Angus Wallace trudged through the damp grass, his boots squelching with each step. The early morning mist clung to the village of Lochranza, obscuring the loch’s edge. “Kylie! Heel!” he called, his voice gruff from disuse. He lived alone these days, and barely spoke to anyone except his dog. The black terrier ignored him, straining at her lead. Angus sighed. He should never have let his daughter name the dog. As they neared the loch, Kylie’s excitement grew. With a sudden jer

Davina Wilson jogged along the lochside; the ground soft beneath her feet. The sun had only just risen, and the air was fresh and clean. She inhaled deeply, filling her lungs with the scent of pine trees and water. She was staying at a luxury hotel just half a mile up the loch, where the President of the United States, her boss, was holed up for the G7 summit. The President hated Scotland – the weather, the food, the people, the goddamn kilts. He’d only come because the Prime

“Jeez, Helen, why did you think we’d want to climb this bloody hill?” Helen looked round to see her friend Bal standing in the middle of a patch of gorse, hand wedged into the small of her back, face red as Helen’s hair. “You’ll be fine, Bal. It’s worth it, I promise.” Bal shook her head. “Nothing’s worth this. It’s torture.” Lisa was a few feet ahead of Helen, poking around in a hole in the hillside. “D’you reckon this is where the castle once was?” She deepened her voice an

Phineas Montague, Silicon Valley’s newest internet billionaire, stood with his hands on his hips and gazed out across the loch. He liked to do this walk every night: two miles along its bank, to the spot where his house disappeared from view, then back again via a circuitous route that took him through woods and across moorland. He turned to check on his house, a low, modern structure nestled in amongst trees a couple of hundred yards back from the water. It was ideally place