Page 15 of The Boathouse by the Loch (The Scottish Highlands #4)

Jake closed his eyes, trying to blank out the memory, trying to control his already shallow breathing.

He wasn’t winning; the memory was coming straight at him, bringing fear and panic in its wake.

‘We were having a good time. Eleanor was skiing with a confidence I’d never seen before, and I was doing all I could just to keep up.

Marcus was following close behind.’ The words tumbled out; he couldn’t hold back.

‘I looked over my shoulder to see a massive grin on his face and remember thinking that he’d noticed the improvement in her skiing too. Then it began to snow – hard.’

Jake opened his eyes. ‘This only added to the enjoyment, the exhilaration, the sheer thrill that the three of us were experiencing skiing in formation down that mountainside. I tell you, it was like something out of a bloody James Bond movie.’ Jake shook his head in amazement.

‘Then the weather closed in. More snow, less visibility.’ Still standing by the window, Jake couldn’t take his eyes off the snow-covered peak of the Cairngorm Mountain beyond The Lake House.

‘Eleanor, she was skiing like the wind.’ At first, it had been exhilarating, but Jake recalled that the faster she skied, the more concerned Jake became for her safety.

‘I was struggling to keep up with her. So was Marcus. I could hear Marcus behind me yelling at her to slow down. Of course, she couldn’t hear him.

Then I had a terrible thought, Faye. I started to think she was doing it on purpose, scaring me for making her go there and share our news with the family.

Then it got worse, then my thoughts turned really bad; was she trying to kill our baby? ’

‘No, surely not!’ Faye cut in.

‘That’s when she disappeared straight over a precipice.’

Jake heard Faye take a sharp intake of breath.

‘Marcus was beside me, grabbing at me, trying to stop me following her. We’d both stopped at the edge.

There was no way I was going to let her go first. It had never been my plan.

I couldn’t face being a widower. So I punched him, Faye, with such force that I must have knocked him out.

Then I went after her, launching myself over that precipice like I was on some sort of suicide mission. ’ Jake stopped.

‘Jake?’ There was concern in Faye’s voice.

‘There she was,’ Jake said, his voice distant, ‘quite still, just a few feet away. She was standing under a snowy ledge, out of the driving wind and snow, sideways on, looking my way. And under those goggles and scarf, I could imagine that knowing smile, those dancing eyes. She’d done it again, Faye; she’d tricked me one last time.

I’d dropped just two or three feet over what turned out to be a shallow incline.

She must have known. God knows how, but she must have known what she was doing all along. But that’s when it happened.’

Jake left the window and sat on the bed. ‘It was on my approach. I must have … it must have been …’

He knew that this would be hard to tell; that it would be hard to admit to being the cause of the accident.

Faye’s soft voice filtered down the phone, encouraging him to continue.

‘I don’t know how it happened, I don’t know what I did, Faye, but as I skied under that ledge to meet her – maybe it was the sound of my skis, maybe I was going too fast – it collapsed.’

‘Oh no.’

‘I found out afterwards there had been an avalanche. All I knew then was that one minute I was skiing towards her, feeling a mixture of blessed relief and complete outrage, wondering which emotion was going to win out, and the next I …’ Jake couldn’t go on.

He couldn’t speak of it. The panic, the breathlessness was setting in now.

‘You were buried alive.’

‘Yes,’ Jake croaked. His throat felt dry. He felt cold, yet his skin felt clammy and hot. He closed his eyes.

He was back.

It was the sudden darkness that scared him most; the bright white world taken from him in an instant by the snow enveloping him, crushing him, until he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, couldn’t escape back to the light, realising that it was all over sooner that he could ever have imagined.

He wanted his last thoughts to be good, to be true.

He didn’t want his last moments to be wasted in a futile struggle against the inevitable.

So, he tried to recall with as much vivid detail as possible the people he loved, so he could at least feel he wasn’t making that final journey alone and perhaps could leave the world enveloped in a kind of peace.

‘Remember that night you stayed over at my house?’ said Faye.

Jake opened his eyes. Of course he did. He’d been babysitting Natty while Faye was on her course that day, training towards her headship qualification.

She’d been stuck in traffic on the way home, and hadn’t got in until very late.

Natty had already been in bed, and was asleep.

Jake had stayed over, sleeping on the couch.

Natty had woken up at a silly hour that morning while Faye was fast asleep.

She’d come down for a drink of water and had snuggled with Jake on the sofa, eventually falling asleep.

‘I heard you, Jake.’ He listened as Faye recounted what had happened that night.

She’d been woken by a noise downstairs. It had been around midnight.

She had got out of bed and automatically checked her daughter’s room.

Finding it empty, she’d expected Natty to be in the kitchen making a racket as well as a glass of water.

But the kitchen had been empty, the lights off, and Faye had begun to feel anxious.

She always locked every door, checked every window; her little ritual twice around the house before lights out. But that night, unexpected company in the form of Jake crashing on her sofa had thrown her little ritual into disarray; she had forgotten it.

Jake’s voice had pierced the silent stillness.

He’d sounded agitated; she’d thought he had called out her name.

She’d bounded through the lounge door. ‘What is it?’ she remembered asking as she approached the sofa.

She had found Jake still asleep but sweating profusely – great beads of sweat were on his forehead, like he had a fever.

And he seemed to be having trouble breathing.

‘I thought you were having an asthma attack. You were really bad, Jake. But when I called your name, and you woke up, you were fine.’

‘I can control it during the day, Faye, when I don’t think about it. But at night …’

At night, it was out of control, and Faye was right; it was really bad.

Jake hadn’t had an uninterrupted night’s sleep since the accident.

Every night he was back. He couldn’t move, he couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe; trapped in a snow-white coffin, paralysed with fear, until a movement above, snow shifting, light, blinding, dazzling, beautiful light.

But the nightmare didn’t end there. It never ended there.

‘At night, I constantly relive that moment.’ The moment when Jake’s relief at being freed from the darkness, being able to breathe in that crisp white air, turned to horror at the thought of Eleanor just a few feet away, so close, yet so alone in her own snow-white coffin.

‘As soon as my lungs were filled with air, I was screaming at Marcus to leave me and find Eleanor, get her out. He left me. Then he returned, asking me if I was OK – asking me what happened, as if he hadn’t heard a single word I had just said. Christ, I felt so helpless.’

Jake remembered that overwhelming sense of helplessness at being trapped in the snow, unable to help rescue Eleanor.

‘He left me again. I was still trapped, but at least I could breathe. But I was desperate to know what was happening. Had he found her? Was she alright? Please, god, tell me she’s alright , I prayed .

But Marcus wouldn’t tell me anything. All I could hear was his voice repeating her name over and over. ’

Jake took a moment to remember to breathe, trying to stave off a panic attack as the memories came flooding back.

‘Then they arrived out of nowhere.’ Jake recalled the thumping sound of the rescue helicopter appearing overhead, whipping up a mini snowstorm around them, threatening to bury them again.

He remembered looking up through the driving snow and seeing a man in bright colours being winched down beside a metal cage.

He looked back and wondered at how quickly they’d been found.

‘They took her first. I insisted. After they had resuscitated her, I wanted them to get her to the hospital fast; I didn’t want to run the risk of losing her again . ’

Jake’s attempts to convince a sceptical rescuer that he was alright so that they would leave without him wasn’t helped by Marcus’s constant interference with the words, ‘You don’t look alright.

’ At Marcus insistence, they checked him over.

There was some bruising, but no broken bones.

Jake even got to his feet to prove he was alright, which he wasn’t – not really.

He was suffering from shock. He was shaking so badly that he didn’t know how he was going to make it off the mountain.

But he did, because all he could think of was being reunited with Eleanor.

‘I saw her. We both did.’ She was nearly free of that white tomb. ‘I remembered thinking …’ Jake shook his head, ‘why her? I should have done something more to stop her.’

‘You can’t blame yourself.’

Jake cut across Faye’s protestations that it wasn’t his fault. He knew what she was going to say; it had started to snow hard, and it was just a coincidence the way that ledge had collapsed on his approach. It wasn’t his fault there had been an avalanche.

Jake wasn’t having any of it. ‘I remember standing there staring as they flew her straight to hospital, thinking it should have been Eleanor that Marcus dug out first.’

Jake stared through the window at The Lake House.

If they hadn’t rowed, if he’d only listened, Eleanor wouldn’t have felt the need to prove a point, and she wouldn’t have been standing under that ledge.

They’d have spent Christmas in London instead.

And Marcus wouldn’t have been forced to make an impossible choice he would have to live with for the rest of his life.

Ultimately, Jake knew, by hating Marcus, by punishing Marcus, by withdrawing his friendship, his love, he was really punishing himself for being the cause of it all. Until Jake could forgive himself for his part in the tragedy, how could he hope to forgive Marcus?

‘Up there, he made the wrong choice,’ Jake said again.

Jake expected Faye to make sympathetic noises, say something, anything. ‘Faye, are you still there?’

‘He told me you’d say that.’

Jake’s eyebrows shot up. So he had told her!

Marcus perpetrating the lie, making Jake look bad in front of Faye.

Making himself out to be the innocent party, the wronged man.

No wonder Faye had told Marcus about his holiday.

No wonder she was mad at him for getting Marcus thrown in jail when he’d followed Jake on holiday to Scotland, and Jake had informed the local police he might have brought drugs on the flight with him.

‘He says you’ve got it all wrong.’

Jake didn’t need this. How many times had Marcus told him this same absurd lie? Even though he was there in Scotland to find out the truth about whether someone had been up there off-piste with them, Jake had to acknowledge that deep down, he just didn’t believe it was true.

‘He says it wasn’t him.’

Jake had seen nobody else on that run. Who did Marcus think it was? The ghost of bloody Christmas future?

‘He says you knocked him unconscious, and when he came around. it was your voice he could hear shouting out. That’s when he realised you were okay; you weren’t buried like Eleanor.

So he started digging her out. He says when he found you, your face was already clear of the snow; somebody had got to you first. He says there must have been somebody else up there with you. ’

‘What do you believe?’ Jake’s tone was curt.

‘I don’t know what to think,’ said Faye haltingly.

That wasn’t good enough. ‘I’ve got to go,’ Jake said abruptly.

‘I’ve got things to do.’ He couldn’t wait to get back to London and have it out with Marcus – once and for all.

He’d been foolishly persuaded that Marcus might, just might be telling the truth.

But if somebody else had been up there with them, then why hadn’t they come forward?

He’d asked himself that question once before, but this time he had the answer: no one had come forward for the simple reason that no one else had been up there with them.

‘Jake, Jake, I didn’t mean …’

Jake slammed the phone down.