‘And he’s not related to you at all? He’s just some kind of hood?’
She nodded. ‘Yep, he told me that he had to visit the wreck, offered me a thousand dollars to accompany him, a holiday in the Old Country – and a chance to say goodbye to Petey. I thought that sounded like the best deal I was likely to make.’
‘Who does your box of money belong to then?’
‘George, of course. I think the government gave it to him.’
‘So you know he’s up here looking for something else?’
‘Oh, sure.’
For the first time since I’d met her in that park in Berlin her story was beginning to hold together – so why did I think she was still handing me a crock of old shit?
‘Can I think about this?’ I asked her. We were catching the others now – they were barely a hundred yards ahead. ‘And talk to you again later?’ Then I stuck in, ‘You still haven’t told me about the bomb.’
She stopped dead, and stared at me. I thought her black eye was less than black already.
‘What bomb?’ Ah. She looked levelly at me and explained, ‘He’s up here looking for a metal box of USAAF documents for a museum – the Smithsonian, I think.’ After a gap in the conversation she asked me, ‘What was that about a bomb?’
‘Nothing, honey, forget it. I must have misheard someone.’
We plodded up to the crash site an hour later. Mysterious Chris opened his golf club bag, and produced a mine detector. It did indeed look like a frying pan with a very long handle. Broken down into handy transportable parts it fitted neatly into a golf bag. He assembled it, and went detecting. Presumably for George’s bomb.
Ean sat on a rock pinnacle, and looked wary. George looked jumpy: he still spent most of the time watching Ean. For ten minutes Doris thought about the aluminium overcast we had strewn around us, and then burst into tears. We few, we happy few: I remembered the quotation, and opened the small pack I always carry and found a sandwich – freshly cut lean ham, and slices of apple between doorsteps of bread.
For those of you who haven’t stood on a hillside with the bits of an aircraft spread around you, I’ll try to explain. I’ve done it before.
What you have to imagine is a thirty-ton machine made of aluminium, steel, rubber and miles of electrical wire thumping into an unforgiving mountainside at two hundred and fifty. What is left, if she doesn’t burn, is a lot of pieces – and I’m sorry to be blunt, but that is often all that’s left of the poor sods who happened to be inside at the time. Got the picture? The Scottish highlands are full of them, and you can climb up to most – but if you do, read that Shelley poem ‘Ozymandias’ first, and expect your spirit to be humbled.
We were on a series of high ridges, crags and small flat plateaus. Just below us – and by that I mean about thirty feet below us – were four lochans: those small lakes. It was odd to find lochs up among the hilltops; as if God had popped them up there in some aberrant fit. The water in them was brown with peat or black . . . and they were full of bits of aeroplane. Everywhere I looked aluminium gleamed back at me from the shallows, under the water surface. On one small island a Wright Cyclone radial engine stood forlornly on its own.
In one of the small lochs a propeller stood upright among the shadows of the hills, one bent blade arching up like a tombstone.
Pieces of disassembled aeroplane glinted back at us from among the heather and coarse grass wherever I looked. It felt too much like a graveyard for me, and I wanted to get away as soon as I could. I still couldn’t believe I hadn’t set a price on this bloody job – can a woman really turn your head that quickly?
George suddenly lost his mind or his nerve. He shouted, ‘Geronimo!’ like the US Marines in cheesy war films, and ran at Ean. This was not a particularly sound strategy because he had to run steeply uphill to where Ean was perched, so by the time he reached him he was out of breath and going too slowly to be taken seriously, even though he was clutching a large American fighting knife in his hand. Ean simply moved out of the way. George couldn’t stop himself. He plunged over the top, fell twenty-five or thirty feet, and rolled into the shallows of the largest lochan to lie among the pieces of aluminium.
Nobody immediately went down to see if he was OK. Doris and I climbed up to Ean, who asked, ‘What the hell was that all about?’
‘I told you. Your rifle gave him the willies. He convinced himself that you’re going to kill him for giving Doris a black eye.’
It was big, silent Chris who moved. He put his metal detector down, clambered through the tussocky heather, and dragged George out of the water.
Doris asked us, ‘I suppose we can’t just leave him there?’
‘Not until he’s paid us all, miss.’ Ean smiled sympathetically. ‘Then we can put him back if you like.’
The whole bloody thing had turned into a disaster, and I was half inclined just to walk off the hill and leave them to it. George had howled every time Chris moved him; either he was a big nance or he’d broken something.
Eventually Chris looked up at me
