Ross Lawhead Read Online Free PDF Page A

did, what would she say? What could she say? Did it matter if she said anything, and if it didn’t, then why should she put herself or him through the torture of awkwardness. And so she just sat there, oscillating between action and inaction, and doing nothing, on the verge of tears.
    â€œFreya!” came a shout from behind her. It was definitely his voice even though it was deeper—a man’s voice now but unmistakably his.
    Her heart nearly stopped but she kept walking.
    â€œFreya, come back!”
    That was too much for her; she broke into a flat-out run. She made it to the end of the street and did a quick turn left and then right, not stopping until she reached the Bodleian Library, which was students only—they wouldn’t allow him in there. She managed to keep herself together until she found an unoccupied study desk, sank into it, head in her arms, and started sobbing silently.
    4
    Alex Simpson of the Northern Constabulary pulled out of the Muir of Ord police station and started the drive back. He was tired to the bone, but there was an electric ball of energy in his gut that pushed him on. He had changed out of his uniform, naturally, but he had pocketed his notebook. It lay on the passenger’s seat next to him almost radiating weight and importance.
    He pulled into the small driveway of his small cottage and let himself in, going straight into his back study and sliding the elastic band off the cover of the black notebook. He thumbed to the last page of writing. He studied it for a few moments and then turned to the wall map. It showed all of Scotland, took up most of the wall, and had cost a fair penny. Today it would be working for him.
    For the first time in several months he had managed to get some time alone on one of the office computers, where he could access the NC’s intranet. Until today, he had been unable to peruse Scotland’s crime and misdemeanor reports for anything that looked—well, suspicious. Suspicious to him, that is. And finally he had found something. Missing livestock, even killed and mangled livestock, was no novelty in the highlands, but that, coupled with a 27 percent bump in area crime, and a 300 percent rise in unnatural deaths in the last nine months—that was suspicious and worth sticking on the map.
    Running his eyes over the blue pins already spread across the wall, he started to put red pins into the map around the Highlands Council area. Seven sheep reported missing and remains found on the farm of Robert Corbet near Kildonan. With no information on where the animals were found or known to be missing from, he stuck three pins around the farmstead. Two cattle killed and found near the farm of Mactire at Braemore—two pins. Nineteen more reports in the last four months—a couple dozen more red pins.
    Next, violent crimes and robberies. A couple hundred of these, in black pins. It took the better part of an hour to mark them all. Next, suicides. Perhaps the most depressing. And again, far more common than one would hope in rural Scotland. In the last six months, forty . Fifteen minutes later forty more pins, these ones yellow, stuck in the map.
    It was certainly painting a picture. Stepping back, he looked at the nebulous whole of incidents spread pretty much at random— except for a massive cluster of pins to the northeast, in Caithness. It was a sparsely populated area, which made the number of crimes even more remarkable. The haze of red, black, and yellow—at least half of the yellow pins—were clustered there, around a mountain called Morven, which had a bright-blue pin sticking in it. Alarm bells rang in his head.
    He phoned his associate and asked him to come over. It was important. His associate was also a member of the Highland Constabulary and the only man in the world besides his father— who was now very old and of diminishing faculties—whom he could speak to about these matters.
    He put the kettle on