Some of the worry goes out of Cal, but a residue stays. He’s more or less satisfied that the kid isn’t the one hurting sheep, but this no longer seems like the central point, or at least not the only one. It’s been brought home to him that he’s not clear, or anything like clear, on what Trey is and isn’t capable of.
Beyond the bend Trey strikes off the path, upwards into the heather. “Mind yourself,” he says over his shoulder. “Boggy bits.”
Cal watches where Trey puts his feet and tries to match him, feeling the ground sink under him here and there. The kid knows this terrain better, and suits it better, than Cal does. “Shit,” he says, as the bog sucks at his boot.
“You haveta go faster,” Trey says, over his shoulder. “Don’t give it a chance to get holda you.”
“This is as fast as I go. Not all of us are built like jackrabbits.”
“Moose, more like.”
“You remember what I told you about manners?” Cal demands. Trey snorts and keeps moving.
They pass between gorse bushes, around old turf-cutting scars, under a sheer cliffside where tufts of grass sprout in the cracks between boulders. Cal keeps an eye out for watchers, but nothing moves on the mountainside, except heather stirring in the wind. This isn’t a place anyone would stumble across by accident. Whatever Brendan was doing up here, he wanted to do it undisturbed.
Trey takes them up a slope steep enough to use up Cal’s breath, and plunges into a thick plantation of spruces. The trees are tall and neatly spaced, and the ground is padded with years’ worth of needles. The wind doesn’t reach them here, but it rakes the treetops with an unceasing restless mutter. Cal doesn’t like the stark contrasts in this terrain. They have the same feel as the weather, of an unpredictability deliberately calculated to keep you one step behind.
“There,” Trey says, pointing, as they step out of the trees.
Brendan’s hideout is below them, sheltered from the worst of the winds in a slight dip, with its back up against the mountainside. It isn’t what Cal expected. He was picturing one of those clusters of raggedy stone-wall scraps with maybe a piece of roof here and there, left to nature’s slow devices for generations. This is a squat white cottage no older than his own, and in much the same shape as his own was when he arrived. Its door and window frames even have most of their red paint left.
Cal finds this more unsettling than his original image. A derelict two-hundred-year-old house fits into the ways of nature: things have their time and then fall apart. For a relatively new and usable house to be abandoned seems to imply some unnatural event, sharp-edged and final as a guillotine. The place has a look he doesn’t like.
“Wait,” he says, putting out a hand to block Trey as he starts towards it.
“Why?”
“Just give it a minute. Let’s be sure no one else had the same idea as your brother.”
“That’s why Bren came here. ’Cause no one else ever—”
“Just wait,” Cal says. He moves back, nice and easy, to stand among the spruce trees. Trey rolls his eyes impatiently, but he follows.
Nothing comes from the cottage, neither movement nor sound. The weeds growing high against its walls have been trampled away on the path to the front door. Its windows are mostly broken out and plenty of its roof slates are missing, but someone has been trying to remedy this, not long ago: a tarp has been tacked down over one patch of roof, and there’s plywood in the windows.
“You said you’ve been in there since Brendan went,” Cal says. “Right?”
“Yeah. Coupla days after.”
That means they’re unlikely to walk in on his dead body. A pair of swifts skim in and out under the eaves, unhurried, practicing their acrobatics in the cool air. “Looks OK,” Cal says, at last. “Let’s go take a look.”
Down in the dip, sound is condensed in a way that comes as startling after the open space above. Their steps are sharp and loud on the grit of the path. The swifts set up an angry chittering and dive for cover.
The door has a big splintered dent near the bottom, where someone has kicked it in with a nice combination of precision and dedication. Not too long ago: the broken wood is only starting to discolor. A steel hasp, its padlock still attached, hangs loose