Coffin Road by Peter May Read Free Book Online Page A

ahead, because the track climbs endlessly into the distance, and so we both focus on our feet, avoiding potholes and boulders on which ankles might get turned. And when, from time to time, we look up, our hearts sink, for we appear to have travelled no distance at all. Until we look back, and are rewarded with the most spectacular view of the beach, far, far below, a luminous silver and turquoise.
    ‘Look!’ Sally’s voice makes me turn my head and I see where she is pointing, towards a small group of cairns gathered on the hillside. I see more of them ahead of us. Each one marking the place where someone has been laid to rest with the world at their feet. A view to die for.
    Below us, on our right, a scrap of loch gathers in a hollow, reflecting the sky, its surface rippled by wind, and I check my map, folded into a clear plastic ziplock. Not too much further before my orange line comes to its end. We circumvent three large boulders strung across the track to prevent vehicles from trying to go any further, and the path starts to climb even more steeply.
    The hills lift almost sheer now on either side, to peaks lost in cloud, the track winding away into obscurity, still rising to what might or might not be its summit. There have been many faux summits before now.
    ‘We must be nearly there,’ Sally says. She is breathless, her face pink from exertion and the sting of the rain. She glances away to our right. ‘Looks like they were quarrying here at some time.’ A cliff face is broken, seamed and jagged, with boulders lying in chaos below it, some of them as big as houses and canted at odd angles.
    But I shake my head. ‘Explosions from a past ice age, Sally. Water freezing and expanding in the crevices until the rock shatters from the pressure.’ I find myself grinning. ‘Nature’s dynamite.’ And I wonder how I know this.
    Sally grins back at me. ‘What, are you a geologist now?’
    I shrug. ‘Who the hell knows? Maybe I am.’
    I turn back to the track and stop. Two boulders, about the size of shoe boxes, but almost oval, sit balanced, one on top of the other. They are unusually shaped, and I can’t see how nature could possibly have arrived at this precarious arrangement.
    ‘What is it?’ Sally follows my gaze but sees nothing out of the ordinary.
    ‘Someone placed those stones like that.’
    She frowns. ‘How do you know?’
    I shake my head. It’s hard to explain. ‘It just doesn’t look natural. But I guess most folk would have walked right past without noticing.’
    ‘I wouldn’t have given them a second glance.’ Sally casts me a curious look. ‘So somebody put them there?’
    ‘Yes, I think so.’
    A pause. ‘You?’
    ‘It’s possible.’ I pull out the map again, wiping away the rain from the plastic with icy fingers. ‘This would be about the right place.’
    ‘Where’s Bran?’ There is a hint of alarm in Sally’s voice. I look up and cannot see him anywhere.
    ‘Bran!’ I shout at the top of my voice. And I hear him barking before I see him. Then he appears on the slope off to our right, emerging from behind one of those huge boulders deposited on the hill, part of the spoil from that ice explosion thousands of years ago. A great slab of rock, split along one of its seams. ‘Here, boy!’ But he stands his ground, barking at me as if I am an idiot, and it occurs to me that he expects me to follow, as if that’s the path we always take. I turn to Sally. ‘Come on.’
    I help her over ground that rises and falls beneath our feet, peat bog sucking at our shoes, soaking them in a brown slurry. I use my stick for balance, climbing slightly as we reach the first of the boulders, and watch as Bran turns and runs down into a hollow ringed by rock spoil, like giant headstones randomly arranged around a level area of beaten grass beneath the cliff, completely protected from the wind. And as we reach the top of the rise to look down into it, we are stopped in our tracks.
    ‘Jesus