'I think I can help. I think I can suggest an alternative procedure…'
He had been there through the night and all of the day before. The necessary stillness and silence were as second nature to him.
In that time he had eaten two cold sausages given him by his mother and not needed more.
He sat motionless, sheltered by a rock from the worst of the wind. He was a thousand feet above the small quarry beside the road where the police waited, two hundred feet above the escarpment of raw stones and weathered tree sprigs where the eyrie was. He had his telescope and the binoculars but he did not use them; he could see all that he needed to see without them. There was only the wind's light whistle to break the silence rippling around him; it was an hour since he had last whispered into the radio the police had given him, and the birds at the eyrie were quieter now.
When the egg thieves came to the mountains the police always called him because, as they told him, he was the best.
The anger burned slowly in the young man's mind… When he had climbed to his vantage-point, using dead ground, never breaking the skyline or making a silhouette, the birds had been frantic at the eyrie, wheeling and crying. It was impossible for the young man to comprehend that a collector would hire people to come to the eagles' eyrie to take eggs, and harder than impossible for him to understand that those same eggs, a pair of them, would be valued by the collector at a figure in excess of a thousand pounds. The notion that the collector would hide the dead, smooth eggs away from sight and keep them only for a personal gratification was impossible for him to believe… He loved the birds. He knew every one of the nine pairs that flew, soared, hunted, within twenty miles of where he now sat.
The previous afternoon he had seen the decoy come down the mountain. It was intended that the movement should be seen. There was a routine and he had learned it. The eyrie would be hit in darkness. A pair of men would climb to it with the aid of passive infrared goggles, and would lift the eggs. They would move them down a few hundred metres and hide them. They would be clean when they reached the road and their car. A decoy would go on to the mountain the next day and appear to make a pick-up, would search in the heather or among boulders, would seem to lift something, and would then come down. Were he stopped and arrested, the decoy, too, would be clean, the surveillance would be blown and the eggs abandoned. If the decoy were not stopped then a man would come for the pick-up the following day. The pick-up man had gone close in the misty dawn light to a group of hinds, had been within thirty yards of them and not disturbed them, had been good. But, he had disturbed a solitary ptarmigan, and that had been enough for the young man at his vantage-point. He had followed the pick-up, his eyes needling on him. He had seen him lift the eggs from a hiding-place and start, with great care, to come down from the mountain. He had told the police over the radio where he would reach the road.
The mountains of this distant corner of north-west Scotland, their eyries and the vantage-points, were the young man's kingdom.
He was Andy Chalmers, twenty-four years old, employed to shoot hinds in the forestry plantations for ten months of the year, and to stalk stags for the guests of the owner of his estate Mr. Gabriel Fenton to shoot during the remaining two months of the year. He was the junior by twenty years of the other stalkers of the neighbouring estates, and in that small, close-knit world he was a minor legend.
If he had not been exceptional, he would never have been allowed near Mr. Gabriel Fenton's guests. Were it not for his remarkable skills at covering ground in covert stealth, he would have been relegated to renewing boundary posts and hammering in staples to fasten the fencing wire. He was surly with the guests, had no conversation, treated wealthy men with undisguised contempt, made them crawl on their stomachs in water-filled gullies till they shook with exhaustion, snarled at them if they coughed or spat phlegm, and took them closer to the target stags than any of the other stalkers would have dared. The guests adored his rudeness, and insisted on him accompanying them when they returned in subsequent years.
He watched the distressed wheel of the birds above their thieved eyrie. Many times the pick-up, from cover, searched the ground above and below him for evidence that he was identified, and failed to find it. There was little satisfaction for Chalmers in the knowledge that the police waited in the small quarry beside the road. The life warmth of the eggs was gone and the embryos already dead. The pick-up disappeared into the tree-line that hid the quarry and the road.
The radio called him.
The wind blustered against him and rain was shafting the far end of the glen.
He looked a last time at the birds and felt a sense of shame that he could not help them.
He took the direct route down, using a small stream bed. The cascading icy water was over his ankles, in his boots, and he felt nothing but the shame.
He came to the quarry. They were big men, the police out from Fort William, and they towered over him, but they treated this slight, spare, filthy young man with a rare respect. They thanked him, and then led him into the trees and pointed to the yellowed yolk of two eggs and the smashed shells. The pick-ups always tried to destroy evidence in the moments before they were arrested. He looked at the debris and thought of the fledglings they would have made, and of the sad, aimless flight over the eyrie of the adult birds. He started towards the police car where the shaven-headed pickup sat handcuffed on the back seat, but the policemen held his arms to prevent him reaching the door.
He was told there was a message for him, at the factor's office.
Peggy was a cog in the wheel of the village's life. She thought of herself as a large cog but to others in the community she was of small importance. She didn't care to acknowledge that reality. Her husband, dead nine years from thrombosis, had been a district engineer with the water authority, and within a week of burying him she had joined every committee that gave her access. Her loneliness was stifled by a workhorse dedication to activity. Nothing was too much trouble for her: she hustled through the hours of the day, out with her bicycle and her weathered bag, on her duties with the Women's Institute and the Wildlife Group and the committee for the Red Cross. She had a checklist of visits to be made each week to the young mothers and the sick and the elderly. Dressed in clothes of violently bright colours, she believed herself popular and integral. What she was asked to do, she did. She was happily unaware that, to most of her fellow villagers, she was a figure of ridicule. She had no malice. She had a loyalty. On that Sunday morning she was tasked by the Wildlife Group to perform a duty which would also feed the curiosity, inquisitiveness, on which she lived.
Frank Perry could see, side on, the slight wry grin on Davies's face, and his hand sliding away from under his jacket. It wasn't anything Perry had seen before: Peggy's coat was a technicolour patchwork of colour, and her garish lipstick matched none of the coat's hues.
'Hello, Peggy, keeping well? Yes?'
Peggy stared past him, a sort of disappointment clouding her features.
'Not too bad, thank you,' she said severely.
Peggy's disappointment, he thought, was that she hadn't spied out an armoured personnel carrier in the hall, nor a platoon of crouched paratroops. She was on her toes to see better into the unlit hall. Perry wondered if she'd noticed the new tree and the new post, the tyre marks; she probably had because she missed little.
'How can I help?'
'It's Meryl I came to see Wildlife Group business.'
'Sorry, you'll have to make do with me. Meryl's still upstairs.'
The unmarked car cruised behind her and Davies gave it a small wave as if to indicate that the woman in the dream coat was not a threat. There were two more cars in the village that morning. Perry was unshaven, half dressed, and he had left Meryl upstairs in bed. She had been crying through half the night, and only now had slipped into a beaten, exhausted sleep.
Peggy blurted her message, 'I was asked to come, the Wildlife Group asked me. Meryl was doing typing for us. I've come for it. I've been asked-' 'Sorry, you're confusing me.' But he was not confused, just wasn't going to make it easy for her.
'Your next meeting's not till Tuesday. She'll have it done by then, she'll bring it with her.'
'I've been asked to take it from her.'
'By whom?'
