Flora read the airport departures board with a sense that a hundred percent of everyone else around here was heading for a much more exciting day than she was. And also, although everyone was wearing T-shirts and some of the men were in shorts, she was almost certainly the only person with a parka in her hand luggage in May. She’d even resurrected a Fair Isle hat she’d had for years and been somehow unable to throw away. Just in case.
She headed toward the Inverness flight with a heavy heart. The last time she had made this journey . . . Well. She wasn’t thinking about that.
She would just focus on the job. Once she knew what the job was, properly. She’d wanted to ask Joel but had been oddly shy about it, even when Kai had stood over her and instructed her to write an e-mail.
“Don’t put kisses on it!” he’d said.
“Shut up!” she had replied, but her very timid message about whether he could brief her any more on the Rogers case hadn’t been deemed worthy of a reply, so she was still in the dark.
She reckoned Colton Rogers wanted to do something the islanders didn’t like, and he wanted the firm to front it. The problem was—and he didn’t know this—the islanders didn’t like her either.
Flora sighed, watching London swirl beneath her as they took off, gazing at the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the M25 and wishing, as very few people ever have, that she was in it.
The second plane ride was bumpy. It was generally bumpy; the plane was tiny—a dozen seats, mostly given over to scientists, ornithologists, hardy walkers, and a few curious tourists. Flora looked down as they sped low over the water. The fleet was out; in one of her last conversations with her father—brief as always—he’d mentioned that their catch was up and permissions were up, but they’d been told to stop killing the seals. She leaned her head against the window. The land had dropped far behind and she was, as always, stunned by how very far away from the rest of Britain the island was.
It hadn’t felt like that when she was a child.
Mure, with its little main street and its soft rolling hills, had been her world: her father out in the fields, with the boys as soon as they were old enough; her mother cooking in the kitchen, her long mane of white hair swishing behind her; Flora doing her homework at the old wooden table. The mainland felt like a myth, going on a train an annual treat at Christmas, and everything else moved to the rhythm of the seasons: the long white summers with endless evenings and the door open to the fresh sea breeze; the cozy dark winters when the fire burned high all day in the range and the kitchen was the only warm place to be.
Flora wondered if anyone would come to meet her at the airport, then told herself to stop it. It was the middle of the farming day. They’d be busy. She’d catch the bus.
She dismounted last, the tourists stumbling around, and walked through the little tin shed they called an airport.
The bus was filled with excited early vacationers, joyful that it wasn’t raining, equipped with bicycles and walking canes and guidebooks. The sun was glinting through, even though the morning haar—the sea mist—hadn’t yet lifted, and as they approached the little town, it made the place look as though it was rising out of a cloud of smoke, like a mystery, or a magic trick. The deep green hills sloped down to the bright white sand you found in this part of the world; the long beaches seemed to stretch on forever.
It was easy to see why the island had been so tempting to the Viking hordes who had claimed it and named it, and whose blood ran in its citizens’ veins even now. No Westminster politician ever visited Mure. Very few Edinburgh ones did. It was a little spot unto itself, up at the very northern tip of the known world.
As they drew into the harbor, the fog started to lift, revealing the cheerfully painted buildings that lined the port and formed the main street. Closer to them, Flora noted that they looked a little dilapidated, paint peeling from the fierce northern gales. One shop—she searched her memory and remembered it finally as a little drugstore—had closed down and sat empty and sad.
Stepping off the bus, she felt nervous. What would people make of her? Because she knew she hadn’t behaved well after the funeral. Not well at all.
It wasn’t for long, she told herself. She was only here for a week. Soon she would be back in the city, enjoying the summer, sitting on the South Bank among the hordes, having bad dates, drinking overpriced cocktails, taking the night tube. Being young and in London. Surely it was the best place in the world.
Of course the very first person she’d see was Mrs. Kennedy, her old dancing teacher, who’d already been ancient when Flora was a girl but whose eyes were still a piercing blue.
“Flora MacKenzie!” she stated, pointing her walking stick at her. “Well, in all my days.”
I am a big serious London paralegal, Flora told herself. I am perfectly busy and professional and normal and absolutely a hundred percent not fourteen.
“Hello, Mrs. Kennedy,” she singsonged automatically. Flora had sat next to big lawyers in court, taken part in serious cases with very seriously bad people. She wasn’t scared of them. But Mrs. Kennedy was a holy terror. Flora hadn’t forgotten a single step even now, although she could only be prevailed upon to perform at parties when people had had too many drinks to appreciate it, and she’d rather lost the finesse.
“So are dhu back, is it?”
“I’m . . . I’m just working,” said Flora, knowing that this piece of information would be round the entire island in less time than it would take her to walk to the farmhouse.
“Good,” said Mrs. Kennedy. “Glad to hear it. They need looking after.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Flora. “I mean, I’m actually working. Like, I have a job. In London. It’s a big six firm.”
Inwardly, she cursed. Who on earth did she think she was trying to impress here?
Mrs. Kennedy sniffed.
“Oh, would that be right, would it? Well, very fancy and nice for some, I’m sure.”
And she swept off down toward the little pier as fast as her arthritic legs would carry her.
Oh Lord, thought Flora. She’d known, after the funeral, that her name wasn’t exactly respected on Mure, but she hadn’t imagined it would be this bad. She felt a sudden flash of homesickness for her horrible little London room and the comforting rumble of the tube, the cars full of nobody she knew.
The fishermen glanced up as she passed. A reticent bunch on the whole, they nodded at her and she nodded back, feeling conscious of how loud her small wheelie suitcase sounded on the cobblestones. She felt someone come silently to a doorway behind her, but when she turned her head, they’d gone. She sighed.
Just past the western end of the main street, the road parted and one fork headed up toward the hills. Most of the buildings were concentrated at the eastern end of the port; here, the pathways led to farming country.
The sun was lying bright on the fields as she walked up the old roadway, pitted and bumpy, toward the house, its sturdy square shape standing out against the hills; its gray stone looking smart in the clear light, belied by its messy interior. Her childhood home.
As she crossed the muddy courtyard, she took a deep breath. Okay. Calm. Professional. Collected. She wasn’t going to let anyone wind her up. Everything was going to be—