Wildfire at Midnight (23 page)

With a heave and a jerk I dragged myself onto the wider ledge that marked the second step. And, inexorably, the next perpendicular barred my way, this time gashed from summit to foot by a vertical crack, or chimney. I flew at this, only to be brought up short as I saw that the rock on which I stood was a stack, a chunk split off the main buttress, and between me and the next upright there yawned a gap which dropped sheer away to the level of the scree.

The gap was perhaps four feet wide, no more. And at the other side, on one wall of the chimney was a smallish, triangular ledge, above which a deep crevice held a slash of shadow.

There was my handhold, there the ledge for my feet, if I could only get across that dreadful gap. . . . But I was nearly foundered, and I knew it. My breath was coming in painful gasps; I had knocked one of my feet; my hands were bleeding.

I hesitated there, on the brink of the split in the rock. Then I heard the rattle of pebbles behind me—close behind. I turned, a terrified thing at bay, my eyes desperately searching for another way off the top of the stack. To left, to right, a sheer drop of thirty feet to the scree. Before me, the chasm. A hand swung up over the edge of the platform where I stood. A dark-gold head rose after it. Mad blue eyes, rinsed of all humanity, stared into mine.

I turned and leaped the gap without a second's thought. I landed on the little ledge. My knee bumped rock, but I hardly felt it as my hands, clawing wildly, found a safe anchorage in the crevice above. Then my knee was in the crevice. With a heave and a wriggle I pulled my body up to it, and was in the chimney, which was narrow enough to let me wedge myself against one side of it while I sought for holds in the other. I swarmed up it like a chimney boy whose master had fit a fire beneath him.

Then my hand slid into a deep grip; I braced myself and with one last heave, one final convulsion, dragged myself out of the chimney and onto a deep ledge sheltered by an overhang.

And this time I was cornered. I knew it. Even if I could have climbed the overhang that bulged above me, the impulse had given out; nature had swung back on me. I was finished. And the place where I now found myself was no more than a ledge of rock, some four feet by ten, piled with small boulders and blazing with bell heather.

I crouched among the scented flowers and peered down.

Roderick was standing twenty feet below me at the edge of the gap, his convulsed face lifted to mine. His breathing was ragged and horrible. I saw the sweat gleaming on his flushed cheekbones, and on the knuckles of the hand in which he held the knife.. ..

I screamed then. The sound splintered against the rocks into a million jarring, tearing echoes that ripped the silence of the afternoon into tatters. The raven swept out from high above me with a frightened bark.

Something flashed past my cheek with the whistle of a whiplash. The wind of it seared my face. Roderick's knife struck the cliff behind me, and shattered into a hundred little tinkling notes that were whirled into the bellow of the echo as I screamed again.

The empty rock flung my terror back at me, hollow, reverberating. The raven swung up, yelling, into the empty blue air. Away to the west, in the greater emptiness, the Cuillin dreamed on indifferently. I crouched in my eyrie high above the sea of cloud, an insignificant insect clinging to a crack in a wall.

Roderick swore harshly below me, and his now empty hands lifted, the fingers crooked like claws.

"I'm coming up," he said on a savage, breathless note, and I saw his knees flex for the leap across the gap.

My fingers scrabbled at the heather, caught up a big jagged rock, and held it poised on the brink of the ledge.

"Keep off!" My voice was a croak. "Stay where you are, or I'll smash your head in!"

He glanced up again, and I saw him recoil half a pace. Then he laughed, and with the laugh the whole situation split up, and re-formed into a yet crazier pattern, for the laughter was genuine and full of amusement. From the face he lifted to me, all the savagery had been wiped clean; it held the familiar gaiety and charm, and—yes, affection.

He said ruefully: "I broke my knife, Janet. Let me come up."

I held onto the rags of my own sanity. "No! Stay where you are or I'll throw this down on you!"

He shook the hair out of his eyes. "You wouldn't do a thing like that, Janet darling," he said, and leaped the gap like a deer.

Then he was standing on the little triangular ledge below me, one hand locked in the crevice. I saw his muscles tense as he prepared to heave himself up the chimney after me.

His head was back; his blue eyes held mine.

"You couldn't do a thing like that, could you?" he said.

And, God help me, I couldn't. My fingers clutched the jagged boulder. I lifted it, ready to heave it down . . . but something held me—the imagined impact of rock on flesh, the smashing of bone and eyes and hair into a splintered nothing ... 1 couldn't do it. I turned sick and dizzy, and the rock slipped from my hands back onto the ledge among the flowers.

"No," I said, and I put out both my hands as if to ward off the sight of the violence I could not do. "No—I can't. . . ."

He laughed again, and I saw the knuckles of his left hand whiten for the upward pull. Then something smashed into the rock not six inches from his head. The report of the gun slammed against the echoing mountain with a roar like an express bursting from a tunnel.

"Don't worry, Gianetta, I can," said Nicholas grimly, and fired again.

ONLY THEN DID I BECOME AWARE that, a little way to the north, the edge of the mist was broken and swirling at last, as men thrust out of it and began to race along the hillside: the Inspector, Hecky, Neill, and Jamesy Farlane, all making at the double for the foot of the stack.

Nicholas, well ahead of them, had already reached the base of the buttress. The slam of his second shot tore the echoes apart, and now the rock by Roderick's hand splintered into fragments. I heard the whine of the ricocheting bullet, and I saw Roderick flinch and, momentarily, freeze against the rock.

The other men, running at a dangerous pace along the scree, had almost come up with Nicholas. I heard the Inspector shout something.

Roderick half turned on his little ledge, braced himself for an instant, then flung himself, from a stand, back across the gap between the ledge and the stack. The nails of his boots ripped screaming along the rocky platform, then they gripped. In the same moment I heard the scrape and clink of boots as the pursuers, spreading out, started to climb the north face of the buttress.

Roderick paused for an instant, balanced, as it were, in mid-flight on the top of the stack. The sun glinted on his gold hair as he glanced quickly this way, that way. . . . Then he leaped for the south side of the stack, swung himself over, and disappeared from view.

Someone yelled. Hecky was half up a lower step of the buttress, and had seen him. ! saw him cling and point, shouting, before he addressed himself even more desperately to the cliff.

But Roderick had a good start, and he climbed like a chamois. In less time than it takes to tell, 1 saw him dart out onto the scree south of the buttress, and turn downhill. He was making for the mist, with that swift leaping stride of his, and I heard the Inspector curse as he, too, started to run downhill

But Nicholas had moved faster. He must have heard Roderick jump down onto the scree, for only a few seconds after he began his dash for the shelter of the mist, Nicholas had turned and started down the north side of the buttress.

From my dizzy eyrie, I could see them both. To that incredible day, the race provided as fantastic a climax as could well be imagined. There was the great dike, swooping down the side of the mountain, to lose itself in the sea of fog; and there, on either side of it, ran hunter and hunted, law and outlaw, slithering, leaping, glissading down the breakneck scree in a last mad duel of speed.

Once, Roderick slipped, and fell to one knee, saving himself with his hands. Nicholas gained four long strides before he was up again and hurtling downhill, unhurt, to gain the shelter of the mist. Not far to go now.. . thirty yards, twenty.. . the buttress had dwindled between them to a ridge, a low wall; . . then Roderick saw Nicholas, and swerved, heading for safety at an angle away from him.

I saw Nicholas thrust out a foot, and brake to slithering ski turn in a flurry of loose shale. Something gleamed in his hand.

The Inspector's yell came from somewhere out of sight below me. "Don't use that gun!"

The gun flashed down into the heather as Nicholas put a hand to the low dike and vaulted it. Roderick gave one quick glance over his shoulder, and in three great bounds reached the margin of the mist. It swirled and broke around his bolting form, then swallowed him into invisibility.

Twenty seconds later the same patch swayed and broke as Nicholas thrust into it, and vanished.

Then, all around me, the cliffs and the clear blue air swung and swayed, dissolving like the mist itself. The scent of the heather enveloped me, sickening-sweet as the fumes of ether, and the sunlight whirled into a million spinning flecks of light, a vortex into which, helpless, I was being sucked. An eddy, a whirlpool. . . and I was in it. I was as light as a cork, as light as a feather, as insubstantial as blown dust. . . .

Then out of the spinning chaos came Inspector Mackenzie's voice, calm, matter-of-fact, and quite near at hand.

He said: "Wake up, lassie, it's time we got you down from there."

I found that my hands were pressed to my eyes. I took them away, and the boiling light slowly cleared. The world swung back into place, and I looked down.

Inspector Mackenzie was on the top of the stack, standing where Roderick had stood, and Jamesy Farlane was with him. "How in the world did you get up there, anyway?"

I don't remember," I said truthfully. I sat there on my cushion of heather and looked down at the two men, feeling suddenly absurd. "I—I can't get down, Inspector."

He was brisk. "Well, lassie, you'll have to be fetched. Stay where you are." The pair of them became busy with ropes, and then Jamesy approached my cliff. He got across the gap with ludicrous ease, and paused there, examining the chimney.

The Inspector, I saw, was looking back over his shoulder.

"Nicholas—" I said hoarsely, but he cut me short.

"Hoots awa' wi' ye"—it was the one conventionally Scottish expression that I ever heard him use—"don't worry about that. Hecky and Neill both went after him, as you'd have seen if you hadn't been so busy fainting. Your man's safe enough, my dear."

And, even he finished speaking, I saw Nicholas come slowly up out of the mist. He moved stiffly, like a very tired man, but he seemed to be unhurt. He raised his head and looked up towards us, then quickened his pace, lifting a hand in some sort of gesture which I could not interpret, but which seemed to satisfy the Inspector, for he grunted, and gave a little nod as he turned back to watch Jamesy's progress.

I cannot pretend that I was anything but an appalling nuisance to poor Jamesy, when at last he appeared beside me on the ledge with a rope, and attempted to show me how to descend from my eyrie. In fact, I can't now remember how this descent was eventually accomplished. I remember his tying the rope round me, and passing it round his own body, and round a spike of rock; I also remember a calming flood of instructions being poured over my head as I started my climb, but whether I obeyed them or not I have no idea. I suspect not; in fact, I think that for the main part of the descent he had to lower me, helplessly swinging, on the end of the rope. And since I could not possibly have jumped the gap to the stack, Jamesy lowered me straight down the other thirty feet or so into the bottom of the cleft itself. I remember the sudden chill that struck me as I passed from the sunlit chimney into the shadow of the narrow gully.

Then my feet touched the scree, and, at the same moment, someone took hold of me, and held me hard.

I said: "Oh, Nicholas—" and everything slid away from me again into a spinning, sun-shot oblivion.

WHEN NICHOLAS DIVED into the pool of mist after Roderick, he was not much more than twenty yards behind him, and, though the mist was still thick enough to be blinding, he could hear the noise of his flight quite distinctly. It is probable that Roderick still believed Nicholas to have a gun, while he himself, having lost his knife, was unarmed; he may, too, have heard Neill and Hecky thudding down the hillside in Nicholas's wake; or he may, simply, have given way at last to panic and, once running, have been unable to stop—at any rate, he made no attempt to attack the pursuer, but fled ahead of him through the fog, until at length they reached the level turf of the glen.

Here going was easier, but soon Nicholas realized he was rapidly overhauling his quarry. Roderick, it will be remembered, had already had to exert himself considerably that afternoon, and now he flagged quickly; the panic impulse gave out and robbed him of momentum. Nicholas was closing in, fifteen yards, ten, seven... as the gap closed, panic supervened again, and Roderick turned and sprang at his pursuer out of the fog.

It was a sharp, nasty little struggle, no holds barred. It was also not quite equal, for whereas Nicholas had only, so to speak, a mandate to stop the murderer getting away, the murderer wanted quite simply to kill his pursuer if possible.

How it would have ended is hard to guess, but Neill and Hecky, guided by the sounds of the struggle, arrived in a very short time, and Roderick, fighting literally like a madman, was overpowered. And when Dougal Macrae, still breathing fire and slaughter, suddenly materialized out of the fog as well, the thing was over. Roderick, unresisting now, was taken by the three men back to the hotel, where he would be held until transport arrived. Nicholas, breathing hard, and dabbing at a cut on his cheek, watched the mist close round them, then he turned and made his way back up the hillside into the sun.

So much I had learned, sitting beside Nicholas on the heather at the foot of the buttress, with my back against its warm flank. I had been fortified with whisky and a cigarette, and was content, for the moment, to rest there in the sun before attempting the tramp back to the hotel.