Authors: Hammond Innes
I watched them as they climbed on board, but it was impossible to tell whether they were Shetlanders or not, and though the sound of their voices reached me across the water, I couldn’t hear what was said. The Land-Rover was back at the hotel now, not a soul in sight. The vessel’s engine started up, figures on the foredeck and the clank of the chain coming in, and when the anchor was housed, she steamed down the firth, hugging the farther shore and disappearing westward through the gap between Herma Ness and Muckle Flugga. I lay back in the peat moss again, thinking of the rig and that damned
fool Fuller exchanging the
Duchess
for one of Sandford’s boats.
I lay there, scarcely moving, until late in the afternoon, when the clouds thickened and it began to drizzle, and by then I knew I was wasting my time. I had discovered nothing, except that in the right weather Sandford used the firth as a base for his boats, and I got to my feet, climbing towards Housl Fiel and the track that led back to Bruce’s cottage.
He came in a little after me, the tweed of his jacket glistening with moisture, his ruddy face flushed with exertion. ‘I could have shown you a snowy owl,’ he said, his bright eyes laughing at me. A snowy owl meant nothing to me and he knew it. ‘You saw the purse-seiner leave, did you? I watched it from the top of Libbers Hill. It was steaming south-west to clear The Clapper and the islands north of Mainland.’
He talked about birds until we had finished our meal, and then he began telling me the story of Goturm’s Hole, how the son of the jarl of Stackhoull had been killed returning from a raid into Norway and the man who had killed him had had his boat wrecked on the rocks north-west of Unst. ‘He climbed the cliffs to the hole named after him and there he would have been killed but for the young man’s sister, who had some contact with Christianity and couldn’t stomach vengeance for vengeance’ sake. Goturm was a Dane and became a king of the Danes, and years later, when the Norse people in Unst had been overrun by yet another invasion from Norway, he repaid the debt he owed for his life, sending one of his captains with a great treasure to the girl who had saved him, now a woman and no longer living in the great hall at Stackhoull, but in a little cot on the Milldale burn. I may well have walked on the ruins of it this very day. A wild place, Captain Randall, this island of Unst – and nothing ever certain in an uncertain world.’
‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked him.
‘Bobbie loves telling the old legend stories,’ his sister said.
‘Aye.’ He nodded, filling his pipe and watching me, his eyes
full of curiosity. ‘Y’see, I taught history as well as English and geography. A bit of natural history, too, of course. I love this land of ours, so rugged, bleak and beautiful. It fascinates me.’
‘But you had a purpose,’ I insisted. ‘All your stories are of invasion and retribution –’
‘Your name,’ he said. ‘And you salvaging the
Duchess
. We may be lonely island people, but we do get the
Shetland Times
.’ I waited while he lit his pipe, staring at me over the flame. ‘Now that’s a strange coincidence. You and the
Duchess
. It was during the war and that same trawler putting in to the firth here in a westerly gale. The winter of 1942 it would be and I rowed out to her. A young naval lieutenant was in command and she was on her way back to Sullom Voe from the Norwegian coast. There was a Randall on board there, a man with his face all twisted and the scar of a gash that had bit deep into his skull. I heard he was some sort of an agent – a Russian agent, so the story went, but it was later I heard that.’ There was a long pause and I thought I knew what was coming. But then he said, ‘There’s nobody here walks the cliffs of Tonga, Saito, Neap and Toolie, all the way out to Humlataes, as often as I do. Not much happens in the neighbourhood of Herma Ness that I don’t know about. And often I catch a glimpse of those big trawlers that hang around our coast with more aerials and scanners than they have fishing gear. About two months ago it would be and I was up on Tonga with the sun shining brightly and a grey greasy-looking bank of fog hugging the sea. Sticking up out of it were the masts and antennae of one of those big trawlers, and coming in from the north the tip of a single mast, cleaving the fog like a submarine’s telescope. It was a queer sight I can tell you, the two of them coming together and voices drifting up through the swirl and the shriek of the birds.’
‘What’s this got to do with the man you saw on the
Duchess
all those years ago?’
‘Aye, it’d be thirty-two years now. But a man so disfigured –’
‘He’s come back, is that what you mean?’ The man on that bench in the sunshine, old now and walking with a stick. My God! And the two of us separated only by that narrow strip of water. ‘He’s at the Root Stacks Hotel. That’s it, isn’t it?’
He nodded and his eyes gleamed with the certainty that here was another story. ‘A week after I had seen that trawler rubbing shoulders with a fishing boat in the fog, I came down off Sothers Brecks to join the track at Fiska Wick and there he was.’
‘Are you sure it was the same man?’
‘No doubt at all,’ Bruce said. ‘Though his name is not Randall now. But a name doesn’t matter, not with the mark of a terrible wound like that.’ And he added, ‘He was sitting there this morning. You must have seen him.’
I nodded, feeling it couldn’t be true, but remembering the old man’s face in the glasses, the twisted, broken features. About the right age, too, and Root Stacks run by Anna Sandford’s son.
‘Mouat, he calls himself now.’
His middle name, and mine, and I knew it must be true.
Bruce leaned towards me. ‘That’s a common enough name in Shetland. But Mouat isn’t his real name. It’s Randall.’ His large hand gripped my knee. ‘And your name is Randall, and whatever you may say, Captain, you’re not here to look at the birds.’
‘No.’
‘Then what are you here for?’
I shook my head, not sure I had really known until this moment. ‘I think that man may be my father,’ I said. And after that I told him a little about myself, enough at any rate to satisfy his curiosity. ‘Do you know if a man calling himself Stevens is ever at the hotel?’ But he shook his head, and when I gave him a description, he said he had never been to the hotel, had never seen any of them close to. ‘Is he Irish?’ he asked. ‘I know there’s an Irish lad works there. And others,
they come and go, claiming they’re birdwatchers, same as you, and a mixed lot they are by all accounts.’
‘I’ll be going up there this evening.’
He nodded. ‘Ask Mouat where he was in 1942. It’ll be the same man I’m sure.’
I left just after nine and he walked with me as far as the neck of land that separated Loch of Cliff from the Burra Firth. There was a lot of cloud and the light was fading. ‘If a new invader were to come to our islands,’ he said, ‘this is as good a place as any. It’s happened many times before – but so long ago nobody remembers, only old men like me who know the history of the islands.’
I looked at his weatherbeaten, gnome-like face, the bright blue eyes, a man so deep in the legends of his land, so close to the wildness of it, that for him the prospect of a new horde landing on the rocks was not beyond the bounds of credibility. ‘There are more subtle ways –’ I checked myself, conscious of the dark hills against the clouds and my thoughts running away with me. A light gleamed down the track beside Burra Firth, a door opening; then it was gone. ‘Don’t wait up for me,’ I said.
I saw him hesitate, but then he nodded. ‘The door will be on the latch.’
I left him and went down the track along the water’s edge. The Root Stacks buildings were dark in the shadow of Mouslee Hill and, as I approached them, I was thinking back to that night on board the
Fisher Maid
with Shetland’s hills black lumps against a cold green strip of sky. It was then that I had decided to come north to the islands, seeking some knowledge of my father that would help me to understand myself. Barely three months, yet it seemed an age, and now, here in the dark of Unst with my mind stuffed full of the ghosts of old legends, in the dark shadow of these buildings …
My pace faltered and for a moment I stood hesitating, unsure of myself and reluctant to face him. The dog was barking, and I walked quickly up to the door and knocked. I
could hear voices, but it was some time before anybody came, the dog protesting from its kennel at the back until a shout silenced it. The door opened and a man stood there, short and squat in an island jersey. ‘What is it? If it’s a drink you’re wanting –’
‘Mr Mouat,’ I said. ‘I’d like a word with him.’
‘Mouat, eh? Are you sure of the name now?’
‘Quite sure.’ I thought he was going to close the door in my face and I put my foot against it. ‘Better call Sandford,’ I said.
He hesitated, looking at me curiously. Finally he turned and called out, ‘Ian. There’s a man here asking for Mr Mouat.’ The lamp-glow in the stone-flagged hallway brightened as a door was flung wide and Sandford appeared, his shirt open at the neck and a drink in his hand.
‘The skipper of the
Duchess
, eh?’ He was smiling. ‘All right, Paddy. He can come in.’ He waved his glass in invitation. ‘I wondered how long it would be before you called on us.’
‘You knew I was here?’
‘Oh, sure. Word of a stranger gets around pretty fast in a place like this. Come on in and have a drink. You’re out of a job, I hear.’ The same brash, breezy manner, but there was something in the eyes, an uneasiness, and the cheerful smile seemed somehow forced. ‘Come on. You don’t hold it against me that I’ve got the
North Star
contract now, do you?’
I stepped into the narrow hallway full of stuffed seabirds in glass cases. ‘The old man’s gone to bed,’ he said, leading me through into the lamplit room where a quiet bearded man sat at a table littered with glasses and the remains of a meaL ‘Whisky?’ Sandford picked up a bottle and poured me a drink without waiting for an answer. ‘We’re short of a skipper. Interested?’ There was a peat fire burning in the grate, and it was warm, his round smooth face shining with perspiration as he handed me the drink, small eyes watchful, waiting for some reaction.
‘You offering me a job?’ I asked. The whisky was colourless, a home brew from some local still.
‘Could be. It depends.’
‘On what?’
‘How badly you need it.’
‘I didn’t come here for a job,’ I said. ‘And I didn’t come to see you. I came to see the man who calls himself Mouat.’
His eye flickered towards the farther door, the uneasiness there again, and his face changing, a hardening of the mouth, ‘I told you, he’s gone to bed.’
I moved to the farther door then, something he hadn’t expected, and before he could stop me I had thrown it open.
The old man was sitting there, in a wing chair, a lamp beside him and a book open on his lap. The gashed side of his head was in shadow, so that all I saw was the smooth transparent skin of an older version of the face that stared at me every time I shaved. The likeness vanished when he turned his head, but the shock of that moment of recognition was so great that I didn’t resist the grip of hands seizing hold of me.
‘Let him be, Ian.’ His voice was very quiet, his eyes glinting in the lamplight, a searching stare. ‘He knows who I am. I can see it written all over his face.’ They let me go then and I stood there, feeling numb as he went on, ‘It’s something of a shock, isn’t it – at your age to find your father isn’t safely dead and buried?’
Was there a note of bitterness there, of regret? ‘Who put that plaque in Grundsound Church?’ I asked, my voice so choked it was almost a whisper.
He contrived a smile that was more of a grimace. ‘I did. Or rather I arranged for it to be placed there.’ The twist of his mouth gave a curious lisp to his words. ‘Leave us alone now, Ian. We have much to talk about – and things must be said that I’d rather you didn’t hear.’
But Sandford stood there, frowning angrily and unwilling to leave us. He didn’t trust me and the old man laughed. ‘The two of you, here together with me for the first time. We should kill the fatted calf.’ That ghastly smile and the blue eyes gleaming wickedly up at me in the lamplight. ‘You met Anna, I believe –
Anna Sandford in Hamnavoe.’ His eyes slid away from me, still with that terrible smile twisting his face, and I turned and stared at Ian Sandford, knowing now what it was he had meant with that reference to the prodigal returned. Christ Almighty! Two sides of the same coin, and I was looking at the other half, wondering how much of the same blood each of us had, whether hidden behind the smooth roundness of my half-brother’s face was the same devil of self-doubt.
I was alone with my father in that room for about an hour. It was a difficult, very disturbing interview, for the twisted features, that terrible gash left by the shell splinter that had ploughed the side of his skull, shocked me deeply. It had marked all the left cheek, split the ear and cut deep into the side of his head, and the wired up remains of his jaw gave a lisp to his speech. Yet he wasn’t a man you could pity. He was too withdrawn, too self-contained. And old though he was, he still had some of the fire that had driven him to fight for a cause he admitted he knew was lost before ever he had embarked for Spain.
‘That plaque?’ I asked him.
‘What about it?’
‘Making out that you were dead when you weren’t. What was the point?’
‘You have your mother’s tidy mind,’ he said harshly. ‘How is she, by the way?’
‘She died about two years ago.’
He didn’t say he was sorry, just shrugged as though accepting the inevitability of death. ‘But there’s something of me in you, too, isn’t there?’ He smiled, grimacing. ‘You see, I’ve checked up on you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why not? You’re my son, aren’t you? As soon as Ian told me …’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve been expecting you, knowing you were bound to come.’ He leaned a little forward. ‘What brought you to Shetland seeking out my past? It wasn’t affection or filial regard. It was something else. Something you’d been told?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
I tried to explain, but it wasn’t easy with him sitting there smiling crookedly. He was remote, a stranger, and I sensed an underlying hostility as I told him of the doubts that had gradually ended my early admiration for him.