Coffin Road

Chapter six

For the third time in two days, something external wakens me. I am disorientated. It is dark, but not late. An old-fashioned clock with luminous hands on the bedside table tells me that it is ten past midnight. Then I remember lying down on the bed after Sally dropped me at the cottage sometime after lunch, and realise I must have slept all afternoon and through the evening.

We had eaten at The Anchorage restaurant on the pier at Leverburgh. Soup, then quiche and salad and a couple of glasses of white wine. Sally told me we had eaten there often, and we were greeted by hellos and friendly smiles from the staff. But I didn’t remember the place at all.

Now I am on full alert. Because Bran has jumped down off the bed, a dangerous, low growling in his throat. I am wide awake in seconds and wishing I had left lights on in the house. But it had been daylight when I drifted off to sleep. I reach for the bedside lamp and knock it over, cursing under my breath as I hear the bulb break.

Bran barks. He is still in the room, but standing in the open doorway now. Not that I can see him. The darkness is so dense it is almost physical. No moon or starlight, no streetlights, or any light from nearby houses seeping in through windows.

‘Sally?’ I call out, more in hope than expectation. Bran would not react like this if it were her. I am rewarded by silence, broken only by Bran’s continued growling, and I swing my legs out of the bed to stand and feel my way to the wall. To my dismay we remain in darkness, even after I have flicked the light switch down.

Now my alarm turns to fear. There is someone in the house that Bran does not recognise, and there is no power. I feel for the door frame and swing myself into the hall. I know that the door to the sitting room is open. I shoosh Bran and stand very still, straining to pick up any sound. But Bran can’t contain himself for long and barks again. I take advantage of the noise to slip into the sitting room. Outside, a break in the cloud lets unexpected moonlight wash silver across the beach, and in the reflected light I see a shadow detach itself suddenly from darkness, filling my vision, a flash momentarily illuminating the length of a blade that signals deadly intent. I instinctively turn side-on to make myself a smaller target, reaching for the knife arm to stop its downward arc, and I put my full weight behind my shoulder as I push it into the chest of my attacker.

He is smaller, lighter than me, and I feel his breath exploding in my face, sour from stale cigarette smoke, as he staggers backwards. I fumble desperately to hold on to his wrist as he struggles to free it, and then I push again, sending us both sprawling over the settee that backs on to the kitchen. I land on top, expelling all the air from his lungs, and we topple then on to the floor, his knife skidding away across the floorboards.

But as we roll over, my head strikes what must be the corner of the coffee table, and light and pain explode inside it. For several long moments I am quite disabled, all my strength dissipated, my limbs feeble and useless. I can hear Bran barking furiously in the dark, and am aware of my assailant scrambling across the floor to retrieve his knife. And there is not a thing I can do about it.

As I turn my head, I see his silhouette rising to its knees. The moon continues to sprinkle intermittent illumination across the beach beyond the French windows, and his face is mired in darkness. Not, it occurs to me in a moment of absurd lucidity, that I would recognise it even if I could see it. And along with this clarity comes the realisation that I am not going to be able to prevent him from plunging his knife into me as many times as he likes. It is one of those moments when your own mortality becomes, perhaps for the first time in your life, more than something to be locked away and dealt with in a distant future. It is here and now, and death is just a breath away.

I make one last attempt to roll over and get to my knees, and find myself knocked back down by a shape that seems comprised only of darkness. But it is a darkness both solid and human, and it flies at the man with the knife. Bran is barking incessantly and my confusion is crowded with the noise of his bark and the crashing of two men locked in physical struggle. Merged into a single entity as I try to make sense of what is happening.

My attacker, and his, fall together on to the coffee table, which shatters beneath them. I feel flying glass cut my cheek, and one of them is up on his feet and running. Through the kitchen and out into the boot room. The second man is slower to rise, winded, and I can hear him gasping for breath before he sets off in pursuit. Bran follows them, barking all the way to the door, and I lie for a moment, breathing heavily, letting my head clear before I try to stand up. I stagger into the kitchen, supporting myself on whatever I can reach, before stumbling into the boot room and out through the open door on to the steps.

The cold air is a physical assault, but it revives me sufficiently to enable me to step down on to the drive, from where I can see the shadow of a man sprinting away along the road in the direction of the cemetery. Just one, and I don’t know whether it is the first man or the second. I spin around, scanning the horizon, and then the beach, for any sign of the other. But as the clouds overhead blow across the moon in the stiffening breeze, the night settles again in a blanket of darkness that smothers the land.

A light comes on in the cottage opposite. The old lady with the yappy dog awakened from her sleep. I turn and shout at Bran to shut up, and he stops his barking. And beyond the wind, I can hear the distant yapping of the old lady’s dog, muffled by doors and windows.

I usher Bran back into the house and slam the door shut, turning the lock to secure it from the inside, and feel my way along the wall of the boot room to where I know the fuse box is set into a cavity above the boiler. Its plastic cover is down, and I fumble for the master switch. There is no light as I flick it up, but I hear the hum of the boiler as it springs back to life. Two steps to the door and I find the light switch, then stand blinking in the sudden painful glare of electric light.

I takes me some time, to come to terms with the fact that I am still alive, and that, apart from the mess in the other room and a gash in my head, nothing has changed. Except that it has. For someone has just tried to kill me. Some person, unknown, has come into my house in the dead of night and tried to put a knife between my ribs. Only by the grace of God, and the intervention of a second intruder, has my life been spared.

Nothing, absolutely nothing since I found myself washed up, semi-conscious, on the Tràigh Losgaintir, has made sense. My memory loss. My failure to find a single clue to my identity, beyond my name, even in my own home. My affair with Sally. The book on the Flannan Isles mystery that I am not writing. Beehives on the coffin road. My missing boat. Now someone trying to kill me. And someone else stepping in to save me. The weight of it all is very nearly crushing.

Bran is still excited and excitable, dancing around me, snuffling and snorting, still on the brink of barking. But I hold him in the boot room with my foot while I shut the door on him. He doesn’t understand, but there is shattered glass all over the floor of the sitting room and I know that I have to clear it up before I can let him back in. He barks his hurt through the door at me as I take a broom and shovel from the kitchen cupboard and start to sweep up. It takes me nearly fifteen minutes, searching out every reflecting speck of glass, and then vacuuming the floor just to be sure.

I right a small table that has been upended, replacing the lamp that stood on it, thankful that the bulb remains intact. Then move into the bedroom to pick up the pieces of broken bulb from the bedside lamp and run the vacuum cleaner over the carpet to suck up any shards I might have missed.

The very act of cleaning up after the attack has allowed me to calm down. My heart is beating almost normally again, and the focus on finding every skelf of glass has stopped me thinking too much about it. I don’t want to think about it. I don’t want to think about anything. I want to go back to the day before yesterday and be who I was then. With whatever secrets I might have had. At least I would have known what they were.

Finally I let Bran back through, and he runs around the house, sniffing in every corner. Strange, threatening scents. He is still on full alert, even if I have put it behind me. Well, not behind me, exactly. It’s more like I have slipped into denial.

Which is when I notice the blade of my attacker’s knife catching the light where it lies, almost obscured beneath the television cabinet. I drop to my knees and bend down to fish it out and hold it in my hand with a sense of awe. This is a hunting knife with a nine-inch blade, razor-sharp along its curved edge, serrated along the other. Its black haft has finger grips. My insides turn to water as I imagine how it would have felt to have this cold, deadly blade slice through my flesh and veins and organs. And I carry it with me through to the bedroom to slip below my pillow before climbing back into bed, Bran jumping up to stretch himself along my length for comfort. If anyone comes for me again, this time I will be ready.

Day two, AML. After memory loss. Morning greets me with dried blood on the pillow and a scab that has formed over my right temple where it struck the coffee table during last night’s struggle. I have a thumping headache, which might owe as much to oversleeping as to my injury. Of the last twenty-four hours, I count up that I have slept away as many as fifteen. I suppose I must have needed to, but it hasn’t improved either my physical or mental well-being.

It is just after six and Bran is already up, sitting patiently in the boot room, waiting for me to open the door and let him out. I oblige, and he scampers away across the dunes, watched by the Highland pony that grazes habitually among the beach grasses. I put out food and water for him and leave the door open for his return, then set the kettle to boil and spoon coffee into a mug.

As I wait, I go through to the sitting room. The only evidence of the life-or-death struggle that took place here at midnight last night is the buckled remains of the coffee table. I lift it up and carry it through to the spare room, and when I come back the sitting room seems bigger, empty somehow. I cross to the French windows and gaze out across the beach, watching sunlight chase shadows across turquoise and silver before they race each other over the purple-grey hills beyond. Buford’s caravan draws my attention, and I realise it is because his Land Rover is gone. And I wonder where he might be at this time of the morning. What does he do all day, every day? And what is his interest in me?

The kettle boils and I make my coffee, pouring in milk to cool it enough to drink, then sit at the table with the view of the beach spread out before me. I close my eyes as I let the warmth of the coffee slip back over my throat, and try to focus on what it is I need to do now. Where do I go from here? I can’t continue to live in this vacuum of ignorance. I have no purpose, no reason to get up in the morning without a past, or any future. Somehow I have to make sense of all this, figure out who I am and what I am doing here.

I incline my head to look at the map on the wall. If what I told Jon and Sally about an academic career in Edinburgh is true, why have I spent the last year and a half on the Isle of Harris pretending to write a book? My eyes come to rest on the cluster of dots on the map that are the Flannan Isles. I make regular visits to the islands, Sally says. But if I am not writing that book, then why? I must have had a reason. I cannot for the life of me think of anything that would connect the Seven Hunters with eighteen beehives hidden off the coffin road. But those islands seem like as good a place to start looking for answers as any.

I hear Bran returning, claws scraping on laminate floor, and his thirsty lapping of water before the rattle of food as he sticks his face in his bowl. I move around the table to sit in front of the laptop and open up my browser, searching for images of the Flannan Isles. There are plenty, it seems, on the internet, mostly amateur photographs taken by tourists, and not particularly useful. I spend nearly ten minutes searching through them before I stumble on the site of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland, and a detailed map of the lighthouse island, Eilean Mòr.

Shaped a little like a turtle on its back, it reveals a ragged coastline, with cliffs rising all around it. Both landing stages are marked, east and west, on the south side of the island, along with the siting of the cranes which must have been used to lift heavy tackle and supplies ashore. Paths lead up from each to converge almost in the centre of the island, before heading on up to the lighthouse itself. A helicopter landing pad is marked to the right of the path, which leads me to assume that service engineers must be brought to and from the island by helicopter. I am surprised to see a ‘Chapel’ marked on the map, just below the lighthouse, and I wonder who must have lived here once, long enough to have built a place of worship.

Bran pads through to sit beside my chair and look up at me, then pushes my elbow with his snout, in search of my hand. I ruffle his head absently, and stroke behind his ears. My boat has gone, God knows where. And I wonder how I will get out there.