Chapter 8
Hamish drank his morning coffee round the side of the ski centre shop, sitting on one of the retired ski lift chairs that still swung over the concrete boarding area.
The sky was dark at just before eight thirty.
Ropes of white light bulbs festooned the slope, lighting up the morning where only the waking gulls and crows disturbed the quiet.
Sitting here had meant a muddy scramble up the low mound from the centre’s picnic area, and his boots were now caked with muck, but it was worth it for the views of the mountain and its dry slope.
An early board rider who often called by from Stranruthie was lazily zigzagging down the Dendix squares without much enthusiasm.
Hamish hadn’t needed to switch the slope sprinklers on, it was starting to drizzle again.
He hadn’t slept well, not knowing what the day would hold.
He’d have to tell his parents about all this at some point.
Maybe he could wait until January and not risk spoiling their Christmas while they were on a high, waiting for his sister’s baby to arrive up on Orkney?
(They’d set up camp at her home in anticipation of the happy event.
Hamish could only imagine Frazer, Holly’s husband, wasn’t much pleased about the invasion).
No, the longer he could keep the inevitable result of this consultation process to himself, the better.
He scuffed his toecaps on the wet ground, making the chair rock, and pulled his coat tighter around him. Even in his beanie, gloves and all his layers, the cold was seeping through.
He used to sit out here under cover of the ski chair canopy at any time of the year and never mind the weather but it had been months since he’d been able to bring himself to come out here.
This was the same spot where, after the Beltane gales back at the end of spring, his ex-girlfriend, Peaches McDowell, had sneaked in with her new man.
They’d thought no one knew, but they’d triggered the security cameras and he’d got the notification on his phone.
Sometimes it was foxes setting off the alert, or a wildcat family.
Other times, it would be local lads, jumping the fence after chucking-out time at the hotel bar and they’d stagger up the mound and sing and shout until their carry outs were drunk, then they’d stagger off after peeing in the bushes.
Harmless stuff, usually. But on that occasion, on Walpurgisnacht, a wild, witching time, the last night of April, famous for its scares and surprises, he’d got the fright of his life seeing a blurry CCTV image of Peaches in a flowy white outfit clambering onto that electrician lad, Euan’s, lap.
During those few alarming seconds, as his brain joined the dots, they’d had no idea there was a lens trained on them.
He’d cut the cameras right away and deleted what footage there was, but it had set off a burning feeling in his gut for what might have been had Peaches chosen not to dump him, even though all that was years ago now.
He’d mostly forgotten about her until that night, but for weeks afterwards he’d got caught up thinking the same thing: she’d never kissed him like that, with absolute abandon.
Probably because they’d been little more than kids and Peaches was still under her mother’s thumb.
When Carenza McDowell ordered her daughter to break it off with him for the sake of her studies, she’d tried to resist the increasing pressure, but eventually it had crushed her willpower and, although they’d been good together, he’d had to accept Peaches wasn’t willing or able to fight for him.
Having her pull the plug, just as he was falling head over heels, had left him with an open wound for a long time.
Even though he’d worked out his body on the slopes and worked out his mind on his business ideas, there’d been a buried part of him still waiting for her to grasp her freedom and come back for him.
She’d have only had to smile in his direction and he’d have melted again; the same way he’d spied that Euan fellow melting, right here on this spot.
The memory jolted him up onto his feet. He tipped out the dregs of his cold coffee over the mud. ‘Lucky so and so!’
Someone cleared their throat. ‘Excuse me?’ exclaimed a voice behind him.
He whipped his head to where a woman was watching him from beside the shuttered concession hatch, and she did not look impressed.
‘Mr Skelton?’ she asked.
Oh no. ‘Ms Norheim? The consultant? You came?’ Shuffling down the mound to greet her, the wet earth shifted beneath his boots and he slipped half the way. ‘Woah!’ It was all he could do to catch himself in case he crashed bodily into her.
That’s when the memory of yesterday unlocked.
‘It’s you!’ they both remarked at the same time.
She was the woman who’d come out of nowhere in a fury in the rain while he’d been hurrying to the accountant’s office to fetch the paperwork her consultancy had demanded.
Hamish attempted to laugh off the unpleasant feeling the memory brought with it. ‘Jinx,’ he tried.
She blinked at him, probably in second-hand embarrassment at the weird way he was behaving. So she was going to pretend she didn’t remember yelling in the street?
‘There was no one at the ticket desk,’ she said blankly, hiking a thumb behind her at the hire shop.
‘Sorry, I was…’ He turned to indicate the vacant ski chair, still swinging gently, wondering what exactly he had been doing.
Sulking? Licking a years-old wound that should have healed by now if he was any kind of man?
‘Just thinking,’ he said, offering his hand which she shook in a surprisingly firm way.
‘Florrie Norheim. Glad to meet you, Mr Skelton.’
‘Just Hamish’ll do.’
Their hands dropped to their sides again. She observed him shrewdly from inside the halo of fluffy faux fur trim on her hood. It was glittering with tiny spots of rain.
She carried an oversized black handbag that looked brand new. Her hair was held back off her face in a tidy way. She hadn’t looked like this yesterday on the street when she’d walked directly into him and had the nerve to roar like it was his fault.
He tried to remain cross with her now, just as he’d tried yesterday, but an intrusive image of the rain running in slow rivulets over her cheekbones transformed her momentarily in his mind’s eye. He felt the same need as yesterday to gulp down a curious feeling he couldn’t name.
She reached into her bag like this was the reason she’d come. ‘This belongs to you.’ It was his umbrella.
‘Ta very much,’ he said, as if she’d been the one lending it to him in his time of need.
Already, he felt the hopelessness of his situation. She had the hard look of someone trained in not giving an inch. She’d have the ‘condemned’ signs pasted up by lunchtime.
And yet, hadn’t she seemed on the verge of tears yesterday? So much so he’d been moved to help her. He wouldn’t usually even consider surrendering his brolly on the rainiest day of the year to an angry person in the street, but he’d thought he’d detected a helplessness in her brimming eyes.
‘Will you show me around the property, please?’ she said, fixing the clasp on her bag once more. ‘After that, I’ll look at your accounts.’ Sharp, laser-focused eyes rose to meet his.
Maybe he’d imagined her vulnerability.
‘This way,’ he sighed, conceding this match before it was even fought.