When Eight Bells Toll

FOUR

As the saying went in those parts, it was as black as the earl of hell's waistcoat. The sky was black, the woods were black, and the icy heavy driving rain reduced what little visibility there was to just nothing at all. The only way to locate a tree was to walk straight into it. The only way to locate a dip in the ground was to fall into it. When Hunslett had woken me at three-thirty with a cup of tea he told me that when he'd been speaking to Uncle Arthur at midnight — I'd been asleep — he was left in no doubt that although the helicopter had been laid on Uncle had been most unenthusiastic and considered the whole thing a waste of time. It was a rare occasion indeed when I ever felt myself in total agreement with Uncle Arthur but this was one of those rare occasions.

It was beginning to look as if I'd never even find that damned helicopter anyway. I wouldn't have believed that it could have been so difficult to find one's way across five miles of wooded island at night-time. It wasn't even as if I had to contend with rivers or rushing torrents or cliffs or precipitous clefts in the ground or any kind of dense or tangled vegetation. Torbay was just a moderately wooded gently sloping island and crossing from one side to the other of it would have been only an easy Sunday afternoon stroll for a fairly active octogenarian. I was no octogenarian, though I felt like one, but then this wasn't a Sunday afternoon.

The trouble had started from the moment I'd landed on the Torbay shore opposite Garve Island. From the moment I'd tried to land. Wearing rubber-soled shoes and trying to haul a rubber dinghy over slippery seaweed-covered rocks, some as much as six feet in diameter, to a shore-line twenty interminable yards away is, even in broad daylight, a bone-breaking job: in pitch darkness its almost as good a way as any for a potential suicide to finish off the job with efficiency and dispatch. The third time I fell I smashed my torch. Several bone-jarring bruises later my wrist-compass went the same way. The attached depth-gauge, almost inevitably, remained intact. A depth-gauge is a great help in finding your way through a trackless wood at night.

After deflating and caching the dinghy and pump I'd set off along the shore-line remote from the village of Torbay. It was logical that if I followed this long enough I'd be bound to come to the sandy cove at the far end of the island where I was to rendezvous with the helicopter. It was also logical that, if the tree line came right down to the shore, if that shore was heavily indented with little coves and if I couldn't see where I was going, I'd fall into the sea with a fair degree of regularity. After I'd hauled myself out for the third time I gave up and struck inland. It wasn't because I was afraid of getting wet — as I hadn't seen much point in wearing a scuba suit for walking through a wood and sitting in a helicopter I'd left it aboard and was already soaked to the skin. Nor was it because of -the possibility that the hand distress flares I'd brought along for signalling the helicopter pilot, wrapped though they were in oilskin, might not stand up to this treatment indefinitely. The reason why I was now blundering my blind and painful way through the wood was that if I'd stuck to the shoreline my rate of progress there wouldn't have brought me to the rendezvous before midday.

My only guides were the wind-lashed rain and the lie of the land. The cove I was heading for lay to the east, the near-gale force wind was almost due west, so as long as I kept that cold stinging rain on the back of my neck I'd be heading in approximately the right direction: as a check on that, the Island of Torbay has a spinal hog's back, covered in pines to the tops running its east-west length and when I felt the land falling away to one side or the other it meant I was wandering. But the rain-laden wind swirled unpredictably as the wood alternately thinned and became dense again, the hog's back had offshoots and irregularities and as a result of the combination of the two I lost a great deal of time. Half an hour before dawn — by my watch, that was, it was still as black as the midnight hour — I was beginning to wonder if I could possibly make it in time,

And I was beginning to wonder if the helicopter could make it either. There was no doubt in my mind that it could land — that eastern cove was perfectly sheltered — but whether it could get there at all was another question. I had a vague idea that helicopters were unmanageable above certain wind speeds but had no idea what those wind speeds were. And if the helicopter didn't turn up, then I was faced with the long cold wet trudge back to where I had hidden the dinghy and then an even longer, colder and hungry wait until darkness fell at night and I could get out to the Firecrest unseen. Even now, I had only twenty-four hours left. By nightfall I would have only twelve, I began to run.

Fifteen minutes and God knows how many iron-hard tree trunks later I heard it, faint and intermittent at first, then gradually swelling in strength — the clattering roar of a helicopter engine. He was early, damn him, he was far too early, he'd land there, find the place deserted and take off for base again. It says much for my sudden desperate state of mind that it never occurred to me how he could even begin to locate, far less land in, that sandy cove in a condition of darkness that was still only a degree less than total. For a moment I even contemplated lighting a flare to let the pilot know that I was at least there or thereabouts and had the flare half-way out of my pocket before I shoved it back again. The arrangement had been that the flare would be lit only to show the landing strip in the sand: if I lit one there and then he might head for it, strike the tops of the pine trees and that would be the end of that.

I ran even faster. It had been years since I'd run more than a couple of hundred yards and my lungs were already wheezing and gasping like a fractured bellows in a blacksmith's shop. But I ran as hard as I could. I cannoned into trees, I tripped over roots, fell into gullies, had my face whipped time and again by low-spreading branches, but above all I cannoned into those damned trees, I stretched my arms before me but it did no good, I ran into them all the same. I picked up a broken branch I'd tripped over and held it in front of me but no matter how I pointed h the trees always seemed to come at me from another direction. I hit every tree in the Island of Torbay. I felt the way a bowling ball must feel after a hard season in a bowling alley, the only difference, and a notable one, being that whereas the ball knocked the skittles down, the trees knocked me down. Once, twice, three times I heard the sound of the helicopter engine disappearing away to the east, and the third time I was sure be was gone for good. But each time it came back. The sky was lightening to the east now, but still I couldn't see the helicopter: for the pilot, everything below would still be as black as night.

The ground gave way beneath my feet and I fell. I braced myself, arms outstretched, for the impact as I struck the other side of the gully. But my reaching hands found nothing. No impact. I kept on falling, rolling and twisting down a heathery slope, and for the first time that night I would have welcomed the appearance of a pine tree, any kind of tree, to stop my progress. I don't know how many trees there were on that slope, I missed the lot. If it was a gully, it was the biggest gully on the Island of Torbay. But it wasn't a gully at all, it was the end of Torbay, I rolled and bumped over a sudden horizontal grassy bank and landed on my back in soft wet sand. Even white I was whooping and gasping and trying to get my knocked-out breath back into my lungs I still had time to appreciate the fortunate fact that kindly providence arid a few million years had changed the jagged rocks that must once have fringed that shore into a nice soft yielding sandy beach.

I got to my feet. This was the place, all right. There was only one such sandy bay, I'd been told, in the east of the Isle of Torbay and there was now enough light for me to see that this was indeed just that, though a lot smaller than it appeared on the chart. The helicopter was coming in again from the east, not, as far as I could judge, more than three or four hundred feet up. I ran half-way down to the water's edge, pulled a hand flare from my pocket, slid away the waterproof covering and tore off the ignition strip. It flared into life at once, a dazzling blue-white magnesium light so blinding that I had to clap my free hand over my eyes. It lasted for only thirty seconds, but that was enough. Even as it fizzled and sputtered its acrid and nostril-wrinkling way to extinction the helicopter was almost directly over-head. Two vertically-downward pointing searchlights, mounted fore and aft on the helicopter, switched on simultaneously, interlocking pools of brilliance on the pale white sand. Twenty seconds later the skids sank into the soft sand, the rackety clangour of the motor died away and the blades idled slowly to a stop. I'd never been in a helicopter in my life but I'd seen plenty: in the half-darkness this looked like the biggest one I'd ever seen.

The right-hand door opened and a torch shone in my face as I approached. A voice, Welsh as the Rhondda Valley, said: "Morning. You Calvert?"

"Me. Can I come aboard?"

"How do I know you're Calvert?"

"I'm telling you. Don't come the hard man, laddie. You've no authority to make an identification check."

"Have you no proof? No papers?"

"Have you no sense? Haven't you enough sense to know that there are some people who never carry any means of identification? Do you think I just happened to be standing here, five miles from nowhere, and that I just happened to be carrying flares in my pocket? You want to join the ranks of the unemployed before sunset?" A very auspicious beginning to our association.

"I was told to be careful." He was as worried and upset as a cat snoozing on a sun-warmed wall. Still a marked lack of cordiality. "Lieutenant Scott Williams, Fleet Air Arm. Takes an admiral to sack me. Step up."

I stepped up, closed the door and sat. He didn't offer to shake hands. He flicked on an overhead light and said: "What the hell's happened to your face?"

"What's the matter with my face?"

"Blood. Hundreds of little scratches."

"Pine needles." I told him what had happened. "Why a machine this size? You could ferry a battalion in this one."

"Fourteen men, to be precise. I do lots of crazy things, Calvert, but I don't fly itsy-bitsy two-bit choppers in this kind of weather. Be blown out of the sky. With only two of us, the long-range tanks are full."

"You can fly all day?"

"More or less. Depends how fast we go. What do you want from me?"

"Civility, for a start. Or don't you like early morning rising?"

"I’m an Air-Sea Rescue pilot, Calvert. This is the only machine on the base big enough to go out looking in this kind of weather. And I should be out looking, not out on some cloak-and-dagger joy-ride. I don't care how important it is, there's people maybe clinging to a life-raft fifty miles out in the Atlantic. That's my job. But I've got my orders. What do you want?"

"The Moray Rose."

"You heard? Yes, that's her."

"She doesn't exist. She never has existed."

"What are you talking about? The news broadcasts — "

"I'll tell you as much as you need to know, Lieutenant. It's essential that I be able to search this area without arousing suspicion. The only way that can be done is by inventing an ironclad reason. The foundering Moray Rose is that reason. So we tell the tale."

"Phoney?"

"Phoney."

"You can fix it?" he said slowly. "You can fix a news broadcast?"

"Yes."

"Maybe you could get me fired at that." He smiled for the first time. "Sorry, sir. Lieutenant Williams Scotty to you — is now his normal cheerful willing self. What's on?"

"Know the coast-lines and islands of this area well?"

"From the air?"

"Yes."

"I've been here twenty months now. Air-Sea Rescue and in between army and navy exercises and hunting for lost climbers. Most of my work is with the Marine Commandos. I know this area at least as well as any man alive."

"I'm looking for a place where a man could hide a boat. A fairly big boat. Forty feet — maybe fifty. Might be in a big boathouse, might be under over-hanging trees up some creek, might even be in some tiny secluded harbour normally invisible from the sea. Between Islay and Skye."

"Well, now, is that all. Have you any idea how many hundreds of miles of coastline there is in that lot, taking in all the islands? Maybe thousands? How long do I have for this job? A month?"

"By sunset to-day. Now, wait. We can cut out all centres of population, and by that I mean anything with more than two or three houses together. We can cut out known fishing grounds. We can cut out regular steamship routes. Does that help?"

"A lot. What are we really looking for?"

"I've told you."

"Okay, okay, so mine is not to reason why. Any idea where you'd like to start, any ideas for limiting the search?"

"Let's go due east to the mainland. Twenty miles up the coast, then twenty south. Then we'll try Torbay Sound and the Isle of Torbay. Then the islands farther west and north."

"Torbay Sound has a steamer service."

"Sorry, I should have said a daily service. Torbay has a bi-weekly service."

"Fasten your seat-belt and get on those earphones. We're going to get thrown around quite a bit to-day. I hope you're a good sailor."

"And the earphones?" They were the biggest I'd ever seen, four inches wide with inch-thick linings of what looked like sorbo rubber. A spring loaded swing microphone was attached to the headband.

"For the ears," the lieutenant said kindly. "So that you don't get perforated drums. And so you won't be deaf for a week afterwards. If you can imagine yourself inside a steel drum in the middle of a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering outside, you'll have some idea of what the racket is like once we start up."

Even with the earphone muffs on, it sounded exactly like being in a steel drum in a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering on the outside. The earphones didn't seem to have the slightest effect at all, the noise came hammering and beating at you through every facial and cranial bone, but on the one and very brief occasion when I cautiously lifted one phone to find out what the noise was like without them and if they were really doing any good at all, I found out exactly what Lieutenant Williams meant about perforated drums. He hadn't been joking. But even with them on, after a couple of hours ray head felt as if it were coming apart. I looked occasionally at the dark lean face of the young Welshman beside me, a man who had to stand this racket day in, day out, the year round. He looked quite sane to me. I'd have been in a padded cell in a week.

I didn't have to be in that helicopter a week. Altogether, I spent eight hours flying time in it and it felt like a leap year.

Our first run northwards up the mainland coast produced what was to be the first of many false alarms that day. Twenty minutes after leaving Torbay we spotted a river, a small one but still a river, flowing into the sea. We followed it up-stream for a mile, then suddenly the trees, crowding down close to the banks on both sides, met in the middle where the river seemed to run through some rocky gorge.

I shouted into the microphone: "I want to see what's there."

Williams nodded. "We passed a place a quarter of a mile back. I'll set you down."

"You've got a winch. Couldn't you lower me?"

"When you know as much as I do about the effect of forty to fifty miles an hour winds in steep-sided valley," he said, "you'll never talk about such things. Not even in a joke. I want to take this kite home again."

So he turned back and set me down without much difficulty in the shelter of a bluff. Five minutes later I'd reached the beginning of the overhanging stretch. Another five minutes and I was back in the helicopter.

"What luck?" the lieutenant asked.

"No luck. An ancient oak tree right across the river, just at the entrance to the overhang."

"Could be shifted."

"It weighs two or three tons, it's imbedded feet deep In the mud and it's been there for years."

"Well, well, we can't be right first time, every time,"

A few more minutes and another river mouth. It hardly looked big enough to take a boat of any size, but we turned up anyway. Less than half a mile from its mouth the river foamed whitely as it passed through rapids. We turned back.

By the time it was fully daylight we had reached the northern limit of possibility in this area. Steep-sided mountains gave way to precipitous cliffs that plunged almost vertically into the sea.

"How far does this go north?" I asked.

"Ten, twelve miles to the head of Loch Lairg."

"Know how?"

"Flown up there a score of times."

"Caves?"

"Nary a cave."

I hadn't really thought that there would be. "How about the oilier side?" I pointed to the west where the mountainous shore-line, not five miles away yet barely visible through the driving rain and low scudding cloud, ran in almost sheer drop from the head of Loch Lairg to the entrance to Torbay Sound.

"Even the gulls can't find a foothold there. Believe me."

I believed him. We flew back the way we had come as far as our starting point on the coast, then continued southwards. From the Isle of Torbay to the mainland the sea was an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, big white-capped rollers marching eastwards across the darkened firth, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wave-tops veining the troughs between. There wasn't a single craft in sight, even the big drifters had stayed at home. It was as bad as that. In that buffeting gale-force wind our big helicopter was having a bad time of it now, violently shaking and swaying like an out-of-control express train in the last moments before it leaves the track: one hour's flying in those conditions had turned me against helicopters for life. But when I thought of what he would be like down there in a boat in that seething maelstrom of a firth I could feel a positive bond of attachment growing between me and that damned helicopter.

We flew twenty miles south — if the way we were being jarred and flung through the air could be called flying — but covered sixty miles in that southing. Every little sound between the islands and the mainland, every natural harbour, every sea-loch and inlet had to be investigated. We flew very low most of the time, not much above two hundred feet: sometimes we were forced down to a hundred feet — so heavy was the rain and so powerful the wind now battering against the streaming windscreen that the wipers were almost useless and we had to get as low as possible to see anything at all. As it was, I don't think we missed a yard of the coastline of the mainland or the close in-shore islands. We saw everything. And we saw nothing.

I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. The day wearing on and nothing achieved. I said: "How much more of this can the helicopter stand?"

"I've been 150 miles out over the Atlantic in weather a damn sight worse than this," Lieutenant Williams showed no signs of strain or anxiety or fatigue, if anything he seemed to be enjoying himself. "The point is how much more can you stand?"

"Very little. But we'll have to. Back to where you picked me up and we'll make a circuit of the coast of Torbay. South coast first, then north up the west coast, then east past Torbay and down the southern shore of the Sound."

"Yours to command." Williams brought the helicopter round to the north-west in a swinging side-slipping movement that didn't do my stomach any good. "You'll find coffee and sandwiches in that box there." I left the sandwiches and coffee where they were.

It took us almost forty minutes to cover the twenty-five miles to the eastern tip of the Isle of Torbay, that wind took us two steps back for every three forward. Visibility was so bad that Williams flew on instruments the whole way and with that violent cross-wind blowing he should have missed our target by miles. Instead he hit that sandy cove right on the nose as if he'd been flying in on a radio beacon. I was beginning to have a very great deal of confidence in Williams, a man who knew exactly what he was doing: I was beginning to have no confidence at all in myself and to wonder if I had any idea in the world what I was doing. I thought about Uncle Arthur and quickly decided I'd rather think about something else.

"There," Williams pointed. We were about half-way along the south coast of Torbay. "A likely set-up, wouldn't you say?"

And a likely set-up it was. A large white three-story stone-built Georgian house, set in a clearing about a hundred yards back from and thirty yards above the shore. There are dozens of such houses scattered in the most unlikely positions in some of the most barren and desolate islands in the Hebrides. Heaven only knew who built them, why or how. But it wasn't the house that was the focal point of interest in this case, it was the big boathouse on the edge of a tiny landlocked harbour. Without a further word from me Williams brought the big machine down neatly in the shelter of the trees behind the house.

I unwrapped the polythene bag I'd been carrying under my shirt. Two guns. The Luger I stuck in my pocket, the little German Lilliput I fixed to the spring clip in my left sleeve. Williams stared unconcernedly ahead and began to whistle to himself.

Nobody had lived in that house for years. Part of the roof had fallen in, years of salt air erosion had removed all paintwork and the rooms, when I looked in through the cracked and broken windows, were bare and crumbling with long strips of wall-paper lying on the floor. The path down to the little harbour was completely overgrown with moss. Every time my heel sunk into the path a deep muddy mark was left behind, the first made there for a long long time. The boatshed was big enough, at least sixty by twenty, but that was all that could be said for it. The two big doors had three hinges apiece and two huge padlocks where they met in the middle. Padlocks and hinges alike were almost eaten through by rust. I could feel the heavy tug of the Luger in my pocket and the weight made me feel faintly ridiculous. I went back to the helicopter.

Twice more in the next twenty minutes we came across almost identical situations. Big white Georgian houses with big boathouses at their feet. I knew they would be false alarms but I had to check them both. False alarms they were. The last occupants of those houses had been dead before I'd been born. People had lived in those houses once, people with families, big families, people with money and ambition and confidence and no fear at all of the future. Not if they had built houses as big as those. And now the people were gone and all that was left were those crumbling, mouldering monuments to a misplaced faith in the future. Some years previously I'd seen houses in plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, houses widely dissimilar but exactly the same, white-porticoed ante-bellum houses hemmed in by evergreen live oaks and overgrown with long grey festoons of Spanish moss. Sadness and desolation and a world that was gone for ever.

The west coast of the Isle of Torbay yielded nothing. We gave the town of Torbay and Garve Island a wide berth and flew eastwards down the southern shore of the Sound with the gale behind us. Two small hamlets, each with its disintegrating pier. Beyond that, nothing.

We reached the sandy cove again, flew north till we reached the northern shore of the Sound, then westwards along this shore. We stopped twice, once to investigate a tree-overhung land-locked harbour less than forty yards in diameter, and again to investigate a small complex of industrial buildings which had once, so Williams said, produced a fine-quality sand that had been one of the ingredients in a famous brand of toothpaste. Again, nothing.

At the last place we stopped for five minutes. Lieutenant Williams said he was hungry. I wasn't. I'd become used to the helicopter by now but I wasn't hungry.

It was midday. Half our tune gone and nothing accomplished. And it was beginning to look very much as if nothing was going to be accomplished. Uncle Arthur would be pleased. I took the chart from Williams.

"We have to pick and choose," I said. "We'll have to take a chance. We'll go up the Sound to Dolman Head, opposite Garve Island, then go up Loch Hynart." Loch Hynart was a seven mile long loch, winding and many-islanded, that ran more or less due east, nowhere more than half a mile wide, deep into the heart of the mountain massif. "Back to Dolman Point again then along the southern shore of the mainland peninsula again as far as Carrara Point. Then east along the southern shore of Loch Houron."

"Loch Houron," Williams nodded. "The wildest waters and the worst place for boats in the West of Scotland. Last place I'd go looking, Mr. Calvert, that's for sure. From all accounts you'll find nothing there but wrecks and skeletons. There are more reefs and skerries and underwater rocks and overfalls and whirlpools and tidal races in twenty miles there than in the whole of the rest of Scotland. Local fishermen won't go near the place." He pointed at the chart. "See this passage between Dubh Sgeir and Ballara Island, the two islands at the mouth of Loch Houron? That's the most feared spot of all. You should see the grip the fishermen get on their whisky glasses when they talk about it. Beul nan Uamh, it's called. The mouth of the grave."

"They're a cheery lot, hereabouts. It's time we were gone."

The wind blew as strongly as ever, the sea below looked as wicked as ever, but the rain had stopped and that made our search all that much easier. The stretch of the Sound from the sand quarry to Dolman Point yielded nothing. Neither did Loch Hynart Between Loch Hynart and Carrara Point, eight miles to the west, there were only two tiny hamlets crouched against the water's edge, their backs to the barren hills behind, their inhabitants — if there were any inhabitants -subsisting on God alone knew what. Carrara Point was storm-torn desolation itself. Great jagged broken fissured cliffs, huge fanged rocks rising from the sea, massive Atlantic breakers smashing in hundred foot high spray against the cliffs, the rocks and the tiny-seeming lighthouse at the foot of the cliffs. If I were Sir

Billy Butlin looking for the site for my latest holiday camp, I wouldn't have spent too much time on Carrara Point.

We turned north now, then north-east, then east, along the southern shore of Loch Houron.

Many places have evil reputations. Few, at first seeing, live up to those reputations. But there are a few. In Scotland, the Pass of Glencoej the scene of the infamous massacre, is one of them. The Pass of Brander is another. And Loch Houron was beyond all doubt another.

It required no imagination at all to see this as a dark and deadly and dangerous place. It looked dark and deadly and dangerous. The shores were black and rocky and precipitous and devoid of any form of vegetation at all. The four islands strung out in a line to the east were a splendid match for the hospitable appearance of the shores. In the far distance the northern and the southern shores of the loch came close together and vanished in a towering vertical cleft in the sinister brooding mountains. In the lee of the islands the loch was black as midnight but elsewhere it was a seething boiling white, the waters wickedly swirling, churning, spinning in evil-looking whirlpools as it passed across overfalls or forced its way through the narrow channels between the islands or between the islands and the shore. Water in torment. In the Beul nan Uamh — the mouth of the grave — between the first two islands the rushing leaping milk-white waters looked like floodwater in the Mackenzie river rapids in springtime, when the snows melt. A yachtsman's paradise. Only a mad-man would take his boat into these waters.

Apparently there were still a few madmen around. We'd just left the first of the islands, Dubh Sgeir, to port, when I caught sight of a narrow break in the cliffs on the southern mainland. A small rock-girt bay, if bay it could be called, about the size of a couple of tennis courts, almost completely enclosed from the sea, the entrance couldn't have been more than ten yards wide. I glanced at the chart -Little Horse-shoe Bay, it was called. Not original, but very apt. There was a boat in there, a fairly big one, a converted M.F.V, by the looks of her, anchored fore and aft in the middle of the bay. Behind the bay was a little plateau, mossy or grass-covered, I couldn't tell which, and, behind that, what looked like a dried-up river bed rising steeply into the hills behind. On the little plateau were four khaki-coloured tents, with men working at them.

"This could be it?" Williams said.

"This could be it"

This wasn't it. A glance at the thin, wispy-bearded, pebble-bespectacled lad who came hurrying forward to greet me when I stepped on to the ground was all the proof I required that this was indeed not it. Another glance at the seven or eight bearded, scarved and duffel-coated characters behind him who had not, as I'd thought, been working but were struggling to prevent their tents from being blown away by the wind, was almost superfluous proof. That lot couldn't have hi-jacked a rowing boat. The M.F.V., I could see now, was down by the stern and listing heavily to starboard.

"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 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 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-barrelled 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 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 MacEachern 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' 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 I 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 met the 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 it 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 it 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 fore-shore 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 side 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.

"What the hell's the matter with you?" she demanded.

"Nothing. The end of a dream. Deirdre would never have talked like that. Where's your old man?"

"My old man?" The one eye I could see had the power turned up to its maximum shrivelling voltage. "You mean my father?"

"Sorry. Lord Kirkside." It was no feat to guess that she was Lord Kirkside's daughter, hired help are too ignorant to have the execrable manners of their aristocratic betters.

"I'm Lord Kirkside." I turned round to see the owner of the deep voice behind me, a tall rugged-doffing character in his fifties, hawk nose, jutting grey eyebrows and moustache, grey tweeds, grey deerstalker, hawthorn stick in hand. "What's the trouble, Sue?"

Sue. I might have known. Exit the last vestige of the Hebridean dream. I said: "My name is Johnson, Air-Sea Rescue. There was a boat, the Moray Rose, in bad trouble somewhere south of Skye. If she'd been not under command but still afloat she might have come drifting this way. We wondered — "

"And Sue was going to fling you over the cliff before you had a chance to open your mouth?" He smiled down affectionately at his daughter. "That's my Sue. I'm afraid she doesn't like newspapermen."

"Some do and some don't. But why pick on me?"

"When you were twenty-one could you, as the saying goes, tell a newspaperman from a human being? I couldn't. But I can now, a mile away. I can also tell a genuine Air-Sea Rescue helicopter when I see one. And so should you too, young lady. I’m sorry, Mr. Johnson, we can't help you. My men and I spent several hours last night patrolling the cliff-tops to see if we could see anything. Lights, flares, anything. Nothing, I’m afraid."

"Thank you, sir. I wish we had more voluntary co-operation of this kind." From where I stood I could see, due south, the gently rocking masts of the Oxford field expedition's boat in Little Horseshoe Bay. The boat itself and the tents beyond were hidden behind the rocky eastern arm of the bay. I said to Lord Kirkside: "But why newspapermen, sir? Dubh Sgeir isn't quite as accessible as Westminster."

"Indeed, Mr. Johnson." He smiled, not with his eyes. "You may have heard of -well, of our family tragedy. My elder boy, Jonathan, and John Rollinson — Sue's fiancé."

I knew what was coming. And after all those months she had those smudges under her eyes. She must have loved him a lot. I could hardly believe it.

"I'm no newspaperman, sir. Prying isn't my business." It wasn't my business, it was my life, the raison d'etre for my existence. But now wasn't the time to tell him.

"The air accident. Jonathan had his own private Beechcraft." He waved towards the stretch of green turf running to the Northern cliffs. "He took off from here that morning. They — the reporters — wanted on-the-spot reporting. They came by helicopter and boat — there's a landing stage to the west." Again the mirthless smile. "They weren't well received. Care for a drink? You and your pilot?" Lord Kirkside, for all the reputation Williams had given him, seemed to be cast in a different mould from his daughter and Mr. Donald MacEachern: on the other hand, as the Archbishop of Canterbury knew to his cost, Lord Kirkside was a very much tougher citizen than either his daughter or Mr. MacEachern.

"Thank you, sir. I appreciate that. But we haven't many hours of daylight left."

"Of course, of course! How thoughtless of me. But you can't have much hope left by this time."

"Frankly, none. But, well, you know how it is, sir."

"We'll cross our fingers for that one chance in a million. Good luck, Mr. Johnson." He shook my hand and turned away. His daughter hesitated then held out her hand and smiled. A fluke of the wind had blown the hair off her face, and when she smiled like that, sooty eyes or not, the end of Deirdre and the Hebridean dream didn't seem to be of so much account after all. I went back to the helicopter.

"We're getting low on both fuel and time," Williams said. "Another hour or so and we'll have the dark with us. Where now, Mr. Calvert?"

"North. Follow this patch of grass — seems it used to be used as a light aircraft runway — out over the edge of the cliff. Take your time."

So he did, taking his time as I'd asked him, then continued on a northward course for another ten minutes. After we were out of sight of watchers on any of the islands we came round in a great half circle to west and south and east and headed back for home.

The sun was down and the world below was more night than day as we came in to land on the sandy cove on the eastern side of the Isle of Torbay. I could just vaguely distinguish the blackness of the tree-clad island, the faint silvery gleam of the sand and the semicircular whiteness where the jagged reef of rocks fringed the seaward approach to the cove. It looked a very dicey approach indeed to me but Williams was as unworried as a mother at a baby-show who has already slipped the judge a five-pound note. Well, if he wasn't going to worry neither was I: I knew nothing about helicopters but I knew enough about men to recognise a superb pilot when I sat beside one. All I had to worry about was that damned walk back through those Stygian woods. One thing, I didn't have to run this time.

Williams reached up his hand to flick on the landing lights but the light came on a fraction of a second before his fingers touched the switch. Not from the helicopter but from the ground. A bright light, a dazzling light, at least a five-inch searchlight located between the high-water line of the cove and the tree-line beyond. For a moment the light wavered, then steadied on the cockpit of the helicopter, making the interior bright as the light from the noon-day sun. I twisted my head to one side to avoid the glare. I saw Williams throw up a hand to protect his eyes, then slump forward wearily, dead in his seat, as the white linen of his shirt turned to red and the centre of his chest disintegrated. I flung myself forwards and downwards to try to gain what illusory shelter I could from the cannonading sub-machine shells shattering the windscreen. The helicopter was out of control, dipping sharply forwards and spinning slowly on its axis. I reached out to grab the controls from the dead man's hands but even as I did the trajectory of the bullets changed, either because the man with the machine-gun had altered his aim or because he'd been caught off-balance by the sudden dipping of the helicopter. An abruptly mad cacophony of sound, the iron clangour of steel-nosed bullets smashing into the engine casing mingled with the banshee ricochet of spent and mangled shells. The engine stopped, stopped as suddenly as if the ignition had been switched off. The helicopter was completely out of control, lifeless in the sky. It wasn't going to be in the sky much longer but there was nothing I could do about it. I braced myself for the jarring moment of impact when we struck the water, and when the impact came it was not just jarring, it was shattering to a degree I would never have anticipated. We'd landed not in the water but on the encircling reef of rocks.

I tried to get at the door but couldn't make it, we'd landed nose down and facing seawards on the outside of the reefs and from the position where I'd been hurled under the instrument panel the door was above and beyond my reach. I was too dazed, too weak, to make any real effort to get at it. Icy water poured in through the smashed windscreen and the fractured floor of the fuselage. For a moment everything was as silent as the grave, the hiss of the flooding waters seemed only to emphasise the silence then the machine-gun started again. The shells smashed through the lower after part of the fuselage behind me and went out through the top of the windscreen above me. Twice I felt angry tugs on the right shoulder of my coat and I tried to bury my head even more deeply into the freezing waters. Then, due probably to a combination of an accumulation of water in the nose and the effect of the fusillade of bullets aft, the helicopter lurched forwards, stopped momentarily, then slid off the face of the reef and fell like a stone, nose first, to the bottom of the sea.