Which he was likely to do unless she found some way to dry her clothes and warm up a little. She managed to get to her feet, wobbling, and noticed that she was short one shoe. It was a miracle that she still had even one but one shoe wasn’t going to cut it if she was to have any hope of getting out of Occleshaw’s clutches.
She shivered, her teeth chattering. The slope of the cliff leading back up to the desolate moor was less steep here but not by much. She let her eyes wander over the near cliff, looking for some way up through the thick scrub brush and bramble. She finally spotted a pale line that zigzagged almost invisibly upward from the bank, appearing and disappearing through the low trees; a path, and almost as good, it seemed to lead to what she first thought was a darkly shadowed rock outcropping but, in the growing light, now saw was a hidden cave, the entrance almost perfectly screened by a dense barrier of undergrowth. She tried to imagine it in full daylight and saw that the entrance itself would probably fade away to invisibility. It also looked as though the path ran out shortly beyond it, making the cave nearly impossible to get to from above.
She stared. If she’d almost missed it then maybe Occleshaw and his men would miss it as well. If she didn’t find some sort of refuge pretty quickly she was going to be too tired to care if she got caught. Impossibly, like a mirage to a man dying in the desert, she could swear that for a moment she’d seen a thin tracing of smoke marking the cave entrance. She looked again and it was gone. Limping on one shoe, shivering in her wet sweater, Jane trudged up the narrow path and began to climb.
It was almost full light by the time she reached the stone shelf that stood at the mouth of the cave. The sun was invisible behind low clouds that looked like tattered old grey shrouds; Scotland’s welcome was no better in the day than it was by night. Jane stopped suddenly as she reached the line of brush that masked the cave entrance. For the first time she saw that the screening effect was far from natural; the brush and bracken had been cut and put in position artificially, the bottom branches and foliage already turning brown.
‘I’ll thank you to keep comin’ on, lass, and dinna mistake my intention. I’ve got a wee gun and I’ll blow those pretty tits of your’n into the river if I have to, which, after due consideration, I’d really rather not do.’
The accent was definitely Scottish and Jane almost smiled, despite the menacing tone. ‘You’re pretty long-winded for a man making threats,’ said Jane. The voice was given a figure as a bearded, long-haired wraith appeared from behind the screen of undergrowth. He had what appeared to be a German Luger in his hand. He was filthy and he was wearing a kilt. The kilt was filthy as well, stained with a month’s worth of meals and what appeared to be blood. His upper body was clothed in what looked like a green, crushed-velvet lounge jacket. Insanely, he was wearing a deerstalker hat perched on his head, riding high on the tangle of black hair shot with wide streaks of grey, flaps down over his ears. ‘Long-winded and wearing a dress,’ said Jane. This time she did smile. Making fun of a lunatic Scotsman wearing a kilt would be dangerous at the best of times but right now her sense of humour was the only weapon she had.
‘Are ye insane, woman?’ said the man.
‘You read my mind,’ said Jane, smiling wearily.
‘Most people would say ye were mad to insult a Cameron that way,’ said the man, hefting the Luger.
‘Your name’s Cameron?’
‘Nay, woman, that’s nae what I said. A Cameron. As in the Cameron Highlanders, late of Verdun, Mons and a host other even less palatable spots.’
‘You fought in the war then?’
‘More like as to say I survived it, lass. Sixteen years old and had the shit scared out of me so far it went all the way back to fecking Carlisle and stayed there. I vowed then I’d never fight for fecking England again and so far I’ve kept that promise.’ He looked Jane up and down. ‘You’re wet,’ he said, stating the obvious.
‘No shit… uh… Sherlock,’ she said, eyeing the hat.
‘It’s McConnigle but my friends all call me Angus. Ye sound like a Yank but are ye friend or foe?’
‘Right now I’d be anyone’s friend for a warm fire.’
‘I can provide that.’ The mad Scot smiled. His lips were cracked and his front teeth were black stumps. ‘How about a cup of tea and a spot of breakfast to go along with it?’ Angus asked, poking the gun into his belt. As he spoke a faint odour came wafting out from the hidden cave entrance. It smelled like bacon fat.
‘God knows what I’d do for that.’ She grinned. ‘You don’t happen to have a cigarette on you by any chance?’
Angus grinned back. ‘Aye, girl, I can provide that too.’ He stood aside and gestured to her to come forward. ‘All the comforts of home await. Come into our humble abode if you will.’
‘Our?’
‘Aye, lass, our. I’m nae alone here and thank the good lord for that.’
She came limping forward, ducking her head under the foliage hanging down over the narrow entrance to the cave, aware of Angus close at her back. She stopped just inside the cave mouth.
The inside of the cave was much larger than she expected, widening substantially beyond the entrance. There was a front ‘room’ containing a stone enclosure for the fire crackling warmly within it, a makeshift metal grill over the flames holding a battered and stained galvanised enamel coffeepot set off to one side and a cast-iron frying pan in the centre cooking the thick strips of bacon she’d smelled outside. Another piece of metal, like a short fishing pole, had been attached to the side opposite the coffeepot, the skinned carcass of a rabbit skewered on its upper end, liquid fat running off its sinewy flanks and hissing as it struck the flames.
Beyond the fire, lost in the long, dancing shadows, was the rear section of the cave, a large, high-ceilinged space with rough sleeping platforms of cedar boughs built on rock outcroppings, the boughs covered in tattered pieces of what looked like the canvas roof of an army truck. The cave interior was warm, the chalky walls absorbing the heat from the fire and reflecting it back into the interior. At one time or another someone had taken a sharp stone and scratched rude landscapes on the walls like some latter-day caveman. The rock art was amateur but it did give the place a homey look. Better than hanging on for dear life on a bridge beam over a river and being shot at, that was for sure.
There were four other people in the cave, two sitting on basic wooden benches, two more, covered by old army blankets, leaning against the stone walls of the ‘kitchen’ and mutely staring into the flames. They were an odd assortment and certainly a match for Angus McConnigle in their eccentricities. One of the two seated against the wall was black as coal, with a broad face and the shoulders of a prizefighter. His head was shaved down to a military fuzz and there was a long, jagged scar like a thunderbolt that stretched down his cheek and into his lip, pulling it up slightly into a perpetual sneer. When he looked up, as Jane came into the cave, she was startled to see a pair of frighteningly intelligent eyes set into the savaged face. Underneath the old army blanket he had across his shoulders Jane could see that he wore the remains of a U.S. Army uniform. Above the left breast pocket Jane could see a dingy rainbow of service ribbons and through a hole in the blanket she could see master sergeant stripes.
Beside the black man was a boy half his size and white as the underbelly of a fish. He looked like a schoolboy, lank dark hair falling over a thin face still splotched by adolescent acne. As Jane entered the cave he showed no interest at all. Underneath his enclosing blankets she could see that he really was a schoolboy, wearing grey flannels and a stained and muddy jacket with a crest on the pocket. Beneath the jacket he was wearing the remains of a white shirt, several buttons gone and replaced with safety pins. There were badly scuffed and scraped black Oxfords on his feet, the laces broken several times and held together by oddly shaped knots.
Seated on benches set close to the fire were the last two occupants of the cave. The one idly moving the bacon around in the frying pan with a stick obviously wh
ittled for that exact purpose looked very much like the mute schoolboy’s headmaster. He was very thin, wearing the remains of a tweed suit that had clearly seen better days, but somehow he’d managed to keep a thin brown moustache neatly trimmed and his steel-rimmed spectacles bright and shiny. On his head he wore a pristine Ivy League cap that would have looked more fitting if he’d been behind the wheel of a sports car with a pipe in his mouth. He had tiny pink ears and a narrow, pointed chin. As he worked the stick in the frying pan he was whistling quietly to himself. Jane was surprised at herself when she recognised the tune; it was a selection from Handel’s Messiah, note for note and perfectly on key.
‘I don’t suppose you know Fingal’s Cave, do you?’ she said with a smile. ‘It’s by Mendelssohn, I think.’ The thin man nodded and, without missing a beat, launched into her request, giving life to what the man on the train had told her about the long- dead composer.
The last of the cave’s occupants was a huge man, head and shoulders taller than the whistler. He leaned slightly in the direction of the man turning the bacon, his eyes closed with a beatific, almost rapturous look on his face as he listened to the music. Jane had known lots of these gentle creatures on Welfare Island, at the asylum where her sister had stayed for most of her life, and had never been able to see why they were put away; they were harmless, affectionate as puppies and in comparison to some people she’d known freely walking the streets of New York they were far from insane.
‘Go stand there beside Solomon if you’re not too nervous,’ said Angus, nodding his head towards the huge man. ‘Warm your naddled wee self before you turn into an icicle.’
She went and stood beside the big man. He opened his eyes and smiled at her. ‘Hello there,’ she said and smiled back. He nodded again and went back to the whistled Mendelssohn.
Angus came and stood across the fire from her, his hands extended to the flames, the Luger gleaming at his belt. ‘They’ve all got their stories, long and short, just like mine.’
‘I’ve got one too,’ said Jane, laughing. ‘God knows where I’d start though.’
‘Beginning is the usual place,’ said the black man from his corner. The words came in a soft Georgia lilt but with none of the backwoods cadence she might have expected. Instead the voice was clear and educated. There was more to the man than a scar and a sneer.
She saw too that telling her story and relating how she got to this place was the price of admission to their select hotel drilled into the cliff beside the river so she told her tale, holding back details she thought had no relevance but not withholding the desperate situation she now found herself in. They fed her from the frying pan, adding a slice of doughy, tough bread that Angus owned up to making in the little makeshift oven he’d created out of river clay. While she ate, surprised at her ravenous appetite, Angus listened and rolled her a cigarette from the fixings he stored in a small leather pouch that hung from his belt.
‘So you think this Okkey fella you mentioned will come lookin’ for ye, lass?’ asked Angus when she was done.
‘I’d bet on it.’ She took the cigarette from his hand. Without a word, the whistling man took a small piece of dried bracken from the small pile at his feet, lit it in the coals of the cooking fire and handed the makeshift match across to her. She lit her cigarette and took the first glorious puff, inhaling deeply then letting the smoke out of her lungs in a slow trickle through her nostrils. ‘I’m sorry if I’ve put you and the others in any jeopardy.’ She looked around the front section of the cave; the four occupants didn’t look terribly concerned.
‘We’ve had others come looking for us from time to time,’ said a grinning Angus. ‘They’ve nae found us yet.’
‘I’m warning you, Occleshaw is different. He’ll keep looking for me till hell freezes over. He’s not the kind of man who gives up easily.’
‘Well,’ said Angus, stretching his arms and yawning, showing off the ghastly interior of his mouth again. ‘This Okkey may be different but so are we. I’ve been “at large,” as the magistrates say, for three years now and they’ve nae come even close to fitting me up yet. I figure Hitler can’t last forever and when he’s done we’ll all go home.’ He nodded at the other people in the cave. ‘At least these lads can.’
‘Not you?’
‘I’m nae sure what I’d call home now. I once had a boat and a little cottage at Brackness Hole – that’s at the mouth of Loch Ryan mind, which has Stranraer at one end, the old ferry port to Ireland – but all that’s gone with the war; submarines and such. The wife died while I was off playing the fool in the previous altercation and, sadly, we had no bairns. This is as much home as anywhere else to me.’
‘What about the others?’ she said, tilting her head towards the giant beside her, now happily listening to Madame Butterfly. ‘Him for instance.’
‘Solomon you mean?’
‘That’s his name, Solomon?’
‘None of us ken what his real name is, lass, but that’s what we call him. It’s a name he keeps on saying. We know he’s a Jew so it makes some wee bit of sense.’
‘How do you know he’s a Jew?’
Angus laughed. ‘The tilt of his kilt, lass.’
‘What?’
‘His membrum virile, girlie. His dickerie doo.’ Angus guffawed. ‘Yon enormous sausage is missing its last inch. He’s circumcised.’
‘Oh,’ said Jane.
‘Aye,’ said Angus.
‘That’s all you know about him?’
‘I can make a guess. We’ve picked up bits and pieces over time.’
‘We think he’s a recent immigrant,’ the black man said from the far side of the cave. ‘Polish, maybe even Russian. He speaks a little of both languages. Yiddish as well.’
‘You can tell what languages he speaks?’ Jane tried to keep the surprise out of her voice but she found it a little hard to believe.
‘I was a cook on a tramp steamer for almost fifteen years before I joined the Army. I got around some.’
Angus spoke. ‘It’s likely he came with his parents; they’ve made the regulations a wee bit stronger in the last years before the war. A lot of people they sent to internment camps on the Isle of Man and such like. A lad like Solomon, here, they’d simply refuse. No mental defectives wanted, you might say. It was that or a camp. Solomon probably just ran off and somehow wound up here.’
‘He sure loves his music,’ said Jane.
‘Aye, that he does,’ said Angus. ‘You never know, maybe his father was a musician.’
‘He’s also an idiot savant,’ said the black man.
‘A what?’ asked Jane.
‘Show him, Potter,’ said the black man. The scholarly looking man beside Solomon dished another few strips of bacon into the frying pan with his makeshift spatula, then rested the wooden instrument carefully on the edge of the fireplace. He turned to Solomon and spoke quietly, putting one smooth, small hand on the man’s enormous shoulder.
‘Solomon…’
The giant opened his eyes and stared down at his friend. ‘Yes, Peter Potter?’ he asked. The voice was soft, almost girlish.
‘Can you sing for us, Solomon?’
‘Of course, Peter Potter.’ Solomon smiled happily. ‘What would you like to hear?’
Potter cleared his throat, wet his lips and whistled a few bars of Beethoven’s Fifth, then stopped. The boy closed his eyes and a few seconds later the enormous head began to move from side to side and one hand, fingers huge and powerful, began to move with the grace and elegance of a symphony conductor. Then he began to sing the chorus from the famous music, the voice ringing powerfully, in perfect pitch, turning the interior of the cave into a concert hall, every sound ringing true and glorious. Jane sat back on her heels, entranced. Potter reached up and put his hand on the boy’s shoulder again and the music stopped abruptly.
‘My God,’ Jane whispered.
‘Doesn’t matter what music you give him,’ said the black man. ‘It’s like he’s got God’s ju
kebox in his head. Everything from Mahler to Eddie Cantor in Ali Baba Goes to Town.’ He paused, shaking his head. ‘I said the name Paul Robeson once and he gave me a perfect “Old Man River” from Showboat.’
Jane dragged on her cigarette, looking at the people in the cave and wondered what a photo feature in Life would be like. ‘Rural Britain Soldiers On’ or something; except Angus wouldn’t like being deemed British – he was on the Scotland side of the river after all.
‘What about you, Sergeant?’ she said to the black man. ‘What’s your story?’
‘What every Negro in America’s story is, ma’am,’ he answered. ‘I did what my old daddy told me and followed God’s word – right into hell and damnation.’
‘You sound a little bitter.’
‘No, ma’am, a lot bitter. You see before you the final remains of a ruined man.’ He laughed – bitterly.
‘You were a soldier, obviously. What happened?’
‘I was a soldier and before that I was a merchant seaman, seeing the world and sowing my youthful wild oats. Before that I was a preacher’s son from Athens, Georgia, with an itch to see the world. Read too many books, dreamed too many dreams.’
‘You mind me asking how you got that scar?’ Jane asked.
‘No ma’am. I got that scar by sliding on my mother’s wet kitchen floor after she’d cleaned it, cutting myself open with the glass of water I was drinking.’ He smiled, the left side of his mouth barely moving. ‘Not all scars come from violent acts, ma’am. Some of them are downright silly. Makes me look like I’m some fierce, bloodthirsty nigger, which has been useful from time to time.’
An American Spy Page 18