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Steph got off the plane, went through passport control and made straight to collect her luggage.

She waited impatiently for the conveyor belt to start.

How long could it take to chuck some bags on a truck and throw them on a belt? Steph tried to look intently at a pillar when the old man from the plane meandered over to the luggage reel.

She had given him enough of her time on the plane.

It didn’t take long to rent a car and drive out of Glasgow.

What did take a while was navigating the roads through the Trossachs towards the village of Calnally where the dead boy had lived.

It was hard to keep her eyes open due to jetlag and, once or twice, Steph had to swerve to stay on the right side of the road, which happened to be the left.

Perhaps she should have spent a night in Glasgow to recover a little bit.

But time was precious.

Besides, she would still be jetlagged in the morning so she might as well endure the pain now, or so she thought.

Calnally was a rather picturesque little place set against the natural beauty of the surrounding wilderness.

Well, what counted as wilderness for Britain.

Living in the USA had given Steph a broader understanding of what wilderness truly was.

Alaska had been a crazy experience.

You could easily get lost there and not even your remains would be found – a great selling point for Steph.

Being a village, Calnally didn’t have many places to stay.

After the third car had screeched its horn at Steph for swerving onto the wrong side of the road, she realised she needed to find somewhere quickly.

She needed to rest.

There were one or two places that made most of their business through ramblers and the type of holiday goer that wanted to escape town life.

In the end, Steph chose a hotel attached to one of the local pubs.

She had long since discovered that the best starting point to get information was from locals who liked to chat.

Drinking tended to induce conversation.

The pub was a no-brainer.

Despite her eagerness to get to Calnally, Steph was in no rush to begin work.

After getting her keys and hauling her luggage up two flights of stairs, her head hit the pillow.

She slept.

It was two in the afternoon.

Having awoken after seven in the evening, Steph forced herself to get up and go downstairs.

She knew lying there would be dangerous, as it would become difficult to get to sleep later.

The carpet leading down the stairs was patterned and worn slightly in the areas over the lip of each step.

Steph supposed there was not much reason for the place to stay at the cutting edge of floor fashion.

It likely had little impact on those who chose to stay there.

Although allowing the carpet to age didn’t inspire comfort, the authentic old-fashioned bar area did.

There was rich oak panelling halfway up the wall, whilst a deep blue patterned wallpaper covered the rest.

A few mounted antlers adorned the wall, along with other game and a couple of old flintlock rifles from years gone by.

To one end, high-backed brown leather chairs surrounded the fireplace.

Steph made her way to the bar.

The room was occupied by a few small groups, chatting the evening away after early dinners, but there was no queue for drinks.

“What can I get you, dear?”

asked a middle-aged woman, her dark grey roots beginning to show under her dyed blonde hair. She smiled good-naturedly.

“A gin and tonic, please,”

Steph replied, looking around the room.

“Coming right up.”

Steph hauled herself up onto one of the padded barstools and leant on the surface of the bar.

“So what brings you all the way up here?”

the woman asked after having taken Steph’s room number.

“Up here?”

Steph asked, pouring the tonic over the lime wedge languishing in the gin below.

“Your accent gives you away.”

“Oh, right, yeah,”

Steph said, taking a sip.

“I’m from Sheffield originally but I’ve lived in the States for the last nine years.”

“Oh, I love America,”

the woman sighed.

“Everything seems so much bigger out there.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“So what brings someone over from America to the middle of nowhere? You have enough nowhere over on the other side of the ocean if you wanted some seclusion.”

Steph smiled and took another sip of her drink.

“Work.”

The woman nodded and then picked up a newspaper and an old ballpoint. She was halfway through a crossword which she now lay on the counter. Steph couldn’t help peering over.

“Five letter word beginning with T, fourth letter M; the clue’s better,”

the woman said without looking up.

Steph thought for a second.

“Trump?”

The woman put pen to paper.

“Well, you certainly trumped me with that one; I’ve been on it for ten minutes.”

Steph gave half a smile as the woman began reading the next clue to herself, her lips moving but no words coming out.

“Is this a quiet sort of place?”

Steph asked.

The woman looked up momentarily before looking down again.

“I suppose so. People come on walking holidays around here and a few who like to escape the city, but otherwise, it is mostly locals. It’s not like people would come to stay here for Ben Nevis or Loch Lomond if you get my understanding. Too much of a distance still. They want it on their doorstep.”

“I get you,”

Steph replied, swirling her glass slightly.

“So it’s quite a cosy village then? Most people know each other?”

“I suppose it is a bit like that, aye,”

the woman replied, putting pen to paper once more.

“Although, it’s not as if everyone knows everyone else intimately, even if news travels fast enough between people. Par for the course in any small place I suppose.”

“I suppose so,”

Steph said. She wasn’t quite sure how to tackle the subject she really wanted to. Death could be a delicate subject.

“Sorry, but seeing as you work in a bit of a local hub, I was wondering whether I could ask you something.”

“Local hub?”

the woman chuckled, looking over to a couple of older men relaxing in the chairs by the fire.

“What was it you wanted to know?”

“I couldn’t help overhearing a couple of people talking about the death of a boy a few weeks ago. I looked it up and supposedly he was attacked by an animal or something?”

The woman pursed her lips slightly. For a moment Steph thought she had hit a dead end, but her face then broke into a sad sigh.

“The Tierney boy, Nathan,”

the woman said.

“Was found dead a few weeks ago, but supposedly, when they found his body it had been attacked by an animal – the poor wee lad.”

“That’s terrible,”

Steph tutted.

“Oh, it’s awful,”

the woman continued.

“I don’t know the Tierneys personally, but you can only feel for them. Apparently, he had run off after an argument. They had no idea he was even missing until they checked his room to see whether he had gone to clean his teeth. The next thing you know, the police were everywhere looking for him; the whole village was on alert. It’s not usual for something like that to happen here.”

Steph could sense that the woman was starting to settle into her role as a storyteller.

“Who found him?”

“Someone walking their dog discovered his body; a complete mess is what they said.”

The woman shut her eyes and shook her head slightly to emphasise the terribleness of the event.

“Did the police not find anything?”

Steph asked, thinking about all the research she had done into the police’s likely theory of events.

“Nothing that made much sense,”

the woman said before dropping her voice slightly.

“They concluded that it was a hunting accident… poaching accident is what was said, I think.”

“Poaching?”

“They suspect someone was out hunting deer, using dogs – some still do practice it I suppose – and the dogs got ahead, sensed the boy’s movements and just saw red, as if some instinct kicked in. I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t?”

Steph frowned.

“No… usually hunting dogs are very well-trained. Unless it was some gypsy who didn’t know his elbow from his arse, hunting dogs are usually well-trained and wouldn’t go after a boy. I’m sure one could train their dogs to hunt someone, but who would be loitering in the woods with his dogs on the off-chance there is a young boy to hunt? That wouldn’t make sense either.”

Steph had little knowledge of how a hunting dog was trained or what sort of people even kept hunting dogs these days. However, she supposed the woman was right; it was unlikely that a dog was the culprit.

“Of course,”

the woman continued, causing Steph to look up.

“it all happened not too far from the fence.”

“The fence?”

“It’s what we call it. A large stretch of fence marks the land owned by some billionaire. It’s electric too! As if even the thought of people crossing his land is too much to bear thinking about, even though he has miles and miles of it!”

“A billionaire owns that tract of land? But I thought it would belong to the people; a national park or something similar?”

Steph asked, swirling her drink. She already knew some of this, but it was good to get the local perspective.

“Bought it from the government somehow. Must have given some politician some amount of money to make it worth their while. It was never a national park, but it was as good as. Now you can’t cross it. Like a bloody military base!”

“Who owns it?”

Steph asked. This she had little idea of.

The woman turned towards the two old men by the fire.

“Jock!”

“What can I do for you?”

one of the men asked, turning to reveal a thinning head of hair and a warm smile.

“Who is it that people think owns the fenced-in land?”

the woman asked.

“Ah, people think it’s that business chap who owns all those technology companies,”

Jock replied, looking to his friend who nodded.

“The one who had that allegation made against him and then went off the radar. That’s what they say, anyway.”

“Do people not know for sure?”

Steph asked, turning to Jock.

Jock shook his head.

“Nobody has seen him, dear, apart from one man and his dog which is probably where the rumour came from that it’s the technology man.”

Technology man? Steph mulled this over in her head.

“How long ago was this allegation against the guy they think it is?”

Steph asked.

Jock turned to consult his friend in a lowered voice before turning back.

“Must be around the turn of the millennium.

Just before or just after; I can’t remember which.

Something to do with a young girl and some cocaine or something along those lines.

You know what these rich types are like.

Didn’t like the media attention so went missing.

Now it’s possible he is hiding out here where nobody gives a shit about his Hollywood antics.”

Steph thanked Jock and finished her gin.

She thought about having another but decided instead to have an evening stroll before going back to bed for an early night.

She was still tired.

It was dark as Steph explored the streets and studied the looming hills that surrounded the village.

They were nothing more than large shadows in the night.

It was funny the perception most people had as to what went on in Hollywood.

Or, even more amusing, the assumption that any American with money must have something to do with Hollywood and not Silicon Valley.

Steph suspected she knew the man they were talking about, although the likelihood of him owning a lot of land in the middle of Scotland that he had fenced off from the public seemed somewhat improbable.

If it was who she was thinking about, then he had been in the public eye and described as a bit of a dot-com playboy from what she had read somewhere.

She was young when he’d been at his most famous so she had no recollection of events that may or may not have been reported by the British media.

Kelvin Handle had been a major name and face in the past as he capitalised on the world’s move towards a digital revolution.

He had been as big a name as Elon Musk was today.

He seemed to show his face everywhere and lived life – or so gossip journalists would have had people believe – like a rockstar nerd.

Then it all went wrong.

He appeared to be in the middle of an accusation with a seventeen-year-old girl and a spiked drink.

There was a court case.

The jury found in favour of Kelvin.

Although he’d been seen with the girl and it was his house party, enough video evidence proved he’d not been in the same room when the drink had been poured or even drunk.

People didn’t care about the verdict.

Mud stuck. Then he just disappeared from the public eye.

Steph vaguely remembered watching a trashy television show late one night called Where are they now? which was as vacuous as it was addictive to watch.

Kelvin featured in a segment that went over the case and then went on about how he had disappeared off the face of the earth – journalists couldn’t find him, and his companies were either tight-lipped or as in the dark as everyone else.

The only evidence for his continued existence was the acquisition of a mixture of other companies from genetics to pharmaceuticals.

Nobody was really interested in him anymore though.

There had been too many new cases of celebrities getting in trouble that were more relevant than some guy from over two decades ago.

Even so, Steph could understand his wanting to stay out of the way of journalists, but buying up land in Scotland from the government and fencing it off? That seemed unlikely.

Realising that her feet hurt and that her knees were beginning to knock, Steph called it a night.

Once again, her eyes shut as soon as she hit the pillow. Her sleep was glorious. Until three in the morning. Then she lay awake, waiting for morning and cursing her jetlag.