it to Dornie? I’m getting hungry. See deer, think venison.”

  “Not far now.”

  At Bundalloch they met up with the metalled road and progress was easier. A low stone building, whitewashed long before, greeted them at the roadside. The green gloss paint was peeling from its windows. One small pane was smashed and waterstained cardboard covered the hole. “I have a story to tell” it seemed to be saying, but nothing could be seen inside.

  Rounding the curve of a small bay, Eilean Donan Castle was suddenly visible beyond the village. The lunch stop for them would be in the village itself, in the Clachan on Francis Street, a quieter, cosier
sort of place.

  It was early evening when they arrived back at the cottage in Conchra, having completed the circuit of the loch, but no-one was thinking about the time. By then they were both thinking about the book.

  3 Two Knights, a Book and a Maiden

  Dornie 2014

  The room was simply furnished with an ordinary table, three wicker chairs and a small coal fire burnt out from the previous evening. It had a black metal casing which bulged outwards with a fleur-de-lis embossed on it, and a grate flanked by two knights, swords clutched to their chests impassively.

  It was nine o’clock and outside the cottage it was now almost completely dark. Inside the rough walls of the small room, angular shapes were softening into an indistinct landscape, where talking felt natural, for Alastair at least.

  “I suppose the whole thing stemmed from my fascination with cars, especially the older models, like that VW camper we saw in Glencoe. When I went to college to do the course I thought I’d go to work on some racing team, get to know Michael Schumacher. Young lads just think like that, don’t they?”

  “I know I did,” said Tom.

  “Well I ended up working in this wee Edinburgh garage. My skill levels were obviously too advanced for Formula One. After a few years there I began to get more interested in the older vehicles that came into the workshop. I liked to actually sort things you see, rather than just replacing parts and I didn’t mind dealing with rust. Soon, nearly all the old stuff was coming to me: you know, Morris Minors, Beetles, bloody horrible A40s, 2cv Citroens with chassis rot. They were things nobody else wanted to touch.”

  “Was that before you worked for the RAC then?”

  “No. I never worked for them. The garage did call-out work for Green Flag and the RAC would phone us if they were busy. That car of yours was really crappy by the way. Typical Astra.”

  “Cheers. I was young and innocent. And it was cheap, with the right number of wheels. She liked four, not two.”

  “You did the right thing, flogging it. Anyway, one day

  we got this old Moggie Minor as a trade in, probably for another second hand car. This would be about fourteen or fifteen years ago. I was to check it over, to see if it was worth trying to sell it or just go as scrap. I went through the usual checks- brakes, suspension etc. As usual, the shackles were gone on the leaf springs. It was scrap right enough but I checked out the glove box where the papers were: registration documents, MOT checklist, scruffy handbook etc. I always checked out these wee compartments.”

  “A bit like sticking your hand down the side of a settee before you take it to the dump?”

  “Exactly. Well, under the wallet there was a book, just tucked way.”

  “Valuable?”

  “I had no idea. It just seemed like a scruffy old library book. I gave it a quick flick through. No dodgy magazines- just a couple of maps here and there and some old photographs.”

  “Maps of where?”

  “The Highlands mostly, near where we are: Arisaig, Strontian; these were the ones I noticed. It made some sort of sense to me as the car had an old ST registration, which I think was Inverness. It’s easily the kind of car which could have been used on a touring holiday up here, well in those days anyway. What caught my eye, though, was the note written on the inside cover at the front. In neat, green ink it said Adrian Fallows, Annat.”

  “Annat?”

  “Yes. To most people that wouldn’t mean anything- just a dot on the map, but I’ve gone through it a few times and to me it’s a dot on the landscape, a tiny wee place. I even stayed there once, in a tent. It has this wee house built into a rock when you enter the village from the south. It must be the most photographed house in the Highlands.

  “To cut a long story short, I kept the book. I knew I’d be going up through the place later in the year, and I thought to myself if I was passing through anyway I could return it. After all, it must have meant something to someone since there were comments written in the margins, underlined and circled bits as well.”

  “Sounds reasonable, if it’s a wee place; and I don’t imagine Fallows is a very common name in the Highlands. So what happened?”

  “Well I did try but it turned out the man had passed away. But I did have a long talk with his sister. She was interesting.”

  Alastair looked at the empty grate.

  “Tell you what- I’ll get the fire going and you go to the car. The book’s in the glovebox. Get some cans from the boot too. We might as well be comfortable, since we’re on our holidays.”

  _________________________

  Alastair cracked open the can and poured it into the glass before continuing.

  “Slainte. As you can see, it’s quite ordinary looking: a brown cloth cover and old fashioned print, with outline maps here and there. It gives you historical information etc about some of the areas of Scotland that are commonly visited. I always take it with me if I’m going walking because it can be useful. There are lots of books like this. I suppose they became very popular once people had the means to travel around the country.”

  “Didn’t Queen Victoria write a book like this: ‘Highland Diaries’ or something?

  “Yes, that’s right. The railways gave people quick and easy access to quite remote parts of the country. This book dates from the early nineteen twenties, when hardly anyone had cars, but they did have a reliable rail service and things like bicycles or even motorcycles. What intrigued me about this particular volume was that many of the pages, and often the accompanying maps, contained annotations.”

  “Saying what?”

  “It varied. Sometimes it was like a correction. For example the text might say ‘heavily wooded slopes’ and the annotation would say ‘cut down’. Or ‘ferry every two hours weekdays’ might say ‘discontinued’.

  “Sometimes it was entirely new information, like ‘salmon cages’ or ‘MOD fuel storage base’ or ‘new bridge being built’- that sort of thing.”

  “Like someone was updating the text?”

  “Yes, but it seemed to be something more than that. Why would anyone bother? Clearly, someone had, going by the amount written in the margins. A lot of time and effort had gone into this.”

  “By what’s his name?”

  “Adrian Fallows, from Annat.”

  “You said you met his sister. Did she tell you anything about why he was doing all that?”

  “Not really. To be honest, I was never all that interested in him as a person. I suppose I felt sorry for him. I pictured him, sitting in a Morris Minor with this book, scribbling away when he could have gone to the pub in Inveraray or wherever, and met folk and had a drink with them. He could have had some excitement.”

  “So what did she say?”

  “Well, it’s a bit of a story but I’ll try to describe it as it happened. You might have to bear with me.”

  _________________________

  ‘I was going to Achnasheen anyway, visiting a pal who was recovering from an operation, so I decided to go via Torridon. You’ll know it. Apparently the mountains there were an inspiration for Tolkein when he was writing “The Lord of the Rings”. They are really intimidating, even if you just walk the lower slopes, like I do. Annat is on the bay just before the range starts. Apart from this strange little house built into the rock it is quite unremarkable. Like so many small highland villages, it just peters out. There’s always another house a few hundred yards away- usually white, with a low stone dyke nearby. Not knowing where the house might be, I popped into the Post Office. I just asked where Mr Fallows lived. The woman at the till- it was a village shop which served as the Post Office- gave me a concerned look. Mr Fallows had passed away earlier in the year. She was sorry to have to be the one to tell me. I told her I hadn’t known him personally, but that I had something which belonged to him, though it wasn’t important really.’

  ‘“You could try his sister,” she said. “She lives in that house.” She pointed to a low, white building, nestling near a stand of
pine trees. I thought for a moment. I considered buying a card but in the end simply doing what I had intended seemed the best and most honest thing to do, so I took the car up the track and parked on the cropped grass next to the trees. She was a small woman, white-haired, with a slight limp. I explained about just passing; about hearing the news in the shop and about the ‘something’ which had belonged to her brother.

  ‘She looked past me, as if checking there was no-one else in the car and held the door open. She said she was making a pot of tea and invited me in. I accepted: it was a cold day and the offer seemed genuine. I followed her into the kitchen. I remember her asking what “Mrs Mackay in the Post Office” had told me about Adrian. “Only that he lived here with his sister,” was my reply. I just felt it had been an odd question.

  ‘The walls were a sort of dull pea-green colour and framed photographs hung here and there, next to a rack of tiny china figurines and miniature crockery. The small window looked out past the trees to the Torridon ridge. She put four biscuits on a small plate and put them down on the table where, following her gesture, we sat down.

  ‘She was obviously used to making decisions and dealing in realities, so I was glad that I had been so direct myself. This was someone who would have recognised an untruth and unpicked it in front of me. She pointed to the biscuits and told me to help myself. I knew she meant “You can have two.” Another was for her and the last should stay on the plate to indicate I’d had enough. It struck me that she would fit in well in Edinburgh.

  ‘Her eyes moved to the small bag I was carrying and then back to me. “This is what I was telling you about,” I said, reaching into the bag and pulling out the book. She inclined her head to see the title more easily: ‘Secret Places in the Scottish Highlands’. I showed her the inscription on the opening page and explained how it had led me to her.