Page 18 of The Boathouse by the Loch (The Scottish Highlands #4)

‘Are you alright, son?’

Jake’s breathing was shallow; he was about to exit the shop, but he was having a problem catching his breath.

‘Yes, of course. I’m fine, Mr Gillespie – really.’ He knew he didn’t sound fine, each word spoken in between laboured breaths.

In the beginning, he had thought he’d developed asthma.

He’d never suffered from it before, but apparently it was possible to get adult onset of the condition.

Thorough medical tests had revealed it wasn’t asthma, pneumonia, a bronchial infection or anything of a physical nature; it was all in his mind.

A psychological problem, Jake wasn’t pleased to hear, manifesting itself in panic attacks triggered by confined spaces and a very specific memory of an event.

If he avoided the triggers, he avoided situations like now.

But sometimes there was no way of avoiding enclosed spaces, like the lifts at the school where he worked.

Instead, Jake had learned to control it.

But this wasn’t one of those situations.

The shop floor was spacious. He wasn’t confined.

So what had brought it on? Jake suddenly had a brainwave.

It wasn’t the actual physical spaces that brought on anxiety attacks, but the memory they elicited.

He’d learned to control thinking about it, and at school in those lifts, he was too busy with work to think of anything else.

Here was the proof. He wasn’t even in an enclosed space, but he was thinking of what had happened on that mountain.

‘Do you need to sit down?’ Mr Gillespie appeared from behind the counter, carrying a stool.

Jake held up his hand. ‘No, really. I’ll be alright.’ He stood by the door, holding the door handle, steadying himself, Mr Gillespie hovering nearby with the stool at the ready. The less Jake thought about the memory, the more he improved.

In the beginning, this had been next to impossible, as his every waking hour had been consumed by that one event.

What he had come to realise was that he needed two things: time and distance.

He needed plenty of both. He had created distance – emotional distance – by leaving the firm and trying to divorce himself from the family.

He had created physical distance – the easy part – by remaining right where he was in London; as far away from Scotland as possible.

The time issue was the tricky part. He had needed a job, and he’d needed it to be one that would keep him on mental high alert, with no time to think, to reflect, to question, to argue, to rage with his tormentor – the past. Becoming a teacher had fitted the bill perfectly.

Not only did he expend all his energies on acquiring the new skills needed to become a teacher – it could be tough working in an inner-city school – he also had a mentor and a class of students he could not fail by not being one hundred per cent dedicated to his job.

From the very beginning, when he’d got the teacher training position in the school, he’d known that the only downside of the job would be the long school summer holiday.

But when he’d started in the autumn term, that had been months and months away.

However, the time had passed in the blink of an eye, with the summer holidays looming ever closer.

So Jake had made a plan – he would volunteer for every summer club run by the school, and if he couldn’t do that, then he’d volunteer somewhere else, like a summer camp in America.

That had been the plan. He certainly had not expected to find himself out of work before the end of term, at a loose end, and told to go on a holiday.

He looked at his bandaged hands. Soon the bandages would come off.

But now he didn’t want to volunteer for summer clubs, or go away to work in a summer camp.

All he wanted was to fast-forward to September so that he could spend as much time at work as possible – not only because he loved his job, but because Faye was there.

And once they were back at work, he could resume babysitting duties for Natty.

But he couldn’t fast-forward to September.

That day, the school was breaking up, and no doubt Faye had plans for the summer.

If only he could spend the summer with them.

Jake raised his eyebrows. How would that happen?

What was he going to do – invite them to his holiday home in Scotland for the summer?

Jake raised his eyes even further. Could he? More to the point, even if she were to accept the invitation, would it work for Faye to come to The Lake House, even though they were just friends?

Jake knew what the problem was – he wanted more than just friendship; he wanted her. And the guilt of falling in love with someone else so soon after what had happened to Eleanor was—

‘I’m glad, though, that at least when the snow thawed, they found the person who fired off that shot.’ Mr Gillespie cut straight across Jake’s thoughts with a bombshell.

‘ What ?’ Jake let go of the door. It slammed shut. ‘What did you just say?’

‘The person who fired off that pistol shot – more than likely started that avalanche and brought down the heap of snow that buried … Oh!’ Mr Gillespie registered Jake’s shock. ‘You didn’t know?’

Now Jake needed that stool. He sat down on it by the counter. He could barely speak.

Mr Gillespie turned around and ushered some surprised customers out of his shop, telling them to leave their baskets by the door and come back later. He put the closed sign in the door, and locked it.

There were just two customers, a young couple, in the interior design outlet. They were too busy choosing curtains to notice that the grocery store customers had suddenly been kicked out.

Jake could feel the anger welling up again about what happened to Eleanor, to all three of them. ‘It wasn’t a freak act of nature?’ he said in a hoarse voice.

Mr Gillespie shook his head. ‘I’m afraid it doesn’t look like it was. I once read that it’s a myth that a noise can trigger an avalanche—’

Jake looked at him sharply. ‘But you just said—’

‘Let me finish.’

Jake shut his mouth.

‘It sounds to me as though that gunshot did cause a shelf of snow to shift, and, well, you know what happened next.’

‘It started off as a rumour among us locals. Somebody – who was it now?’ Mr Gillespie scratched his chin.

‘I forget who first said they’d heard a shot up there that Christmas, but it got around town like wildfire.

Then more people started saying they’d heard something, but others hadn’t.

It was the talk of the town, what with the skiing accident up there that same afternoon.

’ He studied Jake. ‘Of course, you can’t be sure what you hear up there.

It’s the wind, you see – it could carry a sound you thought you heard right next to you from miles away, and it makes it so that a sound could come from any direction, any distance. ’

Jake found his voice. ‘I don’t remember hearing a gunshot.’ But then at the point when Jake had skied over that edge, and caught up with Eleanor, all he could hear was Marcus yelling at his sister to slow down, unaware she’d come to a halt under the overhang.

‘There you go. You see, a lot of people didn’t. Then again, a lot of people did. I guess it depended on where you were – downwind of the shot or not. But what was certain was that it came from the area where you were skiing off-piste.’

‘How could you possibly know that?’

‘Someone came forward, anonymously; someone else who’d been off-piste that afternoon too, claiming there had definitely been a gunshot.’

Jake nearly fell off his stool. ‘Are you saying someone else was up there with us?’

‘Two people, apparently. Mr Anonymous who heard the shot, and the person who took the shot.’

Jake narrowed his eyes. ‘How did they know it wasn’t one and the same person?’

‘Ah, because the person who made the call to the police was very much alive, obviously.’

‘Huh?’

‘They found him – poor guy.’

‘The shooter?’ Jake stared at him.

‘That’s right, when the snow thawed. ’

‘Dead?’

‘Very. Suicide.’ Mr Gillespie put two fingers to his temple. ‘Bullet right here.’

Jake was, quite frankly, astounded; how could he not know this?

‘It was in the spring,’ Mr Gillespie continued. ‘Some walkers found him, raised the alarm. It was suicide, plain and simple. Only thing they couldn’t figure was why he was wearing skiing gear. If that was what his intention was, then why did he go to the bother of taking his skis?’

‘Perhaps he was just having one last ski for old times’ sake,’ Jake said in a small voice.

‘Perhaps. In any case, they confirmed the time of death. Puts him right there that day.’

Jake stared at Mr Gillespie, taking all this in.

‘They found his car at a little-used Forestry Commission car park. Hell of a hike from there to the ski runs.’

Jake didn’t think so; perhaps he wanted some peace and quiet, some solitude, before he departed the world.

Jake had thought about it often enough – in the beginning.

A person could do the craziest things, if they were pushed.

A person could lose all rational thought and do a thing no sane person would even contemplate.

Jake’s hands closed around the sledgehammer.

‘But you know what the craziest part was?’

Jake shook his head.

‘He’d gone and bought a ticket, a car parking ticket out of the machine. That’s how they could pinpoint the exact date and time of death, because those things are dated and time-stamped. Now, tell me,’ he paused, staring at Jake intently, ‘does that sound like a man intent on taking his own life?’

Jake didn’t know what to say .

‘Of course, us locals put two and two together; your skiing accident was most likely caused by the sound of gunfire dislodging the snow, but it wasn’t a matter for the police. There was no crime committed there. It wasn’t as though he was shooting at you.’

Jake stirred uneasily.