The Night Gate - Enzo MacLeod Investigation Series 07 (2021)

by Peter May

  It was more than anger she felt. More than frustration. More than humiliation. But she could no more find a word for it than a voice to express it. All she could do was close her eyes, grit her teeth, and turn to face him once again.

  She buried her face deep in the pillow to smother her sobs. Humiliation at the hands of Sergeant Connolley was bad enough, but she didn’t want the other girls to know just how much he’d got to her. She had no idea how long she’d lain crying in the dark. But the moon had risen in a clearing sky, and was now casting half of her room into deep shadow.

  Their evening meal had been conducted in silence, and Georgette had retired to her room almost immediately afterwards. She felt bruised and broken and couldn’t face the company of her fellow trainees. If she could, she would have made the night last forever, to avoid the indignities that almost certainly awaited her tomorrow. Staying awake might make it appear to last longer, but lack of sleep would also drain her of the physical and mental reserves she was going to need. Swollen eyes were already growing heavy, and she knew it was only a matter of time before she drifted away.

  A soft knocking at the door startled her, and seemed absurdly loud in the muffled silence of the castle. She sat up and quickly wiped the tears from her wet face, then crossed to the door and whispered, ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Mairi,’ came the tiny whispered response from the other side. ‘Let me in, George.’

  Georgette sighed and unlocked the door. Mairi slipped quickly into the room. Like Georgette she wore plain flannel pyjamas, and her bare feet slapped softly on the linoleum. Georgette kept her back to the window to hide her face as Mairi sat on the bed. The islander supported herself with a hand on the pillow and must have felt the dampness there. For she immediately withdrew it and peered through the moonlight at her new French friend. It was clear she knew that Georgette had been crying, but she said nothing. She patted the bed on her left. ‘Come and sit beside me.’

  Reluctantly Georgette dropped on to the bed next to her and crossed her arms. The warmth she felt emanating from Mairi made her realise just how cold she’d become. Mairi must have felt it, too, for she moved a little closer.

  She said, ‘My brother has a word for people like Connolley. It’s an English word. Begins with a C. We don’t have words like that in Gaelic. We have far too much respect for a woman’s private parts.’

  In spite of everything, Georgette found herself smiling.

  ‘Listen, it turns out we’ve got this coming weekend off, so we were thinking we might go to Uig Beach on Saturday.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘Uig’s down in the south-west corner of the island. When the tide’s out, the sands just stretch for miles. We’re going to fly kites if it’s dry, and have lunch at my granny’s.’

  Georgette felt her tears of earlier receding. ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘All of us.’ Mairi’s face was shining in the moonlight. ‘My brother’s home on leave just now, and he’s managed to get access to a jeep. So we’re all going to squeeze in and drive down together. You’ll like Alasdair. He’s fun. And a good-looking boy. Spent his entire teen years fighting off the girls.’ She grinned. ‘Not very hard, mind you.’ She lowered her voice to little more than a breath. ‘He’s attached to some kind of special forces unit that’s being trained to operate behind enemy lines. So he’s not someone to mess with.’

  Georgette raised a self-mocking eyebrow in the dark. ‘As if I would mess with anyone,’ she said.

  The only thing that got Georgette through the next few days was the thought of that outing to Uig on Saturday. Like release from a prison sentence, albeit temporary. Conditional parole awarded for good behaviour.

  She tried hard to be on her very best behaviour. But if she brought out the worst in Sergeant Connolley, he did exactly the same for her, and they ended up barely acknowledging each other. The days passed in an endless cycle of running through the castle grounds with weighted rucksacks, and throwing each other to the ground on the lawn in front of the castle. Connolley continued using Georgette as his demonstrator. She offered no resistance to his moves and that helped her each time to break her fall.

  They’d had two evening sessions indoors when he took them on a pictorial tour of the Westland Lysander that would fly each of them to France at different times. A light, single-

  engined aircraft that was deemed too fast for artillery spotting, and too slow and cumbersome to avoid fighters, but perfect for clandestine short take-off and landing.

  None of the girls had ever flown before. ‘How safe is it?’ Joan had asked.

  Connolley just smiled. ‘Put it this way, love: there were 175 of them deployed over France and Belgium in the spring; only 57 of them made it back.’ Which had filled none of them with confidence, and left each contemplating her own mortality in the dark of their attic rooms that night.

  Georgette woke up on the Saturday morning to find her room filled with the reflected glow of sunlight that seemed to paint the entire island gold. The sky was cloudless, and she was not sure she had ever seen such a deep, clear blue. It reflected in the gentle swell of the Minch, transforming slate grey to crystal cerulean. And her spirits soared.

  The girls chattered excitedly around the breakfast table before heading off on the narrow road towards the town to meet Alasdair on the way up. They were halfway down the hill when he rounded the bend in his green and grey camouflaged jeep and screeched to a halt. He jumped out and gave Mairi a big bear hug, before spinning her round once to then plant her on her feet again and gaze with unabashed love at his little sister.

  ‘Alasdair, meet the gang,’ she said, and made all the introductions.

  Alasdair shook each of their hands solemnly, until he came to Georgette and Mairi told him that she was French. He turned to his sister. ‘How do you say ciamar a tha thu in French?’

  But Georgette pre-empted Mairi’s response. ‘Comment allez-vous,’ she said. ‘Or if you want to be less formal, simply ça va.’

  ‘You speak Gaelic?’ he said in Gaelic.

  Mairi laughed. ‘No! I’ve been teaching them some basic phrases.’

  Alasdair turned towards Georgette again. He had Mairi’s cobalt blue eyes but unlike her, a shock of unruly fair hair. The army had clearly tried to tame it with a razor, but it was growing back in extravagant curls. His smile was irresistible. ‘So how does a gentleman greet a lady in France? I should really know in case I end up there.’

  Georgette contained her smile. ‘With a kiss on each cheek, of course.’

  ‘Well, then, I’d better start practising.’ And he leaned forward to kiss her once on each cheek. She smelled his aftershave, and felt the smoothness of his skin. He was probably three or four years younger than her, but she was aware of the first butterflies fluttering in her tummy.

  She said, ‘In some places it’s three.’

  ‘Oh,’ he said, and kissed her a third time. She heard the other girls giggling.

  ‘And in other places, four.’

  ‘Enough!’ Mairi glared at her. ‘Time we were off.’

  Alasdair leapt back into the jeep, jerked his head towards Georgette and patted the seat beside him. ‘In we get, ladies. It’ll be a tight squeeze.’

  Georgette got next to Alasdair before Mairi could insinuate herself between them. It was clear that she was very possessive when it came to her big brother. The other three shoehorned themselves into the back. A quick three-point turn and they were off, shrieking in delight at the sunshine in their faces and the wind in their hair.

  They were quickly out of the town, and heading south down the east coast on a single-track road towards a place called Leurbost. Endless acres of featureless peat bog stretched away on either side of them, broken only by tiny scraps of water, miniature lochans reflecting the blue of the sky. Sheep that grazed among the purple heather wandered with unerring regularity on to the road.
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br />   Alasdair drove, it seemed to Georgette, far too fast, but she found it exhilarating and leaned in close to him.

  At Leurbost they turned off on to what seemed an even narrower stretch of road that took them through the village of Achmore, a collection of houses that looked as if they had been threaded on a string and stretched out along a mile of single track. To their left the land dipped away across a shimmering plain that was as much water as land. On the far side of it a line of dark mountains pushed up into a clear sky.

  ‘That’s Uig down there,’ Mairi shouted above the roar of the wind. ‘And the Isle of Harris beyond that.’

  Georgette felt that the others probably shared her sense of intrepid adventure in a strange land. Her first impressions of the island had not been particularly auspicious. But this was magical. She wanted to shout out, to release all of the pent-up anger and frustration of the last week. And restrained herself only with difficulty.

  At a place with an unpronounceably long name comprising strings of consecutive consonants, they turned south again. And now the Atlantic Ocean lay shimmering in sunshine off to the west. The road wound endlessly among hills and lochs and inlets from the sea. And Georgette realised that in all this time they had not seen a single tree. Nor another vehicle.

  At a hairpin bend in the road blue water sparkled away to their right, an abandoned croft house set in the bog above the rocks.

  ‘Little Loch Roag,’ Mairi told them. ‘It’s a sea loch. I suppose they’d call it a fjord in Norway.’

  It seemed to stretch endlessly off to the north, before they left it behind and cut through bleak, deserted bogland to descend, at last, to a tiny fishing village and church at Miavaig, at what Mairi said was an offshoot of West Loch Roag.

  Off, then, through a long, curving valley following a rock-

  littered riverbed, hills rising steeply on either side, until they emerged finally at the settlement known as Timsgarry. The huge, yellow-painted Uig Lodge stood proud on a rock promontory overlooking the biggest expanse of beach Georgette had ever seen. In the distance, between rocky headlands, they could see waves breaking blue and white at its extremity.

  ‘Tide’s out,’ Alasdair shouted. ‘Perfect for kite-flying.’

  He manoeuvred his jeep around a tiny winding road that took them to the far side of the bay, and then on a sandy track through the dunes to a stretch of flat machair land above the beach. They all piled out of the vehicle and Georgette felt the power of the wind tugging at her hair and her slacks and her blouse. It was fresh in her face, but softened by the sun. She had not felt this good since leaving France.

  From under the back seat Alasdair pulled out short lengths of bamboo cane that he quickly assembled into braced kite shapes. He turned to look up at the watching girls. ‘You know what a kite is?’

  Georgette said quickly, ‘It’s a quadrilateral whose four sides can be grouped into two pairs of equal-length sides adjacent to each other.’

  Everyone turned to look at her in astonishment. For a moment Alasdair seemed perplexed, then his face broke into a broad grin. ‘No, I mean, do you know what it’s for?’

  Georgette shrugged coquettishly. ‘Flying, of course.’

  And they laughed now, and helped Alasdair stretch different-coloured cotton shapes across the frames of the kites, and attach long rolls of string.

  Mairi said, ‘We used to come kite-flying every Saturday when the weather was good, and stay over with our granny and go to the church over there on the hill.’ The grey presbyterian stone of a stubborn religion stood foursquare against the wind on the far side of the bay. Closer to the shore a big white house sat among the rocks, and Georgette thought she saw headstones almost lost in the grass.

  It was not easy to get the kites airborne because of the strength of the wind, but once they were up they soared, scraps of colour dipping and diving against the blue. They ran across the sands, the wind and the sea at their backs, following the erratic path of the kites, string unravelling, tugging at reddened hands, and they whooped and hollered at the sky.

  The morning vanished far too quickly, and was gone almost before they noticed. Alasdair nodded towards the far headlands. ‘Tide’s turned. Time to go and eat. We might get some more flying in after lunch.’

  They threw their kites into the back of the jeep and set off across the machair, tall grasses eddying like water in the wind, towards where a long, squat stone dwelling with a thatched roof sat on the rise. There was a broken-down drystone wall around it, and sheep clambered over the shambles of spilled stones searching for grasses growing tall among them. The toasty smell of peat smoke laced the air, but the smoke itself was lost in the wind and not visible where it left the house from a hole in the thatch. The thatch was weighted down with stones on ropes, and several sheep stood grazing on a line of turf that ran around the top of the exterior wall.

  Joan stopped and looked at it in amazement. ‘Your granny lives here?’

  Alasdair laughed. ‘Everyone on the island used to live in one of these. It’s called a blackhouse.’

  ‘I don’t see any windows,’ Alice said.

  ‘That’s because there are none.’ Mairi grinned at her. ‘The cows live at one end, and Granny at the other, and she still lights the place with oil lamps.’

  Rebecca said, ‘And do you and Alasdair live in a blackhouse?’

  ‘No, thank God,’ Alasdair said. ‘Our old blackhouse is now an agricultural shed. We grew up in a whitehouse. Which is more like the kind of house you would recognise.’ He looked at his granny’s blackhouse. ‘A few hardy folk still live in these, though.’

  He ducked to enter by the only door in the side of the building, and called to his granny in Gaelic. He waved the others to follow him in.

  A dark little entrance hall gave off to the cattle shed on the right, and the living quarters on the left. The place was full of choking peat smoke, and Georgette quickly found her eyes watering. Alasdair led them into what he called the fire room. It was a large, stone-flagged living room, with chunky items of old furniture lined up along each wall. A peat fire smouldered in the middle of the floor, a large blackened pot hanging above it on a chain that fell from the rafters. Sunshine slanted through the smoke-hole in the thatch, smoke from the fire hanging blue in its angled light. Beyond the fire a square wooden table was set for seven, and beyond that a door stood open in a wooden partition, affording a glimpse into what looked like it might have been a bedroom.

  Granny was a tiny skelf of a woman in a dark skirt and quilted jacket. She wore a long white apron and a grey headscarf, a bird’s nest of pure white hair pulled back beneath it. She had a weathered brown face and a smile that took years off her. ‘Fàilte,’ she said. ‘Welcome. You’re just in time. The pot’s as good as ready.’

  Georgette glanced at the pot above the fire and wondered what on earth they were going to be served. But it smelled good. At least, what she could smell of it above the reek of the smoke.

  It turned out to be lamb stew, served with potatoes. ‘From the lazy beds,’ Granny told them, without explaining. They quickly got used to the smoke, and the stew tasted wonderful, and they all discovered just how hungry they were.

  When they had eaten, and Granny poured them hot milky tea into big china mugs, Joan said, ‘What’s that place on the far side of the bay? The big white house. From the beach it looked like there was a graveyard there.’

  ‘Baile-na-cille,’ the old lady said. ‘And, aye, there’s a graveyard there. Not in use any more. But they say that Coinneach Odhar was born in that house in the seventeenth century.’

  Mairi frowned. ‘Dark Kenneth?’ This was not a story she had heard before.

  ‘Aye, they also called him the Brahan Seer because he could see the future through the hole in an adder-stone. They say that he predicted the Battle of Culloden, and the Highland Clearances, and many things still to come.’


  Alasdair grinned. ‘You’re making it up, Granny.’

  She turned a scowl in his direction. ‘I am not! He was a Mackenzie. Same as us. You can follow the line of descent right down through the centuries.’

  Mairi laughed then. ‘Oh, Granny, you’re not telling us you can see the future, too?’

  The old lady shook her head. ‘No, I can’t see the future, a ghràidh. But sometimes I can see light around people. A little like a halo. Or darkness. Like cloud or mist. The light augers well, the darkness does not.’

  ‘You’ve never told us this before,’ Mairi said.

  ‘I didn’t want to scare you when you were children. But ask your folks. They know.’

  Alice said, ‘Do you see light, or darkness, around any of us?’

  Alasdair stood up. ‘Not a good idea,’ he said. ‘If we want

  to get kite-flying again, we’d better get out before the tide’s

  in.’

  But no one stirred from their seats. Granny said, ‘There’s only one among you who has the darkness.’ Her eyes flickered unmistakably towards Georgette, and Georgette felt a creeping coldness envelop her, like the mist rising from a river at dawn.

  Mairi was on her feet in an instant. ‘Alasdair’s right,’ she said, ‘the tide’ll be in soon. Come on, before we lose the day.’

  They all tumbled out, blinking, into the afternoon sunshine, the wind, if anything stiffer now, blowing away the smoke and the old lady’s words. But Georgette still felt the chill of them, and had lost her appetite for kite-flying. As the others retrieved their kites from the jeep, she said, ‘I’m going for a walk. See you later.’ And she set off among the dunes. The girls stopped and exchanged glances, aware of the sobering effect on Georgette of what the old lady had told them. Mairi looked at Alasdair and in a barely discernible flick of her head indicated that he should go after her.

  Georgette strode through the spiky long grass, feet sinking in soft sand, hugging her arms around herself for comfort, and was not aware for the first few strides of Alasdair falling in step beside her. She looked around in surprise, and the sheer openness of his smile lifted her spirits. He said, ‘Pay no attention to Granny. She’s been scaring folk all her life.’