The Winter Sea (Slains, #1)(15)

It had red granite walls and white dormers and several bow-fronted two-storey projections that gave it a look of Victorian elegance. We were approaching it now from the side, but its long front looked over a lawn that sloped down to the stream which appeared to behave itself better up here, running quietly under a bridge on the main road as though it, too, felt that the building was owed some respect.

‘And this,’ said Stuart grandly, ‘is the “Killie”—the Kilmarnock Arms Hotel. It’s where your friend Bram Stoker stayed when he first came to Cruden Bay, before he moved to Finnyfall, the south end of the beach.’

‘To where?’

‘To Finnyfall. Spelt “Whinnyfold”, but everybody says it like you’d say it in the Doric. It’s not a large place, just a handful of cottages.’

Somehow I couldn’t imagine Bram Stoker at home in a cottage. The Kilmarnock Arms would have suited him better. I could easily imagine the creator of the world’s most famous vampire sitting at his writing-table in an upstairs window bay, and gazing out across the stormy coast.

‘We could go in,’ said Stuart, ‘if you like. They’ve got a Lounge Bar, and they serve a decent lunch.’

I didn’t need a second nudge. I’d always taken pleasure in exploring places other writers had been to before me. My favorite small hotel in London had once been a haunt of Graham Greene, and in its breakfast room I always sat in the same chair he’d sat in, hoping that some of his genius might rub off on me. Having lunch at the Kilmarnock Arms, I decided, would give me a similar chance to commune with the ghost of Bram Stoker.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘Lead on.’

The Lounge Bar had red upholstered banquet seats with brass and glass globe lamps set at their corners, and dark wood chairs and tables on a carpet of deep blue, but all the woodwork had been painted white, and all the walls, except the stone one at the far end, had been papered in a softly patterned yellow that, together with the windows and the daylight, gave the place a cheerful ambiance, not dark at all. No vampires here.

I ordered soup and salad and a glass of dry white wine. Wine with lunch was a habit I’d picked up in France, and one I’d likely have to break myself of now that I was here in Scotland. I’d have to be totally sober to face the coast paths, I reminded myself. Even without my mother’s warning, I knew from experience it wouldn’t do to go tottering close to the cliffs. But for now, since I wasn’t intending to go very far from a sidewalk, I judged myself safe.

Stuart, true to his father’s prediction of yesterday, ordered a pint and sat back in the booth with me, settling his shoulders against the red leather. He was, I thought, a very handsome man, with that nearly black hair falling carelessly over his forehead, and his eyes that were so quick to laugh. His eyes were blue, I noticed, like his father’s, but he didn’t look like Jimmy. Still, in this light, something in his features struck me as familiar, as though I had seen his face, or one quite like it, somewhere else before.

‘Why the frown?’ he asked.

‘What? Oh, no reason,’ I said. ‘I was thinking, that’s all. Occupational hazard.’

‘I see. I’ve never had lunch with a writer before. Should I watch my behavior, in case I end up as a character in your new book?’

I assured him he wasn’t in danger. ‘You won’t be a character.’

He feigned a wounded ego. ‘Oh? And why is that?’

‘It’s just that I don’t base my characters on people I know. Not a whole person, anyway. Bits and pieces, sometimes—someone’s habits, someone’s way of moving, things they might have said. But everything gets mixed up with the person I imagine,’ I explained. ‘You wouldn’t recognize yourself, if I did use you.’

‘Would you cast me as the hero, or the villain?’

That surprised me. Not the question, but the tone in which he asked it. For the first time since I’d met him, he was flirting. Not that I minded, but it did catch me off guard, and it took me a moment to shift my own footing, adjust to the change. ‘I don’t know, I’ve just met you.’

‘First impressions.’

‘Villain,’ I said, lightly. ‘But you’d have to grow a beard, or something.’

‘Done,’ he promised. ‘Could I have a cape?’

‘Of course.’

‘A man can’t be a villain,’ Stuart said, ‘without a cape.’ He grinned, and once again I had that feeling, strange and new, unsettling, that I had seen his face before.

I asked, ‘Were you in France on business, or on holiday?’

‘On business. Always working, I am.’ His sigh was so long-suffering as he sat back and raised his pint that I couldn’t help challenging.

‘Always?’

‘Well, maybe not now,’ he admitted. ‘But in a few days I’ll be back at it, away down to London.’

‘You work with computers, your dad said?’

‘In a way. I do pre-sales support for an enterprise resource planning system.’ He named the firm he worked for, but it meant nothing to me. ‘Their product is good, so I’m in high demand.’

And with a smile like that, I knew, he likely had a girl in every port. But still, he made me laugh, and it had been at least a year since I’d been on a date. I’d been too caught up in my work—no time for meeting men, no time to do much with one even if I’d met one. Writing got like that for me, sometimes. It could be all-consuming. When I got deep in a story I forgot the need for food, for sleep, for everything. The world that I’d created seemed more real, then, than the world outside my window, and I wanted nothing more than to escape to my computer, to be lost within that other place and time.