The Last Wolf (22 page)

There had been reports of damage, some of it quite bad, but nothing that couldn't be repaired by a well-trained crew. Three hours later, Reinhard ordered the boat up to periscope depth and took a look round, a complete sweep of the horizon, before they surfaced from the deep, hull dripping, on to a deserted ocean under a starry sky.

Off the northern coast of Ireland, they came across another lone ship – not a coveted oil tanker as before, but an unarmed neutral Portuguese steamer chugging along, probably blissfully unaware that she was in the forbidden zone. She was too small to waste torpedoes on but big enough to be worth sinking with gun fire. Reinhard sent a warning shell across the steamer's bows and they watched from the bridge as her crew ran about the decks in panic and started lowering lifeboats. The lifeboat carrying her captain, a portly little man, pulled towards them and as they approached, he stood up in the bows and raised his arm in a stiff salute.

‘Heil Hitler!'

A wave slapped against the lifeboat and he lost his balance and fell over backwards among his men, feet in the air. After a while he reappeared, replacing his cap, adjusting it carefully and dusting down his uniform. He saluted once more.

‘Heil Hitler!'

It was apparently the only German he spoke. Reinhard called down from the bridge, in English, ‘Where do you come from? What is your cargo?'

They had come from Iceland and they were carrying a load of fish to Oporto. The captain produced papers from a pocket to prove it and flourished them wildly in the air. The lifeboat was rocking about close to their hull and had to be fended off by the U-boat's crew. Not worth bothering with, Reinhard decided, or worth the risk of advertising their presence to the enemy by gunfire. After all, a U-boat cost four million marks – rather more than a hold of fish.

He waved a hand in curt dismissal. ‘You may continue on your way, Captain.'

The captain tugged a cigar from another pocket like a bad conjuror and held it up.

‘For you, kind sir.'

He shook his head impatiently.

A sack was produced from the bottom of the lifeboat and a scrawny chicken held up by its legs, wings flapping feebly.

‘Please to take, sir. Very good to eat.'

‘No, thank you.'

Finally, the captain understood that they were free to go. There were more shouts of ‘Heil Hitler', servile thanks in bad English, bows and waves, as the Portuguese sailors rowed away back to their steamer. The whole encounter had been a lunatic farce.

Engelhardt chuckled. ‘You should have accepted, sir. You could have smoked the cigar and we could have eaten the chicken. Do you think they realize how lucky they were?'

He said grimly, ‘No. I was in a charitable mood.'

The
Sunderland
appeared so unexpectedly from the solid ceiling of cloud that the lookouts on the bridge were late spotting it. Too late for the U-boat to dive deep enough to escape the effect of its bombs in the hammering attack that followed and, this time, the damage was too bad to be fixed in a matter of an hour or two. There were reports from all over the boat and Franz, his Chief Engineer, had a long list of problems which he read out as though he were going shopping. The U-boat was plainly unfit and unable to continue on active patrol with her two remaining torpedoes. She could barely limp along, dangerously vulnerable to attack.

Franz had finally come to the end of his list. ‘I need a day – perhaps two – somewhere where we can surface after dark and work in peace.'

‘That's asking a lot. We're in enemy waters.'

The Chief Engineer shrugged.

Reinhard went to the chart table and leaned over it, running a finger along the jagged coast line of western Scotland. ‘As it happens,' he said slowly, ‘I might know the very place.'

It would be twenty-seven years since his father had come to Islay in his U-boat, and seven years since they had sailed here in
Sturmwind
. It was later in the year, of course – no longer summer, but autumn – and the seas off Scotland were even more violent and treacherous than he remembered. He kept the boat submerged to escape the worst of it and only came to periscope depth when they had passed the Rhuvaal lighthouse and entered the narrow sound between Jura and Islay. The deep central channel was tailor-made for a submarine. To see and not be seen. He swivelled the periscope from one island to the other, noting things he remembered well – the seals lying on the rocks below the cliffs, the wild goats, the sheep, the long-horned Highland cattle, the flocks of sea birds. It was raining, which didn't surprise him. He remembered the constant rain – more like a mist bathing the islands. They went by the whisky distillery and its wooden pier, and passed the narrowest point of the sound where the ferry went back and forth from Feolin on Jura to Port Askaig on the Islay side. Smoke was curling up from cottage chimneys in the port – peat fire smoke, of course – and the old ferryboat was moored by the slipway, a flock of sheep being loaded. He could see the animals being herded on board, a black and white dog weaving to and fro at their heels, the ferrymen prodding them with sticks and shouting. They'd get a hell of a shock if Reinhard were to surface suddenly – if a U-boat were to loom out of the water before their very eyes. He smiled. This was how his father must have felt when he was sneaking around all those years ago, playing hide-and-seek, thumbing his nose at the enemy. There was a lot of satisfaction in it – as there had been satisfaction in sinking that tanker, though in a very different way.

He took the boat through the narrow entrance to Glas Uig and into the shelter of the cove. The view through the periscope showed him that nothing much had changed, except the season. The leaves on the trees were brown, the grass not as green as in summer, but the jetty was there with its rusty mooring rings, the lichen-encrusted granite boulders, the whale's jawbone wedged in the rocks, the track leading up to the house. All just as he remembered. He kept the U-boat sitting on the bottom of the cove until after dark and then surfaced alongside the jetty.

While the repair work on the boat was being done, he left Mohr in charge and walked up through the woods with Engelhardt. The half-moon gave light that he scarcely needed. His eyes had become very accustomed to darkness, to distinguishing shapes from shadows, the real from the imaginary.

‘There's a house at the top,' he'd told Engelhardt. ‘I came here once before the war. I'd like to take a look.'

They came out of the trees and there was Craigmore, a hundred metres or so away, beyond the rough grass and the reeds and the white blobs of grazing sheep. He could see its outline rising above the bank, squat chimney stacks against the night sky, slate roofs, the sharp points of its gables. The storm shutters were all closed with no single chink of light to be seen. No sign of human life. No sound, except for the rhythmic rush and retreat of the waves over the rocks in the inlet below.

‘Seems deserted, sir,' Engelhardt said.

‘Looks like it.'

They walked across the grass to the dry-stone wall and the iron gate. At the bottom of the bank Reinhard stopped for a moment, looking up. This was where the child had appeared at the top – the boy who had turned out to be a girl, plunging down the slope towards him in search of a lost ball.

Is this what you're looking for?

The croquet lawn was still there, but without the iron hoops, and the grass was uncut. It must be a long time since anyone had played a game.

They walked on up to the house and he tried the handle of the front door. It opened.

Engelhardt said, ‘We were wrong, sir. Someone's at home.'

‘Not necessarily. They never lock their doors on the island.'

‘That's trusting.'

He pushed the door open further. Inside, the house was in darkness. They went in, closing the door behind them, and he switched on his torch and played the beam round the hallway. Flagstone floor, panelled walls, stags' heads staring down at him with their shining glass eyes. No elderly retainer smelling of whisky to show the way, but Reinhard remembered where the drawing room was. Dust sheets draped the furniture like an undertaker's shrouds and it felt as cold and damp as a tomb.

Engelhardt shivered. ‘Rather grim, sir.'

‘It wasn't like this before. It was different when the family was living here.'

‘Well, they must have shut up the place and pushed off.' Engelhardt peered behind curtains. ‘They've put blackout blinds over the windows, sir. We could turn a light on, if you like.'

‘There's no light to turn on. No electricity. Only oil lamps. No running water either, as a matter of fact.'

‘My God!' Engelhardt, who had been brought up in considerable comfort in Stuttgart, sounded appalled. ‘A bit primitive, isn't it? Still, I could probably get one of the oil lamps working.'

Reinhard left him to it and went into the dining room where the long table and the chairs were also covered with sheets. He'd sat here, in this very chair, beside the grandmother who'd talked to him about his schooling and the Navy, and next to Stroma who hadn't wanted to talk to him at all.

He closed the door and moved on down a long passageway to the kitchens. The torch showed him an ancient cooking range, rows of cupboards, scrubbed wooden table, tarnished copper pans and an outsize kettle. In the scullery he found a zinc bath hanging on a peg and a shallow stone sink set on brick pillars with a tap above. The old sock she'd told him about was tied in place – the makeshift strainer that held back the wriggly things but had somehow failed to keep out a snake. He turned on the tap and brown water gushed out.

It comes straight from the burn – brown because of the peat.

He shone his torch into the larder. The shelves were bare except for a crock of flour, a drum of salt, bags of dried beans and glass jars of preserved fruit. Something scampered across his foot – either a big mouse or a small rat.

The main staircase led up from the hall and he climbed to the first floor, opening doors on to bedrooms, beaming his torch in. The first one had a heavily carved four-poster bed and was probably where the grandparents had slept; three more smaller rooms looked as though they were meant for guests and another room that must belong to the brother, Hamish. The mantelpiece and shelves were crowded with model ships, including, he was amused to see, a U-boat type UC III like his father had commanded in the last war. The books in a glass-fronted case were boys' adventure stories:
The Curse of the Pharaohs
,
The Treasure of the Deep
,
Enemy Below
– complete with U-boat on the cover but not very accurately drawn. On the bottom shelf was a pile of old comics – coloured cartoons of brave British and brutish Germans in uniform, of tanks and guns, fighters and bombers and several more U-boats. One sinister character wore civilian clothes, a long coat, a scarf and what was apparently meant to be a Tyrolean hat.
Hamish thought you were spies.

He knew, as soon as he opened the door, that the bedroom at the far end of the corridor was Stroma's. It was a simple room without frills or flowery patterns. Plain wallpaper and curtains, a green silk cover on the bed, a chest of drawers with a white china ewer and basin on the top, beside them, a tortoiseshell hairbrush and comb, and a small bottle of scent. Lily of the valley. He tipped a little into his palm and smelled the fresh sweetness of it.

Her childhood books were very different from her brother's:
The Princess and the Goblins,
Heidi,
At the Back of the North Wind,
Little Women,
The Secret Garden
. . .

He opened the door of the wardrobe in the corner. Grown-up clothes on hangers – a tweed jacket, skirts, a blue wool dress, a Scottish kilt in the same tartan colours that he remembered her wearing at the dinner. Country brogues and one pair of shoes with high heels.

She still came here to visit.

As he closed the wardrobe, the torch beam caught his reflection in the looking glass set in its door – shaggy-haired, unshaven and villainous. Just as well she couldn't see him now.

He went downstairs again and noticed a door that he had missed before at the back of the hallway. It led into what must be the grandfather's study. There was a large mahogany desk with a leather blotter, many books on shelves, a comfortable chair beside the open fireplace, a large-scale map on the wall. He shone the torch over all the details of the Craigmore Estate – the location of the house itself, fields, lochs, streams, farmhouses and crofters' cottages, shorelines and bays – including Glas Uig – were all clearly marked.

Where had the family gone? Why had they left? Surely not because of the war? This was as safe a place as anyone could find. No German bomber was going to waste its bombs here, no invading force going to attempt a landing on its treacherous rocky shores. He went over to the desk and pulled open the top drawer: a fountain pen, pencils, a bottle of ink, a horn letter opener, paper clips, a box of drawing pins. Another drawer contained writing paper and envelopes and postcards, another a cheque book and a sheaf of receipts, pinned neatly together. The grandfather was an orderly man.

In a bottom drawer, he found his diary for 1943 and flicked through some of the early entries. He was prying unforgivably but the diary wasn't a personal account; there were no private inner thoughts committed to paper. The entries were very brief, mainly concerned with the running of the estate. Meetings, reminders, appointments – which included three appointments in February and March with a Dr Mackenzie. The entries finished abruptly on 5th April. All the following pages were blank.

He replaced the diary and saw a bundle of letters at the back of the same drawer. The top one he pulled from its envelope was from Hamish and dated l7th February, 1943. He skimmed through it.

I wish to God that I was serving in a destroyer, instead of a corvette. They're hellish ships to sail in, though we do our best. The destroyers have a much better chance of destroying the U-boats, which is what it's all about, of course. If we don't finish the swine, they'll finish us. In the end, we will. We'll go on sinking them until there are no more left.