Moon Country

by Peter Arnott

  Maggie it was who first caught sight (or thought she did) of Superintendent Bellamy in the background of a piece-to-camera. The officer was walking behind a breathless reporter in company with another man she thought she sort of knew the face of. Another shot revealed her boss again in the background in urgent conference at the edge of a high and treeless moor with this chap who she now recognised as Donald McCormick, sole proprietor and manager of the licensed Scottish franchise of the reputable security firm that had (once upon a time) been transporting used notes for disposal all those years ago, and had been, as aforesaid, among the pioneers of the private-sector provision of prison services, including running one institution that had played lucrative host, in times past, to Tommy Hunter, Joseph Wheen and Jack Webster at various junctures (see 1.0.1.2.2). The camera then showed the silver BMW in the ditch by the road where it had ended up, axle snapped and boot sprung open, and the reporter then gestured towards the partially wooded uplands where the car’s living occupants had apparently fled.

  “Is that …?” Maggie managed to say before “Danny”, his face purple and his throat strangled, asked the surly waitress to turn the volume up. Jumping into the broadcast halfway as they did, they learned first that the discovery of a murder victim in the boot of a wrecked car now seemed about to precipitate some action of some kind against the land occupation that had been going on for some time much in the same way, that whatever the merits of the case, the attack on the Twin Towers had precipitated the invasion of Iraq.

  “Jack Webster …” said “Danny”. “That has to be Jack Webster!”

  “They used to be here, you know?” said the waitress, delivering them their “two full Scottish with Fried Egg and Black Pudding,” bewildering them.

  Swift questioning of the waitress and continued attention to the News quickly revealed that the “they” the waitress was referring to was “those bloody hippies” who were now in illegal occupation of the huge Central Highland estate outside of which the forces of law were finally gathering, it appeared, to some purpose. “When were they here?” asked “Danny”, light dawning on his investigatory intelligence.

  It transpired through the waitress that two years before the Indians had taken over Ossian’s Viewpoint on the mainland, the Lakota Nation, so called, had occupied the tiny island of Ulva (yards off the coast of Mull but accessible only by swimming, rowing and an occasional ferry roughly the size of a bathtub) for nearly a year, upon the occasion of its ownership changing hands. That the timing of this earlier action had so neatly coincided with the sending of the moonlit postcard of nearby Calgary Beach (!) that had lightened the interior darkness of Tommy Hunter so decisively with regard to his sense of purpose upon his release, immediately lit a fire in the guts of Detective Inspector “Danny” Boyle that had him up and out of his seat and paying the bill almost before Maggie could take a breath. Indeed it was while Boyle was precipitately packing that Maggie ascertained from the waitress that a certain Janette Hunter had been employed in this very hostelry at that time, and had been rumoured to have occasionally rowed or swam over the sound of Ulva to pay the dangerous lunatics there a visit.

  The joy of all this revelation was leavened by DS Boyle’s equally sudden understanding that he was currently about a hundred miles to the west and south of where the action was and that he had made something of a vainglorious fool of himself. Maggie’s heart lurched in fear that this operational error on “Danny’s” part would acquire a dimension of moral failure for him, and would now be associated in his mind with his recent abdication of duty in favour of passion. And indeed, Maggie saw, as they clambered into the car, that “Danny”, to her unexpressed horror, his purpose now renewed, seemed to have shed his happiness like a skin. He was all raw and humiliated again. He wasn’t talking to her any more, he wasn’t even looking at her, as if he were mortified at their dalliance, as if he had been caught and was now being punished for the moment of happiness they’d shared, and was now ashamed that their freedom and his recklessness had distracted him from his rivalry with the hated Bellamy, that now he hated her for having been the occasion of his lapse. Maggie felt her soul plunge into her comfortable walking boots as they started back on their way off the island, away from that isolated joy they had shared at that special time and place, that was already becoming a despised memory now they were on their way back towards the guilt and compulsion that they had abandoned with their clothing last night while they sank their teeth and tongues into each other. For that liberation had been yesterday’s child. Once again, the lovers were the slaves and not the masters of the present.

  Maggie didn’t dare say anything as they drove, for fear that her reminding him of the snuggle-bunny he had briefly been to her would cruciate him further and take him from her for ever. He felt a fool, she knew he did. “It’s not my FAULT,” she felt like saying to him, but dared say nothing at all as they drove in silence for about thirty minutes to catch the ferry at Craignure.

  She looked at the map and charted a route for them from Oban to the high road past Spean Bridge and she tried to keep her voice level and her bearing professional even as she longed to appeal to him, to be as naked and open in her need for his spoken love as she had been to his body the magical and fading night before.

  Ironically, unknown to her, “Danny” was admitting to himself that he was feeling a little more nuanced about life than his usual straightforward anger at the world for refusing to lie back and cooperate usually allowed. “Danny” too was wondering how to fold his new contentment into his old routine of flagellation, and was even wondering how to find the words to say to Maggie that would express how much he still wanted her, that he wanted nothing more than to find a way to accommodate both what he had to do as a policeman and what he had to do as a man. But “Danny” was handicapped in his interior search for articulation because he had never actually stopped to consider what it was that Maggie might have seen in him, so now that things had changed again he didn’t know whether what had just happened was just one of those things he’d heard about happening to other people or something else entirely that was meant exclusively (and lastingly) for him. He was even wondering, a bit desperately, if she’d be disappointed in him now if he were less than immediately and miserably focussed on the solving and fixing of everything like he had been yesterday. Doggedness was the quality he most admired in himself, and we are prone, we humans, to imagine that it is that which we approve of in ourselves that others will also find attractive — many, many years of the reverse, if anything, almost always proving to be true, teaching us nothing.

  13.2.1.1

  Teaching us nothing seems to be one of the things that experience is good at.

  13.2.2

  He and Maggie did get married on completion of the enquiry and report he undertook for our Procurator Fiscal eighteen months later, just to save you wondering. And he was promoted to Detective Inspector when Bellamy took early retirement six months after that, so you might say that things worked out very well for him, though, of course, he never lost that sense of grievance which fuels the fire beneath many a Scotsman’s career.

  13.3

  Meanwhile Elspeth Dewar (whose evidence to that enquiry was to be of great importance) had clearly watched the same news that morning as had “Danny” and Maggie, a bag of frozen peas still over the bruises that Frank had inflicted on her in uncontrolled frustration early the previous morning. What she saw on the telly suggested to her that now might well be the time for her to reconsider the strategy of silence she had pursued since Colin’s (or Eric’s) complicity and tragedy in the founding event of Frank Wheen’s fortune. Elspeth got in touch with the authorities the following Monday having thought about it as the news of what had happened up north continued to come in over the weekend, and her sworn statement, most of which was true, along with Danny’s completed report, led to the unsuccessful attempt recently by the Crown to seize the assets of Frank Wheen as being in a heritable sense the proceeds of crime. These o
fficial attempts on the sanctity of her property are to this day being fiercely resisted by the ferocious legal team employed by Eleanor Wheen, co-owner of that fortune, who, I imagine, daily thanks her lucky stars that she had been so wise as to insist long ago that all that was Frank’s was hers, and that all that was hers was hers as well. In contrast to Elspeth’s dithering, Eleanor, watching the same broadcast that Thursday morning and recognising her husband’s car, hesitated only till a minute past nine to contact that fearsome collection of legal minds at her solicitor’s firm in Edinburgh, days before Elspeth, in her own little underprivileged way, made her first contact with the constabulary to charge Frank Wheen with assault.

  13.3.1

  Frank’s physical isolation that morning in the frozen, dewwet company of his hated brother was all of the world that he really had left. Had Frank had even a signal on his phone in this ungodly location in the Wild West of Scotland, perhaps he would have been able to do something by rapid transfers of ownership via his Internet banking facilities and their handy app he had on his Samsung to protect himself from what was coming to him. But to his disbelief, his network had no coverage in this land that time and all the gods forgot, and he damn well wasn’t going to make his way back to the road in search of Wi-Fi, or to the Indian encampment that he and Joe were now spying from the ruined Pictish broch on the high ground misnamed as “Ossian’s Viewpoint” by a previous owner whose tastes were rather more romantic than the Dubai-based holding company which currently held the paper ownership of this sixty thousand acres of Scotland.

  Having been walking most of the night in the wind, the brothers were now in the comparative shelter of the ruins. They had even made a rudimentary windbreak from some plastic sheeting they had found, but you still couldn’t call them exactly cosy, both having left their coats in the car. But Joe’s old field glasses were being pressed into service as he scoured the area for signs of Tommy Hunter. Frank was leaving him to it, eying the piece of inflamed skin at the nape of Joe’s neck where it met his skull and wondering how it would look with a bullet hole in it. All the narrowly focussed Joseph Wheen could see right now were the tents and lodges and caravans and campers of those inexplicable savages in the glen below them, those and the old Youth Hostel, of course — the eighteenth-century dower house that had been converted back in the thirties for the use of the then nascent Ramblers Movement and whose closure by the new owners of the Ossian’s Viewpoint Estate, despite their solemn promises that they wouldn’t when they got planning permission, had been the inciting incident of outrage that had sparked the land occupation by the environmentalist would-be aboriginals in the first place — and from which Short Bull and Kicking Bear now emerged in an unheard but animated conversation as to what the hell they were to do with their uninvited guests.

  13.3.1

  Like Tommy, Frank and Joe had had some survival training in the army years ago, of course, but now, helpless and cold in the Pictish broch whose nineteenth-century misnaming as Ossian’s Viewpoint, despite being ab-anthropologically inept, still gave the whole estate its name, Frank lay back and watched the clouds scud over the azure sky as the wind freshened from the west and sunny morning turned to overcast afternoon. He talked to himself about even he knew not what.

  13.3.2

  Although I’m aware that I’m reconstructing these events from the scattered indications in the public record about the disposal of dead bodies and such, and that the mental state of Frank Wheen that Friday is still a matter of legal dispute, I’m willing to assert within the necessary limitations of narrative the common-sense opinion that Frank was already perfectly well aware how tired and sick and hungry and scared he was, and how his judgement was already being distorted by the multifarious extremity of his plight. It stood to reason in the circumstances. And besides, if he hadn’t been scared, sick, tired and hungry like he was he wouldn’t have been remembering now that when they had put Jack’s body back in the car after their abortive attempt at burying the reproachful cadaver, that Jack had definitely winked at him. He remembered it distinctly that Jack’s open eye had closed and opened again.

  Now Frank knew very well that this hadn’t really happened. Of course he did. Other than in his occasional moments of fear, anger and ecstasy, Frank was nothing if not a rational sort. He also knew very clearly that he hadn’t started remembering the way that Dead Jack had looked at him until well after the fact — that it wasn’t a memory so much as a retrospective hallucination that was gradually overcoming him, and that this obsessional ideation was symptomatic of his imminent mental collapse. He even remembered quite distinctly the first time he had remembered contact with Jack’s departed, vengeful animus — he knew that it was only during the last cold and sleepless and nightmare-haunted night that the vision or dream or whatever it was had come to him with all the force and conviction of recollection. He was only thinking now that poor Jack, who he’d always liked, even when they were boys, who he’d always secretly rather admired for his positive attitude to life, and had even wished he was more like somehow, had winked at him with the malicious garrulousness of the recently dead as they had stuffed his stinking, ruined body back into the boot of the BMW. Even as he had had the memory, he remembered, he had known it wasn’t really a memory of an event that had objectively occurred, rather that it was an exhausted projection on to history of a subjective and subconscious wish that Jack was still alive, that Joe hadn’t killed him and that his own life wasn’t consequently and comprehensively fucked up beyond all possible repair, that such things don’t happen, but what with the cold and the hunger and his hateful, hateful brother occasionally sneaking ugly and vindictive looks at him, what with his fear of ruin, his certainty, really, that all he was doing now was twitching in his coffin on the way to the graveyard, that memory that was not a memory had started to reach the point of vividness now that he’d only to shut his eyes and sleep for just a second and yes, here he was, warm-hearted, lovely, laughing Jack, winking and smiling so understandingly and forgivingly and warmly at him that he couldn’t help but feel his hard heart melt into sentimental acceptance along with the dark waves of sleepiness that kept washing over him and pressing down on his eyelids. Every time he fell into the arms of Morpheus, there was Jack now waiting for him, a beckoning, friendly spectre, summoning him to sleep, to death, to peace, like Fedallah on the whale, so that he had to keep catching at himself to save himself from that cold and muddy embrace, the spectre of which, he knew, was being manifested to him by physical exposure to the elements as much as by his own tortured and self-contradicting mind. Frank, all unknown to Joe, had spent the night dreaming he was trying to keep himself awake and thanking the heavens for it being dark for such a short time in Scotland after the spring equinox, and thanking heaven for the grey light that stole across the moor without a hint of warmth or cheer, for the thin smoor of moistness that filled the air as mist and that sometimes even fell as rain.

  13.3.3

  Crouched behind the binoculars that he’d stolen from a Land Rover on a joint exercise with the Yanks outside Hamelin years before, Joe had already thought he’d recognised Ronnie at one point, walking and talking in an animated way between three women, none of whom he recognised. Thinking he might be wrong, he didn’t say anything to Frank, who seemed to be in a hell of a bad mood for some reason, having passed the hours of daylight so far, at least since they’d found some shelter in the ruins of a Pictish broch to the south of the Indian campsite, just staring at his phone and saying something to himself, his lips moving but no sentient sound emerging. Joe, who was rather enjoying the night-exercise nostalgia of all this, and who was feeling invigorated rather than enervated by the loss of creature comforts, had looked back for the boy and the three women, and found that he’d lost them and gave up thinking about them, rather preferring to continue imagining himself as John Wayne coming across the band of the Comanche that had kidnapped his niece at the end of The Searchers. Joe had made very plain his feelings on Frank’s l
ack of manliness in actually paying Tommy Hunter his share of the proceeds of the robbery, and was sure, for his part, that Frank’s silence now was the silence of shame, and that soon, somehow, they’d sort everything out and he, Joe, would have as much future access to Frank’s money as he deserved and could wish for. Yes, Joe was as as happy now as he had ever been. Which makes what was about to happen to him a mercy of sorts. At least that’s what I like to think.

  13.3.3.1

  Joe was of course, deluded in almost every word of this, and had he but known it, he had indeed spied their quarry among the women, and had he been paying proper attention to who those women might have been, then he might have died an iota less stupidly than he had lived.

  13.3.3.1.1

  As for the three women, his not recognising them was not wholly surprising. He’d never seen Janette as an adult. He’d never seen Denise (the hitcher from chapter 8.0) before, and he’d never seen Janice dressed in buckskins with long purple dreadlocks, hadn’t seen Janice for fourteen years in fact, and anyway he, like almost everyone else in this story, had always thought that she was dead.

  13.3.3.2

  Janice, having been spoken to by Short Bull as well as by Janette, reluctantly made her way into the old Youth Hostel in reluctant search of her husband. Joe wasn’t watching her while she did this, as he was concentrating, bemused and strangely intimidated, on what the Indians were doing.