about in the city, it would not take me long to drive back westward to the service station.
But I didn’t cross the river. Overcome with weariness and nausea and fear, I stopped in a small car park on the south side of Netherloch, just before the stone bridge. I had got up far too early, trying, I suppose, to bring the day’s transaction nearer, because although I was a little shocked by how swiftly my mind had worked out all the details of what I was going to do, I was still very afraid. I was anxious to have it over with, one way or another, both dreading and hoping that it would all come to nothing. Maybe the man wouldn’t answer the phone. Maybe he wouldn’t show up, or I could take fright myself and reconsider the whole idea. Or I might not have to go through with it at all; my telephone could ring at any moment and it would be Col saying he was sorry, he’d made a terrible mistake. Please come back, he might say. Come back right this minute, we’ll spend the whole day together. I’ll look after you.
That was when I began to cry. The car park was one of those places for tourists, with green areas planted up with bushes and dotted with picnic tables, and there was nobody there. I sat in the car weeping noisily, tears pouring down my cheeks. With the engine turned off, the air was soon stuffy with the peppery, acrylic smell of car upholstery, and to stop myself feeling any sicker, I wound the window down. Cold, foggy air rushed in, and still I could not stop crying. I sank my face into my hands and rested my head on the steering wheel and cried, and cried.
When I raised my head several minutes later, feeling a bit calmer, there was a man watching me. The fog was clearing under the trees, and he was sitting at one of the picnic tables a few yards away, looking at me. He didn’t avert his gaze when he saw I had noticed him. Instead he got slowly to his feet and, with a sympathetic nod of his head, walked away. I wanted to be angry, and I should have felt foolish, but all I felt was that I had been not watched, but watched over. I stared after him. I couldn’t have described his face except for his eyes, which even from a distance had conveyed something light and clear. His head was heavy and square and covered with graying stubble; he was powerfully built and dressed in jeans and a black sweater. He climbed into a Land Rover parked in a space on the far side of some bushes and drove away.
I wound the window up and got the car warm, then I tipped back the seat and slept.
Later, I drove on from Netherloch, staying on the south side, retracing exactly my path of the day before. As before, I kept pulling off the road and loitering along the river, for I had decided against going to Inverness at all. The stopping places were quiet, and because of the fog there was much less to see.
I went again to the cafe at the service station and sat at the window. Across some fields to the east, near where the squat concrete pillars of the bridge approach studded the ground toward the river, lay a patch of industrial wasteland. Beyond it I could see cold spangles of light on the water. There was a strong breeze blowing across it, and the breeze was also rocking the bushes and bracken in the fields and lifting the fog out from the trees.
I waited, staring at my phone, until after it was time. When it rang, I didn’t answer. It rang a second time, and on the third ring I picked up.
“You’re supposed to call, you got a problem? Listen, you want to sell the car you call me in next half hour, okay? That’s all the time you got. You don’t call me back, I got other clients, okay? I pay cash, remember, good deal. You call me back.”
I had expected that the man would tell me to drive into Inverness, but when I dialed the number, and once I had assured him I was alone, he gave me instructions to drive back toward Netherloch.
“Go west along the river road. There’s a rest area a mile on the right. Slow down when you see it. Go past it two hundred meters more and there’s a gap in the trees and a gate. On the right, the river side. Pull off the road and stop at the gate. Wait there.”
I did as he said. I followed the road until I saw the rest area. It was where I’d stopped the day before. I bumped the car to a halt over stones and deep ruts on the shoulder opposite the gate. I was glad he’d told me not to go any farther. The gate was rusted and skewed and off its hinges, and a track stretching behind it was barely a track at all, just a narrow scree of stones and crushed branches dipping sharply down through undergrowth in the direction of the river. I waited, my heart thumping, with all the doors locked. Traffic rushed past, buffeting the car. Then I noticed a movement, and from the undergrowth at the edge of the track a figure appeared, a young man in jeans and a short jacket. His arms were clasped around a well-wrapped and heavy-looking bundle: the child. He was wearing a hat but no gloves, and as he came up to the fence, I saw his hands were raw and red. With some difficulty he hoisted the bundle higher up on his shoulder and motioned at me to approach. I started to get out of the car, but he shook his head and waved me back. Then he put the child down at the side of the track and beckoned to me again, and I understood that he wanted me to bring the car forward. He freed the gate and hauled it back, keeping hold of the child’s hand. I started the engine and turned the car, and he waved me on past him. When he’d closed the gate, he gestured at me to keep going, and I did, slowly and carefully, but scraping the car sides against branches as I went, sinking into ruts, skidding on the stones. He followed with the child in his arms. I had no idea where the track led or how I might get back up it again, with the car or not. But I had glimpsed his face and I had seen how he held his child, and though those were hardly reasons enough to trust him, I kept going, edging the car forward at barely more than walking pace.
A long way down, the ground leveled out into an area of water pools and grimy rock and reeds strewn with jetsam and river debris. Ice lay in patches under fallen trees. The tide was out; the river ran along some distance away, and upriver, almost out of sight, was a disused jetty sticking up from a shining field of mud.
Set on a patch of cleared ground under some trees a long way from the river was an old trailer with plastic sheeting over its roof. Amid the encroaching dereliction, it was still clearly a home; it looked tidy and well kept. Laundry swayed on a washing line fixed between one corner of the trailer and a tree. A bucket and broom, a plastic bath and picnic chairs, some large plastic toys and water containers were stacked neatly along the side. Nearby was an ashy fire pit set inside a circle of rocks.
I got out of the car and waited in the freezing wind for him to make his way down. We were quite a long way from the road now and well below it, hidden by a thicket of frost-bound undergrowth. On the far side of the river, the thickly wooded land sloped steeply all the way to the shore. It was hard to tell how wide the river was until I saw a frail-looking wooden hut set into a curve in the bank and a white rowing boat moored to a little jetty nearby, both standing out brightly against the silvery whorls and eddies of the tide. All at once I understood what I was seeing on a human scale, and then I saw that the wind in the pinewoods around the hut was restless and quick; branches jerked and trembled with none of the dreamy enchantment of swaying trees seen from a distance. And I thought, if someone were to appear from the door and walk down the jetty to the boat, I would be close enough to call out, and she might look up and see me standing and waving, offering as clear and perfect a picture to her as she did to me. I looked downriver to the bridge, maybe a mile away, arching over from the city to the forest side. I walked a few yards down the shore. Now, closer, I could hear above the shirring of the water a stately, faint thrum from the traffic crossing over it, and carried by the breeze that blew across, there came an eerie, soft booming that I supposed had to do with the disturbance of air through the steel spans stretching up into the windy sky.
Suddenly there was a rattle of stones and a shout behind me. I turned in time to see the man struggling to keep his balance, sliding sideways on the slope of loose rocks and puddles. Falling, he let go of the child, pushing her away from him so as not to squash her under his weight as he toppled. I ran toward them. The child was a rolling bundle of unraveling clothes and wrappings, and I reached her just as she began to scream. The man tumbled several feet and landed heavily, letting out a long cry just as the child screamed again. She wasn’t hurt, but she was frightened and indignant, and when I picked her up, she was so puzzled she stopped crying abruptly to stare at my face. I saw her eyes register that she didn’t know me, and then she writhed in my arms and took a deep breath, ready to roar her head off. I jounced her up and down and smiled and chuckled, and turned her around so she could see her father getting to his feet.
“There, there, little one, there’s Papa, ooh, look, oops-a-daisy! Silly Papa! Look!” I crooned, and the child gave me another assessing look before she burst out wailing, stretching her arms out to her father. He came toward us breathless, unsmiling. I handed the child over, but he had hurt his arm or shoulder and winced under the weight of her.
“Oh, here, I’ll hold her for you,” I offered, and tried to draw her to me again, but she curled up crying into his chest and he took two long steps back. He spoke a few words to her in a foreign language I couldn’t identify, then cast me a pained look and nodded toward the trailer. “I can manage that far,” he said.
At the trailer door, the child scrambled down without a word, plonked herself on the bottom step, and lifted up
