Below the Thunder

by Robin Duval

  This time, after leaving the alley, he went northwards down the narrow ways past the allotments and over the golf course, and across the main west road until he reached Perivale Station. He took the train out as far as the northern branch of the Central Line allowed, hired a car from a small private garage, and set off up the M40.

  After the distances he’d become accustomed to in the American West, the drive to Scotland was a breeze. Aside from refuelling at a motorway service station – paying cash again – he did not need to pause until he was well past the border.

  He pulled off the road north of Moffat for a doze. It was still a few hours before sunrise. The bright achromic beauty of the moonlit landscape could merely hint at the oranges, yellows and reds already suffusing the Lowlands hills. Even so, it was not until a cloud drifted across the moon and the forest fell into shadow that Bryn was able to close his eyes and sleep.

  By early morning he was on the A9. Edinburgh to John O’Groats, the longest road in Scotland. And for a historian, one of the most resonant highways of Europe. You could trace the narrative of Scotland through the great battlefields that lay beside it. Mons Graupius, where Agricola subdued the northern tribes; Bannockburn, where independence was won from the English; and Culloden, the death knell – until the present century – of Scottish nationhood.

  He had arrived at Inverness. And he was too late.

  The night train from Euston had been and gone. He parked up in the station yard and wandered around. There was not a person to be seen. He spotted a car rental across the road and went in. A red-cheeked middle-aged lady smiled at him from behind the counter.

  ‘I know this is a very silly question,’ he said. He could hear the Englishness echoing back at him.

  ‘I dinnae mind silly questions.’

  ‘I want to check if my wife managed to rent a car here earlier.’

  He pulled out Agnete’s iPhone.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get her all morning on her mobile but either she’s got it switched off or there’s no signal.’

  He showed the lady the photograph of them posing together with champagne glasses in their hands.

  ‘Honeymoon photo,’ he said bashfully.

  ‘You wouldnae get her anyway,’ said the lady. ‘There’s no signal where she’ll be now.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Did ye not know that?’

  ‘No signal at all?’

  ‘Depends how patient y’are of course.’

  ‘How patient do I need to be?’

  ‘Och, it’ll be fine when she gets to Lochinver.’

  ‘Lochinver?’

  She looked at him curiously.

  ‘D’you no ken where your wife’s goin’?’

  Chapter 21

  For much of the journey it was an ‘A’ road in name alone, winding and slow, frequently single-track with ‘passing places’, bleakly surrounded by a harsh, unyielding country of rocks, marshes and tiny rushing streams. For an hour and more at a stretch, there was no sign of habitation and just occasionally of sheep or other livestock struggling to crop the bald terrain. Even the sky was devoid of birdlife. Savage, isolated crags of weathered granite loomed above the approaching horizon like pieces of Henry Moore. But though he started probably not more than an hour behind Agnete, drove as fast as he could and had few vehicles to pass, he never caught sight of her.

  It was well into the afternoon before the road finally petered out and he reached Lochinver, a small grey town on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.

  The breeze coming in across the water was, unsurprisingly so far north, bracingly fresh. He put on Dieter’s anorak and the velvet slouch hat, slung the birding binoculars around his neck and went for a stroll. There was one main street and hardly anyone about. No clues at all as to where Agnete might be. He switched on her iPhone in the vague off-chance she might try ringing it from a landline to trace its whereabouts. The lady in Inverness had been right. At least there was a signal in Lochinver, if not a very strong one.

  It took him barely an hour to explore the town to both ends, twice. He found a teashop and settled in the bay window with a pot of strong tea, a slice of banoffee pie and the previous day’s Guardian, to watch for comings and goings. Pensioners chatted outside the greengrocer’s; fishermen in chest waders came up from the harbour with boxes of fish and ice; cars dawdled through the town; time passed.

  A young family was taking tea at the far end of the room. Father, mother, girl and boy a year or so apart. Without thinking, he picked up the iPhone to dial his own daughter’s number and for a minute or more his finger hovered over the keys while he struggled to suppress the dawning conviction that – the instant she lifted her receiver – every intelligence agency in the country would be triangulating his position. He laid the phone down on the table and turned away to gaze morosely out of the window.

  Someone had parked a dirty Ford MPV on a double yellow line on the other side of the road, outside the public library. He had glanced at it once or twice, wondering how long it would be before the Caithness and Sutherland police intervened, when it occurred to him that the MPV was the sole vehicle in Lochinver – apart from his own – without a Scottish ‘SX’ or ‘SY’ prefix on its number plate. Instead it bore an ‘L’, for London.

  He did not have to watch for much longer before a slightly built man, in an anorak very like his own, emerged from the building carrying a small MacBook. It was Marcus – fresh from a session, he guessed, plugged into the library’s broadband connection. He moved quickly to the MPV and was away while Bryn was paying his bill.

  Slow-changing traffic lights at the junction east of town held the Ford up long enough for Bryn to catch up while they were still on the main highway. He held a position a couple of hundred yards to the rear as the other vehicle turned north up a small coastal road which shortly deteriorated to a tarmac track, snaking round the sides of sharp, rocky outcrops and through a tumbled domain of boulders and narrow valleys, sheep and hooded crows. The one passing place sign was pitted with gunshot.

  Once or twice, the MPV slowed its pace as if suspicious of the following vehicle. When it veered sharply right up a rutted path too challenging for an ordinary saloon, Bryn accelerated on down the main track. But – as soon as he was out of sight – parked up within the lee of a drystone wall; and scuttled back.

  Marcus’s path ran over the crest of a rise and down towards the coast. Directly ahead was a tiny cove, squeezed between granite promontories. Twin ramp-like blocks rose out of the ocean at its entrance, their inward faces a perfect match as if, millennia before, a single monolith had split and drifted apart.

  Tucked into the curve of the bay was a solitary house. It had been built in the modern, cosmopolitan style with floor to ceiling sliding windows on the seaward side, and looked out upon a landscaped terrace of benches and summer barbecues. On the landward side there was a gravelled stand for four-wheel drive vehicles, and a small parked car.

  Bryn ducked behind a drystone wall and watched.

  Rabbits chewed at the grass. A Wheatear pecked at some tiny dark-blue berries. Somewhere out near the shoreline, Oyster Catchers shrieked.

  Marcus had driven his MPV onto the grass below the terrace and was standing on a wall, peering out to sea. He hopped down and entered the house through one of the sliding window doors. For a while Bryn lost sight of him – until he arrived in the kitchen, immediately below his hiding place. A second person emerged from an inner room to greet him. It was Agnete. For a moment they were framed against an open window: he kissing her briefly on the lips, she resting a hand lightly on the side of his face. Then she placed a finger on his mouth, as if sealing an important message.

  He felt no better than a Peeping Tom. He slipped down from his eyrie, retraced his steps to the car and drove away along the curve of the ocean until he reached a headland north of the bay. There he found a small walled cemetery nestling in the lee of the high ground. He left the car and went in to find some solace in other thoughts.r />
  Maclean, Macdonald, Mackay, Matheson, Macrae, MacAuley, MacLeod, Mackenzie. Sturdy headstones of granite enduringly inscribed. A roll call of the western clans. The names of families – the last two in particular – that had ruled this wild land since the earliest middle ages.

  And little change since to the surrounding landscape. Too windswept and exposed for anything better than a scrawny kind of grass, full of salt and sand, nibbled at by little wiry sheep. One low wall snaking across it – millennia old – constructed not of conventionally horizontal dry stone but of sharp vertical rocks, like giant’s teeth. Wild yellow irises. Bogs and fields of white flowers with blossoms like cotton tufts.

  He wandered towards the sea and back down the shoreline. Another battlefront of tumbled boulders, bleached flotsam and tangled vegetation wrenched from the ocean. A landscape of violence. Who could not admire the resilience of the people who had made their home in such wilderness?

  Where the coastline swerved up towards the cliff edge, he came across a pile of rocks more densely packed than the rest. They all seemed to have been roughly squared off, like gargantuan dice, and covered an area not much smaller than a football pitch. He walked round them until he found a narrow pathway leading towards the centre.

  It was a broch: a two thousand year old circular tower built by the local Celts against rival tribes. Its original height could be guessed at by the quantity of stone jumbled around what remained of the central structure. Thirty feet perhaps. High enough to look across the ocean for a threatening enemy.

  There was a small entrance in the low landward wall with a triangular stone lintel across the top. Modern six-foot man could just about enter, bent double. Inside, the ground floor was well preserved with a low stone-ceilinged corridor and a couple of rooms leading off it. The most macabre feature, though, was the killing room.

  Two or three feet within the broch, where an interloper might wait for a moment while his eyes adjusted to the gloom, a hole had been let into the ceiling. And above that, a secret space embedded within the walls, wide enough for a small man – or a mature boy – to wait invisibly, knife in hand…

  In the spirit of historical enquiry, Bryn crawled on down the corridor. The origins of the brochs remained shrouded in mystery, with historians and archaeologists arguing to this day about whether they were for military defence, or merely a safe winter lock-up for crops and livestock. The first room was too full of fallen rock to make a guess at its size or likely use. He crawled on to the second.

  This room’s flagged ceiling was high – higher than necessary for storage purposes – and the daylight through a collapsed hole at its apex illuminated the broken corpse of a large ram. All the flesh had been eaten away from the skull and legs. The fleece though was intact and gently vibrating, as an army of tiny creatures worked busily beneath it. A strange, sweet odour caught his nostrils and he withdrew the way he had come.

  A barely altered iron age land. What else might he find? A broch was such a major investment, it would be surprising if there were not other fascinating remnants of its ancient community nearby. He continued on down the coastline, wishing he’d been more alert.

  A few hundred yards further on, in a tight curve of the shore and near the water’s edge, he came upon a diamond-shaped carpet of rounded stones. Too recent and tidy to have any historical significance. But intriguing nevertheless. He climbed down and explored around the carpet in widening circles, until he arrived at a clutter of wooden staves jammed between some rocks. He dragged out a couple.

  There was a short flight of stone steps behind them, leading to a small padlocked wooden door. He tried the lock but it was too new and robust to shift, so he returned to the shore. It was interesting to speculate what lay beyond the door. There would once have been a natural cavity deep within the cliff where the rock-face had, over æons, fractured and crumbled. Dug out and cleared to make an iron age souterrain perhaps – a more practical and secret storehouse for the community’s winter food than the broch, and a likely companion to it. He wondered who might be using it now.

  The daylight was beginning to fade. He had forgotten how quickly dusk fell in the north. Time to get back to the car and maybe find somewhere to stay in Lochinver or Ullapool. As he reached the top of the cliff, he looked back across the sea and noticed for the first time an ocean-going yacht riding at anchor a quarter of a mile out. A small black rubber inflatable emerged from the seaward side and started heading his way.

  He slid out of sight behind a rocky outcrop and focussed Dieter’s birding binoculars on the men in the dinghy. They were short, square and tanned, and very familiar. He tilted the glasses up to the yacht. It had been given a fresh coat of paint since he had last seen it in the San Francisco East Bay. And it had a new name: Stella Polaris.

  The dinghy beached in the middle of the cove and the men fanned out like a searching party. One of them came upon the stone carpet and whistled quietly to the others. The rest went back to the boat while the whistling man paced away from the diamond towards the cliff face, directly to the souterrain entrance. The staves were cleared to the side and several shiny upright black bags carried from the dinghy down the stone steps. The men stood for a while on the beach conferring together before finally clambering back into the dinghy and returning to the yacht.

  Bryn waited. The yacht continued to sit at anchor, its sails down, its crew invisible below deck. Apart from the distant undulating chur of a nightjar somewhere on the moor behind him, everything – the land, the sea – had fallen into a death-like slumber.

  He crept down to the shore. No attempt had been made to replace the staves, which lay in a pile beside the storehouse entrance. Though the padlock was hanging on the door, no one had bothered to click it back into place.

  It took him a while to become accustomed to the darkness inside. The room was roughly cube-shaped with concreted-in stone walls, and wood planks for a ceiling. A number of black waterproof canoe bags stood together on the rock floor, sea-water wet. He undid a buckle on the first of them and pulled back the velcro seal: the bag was full of shiny foil-wrapped packages, about the size of small, fat, French baguettes. He fished one out and ran a thumbnail across the foil. Some coarse white powder spilled out. He became rapidly very nervous; and returned the package to its bag, sealed the whole thing up again, and started for the exit.

  A blonde man was standing at the top of the steps with a small hold-all beside him. He did not seem at all surprised to see Bryn.

  ‘¿Es usted el inglés?’

  Bryn took a flyer on the one word he thought he could recognise.

  ‘Inglés. Si. Yo soy. I am indeed the Englishman.’

  And, on an inspiration:

  ‘Have you got something for me? ¿Para mi?’

  The blonde man laughed and produced from the hold-all a parcel, gift-wrapped like a Christmas present.

  ‘Careful,’ he said, in English.

  ‘I expect it’ll be heavy,’ said Bryn.

  The man laughed again and Bryn grasped the packet to his chest. Markedly heavier than the last time, requiring both arms to support it.

  The blonde man was already returning to a small outboard motorboat bobbing at the water’s edge. Bryn gave a friendly wave as it gunned away towards the anchored yacht.

  As soon as he felt it safe to do so, he made off as fast as he could – along the shoreline, under cover of the rocks, until he reached a path leading up to the broch. He found the lintelled entrance, and crept inside. Moonlight was now filtering through small gaps in the ceiling and he settled down to catch his breath and explore the new acquisition.

  Inside the Christmas wrapping was a sturdy wooden box. Inside that was what at first sight looked like a solid cube of lead; but which, once out of the box, revealed itself as two separate halves. As he carefully lifted the upper one, a glass jar appeared. Thick, opaque, and a dark, possibly amber colour; with a heavy glass stopper partly shrouded in industrial strength duct tape. He did not explore further.
He gift-wrapped it anew and halfcrouched, half-crawled his way back to the exit.

  Where the heavens descended upon him. As he passed under the lintel, he was crushed suddenly and violently to the ground. A choking ligature materialised around his throat. A body, with the silence of a ghost, had plummeted from the space above the entrance and lay so heavily across him that he could not move. On either side of his face fists were jerking at the ends of a leather belt. He could not speak, even gasp. The pain was excruciating. The only sound he heard – as unconsciousness overtook him – was a rasping high-pitched whisper close against his ear.

  ‘See y’in hell, dawg!’

  He awoke with a paroxysm of coughing and retching. Every intake of breath raked at the muscles and tendons of his throat. The belt had fallen to the stone floor. The murderous incubus lay across him, as still as a windless day. Very slowly, as the pain began to recede, he was able to wriggle himself free and climb shakily to his feet.

  He could see a small tear in the middle of the man’s shirt, six inches below the shoulder blades. Blood was spreading from it across the cotton. A San Francisco baseball cap had tumbled away across the grass and the dead man’s face was tilted towards the moonlight, open-mouthed and glassy-eyed. A kitchen knife, bloody to the hilt, lay on the rocks beside him.

  Twenty feet distant, propped up against the outer wall of the broch, was Agnete.

  Her smock was heavy with blood. Blood glistened on her right forearm. Her breathing, as he approached her, was shallow, fast and uncontrolled. He crouched down to put an arm around her and she shrank against him with a shivering judder that almost tipped him to the ground. Her breathing gradually slowed and relaxed and she lay, eyes closed, against his shoulder.