Cape Wrath (7 page)

Horror jolted the pair of them, violently.

Craig was up there, hanging from one of the higher boughs – not by his hands, or by a piece of clothing caught on a twig, or even by a rope. He was hanging from the branch because he'd been bent over it. Backwards. It was a horrible and yet impossible sight. The back of Craig's head almost touched the backs of his heels. It was as if he had no spine at all. He'd simply been thrown over the branch and draped there like a wet towel. Even from far below, they could see that his rigid face bore an expression of excruciating pain. His camera still hung by its strap from one of his dangling wrists.

“Oh my God …” David breathed, scarcely audible.

A second of stunned silence passed, then Alan jerked into action. “Quickly!” he said. “Give me a hand.” He dashed forward, jumped for one of the lower branches and tried to haul himself up.

“But he must be dead,” David protested.

“We don't know that.”

“Know it? But he's been folded up like a piece of paper …”

“David!” Alan shouted. “Just get your arse over here and give me a hand!”

David hurried to comply, and at last Alan got a decent purchase, swung himself up and began to climb properly. He went up steadily, moving from one gnarled limb to the next. Ten feet, 20 feet … He continued to clamber, never once looking down, oblivious to the soon-precipitous drop below him; not because he was naturally fearless, or even because he was particularly good at climbing trees, but because the circumstances wouldn't allow it. He knew only one thing – that he had to get up alongside Craig in order to discover that the casualty was actually okay, that it looked far worse than it was, maybe even that the Welsh guy was shamming, just playing a sick joke on them.

But long before he reached the jack-knifed form, he knew this wouldn't be the case.

Craig hung in a posture for which humanity had never been intended. As David had said, he'd literally been folded in two. The only explanation was that his backbone had snapped, probably with the impact on the heavy branch.

Alan finally got alongside his friend, and shinned out towards him. Hurriedly, he reached down and took Craig's wrist in his fingers. There was no pulse he could detect; the flesh was stone-cold. Alan let the hand drop and peered upwards. There was maybe 20 yards of open air between this tree and the rock-face, and as the rock-face ascended it leaned further and further away. It was difficult to see how Craig could have hit the tree at all in a straightforward fall. But then, one never knew. On such a slope, at such an angle, spaces could be deceptive. One thing was certain: Craig was not shamming.

“Shall I go and get the others?” David called up.

“You … you might as well,” Alan replied, trying to keep his voice steady.

David hurried off down the slope, leaving him there alone … which was something of a relief. Alan was at last able to hang his head. Tears squeezed out onto his cheeks. It was hardly the manly response to a crisis, but after all the emotional turbulence of the morning, this was the last thing he needed. On top of that, of course, there was shock. He'd never known anyone of his own age who'd died before; only now was the numbing realisation seeping through him that Craig Barker, a buddy since his first week in college, would never again figure in his life; that a few hours ago the cheeky chappie from South Wales had been healthy and perky as a spring-lamb, and that now it was all over and he was gone. They hadn't even had the chance to say “See you”.

Several minutes passed as Alan silently wept, at the end of which time he struggled to get it back together. He couldn't afford to let the others see him like this. In addition, there were things he had to do. Like, somehow, get Craig's body down to ground level.

It wasn't going to be easy, but the problem was solved for him; as he took hold of Craig's trouser belt and tried to lug him along the branch towards the main trunk, the body dislodged and slid free. It fell heavily but limply, twisting and turning as it plummeted the remaining 30 or so feet to the ground. Alan winced at the sound of the collision, even though he knew that Craig was far past the point of pain.

It took him another five minutes to get himself down safely, and even then there were one or two hair-raising moments, smaller boughs bending or cracking beneath his boots, his hands occasionally losing their grip on the flaking, silver-gray bark. At long last, however, he touched down, then walked over to where Craig lay. The Welshman had landed on his back again, his arms and legs splayed out, his neck to one side. One of his eyelids had opened slightly, the already-yellowing orb visible below it. The mouth was still twisted in a rictal grimace of pain. There was a horrible rigidity about that final ugly expression – it was like an image carved from wax, rather than a human face.

Alan gazed helplessly at it for several more minutes. He was still doing so when the others arrived, scrambling up through the trees, David at their forefront. The students gathered around in stunned silence, while Professor Mercy and Clive attended to the body, checking the carotid artery at the side of the exposed throat, planting ears against the narrow, motionless chest. No check they made came up positive, however.

Another minute seemed to pass before anyone spoke. The tutors were standing up again as Alan began a long rambling explanation about how and where they'd found Craig, and how he'd accidentally knocked the body to the ground while trying to recover it. His words petered out as Clive hunkered down and checked again for vital signs, still to no avail.

Eventually, Professor Mercy looked up and gazed around at them. Her expression was difficult to read. Linda, on the other hand, was visibly upset, her green eyes glazed with tears. Nug was grim, David still white-faced. For all his usual bravado, even Barry Wood seemed shaken up.

“This is a bitter lesson to us all,” the Professor finally said. “It just shows … this is not some holiday idyll. This is wild countryside and we're out on our own in it. From now on, recreational activities are out, okay? No exceptions.”

Alan looked up at her in surprise. “From now on? You mean we're going on with the dig?”

She shrugged. “What else can we do?”

“But surely we're at least going to call someone?” he said. “I mean, the Coast Guard for instance. McEndry said we could …”

The Professor eyed him keenly. “Why should we alert the Coast Guard? Nobody's in danger, nobody needs rescuing.”

Alan was astounded. “But someone's just died!”

“People die all the time, Alan,” she replied. “Accidents happen. It's terrible, I admit, tragic, but we've got a boat coming on Thursday evening. We don't need to call the Coast Guard.”

“Don't you think we should at least report it?”

“We will do,” she said. “As soon as one of us gets back to the mainland.”

“I don't believe I'm hearing this …”

Now Barry Wood stepped in. Inevitably, because the Professor was occupying a position contrary to Alan's, he was on her side. “There's nothing anyone can do, is there?” he said. “No-one can bring him back.”

Alan looked from one to the other. “So you're saying we just carry on as though nothing's happened?”

“We'll put Craig in the monks' cave for the moment,” the Professor replied. “No sense in burying him when we'll be out of here soon …”

“Are you serious?” Alan turned for support from some of the others. “Surely I'm not the only one here who thinks we should call for help?”

Clive looked uncertain. “It's legally beholden on us to report the incident, of course,” he said.

“But that would mean making the find public knowledge before we've even half excavated it,” the Professor replied. Now Alan caught a glimmer of the way she was rationalising the tragedy. It both horrified and sickened him.

Clive nodded to himself. “That must be a consideration.”

“Why don't we take a vote?” said Barry.

Alan was incredulous. “A vote?”

“On whether we carry on, or call for McEndry to come early.”

“For Christ's sake, someone has just died!”

“Yes, but this is the find of the century, we're sitting on here,” the Professor argued. “The last thing we need now is the press crawling all over the island, not to mention souvenir hunters.”

Alan found himself staring at her in disbelief and no little disgust; a stare she returned intently. For a fleeting moment, it was like he was looking at someone else, someone who also had beauty and power, but who had ice running through her veins instead of blood, who had a thing of iron where her heart should be. It was a side of her that he – in fact any of them – had never seen before.

“I can understand your position, Jo,” Nug finally said, in the stress of the moment using the Professor's first name. “But while we've got the means to contact the authorities, people are certainly going to wonder why we didn't.”

“Of course they are,” Alan added. “Even a couple of days' delay, and they'll be asking questions.”

For the first time, the Professor seemed unsure of her position. She gazed thoughtfully down at the body, then glanced sidelong at Clive. “They have a point, I suppose,” he finally said. “People
will
ask questions, and if it turns out we've delayed because we were too busy with the find, it won't look good.”

Again, she relapsed into thought, though clearly Clive's reasoning had made sense to her. “All right,” she eventually said. “We'll inform the Coast Guard station. This isn't an emergency, so it'll probably take them a day or so to get out here, anyway. Come on. Help me get something to cover him with.”

And with that, she turned and set off back towards the camp. The others went with her, all except Alan and Nug, the latter of whom now sank onto his haunches.

“Jesus,” Alan said, half to himself, “talk about priorities.”

Nug, however, wasn't listening. He was crouching by the corpse, staring at it, a far-away look on his face. Finally, he stood up and turned. “Listen, I don't particularly think there's anything in this, but you're sure Craig's death was an accident?”

Alan raised an eyebrow. “Well … obviously. I mean, he must have fallen. It's hard to see how he could have hit the tree, but what else could have happened?”

Nug stared up at the rock-face. “It's just that … well, this is obviously a big coincidence, but his spine's been broken, yeah?”

“I think so.”

Nug mused on this. “If he'd fallen down through the upper branches, wouldn't there be other marks on him, cuts, grazes and such?”

“I suppose.”

“And there aren't.”

“What are you saying, Nug?” Alan was suddenly too tired for word-games.

Nug looked him in the eye. “Ivar Ragnarsson sacrificed Mael Guala, the king of Munster, to the gods, by having his back ritually broken over a millstone, then hanging his body from a tree.”

 

They wrapped Craig's twisted body in the groundsheet of his tent, then zipped him into his sleeping bag, before carrying him down the slope and finally depositing him just inside the mouth of the cave.

There was no ceremony, no-one made a speech or said any words. It was a forlorn and desolate little moment as they laid him there, but it occurred to Alan how much Ivar the Boneless would have approved. The Christianity the ferocious Dane had striven so hard to destroy by sheer barbarism, had eventually fallen to sophistication; the Godless wilderness he'd sought to create with fire and sword, had finally arrived through discussion and intellectualism. Such, it seemed, was the prize of progress.

Alan stood there for a moment, looking down at the shrouded form. Then he glanced up into the opaque darkness at the back of the cave. “Perhaps we should move him further in?” he said. “We don't want some animal to come and mess with the body.”

“And what kind of animal would that be?” Barry Wood scoffed. “A grizzly bear?”

Alan turned sharply to face him. “Do you have to try and score points off everything!”

Barry sneered in response. “Do you have to find problems with everything!”

“I think we've got problems enough, without having to find them!”

“Will you two pack it in!” the Professor snapped. “This is an upsetting incident, but we can only put it behind us and get on with our work if we stick together as a team. Now just simmer down, the pair of you.”

The two students backed off and did as they were told, Barry moving over to Linda, putting an arm around her, Alan finding solace in Nug's company. One by one, the group drifted out of the cave, making their tired, uneasy way back around the bog-pools towards the encampment. Eventually, only Alan and Nug remained.

“He was a good lad,” Alan said. “A bit obsessive at times, but a good lad. There was certainly no evil in him.”

“He didn't deserve a death like that, that's for sure,” Nug replied. Then he glanced up. “So what do you think?”