When eight bells toll (11 page)

"Hallo, hallo, hallo," said the character with the wispy beard. "Good afternoon, good afternoon. By Jove, are we glad to see you!"

I looked at him, shook the outstretched hand, glanced at the listing boat and said mildly: "You may be shipwrecked, but those are hardly what I'd call desperate straits. You're not on a deserted island. You're on the mainland. Help is at hand!"

"Oh, we know where we are all right." He waved a deprecating hand. "We put in here three days ago but I'm afraid our boat was holed in a storm during .the night Most unfortunate, most inconvenient."

"Holed as she lay there?   Just as she's moored now?"

"Yes, indeed."

"
Bad luck.  Oxford or Cambridge?"

"Oxford, of course." He seemed a bit huffed at my ignorance. "Combined geological and marine biological party."

"No shortage of rocks and sea-water hereabouts," I agreed. "How bad is the damage?"

"A holed plank.   Sprung.   Too much for us, I'm afraid."

"All right for food?"

"Of course."

"No transmitter?"

"Receiver only."

"The helicopter pilot will radio for a shipwright and engineer to be sent out as soon as the weather moderates. Good-bye,"

His jaw fell about a couple of inches. "You're off? Just like that?"

"Air-Sea Rescue.  Vessel reported sinking last night."

"Ah, that.   We heard."

"Thought you might be it. Glad for your sakes you're not We've a lot of ground to cover yet."

We continued eastwards towards the head of Loch Houron. Half-way there I said; "Far enough. Let's have a look at those four islands out in the loch. We'31 start with the most easterly one first of all - what's it called, yes, Eilean Oran -then make our way back towards the mouth of Loch Houron again."

"You said you wanted to go all the way to the top."

"I've changed my mind."

"You're the man who pays the piper," he said equably. He was a singularly incurious character, was young Lieutenant Williams. "Northward ho for Eilean Oran."

We were over Eilean Oran in three minutes. Compared to Eilean Oran, Alcatraz was a green and lovely holiday resort. Half a square mile of solid rock and never a blade of grass in sight. But there was a house. A house with smoke coming from its chimney. And beside it a boatshed, but no boat. The smoke meant an inhabitant, at least one inhabitant, and however he earned his living he certainly didn't do it from tilling the good earth. So he would have a boat, a boat for fishing for his livelihood, a boat for transportation to the mainland, for one certain thing among the manifold uncertainties of this world was that no passenger vessel had called at Eilean Oran since Robert Fulton had invented the steamboat. Williams set me down not twenty yards from the shed.

I rounded the comer of the boat-house and stopped abruptly. I always stop abruptly when I'm struck in the stomach by a battering-ram. After a few minutes I managed to whoop enough air into my lungs to let me straighten up again.

He was tall, gaunt, grey, in his middle sixties. He hadn't shaved for a week or changed his collarless shirt in a month. It wasn't a battering-ram he'd used after all, it
was a gun, none of your fancy pistols, just a good old-fashioned double-barrelied twelve-bore shotgun, the kind of gun that at close range — six inches in this case - can give points even to the Peacemaker Colt when it comes to blowing your head off. He had it aimed at my right eye. It was lite staring down the Mersey tunnel. When he spoke I could see he'd missed out on all those books that laud the unfailing courtesy of the Highlander.

"And who the hell are you?" he snarled.

"My name's Johnson.   Put that gun away.   I------"

"And what the hell do you want here?"

"How about trying the ' Ceud Mile Failte' approach?" I said. "You see it everywhere in those parts. A hundred thousand welcomes------"

"I won't ask again, mister."

"Air-Sea Rescue. There's a missing boat-----"

"I haven't seen any boat. You can just get to hell off my island." He lowered his gun till it pointed at my stomach, maybe because he thought it would be more effective there or make for a less messy job when it came to burying me. "Now!"

I nodded to the gun. "You could get prison for this,"

"Maybe I could and maybe I couldn't. All I know is that I don't like strangers on my island and that Donald Mac-Eachern protects his own."

"And a very good job you make of it, too, Donald," I said approvingly. The gun moved and I said quickly: "I'm off. And don't bother saying ' haste ye back' for I won't be,"

As we rose from the island Williams said: "I just caught a glimpse. That was a gun he had there?"

"It wasn't the outstretched hand of friendship they're always talking about in those parts," I said bitterly.

"Who
is he?  What is he?"

"He's an undercover agent for the Scottish Tourist Board in secret training to be their goodwill ambassador abroad. He's not any of those I'm looking for, that I know. He's not a nut case, either - he's as sane as you are. He's a worried man and a desperate one."

"You didn't look in the shed. You wanted to find out about a boat. Maybe there was someone pointing a gun at him."

"That was one of the thoughts that accounted for my rapid departure. I could have taken the gun from him,"

"You could have got your head blown off,"

"Guns are my business. The safety catch was in the 'On' position,"

"Sorry." Williams's face showed how out of his depth he was, he wasn't as good at concealing his expression as I was, "What now?"

"Island number two to the west here," I glanced at the chart, "Craigmore."

"You'll be wasting your time going there." He sounded very positive. "I've been there. Flew out a badly injured man to a Glasgow hospital."

"Injured how?"

"He'd cut himself to the thigh-bone with a flensing knife, Infection had set in."

"A flensing knife?   For whales?   I'd never heard------"

"For sharks. Basking sharks. They're as common as mackerel hereabouts. Catch them for their livers - you can get a ton of liver oil from a good-sized one," He pointed to the chart, to a tiny mark on the north coast. "Craigmore village. Been abandoned, they say, from before the First World War. We're coming up to it now. Some of those old boys built their homes in the damnedest places."

Some of those old boys had indeed built their homes in the damnedest places. If I'd been compelled to build a home either there or at the North Pole I'd have been hard put to it to make a choice. A huddle of four small grey houses built out near the tip of a foreland, several wicked reefs that made a natural breakwater, an even more wicked-looking entrance through the reefs and two fishing boats swinging and rolling wildly at anchor inside the reefs. One of the houses, the one nearest the shore, had had its entire seaward wall cut away. On the twenty or thirty feet of sloping ground that separated the house from the sea
1
could see three unmistakable sharks. A handful of men appeared at the open end of the house and waved at us.

"That's one way of making a living. Can you put me down?"

"What do you think, Mr, Calvert?"

"I don't think you can." Not unless he set his helicopter down on top of one of the little houses, that was. "You winched this sick man up?"

"Yes. And I'd rather not winch you down, if you don't mind. Not in this weather and not without a crewman to help me. Unless you're desperate."

"Not all that desperate.   Would  you vouch  for them?"

"I'd vouch for them. They're a good bunch. I've metthe boss, Tim Hutchinson, an Aussie about the size of a house, several times. Most of the fishermen on the west coast would vouch for them."

"Fair enough. The next island is Ballara."

We circled Ballara once. Once was enough. Not even a barnacle would have made his home in Ballara.

We were over the channel between Ballara and Dubh Sgeir now and the Beul nan Uamh was a sight to daunt even the stoutest-hearted fish. It certainly daunted me, five minutes in that lot whether in a boat or scuba suit and that would have been that. The ebb-tide and the wind were in head-on collision and the result was the most spectacular witches' cauldron I'd ever seen. There were no waves as such, just a bubbling swirling seething maelstrom of whirlpools, overfalls and races, running no way and every way, gleaming boiling white in the overfalls and races, dark and smooth and evil in the hearts of the whirlpools. Not a place to take Aunty Gladys out in a row-boat for a gentle paddle in the quiet even fall.

Oddly enough, close in to the east and south coast of Dubh Sgeir, one
could
have taken Aunty Gladys out. In those tidal races between islands a common but not yet clearly understood phenomenon frequently leaves an undisturbed stretch of water close in to one or other of the shores, calm and smooth and fiat, a millpond with a sharply outlined boundary between
h
and the foaming races beyond. So it was here. For almost a mile between the most southerly and easterly headlands of Dubh Sgeir, for a distance of two or three hundred yards out from the shore, the waters were black and still. It was uncanny.

"Sure you really want to land here?" Williams asked.

"Is h tricky?"

"Easy. Helicopters often land on Dubh Sgeir. Not mine - others. It's just that you're likely to get the same reception here as you got on Eilean Oran. There are dozens of privately owned islands off the West Coast and none of them like uninvited visitors. The owner of Dubh Sgeir hates them."

"This world-famous Highland hospitality becomes positively embarrassing at times. The Scotsman's home is his castle, eh?"

"There is
a castle here. The ancestral home of the dan Dalwhinnie. I think."

"Dalwhinnie's a town, not a clan."

"Well, something unpronounceable." That was good, considering that he like as not hailed from Rhosllanerchrugog or Pomrhydfendgaid. "He's the clan chief. Lord Kirkside. Ex-Lord Lieutenant of the shire. Very important citizen but a bit of a recluse now. Seldom leaves the place except to attend Highland Games or go south about once a mouth to flay the Archbishop of Canterbury in .the Lords."

"Must be difficult for him to tell which place he's at, at times. I've heard of him. Used to have a very low opinion of the Commons and made a long speech to that effect every other day."

"That's him. But not any more. Lost his older son -and his future son-in-law - in an air accident some time ago. Took the heart from the old boy, so they say. People in these parts think the world of him."

We were round to the south of Dubh Sgeir now and suddenly the castle was in sight. Despite its crenulated battlements, round towers and embrasures, it didn't begin to rank with the Windsors and Balmorals of this world. A pocket castle. But the side had the Windsors and Balmorals whacked to the wide. It grew straight out of the top of a hundred and fifty foot cliff and if you leaned too far out of your bedroom window the first thing to stop your fall would be the rocks a long long way down. You wouldn't even bounce once.

Below the castle and a fair way to the right of it a cliff-fall belonging to some bygone age had created an artificial foreshore some thirty yards wide. From this, obviously at the cost of immense labour, an artificial harbour had been scooped out, the boulders and rubble having been used for the construction of a horseshoe breakwater with an entrance of not more than six or seven yards in width. At the inner end of this harbour a boathouse, no wider than the harbour entrance and less than twenty feet in length, had been constructed against the cliff face. A boathouse to berth a good-sized row-boat, no more.

Williams took his machine up until we were two hundred feet above the castle. It was built in the form of a hollow square with the landward side missing. The seaward side was dominated by two crenulated towers, one topped by a twenty-foot flagpole and flag, the other by an even taller TV mast. Aesthetically, the flagpole had it every time. Surprisingly the island was not as barren as it had appeared from the sea. Beginning some distance from the castle and extending clear to the cliff-bound northern shore of the island ran a two hundred yard wide stretch of what seemed to be flat smooth turf, not the bowling green standard but undoubtedly grass of the genuine variety as testified to by the heads down position of a handful of goats that browsed close to the castle. Williams tried to land on the grass but the wind was too strong to allow him to hold position: he finally put down in the eastern ke of the castle, close but not too close to the cliff edge.

I got out, keeping a wary eye on the goats, and was rounding the landward corner of the castle when I almost literally bumped into the girl.

I've always known what to look for in a suddenly-encountered girl in a remote Hebridean Island. A kilt, of course, a Hebridean girl without a kilt was unthinkable, a Shetland two-piece and brown brogues: and that she would be a raven-haired beauty with wild, green, fey eyes went without saying. Her name would be Deirdre. This one wasn't like that at all, except for the eyes, which were neither green nor fey but certainly looked wild enough. What little I could see of them, that was. Her blonde hair was cut in the uniform peekaboo scalloped style of the day, the one where the long side hair meets under the chin and the central fringe is hacked off at eyebrow level, a coiffure which in any wind above Force i allows no more than ten per cent of the face to be seen at any one time. Below hair level she wore a horizontally striped blue and white sailor's jersey and faded blue denim pants that must have been fixed on with a portable sewing machine as I didn't see how else she could have got into them. Her tanned feet were bare. It was comforting to see that the civilising influence of television reached even the remoter outposts of empire.

I said:   "Good afternoon, Miss - um------"

"Engine failure?" she asked coldly.

"Well, no------"

"Mechanical failure? Of any kind? No? Then this is private property. I must ask you to leave. At once, please."

There seemed to be little for me here. An outstretched hand and a warm smile of welcome and she'd have been on my list of suspects at once. But this was true to established form, the weary stranger at the gates receiving not the palm of the hand but the back of it. Apart from the fact that she lacked
a.
blunderbuss and had a much better figure, she had a great deal in common with Mr. MacEachera. I bent forward to peer through the windblown camouflage of blonde hair. She looked as if she had spent most of the night and half the morning down in the castle wine cellars. Pale face, pale lips, dark smudges under the blue-grey eyes. But clear blue-grey eyes.