I smoked a pipe and chatted with Ean across the bar. He smoked his pipe too. I wasn’t keen to get my head down: I told you, I was missing Doris already and her interesting demands even more. I could still feel her tongue in my mouth; urgent like a wren. After sampling several drams Ean pointed out to me that I seemed to favour what he called the Highland malts, whereas he preferred those from Speyside. I held up my empty glass to him. He poured me an Islay Ardbeg, and I fell in love with it.
Later I told him, ‘These people I’m with?’
‘Aye?’
‘I’m not so sure of them.’
After a longish pause, during which Ean took a large sip of his whisky and rolled it around in his mouth, he asked, ‘And why are you telling me?’
‘Because you’re coming up the hill with us tomorrow. I thought it fair that you should know I had my doubts.’
He nodded.
‘OK. Fine. Thank you.’
Appearances can be deceptive, can’t they? I asked him, ‘What did you do in the war?’
‘Lovat Scouts.’
‘Pegasus Bridge?’
‘Margaret doesn’t like me to talk about it.’
So that was that, then. Another hard bastard. We were probably in good hands. We went back to teaching me the finer points of whisky appreciation.
Before I left him he asked, ‘Can your people be ready to go by ten-thirty tomorrow morning?’
‘Yeah. I warned them it could be even earlier.’
‘Good. One last point . . .’
‘OK. What?’
‘If I say the weather’s no good, we don’t go . . . and no one argues.’
‘I’ll tell them, but George may not like it.’
‘Yon Doris says that often, doesn’t she?’
That was interesting. I wonder what Ean had been up to when she told him that?
It rained. It was bloody Scotland, after all; why should I have expected anything different?
Ean said we weren’t going.
George’s mouth turned down, but he spent the day in the small bar playing cards with me, Chris and a couple of shepherds. George didn’t win at every game, and didn’t seem to mind losing. You have to watch people like that. Ean watched a hand or two later on, and told us, ‘The forecast is fine for tomorrow. You can reckon we’ll be out on the hill.’
‘Your call, captain,’ George said without looking up from his cards. You’d think he didn’t give a toss: he was a lot brighter than he pretended to be. Not for the first time I wondered what services George’s company provided.
Doris didn’t show at all that day. She kept to their room and Ean’s Margaret took her food up to her.
Later I asked George, ‘What’s happened to Doris?’ I thought it would be even more suspicious if I hadn’t asked.
Again George didn’t look up from his cards.
‘Sore guts I guess, Charlie. It must have been someone she ate. We’ll see her in the morning – she won’t let us up on that mountain without her.’
Chapter Six
Lost John
We set out the next morning, walking back along the road we had arrived by, each carrying a small pack with our essentials. Chris was carrying something else, but I’ll come to that later. Then we branched up along an old estate road past a farm, and up into the hills. Ean led the way. He wore a pair of cared-for army boots, and carried a nice old .243 rifle.
George asked, ‘What’s the gun for? I didn’t expect guns.’
I had my small pistol in a pocket, but I didn’t tell him that of course.
Ean said, ‘I might spot a nice fat buck – cheap meat for the table.’
‘Don’t you need the landowner’s permission to go shooting things?’ George persisted.
‘I gave myself permission this morning. Just before we set out.’
‘You own all this land?’
‘I think so. That’s what my father told me.’
I may have been mistaken, but I thought that George’s mouth might have turned down at that. He and Ean led us. Chris and Doris followed them, and I brought up the tail. Chris was carrying a golf bag. Yes, you read me right the first time: he was taking a golf bag up a mountain. Doris dropped back to walk with me for a while – it looked as if her sore stomach had given her a black eye. My enquiry was probably written all over my face. She told me, ‘I hit my head on the basin while I was being sick.’
‘It must have hurt.’
‘Just my pride.’
George looked over his shoulder, and she moved up to walk alongside Chris again. I watched George’s back – the small pack he carried between his shoulders – and wondered what I could do about him if he turned nasty. After an hour of zigzagging over the approaches to the hill my knees ached. Ean strode ahead with the ease of a feral goat. Twice Doris tripped in the scrubby heather, and twice I hauled her up. Each time she said, ‘Thanks.’
I nodded at George and waved that she was OK, but I told her, ‘I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand the guy.’
She said, ‘Snap!’ Her mouth set in a determined little line. That was interesting.
At least the sun was shining. I decided to stop watching George until the train arrived at the station. I watched Doris’s backside instead.
The last climb I did was in a dry summer, five or more years earlier and that had been easier. That approach had been along well established forestry tracks, and had been bad enough. This crumbly old mountain was wet, and it was falling to bits. You went from reasonably hard going into knee-deep boggy lichen without warning, and by the time we were making a serious attempt on the lower slopes my
