So now, to be in the sea in poor weather was not an exceptional experience. She knew what to do. Her arms and legs engaged in a slow, powerful measured crawl, her breathing regular and controlled, she made slow headway against the water that was trying to pull her out to sea, to lie forever in its cold, wet embrace. Hanlon did what she was good at, refusing to give in, keeping on going.
But it was an exhausting struggle. She was tired, emotionally drained and the sea was cold. The wind was getting up now, whipping the surface into choppy waves; once or twice she had to fight down panic as she swallowed water and coughed and spluttered. At times the task seemed hopeless; she was putting all her effort into swimming, but to no effect. The pull of the whirlpool was strong and remorseless, and unlike her it would never weaken, never tire, never cease.
The mountainous form of Jura was there in sharp clarity, but it seemed to be getting no nearer. There were moments she thought she was actually going backwards, being pulled slowly but surely into the relentless maw of the vortex.
She emptied her mind as she swam. There was no past, no future, only now. To have thought of the distance facing her, to have thought of the current pulling at her body, would have been to give in to fear and that would have been the start of the end. For her it was just the eternal present as the iron muscles of her shoulders and legs working in harmony powered her through the sea.
And slowly, imperceptibly, the pull of the current lessened, and slowly her hope flickered and burned more brightly, and the centimetres became metres and the metres became hundreds of metres and then a kilometre and then more, and Hanlon kept grimly swimming. The bulk of Ben Garrisdale visible in the far distance grew larger and larger. With her shoulders burning and forcing her legs to move, she kept on, occasionally inhaling water but refusing to allow any panic, for there was only the now… and now she could make out the stony summit strewn with grey scree. Blurry details resolved themselves, greenery became trees, shrubs and ferns, and she allowed herself the luxury of certainty. She began to feel bootlace weed against her legs, seaweed had never felt so good, and then the tough brown bladder wrack with its bubbles of air trapped in its leathery leaves between her fingers, and there was the blessed black, boulder-strewn shore.
Hanlon slowly clambered out of the water. She had no clear idea how long she had been swimming; she had lost all sense of time. Her legs were trembling and her arms barely able to move. She sat, briefly, on a rock, and she leaned forward with her head between her knees, breathing deeply, feeling its cold, barnacled roughness with her fingers, entranced by the sensation. Solid, unyielding rock. She was alive. She was alive! She looked back across the horizon; far away in the distance she could still see the lonely form of the fishing boat ploughing the seas.
She lifted her head. With a flap of wings, a herring gull landed on a rock not far away from her and stared at her balefully. It opened its beak and gave an unmelodious caw. Hanlon returned its unfriendly gaze. She knew just how close she had come to being food for the gulls, her naked washed-up body a mini banquet for the voracious seabirds. The vicious, sharp, strong yellow beak scything down into the soft tissue of her dead grey eyes.
I’M ALIVE!
She pushed her sodden hair, hanging in black rats’ tails, away from her face and her eyes gleamed with a sinister light as they reflected the silver of the sea and the answering grey of the leaden skies.
Big Jim, she thought grimly, I’m coming for you.
Hanlon stood up and stretched. Well, she thought, she couldn’t stay where she was indefinitely. Another wave of gratitude hit her. Despite the bitter cold that she was feeling, she was alive.
Inland she noticed a plume of thin grey smoke rising up into the skies. A fire, probably from one of the isolated crofts that periodically dotted the island.
She shivered again, and this time it took a while for it to pass. Shivering was now too mild a term; her body was shaking with cold. She was abruptly conscious that she had to get some covering over herself, and quickly. She stood up and set off up the beach towards the treeline. The worst of it was not so much being practically naked, it was that she was barefoot. Moving slowly, the rocks painful on her bare skin, she was conscious of every barnacle on every stone, wincing with pain every time she put her weight down on the soles of her feet.
She stood on the foreshore, breathed deeply and headed towards the house where the smoke was coming from.
20
Morag Jamieson, a fifty-year-old, divorced forestry manager, quietened her dog, Bridie, and opened her front door to the unexpected ring on the bell. She stared in astonishment at the sight in front of her. Momentarily she wondered if she was hallucinating. A woman wearing practically nothing, dripping wet, barefoot – black mud coating her legs up to her calves. Her arms and legs were covered with vicious red scratches from where she’d had to force her way through brambles and undergrowth that had obscured the path from the beach to the track and there was a long smear of dried blood on one of her thighs. Her skin was very pale against the black of her underwear.
Despite the state she was in, despite surviving God alone knew what, there was no sense of desperation or helplessness. She stood with her arms folded, grey eyes commanding under a mane of tangled dark hair, very much in control.
‘My boat sank,’ she
