The Chessmen (21 page)

A sound, like a pebble landing in the water, drew his attention, and he could see silvered rings emanating from a point not far from the opposite bank. A fish, perhaps, jumping to catch insects. There was no sign of life. No further sound.

Fin stepped up on to the wooden bridge and scanned the loch. He felt the wind rising now, clouds that had been so distant starting to gather overhead, the advance guard of the coming storm. Even as he stood on the bridge, looking back down the length of the stream which had so nearly taken his life all those years before, he felt the temperature falling. The midges were gone already, and Whistler’s moon appeared and disappeared with increasing frequency, a bizarre, flitting, colourless light show.

As Fin turned back towards the loch he saw a movement on the far shore. A shadow drifting against the rise of the scree slope behind it.

‘Minto!’ he called out into the dark, feeling his voice whipped away from his mouth on the edge of the wind.

All that came back to him was a laugh that he knew only too well. And in a sudden blink of moonlight he saw Whistler standing there looking at him across the water. He raised his right arm, and Fin saw a huge wild salmon dangling from his hand, strong thick fingers hooked through the gills. ‘We could just go back to the croft, Fin. Roast her in
tinfoil over the peat. Share a glass and a memory or two. What do you say?’

Fin was very nearly tempted. ‘Oh, come on, Whistler, cut it out. We need to chat, you and me.’

‘Is that what you brought your muscle man for? A chat? I’m disappointed in you, Fin. Thought better of you than that.’ And Fin realized then the mistake he had made by involving Minto.

Almost in the same moment, the moon vanished behind a cloud and Whistler was swallowed again by the dark. Fin heard a loud banging coming from the direction of Minto’s Land Rover. He jumped down off the bridge and ran across the parking area to throw open the back door.

Minto was lying curled up on the floor, securely bound by his own tow rope, trussed up like a chicken, an oily rag shoved into his mouth. He had manoeuvred himself on to his back so that he could kick the side of the vehicle with the flat of his feet.

‘Jesus, Minto!’ Fin climbed in the back and untied him, pulling the rag from his mouth. Minto gasped for several seconds until he had caught his breath, saliva foaming around his lips.

‘I’ll kill him. I’ll fucking kill him!’

Fin gazed at him in disbelief. ‘What the hell happened?’

‘He jumped me, that’s what fucking happened.’

Fin almost found himself laughing. ‘
He
jumped
you
?’

‘Strong as a bloody ox that geezer is, Macleod.’

‘I thought you were going to take him down, Minto?’

Minto glowered at him, his pride seriously dented. No one man should have been capable of doing something like this to him. ‘I would’ve. Given half a chance.’ He sat up and winced, his left hand crossing to his right shoulder. ‘I think he’s dislocated my bloody shoulder.’

Fin sat cross-legged on the floor and looked at him. ‘Well, you’re not going to be much damn use to me now, are you?’

Minto cast him a surly look. ‘You’ll never take him on your own, mate. A skinny little runt like you.’

Fin got to his knees, and crouching made his way to the back. He jumped down. ‘Go home, Minto.’

He stood and watched as Minto struggled into the driver’s seat and started the motor. His headlights were devoured by the dark, making almost no impression on it as the vehicle turned and bumped back down the track to the loch below. Fin felt the first drops of rain in his face.

Now it was just him and Whistler.

He turned and scanned Loch Tathabhal, the surface of it dimpled and ridged by the rising wind, floods of fleeting moonlight caught in brief spangled moments of illumination. And there was the shadow of his friend moving along the far shore, his laughter lifting itself above the wind. ‘Come on, Fin, catch me if you can.’ The voice distant, somehow, and carried off into the night.

To Whistler it was all a game. Not to be taken seriously. And yet to cross Jamie the way he had was to court disaster. If he lost his home it was likely he would lose the court case for custody of his daughter. And if he lost both, God only knew what might become of him.

For several long moments Fin contemplated getting back into his Suzuki and going home. What good would it do to play Whistler’s game? And yet to walk away would be like turning his back on the man who had saved his life. Whistler would never have done that to Fin. At the very least he needed to make him understand the trouble he was in.

‘Whistler, wait!’ But his voice was consumed by the night, and he saw Whistler outlined against the sky in the moment before he began slithering down the scree to the lower valley.

Fin sighed and hesitated briefly before opening up the back of his four-by-four and taking out his waterproof jacket and a small rucksack. He slipped into the jacket, slung the rucksack across his shoulders and grasped the non-slip grip of his telescopic walker’s stick firmly in his right hand.

Coming, ready or not.

At first it was easy to keep Whistler in his sights. Amazingly there was still some daylight in the sky, and plenty of moonlight washing across the slopes between clouds. He saw Whistler’s shadow moving nimbly among the rocks as he scrambled down the incline. The wind was increasing in strength, temperature falling further as the black storm clouds began to roll in. But the rain, as yet, was still only a spit in his face.

Loch Raonasgail was no more than a big black hole scoured out between Tathabhal and Mealaisbhal by shifting glaciers
in some long-ago ice age, filled now with the millions of gallons of rainwater which the mountains that heaved up around it shed from their slopes. Fin saw Whistler circumvent its south-west shoreline, crossing the track, and heading off through the boulder-strewn valley in the shadow of Cracabhal.

The lightning came before the rain. Great jagged flashes of it that lit up the mountains and plunged their valleys into deeper darkness. His glimpses of Whistler now were few and far between as blackness settled over them like dust.

The heather and bracken beneath his feet were dry, and crackled in the dark. Normally sodden peat was hard and unyielding underfoot. Fin gritted his teeth and forced himself on. For forty minutes or more he followed the phantom that was Whistler. He found his leg muscles aching, joints hammered by the hardness of the ground, breath sucked with increasing rapidity into lungs that heaved and strained to pump sufficient oxygen to already tiring muscles.

No matter how hard he went at it, he never seemed to get any closer to him. And it became apparent that if Whistler wanted to, he could lose Fin in a heartbeat. But still he kept appearing, just when Fin thought he’d lost him. A glimpse here, leaping from one rock to another like a mountain goat. A glimpse there, as he turned to gaze back through the darkness. He was playing with Fin. Having fun. Making absolutely certain that he didn’t lose him, showing himself in tantalizing moments, like the lure of a fly drawing a fish on to the hook.

Lightning crashed so close to him that Fin instinctively ducked, and dropped to his knees, an image of the valley ahead of him left burned on his retinas. A bizarre and brutal landscape littered with the spoil of ice explosions millions of years old. For a moment he could barely hear, and his nostrils were filled with the ozone that suffused the air in the aftermath of the storm’s electrical discharges.

Whistler was there, too, in that image burned into his consciousness by the lightning, about three or four hundred yards ahead of him. Clambering over giant clusters of rocks. Then consumed again by darkness.

Absurdly, Fin found thoughts creeping into his mind of the bogeyman who had haunted the childhood imaginations of generations of island children. The outlaw Mac an t-Stronaich. A man credited with more brutal murders and assaults than any living soul might be capable of committing. And yet he had existed in reality, in some more minor incarnation no doubt, and on the run had escaped into these very mountains to avoid capture. Before being brought to justice, finally, and hanged in 1836. Whistler moved among the rocks like his ghost.

Sheet lightning lit up the sky once more, and Fin saw the black underside of the clouds that rumbled in low over the peaks, laden with moisture and threatening deluge. And in that moment he decided on the folly of this fruitless chase. Let Whistler go scampering off into the mountains. To hell with him! Fin would go back up to Tathabhal and pick up his Suzuki. He would drive to Whistler’s place and wait for him there. He was bound to
return sooner or later, and he would have it out with him then.

Another flash saw Whistler silhouetted on the shoulder of the mountain, standing still and looking back down the slope towards him. His hair was blowing all around his head, and he stood proud, like an ancient Viking warrior, his face leached of all colour by the lightning. The thunder that followed immediately was so directly overhead that it felt like a physical blow. And then the rain came. Out of nowhere. Sweeping suddenly down the valley in a blinding mist, the first exhalation of the storm. Hail was whipped into Fin’s face by a wind whose sudden increase in force very nearly knocked him off his feet. He turned and began to blunder back the way he had come.

Within minutes he had totally lost his sense of direction. Visibility was zero. He could see only in those brief moments when the lightning came. And then he stumbled forward with a memory of the next few yards held briefly in his mind, until his confidence wavered and he stopped, waiting for the next explosion of light.

Very quickly he realized that he was going up rather than down. But when he turned towards the descent he had no belief that it was taking him in the right direction.

The rain whipped relentlessly into his face, finding its way beneath his jacket at the cuffs and neck. He wasn’t wearing waterproof overtrousers, so his jeans were quickly sodden and heavy. His feet, in their well-worn hiking boots, were wet and already starting to grow cold.

He crouched down and took off his rucksack, delving
inside it to find his flashlight and a compass on the end of a loop of ribbon that he could hang around his neck. He clutched the torch, but before his fingers had closed around the compass, his rucksack filled with air from a blast of wind that nearly knocked him over and was torn from his grasp. He lunged at it as it flew off into the night, a hopeless leap in the dark that netted him only fresh air. And the rucksack was gone, leaving him sprawled among the grass and heather, water running like a river over the hard, impervious surface of the peat beneath him.

In desperation, he searched around for his stick, the thin beam of light from his torch making little impression on the dark. He was certain he had laid it down beside him when he crouched to open his rucksack. But there was no sign of it, and now it began to dawn on Fin that he was in trouble. He had no compass or map, no stick to help him keep his feet. He was soaked through and starting to feel the cold seep into his soul. He had no idea where he was or what direction to go in. And by now, for sure, in these conditions, Whistler must have lost him, too.

He crouched down on his hunkers, his back to the wind, and tried to make a rational assessment of his situation. But all the rational thought in the world could not displace the one that filled his mind. Men died in these conditions. Experienced walkers and climbers caught in a storm among the mountains, fully equipped and often in broad daylight, could perish in a matter of hours. Fin was inexperienced, ill-equipped and lost in the dark. One false step
could lead to a twisted ankle or a broken leg, a fall that would leave him lying hopelessly exposed to the elements. The cold would steal his consciousness. Sleep would come quickly, and there would be no waking from it. He knew beyond any doubt that he had to find shelter, and find it fast.

He closed his eyes and tried to focus on where he thought he was. Whistler had led him up through the valley between Mealaisbhal, and Cracabhal to the south of it. The last time he had seen him, he had been standing on the shoulder of the rising shadow of what he took to be Mealaisbhal on his right.

Fin had covered almost no ground since then, and if he was climbing, then the rise would take him up over that same shoulder. He had never been in the valley to the north of the mountain. But he remembered from his schooldays the stories of the Cailleach of Mealaisbhal. Cailleach was Gaelic for an old woman, and this one had killed her son and lived wild in the caves of Carnaichean Tealasdale beneath the cliffs at the north end of Mealaisbhal. Or so the story went. But there were supposed to be numerous caves there, among the cliffs and rocks. Caves that would provide a man with life-saving shelter.

He decided to keep climbing.

With the beam from his torch trained on the ground immediately ahead of him, he forced himself up the slope, taking the shortest route over boulders and rocks lying in jumbles and clusters all across the slope of the shoulder. They were slippery and treacherous, and with the hail
stinging his face, and the rain in his eyes, he could barely see.

But he could tell immediately when the ground beneath his feet began to level off, and at the same time he found himself even more exposed to the weather. He staggered forward through the rain, the wind hitting him with such force that he fell over several times. But still he kept going, even though every muscle and sinew in his body was crying out for rest.

The shadow of a massive rock rose up ahead of him, and he felt his way around it to the leeward side where he was briefly out of the wind. He pressed himself back against the sheer face of this giant slab and stood there gasping for breath. He had never in his life felt so small, or so vulnerable. The scale and scope of the land, and the power of the elements, dwarfed him into insignificance.

He found himself shivering now with the cold, teeth chattering. To stop would be fatal. He had to find shelter. As he turned again to face the black uncertainty that lay ahead of him, the sky lit up in a series of lightning flashes that cast their ghostly effulgence across the valley that fell away beneath him. It was startling and bleak in this unforgiving light, a landscape so alien and primordial that it would not have been out of place on the moon. Cliffs rose sheer at his right hand, pitch-black and shining wet, reflecting the flickering lightning from overhead. Then the ground fell away in shelves and inclines into a wide valley littered with boulders the size of tower blocks, massive chunks of gneiss and granite cast upon the land by long-ago ice bursts. Sometimes
in clusters, sometimes in single, solitary chunks that stood at impossible angles, balanced on corners and edges, casting their shadows like elongated fists, before vanishing again into darkness. It was like nothing Fin had ever seen.