Murdo's War (2 page)

Donald raised his eyebrows, then leaned across and picked up his glass.

‘Slàinte,’ he said.

‘Slàinte mhath.’

Not entirely unaccustomed to whisky, Murdo took a sip. The burning spirit filled his mouth and lungs so that he gasped, but stifled it so that the men should not see. It tasted terrible. Then a warm glow started in his chest and stole down into his belly. It was good in the cold air. He had not realised how chilled he was. Another sip and it was finished.

Lachlan, sandy-haired and twelve, built like a whippet, got none, though he was quite as cold as the men and his older brother. Hector felt inside his oilskins for a packet and passed the boy a strong fisherman’s lozenge.

‘Made for trawlermen off the North Cape,’ he said. ‘Strip your teeth down to stumps. That’s better for you than the demon drink.’ Donald rolled the whisky round his tongue and smacked his
lips appreciatively.

‘That’s good stuff,’ he wheezed. ‘Good stuff.’

Hector nodded and added a drop more to their two glasses, then set the bottle aside. ‘John-George Lyness,’ he said. ‘He knows what he’s about, that one.’

Murdo passed his own glass across.

Deliberately misunderstanding, Hector set it on the engine casing and cupped a hand about the bowl of his pipe. Fragrant smoke drifted across the lantern light. Suddenly he chuckled. ‘He’s a boy, is John-George. When we went there this morning he had it all on the jetty. Broad daylight. Thirty-four crates of whisky for all the world to see, and the police station not half a mile away.’ He shook his head. ‘And they’re hot, those Orkney bobbies, especially now with the war on.’

‘Aye, but you can be too clever, as well.’ Donald pulled a battered tobacco tin from his pocket and carefully rolled a cigarette.

‘There was something not right up there on the dunes tonight. I left the car beside yours at the graveyard. All the time I had the feeling somebody was watching us. There was another car pulled back off the road at the top end of the wall, a big black one. It wasn’t a police car – I don’t know whose it was. There was nobody in it, but I’m sure I heard someone in the graveyard. Lachlan heard it too, like footsteps – and it sounded like someone kicked a gravestone. We had a look, but we couldn’t see anything.’

‘Probably just sheep got in,’ Hector suggested.

Donald shrugged. ‘The moon wasn’t so bright and the fog was pretty thick, sure enough. It didn’t sound like a sheep, though.’

Hector picked up the three glasses and swished them clean on the dark water. Still dripping, he returned them to the locker, set the whisky bottle in a coil of rope and clipped the door shut.

‘Well, police or no police,’ he said, ‘it’s no good sitting here. Let’s get the stuff unloaded.’

They pulled back the tarpaulin. Donald and Murdo jumped down into the shallows and Hector passed each a wooden crate. They carried them a few yards up the beach and dumped them on the wet sand.

‘Can you carry one safely?’ Hector asked Lachlan.

‘Aye,’ said Lachlan.

‘Come on, then. Give them a hand.’

The boy took the crate of whisky with some effort and splashed ashore as his brother and Donald were returning. It did not take many minutes to unload the boat and soon the stack was complete, thirty-four cases of whisky stranded in the fog, far down the sands of a Highland beach.

‘You give me a hand now, Lachlan,’ Hector called. ‘We’ll take the boat round while they carry some of the cases up.’

Murdo pulled out the mooring pin and tossed the painter over the bows. Swiftly Hector coiled it down then moved to the stern as all three threw their weight against the green timbers. The
Lobster Boy
was much lighter; at once she floated free. Lachlan flung himself over the gunwale and clambered aboard as Murdo pushed the boat into deeper water.

‘Back in about twenty minutes,’ Hector called out. ‘Watch yourself now, Lachlan.’

The engine burst into life and the old boat backed out of sight into the thinning mist. Then the note changed and she put-putted away down the shore. The hazy glow from the lantern faded into darkness.

The beach was silent, save for the hissing of the waves at their feet, and a soft roar where they broke over rocks a little way off.

Murdo and Donald turned back to the crates. Each swinging one to his shoulder, they trudged up the long expanse of beach. The sand was flawless, smooth as a carpet right to the high stacks and rock buttress of the cliffs. A moment’s searching brought them to the cave, and they dropped their cases in the shadowy mouth. Donald disappeared inside, the light of his torch glimmering into the dark recesses.

The mist was definitely lifting. From time to time the moon appeared overhead and the sands were lightening. Murdo sat on one of the cases and gazed out between the stacks. He was tired and enjoyed the luxury of a huge yawn that stretched his face wide and made his ears crackle. It was followed by another.

Suddenly there was a sound down the beach – a muffled cough! Murdo’s heart leaped, his mouth snapped shut. It came from a little to the left, not fifty yards away. Frozen motionless, he stared into the mist, every fibre of his being on the alert. But he could see nothing in the shrouded darkness. There was another sound that could have been soft running footfalls, but equally could have been the wing-beats of a bird or a noise carrying a long way from one of the crofts on the headland beyond the river. Biting his lip, he took a few cautious footsteps down the sands. For a full minute he stood by an outcrop of rocks listening, eyes wide, ears straining. But there was only the noise of the sea. A slight breeze fanned his cheek and stirred his hair, a seagull cried a long way off. Nothing! He waited a moment longer, then walked quietly down to the water’s edge. Still – nothing.

Back at the cave a warm light glowed from the shadowy depths, and Donald had lifted the two boxes from the entrance. Murdo followed him inside, squeezing through the narrow neck into the inner chamber. He found the tall seaman clambering awkwardly from a rocky shelf several feet above the tumble of boulders that choked the further end. A lantern shone golden on the lip of the shelf and illuminated the scoured walls of the cave.

‘There was somebody on the beach,’ Murdo said.

‘What!’ said Donald. ‘Oh hell! Did he see you?’

Murdo told him about the cough, though he was beginning to wonder whether he had not imagined the whole thing, mistaken the cough of a sheep or a cow on the cliffs above him. He climbed to the shelf, and Donald passed him the second crate. He stacked it at the back, alongside the first one, and climbed down again. Then Donald blew out the lantern, and they made their way out of the cave to the brightening sands.

Fifty yards down the beach they came upon a line of footprints. They were tumbled, very fresh, stretching away into the darkness.

Donald swore softly in alarm.

Murdo’s heart thudded and his knees trembled. He was poised for flight. But still there was nothing – no-one. All was still. He knelt to examine the footprints, feeling them lightly with the tips of his fingers.

‘They’re not big enough for boots,’ he said, ‘and there’s no tread marks. I think he was wearing shoes, whoever it was.’

‘Aye,’ Donald said. ‘It’s not sea boots or tackety boots, anyway.’ They followed the footprints down. In a few yards they came

to a place where the sand was trampled. Clearly the intruder had been standing there for some time.

‘Perhaps he just heard something and stopped for a minute,’ Murdo suggested. ‘It might be someone staying at the inn.’

‘I don’t know,’ replied Donald. ‘I really don’t know.’ He thought for a moment. ‘It’s not the police, that’s sure. They’d have come up and caught us red-handed.’

‘Unless they’ve gone down to the stack,’ Murdo said.

Donald settled his grip on the heavy rubber torch. ‘You’re a real bundle of joy,’ he said.

Cautiously they made their way to the water’s edge. No-one was there. No prints but those of their own barred sea-boots disturbed the sand around the pile of whisky crates. The tide had turned and was now inching back in, spilling into their footprints, drawing ever closer to the stack of whisky.

‘Leave well alone,’ Donald said. ‘The quicker we get these put away, the better.’ Bending, he swung a case to his shoulder, tucked a second one awkwardly under his left arm, and started up the beach.

In a few minutes Hector and Lachlan rejoined them. They had moored the
Lobster Boy
beyond a little headland in a rocky pool that Hector sometimes used in settled weather. They lent a hand and soon the pile of crates was well hidden from prying eyes.

Hector rubbed a dew-drop from his nose. ‘I want to have a look at those footprints,’ he said.

‘Ach, leave them for now,’ said Donald. ‘Let’s get away out of here.’

Hector, scarcely up to the tall man’s shoulder, gave Murdo a mischievous wink and picked up the lantern.

The intruder’s tracks led down the beach from the direction of the graveyard. They traced them back until they were lost among the coarse grass of the dunes; they followed them down, passing the place where the man had lingered, until they vanished in the rim of the flooding tide. Forty yards on, however, the tracks reappeared, only to be lost for good where the man had climbed from the sands on to the barnacled rocks of the headland.

‘Maybe it was somebody out for a walk,’ said Lachlan, who had so often seen his own line of footprints across the same sands.

‘In the fog – on a night like this? No,’ said Hector. ‘If anyone was mad enough to go out walking tonight, he’d have stayed on the beach. But why was he hanging about and then running? See how far apart the footprints are, the way the sand’s tumbled.’

Lachlan stretched his legs in giant steps, but could not nearly compass the length of the intruder’s strides.

‘No, there was no-one down here by accident tonight. Whoever it was, he was nosing around.’ Hector scratched the back of his neck thoughtfully, then flexed his shoulders and looked quizzically at the anxious faces beside him. The lantern picked out a glint of laughter, or recklessness, in his shadowy eyes. ‘Ah well! It’s no good hanging around here, anyway. We’d best get on up to the village with some of that whisky. From what you tell me, Donald, there’s a lot of desperate men up there.’

Donald opened his mouth as if he would speak, then closed it again and shrugged helplessly.

Back at the cave, Murdo and the two men each shouldered one of the rattling crates. Lachlan, not yet strong enough to carry one the distance, pushed bottles into his pockets and thrust more beneath his jersey. Hector flashed his torch around the chamber to see that everything was safely out of sight, and led the way out to the moonlit beach.

A few last wreaths of mist shrouded the river, half a mile away across the puddled sands. Little fields on the headland were pale with frost. A line of waves glimmered white along the edge of the sea. Soon the flooding tide would cover the churned-up sand in the cave mouth. By morning it would be as smooth as a carpet once more, flawless, as though no man had trodden the beach for half a year.

Slowly they made their way along the foot of the cliffs and up into the wilderness of dunes. The men held their cases firm, but Murdo’s case cut painfully into his shoulder, so that he was con- tinually shifting it to find a more comfortable position. With an effort he kept up, and soon they were wending their way around the wall of the lonely graveyard.

Their two cars were parked in a grassy turning space by the black iron gates where the track ended. Donald, who lived in the little village of Clerkhill ten miles further west, pulled open the rear door of his well-polished Vanguard. Carefully he spread a newspaper over the green upholstery and laid the crate on top. Then he took a couple of bottles from Lachlan and pushed them into a pocket beneath the shining dashboard.

After a brief struggle, Murdo threw up the icy boot of Hector’s old Ford. It was half full of odds and ends and there was not room for the two cases of whisky. He pulled out an old pair of waders and a tin of sheep drench and pushed the rest to one side. He was just sliding the first case inside, when beyond the far corner of the graveyard a car engine whirred, then whirred again and burst into life. Startled, he looked up. A big dark car slowly backed out of the grassy siding, then drew away up the rough track towards the main road. He looked at Hector, who stared after it for a moment in silence. Then he bent and handed Murdo the second case of whisky.

MURDO DROVE THE RATTLING
old Ford. Often Hector let him take the wheel, especially at night. For a boy of his age he drove well. Disapproving, but keeping his opinion to himself, Donald followed at a safe distance behind.

The track from the graveyard to the main road was potholed and twisted, with tussocks of frozen grass between the wheel tracks. It was quite short, however, and in two or three minutes the cars drew up at the first house.

As Hector opened his door Donald wound down the window and called across. ‘I’ll not stop. Better get this lad back to his aunt or we’ll all be for it.’ He looked at the boy beside him who twisted with frustration and made a face. ‘Now stop that, Lachlan, you know I’m right. We’re more than an hour late as it is. And it’s an early start in the morning.’ He turned back to Hector. ‘The boy’s coming down with me tomorrow to see our Jessie in Edinburgh. I promised I’d give them a visit.’