Where Have All the Boys Gone?(20)

Katie looked up. The owner of the voice, with its gentle Highland burr, was tall with green eyes, untidy curly brown hair, and a mouth that looked as though it was permanently teetering on the edge of a grin. He turned to face them.

“What can I do for you? Let me tell you, if it’s for prize cattle, you’re swing out o’ luck.”

The man on the desk gave Katie a look which clearly read “I am now going to hate you for ever.”

“I heifer feeling you’re not going to like it,” said Katie, pushing past the now incandescently annoyed assistant.

The green-eyed man opened his arms in a gesture of surrender. “What about your friend?” he said, looking over at Louise. Louise flashed him a beaming smile.

“She’ll be fine,” said Katie, storming into the room beyond. Then she stopped suddenly. What she’d imagined to be a full and busy newsroom was really quite small, about fifteen feet long. There were three desks, one empty, one containing another very old man talking quietly down the phone, and one clearly belonging to the man beside her. In the corner was an old-fashioned record player, playing, at full volume, a sound effects track of typing, telephoning, shouting . . .

“You’re really not meant to be in here,” said the young man with a sigh.

Katie stared at the record player and back to him.

“It’s for advertising,” he said apologetically. “That goes through Mr. Beaumont there, but not everyone has a telephone and some people like to pop in on market day and . . .”

“You want them to think there’s a million people working here.”

“Working for the good of the town.” The man’s green eyes danced mischievously. “Well, you’ve scooped us. Unfortunately, I’m not sure the local paper will run it.”

Katie smiled and put out her hand. “Well, I’d like to say your secret’s safe with me . . .”

He took it and bowed low. “Yes, bonny English maid?”

“But I’m afraid I’ve been sent here by Harry Barr.”

He dropped her hand as if it were a live snake. “Och, you have not now.” He looked around as if for assistance.

“You have to be Iain Kinross.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “Um, no. That was him out on the front desk. Bit of a dour type.”

He paced across the room and sat down on the comfortable green leather swivel chair in front of his desk. He had an antiquated computer in front of him, and a rather more used-looking typewriter; small Stanley knives and tubes of paper glue littered the tabletop and floor, and piles of paper filled the shelves around his desk. He squinted at her, and pushed back a rogue lock of hair. “You don’t look like a rottweiler.”

“I’m the new forestry PR,” said Katie.

“Oh God,” said Iain, and, suddenly, he disappeared below his desk.

“Are you being sick?” ventured Katie, when he didn’t reappear.

“No, uh no.” He emerged. “There’s a mouse in here somewhere. Thought I saw it in one of the coffee cups.”

“One of the coffee cups?” said Katie. “How many do you have under there?”

“One,” he said quickly. “You don’t want a coffee do you?”

“I sooo don’t.”

“Good. That’s good. So, I suppose Harry has told you lots of horrible things about me?”

“No.”

His open face brightened. “Really? That’s good.”

“Just that you were a ‘prickwobbling dicko.’”

It fell again. “Oh.”

“And that he’s not killing all the trees.”

At this, Iain leaned forward. “Look. Are you a country girl?”

“Yes,” said Katie quickly. Well, she’d nearly gone camping on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme once. It wasn’t her fault that it had started raining and her mother had given in to her noisy and tremulous tantrum and let her stay at home and watch Doctor Who and drink hot chocolate instead. Katie had picked up a thing or two from her canny younger sister.

“OK well, you should understand then. If they’re going to cross-fertilise from the GM firs just because they’re gaining on their EU dispensation, it’s going to be no surprise to anyone when they start to lose the red and have yet another heron panic.” He snorted at the ludicrousness of Harry’s position.

“Heroin? Really? Up here? Well, I suppose it is Scotland,” said Katie.

Iain stared at her suspiciously. “OK, well, let’s pretend I was explaining to you as if, for one minute, you weren’t a country girl. Just for fun.”

Katie got her notebook out.

“I mean, if you keep planting one type of tree instead of lots of different types, you’re going to have to understand why animals who like lots of mixed habitats might move on. Which then affects the environment and turns back on the plantations themselves.”

“That sounds terrible,” said Katie. It did sound terrible. Though she didn’t know why.

“It is,” said Iain, pounding his fist on the desk, which made lots of suspicious-sounding clinking china noises. “That’s why you . . .”

“Katie,” said Katie.

“That’s why you, Katie, have to help me. That man is killing trees.”