The Yacht Party (Lara Stone)

‘That’s what my phone’s saying,’ said Stella. ‘Mind you, I’ve got zero signal, so we could have passed Ullapool hours ago.’

‘There!’ She pointed at a sign emerging from the sea mist.

Ullapool Harbour, it read. Ferry vehicle check-in.

‘We’d better park,’ said Lara, swinging into a space by the dock. ‘Otherwise we might drive off the edge of the world.’

She yanked on the handbrake and they clambered out, stretching and groaning, the cold air clean and sharp after the over-heated fug of the car. Lara turned her face up towards the sky. The weather was definitely easing off. Maybe.

‘Would you just smell that, though?’ said Stella, inhaling deeply.

‘The sea?’

Stella grinned and pointed to a café behind them.

‘No, fish and chips.’

It was already gone two o’clock and they both agreed that they were starving. Stella went into the shop and came out with two white bags. They sat on the stone wall that framed the crescent of pebbly beach. Lara unwrapped the paper and picked off the crispy batter just as a blast of wind whipped along the front and pushed the cloud back. Suddenly they could see the other side of the bay, then, like a giant hand was pulling back a curtain, the snow-capped mountains beyond.

‘Now that’s special,’ said Lara, eyes wide. ‘Almost worth the drive.’

‘Almost,’ said Stella, dipping a chip into a pool of ketchup.

‘So have you been here before?’

Stella shook her head.

‘Nah. We didn’t really go on holiday when I was a kid. And if we had, we’d have got the hell outta Scotland and gone somewhere bloody warm. What about you?’

‘I spent nearly every summer in Scotland but never came this far north.’

MOAAA-RRRGH

‘What the…?’

MOOAW-WARR

A ghostly shape emerged from behind the harbour buildings, like a moving office block.

‘Is that the ferry?’

‘It’s huge. How many passengers are they expecting?’

Although it was late spring, the village looked deserted. Lara wondered what had brought a young woman like Rebecca out here.

‘Why do you think Rebecca didn’t go to Helen’s funeral?’ said Stella, as if she were reading her thoughts. ‘It seems strange given they were such close friends.’

Lara tried to imagine herself not attending Sandrine’s funeral but she couldn’t, no matter how painful her grief.

‘I’m not sure. But we’re going to find out,’ she said, crunching her wrapper into a ball and tossing it into a bin.

Rebecca’s aunt hadn’t returned Lara’s call, but it hadn’t taken Stella too long to find out the address of her Ullapool property. When you had a name and an approximate geographical area, it wasn’t difficult in the twenty-first century. They drove up the hill away from the water into a residential area of squat houses. Pebble-dashed and simple, they were designed with the sole purpose of standing up to wind, rain and snow. Practical, yes, but welcoming they were not. Flipping up her collar – their flimsy London coats entirely unsuitable for the north – Lara strode up the path and rang the doorbell. Nothing. She tried again: they could hear the buzzer inside, but no lights, no movement. No one home.

Lara peered through the front window into a living space. She could see copy of Grazia magazine, a can of coke on the coffee table and pair of Converse by the sofa. Not Becky’s aunt, at a guess. Lara got back in the car.

‘No-one’s home but I don’t think they’ll be long,’ she said, turning up the heater.

‘Not long is too long,’ said Stella. ‘I’m freezing. I might go back to the chippy to get a pie.’