Bring Me Back (B.A. Paris)(64)
A flash of anger ignites in my brain. I need to find Ellen. So where has she gone? Abroad? Not if she has Peggy with her. To the cottage in St Mary’s? Or somewhere else, somewhere she thinks I won’t be able to find her? If she left as soon as I went tearing off to St Mary’s, she could be halfway up the country by now. She wouldn’t have gone south, it wouldn’t be far enough away. She must have had a destination in mind, she wouldn’t be driving around aimlessly, not in the middle of the night. Is she in a hotel, sleeping the sleep of an innocent while I’m condemned to hell? On impulse, I pull her keyboard towards me and bring up her search history, hoping to find a link to Booking.com or some other accommodation website. There isn’t, but there’s a link to a CalMac Ferries website. I open it quickly and find they run services between the mainland and the Scottish Isles. And when I look further, I find the timetable for services between Ullapool and Stornoway, on Lewis.
‘Harry!’ I yell.
‘You OK?’ he asks, coming through in a hurry.
‘What’s the quickest way of getting to Lewis?’ I ask urgently. ‘Is there a flight or something?’
‘I have no idea. I don’t even know if there’s an airport on Lewis. Why do you want to go there?’
‘Because that’s where Ellen’s gone. She was looking up the ferry crossings, so she’ll have driven up, or got the train part of the way. But there has to be a quicker way.’ I go onto Google and type in: flights to Lewis. ‘Yes – there’s an airport at Stornoway. I can fly to Glasgow and take another plane from there.’
I start looking up flights, aware of Harry hovering uncertainly behind me.
‘What time is it now?’ I ask. ‘There’s a flight that leaves for Glasgow from Birmingham at eleven forty – can I make it?’
‘Maybe,’ Harry says reluctantly. ‘It’s only eight thirty. But even if Ellen is there, are you sure it’s a good idea to go charging up to see her?’
‘Definitely! I need to speak to her, I want to know why, why she set up this whole charade to make me believe Layla was alive. I want to ask her how she could be so damn cruel!’
‘So why not wait a few days? There’s no rush, is there? Why don’t we see what Tony says?’
‘No.’ I shake my head vehemently. I turn my attention back to the screen. ‘If I don’t make the Glasgow flight there’s another at twelve forty, to Edinburgh.’
‘You might not get a ticket for today,’ Harry warns, as if he’s hoping I won’t.
‘Then I’ll charter a plane,’ I say fiercely. ‘I’m going, Harry, and nobody is going to stop me.’
‘Then I’ll come with you.’
‘No – hold on, there’s a ticket for the Glasgow flight, just let me get it.’ It takes a while to complete the transaction and when I’ve finished, I raise my head and find him watching me. ‘Thanks, Harry, but I’m going on my own.’
‘Then at least let me drive you to the airport.’
I hesitate, then realise I’m too wound up to drive. ‘Thanks. But we can’t tell Ruby and Tony where I’m going, OK?’
The look of resignation on his face tells me he was hoping they’d be able to dissuade me but he nods his agreement. We go through to the kitchen where Ruby and Tony are sitting, their hands clasped around mugs of hot coffee, as if bracing themselves for the coming storm.
‘Good idea,’ Ruby says encouragingly, when we tell her we’re going for a drive to clear our heads, and Harry and I both know she’ll kill him when she finds out the truth.
I don’t even take a change of clothes with me. I don’t intend staying on Lewis. I’m going for one reason, and one reason only.
FIFTY-SEVEN
Finn
It takes just over an hour to get to the airport and I use the time to work out the whereabouts of Ellen’s house on Lewis. I know it’s along the Pentland Road and I remember Layla telling me that when they were young, whenever she and Ellen went on walks with their mother, they would stop to run sticks along a cattle-grid just below their house. She also mentioned a loch nearby, so using Google Maps I try and locate roughly where the house might be. It isn’t easy because the Pentland Road splits in two at one point, but somewhere along the left-hand turn I eventually find a cattle-grid, a loch and a stone house all within close proximity of each other.
Harry wants to come into the airport with me but I persuade him to go back to the others.
‘Be careful,’ he says, giving me a man-hug. He keeps his tone neutral but the warning is there and I know it’s not me he’s worried about.
I nearly go mad on the journey. Stuck on a plane, then at Glasgow Airport, then on another flight, all I can think is that Layla isn’t back, that she never was, that I’ll never see her again. The words go round in my head – Layla isn’t back, she never was, I’ll never see her again – building on the anger I feel towards Ellen. When I finally land in Stornoway, and find driving rain sweeping across the airfield and a mean wind whipping itself into a frenzy, my mood, already black, becomes darker still.
It’s another frustrating hour before I’m driving through the small village of Marybank towards the Pentland Road. My fault. I should have thought to organise a hire car on the way to the airport instead of expecting to pick one up the moment I arrived. The landscape, which at first is dotted with sheep and low-slung white stone houses, soon becomes bleak and unforgiving, an endless expanse of peat bogs with nothing to provide relief for the eye save the distant hills, brooding and menacing, mottled with bare rock. The fact that I don’t pass a single vehicle only lends to the feeling that I’m driving into the back of beyond, to the end of the earth.