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Rachel shook her head. ‘I only know it happened on the high road above the loch. The Dunglevin Road.’

Rose nodded. ‘That’s right. And do you know
why
she was going to Dunglevin? Alone? At midnight?’

Again Rachel shook her head.

‘Use some common sense, my girl. There
could
only be one reason for a fly-by-night like Celia Duncan—she was going to another man, of course. And the other man was Ben Carson. It’s my guess she wasn’t coming back, either.’ Rose lay back in her chair and closed her eyes.

Rachel digested this for several minutes. ‘Have you any proof?’ she asked at last.

‘Only what my eyes and common sense tell me.’

‘What about Richard?’

‘Richard? Do you imagine his pride would allow him to admit that his wife had gone off with another man? The whole incident was handled very discreetly, naturally. The story put out was that Celia had had an
urgent call to her sick mother.’ Rose shrugged. ‘It wasn't true, of course. Celia had no mother. At least, if she had she wasn’t on good terms with her, because she wasn’t at her wedding, I do remember that.’ She paused to let Rachel think this over before she added, ‘In any case, as she never reached Dunglevin there was nothing to prove or disprove. But I’d seen the way she’d carried on with that Ben Carson, and anyone could see with half an eye that he was besotted by her.’ She leaned forward as far as her restricted movements would allow. ‘And
that
week-end he was away—the only time he’s ever been away, because he never goes home.’

‘Where is his home?’

‘Some remote Hebridean island, I believe. He never even talks about it. But that week-end he'd gone home for his father’s funeral.’ Rose shook her head. ‘Coincidences like that simply don’t happen.’

‘Did anyone else suspect? Alistair? Moira?’

‘Alistair, bless him, never sees further than the end of his nose. He imagines that all marriages are like his own was, idyllically happy. Till death us do part. It would never occur to him that Celia could have preferred another man to Richard, his son.’

‘What about Moira?’

Rose made a face. ‘If Moira suspected anything she wouldn’t say. After all, Fate had played right into her hands, hadn’t it? With Celia out of the way the field was clear for her.’

Rachel was silent for a while. ‘Do you think Richard and Moira will marry?’ she asked at last.

‘Eventually, yes. But not until Richard’s business is on a more sound footing. Richard would never be content to live on his wife’s wealth.’

‘But Kilfinan....’

‘Kilfinan won’t come to Richard until his father
dies, which, please God, won’t be for a very long time.’ Rose yawned, ‘I’m sleepy now, my girl. I think it must be all the pills they keep giving me. Pills for this and pills for that—sometimes I can’t think straight, I feel so dopey.’ She regarded Rachel thoughtfully. ‘I’ve talked an awful lot, too, this afternoon, about things best forgotten.’ Her eyelids drooped. ‘But you’ll see now why I worry about the child ... with
him.
He’s only kind to her because she’s Celia’s daughter .....'

Rachel got up and kissed her aunt. ‘I’m sure you’ve no cause to worry, Auntie’, she said gently.

She left Rose and made her way to the car park, too full of her own thoughts to stay and shop in Dunglevin as she sometimes did. She drove home as far as the vantage point above Eilean Dorcha and here she stopped and left the car. A walk was what she needed to clear her muddled thoughts. She climbed the stile and began to follow the footpath Ben had pointed out to her the first time they had come to this spot. It was rough going as it wound down the mountainside between trees and bushes and she was relieved when she came to a clearing with a strategically placed seat overlooking the island. It was aptly named Eilean Dorcha, Rachel mused; with its dense, almost black vegetation it did indeed look a dark island, and she wondered briefly if there was some sinister history attached to it or whether it was just that it looked so dark against the brilliant blue of the loch.

She sat down on the seat and let her thoughts wander back to her conversation with Rose. She frowned. Apart from complaining about the pills they made her take Rose seemed entirely rational. Yet her story was far-fetched, to say the least. Mentally, Rachel ticked off each item. One. Celia had been killed driving along the Dunglevin road; not at the vantage point where the Mini was now parked, but at a point not far distant from it. That much was undisputed fact. Two. Rose insisted that Celia was going to another man, and that that man was Ben Carson. This was Rose’s idea, no one else had even hinted that this might be so, in fact, if anything quite the reverse. Alistair had obviously liked his sons’s wife; Ben had idolised her from afar, and Richard—Richard still had eyes for no other woman. On the other hand, Rose, on her own admission, had disliked Celia, and had, according to Ben, been jealous of her. Understandably, perhaps. As Ben had pointed out, nannies could be very possessive and to be relegated to the cottage after over twenty years must have been hard to take. Then there was Ben. Of course,
he
wouldn’t want anyone to believe Celia was going to another man, particularly if he was the man. And if he had not been the man surely his faith in her would have been shattered, which it clearly was not. Rachel sighed. It all seemed such a tangle, with Melanie, poor disturbed little Melanie, right in the middle of it all. Suddenly she caught her breath. Maybe that was why Ben, who of all people might have been able to break Melanie’s barrier of silence, had made no effort to encourage the little girl to talk. Maybe if she talked she would tell too much ....

Slowly, she retraced her steps back to the Mini, so lost in thought that she didn’t notice how steep the climb was. She paused and looked out over the Kyles towards the mainland before getting back into the car. What had happened to Celia Duncan was all in the past. It was, as Rose had once said, useless to rake it all up. Yet it still seemed to hang, like a cloud, particularly over Melanie, and until it was brought out into the open would she ever be cured?

Several weeks had gone by since the trip to Arran, and although Rachel had given her every encouragement Melanie had not allowed the chink in her armour to widen beyond humming to herself when she thought nobody was near. Rachel was baffled. Melanie seemed happy and relaxed now, yet something was still holding her back from communicating like a normal child.

‘It’s disappointing,’ Rachel confessed to Richard. ‘I thought she was really beginning to open up when she began humming, but .....’

‘Hasn’t she done it again since the day at Arran?’ Richard searched her face anxiously.

Rachel didn’t meet his gaze. They had met at the door as she and Melanie were off on their afternoon walk and she was very conscious of the fact that her slacks had seen better days and that her sweater was old and baggy. He, for his part, had just come from a meeting and was extremely smart in a dark grey suit, beautifully cut, with a blue shirt and a darker blue tie. As always the sight of him made her senses misbehave and she caught her breath. Was this man always going to have this devastating effect on her?

She answered his question with her eyes firmly fixed on the mountain rising behind Kilfinan House. ‘She hums to herself when she thinks nobody can hear,’ she told him. ‘I’ve tried to encourage her by singing with her, at which she immediately stops. I’ve tried to make her talk by deliberately turning my back on her when she make signs to me, but that doesn’t work, either. She’ll go to endless lengths to make me understand. But she won’t speak.’

‘I see.’ He tapped his briefcase thoughtfully with one finger. ‘And where are you going now?’

‘For our walk. We always go in the afternoon if the weather isn’t too bad. The fresh air does her good and she particularly likes it up by the waterfall.'

‘Have you seen the big one, up on Ben Binnean?’ He nodded towards the mountain towering over the landscape.

‘No. You warned me once about the stupidity of wandering about on mountains, so Melanie and I stick to the parts we know, mostly the Estate, unless we go somewhere in the car and then walk.' Rachel looked round for Melanie, who had run off somewhere.

Richard looked at his watch. ‘Give me five minutes to change and I’ll take you up Ben Binnean. It’s true it wouldn’t be wise for you to try it on your own, but I’ve scrambled over it since I was knee-high to a grasshopper and I know it like the back of my hand.’ He turned to go into the house. ‘Oh,' he added, over his shoulder, ‘shoes, not sandals. Both of you. The going can be quite rough.’ He disappeared inside and Rachel went to find Melanie, who was watching rabbits just inside the woods.

Five minutes later, in stout walking shoes, they set off with Richard, who had exchanged his city suit for old corduroy trousers and a sweater that was even more shapeless than Rachel’s.

‘This way.’ He led them up a grassy path that had once been a cart track and over a five-barred gate. The track wound upwards, gradually narrowing into nothing, and the heathery slopes became steeper and craggier as they climbed. They could hear the rush of the waterfall long before they reached it, but then suddenly there it was, roaring angrily from a great height to spill and tumble into a deep ravine where it was lost in a mist of froth and spray.

‘They call it Eas Mhor—Great Waterfall. Impressive, isn’t it?’ said Richard.

Rachel held Melanie s hand tightly, sensing the awe in the little figure. Even she had to suppress a shudder at the sheer ruthless power that nature had unleashed. ‘It’s ... I’ve never seen anything like it,’ she said, at a loss for words. ‘It looks—cruel. And disappearing down into that huge hole ... it looks as if it might easily go right down into the middle of the earth.’

‘Actually, it divides up and part of it comes out lower down as Eas Beag, Little Waterfall, the one you so enjoy visiting.’

‘At least it’s more friendly by the time it becomes Eas Beag,’ Rachel remarked. Don’t you think so, Melanie?’

Melanie nodded; her eyes were wide with wonder at the majestic sight and she kept very close to Rachel’s side.

‘Look,’ Richard had climbed a little higher, ‘you can just see the house down there between the trees. Looks small from here, doesn’t it?’

‘Almost like a doll’s house. I didn’t realise we’d climbed so far up.' Rachel bent to Melanie. ‘See, Melanie, that’s Kilfinan House, where we live. Doesn’t it look tiny?’

Melanie nodded again. Suddenly she let go Rachel’s hand and darted across to a boulder a little distance away.

‘Melanie!’ Richard called sharply. ‘Don’t run off. The mist can roll in almost without warning, you must stay with us.’

But Melanie appeared not to hear. She was intent on something she had seen in the heather and went running off.

‘Melanie! ’ Rachel ran after her and caught her. The little girl tugged at Rachel’s hand. ‘What is it, dear, what can you see?’ Rachel bent down to see what had caught the little girl’s attention. ‘Oh, it’s a frog. That’s because the ground here is damp. Frogs like soggy ground and pools. He’s quite attractive, isn’t he?’

Suddenly the frog gave an enormous leap and was gone.

Rachel stood up and looked round for Richard. He was nowhere to be seen, but rolling towards them was a thick white wall of mist, swallowing everything in its path. This was what he had warned them against. In seconds it had enveloped them, isolating them in a dense, eerie blanket with no sound but the roar of Eas Mhor, which was no comfort at all, nearby.

Rachel shivered and put her arm round Melanie, whose face was a mask of sheer terror. It had all happened so quickly that she’d had no time to check where she was and now all sense of direction had gone; she didn’t know whether Richard was to her right or left, in front or behind. And somewhere, very near, was a deep ravine into which the great waterfall was cascading.

‘It’s all right, darling. We’ll just stay here, completely still, until it clears.’ She tried to sound confident and reassuring, but she could hear the tremor in her voice as she comforted Melanie. ‘It’ll go as quickly as it came, I daresay.’

Melanie huddled against her, petrified. Then, suddenly, she took a deep breath and lifted her head.
‘Daddy!’
she screamed.

Almost immediately Richard’s shadowy form appeared and Melanie flung herself at him. ‘Daddy!’ she sobbed again. ‘Daddy!’

‘It’s all right, little one, I’m here,’ Richard soothed, holding her to him and stroking her hair. ‘There’s no need to worry. We’re quite safe. I’ve got a compass, I know the way back, it’s perfectly all right.’ All the time he was speaking his eyes were on Rachel and the expression in them was a mixture of pride, relief and elation. ‘She spoke! ’ his eyes said. ‘Melanie spoke!’ And Rachel, her eyes bright with tears, rejoiced silently with him.

Together the three of them made their way carefully down from the grey, cottonwool world of the mountain mist. Richard had no difficulty in directing and as they reached the lower slopes the mist became wispy and thin, finally disappearing altogether.

When they arrived back at Kilfinan House Rachel sent Melanie to wash while she prepared tea.

‘Will you have some with us?’ she asked Richard, who had perched himself on the corner of the dresser. ‘I’m sure Melanie would like that.’

‘Why not?’ Richard smiled one of his rare smiles. ‘The mist on the mountain has resulted in a real breakthrough. We’ve cause to celebrate, haven’t we?’

Rachel paused in the act of buttering bread. ‘I think we still have to go carefully,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Melanie isn’t suddenly going to become garrulous. But now we know she
can
speak, so we must simply be patient and encourage her. If we push her too hard she could easily slip right back into her shell.’

Richard rubbed his chin. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. I notice she hasn’t said anything else.’

‘I think she’s very delicately balanced at the moment. A wrong move and we could be right back to square one.’ Rachel drew the knife slowly across the butter.