enough to make the prow-like cliff shake as if about to fall. The same wind was provoking the ocean into great white-tops that thumped the shingle far below. Again and again the wind Dried to prise me away from the cliff and carry me with it, but I stayed motionless until its brunt was gone. Vertigo, as all its victims know, is not a fear of falling but an atavistic desire to fly, which is why so many of its sufferers are aviators.
I rounded the headland, and breathed a sigh of relief before seeing another bay and another headland. Worse, this section of the path was blocked. It looked at first like a fall of rubble but the boulders were too evenly matched in colour and size; balanced precariously upon the smallest of toeholds they shimmered as a gust of wind thumped the cliff face, roaring upwards and scooping in its draft both snowflakes and fragments of cliff.
Alone on this extreme edge of the peninsula I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I could not be seen from anywhere on Blackstone. I released ray grasp on the rock and, moving my arm very slowly, I bared my wrist to see the time. Would they by now have mustered their full manpower to form a line across the peninsula's waist? I shivered with cold, fear and indecision, except that there was no real decision to make. I had to go on, as fast as possible.
The ledge widened. It was enough for me to quicken my progress to something like walking pace, if I pressed a shoulder to the rock. Still I could not discern the nature of the blobs that covered the cliff face like pox upon an ashen face. Even when I was only ten yards away I still could not see what was waiting in my path. It was then that an extra large breaker, a gust of air, or just my approach seemed to cause the cliff itself to explode into whirling fragments. The grey blobs were all over me: a vast colony of sea-birds, sheltering from the storm. They raised up their enormous wings, and climbed into the blizzard to meet me. Blurred grey shapes circled the intruder who had invaded these ledges to which they returned each year to nest. They dived upon me, screaming, croaking and clawing and beating their giant wings, in the hope that I might fall, or fly away.
By now I was climbing through the colony itself, my hands lacerated and bloody as I groped through the ancient nests of mud, spittle and bleached vegetation. My feet were crunching them and sliding in the dust and filth of a thousand years of stinking bird droppings.
I closed my eyes. I was afraid to turn, my head as I felt the wings striking my shoulders and felt the fabric tear under their beaks and claws. I still didn't slacken my speed, even when I found enough courage to look back to where the sea-birds wheeled and jeered and fidgeted in the crevices. The wind had continued the work of destruction and now the brittle nests were shattered by the air current that roared up the cliff face, like a great flame licks a chimney, taking the colony with it and grinding all to dust.
Ahead of me I saw a bent piece of rusty tin and persuaded myself with, all kinds of twisted rationalizations that the path would be easy going from this point onwards. There was still another headland to negotiate, but it was easy only compared with the journey I had already made. After that, the path sloped gently upwards until it regained the cliff edge. I sat down, hardly noticing the thorns and mud. For the first time I became aware of the fast shallow breathing that my anxiety had produced and of the thumping of my heart, as loud as the breakers on the shingle a hundred feet below me.
From here I was able to look north-west across the width of the peninsula, and I didn't like what I could see. The buzzard, which was still driving hard against the cliffs at sea level, had thinned enough for visibility to increase to a mile or more in between the flurries. If they were after me, a dozen of them could put me up like a frightened partridge. I stood up and started off again. I forced myself to increase the pace, although my tortuous cliffside journey had left me in no state to attempt records.
From this place on the cliff top, my path was mostly downhill. This world was white and a thousand differing shades of brown: bracken, heather, bilberries and, lowest of all, the peat bogs. All of it dead, and all of it daubed with great drifts of snow that had filled the gullies and followed the curious pattern of the wind. There were red grouse, too. Disturbed, they took to the air, calling, 'Go-back, go-back,' a sound that I remembered from my childhood.
Already I fancied I could see the dark patch that would be the pines at the little croft. I promised myself cubes of chocolate that I never did eat. I walked as soldiers march, placing one foot before the other, with hardly a thought for the length of the journey, or the surrounding landscape. 'All my soldiers saw of Russia was the pack of the man in front of them,' said Napoleon, as though the ignorant rabble were declining his offers of side trips to St Petersburg and the Black Sea resorts. Now I bent my head to the turf.
A shaft of sunlight found a way through the cloud so that a couple of acres of hillside shone yellow. The patch ran madly up and down the slopes and raced out to sea like a huge blue raft until, a mile or more off-shore, it disappeared as if sunk without trace. The clouds closed tight and the wind roared its triumph.
Once I knew where to look, there was no difficulty in finding the foot-bridge. It was a good example of Victorian ingenuity and wrought iron. Two chains across the Gap were held apart by ornamented sections of iron, into which fitted timber flooring. Shaped like stylized dolphins, smaller interlocking pieces had tails supporting two steel cables anchored into the ground at each end as supplementary supports. That, at any rate, must have been how the engraving looked in the catalogue. Now a handrail was hanging in the gully and one chain had slackened enough to let the frame twist. It groaned and swayed in the wind that came through its broken flooring, singing like the music of a giant flute.
Adapted into a fairground ride it might have earned a fortune at Coney Island, but suspended above the demented waters of Angel Gap only the cliff path behind me was less welcoming.
There was no going back now. I thought of that trigger-happy girl — custom tailoring for cadavers, and
Any kind of bridge was better than going back.
The off-sea wind had kept the cliffs virtually free of ice, but the bridge was precarious. There was only one handrail, a rusty cable. It sagged alarmingly as I applied my weight to it and slid through the eyes of the remaining posts so that I fancied it was going to drop me into the ocean below. But it took my weight, although as I passed each handrail post it paid the slack cable to me with an agonizing whinny. Without a handrail I could not have crossed, for at some places the floor of the bridge had warped to a dangerous angle. I had to use both hands and by the time I reached the other side my wounded arm was bleeding again.
I hurried up the hill so that I could get out of sight. Only when I was hidden in the copse did I stop. I looked back, at the ocean roaring through the gap, and at as much of the peninsula of Black-stone as was visible through the storm. I saw no pursuers, and I was truly thankful for that, for I could see no simple way of wrecking the bridge.
I took off the short overcoat and with some difficulty pulled my jacket off too. I'd lost a lot of blood.
It took me over an hour to do the four miles to the road. The clouds broke enough to allow a few samples of sunlight to be passed around among the trees. There were sunbeams on the road when I finally caught sight of It. Perhaps by that time I was beginning to expect a four-lane highway with refreshment areas, gift shops and clover- leaf crossings, but it was what they call in Scotland a 'narrow class one' which means they'd filled the ditch every two hundred yards in case you met something coming the other way.
I saw the two soldiers sitting at the roadside when I was still a couple of hundred yards away. They were sheltering under a camouflage cape upon which the snow was settling fast. I thought they were waiting for a lift, until I saw that they were dressed in Fighting Order. They both had L1 A1 automatic rifles and one of them had a two-way radio too.
They played it cool, remaining seated until I was almost upon them. I knew they'd put me on the air, because only after I'd passed him did I notice another soldier covering me from fifty yards along the road. He had a Lee Enfield with a sniper-sight. It was no ordinary exercise.
'Could you wait here a moment, sir?' He was a paratroop corporal.
'What's going on?'
'There will be someone along in a minute.'
We waited. Over the brow of title next hill there came a large car, towing a caravan of the sort advertised as 'a carefree holiday home on wheels'. It was a bulbous contraption, painted cream, with a green plastic door and dated windows. I knew who it was as soon as I saw huge polished brass headlights. But I didn't expect that it would be Schlegel seating alongside him. Dawlish applied the brakes and came to a standstill alongside me and the soldiers. I heard him saying to Schlegel'… and let me surprise you: these brakes are really hydraulic, actually powered by water. Although I must confess to putting methylated spirit in for this trip, on account of the cold.'
