The Going Down of the Sun (21 page)

BOOK: The Going Down of the Sun
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We cruised clear round the island, poking our bows into every nook and cranny, but unless he'd scuttled his transport Alex wasn't there. Perhaps Gigha was too close to the mainland for comfort. So we motored across the Sound to Islay, ten miles away.

For the rest of the day we puttered round the southern half of Islay, the deeply indented coastline folded into miles of shore. Yet much of it would have offered little to tempt the fugitive: the main tourist road ran beside long stretches of it, and there was water traffic too in Port Ellen and Port Askaig. We searched carefully round the strange, remote, almost circular southern peninsula called the Oa, and again along the eastern shore where there were few dwellings and fewer roads. But we found nothing, and that evening, with the sun slipping behind the shoulder of Bein Bheigeir looming over us, we found a decent anchorage and dropped the hook.

I explained the situation to Duncan. “We could go on to Port Askaig and get rooms for the night. But by the time we got there, and got in somewhere, and got ourselves settled in, it would be time to move again in order to be back here about dawn, which is when he'll do most of his travelling.

“So we're sleeping here, on the boat. You bridle your lust and I'll bridle mine. If the wind blows up during the night the sea will get a bit choppy and the boat'll move around some. This is nothing to worry about; it is most specifically nothing to wake me up for. If you feel the need to call Hughie on the great white telephone, over the stern's your best bet—the bows will always be pointing upwind. I'll be on deck about four. Be ready to leave any time after that.”

He had only one question, and he posed it diffidently. “Who's Hughie?”

The travel alarm woke me half an hour before dawn. The potting shed was cold. I hadn't taken that many clothes off to bunk down; now I scrambled back into them as quickly as I could, and pulled the spares from my suitcase on top of them. I stumbled round in the dark until I came across the galley and the box of matches. Mindful of why we were here, and not wholly confident of the
Fairy Flag's
plumbing, I had a good sniff round before striking one.

By the time Duncan Galbraith was re-entering the land of the living, assisted by the smell of coffee and a couple of hefty kicks to the side of his bunk, there was a perceptible lightening of the sky eastward towards Kintyre. Wrapped in three sweaters and two pairs of socks, my gloved hands nursing a mug of hot coffee, I went on deck and watched the day come.

Somewhere near, I thought, Alex Curragh was waking and warming his hands, and watching the same sky pale over the same Kintyre up-lands. And when the oyster streaks spread down to the horizon and bled into the sea, he'd hoist his tan sails to the stirring breeze and resume his private journey up the Sound of Jura.

I'm not sure, now, why I was so confident he was here. The only evidence was a missing boat. It could have been Alex who took it, landed nearby from a vessel outward-bound from Glasgow, but it didn't have to be. I don't suppose straightforward theft is a crime unknown in Scotland, even on the wild and picturesque west coast.

Even if it was Alex, no natural law said he had to come this way. If he was anxious to stay out of sight, the islands to the north of Islay and Jura offered more remote and less accessible anchorages still, and were well within the scope of a fifteen-foot sailing boat in competent hands in settled weather. Beyond Islay lay, effectively, the Atlantic Ocean and as many chances to lose himself as even a private man could want. By comparison the Sound of Jura was a big boating lake, three-quarter land-locked, heavily trafficked and easily observed.

Yet I was sure he was coming home. He might take his time about it, give himself space to think and come to terms with what had happened. But after that, where was there for him but Crinan, where he lived and worked, where he had friends and people he trusted as he could not understand or trust the city-dwellers? He had nothing left to hide; sooner or later he would let the police know where he was and let the thing get finished. I thought he would be making his way home by easy stages, not fleeing into an unnecessary exile.

Apart from all of that, I could almost feel the nearness of him. In this extraordinarily barren beauty of heather, rock and water, where he and I might be the only wakeful people watching the sunrise in a hundred square miles, I was conscious of something faint, electric, intangible, that said he was close. It was an awareness a woman might have of her lover, or a hunter of his quarry. I
knew
he was there—invisible, out of reach, probably out of earshot though sound carries across still water in that quiet hour after the dawn: it was not impossible that if I hailed him he would hear. I toyed with the idea but reluctantly dismissed it. I was more likely to scare him off than bring him out, and there was still the risk of attracting the attention of someone whose interest would be better avoided.

So I sat hunched up on top of the potting shed, six feet above water-level, folded round my coffee with the binoculars on the roof beside me, watching the light colour first the sky over the hills, then the hills themselves, finally run down the hillsides to touch the water with blue and silver. The water was like a mirror, the breeze not yet firmed up enough to ruffle it. As soon as the light touched it, the whole flat sheet of it from the Mull of Kintyre to the funnel at Luing was ablaze with the pale brilliance of shot silk; for just a few glorious moments.

Then, as it were out of nowhere, mists began to gather. The long view up that highway of bright water lost its brief sharp clarity as if a curtain of faint translucent gauze had been drawn between. As I watched, shores which had been clear first softened and then vanished behind the gossamer veil. Thickening even as the sun rose, it shrouded the contours of the land and filled the little bays with a vapour so fine it was impossible to see where it was coming from. There was a breeze, just, that brought me the scent of the land and caressed my cheek with soft misty fingers, but it wasn't enough to blow holes in the opacity and dispose of the shreds. My guess was that it wouldn't clear before mid-morning.

And just then, as the mist closed in, moving outward from the shore in slow-motion billows like frosty breath, not a mile away I saw it—a gunter mast carrying a tan sail. The mist had already swallowed the hull. He was clearing Ardmore Point, or where the Point had to be, and setting north. God knows how he could see where to steer. I suppose he couldn't, and sheer familiarity with the Sound kept him clear of its rocks.

I had his sail in view for two or three minutes. If I'd had the courage to weigh anchor and feel my way through the mist in his wake, I would have caught him in ten minutes more, and then it would all have been over and we could have gone safely home. But I couldn't do it. I knew these shores and waters, but not as intimately as Alex did. I couldn't find my way blind. Maybe I hadn't his skill either. Certainly the
Fairy Flag
was ill-designed for feeling her way—at least under sail you have a chance of hearing breakers before you hit the rocks they're breaking on.

Anyway, I couldn't bring myself to follow him into the pale oblivion, and even with hindsight I don't think it would have been sensible to do so. I sat on the potting shed watching the tan sail slip gently northward and the mist swallow it from the reefing points up, and then I went below again.

Duncan was dressed and warming himself at the stove. He looked up as I swung down the companionway from the wheelhouse. Then he looked again, startled. “Whatever's the matter? You look you've seen a ghost.”

“I've seen him,” I said, keeping my voice low and the emotion out of my eyes. “Alex. He just sailed past us not much more than half a mile away, and there's barely enough wind to keep him moving, and if I was half the sailor I think I am I'd pull up the hook and follow him, but I'm not and I shalln't.”

Duncan moved sharply to the window and looked out as if he might catch a last glimpse of the tan sail. Instead he saw mist all round. “I should bloody well hope not,” he said feelingly.

Chapter Two

We had porridge for breakfast. It was that or baked beans, and would be for as long as we were on board. While we ate, I was studying the chart.

“We must have sailed right past him. He must have been in here”—I stabbed my finger into the chain of tiny islands with romantic names like Eileana Chuim and Eilean Bhride—”it's the only place close enough for him to have got here since sunrise. We must have passed within a few hundred yards of him. He's only been a couple of miles away all night!”

Duncan was peering at the chart with me, straggling to relate it to the world of rock and water outside. He frowned. “That's the lagoon just south of here. We went in there.”

Indeed we did. Perhaps we were getting tired and not looking as carefully as we should. Or perhaps he had out-thought us. With the boat beached, the sails struck, the mast shipped and the keel rolled up she could have looked very like another rock—particularly if, to go with his tan sails, her owner had tarred her bottom. Alex could have slept under her all day with almost no risk of discovery unless someone was prepared to walk every beach in the Sound. But when he was ready to move he could rig her fit for sea in a matter of minutes.

The breath of air that carried Alex Curragh into the safety of the dawn mist began to firm up around eight, and by nine the combination of sun and wind had reduced the miasma to a mere haze, a shimmering of the air. The water was losing its glassiness now that the breeze was kicking a sparkle into it. The breeze had veered from the south round into the west.

By then Duncan had the anchor on deck and I was taking the
Fairy Flag
out of Claggain Bay and heading north for Jura. I guess that Alex had already reached whatever haven he meant to pass the day in, and secreted his boat as well as he had yesterday. He might have had five hours'sailing. For much of that time the wind had been breathy light—the tide pushing up the Sound would have contributed as much to his progress. He might have got fifteen miles. Unless he was prepared to risk being spotted as day began in the civilised world, I doubted he could have got much further.

I looked at the chart. There were eight miles of crags, islets and coves along the eastern shore of Jura that he could have taken his pick from by nine o'clock. Admittedly the road—
the
road, the only road on Jura—ran along the shore for maybe half that distance, and he might prefer not to camp that close to even Jura's meagre traffic. On the other hand, the cluster of small islands moored half a mile out would be an ideal alternative. Any way you looked at it, Duncan and I had eight miles of fine-tooth combing ahead of us.

It took us six hours. Four times I left Duncan on
Flag
and rowed ashore in the rubber dinghy because rocks on the shore showed an improbable symmetry. Another time I rowed ashore and the long low shape was indeed a boat turned turtle on the beach, but the couple sheltering from the sun on the landward side had anticipated no pursuit, unless possibly by her father.

By early afternoon, with the sun already past its zenith and about as warm as it would get, the long stretch of the Sound was dotted with pleasure craft. Multi-coloured sails stretched to the freshening breeze, multi-coloured hulls dipped and spun on the dancing waves, and the little red speedboat we'd met off Kilberry head raced past us again, this time heading north, carving a bright wake that
Flag
trod underfoot with barely a nod of acknowledgement.

The sheer scale of this body of water, surrounded by land on three sides but still unmistakably an arm of the sea, was more emphasised than undermined by all this activity. We could count the boats, estimate their size, guess at the number of people afloat that afternoon, yet what the eye saw essentially was a great stretch of water, hemmed in by dark hills, flecked by occasional islands, with the coloured dots small enough and far enough apart to look lonely. Where they crowded together it seemed to be for company in a void big enough to ache. Worrying about the impact of pleasure craft on the Sound of Jura was like worrying whether the butterflies in Kew Gardens were leaving enough room for the plants. It was a big place. Searching it was a big task.

But a little before three it crept up on me again—a little like subliminal music, a little like indigestion—that quivering in the nerves, that quickening of the blood that said the quarry I sought was near. I'd felt it before, and too late to do anything about it I'd been proved right. I was right this time too, and now I had time and daylight on my side. I called to Duncan to throttle back and move inshore, and from my perch in the bows—as his seamanship improved I had abandoned first the wheelhouse and then the well it opened into—I raked the rocky coast with the binoculars. I saw nothing, but I could almost smell him.

Quite suddenly then I knew where he was. Nothing I could see, or smell, confirmed it but I knew as surely as if I had been with him when he went in there. It was perception of a kind, but hardly extra-sensory. He was there because logic put him there. It was about as far from Islay as he could have safely sailed: he needed to have those noticeable tan sails stowed by nine when the mist was beginning to yield to the firming breeze. Tomorrow he would sail into Crinan, and what happened after that would be out of his hands, so this last quiet time would be important to him, important enough to protect. I couldn't think of a beach within ten miles where he could feel safer than Lowlandman's Bay.

It's a strangely bleak place. Dark rocks tumble to the water's edge, enclosing a perfect pocket of a bay. A long causeway runs across from a little promentory on the north side, all but completing the stone circle. The narrow mouth keeps it safe from any sea and almost any wind, though sailing in and out can be tricky. The winds are not wholly to be trusted, either in force or direction, spilling as they do off the shoulders of the twin mountains looming above the beach.

BOOK: The Going Down of the Sun
9.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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