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  Vanessa knew her limbs were incapable of any movement. She could feel the air in her nostrils with each inhalation, her scalp taut with fear. The world stood still and she waited. And then she saw her.

  Nessie’s head broke through the surface and for what seemed like an eternity, she held her neck high and looked towards Vanessa. She felt a warm rush of pleasure break like a wave inside her. She was looking at Nessie – her mother’s dream had come true.

  Time stood still.

  Then she saw the monk raise his right hand as if in a blessing or a salute to the magnificent creature and, to her dismay, the scene slowly began to fold in on itself, the colours caving, once again, into blackness.

  CHAPTER 14

  On 14 April 1933, Mr and Mrs John Mackay, the owners of the Drumnadrochit Hotel on Loch Ness were driving home when they saw a disturbance on the loch surface. They watched ‘an enormous animal rolling and plunging’ for several minutes until it disappeared in a great upsurge of water. Their story appeared in the Inverness Courier, 2 May 1933.

  Vanessa woke to a definite noise this time. There was someone at her door. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was ten o’clock. Why was she sleeping so long and so late these days? The soft knock came again and she realised that Maggie was probably standing outside with a huge breakfast. What would she do with it this time? She would have to divide it into small stashes, wrapped in tissue, and get rid of it slowly over the day.

  When she opened the door, it was the last person on earth she expected to see – Lee.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said ungraciously. ‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ she stumbled on, realising how rude it had sounded. ‘It’s just that I was expecting Maggie. She brought me breakfast yesterday.’

  ‘So I heard. I also heard that you almost fainted with hunger a few hours later, so I guessed you felt the same about her breakfasts as I did growing up.’ And with that she pushed an oval tray into Vanessa’s hands. When Vanessa looked down she saw, to her delight, a tray filled with all her favourite breakfast things – white toast with butter and marmalade, a bowl of Rice Krispies, fresh orange juice and a huge cup of hot chocolate. She looked up at Lee and grinned with delight.

  ‘She won’t be offended?’ she asked Lee.

  ‘She won’t know,’ Lee answered mischievously. ‘I just said I’d bring you breakfast this morning. Indeed, she’d be mortally wounded if she ever found out we hated salted porridge and haggis.’

  ‘And did she never guess?’

  ‘Goodness gracious no! I could never bear to hurt her feelings. She was so sure that I’d love Scotland and love their food when I arrived from America to live with them.’

  ‘And did you?’ Vanessa asked with genuine interest.

  ‘Loved Scotland, still hate the food! But don’t ever tell her. Well, I’d better see to the others. See you later.’

  ‘Thanks, Lee.’ It was the first time Vanessa had used Lee’s name, and it felt strange on her tongue. She was sure she saw Lee start slightly when she said it.

  Vanessa ate her breakfast at the table by the window. She stared hard at the water and the grass below, picturing the monk, the colours and trying to visualise Nessie in front of her. It was frustrating, though: the sun, clear skies and mirror-like water made too much of a contrast to let her recall the scene properly.

  By the time she had finished, it was almost half past eleven, so she dressed and went down to the kitchen. It was empty except for Daisy, who gave her an exuberant welcome. She eventually settled the dog down again by giving her a piece of ham that she found in the fridge, and made a quick getaway into the garden. That dog wasn’t the easy canine companion you’d want. She was like one of those friends that talked incessantly – interesting, but exhausting.

  Vanessa found everyone gathered down near the end of the lawn bent over a pile of boxes, and she could see a number of fishing rods on the grass. Luke and Ronan were in their element.

  ‘Vanessa, wait until you see this kit,’ Ronan said, when he spotted her. ‘It’s fantastic.’

  ‘Look at this one!’ Luke held up a rather ordinary rod and waved it in Vanessa’s direction.

  ‘Ghillie’s Choice, one of the finest Clan Rods,’ Maggie offered, ‘as used by the Prince of Wales.’

  Let me guess – Lee’s rod with which she won every angling competition there ever was in the Highlands, Vanessa thought.

  It was as if Maggie had read her mind. ‘They belonged to my husband, Peter. He won lots of competitions in his lifetime. All the cups in the sitting room cabinet are his.’

  ‘Oh, right. I noticed those yesterday,’ Vanessa said lamely. She was flushed with embarrassment.

  ‘Are you going fishing again?’ Vanessa asked nobody in particular.

  ‘Well, Luke and Ronan are going to fish in Loch Ness and Lee and I …’ Alan started to explain.

  ‘But is there anything to catch in it?’ Ronan interrupted.

  ‘Of course, lad!’ Maggie exclaimed before Alan could reply. ‘The loch has tons of fish – brown trout, sea trout, arctic char. And you might even still get a few salmon, although it’s late in the season. The best spot on the loch is around the bend there at Bell’s Point. It’s the Mackay’s land so there’s nae a problem.’

  Ronan and Luke looked pleased.

  ‘Vanessa, I’ve given the boys the choice of staying here to fish, or coming with Lee and me to visit Lorrie on the Isle of Skye. That’s Lee’s grandmother,’ Alan added when he saw her blank look. ‘What would you like to do?’

  ‘Fish,’ she said shortly. She couldn’t believe that he was going off with her again. Family holiday, my foot.

  ‘Can we take the boat out?’ Luke asked. ‘We’re all good swimmers.’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Maggie said without hesitation. ‘The winds can get up suddenly on the loch. And no swimming either, the eels are big out there.’

  ‘When we get back, maybe Lee could take you out,’ Alan said looking at Lee for support.

  ‘Of course, I’d love to. I’ll show you all the nooks and crannies on the south end that only the locals know.’

  The boys agreed eagerly enough, but Vanessa said nothing.

  ‘We’ll be back by half past four. Make sure you catch us something for dinner.’

  ‘So we’ll go out in the boat at half four?’ Vanessa demanded, examining Luke’s rod closely.

  ‘No problem.’ Alan was clearly relieved with the outcome. He picked up a rod in three pieces and began its construction. ‘Will you look in the box for a reel, Vanessa, and this one can be yours?’

  They found their way easily enough to Bell’s Point. It was a thin piece of land that jutted into the loch and at the end was a small whitewashed round bollard. The boys laughed and joked about whether it was something used to tie up boats, a viewing platform for Nessie hunters or a very tiny bell tower, as Luke suggested. In the end, Ronan decided that it was a leprechaun perch and sat himself on top with his fishing rod.

  Within the next couple of hours, they caught a few fish, all of which were tiny and were returned immediately to the water. Maggie had packed them a picnic, but Vanessa eyed it uncertainly. It looked pretty, bound up in a blue and white check cloth, but knowing Maggie it could be that haggis stuff again. She unpacked it to find small bundles in grease proof paper tied with string.

  ‘Anyone hungry yet?’ Vanessa shouted. ‘It’s nearly half past one, you know.’

  ‘OK, you put the stuff out and we’ll – ’ Luke stopped mid-sentence, his face lit up. ‘I’ve definitely got something bigger this time.’ He started to reel it in.

  Vanessa watched with a smile on her face. Luke was pretty cool really. So many of her friends complained about their horrible teenage brothers and how mean they were. She felt the lump in her throat. If she was being honest, it was she who was horrible to him … and to Ronan sometimes.

  She busied herself by unpacking the picnic onto the cloth which she spread out on the grass, but she was still thinking abo
ut her brothers. Why did she give them such a hard time? They had lost their mother too.

  And then something that she had never thought of before struck her. It seemed to reverberate and gather intensity in her head and she knew that it was true. She was angry with Luke and Ronan, angry that they were able to cope so well with their mother’s death. Of course they cried and still had their bad days, but they were OK. She knew suddenly that she was not only angry with them, but envious of them too.

  It seemed to Vanessa that the pain which seared through her on the day they buried her mother had not lessened even for a moment. She remembered standing over the deep grave and throwing the soil on the coffin, she could hear the scattering of the earth in her head. But worse came as they left the graveyard: the feeling that they were all deserting her. She could never forgive herself or them for that.

  Since then, she had felt adrift, disconnected from everyone and everything. Her friends talked about the future and what they would do – where they would go next week, what they would do next summer, even about university. Vanessa tried her best to act the same, but it felt as if life had stopped that day. There was only her past now and no future for her at all. She dreaded everything ahead – her next birthday, the third Christmas without her mother, going into secondary school, getting her period. Who would help her through all that?

  ‘Look, look, Vanessa. Luke’s caught a huge one.’ Ronan was almost dancing with excitement as the fish was landed. Vanessa restrained herself from saying anything – bigger, it was; huge, it wasn’t.

  ‘What is it, Luke?’ Vanessa asked instead.

  ‘A trout, I think. It’s large enough to eat, so we’ll bring it back and cook it later.’

  He put the fish into a bag filled with ice that Maggie had given them. ‘OK, so what’s for lunch?’

  They all stared at the tablecloth laid out on the grass, Vanessa seeing the contents for the first time herself.

  ‘At last, a proper Famous Five picnic!’ Luke said. ‘Freshly baked bread, sliced sweet tomatoes, farmhouse cheese, cold sausages and to top it all, George …? ’ He looked at Vanessa expectantly.

  ‘What?’ she said sternly. ‘And I’m not George, I’d rather be Timmy the dog than that cranky insecure girl/boy thing.’

  ‘I’m Dick,’ Ronan said quickly.

  ‘So where’s the ginger beer, Timmy?’

  Vanessa checked the basket again.

  ‘None, sorry. Aunt Fanny has failed us badly this time.’

  The boys decided to stay on fishing for a little while longer, but after lunch Vanessa went back to the cottage. Despite the lovely afternoon, she felt strangely despondent. It was hard to put one foot in front of the other and she desperately needed to sleep. She hoped that Maggie wouldn’t be in the kitchen; she didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  Once inside the cottage, Vanessa scurried quickly up the stairs, trying to make her footsteps light on the creaking boards. She washed her hands and face in cold water and then lay down on her bed. She wondered if she would have the same dream again, and this time maybe she would get a longer look at Nessie.

  Twenty minutes later, she was still awake. Her eyes roamed around the room and came to a stop at the cupboard that Maggie had got the charcoals and sketchpad from.

  She opened both doors wide. It was clearly a much loved space. Labelled boxes lined the shelves – Water colour paints, Oils, Pastels, Brushes. Her eyes flew along the rows and then stopped at one labelled Loch Ness articles.

  Vanessa looked back over her shoulder to the closed bedroom door. She knew she was being nosy; something she despised in others and usually had no problem resisting herself. But this time something compelled her, and it felt too important to ignore.

  Sliding out the box, she opened the top and lifted up the first article. It was a copy of the Northern Chronicle, dated June 1930. ‘A Strange Experience on Loch Ness.’ She scanned the page. It was about local fishermen who had seen a large creature cause a disturbance in the water near Tore Point. It finished by asking if readers could help enlighten them on the subject. The next few articles were ones received over the following weeks in reply. Her eye caught another from the Inverness Courier, dated 2 May 1933. ‘A Strange Spectacle on Loch Ness’ by Alex Campbell. Vanessa read quickly through the opening paragraph.

  ‘Mr and Mrs John Mackay, owners of the local Inn at Drumnadrochit …’

  She started at the name, Mackay – weren’t they the neighbours, the odd brothers, she had met on their first night? Her mind ran furiously over conversations trying to remember their names – Pat was the cranky one with the wild white hair, but what was the bald one called? Hang on. If he was even twenty years old in 1933, that would make him over a hundred now. Maybe John Mackay was their father. She remembered them talking about their mother. James – that was the bald one’s name! He was the one who believed in Nessie and had talked about sightings, but Pat had dismissed it altogether.

  Vanessa rifled through the rest hungrily, scanning the dates and headings. They were all in meticulous chronological order. And there were hundreds of them. It would be days of reading. What if she started with the last article, the most recent one? Having found it, however, she was disappointed, as the last article proved to be nothing about the Loch Ness Monster. Dated 7 May 1986 and in the Inverness Courier, it appeared to be about a local child, Lena Cook, who had gone missing, and there was an appeal to the community for information.

  A creak on the stairs made Vanessa jump guiltily. She closed the box quickly and shut the cupboard doors as quietly as possible. She waited, but the footsteps continued past her door without hesitation and she heard another door close down the corridor. Vanessa felt a tightness in her chest. Asthma or panic? She sat on the side of the bed again and tried to breathe evenly; she hadn’t had an asthma attack in about five years. Her mind was racing but her eyes kept being drawn back to the closed cupboard doors. What else would she find in there?

  This time she looked at the piles of canvases stacked on the floor. They were all facing inwards. She would need to move a couple of things in front of them to be able to turn them around and get a proper look. Maybe they were all blank on the other side. She paused a moment, undecided about moving things. This was serious snooping. She would absolutely hate anyone, especially a stranger, rearranging her personal stuff.

  When she turned the first and the largest canvas around, the shock was so great that she actually dropped it. The thud was soft enough but she was terrified someone had heard it and would come to investigate. When there was no sound, she picked it up again and held it tightly. Her hands were shaking.

  The colours and light were exactly as she had seen them, but the detail of Nessie’s face was much clearer – smooth skin and almost seal-like eyes. They were intelligent eyes, but she looked anxious, even threatened, Vanessa thought. But it was the monk in the cowl that really spooked her. That had been her dream, hadn’t it? Who had painted it and when had they done it? Perhaps she had walked in her sleep the first night, saw the picture and then dreamt about it the second night? It sounded ridiculous to her, but then the alternative was even more unbelievable.

  CHAPTER 15

  On 22 July 1933, when Mr and Mrs Spicer were returning home after a holiday in Scotland, their car nearly hit a huge creature as it slithered across the road into the loch. The ‘prehistoric animal’ as Mrs Spicer described it, was very ugly: about 6 to 8 feet long with a tall neck and a high back. In a letter to the Inverness Courier published in 1933, Mr Spicer said:‘Whatever it is, and it may be a land and water animal, I think it should be destroyed, as I am not sure, if I had been quite so close to it, whether I should have cared to tackle it. It is difficult to give you a better description, as it moved so swiftly and the whole thing was sudden. There is no doubt it exists.’

  Vanessa turned over the rest of the canvases quickly and positioned them in a circle around her. They were all different images of Nessie moving through the water. Her skin was generally
a charcoal grey but in some pictures, it had a definite green tinge. The fins looked similar to a whale’s, except for the second smaller set of fins at the back. Maybe they were the residual limbs of a sea mammal that was also once a land creature. The elongated tail and neck were more like that of the deep-sea eel. Perhaps their theory had been right after all, and Nessie was some form of deep-sea-adapted mammal. Well, why not? The beaked whale lives in deep oceans and can dive to 1,000 feet.

  Vanessa whooped quietly for joy and the intensity of her excitement made her feel if as she might explode in the confines of the small cupboard. Suddenly, she felt very sure about Nessie – she was a sea creature that came into the loch when she was small and got trapped. That’s why the real sightings only happened after the building of the Caledonian Canal. She had seen Nessie herself – at least in her dream or premonition or whatever it was. But whoever had painted these pictures knew the monster very well indeed.

  Vanessa looked at her watch. It was twenty to five. Her dad had said that Lee would take them out in the boat on Loch Ness at half past four. It was time to go – with or without Lee. If she waited much longer it would get too dark.

  She pulled on her jacket over her warm fleece and went downstairs. There was no sign of the boys or of Maggie, thank God. The air was crisp and cool when she stepped into the garden and the boat was sitting quite still in the water. It was like a millpond, perfectly safe. She would take it out 50 metres or so around the corner and probably be back in before Alan and Lee arrived home.

  She untied the boat easily enough and pushed off with the oar. To her dismay, she found that she wasn’t a very good rower. It was usually Luke or her dad who rowed when they went fishing in Ireland.

  Vanessa put the oars in the oarlocks and pulled hard. They were surprisingly heavy and too deep in the water to pull. They should be closer to the surface, she decided, but when she tried that, she skimmed the top of the water and splashed herself. It took a couple of minutes to work out, but soon she managed a few small but even strokes and moved off from the bank. Keeping the rhythm going, she felt very pleased with herself. It was really quite easy when you got the hang of it. Once she rounded the corner, out of sight of the cottage, her determination evaporated. Dad would kill her if he caught her.