Perfect Strangers

Josh didn’t reply, just carried on staring out at the dark shapes of the mountains and the deep curve of the loch.

‘I’m cold,’ said Sophie, beginning to get up, but he put his hand on her knee.

‘Stay with me and watch the gloaming.’

‘What’s the gloaming?’ she said. It seemed like a suitable word for how she was feeling: uncertain and restless.

‘It’s an old Scottish word,’ said Josh. ‘It’s that little window of time before sunrise or after dusk when everything’s still. There’s no place more beautiful than the Highlands in the gloaming.’

She shuffled closer, pressed up against him, and watched as ribbons of silver light twisted up from the horizon. It was eerie and yet quite magical, like viewing the landscape through a dark blue filter, when everything felt suspended and full of possibility. And then the sky lightened just a touch and the moment was gone.

Sophie squeezed Josh’s hand, about to speak, when she heard a creak behind them.

‘Go and get ready,’ said Lana, standing in the doorway, fully dressed. ‘I want to leave in ten minutes.’

By the time Josh and Sophie came back downstairs, Lana was standing on the driveway, the Range Rover’s engine idling, the heaters on full blast. She threw the keys to Josh.

‘You drive,’ she said, handing the map to Sophie. ‘You can navigate.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Josh, tugging at an imaginary cap and rolling his eyes at Sophie. They may have been hundreds of miles north of Knightsbridge, but Lana still clearly believed she was entitled to the luxury of staff.

They drove towards Ben Grear in silence. Perhaps the others were thinking of what they might expect at the other end of the single-track tarmac road, but Sophie was entranced by the landscape around them. She had never been to the Highlands before, and the storm had obscured everything the previous night, save for what was in their headlight beams. But the clouds had lifted this morning and the colours cast by the rising sun were quite astonishing: the mauve, deep orange and emerald of the heathered moorlands swept up to the distant crags, which seemed to tower over them, their naked rock slopes a hundred shades of purple.

‘Are you following the map, or are you looking at the flowers?’ said Lana irritably from the back seat.

‘It’s all under control,’ said Sophie, praying she was reading it correctly. ‘Around this next bend, then two or three miles and we should see Ben Grear.’

‘We don’t want to see the mountain,’ said Lana. ‘We want the building. We don’t even know what it is.’

‘It’s a castle,’ said Sophie.

‘How can you possibly say that?’ scoffed Lana. ‘I’ve studied the map, it isn’t even marked.’

‘No, it’s a castle,’ said Sophie, pointing straight ahead. Even from this distance, she could see it: a tiny castle built on an outcrop of land that jutted into a small loch, the glassy surface of the water reflecting it back like a mirror, the dawn sky casting a pink glow over it.

Josh tapped the GPS on the dashboard. ‘Yep, that’s it,’ he said. ‘Matches the co-ordinates exactly.’

He glanced over at Sophie, then pressed down on the accelerator.

‘It’s beautiful,’ said Sophie as they wound up the little access road cut into the side of the mountain. It wasn’t a castle, the kind you would visit on a school trip, with a moat and arrow slits and a drawbridge; it was more like someone’s idea of what a fairy-tale castle should look like. It was made out of pale weathered stone, with a darker slate roof, tiny windows and two Rapunzel turrets bookending the building. A folly, perhaps, or some long-dead landowner’s Highland fantasy; it didn’t matter: to Sophie it had all the romance and magic she had dared to hope for. She had known instantly that this was her castle, the ‘X’ on the pirate map, the place her father had so carefully led her to, because it was exactly as they had talked about. Even now, she could hear her father’s voice, daydreaming with his daughter about where they would one day live.

Our own little magical castle, he had promised. And he had kept his word. But at what cost? She closed her eyes and thought of her father: the kind, generous man who had been her hero and protector, the clever, smiling youth so full of promise that she had seen on Miriam Asner’s Super 8 footage. How could such a decent man, with so many wonderful qualities, have got mixed up in Asner’s plan? How could he have been involved in a theft of that magnitude? A theft that had stripped so many innocent people of their money. Was money such a destructive, corrupting force? Of course, she knew that it was. What she would never know were her father’s reasons, his justifications for getting involved.

‘Look for a key,’ said Lana, getting out and slamming the Range Rover’s door. ‘Whatever’s here, it’s going to be inside.’

Sophie tried the obvious first: she looked under the mat in front of the wide oak door, then along the top of the door frame and under flowerpots. Nothing.

Lana emerged from the back of the property, her hands empty.

‘Do you have the key?’ she said.

‘Of course I don’t have the bloody key,’ snapped Sophie. ‘Do you think I’d come all this way, then somehow forget—’

She stopped as they heard a grunt, then a crash. Running to the side of the house, they saw Josh’s legs disappearing through a window. Sophie swore under her breath. What if he was about to wake up a couple of honeymooners, or worse – an angry Scottish laird with a shotgun? It would be just typical to chase thousands of miles only to be arrested at the last moment for breaking a window.

‘No one’s home,’ said Josh two minutes later as he opened the creaky door from inside.

Sophie pu