Vee: Lost and Found

by David Roberts

  “The Pass of the Cattle. It’s the nearest thing in Scotland to one of those famous Alpine passes. I’ve seen snow here in July.”

  The hill down to Applecross was much more gentle, though some of the bends were still tricky. Reaching the lower third, the trees began to appear, and then they were there.

  With little B and B in the area- but a good campsite- this would be a night for the tent. After selecting a suitable pitch, they left the car, put on their gear and walked to the pub. They would take a walk along the coast road, but the dramatic car journey from Dornie over to Applecross: that was really what the day was all about.

  The pub was a long, white, low building with a doorway that makes you change direction as soon as you’ve stepped inside. If you are wearing a rucksack it can make you feel like a cow negotiating its way round a phone box. It was a fairly bright day so they opted to have lunch brought out to one of the big trestle tables. While they were waiting Tom spread out the map, weighting the corner with his camera.

  “Toscaig is too far, I think. It looks about five miles each way. How about going to here?” He put his fingernail at the top of a small peninsula marked ‘Aird Dubh’.

  “There’s not much there, just a small cluster of farm buildings but that’s about the right distance- say about seven miles there and back.”

  “And the views?”

  “They are great. You can see right across to Scalpay, Raasay and Skye. Very dramatic.”

  They would play it by ear.

  In fact, they left the road even before the village was out of sight, choosing to pick their way along the shore, slipping occasionally on the larger stones which had piled up. Their boots clattered and dunted the stones for ten minutes, then Tom recrossed the road and they moved on to easier grassland.

  The grass was short, well cropped by the sheep, as they made their way along the slopes above the road, giving them views of the islands and the flat, silvery water between Raasay and the mainland. Somewhere on Skye rain was falling, a dark, low cloud hanging heavily. Nothing similar appeared to be heading in their direction, thankfully.

  The sheep walked off unhurriedly as the two human walkers moved down the slopes towards the natural harbour of Camusterrach, which would take them to the turn off for Aird Dubh.

  “I don’t know what the name means,” said Alastair, “but I have heard that this place used to be some kind of sanctuary.”

  “Just this place, or the whole of Applecross?”

  “This place in particular, I think. You can see how that would be: the remote location, the quiet beauty of the place.”

  “Ideal if you wanted to get away from it all.”

  “Or from yourself.”

  Their thoughts were suddenly interrupted by the unmistakeable sounds of panic. Fifteen yards away, a sheep had its head stuck in the wire fencing put up next to the drystane dyke. This was obviously cheaper than repairing the dyke itself.

  As they approached the animal, its efforts to escape became more and more frantic. Putting his rucksack down, Tom grabbed the back end of the sheep, which was by now moving desperately any way it could. Alastair helped by holding the wire and grabbing the neck to guide the head back through as the animal was pulled away. It took off immediately, racing away, scaring the other sheep into a stampede.

  “Strange, that,” said Tom. “It must be used to people. You’d think it would have known we were trying to help.”

  “We can’t think the way an animal thinks.”

  They continued down towards the road, feeling the oily warmth of the sheep on their hands, their fingers remembering its struggling. They crossed the Toscaig road and headed along to the Aird Dubh turn-off. That was where they both wanted to be; a mile ahead; that is where the views would be. And perhaps it was this- this thinking of what lay ahead- that freed each man from thoughts of companionship as well as from the grind of the everyday lives they had to focus on so much: the hours of working with cars or ledgers, customers and difficult clients. For ten plodding minutes each man was just himself, until that too became a form of pressure and needed to be relieved.

  Tom broke the silence which was beginning to feel awkward for both of them.

  “I’ve been thinking about what you were saying to me yesterday, about finding that book. It reminded me of what you told me in Aviemore last summer. You said you found two bodies. It was a long time ago. Something like that anyway. I was just wondering, was it the book that led you to them?... Were they in it?...”

  There was another silence.

  “If you don’t want to talk about it that’s ok.”

  “No, it’s not a problem. I was just trying to sort out the order in my head…. They weren’t in the book. The book came afterwards, in ‘98. I found the bodies three years earlier, late on in the autumn. If anything it was connected to the job.

  “I was working in south Argyll, servicing the tractors and some similar machines for the Forestry Commission. It was mostly routine- some work on the hydraulics where seals and hoses had gone, plus the usual oil and filter changes, checking and readjusting to take up wear. Occasionally there was a bigger job where you had to improvise or wait a week for a part. You could use the hydraulic rams to straighten bent stays, or cannibalise parts from vehicles which had been wrecked.

  “I was still working at the same small Edinburgh garage, so God knows how they managed to get the contract. Going by the rate they paid me, I can only assume it was on grounds of cost.”

  “The lowest bidder?”

  “The lowest of the low. Anyway, the Commission was clearing forestry from the centre of the peninsula. The big machines tended to be stored in a clearing- the harvesters and caterpillar tractors etc. The maintenance area for me was inland from Tayinloan. There was a small road there already: the forestry just extended it further, making a new clearing where required. This was before all the wind turbines of course. Now there are roads everywhere. We just had the dirt tracks; absolutely horrendous in muddy conditions. You just got thrown around inside the Landrover, like a pea in a whistle.

  “At the end of my shift on this particular day I decided to take my fishing rod up to one of the wee lochs. It’s one of those telescopic ones.”

  “A telescopic loch?”

  “Very funny. I just took it to Argyll to give me an excuse to walk around without feeling like a complete pillock. ‘Going fishing’ always sounds better than ‘going for a wander’. That would just sound dodgy. There’s a couple of lochs up past Tayinloan so I dumped the Landrover and just headed off- no signs or anything. I followed the river for some of the way.”

  “Is that when you found the bodies?”

  “Yes. It was near some big rocks. I remember standing on one to get a decent view of the peninsula (though it was too dull for that, and the view was not likely to be good anyway, I discovered.)

  “Fifty yards away I saw the flash of metal from the grass- it turned out to be the clasp of an old purse, with remnants of the bag attached: leather, with a red lining. I turned it over with a stick and then, half hidden beneath it, was what looked like a cracked white stone, round in shape. That’s when I sensed there was a body there, even before I moved the earth around it, just to make sure.”

  “That must have been a strange feeling.”

  “Oh it was. But the strangest feeling was that I just seemed to know that there would be two bodies there. It made sense to me, somehow, that there would be two.”

  “God!”

  “I knew not to touch anything of course. I marked the place using a branch to point from the big rock in an arrow arrangement five yards way. The police complimented me on doing the right thing.”

  “I don’t remember hearing anything about this on the news.”

  “You wouldn’t have. It got a very brief mention in the Herald at the time, but the longest reports were in the local papers. The Oban Times and the Campbeltown Press both ran it but it was a reporter from the Times who actually interviewed me. Her report
was accurate, as far as it went but it wasn’t very “sexy” in newspaper terms because there had been no crime. Also, there was a General Election coming up, I think, so there was a lot of political infighting, which always dominates the news. It’s designed to, of course.

  “They thought the bodies dated from about 1930: sometime about then. The male was in his mid thirties, the woman slightly younger. There were no signs of foul play, as I’ve said. Apparently the area floods badly and there is a lot of soil movement which could have the effect of burying anything on the surface.”

  “Or I suppose revealing something buried.”

  “Yes, I suppose so. The police made local enquiries about missing couples, and there was a bit of a trawl through records and old newspapers, but nothing came up, or at least nothing thought to be relevant, so things just moved on.”

  “That must have been difficult for you, the not knowing. If it was me I wouldn’t be able to stop thinking about who they were, what they might have looked like, what had happened to them… Did you not find it difficult to switch off?”

  “In a way, yes- but the feelings I had didn’t really seem all that strange. After all, I had somehow known there would be two bodies there, not just the one. It did make me wonder what had taken me to that particular spot, though. Had it just… happened? It made me think, much later, ‘how much do I know about what I know’, if that makes sense. Maybe a lot of these things are buried too.”

  The two men rounded the corner of a building and entered a small, flat area of gravel. It was the end of the road, quite literally. One of the buildings had been updated into a modern farmhouse. The others were a bit run down, in a natural state which seemed more in keeping with their surroundings.

  Out to the west, looking over the inner sound, they could see Raasay and Skye and some smaller islands. It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. On some days, if the sea is dead calm and the sky bright, islands like these can seem to hover over the water, but it was not like that on this day. A grey raincloud squatted over the Cuillins, stationary for the moment but they knew that could change. It was time to head back.

  6 Fallen Comrades

  Applecross 2014

  It was a dull sort of a morning. The outer skin of the tent had a heavy, cold feel as they tied the flaps back and peered outside. Alastair lit the gas stove a yard away from the entrance and fiddled with the hinged alloy screen which protected the burner. The car had a dull coating of condensation, except for a few runs on the bonnet where the moisture had coalesced into drops and run down, leaving shiny trails.

  Breakfast was a simple affair: cheese sandwiches and coffee, and twenty minutes saw them pack the car. They shook the flysheet of the tent between them like a dog drying itself and draped it over the back seat. After a final check of the site (for tent pegs and litter) and a final visit to the toilet block, they moved out of the campsite and rejoined the main road. Half a mile to their left was Applecross. They were going right, to Sheildaig and beyond, through Torridon and into Gairloch.

  Tom rubbed his hands together roughly, shivered and reached forward to adjust the heater controls. When the screen had cleared Alastair reached over, turning the control from screen to interior. The road, single track almost all the way, took an uphill curve around the headland and followed the coast.

  Tom opened up the map and identified the tiny places on the route to Sheildaig. Near Fearnmore they stopped and reversed into a larger than usual parking space. Barring the Post Office van and the occasional tradesman’s transit, the road was pretty much empty. It was a bit late in the season for tourists and their campervans.

  Tom pored over the map for a few minutes and they waved a builder’s merchant’s lorry through. The driver raised a hand in greeting.

  “I see this road goes through Annat.”

  Alastair nodded.

  Tom was not sure how to proceed, so he looked back at the map and then at the road ahead.

  “I’ll point out her house to you as we pass through. But there’s something else I want to show you first.”

  Rounding the top of a hill they came upon a long lay-by, big enough for perhaps five cars. On the left, providing a natural viewing point for Loch Torridon, was an area of flat rock, light brown in colour and level with the road. They got out and walked across. As they looked north across Torridon water, the rocks seemed to head off like giant steps into the tree line below.

  “Now look at this,” said Alastair. He opened up the book and handed over a black and white photograph. There was no date or inscription but it was clearly old.

  “It’s the same place. The trees are different but it’s definitely the same place. I realised that when she was speaking to me. Though she couldn’t remember exactly where it was, I had just driven past it on the way to Annat. We are only about five miles from there.”

  “What about the other photos. Have you worked all of them out?”

  “A couple. Loch Maree is easy. But it’s not the photographs that I find interesting. It’s the comments .

  Tom flicked his way through the pages, stopping at random as they continued in the direction of Annat. The annotations appeared to be quite straightforward.

  Stromeferry- discontinued

  Plockton- new airstrip

  Loch Kishorn- oil rig yard

  Glen Dochery- road upgraded

  These looked useful to the traveller- but surely any up to date map would have contained all the new information anyway.

  “I still don’t get it,” said Tom. “Why bother updating it?”

  Out in the loch far below they could see two yachts; one with white sails, the spinnaker bulging as it sped seaward, the other with its mast unfurled, almost stationary.

  “I can see the attraction- all the power just bowling you along. It’s not what grabs you when you’re up here though. Up here you’re away from everything that happens, like you’re on a different level.”

  “Exactly,” said Alastair. “That’s why I come to places like this: to experience nothing, well nothing obvious.”

  They watched a small dinghy leave the stationary yacht and head towards the shore.

  “It’s a strange thing. When I look down there I know what it’s like- and I can see myself clambering into that boat. It’s like….”

  “It’s like seeing your own life from a new perspective,” Alastair added helpfully.

  “That’s it. That’s what I mean. You feel tiny, insignificant. Down there you feel important- earning a good wage, going about your business, doing the everyday things that fill up the day. From up here, these things seem to lose all their importance. It sort of cleans you out….”

  “You mean like Eleanor did with the house and contents?”

  There was a loud guffaw immediately to Alastair’s left. He untwisted a packet of Polo mints and offered one, in consolation. There was a brief eye contact and a mutual shaking of heads before Alastair continued.

  “I do know exactly what you mean. And the weirdest thing is that the feeling of being insignificant is somehow... reassuring. I actually seem to enjoy it… Does this make any sense to you?”

  “Yeah. I know it’s not logical. It should leave you feeling down but it does the opposite. It’s a mystery all right…Maybe that’s why we come here, to places like this: because of the mystery. Would you still want to come if it all made sense?”

  Alastair looked at his watch. Ten to one. The hotel in Gairloch was booked and it was only about thirty miles away. They could take their time.

  After a few more minutes watching the yachts, they pulled out of the lay-by and continued on the coastal road, which dipped down to the lochside. On their right was the house built into the rock and a little further along was the shop-cum-Post Office. They parked outside it and Alastair leaned over and began pointing out features in the book.

  “The maps aren’t the right scale if you want details of what’s on the ground, but the book is a useful guide because the written par
t of it (he tapped the facing page of text) gives information about walks, vegetation and so on. In its way, it is more useful than just a map: that’s why so many books of this type were produced.

  “There’s a good example of what I’m saying near Achnashellach. The river Lair comes down to the loch and there’s a trail which leads along the river. It takes you through a narrow gorge, with dramatic waterfalls and pine trees. It skirts a small triangular lochan which is on your big map.”

  Tom unfolded the OS map and that became the focus of the discussion.

  “It goes up there and then heads north-east, passing the two larger lochs. He pointed to Loch Coulin and Loch Clair. This is a walk that’s in a lot of guidebooks. It’s generally seen as unmissable for walkers visiting the area. The old guidebook says…..”

  There was a pause as he looked for the passage. It was on a previous page.

  “…This trail should on no account be omitted by walkers planning to explore the Torridon area.”

  “The description of the landscape appealed to me too, so I was keen to try it out. If you go right across from to Loch Clair from Achnashellach it’s about eight miles, and of course your car would be stuck in Achnashellach, so you’d have to find a way to get back to it. So I decided to go along the river trail, up on to the high ground and then come back the same route. It was about four hours.”

  “And this was when?” Tom asked.

  “About three and a half years ago, a sort of Easter holiday. This was a long time after I’d seen Ellie of course.”

  The mention of her name seemed to redirect the flow of the conversation without either of them intending it to.

  “You’d like to see her house?”

  “Yes, yes I would.”

  They locked up (an unnecessary precaution in view of where they were) and Alastair led Tom a short distance along the main road, before a trail led them up a gentle curve towards a stand of trees.