Murdo's War (17 page)

Murdo had never seen a dead man before. He looked up at
Hector. The old man’s face was impassive.

For a long time nobody spoke.

It was Henry Smith who broke the silence. ‘What direction does the current flow here?’ he asked.

Hector pointed out to sea, beyond Strathy Point.

Henry Smith followed his arm, looking past the high crag to the rolling swell and dim horizon. Slowly his gaze swept the bay, and he looked up at the stars. Then he looked down, and nodded. Crouching beside the dead man he began to go through his pockets. The blind white face rolled over against the stones as he pulled the twisted clothing this way and that.

‘You go along the shore and tell the others, boy,’ Hector said quietly, with a knowing glance in the direction of the snowfield at the back of the beach.

Henry Smith looked up and carefully placed the revolver on a boulder beside his right hand.

‘Bjorn, you’d better go and tell them,’ he said. ‘You two stand over there.’

By the time Bjorn returned with Carl Voss and Gunner, Henry Smith had finished going through the young soldier’s pockets. His few belongings lay on his sodden handkerchief beside his head. They were pathetic: a box of matches, a packet of cigarettes, a pocket knife, his wrist watch, and a wallet with a little picture of a girl on one side and a middle-aged couple on the other. Murdo watched, every detail burning itself into his memory. Could this awful, dead thing be the same Dag who had laughed and smiled and so merrily played the flute on that first trip to the island? Now the flute was gone. He stared at the wet hair and expressionless face, the stilled white hands fallen between the stones.

‘You stay here with me,’ Bjorn said to him.

Gunner bent and took the body of his dead comrade over his shoulder. Supported by Carl Voss so that he did not fall, he made his way with Henry Smith and Hector around the foot of the cliff. A couple of minutes later the group reappeared in the moonlight on a little rock platform that jutted out above deep water. Gunner laid the body at their feet. The men composed themselves and Henry Smith said a prayer for the dead, though no word of it reached Murdo and Bjorn above the roar of the sea. Then Carl Voss and Gunner bent, took up the body of their friend and swung him far out into the waves, well clear of the rocks. For nearly a minute he floated, borne up by a balloon of air trapped in the wet clothes. Then the air escaped and Dag was gone, sunk into the depths of the Pentland Firth. Nothing remained but the few belongings gathered together at Murdo’s feet. Bjorn tossed the cigarettes into the water, then carefully wrapped the other things in the wet handkerchief and put them in his pocket.

For an hour, then, they searched up and down the stony cove, and from the flanking cliffs and shores beyond, treacherous beneath the mantle of snow and ice, but there was no sign of Haakon. At length Henry Smith reluctantly admitted there was no more they could do, and the little band of men retreated to a corner of the bay to seek shelter among the rocks and boulders and wait for the morning light. According to Henry Smith’s watch, which had survived the immersion and rough treatment, it was a little before three o’clock in the morning.

Murdo stripped himself of his trousers, battledress jacket and sweaters and wrung them as dry as possible, then put them back on and huddled beside Hector for warmth. But soon his trousers were stiff with the frost, and the oilskin on Hector’s back might have been pressed out of crumpled tin. Murdo tried to pull the trousers over his frozen feet, but it was hopeless. The cold was terrible, the hours dragged by like an arctic night. The Germans talked quietly among themselves, but between Hector and Murdo it did not seem there was much to say, and for the most part they were silent.

Some time in the middle of the long night, Bjorn Larvik rose from his comrades and crossed to the two Scots. Without a by- your-leave he seated himself next to Murdo in the shelter of their rock. The boy did not like it and wished to move away, but Hector was on his other side, and he was reluctant to disturb the small pockets of heat he had been nurturing for more than an hour. He remained where he was between the two men, and very soon the warmth of the big German’s body began to steal through to his skin.

Bjorn rarely spoke, and was so still that he might have been asleep, yet each time Murdo stole a sideways look he was awake, his eyes glinting in the light of the moon.

‘Close your eyes,’ the man said. ‘At least try to sleep. The night will pass more quickly.’

But sleep was impossible. Murdo nursed his damaged finger, which sometimes ached with the cold, and his mind was full of confused thoughts. Larvik was a German, an enemy, one of Hitler’s men, a commando come to overthrow Britain. Yet he liked him, he seemed a good man, very different from Henry Smith and Voss and all the Germans he had imagined and read about. It was a troubling thought, and led on to all kinds of complications. The only fact, after a time, of which he was sure, was that he was glad Bjorn had come across, and wished – though there was no doubt he was a faithful German soldier – that he could have been on their side, to help Hector and himself in their present trouble. He stayed for more than two hours.

The moon slid imperceptibly around the sky, climbing, then dropping towards the white crown of moorland behind them. A hundred times the darkness over the sea seemed to be lightening, but the sky remained as cram-full of stars as ever. However, a pale light was clearly discernible in the south-east, and slowly the wintry colours, purple and pink and green and yellow, slid into the clean night-washed sky.

Painfully Henry Smith climbed to his feet and stretched his frozen joints. His wispy fair hair, dried through the night, blew in the wind. His spectacles had vanished in the sea and without them his eyes, watery-pale, were almost fish-like. Dark bruise-marks of tiredness beneath them told the strain of the past few days. His eyelashes were blond, almost white, and his eyebrows sparse and thin. He screwed up his eyes and took in the bitter landscape.

‘Now then.’ He turned to Hector. ‘Where are we – exactly?’ Hector moved his stiff shoulders. ‘You know as well as I do, Strathy Point.’

Henry Smith sighed. ‘Exactly,’ he repeated.

‘I don’t know,’ Hector said. ‘About half way down the shore I should think. You’ll probably see the beach from the top of one of those headlands there.’

‘So. Would this be the place you call the Geo Borbh?’ Completely taken aback, Hector could not keep the surprise

from his face.

‘I see I am right.’ Henry Smith said something to Carl Voss, who passed a stiff, buckled map from the rocks beside him. With some difficulty, for the pages had frozen together, the leader unfolded it and carefully checked their position. Then, slipping on the rocks, he made his way to the edge of the sea and peered across the southern headland towards Strathy beach. His plump figure was small against the backcloth of ocean.

He returned, smoothing the dishevelled hair across his bald patch.

‘Bjorn,’ he said.

The huge blond man stretched and rose smoothly to his feet. He had bathed the cut on his face with sea water and already it was healing beneath a long brown scab.

‘We can all do with some food and a hot drink,’ Henry Smith said. ‘Go down to the cave and get what you can from Knut. It’s not very far. And ring the Captain Ivy from the call box in the village. Tell them I’m staying away, but I’ll be back in a day or two.’

Bjorn nodded. ‘Right,’ he said briefly, and bent to tie his boots.

‘Keep an eye open for Haakon,’ Henry Smith continued. ‘And see if you can spot a boat anywhere. I think we might need it tonight – for the guns. We’ve got to try to get this lot ashore.’ He indicated the waste of water at the mouth of the bay, where the
Lobster Boy
had gone down.

Bjorn looked up in surprise, but kept his own counsel and finished tying his laces.

‘That’s it, then,’ he said, standing. ‘I’m off. I’ll be back as soon as I can.’ He glanced from Murdo to Carl Voss, then back to Henry Smith. ‘Don’t be too hard on the boy,’ he said. ‘And keep that animal away from him.’

‘You just get the food,’ Henry Smith said to him. ‘That’s your job.’

‘Just don’t be hard on the boy, that’s all,’ Bjorn said again. ‘There’s no need for it.’ He regarded the dark sea, still foaming about the rocks.

Murdo looked at Carl Voss. His face was turned towards the spot where Bjorn had just passed out of view. His lips were set and his dark eyes glittered. With powerful fingers he massaged his twisted knee.

For a while nobody moved, holding on as long as they could to the little pockets of warmth which they all, like Murdo, had nurtured through the long hours. Henry Smith, still standing, surveyed the four remaining survivors. They were a bedraggled and weary group of men, unshaven, their faces pale and blotched with the cold, clothes crumpled and still wet, frozen where they were not touched by the heat of their bodies. He took the revolver from Carl Voss and shortsightedly lined the sights up with a rock ten or twelve yards away.

‘I have been thinking,’ he said almost absently. ‘It would be better if you were both out of the way. The current here is very convenient, as we know.’

Seconds passed, seeming like minutes. Then, very slowly, he dropped his aim, until the barrel lined straight up with the middle of Murdo’s face. There it paused. Murdo’s eyes widened, hypnotised by the small black hole with its rim of blue steel. Henry Smith’s face was very calm, his breathing easy. His eyes blinked unemotionally. Then, relaxing, the arm fell to his side, and he addressed them in a detached and matter-of-fact voice.

‘Yes, I feel it might save us a great deal of trouble in the long run – but yet again you can be useful to me. So I must, for the present at least, postpone that convenience. Possibly I might even overlook it. We will see how you get on.’

Frozen though he was, Murdo felt a great surge of relief, prickling through his body from legs to scalp. He half relaxed, but still the German leader held his rapt attention.

‘There are two things I want you to know, however,’ Henry Smith went on. ‘The first is to remind you that if you attempt to run away, or thwart me in any respect whatever, I shall this time shoot you dead. In the present circumstances I should think no more of it than if I was shooting a rabbit in the garden. The second is that I intend to raise the boxes of guns from your sunken boat.’ He shook his head. ‘No, no, Mr Gunn. It is no use looking bewildered. You know even better than I do, it is perfectly possible. That was not just any rock you ran your boat into, you know exactly where she is lying. And with that weight in her she will not have moved much. Now, with the full moon we all saw last night, there will be big tides at the moment – if I remember the tide tables correctly, a rise and fall of about seventeen feet. It was nearly high tide when we crashed last night, and it will soon be low. So if the boat is where I think, there will not be much water above her even now.’ He looked across the wilderness of rocks. ‘Unless you have made a mistake and she is lying in a gully, it should be a relatively simple operation – and somehow I don’t think you would make that mistake, not with the
Lobster Boy
, she means too much to you.’ He smiled. ‘That is the advantage of having ‘the best seaman on the coast’ to assist us.’

He turned slightly to bring the two Germans into his sphere of authority. ‘First, however, we must look for Haakon. I do not think we’ll find him, and we can’t look for long. But there is the unlikely chance that he has survived and is hurt, or that his body has been washed up. So we must look. Voss, you come with me and these two Scottish...’ he hunted for a word, then left the sentence unfinished. ‘Gunner, you can go that way. I will see you back here in forty minutes, that is at – eight thirty.’ He pushed the watch back up his wrist. ‘Right, on your feet, everyone.’

Slowly the dishevelled figures pulled themselves from the boulders. The night had taken its toll and it was a painfully stiff and weary group of men that stood there, cautiously stretching and trying to rub some circulation back into joints and muscles which had frozen through the cold hours. One figure alone showed no signs of the ravages of the night – Hector. The sturdy old man stood there as solidly as if he had risen from his bed an hour earlier. His white hair was rumpled, the stubble thick upon his chin, but the clear blue eyes gazed out as steadily as ever. Even the blow from Carl Voss had resulted in only a slight redness on the side of his face. Murdo touched his own bruised eye and rubbed his frozen legs, and wished he was as tough himself.

The search along the coast revealed nothing. Haakon was certainly dead, for the water below the long line of cliffs to each side of the cove was bottomless, and the shore rocks beyond were empty. No tracks save those of a few sheep disturbed the mantle of snow. A Cambridge degree and engineering skills were no use to him now, for with Dag he was drifting through the weed and bumping over the stones on his way to the deep currents of the Pentland Firth.

At half past eight they assembled once more beneath the ice- sheathed cliff. Murdo gazed down at the beach. The tide was far out, a chaos of rock extending between themselves and the open water of the bay. He tried to pick out the pinnacle to which he had clung, and the two outcrops past which he had swum in the blackness of the night, but now the water had receded it was difficult to tell which they were. He thought he recognised them, rising from deep weedy pools, but he was far from certain.