She rounded a bend in the path and then dropped down flat below the skyline, disturbing several small black-headed birds that had been lurking in the heather. She didn’t want him to see her silhouetted against the blue Hebridean skies. She saw the buzzard again, high up in the heavens, wheeling lazily over the tallest of the hills.
Below her was an awe-inspiring sight. It was a truly wonderful view. There was a flat patch of green grass surrounded by stunted birch trees, their trunks a ghostly silver in the morning sun. Just beyond it was a large loch. Its surface was like a mirror on which were reflected the few clouds that were passing overhead. On the grass was a circle of standing stones with a cairn of rocks in the centre. It was a miraculously beautiful place.
She took out her field glasses and focussed in on Campbell. He unslung his backpack and put it down near to the cairn. Hanlon’s heart raced; what did it contain? Drug money? She looked at the terrain near to the loch.
The actual loch was more or less hammer-shaped and it lay in the lee of the peaks of three sizeable hills. She could see trickles of water, what looked like trickles from here but would, she suspected, be sizeable streams, running down their flanks into the waters of the loch below.
The ground near the standing stones, one piece of it anyway, was as flat as a table; there were no tall trees or power lines. It would be easy to land a helicopter there, she thought.
She swung the binoculars back to Campbell. He was unbuttoning his shirt – it was blue, standing out against the green background – and took it off. He stood there a moment and then sat down on a boulder. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and his pale freckled arms stood out against the fabric. She increased the magnification as he leaned forward to undo the laces on his walking boots. He slipped those off; all of his movements were smooth and rhythmical. His socks followed. Then he pulled his T-shirt up over his head. He had his back turned to Hanlon; she could see the V of the muscles running down his back. She wondered what he was going to do with it; she found herself nodding in approval as he neatly folded it rather than balling it up and dropping it on the rock. It was what she would have done.
He turned round and she could see his short red hair ruffled by the breeze. Her gaze travelled down. There was no fat on Campbell’s belly. She could see the ridges of muscle on his stomach. His fingers undid the belt and then unbuttoned his army trousers. They dropped to the floor.
He stepped gracefully out of them. He stood a moment and contemplated the loch, maybe about fifty metres from the stone circle that he was standing in. Then he rested one hand on the boulder and pulled off his pants.
Campbell unhurriedly folded the rest of his clothes neatly, then reached into the side of his backpack and pulled out a bag with a zippered top. He put his boots and clothes in then zipped it shut. He walked slowly down to the water in his bare feet, Hanlon admiring through her binoculars.
The water must have been freezing but Campbell didn’t flinch. He had to be used to wild-water swimming, thought Hanlon.
When he got waist deep, holding the bag shoulder high, he turned around and lay on his back in the water, balanced the bag on his chest and kicked out strongly with his legs. Within a couple of minutes, he was lost to sight behind a promontory that stuck out from the shore.
Hanlon guessed that he would swim round where the deer fence ended in the loch – it looked fairly unclimbable – and then return the way he came, or maybe walk down to Craighouse, which she reckoned was not too far away. From his gran’s house to the village was two sides of a triangle, one up here, the other down the way.
And then someone else would come to reclaim the backpack. Either on foot, the way they had – there was no way you could get a vehicle up here, although she suddenly thought of the deer fence. Maybe on the other side there would be a track. There had to be, she guessed, to have hauled the materials up here to build it. The track, she thought. Had Campbell made his way to the bothy yesterday afternoon along the forestry trails that criss-crossed the island, avoiding the road? Had it been Campbell who had stolen out of the hills like a wolf falling on the sheep-fold?
She gave him ten minutes more just to be sure that he hadn’t just gone for a swim, although why anyone would take their clothes with them as he had done would be a hard question to answer.
She stood up, disturbing the black-headed birds again, and walked down the slope of the hill, through the heather, skirting the impenetrable bog myrtle and gorse, down to the standing stones.
As she walked into the space between the birch trees she felt a sense almost of being in a holy place, like walking into a church or a cathedral. The jagged, weathered stones, covered in moss and lichen, were like pillars flanking a nave.
She walked up to the cairn and up to the backpack. It was green canvas, heavy duty so it wouldn’t get ripped or torn by vegetation or tree branches.
She knelt down and put her hand on the backpack zipper.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’
She looked round.
Campbell was standing over her, a heavy tree branch like a club in one hand. His eyes furious.
25
Hanlon slowly
