Chapter 3 #2
I’ve decided to visit the Torridon Hotel, the closest building of note to me.
It’s supposed to be a four-star country house with a long gravel drive and a view of Upper Loch Torridon.
I have the kind of cash for one drink and a small dinner if I order carefully, which will be a small miracle if I can pull it off.
Me and budgeting have never ever mixed well—another reason Ryan and I fought all the time—but I have vowed this year to make every damn dollar count.
I pull on my good wool sweater, the burgundy one that doesn’t smell like a basement, and I get in the car.
The drive itself is an event. The single-track wraps around the foot of the mountain across the head of the loch, and even in the fog you can feel the scale of what’s around you, the way the hills hug you and the mountains rise dramatically and the dark water carves a boundary around you as if trying to pin you in place.
I take it slowly, and luckily there are no cars coming the other way that make me panic whether I’m driving on the right side of the road or not.
The pub at the Torridon is dark wood, good vintage lamps and the kind of fireplace that’s, in late August, doing a small token fire because the management has correctly identified that the tourists want one.
The bar smells of peat and good whisky and something braised.
I order a pint of the local ale, a bowl of Cullen skink because the name sounds funny—I imagine it’s a dish the Cullens would have made their non-vampire guests—and a chunk of bread, and sit at the corner of the bar with a paperback I picked up at the airport that I keep reading the same couple of pages of.
There are eight or nine people in the place.
Two hill-walkers in technical gear at a corner table, and a couple in their seventies sharing a plate of haggis fritters (yum).
Three locals at the far end of the bar, two men and a woman, all roughly fifty or sixty, all settled in the way of people who’ve been at this bar for a good long while and intend to stay for longer.
There’s something about that that I admire, maybe even envy.
I drink my beer and eat my creamy fish soup and half-listen to the ambience around me.
It takes about ten minutes for the conversation at the locals’ end to drift somewhere useful.
The man in the middle, ginger-bearded, in a cream fisherman’s jumper, says something about “the Mackenzie lass” and the woman beside him says “Aye, two weeks now,” and the third man, older and quieter, makes a faint gruff sound.
The hill-walkers, who’ve been quiet at their table, hear it too. “Sorry,” the woman hill-walker says, leaning toward the bar. “Are you talking about that woman who went missing?”
The three locals look at each other. The ginger-bearded man takes a careful pull of his pint. “Aye,” he says. “Walked from her cottage to her sister’s, never got there. Two weeks last Sunday.”
“Where was this, near here?”
“Down near Applecross.”
“That’s the third one, isn’t it?” the male hill-walker says.
A silence at the locals’ end of the bar that’s not awkward but is deliberate. The older quieter man finally says, “Aye, the third. All vanished this summer.”
“All women?” the female hill-walker asks nervously.
“All women.”
“Tourists or locals?”
“Mix of both it seems.”
“The polis any nearer?” the older man wonders, to the room more than to anyone specifically.
“The polis,” the ginger-bearded man begins, “are doing what they do. Which is bugger-all. Seems to think all the ladies were too capricious and decided to start their lives over elsewhere.”
“Well, they don’t have any evidence that something bad happened to them,” offers the bartender, giving them a reproachful look that says don’t scare the fucking tourists. He’s a blond man in his thirties with the kind of soft Highland accent I could listen to all day.
The woman among them, who’s been quiet, picks up her pint and says, in a tone that’s half-joke and half-not, “Well, aside from the liver.”
“The liver?” the male hill-walker exclaims. “What liver?”
“Oh, they found a liver on the shore of Applecross Bay. A human liver by the looks of it. Not sure what came of it though.”
“What came of it was that it belonged to a deer,” the bartender admonished her. “None of this human remains nonsense.”
The older man laughs, but only a little. “You want nonsense, then don’t mention the wives.”
The bartender lets out a tired sigh and goes back to cleaning glasses while shaking his head.
“The wives?” the female hill-walker inquires.
“Och, it’s an old story.” The woman waves her hand. “They’ll tell you in any pub on the coast. The drowned wives wait at the edge of the water at dusk and pull the swimmers down. Don’t go in the loch alone, and certainly don’t go in after dark. They’ll have you.”
The ginger-bearded man shakes his head slightly. The older man stares into his pint.
“And that’s what you think happened to the Mackenzie woman?” The female hill-walker’s tone is incredulous, but it’s clear she is trying to be respectful at the same time.
“That’s what my granny would have said,” the woman replies, and she’s still smiling but it’s more careful now.
“My granny said this loch’s had a tenant or two since before her granny.
Lots of folk gone missing over the years if you go back, usually by the shore but sometimes in the trees by the water as well.
Three over the summer is a lot more than normal, but it’s not unusual.
We’d be a sight more worried if it wasn’t happening. ”
Great.
The older quieter man clears his throat, finally, and says, in a voice that’s not unkind but is final, “Mary, that’s enough. Missing women are one thing, but the stories are another.”
The conversation closes. The hill-walkers exchange a look that dismisses it as colorful local folklore, and go back to their plates.
The locals settle into a quieter register about something else, fishing licenses and trout, I think.
I don’t know, I’m not listening anymore.
I eat my soup with gusto it’s actually quite tasty if you don’t mind skink and think about those three missing women and who could have taken them.
Because, even as witchy as I am, I know there’s no such thing as ghosts that kill people.
Haunt people, yes, but actively murder them? No.
And now I’m thinking about the man at my door last night who wouldn’t give me a last name.
What if the man at my door is the reason those women are gone? The man staying in a crumbling old castle that’s supposed to be empty?
The thought is so cold it sobers me up. Which is a pity because I was enjoying the buzz.
I pay the bill. The bartender glances at the credit card and then at me. “Galloway,” he says, mildly, then looks at me closer. “You’re the niece. You’re the one staying out at Effie’s place.”
Am I locally famous, or what?
“That’s me. You knew her?”
The locals at the far end of the bar have all looked over. The woman, Mary, raises her glass an inch in something that might be a toast.
“Sure did. She was a good woman, your aunt,” the older quiet man murmurs.
“Thank you,” I say. I’m getting better at saying this. “She was.”
“Knew the loch better than most,” he states. “People would come to her with all sorts of problems and she’d solve them. No matter how outlandish they seemed.”
I don’t know what that means but I give him a half-smile and tip twenty percent because the North American way of doing things has been ingrained in me, then I gather my paperback and coat and I leave.
The fog has thickened in the time I was inside. My car looks like an angel has been weeping over it.
The drive back to the cottage is slow going.
The single-track is wet, the visibility bad, and I’m taking it with my headlights on full, watching for sheep and the occasional hill-walker who hasn’t read the signs about reflective gear.
The fog has gone the color of pearl and it’s darker, though dusk is hours away.
The mountains and loch are still swallowed up.
I have the road and the verge and a few meters of bracken beyond it, and that’s it.
It’s spooky as fuck.
Then, ahead of me I see a man walking on the side of the road.
His back is to me, and I see him only because my headlights catch the pale of his shirt against the dark of the ferns and the wet road.
He’s in dark trousers and a white shirt that’s wet through, sticking to his back, and his hair is dark and wet against his collar.
He’s walking with the kind of even, unhurried pace of a man who hasn’t noticed a car coming up behind him.
I can’t even tell you what his face looks like and I’m only looking at him from behind, yet I know it’s him.
I should drive past him at full speed because the man on the road might be the man who’s been murdering women in these parts, and stopping for him is the dumbest thing I could do.
And yet my foot is coming off the gas because even though my aunt’s words flash through my head—don’t let him in—and even though I just heard about a possible serial killer, there’s a terribly unwise and reckless part of me that wants to roll down the window and say his name.
Alasdair.