by William Boyd
I managed to semi-cover KT-99 with the olive-green tarp that I’d bought, holding it in place with rocks. I unrolled my length of foam rubber and sleeping bag in the rear between the bench seats and then I cooked myself some supper on my camping gas stove, sliced square sausage and baked beans followed by a bar of chocolate and strong tea.
I’d also bought heavy-lugged walking shoes, thick socks, waterproof trousers, a thigh-length olive-green polyamide jacket with hood, a compass, a weighty long-handled LED torch and powerful binoculars. I was going to hike to St Mungo’s with my holy water, observe it for as long as necessary and then make my appointed rendezvous at midday, all being well, twenty-four hours later than planned. I hoped that would be an end to this bizarre adventure but a warning voice in my ear – Gregson David Defoe’s, in fact – told me that ‘hope is for wimps’. One step at a time, I said, pleased to think at the least that for those chasing me, whoever they were, I would have vanished again. I was snug and secure in my cleft between the rocks on Clachan Mor. I had eaten well and I had a roof over my head.
I slept well, also, but woke abruptly at first light. I boiled some water on my stove, made some tea and had a shave. The unsought-for thought came into my head that in the British Army in the First World War no soldier was allowed to go unshaved for a day, even in front-line trenches. I happen to know this because I was in an overly sentimental First World War movie called Pack Up Your Troubles. My symbolic act of shaving was a preparation for my going over the top, into no man’s land.
I set off, rucksack on my back with the flask of holy water inside, compass and map in hand. It was a straightforward piece of orienteering to make my way across the face of Clachan Mor and over a hog-backed ridge to a glen called Coire Creag. There I would pick up a stream of some size, called Eas Braglen, according to the map, that flowed west from a very small lochan, and following that would lead me downhill towards the minor road to the village of Alcorran. As I strode across the mountain’s west face, hood up, through the knee-deep heather, the fresh wind stinging my cheeks with a fine drizzle, I felt that all I needed in my hand was a C8 carbine and this could have been an out-take from The Upside-Down War (2011), one of my favourite films, where I played a member of a special-forces unit in Kosovo. I was a young lieutenant – I died early on in the film: my speciality.
But here I was, instead, hiking through the rugged landscape of the west of Scotland on another mission entirely. But the memory of the film made me think – a weapon … Perhaps I should have bought a knife, at least … Too late now.
Alcorran was a small, classic Scottish village on the Moidart peninsula, huddled in the lee of some low hills that protected it from the Atlantic gales. There was a narrow high street flanked by low cottagey houses – whitewashed, small-windowed with heavy lintels painted black – with a few shops, a hotel and a church with a clock tower at the end. This church wasn’t St Mungo’s – St Mungo’s was a different denomination, some dissenting branch of the Free Church of Scotland, and was two miles out of town on a rocky promontory looking out over the sound towards Skye.
I paused outside the Tallen Brae Hotel. It was just after eleven o’clock and the bar was open. I pushed open the door. Tartan carpet, painted taupe wainscoting, rows of mounted antlers below the ceiling line and a small stone bar with a massive array of whiskies behind it. An old man sat in a corner with his Scotch and half-pint chaser staring into infinity. I was the second customer of the day. I shucked off my rucksack and jacket, hung them up, and took a seat at the bar.
A young woman was serving. Her hair was vermilion, her eyes black with kohl, and she had three rings in her bottom lip. Her maroon, cap-sleeved T-shirt revealed that one arm, the right, was heavily tattooed to the wrist – a full sleeve. Work had begun on the left.
‘Hiya,’ she said brightly, with a wide smile. ‘What can I do for you, this lovely day?’
I had a powerful urge for some Dutch courage before I made my way to St Mungo’s and asked her what whisky she’d recommend from the eighty or so she had on display behind the bar.
‘You’ve got to try the Glen Fleshan,’ she said. ‘Distillery’s two miles from here. Double wood. Peaty, of course, but with notes of clove, dried fruits and green apple. Some people claim to taste crème brûlée, but I can’t. Light, though, for a malt from hereabouts. A good whisky to start the day with.’
I ordered a double Glen Fleshan and asked her how to get to St Mungo’s Church. She told me: down the high street, turn left and take the B-road to Ardsault. You’ll see the sign to St Mungo’s about a mile yonder.
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘This is a delicious whisky. What’s your name, if you don’t mind my asking?’
‘It’s Stella,’ she said. ‘What’s yours? I think I know your face from somewhere. Are you on telly?’
I lay up in some wind-battered gorse bushes on the rocks above the small beach by St Mungo’s, studying the church through my binoculars. It looked more like an isolated village hall than a church: a basic, solid, whitewashed, pebble-dashed rectangle with a steeply pitched slate roof and a small bell set in a wooden belfry on the end of the ridge of the gable end. It had been built about a hundred yards from the sea and in winter must have to take a fair battering from the Atlantic gales.
How many Stellas was I going to meet on this journey, I wondered? – not beguiled or amused by the coincidence. I rather wished I was back in the bar of the Tallen Brae Hotel benefiting from Stella number two’s astonishing whisky expertise but I knew that closure was more important, and I was pleased to see that a mid-range silver people-carrier was parked outside the small porch at the front of the church. Maybe Stella number one was inside waiting for me. I looked at my watch: 12.45. I’d deliberately made her wait. There was nobody else around and the church looked in some disrepair, now I could see it clearly, its congregation dismayed, perhaps, by the bleakness and exposure of its setting. A church for a particularly implacable, humourless and demanding God, I thought to myself, as I stood up and walked towards it, trying to ignore the palpable increase in my pulse rate.
The front door was an inch ajar. I had a final look round and pushed it open, slowly, and stepped in. Inside, there was a powerful smell of dust and mould, almost astringent, a place that hadn’t been aired in weeks. The simple room with its high-beamed ceiling was austere in the extreme and very cold, colder than outside. Two rows of sturdy wooden pews flanked an aisle that led to a heavy oak table with a brass crucifix in the middle. The small windows were clear glass. No organ, no pulpit, no images of any kind, just an ebony lectern set to one side. I stood in the vestibule looking around, hugely disappointed that there was no one waiting for me. Where the hell was Stella? There was a closed door to one side behind the altar table.
‘Hello?’ I called out. ‘Stella? It’s Alec Dunbar.’
Silence.
‘Hello!’ Louder.
Nothing. I swore to myself. Maybe the car outside wasn’t Stella’s. Maybe the people who owned the car were simply hikers out walking somewhere, ramblers who’d parked up and headed off to Ardnamurchan Point, say. So I made my decision. I was going to place the flask of holy water on the altar table beside the crucifix and leave, get the hell out of there. I’d earned my grand and it was time to bring this sinister farce to an end.
I strode down the aisle and stopped abruptly. From my angle I could now see, in the gap between the first and second left-hand pew from the front, a leg, supine.
A leg in a blue plastic leg cast.
I took a couple of paces. Stella Devereaux, lying there, inert, on her back. Dead, to all intents and purposes. Something made me turn. In the gap between the second and the third pew on the right was another still body. A man, prone.
I closed my eyes. I was in shock and some more primitive self inside me had taken over, ruthlessly shutting down emotions and feelings. I knew I shouldn’t do this but it was impossible to resist. I reached forward, grabbed the shoulder of the man’s jacket and heaved him ove
r a bit, just enough so I could see his face. I let him roll back, gently.
Ron Suitcase – aka Ronaldo Sudkäsz. The producer.
I could hear a shrill keening noise in my ears and realized it was just a sudden symptom of my baffled panic.
Control yourself, Dunbar. Gather yourself. One more check. I leant over Stella Devereaux. She was definitely dead – she was as still and cold as the dummy plastic bodies they use now to simulate dead bodies in movies. Not a breath and not a sign of any fatal cause. Her eyes were closed, her expression neutral. Fully clothed, nothing disarranged. She might have been taking a nap but no one was ever that still, even in the deepest sleep. I decided not to examine Sudkäsz. I left the church and closed the door behind me.
The car was a rental, locked, nothing inside that gave anything away.
Paradoxically, once I was outside and the trembling in my body began to diminish, I felt a strange wave of relief wash through me. Something was over – I wasn’t on my own any more. Now I could justifiably call the police.
Part Five: Night on Clachan Mor
Stella (the barmaid) poured me my second Glen Fleshan, all agog at my news. I had just called the police in Mallaig and reported the discovery of two dead bodies in St Mungo’s Church, Alcorran. I told them I was at the hotel and would be waiting for them in the bar.
‘Were they dead?’ she asked, full of appalled curiosity.
‘Well, I think so. I don’t know. I didn’t hang around. Deeply comatose, at best. Not moving, not a flicker of life that I could see.’
‘It’s a funny wee church that. Maybe two or three services a year. Some priest comes up from Glasgow.’ She shivered. ‘Don’t know why they keep it open.’
‘Well, I was just walking past, saw the door slightly open –’
Two uniformed policemen came into the bar. I introduced myself and we sat down at a table. One was a young guy, good-looking, I thought, a sergeant. He introduced himself as Sergeant Callum Strang. The other, an older man, had the flushed cheeks and the dead, puffy eyes of a functioning dipsomaniac. He kept glancing at the bar and its ranked bottles, I noticed.
I retold my story to Sergeant Strang. I was on a hiking holiday, I said – walking past the church, saw the door open, the car outside, went in. Two dead bodies.
‘You didn’t touch them?’
‘No.’
‘How did you know they were dead?’
‘They looked dead. Extremely.’
‘Let’s check it out,’ Strang said and stood up.
We drove in their police car back to the church. The people-carrier had gone, I saw at once. Strang pulled on a pair of blue latex gloves and pushed the door open. We walked in.
The church was empty. No Stella Devereaux, no Ronaldo Sudkäsz.
‘They were here,’ I said, pointing out where they had been lying. ‘She was there, face up. He was there, face down.’
‘You said you were sure that they were dead.’
‘I’m not a doctor but they looked dead to me.’
I was trying to remain calm but a cacophony of jabbering counter-explanations was ringing in my ears as I tried to guess what might have happened. I remembered once, filming in the Bahamas, I had guilelessly swum out beyond the coastal shelf of the island where we were shooting and the water had turned from the palest sun-shafted blue to fathomless black, or so it seemed, as some sort of oceanic trench opened up beneath me. It had been a most uncomfortable feeling and I was feeling it again now.
Callum Strang was looking at me intently, shrewdly – I sensed he was aware of my unease.
‘Did you know these people?’
‘What? No. How could I have? I was walking past – I just popped my head round the door.’ I lied as convincingly as possible. Sometimes I was glad to be an actor.
‘Sure you hadn’t had a dram too many?’ the older cop said.
‘I assume that’s some kind of a joke,’ I said stiffly, offended.
Callum Strang handed me his card.
‘It looks to me like a sick prank,’ he said. ‘You know – scare the life out of a visiting churchgoer. Did you take the number of the car?’
‘Ah, no. I didn’t,’ I said. Stupid idiot. ‘I was in a bit of a state of shock.’
‘Totally understandable, sir.’
Strang paced around, thinking. ‘Probably their vehicle. Let me know if you run across them again, or spot the car. We’ll give them an official warning. Get them into the police station, you know. Shake them up.’
‘Right. I will.’
‘Where are you staying?’ Strang asked.
‘I’m camping – up on Clachan Mor.’
‘Have you a phone?’
‘I did – but I dropped it in a stream yesterday. Stupidly,’ I improvised. ‘It’s not working. I’ve ordered a replacement.’
‘We’ll have to rely on you to get in touch, then,’ he said with a hint of a smile. Strang was no fool – I’d better not forget that.
They took me back to the hotel and then drove off. I bought a bottle of Glen Fleshan from Stella and set off back to my mountain hideout before the light began to go.
It was slower going, heading uphill, following the rushing shallow river back up to its source, and my mind was full of baleful and depressing thoughts. There was no doubt, as far as I was concerned, that the two bodies I had seen were dead bodies. Though I have to confess I’ve never actually seen a dead body before – a real dead body. In the films I’ve made I’ve wandered over battlefields littered with dead bodies; I’ve stood in rooms swimming with stage blood and plastic body parts after some gangland massacre but I’ve never actually seen a real corpse. How many of us have? Death is hidden away from us in our century – it’s become something secret that happens in hospitals or morgues. We only see it on a screen – filtered, lit, factitious.
In any event, I was under no illusions: Stella Devereaux and Ronaldo Sudkäsz were no more. So who had killed them? The only candidates I could think of were the girl in white and whoever had been driving the car. Had I somehow led them to Stella and Ronaldo? Was that why I had been followed so assiduously from London? And why had they been killed? And who had removed the evidence so swiftly and effectively? What high stakes were being played for here?
I plodded on up Coire Creag as the answerless questions multiplied, hearing the bottle of Glen Fleshan clinking against the glass flask in the rucksack on my back. Whatever was in the flask held the clue, I realized, deleting all my previous speculations about family feuds and sibling rivalry.
As I was crossing the ridge that led up to Clachan Mor, in the roseate gloaming of a Scottish evening, I heard the sound of a helicopter approaching, flying low – that inimitable pulsing chop of the blades. Something told me to take cover so I squirmed down into the springy heather and pulled my hood up. A small black helicopter – an Enstrom Falcon, I thought – swept over the north side of the glen and swooped down the river, veered round and clattered off over the next line of hills. Forestry Commission? Mountain rescue? Electricity board? Or someone looking for me? I imagined the police radio network was being listened to intently. Strang would have routinely called in to the station in Mallaig to inform them that the report of two dead bodies was negative and that he was heading back to base from Alcorran …
I was home at my cleft in the rocks before night fell, extra pleased that I’d rigged the tarp over KT-99 now there was a helicopter flying around. I wanted deep camouflage, needed time to think, to contemplate what I might do next and I felt secure hidden up here on the mountain, realizing, with a certain pang, that nobody in the entire world knew where I was – and then, with another sharper pang, realizing further that my entire circle of friends and acquaintances, my scattered family, my ex-wife, my Facebook prodders and Twitter followers thought I was larking it up on holiday in Honduras.
In a dark and somewhat self-pitying mood – why had this happened to me? What had I done to deserve being in this hideous predicament? – I cooked up my usu
al supper of square sausage and baked beans, washed down with liberal draughts of Glen Fleshan. Ambrosial feast, I thought, and my sombre mood began to improve and mellow as I began to analyse what had happened to me and sense some sort of plan of action emerging.
Stella and Ron had something, something important, contained in the glass flask and that ‘something’, evidently, other people wanted badly for themselves. It must be precious, I reasoned, because they had taken special care to line up a patsy, a fall guy, who was going to transport this ‘something’ to a remote part of Scotland for them. But why me? What research had led them to Alec Dunbar as the perfect, unquestioning mule? Then to burgle my flat, steal my clothes, penetrate my computer and immobilize my poor car – all achieved before the fake audition for the fake film where the casual offer of earning £1,000 for a simple drive to Scotland is mooted … What if I’d said no thanks? … Maybe there was another actor waiting, and another – until somebody bit.
In any event, I had taken the bait and was soon off and running with the glass flask and its contents. Enter the girl in white and the black saloon. Who the hell were they? Why were they chasing me? Why the hitch-hiking charade? Why the encounter in the filling station? What if, by chance, I’d actually given the feral girl a lift to ‘Scottlan’? I saw the line of unanswered questions stretching on to the crack of doom. Maybe the feral girl and her unseen driver were checking me out. Maybe they thought I was working with Stella and Ronaldo, in cahoots, somehow, a member of the gang … The spiralling ramifications of this scam or scheme were completely beyond my comprehension. Or maybe, it came to me, they thought I was some kind of diversion meant to lure them away from London while the real action took place in their absence – which was why they came so close, why they tried to spook me …
I stopped, had another sip of Glen Fleshan, trying to clear my head of its overload of conspiracy theories, burgeoning exponentially. And then there must have been some kind of encounter in St Mungo’s Church. Some kind of fatal encounter, to be more precise. How were Stella and Ronaldo killed? I was pretty sure I was not meant to find them dead, so had the killers been surprised by the people-carrier pulling up outside and had made a quick escape? Innocent hikers, as I’d surmised, parking up beside the church to go on a coastal walk. And then I’d appeared. And while I was calling the police in Alcorran the killers had returned and the bodies were whisked away …