Coffin Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

none. It has been set to private browsing. Both the cookie and download folders are empty. A glance at the top of the screen tells me I am connected to the internet. And even as I look, I become aware of just how familiar I am with this laptop and its software. Computers are not some technology foreign to me. I know my way around. I check Recent Items , and find it, too, empty, apart from the mailer and browser that I have opened only in these last hours. And I realise that I must have been covering my tracks. Whatever use to which I was putting my computer, I did not want someone else knowing. All of which is very frustrating, when I am trying to learn what I clearly went to great lengths to prevent anyone else from finding out.
    I breathe frustration through my teeth and am just about to shut down when I notice a folder sitting innocently between Downloads and Music . It is labelled, simply, Flannans . I double-click and it opens to reveal a long list of files. Chapter One , Chapter Two  . . . all the way through to Chapter Twenty . Again I double-click, this time on Chapter One , which triggers the opening of my Pages word-processing software. The document opens. There are headers and footers and a chapter heading, but not a single word of text. I look at it, startled by its emptiness, before opening Chapter Two . Exactly the same. With an increasing sense of disorientation, I open every single document, and find every one of them empty.
    Now I sit back and gaze at my blank screen, feeling more and more bewildered. Whatever I might have told Jon and Sally, or anyone else, I am not writing a book about the Flannan Isles mystery. I am a fraud.
    I can feel the sense of frustration building inside me, bubbling up like molten lava to erupt as an explosion of anger. My chair falls to the floor as I stand up suddenly, just as in Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s poem. There must be, in this house, something that will reveal to me more about who I am. There has to be! I live here, after all. I’m not a ghost. I must leave traces.
    And I spend the next half hour going through every drawer and every cupboard, pulling stuff out of them in a frenzy, searching for something, anything, I don’t know what. I pull every book from the shelves of the bookcase, shaking each in turn by the spine, in case there should be something concealed among their pages. By the time I head for the bedroom, the floor is littered with debris, the detritus of my desperation.
    But I stop in the doorway, my attention caught by a map lying on the coffee table, next to the bottle of whisky. An Ordnance Survey map, all neatly folded up within its shiny, cracked covers. I step over to the table and lift it up. A South Harris Explorer Map. It is well thumbed and torn along some of its folds. It is large and unwieldy as I open it up to reveal the myriad contour lines that delineate the shape and form of this lower half of the Isle of Harris. A landscape pitted by countless lochs, ragged scraps of water reflecting stormy skies. Red denotes the A859 main road, such as it is, with minor roads in broken black lines and yellow. Tràigh Losgaintir, where I washed up only hours ago, is a vast triangle of yellow. I find the cemetery, and my house next to it. Then my eye is drawn to a thick line of luminous orange, tracking part of a broken line from the south end of the beach, that heads almost straight up and over the hills towards a cluster of lochs on the east coast. It is a line I must have drawn on the map myself, with a marker pen. But not recently. It is quite faded, and I wonder how long I must have been here for the ink to lose its colour.
    Holding it under the light, and squinting to read tiny print, I see that the track my marker pen follows is called Bealach Eòrabhat . Gaelic. But I have no idea what it means. I cannot imagine why I might have marked this track in orange, but if nothing else it gives me somewhere else to look. A starting point tomorrow. For there is