Page 17

T he following day, Simon drove to the station and caught the train to Edinburgh.

He thought, I’m leaving Sky, I’m leaving Rose .

He visualised them abandoned, Sky with her fingers curled round the wire of the fence and Rose, trapped in the kitchen, looking down the glen to nothingness.

He shook his head. What was happening to him?

Rose was capable, Sky was, at least, alive and right now, a wolf again.

It had only been a couple of weeks since he’d been in the city, but the sudden noise, the disorientation of direction unnerved him.

He needed to focus. Taking the taxi to the studio the long way, he looked out at his family home, with its unfamiliar curtains and strange car parked outside.

It was as if his natural habitat had been soiled.

At the studio, he showed his pass and the security guard did a double take before letting him through. One or two people did the same in the corridors, but no one did more than nod an acknowledgment of his presence. He might have been a ghost.

Sue sat him down with a coffee at the monitor. ‘I’m really not sure about this,’ she said.

‘We were both there, Sue. The filming was going great right up to the last couple of days when it went a bit weird and then the last day when… anyway, the point is, can’t we salvage the main part of it and make a decision about how to finish it off?’

Sue took a deep breath, her fingers tapping without pressure on the keys of the keyboard.

‘Maybe. Have you spoken to Rose?’

‘She says she doesn’t want our work to go to waste.’

‘David’s work particularly?’

‘Yes. Ask her yourself. I said I could take her home an edited version and she could see what we were thinking.’

‘Why didn’t you bring her?’

‘She wanted to do some gardening or something.’

‘Rose? Really?’

‘And also some sort of music thing going on.’

‘Oh right, David used to worry that she’d put that to one side. He’d be glad she’s taken it back up.’

‘Did he? Would he? He never said.’

‘You wouldn’t have listened Simon. He wouldn’t have been talking about you. Anyway, getting back to the point in hand. What do you want to do? Watch it all? Only, I think it might be worth watching some of the other stuff too, not the main filming but the team in the camp and so on.’

‘I thought the police went over that with a fine tooth comb.’

‘Yes but even so.’

‘How many hours of footage are we talking about?’

‘Well, the main shoot has been edited down to six hours ready for broadcast. That’s fairly straightforward and just needs the commentary to be recorded.’

‘Even without an ending?’

‘We’ve got a sort of provisional ending and some ideas.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

‘Well that’s where the other stuff comes in, the stuff round the camp. We were looking at the both things in isolation, and then one day, I’d been looking at one and then the other and there was something odd. Let me show you.’

Simon’s sense of unease increased. He realised he’d been replaying the shoot in his head for over a year without seeing any of it.

He could remember the intensity of studying the wolves, even before Sky turned up, learning their hierarchy, giving them names, watching them in the forest as they watched him.

He remembered being intent on their activities as he always was, noting the markings and scars, calculating ages, relationships, the ascendant youth and ailing veterans.

Now his knees ached from being in the train. Perhaps. He ignored the discomfort.

When he was studying an animal, nothing else mattered.

People, women mostly, accused him of being self-absorbed but when he was with the animals his self-awareness disappeared.

He felt himself in the centre of the action, an unseen observer, like the dust spiralling in a shaft of sunlight.

That was, perhaps, why his books and films were so successful.

Simon was not in them, other than Simon as the animal.

Away from the animals, he paced, bored, waiting for something to entertain him.

How was he suddenly able to recognise this in himself? He had never thought of it before .

Sue played the film for broadcast first. Fast forwarding from time to time gave the impression it had been filmed under green water, the wolves peering from under trees, dappled by the shade.

Then she let it run at normal speed. Simon was used to seeing it without sound because the sound of the crew would have to be removed and natural sounds replaced or enhanced, but this time, there was an eerie-ness about it.

He was aware of the wolves’ alertness, even when they were resting and he spotted a continuity error, a member of the crew appearing at the edge of the screen.

‘Who’s that?’ he pointed.

‘Good question,’ said Sue, pausing the film and zooming in. It was a man, but his face was in the shadow of the trees. Even zoomed in, Simon’s eyes watered as he tried to differentiate the figure from the upright trunks and undergrowth, yet there was…

‘Something familiar about him.’

‘Really?’ queried Sue, zooming out again. ‘Watch the wolves.’

Simon watched them again.

He realised the alertness, the twitching ears, the eyes open even though muzzles appeared relaxed, was not the result of the film crew. They had presumably become used to that. The ear twitching was in the direction of the stranger.

Simon’s eyes traced through the pack, naming them all in his head, looking for Sky.

He had called her Sky after the blueness of her eyes.

Now that he watched the film again, he remembered how much out of synch she had seemed, on the edge of the pack, fascinated by their human watchers.

Ah, there she was, slightly towards the back of the picture in a pool of shade.

She was the only wolf with her snout pointed directly towards the stranger under the trees while the stranger watched her.

Then she twisted her head away and at the same time, the whole pack also shifted position, some of them start to stand, prepared.

They were aware of the stranger and aware of the film crew but becoming increasingly tense…

‘Why’s the film stopped? What happened next?’

‘I don’t know. It’s blank for a while after that.

But there’s something about half an hour later.

’ Sue clicked on another tab. It had been taken by one of the fixed cameras which filmed when they weren’t there.

It was at a slightly different angle, looking down from the trunk of a tree and over the clearing.

You could see the pack, alert and wary, looking at something moving under the denser trees in a slightly different direction from where the stranger had been.

‘It’s another wolf,’ said Simon. ‘But not part of the pack.’

‘Is it?’ said Sue, zooming in.

The lone wolf was barely visible in the darkness, its fur mangy and its eyes black. It moved awkwardly as if it was injured, tired, dying. It was not watching the pack or the stranger but the TV crew.

Peering at it, Simon felt his hands shake and nausea rise, he recognised that wolf. He recognised that staggering gait, the movements of something that is struggling to remember how to walk on four legs. His face felt cold, he could feel cold on his damp skin….

‘Simon! Simon!’

He was lying on something hard and someone was calling out. He blinked at the ceiling, wondering for a moment, what it was and why it was there and when the woman would stop shouting. He closed his eyes and opened them, looking up into Sue’s face. She was withdrawing her arm from under his neck.

‘Did you hit your head? I tried to stop you from banging it on the floor. Are you ok? Should I get your doctor, what’s his name? Ford isn’t it? Are you ok? What should I do? Should I call Rose?’

Simon sat up, Sue supporting his shoulders.

‘Don’t know what happened,’ he said. ‘No breakfast, blood sugar must be low. I’m seeing Andrew later, don’t worry. Don’t bother Rose.’

‘Sit down and I’ll get you something to eat and drink. That was it, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, it was.’

While Sue went to get coffee and chocolate, Simon sat back at the monitor and stared into the eyes of the werewolf who had attacked him.

He went through his notes to find out when this piece of film had been taken.

It was at least a full month before the attack.

The werewolf was stalking them but a man was observing them.

He couldn’t believe he hadn’t noticed the lone wolf at the time but somehow what unnerved him more was the stranger.

He clicked back onto the first piece of film and rewound a little. Zooming in, he tried to make out what it was in the man’s features, or stance which made him familiar.

‘It’s Old,’ he said as Sue came back in.

‘Who?’

‘Old. Don’t you remember? He was that other fixer who hung round the crew. A bit of a loner. ’

‘No I don’t remember him. I only remember Henrik, Anton and Emil. Old? Was that his surname?’

‘Assume so. Can’t believe you don’t remember him. Kept himself to himself, just hovered round.’

‘Local?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Simon. ‘I can’t recall his face clearly enough, and his accent was very neutral, his English perfect. I didn’t talk to him a great deal. He was just sort of there.’

‘I don’t remember him at all, and I’m pretty sure there was no one called Old on the payroll or the credits. Simon… sometimes when someone has had a trauma…’

‘False memory?’? Simon shifted in his chair. ‘Can we check through some of the film from the camp? Not the wildlife stuff, the team stuff? See if he’s there.’

‘OK, but you do realise that the footage from the camp includes the attack on you and later on you and David? We haven’t edited all of that. No one could face it. Are you ready for that?’

‘Am I going to faint again you mean? No I’ll be all right. But I do need to check some dates.’

Flicking back through his notes and diary, as Sue found the other files, Simon ground his teeth.

As far as he could work out, the piece of film with the wolves and Old and the werewolf had taken place two clear days before the full-moon.