When Eight Bells Toll

'And a very good job you make of it, too, Donald,' I said approvingly. The gun moved and I said quickly: 'I'm off. And don't bother saying ' haste ye back' for I won't be,'

As we rose from the island Williams said: 'I just caught a glimpse. That was a gun he had there?'

'It wasn't the outstretched hand of friendship they're always talking about in those parts,' I said bitterly.

'Who is he?  What is he?'

'He's an undercover agent for the Scottish Tourist Board in secret training to be their goodwill ambassador abroad. He's not any of those I'm looking for, that I know. He's not a nut case, either - he's as sane as you are. He's a worried man and a desperate one.'

'You didn't look in the shed. You wanted to find out about a boat. Maybe there was someone pointing a gun at him.'

'That was one of the thoughts that accounted for my rapid departure. I could have taken the gun from him,'

'You could have got your head blown off,'

'Guns are my business. The safety catch was in the 'On' position,'

'Sorry.' Williams's face showed how out of his depth he was, he wasn't as good at concealing his expression as I was, 'What now?'

'Island number two to the west here,' I glanced at the chart, 'Craigmore.'

'You'll be wasting your time going there.' He sounded very positive. 'I've been there. Flew out a badly injured man to a Glasgow hospital.'

'Injured how?'

'He'd cut himself to the thigh-bone with a flensing knife, Infection had set in.'

'A flensing knife?   For whales?   I'd never heard------'

'For sharks. Basking sharks. They're as common as mackerel hereabouts. Catch them for their livers - you can get a ton of liver oil from a good-sized one,' He pointed to the chart, to a tiny mark on the north coast. 'Craigmore village. Been abandoned, they say, from before the First World War. We're coming up to it now. Some of those old boys built their homes in the damnedest places.'

Some of those old boys had indeed built their homes in the damnedest places. If I'd been compelled to build a home either there or at the North Pole I'd have been hard put to it to make a choice. A huddle of four small grey houses built out near the tip of a foreland, several wicked reefs that made a natural breakwater, an even more wicked-looking entrance through the reefs and two fishing boats swinging and rolling wildly at anchor inside the reefs. One of the houses, the one nearest the shore, had had its entire seaward wall cut away. On the twenty or thirty feet of sloping ground that separated the house from the sea 1 could see three unmistakable sharks. A handful of men appeared at the open end of the house and waved at us.

'That's one way of making a living. Can you put me down?'

'What do you think, Mr, Calvert?'

'I don't think you can.' Not unless he set his helicopter down on top of one of the little houses, that was. 'You winched this sick man up?'

'Yes. And I'd rather not winch you down, if you don't mind. Not in this weather and not without a crewman to help me. Unless you're desperate.'

'Not all that desperate.   Would  you vouch  for them?'

'I'd vouch for them. They're a good bunch. I've metthe boss, Tim Hutchinson, an Aussie about the size of a house, several times. Most of the fishermen on the west coast would vouch for them.'

'Fair enough. The next island is Ballara.'

We circled Ballara once. Once was enough. Not even a barnacle would have made his home in Ballara.

We were over the channel between Ballara and Dubh Sgeir now and the Beul nan Uamh was a sight to daunt even the stoutest-hearted fish. It certainly daunted me, five minutes in that lot whether in a boat or scuba suit and that would have been that. The ebb-tide and the wind were in head-on collision and the result was the most spectacular witches' cauldron I'd ever seen. There were no waves as such, just a bubbling swirling seething maelstrom of whirlpools, overfalls and races, running no way and every way, gleaming boiling white in the overfalls and races, dark and smooth and evil in the hearts of the whirlpools. Not a place to take Aunty Gladys out in a row- boat for a gentle paddle in the quiet even fall.

Oddly enough, close in to the east and south coast of Dubh Sgeir, one could have taken Aunty Gladys out. In those tidal races between islands a common but not yet clearly understood phenomenon frequently leaves an undisturbed stretch of water close in to one or other of the shores, calm and smooth and fiat, a millpond with a sharply outlined boundary between h and the foaming races beyond. So it was here. For almost a mile between the most southerly and easterly headlands of Dubh Sgeir, for a distance of two or three hundred yards out from the shore, the waters were black and still. It was uncanny.

'Sure you really want to land here?' Williams asked.

'Is h tricky?'

'Easy. Helicopters often land on Dubh Sgeir. Not mine - others. It's just that you're likely to get the same reception here as you got on Eilean Oran. There are dozens of privately owned islands off the West Coast and none of them like uninvited visitors. The owner of Dubh Sgeir hates them.'

'This world-famous Highland hospitality becomes positively embarrassing at times. The Scotsman's home is his castle, eh?'

'There is a castle here. The ancestral home of the dan Dalwhinnie. I think.'