Dead Men and Broken Hearts: A Lennox Thriller (Lennox 4) (41 page)

The Cresta had plunged through one thicket and into a second. I worked out that it would be difficult to see from the road, but I would have to get back up there before I could see for sure. The one thing I didn’t want was someone knocking on McBride’s door and telling him that his car had been found trashed and dumped in the middle of nowhere. I knew he would never give me up deliberately, but Twinkle was Twinkle and didn’t sparkle the brightest.

It took me a good half hour to collect all of the stuff from the car, roll up the sleeping bag and pack everything into the rucksack. The only thing I couldn’t fit in was the bivouac, but I lashed that to the back of the rucksack. All in all, with the anorak, the backpack and the professional mountain gear, I would really look the part of the serious mountain rambler. Given that it was November and freezing, it was probably more the part of the seriously deranged mountain rambler.

I decided to get the lay of the land. Leaving my pack by the car, I tried to find my way through the tangle of branches the Cresta had become caught up in. I couldn’t, so I edged my way along it and stepped around the side.

Instinct, that strange old thing the nature of which I had debated, saved me. As soon as I felt the ground go from beneath my feet, I grabbed two fistfuls of branch. My feet scrabbled on the loose gravel, trying to get purchase and get me back from the edge of the cliff that dropped below me.

Scrambling back from the edge, I dropped down onto my backside, that good old instinct telling me to get as much of my body as possible in contact with solid ground, as soon as possible.

When I got my breath back, I inched forward again and peered down into the gully. Thirty feet below me, a river frothed angrily over rock as it surged along the valley bottom. I turned to look along the length of the cliff edge: the bonnet of the Cresta, projected over the edge by a few inches where it had burst through the tangle of bush, root and branch.

I had just slept through the night, like a baby, in a car being held back from a deadly plunge by a mess of dead vegetation. I suddenly felt sick and started to shake, as if the realization had triggered the delayed shock of the crash.

I stayed where I was, sitting on the cold, frosty earth, took the pack from the bib pocket of the anorak, lit a cigarette and smoked it to calm my nerves.

Then I smoked a couple more.

There was no point in trying to get back up to the road at that point. In fact, it was probably a bad idea to be visible, even if the chances of a car or truck passing were remote.

Instead, I decided to walk along the shelf edge that ran parallel to the road, but was low enough down for me to keep out of sight. Checking Ellis’s map before setting out, I reckoned I hadn’t that far to go, and the walking, while rocky, wasn’t that arduous.

I had guessed that the shelf I was walking along would eventually come up to the road level, but it didn’t, instead declining sharply into the valley bottom. After half-an-hour’s walk, I found myself at the river’s edge. I took the opportunity to fill a billycan and heat it on the small gas stove, tossing in some loose tea. I sat watching the river while I drank the tea. The odd thing was that, because of what I was wearing and the body heat from my exertions being trapped in their layers, I didn’t feel at all cold other than on my cheeks – and my hands, whenever I
removed my gloves. I looked around me at the heather-dressed mountains whose hues changed constantly, depending on the light and the occasional passing shadow of a cloud in the unforgivingly cold, blue sky.

There was no denying it. Scotland could be breathtakingly beautiful.

But so could Cape Breton Island or British Columbia. I rinsed out the billycan, packed up my gear and headed onward.

Despite it being a tiny mark on the map, there was a lot of give and take in the area it indicated, but eventually I caught sight of a pale grey wisp of smoke rising from some kind of settlement up ahead. The valley floor had been rising for some time and I guessed that the handful of houses indicated on the map at the head of the valley were the source of the smoke.

I found my way up the side of the mountain on the far side from the road and walked along a ridge, approaching the village from what I hoped would be an unconventional and unexpected direction. But the ridge became a path that again started to take me up the mountainside and away from my target and I realized I would have to retrace my steps. I changed my mind when I saw what I thought was an abandoned croft. It would give me a good view of the settlement, I guessed, so I headed for it.

It turned out not to be an abandoned croft but a bothy in a full state of repair. Bothies were small buildings maintained to provide shelter for hill walkers and mountaineers.

A notice board by the door instructed me in the etiquette of using the bothy’s facilities. Basically, you were expected to leave the shelter how you found it, and if you took a dump you did it outside away from a watercourse; no trash to be left in the bothy when you left, that kind of thing.

The building itself was a rectangle of two-foot thick stone walls, divided into two rooms, each accessed from a separate door and not connected internally. The first room was the accommodations: a basic box of a room of naked, unplastered stone with a large fireplace and chimney breast in the soot-stained back wall. A robust table of some dense wood that was unidentifiable under several layers of lacquer sat beneath the single, square window. The second room was a storeroom containing a shovel for latrine digging, a box of candles and a couple of brooms. There was even a pile of firewood, which the notice on the wall advised had to be replaced if used.

The bothy was a godsend. I reckoned that at this time of year there wouldn’t be many walkers up in the hills, although I knew it was a fraternity not noted for its common sense when it came to the weather, and the bothy was closer to a settlement, albeit a small one, than most were. If I were stuck, I could camp down here overnight.

I had been wrong about having a view of the village from it, however. A thicket of trees and a swell in the hillside obscured the view, meaning I would have to head back down the trail a little to see it; but that also meant that the bothy could not be easily seen from the village or its approach road.

I left my stuff in the bothy and walked back down the trail to where I could get a good view of the village, using my new binoculars to watch any activity. There was none. The village consisted of a clutch of cottages arranged on either side of the road, two larger houses and an inn. There was the massive shoulder of a mountain behind the village and I could see a second clutch of buildings higher up, about a half-mile from the village on the far side, and I recognized it as a farmhouse and outbuildings. But it was the second house that interested
me. It was a grander sort of place and more like something you would see in town. A big, solid villa, with two wings to it and a separate stable block. I guessed that the farm was a tenancy of the big house.

Being on the other side of the village, the big house was too far away for me to keep tabs on from where I was. I needed to get closer.

I went back to the bothy and brewed up some tea with the gas canister stove, not wanting to light a fire and make smoke, despite the fact that the bothy was pretty much hidden from the village. I stretched out Ellis’s map on the table and took the automatic from my backpack, checked the magazine and safety, and tucked it into the waistband of my flannels, obscured from view by the waterproofs, the heavy turtleneck sweater and the anorak. No one would see the gun, all right, but I sure wasn’t going to win any fast-draw contests.

I leaned over the table and examined the map. Ellis’s mark corresponded to my current location. What I was looking for was somewhere in the village, the farm or the large house I had seen.

This was where Ellis had come the night his wife had heard him on the telephone. I knew that for sure. I’d known it ever since I’d examined the mark on the map more closely at the barge’s window. The mark wasn’t a cross after all.

It was a ‘T’. ‘T’ for Tanglewood.

It was, I reckoned, time for lunch.

I walked down the hillside, and along the valley towards the village. My destination was the inn and I wore my rucksack to convince anyone who cared that I was one of the more hardy, or foolhardy, of Scotland’s wilderness wanderers.

The inn was a long, low jumble of stonework and small, irregular windows. It was one of those places you came across every now and then in Scotland: inns and taverns that had offered rest and nourishment to the weary and hungry traveller continuously since the days of Bonnie Prince Charlie or before.

In fact, the mutton pie they served me with a pint of roomtemperature beer tasted like it had been in the pantry since the last visit of the Young Pretender – probably when, during one of Scotland’s more dignified historical moments, the Prince had stopped by for a snack before slipping into women’s clothing and skipping town.

The welcome I got from the barkeep reminded me that
dour
is indeed a Scottish word, and I was tempted to ask him if he had a brother in Milngavie, in the newsagent business. Instead I smiled and took the tepid beer over to a table.

The only other customers were a pair of old boys at the bar who watched me expressionlessly but constantly from the
moment I came in. They had obviously run out of conversation sometime around the Boer War and the lack of animation in their expressions would have made Archie McClelland look like Danny Kaye. They could have been twins, I thought, their white, wrinkled, leathery faces identical under matching flat caps. They probably weren’t twins, though: this was rural Scotland where everybody unrelated probably was.

I had once visited Fifeshire, because I had had to – which was the only reason anyone ever visited Fifeshire. Everyone in the ancient Pictish kingdom had shared the same dull-coloured hair and had had the kind of big, long face you would usually associate with a favourite for the one-thirty steeplechase at Chepstow. The look here was different but still familial and I reckoned that, as in Fifeshire, the wedding vows in this part of the world probably included the wording ‘do you take this woman as your lawfully-wedded sister?’

I sat at a table in the corner of the taproom near the fireplace and picked at the mutton pie. Even in the hiker get-up, I felt hugely conspicuous. I guessed they didn’t get a lot of outsiders here. As I had walked along the village main street – basically the road through it – I had seen only one vehicle, and that had been an ex-army Land Rover whose mud-splattered flanks told me that the driver was probably a local farmer. I took some solace in the fact that there was probably a direct ratio between the number of policemen in any given area and the overall population, making my chances of running into the bicycle-clipped forces of law and order pretty remote.

I was still pushing the pie around the plate, wondering if fossilisation was a cooking process, when two men came in and sat at the opposite end of the bar from the two old not-twins
in caps. From the way the geriatrics shifted their gloomy attention from me to the two new customers, I guessed that the recent arrivals were, like me, strangers.

I checked them over without making it obvious. They were both dressed in ordinary suits beneath raincoats and one of them, the one with the curly dark hair and beard, was built like a house on legs, while the other was lean and more athletic-looking. Despite his less impressive build, it was the thinner of the two that had the look of a hard and dangerous man. When he took off his hat and hung it up on the rack by the door, his blond hair was skull-clingingly oiled and combed back from his brow and the skin on his hard-featured face was pock-marked.

I didn’t recognize either man. But that didn’t mean that they hadn’t been part of the crew who had turned up outside Larry Franks’s place. Despite everything having happened as a blur, the two guys who had left Ellis dying in my office and with whom I’d exchanged pleasantries on the stairs had made a big enough impression on me to remember their faces. These guys definitely weren’t them.

Nevertheless, their presence bothered me. It was not as if they had paid me any attention when they had arrived; it was that they had gone out of their way
not
to pay me attention, or even look in my direction.

But the truth was my little trip into the village had been as much to show the dogs the hare as anything else.

I contemplatively swirled the last quarter of my tepid pint sluggishly around the glass, then I took the pipe out of my pocket and filled it, inexpertly, with tobacco, before quietly smoking it as I sat. Or at least sat quietly struggling to stop the pipe from going out while the two newcomers at the bar studiously avoiding looking in my direction.

I didn’t think they were policemen but, coppers or not, it made no sense that the two heavies at the bar were there on my account. Whatever the connection between Ellis and this part of the world, there was no way anyone could have known I was on my way up here. Unless, of course, mine host at the bar had been told to make a call if anyone out of the ordinary called in at his establishment. Maybe that would explain why it had taken so long for my mutton pie to arrive, lukewarm, in front of me.

Or maybe I was just letting my paranoia run away with me again.

I decided to put them to the test. I downed the last of the pint, got up and left. Again the only eyes on me were the geriatrics at the bar.

I walked to the bridge over the river and leaned on the stone parapet, smoking my pipe while really waiting to see how long it would take for the two burly types to come out of the inn. They didn’t.

A false alarm, clearly. If you’re going to get through this, Lennox, I thought to myself, then you’re going to have to calm down. Nothing gets a wanted man caught like panic. Or self-doubt.

I found my way to the far side of the village and started to hike uphill. The byway I was on was obviously used by occasional traffic, but was unmetalled and more like a farm track than anything. It took me up past the farm and its outbuildings, but it became clear there must have been a second, parallel route up to the large manor. I guessed that would be a better maintained way than the one I was on. As I passed the farm, I was aware of two men in the yard stopping whatever it was they were doing to watch me pass. I made sure I kept going,
my pace unbroken and determined, like some wintertime nature lover striking out resolutely to attain the hilltop.