Chapter 14
‘Why aren’t you stopping?’ Murray said as Finlay stuck to the sixty-mile limit and not a bit over.
‘Eh?’ He hadn’t a clue what Murray was on about.
‘That was the entrance to the garden centre back there. You’ll have to turn around.’
Again, Finlay didn’t get it. ‘Fillbarrows Garden Centre? Who said we were going there?’
‘You did!’
Murray had seemed agitated since getting in the truck, but now he simply wasn’t making sense.
Maybe it had something to do with that lanky fellow kissing him.
It had turned him stupid. Finlay had been given all of one second to disguise the shock of seeing it happening right in front of his eyes.
A kiss that they’d probably have preferred to go unwitnessed.
He had felt their kiss like it was his own mouth warm against Murray’s chilled cheek, aimed right at the spot below the wide cuff of his black Swiss flag beanie where auburn curls spilled out in every direction.
Finlay had felt that kiss in his gut, had wanted it – in the simplest, most primal way – to be his, and yes, he’d immediately added that tall, handsome fellow in orange to his long list of people he would not get along with.
He’d sort of guessed Murray was gay or, at least, deep down, he’d hoped he was, but why hadn’t he considered the possibility that he would already be with someone?
Stupid, really, considering. Not that Finlay had any plans of actually trying anything, obviously, and as this morning proved, he’d been completely correct in that decision.
He wouldn’t have stood a chance. Naturally.
‘Where are we going, then?’ There was a note of alarm in Murray’s voice.
‘Right enough, I never said.’ This was his way of yielding.
He was being generous because Murray had assumed when he’d mentioned picking up plants he meant the giant commercial place with all the imported bedding and ornamentals that had travelled further than Finlay himself had in his whole lifetime.
‘I booked us in for a visit to the Snow Road Native Plant Nursery.’
Murray pulled a face. Clearly he’d never heard of the place.
‘Nae reason you should know it. It’s the only place round here that grows Cairngorm montane trees and species on the rare plant register.’
‘Montane?’
‘You know? Upland species?’ Murray really did need his help if he didn’t know something as simple as that. ‘I thought you wanted this garden to reflect the botany of the region?’
‘I’d assumed we were going to turn up at the garden centre and put in an order for a few trays of…’ Murray paused.
Finlay simply had to tear his eyes away from the road, just for a second, not something he’d usually do, just so he could see Murray flailing, searching his brain for the name of literally any plant. Sure enough, he was puffing his cheeks, eyes screwed in meditation.
A tiny glow sparked into life inside Finlay’s chest. Regardless, he wasn’t about to help the guy out. ‘Go on,’ he prompted, actually at risk of enjoying himself.
‘Petunias!’ Murray announced in triumph.
Finlay sniffed a laugh, but soon after, silence fell and Murray took to adjusting the cuffs of his sporty white jacket with the expensive European logo that Finlay, of course, hadn’t recognised.
Murray seemed put out. Was he? The regret flooded in. He hadn’t been trying to upset him. He’d assumed they were participating in the kind of ‘banter’ these town folk went in for, but which, more often than not, left Finlay wondering what exactly was required of him.
He resolved not to say anything else. Stupid of him to think he could compete with… well, with anyone, in the flirty patter stakes. What had come over him? No more getting carried away, he told himself.
Finlay carefully mirror, signal, manoeuvred on the deserted stretch of road and turned slowly into the nursery carpark, empty save for an ancient Collie dog with grizzled white chops who was bouncing with excitement all of one centimetre off the hardened mud yard where he seemed to roam freely.
‘Is this it?’ Murray said, peering through the windscreen at the polytunnels behind fencing. ‘Bet they don’t have a coffee shop or houseplants or nice cookware stuff here.’
Finlay yanked at the handbrake. He didn’t know if Murray’s petulance was in jest or serious.
‘We’re no’ here for galivanting,’ he snapped.
Murray’s face snapped into a look of irritation. Good.
Sticking to his old tried and true defences was by far the safest way of navigating this excursion, and yet the pinch at Finlay’s heart made him regret his charmless ways, and, not for the first time, he wished himself a different, easier-to-like person altogether.
* * *
Murray could at least help haul the trolley. That, and having possession of the project’s credit card, would be his only contribution to today’s trip. Finlay had the rest under control.
The owners, a youngish couple in matching green fleeces and wellies, had let them in, handing them plastic luggage tags and black marker pens so they could claim the larger items they wanted delivered to the project site.
Then they left the pair to it, and Finlay led the way up and down the rows of plants, with the resident soppy dog following at his side.
He’d been surprised to see Finlay greet the mutt as soon as it ambushed him getting out of the driver’s side door. He’d not gone so far as to talk to the dog in a baby voice, but he’d crouched before the animal and scratched behind its ears and asked permission to take a look around.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that Finlay liked animals, hiding away with them up on that mountain of his. Still, the sight had softened Murray’s opinion of the curmudgeon.
Seeing him picking through the pots of plants in their winter dormancy surprised him even more.
To Murray, most of the plants looked like nothing but unpromising stumps caked in earth, but to Finlay they seemed to be something else, a whole magical forest he could conjure in his mind just by reading the labels.
‘Ah, we’ll need a few of these!’ Finlay said, lifting a tray of tiny rosettes of wet green. This really was a terrible time of year for buying plants, if Finlay hoped to enthuse Murray about them.
‘Really?’
‘Aye! Creepin’ lady’s tresses. These’ll make a braw green carpet around the trees and they’ll encourage the bumblebees. Unless,’ he said, looking worried, ‘you’re planning on keeping the grass as a pristine mowed lawn with the stripes and all that?’
Murray shrugged. ‘That doesn’t sound anything like as much fun as a load of creepy ladies dresses, or whatever it was you said.’
A light flared behind Finlay’s eyes but seemed to extinguish itself as quickly as it appeared. ‘They’re evergreen and throw up green spikes with wee white orchid flowers in summer. We’ll take twenty to be getting on with, knowing they’ll spread themselves aboot.’
‘Right, right.’ Murray tried to follow Finlay’s business-like lead, writing ‘McIntyre x 20’ on a label and attaching it to the tray.
Finlay moved quickly onward to something else. ‘Twinflowers! These are rare in Scotland now. We’d better have some. They’ve two wee pinky-white pixie hats hanging like bells from a double stalk. Hence, twinflower. Can we have twenty of these too?’
He was like a child at the cinema Pick ’n’ Mix.
‘I’m a twin,’ Murray blurted, out of habit whenever the topic came up, but also trying to get in Finlay’s good books, if such a thing was possible.
Finlay stopped to observe him. ‘There’s two of you?’
‘A sister, so unidentical, obviously, and she’s not much like me, really.’
‘Hmm.’ Finlay turned back to the plants. ‘Label, please.’
‘Oops, sorry.’ Murray hastily labelled the twinflowers, feeling every bit like Finlay’s secretary and as far from making friends as you can get.
The ranger stepped along the row, making sure to scratch the dog’s head to keep it by his side. ‘I’m an only child myself,’ he said in a begrudging way.
Murray ignored the urge to say something jokey and overfamiliar about how that explained a few things, and chose to ask instead, ‘Are your family from around here?’
This was clearly a question too far. ‘Cuckoo flower. Four trays?’
Murray poised the pen with a sigh. ‘How’d you spell cuckoo?’
‘Just put lady’s smock. The caterpillars love them in the spring.’
‘Not sure we want caterpillars eating…’ Murray checked the price sticker. ‘About thirty quid’s worth of flowers.’
‘Have you ever seen a cloud of orange-tip butterflies?’ Finlay challenged. ‘Or a green-veined white, for that matter?’ He asked this like he already knew the answer. The smartarse.
‘Four trays it is,’ Murray conceded, writing on the label.
‘Did you ken that a long time ago our ancient Caledonian woodland was an Eden of wildlife and plant species, before it was decimated for game hunting and logging?’
Murray had the feeling a lecture was coming, like the one this guy had given his sister when she’d got caught in the fog up Mount Cairn Dhu last summer and she’d found a fun way to keep herself and her policeman boyfriend entertained while she was stuck there.
Ally had hinted as much, swearing her brother to secrecy.
It didn’t require a detective to put two and two together and deduce it was Finlay Morlich she’d described as the ‘misery-guts ranger’ that’d lectured them all the way down the mountain about how being irresponsible even at lower altitudes cost lives and he had made them both take home leaflets about staying safe in the Cairngorms.
Finlay was still talking, lifting plants and examining them, putting them down again, anything to avoid eye contact, Murray guessed.
‘We’ve a responsibility with this garden to encourage missing or threatened species, don’t you think?
If we plant strategically we could see new populations of mining-bees, pine hoverfly, aspen hoverfly… ’
‘Aspen? That’s the trees Cary wanted us to buy, wasn’t it?’
‘That’s right. We’ll look at those afore we leave.’