Page 7 of Fixing a Broken Heart at the Highland Repair Shop

Three and a half hours after his shift was supposed to end, Jamie turned the key on his apartment door on the second floor of the grey-harled block of flats above the chippy on what passed for a high street in Cairn Dhu.

The summer weather hadn’t held and the clouds had rolled in making it feel like a dull, damp autumn evening.

There’d been a drug raid planned for an address over an hour’s drive away, where a young lad, well-known to the constabulary, had been taking delivery of some suspiciously heavy, dense parcels through the Post Office.

A raid was needed to find out if they were one of the few persistent coke dealers living on ordinary streets across the Highlands.

The officers had hung around the station waiting for a warrant that never came.

Edwyn finally admitted it wasn’t likely to happen tonight and told Jamie he might as well go home, especially since he wasn’t being paid for overtime.

In fact, as a volunteer Special Constable he wasn’t being paid anything at all.

He was living off his savings now and even they were running dry.

Starving, he’d parted with a fiver for a chip roll and a Fanta and taken his food upstairs. Inside, it was warm and stuffy. At least it felt like summer in here. He’d pulled off his boots, lining them up neatly beside his running shoes by the door. Well-ordered and tidy, just how he liked things.

He ate joylessly in front of a programme about farming that he didn’t understand a word of. There’d been something up with the TV since he moved in; it was stuck on the local channel where half the programmes were in Gaelic, plus the subtitles didn’t work at all.

He took brisk bites between swigs straight from the can, barely tasting the good, crisp, salty chips.

The novelty of living over a chip shop had worn thin a couple of weeks ago, shortly after he’d transferred here, and around about the time he was questioning why on earth he’d thought putting in an application for a post so far from Edinburgh was a good idea.

He’d tried his best with the flat, but hadn’t forgotten this was only a temporary, summer home. It had come furnished; if a lumpy bed, wonky TV, drop-leaf Formica dining table and a sofa counted as furnished. There was a kitchen but it was so pokey he only used it for toast and tea.

He tried to work out what the presenter was saying to the farmer, something gripping about hay bales.

Even as he stared at the screen he found his mind wandering, dragged back to that repair workshop and the angry Ally McIntyre.

She had wild red hair that hung over her shoulders in a mix of coils and waves and there’d been a pink neon light shining from somewhere behind him getting caught in her curls so they glowed an extraordinary violet.

She hadn’t been angry, of course; she’d been afraid.

Frightened people lash out. Rule 101 of human psychology.

The more intimidated she had felt, the more she’d glowered.

She loved her dad, that much was obvious, and she’d been prepared to stick up for him, and it had all turned into hot fire within her.

He knew that anger too well. He’d been eaten up by it as a teenager. It had got him into run-ins with the Edinburgh beat officers who’d taken him home at fifteen to his shamefaced dad after finding him soused on Buckfast at the cemetery, pulling the heads off daffodils.

‘He’s lost his mum,’ his dad had told the officers on the doorstep, hoping they’d be lenient.

‘Sorry to hear that,’ the woman officer had said, world-weary and already turning to go.

‘He was only four at the time,’ his dad had added. ‘Took it hard.’

‘It was years ago,’ Jamie had grunted, cringing, hands shoved into his pockets, cheeks blazing, wanting to cry. ‘Hardly relevant now.’

The sanguine officer wasn’t moved by any of it. The woman had smiled thinly. ‘You keep yourself out of trouble and let us keep on with our real jobs, OK? We’re no’ a taxi service.’

She’d left with a nod, and his dad had closed the door.

The telling-off young Jamie needed never came. He’d wanted a shouting match. Finger pointing. Blame. But his dad didn’t seem capable of anger any more. Grief had taken it, along with his waistline, his clean shaven face, and his smile.

The teenage Jamie had slunk upstairs, slamming his bedroom door, momentarily shattering the silence that sat over the house like a tea cosy on a pot long since grown cold.

His dad had tried to keep things going, in his own way.

He’d kept the house dusted and vacuumed.

He followed the same stew recipe his wife used to make.

It didn’t taste even a bit the same, but no one said anything.

He handed over lunch money every morning at the door as Jamie left for school and his sister, Karolyn, for college.

He’d done his best under the circumstances.

But they all knew their mum would have done it so much better.

It was the silence at home that had sorted Jamie out, in the end.

He couldn’t bear it, and he enrolled in the cadets, just to be out of the house.

When he was eighteen and too old for cadets, he joined the Army Reserve, then he took a job in logistics at his local barracks and stayed there for a long time, a salary man.

Sixteen months ago he’d signed up as a Special Constable based at a station just five minutes from his Edinburgh childhood home, doing a few hours a week in voluntary policing around his work day until recently when he’d quit the barracks and transferred here, just for the summer, until he got to the bottom of this recent bout of restlessness.

Aye, as a kid Jamie had known anger and fear, as well as the impulse to protect others, and it had made him determined as an adult to see the best in people, for the sake of his own well-being as much as theirs.

You never knew what someone was going through, so it was best to be kind where you could.

Sympathy – better than courage, better than brawn – was the best thing he could bring to his volunteer policing.

He found to his surprise the chip wrapper in his hands was empty.

He’d done it again, got lost in the quiet, staring, dissociated autopilot that could claim hours of his time, if he let it. He rarely let it. That was where the old Reserves discipline came in handy.

The farming programme’s credits rolled on-screen and the music played.

He moved, picking up his hand weights in the corner and building his arms for a hundred reps – the same every night; in the morning he did legs.

Then he took himself to the shower.

He had found this flat was something of a quiet, muffled sort of place too, just like the house where his dad and sister still lived back home. To avoid the quiet, he played music on his phone and turned the water pressure right up, drowning out the horrible blankness.

In the steam, as he washed, he saw Ally’s face again, pale and unblinking, those red-purple curls trailing in a V down her shoulder blades. He should find a reason to go back and see her… No!

He reminded himself of the rules about that kind of thing.

Policing ‘without fear or favour’. No fraternising with members of the public you have come into contact with during the course of your duties, especially those involved with investigations.

He rinsed away the shampoo, thinking how, even if he had asked her to have a coffee with him, Ally McIntyre would probably have laughed in his face.

Hadn’t she just been dumped? She’d said it herself. It had happened right where they’d stood. Another reason she was hurting. Another reason to leave well alone.

He was soon taking grey and black tartan pyjamas from the suitcase by his bed. He really ought to have bought a wardrobe or something. Would IKEA deliver way out here?

What if he brought a woman back here? A woman like Ally with sharp eyes? She’d take one look at the sorry state of the place and turn and run.

Socks, needed even in summer, came from the case next. He kept his clothes in an orderly way. The laundrette up the road did a service wash for him twice a week and delivered everything folded neatly. All he had to do was lay it down in the case and close the lid.

Tonight he reached for something under the neat jumpers, not sure why he wanted to see it again; the first time since he came here.

He pulled the soft, orange-brown thing free; its familiar weight and fuzziness having the same effect on his emotions as it always did.

The stuffed Highland cow looked back at him through its one black glassy eye. Two curved felt horns – one coming away at the seams – framed its silly face. Long ago, when his mum gave it to him, it had a pink, stitched smile but that was long gone. She was worn and bobbled.

His mum had let him name his new cow, or so the lore went, and he’d chosen the name ‘Holiday’ – and nobody had thought to divert him towards something more fitting like Hamish – and so, he’d made a friend for life.

He couldn’t remember that first visit to the Cairngorms – the only proper family holiday they’d ever had together – or even the tourist tat shop where Holiday had been bought. Jamie had been three years old.

There were photographs though, also in his suitcase, of him in red shorts, holding his mum’s hand at the ski centre where they’d tobogganed on the dry slope.

Then they were snapped together on the mountain railway, his dad behind the camera, his sister holding a pink Power Ranger.

There was another, capturing them sharing a picnic at the foot of Ben Macdui, and two or three others at various tourist attractions and beauty spots.

These photographs were beyond precious to Jamie.

Not one location, when he’d paid them a return visit this summer, clutching the relevant picture, had sparked any memory whatsoever of having been there with his mother, try as he might to stand in the exact same spot, holding up the image, matching the angle and elevation, attempting to conjure up the sensation of his hand in his mum’s or the feeling of her smiling down at him.

The experiments, or whatever they were supposed to be, hadn’t worked.

Were they his attempt at ‘finding’ her in the landscape?

As though she was still somehow residually there?

Even now he didn’t want to believe that deluded hope had been the reason he’d asked for the summer transfer to the Cairngorms police station in the first place.

He was a good Special Constable with a proven track record of being calm, observing protocol, and keeping out of trouble. He’d been free to take his volunteering anywhere.

‘I really did come here to help out an understaffed force,’ he told Holiday the cow, wanting to believe his motivation hadn’t been born from delusional curiosity and hope. ‘What do you mean, you’re not buying it?’

Shaking his head, he slotted Holiday between the tightly tucked covers of his bed, patting her skinny body – she’d lost a lot of stuffing over the years.

He didn’t like feeling maudlin, like his dad was. He wouldn’t let himself slip into sadness. Making his way round his flat, he poured a glass of water at the kitchen sink and downed it, then he brushed his teeth, before telling his reflection in the bathroom mirror to go to bed.

The noise from the TV caught his attention. He’d left it on, talking away incomprehensibly to itself. The evening news, which was mercifully mostly in English, came from a studio somewhere north of here, and was just winding down to the weather forecast.

There was Morag Füssli, who he’d observed Edwyn talking to that very morning, on-screen now, reminding viewers of the special edition of Highland Spotlight where they’d celebrated the dedicated, community-minded Charlie McIntyre.

The screen showed stills of the stolen jewellery in his hands over Füssli’s appeal for anyone with information about the Hogmanay robbery, along with a description of the woman in the Afghan coat who was ‘of interest to police’.

The reporter signed off by saying, ‘This mishap may spell an uncertain future for the Cairn Dhu Community Repair Shop and Café who can ill afford to be associated with organised crime in the Cairngorms. Can they regain the trust of their community?’

Jamie ran a hand through his still damp hair, picturing Ally McIntyre watching this at home. ‘Oh naw,’ he said. ‘She’s going to be furious.’

* * *

That night Jamie Beaton lay awake, listening to true crime podcasts.

Usually he was asleep by the end of the second episode but tonight, as he curled up on his side, duvet over his head – a childhood habit – he couldn’t help imagining himself back at that cosy, bright repair shop with the smells of coffee and baking, sawdust, oil and rust heavy in the air, and with a fierce redhead standing before him, looking for all the world like she was ready to jab at him, her frustration and fear crackling behind her green eyes.

He told himself to forget her, consign her to the blank region of his brain where his mum also resided, more a feeling than a memory these days; but try as he might, the enchanting vision of beautiful, wounded, fiery-hearted Ally McIntyre would not go away.