THIRTEEN
Ewan Nicolson was on duty at the Trout development site every day from dusk to dawn; his superiors had refused to provide full twenty-four-hour protection, even after a personal call from William Trout. He had arrived early that day and found himself embarrassed by meeting the Cameron grandchildren, against whom he was supposed to be guarding this unpopular site. Well, he thought, nothing personal—it’s my job. I don’t choose what to do. Now the sun had just set, in the long summer day of the Western Highlands, and Freddy Winter and his men had gone away for the night. Ewan was sitting in his white police car eating the sandwiches that were his supper, with occasional sips from a thermos flask of hot coffee to help him stay alert. The front windows of the car were partly open, to let in fresh air, and he was trying to watch for the tiny stinging midges that always came in with it. On the seat beside him was his dessert, which consisted only of an apple because his wife felt he was in danger of putting on weight. In the glove compartment of his car there were also two bars of chocolate, though his wife didn’t know about those.
Ewan took a bite of his last chicken sandwich and chewed. Meeting those children had taken his mind back a very long way, to his first friend, Tommy Cameron. He was thinking about a day thirty years before, when he and Tommy had sung a song together at the party that is called in the Gaelic a ceilidh. And Tommy had done a Highland dance, light as a feather, while he, Ewan Nicolson, played the fiddle. That was back in the days when he was a good fiddler, for one so young. He was remembering the feel of the strings under the fingers of his eleven-year-old left hand when suddenly he realized what he was seeing now, at this moment, out of the car window, and he nearly choked on his sandwich.
Two large round balloons were bouncing in the air above the two bulldozers parked on the farmland now owned by the Trout Corporation. One balloon was yellow, the other blue. Each had a string stretched down tight beneath it, but nobody was holding the strings. And though there was no breath of a breeze blowing, the balloons then moved sideways to the new hill of dirt facing Angus Cameron’s store, and bounced there as well.
Ewan Nicholson sat there frozen, watching.
The balloons moved down from the hill to the surveyors’ string of small orange flags that now stretched along the boundary between Trout and Cameron land. They paused, as if in thought. Then they began to bounce again.
With each bounce, each balloon paused—and a small orange flag rose from the ground and hovered in the air next to the balloon’s tight, straight string. Then another, then another. The balloons moved along the boundary, and flag after flag rose, until two growing bunches of flags were moving along with them, hovering, as if held by invisible hands.
Ewan blinked, and shook his head. He reached for his thermos, poured a cupful of coffee and hastily drank it, staring out through the window. But the balloons were still there, moving along, collecting flags now from the edge of the hill of dirt on the Trout land. It was eerie, and he knew he was afraid. For the first time since he was very young, he was afraid of ghosts.
But he was a policeman, on duty, not a fiddle-playing small boy. He was an educated man, trained to believe in facts that could be seen and proved. So he took a deep breath, put down his sandwich next to his apple, and got out of the car.
He saw both balloons give a little extra bounce, as if in greeting.
Ewan heard himself give a little moan, but he forced his legs to walk toward the boundary line—which was no longer visible, since nearly all the boundary flags had now flown up one by one to join the two large bunches hovering ahead. He thought he heard a breath of laughter in the growing dusk, but he hoped he was imagining it.
He was almost in reach of the nearest balloon. Its string stretched down underneath it, taut, with the bunch of flags at its side. He looked at it in despair. This was not possible; he was dreaming, or losing his mind. He would lose his career in the police force, his wife, his children. Nobody in the world would believe what he was seeing at this moment.
He reached out to grab the balloon’s string.
And just before he could touch it, the string went slack and the balloon rose out of his reach, drifting high into the air, with the second balloon alongside it. Like two leisurely shooting stars, yellow and blue, they floated up and up, out of sight, into the twilit sky. But the bunches of flags didn’t go with them; they flew sideways, through the air, past his police car, toward the loch.
Ewan ran after the flags, groping. He thought he heard the soft laughter again. The two bunches of orange flags rose higher, and they too gradually disappeared, over the water of the loch, as though they were heading past Castle Keep to the Seal Rocks.
Ewan stood there for a long moment, and then he went back to his car. He climbed in, and instinctively reached to clasp his seat belt around him, as if it could keep him safe. Though he would be here on duty for hours yet, he started the engine, and felt a flicker of relief as the reassuring beams of light shone out through the growing darkness, showing him the cleared land and the hill of dirt. Perhaps he had imagined everything in these last few minutes; perhaps another cup of coffee would clear his foolish head.
He looked down at the seat beside him, for final reassurance from his thermos of coffee and his dinner.
The thermos was still there, but the apple and half-eaten sandwich had gone, and there was no sign of them anywhere in the car. Instead, next to the thermos on the front seat, he saw a single orange boundary flag.
* * *
Portia had gone home, and Granda and Tom were back from their meeting. They were not happy about the reports they had heard from the local council, and they too had stared in disbelief at the ruined land they had passed on the way home, and the great earth barrier beyond the house.
“He’s working really fast,” Granda said. “And he’s lying, he’ll nae keep all these promises he’s made to the government. They really seem to believe what he says, about protecting the coastline—at the same time as he’s covering the shore wi’ stones, and changing the water patterns. There are salmon farms in this loch, mussel farms—what’s to become of them? We have to get some hard facts, to show him up! The Boggart’s right about needing a council of war.”
“But they went off again—do they ever stay anywhere for more than five minutes?” Allie said. “The Boggart said we all had to work together, with what he calls the Old Things, and then off they both went, with balloons.”
“It was us mentioning bulldozers,” said Jay. “Made them shoot off like rockets. They hate the bulldozers even more than they hate Mr. Trout.”
“I doubt they’ll move a bulldozer this time,” Granda said. “Not with the police watching.”
“If I’d known that cop was Ewan Nicolson, I’d have stopped to say hi,” Tom Cameron said. “Remember him, Da? Red hair. Played the fiddle.”
“It’s a long time ago,” Granda said
They were all upstairs in his study, examining the book that the departed Mr. Mac had given him: Hauntings of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. Allie wanted to look up the Boggart’s mysterious mouthful of Gaelic names, after failing to find them online, but was having no success in finding any of them here, either.
“The only trouble with Gaelic,” she said, “is that nothing looks the same as it sounds. The Kane-chuch, he said. I think. But it’s not here.”
“Spelled Caointeach,” Angus Cameron said. “Look under C. And the ch at the end sounds the same as the ch in ‘loch.’ ”
Jay turned pages. “Here it is. A wailer, it says, a little woman whose cry, rising to a scream, warns certain clans of impending disaster or death.”
“Good grief,” said Allie. “And she’s the one who wants bacon?”
They had explained the Boggart’s odd request to Granda and Tom and been amazed by how calmly they accepted it.
“And that other name, Granda,” Jay said. “He said it so quick, it sounded like Ech-ooshga.”
“That’s pretty close,” Granda said, “but
it’s spelled Each-Uisge, and you’ll find that it’s a water horse, an awful dangerous creature. And didn’t he mention the Nuckelavee? That one’s even worse.”
Allie had found it in the book, with a large and alarming drawing. “A terrible sea monster, half man and half horse but with the head of each, and no skin! Yuk! And the only thing that can stop it carrying you off is if it has to cross fresh water! Do you believe in all these creatures, Granda?”
Angus Cameron looked at her over his glasses. “Do you believe in boggarts?” he said.
There was a short pause.
“I see what you mean,” Allie said.
“Once,” Granda said, “long ago, I said, ‘There’s no such things as boggarts’—and the Boggart and Nessie took me up in the air with them, and I flew. Your mum would remember that.”
“She would indeed,” Tom said. “I certainly do.”
Granda looked out of the window across the loch, into the shadowy evening sky, and he smiled. “It was wonderful,” he said. “Just wonderful. I dream about it, once in a while.”
Jay said, “You really flew?”
“Well, they were holding me, of course,” Granda said. “One on each side. But there I was, up there in the sky, swooping over the loch like a bird.”
He looked down at the book. “Most of the time we choose what we believe in,” he said, “but sometimes it just comes to you and it says, ‘Here I am.’ ”
“Like a voice over the loch speaking Gaelic,” Allie said, “even though there’s nobody there.”
“Just like that,” Angus Cameron said.
* * *
The Trout Queen was back in the loch next day, anchored in the deeper water beyond Castle Keep, and William Trout was angry. He had had a miserable boat trip instead of a game of golf, there had been no more sightings of the Loch Ness Monster, and now there was a new irritation as well. Freddy Winter had come aboard, reluctantly, to report the disappearance of all the marker flags put in place by the surveying team, and the Trout reaction had been even louder than he expected.
“What’s the matter with you guys? You can’t keep a construction site safe from a couple of whiny Scots and two kids?”
“We don’t know for sure who did it yet,” Freddy said.
“I thought you had a cop watching everything?”
“We did. We do.”
“I’m calling the cop office right now. Then I’m going over there myself. You know what my time is worth? Do you have any idea?”
He had gone on like this for longer than Freddy cared to remember, all the way across in the Trout Queen dinghy, and now they were over on dry land, watching the bulldozers drop more loads of dirt on the growing hill, waiting for PC Ewan Nicolson to come on duty.
“We’ll have to have the surveyors come back and do all the work again, to make sure it’s legal,” Trout said. “This is ridiculous. I should take it out of your salary. Where was the boundary line?”
“Right next to the berm.” Freddy pointed to the hill. He added hopefully, “It’s getting big enough, right? Cuts off the view of Cameron’s store completely.”
William Trout grunted, and then swung round as Ewan Nicolson’s gleaming white police car came bumping across the field. He began bellowing as soon as the car door opened, repeating everything that several people had already bellowed at Ewan in the last few hours, from the chief superintendent on down.
But none of these people had seen what Ewan had seen, and nor had William Trout.
“This better be the last time!” Trout roared. “They took the markers off the trees, they pushed our lumber into the water, they wrecked a bulldozer—and now they’ve stolen the survey flags! They’re vandals! Stop them!”
“We certainly will, Mr. Trout, once we find out who they are,” Ewan said.
Trout snorted. “It’s obvious who they are! Weren’t you on duty here last night, Officer? Were you asleep?”
Ewan thought, Oh, I wish I had been asleep. I wish it had been a dream.
He said, “Members of the police force do not sleep on duty, Mr. Trout. I was wide awake, and I promise you I didnae see one single human being touch your marker flags.”
Trout said, “So they waited for you to leave, and came out once you’d gone. You think they’re stupid? Use your imagination, man. If you’d pretended to go, and then come back to check, you’d have caught them red-handed.”
Ewan shook his head. “The flags were not taken by the Cameron family,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Garbage!” said William Trout. “How can you be sure?”
Because I saw a ghost do it, Mr. Trout. Two ghosts.
“It’s under investigation, Mr. Trout,” Ewan said.
Trout glared at him. His face was flushed and angry, and his heavy eyebrows hunched together in a frown. “I’m gonna put a stop to this! I want those people watched where they live—I’m gonna have you outside that miserable store, so you’ll see every time they leave, every place they go! So let’s go! Right now!”
Ewan Nicolson sat motionless in his police car. He said stiffly, “I cannae make any change without instructions from the office, Mr. Trout.”
“Well, you’ll get them, believe me!” Trout swung furiously away from the car, and Freddy Winter hurried to keep up with him as he strode back down the road toward the loch and Castle Keep.
“And you!” William Trout said, switching his angry gaze toward Freddy. “I want you based with me in the Trout Queen, not stuck out of phone range inside the castle. Right now! I’m sick of having to use radio—I need to be able to text you, and I need you to be able to reach everyone else.”
Freddy began to explain the complications of Wi-Fi and mountains, but Trout flapped an impatient hand at him. “Spare me,” he said. “Just move to the boat.”
Freddy had a sudden happy image of a comfortable yacht cabin, instead of his nights in lonely Castle Keep.
“With pleasure,” he said. “I’ll do it today. D’you want me to bring all the plans and the paperwork? And the models?”
“No, there’s more room in that library. And it gets me out on the water, going to and from the castle. Why haven’t we got a picture of the Monster yet?”
“I’ve got people watching, day and night,” Freddy said. “Some onshore, some in boats going up and down the loch.” He didn’t mention that everyone he had hired had clearly thought it was a joke. He added, “And all their cell phones work.”
“Well, hire more, farther up the loch. We have to get a picture! Offer them a hundred-pound bonus for the first shot. I can’t believe my camera didn’t pick it up. At least I have you and those two sailors as witnesses—you saw it!”
“Yes,” said Freddy, who had been trying to forget the sight and smell of Nessie ever since. “But we can’t prove it either.”
“Soon we will!” said William Trout hungrily. “Very soon!”
FOURTEEN
A morning mist hung over the loch, masking the far shore. The sky was grey, the water was grey, and the air was still and cool. Jay sat at the bedroom window, looking out through binoculars at the Trout Queen and making a note every time a boat left it for the construction site. His notebook also had columns for the times of arrival and departure for all the workmen and their trucks and cars. He and Allie were groping for any detail that might contradict local government’s persistent good opinion of William Trout, since their father and grandfather had woken up even gloomier than ever.
“They trust him,” Granda had said despondently. “They believe him when he says he’s going to bring jobs to Scotland, even though his construction folk working out there now were hired from Ireland, because they were cheaper!”
“He’s nothing but talk,” Tom Cameron said. “And he’s so glib—it’s how he makes his money.”
“Facts, that’s what we need,” Granda said. “Facts to prove when he’s lying. Except of course that he’d say they were fake.”
Now the two of them were already busy at their comput
ers again, reaching out to all their petition signers to form an online army called The Resistance, and tonight in Port Appin they would be videotaping a talk by an environmentalist about all the damage that the Trout Castle Resort was likely do to Argyll’s creatures and land and sea. All the Camerons would be there; Allie was hoping to be allowed to help with the taping.
Outside, the daily rumble and roar of machinery began to rise again. The mist faded into the grey sky, and a fine rain began to fall. Jay went downstairs, and found Granda had come down from his office to make a cup of tea.
Allie was still asking questions about the council meeting. “Didn’t any of them talk about the wildlife and the birds, last night, and the seals’ breeding ground?”
“Oh aye,” Angus Cameron said. “There’s some good sound people—but not enough. Well, they’re all good sound people, it’s just that they’re so glad of the jobs and the investment, they let Trout feed them promises with a spoon. They dinnae question. Not enough, anyway.”
“What happens next?”
“We go on making noise. We go on asking them to reconsider. We try to find a helpful law—maybe the man tonight will help wi’ that. We all turn up outside their next meeting, wi’ placards.”
“When’s that?” Jay said.
“Three weeks from now,” Angus Cameron said.
“But we shall have gone home!”
“And so much damage will have been done!” said Tom. “Even if there’s a council vote to stop, which is by no means certain.” He was sitting in a corner with his laptop, writing an impassioned article about coastal preservation that he hoped to send to the Guardian.
Granda said, “It’s just what we knew would happen—he’s deliberately working fast, to get a lot done.” He sighed. “Where are our boggarts when we need them? Playing games with balloons isn’t going to help a bit.”
“Resting, perhaps?” Tom said. “They did go all the way to the Minch and back.”
“The Old Things, the old ways,” Granda said. “That Caointeach of theirs may have a better answer than any of us, in the end.”