by Jeff Gulvin
Cullen rolled another cigarette and cupped his hands round the match. ‘Are we going then, or what?’
They drove east on the Blairgowrie road. Connla was paying Cullen. Not a great deal, but he was paying him. Cullen was going to take him to the most recent sites. ‘Elgin,’ he mused, smoking as they drove; his window down just a fraction. Connla glanced at where the pitbull sat, with its backside on the rear seat and its legs on the floor, head jutting between them. Those incredibly powerful jaws gaping open, white teeth hung with saliva that bubbled against leathery black lips. Every now and again the dog would glance up at him, and Connla noticed again that meanness in its eyes. ‘Aye, we’ll head up that way,’ Cullen went on. ‘Go over the Lecht and through Glen Rinnes Pass. There’s a farmer near Dufftown who phoned me two nights ago. Had a sheep killed up there; he’s still got the carcass.’
Connla glanced sideways at him. ‘How was it killed?’
‘Spinal cord snapped. Bite to the back of the neck.’
‘Was it eaten?’
‘No.’
Connla cocked an eyebrow. ‘Sounds like a dog to me.’
‘You mean the bite, or the fact it was left?’
‘Either. Both.’
‘Tigers kill with a single bite to the back of the neck.’
Connla nodded. ‘I know they do. The tiger’s the cleanest killer of all the big cats. If you’re gonna get killed by one, make sure it’s a tiger.’ He squinted sideways at him.
‘Are you telling me we’ve got a tiger loose in Scotland?’
‘No.’ Cullen pressed the stub of his cigarette through the gap in the window and wound it up again. He folded his arms across his chest. ‘Leopards have been known to kill that way. You ought to know that.’
‘But the carcass was just left, you said. Sounds more like a dog to me.’
‘That’s a point, right enough.’ Cullen shifted himself in the seat. ‘But there were bite marks round the snout, Mr McAdam. How many dogs do you know that try to suffocate their prey?’
They drove north out of Blairgowrie, on a steep winding road through the Bridge of Cally and up the Spittal of Glenshee. The heavily wooded land gave way to spartan hillside and the southerly fringe of the Grampian Mountains. Connla saw ski lifts and a lodge as they passed.
‘It snows up here in the winter, Mr McAdam,’ Cullen told him. ‘Do you ski, yourself?’
Connla smiled. ‘Badly. I prefer climbing.’
Cullen looked impressed for the first time. ‘Climbing, eh. Rock or snow and ice?’
‘A little of both.’ Connla eased the truck into a lower gear as the road got steeper. ‘I do a lot of rock work in the summer. Plenty of mountains in North America, Bird Dog. Sometimes you gotta climb if you want to take good pictures.’
‘Got your boots with you, have you?’
‘Never go anywhere without them: boots, harness and cameras. Always two, always loaded. That way I’m ready.’
Cullen laughed a harsh burble in the back of his throat. ‘Sounds like me and my guns.’
They drove on, up through Braemar, with the Grampians shouldering them to the north-west. Scottish towns were grey, Connla decided, the architecture not quite matching up to the splendour of the natural surroundings. Dour was a word he would have used, even with the sun bouncing off their whitewashed walls. From Braemar they carried on up the A93 as far as Crathie. Connla frowned and looked at Cullen.
‘Isn’t there something I should know about Crathie?’ he said.
Cullen curled his lip. ‘The Queen, God bless her. She visits the church, aye. Balmoral’s just up the road.’
At Crathie they turned north into the hills. ‘We’re going over the Lecht,’ Cullen told him, ‘really wild and windswept. Not a place to be driving in winter. It’s the first major road to get closed when the snow comes. That and yon one to Grantown from Tomintoul. We’ll stop in Tomintoul.’
Gradually they got higher, the hills were smoother, brown and green with just a handful of shallow crags, and mottled here and there with man-made forests of pine. Cullen explained that 90 per cent of the old Caledonian forest had been ripped out during the Industrial Revolution.
‘Is that when they forced out all the Highlanders?’
Cullen shook his head. ‘No, much later. You’re talking about the clearances.’ He rolled another cigarette. ‘That all happened after Culloden in 1746, when Bonnie Prince Charlie fled to Skye with the Duke of Cumberland at his heels. The Highland clans were broken up by the English and shifted down to the lowlands. Gaels, man. Scottish Celts. Gone. No language, no tartan, no nothing.’
‘Flora McDonald?’
Cullen laughed drily. ‘Aye, he certainly dumped her, so he did. Not quite as romantic as the story is told, Mr McAdam.’
They drove through a second ski area and crested the Lecht Road, then wound down a low hill where Connla saw a pair of red deer stags, their antlers coated in velvet, a short distance from the roadside. ‘Beautiful,’ he muttered.
‘Aye. They make good eating, too.’
‘You hunt them?’
Cullen nodded. ‘In the season I do. Got a permit from two or three estates. We’ve got about a hundred thousand too many up here, Mr McAdam. The land canny sustain them. No natural predators, you see.’ He glanced back at the stags. ‘Even so, it’s not often you see them at this time of day.’
‘Dawn or dusk,’ Connla said quietly.
‘Aye. Dawn or dusk.’
They drove on and Corgarff Castle seemed to spring from the hillside below them, a square stone fort with a pitched-slate roof.
‘Garrison for the soldiers,’ Cullen explained. ‘English soldiers. The Duke of Cumberland built this road after Culloden.’
‘They kept coming up here, the English, didn’t they,’ Connla said.
‘Aye. And have you noticed how they’re still at it?’
Cullen told him that Corgarff was an eerie place at night, especially when lit up in the winter. Snow on the hills, the land wild, empty and barren, and this ancient fort rising from nothing like a lone candle to pierce the darkness. ‘The Wolf of Badenoch used to raid up and down this pass,’ Cullen told him. ‘Clansman from Speyside. Nasty piece of work, so he was.’
‘I heard a rumour that they were considering reintroducing real wolves in Scotland,’ Connla said. ‘To take care of the deer.’
‘That’s a rumour, aye. But the farmers are all against it. Think about it, Mr McAdam. If you’re a hungry wolf, what’re you going to go after, a light-footed deer or a sheep?’ They left the Lecht Road and drove into Tomintoul. ‘Highest village in the highlands,’ Cullen said. ‘I’ve got a lot of friends here. If we get a sniff of anything we can stay in the hotel.’
The town was small and grey, with single-storey houses bordering the sides of the road that led down to a small square with three pubs or hotels and a tourist-information shop. Cullen indicated the hotel on the far side of the square which had an upmarket-looking coffee shop directly across from it. A small patch of green was decorated with park benches, and by the time they got there the rain was falling as fine drizzle. Cullen directed Connla to stop and they went into the hotel for something to eat.
The bar was spacious and decked out in quality wood panelling. A pair of ancient skis hung on one wall, along with carefully selected pictures depicting Highland scenes. A sign hung above the optics: ‘Vagabond Bar’. This’ll do, Connla thought. A handful of men were seated on wooden-backed stools, one of them in the boots and gaiters of a gamekeeper. Connla noticed a powerful torch poking out of the canvas bag at his feet. Cullen knew them all; they shook hands with him and he nodded to the torch.
‘Been lamping?’
‘Aye, last night.’
Cullen turned to Connla. ‘Lamping,’ he said. ‘For foxes.’
Connla nodded. ‘Shine the light to dazzle them, then shoot them like sitting ducks.’ He glanced at the three men. ‘You get a lot of trouble with foxes?’
‘The estate owners don�
�t like them.’
Again Connla nodded. ‘You got a lot of rabbits?’
‘Millions of the bloody things.’
Connla nodded to himself this time, sat on a stool and ordered coffee. Cullen introduced him to the men and told them what they were doing. The gamekeeper lit a cigarette and regarded him thoughtfully. He had cropped sand-coloured hair, blue eyes and the permanent facial tan of a man who spends his life out of doors. ‘Black Panthers, eh?’ He made a face. ‘Yon beast of Elgin. Bird Dog’s certainly your man for that.’
‘You ever see it?’ Connla asked him.
He shook his head. ‘No. I’ve seen the odd wild cat and plenty of ferais in my time. Nothing bigger, mind.’
‘I’ve seen traces.’ One of the younger men, with a parka and mop of tousled black hair spoke up. He sipped from his thin beer and rattled the glass against the bar. ‘Tracks and that, ken. Big toes. No claw marks.’ He sat back. ‘That’s all I’ve seen, mind, and I beat for grouse every year.’
‘But they are out there,’ Connla said.
‘So everyone tells us.’
Cullen looked wistfully through the window. ‘Och, they’re out there all right,’ he said.
The farmer showed them the sheep’s carcass. ‘Lucky you came just now,’ he said. ‘I was about to burn this before it stank the whole place out.’ He had it laid under a sheet of tarpaulin behind an old machinery shed in his concreted yard. Two collies gambolled at their heels. The pitbull remained in the Land-Rover. Connla lifted the neckerchief he wore to cover his nose as he pulled back the tarpaulin and inspected the foul-smelling carcass. The spinal cord had been severed with what looked like a single bite, but the teeth marks were inconclusive and could have been made by a dog. Rolling the carcass over, he looked at the indentations around the muzzle—burned-looking holes amid the short black fur of its face, where pinpricks of blood had congealed. He worked out the pattern, then rocked back on his haunches and rested his forearm across his thigh. ‘Something certainly tried to suffocate it,’ he said.
Cullen squatted then and began to probe the tightly woven wool with his fingers. Connla worked at the other side. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘And here.’ He counted four tears in the skin which had initially been hidden by the wool. He looked at the spacing carefully, having witnessed similar scenes a hundred times before. ‘Leopard,’ he said and stood up.
The rain had stopped but the wind was stronger, and it dragged the weight of the clouds across the hilltops, smothering their upper flanks in smoke. It was mid-August, but all at once Connla was cold. He looked out across the fields of grazing sheep to the foothills and ridges of Glen Rinnes Pass—wooden stretches, rocky outcrops, and thick, deep bracken; a million and one places for an animal as silent and stealthy as a leopard to be hiding.
‘Have you ever seen anything?’ he asked the farmer.
The man nodded. ‘Once,’ he said. ‘Aye, just the once. A long way off.’ He pointed due west to the first line of wooded hills. ‘Yon tree, standing slightly apart from the rest. Like a black shadow, it was. I only saw it for a moment.’
Cullen rested his back against the door of the Land-Rover, rolled a cigarette and then licked the gummed edge of the paper. ‘This is the area where there’s been the most sightings,’ he told Connla. ‘From here to the Lecht Road.’ Connla had the map laid out on the bonnet. Cullen spoke without looking at it. ‘Due south you’ve got a passage of land through the hills. Highest peak’s about twenty-five hundred feet. South of the Glenfiddich Lodge there’s the Blackwater Forest; plenty of cover there. Then there’s the Ladder Hills, with woodland both east and west.’ He lit the cigarette, letting thick smoke drift from his nostrils. ‘We’ve had more sheep taken from more farms in this one area than all the rest put together.’
‘More than one cat,’ Connla stated.
‘Maybe a whole family.’
‘Panthers are solitary, Bird Dog. Young stay with the mother for just over a year, then move on.’
‘You know what I mean. There’s loads of territory space.’
Connla folded his arms and rested the heel of one field boot against the toe of the other. ‘You think they’re breeding then?’
Cullen made a face. ‘Nobody else does, but ninety per cent of them were released twenty-two years ago. How long do leopards live?’
‘In the wild? Normally, twelve to fourteen years.’ Connla twisted his lip. ‘But then you gotta take account of natural predators in that equation. Cougars live twenty years; that’s because nothing really hunts them. A panther living up here would have no natural predators. There’s no record of anybody shooting one, so you can’t even count man.
Not only that, there’s good habitat, excellent water and a multitude of game. I figure a leopard could live twenty years and change.’
‘That doesn’t explain it, Mr McAdam. It would mean all of them were about to pop their clogs.’ Cullen shook his head. ‘No,’ he said, ‘they’ve got to be breeding.’
Thirteen
IMOGEN KNEW WHAT DANIEL Johnson was going to tell her long before the telephone call came through. She was in the kitchen, resting her backside against the dresser, holding the receiver with her free hand clutched in her armpit. ‘It was poisoned, wasn’t it,’ she said.
On the other end of the phone he sighed. ‘Strychnine.’
‘I knew it would be.’
‘I’m going to telephone Atholl McKenzie.’
‘Why don’t we just go up there? It might be his own land, but McKenzie’s pretty much a full-time shepherd. He’ll be nowhere near a phone.’
Johnson seemed to ponder for a moment. ‘OK. Let’s meet up on the coast road and go in one car.’
Imogen had the shorter drive to Attadale, where the unmade road wound five miles due east to McKenzie’s isolated sheep farm. She had never been onto his land this way before and she waited for half an hour in a lay-by before Daniel Johnson’s Royal Society Land-Rover rounded the bend and passed beneath the slabs of broken granite that crowded the road. Imogen slipped out of her truck, pushed the door to with a creak and heaved it again to shut it completely. Johnson watched her with a smile.
‘The old ones were always the best,’ he said as she climbed into the passenger seat.
‘Tell me that in January when there’s a foot of snow on the ground.’
He laughed, engaged first gear and pulled back onto the road. One hundred twisted yards further was the turning for Atholl McKenzie’s farm.
‘Have you met him before?’ Imogen asked as they bumped their way along the rutted track, furrow deep with rainwater in places. Johnson shook his head. ‘I know of him, though.’
‘Then you’ll have heard what a cantankerous old goat he is. I’ve come across him once or twice. When he first bought out the farm he tried to stop me riding on his land. He claimed my horse tore up the ground too much.’
Johnson looked sideways at her. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing. I still ride on his land, but I keep to the deer trails wherever I can. McKenzie drives around on a quad, Daniel, and there’s no way anyone can tell me a horse’s hooves do more damage than tyre tracks.’ She lifted her eyebrows then and grimaced. ‘I think the last time he saw me he called me the horsey hippy bitch.’
McKenzie wasn’t home. The farmyard was deserted. It was a cluster of grey stone buildings with corrugated rust-coloured roofs; all except the house, which had been fitted with new slate. No smoke curled from the chimney and nobody came to the door.
‘Has he not got a wife?’ Johnson asked her.
Imogen shook her head. ‘Not that I know of.’
Johnson looked around the yard. ‘A thousand acres, you say. He could be anywhere.’ Imogen peered through a greasy window into the kitchen. Pots and pans littered the sink and draining board and more were stacked on the table. She turned to Johnson again. ‘Let’s drive up to the loch. Check the area for lambs’ carcasses. Those men might be working again.’
They lurched their way up the tr
ack that pitted the hillside, roughly worn by a parade of different vehicles. Johnson had the Land-Rover in four-wheel drive and they bumped and bounced their way up and down a succession of low hills until they came to a pine forest. The track led them right through the middle of it. On the far side was a clearing, then more thinly spaced trees, and beyond it the coire and flat waters of Loch Thuill. They saw a tractor and quad bike parked by the loch side, but there was no sign of any humanity. Imogen sat forward, gripping the rail on the dashboard, thinking that they were already too late and imagining the eagle and his mate lying prostrate on a boulder somewhere, shot or poisoned or worse.
Johnson pulled up next to the quad and switched off the engine. Imogen sat still for a moment and the two of them peered across the expanse of the loch to the foothills, the edge of the coire and the buttresses rising above it. No movement, not much wind, all was still, and when they got out of the cab the silence seemed to settle against them like something chill yet living. Again Imogen was visited by the sensation that something was wrong. She looked sideways at Johnson and then took her binoculars from the cab and scoured the crags at the point where she knew the eyrie to be. She could see nothing and almost panicked, but then told herself that she wouldn’t be able to see it from that angle anyway. Lowering the glasses, she stood in silence for a moment, then heard voices among the trees.
She turned as four men walked out of the wood carrying two logged tree trunks between them. Imogen recognized William Morris the gamekeeper and two of the labourers from the other day. The fourth man was Atholl McKenzie. He squinted at their Land-Rover, and then his eye caught hers and he leaned to one side and spat.
Johnson stood and watched them, arms folded as they skirted the edge of the loch fifty feet away. They carried the logs to what would become the picnic area and stopped. McKenzie dropped his end and shifted his shoulders before turning to face them. Imogen and Johnson walked over. Nobody said anything, but McKenzie, a big powerful man in his fifties, looked them up and down with the faintest curl of his lip.