by Adam Thorpe
‘You see what Joseph H. Kenley’s men have been up to, Captain. Why we must continue the fight.’
Men, women, children. Some just looked as if they were pretending, in funny positions, all elbows, but of course they weren’t. One woman sat upright in a hut, worms teeming in the sockets of her eyes, her feet and hands missing, stomach bloated by gas. She’d taken a day to die, they said.
The guys that had done it were not the first, rowdy lot he’d carried here, as Bob had assumed, but the second: the quiet bunch led by Bible-loving, poetry-quoting Joseph H. Kenley. Machete lore. Bob didn’t believe the colonel at first (the sides kept changing), but survivors trickled in from the forest and confirmed it. Several hundred victims. Guns and panga blades and terrible spells that would pass on through the generations.
‘They are the worst,’ the colonel said, ‘to these ignorant peasants.’ His son was at Marlborough.
Bob threw up in the charred remnants of a hut and got a blinding headache. He had all sorts of silly notions in his fever – that he was a carrier of plague, and so on – and took several days to pull out of it, lying on a pallet in an airstrip shack that stank of the nearby latrines, with a Pepsi-Cola bottle on the sill (a candle holder) that loomed large in his delirium. His right arm suffered from what a doctor back in Worcestershire was to call rigor, as in rigor mortis: a temporary rigidity, a kind of paralysis.
Al nursed him, making sure the water was boiled, erecting a mosquito net, counting out the malaria pills, stamping on the huge cockroaches (they’d still lumber off). Bob went home on sick leave, not quite himself.
Olivia always thought it was straightforward bush fever. Well, in a way it was. He told her it may have been a spider bite, one of those giant bird-eaters that make their nests under the houses’ eaves. She asked him to show her the bite, but he had so many red bumps that it was pointless: now and again they’d produce little worm heads, like tiny white moles taking a peep. He walked about with central Africa in him – in more ways than one. The twins had always loved it, in a sort of ghoulish way; now they were hidden behind screens, headphones, and hardly noticed. Al was tougher: he had the capacity to shrug. That’s why Bob had found his recent intolerance of the local Berkshire yobs a bit out of kilter.
‘Why are you reading poetry?’ asked Olivia, amazed.
They were in bed, Sunday morning in May, wood pigeons cooing through the open window. One of his father’s old anthologies, won as a prize at school, the pages smelling of 1930s damp and coal smoke.
‘Wordsworth,’ Bob said. ‘We did him in English with nice Mr Bentall, before I got expelled after the chapel incident.’
‘And?’ She looked worried; she’d reckoned her husband was getting better. But he was, he was.
‘Don’t really clock it,’ he said. ‘But thought I’d best check.’
* * *
The northern, sea-surrounded days were long, and getting longer: he’d go to sleep in light and wake up early, thinking it was late.
He kept looking at his NO DOUBT!! alarm in the diary, and wondering about the best approach. This problem’s handling procedures were not encoded; they kept altering.
He knew Al better than most, but folk have many sides, and the business side was unfamiliar. He was always thrifty, though. In the pre-hush glory days of Ostend’s Hotel Ter Streep, where anyone up at the bar would be expected to stump up a collective round for the other crews, he’d be absent at the crucial moment. ‘I’m a Lowlander,’ he’d joke when Bob complained. ‘Money is flat that it may lie still.’
It’s also round that it may roll: he was rolling it, all right. And now what? Bob regretted his long-distance calls: he’d sounded tetchy, peevish. All that grey suits nonsense. Wanting to buy the place.
It wasn’t so much Al who was scary, but the world he moved in: about as much compassion as the infrared payload on an unmanned drone. And you never knew who was in on it, once the loaded mule had started trekking down the Afghan hillside or wherever. All he did know was that lower rungs do not and must not see whose boots are on the higher rungs: it seems that rule had been broken in this case. And those rungs stretched right up into the stratosphere, into the playground of the gods: politicians, the military, corporate heads, top bankers. What’s that written on the wing? DO NOT WALK OUTSIDE THIS AREA.
He felt their cross hairs warm on his neck.
And why had Al suggested a pay-as-you-go throwaway mobile? Bob paced up and down the attic bedroom and then out and around the house, tripping on tussocks, wishing he had never left passenger for freight. He hadn’t even bought a dinghy for the loch, for those long afternoons on the water, fishing. A cloud of midges suddenly appeared, like a black thought bubble above his head. Here we are, mate. Another year. Only doing our job. They descended onto his eyes and nose and lips, then a gust came and they were gone. Or maybe they didn’t like the smell.
It was late afternoon. Fresh green bracken had grown up around the phone box. By the time he was standing inside it, he was shaking. Not typical of the skipper. What he had planned to say to Al was, ‘Pull the plug on the wind-farm project, and I’ll keep mum about Swallowtail Trading Ltd, about which there ain’t much I don’t know.’ But it occurred to Bob that, even if Al himself didn’t phone Contract Killer Inc. and book a job for a few thousand dollars (rates being cheap in these days of high unemployment), Winrush would be lucky not to end up with his excised face stitched to a football. The Mexicans were in Liverpool and probably Glasgow. Near neighbours. He pictured sombreros emerging onto Bargrennan’s beach airstrip and being snatched away into the surf. If Mossad was the problem, he had a different picture: wigs flying off.
He lifted the receiver. What was he supposed to do? There was a movement in the burnt-out bungalow: a stripe of sunlight, manoeuvring through a slit in the low-slung cloud, crept away over its charred guts, to continue on across the blackland beyond.
That was it. That’s as much as you’re getting.
It shimmered on what must have been the sea, seemingly far off. Then the grey lid shut tight again. That’s what a lifetime is. It doesn’t wax then wane, it flits. You don’t have time to see what’s lit up, not properly.
‘Al? How goes it?’
‘As good as ever. I’m sitting on a chair in the warm ocean, Painkiller in hand. Are you keeping your head down, skipper?’
‘Right out of the wind. How’s your jaw?’
‘My jaw’s fine. Why?’
‘I hear it got broken, last time you visited.’
There was a silence. Bob realised his mistake.
‘Did you tell your informant you knew me, or are you still sane?’
‘Of course I didn’t. You’re just my absent landlord. You’re not popular, either. The wind farm.’
‘You seem to be getting involved in the local community. Is that wise, skipper?’
‘Give me a break, Al.’
‘You sound nervous.’
‘It’s the line. Eaten into by salt. Never felt better.’
Walking back, he realised he’d have to tell Tim Sightly not to bother with Swallowtail any more: further enquiries, however unlikely, might give Al and his mob the wrong idea. Bob was the skipper, and as the skipper he strongly disapproved of his subordinate’s actions. But he’d have to keep his mouth shut, now.
Marcie’s place was still open. He was sending the don’t-bother message when Judith came in. She didn’t spot him. He hadn’t seen her since the swim, nearly two weeks back.
He ambled across once Marcie had served her, heart bumping in quick time. She looked up and smiled without her eyes and said hello. He asked how things were.
‘Fine. And yourself?’
‘Busy. How’s Ewan?’
‘Unhappy.’
The café was empty bar a young male hiker with a stubbly chin and smart trekking jacket, studying his mobile by the front window. Fortunately, the Cuban stuff playing over the speakers made their talk less audible.
‘You seem cross.’
‘We had a row,’ she said. ‘Ewan was there.’
‘Where?’
‘On the beach, when we went swimming. He’s now totally convinced you’re some sort of undercover agent luring me onto your side.’
‘Do I look it?’
‘Very much so. Undercover means just that. A police helmet would give the game away.’
He thought of the grey suits and felt obtuse. Of course. A contract killer would not come to a remote Scottish island looking like a contract killer.
‘I’d love to know who I’m supposed to be working for.’
‘The wind-farm project’s gathering pace. Scottish Torches deny specifics but are working like crazy behind the scenes, oiling the wheels before it’s rolled out into the sunlight.’
‘I give you my solemn word, I’m not working for Scottish Torches, the FBI, or any other outfit,’ Bob said. ‘And I’m equally sad about the wind farm, because I like birds. Especially sea eagles.’
She sighed. ‘Ewan’s under a load of pressure. Drastic funding cuts. He doesn’t want me to have anything to do with you. And he’s the boss.’
‘We’re just friends, aren’t we?’
‘He didn’t believe me on that one, either.’
‘I’m flattered. I guess that’s it, then. And if I prove that I’m just a birder in midlife crisis, waiting for his final divorce papers?’
Astra ran in from nursery school and began to swipe Bob’s legs with a Mickey Mouse bag.
‘Nuts!’ he shouted. ‘Nutty nuts, Uncle Kit! I’m gonna fly into your eye!’
The young hiker in the window tore his own eyes away from his mobile and watched. Marcie came to lull Astra with the help of a chocolate biscuit and telly.
‘It’s release after being force-fed at school,’ she said, instead of telling him off.
8
IT HAD BEGUN to rain, so Judith gave him a lift back from Bargrennan. It was gloomy outside; he invited her in for a farewell splash of Talisker.
‘Are you luring me again?’
‘Just to admire my spotter’s telescope.’
‘A spotting scope, as real birders call it.’
‘When required.’
‘And your massive gun collection. And your split mind.’
‘No, that’s private.’
‘It’s pretty wet out there.’
‘I keep the Raeburn going all day, these days.’
Ensconced in front of the blazing fire on the blanket-covered sofa, her hair tied up to leave two long curls dancing over the ears, she told him about the previous resident of the manse, an eccentric recluse murdered by persons unknown in the 1970s.
‘Ask Carol MacLean. She’s fey, of course, being an islander. Clairvoyant. Och, that new mainland ferry, it’s going to sink, they said – thirty years ago. Anyway, she saw his taish.’
‘Remind me.’
‘Gaelic for someone’s ghost, except it appears before death and not after. She was about twelve. She saw him walking up the road, near your gate, heading for Ardcorry.’
‘Perhaps he was.’
‘No way. He was smothered in his bed about the same time. Anyway, he was bedridden.’
‘In two different places at once,’ Bob said.
‘Except one’s the spirit. It confused the Feds for a bit.’
‘Marcie saw a taish. Angus MacLean’s diving partner, funnily enough—’
There was a sudden fierce rapping on the front door, exactly like Judith’s. Bob’s nerves were trained to react steadily to surprises, but today he jumped.
‘That can’t be you, can it, Judith? Your taish?’
‘I’m all here,’ she said, turned pale. ‘It could be Ewan.’
‘He’s not scary.’
‘Anyone’s scary, potentially.’
‘Too true. Stay put. Check your seat belt. No need for concern.’
He ran up to the attic bedroom. Perhaps Carol had confessed to Angus. He opened the front skylight carefully and popped his head out, but the closed porch hid its secrets. He grabbed the Makarov from the hidey-hole, checked the clip out of habit, released the safety catch, donned his Harris tweed jacket and cradled the weapon in the outside pocket. Meanwhile there was another rapping. It would be clear, from the reddish glow in the windows, that the house was occupied; the world outside was in cargo-hold gloom.
He went downstairs and stood to one side of the door, opened it carefully with his gun in firing position in his pocket – and faced, not Gold Teeth and cronies, nor an angry Ewan, nor Angus with his rifle, but a drowned rat of a hiker, trembling with cold, his white cheeks alternately glistening and blackening under the swaying glow of the hall paraffin lamp as the air swirled in. A head torch flashed into Bob’s eyes. The man had rain still dribbling off his smart green waterproof jacket and stubbly chin.
‘Rather wet,’ he said in what might have been a German accent. He held up a GPS aid, like a large yellow mobile. ‘I think the water fell in, total fucked the battery.’
He explained, while his outer clothing steamed before the Raeburn and filled the kitchen with the smell of feet, that he’d tried to take a short cut to Ardcorry, but kept hitting either marsh, bog, or rock. He hadn’t wished to disturb, but had no choice. He was staying in the Tinker’s Arms.
‘The day started with much sun and quite warm,’ he said mournfully.
‘Three seasons in one day up here.’ Bob sighed, feeling indigenous. He remained standing. ‘You were in the café in Bargrennan, weren’t you? An hour or two ago? In the window seat? Or was that your taish?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘Anyway,’ said Judith, ‘what’s wrong with a paper map?’
‘I know, bloody stupid. Not so much progress after all.’
‘The evolution of intelligence isn’t a straight curve,’ she smiled.
His small eyes focused on her with puzzlement. Bob told him to drink up. He took a slug of Talisker and almost choked. ‘I think I am the beer drinker.’ He grinned. Bob got him a bottle of stout.
‘No electrics, no fridge, I’m afraid.’
‘This is OK. I like it like piss today.’ His features seemed to clear: squarish face, small nose, puckered chin you could almost plonk your glass on.
‘I’ll bet you’re German or Dutch,’ said Judith.
‘German. And you?’
Judith laughed. ‘Edinburgh.’
He was trekking around Scotland, he said. ‘John o’Groats. Lots of hills.’
‘The Highlands?’
‘Yes. So beautiful. And you?’
Bob hesitated. The youth’s grey eyes were fixed on his face.
‘He’s our bird man,’ Judith announced, smiling. ‘Everything you want to know about black-headed gulls.’
He nodded slightly. ‘That’s good. They said to me this in the pub. The famous Mr Vebb?’
The youth’s hands were both visible, one of them round the stout bottle; Bob’s hand was clamped to the Makarov. ‘Mr Webb is my research partner,’ he said. ‘He’s out. Up on Lewis for the week. My name’s Geoff. Geoff Smith.’
Judith was looking at him with a puzzled frown. Everything had slowed down, leaving him plenty of time to think and act. The hiker looked momentarily puzzled above his dark polo-necked sweatshirt. Beyond the smell of feet, of wet wool steaming, there was something else: cheap aftershave, bland hotel rooms.
‘Mr Webb’s keen on cliff nests,’ Bob went on, with a hint of contempt. ‘I don’t like cliffs. They give me vertigo. Mudflats, me.’
The hiker nodded. ‘I think maybe I saw him on a cliff. Real near from the edge. Does he have a beard?’
‘We birders all have beards, more or less. Self-neglect.’
The man turned, as Bob guessed he would, to Judith, who was still looking bewildered. A tiny muscle twitched under his eye. Once, twice. ‘I like all animals,’ he said, over-pronouncing the s. ‘Not so much sheeps.’ He smiled without altering anything but his mouth.
‘No,’ said Judith, not quite keeping up. �
��They get in the way, somehow. I’m Judith, by the way.’
‘I am Ulrich. Where is your toilet? I’m exploding.’
‘Take this lamp,’ Bob said.
As soon they were alone, he turned to Judith and hissed, ‘Look, for health and safety reasons I’m not Kit Webb, I’m Geoff Smith. OK?’
‘Who’s Geoff Smith?’
‘Me. Kit Webb is on the cliffs the other end of the islands. Kit Webb is not me. In case.’
‘In case what?’
‘In case he’s checking the chamber on his semi-automatic.’
‘You’re scaring the shite out of me. He seems harmless enough.’
‘Before he goes, I’ll be caught short. OK? In case he’s put something in the loo.’
‘Like what?’
‘An incendiary bomb, for instance.’
‘Christ, I’ll call the police. They’ve got a helicopter, somewhere.’
‘No.’
A rattle and squeak in the pipes: the chain being pulled. He raised a hand for silence. ‘I told Kit,’ he began, in a loud voice, ‘that we had established the aggression as being directly linked to gull density on specified food patches. His figures are not relevant to exposed mud–water margins. You see what I’m saying?’
‘Yes,’ said Judith, feebly.
Ulrich came in, clean-faced and with shiny hands. Bob ignored him. ‘I’m not letting Kit reconfigure my figures,’ he went on testily. ‘When he gets back from his bloody cliffs I’ll have to tell him. His log-linear model of capture rate was crap.’
‘Kit’s always been a mystery to me,’ said Judith, in a stronger voice.
‘Sometimes I don’t think he’s very professional, as a birder. He didn’t even know about trade-off.’ Bob turned to the hiker, who was hovering by the Raeburn. His hands were clear of any pocket. ‘Sorry, we’re being rude about our colleague.’
