The Last Wolf (2 page)

Apart from the thousands of rabbits on the island, there were hundreds of adders – serpents, the islanders called them, which made them sound much worse than they really were. They'd come across them basking in the sun and, once, they'd spotted the shed skin of one – left whole and perfect on the bank of a burn, the V-mark on its head, the dark zigzag pattern marking its back down to the tail. Hamish had picked it up carefully and taken it back to the house to keep on the mantelpiece in his bedroom. The weather never stayed the same for long; it changed, and changed, and then changed again, the clouds always on the move, the light and the shade coming and going, the gentle colours glowing and fading. When it rained, which was often, the rain was soft, like mist.

The island of Islay was shaped like a diamond – a precious jewel set in the southern Hebrides and studded with standing stones as old as time itself. Stroma's favourite place on earth.

In early September, when the summer holidays came to an end, they had to make the long trek back to London. The paddle steamer
Lochiel
took them over to Kennacraig on the mainland, and from there they went by bus and ferry and cart, in stages, across to Glasgow where the night train would bear them away clickety-clack, clickety-clack, down to London, and back to the house in Bayswater.

But not yet. Not yet.

She went over to the open window and looked out at the silver-grey sea. The wind carried the lovely smell of salt and seaweed to her, and the harsh mewing of the gulls. She shut her eyes, breathing in deeply.

Sturmwind
had crossed the North Sea without difficulty, the yacht helped along by the strong south-westerlies, but sailing round the coast of Scotland proved much trickier. After passing south of the Orkneys and battling through the rip tides of the Pentland Firth, they had rounded the north-west corner of Scotland slap into a fearsome head wind and an Atlantic swell that had given them no sea room and done its best to hurl them on to the shore. Once or twice Reinhard had thought
Sturmwind
was going to join the other wrecks littering the coast.

At Skye, in the Inner Hebrides, they had re-provisioned and sailed on to Mull and then by the Strait of Corryvreckan between the northernmost tip of Jura and Scarba. They had sailed close to the notorious whirlpool – at flood tide a swirling, roaring maelstrom that could suck a ship down to its doom. According to Reinhard's father, who knew those seas well, they were among the most perilous in the world. Apart from the Corryvreckan there were other whirlpools, treacherous currents, back-eddies, standing waves like solid walls, gale-force winds, violent storms and jagged rocks.

None of this worried Reinhard – quite the opposite. He relished the risk. His father had taken him and his brother Bruno sailing since they could walk and they were not afraid of the sea, though they had plenty of respect for it. Father had taught them that, too. A man foolish enough to disrespect the sea was likely to die in it.

They sailed along the western coast of Jura, Father at the helm of
Sturmwind
, Bruno and himself a well-drilled crew following his commands. They sighted a minke whale, which swam around close to them before arching its back to dive deep. A group of dolphins escorted them for a while – show-offs somersaulting high in the air and vanishing beneath the ketch to reappear on the other side. As they passed the Rhuvaal lighthouse at the north-east point of Islay and entered the narrow sound between the two neighbouring islands, Jura and Islay, the wind moderated and the sea calmed. Colonies of seals slumbered on the rocks, wild goats leaped nimbly up the steep cliffs and deer and cattle and sheep roamed the beaches, grazing on the seaweed.

They passed a whisky distillery to starboard with a wooden pier jutting out into the sound and, to port, the misty mauve Paps of Jura sloped down to a narrow strand along the shore. There were a few stone cottages huddled round a slipway at the narrowest point of the sound where the ferry crossed between Feolin on Jura and Port Askaig on Islay.

Father had sailed here in the German navy during the Great War. He had served with the U-boat Force, commanded his own submarine and had been decorated with the Knight's Cross for his skill and bravery. Before the beginning of the war, he had told them, submarines had been thought a useless weapon against civilian shipping: they had no space to take prisoners on board and no spare crew to man a captured ship. But, once the war had started, it had been decided that it was not necessary to capture a merchant ship – merely to sink it. After that, the U-boats had prowled after enemy merchant ships and torpedoed them mercilessly. At the height of the war, one enemy ship in every four had gone to the bottom. Father himself had sunk no less than seventy-eight. England had been brought close to starvation and defeat by German U-boats until America had finally entered the fray and the convoys began to be escorted by Allied warships.

Father had talked about it all. He had told them what it had been like to go to war at sea for months on end with forty or more other men, to be sealed up in a metal tube less than a hundred metres long and six metres wide, and about the fetid air and the damp. He had told them about the all-pervading smell of diesel oil and the reek from the bilges, the stench of unwashed bodies, and the stink from the heads. He had described the green mould that had to be scraped off rotting food, the head-splitting pounding of the pistons, the non-stop rocking of the boat, sometimes pitching and corkscrewing and yawing so violently in heavy seas that men were catapulted out of their bunks. And he had talked of the lack of fresh air, exercise, privacy, comfort, of men driven mad by claustrophobia and the dread of a horrible death. But he had also talked about the comradeship, where every man shared the same hardship and fate and depended upon the rest for their lives.

He had described the thrill of the hunt for the enemy, the skill of closing in for the kill, the elation, tempered with any sailor's natural regret at the sinking of a good ship and the loss of a crew who would seldom be saved. Once, he had torpedoed a steamer carrying cavalry horses in wooden stalls on the decks. As he had watched through the periscope, the ship had gone down and the horses – beautiful, long-tailed beasts – had leaped in terror over the rails into the sea. He had turned his head away from the sight.

It had been during a patrol off Scotland, lying in wait for the British convoys approaching the Clyde, that Father had discovered the cove on the island of Islay. Urgent repairs had been needed to his boat and a safe, quiet place to carry them out. He had taken the submarine at periscope depth along the sound, hunting for such a place, and where it widened out to rejoin the sea he had spotted what had proved to be a perfect refuge – a hidden cove deep enough for the U-boat to enter submerged, even at low tide.

They had stayed in the cove until the repairs were done – spending the daylight hours concealed under water and surfacing at night. It had been a memorable time, he had said, smiling. Almost like a holiday. The cove was remote and well-hidden, their only observers sheep. After dark, the men were permitted on deck in turns and he had allowed them to go ashore in the moonlight, even to swim. During their stay they had killed and eaten one of the sheep – a rare feast of fresh meat for the crew.

The U-boat repaired and operational again, they had emerged at dawn, slipping quietly back into the sound. As they had moved down the coast, Father had noticed a grand old house up on a bluff, looking out over the water. He had admired it through the periscope – admired it so much so, in fact, that he had made a promise to himself to return one day, when the war had been won, and to buy it if possible.

But, of course, the war had been lost by Germany. Father had been forced to surrender his U-boat to the British and had spent months in a prisoner-of-war camp in Scotland before he had been released. His naval career over, he had joined the family ship-building business in Hamburg, which had managed to survive the war very well. He had married his fiancée, Katrin, and Reinhard had been born in l919, Bruno three years later.

There had been several smaller boats while Father had been teaching them to sail. Then he had bought
Sturmwind
three years after Mother's death and they had sailed her every summer in the Baltic. This summer, however, he had decided to revisit his old wartime haunts off the Scottish isles, including the hidden cove – if he could find it again. To take a trip down Memory Lane he had said with a faint smile; and to have another look at the house.

Now, two hundred metres from the entrance, Reinhard and Bruno lowered the sails and Father used the engine to bring
Sturmwind
through the gap between the rocks and into the cove.

The water surface was like glass, the surrounding hillsides lush and green with long grass, tall ferns and trees that had soft, broad-leafed trees, not the sharp, dark needles of the Scottish kind, or of Germany. After the open sound, everything was suddenly calm and quiet and peaceful. A magical sort of place, Reinhard thought: a place out of a story book.

Giant granite boulders had been used to make a jetty. They were thickly encrusted with orange and white lichen and set with rusty mooring rings. Traces of an old track led from the end of the jetty up into the woods on the hillside. Obviously, nobody had used the place for a very long time – except, perhaps, for his father.

As
Sturmwind
nosed alongside the jetty, Reinhard and Bruno jumped to fasten the bow and stern lines to the rings. When they'd finished, Father came ashore and stood, fists on hips, looking round.

‘Twenty years since I was here. The woods have grown thicker but otherwise it's much the same. The house was on the next headland, if I remember correctly. We can't see it from here.'

Reinhard said, ‘I could go up through the woods and take a look for you.'

‘Yes, go and see, Reinhard. I should like to know if anyone is living in it. Take the binoculars with you.'

He followed the track through the wood, making easy work of the steep incline. The trees were gnarled and bent like old women, the younger, straighter ones thrusting for living space. Oak and hazel, he thought, some apple trees too and other kinds he did not know. There were outcrops of granite poking up through the moss and ferns and wildflowers, and dozens of rabbit holes tunnelled into the hillside. Close to the hilltop, he paused and turned to look back. The cove was completely hidden from his view and so was
Sturmwind
. A wonderful hideout! He climbed on steadily and emerged from the woods on to an open stretch of rough grass and reeds and bracken where sheep were grazing.

And there was the house. It stood two hundred metres or so away, facing out to sea and partly concealed by a bank rising beyond a dry-stone wall. Reinhard focussed the binoculars to take a better look. The gabled roofs were slate, the stone walls whitewashed, the window shutters painted black. A massive old place with great chimney stacks and many chimney pots, and a large barn and outbuildings at the back. Not beautiful or elegant but certainly imposing. Designed to fit with the rugged Scottish landscape and built to withstand the Atlantic weather. He could see why his father had taken such a liking to it.

There was a high plateau of ground in front of the house on the seaward side and, from its edge, the land sloped down to a rocky inlet, much shallower and more open than the neighbouring cove where
Sturmwind
was moored. He lowered the binoculars and walked on across the grass towards the house. As he drew nearer, he could hear voices coming from up on the plateau above him – young voices – and the loud thwack of a heavy ball being hit with some kind of bat. Cricket, perhaps, though he was not sure that the Scots played that dull and incomprehensible game. He found an iron five-barred gate in the stone wall and swung himself over and, as he started up the bank, a ball came rolling down towards him. It stopped near his feet and he picked it up; it was hard and heavy and made of wood, painted red.

The ball was followed by a child who appeared suddenly at the top of the bank and plunged down the slope. It was a boy dressed in grey shorts and a blue short-sleeved shirt. At first, the child didn't notice him, eyes down and intent on the search for the ball in the grass. After a moment, Reinhard called out in his best English.

‘Is this what you are looking for?' He held out the ball.

The boy raised his head, startled. ‘Gosh, yes.' He skipped over grassy tussocks to reach him. ‘Thanks awfully.'

The child didn't sound Scottish – more like English – and, at closer quarters, he saw that it wasn't a boy, after all. The short hair and the clothes had had him fooled, but now that Reinhard could see the face better, he realized that it belonged to a girl – a small, thin girl of about ten years old with a pointed chin, wide mouth, dark eyebrows the shape of outstretched bird's wings and hair that stuck out in clumps round her face. Her skin was sunburned, her clothes dirty and torn, her feet bare. She looked like a gypsy child. He noticed, too, that there was blood seeping from a cut on her knee and trickling down her leg. He stepped forward and placed the ball in her hand.

He said, ‘I am sorry. I should not perhaps be walking here. It is private?'

‘No, it isn't,' she said. ‘You can go wherever you like on the island. There's no law against trespassing.' She stared up at him; he saw that the eyes beneath the bird's wings were smoky grey. ‘Where have you walked from?'

He turned to point at the woods behind him. ‘From the cove down there. I am sailing with my father and brother and we have moored our boat there. I do not know the name of the place.'

‘Glas Uig,' she said. ‘That's the Gaelic. It means Green Cove. Hamish and I go there a lot.' She was frowning at him now. ‘Actually, it's our special secret place.'

‘I'm very sorry,' he said. ‘We did not know that.'

‘How did you find it?'