Page 10 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

THAT EVENING

You might have heard the Cairngorms described as Britain’s Arctic, and never is that comparison clearer than in the white nights of summer.

At fifty-seven degrees north, on a late-June night, the sun has no sooner melted below the horizon than it is on its return journey above it once more, bringing in an early dawn. The birds barely have time to sleep.

Ally pulled her knees to her chest on the wide stone lintel of the glassless window directly above her home’s old wooden water wheel, her eyes set on the sky above her. The rain had blown over hours ago; weather changes swiftly in the Cairngorms.

Now the sky was a sapphire blue spotted with summer constellations while a waxing crescent moon glanced down on Cairn Dhu mountain with its plateau split in two like a broken molar tooth by a wide, ragged crevasse.

The mountain’s shape was so familiar and comforting to Ally and her brother, they’d both elected to tattoo the inner side of their left wrists with its outline, drawn in matching heather ink on their eighteenth birthday (when, seeing her poor brother red-faced and puffing at the pain, Ally had become all the more determined to convince the artist it didn’t hurt a bit when it came to her turn).

From this angle she could just about make out the ski centre, its snowless slope and chairlift lit up even in the summer season when all that was on offer during the day was dry-run tobogganing and the Ptarmigan après-ski nightclub at the foot of the slope.

Many nights she’d gone there with her brother, their college friends (and random backpacking hillwalkers from all over the world) to drink Irn Bru cocktails and talk and dance until closing time. It was a Cairngorms institution.

She pictured the scene over there tonight. While happy people spilled out of taxis, the bar would be getting loud and wild, especially if the lads from the climbing and water sports centres were there with their clients from out of town.

It had been ages since she’d been anywhere after sunset. Gray had always wanted to stay at his place with her – to minimise his chances of being spotted with his other woman, she supposed.

She breathed in the night and blew out hard a few times over. It was difficult to sleep during the Highland white nights. Goodness knows how they cope up in Svalbard in the actual Arctic, and not all that far away, where the sun refuses to set at all for four months in summer.

Nights like these had always kept her out of bed. They made her think. She’d come here to her thinking spot over the water wheel, sometimes dangling her feet over the ledge so they almost touched the pitted, dry, wooden wheel and cogitate her way out of her problems.

She remembered her phone in her hands, and turned to scrolling through Instagram, deliberately searching for the profiles of Mhairi, Jo and Brodie, her oldest pals, and thinking tonight she might try sending a few messages saying she was ‘just checking in’ and hoping they were well.

She knew they were busy, she might tell them, pointlessly, but if they had time, she’d be free for a meet up.

On second thoughts, their socials showed them and their partners amidst a whirl of baby scans, flat decorating, wedding photo edits, something called toddler sensory classes, work nights out and ghastly looking ‘team building exercises’ at the go-kart track, and, to her amazement, there were even a couple of ‘first day at nursery school’ pictures of little kids she’d felt sure were still only babies in arms.

She hastily sent appropriate reactions, love hearts and ‘wows’ with lots of exclamation marks and some ‘So happy for you guys’, but she couldn’t ignore the realisation that none of them had been in touch when her family were all over the news or when she’d deleted ‘In a relationship with @grayinthegorms97’ from her Facebook bio.

She told herself that hers were small, insignificant problems – a local news story and an ex-boyfriend – compared to the grown-up things they were facing.

Hell, Brodie and her wife had gone through IVF and had their catering business to run; Jo was soon going back to her corporate job after her second baby, and Mhairi, well, there weren’t as many updates from her.

She must be happy in the pre-schooler bubble.

They probably hadn’t even noticed Ally’s tiny upheavals.

Still, it stung. She hated to admit she was lonelier now than ever.

Could she have done more to keep in touch with them when they moved out of Cairn Dhu to get a foothold on the property ladder in the more affordable new villages? Definitely.

Maybe she ought to have celebrated their successes more, even though she’d sent all the cards and bought things from gift registries and travelled for engagement dos and hen dos and wedding receptions.

She hadn’t been able to reciprocate with big exciting invites of her own and, if she was really honest, she’d done her best, at first, to contribute to the baby discussions (which carrying sling is best?

Which travel system safest? Where are the best schools and how much do houses cost in their catchment areas?), but it had been kind of hard to relate, if she told the truth.

She put down her phone. It was too late now to get back into their lives, most probably, and if they missed her the way she’d been missing them, wouldn’t one of them reach out and tell her?

The cool evening offered no answers. In fact, by the rustling noise coming from the ferns and long grasses on the other side of the garden wall across the low summer river, it sounded like yet more trouble might be coming her way.

A clang of metal and some good Scottish swearwords shattered the quiet of the twilight.

‘Who’s there?’ she shouted. ‘Murray, are you muckin’ about down there?’ Not that Murray was the type to take a sunset walk around Cairn Dhu.

‘Sorry, who’s that?’ a voice shouted back; mortified, a bit posh. She recognised it as Jamie Beaton’s right away.

A head popped up over the stone wall. Even at this distance she could tell his hair was sticking up.

‘You all right there, officer?’

‘I fell over a… a roll of barbed wire. In fact… I’m a bit tangled up in it.’

She pulled her lips tight to stop the smile. ‘Stay still. I’ll get my pliers.’

Part of her expected to find a pair of abandoned trousers knotted in wire over the wall when she got there. Jamie wouldn’t like her seeing him caught red-handed prowling around her property. He’d be embarrassed.

Yet there he was, trying to lean, nonchalant, on the stones, still very much bound up, wearing off-duty clothes: jeans black and rolled at the ankles; boots, also black with thick dark socks over the top, and a heather coloured Henley, all three buttons done up.

He looked good out of uniform too. The realisation shouldn’t have stalled her in her progress towards him, but it did, just for a second.

Luckily he was too riled to notice.

‘Who leaves rolls of barbed wire on a public footpath?’

‘Not us,’ she threw back. ‘This is Mill House land all the way down the hill to the ski slope. You’re on a private path.’

He looked around, neck stretched like a hare scenting wild dogs. ‘There’s no sign saying so.’

‘Isn’t this part of your beat? You ought to know whose land you’re on at all times,’ she said with a challenging smile, even as she kneeled to free him.

‘All the locals know not to walk this way. It’s boggy further down, even in summer.

If a man is lucky enough to get away with his life he could still easily lose his wellies to the mud.

Everyone walks the main road to get to the Cairn Dhu Hotel bar. ’

‘I’m not looking for a drink,’ he said, glancing down at the top of her head as she crouched at his feet, working to unsnag him, before quickly averting his eyes with a sense of embarrassed propriety.

Surprised at the teensy lift in her spirits that he might have come searching for her, Ally didn’t say what she was thinking: what were you looking for, then?

‘There you go,’ she told him, getting to her feet. ‘Didn’t need to cut your jeans at all.’

‘Right, well, thank you.’ His face flared red as she met his eyes again. ‘You’ll need to tell your dad to get that shifted. It’s not safe.’

‘I will.’ The part of her that had wanted to fight earlier today surrendered. ‘Getting late for a walk, is it no’?’ she tried instead.

He looked all around, as though hoping for a rescue of some kind.

None came, and he sighed at the realisation.

With shoulders slumping in defeat he reached into his back pocket.

‘I was looking for this, actually.’ He showed her a fading photograph of a bridge, his thumb deliberately obscuring the figures in the image.

She peered at the shot, then at him. ‘That’s the Nithy Brig.’

‘That’s what one of the crofters told me, but he pointed me in this direction and said it was only a twenty minute walk from the police station, but it obviously isn’t. Unless it somehow magically moves locations. It’s never where people say it is.’

‘How long have you been looking for this bridge?’

‘Since I got here a few weeks ago. It doesn’t seem to be on any maps either.’

‘Maybe us locals want to keep it a secret.’

He crumpled his lips. ‘Are you going to tell me where it is?’

‘Well, it’s not as easy as twenty minutes in a straight line, that’s for sure.’ Seeing the darkness in his eyes, she added, ‘I can take you to it, if you like?’

‘Now?’

She looked down at her pyjama bottoms. She’d changed right after dinner but picked out a baggy green jumper to keep away the evening chill (Murray’s, as it happened, and nothing to do with Jamie saying she looked nice in green).

‘Unless you were busy, of course?’ he said, suddenly, darting his eyes to the window ledge where she’d been sitting. So he had seen her.

‘Busy?’ She laughed. ‘No, I just sit there when I need to…’

He tipped his head, waiting for the rest.

‘I’ll get my boots on.’