‘Doesn’t your country mean anything to you?’ he groaned at her.
‘What has our country to do with it?’
‘I’m doing this for America, you bitch – saving face for Ike and the old country.’
‘Balls, George, you’re doing it for that suitcase of money that I’ve been carrying around for you for a month. I hope you die before we get you down off this mountain again.’ And she stalked off to lend her captivating presence to Chris.
Some kind of instinct kicked in: something I must have picked up on. You’re acting, Doris, I thought. You’re still bloody acting a part.
Despite herself, I think she was interested in the bomb.
I asked George, ‘Why didn’t you just tell us Brits you’d lost a bomb that wasn’t supposed to be here, apologize, ask Monty and the army to find it for you and give it back?’
‘Go away, Charlie. I don’t want to talk any more. I think I’m dying.’
I whistled one of those skiffle tunes they were beginning to play on the radio. I can’t remember which one now. Maybe it was ‘Lost John’ – I was fond of that one at the time. Eventually George groaned again, and asked, ‘Can I have a drink of water?’
I looked levelly at him, and asked it again.
‘Why didn’t you ask the British to find it for you, George?’
‘Because it wasn’t supposed to be here, stupid. The Prez had already decided to withhold the technology from you, so we couldn’t tell you it was already sitting here in your back garden – all you had to do was find it. You got it later, after you paid for it.’
‘So because you were frightened of us getting the Bomb before you wanted us to, an atom bomb has been lying out here in the rain and snow for ten years?’
‘It’s only a little one, Charlie, a model for the real thing – about a quarter-size.’
‘Which makes me feel much better – if its casing has broken we’re sitting on a radioactive fucking mountain, George! Doesn’t uranium do something to your balls? How can you have been that foolish?’
‘Not me, Charlie – the state department. I’m just a hired hand.’
‘OK – then why not send the US Army to get it back – the real US Army?’
‘They thought no one would notice a small outfit. When the army makes its own moves you find battalions of OD bastards wandering around. They can’t think small, and they do tend to get noticed.’
‘You can have that water now,’ I told him, and gave him my water bottle.
‘I think I stabbed myself in the guts, Charlie. I’m scared I’m gonna die.’
‘Flesh wound, so stop bellyaching.’ OK, so that was an unfortunate turn of phrase. ‘If you turn on your side I’ll dress it for you.’
‘Doris could do that. She’d be gentler. She has soft hands.’
‘Believe me, George, you’re better off with me. Doris is not your friend today – you beat her up, and told her too many lies.’
George did say, ‘Don’t leave me here alone, buddy,’ but I thought that it was time for him to learn one of life’s hard lessons, and walked away to find the prospectors – they wouldn’t be all that far away.
Chris’s Geiger counter had stopped geigering: he was sitting in the heather taking it apart, and reassembling it. Doris sat on a rock a few yards away striking attitudes like Lady Hamilton. Chris wasn’t buying them; he was in love with his instrument. I squatted between them playing the gooseberry.
I asked Chris, ‘Assuming your box of tricks hasn’t given up on you, how on earth did you expect to find this – what did you call it? – box of radioactive isotopes for X-ray machines?’ I was glad I’d logged the word isotopes – you heard a lot of it in years to come. ‘This aircraft is spread over a square mile – it will take you days to search it all.’
He grinned happily. I reckon he really liked his job.
‘Don’t worry, Charlie. If there was ever a large radioactive source in this wreck it will leave a spoor – just like big game. All I have to do is walk around the main impact area in a circle until the counter finds the radioactivity trail . . . then I follow the trail until I find the source. If it survived the wreck it’s probably rolled a long way downhill.’
‘But won’t the radioactivity have been washed away in the rain and snow? It’s supposed to have been up here for ages.’
‘No, Charlie. If the hot stuff was ever here, I’ll find it. It takes hundreds of years to decay.’
‘Decay? You make it sound as if it was once alive.’
‘Sometimes it seems that way. Out of the way now, there’s a good fellow – let the dog see the rabbit.’ He stood up and stretched; apparently he was ready to go geigering again. Doris gave me a po-faced smile, so I went to sit with her and watch the man at work. The breeze had veered, and changed direction. It was now a buffeting little cold wind – George was probably the only one out of it. Chris stumbled a circle of about a hundred yards around the main lochan, detouring for stubby tussocks of heather and juniper.
Doris told me, ‘They said that Petey’s body hadn’t a mark on it – it’s hard to see that that was possible. He was up in front of an airplane that smashed itself to pieces on that bloody rock face. Why do they lie to us?’
‘The excuse they use is that it spares a family’s feelings if you tell them that the dead person didn’t feel a thing.’
‘I think they tell us that to spare their own feelings, don’t you?’
‘Yes, but I’ve seen a few air crashes . . . and been in a couple myself. There’s no sign of fire here, so I think it would have been over very quickly for him, practically instantaneous . . . Now you’ve been here, and seen it, you’ll be able to tell your people that with a clear conscience.’ She didn’t reply; just leaned her head on my shoulder. I hoped I’d helped, and for once I’d been telling the truth.
Chris had a few false alarms – his frying pan showed a marked affinity for the dials from smashed instrument panels, and his machine started to sing whenever it got within range of the luminous paint from the instruments. Suddenly he stopped hopping the bushes, and looked outwards from the circle and down the mountainside away from the way we had climbed in. He looked a bit like a dog that had got the scent. He raised his hand to signal to us, and moved off down the slope. We stumbled after him. Bollocks. I’d hoped the bloody thing had never been there in the first place. Half an hour later we found it in a fast-flowing burn; it had rolled nearly a quarter of a mile. It looked obscene. The Geiger counter went crazy anywhere near it, and the radioactive trail stretched away from us down the burn.
Chris went into man-in-charge drive, and angrily shouted, ‘Shit.’ Then he marked it with a small red flag on a whippy metal pole he had been carrying, and shooed us away uphill in front of him. We ran. Have you ever run up a mountain through hard stumpy heather, junipers and over a rockfall? That was my first atom bomb. Unless one of the radioactive governments gets even flakier than they usually are, it will also be my last.
We stopped when we reached George.
‘You bloody bastard,’ Chris shouted at him. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
George opened his eyes, and asked, ‘What?’ as if we had disturbed a reverie.
I told him. ‘What, George, is a battered bomb lying in a small stream bed a quarter of a mile away . . . and it’s corroding and leaking. There are going to be a lot of people very annoyed with you.’
‘It wasn’t my fault.’
‘You could have told someone. We could have brought someone up here who knew what he was doing.’
‘You’re not going to leave me here alone, are you?’
‘We should,’ Doris snorted, ‘but we won’t. Mad Angus is slogging his way up to us with a rescue party – not that you deserve it.’
‘What happens after that?’ he asked me, as if Doris hadn’t spoken to him.
‘Wait and see, but whatever it is you won’t like it.’
Nor will I, I thought. If Fabian of the bloody Yard gets hold of me after this,
he’ll bloody strangle me. I heard some shouts drifting up from low down on our original path, and hollered back. All of a sudden Cyprus was not so bad a prospect after all. Provided I could get there before I was picked up.
Carrying a man on a stretcher down a mountainside is one of the few situations where a small man like me comes into his own. It always helps to have a couple of small guys at the back – you work it out. The other small guy was a shepherd who’d come in for a drink and had been shanghied onto a rescue party. I knew he was a shepherd without asking, because he smelt like a wet sheep and was sure-footed. George groaned all the way, and I was tempted to drop him. The laird was still doing the lairdy thing and leading the party, but he dropped back from time to time to keep my morale up.
‘Doing OK, Charlie?’
‘Yeah. How long before we’re back down on the flat stuff?’
The light was beginning to draw in. I didn’t fancy stumbling around in the dark.
‘About twenty minutes. Then a couple of the bigger guys can finish the job. You’ve done very well under the circumstances.’
‘And you’re a patronizing bugger.’
‘It’s Lord of the Isles syndrome – I slip back into it as soon as the need arises. I’m supposed to be Galbraith of Shieldaig up here. Sorry.’
He was right though. Twenty minutes it was. He was probably quite good at this sort of thing – his family had probably been directing hill rescues for generations. As soon as the paths began to flatten out, two hulking great brutes took over from me and the shepherd, and matched up with the two hulking great brutes on the front of the stretcher. Oddly, I found that when I handed it over my right arm and curled fingers had locked shoulder height in the stretcher-bearer position, and for a few minutes I had to march along with a raised clenched fist like an Italian Boy Fascist. That made Doris laugh. I didn’t mind – we all needed a little something to laugh at. It dropped suddenly as the blood flooded back into it, and was temporarily too heavy to lift. All my strength had been expended carrying George. Doris had been behind me with Chris. Now she moved up, and took my arm. The track was wider, but even so we swayed like a couple of boozers.
She asked me, ‘What happens to George?’
‘Arrested, I hope . . . along with all the silly beggars who put him up to this.’
‘He won’t like that.’ They seemed like words I had heard before. I laughed, and eventually Doris laughed with me – the others must have thought we were touched.
‘And what about me?’
‘How good are your good friends at the consulate?’
‘Very good. I knew one of them very well.’
I could imagine Doris’s very wells.
‘Then I should imagine you’d be all right.’
‘And George’s bomb?’
‘I think I’ll leave that to our bold new leader. He seems to be properly in charge, and I suspect he knows what he’s doing. Did you deserve that black eye George gave you?’
‘Only with you. Ut victor praemium.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘To the victor the spoils, I think. George lost this time. We won. I flunked Latin.’
‘I learned some Latin phrases from a girl in Egypt a few years ago.’
‘What were they?’
‘Tell you tonight if we’re not in a cell somewhere.’
After a pause she squeezed my good arm, and said, ‘Maybe if we’re good they’ll put us in the same one.’ Doris was a girlful of transferable allegiances. George was suddenly not a good bet.
When we stumbled into the hotel it was full dark, and I was reacting to the physical effort I’d just put in. I was shaking. Doris was so close alongside you’d think she was welded. There was a new Scottish Ambulance Service Daimler outside, a police Land Rover and a police car. And a policeman at the door who said, ‘You’ll be Mr Bassett, of course.’
I couldn’t stop shivering. I hoped he didn’t think I was in a funk. Doris pushed us past him, and on into the small bar. She said, ‘Yes, sheriff, he is, but he needs a fire, and his hand around a whisky glass before I let you at him.’ She must have thought I was worth looking after: that was nice.
The copper smiled. That was nice too. I suppose you can afford to smile if you are about eight feet square and built like the proverbial brick privy. He said, ‘As you say, ma’am, there’s nothing that can’t wait.’ His smile had turned into a big grin as if someone had told him a decent joke. He followed us through to the small bar where the fire was burning. He even went behind the counter to pour me the drink himself. That wasn’t a first as it turned out. When he couldn’t hold it in any longer he kind of smirked, and said, ‘Hello, Charlie. Long time no see.’
‘Hello, Alex. What are you doing here, and why do you sound like a Scottie?’
The last time I had seen him he had been an RAF policeman quick-marching poor bloody National Service recruits into their farcical medicals in 1953: our paths had crossed several times since the 1940s. I looked on him as proof positive that it was indeed a small world.
‘I am a Scot, didn’t you know? I made my bid for freedom after doing twelve – I wasn’t going any higher in the RAF – and joined the civvy police. Better pay and nobody shoots at you . . . well, not so many, anyway. They made me a sergeant.’
‘And I suppose you’re here by accident?’
‘Not entirely. I’m at the police office at Fort William. Your name came up on a general request from London yesterday. I didn’t think there were that many “Bassett C”s in the country, so when Shieldaig himsel’ phoned Fort William for an ambulance and a bomb-disposal squad, mentioning a small fellah named Charlie who might just know what the devil was going on, I put three and three together, and got in the car. The Scotland Yard signal didn’t say much – who have you upset now?’
‘Have you heard of a long-nosed fellow called Inspector Fabian? He caught murderers, writes for the papers, and is supposed to be retired.’ I’d knocked back my Scotch. Doris was watching the conversation go from me to Alex and back like a spectator at Wimbledon.
Alex said, ‘Hard luck. He’s a tough bastard, isn’t he? You’d better have another.’ What he meant was that we’d both better have another. My body gave a final tremor, and then began functioning again.
‘Pour three. One for Doris. Doris, this is Alex. He used to be a friend of mine but he’s wearing a funny dark blue uniform, so I’m no longer sure. Alex, this is Doris. She’s an American and plays by American rules. I wouldn’t believe a word she says if I was you.’
Doris gave him her Marilyn smile. She held out her hand for the ritual. He shook it, and then placed a hefty Scotch in it.
She said, ‘That’s right. I’m Doris. I probably have diplomatic immunity.’
Alex smiled again. He liked jokers.
‘What does probably mean? Don’t you know?’
‘It means that I probably don’t have it right this moment, but will have as soon as you let me speak to the embassy.’
Alex lifted his glass in a silent toast, and asked, ‘Would it help if I suggested putting off any more talk until you two had soaked in a bath for an hour, and put some warmth back into your bones?’
The bathroom was at the end of the corridor on which our rooms were situated. Doris ran the bath half full of steaming hot water – that seemed to be something that none of these Scottish hotels were short of – stripped me off like a baby, and helped me into it. I thought she’d underfilled it until she stripped off herself, and joined me. I hoped she’d turned the key in the door lock. With both of us semi-submerged the water came up to within three inches of the top of the tub: maybe she’d done this sort of thing before.
We took the hour Alex had given us, but when we came down he had gone. So had George and the ambulance. So had mine host and our brave bomb detector. Ean’s wife beamed at us and said, ‘The sergeant will be back in the morning – he has to meet some people from the army. He said to feed you well – you’ve had a trying day. He’ll see
you tomorrow.’
‘What’s the time, Mrs Galbraith?’ I’d left my watch upstairs.
‘Just past seven, sir. Dinner’s in an hour, but the bar’s open.’
‘Maybe we’ll just go upstairs and rest,’ Doris told her. The glorious Freemasonry of women exchanged sly smiles. They’d be speaking in tongues next.
Upstairs I flopped on the bed. Beat, but not too beat. Doris looked relaxed.
‘Don’t worry, Charlie. The state department is very good at papering over the cracks, and your government will muzzle the natives with some sort of Hide the Secrets Act, and lots of money – no one will want any of this to get out. They’ll probably be very pleased that there was someone as diplomatic as you along to hold our hands. I wonder if someone may even have steered us to you for that very reason in the first place.’
‘I doubt it. Apparently the FBI has already complained about me to our Foreign Office.’
‘Posturing – you know what these civil servants are like. They’ll probably give you a Purple Heart on the quiet – to keep you quiet.’
‘Don’t want one.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want you again.’
After enough of a pause Doris sighed, and whispered, ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk so crude,’ as she clambered over me. I don’t understand it. I’ve met them from time to time, and so have you: these wonderful and terrible women who – periodically – can’t get enough of you, but don’t like saying it with real words. So I kissed that superb triangular hollow in her shoulder blade, and whispered, ‘I want to take you on a trip to the moon on gossamer wings.’
‘That sounds much too corny – as if it’s from a song.’
‘If it isn’t, then it soon will be.’
Alex came in and plonked himself down at our breakfast table the next morning. He didn’t say no to an enormous free breakfast: that’s cops the world over for you. What goes around comes around. Egg yolk was dribbling delicately down his chin as he said, ‘I hope that you two have said your goodbyes. I’m to see you packed this morning and carry you into Fort William at lunchtime, where you’ll be split.’
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