Climbing the wall was easy, and quieter. Torch in my pocket, I began the long slow climb up the fellside, walking bent and pressing my hands on my knees. The ground was soaked to squelching over my shoes. It made me slip on rocks projecting underfoot. Heather started kicking back at each pace, whipping my legs. There was no moon. How the hell had highwaymen managed? I did my best to follow the direction I’d planned, but within minutes I was using my torch to find the first gale-torn hawthorn and check its position against the faint glow of light from the house below. There were two leaning crags which would be my markers to aim off at a forty-degree angle to the right. The cottage was more or less a mile from there.
Common sense told that Shooters wasn’t Hector’s home. If it had been, why did he need to walk out there? The shepherd had innocently assumed that, being a McGunn, I was in on the cottage thing. Maybe Shooters, I hoped with spirits rising, was in fact a great Victorian shooting lodge and it was there that Duncan/Robert/Michelle or whoever had salted away the missing antiques from Tachnadray, if any.
Maybe nine o’clock when I set out. That made it getting on for ten when I made the first leaning crag. Odd, but I was starting to understand how the nightwalkers had managed. It’s quite easy, really. Once you get used to being away from civilization’s buildings and lights, night resolves into distinct components. Ground underfoot stays pitch- black, but the sky’s dark intensity less somewhat. Tall stones and trees condense the sky’s consistency, so that though you still can’t actually see them as such, you can somehow perceive that they’re there in your path. Tachnadray’s light was more distant, but seemed almost blinding from the hilltop. I stopped looking at it because it lessened my night vision.
From the crags the ground descended and took me out of direct view of Tachnadray for the first time. Even so I wasn’t too worried. The faint sky shine from that direction was enough to show me the hilltop’s sky interface. Every so often I cricked over on the stones that littered the fells, so I developed a trick of walking with knees bent, using short steps, not putting my heels down first. It intrigued me. I’d adopted Robert’s curious gait. A new way of looking, and a new way of walking, all in one go. I felt a real discoverer.
In fact I was so busy praising myself that I was stuck when a building thickened the darkness to my left. I’d actually come upon Shooters. A disappointingly small edifice. A pointless low wall ran from it for a short distance. Something to do with cattle? A snow-break to halt fell drifts in blizzards? I felt my way along it, stepping carefully in case tins or bottles or other fellwalkers’ debris lurked in wait.
Derelict? There was no sound. I halted, listened. In the distance a short deep bark sounded, curt and businesslike. I dismissed it. Hector’s dogs probably wouldn’t be out at this hour. I’d heard Duncan talk of red deer. Perhaps a stag calling its herd, maybe scenting me and resenting intrusion on its patch?
Risking, I took my flashlight and moved off a few silent yards. If somebody saw me I wanted a head start. I wasn’t in good enough shape to sprint the two boulder-riddled miles to Tachnadray without breaking my neck, so I’d have to do a short dash and hide among the outcrops. Escape by subterfuge is really my thing, but it’s easier in towns than out here in all this loneliness. I crouched.
Flash. The beam swept, hit buildings, doused into blackness again. In that instant of brilliance, my eyes beheld a child’s drawing two-story cottage, symmetrical and unadorned. The windows were wood-shuttered. Slate roof. Single chimney. A bare building on a barren hillside. What the hell was I doing out here? I asked myself irritably. One upper-floor shutter had stood slightly ajar, I’d noticed. I thought over the image in my mind. The obvious thing was to wait a minute in case my beam had disturbed an inhabitant, then creep up and simply try the door. For all I knew I might be stalking an empty house.
As I felt around me for a couple of decent-shaped stones, I heard again that deer’s bark. Closer, and only once, but now out beyond the cottage. I actually chuckled to myself. If only that apprehensive stag knew how little it had to fear from me it would get back between the sheets and nod off. God’s creatures are gormless. No wonder.
God was a beginner at creation.
It’s a fallacy to assume that burglars can’t climb a wall without a ladder. A burglar can climb anything, because even a blank wall offers ledges, pipes, rectifying studs, cistern overflows. You might say that such feeble supports might not support a burglar’s full weight—and you’d be right. But they’d support a quarter of a burglar’s weight, and that’s all he needs because he can do the bolus trick, the town burglar’s favorite.
This evolved from sailing ships, I’ve been told. Others say it’s what Argentina’s cowboys do to hobble bulls. The stones make the cord whip-tangle anything hit. I’ve even seen it used to put a rope round untouchable scalding steam pipes along a mill ceiling. You take a piece of strong twine a yard long, and tie stones at the ends. This is the bolus.
Then fasten a long length at the midpoint, and coil that length on the ground beside you. Take the midpoint of your bolus between finger and thumb of your left hand, and hold one tied stone in your right. Then start swinging the other dangling stone in a circle.
Clockwise or anticlockwise doesn’t matter. Once it’s going, you simply fling the opposite stone in the opposite direction, and you’ll find you are holding a piece of string by its middle with two stones whirling round in opposite directions. Naked tassel-dancers do it in night clubs from their breasts—er, I mean I’ve heard they do. To keep the bolus spinning, you simply move your hand up and down.
You lean, fling the bolus with a slow overarm cast. The best is that if you miss the chimney you simply reel it in again, or cut your cord and make another bolus. This actually happened. I missed the chimney stack twice. I tried pulling on the twine, but the bolus must have caught on something on the far side of the cottage roof. It’s usually the guttering or a cistern-overflow pipe. I bit through the nylon, let its free end whip away into the night air, and chewed away another one-yard length. By feel, I’d still got enough to stretch from roof to ground, and I was in no haste.
Mostly, I (I really mean burglars who go in for this sort of thing) prefer elongated-waisted stones because they hold the string better. City burglars use spark plugs, partly to assume innocence if they’re caught. I only took a minute finding a decent heavy pair of stones out in all this horrible countryside, and I was in action for another go. I reached for my coiled twine.
And stopped.
Almost beyond hearing, I could just make out a faint yell. “Run! Run!” Quite like a yell heard through glass.
Baffled. I strained to hear. Run? Run where? And why? I actually got up and turned this way and that, head tilted to catch the gnat’s whine of a shout, before it dawned. It was inside the cottage. Somebody was yelling for somebody to run. If I hadn’t been thick I’d have guessed, but I’ve a zillion untrained neurones. I was quite unconcerned, merely puzzled.
My beam cut the night. And something moved, far over to my right, beyond the low wall.
Robert stood there. He looked gigantic in the solid glare from my torch. With him on a leash stood Ranter, its
