‘I don’t mean the States; I mean here, in Scotland.’
‘There’s no Salem in Scotland, girl, at least I don’t think there is.’ He shrugged. ‘God only knows, lass, I could be wrong; education was never my strong suit.’
‘I don’t mean to interrupt,’ said Potter, the whistling schoolteacher, in his soft, gentle voice. ‘But could you mean Salen? With an “n” instead of an “m”?’
She dug out her wallet and took out the still-damp matchbook cover, peering at it in the flickering light thrown up by the cooking fire. ‘It’s possible,’ she said, slipping the cover back in place and putting the wallet back in her pocket.
‘Well, that could be it then,’ he said, flushing for no apparent reason except his proximity to the fire. ‘Angus is quite right, you see, there is no Salem in Scotland. I’m fairly sure at any rate.’ The flush deepened. ‘I taught geography as well as music, you see. There is no Salem but there is a Salen. It’s on the Isle of Mull, actually.’
‘You mean Kintyre or Mull?’ said Angus. He laughed. ‘There’s plenty of Mulls but no Salems.’
‘Mull,’ said Potter. ‘The Mull of Kintyre is altogether different.’
‘Well, that’s settled then,’ said Angus. ‘Is that where we’re going?’
‘We?’ said Jane.
‘Aye, lass. You were no thinking of going on alone, were you?’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘Nae, it won’t do, lass, they’d be on you in a minute,’ he said emphatically. ‘You might get by on how you look but open your mouth to natter and you’re doomed.’ He nodded towards the schoolboy. ‘You can be a mutie like him and a bit slow like our friend Solomon there; that ought to do us for the while.’
‘What about the others?’ asked Jane.
‘Take them to our winter quarters, Sergeant,’ said Angus, turning towards the black man. ‘I’ll meet you there when I’ve done with the girlie.’ He turned towards the mouth of the cave and sniffed the air thoughtfully. ‘You’ve got an hour or so to be in the wind, Sergeant, if my senses are correct.’ He turned back to Jane. ‘Come along now, Geordie boy, we’d best be going.’
He stripped her half-dried clothing off the sticks it had been suspended from around the fire, crammed it into the carpetbag and pushed her towards the mouth of the cave. She turned once and raised her hand to the others but they were too busy packing up to notice, with the exception of Solomon, who lifted his hand in a little wave and smiled. She turned away and followed Angus out into the light and down to the river.
‘Are you sure they’ll be all right?’ she asked, easing her way slowly down the treacherous slope behind Angus.
‘Aye,’ said the Scotsman without turning around. He was moving quickly and she had to hurry to keep up, the rocky scree sliding out from under her feet. ‘There’s an old Roman silver mine on the edge of Seven Sisters Moor about ten miles from here. The mine goes into an old barrow and there’s plenty of room. Lots of rabbits and other game on the moor.’
They reached the bottom of the near cliff and turned along the riverbank. A few moments later they reached the spot where Jane had come ashore.
‘Is that where you washed up, lass?’ said Angus, pausing briefly.
‘Yes.’
‘You’re lucky to be alive, girl. You realise that, don’t you?’
‘It’s not the first time I’ve had a close call,’ she answered.
‘No doubt,’ said Angus, looking at her speculatively. ‘Cats and kittens I suppose, except you’ve gone and used most of your nine lives by now.’ He stared upriver. ‘I’ve seen these currents take a full-grown elk and drown her in a minute,’ he said. He smiled. ‘As you’re no doubt aware, lass, the Scottish side of the river is a treacherous place.’ He turned away and moved off down the riverbank, keeping up a steady pace for the next ten minutes. He stopped at a small backwater and moved nimbly among the rocks, almost falling into the inky pool of still water. Jane followed as best she could.
‘You mind telling me where we’re going, Angus?’
‘Here we are then,’ he said and pointed. There, tucked away between two large rocks and perfectly camouflaged from the river by an immense, overhanging willow tree was a long, narrow, lapstraked rowing boat, twin oars neatly shipped, and fitted with a wooden rudder in the beautifully curved stern. Neatly painted on the transom was her name:
Four Winds
‘Where did this come from?’ Jane asked, eyeing the pretty little craft appreciatively; she didn’t know stem from stern or abaft from abeam but she had a photographer’s eye for beauty and knew good lines when she saw them.
‘She floated down the river one day and I rescued her,’ said Angus blithely, not meeting Jane’s eyes. He handed her into the back of the boat, then let go the forward painter, which had been looped around the stump of an old tree, and climbed in himself, settling down on the middle thwart and unshipping the two long oars. He lifted the left oar out of its lock and used it to push them out into the open stream, then dropped the well-oiled spindle back into place. Arching his wide back slightly he began to row, easing them out into the main current of the broad, fast-flowing river.
‘Why is it I don’t believe you?’ said Jane.
‘A lack of judgement regarding the human condition, I expect,’ Angus replied, his large nose lifting delicately into the air. ‘Fer it’s God’s own truth ahm telling you.’
‘Did you know your Scots accent gets more and more heather in it when you lie?’ said Jane, laughing.
‘Now is that a fact?’ said Angus, grinning broadly and showing off his impoverished dental work. ‘And by the bye, dearie-me-love, what would you know about the heather?’
‘You’re not the country bumpkin you make yourself out to be, are you?’ asked Jane, the water burbling in noisy little vortexes around the transom. The clifflike banks of the river rose dramatically on either side, sparsely treed and dangerous-looking, jutting outcrops of dark rock poking out here and there like giant old teeth heaving angrily out of the hard-packed earth.
‘I’m nae a bumpkin and I’m nae from the country, girlie; ah told you I was a sailor, didn’t I?’
‘That you did,’ agreed Jane. She found herself wondering what Angus McConnigle’s real story was and whether she’d ever hear it. Twelve hours ago the world had been a straightforward place of black and white, good and evil, truth and lies. Now that world had been turned upside down and her along with it. Dundee had vanished into thin air and then she’d been confronted with a dead woman in her bedroom and a killer lying in wait for her, slung under a bridge. Occleshaw the cop was the enemy bent on tracking her down come hell or high water and her knight on a white charger was a self-admitted criminal with bad teeth, rowing her off to God knows where down the river she’d almost drowned in.
‘Where exactly are we going, Angus?’ she asked. The sun was breaking through the scudding clouds here and there, giving the promise of a slightly better day. In front of her Angus laid off the oars for a moment, letting the river’s swirling current do the work.
‘If you take Mr Potter at his word, we’re going to Salen, which, as he told you, is on the Isle of Mull. We’re a fair ways from there at the moment I’m afraid. A hundrit and fifty miles or thereabouts.’ He frowned, thinking hard. ‘I’d say our best chance lies in getting away from this area as quickly as possible. The main line of the railway is behind us, as you know, but there’s a number of local trains we can take.’
‘Heading where?’
‘Glasgow for the wa’, then on to Oban. There’ll be steamers to Mull.’ He paused. ‘I seriously doubt yon Okkey would be looking for you so far afield.’
‘I’m afraid he’s not the only one we’ve got to worry about.’
‘Aye.’ Angus nodded. ‘You’ve said as much. But I only said there were steamers at Oban that could take us across the water to Mull.’ He smiled. ‘I did nae say we had to take one.’
‘How long?’
‘Across the wa
ter to Mull? A few hours, I’d guess. Been a time since I’ve been to Mull.’
‘To get there. From here.’
‘Depends,’ said Angus.
‘On what?’ asked Jane.
‘Oh, well, as thy saying goes: many a mickle mak’s a muckle.’ He smiled and picked up the oars in his large strong hands and started to row again.
They slid down the river quickly, the cliffs lowering on either side until Jane could see low, rolling hills and cols both north and south; great lonely moors broken here and there by small brushstrokes of wood and the occasional fell, rising like a stone spike out of the boggy earth. There were long twists of chalky road that wound through the moorland, but not many, and no signs of civilisation beyond the odd line of a stone wall or a spill of smoke from a peat fire.
Eventually the river began to slow and widen, small islands appearing within the stream. Jane could swear she smelled salt in the air and said so to Angus. In reply he nodded briefly and, as they reached a low valley crossing the river at right angles, he began guiding Four Winds towards the northern shore.
‘The North Sea,’ he said as he took the boat up onto the pebbled beach and shipped the oars. ‘Still a fair bit off yet but we’re as close to Berwick on Twa’ as we dare be.’ He gestured. ‘Oot the boat, girl. We’ve a fair bit of walking to do before the day is done if we want to avoid thy Okkey.’
‘He’s not my Okkey,’ said Jane, stepping over the thwarts gingerly and hopping out of the boat. Angus pulled Four Winds higher up the scree then tied the painter to a log that had washed up on shore. Then he set off up the beach. Their river road had come to an end.
Chapter Twenty-two
‘Is it safe to leave it like that?’ asked Jane, scrambling after him. In New York it would be like leaving a brand-new Packard Clipper by the curb with its doors unlocked and the keys in the ignition.
‘Well,’ said Angus, turning back to look at the boat and scratching his head. ‘We could post a guard, I suppose. On the other hand, the only person who’d steal her is someone who needed her and who am I to deprive a man of transportation when he sore requires it?’
They crossed the beach and found a pathway leading up onto the moor. It was still cold but Jane’s assortment of borrowed clothing was warm enough. She was surprised to find that she felt almost light-hearted as she matched Angus’s stride. All in all, she decided, it could have been a lot worse – the shadowy figure under the bridge could have been a better shot, for instance.
They walked for an hour, heading upland through the narrow valley, the sun climbing in the sky and the air warming somewhat. They reached the top of the valley and paused beside a small, tinkling stream that seemed to spring almost magically from a knot of stone some yards away. Cupping her hands, Jane drank some of the crisp, ice-cold water then splashed some on her face. She thought about the colour of the water that came out of the tap in her Greenwich Village kitchen and smiled to herself. She checked her Hamilton and was astounded to see that it was barely eight in the morning.
‘I’d hide that wee trinket away,’ said Angus, looking at the watch. ‘Nae mutie hairdsman’s boy aught sich a thing in these parts.’
Jane nodded. She undid the strap of the watch then shoved it into the pocket of her jacket. She had another drink of water from the stream and sat back on her heels, taking in the view ahead.
In front of her, stretching out for at least a mile, was a long, sloping section of moor, boggy and spotted with tussocks of sparse grass. Beyond that she could see a winding stretch of road heading away to the north, bracketed by grazing pockets of sheep held behind low wire fences, broken here and there by stiles and the odd rough gate. The road itself was bare of any traffic. On the road’s far side she could see a strange feather of wood that crept up the side of the hill and then topped it.
To the left and right of the road were low, sloping hills, broken by stone outcroppings as they had been in the valley they had just passed through. Beyond that, farther distant and misty even at midday, were low, heathery mountains. There was no sound intruding into all of this except the tinkling of the stream and the distant calls of plovers, winking and darting from side to side, high in the morning sky.
‘It’s beautiful,’ she said quietly.
‘It’s bloody dangerous,’ muttered Angus, squatting down beside her and looking out over the barren countryside. ‘Land’s as bald as a baby’s arse and there’s nae enough cover for a tom-tit in all that fooking grass.’ He stood. ‘We’d best be getting across all that to the railway before they send out beaters.’
‘Beaters?’
‘Aye, girl,’ Angus said, scanning the horizon. ‘It’s how they hunt for pheasant… or escaping prisoners. They set out a line of men to beat the grass and flush yon prey.’ His lips thinned. ‘And then, like as not, they fire their great bloody guns. Whisht! Sometimes they have bloodhounds as well, d’ye ken?’
‘I think so,’ said Jane. ‘Let’s get going.’ They both trudged over the crest of the valley and began working their way around the shallow patches of bog. The air smelled sweetly of peat and the death of small things and grass. It was, thought Jane, the exact opposite of living in a city where every odour came from either man or machine. For all Angus’s dire predictions about the dangers of such a place, Jane found herself thinking once again about the stories about England and Scotland she’d read when she was a girl and almost believing them once again.
‘When you were young did you ever read Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson? Or The Master of Ballantrae? I used to get copies out of the library with these great illustrations, as good as any comic, and…’
‘Hush!’ said Angus, stopping and leaning his ear into the wind.
‘What is it?’
‘Quiet, lass!’ Angus hissed, listening hard. Then Jane caught the sound as well, rising out of the distance to the south like a little mechanical gnat.
Aeroplane.
‘Where?’ asked Jane.
Angus pointed. ‘There,’ he said. Jane followed his raised arm to the western horizon, more or less in the direction of the cave, far upriver from the little, toy-like valley they’d just left. At first she saw nothing but the rolling hills and moor and the ragged, magic shadows of the clouds passing overhead but then it appeared, a small shape growing larger with each passing second.
‘Shit,’ said Angus flatly.
‘Maybe they’re not looking for me at all,’ said Jane. ‘There’s got to be some other reason for a plane to be flying around up here.’ She paused. ‘There is a war on, you know.’
‘What kind of war would that be?’ asked Angus. ‘One with sheep and wee Scots bunnies for the enemy? Armed to the teeth, presumably?’ He shook his head. ‘Nae, girl, they’re looking for us, there’s little doubt of that; and they’ll catch us soon enough, you can be sure. Naw doubt they’re having radios and all, talking to their people on the ground.’ He gave a long heartfelt sigh. ‘It’s nae like it used to be when a runner at least had a bare chance of getting away from the flatties and flouders.’
‘Who?’
‘Police, lass.’
‘I don’t think so, Angus,’ said Jane, watching the sky. It was a high-winged monoplane, small, with a spidery, awkward-looking undercarriage. The Army called them Grasshoppers, small inspection and courier aircraft that could hop easily from one military installation to another, carrying personnel and mail. It wasn’t the kind of thing the cops would have access to in an out-of-the-way place like this and somehow she didn’t think Occleshaw would want to call attention to himself by asking for military aid.
She bit her lip; this was something even more dangerous than the man from Special Branch. These were the people who’d taken Lucas and killed the woman in her bedroom on the train. They didn’t play by anyone’s rules except their own.
Watching, they saw that the plane was travelling in wide circles about three hundred feet off the moor, making a slow pattern in the air. Searching. With their backs against the
sun and keeping to the shaded side of the hill it was doubtful they’d been spotted yet but it was only a matter of time. Directly ahead, with nothing but open moor between, was a dense wood on the far side of a narrow road that was barely more than a track twisting and turning through the small glens and hills that made up the landscape.
‘The woods!’ yelled Angus. ‘Run!’
He grabbed her and they began pelting down the hill, cutting around the tussocks of grass and the treacherous areas of slippery bog waiting to entrap them. With one eye on the approaching aircraft and the other eye on the ground at their feet, they raced down the slope, heading for the road and the dark patch of trees just beyond.
‘Christ, look!’ said Angus, pointing up the road. A mile or so distant, separated from them by a string of small cols and glens, Jane saw a plume of dust coming out of the north; a car or some other vehicle that stood between them and the safety of the forest. Angus grabbed Jane by the arm and they began to run again. Jane knew it was no use; the car would get there before them; they were trapped out in the open. She caught a flashing glint of reflected light out of the corner of her eye. Someone in the Grasshopper had a pair of binoculars.
Angus suddenly pulled up short and dragged her to the left. They were fifty yards from the road and the car had disappeared into a small valley to the left. Directly in front of them now was a flock of fifty or so sheep scattered about the hillside, calmly grazing at the low, rough grass. Angus began to wave his arms and hoot loudly. The startled sheep suddenly clumped together skittishly and headed down towards the road. Angus stopped his flailing and clapped his hands once or twice, making little yipping noises in the back of his throat and sounding remarkably like a dog.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ asked Jane, looking towards the road. The car was still on the far side of the hill and out of sight.
‘Hairding,’ he said. ‘It’s what a sheep hairder does and I’d advise ye to do it as well if you value your freedom.’ He continued making the yipping noises, the sheep now flowing around him, content to be herded along towards the road. Jane did the same, following Angus’s lead, making sure her gestures weren’t too broad and always keeping one eye on the road.
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