Lost Secrets of the Scottish Castle

Chapter 1

Please keep away from the edge, as the cliffs fall one hundred metres to the sea and are prone to weathering.

‘Bollocks,’ I muttered under my breath, barely listening to my brother’s list of all the things that needed to be done.

‘Bollocks to the lot of it.’ I was angry, mostly with myself, for absolutely everything.

Not entirely without reason either, I’d been dumped and had taken out a bank loan on the same day, which would be enough to make even Pollyanna a bit glum.

Now, as a direct result of the bank loan and an indirect result of being alone and having nothing else more pressing to do, I was in Scotland. This was not improving my mindset.

‘And once we’ve got the roof on and made it weatherproof we can see about the flooring. Honestly, Pax, people will flock to come and stay! How many people can say they’ve slept in a genuine castle? Look at the view!’

I looked. Sea. It was just sea. A big, bobbing wobbly body of water, which didn’t so much look picturesque as remind me that I’d meant to join the gym and not got round to it.

If I turned around I could see the coastline of this part of Scotland running off into the distance like a chewed crust. It would probably look pretty, beautiful even, to someone not staring down the barrel of a future as a single woman up to her knees in threatening letters from Barclays.

‘Bollocks,’ I said again. ‘I’ve no idea why I ever listen to you, Lenny.’

Lennox leaned back against the wall. Little flakes of crumbling mortar rained down around him as he did so.

‘Dunaire Castle is our history!’ He flung out an arm, banged his hand on the wall and stared sadly down at his grazed knuckles.

‘Our family built this place. We owned it once, and now we own it again.’

‘We owned it when it was a working castle! Soldiers and kilts and… huge kitchens turning out roasted oxen. Now it’s just a bunch of falling-down walls. We could have bought a derelict cottage in Walthamstow if we wanted falling down walls.’

‘Ah, but we couldn’t turn a derelict cottage into a hotel, could we?’ Lenny was irrepressible when he was excited. All I could do was hang on and go for the ride.

I gazed back out over the black sea. Large clouds were scudding towards us from the horizon, not fluffy innocent little summer clouds, but big dark ones that meant business. ‘I still don’t know why I listen to you.’ I did know, of course. A generalised sense of guilt will make you behave unwisely.

I got a beaming smile in return. ‘Because I have charisma, and between us we could raise the money. You’ve got to admit it though, Pax, it’s a cracking place for a hotel.’

I revolved slowly, taking in the fallen walls, the windswept nature of the headland, the pathetic row of grey stones standing two rows high that marked the foundations of the long-gone kirk and, above all, the vision of my brother, six-feet-three of Irn Bru-fuelled idiocy.

The only ‘cracking’ things around here were the walls and my mental state.

The remains of the tower house dominated the centre of the site, standing like one remaining tooth in a grey-gummed mouth with the site of the old kirk teetering on one edge of the headland.

The rest of our purchase was wind-scoured grass and mud.

These were also grey. A partly collapsed wall ran around the whole clifftop, serving solely to show where the land ended.

‘Ruins’ did not do it justice. ‘Post-apocalyptic’ was nearer the mark.

Lennox was still beaming. ‘Bollocks,’ I said yet again, but with slightly less venom this time.

Beneath us, the sound of waves denigrating the rock of the headland boomed in the chasms and cracks as seabirds swung.

An empty bottle that had once held cheap wine rolled steadily towards the drop and then back with an oddly musical sound as the wind toyed with it.

The place had a lonely and desolate feel that did not inspire me with ‘successful hotel’ vibes.

‘Did they ever find out what happened to that archaeological dig that vanished from here?’ I asked idly, watching the bottle rotate over the tussocky grass. ‘I mean, four people disappeared – it’s basically a TV series waiting to happen.’

It had certainly occupied a good deal of the time I’d spent being interviewed by the bank manager about my loan.

‘You’ll have to take out life insurance on the loan, in case you disappear without trace,’ he’d said, with a certain amount of hand-rubbing glee.

‘Like those archaeologists. There might be a serial killer on the loose and how would we get our money back if you get murdered?’

Honestly, I don’t know how he achieved managerial status, because it wasn’t based on his consistent positive attitude.

Lenny was sucking his bruised hand. He leaned slightly to look over the remains of the headland wall at the drop down to the water.

‘The police think they went over the edge,’ he said vaguely, as though the mysterious disappearance of an entire archaeological team was merely a matter of academic interest. ‘They vanished during a really bad storm and there was no sign of any foul play. And,’ he added more cheerfully, ‘it meant that the price went down. We got the site for a snip. Nobody wanted to buy somewhere four people had fallen to their deaths.’

I looked again at the desolate outcrop, peppered with seagull droppings and random bits of fallen wall.

‘Lenny,’ I said steadily. ‘It was overpriced at “a snip”. There’s no McDonald’s for thirty miles unless we’re talking about random members of the clan, and the nearest village is twelve miles away. Even the sheep don’t hang around.’

‘Another reason why it was cheap.’

The dark clouds had swept further in towards the land and begun to muster above us, in a grimly determined way. We were going to get wet, the clouds said, even if they had to jump up and down on our heads to make it happen.

‘So you made us buy back our old family heritage just because it was cheap?’

‘And so we can turn it into a hotel.’ Lenny waved expansively again towards the tip of the headland, beyond which the irritated ocean scratched at the coastline like nails at a flea bite. ‘I mean, look at that view.’

As the view, which seemed to be all that the place had going for it, was obscured by the first squall of rain blowing in in a great veil of sudden damp, my mood did not improve.

‘Let’s get under cover,’ I said. It was habit, organising my older brother.

Lenny was full of spontaneous ‘good ideas’ – like buying back the piece of land that had belonged to our family, the McKells, after several hundred years – but he couldn’t be trusted to behave sensibly when faced with a broken washing machine or, indeed, rain.

‘There isn’t much shelter.’ Lenny looked around as though he’d never seen the place before. ‘A few doorways, maybe.’

The rain was cold. It smelled of its recent travels over the sea and made a hissing sound as it hit all the fallen masonry that scattered the site as though a giant had built a rockery.

Much of the rain bounced. I stared across towards the main body of land off which the headland jutted and where our cars were parked in a farmer’s field, half a mile of vertiginous climb and several flights of steps away. ‘We should have brought a tent.’

‘It’ll pass soon,’ Lenny said, ever the optimist.

‘Well, until it does, I’m going to find some shelter.’

‘I just want to go over here and have a look at that big wall.’ Lenny jogged off, ignoring the downpour that still teemed and splattered off the stones and flat-grassed land as though trying to compete with the sea below. ‘I won’t be long.’

‘Put your hood up, then!’ I called after him and he flipped up the hood to his sweatshirt with a cheery wave, almost tripped over a protruding boulder and righted himself. ‘And be careful! Don’t go near the edge.’ The habits of a hundred school-trip supervisions died hard.

The rain was finding its way down the neck of my down-filled jacket now.

My hair was sticking to my head with the weight of water, dripping onto my shoulders and over my face, and the niggly wind that had accompanied the cloud was making me shiver.

It might be July, but clearly no one had told Scotland.

I backed slowly into the main ruin, that of the tower house.

This was the earliest part of the structure, built, so Lenny had told me as he’d dragged me around the site, around 1460.

The walls still stood to a height of thirty feet, there were remnants of floor joists, and smears of plaster still adhered to protected corners.

I looked around me as the rain lashed down inside the building, and sighed.

Lenny was so sure we could rebuild and turn this into a bijoux hotel, and now we were both up to our eyeballs in debt, but all I could see was ruin, both of the crumbling-wall variety and financial.

Over in one corner, set in a recess, was the remains of a small flight of stairs that ran four steps high, originally to the upper storey, which was now no more than a few jutting stones and some holes.

During our tour, Lenny had pointed these out, together with the few crumbling steps that had once gone down into the kitchens beneath, now just a cavernous space, inaccessible because of the disappearance of the rest of the staircase.

There would once, Lenny had informed me gleefully, have been two ways down to the basement rooms – these stone stairs as a permanent fixture giving access from inside the building, and a wooden structure leading in from the yard outside.

Peasants, apparently, warranted only an unsafe and mostly rotting way down, whereas the castle occupants were entitled to a proper staircase.

There was now nothing left of either. Most of the stone steps had probably, as with much of the rest of the stone, been carted away by local farmers to repair farm buildings.

I stood for a second looking down into the dark, dank-smelling hole and wondered how desperate the farmers must be for rock in order to clamber all the way up here just for something that seemed to be a major crop in local fields otherwise.

At least in here the wind was mitigated by the thick walls, although it gusted and whistled through passages and corridors in its attempt to search me out.

The rain, though, would not be diverted and was coming straight down, slicking the stones and pushing my wet hair further down inside my coat.

I shivered again and decided to go and sit on what remained of the basement steps, where the floor of the entrance hall provided a kind of roof.

It might keep me dry enough not to again want to murder Lenny when he came back, no doubt soaked to the skin but with a renewed enthusiasm for doing something expensive to what remained of the buildings.

Cautiously I inched my way into the gap that led to the staircase, keeping one hand on the three feet of stone for security.

There was a worn groove here, a smooth patch where the otherwise gritty sandstone had been eroded, and I stopped for a second to look at it.

It came just at the end of a run of small holes where, so Lenny had told me and he was the one with the history degree, a support had stood to help those going down to the kitchen below not to plummet down the staircase.

This must have been where hands had rubbed, using the wall as a guide before grabbing for the rail or rope or whatever had been fixed by those holes.

A connection with the long-gone past, I thought, imagining all those hands sliding along, desperate to grasp at the safety of something fixed.

For a moment I could almost understand Lenny’s passion for history, those people of long-ago living lives so like and yet so unlike our own, and then I shook my wet head.

History was, like my brother, impractical.

Our family might be old, but so was everyone else’s – we could trace ours, that was all.

It didn’t make us any better or any more worthy, and Lenny’s obsession with the past was just a symptom of his general desire not to have to live within the confusion of the twenty-first century.

History didn’t pay the bills. History didn’t tell you what to do when your on-off boyfriend decided to become permanently ‘off’ and when your summer holidays from your job attempting to teach the rudiments of chemistry to uninterested teenagers suddenly turned into a trip to a ruined Scottish castle.

Lenny’s defence when challenged was always that we could learn from history.

History was, I mused as I turned to sit down on the second step, resoundingly silent on the subject of what to do when your life seemed to be turning to shit.

As I bent my legs to sit, a loose stone rolled beneath my foot and unbalanced me.

I lost my footing, grabbed for the edge of the step above and missed.

History might not be up to much in the real-life stakes, but physics obviously knew what it was doing and gravity took over as I slid down the remaining two steps and then onto what was left of the rest of the staircase, which turned out to be what felt like a stone chute, propelling me downwards into the dark of the basement on my back and bottom amid a shower of loose stones and a torrent of very bad language.