Reaching it, Angus opened the simple gate and the sheep began to flow out onto the rutted track, completely blocking it within seconds. The car appeared at the top of the hill and began coming down. It was an old Alvis with a flat windscreen, black and covered with the grey, chalky lime dust that covered the road.
‘Now what?’ Jane whispered.
‘Keep your yap shut and act like a mutie. Leave the talking to me.’
Once the sheep were all into the road Angus calmly closed the gate behind him and began guiding the benign, flat-faced animals directly towards the car, making a huge wooly roadblock of gently moving sheep. The car pulled to a stop and two men climbed out. One was tall and heavyset under a dark brown belted coat and an old-fashioned soft derby that threw most of his face into shadow. The driver was much slimmer, hatless and wore small, steel-framed spectacles, the lenses tinted a pale green.
The driver spoke, his voice calm and without accent. The only thing Jane could be sure of was that he wasn’t a Scot. ‘Your sheep are in our way,’ he said, smiling.
‘Aye,’ replied Angus. ‘And your motor car is in mine.’
‘I suppose that is the case.’ The man paused, his smile widening. He had false teeth and the ones in the back gleamed. Steel or white gold perhaps. Not the kind of thing you saw in England. Whoever this man was, he wasn’t one of Occleshaw’s boys.
‘Perhaps you can tell me if you are from this area.’
‘Why should you want to know that?’ asked Angus. Jane wished he’d just get on with it and move the sheep out of the man’s way.
‘Idle curiosity,’ said the man. Jane could see a distinct bulge on the left side of the man’s heavy winter coat. He was carrying a gun.
Angus satisfied it. ‘Well, a bash on your curiosity. Here I am tethered to yon dumb lad with sair ‘een and a back like a suckle. My heid burstint too, for sure. I am nae sober, you see, in cause my young dochter Merran was waddit and they danced till foyer in the byre. Me and some other chiels sa’ down to the drinkin’ and here I am. Peety I een looked at the wine when it was raid.’ Angus smiled and Jane simply stared, dumbfounded. She’d barely understood a word he’d said. The driver of the Alvis looked blankly at him, the wide smile frozen on his face.
‘Can you tell me if you’ve seen anyone hereabouts today?’
‘Only yourself and your friend,’ said Angus.
‘Other than that.’
‘Nae. The sheep.’
‘I see.’
‘Not many of the tourist kind get to the likes of this place,’ mused Angus. ‘They’re nae much to do except watch sheep fookin.’ He smiled back at the driver, waving a broad flat hand over the flock that stood between them and which had already begun to absorb the car into its midst. ‘Which, as you can plainly see, they’ve been doing with a might.’ For the first time Jane actually took a good look at the animals surrounding her. They either had a patch of pale pink colouring on their bellies or their backs and it didn’t take her long to figure out why. By putting some sort of red dye on the rams ‘bellies it was possible to tell if an ewe had been mounted, and was likely to be lambing in the spring, if there was a mark on her back. Whoever really did own this flock appeared likely to be dining on lamb chops in March or April of next year.
Above them, the aeroplane had come down for a closer look and Jane saw that she’d been right; it was a Grasshopper, painted in the colours of the Eighth Army Air Force, with a serial number on the tail. It flew directly over them a hundred feet or so in the air, engine roaring, scattering the sheep in all directions. Ignoring the Alvis driver and his companion, Angus started rounding them up, making the yipping noise in the back of his throat again. Jane joined him, watching the two men out of the corner of her eye. They stood in the road for a moment and the driver seemed to be paying particular attention to her but eventually he turned and said something under his breath to his friend and they both climbed back in the car. A few moments later the last of the sheep trotted out of their way and the car drove off slowly. A minute later it was gone, hidden by the crest of the next hill.
‘Now what?’ asked Jane.
‘Keep at it,’ said Angus.
‘What?’
‘Listen,’ said Angus. Jane did. All she could hear was the distant drone of the plane as it headed across the hilly moor.
‘I don’t hear anything.’
‘Exactly,’ said Angus. ‘Watch the road on yon rise over there.’ Jane turned slightly. She suddenly saw the two men from the Alvis come over the hill and simply stand there, watching them. ‘The laddies are nae fools. Catch us running pell mell into yon woods and they’d have had us.’ The two men stood peering down at them for a long moment, then turned and disappeared. Angus turned to Jane and looked at her strangely. ‘They weren’t the police, Janey girl.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘Maybe it’s time I told you the whole story.’
‘Aye, maybe it is,’ he answered. ‘Since I appear to be one of the characters in it now.’
It took Jane and Angus ten minutes to round up their plump, woolly charges and set them back to foraging in the upland pasture they had been briefly released from. When the gate was firmly latched behind them, the two crossed the road and entered the woods they’d seen from the top of the long burn that led up from the river. They found an old deer trail and began to make good time, safely out of sight of both road and air. They stayed in the woods for most of the morning and Jane told her tale. For his part Angus simply listened, nodding now and then or making a small grunting noise when something interested or surprised him. He didn’t show the slightest surprise at the crown jewels being involved or the fact that Jane and Dundee had stumbled on a rat’s nest of organised deserters. He showed even less surprise that their leader was a well-heeled officer in the same army.
‘It was ever so,’ he said. ‘During the last war it wasn’t just the big industrialists who turned a farthing or two at the expense of the lads in the trenches. It was bad enough that bullets had half the powder they should have had and one out of three barrage shells was a dud but the food was rotten in its wee casks and the boot soles were sometimes made of cardboard. A lot of senior officers made a fair wage out of shortchanging their own lads.’ He scowled.
‘You sound as though you’re talking from personal experience,’ said Jane, trudging along beside him.
‘Aye,’ spat Angus, ‘along with four brothers and a lot of mates who died for no good reason. I came back from yon bonnie war with a bone in my craw for a lot of little men in the Department of Supply and Services, of that you can be sure.’ He laughed, his voice booming hollowly over the broad, dreary landscape they’d come to after leaving the trees. ‘And to make it worse, when I came home I found the tax man had taken my boat for want of payment owing for two years; they said that fighting for “my” country was no excuse for not making the proper quarterly payments to the fookin’ Inland Revenue.’
They tramped on through the morning, cutting across Cold Law and Collyburn Hoy, then moving across the Cheviot, Comb Fell to Crookedsike Head and Standrop Rigg, always heading north and west, heading for someplace called Tom Tallens, where Angus said there was a proper local train to be had.
Three times on the journey they had to take shelter from the Grasshopper and three times they managed to find cover before they were spotted. Finally, just after twelve, their luck ran out.
They had just reached the crest of yet another hill among a frozen sea of them that seemed to stretch on forever. Jane was famished and for the last hour or so they had been walking across the hills and moorland silently, lost in their own thoughts. At this point most of Jane’s were about food and so far she’d come to the conclusion that, for overall volume and weight, Beefsteak Charlie’s on West Fiftieth was the best deal in New York. There was sawdust on the floor, waiters with their hair parted down the middle and aprons down to their shoe-caps, great fat-dripping beefsteak sandwiches, baked potatoes that you could hide behind and lamb chops three
inches thick. The only decorations were rows of photographs of racetrack accidents on the walls, as though seeing jockeys trampled in the mud and thoroughbreds cracking their ankles as they fell head over heels, crushing their riders, was some kind of aid to digestion, like chewing your way through a roll of Jests as she’d done more than once after an evening at Charlie’s. She was also beginning to seriously crave a cigarette. Twice now she’d vainly gone through the empty pockets of her jacket on the off chance a pack of Spuds or Pall Malls might have mysteriously appeared. They hadn’t.
‘Down,’ said Angus, spotting them first. He put a large hand on Jane’s shoulder and pushed her down into the heather.
‘Where?’
‘Behind a bit… there,’ said Angus, pointing, but keeping himself below the crest of the hill. Jane looked back down into the valley they had just climbed out of and saw them. There were half a dozen men, spread out like a fan, slowly making their way down the hillside, coming through the heather slowly, scanning back and forth, poking into bits of brush or stone hollows with walking sticks or wooden staves they carried. At the top of the far hill, overseeing this, was a figure in a lightweight hacking jacket. He had something dangling around his neck that Jane assumed was a pair of binoculars. At first Jane thought the man was one of the two in the Alvis earlier that morning but then he was joined by a second figure, this one in a dark constable’s uniform, complete with bobby’s helmet, looking a little formal and out of place on the wild moor terrain.
‘Cops,’ she said.
‘Aye,’ said Angus.
‘Can we get away from them?’ Jane asked, looking anxiously forward at the immense sea of hills rising to the north, breaking down here and there in broad ridges of ancient stone that separated various wide and shallow dales.
‘Perhaps,’ said Angus.
There was virtually no cover at all. If Occleshaw had enlisted the aid of local folk who knew the land well, which seemed to be the case, they didn’t stand a chance. She was beginning to think that Occleshaw was the lesser of two evils; at least the son of a bitch wouldn’t begrudge them a meal.
‘Maybe I should give myself up, Angus; give you a chance to get away.’ She stared down into the valley at the approaching men. ‘I’m only slowing you down.’
‘Tommyrot,’ said the Scotsman angrily. ‘Come, you; follow me.’
He led them forward, crawling along the ridge on his belly until they found a shallow trench that led farther up the steep hill; probably a dried-up spring. This, in turn, led to a narrow gully, widening into a burn that took them up to the crest of the hill and over it, leading them safely out of sight. Behind them the beaters were patiently quartering their way down the slope of the far hill. By Jane’s estimation they were about twenty minutes to half an hour behind.
‘Faster,’ said Angus tersely. Keeping below the skyline, they ran along the crest for almost half a mile, until Jane judged they’d reached the uppermost end of the glen occupied by the beaters. Reaching it, Angus stopped and then, to Jane’s horror, he stood up, outlining himself against the sky, yelling a loud halloo and waving his arms.
‘Jesus, Angus! What are you doing?!’
‘Divairshon,’ answered the Scot briefly. One of the men in the valley had spotted Angus and was passing the word along to the others. They began to yell back and forth to each other and Jane saw that the direction of their search was drifting broadly in their direction. ‘This way now, Janey,’ said Angus, grabbing her hand. They ducked down behind the crest of the hill again and ran back the way they had come. In ten minutes they were back where they’d started but their searchers were now moving off, hopelessly on the wrong scent.
‘That’ll give us some time,’ said Angus, breathing hard now. The sky overhead was a clear, cold blue; thankfully there was no sign of the Grasshopper. There was a choice of routes across the moor and Angus chose one that soon put a deep, wooded glen between them and their pursuers. In ten more minutes they were into the woods, which smelled sweetly of pine and old, rotted boughs dropped to the dark, rich earth. In another twenty minutes or so, panting with exertion, they were high on the next rise.
‘It’s nae working,’ muttered Angus, looking back. The beaters were cresting the far hill and the binoculars carried by the man in the hacking jacket, presumably Occleshaw, glinted in the sunlight. There seemed to be fewer people after them now, which meant that some of them at least had been drawn off by Angus’s previous ruse. Either that or they were coming around from the right, flanking them and intending to cut them off.
‘We’ll have to make a good run for it, lass; the only thing for it is to put distance between us now. We must get across yon Common to Newton Tors if we’re to get clean away.’
‘Whatever you say,’ wheezed Jane.
‘Come on, then.’
They began to run, stumbling down the hillside to the broad sweep of heather that lay between them and the craggy, deeply cut glens and valleys of Newton Tors that lay a mile or so to the north. Jane could see the faint line of a road in the distance, leading into the dales beyond, winding its way obscurely north. It was empty, like everything else in this damned country. Another hour took them to the wilder country beyond the narrow moor and, looking back, they could see no sign of pursuit. Yet.
‘Maybe we’ve lost them.’
‘Don’t bank on it. They know the countryside and we don’t, at least not as well as they do.’
They kept on, their breath coming in ragged gasps now, the terrain deceptively tiring. The last of the moorland tilted at a slight angle, making all progress almost imperceptibly uphill. They reached a large field of heather, blowing gently in the breeze, the direction of the grass pointing the way forward, up the side of the hill, its crest topped by a thick stand of pines like the fur on the back of an angry dog. The road Jane had seen before wound around the base of the hill, then up it, cutting through the pines. There was a fence and a gate at that point but no sign of anyone’s sheep. Angus pulled open the gate.
They went through and he closed it behind him. They kept to the top of the ridge, safely hidden by the trees, following a narrow track through the trees. Coming out on the far side of the pines, the track turned into a respectable road that ran down into a narrow glen, crossed over a racing trout stream on a stone bridge and disappeared into another stand of trees that covered the bottom of the valley.
Angus paused. ‘There’ll be a crofter’s cottage there. Maybe better. There’s trees anyway, cover enough for us to bide a moment.’
They tramped down the narrow, rutted road and crossed the bridge. Jane paused for a moment, watching the flitting shapes of fish in the sparkling, trilling water below. Brown trout, lots of them, swimming with their perfectly hydrodynamic snouts pointed upstream, into the current, biding their time in the shaded water beneath the bridge until the sun faded from view and it was safe to come out to eat. You might be able to tempt them with a Yellow Peril or a Rose of New England but nothing less at this time of year; with the water as cold as it was, their hunger would be dulled anyway. Size and colour would be the only thing to get them to come away from the safety of the bridge.
‘Ah could do with one or two of those in a skillet,’ mused Angus, looking over the bridge himself.
‘If I had my Granger reel and a nice little Hardy eight-footer, I could catch one of them for you.’
‘You fish then, lass?’ said Angus.
‘Ah doo,’ she said, smiling and imitating his accent, enjoying her first moment of the day since they’d first sighted the people on their trail.
‘You’re a girl of many parts, lass,’ said Angus. ‘You’re a good partner to have in this little escapade.’
‘If it wasn’t for me there’d be no escapade.’ She laughed. ‘You’d be back in your cave with a nice warm fire and your friends around you.’
‘Aye,’ he said, smiling back at her. ‘But if truth be told, my friends aren’t half as exciting as you. A man gets in a rut from time to time. It’s go
od to get out and see the world once een a while.’
They crossed the bridge and hurried into the cover of the trees on the far side. Jane looked over her shoulder just as they slipped into the shadows and once again saw the distant form of the man with the binoculars.
‘We have to hide somewhere,’ said Jane, pointing out the figure to Angus. ‘Maybe if we let them get beyond us we can figure out some other way to get out of this.’
‘That’s an idea, Janey. We’ll gi’ it some thought.’ They kept on walking and a few minutes later came out of the woods and spotted a decrepit old cottage, its thatched roof rotted and collapsed, a sagging pile of peat leaning against one wall like a hunchbacked old woman. They passed in front of the cottage’s overgrown garden and stepped into a small field of young hay. Beyond that was a plantation of windblown firs and Jane spotted a wisp of smoke rising up from the far side of it. People.
Food.
Coming through the head-high firs they reached a narrow ditch full of stagnant water and, jumping across it, found themselves on a rough lawn, tilted slightly like the moor behind them. The lawn was very rough, cut with a scythe by the looks of it, and planted with haphazard beds of scrubby rhododendrons. A brace of some kind of moor-bird or pheasant leapt up at their approach, screeching loudly and flying off with a great flapping of wings.
‘If he didn’t know we were coming before, he knows it now,’ Angus grunted.
Chapter Twenty-three
The house before them was an ordinary thatch-roofed moorland farm building with a larger, newer, whitewashed addition, its roof sheathed in slate. Attached to the wing was a glassed-in solarium or veranda. Through the glass Jane saw a small, pale- faced man looking curiously out at them. The old building had a garage attached to it and the remains of an old mill appended to one side, where a gurgling spring coursed around a small, rock outcropping. Beside the mill was an old stone dovecote at least twenty feet high, with a flat wooden roof that had partially collapsed with age. The last pigeons had clearly flown from the old building many years before.
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