I knew the feeling.
‘When can we go back?’ I said.
‘What’s your hurry?’ said Will. He sounded like a native of those parts. He had the quiet manner of speech of somebody who had lived in the Highlands for most of his life.
‘Mum’s still there,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to get her away. I don’t know what’s going on but if I’m in danger, then surely she must be as well.’
‘Not quite the same kind of danger,’ said Jeff. He added, to Will, ‘Have you got the dinner on?’
‘I didn’t know you’d be back so soon,’ said Will defensively. ‘I’ll start the spuds now and we can eat about two.’
‘Spuds?’ I asked.
The two men burst out laughing.
‘Spuds – potatoes. Pommes de terre. Kartoffeln,’ said Jeff.
‘Oh, yes! I know!’ I must have sounded like an over-excited six-year-old. I thought back to Ravernie, where my father and I had excavated potatoes from the ground and cooked and eaten them together. I blinked back a tear.
We all sat down round the table, with its old, scratched surface. I felt as if I was at home for the first time since my father and I had left Cramond, all those months before. It was silly, of course. I didn’t really know what Will and Jeff were up to. For all I knew they were white slave traders or something. I smiled suddenly. I suppose it was the old-fashioned surroundings that had sent my brain back to something I had once read in my great-grandmother’s journal. Even when she was a girl, it had only been an urban legend.
‘How much do you want to know about what we’re doing here?’ said Jeff.
‘Don’t tell her anything!’ Will urged. He stared at me, not in a hostile way but with that scared-rabbit expression I had seen earlier. It could have something to do with the way his sandy eyebrows were permanently raised, or with his very slightly protruding teeth… I dragged my attention back to the point.
‘I don’t even know enough to wonder what I don’t know,’ I said, hoping to make some kind of sense. ‘Are you a secret agent?’
Both men broke into genuine laughter, spluttering with it, catching each other’s eyes and starting up again when they were about to stop.
‘Secret agent?’ said Jeff at last, still shaking with the aftershock. ‘What’s that when it’s at home?’
‘I don’t know – a spy?’
He shook his head.
‘Well, do you work for a foreign power?’ I asked, not knowing how else to express it.
‘In a manner of speaking,’ said Jeff.
Will shook his head. ‘You shouldn’t tell her. What if she falls into the wrong hands?’
‘The wrong hands?’ I was even more bewildered, if that was possible.
‘Just about any hands are the wrong hands,’ said Will.
‘I know that already,’ I said with feeling.
‘Except ours,’ he added hastily.
Jeff made a sound halfway between a sniff and a snort.
‘Any hands can be the wrong hands,’ he said. ‘Depends on lots of things.’ He leaned forward, closer to me, and spoke in a low voice as if he thought there might be eavesdroppers inside the room. ‘I’m an envoy from the English government.’
For some reason it made me giggle. ‘Envoy?’
‘I told you not to tell her,’ said Will.
‘Yes, an envoy,’ said Jeff. ‘I’ve been sent with my team to establish the extent of support for certain ideas in what’s left of Scotland. Believe it or not, I work for the English Diplomatic Service.’
‘What sort of ideas?’
‘Hmm. Dangerous ideas. Ideas that could be seen as treason in certain quarters.’
His words didn’t strike quite the appropriate amount of fear into me. After all, my brother had once been in jail for conspiring against the Scottish government, and he had lived to tell the tale. Not that he had actually told it, having been preoccupied with survival ever since his release. Knowing him, he would prefer to take part in more action rather than reviewing the past in any case. My father and I had been on the run from government agents and had escaped, and my mother – well, she was different.
‘Treason? You mean, rebellion against the government?’
‘My information is that there is no government,’ he said.
This didn’t exactly come as a shock, but it was startling to hear it spelled out in these uncompromising terms.
‘Anarchy,’ he said. ‘Marauding bands of looters taking what they want, crimes of violence on every street corner, whole areas where private paramilitaries have taken over… That isn’t what we want on our doorstep.’
‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ I said meekly. I supposed the group my father and Dan and the others were involved in might count as a marauding band of looters, although I didn’t like to think of it in those terms.
Having conjured up the rest of the family, so to speak, I was so busy worrying about them that I didn’t think through the possible implications of his final sentence for a moment or two. There was a short pause.
‘Are you going to invade Scotland?’ I said as I at last worked it out.
The two of them laughed again. Well, at least I was providing them with some free entertainment.
‘Don’t worry about that for now,’ said Jeff, not quite laying my fears to rest. ‘We do need to speak to your mother, though. We think she may have information that could be useful to us.’
‘I’m sure she has,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how you’re going to get it out of her while she’s trapped in there. Have you got a plan?’
‘A plan?’ said Jeff, almost as if he hadn’t even heard the word before. ‘It isn’t quite as specific as that.’
‘You are going to rescue her, aren’t you?’
‘If we can,’ he said.
‘What about you?’ I asked Will. ‘Are you on the same side as him?’
‘It isn’t really a matter of taking sides,’ said Will evasively.
‘You can assume he is,’ said Jeff, cutting across Will’s reply. ‘But he’s right, there aren’t any sides.’
‘There are always sides,’ I said. ‘Quite often more than two.’
They didn’t laugh at this.
‘Weren’t you going to put the spuds on?’ said Jeff to Will. ‘And perhaps some sausages?’
‘I suppose you make your own sausages too,’ I said.
‘No, we barter potatoes for them,’ said Will. ‘The gamekeeper down the road makes them from venison. Only in season, of course.’
I hadn’t realised such an old-fashioned kind of community existed, here in the hills. It hadn’t even been like this at Ravernie.
It was a mistake to think of Ravernie. It reminded me of my father.
GAVIN
The search party took longer than I had expected. I couldn’t do any more work in the stables. It was too dark, and we had a self-imposed ban on having unnecessary lights on after supper, to preserve what energy resources were left. Of course I couldn’t sleep, which would have been my next choice of how to pass the time. Instead I wandered more or less aimlessly about the encampment – now that it was more formal, with its rows of army style tents and the larger kitchen tent with its extending canopy, I felt justified in giving it this title – mulling over in my mind such weighty issues as whether to mend my socks again or to ask somebody to forage for some new ones on the next trip down into town.
I thought about Emma and Jennifer too, and hoped they weren’t getting too bored during their enforced rest. A bored Emma was a dangerous Emma. I wasn’t sure if Jen ever got bored. She tended to find something to use her brain for in the most unpromising situations. She didn’t always translate her ideas into action, though. I suppose she was more like me in that way.
This line of thought was interrupted by the sight of lights in the distance, coming closer at a rate that could have been rather dangerous and which seemed so ominous that I found myself heading out to meet the search party instead of just standing waiting for it, whi
ch would have been more sensible.
Inevitably, my foot slipped on a wet rock and I was only saved from falling by Declan’s reflexes as he reached out and held on to my arms. It was embarrassing to be helped up, but I quickly extricated myself from his grip and searched his face in the torchlight for a sign of what had happened.
‘You all right, mate?’ he said.
I knew it had all gone wrong just from his tone of voice as he said those few words.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Wait until we get down to base camp.’
It was only a few steps away, but it was an infinite, tortuous journey from hope to despair.
‘They’ve been taken,’ he said once we were outside the kitchen. Some members of Tanya’s team were still clearing up in there, so there was enough light to see his grim expression properly. In a way I wished there wasn’t.
‘Taken? Who on earth by? You seemed to think it would be perfectly safe going up there on a day like this. How do you know they haven’t fallen over some cliff that you had forgotten was there?’
‘Get a grip, Gav,’ he advised. ‘Losing it with me will not help.’
I realised I had been almost shouting in his face. I drew back a bit. Tanya came up to us.
‘How do you know?’ she said to him.
‘Signs of a scuffle,’ he said. He put his hand in a pocket and brought out a knitted Fair Isle hat. ‘It’s Fiona’s.’ His voice broke. I felt sorry I had shouted; in that moment of knowing Dan was lost, I had forgotten Declan too had lost somebody.
‘They must have come over the hills,’ said Tanya. ‘I’ll post extra guards tonight.’
‘Extra guards?’ I hadn’t known there were any guards in the first place. ‘Did you know this kind of thing was going to happen?’
‘I knew there were bands of looters about,’ she said gravely. ‘I didn’t know they were going to snatch two of our number.’
‘But why?’ I said helplessly. ‘What do they want with Fiona and Dan? He’s only a boy.’
‘Recruitment,’ suggested Declan, his face still set in grim lines. ‘Maybe they didn’t have enough of a group to be viable. Maybe they lost people.’
Tanya nodded. ‘That would make sense.’
‘What can we do?’ I said.
I half-expected her to round up a team and go after them there and then.
‘We can’t do anything tonight,’ said Tanya. ‘In the morning – we’ll see.’
‘In the morning?’ I cried. ‘They could be miles away by then – taking my son with them. I’d only just got him back from… well, never mind all that. Don’t your lot have night vision stuff or something with them? I’ll go too if that makes any difference. If you help me with this I’ll devote the rest of my life to helping with whatever you want me to do.’
‘Gavin,’ said Declan. He sounded almost as if he were warning me off. It wasn’t as though I was selling my soul to the devil, though. Even although a shiver ran up my spine when I re-played my own words back to myself.
‘Don’t make promises you can’t afford to keep,’ snapped Tanya. ‘I’ll get a team together to set out at first light. If you’re out of bed in time you can tag along.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Declan. ‘It’ll be quicker if I show you what we found tonight.’
The night went very slowly. Even when I was on the verge of dropping off to sleep, which happened once or twice, I would give a start and become fully awake again. I suppose I was listening for Dan to come in. In some ways I wished Emma were here to help, and in other ways I was glad she was hundreds of miles away, cocooned in her hospital bed, safe in her ignorance of all this.
I wasn’t sure whether Tanya had meant ‘first light’ absolutely literally, but just in case, I got out of bed as soon as the patch of sky I could see through the gap in our roof, such as it was, started to go through that almost imperceptible change from black to dark grey. I found them all having breakfast, so I was just in time.
We went up the hill in silence, passing the first reservoir quite quickly and then heading towards the place where the search party had looked the night before.
‘Is this really the sign of a struggle, or is it where the searchers milled around?’ I enquired as we all stared in the half-light at the patch of disturbed undergrowth between two small rocky outcrops.
Declan gave me a look. ‘It was like this when we came along. Then there was Fiona’s hat.’
‘The hat. Of course.’ Privately I thought the scuffs and marks on the ground could just as easily have been caused by animals fighting to the death, or a few stray sheep panicking, but I didn’t have any claim any expertise in interpreting tracks or any other kind of bush craft.
Fighting to the death…
‘Is there any blood?’ I added.
‘We couldn’t see anything that looked like that,’ said Declan, after a slight pause that made me wonder if they had in fact found bloodstains and he was trying to protect me. If he was, it would be the first time ever.
We stood and stared at the patch of ground for several more unnecessary minutes.
‘Which way did they go, then?’ I asked.
‘We think there’s a trace over here, sir,’ said one of Tanya’s team. I wished they would stop calling me ‘sir’. It was hopelessly old-fashioned and made me feel about a hundred. I tried to imagine Dan calling anybody ‘sir’, and failed. That was cheering in a way. I quite liked the idea that he wouldn’t easily give into anybody. Although of course there were times when that could be the sensible thing to do.
I hoped he was being sensible right now. Maybe Fiona could help him with that.
We all went to look at the trace. After peering very closely, I discerned a slightly bent clump of grass there. Maybe the others could see things I couldn’t. If only I had got my eyes tested when that was still an option. Let that be a lesson to me.
I followed the rest of the party as Declan and another expert followed the trail only they could see. We went up over the top of one hill and then down a bit and up another. There was always another hill to climb, much as there usually is in life.
We walked and climbed for most of the morning, and then it turned out that Tanya and her team had provided cheese sandwich capsules and some kind of condensed drink for everybody. I hoped that didn’t mean we were going to be out for the whole day. I was definitely beginning to flag, and I still wasn’t entirely convinced we were on the right track. Wouldn’t it be funny if we got back to our own camp and found Dan and Fiona there waiting for us?
No, it wouldn’t be funny, exactly. It would be a miracle, and one that I wished I could believe in.
Sure enough, when we finally turned and trudged back home again as darkness fell, only the four or five guards we had left behind were waiting for us. We hadn’t seen any sign of a marauding band that might have seized Dan and Fiona.
‘At least we know they’ve had practice in looking after themselves,’ said Declan, trying to cheer me up as we sat in the kitchen together after supper. He gave me a chocolate capsule. ‘Pity they don’t make whisky in capsule form – you look as though you could do with it.’
‘You should have brought back a few bottles of the real thing when you were on one of those damn raiding parties,’ I grumbled at him. ‘We were bound to have an emergency sooner or later.’
‘Maybe we should have gone further afield today,’ Declan mused. ‘They might have been camped over the next hill.’
‘Are we planning to do the same again tomorrow?’ I asked him. I had run out of ideas and energy. The only thing keeping me going at all was the overwhelming wish to find Dan – to be able to bicker with him once again in our temporary home, and to dream of the family being reunited in the foreseeable future. I didn’t know if he would come to any harm with the other group, if indeed another group had taken him as everybody seemed to have concluded. It still seemed strange to me that they would take him at all unless they wanted him to work for them in some way. If t
hey had been planning to kill him and Fiona, surely they would have done it right away on that hillside – or would they? I said as much to Declan.
‘Surely they would,’ he said with a nod. ‘And there aren’t so many able-bodied young people left that anybody can afford to waste them, now, are there?’
That explained why he wasn’t as distraught as I might have expected.
Or there could have been another explanation.
Tanya woke me up at first light again. This time I really had been asleep.
‘Declan’s gone,’ she said.
The words didn’t make any sense until I had heaved my mind out of the chasm between sleep and wakefulness. Once that had happened, I sat up in bed and said, ‘Where?’
‘We don’t know yet. He disappeared in the middle of the night, apparently, but neither of the men on watch saw him leave. If we were a military team I’d have had them both court-martialled. Do you have any idea where he might have got to?’
‘Me?’
‘Gavin, you’re the only one who knows him at all well. If you had no idea of what he was planning…’
‘What he was planning? You think he’s gone off under his own steam?’
She glared at me. ‘Can you imagine anyone in their senses trying to abduct Declan? They’d be mad to try. No, he’s been up to something all along. I had a feeling he might be. Come along, let’s get going.’
‘Going?’
‘We’ve got to get after him.’
‘Why?’
I suppose my mind wasn’t quite as fully in the realms of wakefulness as I had imagined. I resolved to try not to ask any more stupid questions. Or at least, not in every sentence.
Tanya made a sort of hissing sound like an angry cat, and stalked out of my presence. Maybe she’d feel better once she’d caught a few voles.
I got up and got dressed anyway. I had no real intention of going to look for Declan. Of all the people I knew, he was the one who was most able to take care of himself. I even wondered for a moment if he had faked the whole thing with Dan’s and Fiona’s disappearance. Maybe they were waiting for him just out of reach, ready to gang up with him again and escape to their friends in the Highlands. The rebel base there must surely be still active. On the other hand, I mused, moving slowly in the direction of the camp kitchen, did they really have anything to rebel against now? From all we had seen in recent weeks, the government seemed to have fallen apart, and instead there were various conflicting authorities vying for control over their little fiefdoms. Perhaps there were other private enterprises like Fairfax Consulting operating in other parts of Scotland.
The Petitioners Page 6