Chapter 36 #2
On instinct she went through all the rooms in the house with the orange-handled hatchet in her hand.
She saw the mess he’d made rifling through the rooms and found no one else hiding behind doors or waiting for her around any corners.
She did find an unflushed turd in the toilet, which somehow seemed both characteristic of the man and another violation.
She flushed it and moved on, back downstairs to the kitchen.
She made herself eat and drink before changing out of her cut-off boiler suit and into the other one, putting a sweater on beneath it.
There was blood on her cut-offs, though she had imagined she’d been careful enough to avoid it.
She knew she’d never wear it again, so burned it in the fireplace.
Because that’s what you did, she told herself, when you hid a body.
Cover your tracks. Burn your clothes. She decided she was getting light-headed, because the sudden vision of herself crouched in front of the hearth poking at the burning rags with the fire tongs like a murderer in a TV show made her want to laugh, when of course she should be racked with fear at the night’s events, both the attack and the hiding of the evidence of it.
She’d definitely crossed one line. Who was to say she wasn’t travelling across another one in the unsettled marches between sane and something else? She knew the answer to that.
“Have the PTSD later,” she said again and went into the bathroom to grab a roll of surgical tape from the medicine cabinet and her last box of Ibuprofen, the one she’d been saving for emergencies since the island emptied and the shop closed.
She decided this was an emergency, but didn’t take any yet, promising herself she would only do so if the pain got really unbearable.
She went to the cupboard under the stairs and unlocked the discreet gun cabinet where her grandfather’s twelve-bore lived and took it and a box of cartridges.
She packed two rucksacks, snagged the birdwatching binoculars from the hook by the kitchen window, locked the front door behind her and headed down the long drive to the high ground on the other side of the road from the house.
There was a low shelter by the T-junction at the roadhead where, in earlier years, the refuse bins had waited for the fortnightly rubbish and recycling lorry to grind past and empty them.
She put down her packs and the gun and took the time to pull all four of them out and leave them stretched across the entrance to the drive, not because they would stop anyone entering, because they were easily wheeled out of the way, but because if anyone came to the house while she was asleep, she would see they had been moved.
She then crossed the road, awkwardly jumped the ditch trying to avoid landing on her bad foot, fell over and swore a lot before getting up and taking to the heather beyond.
She climbed the slope to the high ridge, and only fell over unseen obstacles twice on the way, and spent the rest of the night in a sleeping bag wrapped in a waterproof bivvy-bag, sleeping surprisingly deeply.
Come morning she pitched the low brown two-man tent just behind the ridgeline in a shallow depression that hid it from the road and any other houses that might harbour eyes, even in the far distance.
She grimaced at the two badly bruised toes.
She was able to wiggle them a very little, enough for her to hope they might just be badly staved and not properly broken, though they hurt quite as much as if they were.
She strapped them together with the surgical tape, wincing as she did so, but decided against taking any of her valuable painkillers for now. And then she began her vigil.
She lay up in the deep heather, binoculars ready, and just watched the house and the land and the seascape beyond. If he was part of a group, she’d see them coming. She wasn’t going to be surprised again.
She’d taken food for ten days and lasted seven before she went back down the hill, limping much less than she had on the way up.
In that time she saw no sign of any companions looking for her attacker.
There were no lights in the darkness, near or far.
Nothing moved on the road round the island, which she could see in the far distance.
The only animals she saw moving in the landscape were some faraway sheep down on the machair and a family of red deer who drifted over the ridge into her dip and stopped in mild surprise at finding her there, and then drifted on, seemingly without interest or much alarm.
She saw hooded crows and ravens and the golden eagle that circled overhead at the same time each day, as if it was following a set patrol pattern, and in the fields beyond the house she heard and saw a flight of geese honk into land and feed for most of an afternoon.
But apart from endless distant white flashes of gulls and one skua that found itself inland enough to fly over her, she saw nothing else to alarm her.
Still sticking to her plan, she came off the hill, reclaimed the house and went for a swim.
Pete Boggarty’s island still watched over the bay and she felt its gaze no more peopled and sinister than she ever had.
She was, despite herself, pleased to note that she still experienced it as an old familiar part of her landscape. Just an island. Not a crime scene.
She cycled across the long causeway between North Uist and Berneray and put the bike on the Hope.
Then she cast off and sailed it out of the small boxy harbour around and back across to the larger island and the more open mooring that lay beside the old ferry pier.
The building of the causeway had rendered it obsolete back when her grandfather had been young, but it was still a good mooring and a secure enough place for the boat.
Most importantly, it was closer to hand should she need to move fast. She estimated she could run from the house to the pierhead in less than three minutes.
It just made sense, she told herself, proud at how rational she was still sounding.
She was keeping a grip. She might not even have to allow herself the PTSD at all. Which brought her to the next phase of the plan she had made leaning on the quad bike, trying not to see the dead pile of clothes in the dark behind her.
Things not to do.
Don’t lose your routine. You can lean on it, she told herself. Discipline and repetition would mark time passing and create a framework of familiarity to keep her moored in reality as she waited for him.
She persuaded herself it would be simple.
She wrote it out on index cards she found in a desk drawer and pinned them among the drawings and paintings with which she had covered the tongue-and-groove wall of the living room: KEEP JOURNAL.
KEEP VEGETABLES GROWING. EAT. WASH. FISH. SWIM. READ FOR COMPANY.
On one bad day she wondered if it was beginning to look like a murder-wall in a police drama, but one in which she was both victim and perpetrator. She banished that thought quickly and wrote another card:
HAVE PTSD LATER.
She kept her routine, and the drawings spread across the walls to mark the time passing. But of course it wasn’t quite her old routine, because of the third plank in her survival plan.
Adjustments were made.
She took care that there were no lights that escaped the house to give her presence within away to any night-time searcher or passers-by.
The billiard room at the back of the building was an over-grand anomaly for what had been built as a substantial enough but simple farmhouse.
It had been added by an optimistic hotelier who had bought the place in the middle of the last century and tried to run it as a fishing hotel for the adventurous gentry who came north every year to try the sea lochs and moorland pools of the remote island.
The vision had failed, as had the hotel, but the full-sized billiard table remained.
There was scarcely room for it in the place, and in one corner you had to use a specially shortened cue to make certain angles, but there was a fireplace and it could be made snug and light-tight, so it became her after-dark refuge.
She didn’t let herself call it a safe room, because that would be both overdramatic and admitting to a deeper fear of unspecified dangers that might be peopling the outer darkness that she wished to remain in denial of.