500 Miles from You (Scottish Bookshop #3)(24)
He opened the door for her on the way out.
“Can I give you a hand with the buggy?” he asked, seeing her struggle.
“Fuck off, Social Work,” she barked at him, and the day went on.
Chapter 26
It was the silence she’d noticed as she sat down the previous evening on the deep and comfortable little sleigh bed in the slope-roofed spare room, with its gray washed boards and faded blue-and-yellow rug. Well, no, it wasn’t silent, in fact; there were rustles outside; she could hear the wind, unusually, moving through the trees and the distant squawk of—what, a bird? An animal? She didn’t know.
Lissa prepared herself for not being able to sleep. She was in a strange bed a very long way from home, cast into exile. She had a million new things to do tomorrow: a new case list to take on, a new set of worries as well as the ongoing ones—everything circling in her brain. She was never going to be able to sleep, everything was so strange and odd: the sweet-smelling air, the comforting crackle of the whisky wood in the fire, the faint tinkling of the stream in the bottom of the garden . . .
When she woke up nine and a half hours later, she hadn’t even taken her contact lenses out.
SHE WAS TOO late to make breakfast or do anything, in her surprise, other than jump into the shower and, in her haste, use some of the old shampoo already there. It smelled of almonds.
She threw on her uniform, put on her glasses, tied up her damp hair. Of course there wouldn’t be any food; she was an idiot for not having planned all of this yesterday. Automatically she went to open the fridge door anyway—then stopped, as her hand didn’t find the handle. That was odd. She tried it again, then smiled to herself. The door opened on the other side. It was a left-handed fridge. She supposed it wasn’t that strange in the scheme of things—one in ten—but she was left-handed too and had always considered such a thing the height of luxury. If he had a left-handed fridge, he would have left-handed scissors too! And can opener! It was oddly thrilling. She glanced around, but there wasn’t a picture of him—or anyone, or anything, in fact—up anywhere in the cozy little sitting room. Typical man, she thought. She had to email him; she glanced at her watch. Nope. No time. Dammit, and he’d have had Zlobdan’s mob this morning, whom she’d come up against before. Could always do with a bit of prior warning. She glanced at her phone; there was a long message from him telling her what she should be doing.
Finding a half-empty tin of dry cornflakes at the back of the cupboard, she grabbed a handful and looked at the message crossly. Well, wasn’t he organized. Show-off. There was quite a lot to it. She’d look at it later.
LISSA SQUINTED AT the address, but it wasn’t making much more sense than it did before. She was parked on a narrow single-lane track, having a fight with the GPS and having lost her phone connection, which meant she couldn’t read the email Cormac had sent her that presumably explained exactly what to do and where she was meant to be going to meet this patient. Oddly this was making her cross with Cormac rather than, for example, herself.
She got out of the car and was struck once more by just how incredibly quiet everything was. She could see in the distance figures up and about on the hills—farmers, she imagined. Shepherds. Were shepherds still a thing? She supposed they were. She looked closer. The white shapes on the hillsides had smaller white shapes prancing along beside them. Perhaps they were lambs. It looked like something out of a children’s storybook; an old orange farmhouse set back from the road that she’d passed as she came in, with its red barn, looked like something you’d read about to a very small person.
Lissa had never in her life given her food a second thought beyond checking it was organic, sometimes, when she felt flush enough. She never cooked at all; why would you in London? Her mother hadn’t cooked, had said it would put her in a domestic servitude role, whereas her job was to break out of feminine stereotypes. Which was why the nursing had never really gone down too well.
Anyway. Lissa wasn’t going to think about that right now. Instead she drove back into the center of the village, parking right in front of the bakery, to her utter amazement. There were no yellow lines or anything. She took a photograph to send to Kim-Ange, but she couldn’t make it send.
Nothing seemed to have a street name, or at least not one she recognized. There was something called “The Binns,” something else that looked like “Lamb’s Entry,” which she didn’t like the look of in the slightest. Why they put a farm name in the case notes, when there were no directions to farms and they didn’t show up on Google Maps, was unhelpful to say the least.
She looked in the window of the bakery. There were lots of things she hadn’t seen before, including signs advertising “Puddledub!” and “Lorne!,” neither of which meant much to her, but she went in nonetheless. It was incredibly cozy and warm inside, and a cheery-looking woman looked up.
“Hello,” she said, taking in Lissa’s uniform. “Och! You’re yon lass that’s up here doing Cormac’s job for three months! Amazing, welcome, it’s lovely to see you. Now listen, do you want me to put you down for a regular ginger delivery? And also the provost says could you join the Highland Games Committee? But he says that to anyone who turns up, you don’t have to say yes just to be polite, okay? Dinnae mind it.”
Lissa had understood about one word in six of this and was seriously unnerved by why this woman was jabbering away to her and how on earth she knew so much.