The Bone Glen

Chapter 1: The Weight of the Living

Gavin Leckie had rehearsed the phone calls for three weeks before he made them.

He sat in his Edinburgh flat on a Tuesday evening in September, a glass of Talisker going warm on the coffee table, and stared at his phone. Three names. Three conversations he'd been avoiding for the better part of two years. The whisky was supposed to help, but four fingers in, he still felt like a man standing at the edge of a diving board with no water below.

Tommy first. Tommy would be the hardest.

The phone rang five times. Gavin almost hoped it would go to voicemail — that coward's reprieve — but then there was a click and a voice he hadn't heard in eighteen months said, "Aye?"

"Tommy. It's Gavin."

Silence. Not the silence of a bad connection, but the deliberate silence of a man deciding whether to hang up.

"I know," Tommy said finally. "Caller ID's a thing, Gav."

"Right. Course." Gavin rubbed the back of his neck. "How are you?"

"Fine. Working. What do you want?"

No small talk, then. Fair enough. Tommy Maclean had never been one for pleasantries even before everything went wrong. He was a history teacher at a secondary school in Stirling, a compact, serious man with a red beard and a memory that held grudges the way amber held insects — perfectly preserved, impossible to extract.

"I want to do the walk," Gavin said. "The one we always talked about. Five days through the Highlands, wild camping, the whole thing. For Alec."

Another silence. Gavin could hear something in the background — a television, the low murmur of a football match.

"For Alec," Tommy repeated, and the way he said it made the words sound like an accusation.

"It's been two years, Tommy. I think we owe him this."

"We owed him a lot of things. A walk's not going to settle the account."

"No. But it's something."

Tommy breathed out slowly. "Who else?"

"Yvonne and Gillian. I haven't called them yet. Wanted to ask you first."

"Because you knew I'd be the hard sell."

"Because you were his best mate."

That landed. Gavin heard it in the quality of the silence that followed — something shifting, softening just slightly at the edges.

"Five days," Tommy said.

"Five days. Late October, before the real cold sets in. I've got a route planned — starts at Kinloch Hourn, cuts through Glen Quoich, then north toward Kintail. Proper remote stuff. No pubs, no road crossings, just hills and sky."

"October's late for the Highlands."

"Alec always said the Highlands were best when they were trying to kill you."

Tommy almost laughed. Almost. "Aye, he did say that." A pause. "All right. I'm in. But I'm not pretending everything's fine between us, Gavin. We're not picking up where we left off."

"I'm not asking you to."

"Good. Because I won't."

They hung up without saying goodbye. Gavin drained his whisky and called Yvonne.

---

Yvonne Buckley answered on the second ring, which surprised him. She'd always been the hardest of them to reach, even in the good years — a woman perpetually in motion, phone buried in a bag or left on silent in another room. She worked in environmental policy for the Scottish Government, or had done. Gavin wasn't sure if that was still the case.

"Gavin Leckie," she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice, though it sounded tired. "I was wondering when you'd call."

"You were?"

"The anniversary's coming up. I figured one of us would do something."

"I'm organizing a hike. Five days in the Highlands. For Alec."

"I know. Gillian told me."

Gavin blinked. "Gillian? I haven't called Gillian yet."

"She saw your Instagram. You posted that photo of the OS maps last week — the ones spread out on your table with the route marked. She recognized the handwriting."

"Christ." Gavin rubbed his face. He'd forgotten about that post. A moment of late-night sentimentality, a photo taken and uploaded without thinking. "Is she angry?"

"She's Gillian. She's curious. There's a difference, but it's a thin one." Yvonne paused. "I'll come. I need to get out of Edinburgh for a bit."

Something in her voice — a brittleness, a hairline crack running through the composure — made Gavin careful with his next words. "Everything all right?"

"Fine. Just — things are complicated. Neil and I are sorting some things out."

"Sorting things out" was Yvonne's way of saying the world was ending. Gavin had known her since first year at St Andrews, and in twenty years, he'd never heard her admit to anything worse than "a bit of a rough patch." If she was volunteering information, things were bad.

"I'm sorry, Yvonne."

"Don't be. It's been coming for a while. The walk will be good for me. Fresh air, old friends, all that." She paused again. "Tommy's coming?"

"Aye."

"That'll be fun."

"It'll be fine."

"It'll be something," she said, and rang off.

---

Gillian Cattanach called him before he could call her.

"I know about the walk," she said, without preamble. "I'm coming. But I want you to know I think you're doing this for the wrong reasons."

Gillian was a solicitor in Glasgow, sharp-featured and sharper-tongued, the kind of woman who could cross-examine a waiter about the provenance of a fish pie and make it feel like a criminal proceeding. She and Gavin had dated briefly in second year, a relationship that had lasted exactly six weeks before they'd realized they were better suited as sparring partners than lovers. In the years since, she'd become the group's unofficial conscience — the one who said the things everyone else was thinking but lacked the nerve to voice.

"Wrong reasons," Gavin repeated.

"You feel guilty. You think if you organize something sufficiently punishing — five days in the rain, bad food, blisters — it'll count as penance. You'll have suffered, and that'll make it okay that you didn't return Alec's calls for the last four months of his life."

The words hit like a slap. Not because they were cruel, but because they were precise.

"That's not—"

"It's exactly what it is, Gavin. I'm not judging you for it. We all failed him. But let's not dress it up as something noble. It's a guilt trip. Literally."

Gavin was quiet for a moment. Through his flat's window, he could see the lights of Leith Walk, the steady flow of buses and taxis. Normal life. The kind of life Alec Brogan would never have again.

"Maybe you're right," he said. "Does it matter? We should do it anyway."

"Probably. I just wanted us to be honest about it." Her voice softened marginally. "I'll be there. Send me the details."

---

Alec Brogan had been the best of them. Everyone said so, and it had the uncomfortable quality of being true.

He'd been the brightest, the funniest, the most generous — a lanky, dark-haired Glaswegian with a laugh that could fill a lecture hall and a capacity for joy that made other people's happiness seem like a diluted version of the real thing. He'd studied philosophy at St Andrews, then drifted into journalism, then into documentary filmmaking, then into a series of increasingly vague creative projects that never quite materialized. The drift hadn't seemed alarming at first. Alec had always been restless, always chasing the next fascination. It was part of his charm.

The drugs had started somewhere in the middle of the drift. Not hard drugs, initially — just the usual Scottish recreational pharmacopoeia of hash and MDMA and the occasional line of cocaine at a party. But somewhere around his thirtieth birthday, the recreational had become habitual, and the habitual had become necessary, and by the time anyone noticed the difference, Alec was already somewhere they couldn't reach.

Gavin had tried. They'd all tried, in their way. But trying was different from succeeding, and none of them had succeeded, and on a grey Tuesday morning in November, Alec's flatmate had found him on the bathroom floor with a needle in his arm and his eyes open and looking at nothing.

The funeral had been enormous. Alec had known everyone. The wake had gone on for two days. And then, slowly, the five of them — the four who were left — had stopped talking to each other. Not deliberately, not with any conscious decision. It was more like the gravity that had held them together had been located inside Alec, and without him, they simply drifted apart.

Two years. Long enough for grief to calcify into guilt, for guilt to curdle into resentment, for resentment to harden into silence.

Gavin stared at his phone, at the three brief conversations logged in his call history, and felt something that might have been hope or might have been dread. It was hard to tell the difference anymore.

He pulled up the maps again. The route was good — challenging but manageable, nothing technical, just long days of walking through some of the most remote terrain in Scotland. He'd planned it carefully, plotting each day's distance against the available daylight, identifying camping spots near water sources, noting escape routes to the nearest roads in case of emergency.

He ran his finger along the line he'd drawn, tracing the path from Kinloch Hourn northwest through the emptiness. There was a section on the third day where the route passed through a long, narrow valley — more of a cut in the hills, really, barely visible on the 1:50,000 map. He'd marked it as an alternative to the higher ridge route, a bad-weather option in case the forecast turned foul.

He couldn't remember now where he'd found the suggestion for that particular valley. A hiking forum, maybe. Or one of the old guidebooks he'd picked up from a charity shop. It didn't matter. It was just a valley. Scotland was full of them.

Gavin closed the maps and went to bed, and dreamed of nothing he could remember in the morning.