Murdo's War (5 page)

‘I suppose I’ve got to come to the point sometime. I want a few things bringing across from Island Roan, and I hoped you and I might come to some arrangement. I need a boat.’

‘Island Roan!’ Hector exclaimed. ‘I’m afraid someone’s been misleading you, mister. The last people came away from Island Roan the year the war started. There’s nothing there now but empty houses and a few sheep.’

‘I know that.’

Hector regarded the man opposite him afresh. ‘You mean you’ll be taking something there first?’

Henry Smith shrugged. ‘Maybe. It depends what things are like over here. And if I can get a boat.’

‘Mm.’ Hector’s distaste was obvious. ‘What is it, black-market goods – clothes, tinned meat, chocolate – stuff like that?’

‘No, it’s not stuff like that. I’m not a profiteer, if that’s what you’re thinking. It’s... machinery, as a matter of fact.’ A look of shrewd intelligence flickered across his pale eyes and then was gone. ‘I don’t exactly want it spread across the front pages, but I’ll tell you something about it anyway. Then you can see if you’re interested.’

Hector settled back a little and laid one leg across the other. ‘Well, if you want the
Lobster Boy
I’ll need to know more. Hearing does no harm – not with me, anyway.’

‘As I said, I don’t exactly want everyone to know about it. I can rely on you to – er...’

The muscles stirred along Hector’s bristly jaw, his nostrils widened a fraction. Murdo felt a shiver up the back of his neck.

‘I’ve got a factory down in Oxford,’ said Mr Smith, ‘and we’re doing some work on a new type of engine. Runs on paraffin. I don’t need to tell you how important that could be with the war as it is right now. Ten years I’ve been working on it. Anyway, the only other people doing the same work was a Norwegian firm, Thörsen’s of Stavanger. When the Germans over-ran Norway in
1940, old Edvard Thörsen hid his records and data, and took all the prototype machinery to a secret place down the fjord. The Germans aren’t always too nice in their methods – the Gestapo, anyway – and they caught hold of a couple of Thörsen’s managers and... well, they talked. Thörsen himself was hiding, but word got to him and they shifted the stuff to a new spot out in the Lofoten Islands. A real underground job.

‘Things quietened down a bit after that, but the Germans never forgot and a month back, quite by accident, they got a new lead. They weren’t slow in following it up either; not with an engine like that at the end of it. Edvard Thörsen had to run for it. They moved the engines to another part of the islands, and he got a message out to me on one of those Shetland fishing boats. I didn’t know him very well, although I’d met him at conferences, of course, and he knew I was working along the same lines. He said that he believed it was only a matter of time before the Germans found the machines, and wanted to get them out of the country. He asked me to take the work over and develop it as a joint effort in my factory.’

‘Why bring the machine parts across?’ Hector said. ‘Why not just the drawings? They could drop the machinery in the fjord.’

‘It would take months to cut new moulds and set up the plant. A year at least. He was a great engineer. I haven’t seen the figures yet, but I understand it’s a magnificent engine, and from what he wrote the experimental work was finished. I’m nowhere near that stage.’

‘He
was
a great engineer?’ said Hector.

‘Yes. A fortnight ago the Gestapo caught up with his wife and himself. First he shot her, then he shot himself. They’d agreed about it beforehand. He was a leader in the Norwegian underground.’

Hector nodded slowly.

‘An engine like that, why don’t you tell the government? They’d bring it over for you if it’s that important.’

‘I’ve had dealings with the government before! Two years ago they were going to take me over, lock, stock and barrel. Never so much as a ‘by your leave’. Then some boffin told them it could never work because of the jet/power ratio, and they forgot all about it. I’ve spent ten years of my life on this, Mr Gunn – ten years! And now, with Edvard Thörsen’s help it’s coming to fruition. This engine is the only really important thing I will ever do. My life’s work.’ His eyes glittered intensely behind the gold-rimmed spectacles. ‘Don’t expect me to throw that away and let some milk-sop office boy take all the credit. That’s happened too often: it’s not going to happen to me!’

He lit another cigarette and drew several deep lungfuls of smoke. When he continued his voice was calmer.

‘It’s important. They can’t bring everything over, of course, just those parts small enough to crate and handle. The rest we’ll have to produce ourselves.’

He sat back, the pale blue eyes once more blinking nervously, pink fingers tapping the ash off his cigarette into a big ashtray beside the discarded pipe.

‘So, there you are. If you’re not interested, just say so and forget all about it.’

There was a long silence. This time it was Hector who broke it.

‘How did you come to ask me?’

‘I’ve been asking around – oh, generally of course – and Johnny here,’ he indicated the barman, ‘said I should perhaps have a word with you.’

‘Oh, did he?’

Henry Smith leaned forward. ‘Can I buy you a drink?’ Hector shook his head. ‘Not just now, thank you.’ He looked across at his old friend the barman and smiled slightly. ‘I don’t think you’d get it, anyway. One pint a night these days.’ He shifted in his chair and clasped the fingers of his big gnarled hands together, shrewdly regarding the man who sat opposite him.

Murdo looked from one to the other, and an odd pair they made; the weather-beaten fisherman in his old sweater and seaboots, the smooth-cheeked businessman in a country tweed suit.

This time the silence remained unbroken. Murdo felt the tension mounting.

‘Well, it’s up to you,’ Henry Smith said at length. ‘I’ve told you all I can for the present. You’ll be well paid, I can promise you that.’

For a long moment Hector did not reply, then, ‘How much stuff is there?’ he asked.

‘About eight or ten loads, I should say – if your boat is the size I think.’

‘How is it packed?’

‘Boxes and crates, I suppose. Nothing very big, anyway.’

‘And where do you want them taking?’

‘Well, I thought if you brought them here we could stack them away somewhere until I get a lorry to pick them up.’

‘What, here?’ Hector indicated the inn.

‘Hardly.’

‘What do you mean by ‘here’, then?’

‘Somewhere near the beach, I thought.

Murdo sat up and looked towards the bar to hide his growing excitement.

Hector shook his head patiently. ‘It might be a quiet place, this, but you can hardly leave a great stack of cases on the beach in the middle of a war and expect nobody to see them.’

‘Naturally not.’ A trace of impatience showed on Henry Smith’s face. ‘I’m not entirely stupid. We’d find a place to put them.’

‘Where?’

‘I don’t know. But there must be some fairly deep caves around here, some place they would be safe for a few days.’

Murdo’s eyes widened. Quickly he glanced at Hector.

‘I don’t suppose you were anywhere near the beach tonight?’ Hector said.

‘No, I was away at Thurso until I came in here. Why?’

‘I was just wondering.’ Hector put yet another match to his pipe. He spoke through the smoke. ‘You’ve got a car, then?’

‘Yes, of course.’ The Englishman leaned forward again, not to be deterred. ‘Is there a cave,’ he said, ‘or an old croft house, or somewhere like that?’

Hector shrugged. ‘I suppose you could find some place, right enough.’

Casually Murdo looked down at the man’s shoes, but they were neat and well-polished and bore no trace of sand.

‘One thing I should say,’ Mr Smith continued. ‘Some men will be coming over with the crates. They used to work in the Stavanger factory and I want them to join me in Oxford. One of them could come across and keep an eye on things if you thought it was necessary.’

‘Mm.’ Hector drew himself up and took a deep breath. ‘Well, I’ll let you know.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘No; say Wednesday.’

‘What time?’

‘Oh, around six-thirty.’ Hector turned to Murdo. ‘Come on, boy. It’s time we were home.’

Murdo stood up and pulled his jacket comfortably around him.

‘Goodnight,’ Henry Smith said.

‘Goodnight,’ and the two, old man and boy, made their way across the smoky bar-room.

As they stepped out of the door, Murdo felt the night air grip his face like a giant, icy hand.

In a moment his eyes accustomed themselves to the moonlight. He looked down the hillside to the bay from which the soft, ceaseless roar of the waves rose on the breeze. Suddenly he touched Hector’s arm and pointed. Almost invisible among the shadows of the inn yard was a big black car. It had not been there an hour earlier, of that he was certain.

The old Ford was hard to start and needed a few cranks to get it going, but in a few minutes they were home. The tilly lamp was lit, a fire roared up the chimney, and Hector busied himself over the stove. Soon they were seated at a small table tucking into black- pudding, bacon and eggs while a big teapot steamed gently on the hob of the fire.

Hector was first to finish. He pushed his plate back with a sigh and rubbed the back of a hand across his lips. Taking a couple of biscuits from the tin, he carried his mug of tea to the fire and topped it up from the big teapot. A minute later Murdo joined him, and at either side of the fire they stretched back in the old armchairs and gave themselves up to the heat flung out by the blazing peats.

Murdo propped his thick-stockinged feet on the hearth and gazed into the heart of the fire. He was a dark boy with shaggy black hair that tumbled down his forehead, not particularly tall, but thickset for his years. He was growing up quickly, already his upper lip was shadowy with down. Although no relation, he had been living with Hector more or less since the previous summer when he had left school. The two of them got along very well. The old fisherman was glad of the boy’s company in a house which had seemed empty since his daughter went down to England to be married; and Murdo liked living with Hector, whose rough and ready ways were so warm and homely, especially after his aunt’s spick and span house.

How he had hated that shining place they had to call home. They had lived there almost since Murdo could remember, for his mother had died when Lachlan was born, leaving his father, still in his early twenties, with three children to look after. At length circumstances had compelled him to accept the generous offer of his sister Winifred, ten years older than himself, to move into the old manse. She had done her best, but a joyless sort of place it had been. As he stared into the fire Murdo remembered – the complaints, the smacks, the punishments.

‘Murdo, don’t play on the stairs, I’ve just brushed them; and put that china dog down, you’ll break it. Goodness sake, child, watch the wallpaper. Let me see your hands – go and wash them! I don’t know how you get in such a mess. Why can’t you be content, like Geoffrey, and read a book?’

Geoffrey was the son of the local minister, a blond boy with white knees and soft hands. Murdo’s hands, in contrast, were broad and usually stained or cut. The top joint of the third finger on his right hand was missing as the result of an accident with a wire rope when he was ten.

Sandy, their father had been the one bright spark in all those years: his father, strong and sandy-haired as his name, who would take him out in the boat to the lobsters, or fishing up the river; who bought him the second-hand bicycle and fishing rod; who would swing him up before him on one of the horses and gallop wildly about the fields. And then he had gone, volunteered for the army in the early days of the war – and Maggie, Lachlan and himself were left to the dreary round of existence with their Aunt Winifred and Uncle George. A few months later Maggie had left school and went to work at a hotel in Thurso, twenty miles away.

By then Murdo was eleven and old enough to keep out of his aunt’s hair. Increasingly as he grew older, however, they seemed to come into conflict. He and Lachlan, towards whom he felt a growing responsibility, were in the house as little as they could manage. Certainly they were unjust to her, for she gave them good meals and warm beds, and their clothes were always well cared for. After all these years, however, she still thought that boys should not have mud on their trousers, should not get dirty hands, or tear through the house, or shout or get into trouble. She wanted them as still and cool and well-ordered as her own shining rooms, and life was one long battle.

A few days after his fourteenth birthday, Murdo had left school. It was his ambition to join the merchant navy and work his way towards bosun – or possibly to become a trawlerman – and when he was older to work a croft and run a boat of his own, like his father and Hector. For a year or two in his spare time he had helped Hector with the creels, and begun to set a few that he made himself. Now, since the merchant fleet was cut back by enemy action and there was no work locally, he began to go fishing and help about the croft more regularly. Despite the old fisherman’s reputation as a rogue, Murdo’s father was pleased at the unlikely friendship.