Tormentor Read Free

on the drive—although it was still cloudy, it was dry and with the windows rolled down I smelled the sea—and, yes, manure, at every turn of the road.
    It was midmorning before I pulled up in the town square parking area, and past noon before I managed to tick off the items on my list—I’d underestimated the difficulty of getting what I wanted this far away from the larger stores on the mainland. I was going to have to wait for a writing desk and chair, and the washing machine would be a week’s wait for delivery. I did, however, get a powerful flashlight—and curtains.
    I stocked up on beer at the off license and by the time I was ready to leave, the trunk of the car was full, my shopping spilling over into the rear seats. I had just organized it all to my liking when I heard Alan Bean speak from behind me.
    “So, you needed more than you thought you did then?”
    “Just a bit,” I said, laughing.
    “It’s my lunch hour,” he said. “Do you have time for a bite?”
    I thought he might lead me to a café or restaurant, but instead I followed him for ten yards, straight into the public bar of the George Hotel, where he ordered two beers.
    “Just the one,” I said, echoing his words from the day before. “I’m driving. And I’ve got curtains to put up.”
    “Living the high life already, I see?” he replied. He handed me a beer that looked far darker than I was used to down south. It tasted stronger too—full of malt and caramel. It went down smoothly enough though.
    “Settling in okay?” he asked after we’d ordered some sandwiches and taken a seat in the corner.
    “You know what it’s like,” I said. “New house, new place and too much quiet—I didn’t get much sleep.”
    “That’s what the Talisker was meant for,” he said, and laughed. “You’ll soon get used to the quiet—and if you want some noise, come down here on a Saturday night—or over to the Dunvegan Arms—your new local—it gets a bit lively in the summer over there.”
    I hadn’t paid much attention to what he was saying. An old woman—somewhere in her eighties by the looks of her—hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I sat down. It looked like the man with her—her son probably—was trying to get her to stop staring, but he wasn’t having any luck with that.
    Alan saw me looking and turned. That was her cue to start talking, too loud in what had until then been a quiet bar.
    “You should be ashamed of yourself, Alan Bean—selling that house after what it did to poor Annie Menzies.”
    Her son stood and got the woman out of her seat.
    “Sorry, Alan,” he said. “You know what she’s like…”
    “Ashamed!” she shouted, and by now the whole bar was watching the performance. “It should have been burned down, like in the old times. No good will come of it—we all know that.”
    With another “sorry,” the man got her out of the door, but not without a parting shout from her.
    “Burn it down. Burn it and pish on the ashes—do it now, before it’s too late.”
    The door swung closed behind them, and the rest of the bar went back to their conversations.
    “What the hell was that all about?”
    Alan didn’t seem perturbed.
    “The auld dear has gone a bit off-kilter these past few years—Alzheimer’s or so I’ve heard—she doesn’t mean anything by it.”
    “Just tell me I haven’t bought myself the proverbial local bad place. I’m not going to have kids coming round looking for spooks, am I?”
    “Och, no, man,” he replied. “There’s not a house on the island that doesn’t have a story attached—and yours is older than most. Just think of it this way—there’s more happy stories than there are sad over the centuries—a few bad years doesn’t make a bad house.”
    The sandwiches arrived and our conversation turned to mundane matters—I found out where to pay my taxes, got a good contact for a contractor to look after the septic tank—and turned down the offer of a second