Whirligig (32 page)

Milky got out and opened the back doors. Peregrine was now still, listening.

‘Right, fucker,' said Milky, ‘when I take that bag off and untie your legs and let you out, either you can struggle, or do something stupid like run away
–
we will fight and I will win… or you can just behave yourself and do what I tell you… What's it to be?'

Peregrine mumbled clear assent even though no words could be divined.

Milky took the bag off Peregrine and squinted at him in the dim light of the van's tail lights. He smiled to see the old man's distress, but took the child's vest out of his mouth. Immediately, Peregrine screamed.

‘Help!' he yelled into the wind. Other than wincing from the volume of the scream, Milky did nothing.

Peregrine yelled again, ‘Help me!' at a slightly higher pitch and even louder, but Milky merely gestured towards the darkness. Although Peregrine could not
see further than a few yards, he knew that Milky was indicating the futility of shouting into the wind and the wilderness. With bitterness, Peregrine was forced to give up all thoughts of rescue.

‘Bugger off,' said Peregrine with feeling, and spat unpleasantly.

‘That's better,' said Milky darkly. ‘Now, if you would be so kind as to walk into that graveyard. You and I are going to have a wee chat.'

Lachlan and Claypole had not spoken for the first four minutes of the boat ride from Garvachhead to Glen Drum beach. But Lachlan now shouted in order to be heard above the noise of the engine and the sea angrily slapping the hull of the dinghy.

‘What did you say to Peregrine at the community hall?'

‘Brr,' said Claypole.

‘One minute he was all for having you thrown out of the meeting, but after your little conference, he didn't say another word. What did you say to him?'

Claypole calculated before answering. He could not have told Coky, but perhaps he could tell Lachlan. Lachlan had, after all, confessed to him.

‘I blackmailed him.'

‘What?' Lachlan had either not heard, or was astonished.

‘I blackmailed him. I found a bird survey that said there was a pair of nesting golden eagles above the Giant's Table, which Perry had tried to destroy. I told him I would tell everyone about his fraud if he didn't let me have my say.'

‘That was my survey!'
Lachlan seemed pleased, and then realised that his work had been ignored. ‘Oh. Did he keep the bit about the merlins, and the ospreys?'

‘He buried the whole thing. Would have shredded it if I hadn't… nicked it.'

Lachlan thought again. ‘But why didn't you trash the whole project, then?'

‘Because,' Claypole shouted, ‘if Peregrine were actually proved to have been fraudulent, the whole wind farm would have been thrown out. I didn't want to do that to Coky. But I did want it postponed. I meant what I said in there. It could be a good wind farm, if the environmental survey were done properly and if given a little more time. If there are rare birds up at the Giant's Table, the turbines near them should be removed from the plans. But it doesn't mean that the whole thing should be trashed. I realised all this while I was standing in the sea last night.'

‘Hm', said Lachlan, now deep in thought. They focused on the horizon and the approaching beach at Glen Drum.

The two men wordlessly dragged the boat onto the beach, and Claypole looked around while Lachlan secured the boat. He had been looking forward to landing at the beach, not just because bobbing around on a dark and forbidding ocean was not his idea of fun, but because it was a familiar place. It appeared so different from the friendly venue for Lochstock. It was so vast and forbidding, and the little camp, with only one light on in a teepee, looked so tiny and desolate.

They scrambled up some rocks at the back of the beach and headed into the dark forest at a brisk trot. Claypole remembered the small torch that Peregrine
had lent him along with the Land Rover, and felt for it in his jacket pocket. It proved to be worse than useless. It cast a thin light, sure enough, but it created shadows that gave false impressions of what to avoid and what was air.

‘Best just get your eyes used to the dark,' Lachlan said, and Claypole chucked the torch away. Any excess weight might hold him back, he thought. But once again, Claypole had cause to remember that he was not a slick machine, the forward movement of which might be improved by being lighter. Lachlan was now scampering through the woods, ducking branches and skipping over fallen trees. Even if he had not been hit by, or had not tripped over every one of these obstacles, he would still have found it impossible to keep up.

‘Come on, Claypole,' Lachlan would call behind him every few seconds, but received no response. Claypole had been too out of breath to reply after a minute. They had been running for ten minutes and it took all Claypole's effort to muster a one-finger salute, unseen as it was in the darkness. Then Lachlan whispered, ‘We're nearly there,' and Claypole managed to grunt with relief.

Then there came a weird call from out of the darkness ahead of them. It sounded to Claypole's ear like a wolf, and both men halted. They looked at each other, and Claypole felt a new dread. He wondered briefly if there were any coyotes in Scotland, and decided that there probably were not. So, a cat maybe. Or a badger. Just as he was debating in his mind whether badgers made any noise, they heard the noise again. Louder and more prolonged, it chilled them both instantly. It was a human, in distress.

‘Come on,' said
Lachlan, and dived further into the brush.

‘Oh, God,' muttered Claypole. The idea of rescuing Peregrine had in the previous half-hour amused more than frightened him. He had allowed his mind to play several fantasies out. First, he imagined Milky and Lachlan undergoing some sort of boxing match with Claypole acting as referee. The second fantasy involved the appearance of Coky playing the role of mewling damsel, and had a more convoluted rescue that ended in a kiss. The third, quite Gothic and blood-strewn, involved Claypole bouncing from the undergrowth like Rambo and single-handedly disarming Milky and (it was a fantasy) laying waste to an additional half-dozen Nazis using only a Swiss Army penknife, before a grateful Peregrine forgave him and paid off all his debts. But the reality that Peregrine might actually have been physically harmed by the encounter with a genuinely crazed and bloodthirsty Milky had been brought home to Claypole all too well by the real horror contained in the scream he had just heard. He no longer felt merely out of place and uneasy. He was properly scared now.

Claypole slowed as Lachlan darted forward and out of sight. The moon was hiding, and although he could see that there was a clearing coming up in the dense wood, he could make out little else.

‘Lachlan,' he whispered, but there was no reply.

The scream came again, this time more agonised and prolonged, and at its end it had a self-pitying tremor that was gut-churning. Suddenly, Claypole could feel his chest tighten, as if in the grip of a fist. He bent over and breathed deeply, feeling a metallic taste in his mouth. His body was in crisis, and his mind turned
again to the unswallowed pills in his ransomed rucksack at the Loch Garvach Hotel. He looked up again to locate Lachlan, but Claypole could see nothing except a few branches, and felt utterly alone.

As he inched forward, crouching, the air changed. From being just the outward breath of trees, close and muggy, Claypole felt the salt wind gently on his face. As he approached the clearing, Claypole suddenly wanted more than anything not to be there. All confidence evapor-ated, he would have turned round and crawled off in the opposite direction if he thought he had a greater chance of survival. But he inched forward again. Then he saw what he most feared, and he gagged.

The clearing was a long-ruinated churchyard, and by one of the larger grey headstones was a tall dark figure knelt over a body that was partly white. Was that a disarranged shirt or pale skin? Another figure that Claypole recognised as Lachlan appeared, walking with purpose towards this scene. Lachlan hesitated as he got nearer, but then rushed towards the man on the ground. Lachlan said something terse and direct. There was protest from the standing figure which, as it turned, Claypole could see was the shaven-headed Milky.

Claypole crawled further forward and squinted at the man on the ground. His face was pale and his white shirt was torn open to the navel. The man's wide dry eyes stared deeply into nothingness. Peregrine MacGilp was dead.

Lachlan quickly straddled Peregrine's body. He pounded at the dead man's chest, slapped his face and puffed into his mouth. Milky watched and paced while yanking stupidly at his own fingers and saying ‘fuck, fuck, fuck'.
When Lachlan finally realised his actions were pointless he sat back on the ground and spat. Then he tucked his head into his chest and was still, his arms limply hanging by his sides.

‘Oh shit, oh Christ,' said Milky, backing off a couple of yards. Lachlan turned to look at him wordlessly.

‘I didn't do anything,' protested Milky in a childlike wheedle.

Lachlan said nothing. He just looked empty.

‘I didn't touch him,' said Milky, in the same whine.

‘Is he…?' This was Claypole, now standing behind the two men. They turned to him. Lachlan nodded.

‘Did you…?' This was Claypole again, directing the half-question at Milky, and backing away.

‘I only wanted to scare him,' said Milky pathetically.

Claypole edged backwards.

‘Don't go anywhere, Claypole,' said Lachlan, with a tone of exasperation, and Claypole stopped.

Milky looked at Lachlan, who got up from the ground as if exhausted.

‘What do we do, Lachy?' The use of the diminutive name, in that childish whisper, jarred Lachlan.

‘Claypole,' said Lachlan quietly. ‘Don't go anywhere.' Claypole, who had begun to move backwards again, stopped once more.

‘Lachy, I didn't…' said Milky, back to his monotone drawl. ‘It's the truth. I tied him up and just wanted to get him to talk, and he just… went.'

‘What about the screaming?' Lachlan's voice was level.

‘That was
me
, man.'

They both looked at Peregrine's too-still body, its face contorted in horror.

‘OK, Milky,' sighed Lachlan.

There was silence between the three men, and Claypole took this as his cue. He turned and ran.

For a moment, Milky and Lachlan just looked at Claypole hoofing his way through the clearing and away from them. In no particular hurry, they looked at each other.

‘Where on earth does that fat fuck think he's going?' asked Milky in a tone of wonderment.

Lachlan sighed. ‘Just get after him or we'll all be for it.'

Claypole thundered away from the scene of death in a hideous daze. His legs were quickly wobbly and uncommandable. There was a pounding of blood in his ears and each swish and sting of branch and bracken felt like a lash as he ran through the trees. But there was the echo of that scream and the image of poor Peregrine's body, white and lifeless, flashing horribly in his mind to urge him on. He stumbled on and found that the forest was becoming less dense. But then he heard Milky's massive thudding steps bearing down on him. His heart gave a skip and a lurch. Claypole tried to shout something but found that he had no voice. He tripped just before Milky reached him, and Claypole was as certain as he could be – as certain as the last time he had fallen over, voiceless, in a café in London, in the presence of the woman he loved – that he was about to die.

Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com'è bisogna che tutto cambi.

If we want things to stay the same, things will have to change.

The Leopard
, Giuseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa

A
thousand hooded crows were barracking each other in the huge cypress trees above MacGilp House on the morning of the first day of September. Jim Fry, the Minister of the Loch Garvach kirk, looked up at the black birds, wheeling and cavorting noisily, and hugged his anorak tightly around him. He knew that there was an unusual collective noun for crows, and had whimsically been trying to remember it for the last five minutes. He turned his mind to the peroration he must now perform. He got up slowly and thoughtfully, minutely adjusted his dog collar and stepped in front of his audience of no more than a dozen souls. Just before he began to speak, he remembered the collective noun for crows and smiled to himself. A murder. That was it. A murder of crows.

Fry felt uneasy about conducting a funeral in such circumstances. It was not that they were not in a church, although having an event outdoors in Scotland
in autumn has obvious weather risks. But the rain had as yet held off, and the wind, although it had something to say in the matter of the changing season, was not yet biting. What irked Fry was the fact that he had been asked to conduct a service that, at the request of the MacGilps, was to contain no reference to God. This was not liturgical fussiness on his part. He did not mind that the casket was wicker. He did not mind that, rather than a headstone, a tree was to mark the last resting place of the departed. And he did not object, for he knew them well and liked them, to being given instruction by George and Vesper, the ‘green' funeral directors. He felt sure that the Almighty paid scant attention to these things. But Jim Fry had his suspicions that the man in the casket would have preferred a church service, having taken part in one of his services only the Sunday before his death. Nonetheless, the minister thought to himself, a funeral service is for the living, not the dead. The modern clergyman must compromise and adapt to the wishes of his congregation. So he examined the individuals in the assembly with his stern stare, attempting to transmit solemnity rather than rebuke.