THE PIERCING CRACK OF A HUNTING RIFLE slaps the early morning. Nothing is there to muffle the shot so it is crushed in the frosty grip of the air. Two blackbirds flee. On the floor of the clearing, warm, inky blood melts a lingering patch of ice between exposed rock and the foot of a Scots pine. It flows over dead needles in fading pulses watched by cyan blue eyes. As the blood slows, the eyes lose their lustre. A liver spotted hand lies curled in the lap of worn jeans. The index finger and thumb twitch as nerves fire randomly. The tongue slides down the throat as the tissues spasm. The mouth opens and closes but no sound escapes.
Soon the skin of the other hand is purpling and as cold as the granite it rests upon. The electricity is off. Nothing stirs inside. The temperature keeps the rot at bay for now but not the wildlife. A wildcat returns to her nest in a rowan bush at the bottom of a shallow trench to find fresh blood dripping down a crack in a bare, dark stone where the roots of the pine above have forced a split. Her nose moves subtly from left to right, hair prickling with cautious interest. She does not recognise the scent. It is not the blood of a rabbit, a hare or a pine marten. It is tarter, more metallic. It is something larger. She can smell urine and faeces and a faint sickly heaviness. She can smell death. She pushes her head through the foliage and peers over the hump of the weather-eroded rock.
Furtively she climbs, hunkered as flat as she can. Her claws rasp against the stone. She is alert but entirely focussed on the dead thing. Her ears flatten and pan, scanning the forest independently, searching for danger. A kilometre away a mother deer, grazing with her fawn on the grass verge beside a single lane forestry trail, steps on a dead branch. The wildcat’s ears prick but she senses no danger.
The mother deer chews with her head aloft. She watches the abandoned grey car on the opposite side of the road. She is wary of manmade things, but this one is derelict and the smell of sweat and smoke is fading. The engine is not yet completely cool but the weight of the vehicle on the thawing earth is causing it to sink.
After four days, the sweet, claggy rankness of maggot excrement cuts a path through the still Caledonian air and a hooded crow darts to attention. He breaks the stillness with a throaty caw and jumps from his perch on a bough. He goes for the eyes first. As if he cannot stand to be watched as he eats. Then he moves to the festering pulp on the back of the head. The wound writhes, the mind unquiet again.
Pine martins, badgers and wildcats have fed and the lolling mouth grins widely and raggedly. The hollow eye sockets stare at the blood stained walnut stock of a Remington 700 which lies trigger up on the sodden earth between the legs. Flies scuttle over the black crust surrounding the neat hole in the hairline, where the round entered the skull.
Nobody knows that Alec McNaughton is here. Nobody even knows he is missing. Nobody will find out for seventeen years because nobody cares. Were it not for the fact that Alec is sitting in an active logging area, it is likely nobody would ever have found him. And were it not for the fact that he chose to sit against that particular aspect of that particular Scots pine he may never have been seen at all before the tree was felled, crushing his bones into an uncountable number of infinitesimally tiny pieces. But Alec being found is largely irrelevant.
Alec killed himself because he hated himself. Alec hated himself because he wasn’t paying attention. Sadly, for Alec and for Mr Davies, that lack of attention resulted in catastrophe. Alec didn’t see the temporary speed limit signs because he was enjoying the freedom his new used motorbike afforded. The loose road surface signs also passed him by, as did the fact that a stone, kicked up by the rear wheel of his bike, shattered the windscreen of a car behind him. Alec was unaware of the carnage behind and its shadow in front. That was the last time Alec McNaughton was hopeful.
When he arrived at work that morning he had an email from his director in his inbox. It was entitled ‘Meeting’. Alec wondered what on earth the meeting could be about. He had only recently been promoted to team manager and given a salary adjustment, he was just getting used to the power and the disposable income.
Alec,
After this morning’s board meeting would you please attend my office. We should be finished at around 10.30.
James Tanner
Executive Director
Stanley & Co Ltd.
Unit 7
Hartley Industrial Estate
Ipswich
Alec was summarily dismissed for “infringement of official company expenses procedure.” Alec went for lunch with his girlfriend the week before. He accidentally claimed for the full cost of the meal without discounting Angela’s items because he was in a rush the morning he filed his expenses. The real reason he was dismissed was because James Tanner wanted to re-allocate the position to his friend’s daughter, because she suggestively touched his arm when he offered to try to find her a job at Stanley’s. James Tanner wanted to sleep with her and he thought giving her the job would more or less guarantee that. He always managed to sleep with the staff on cocaine-fuelled work nights out. His pregnant wife was unaware. He also didn’t like the fact that Alec was more popular with the office team than he was. Alec didn’t have comedown rage issues.
Alec packed up his belongings into a bag for life and left it with reception to collect another time. He couldn’t fit it on his bike. He rode home, again not paying much attention, though this time he was decidedly less carefree. When he pulled into the drive, he was so preoccupied that he didn’t notice that there was an extra car. He walked through the door. The sound woke him up from his fog of shock. She never screamed like that with Alec.
Most men might have stormed up the stairs and beaten the bastard to a pulp but he couldn’t. He froze. He sat on the sofa and waited for them to finish. Half an hour later they came down the stairs.
‘Shit,’ she said. Alec stayed silent and watched Daniel, her boss, frantically trying to assemble some sort of response. He was usually so quick, so smooth, but now he just mouthed like a handsome fish.
‘How long have you been home?’ she said, almost accusationally.
Alec shrugged. ‘I don’t know, half an hour maybe,’ he said with tears glazing his eyes.
‘Shit. Why are you back so early?’
‘I’ve been sacked.’
‘What for?’
‘Some expenses thing,’
‘I’m sorry,’ Daniel said.
‘Thanks. Probably wasn’t the right job for me anyway. I’m no good at telling people what to do.’ Daniel and Angela were both evidently excellent at that. They looked at each-other nervously. Then Angela sat down and put her arms around Alec. Her porcelain skin was still tacky with sweat, a mixture of her own and Daniel’s. Alec could feel her heart beating fast against his arm which was wedged between her un-brassiered breasts.
‘Are you leaving me?’ He asked through silent tears. He could smell Daniel’s exquisitely expensive aftershave in her dirty blonde hair. He recognised the smell now. She had that smell on her a lot, he just never payed attention.
‘I think I have to.’
The door clicked shut as Daniel left quietly. Alec looked into Angela’s ice blue eyes. She had beautiful eyes. So did Alec, they were “the eye couple”. He bit his lip and dropped his face as a tear finally welled over and down his cheek.
‘Can I have one more kiss?’ He said. His voice cracked, looking back up at her, the whites of his eyes were already webbing with fine red blood vessels. She just shook her head and gave him a half-hearted squeeze before standing and slipping her shoes on. She opened the door and turned to speak but changed her mind about what she was going to say.
‘Speak soon.’
Alec went to bed with a bottle and didn’t get up until his landlord shouted through the door that he was commencing eviction proceedings. He wrapped the filthy duvet around his shoulders and walked to the door.
‘You are alive then! Jesus Christ, what’s that stink? Have you got cats in there? You know that’s not allowed on the contract. You owe me three months’ rent. Didn’t you get the letters? Jesus Christ what’s the matter with you people? I want it by next Friday or you’re out,’ he said spitting over Alec’s face, despite having stepped back two feet from the stench. The letters were still on the welcome mat.
‘I lost my job,’ Alec said meekly.
‘I don’t give a flying fuck. That’s not my problem. Get her to pay it,’ the landlord said looking past Alec for Angela.
‘She’s not here,’ Alec said meekly.
‘Well when she gets back you two need to have a serious chat. I want the rent. No exceptions, no sob stories. Just get it paid. You hear me?’ He brandished his finger in Alec’s face. Alec nodded.
‘Friday latest.’
Alec couldn’t get the money he owed because he had used up his savings to pay for his mother’s specialist dementia nursing home. She died the previous year, penniless, not knowing who he was and leaving no other family. He had nothing of real value to sell, other than his second-hand motorcycle, which would only cover half of the debt. So he left.
The morning after the visit from the landlord he took a shower for the first time in exactly four months. He packed his old work rucksack with a coat and a sleeping bag and drove his motorbike to a used car dealership. He exchanged the bike for a grey Ford Ka with 116,123 miles on the clock. The bike was worth £200 more than the car, even at the dealership’s criminal undervaluation. Alec waved off the offer of a free service plan.
In the car park of the dealership an old copy of the Ipswich Star fluttered in the wind. The headline caught Alec’s attention:
‘MOTORCYCLE MANIAC: MAN LEFT IN CRITICAL CONDITION AFTER WRECKLESS RIDER IGNORES SAFETY WARNINGS’
Alec picked the newspaper up. It was dated exactly four months ago.
According to witnesses the man rode a black sports type motorcycle and wore a white helmet with a central blue stripe. Police Superintendent Charles Miller issued a statement appealing to the culprit’s humanity – ‘please, if this was you, can you contact police so that we can help Mr Davies to rebuild his life.’
Davies underwent emergency surgery following the incident in which surgeons were forced to amputate his left arm below the elbow and left leg above the knee. In a statement issued to the press Mr Davies wrote ‘doctors have told me that I’ll be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life and that I’ll suffer from extreme chronic pain and spinal degeneration.’ Due to severe facial injuries Davies is also blind in one eye and struggles to speak and eat solid food.
Alec turned back to the large window of the dealership. The salesman was waving at him, beaming, holding Alec’s white helmet with the blue stripe. His black bike was being wheeled to the rear of the shop so the mechanics could spruce it up. Through his tears Alec didn’t see the screen of his phone, on the passenger seat of his new used car, light up with a notification before the battery died. He just drove, going nowhere in particular.
After several hours on autopilot, Alec was roused from his desperation by the ping of his petrol alert light. He became aware of the words on the blue motorway signs. He was on the M6 heading north to Carlisle. He remembered this journey from childhood when his parents would take him on holiday to the Loch Lomond and the Trossachs National Park. He enjoyed those holidays. There was a little Inn in Killin, where they stayed a few times. Alec was fascinated by the bar. He would sit, holding a plain glass tumbler of orange juice, drinking through a fluorescent straw, looking at the stuffed stags’ heads on the dark wood-panelled walls. His parents would talk to the huge, fat man behind the bar about hunting. Alec could never understand what the man said but he remembered the enormous, gravelly laugh. It scared him. There was a rifle hanging on the wall above the bar. The landlord showed him how to load the gun once and showed him that he kept some shells under the bar, between the two cask ale pumps.
Alec refuelled and got back into the car. He drove to Killin without consulting a map. When he arrived, it was one o’clock in the morning and the lights downstairs in The Old Smiddy were out. He remembered that the owners had left a spare key for guests behind a removable plaque fastened to the stone plinth of the anvil to the right of the door. Nothing else seemed to have changed, so he figured why would that. He retrieved the key and unlocked the door. He took the rifle down and found a round in a cardboard box under the bar. He locked the door and replaced the key in its safe spot. Small towns in Scotland don’t change much.
‘The mobile phone’s alive Sarge,’
‘Fuck off! Really?’
‘Aye. Has a couple of unread texts on it. Look,’
I’m pregnant. It’s yours.
I understand. Won’t contact you again
