“Sorry, where, exactly?”
“Cut across, towards the sea. The low white farmhouse. You’ll find me, sure enough.”
“Do you have a mobile?”
He shook his head. “Don’t hold with them.”
Just like email, then. Archie Campbell was a positive Luddite, which was another thing Laurel normally wouldn’t mind. She had only succumbed to a smartphone a couple of years ago, and she wasn’t particularly fond of tech gadgets, although admittedly she couldn’t live without her laptop.
But, for some reason, Archie’s behaviour unsettled her, made her feel prickly. Perhaps it was because of the way they’d met—with him pointing a gun at her. Not the best start to any relationship, not that she would ever be seeing him again.
“All right, then,” she said. “Thank you. And what about the taps?”
“I’ll show you.”
Laurel followed Archie up the narrow stairs, Zac following closely behind her, almost as if he didn’t want to be left alone. He probably thought Orkney was full of gun-toting farmers. Perhaps it was.
“So there’s a bit of a mix-up with the taps,” Archie said cheerfully. “The hot comes out of the cold tap, and the cold out of the hot.”
“Right.” Laurel didn’t remember that from her childhood. In fact, she didn’t remember nearly as much as she thought she had—the cottage felt far darker, smaller, and definitely colder than those hazy summer days she recalled with so much sentimental affection.
“But sometimes they switch,” Archie continued, and Laurel stared at him.
“Wait, what?”
“Yeah, bit daft, eh?” He smiled, revealing dimples amidst the weathered crags of his face. Laurel wondered how old he was—fifty? Older? It was impossible to tell. “Don’t know how it happens, truth be told, but there you are.”
“So what do you do when they switch?”
He shrugged. “Wait till they sort themselves out, I suppose.”
Thanks for the tip. Laurel bit her tongue. If Archie MacDougall were a character on a show on Netflix about moving to the countryside, the kind of program she normally loved to watch, she’d find him endearingly eccentric. There would probably be an Archie fan club on Twitter, and even women swooning over his decidedly weather-beaten looks. But, right now, Laurel just found him mildly exasperating and definitely strange.
“How long does it usually take,” she asked, “to sort themselves out?”
Archie lifted his shoulders in a beats-me shrug. “Who knows? But if you need a bit of a hand, you know where to find me.”
Actually, she didn’t, since across the paddock could just be about anywhere on the island. Laurel nodded, deciding she’d had enough of his supposedly sage advice. “Thanks very much for everything.”
“Not a bother.” He turned from the taps, glancing again at Zac, who was loitering in the doorway, hands jammed into the pockets of his ultra-skinny jeans. “How long are you here for, again?”
“Just a couple of weeks.”
“Right. Well, that’s something. I suppose I ought to be off.” He gave them both a fleeting smile that made Laurel feel guilty somehow. Was she being unfriendly? Standing there in the cramped bathroom, hunched because of the sloped ceiling, she realised how tired and hungry she was. She’d been travelling since what felt like forever, and she hadn’t eaten since lunch, a bowl of mediocre soup somewhere near Glasgow. Plus her back throbbed from where she’d scraped it against the window frame. Worst of all, being back at Eilidh’s opened an ache inside her she’d tried to forget she had, and that made her feel even more raw, in a way that was taking her entirely by surprise.
“Thank you for everything,” she said again. “Especially for not shooting me.”
Archie gave her a quick look before his mouth quirked in a small, wry smile. “Aye, that’s the spirit,” he said, and then he was gone, striding down the stairs and out the front door, a gust of cold air blown in as he shut it behind him.
Laurel made her way to the kitchen, the house feeling empty and smaller somehow, now that it was just her and Zac. She glanced at the heap of boxes in the middle of the room, and wondered if the taps were too temperamental for her to have a bath.
“Right,” she said out loud. “Zac, can you get some wood for a fire? I’ll put the stew I brought on the cooker…” She hunted for the Tupperware container of stew that she’d made last night, when she’d been imagining a cosy evening tucked up the fire, exchanging jokes and confidences. They’d get there, she told herself. Eventually.
“Wood?” Zac said sullenly. “Where am I supposed to get that?”
“There’s a woodpile outside,” Laurel told him. “By the side of the cottage.” At least there had been thirty years ago.
The Rayburn was emanating a barely-there heat, but Laurel gamely dumped the stew into a cast iron pot and hop