Page 45 of The Boathouse By the Loch

He waved his hand at Jake. ‘Okay, all right. Come with me.’

Jake followed security past the long queue and watched him ask someone who was about to step up to one of the ePassport gates to step aside.

Jake stepped outside the airport terminal and immediately hailed a taxi. He wasn’t going straight to Faye’s. There was somewhere he needed to go first. He had something to pick upthat he hoped he’d find in Aubrey’s apartment. Jake asked the taxi driver to wait as the car pulled up outside the Ross Corporation’s apartment building. He barely acknowledged the porter on the door as he raced inside. The concierge at the front desk recognised Jake, looking surprised to see him again in the space of just a few days.

The concierge hurried over to ask Jake if he had any luggage.

‘I’m not staying. Just a flying visit.’

The concierge returned to his desk.

Jake got in the lift that took him straight to William’s top floor apartment, where Aubrey was living. He needed something that he was sure Aubrey would have. And it wasn’t the speciality teas that Aubrey was so fond of.

He paused in the bright white, airy hallway, listening. He didn’t call out Aubrey’s name. He hoped Aubrey wasn’t in. All Jake could hear was his own heavy breathing. Nobody was home. He sighed with relief. Aubrey would not let him have what he had gone there to take without a very, very good explanation. But Jake was not about to tell anyone what he had it in his mind to do to get Natty back.

He raced to the study. Aubrey had told him once where he kept just what Jake was after. Jake was making an educated guess that wherever Aubrey was residing, he’d keep it in the same place – a desk drawer of a study.

‘Aha!’ Jake grabbed the small black case and slammed the desk drawer shut. Thrusting the case into his jacket pocket, he retraced his steps to the lift and waited impatiently as it made its way to the ground floor. His usual panic in lifts had not troubled him this time; he was too focused on his task.

Jake sprinted past reception and a bemused concierge andstraight out of the door to the waiting taxi. He told the driver his next destination and then slumped into the back seat, catching his breath, staring out of the window as the taxi manoeuvred into the late afternoon traffic outside the apartment building. Jake frowned. Rush hour had already started. He hoped the London traffic did not hold them up.

Jake looked at his phone. He was still praying that Faye would call him and say the search had been called off because they had found her; that the nightmare was over. Jake had watched enough police procedurals with the same old line – the first twenty-four hours were crucial, and after that, the chances of finding a missing person fell dramatically. It was all tosh – wasn’t it? And if there was some basis in fact, Jake wasn’t going to be unduly worried that he had just a short time to find her, because he knew exactly where to look. And more importantly, he had exactly what he needed when he got there. Jake had the small black case in his hand at the ready.

Chapter 18

The flat was located in a large complex of purpose-built flats on a busy main road. Jake had to google the address. The complex was a lot bigger than Jake had thought – huge, with two different entrances, and several concrete squares with small play areas. At first he’d been thrown by the sheer scale of it. Fortunately, the taxi driver had said that he had a friend who had lived there decades earlier, so he knew which entrance to aim for. The driver had explained that the place was not like a modern apartment building with one foyer and lifts up to the different floors. There were five floors. The complex had no lifts, but rather lots of entrances to stairwells that rose to the flats in that part of the block. The trick was to know which part of the block the flat number was located in.

Unlike in the Ross apartment building, there was no concierge and no reception desk, and to Jake’s relief, there wasn’t even a buzzer system – he could just walk right in off the street, through the gates.

He stood in a large inner concrete courtyard and thought that if the taxi driver hadn’t been able to direct him to the right entrance, he could have been walking around for hours.

He walked around the courtyard and found the entrance to the hallway and stairwell for the flat. ‘Damn!’ he said. He recalled the taxi driver saying he hadn’t been there for years. Things had obviously changed. The driver had said that Jake could just walk into one of the hallways. There would be two flats located on the ground floor, but if he was visiting someone on a higher floor, then he just took the concrete stairwell. There were outer doors on the entrances to the hallways. Whilst he’d been able to walk into the courtyard from the street, he couldn’t get near the flats uninvited and unannounced, which was exactly what he had intended to do.

Jake looked around at the red-brick building, at the upper floors with small concrete balconies. It had been built back in the fifties by the Catholic church – most of the residents back then had been Catholic. The huge complex had later become council flats. He knew that most, if not all of them, would now be privately owned and worth around half a million.

Jake shuddered. It wasn’t the sort of place he’d want to live. He understood its appeal. It was close to the shops in Kilburn High Road, and he could imagine it was a nice, friendly community in which to live, and so close to central London. The taxi ride from the Ross Corporation building had been very short. They’d passed a park on the way that the taxi driver remembered his friend had fondly called The Rec.

But coming from Aviemore, with its lochs, mountains and wide-open spaces, and his beautiful garden at The Lake House, the contrast with where he was standing couldn’t have been any more stark. In fact, Jake had noticed something when he’d returned to London from Scotland – something that, for some reason, he hadn’t really noticed before; how much he hated the crowds, thenoise, the hustle and bustle of city life, and the traffic. When he’d stepped through the gates of the complex, he’d found that the inner courtyard was so much quieter away from the main street outside, full of traffic. He realised how tired of it he was.

He stood there, appreciating the surprising oasis of quiet and calm, away from the noise, and the traffic, and the people outside those gates. He longed to return to Scotland. He’d never felt that longing before, not after any of the trips he’d made to The Lake House for Christmas. Perhaps it was that he’d been too busy wrapped up in his life working for the Ross Corporation to even notice that he wasn’t happy, to even care, because supposedly he had it all. And he’d had nothing to complain about. Although there had been times he’d questioned whether it was truly the life for him.

But I’m busy now, with my teaching job, so why am I feeling this way, this unhappy? What has changed?What Jake realised, staring at the door he couldn’t get through, was that without Faye and Natty, he just couldn’t stay in London. They made it palatable. They made his life here worthwhile, complete – almost.

If only he could take them with him back to Scotland. Then his life would be just about perfect.

Jake shook his head. What a stupid thought. They weren’t a couple, a family. And besides, he knew that would never, ever happen, even if he and Faye were together; he remembered the reason Faye had split up with Natty’s father, Yousaf. He had wanted her to return with him to live in his home country. Granted, Scotland wasn’t as far away as Oman, where Yousaf’s family were from, but it would still mean taking Natty out of her school, and Faye changing her job, and leaving the little rental they called home.

Jake glared at the door. He didn’t have time to stand aroundimagining a life that would never be.

Thinking of Natty’s father reminded Jake why it was imperative he got through the door into the block.

‘Hey, there. Are you okay?’

Jake froze and looked about him, wondering where the voice had come from.

‘I’m up here.’

Jake looked up, scanning the concrete balconies. Some had little washing lines with clothes hanging out to dry. There were others with planting boxes full of summer flowers.

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