Sabbathman

by Hurley, Graham

  ‘What?’

  ‘A solicitor. Out Ilford way. His name’s Charlie Truman.’ Kingdom spelled the name and repeated the phone number twice. ‘Give him a ring, sir. Tomorrow. First thing. He’ll be expecting your call. I’ll have been in touch.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s got a cassette of mine, an audio tape. I sent it yesterday, first class, from London. Get the cassette off him and listen to it. Then give it to the bloke who used to be in charge of “T” Branch. The one they just elbowed. The one you mentioned.’

  ‘Wren?’ Six hundred miles away, Allder sounded lost.

  Kingdom permitted himself a grim smile. ‘That’s him. Jenny Wren. He used to be Annie’s boss. He liked her. At least, that’s the impression I got.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Just listen to the tape. Then you’ll understand.’

  ‘Yes, but why Wren? Why send it to Wren?’

  ‘Because he’s now in charge of Five’s intercepts people. It’s a kind of Gulag. The place they send the has-beens.’ He paused. ‘If he listens to the tape, I’m sure he’ll oblige.’

  ‘With what?’

  Kingdom frowned, wondering whether Allder had been at the Scotch again. Maybe he’s taken a bottle or two home, he thought. One of those special malts. All the way from Inverness airport. The phone transcripts,’ he said patiently, ‘the Feasey transcripts. What she and Dave Gifford have been up to. How much she knew and how much the customer knew …’ He paused again. ‘Wren will be able to access all that. He’ll know.’

  There was silence on the line for a moment or two, then a new note in Allder’s voice. He understands, thought Kingdom. At last he’s beginning to put it together.

  ‘This cassette,’ Allder was saying, ‘where did you get hold of it?’

  ‘Three-one-eight Queen’s Gate Gardens. Flat two. That’s the other thing. You should organise a visit. Soon as you can.’

  ‘You mean a warrant?’

  ‘No, sir. A visit. A Black and Decker job. If you do the place tomorrow, what we’re after might still be there. It’ll save us a lot of grief on the Willoughby Grant hit, believe me.’

  ‘What are we looking for?’

  ‘Anything. Maps. Petrol receipts, A weapon, maybe. Who knows?’

  Allder began to ask for a name, the person who owned the flat, but Kingdom cut across him, repeating the address, then changing the subject.

  ‘Andy Gifford,’ he said.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘Back already?’

  ‘No, sir, he never left. He’s been here all weekend. And so has his father.’

  ‘What?’

  Kingdom held the phone at arm’s length a moment, hearing Allder demanding to know more. Then he switched the power off and slipped the mobile into his pocket. High above, suspended in the darkness, the light shone on.

  EIGHTEEN

  It was Andy Gifford who woke up Kingdom in the bunkhouse next morning. He stood by the bed, his face at the level of Kingdom’s pillow. Kingdom could smell the tang of the peat on his clothes. Something was steaming in the mug he held up.

  ‘Tea,’ he grinned, ‘two sugars. Breakfast in the house when you’re ready.’

  Kingdom drank the tea then struggled out of bed. When he tried the shower, nothing happened so he made do with a cold-water wash in one of the row of basins. The American student who’d been sleeping in the bunk below had already disappeared, his paisley pyjamas neatly folded on his pillow. Kingdom began to dress, pulling on the heavy socks he’d bought at Millets, remembering Andy Gifford standing beside the bunk. Five-foot seven, five-foot eight, he thought. Exactly the height Clare Baxter had described.

  Breakfast was served in the Giffords’ kitchen. The room ran the width of the house at the back and was obviously a recent extension. There was an enormous cooking range, fuelled by bottled gas, and a couple of tall fridge-freezers. On a pin board beside the back door was a sheaf of bills from a cash-and-carry in Portree and a washing-up rota dating back to the early summer. Kingdom sat at the long deal table while Andy Gifford served eggs and bacon and nuggets of fried potato from a sizzling pan. There was fresh mud on his boots and Gifford wondered how long he’d been up.

  Kingdom was demolishing the last of the fried potatoes when Dave Gifford appeared. He was wearing a dressing-gown over his T-shirt and there was a comma of shaving foam under his chin. He had an envelope in one hand and a sheet of paper in the other. He passed the paper across the table towards Andy, ignoring Kingdom.

  ‘What d’you think?’ he said.

  Kingdom watched as Andy abandoned the coffee pot and picked up the paper. Under a colour photo of an ocean-going yacht, there was a list of specifications. He read them quickly and then returned the paper to his father.

  ‘Not a lot,’ he said, ‘for ninety grand.’

  Dave Gifford peered at the photo again and then shrugged. ‘Looks alright to me,’ he said, folding the details into the envelope and leaving the room.

  Kingdom and Andy Gifford set off for Sgurr Fasach about an hour later. They both carried light day sacks with sandwiches, chocolate and flasks of hot soup, and as they made their way inland Kingdom tried to identify the rock where he’d sheltered to make the phone call the previous night. Twice he thought he’d found it and both times he looked up, trying to locate a source for the light he’d seen. On both occasions, though, there was nothing except the browns and purples of the mountainside, dimpled with grey rocks.

  At first they walked in silence, Andy in the lead. It was a soft, moist day, not a whisper of wind, the ground soggy underfoot. After a couple of miles, the path divided and Andy paused while Kingdom caught him up. From here on, he said, the going got tougher. Soon, they’d begin to climb. The trick was to find a rhythm. There were no records to break, no prizes to claim. Just getting to the top and back would, he said, be ample reward.

  Kingdom listened to him, aware of the warmth in the man, his obvious love of this bare, bleak wilderness, trying to reconcile it with the voice he’d heard in the book he’d read on the plane. Enemy Territory had been full of bewilderment, and pain, and anger, and he’d assumed at the time that the Falklands themselves had played a part in all this: the numbing cold he’d described, the endless slog over tussock and bog, the incessant wind and rain, the hints of malevolence in the terrain and the climate. That judgment, though, had been plainly wrong. The west coast of Scotland was almost identical to the Falklands: treeless, windswept, sub-Arctic. Yet here he was, pushing steadily uphill, pointing out the names of the surrounding peaks, giving each a character. One was ‘a pain’, another ‘a kitten’, a third ‘needed watching’, a fourth you’d ‘lie down and die for’.

  The latter phrase brought a smile to Kingdom’s lips. They were halfway up the first serious ascent, the air appreciably colder, An Carraig a small white dot a thousand feet below.

  ‘So why go?’ Kingdom asked between breaths. ‘Why leave all this?’

  Andy glanced back over his shoulder. He was still in the lead but only by a yard or so. ‘The old man,’ he said, ‘it’s for him really.’

  ‘Why?’ Kingdom said again. ‘What’s gone wrong?’

  ‘Everything, more or less. The business has been OK, that’s held up, but everything else has … I dunno … gone.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Andy looked round again, not answering. Then he stopped and slipped off the day-bag. A thin, fine drizzle had begun to drift in from the sea, almost a mist, and droplets of moisture clung to his face. Andy wiped his nose, then unscrewed the top of the Thermos, and for the first time Kingdom saw the tiny blue eagle tattooed on the back of his right hand. Gloves, he thought. The man had always worn gloves.

  ‘My mum died,’ Andy was saying, ‘that was the start of it. They’d been close, really close, as long as I can remember. She’d never liked it up here, in fact she hated it, but she never once let on and he loved her for that. That was loyalty, you see. And loyalt
y meant everything to Dave. He thought the world of her.’

  ‘Because she was loyal?’

  ‘Yeah. And because she didn’t winge. Ever.’

  He found a seat on a rock and poured a cupful of soup, offering it to Kingdom. Kingdom took it, thinking suddenly of Ernie and his own mother. Same relationship, he thought. Same unquestioning devotion. Andy was watching him now, openly curious about his interest, and Kingdom told him about his own father, what had happened to Ernie over the last few months, how much he’d changed. By the time he’d got to the end of the story, the soup was nearly cold.

  ‘Shit,’ Kingdom said, offering the cup back to Andy. ‘I’m sorry.’

  Andy took the cup and added more from the Thermos. Then he nodded down towards the beach and the tiny collection of huts. ‘Same with Dave,’ he said. ‘He’s a bit younger, I know, but it’s like he’s caught some disease or other. Building that place, the pair of them, he was happy as Larry. And that made mum happy, of course. That’s the way it worked. What she really felt about the weather and all the stuff there was to do didn’t matter. As long as Dave was Dave. That’s why she’d married him. The spirit of the man. I used to come up here sometimes, seven, eight years back, and the place would be chaos. Huts half-built, timber everywhere, no proper sanitation, people shitting in holes in the ground, nothing to eat but porridge and toast, but Dave was in his element. There was nothing could stop him. Nothing. He’d been in the service, the Marines, you probably guessed that already, and that whole thing up here was like one long exercise, the toughest anyone could ever throw at you, positively the worst.’

  ‘And Dave?’

  ‘Like I say. Loved it.’

  ‘And your mum?’

  ‘Killed her. In the end.’

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘Yes.’ He nodded, his eyes still on An Carraig, the little white house by the sea. ‘I’ve been up and down here a lot the last couple of years. The place was humming, really busy. Dave had cracked it. They both had. But it was daft, too, and stupid. Because they ended up with the one thing that Dave couldn’t handle.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘Success. You know the old story?’ He glanced across at Kingdom. ‘The day the goose lays the golden egg is the day you discover you can’t stand omelettes. That’s exactly how it was with Dave. The business just grew and grew. The place was bursting. People were arriving from all over and it just got on Dave’s tits. It was like trespass. Sartre’s line. Hell is other people. He used to call them aliens, the monsters from outer space. He couldn’t stand it, any of it. Drove him nuts.’

  Kingdom nodded, taking the cup again, swallowing another mouthful of hot soup. The Planet Zilch, he thought. Like father, like son.

  ‘But that’s why he’d built the place to begin with,’ he pointed out. ‘To get people up here. To make money.’

  ‘Yeah. I know. But he couldn’t handle it. Not when it worked so well.’ He paused, flaking dried mud off the tops of his boots. ‘I suppose you’d call it irony. Isn’t that the word?’

  He looked up and Kingdom nodded, finishing the soup.

  ‘And your mum?’ he said at last. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She got sick. About this time last year. She always suffered when the winter set in, colds and flu and so on, so Dave just put her to bed, thought nothing of it. The place was a factory by then. We were turning over twenty, twenty-five people a week, like I said in the van. Dave was worked off his feet, just keeping it all on the road.’

  ‘And your mum?’ Kingdom said again.

  ‘She got pneumonia. She had no reserves, no strength at all. She smoked like a chimney. Thin as a rake.’ He paused, taking the empty cup from Kingdom. ‘She died in Portree Hospital two days after Dave brought her in. He wasn’t even with her when she went. Broke his heart. Believe me.’

  Kingdom looked away, thinking of Ernie again. ‘Yeah,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘I can imagine.’

  They climbed for another hour, skirting one peak then traversing the head of a valley before beginning another ascent towards the next summit. The blanket of cloud was thicker now and a steady rain had set in by the time they reached the top. Andy was fifty yards ahead, a shadow in the enveloping mist. He’d stopped beside a cairn of stones. Kingdom joined him, breathing hard. Every bone in his body ached. He’d never felt so tired in his life. He looked round. To his right, there was a sheer drop of scree and rock face and tendrils of straggling heather. The view, if you chose the right day, must have been sensational.

  ‘This it?’ Kingdom asked. ‘Sgurr Fasach?’

  Andy shot him a glance, at once proud and faintly shy. ‘No,’ he said, ‘change of plan.’

  Andy was looking at the cairn now, and for the first time Kingdom saw the flowers. They looked fresh, half a dozen roses in a hideous green vase. Andy was down on his knees, rearranging them.

  Kingdom caught his eye as he looked up. ‘Your mum?’

  Andy nodded. ‘She’s buried down near the house,’ he said, ‘but Dave always wanted to build a memorial. This was perfect, his favourite run.’

  ‘Run?’

  ‘Yeah. Dave used to run a lot. Still does. He’s got various circuits, various routes, but this one has always been tops.’

  Kingdom gazed at the flowers, remembering the path up, how rough it was, how slippery, the endless climbs, the sudden descents, the way the mountains played tricks with you, teasing you, offering crest-line after crest-line, each one more definitely the summit, testing your will to breaking point. Today, at a steady plod, it had taken nearly three hours. So what fuelled Dave Gifford? What drove him on? He put the question to Andy.

  ‘Mum,’ he said simply, ‘though he’d never admit it.’

  They took a different path back, following a track that plunged towards the sea, turned inland again, then doubled back on itself, offering yet another view of the island of Soay. They were still hundreds of feet up and Kingdom could just make out the shapes of the three returning canoes, red matchsticks on the slate-grey water. Going down the mountain was hard on the knees but took much less physical effort and Kingdom was able to sustain a conversation for most of the way.

  The last straw for Dave Gifford had evidently been the building of the new bridge from Skye to the mainland. Not only would the bridge bring tourists by the thousand but it was also privately built and owned, an affront – in Dave’s eyes – to everything the island had represented. The tolls would go to some remote bunch of shareholders hundreds of miles south. They had no connection with the island. They belonged to a world of company boardrooms, and expense account lunches, and sleek women. Skye, with its silence and its peace and its bare, clean, windswept spaces was – quite literally – none of their business.

  Dave had done his best to stop the bridge being built. He’d written letters to the press, lobbied his local MP, contacted the Department of Transport. When none of that had worked, when many of the locals had gone on swallowing all the yatter about boosts to tourism and a new dawn for the island’s economy, he’d begun to brood about guerrilla action. In a way, thought Kingdom, the bridge was the same kind of issue as Twyford Down, a threat to something rare and irreplaceable, another victory for the remorseless onward march of the men with the money and the power and the influence. In his prime, said Andy, none of these things had mattered to Dave Gifford. He was far too busy building his own little idyll to worry about the real world. But when An Carraig was prospering, when he himself had become part of what he hated so much, then he’d turned abruptly against it with a passion that was all the fiercer for being so frustrated. No one had listened to him. The bridge was nearly complete. Skye, his Skye, would be an island no more.

  They were halfway down the mountain, the track running parallel to the sea, the little cove of An Carraig clearly visible a couple of miles down the coast. Listening to Andy talking about Dave Gifford and the bridge, Kingdom had wondered how much of his father’s passion he shared. They were walking slow
ly now, Kingdom trying to spare his blistered heels.

  ‘So what will you do,’ he said, ‘the pair of you?’

  ‘Sell up.’

  ‘Is that easy?’

  ‘We’ve had offers. Nothing wonderful, but offers. There’s another guy flying up from London tomorrow. He’s only just got in touch. Seems to know all about us, though. Which helps.’

  ‘And once you’ve sold?’

  Andy paused, stooping to tug at one of his socks. ‘New Zealand,’ he said. ‘Dad’s idea. He thinks it’s a bigger version of here. Without the bridge, of course.’

  ‘And is he right, do you think? Will it sort him out? Do the trick?’

  ‘I’ve no idea.’ Andy grinned. ‘But getting there should be fun. We’re after a yacht. Something half-decent.’

  ‘Was that what this morning was all about? The one Dave showed you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Andy kicked each boot against a rock, loosening some of the mud caked underneath. ‘He can’t resist interfering. That’s his problem. We’ve spent the last couple of months looking at yachts, you know, doing it the sensible way, going from marina to marina, doing the thing properly, coming up with a short list, all that. Yet still he writes off for all these bits and pieces, special offers, bargain boats, anything that catches his eye. Mr Impulse. Mr Fidget. Just can’t leave it alone …’

  Kingdom was watching the canoes again. He could see the two girls now, plump black dots paddling hard against the current.

  ‘So you’ve been away a lot,’ he said lightly, ‘the pair of you?’

  ‘Yeah, since the start of September.’ Andy gave each foot one last stamp, nodding along the coast, back towards An Carraig. ‘Closed everything down completely. First time for five years.’

  Inexplicably, the path began to climb again. The rain had stopped now but they were off the rockier slopes of the mountain and the stands of heather on either side of the narrow track brushed wetly against their legs as they passed by. Up ahead, Andy had stopped again. He was standing on a grassy plateau overlooking the approaches to An Carraig. Away to the left, at the back of the tiny white house, Kingdom could just make out Dave Gifford hanging up a line of washing. Andy was watching him, too. Kingdom joined him on the edge of the sheer drop. The wind was picking up and there were seagulls below them, side-slipping lazily in towards the cliff-face.