I drove up the side of Loch Lomond, a massive expanse of water and the biggest lake in Britain. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but I had to drive carefully as the roadway sparkled white with frost. After the gloom and grime of Glasgow, it made everything look fresh and crisp and clean. It was funny, I thought, how any sun – even hard, warmth-less sun – lifted your mood.
Halfway up the loch, I stopped at a roadside tearoom with a view out over the water and ordered some cheese sandwiches with coffee. The woman who served me was in her early forties, with fresh, pale skin and dark blonde hair. She was slim but sexy and I promised myself a return visit in happier times; but there was something about her nagged at my gut. I realized that she reminded me, in an odd way, of Fiona White. She had only one other guest in the place and I had to dance around her questions about where I had come from, where I was going, what I was going to do there … the routine building blocks of conversation she must have used with every guest she chatted with. I had given up on trying to sound Glaswegian or Scottish and simply sought to neuter my speech to a standard English.
She had probably seen the way I had looked at her and it was obvious she didn’t mind at all and we chatted about nothing, all the time laying out our stalls in the indirect and abstract way you do before you seal the deal.
What the hell, Lennox, I suddenly said to myself, do you think you are doing?
I paid her and left.
I may have been picking up many of the skills of the fugitive; making myself forgettable was not one of them.
I cleared the top end of Loch Lomond and was well into the Highlands by the time the sun started to play peek-a-boo behind the mountains.
I stopped a couple of times to check Ellis’s map and make sure I didn’t miss my turning, but in the event I did. In the gloaming the landscape had started to melt into soft shapes and splashes of dull red light and shadows, and I drove past the exit and had to drive farther along the ribbon of lakeside road before I found a spot safe enough to execute a three-point turn.
It wasn’t really surprising that I had missed it – a narrow, bush-flanked mouth that led off the main highway and up and away from the loch. I turned and followed it up a steep hillside and across an empty, darkening landscape of umbrous hills and deep gorge. There was one thing that was for sure: I wasn’t being tailed. This was the Scotland of glens empty of anything other than sheep, wildcats, adders and eagles, and I would have spotted other headlights ten miles away.
After the adventures of father-and-son Catholic pretenders to the British throne, the lairds and lords of the Highlands had followed, with enthusiasm and vigour, the Hanoverian edict that the Highlands had to be cleared of troublemakers. Scotland’s loss had been North America’s gain, with whole Gaelic families of every generation being driven to the sea, then across it, to the colonies of what was now Canada and the US.
The Scots, I knew, liked to paint this pretty episode in their history as English domination and cruelty. The truth was that the conflict had been primarily Scot against Scot: Protestant against Catholic, Lowlander against Highlander. And the lairds and landowners who had driven the masses from their crofts had been their own kind. And often the Chiefs of the clans they belonged to.
Every now and again, I would pass evidence of the purge: roofless croft cottages, more like piles of roughly assembled stones, standing empty and barely perceptible in the gloom, in the middle of a trackless landscape or looming suddenly at the roadside.
The sky turned violet and the stars sparkled like the frost in my headlights. Up here, there was no city streetlight glow to obscure the stars, and the night remained bright and sharp and cold. Again, I had to stop a couple of times to fix my bearings with the map I had taken from Ellis’s shed. The road here was only wide enough for one car to pass and was intermittently blistered with marked passing places, just wide enough to fit a car or tractor in to allow oncoming vehicles to pass. Some passing places came perilously close to where the edge dropped away steeply and suddenly into a gorge which, in the growing dark, turned into a bottomless chasm.
The narrow ribbon of road ahead of me became reduced to a frost-edged pool of light from my headlamps, and I found that bends would appear without warning. Some were unexpectedly sharp. Driving here in the daylight would be challenge enough, but in the dark it was a nightmare.
I just didn’t see it coming. The road had been perfectly straight for half a mile, then took an almost right-angular twist. I slammed on the brakes, but the Cresta simply skated along the road, not responding to anything I did with the steering wheel.
The world slowed down. I took my foot off the brake, reapplied it gently, took it off, reapplied it.
Nothing worked.
Straight ahead of me was darkness, the road gone.
It was the strangest thing: to feel nothing beneath the wheels. To know you were in a motor car suspended in space. Another weird thing was that all that went through my head was McBride’s pride in his car. The way it had been polished and cherished.
‘Sorry, Twinkle …’ I said out loud, and waited for the impact.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
When it came, the first impact, I felt it in every bone in my body. The Cresta had come down hard, but not nose first, instead landing not quite squarely on all four wheels. I was thrown upwards and collided with the roof. The car bounced and jolted, each impact crushing and tearing metal, tossing me around its inside. Every now and then I would see a flashbulb image of grass and rock in the headlights. More noise. Sound that seemed to fill the universe.
The windscreen shattered and showered me with glass.
Silence.
The engine had died. Or been killed by the crash. There was no more light from the headlamps and I guessed they too had been smashed by the impact.
I tried to work out where I was hurt. Which was difficult, because I hurt all over. Sprawled on the bench seat, I lay still, drinking in the silence and the dark. I was pretty sure I was alive, and I was going to stay that way. Or at least stay alive until I had to tell Twinkletoes what I’d done to his precious Cresta.
I slowly reconnected with my body. I made two fists and then flexed my fingers. Worked my elbows. Rotated my shoulders, getting a jab of pain from the right but not enough to indicate anything more serious than a strain. Tilting myself up slowly, using the steering wheel as a lever, I eased up into a sitting position before running my hands down each leg, rotating each booted foot at the ankle.
I took a long, slow breath. I knew that within a few hours I was really going to start hurting and I’d be as stiff as a board, but I didn’t care. I was alive. I sat in the dark, behind the wheel, as if patiently waiting in a queue of traffic. It was weird. I couldn’t see a thing in the pitch darkness and for a panicked moment wondered if I’d been blinded by a head injury. I ran my fingers over my face and through my hair. No blood. No lacerations. No duck egg bumps.
I felt around for the glove compartment, opening it to get some light into the cabin of the car, but none came on. The electrics must have been shot. I couldn’t find my penlight in my pocket and spent ten minutes fumbling around on the seat and the floor trying to find it, without success. It would be hours before daylight – a full night, in fact – and I couldn’t hang around till then. I decided to get out of the car, but the driver’s door was jammed tight in its twisted frame. I slid over and kicked the passenger door open and crawled out.
It didn’t do me much good. The only light was coming from the moon and stars, and even that was shaded by the brooding black shoulder of the hill above me. What I could see was that I hadn’t come that far: maybe twenty yards from the road, but most of that had been downwards. I stumbled about and moved to the front of the car. More from what I could feel rather than see, it became clear that my continued descent down the slope had been halted by a thicket of brush and tangled wood. I allowed myself a smile at the irony. I looked up at where the road was, most of my journey back to it hidden in the deepest shad
ow. It would be difficult enough to get back up in the daylight and there was no way I could make it in the dark. Anyway, I had all of my gear still in the car. There was nothing for it: I was going to have to spend the night in the car.
Somehow, without the aid of my penlight, I was able to open the boot and feel around for the sleeping bag. I took it into the back seat, shoving the scattered clothing onto the floor and, still wearing trousers, waterproofs and boots, climbed into it.
With my aches and pains, and with the adrenalin from the accident still coursing through my veins, I knew there was no way I would get to sleep.
As usual, I was wrong.
The sound of a car, up above on the single track road, woke me. By the time I was fully conscious, the engine sound was already fading into the distance. Not that it made much odds: there was no way I could flag down a motorist and cadge a lift.
The pain from being buffeted about in the crash was now localized – to the space between my toenails and the top of my skull. Just like the night before, everything hurt. It just hurt more. I took a minute to gather my senses, then unzipped myself from the sleeping bag and crawled out. The grey morning outside nipped at my hands and face as soon as I got out of the car. The sky was clear, but the morning was still busying itself with the uplands, and would take some time before getting down here. Still, I had a good view all around me. Looking up to the road, I could see where the car had dropped a good five feet before careering down the steep slope, leaving a scar where it had scored through the thin layer of earth that covered the rock. I blessed the five-foot drop for not being a fifty-foot drop, which it would have been if I had come off the road around the corner.
The Cresta had plunged through one thicket and into a second. I worked out that it would be difficult to see from the road, but I would have to get back up there before I could see for sure. The one thing I didn’t want was someone knocking on McBride’s door and telling him that his car had been found trashed and dumped in the middle of nowhere. I knew he would never give me up deliberately, but Twinkle was Twinkle and didn’t sparkle the brightest.
It took me a good half hour to collect all of the stuff from the car, roll up the sleeping bag and pack everything into the rucksack. The only thing I couldn’t fit in was the bivouac, but I lashed that to the back of the rucksack. All in all, with the anorak, the backpack and the professional mountain gear, I would really look the part of the serious mountain rambler. Given that it was November and freezing, it was probably more the part of the seriously deranged mountain rambler.
I decided to get the lay of the land. Leaving my pack by the car, I tried to find my way through the tangle of branches the Cresta had become caught up in. I couldn’t, so I edged my way along it and stepped around the side.
Instinct, that strange old thing the nature of which I had debated, saved me. As soon as I felt the ground go from beneath my feet, I grabbed two fistfuls of branch. My feet scrabbled on the loose gravel, trying to get purchase and get me back from the edge of the cliff that dropped below me.
Scrambling back from the edge, I dropped down onto my backside, that good old instinct telling me to get as much of my body as possible in contact with solid ground, as soon as possible.
When I got my breath back, I inched forward again and peered down into the gully. Thirty feet below me, a river frothed angrily over rock as it surged along the valley bottom. I turned to look along the length of the cliff edge: the bonnet of the Cresta, projected over the edge by a few inches where it had burst through the tangle of bush, root and branch.
I had just slept through the night, like a baby, in a car being held back from a deadly plunge by a mess of dead vegetation. I suddenly felt sick and started to shake, as if the realization had triggered the delayed shock of the crash.
I stayed where I was, sitting on the cold, frosty earth, took the pack from the bib pocket of the anorak, lit a cigarette and smoked it to calm my nerves.
Then I smoked a couple more.
There was no point in trying to get back up to the road at that point. In fact, it was probably a bad idea to be visible, even if the chances of a car or truck passing were remote.
Instead, I decided to walk along the shelf edge that ran parallel to the road, but was low enough down for me to keep out of sight. Checking Ellis’s map before setting out, I reckoned I hadn’t that far to go, and the walking, while rocky, wasn’t that arduous.
I had guessed that the shelf I was walking along would eventually come up to the road level, but it didn’t, instead declining sharply into the valley bottom. After half-an-hour’s walk, I found myself at the river’s edge. I took the opportunity to fill a billycan and heat it on the small gas stove, tossing in some loose tea. I sat watching the river while I drank the tea. The odd thing was that, because of what I was wearing and the body heat from my exertions being trapped in their layers, I didn’t feel at all cold other than on my cheeks – and my hands, whenever I removed my gloves. I looked around me at the heather-dressed mountains whose hues changed constantly, depending on the light and the occasional passing shadow of a cloud in the unforgivingly cold, blue sky.
There was no denying it. Scotland could be breathtakingly beautiful.
But so could Cape Breton Island or British Columbia. I rinsed out the billycan, packed up my gear and headed onward.
Despite it being a tiny mark on the map, there was a lot of give and take in the area it indicated, but eventually I caught sight of a pale grey wisp of smoke rising from some kind of settlement up ahead. The valley floor had been rising for some time and I guessed that the handful of houses indicated on the map at the head of the valley were the source of the smoke.
I found my way up the side of the mountain on the far side from the road and walked along a ridge, approaching the village from what I hoped would be an unconventional and unexpected direction. But the ridge became a path that again started to take me up the mountainside and away from my target and I realized I would have to retrace my steps. I changed my mind when I saw what I thought was an abandoned croft. It would give me a good view of the settlement, I guessed, so I headed for it.
It turned out not to be an abandoned croft but a bothy in a full state of repair. Bothies were small buildings maintained to provide shelter for hill walkers and mountaineers.
A notice board by the door instructed me in the etiquette of using the bothy’s facilities. Basically, you were expected to leave the shelter how you found it, and if you took a dump you did it outside away from a watercourse; no trash to be left in the bothy when you left, that kind of thing.
The building itself was a rectangle of two-foot thick stone walls, divided into two rooms, each accessed from a separate door and not connected internally. The first room was the accommodations: a basic box of a room of naked, unplastered stone with a large fireplace and chimney breast in the soot-stained back wall. A robust table of some dense wood that was unidentifiable under several layers of lacquer sat beneath the single, square window. The second room was a storeroom containing a shovel for latrine digging, a box of candles and a couple of brooms. There was even a pile of firewood, which the notice on the wall advised had to be replaced if used.
The bothy was a godsend. I reckoned that at this time of year there wouldn’t be many walkers up in the hills, although I knew it was a fraternity not noted for its common sense when it came to the weather, and the bothy was closer to a settlement, albeit a small one, than most were. If I were stuck, I could camp down here overnight.
I had been wrong about having a view of the village from it, however. A thicket of trees and a swell in the hillside obscured the view, meaning I would have to head back down the trail a little to see it; but that also meant that the bothy could not be easily seen from the village or its approach road.
I left my stuff in the bothy and walked back down the trail to where I could get a good view of the village, using my new binoculars to watch any activity. There was none. The village consisted of a clutch of
cottages arranged on either side of the road, two larger houses and an inn. There was the massive shoulder of a mountain behind the village and I could see a second clutch of buildings higher up, about a half-mile from the village on the far side, and I recognized it as a farmhouse and outbuildings. But it was the second house that interested me. It was a grander sort of place and more like something you would see in town. A big, solid villa, with two wings to it and a separate stable block. I guessed that the farm was a tenancy of the big house.
Being on the other side of the village, the big house was too far away for me to keep tabs on from where I was. I needed to get closer.
I went back to the bothy and brewed up some tea with the gas canister stove, not wanting to light a fire and make smoke, despite the fact that the bothy was pretty much hidden from the village. I stretched out Ellis’s map on the table and took the automatic from my backpack, checked the magazine and safety, and tucked it into the waistband of my flannels, obscured from view by the waterproofs, the heavy turtleneck sweater and the anorak. No one would see the gun, all right, but I sure wasn’t going to win any fast-draw contests.
I leaned over the table and examined the map. Ellis’s mark corresponded to my current location. What I was looking for was somewhere in the village, the farm or the large house I had seen.
This was where Ellis had come the night his wife had heard him on the telephone. I knew that for sure. I’d known it ever since I’d examined the mark on the map more closely at the barge’s window. The mark wasn’t a cross after all.
It was a ‘T’. ‘T’ for Tanglewood.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It was, I reckoned, time for lunch.
I walked down the hillside, and along the valley towards the village. My destination was the inn and I wore my rucksack to convince anyone who cared that I was one of the more hardy, or foolhardy, of Scotland’s wilderness wanderers.
Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) Page 32