North Star (31 page)

Running south that evening, the crew grumbling about how they could have been coming into Scalloway with the prospect of four days ashore, I wondered why Ian was sending one of his boats all the way to Scotland to pick up a few cases when it would have been so much cheaper to ship them up in the steamer from Aberdeen. And why such a tiny, unfrequented little gut? ‘You go in on the top of the tide,’ Jamie had said. ‘You’ve got to. An’ if ye can’t load the cases fast, then ye’re stuck there for twelve hours dried out alongside a bit of a stone jetty.’

I didn’t like it. Kinlochbervie would have made more sense, unless there was something about those cases and secrecy of prime importance. But at least we were running, with the cold north wind up the old girl’s skirts, and we made fast time of it, arriving at the entrance to Loch Eriboll shortly after 15.00. The wind had backed westerly and we lay hove-to under the lee waiting for the tide to make. The sky had already clouded over, and as the daylight began to fade, mists came down thick over the flanks of Creag na Faoilinn to form a black mass at the bottom of the loch.

Shortly before seven o’clock we began closing the entrance to the little bolthole, nosing very slowly into the gut till we could see the small stone jetty and a trade van waiting. At least Ian had got his timing right, the tide now almost at the full, but even at high water it was still only a gut. The rocks closed in on either side as we crept forward watching the echo-sounder. And then we were through the rocks and there was a house, a nice house standing white beyond the jetty, with a gravel drive and a bit of a lawn right beside the water.

A man got out of the van as our bows touched the stonework. He took our warps and told us to hurry. He sounded nervous. ‘There’s the cases.’ He had the doors open before we had made fast, and when we had got the cases aboard he made me sign for them and then he was into his van and away.

‘A mick,’ Jamie said and spat.

I looked at the cases. All three of them had
HANDLE WITH CARE
stencilled in black across the top and
MARINE ELECTRONICS
on the side. ‘Better get them below.’ They weren’t heavy enough to contain explosives, but all the same I wanted them out of sight. Time enough to consider what was in them when we were out of the gut. I let Jamie handle her and he worked her on a springer round the end of the jetty until our bows were facing outwards, and then we steamed out on a stern bearing, the break of our wash against the rocks unpleasantly loud.

We lay the night under An t’ Aigeach and in a cold green cloudless dawn we hugged the coast round Cape Wrath, taking advantage of the constant west-going stream, and carried a fair tide southward to Loch Inchard. Coming into Kinlochbervie, Sutherland looking a wild land with the great bumps of Arkle and Ben Stack looming over the end of the loch, I was very conscious that I was in mainland Britain now, not in the remotest islands of the north. It was the first time in over four months and I felt suddenly uneasy as the little port opened up to the north and we turned in to drop our hook astern of two Scottish trawlers. There were others moored along the quay, a line of buildings, and more activity than I had expected.

I sent Jamie ashore to see about re-fuelling and he came back with the information that the two trawlers anchored ahead of us were waiting to re-fuel and more expected that evening. ‘Ah told him we’d only be alongside a few minutes, just for water and fuel, and he agreed to squeeze us in if those two boggers don’t take all afternoon.’

We had a meal and hung around waiting until shortly after five when the second of the two trawlers pulled away from the quay and we were signalled in. We had barely got the fuel line aboard when a brand new trawler with flared bows steamed in, a sister ship close behind her. They had fish to land and they lay close off the quay, their engines throbbing gently in the evening stillness.

By six we were anchored off again. There was a Mission for Deep Sea Fishermen on the quay and I sent the crew ashore
in the boat. They needed a break, and I wanted to be alone. As soon as they had gone, I went down into the hold. It was dark down there, the fish smell lingering, and in the beam of my torch the three cases looked strangely menacing, alone there in the dark hollow of that empty space. I stood staring at them for a long time, wondering what the hell they contained, where they had come from?

There was only one way to find out, and I got a hammer and cold chisel and went to work. They were nail-fastened and no possibility of breaking into them without it showing. But by then I didn’t care. I had to see what was inside.

The result was puzzling. The first case contained what appeared to be some sort of radio equipment, a grey metal box with tuning dials, and an electrical lead neatly coiled, the whole thing carefully packed in a moulded plastic container. The second contained a completely sealed torpedo-shaped object. There was a large towing eye at one end. It was swivelled and had an electrical socket in the centre of the eye. The case also contained a heavy reel of plastic-coated wire, one end of it fitted with a watertight plug.

I stood there for a long time staring down at those two pieces of equipment. In the light of my torch, against the rough boards stained black with fish oil, they had a deadly, futuristic gleam. Or was that my imagination again? Explanations leapt to mind. I knew nothing about electronics, but the torpedo was obviously for towing behind a vessel, and the other for sending or receiving some sort of signal. It could be some advanced scientific way of locating a shoal of fish, in which case Marine Electronics was a fair description. I was remembering what Ian had said about his backer trying new ways of fishing, remembering too what had happened out there by
North Star
in June. It was four months ago now, but the memory was still vivid. This sort of equipment could equally be for locating something on the seabed – an anchor, for instance, or a wellhead after the rig had left the site, or broken adrift.

In the end I packed them back in their cases and nailed the
boxes down again. I did it as neatly as I could, but the marks of the chisel were there for anyone to see, and the wood was split in places. I didn’t bother about the third case, and when I went up on deck, glad to be in the fresh air again, I was sweating. Several more trawlers had come in. I lit my pipe and sat on the bulwarks, staring across at the lights on the quay, thinking about
North Star
out there to the west of Shetland. A trawler was pulling away from the quay, another nosing into the vacant berth, but my mind was so engrossed in considering whether the equipment we carried in our hold was connected in any way with the future of the rig that it was some time before the shape of that trawler registered as familiar. And then suddenly I was on my feet, staring across the water at her as she moored alongside the quay.

She was against the lights, in silhouette, her hull black as the water that separated us. But when you have worked on the hull of a ship, when you know every inch of her, you cannot mistake her lines. No doubt at all – it was the
Duchess
lying there against the quay. And my boat ashore, no means of getting to her.

I forgot about Marine Electronics after that. I was thinking of Gertrude, of what I would say to her when we met. Would she slam the door in my face? And if she didn’t, what then? All the explanations, the fight to try and clear myself. Nothing else would do. I knew that. And suddenly I realized she was the crossroads in my life. She was the focal point of all my doubts, the centre around which I could rebuild my life – if I had the guts.

The boat came back about ten o’clock. By then the
Duchess
was anchored off and I had drunk a lot of whisky. I decided to leave it till morning. In the morning I would be sober enough and clearheaded enough to face her. But when I went across to her in the cold grey light of dawn her decks were deserted. The other trawlers had all gone or were getting under way, but the
Duchess
lay there silent and asleep.

Nobody answered my hail, and when I climbed on board
and went through the starboard gangway into what had been my cabin, it was empty. Her things were there, her clothes in the locker, but the bunk had not been slept in. I routed Johan out and he stared at me as though I were a ghost.

‘Where’s Gertrude?’ I asked him.

‘Ashore,’ he growled.

‘At the hotel?’

‘No. She is gone to Inverness.’

I felt at a loss, utterly deflated. The confrontation for which I had prepared myself was suddenly not there. ‘What the hell’s she doing in Inverness?’

‘A message we have over the R/T when we are fishing.’ And there was hostility in his voice as he added, ‘It is about you, so we have to haul our gear and come in here.’

‘About me?’

‘Ja.’

‘What was the message?’

‘That is for Gertrude to say.’

I hesitated. But it was obvious I wouldn’t get anything more out of him. The relationship I had so carefully built up with the big Norwegian was gone now. I left him and went back to my boat. I didn’t even bother to leave a note. I had nothing to say and not much hope that he would have delivered it anyway.

We sailed immediately, and as we motored out, I could see the crew of the
Duchess
– my crew, all the old faces – standing on the deck staring at us. We passed less than half a cable from her, her hull showing streaks of rust, her superstructure dirty with lack of paint, and there was a green fringe of weed along her waterline. I would have given anything to be back on board her.

It was a grey dirty morning with cloud low on the Sutherland hills, and it stayed grey all the thirty-nine hours it took us to raise the light on Muckle Flugga. The time would have been about ten-thirty, a pitch black night, and we lay hove-to with a good offing till dawn. By then we had the tide against us so
that it was an unpleasant passage until we were out of the stream and into the quiet of Burra Firth. Ian came off as soon as we had anchored to check the cases. I left him to go down into the hold on his own, and Jamie followed him.

A few minutes later he came storming up into the wheelhouse, banging the door to behind him. ‘There’s two of them been broken into. Jamie says it was you.’

I nodded. He had discovered it when they had lashed the cases down on our way out of Loch Inchard.

‘Why did you do it?’

‘They might have contained contraband, or explosives.’

‘Explosives!’ He snorted. ‘You have the most fertile imagination.’

‘Why send me all the way down to Scotland for them?’

‘If you own a ship, you might as well make use of her,’ he snapped. ‘And it’s not for you to query your orders, or break into cargo. You’d no right.’

‘It would have been a lot cheaper to have them sent up on the boat from Aberdeen.’

‘And a lot slower.’

‘Why the hurry?’

‘Because Dillon is due up here this weekend. He’s my backer. He’s had this equipment made specially and he wants to try it out.’

‘Where?’

‘How should I know? Wherever there’s fish, that’s where.’ He turned to the door and a shaft of watery sunlight showed as he opened it. ‘I’ve told Jamie the men can go ashore as soon as they like. They’re due a few days’ rest.’

‘What about the cases?’

‘They’ll remain on board. An engineer will be out shortly to install the equipment. And don’t go monkeying around with it when the crew have gone and you’re on your own.’

He left me then and I sat there smoking my pipe and wondering what sort of a man Dillon would prove to be and how he
was going to get a weekend’s fishing with the crew gone to their homes and only myself on board.

Later I went out to see the men away in the boat. The sun was glinting on the water and the old man sitting on the bench outside the hotel. The left side of his face was in shadow so that he looked like any harmless old gentleman taking the sun. He was so still I thought he must be asleep, but when I looked at him through the glasses, I could see his eyes watching me below the hooded lids, and his lips were moving as though he were mumbling something to himself.

I could have hailed him and asked to be brought ashore. Was that what he wanted? I could almost feel him willing me to come to him. It would have been the natural thing for me to do, but in other circumstances. What would be the point now? To resume our probing of each other? I sat on the deck in the sunshine, my back against the side of the wheelhouse. It was warm and I closed my eyes. But I couldn’t sleep. Too many thoughts were chasing through my mind.

The sun went in and I wished I had gone ashore to stretch my legs on the steep slopes behind the hotel. I could have walked across Mouslee Hill to Goturm’s Hole, perhaps had a word with Robert Bruce. Bored with myself, I went into the wheelhouse and switched on the R/T. Almost without thinking I turned to the frequency used by
North Star
. But there was no traffic. Probably I was too far away, and I began idly playing with the dial, picking up scraps of talk, but all very faint. And then suddenly a voice said through a blur of static, ‘… ready for me.’ I was almost on the frequency for the Norwick voice channel and something about that voice made me hurriedly adjust the tuning. I went too far and missed something, but then the same voice came in loud and clear; ‘… the hurry? Where are you speaking from?’

I knew who it was then, that slight lisp.

‘The ferry. Have Ian meet me in the Land-Rover. And he’s to take the boat back to Lerwick, tell him. As a member of the Council, that’s where he should be now. Got it?’ And
then a different voice came on – ‘Thank you, Norwick. That’s all. Over and out.’

I switched the set off and stood there, thinking about that scrap of conversation. Dillon presumably. And in a hurry to get to the
Mary Jane.
Why? I was still thinking about that when the inflatable came alongside. Ian was at the outboard and another man in the bows. He was young with a wisp of a beard and shoulder-length hair blowing in the breeze under a grey woolly cap. He looked like a student, his eyes magnified by round glasses as he handed a metal toolcase up to me. ‘The old man wants to see you,’ Ian said to me as the engineer climbed aboard.