Torbay Sound has a steamer service.’
‘Sorry, I should have said a daily service. Torbay has a bi-weekly service.’
‘Fasten your seat-belt and get on those earphones. We’re going to get thrown around quite a bit to-day. I hope you’re a good sailor.’
‘And the earphones?’ They were the biggest I’d ever seen, four inches wide with inch-thick linings of what looked like sorbo rubber. A spring loaded swing microphone was attached to the headband.
‘For the ears,’ the lieutenant said kindly. ‘So that you don’t get perforated drums. And so you won’t be deaf for a week afterwards. If you can imagine yourself inside a steel drum in the middle of a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering outside, you’ll have some idea of what the racket is like once we start up.’
Even with the earphone muffs on, it sounded exactly like being in a steel drum in a boiler factory with a dozen pneumatic chisels hammering on the outside. The earphones didn’t seem to have the slightest effect at all, the noise came hammering and beating at you through every facial and cranial bone, but on the one and very brief occasion when I cautiously lifted one phone to find out what the noise was like without them and if they were really doing any good at all, I found out exactly what Lieutenant Williams meant about perforated drums. He hadn’t been joking. But even with them on, after a couple of hours my head felt as if it were coming apart. I looked occasionally at the dark lean face of the young Welshman beside me, a man who had to stand this racket day in, day out, the year round. He looked quite sane to me. I’d have been in a padded cell in a week.
I didn’t have to be in that helicopter a week. Altogether, I spent eight hours’ flying time in it and it felt like a leap year.
Our first run northwards up the mainland coast produced what was to be the first of many false alarms that day. Twenty minutes after leaving Torbay we spotted a river, a small one but still a river, flowing into the sea. We followed it upstream for a mile, then suddenly the trees, crowding down close to the banks on both sides, met in the middle where the river seemed to run through some rocky gorge.
I shouted into the microphone: ‘I want to see what’s there.’
Williams nodded. ‘We passed a place a quarter of a mile back. I’ll set you down.’
‘You’ve got a winch. Couldn’t you lower me?’
‘When you know as much as I do about the effect of forty to fifty miles an hour winds in steep-sided valley,’ he said, ‘you’ll never talk about such things. Not even in a joke. I want to take this kite home again.’
So he turned back and set me down without much difficulty in the shelter of a bluff. Five minutes later I’d reached the beginning of the overhanging stretch. Another five minutes and I was back in the helicopter.
‘What luck?’ the lieutenant asked.
‘No luck. An ancient oak tree right across the river, just at the entrance to the overhang.’
‘Could be shifted.’
‘It weighs two or three tons, it’s imbedded feet deep in the mud and it’s been there for years.’
‘Well, well, we can’t be right first time, every time.’
A few more minutes and another river mouth. It hardly looked big enough to take a boat of any size, but we turned up anyway. Less than half a mile from its mouth the river foamed whitely as it passed through rapids. We turned back.
By the time it was fully daylight we had reached the northern limit of possibility in this area. Steep-sided mountains gave way to precipitous cliffs that plunged almost vertically into the sea.
‘How far does this go north?’ I asked.
‘Ten, twelve miles to the head of Loch Lairg.’
‘Know it?’
‘Flown up there a score of times.’
‘Caves?’
‘Nary a cave.’
I hadn’t really thought that there would be. ‘How about the other side?’ I pointed to the west where the mountainous shore-line, not five miles away yet barely visible through the driving rain and low scudding cloud, ran in an almost sheer drop from the head of Loch Lairg to the entrance to Torbay Sound.
‘Even the gulls can’t find a foothold there. Believe me.’
I believed him. We flew back the way we had come as far as our starting point on the coast, then continued southwards. From the Isle of Torbay to the mainland the sea was an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, big white-capped rollers marching eastwards across the darkened firth, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wavetops veining the troughs between. There wasn’t a single craft in sight, even the big drifters had stayed at home, it was as bad as that. In that buffeting gale-force wind our big helicopter was having a bad time of it now, violently shaking and swaying like an out-of-control express train in the last moments before it leaves the track: one hour’s flying in those conditions had turned me against helicopters for life. But when I thought of what it would be like down there in a boat in that seething maelstrom of a firth I could feel a positive bond of attachment growing between me and that damned helicopter.
We flew twenty miles south – if the way we were being jarred and flung through the air could be called flying – but covered sixty miles in that southing. Every little sound between the islands and the mainland, every natural harbour, every sea-loch and inlet had to be investigated. We flew very low most of the time, not much above two hundred feet: sometimes we were forced down to a hundred feet – so heavy was the rain and so powerful the wind now battering against the streaming windscreen that the wipers were almost useless and we had to get as low as possible to see anything at all. As it was, I don’t think we missed a yard of the coastline of the mainland or the close in-shore islands. We saw everything. And we saw nothing.
I looked at my watch. Nine-thirty. The day wearing on and nothing achieved. I said: ‘How much more of this can the helicopter stand?’
‘I’ve been 150 miles out over the Atlantic in weather a damn’ sight worse than this.’ Lieutenant Williams showed no signs of strain or anxiety or fatigue, if anything he seemed to be enjoying himself. ‘The point is how much more can you stand?’
‘Very little. But we’ll have to. Back to where you picked me up and we’ll make a circuit of the coast of Torbay. South coast first, then north up the west coast, then east past Torbay and down the southern shore of the Sound.’
‘Yours to command.’ Williams brought the helicopter round to the north-west in a swinging side-slipping movement that didn’t do my stomach any good. ‘You’ll find coffee and sandwiches in that box there.’ I left the sandwiches and coffee where they were.
It took us almost forty minutes to cover the twenty-five miles to the eastern tip of the Isle of Torbay, that wind took us two steps back for every three forward. Visibility was so bad that Williams flew on instruments the whole way and with that violent cross-wind blowing he should have missed our target by miles. Instead he hit that sandy cove right on the nose as if he’d been flying in on a radio beacon. I was beginning to have a very great deal of confidence in Williams, a man who knew exactly what he was doing: I was beginning to have no confidence at all in myself and to wonder if I had any idea in the world what I was doing. I thought about Uncle Arthur and quickly decided I’d rather think about something else.
‘There,’ Williams pointed. We were about halfway along the south coast of Torbay. ‘A likely setup, wouldn’t you say?’
And a likely set-up it was. A large white three-story stone-built Georgian house, set in a clearing about a hundred yards back from and thirty yards above the shore. There are dozens of such houses scattered in the most unlikely positions in some of the most barren and desolate islands in the Hebrides. Heaven only knew who built them, why or how. But it wasn’t the house that was the focal point of interest in this case, it was the big boathouse on the edge of a tiny land-locked harbour. Without a further word from me Williams brought the big machine down neatly in the shelter of the trees behind the house.
I unwrapped the polythene bag
I’d been carrying under my shirt. Two guns. The Luger I stuck in my pocket, the little German Lilliput I fixed to the spring clip in my left sleeve. Williams stared unconcernedly ahead and began to whistle to himself.
Nobody had lived in that house for years. Part of the roof had fallen in, years of salt air erosion had removed all paintwork and the rooms, when I looked in through the cracked and broken windows, were bare and crumbling with long strips of wall-paper lying on the floor. The path down to the little harbour was completely overgrown with moss. Every time my heel sunk into the path a deep muddy mark was left behind, the first made there for a long long time. The boat-shed was big enough, at least sixty by twenty, but that was all that could be said for it. The two big doors had three hinges apiece and two huge padlocks where they met in the middle. Padlocks and hinges alike were almost eaten through by rust. I could feel the heavy tug of the Luger in my pocket and the weight made me feel faintly ridiculous. I went back to the helicopter.
Twice more in the next twenty minutes we came across almost identical situations. Big white Georgian houses with big boathouses at their feet. I knew they would be false alarms but I had to check them both. False alarms they were. The last occupants of those houses had been dead before I’d been born. People had lived in those houses once, people with families, big families, people with money and ambition and confidence and no fear at all of the future. Not if they had built houses as big as those. And now the people were gone and all that was left were those crumbling, mouldering monuments to a misplaced faith in the future. Some years previously I’d seen houses in plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, houses widely dissimilar but exactly the same, white-porticoed ante-bellum houses hemmed in by evergreen live oaks and overgrown with long grey festoons of Spanish moss. Sadness and desolation and a world that was gone for ever.
The west coast of the Isle of Torbay yielded nothing. We gave the town of Torbay and Garve Island a wide berth and flew eastwards down the southern shore of the Sound with the gale behind us. Two small hamlets, each with its disintegrating pier. Beyond that, nothing.
We reached the sandy cove again, flew north till we reached the northern shore of the Sound, then westwards along this shore. We stopped twice, once to investigate a tree-overhung landlocked harbour less than forty yards in diameter, and again to investigate a small complex of industrial buildings which had once, so Williams said, produced a fine-quality sand that had been one of the ingredients in a famous brand of toothpaste. Again, nothing.
At the last place we stopped for five minutes. Lieutenant Williams said he was hungry. I wasn’t. I’d become used to the helicopter by now but I wasn’t hungry. It was midday. Half our time gone and nothing accomplished. And it was beginning to look very much as if nothing was going to be accomplished. Uncle Arthur would be pleased. I took the chart from Williams.
‘We have to pick and choose,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to take a chance. We’ll go up the Sound to Dolman Head, opposite Garve Island, then go up Loch Hynart.’ Loch Hynart was a seven mile long loch, winding and many-islanded, that ran more or less due east, nowhere more than half a mile wide, deep into the heart of the mountain massif. ‘Back to Dolman Point again then along the southern shore of the mainland peninsula again as far as Carrara Point. Then east along the southern shore of Loch Houron.’
‘Loch Houron,’ Williams nodded. ‘The wildest waters and the worst place for boats in the West of Scotland. Last place I’d go looking, Mr Calvert, that’s for sure. From all accounts you’ll find nothing there but wrecks and skeletons. There are more reefs and skerries and underwater rocks and overfalls and whirlpools and tidal races in twenty miles there than in the whole of the rest of Scotland. Local fishermen won’t go near the place.’ He pointed at the chart. ‘See this passage between Dubh Sgeir and Ballara Island, the two islands at the mouth of Loch Houron? That’s the most feared spot of all. You should see the grip the fishermen get on their whisky glasses when they talk about it. Beul nan Uamh, it’s called. The mouth of the grave.’
They’re a cheery lot, hereabouts. It’s time we were gone.’
The wind blew as strongly as ever, the sea below looked as wicked as ever, but the rain had stopped and that made our search all that much easier. The stretch of the Sound from the sand quarry to Dolman Point yielded nothing. Neither did Loch Hynart. Between Loch Hynart and Carrara Point, eight miles to the west, there were only two tiny hamlets crouched against the water’s edge, their backs to the barren hills behind, their inhabitants – if there were any inhabitants – subsisting on God alone knew what. Carrara Point was storm-torn desolation itself. Great jagged broken fissured cliffs, huge fanged rocks rising from the sea, massive Atlantic breakers smashing in hundred foot high spray against the cliffs, the rocks and the tiny-seeming lighthouse at the foot of the cliffs. If I were Sir Billy Butlin looking for the site for my latest holiday camp, I wouldn’t have spent too much time on Carrara Point.
We turned north now, then north-east, then east, along the southern shore of Loch Houron.
Many places have evil reputations. Few, at first seeing, live up to those reputations. But there are a few. In Scotland, the Pass of Glencoe, the scene of the infamous massacre, is one of them. The Pass of Brander is another. And Loch Houron was beyond all doubt another.
It required no imagination at all to see this as a dark and deadly and dangerous place. It looked dark and deadly and dangerous. The shores were black and rocky and precipitous and devoid of any form of vegetation at all. The four islands strung out in a line to the east were a splendid match for the hospitable appearance of the shores. In the far distance the northern and the southern shores of the loch came close together and vanished in a towering vertical cleft in the sinister brooding mountains. In the lee of the islands the loch was black as midnight but elsewhere it was a seething boiling white, the waters wickedly swirling, churning, spinning in evil-looking whirlpools as it passed across overfalls or forced its way through the narrow channels between the islands or between the islands and the shore. Water in torment. In the Beul nan Uamh – the mouth of the grave – between the first two islands the rushing leaping milkwhite waters looked like floodwater in the Mackenzie river rapids in springtime, when the snows melt. A yachtsman’s paradise. Only a madman would take his boat into these waters.
Apparently there were still a few madmen around. We’d just left the first of the islands, Dubh Sgeir, to port, when I caught sight of a narrow break in the cliffs on the southern mainland. A small rock-girt bay, if bay it could be called, about the size of a couple of tennis courts, almost completely enclosed from the sea, the entrance couldn’t have been more than ten yards wide. I glanced at the chart – Little Horseshoe Bay, it was called. Not original, but very apt. There was a boat in there, a fairly big one, a converted M.F.V. by the looks of her, anchored fore and aft in the middle of the bay. Behind the bay was a little plateau, mossy or grass-covered, I couldn’t tell which, and, behind that, what looked like a dried-up river bed rising steeply into the hills behind. On the little plateau were four khaki-coloured tents, with men working at them.
‘This could be it?’ Williams said.
‘This could be it.’
This wasn’t it. A glance at the thin, wispy-bearded, pebblebespectacled lad who came hurrying forward to greet me when I stepped on to the ground was all the proof I required that this was indeed not it. Another glance at the seven or eight bearded, scarved and duffel-coated characters behind him who had not, as I’d thought, been working but were struggling to prevent their tents from being blown away by the wind, was almost superfluous proof. That lot couldn’t have hi-jacked a rowing boat. The M.F.V., I could see now, was down by the stern and listing heavily to starboard.
‘Hallo, hallo, hallo,’ said the character with the wispy beard. ‘Good afternoon, good afternoon. By Jove, are we glad to see you!’
I looked at him, shook the outstretched hand, glanced at the listing boat and said mildly: ‘You may be shipwrecked, but those ar
e hardly what I’d call desperate straits. You’re not on a deserted island. You’re on the mainland. Help is at hand!’
‘Oh, we know where we are all right.’ He waved a deprecating hand. ‘We put in here three days ago but I’m afraid our boat was holed in a storm during the night. Most unfortunate, most inconvenient.’
‘Holed as she lay there? Just as she’s moored now?’
‘Yes, indeed.’
‘Bad luck. Oxford or Cambridge?’
‘Oxford, of course.’ He seemed a bit huffed at my ignorance. ‘Combined geological and marine biological party.’
‘No shortage of rocks and sea-water hereabouts,’ I agreed. ‘How bad is the damage?’
‘A holed plank. Sprung. Too much for us, I’m afraid.’
‘All right for food?’
‘Of course.’
‘No transmitter?’
‘Receiver only’
‘The helicopter pilot will radio for a shipwright and engineer to be sent out as soon as the weather moderates. Good-bye.’
His jaw fell about a couple of inches. ‘You’re off? Just like that?’
‘Air-Sea Rescue. Vessel reported sinking last night.’
‘Ah, that. We heard.’
‘Thought you might be it. Glad for your sakes you’re not. We’ve a lot of ground to cover yet.’
We continued eastwards towards the head of Loch Houron. Half-way there I said: ‘Far enough. Let’s have a look at those four islands out in the loch. We’ll start with the most easterly one first of all – what’s it called, yes, Eilean Oran – then make our way back towards the mouth of Loch Houron again.’
‘You said you wanted to go all the way to the top.’
‘I’ve changed my mind.’
‘You’re the man who pays the piper,’ he said equably. He was a singularly incurious character, was young Lieutenant Williams. ‘Northward ho for Eilean Oran.’
We were over Eilean Oran in three minutes. Compared to Eilean Oran, Alcatraz was a green and lovely holiday resort. Half a square mile of solid rock and never a blade of grass in sight. But there was a house. A house with smoke coming from its chimney. And beside it a boatshed, but no boat. The smoke meant an inhabitant, at least one inhabitant, and however he earned his living he certainly didn’t do it from tilling the good earth. So he would have a boat, a boat for fishing for his livelihood, a boat for transportation to the mainland, for one certain thing among the manifold uncertainties of this world was that no passenger vessel had called at Eilean Oran since Robert Fulton had invented the steamboat. Williams set me down not twenty yards from the shed.
When Eight Bells Toll Page 10
