Bridge of Sighs, Excerpt One: Prologue:
Early Morning, Saturday the 28th of February
Charlie Baird walked back into the control room carrying two mugs of coffee and placed one of them on the plastic coaster beside Petra’s keyboard. She looked up at him and smiled.
‘Thanks, Chaz. What’s it like outside?’
‘Cold. Really cold, even with my coat and hat on. The puddle outside the door has frozen over. I walked back up the track towards the main road. There’s no moon and, when you get out beyond the coverage of the lights, it’s so clear you can see the Milky Way. If my eyes had more time to adjust, I’m sure the show would have been even better.’
Charlie had left the Portakabin fifteen minutes earlier for what he’d called a security patrol, though it was actually a cigarette break. Petra didn’t seem to mind. She could have watched him on the functioning top row of the bank of 24 screens that filled one wall of the control room. These showed the feeds from the eight cameras covering what they called the fish farm site after its previous occupants. The other two rows would become live once cameras were installed around the loch, a mile to the south-east, and along the line of the planned fence through the forest.
The number of cameras would eventually exceed the number of screens, making it necessary to choose which feeds to display. For now, the only option for those monitoring the screens was to select which of the available cameras to pan, tilt and zoom. Charlie had been shown how to do this on his first shift, the previous Thursday night. On his first three nights, he’d shared the control room with Eric, a man in his sixties who’d only started the week before but had experience as a security guard and spent most of his time grumbling about finding himself working for ‘a bunch of cowboys’.
After his scheduled three days off, Charlie had turned up on Wednesday evening to find he was now the experienced hand and that he needed to teach Petra everything he knew on her first shift. It didn’t take long.
Petra had placed her phone face down on the desk as Charlie came back in. During the first two shifts they’d worked together, Charlie had noticed that she spent a lot of the first few hours texting friends. Until, presumably, they went to sleep. Tonight, the texting had continued into the early hours, and he suspected that she’d hidden the screen of her phone to stop him from seeing who she was chatting to, or about what, while he was putting her coffee down.
It was no skin off his nose. There wasn’t much outside to guard, not yet. Besides, he knew that he spent too much of his time on his phone working out ways of beating the odds on online football betting sites. That he had applied for a job that meant spending three nights out of every six in a Portakabin in the middle of nowhere, watching video screens on which nothing ever happened, was ample testament to his lack of success as a gambler.
Charlie wondered why Petra had wanted this job. For him, it was a godsend. There wasn’t much call in Lochinver for a man in his fifties who’d had to stop working on fishing boats after a winch hauling in a net had removed the three outside fingers of his left hand. Since then, he’d done various odd jobs from tending bar, which he’d managed better than he feared he might, to driving a school bus during term times and a snowplough in winter. He’d even, briefly, tried cleaning self-catering lets in the Saturday rush between one set of guests leaving and the next arriving.
Samantha had already left him by the time of his accident, taking the two girls to live with her parents in Inverness. It had been years since he’d heard from any of them. When they subsequently divorced, he’d not challenged her wish to have sole custody of the girls, and she’d not challenged his to keep the small run-down cottage on the edge of Lochinver that he’d inherited from his parents. It was her hatred of it and of Lochinver that had caused their marriage to fail. That and his absolute refusal to consider any alternative to either, he sometimes admitted to himself. He concealed the compensation he received while their lives were being legally divided. A decent time afterwards, he used much of the money to do the cottage up. It was still small, but he’d transformed it from a place where his father’s parents would have felt at home into a modern dwelling that Charlie could use as a holiday let in the unlikely event that he ever found a reason to move away.
Petra was different. She was pleasant enough. But she’d said nothing about herself, and he’d not wanted to pry. He guessed she was about thirty, but it was difficult to tell because of the heavy Goth look she went in for. This included Cher-like black hair, lots of black makeup and nail polish, nose and lip piercings, and hints of tattoos appearing above the collar of her white work shirt and below the cuffs of her black uniform jumper.
Not that Charlie looked too closely. With the two of them alone in the cabin for twelve hours at a stretch, the last thing he needed was to give the slightest impression that he was a middle-aged creep ogling a pretty young woman. That didn’t stop him from idly wondering how far the tattoo tendrils he had seen on her throat extended downwards. But while his ex-wife had made no secret of considering him a Neanderthal, he wasn’t stupid, and he kept his curiosity to himself.
All he knew about Petra was that she spoke with a strong Glaswegian accent, that she drove an ageing black Golf GTI that seemed well cared for, that at the end of the shift she turned left onto the main road towards Scourie while Charlie turned right towards Kylesku, and that she chose to call him ‘Chaz’. He hated that, but was probably stuck with it as he’d failed to correct her the first couple of times she’d done it on Wednesday, and it now felt too awkward to say anything.
Charlie had never minded working at night but found it easier in summer when, this far north, the hours of darkness were short and the promise of dawn followed swiftly on the heels of dusk. The experience was less appealing in winter. It was now getting dark noticeably later each evening, but the spring equinox was still three weeks away.
By 3 a.m., with the first hint of light in the sky over three hours away, Charlie found himself struggling to pay attention to the screens, even after he’d put his phone to one side and used the joystick beside his keyboard to play with each of the cameras in turn, seeing if he could work out how good their coverage of the site was and whether there were any blind spots.
‘I’m going outside for another look around,’ he said.
‘I gave up smoking a few years ago,’ said Petra, looking oddly tense. ‘You should try it. You’d not believe how much money you save.’
‘I try to give up pretty much every time I finish a packet,’ said Charlie. ‘I’ve cut down a lot but, as you’ve noticed, I’ve not succeeded yet.’
He stood up and left the control room. The doors to the small bathroom and kitchen were on the left of the short entrance corridor, and the coat rack was just ahead, beyond the door on the right to the outside world. Charlie put on his black donkey jacket and matching beanie, realising that both must be at least as old as Petra’s Golf GTI.
He avoided the icy puddle outside the door and turned right, walking beside the featureless length of the Portakabin housing the control room. As he walked, his breath billowed out ahead of him in the cold night air. The track in this direction headed slightly downhill towards the head of the inlet. In the other direction, it led to the main road.
Beyond the main cabin was a second, similarly sized structure, which housed the generator and a bank of batteries. On the other side of the track were two shipping containers placed end-on to it and a large semi-cylindrical inflatable building, likewise positioned so he could only see its near end. The containers were used to store tools and more valuable equipment, while the hangar, as everyone called it, housed building materials and wood, as well as larger pieces of equipment. All the structures were finished in dark green, as were the portable masts used to support the lights and the cameras that had not been placed on buildings. It was less obvious in the dark, but Charlie knew that even the satellite dish on the roof of the generator cabin was dark green.
The track led out of the pool of white light surrounding the buildings towards another, a couple of hundred yards away. This marked the harbour, still very much a construction site. At the moment, it comprised a bulldozed slipway covered in coarse gravel that led down into the water at the head of the inlet. Nearby was a short wooden pier.
Beached on the slipway and moored by ropes to stakes set into the top of the slope was Genevieve. She was a red landing craft with a loading ramp, currently closed, at the front of the vessel, the end nearest Charlie. At the rear was the bridge and the other accommodation, while on the port side was the vessel’s integral crane. It made Charlie think of some of the smaller and older CalMac ferries he’d seen in the past. She had only arrived two days earlier, and he knew that her crew of four were being put up in Lochinver for the duration of her time here.
Moored to a buoy a little way out into the inlet was Celtic Charm, a small green-hulled ex-fishing boat used to ferry people back and forth between here and the loch.
Charlie finished his cigarette and flicked the dog-end into the water. Then he turned back along the track and up the start of the gentle incline towards the Portakabins and other structures. As he walked out of the harbour’s pool of light, he thought he saw movement ahead of him, by the generator and battery cabin. He stopped to try to get a better view just as all the lights went out.
He knew that if the generator died, the batteries were meant to cut in immediately, but the whole area remained pitch dark, with the only light coming from some of the brighter stars that were slowly becoming visible as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.
Charlie had a small torch in his jacket pocket and pulled it out. Even with it set on a narrow beam, the distance to the nearest cabin was too far to see anything there. Then he heard a noise from behind him. It sounded as if someone was knocking a fence post into the ground. Charlie turned round. The noise seemed to be coming from the track as it ran along the right side of the inlet, a little beyond the slipway. From where he stood, his view was obscured either by distance or by Genevieve’s superstructure.
Though he knew it was pointless, Charlie pulled his phone out of his pocket. As he expected, there was no signal. Local topography meant that the area around the site was out of mobile network coverage. That was no problem when the satellite broadband had power and was connected, meaning there was free Wi-Fi available across the site, but it was a problem now. Charlie hoped that Petra would remember what he’d told her about the satellite phone in the drawer of his desk in the control room. They needed to let someone know there was a problem and, short of driving the half mile up the track to the main road, where there was a weak mobile signal, that was their best option.
The noise stopped. Charlie retraced his steps to the harbour and then carried on along the track beside the inlet. In the light of his torch, he could see something ahead of him that was so bizarre it was hard to believe he wasn’t hallucinating. Charlie’s magic mushroom days were decades behind him, but it still took a conscious act to force himself to believe that what he was seeing was real.
He came to a halt on the track, the light from his torch shining on a sheep’s head impaled on the top of a straight piece of wood, perhaps the trimmed trunk of a small conifer, that had been driven into the loose ground on the inlet side of the track. The piece of wood was long enough for the sheep’s head to be at Charlie’s head height, and the animal’s eyes seemed to be looking directly at him. He was no expert, but Charlie thought the sheep must be freshly killed from the amount of blood and other matter he preferred not to think about oozing down the wood.
It occurred to Charlie, a moment too late, that whoever had done this was still nearby. He swung his torch round, just as he heard a noise to his right. Then something hit him very hard on the side of the head and Charlie’s world faded to black.