Shot Through The Heart (Supernature Book 1) (14 page)

"Sarah still complaining about your drinking, then?" asked Buffy.

Mark frowned. "How did you know about that?" he asked.

"You were moaning about it on your stag do," said Buffy. "You said that she wouldn't let you meet up with the boys."

Mark blushed. "I don't think I'm under the thumb," he said.

Buffy leaned back and bellowed with laughter. "You are," he said.

"It's not that," said Mark. "She just worries about how much I drink, that's all. Her old man was an alcoholic. He died when she was young."

"I see," said Buffy, avoiding eye contact. "So, your way of dealing with that in a sensitive manner is to get absolutely blootered every time you're away from her?"

"It's not that," said Mark.

"It is," said Buffy. "How many pints have you had since you got here?"

Mark shrugged. "A few," he said.

"Beer, wine or whisky?" asked Buffy.

Mark laughed. "I've not had any whisky," he said. "To be honest with you, I am getting really stressed with this book. It's weighing down on me."

"Are you getting pressured by your publisher?" asked Buffy.

"Not really, no," said Mark. "It's more internal pressure. I just want to get onto the next project, you know how it is."

Buffy nodded. "You never could finish anything," he said. "You were a nightmare when you were doing that dissertation at uni. I had to write a plan for you, if you remember."

"Not that I stuck to it," said Mark.

Buffy took a big drink. "Doesn't matter," he said. "It took a load of stress away from you. You finished it."

"I guess you're right," said Mark.

"Did your researcher turn up?" asked Buffy.

"Not yet, no," said Mark.

"What are the police saying to it all?" asked Buffy.

Mark closed his eyes. "I've not been to them yet," he said.

"That's like five days, isn't it?" asked Buffy. "Shouldn't you have contacted them by now?"

"I'll do it on Monday," said Mark.

"I hope she turns up okay, mate," said Buffy. "For your sake, if nothing else."

"She will," said Mark. "Believe me, she will. I've spoken to her parents and they're not at all worried about it."

"How is your book going?" asked Buffy.

"Tough," said Mark. "The biggest problem I've got is that I'm writing and researching at the same time."

Buffy laughed. "Sounds like you," he said. "Typical chaos."

"You know me well," said Mark, with a grin. "It's interesting, though. I think the main thing is that I'm finding new stuff out, just being there. Trying to write this sort of book remotely just isn't me. I need to get in there and experience the place. It's killing me in a lot of ways by being away from Sarah and Beth, but actually being in the Highlands and speaking to the people is really helpful."

"What sort of people are you talking to?" asked Buffy.

"Some of the locals," said Mark, "a couple of landowners. There are a couple of interesting characters. There is this blacksmith in the village, kept trying to sell me a ring. There's also some devil worshippers."

"Shut up!" said Buffy.

"Seriously," said Mark. "They've got a religious centre just outside the village." He took a long drink of the stout. "And there's Lady Ruthven. She's a very interesting woman."

"Oh aye," said Buffy. "Here we go."

"It's nothing like that," said Mark. "She's old enough to be my mum."

"Wouldn't have stopped you back in the day," said Buffy.

"Yeah, when I was twenty, it would have been a different matter," said Mark.

He reached into his laptop case and got some paper out - he'd gone through a fiver making copies of a book about the families of the Highlands, mainly the chapters regarding the Ruthven and Sellar families. He shouldn't have taken that many, but he hadn't been caught. In the end, it would have been cheaper to buy the whole book if he could have found it, but it was out of print and the cheapest he'd seen it online had been forty quid on eBay.

"That's her great-great-grandmother," said Mark, pointing to a page of photos and portraits. When he'd looked at them originally, he remembered Adam's assertion that people bought books for the photos. "Lady Elizabeth Ruthven the first. It's the fifth that I've been meeting."

Mark hadn't noticed it in the library - he'd just photocopied the entire section as a bulk job without really looking at it - but the portraits were strikingly similar. He didn't want to bring it up with Buffy for fear of getting dog's abuse, but he wondered if the Ruthven family married close…

He'd scanned through the photocopies, struggling to find any reference to an exchange of land during the Highland Clearances between the Ruthven and Sellar families. Searching through, he did recall from another source he'd read months previously that there had been a Sellar who came up from the south of England to act as an estate manager for one of the Clans, but ended up owning a large estate himself. Mark had looked through some books, but he couldn't find anything to connect the families, instead resolving to try again when he was back in a proper city with a proper library.

Buffy grabbed the page and looked closely. "She's not bad looking," he said. "How old is she?"

Mark shrugged. "No idea," he said. "Late thirties, early forties."

Buffy laughed. "That's not like a cougar," he said, "you're too old, mate."

"I'm not trying it on with her," said Mark, "I'm just interviewing her. I've not done anything."

"Yet," said Buffy.

Mark finished his beer - Buffy still had a good few fingers depth left. "I read that comic you sold me," he said. "Pretty good stuff."

"Oh aye," said Buffy, suddenly looking interested. He gave the sheet of copy back to Mark and he put it back in his laptop case. "I'll pass your comments on. I've actually sold a fair few this week - it's getting a lot of interest from America."

"That's impressive," said Mark.

Buffy nodded, looking pleased with himself. "I do a lot of online sales," he said. "It's usually dead for the mainstream comics - I can't compete with Forbidden Planet and the likes, but the stuff that nobody else will touch seems to sell well, weirdly enough. No idea how these things get out there on the internet, but I've sold a lot of books to the US and Canada. Must be a blog getting hold of it or something." He finished his pint in one go. "How did you get on with those Blade trades I sold you?"

"I haven't had time to read them," said Mark. "See the bit at the end of the book, about real vampires and that. That's just marketing, right?"

Buffy laughed. "I'll let you decide that," he said. "Has something spooked you up in the northern wastelands?"

"Maybe," said Mark.

"Maybe?" asked Buffy.

Mark let out a deep sigh. "There have been a couple of weird things," he said. "On top of Kay going missing, which is most likely just her leaving for a bit before you start, right, there have been a couple of things."

His fingers tapped the side of the glass, trying to gesture to Buffy to go to the bar. He gave up, decided to plough on.

"The windows in my room have been rattling like hell. There's a really strong wind that is totally shaking the cases, but it doesn't seem to be affecting anyone else. And the other thing is that there's this wild dog that's been hanging around the hotel. At nights, it sits on the lawn and looks up at my window. It seems to be able to control the weather."

Buffy burst out laughing. "You know that vampires can change shape into dogs," he said, when he stopped.

"I thought that was werewolves," said Mark.

"Haven't you read
Dracula
?" asked Buffy. "That's how he gets off the boat. I know my vampires, hence the nickname you gave me."

Mark reached into his laptop case and got his copy of the comic out. He flicked to the end and handed it to Buffy. "This bit here," he said. "
Ability to change shape has scant evidence at best, but has not been disproven."

"Huh," said Buffy. "Definitely happens in
Dracula
, though."

Mark tried to get colour back into his cheeks. "Are you winding me up?" he asked.

Buffy picked up the glasses and stood up. "I'll let you decide," he said. "Same again?"

Mark nodded and then watched Buffy heading to the bar.

He tried to fit what he'd seen with the evidence - it couldn't be, could it?

Mark was desperately out of breath, running along the platform towards the train.

"Wait!"

The guard stood with his whistle in his mouth.

"Please!"

The guard checked his watch as Mark closed in on him.

"Please, let me on," he said.

"Train's ready to go, pal."

If he didn't get on, he'd have had to stay on Buffy's floor - it turned out that he still lived with his parents.

Mark pressed the button for the last door. The guard stood in his way.
 

"What are you doing?"
 

"I need to get that train," said Mark. "It's the last one."

"Have you been drinking?"

"Not much," said Mark.

In truth, he was three sheets to the wind. He'd lost count of the number of pints they'd had. He had persuaded Buffy to go for a curry at the back of four - the pubs were getting busy. The vast intake of carbohydrate - fifteen poppadoms between them, then pakoras to start, and a curry with a naan and portion of rice each - had gone some measure to sobering him up, but they'd drunk another three pints of lager with the curry. His belly - never the flattest at the best of times - had swollen up to six-months-pregnant size.

He'd set off from the curry house in good time, stopping at a supermarket to stock up on provisions - four cans of lager and a fair few bottles of wine that were on offer, along with three bags of sweets and two big bags of pan-fried crisps. And a packet of ham. And a fountain pen.
 

In the end, he'd had to run to the station, leaving a drunken Buffy heading back to his shop to see if the Saturday boy had stolen any cash from him.

"You know it's the law that I don't have to let you on?"

"Please," said Mark. "I'll be stuck here."

"The rest of my passengers managed to get here in plenty of time."

"I'll pay you," said Mark.

"There's no need for that, sir. Just get on the train and keep yourself to yourself."

Mark tried to thank him without seeming too drunk. He stumbled on the train, and found a free table in the third carriage he tried. He set his laptop case and the shopping bags down, clinking like a Glaswegian fishing trip. He got the laptop out but his eyes struggled to focus on it, so he looked out of the window as the train chuntered its way north, leaving the city behind.

He realised that the only toilet on the train was in the first carriage.

Mark woke up the following morning feeling refreshed. He got out of bed and drew the curtains on a glorious summer's morning, still with enough time to have breakfast.

He took in the view for a few minutes.

His expected hangover hadn't materialised - he'd worked his way through the contents of his supermarket bag, and drunk a couple of pints of water.

He also couldn't recall hearing the window rattling, but that wasn't to say it hadn't happened. He'd slept like the dead.

He decided to go for a cycle to Kinbrace.

He'd struggled the previous evening. He didn't know if drunk cycling was a crime, but if it was, he'd committed it. It was only five miles or so but had taken him a good half hour when it should have been fifteen minutes at the most. The wind had been oppressive and he'd been cycling against it, but even so he was determined not to lose the rudimentary level of fitness he still had.

Instead of avoiding work, a visit to Kinbrace to progress some research. As it was the Lord's day, he could do some compare and contrast stuff with religion back in the Clearances and what had been left, two hundred years later. He wanted to interview some locals and attend the church.

The religious life fascinated him. Personally, he could take it or leave it, but he wanted to see how the church was here. As far as he knew, it was Presbyterian - at the time of the Clearances, the area was predominantly Catholic.

He considered that for a few moments - it might be another angle to approach. An anti-Catholic drive - the landowners would have been largely Protestant, in a distinct minority, and the crofters would still be clinging to their distant Irish ancestry and its Catholic faith. It wasn't central to his theory, that was for certain, but it might need to be covered.

He dressed slowly, thinking through another knot in his workload.

Mark locked his bike to a post by the train station.

His initial impressions of Kinbrace - based only on being collected from the station and then getting the train the previous day - had been of a very small settlement, barely even a hamlet.

The rail tracks cut through what passed for a town, the rails meandering off into the distance in both directions, the road and some houses accompanying it for part of the way. Mark was only used to seeing train lines as distant objects - save for spending time in a station - protected by barriers and walls. From the slow pace at which the train had progressed the previous night, he'd seen that the Far North Line had a more casual attitude to safety. The railway was open on both sides with no barriers in place. The fact that there were only three trains a day each way probably meant that the risk of danger was significantly less than further south on busier routes.

Mark found the small church easily. It was perched in the middle of the settlement, six or seven buildings of the usual Scottish style. Mark couldn't work out why it had its own station and Ruthven hadn't, other than presenting a slight divergence from the main route. It hadn't brought prosperity - it wasn't as if it was commutable to Inverness - and there were few famous landmarks around, other than the three lochs by Ruthven village.

He sneaked in at the back of the small chapel, sitting and observing after the lingering stares of the congregation died away. It was full to capacity, though that seemed to be twelve people.