Scrambling back from the edge, I dropped down onto my backside, that good old instinct telling me to get as much of my body as possible in contact with solid ground, as soon as possible.
When I got my breath back, I inched forward again and peered down into the gully. Thirty feet below me, a river frothed angrily over rock as it surged along the valley bottom. I turned to look along the length of the cliff edge: the bonnet of the Cresta, projected over the edge by a few inches where it had burst through the tangle of bush, root and branch.
I had just slept through the night, like a baby, in a car being held back from a deadly plunge by a mess of dead vegetation. I suddenly felt sick and started to shake, as if the realization had triggered the delayed shock of the crash.
I stayed where I was, sitting on the cold, frosty earth, took the pack from the bib pocket of the anorak, lit a cigarette and smoked it to calm my nerves.
Then I smoked a couple more.
There was no point in trying to get back up to the road at that point. In fact, it was probably a bad idea to be visible, even if the chances of a car or truck passing were remote.
Instead, I decided to walk along the shelf edge that ran parallel to the road, but was low enough down for me to keep out of sight. Checking Ellis’s map before setting out, I reckoned I hadn’t that far to go, and the walking, while rocky, wasn’t that arduous.
I had guessed that the shelf I was walking along would eventually come up to the road level, but it didn’t, instead declining sharply into the valley bottom. After half-an-hour’s walk, I found myself at the river’s edge. I took the opportunity to fill a billycan and heat it on the small gas stove, tossing in some loose tea. I sat watching the river while I drank the tea. The odd thing was that, because of what I was wearing and the body heat from my exertions being trapped in their layers, I didn’t feel at all cold other than on my cheeks — and my hands, whenever I removed my gloves. I looked around me at the heather-dressed mountains whose hues changed constantly, depending on the light and the occasional passing shadow of a cloud in the unforgivingly cold, blue sky.
There was no denying it. Scotland could be breathtakingly beautiful.
But so could Cape Breton Island or British Columbia. I rinsed out the billycan, packed up my gear and headed onward.
Despite it being a tiny mark on the map, there was a lot of give and take in the area it indicated, but eventually I caught sight of a pale grey wisp of smoke rising from some kind of settlement up ahead. The valley floor had been rising for some time and I guessed that the handful of houses indicated on the map at the head of the valley were the source of the smoke.
I found my way up the side of the mountain on the far side from the road and walked along a ridge, approaching the village from what I hoped would be an unconventional and unexpected direction. But the ridge became a path that again started to take me up the mountainside and away from my target and I realized I would have to retrace my steps. I changed my mind when I saw what I thought was an abandoned croft. It would give me a good view of the settlement, I guessed, so I headed for it.
It turned out not to be an abandoned croft but a bothy in a full state of repair. Bothies were small buildings maintained to provide shelter for hill walkers and mountaineers.
A notice board by the door instructed me in the etiquette of using the bothy’s facilities. Basically, you were expected to leave the shelter how you found it, and if you took a dump you did it outside away from a watercourse; no trash to be left in the bothy when you left, that kind of thing.
The building itself was a rectangle of two-foot thick stone walls, divided into two rooms, each accessed from a separate door and not connected internally. The first room was the accommodations: a basic box of a room of naked, unplastered stone with a large fireplace and chimney breast in the soot-stained back wall. A robust table of some dense wood that was unidentifiable under several layers of lacquer sat beneath the single, square window. The second room was a storeroom containing a shovel for latrine digging, a box of candles and a couple of brooms. There was even a pile of firewood, which the notice on the wall advised had to be replaced if used.
The bothy was a godsend. I reckoned that at this time of year there wouldn’t be many walkers up in the hills, although I knew it was a fraternity not noted for its common sense when it came to the weather, and the bothy was closer to a settlement, albeit a small one, than most were. If I were stuck, I could camp down here overnight.
I had been wrong about having a view of the village from it, however. A thicket of trees and a swell in the hillside obscured the view, meaning I would have to head back down the trail a little to see it; but that also meant that the bothy could not be easily seen from the village or its approach road.
I left my stuff in the bothy and walked back down the trail to where I could get a good view of the village, using my new binoculars to watch any activity. There was none. The village consisted of a clutch of cottages arranged on either side of the road, two larger houses and an inn. There was the massive shoulder of a mountain behind the village and I could see a second clutch of buildings higher up, about a half-mile from the village on the far side, and I recognized it as a farmhouse and outbuildings. But it was the second house that interested me. It was a grander sort of place and more like something you would see in town. A big, solid villa, with two wings to it and a separate stable block. I guessed that the farm was a tenancy of the big house.
Being on the other side of the village, the big house was too far away for me to keep tabs on from where I was. I needed to get closer.
I went back to the bothy and brewed up some tea with the gas canister stove, not wanting to light a fire and make smoke, despite the fact that the bothy was pretty much hidden from the village. I stretched out Ellis’s map on the table and took the automatic from my backpack, checked the magazine and safety, and tucked it into the waistband of my flannels, obscured from view by the waterproofs, the heavy turtleneck sweater and the anorak. No one would see the gun, all right, but I sure wasn’t going to win any fast-draw contests.
I leaned over the table and examined the map. Ellis’s mark corresponded to my current location. What I was looking for was somewhere in the village, the farm or the large house I had seen.
This was where Ellis had come the night his wife had heard him on the telephone. I knew that for sure. I’d known it ever since I’d examined the mark on the map more closely at the barge’s window. The mark wasn’t a cross after all.
It was a ‘T’. ‘T’ for Tanglewood.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
It was, I reckoned, time for lunch.
I walked down the hillside, and along the valley towards the village. My destination was the inn and I wore my rucksack to convince anyone who cared that I was one of the more hardy, or foolhardy, of Scotland’s wilderness wanderers.
The inn was a long, low jumble of stonework and small, irregular windows. It was one of those places you came across every now and then in Scotland: inns and taverns that had offered rest and nourishment to the weary and hungry traveller continuously since the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie or before.
In fact, the mutton pie they served me with a pint of roomtemperature beer tasted like it had been in the pantry since the last visit of the Young Pretender — probably when, during one of Scotland’s more dignified historical moments, the Prince had stopped by for a snack before slipping into women’s clothing and skipping town.
The welcome I got from the barkeep reminded me that dour is indeed a Scottish word, and I was tempted to ask him if he had a brother in Milngavie, in the newsagent business. Instead I smiled and took the tepid beer over to a table.
The only other customers were a pair of old boys at the bar who watched me expressionlessly but constantly from the moment I came in. They had obviously run out of conversation sometime around the Boer War and the lack of animation in their expressions would have made Archie McClelland look like Danny Kaye. They could have been twins, I thought, their white, wrinkled, leathery faces identical under matching flat caps. They probably weren’t twins, though: this was rural Scotland where everybody unrelated probably was.
I had once visited Fifeshire, because I had had to — which was the only reason anyone ever visited Fifeshire.
