Cold, Lone and Still

while I played the tiny part of the toadying and sycophantic James Mackenzie. Amateur material were the whole lot of us, but the play itself carried us through, although I wouldn’t go bail for our Campbell’s Scottish accent! However, I digress, as the lecturer said when he was extolling the beauties of the Clifton Blue butterfly and stepped backwards off the cliffs at Beachy Head.

Slowly, and with many pauses for rest, although it was too wet everywhere to sit down, we made progress towards Kingshouse. Of one thing I was determined. If the hotel there could accommodate us, we were going to stay there at least a second night. We had allowed a fortnight for the holiday and still had a day or two in hand, but, apart from that, there was nothing to stop us from putting in another week if we felt so inclined. Our return tickets to London from Glasgow were valid for a month, so no problem there, and I had money enough to cover any extra expenses and could get more in Glasgow if we needed it.

At last the climbing was over and The Way began to descend. I knew, however, that to get to Kinlochleven there was more climbing ahead of us and I was becoming more and more anxious about Hera’s powers of endurance. She knew what I was thinking, for, when we stopped to admire the view we got of Buachaille Etive Mor, she said, ‘Stop worrying, Comrie. Women are much tougher than men. We have to be.’

We passed the way to the ski-lift and came on to a well-surfaced road and a car park. We passed Blackrock Cottage and then, thankfully, we found that The Way took us downhill again and across the moor to the remote but more than welcome Kingshouse hotel. I enquired at once about the possibility of extending our booking and, to my great relief, this turned out to be possible.

The hotel and its pine trees were grandly situated under the protection — or the menace — of mighty Beinn a’Chrulaiste and all around were other mountains and the moors. Fortunately Hera was so greatly taken with the setting that she made no objections to my booking us in for an extra night and, although I knew she would never admit it, I am sure she was relieved to think that we were to take a whole day off from walking.

I had one other card up my sleeve, but I had to be wary about how and when I played it. To get to the Kingshouse hotel we had had to cross a main road and I knew from the guidebook that a bus route went along it to Fort William. It was my intention to insist, when the omens seemed favourable, that we should catch a bus and finish our journey that way. I thought of complaining of blisters on my feet, but the necessary evidence for this was lacking. I wondered whether I could fake a sprained ankle, but this would be inconvenient later if I had to cry off climbing Ben Nevis, a project on which she had set her heart.

In the event, I adopted neither subterfuge, but opted for yet another night at the hotel, pointing out to Hera that a stay of three nights entitled us to a rebate on the day-to-day terms charged, although whether this was the case I neither knew nor cared. Finally I put it to her bluntly that I had booked us for the third night as well as the second one and that she must please herself about what she wanted to do, but that I was determined to stay.

‘We’ve covered sixty miles since we left Drymen,’ I said. ‘A good deal more, if you count the extra miles we covered when we lost our way in the mist. We’ve proved our point, don’t you think?’

‘I’m not sure about that,’ she answered. ‘I don’t terribly care for your protective attitude. It isn’t really protective, you know. It’s mere self-assertion and male vanity. I detest this ‘women and children first’ nonsense. On a ship the sailors are the people to be considered. As for the Victorian ideal of the captain’s either being the last to leave the vessel or even going down with it, I never heard such poppycock! The leader ought to be the principal survivor, not the inevitable casualty.’

‘Why?’

‘For obvious reasons, I should have thought. Where would the sheep be, if the shepherd died?’

‘So what exactly are you getting at?’

‘Go and get us more drinks and I’ll tell you. You see,’ she went on when I returned, ‘you were very quick to hustle me away from that corpse. I won’t blame you for that, except to say that it was high-handed and unnecessary.’

‘You didn’t really want to see a murdered man, particularly somebody we knew,’ I said.

‘But are you sure that it was somebody we knew? You only flashed your torch on him before you were grabbing me by the arm and dragging me back to that other room and then forcing me to get back to our road.’

‘What is all this? Of course we had to get back on to our road. We had to get to the hotel.’

‘I still think that, if you saw what you say you saw, we ought to go to the police. There might be all sorts of things for them to find out.’

‘We’ve been into all this.’

‘Look, when the mist came down and we lost our way, how far ahead of us were the other four?’

‘If there still were four of them. The Minches might have left Todd and Carbridge by then. Everybody else had left them.’

‘In any case, whether there were four of them or just the two men, they might have got to that turning we took long before the mist came down. Why should they have gone off the track? What made them leave The Way and go junketing away across country? It’s too far-fetched to suppose that they were trying to take a short cut by the same route we had chosen. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘They may have heard about the ruins and wanted to take a look at them.’ I knew this could not be true. Hera picked up the suggestion and threw it away.

‘The ruins are not mentioned in the guidebook. Besides, Carbridge wanted to get to Fort William quickly. He wasn’t any too pleased when Perth and the students spent that time at Inchcailloch on Loch Lomond and he dropped them altogether later on because they wanted to linger and collect bits of rocks and things. Why should he — or any of the others, for that matter — have wasted their time and energy going off the marked route?’

‘You tell me,’ I said.

‘When you went charging down that dark passage you talk about, did you slip?’

‘No, I fell over the body, as I told you. If you’re thinking of blood, it coagulates pretty quickly unless the chap is a haemophiliac’

‘Why wouldn’t you let me see him?’