Sabbathman (54 page)

‘And your mum?’ Kingdom said again.

‘She got pneumonia. She had no reserves, no strength at all. She smoked like a chimney. Thin as a rake.’ He paused, taking the empty cup from Kingdom. ‘She died in Portree Hospital two days after Dave brought her in. He wasn’t even with her when she went. Broke his heart. Believe me.’

Kingdom looked away, thinking of Ernie again. ‘Yeah,’ he said, getting to his feet, ‘I can imagine.’

They climbed for another hour, skirting one peak then traversing the head of a valley before beginning another ascent towards the next summit. The blanket of cloud was thicker now and a steady rain had set in by the time they reached the top. Andy was fifty yards ahead, a shadow in the enveloping mist. He’d stopped beside a cairn of stones. Kingdom joined him, breathing hard. Every bone in his body ached. He’d never felt so tired in his life. He looked round. To his right, there was a sheer drop of scree and rock face and tendrils of straggling heather. The view, if you chose the right day, must have been sensational.

‘This it?’ Kingdom asked. ‘Sgurr Fasach?’

Andy shot him a glance, at once proud and faintly shy. ‘No,’ he said, ‘change of plan.’

Andy was looking at the cairn now, and for the first time Kingdom saw the flowers. They looked fresh, half a dozen roses in
a hideous green vase. Andy was down on his knees, rearranging them.

Kingdom caught his eye as he looked up. ‘Your mum?’

Andy nodded. ‘She’s buried down near the house,’ he said, ‘but Dave always wanted to build a memorial. This was perfect, his favourite run.’

‘Run?’

‘Yeah. Dave used to run a lot. Still does. He’s got various circuits, various routes, but this one has always been tops.’

Kingdom gazed at the flowers, remembering the path up, how rough it was, how slippery, the endless climbs, the sudden descents, the way the mountains played tricks with you, teasing you, offering crest-line after crest-line, each one more definitely the summit, testing your will to breaking point. Today, at a steady plod, it had taken nearly three hours. So what fuelled Dave Gifford? What drove him on? He put the question to Andy.

‘Mum,’ he said simply, ‘though he’d never admit it.’

They took a different path back, following a track that plunged towards the sea, turned inland again, then doubled back on itself, offering yet another view of the island of Soay. They were still hundreds of feet up and Kingdom could just make out the shapes of the three returning canoes, red matchsticks on the slate-grey water. Going down the mountain was hard on the knees but took much less physical effort and Kingdom was able to sustain a conversation for most of the way.

The last straw for Dave Gifford had evidently been the building of the new bridge from Skye to the mainland. Not only would the bridge bring tourists by the thousand but it was also privately built and owned, an affront – in Dave’s eyes – to everything the island had represented. The tolls would go to some remote bunch of shareholders hundreds of miles south. They had no connection with the island. They belonged to a world of company boardrooms, and expense account lunches, and sleek women. Skye, with its silence and its peace and its bare, clean, windswept spaces was – quite literally – none of their business.

Dave had done his best to stop the bridge being built. He’d written letters to the press, lobbied his local MP, contacted the Department of Transport. When none of that had worked, when
many of the locals had gone on swallowing all the yatter about boosts to tourism and a new dawn for the island’s economy, he’d begun to brood about guerrilla action. In a way, thought Kingdom, the bridge was the same kind of issue as Twyford Down, a threat to something rare and irreplaceable, another victory for the remorseless onward march of the men with the money and the power and the influence. In his prime, said Andy, none of these things had mattered to Dave Gifford. He was far too busy building his own little idyll to worry about the real world. But when
An Carraig
was prospering, when he himself had become part of what he hated so much, then he’d turned abruptly against it with a passion that was all the fiercer for being so frustrated. No one had listened to him. The bridge was nearly complete. Skye, his Skye, would be an island no more.

They were halfway down the mountain, the track running parallel to the sea, the little cove of
An Carraig
clearly visible a couple of miles down the coast. Listening to Andy talking about Dave Gifford and the bridge, Kingdom had wondered how much of his father’s passion he shared. They were walking slowly now, Kingdom trying to spare his blistered heels.

‘So what will you do,’ he said, ‘the pair of you?’

‘Sell up.’

‘Is that easy?’

‘We’ve had offers. Nothing wonderful, but offers. There’s another guy flying up from London tomorrow. He’s only just got in touch. Seems to know all about us, though. Which helps.’

‘And once you’ve sold?’

Andy paused, stooping to tug at one of his socks. ‘New Zealand,’ he said. ‘Dad’s idea. He thinks it’s a bigger version of here. Without the bridge, of course.’

‘And is he right, do you think? Will it sort him out? Do the trick?’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Andy grinned. ‘But getting there should be fun. We’re after a yacht. Something half-decent.’

‘Was that what this morning was all about? The one Dave showed you?’

‘Yes.’ Andy kicked each boot against a rock, loosening some of the mud caked underneath. ‘He can’t resist interfering. That’s his
problem. We’ve spent the last couple of months looking at yachts, you know, doing it the sensible way, going from marina to marina, doing the thing properly, coming up with a short list, all that. Yet still he writes off for all these bits and pieces, special offers, bargain boats, anything that catches his eye. Mr Impulse. Mr Fidget. Just can’t leave it alone …’

Kingdom was watching the canoes again. He could see the two girls now, plump black dots paddling hard against the current.

‘So you’ve been away a lot,’ he said lightly, ‘the pair of you?’

‘Yeah, since the start of September.’ Andy gave each foot one last stamp, nodding along the coast, back towards
An Carraig
. ‘Closed everything down completely. First time for five years.’

Inexplicably, the path began to climb again. The rain had stopped now but they were off the rockier slopes of the mountain and the stands of heather on either side of the narrow track brushed wetly against their legs as they passed by. Up ahead, Andy had stopped again. He was standing on a grassy plateau overlooking the approaches to
An Carraig
. Away to the left, at the back of the tiny white house, Kingdom could just make out Dave Gifford hanging up a line of washing. Andy was watching him, too. Kingdom joined him on the edge of the sheer drop. The wind was picking up and there were seagulls below them, side-slipping lazily in towards the cliff-face.

Andy glanced across at Kingdom.
‘Chez moi,’
he said.

Kingdom followed his pointing finger. Behind them, hidden from the path, was a simple wooden hut. It was a decent size, about eighteen feet square, with a pitched roof covered in bitumen felt. The clapboard walls had recently been painted with creosote and the windows on either side of the stable door were picked out in white. Wires stretched tight over the roof were secured to stakes driven deep into the rock, a testament – Kingdom assumed – to the strength of the wind.

Kingdom gazed at it a moment, trying to calculate its position relative to the path he had taken last night. The light, he thought, hanging in the darkness. ‘You live here?’

Andy nodded. ‘Yes. And I built it, too. Everything hand-carried up the hill. Took forever.’

‘And you sleep here at night?’

‘Of course.’

Andy led him to the front door. It opened without a key. Inside was a bed, a chest of drawers, and a table underneath one of the two front windows. On the table was a manual typewriter and a pile of manuscript. Around the manuscript was a litter of books and maps and sepia photos of the kind that Kingdom had already seen on the walls of
An Carraig
.

‘What do you use for light?’

‘This.’

A Tilley lamp hung on a hook on the back of the door. Andy took it off and shook it gently. Kingdom could hear the paraffin slurping in the reservoir beneath the wick.

‘And heat?’

Andy nodded at the chest of drawers. ‘Sweaters,’ he said, ‘and thermal underwear.’

‘Water?’

‘There’s a spring up in the rocks. Behind the hut. You can drink it, wash in it, whatever. No problem.’

Kingdom smiled, fascinated. If you were after the simple life, this was as perfect a setting as you’d ever find. For the second time that day he began to wonder about the years that separated father and son. The gap, he thought, was infinitely smaller than Andy Gifford would probably admit.

Kingdom sat down at the desk, glad of the weight off his feet. The view was breathtaking, the clouds beginning to clear now, weak autumn sunshine puddling the water below, and in the distance he could just make out the still blue shadows of the mainland.

Andy had retrieved a pair of binoculars from the floor beside the chair. He gave them to Kingdom.

‘Take a look at the island,’ he said.

Kingdom racked the focus ring until a rocky beach across the Sound was pin-sharp. A pair of black heads broke the surface of the waters offshore and then disappeared again. Kingdom returned the glasses. ‘By the beach,’ he said, ‘what are they?’

Andy looked. ‘Seals,’ he said at last. ‘There’s a colony over there. The salmon farmers hate them.’

Kingdom nodded, sitting back, absorbing the view. He’d never
seen anything quite so beautiful. ‘You’re a lucky man,’ he said. ‘People would kill for this.’

Andy looked down at him, smiling, saying nothing.

Kingdom glanced at the pile of manuscript, neat lines of type. ‘You writing a book, or something?’

‘Yes.’

‘About what?’

Andy turned away, opening the top half of the stable door, leaning out, suddenly diffident, not wanting to talk about it. When Kingdom asked again, he shrugged. The book was an experiment, he said. He’d based it on a true story. Back in the eighteenth century a ship called the
William
had arrived off Skye. Her master evidently had a contract to rid the island of various miscreants but instead of rounding up the thieves and vagabonds, he’d simply kidnapped a hundred or so locals, bound them hand and foot, and thrown them in the hold. On the plantations of North America, they’d fetch a high price.

Kingdom was looking hard at a line of typescript. ‘As what?’ he said.

‘As slaves.’

‘And they went?’

‘No. First they escaped from the ship. Then they were recaptured and taken on board again. The captain’s name was Davison. He ordered his men to teach them a lesson. Some of them were beaten unconscious. By this point he was ready to sail but the locals staged an insurrection and appealed to the clan chief. They wanted Davison and his employer arrested. The employer was the key to it, a man called Macleod. Without him, Davison would never have arrived in the first place.’

Kingdom was examining a second sheet now, no less attentive. ‘So what happened,’ he said, ‘to Mr Macleod?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘The magistrate had to answer to the clan chief.’

‘And what was his name?’

‘Macleod.’

Andy stepped back into the room, closing the stable door behind him. The smile on his face had gone. He looked, if anything, resigned, a man for whom life and history no longer held any surprises.

‘I’m afraid you’re on your own tomorrow,’ he said softly. ‘I’m over to Inverness to pick up our friend from London.’

Kingdom awoke in the bunkhouse next morning with the sun in his eyes. He turned over, sheltering beneath a corner of the sheet, wondering whether he could summon the strength to make it through to the lavatories next door. When he tried, easing his long frame over the edge of the bunk, it was an effort to make his legs even bend. Ten hours’ sleep had turned the aches and pains into an enveloping stiffness. His legs felt armour-plated, almost alien, as if they belonged to someone else, and both heels were badly blistered.

Kingdom limped across the bare wooden floor. He had the bunkhouse to himself now. Both the girls and the American student had begged lifts from Andy, leaving at first light. By now, they should be almost in Inverness.

Shaved and dressed, Kingdom made his way to the house. One of the dogs met him at the door, jumping up and barking as he pushed past. In the kitchen, he found Dave Gifford. He was on his hands and knees on the tile-patterned lino, mopping away with a floor cloth. He barely glanced up as Kingdom appeared in the open doorway. He was wearing the tracksuit bottoms again with a sweatshirt on top, and his face had an unyielding, determined look, as if someone was trying to distract him. On the rack over the cooking range hung a newly-washed red singlet and a pair of khaki shorts.

‘Been running?’ Kingdom inquired cheerfully.

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Up in the mountains?’

‘Yeah.’

Kingdom asked about breakfast. He felt, he said, incredibly hungry. The mountains again. Their fault.

‘You went up with Andy?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Productive?’

‘Immensely.’

Dave Gifford looked up. Kingdom could see the ring at the base of his neck where the leathery windburn stopped and the paler flesh began.

‘What about today?’ he said. ‘You want company? Only Hughie …’

Kingdom had found the frying pan now, and the cupboard where Andy kept the eggs. Self-help was clearly one of
An Carraig
’s charms.

‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘I’m off out by myself. Andy was marvellous. Told me everything I needed to know.’

‘He did?’

‘Yes.’ Kingdom poured oil into the frying pan. ‘Give or take.’

It was nearly eleven before Kingdom left
An Carraig
. After breakfast, he’d returned to the bunkhouse, packing the day-sack again. Under the sandwiches and the flask of tea, he’d stowed his camera, the mobile telephone, and the address book where he’d stored all the key numbers. Beside it, wrapped in a T-shirt, was the Browning Hi-Power he’d brought over from the mainland. The automatic was fully loaded, and he had two spare clips of ammunition.