Restless by William Boyd Read Free Book Online Page B

if she could make out Staff Sergeant Law's lorry as it wound down between the folding hillsides towards, she assumed, the Tweed valley but there was a mistiness in the evening light that blurred the pinewoods and the stone walls alike and there was no possibility of picking out Law's two-ton truck at this range.
    She strode on down to the river, her rucksack bumping the small of her back. This was an 'exercise', she told herself, and it had to be undertaken in the right spirit. There was no race on, so her instructors had told her, it was more to do with seeing how people coped with sleeping rough, what sense of direction they could acquire and what initiative they showed in the time it took them to find their way home when they didn't know where they were. To this end, Law had blindfolded her and driven her for at least two hours, she calculated now, glancing at the reddening sun. On the way Law had been untypically chatty – to stop her counting, she realised – and as he dropped her off at the top of the remote glen he said, 'You could be two miles away or twenty.' He smiled his thin smile. 'But you'll no be able to tell. See you tomorrow, Miss Dalton.'
    The river that ran along the valley was brown, fast and shallow. Both its banks were thick with vegetation, mainly small, densely leaved trees with pale grey, twisted trunks. Eva began to walk steadily downstream, the saffron sun dappling the grass and undergrowth around her. Clouds of midges swarmed above pools and, as the late Scottish evening drew in, the birdsong grew in confidence.
    When the sun slipped below the western edge of the glen and the light in the valley turned grey and neutral, Eva decided to rest up for the night. She had covered a couple of miles she. reckoned, but there was still no sign of a house or any human habitation, no barn or bothy for her to shelter in. In her rucksack she had a mackintosh, a scarf, a water bottle, a candle, a box of matches, a small packet of toilet paper and some cheese sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper.
    She found a mossy hollow between the roots of a tree and, putting on her mackintosh, huddled down in her makeshift bed. She ate one sandwich and saved the others for the night, thinking that she was rather enjoying the progress of this adventure, thus far, and almost looking forward to her night in the open air. The hurry of the fast water rushing over the round pebbly rocks of the river bed was soothing: it made her feel less alone and she felt she had no need for her candle to keep the gathering darkness at bay – in fact she was rather relieved to be away from her colleagues and the instructors at Lyne Manor.
    When she had arrived at Waverley Station that day, Staff Sergeant Law had driven her south from Edinburgh and then along the Tweed valley through a succession of small and, to her eyes, almost identical mill towns. Then they had crossed the river and headed into remoter country; here and there was a long solid farmhouse with its steading and lowing herd, the hills around them higher – dotted with sheep – the woods denser, wilder. Then, to her surprise they drove through the ornamental gates of a manor house, with neat lodges on either side, and on down a winding drive flanked by mature beech trees to what looked like two large white houses, with neatly mown lawns, positioned to look up their own narrow valley to the west.
    'Where are we?' she asked Law, stepping out of the car and looking at the bare round hills on either side.
    'Lyne Manor,' he said, offering no more information.
    The two houses, she saw, were in fact one: what had looked like a second was a long wing, stuccoed and whitewashed like the other, but of obviously later date than the main house – which looked as thick-walled as a keep, and rose a storey higher, with small irregular windows under a dark slate roof. She could hear the sound of a river and through a screen of trees across a field made out a spangle of light from some other