Chapter Three #2
“We think you have the talent to do the collection justice. We like your modesty and the breadth of your learning. We like
the way you think. I hope you’re convinced by what you’ve seen today.”
“Do you think Tracy is convinced by me?” Sid would have told me not to ask. Trevelyan and my mother would have said the same.
Clearly, Diana Cornish was still trying to persuade me to join the Institute. But my anxiety was always there like a tiny
stone in my shoe, irritating me and demanding my attention.
“You have nothing to worry about. Enjoy the rest of your evening, and safe travels in the morning. All we ask is that if you
want to accept our offer, you let us know by end of day tomorrow.”
I messaged Sid asking where he was, and he came down to meet me in the cozy hotel bar. We had a nightcap beside the crackling
fire. He told me about his evening. He’d had a nice time, was a little buzzed. “Paul’s nice. Reserved, but a good bloke. I
could see myself going for a pint with him, and he’s offered to take me bouldering if we move here.”
I loved that Sid was already imagining himself here, because I was, too. I told him what I could about my evening, which wasn’t
a lot, because of the NDA, but he got the gist.
“Will you accept the offer?” he asked.
“Only if you want this, too.”
“I could make it work.” He smiled and held up his glass, and I chinked mine against it.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “That’s a tight deadline she’s given you to respond. They must be keen. Will you tell her tonight?”
“I think we should sleep on it,” I said, because he’d had a few to drink and I didn’t want either of us to rush into a decision,
but in my gut, I already knew what my answer would be.
Clio
Clio attended Lillian’s cremation on a bleak day in Essex. It seemed Lillian had almost no family; her job had been her life.
Clio thought of the friend who Lillian said she’d lost and felt her absence. She wept silently in the second row of the nondenominational
chapel during the service and fought to hold back tears the next day back at work, when she couldn’t concentrate because her
mind’s eye kept replaying the moments after Lillian’s death in excruciatingly vivid detail. The rain, the blood, the absence
of life in Lillian’s open eyes. Her boss offered her a week of compassionate leave, and she took it, but once she got home,
she had no idea what to do with herself.
The intensity of her grief was surprising and oppressive. She felt as if the walls of her flat were closing in around her.
The first night of her leave she lay in bed, so physically tense her muscles ached and emotionally fretful, unable to sleep.
She spent hours watching shadows move across the ceiling as cars drove by, their headlamps sweeping the room.
By morning, she decided the only way to get through this was to do the thing that Lillian had asked her to. From her work
account, she sent an email full of questions to the Scottish police and got a quick reply.
To: Clio Spicer
From: Rory Thomson
Re: Eleanor Bruton
Date: April 8, 2024
Hi Clio,
Happy to help. Eleanor Bruton’s death was an open-and-shut case for us.
I’m attaching the official on-scene report, autopsy report, and a transcript of an interview with Simon Bruton, the deceased’s
son.
If you don’t fancy plowing through them, main points are as follows:
Mrs. Bruton’s body was found by a local fisherman who was collecting his lobster pots. Her swimsuit had snagged on some rocks
in Lythe Bay, an inlet on the coast of the mainland. She was face down in the water and in a bad way. We don’t know how long
the body had been there, but the weather had been poor for at least four days, with big swells and high tides.
There was trauma to her head consistent with falling onto the rocks or being washed up hard against them and abrasions on
her face, hands, and feet that were consistent with the body having traveled in the water postmortem. The fisherman pulled
her body onto his boat and took her to shore. The body was bloated, and the autopsy report noted that her skin had marked
wrinkling and had sloughed in places, suggesting prolonged immersion. The report also confirms that there was water and debris
in her lungs, so we know she was alive when she went into the sea.
After a search of the east side of the island we discovered a towel, and a dry robe had been left tucked into some rocks in a small cove closer to the cottage.
A thermos of tea was with it. A search of Mrs. Bruton’s cottage found it to be immaculate.
There was a pan of soup on the hob and some dough had been left to rise on the kitchen sideboard.
We found sprigs of heather in a jug on the table. There was no note.
Ian Robertson, who had been bringing her groceries to the island, said that he’d once seen Mrs. Bruton swimming and once spotted
her wearing the dry robe, too. She’d been on the island for eight months.
We spoke to Mrs. Bruton’s son, Simon. He asserted that she wasn’t the type to consider taking her own life, although he also
mentioned that he and his wife thought it was out of character that she’d moved to Scotland. Between us, I’d have traveled
some distance to avoid him if I were her. I got the feeling that most of his objection to her moving had been the loss of
free childcare, so we took that with a pinch of salt.
The coroner ruled it an accident, and I think she was right. The likelihood is that Mrs. Bruton slipped off the rocks when
entering the water. She wasn’t the first to drown there and she won’t be the last. Loch Moidart is connected to the sea and
is tidal. The currents are strong, and the water is very cold.
Please be in touch if there’s anything else you need from us.
Rory
DC Rory Thomson
Major Investigation Team, Glasgow
Clio read the email carefully, then the attachments.
They included the address of the cottage.
She looked it up online and found that it was available for rent.
Impulsively, she booked it for a few nights, threw some stuff in a bag, and began the journey up north.
It would be a distraction, she thought. A way to tamp down her feelings about Lillian, channel them into action so she didn’t dwell on her grief. Lillian wouldn’t want that.
She broke the drive overnight in a motel where the décor matched her sense of desolation but felt better the next morning
when she reached the Scottish Highlands, whose beauty left her a little awestruck. When she stopped for provisions in Fort
William, she felt like she could breathe easier, as if the sights and sounds of this quest were replacing some of her muddled
grief, or at least distracting from it.
After another hour of driving, she found herself standing on the shore of Loch Moidart beside the ruins of an ancient castle,
watching a man load her things onto his boat. The island had no shop, no public transport, no access via land. She would be
there for four nights.
Choppy waves roughed the loch’s surface. The water looked dark and deep, even though the sky was bright with autumn sun. The
loch and its surroundings were wilder and more intimidating than they’d looked in the online pictures, and she thought, What
am I doing here? But it was too late to turn back now.
The man’s hand swallowed hers as he helped her onto the boat. It was small and low to the water. As he readied them to leave
the dock, the lenses of his sunglasses reflected the sky, the water, the castle, the prehistoric-looking copse on a tiny islet
out in the loch. Clio could also see a reflection of herself perched in the prow of the boat, dwarfed by everything.
“What brings you here?” he asked once they were free of snaking sandbars and in open water, headed directly for a pier on
spindly wooden posts that reached out from the island. She could see the cottage she’d booked. It was built from gray island
stone and was flat fronted, with four windows, symmetrically arranged two on each side of the front door, one atop the other.
It looked like a child’s drawing of a cottage.
“Bird-watching,” she said. A pair of brand-new binoculars, purchased in Fort William, hung around her neck.
He slowed the boat as they approached the pier, and the water behind it churned and frothed.
He killed the engine, tied the boat to a post, and helped her out.
The pier was scarcely wide enough for two people to walk along it together, so she followed him.
The water looked gelatinous and dark through the wooden slats.
It slapped the stilts and the rocky shoreline.
On land they followed a path. Where the shore ended, woodland began, and they were quickly surrounded by trees as far as she
could see; some had trunks as thick as a man’s torso. Silver lichen clung to the branches. The leafy canopy of goldening green
twitched and rustled above, and the ground was so thickly carpeted with acid-green moss that it was hard to know what was
beneath it: stone or loam or fallen timber. Rich green scents thickened the air. Clio’s lungs felt more capacious with each
breath. It was an otherworldly place.
They passed a small shed tucked to one side of the path, and the man—Ian Robertson, his name was, the same man who had looked
after Eleanor Bruton when she lived here—yanked the door open and took a glance inside before shutting it again.
“What’s that for?” Clio asked.
“It’s where we leave groceries for long-term tenants, the ones who don’t like to be disturbed.”
“I guess if you want solitude, this is the place to come.”
“Yeah. Tenants leave trash there for us to pick up. It’s a good system, except when something tries to nest in there.”
“I guess you get a lot of people wanting solitude?”
He shrugged. “Some do. We had a woman staying until earlier this year for eight months.”
That would be Eleanor, Clio knew. He said no more about her. Not a good idea to tell a new tenant that the previous one had
died here, she supposed.