Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘That boarding card?’

  ‘Look at it close, Mr Webb.’ Bob took it. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘Well, the passenger was a certain Robert C. Winrush. He was flying from somewhere beginning with D to London Heathrow. Date not clear. It’s been in the wash.’

  ‘Dubai, Mr Webb.’ Angus leaned forward. Wiry, but his strength would be considerable. He prised scallops off the deep seabed. ‘It scares me, flying. I once went in a helicopter, winched oot the sea in the storm of 92. Leave it to the birds, I say.’

  ‘I haven’t flown for years. Not good for the climate.’

  ‘You’re an intelligent man. Teaching bairns, studying birds. Do you see what I’m getting at? And don’t bother saying you’ve not got a clue.’

  How did he spot the scallops down there, in the gloom? Did he have a torch? He had placed a flat, battered tin on his knee and began to roll a cigarette.

  ‘Don’t you think we’re drifting a bit far, Angus?’ The boat, side-on to the swell, was now rocking so much that the bilge kept splashing onto their chins. The world was careless, ultimately. You had to meet it with precision. This would get them nowhere. But Angus didn’t seem to notice. He probably had exceptionally large lungs, to go with his hands. He drew deeply on his roll-up. The air was tinged with smoke, instantly whipped away.

  ‘Mr Webb, I passed you on the road not a hundred metres from our hoose. The same afternoon.’

  Bob frowned, as if remembering with difficulty. ‘Oh, right. I was visiting Ardcorry church.’

  ‘Not the Tinker’s Arms?’

  ‘Oh no. The church. Its churchyard, anyway. Atmospheric.’

  ‘There are eleven MacLeans buried there,’ said Angus. ‘All drowned.’

  Bob yelped, because a more excitable wave had pitched them to one side so far that he thought he would topple in. Angus smiled, raising his hand. Some gulls passed near them, squawking over the open water. Bob found them faintly reassuring. The grey sky was very dark to the west: stormy, even.

  He pulled a face. ‘A bit of dropped litter and a power-shower. I don’t see it, Angus. What does the accused say?’

  Angus snorted. ‘What, frighten off the rabbit? I’ve not told her a thing. Not yet. You don’t know her. She was aye liberated from the start. I cannae lay a finger on her.’

  Bob was feeling a touch nauseous. He couldn’t find his sea-legs, not even sitting.

  ‘She tells me,’ Angus went on, ‘you’re interested by the grey suits staying at the Tinker’s Arms, where she cleans.’

  ‘Not that interested. Intrigued?’

  ‘And Murray told me they were talking about the Middle East.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Bob, relief mingling with fear. ‘Maybe your wife dropped something after cleaning one of the rooms.’

  ‘There’s no Robert C. Winrush staying in the hotel. I’ve looked the name up on the computer. Only one Robert Winrush came up: a mercenary pilot.’

  Bob almost jumped. ‘We’re in a jam, then,’ he said.

  A large moving body of water lifted them like a cork, spun them slightly, lowered them with a curious wobble. Angus’s glance flickered to the west, towards the mid-ocean wastes they were approaching. There was a sudden increased coolness in the air. ‘Do you think,’ said the passenger, in a pinched voice, ‘the weather report is not completely reliable?’

  The skipper pulled at the motor; it started on the second attempt, springing into life like something blessed. How I love civilisation, technology, human expertise, thought Bob. They were heading for land, Angus with a bad-tempered frown of dissatisfaction. The passenger had no idea what to say, partly because he felt sick. Feeling sick, although unpleasant, was a good substitute for dying. Land was better than water. He was not good at the liquid element thing, unless it was framed by tiles.

  As they were tying up at Ardcorry, he said, ‘I didn’t see a soul on the road that afternoon, Angus. If that’s any help.’

  ‘Just as I thought, or you’d have said straight oot.’

  ‘I lost my wife,’ Bob went on. ‘She’s not dead; she left me. I neglected her. She cheated on me. I didn’t love her enough. I got grumpy and she just got fed up. She’s with someone else now. A failed artist. Learn from my mistakes,’ he added.

  He dropped the boarding-card stub in the water. It floated, annoyingly, but was soon taken out by the currents like a petal and disappeared.

  Angus watched it. ‘You’re an intelligent man,’ he said. ‘I knew I did right, asking your opinion.’

  He shook Bob’s hand: a terrifying grip.

  Bob called Carol’s mobile from Ardcorry churchyard, using his pre-paid phone. He didn’t mention the name on the stub. She thanked him for the warning.

  ‘I’m clear,’ he said. ‘He thinks I’m the bee’s knees.’

  ‘Aye,’ she sighed, ‘he’s always been a hopeless judge of character.’

  No more hot showers, Bob thought. He counted ten MacLean graves, their subjects all lost at sea. He gave up on the eleventh, but there were quite a few stones mossed over, or fallen.

  He got back to company.

  For three months he had not seen a single person on this peninsula. Now there were two figures on the blacklands, near the loch: backs turned. He produced the Makarov, did an SAS-style running crouch to the house, found his binos and brought the intruders closer through the tweaked-open skylight. Close-cropped heads, pale and burly, in cagoules. They were either taking photographs or checking their weapons. His hand-shake made them look worse, like a TV docudrama. He was not that surprised: they were staking out the territory for some later and more sophisticated operation called Get Winrush. There was a high mewing note and they looked up, one of them pointing.

  It was the sea eagle, circling high overhead on its jumbo wings. They look yummy, Bob hissed telepathically. Dive in. It glided away. He’d hoped their shaven pates might have resembled fat mice from that height.

  They began walking back, stumbling now and again. They were now close enough to spot a shadow in the skylight, if they looked up. The attic was roughly at the height of a seven-oh’s cockpit, and they reminded him of two ramp agents sauntering up for the ground handling.

  He waited at the top of the boarded-in ladder staircase, Makarov trained on the closed door at the bottom. He considered using the hidey-hole. He had never actually shot at anyone in his life. When the knocking resounded through the house, he all but buckled at the knees. Where were his James Bond credentials? Where had his pilot phlegm gone? At least they were knocking, rather than breaking the door down.

  The floor creaked at the slightest pressure. The gunsight pinned the door below at what he guessed was chest height. The safety lever was down. His trigger finger ached from sustaining its slight pressure and the door kept trembling, drifting. No more knocking. What he expected was the punch and shatter of broken glass. Instead, dim voices. They were circling the house. By now he had realised that if you take up a firing position for more than a few minutes, you need to rest your arms on something. The pistol had tripled in weight.

  He peeped out through the front skylight: they were both on their phones, by the fallen chicken wire fence, talking in nasal voices. They ducked suddenly and there was a shot, like a cut-off clap of thunder, carried late to Bob’s ears by the gusts. It wasn’t his shot.

  They put their hands out to the sides, as in a cowboy film. Angus hove into view, cradling his .22. He was shouting at them, telling them to go home. He was, as far as Bob could catch, calling them English this-and-thats – perverts? – and how no true islander would ever surrender his property or his wife. But he couldn’t be certain: the words were slurred and snatched at by the wind. Part of them might even have been Gaelic. Maybe Carol was lying in her kitchen in a pool of blood. He’d been an idiot, even going as far as he did.

  And then, in a lull, a complete sentence powering upwards: ‘Which one of you’s Robert Windrush?’

  Their protests, high-voiced and whiny, achieved nothing. Angus w
as again pointing the barrel at them. If they were pros, they would take him out, rifle or no rifle. Bob tweaked the skylight open a few more inches: he aimed the Makarov at the nearest man’s head. The wrap-around shades glinted. Sheep and goats, Bob thought.

  The head shifted: the men were moving off with hands high and Angus was following them, still yelling.

  Soon there was nothing but the wind’s sigh rushing around the house – as though it was the house itself that was hurtling on without a break, destination still unknown. If Angus had, as most people did, misremembered his name, he might yet be safe.

  Only boats, farms and rivers were called Windrush.

  4

  NO SCHEDULES, NO estimated arrival and departure times, no fear of being late into the front office. No one to get back to on time. No crackling voices over the radio, no telexes wondering why the precious cargo was delayed, no thinking hundreds of nautical miles ahead at every moment – just in case. There was no just-in-case, now. Except for the minor problem of someone aiming to erase him: but then everyone had that problem, sooner or later.

  He was spreadeagled in the sweet, harsh marram towards the headland’s cliffs. He was over halfway through The Guns of Navarone. The grey suits had gone; they had taken a Twin Otter from Bargrennan airport, which consisted of a shed and a windsock and 700 metres of smooth sand. He had watched them depart (alerted by Carol) from the viewing terrace of the dunes. They were never hit men; they were businessmen. Land development consultants, he’d discovered – after feeding in their names (provided by Carol) to the Internet’s infinite maw. Bob was relieved, but everyone else was worried.

  The policeman from Stornoway sent to have a word with Angus was a distant cousin. They had laughed a lot of the time, apparently. The men’s identities had been established as genuine: neither was Robert Winrush. Mercenary pilot Robert Winrush appeared on a website run by Israeli peaceniks: they were honouring Sharansky by displaying his recent unpublished articles. He had to close it quickly when Marcie appeared, bearing his cake.

  He phoned David again from the piss-smelling call box in the harbour, the gulls deafening. The Podgorica article did not derive from anybody involved with the UK campaign. Sharansky’s computer was still in Tel Aviv, obviously.

  ‘Free speech, free access, Dad.’

  ‘Don’t let him near your daughters.’

  ‘Is the deal with Tim off, then?’

  ‘I’m not that mercenary,’ said Bob.

  David laughed. ‘Are those gulls, or just sound effects to put us off the scent?’

  ‘Oh no, look, the ceiling fan’s just blown away my sweat-stained papers. Hey, are we any closer to knowing who killed Sharansky?’

  ‘As Tim put it, we’re not in synchromesh with the Polish police. They’ve this theory that he was an Israeli spy.’

  ‘Don’t mention the war,’ Bob said.

  He bumped into Carol as he emerged from the phone. She gave him only a shy smile, because folk were milling about, waiting for the ferry.

  ‘Mobile broken?’

  ‘I don’t really own one.’

  She looked at the gulls and said, ‘Are you Robert Windrush?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, not inaccurately. ‘I bought the book second-hand. The stub was already in it. Did Angus get at you? I think the consensus is that we had a very close shave.’

  ‘He didn’t shoot me,’ she said. ‘It’s happened before. He knows the score but sometimes he asserts his maleness. He doesn’t need to, he’s the bravest man I know. A lot braver than you, for all your muscle.’

  He nodded, admiring her gall. ‘I’m only scared of one thing, Mrs MacLean: deep water.’

  The sand was warm. The air was springlike. He kept dozing off in his coat: catching up on three decades of jet-tormented sleep.

  ‘You haven’t called.’

  He looked up, startled. She was dressed in a baggy knitted sweater and was holding a towel. He looked at her as if surprised.

  ‘You can’t be thinking of swimming, Dr Byrne.’

  ‘Usually there’s no one here, but I bring my costume just in case. What are you up to? Spying on birds?’ She didn’t seem to imply anything else in her tone.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll keep my eyes shut.’

  ‘Should I worry about you?’

  He pulled a face. ‘You don’t know me, I suppose.’

  ‘They say you can never tell, but you don’t look like a psychopath.’

  ‘They look much like anyone, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s OK then, because you don’t look much like anyone, Mr Webb.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  A contemptuous snort ended in that feisty smile. ‘I hear Angus MacLean chased off some Sassenachs. On your croft-land.’

  ‘His land, actually, in terms of tenancy. But next to the house, yes. Luckily, they saw his point of view.’

  ‘Did you not know them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But he found them on the croft.’

  ‘So? It’s just bumpy grass and rocks to me.’

  Her eyes narrowed above a screwed-up face as if her sight was faulty. She had what Olivia would call (with a hint of contempt) a face with character.

  ‘Ewan’s keen to have a chat with you, about this and other stuff such as birds. Are you free for a tea? Like, how about now, after my plunge?’

  This was thrown out much more like a challenge than an invitation. Her seal-dark eyes were firmly on him as the gulls shrieked and the sea rumbled and roared from its gauze of background din. Bob consented.

  She trotted down to the surf, changed under her towel, and swam in an elastic black costume cut so low at the back it was only a couple of vertebrae short of the buttocks: sinuous was the operative word, thought Bob. As far as he could see with a squinting eye, she emerged with the same face, hair in black clumps over her broad shoulders. He had not read a word since she’d appeared.

  They drove to the centre in the Land Rover, following a little winding road he’d only ever taken as far as the head of a loch shaped on the map like a fist with a wagging finger: a wooden sign said PRIVATE ROAD ONLY. THE GAIR CENTRE. The shallow, shadowy glen stretched away like a location for a dinosaur film, its rocky slopes all bleached grass and scree; the loch was black with peat. The metalled track ran beside the loch shore, then cleared the feeder burn on a pitted hump of concrete, giving out in gravel in front of the house – a large severe manse of soot-coloured stone, its six long windows and crooked portico facing the loch. They stepped out of the four-wheel drive. The glen had silenced the wind and distant surf; it was all local tricklings over the hush. The banging of the car doors sent echoes flying over the water.

  ‘Impressive,’ said Bob.

  They’d talked about island politics during the ten-minute drive, half of which had him lost in acronyms, the names of this and that council. Her face was mobile, her gestures energetic: she was more like an actress than a zoologist.

  The manse was surprisingly bare inside, apart from shelves of books, heavy fire doors, gatherings of shabby and unmatching easy chairs, one long room with sweeping girders of brand-new pine presenting an environmental exhibition with huge backlit photos and interactive screens. It bored him instantly, but he made the right noises. Judith explained that Alexander Gair was an island man who’d recorded its wildlife and flowers and so forth way back before the war: one dim dust-spotted image of a man with cavernous cheeks, in a flat cap and cardie.

  ‘The Richard Jefferies of the Western Isles,’ she added.

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Bob, who had never heard of Richard Jefferies.

  ‘Gair had an incredible sense of jizz,’ said Judith.

  ‘Jizz?’

  ‘You must know what jizz is.’

  ‘Only in its obscene version.’

  She laughed. ‘Wow, you’ve a long way to go. It’s the way a bird looks, the overall impression you get. It’s a complement to the field marks. Fairly subjective, but useful. The gestalt approach. You
’ve just blown your cover, by the way.’

  ‘Cover for what?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well, let me know when you’ve found it,’ he said, feeling he’d walked into the trap.

  Gair’s modern counterpart, standing in the big utility kitchen, was surprisingly short: compact, vaguely bearded, with an earring and suspicious eyes, sporting jeans and a woolly sweater that hung off his elbows. Ewan was a mountain climber.

  ‘Hello there,’ he said, not shaking hands, barely looking up. ‘Judith mentioned you. Our bird enthusiast. Let’s have tea.’

  The dining room, with two long pine tables, had a flashy wood stove merrily aglow. Ewan fed it some more logs and they sat down to a health-food version of fruitcake.

  Ewan hailed from Fife. Bob stopped himself mentioning McAllister; he was playing terse. Sophie would have called it cool. Ewan was genuinely cool: never smiled, narrowed his eyes as if smoke was in them. He climbed cliffs and had prehensile fingers. He’d studied for his DPhil in Aberdeen.

  Inevitably, they began to probe.

  ‘How long are you over for, Kit?’ asked Judith.

  ‘As long as it takes for the gulls not to do what I expect them to do.’

  ‘There’s a good scientist,’ said Judith, meaning it.

  ‘Completely amateur. But keen.’

  ‘Tired of teaching?’ said Ewan.

  Bob shrugged. ‘Not always.’ He remembered what Olivia had said about the shop, adapted it. ‘I think it got tired of me.’

  Ewan asked him if he kept a photographic record.

  ‘Of the birds? Oh yes.’

  ‘Could be useful.’

  Bob found bird photos about as gripping as aircraft photos, whether an osprey or a Vulcan XH558. He was only here because of Judith’s smile. He caught his reflection in the glass and took his woolly cap off, smoothing his hair.

  ‘Who cut it?’ asked Judith.

  ‘Oh, the female barber of Ardcorry. Carol MacLean.’

  ‘Talking of the MacLeans,’ said Ewan, ‘I hear Angus frightened off your compatriots.’