Over the Sea to Death Read online

  ‘You’re going to the youth hostel.’

  It was a casual assumption. His hand moved to the ignition key but he was looking at the mountains across the glen.

  ‘I’m going to the camp site.’

  He twisted in his seat. ‘Meeting someone there?’

  ‘That’s hardly our business,’ Lavender observed pointedly.

  ‘You don’t seem to be able to take care of yourself,’ he grumbled. Suddenly, back in the car, he felt a wave of claustrophobia and remembered that he’d lost a day’s climbing—at his age never to be recovered. It couldn’t be recovered at any age, but time was unbelievably precious once one had passed fifty.

  ‘I guess, when I throw myself on your mercy like this,’ Terry was saying, ‘that it could be your business what becomes of me.’

  ‘You’re making us responsible for you?’ Lavender asked in astonishment. Maynard switched on the ignition and started down the road.

  ‘Hell,’ the girl said. ‘Old people are always getting in a state about me.’

  He winced but recovered quickly. ‘They’ve got good cause. Suppose the mist had come down on the moor. What would you have done?’

  ‘It wouldn’t. I got a lift with a fellow who lives here and he said it would stay fine tonight. Anyway, he’d have come and looked for me.’

  ‘How enchanting. What fellow was that?’

  ‘Willie MacNeill.’

  ‘Oh, Lord!’ His eyes met hers in the mirror and she winked at him. ‘How old are you?’ he asked curiously.

  ‘Nineteen.’ She was prim.

  Lavender asked coolly: ‘What are you proposing to do in Glen Shira?’

  ‘I’m joining a friend.’

  ‘Another one?’

  In the silence he thought: Go on: elaborate, dear. Tell the girl you meant she’s being passed from hand to hand. . . .

  Terry was saying pleasantly: ‘I didn’t know Willie before he picked me up. The only friend I’ve got here is the one I’ve come to see.’

  ‘You’re wrong there,’ he said firmly, ‘you’ve got me.’

  Lavender gasped. ‘What?’

  ‘This child,’ he said with mock-seriousness, ‘is one of Nature’s innocents. And this glen—’ he glanced at his wife and he wasn’t smiling, ‘—in a heat-wave, is a curious place.’ But he chuckled at Terry in the mirror and she smiled a little wearily. ‘You don’t know Skye, do you? There are some funny people in Glen Shira, my dear; you could do with one more friend than the one you have already, you particularly.’ He paused, wondering if she was aware of her own beauty. ‘Who is he, by the way?’ No one thought of Terry as having women friends.

  ‘His name’s George Watkins. Do you know him?’

  Lavender turned again and stared at her. ‘The guide?’

  ‘Yes. You do know him then?’

  ‘We know him.’ Ken’s voice was flat. ‘Like I said: you need friends, dear.’

  Chapter Two

  Melinda Pink, J.P. was sitting in her modest Austin at the top of the ramp leading down to the Sound of Sleat. Hers was the first car in the queue and standing beside her open window was a young man with flowing hair restrained by a brow-band which, with his deep tan and sombre eyes and the fact that the hair was silky and bleached almost white, gave him the air of a Palomino pony. Beside him on the cobbles was a tall heavy pack. He had old boots creamed with dust, and his breeches had seen better days. Under a ragged tartan shirt he wore a pendant in twisted metal on a leather boot-lace.

  Miss Pink had exchanged a few words with him about the heat and the difficulty shown by a cormorant in trying to swallow a flatfish, and now, pouring tea from her flask, she invited him to share it. He accepted, and surveyed the contents of the car: the olive anorak on the back seat, a small, practical rucksack. His eyes considered her cropped grey hair and owlish spectacles.

  ‘Are you climbing?’ he asked tentatively.

  ‘I’m going to Glen Shira. Can I give you a lift?’

  With alacrity he stowed his pack in the boot and settled himself in the passenger’s seat. A strong odour of sweat came in with him. He said he had been climbing on Ben Nevis for two days and that he had a cottage in Glen Shira. She asked him if he lived on Skye all the year round.

  ‘No, just for the summer.’ There was a pause. ‘I do some guiding when I can get the custom.’ He caught her quick look and smiled. ‘I’m not certificated.’ When she made no comment he continued, ‘Do you think guides should be slaves to bits of paper?’

  ‘You’ve got to protect the public. I’m strongly against incompetent men setting themselves up as guides and putting foolish clients at risk. The public is extraordinarily trusting where dangerous activities are concerned.’

  ‘There are bad guides.’

  ‘Qualified, you mean? With certificates?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  He was grim. Miss Pink’s mental ears were pricked. ‘Have you engagements in Glen Shira now?’ she asked casually.

  ‘A couple of days next week. It’s been a long season and I’ve been lucky. I had a day with a guy from Glen Shira House last week. He arrived early and had booked Madge Fraser for a fortnight but she asked me to take him till she was free. Do you know Madge?’

  ‘I don’t know her; I’ve heard of her, of course. Does she live in the glen?’

  ‘She’s not resident there. She moves about, like me—like all of us.’ There was that grim note in his voice again. ‘She’s spent most of this season in Scotland: the Ben, Glen Coe, Skye. I go out with her occasionally. She’s good.’

  ‘Ah.’ Miss Pink turned interested eyes on him. ‘Who leads?’

  ‘We lead through a lot.’

  ‘Who leads the hard pitches?’

  ‘She’s a good all-round mountaineer,’ he said firmly, ‘but she admits herself that she’s no great rock climber.’

  Miss Pink regarded the approaching ferry in astonished silence. All climbing was relative and she would have said that the routes which Madge Fraser had to her credit were very fine climbs indeed, so if this man were better, then he was good.

  The ferry docked and she was waved down the ramp and across the deck. She switched off the ignition and they stared through the windscreen at the ruined castle on the other side of the sound.

  ‘Who did you say her client was?’

  ‘This man I had earlier, Ken Maynard. He’s a bouncy little guy, lives only for climbing, and there’s nothing he won’t tackle. He could never lead, of course, which is why he takes guides, but he’s a competent second. Great company on the hill, too.’

  As he talked his mobile face shone with enthusiasm and she thought what a happy contrast he was with some of the young men she saw in the courts. Aloud she said, ‘I met Mr Maynard last year in the Lakes. You didn’t tell me your name.’

  ‘Colin Irwin.’

  ‘Mine is Pink. I live in Cornwall.’

  ‘Do you?’ His eyes lit up again. ‘I’m from Stranraer; our sea cliffs are just vertical tips.’

  ‘Granite is delightful,’ she enthused, ‘but at rather a high angle when one is getting on. I have to lower my standard on Cornish cliffs.’

  ‘Have you been climbing up here?’

  ‘I’ve just had two weeks in Sutherland and Wester Ross. If you’re free tomorrow you might like to take me up something.’

  ‘I’d be delighted.’

  They discussed the relative merits of Skye climbs and he filled in the gaps in her memory. It was many years since she’d visited Glen Shira. She had booked a room at the only hotel and now she asked him if he knew the proprietor: Mr Hamlyn.

  ‘Mister Hamlyn,’ he repeated, savouring it, and smiled. ‘Everyone in the glen calls him “the colonel”. Yes, I know him: not to speak to, of course; he wouldn’t acknowledge me. He’s been brought up in the tradition of alpine guides: a very formal crowd, call their clients “sir” and all that.’ He grinned mischievously. ‘Keep their hair short.’

  ‘Yes,’ Miss Pink said. ‘But it’s not
the appearance, is it? It’s those certificates. Regular Servicemen have etiquette drilled into them. Does he still climb?’

  ‘Occasionally. Not with me of course.’

  ‘With Madge Fraser?’

  ‘Yes. Not with Watkins.’ She said nothing. ‘George Watkins,’ he elaborated without expression. ‘He’s the other guide in the glen.’

  ‘Why doesn’t Colonel Hamlyn go out with him?’

  He looked out of his window. ‘Everything’s as dry as a bone,’ he observed. ‘That waterfall has hardly anything in it.’ Then, carelessly: ‘Watkins and the colonel? I guess they don’t get on.’ After a moment he asked: ‘What does Ken Maynard do?’

  ‘He edits a woman’s magazine.’

  ‘That explains a lot. I thought he was trying to escape from something.’ He sighed and his eyes followed a cockerel which suddenly raced across the road to a barn. ‘His wife’s very unhappy,’ he added gravely. Miss Pink slowed for a cow suckling its calf in the middle of the road. ‘Funny lot,’ he went on. ‘Then there are the Lindsays. They’re with Watkins,’ he added tightly.

  ‘Who are the Lindsays?’

  ‘Oh, another couple. But they both climb. Mrs Maynard doesn’t, you see. Perhaps that’s the trouble. But both the Lindsays climb.’ He was abstracted again. ‘That may be their trouble.’

  Ahead of them Sligachan Hotel showed at the junction of the Portree and Dunvegan roads. Miss Pink continued west, across the centre of the island at its narrowest point, and after a few miles they came to the hamlet of Drynoch.

  Below them now was Loch Harport, filling up with the tide, so full in fact that the water had pushed a trio of heron back to the weed-line. Miss Pink stopped and the birds rose and flapped lazily up the course of a burn to fish in lochans on the moor.

  ‘Midges are biting,’ she remarked, putting the car in gear. One didn’t halt for long beside a Skye loch on a September evening.

  She drove up the hill to the Shira road-end, turned hard left, and as they crossed the high moor, she watched the peaks of the Cuillin come into view, gauzy and dreaming in the sun, with the two splendid corries separated by the cone of Sgurr an Fheadain where Waterpipe Gully was a pencilled line on the rock.

  The road was narrow but where it dipped to descend steeply to the glen, there were wide hairpins, then the way reverted to a single track with passing places marked by white diamonds on posts. She remembered that somewhere about here was the start of the path going over to Sligachan. On the right was a big lay-by with a forestry track behind a gate. Below them the river bed was a string of boulders with hardly a gleam of water visible from a distance. On the other side of the glen long scree slopes ran to the top of the only dull peak in Glen Shira. A drift of warm air spiced with resin came through the open windows.

  They crossed the river by way of a wooden bridge which rattled under the wheels. Now the road twisted among heathery humps and far ahead the sky seemed brighter and the light of a different cast: softer perhaps, as if it held another quality from that inland—if anywhere could be termed inland on an island that was nowhere more than a few miles from the sea.

  A tall square structure appeared: the youth hostel. Figures moved about it: all young except for an elderly collie. There were towels and swim suits on washing lines, and a few dusty cars. Cattle replaced sheep on the road, and the woods of Glen Shira came into view: sycamores and birches with the odd redwood spired above the canopy. From road-level the trees hid the mouth of the glen and, but for the curious light and the tang of weed (scarcely noticed because it is seldom lost on the island), one would never have guessed that the Atlantic lay within half a mile.

  Irwin asked to be set down before they reached the woods. ‘That’s my place.’ He indicated a shabby cottage on the far bank of the river. ‘That’s Largo,’ he added with pleasure. ‘Maybe I’ll go out and get some fish for supper.’

  ‘It’ll soon be dark.’

  He smiled. ‘But that’s nice: fishing in the dark. I’ll take you out one night.’

  After she’d dropped him she continued to a gateway and a notice by a cattle grid which said, glen shira house private. A gravel drive wound through glades where sycamore trunks sprouted lichen like plastic lettuce leaves. As a walled garden came in view on her left, the trees thinned and the house appeared, raised a few feet on a knoll. It was shabby, large and roughly square, with a porch crowned by concrete castellations. A figure moved behind a window and a man stepped out on the gravel sweep.

  Miss Pink, suddenly assuming the protective role of the elderly spinster and blinking with what might have been nervousness, saw a tall and well-preserved man in his sixties who, from his bearing, could only be the colonel: Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Hamlyn (Rtd). He wore a soft shirt the colour of mud, a club tie and shapeless trousers in expensive tweed. His hair was short and his moustache clipped. His eyes were blue and he regarded her with a belligerent stare. The impression was that he was over-playing the role and she could only pray that he would turn out to be amusing.

  He gave a welcoming bark. ‘Miss Pink, ma’am! We are delighted to see you safe and sound.’ She felt as if she’d galloped down the Khyber in front of Afghan hordes. She blinked at a string of molehills on the lawn and said she was delighted to be there.

  He carried her bags upstairs. The walls were hung with swords and sabres, daggers, a pair of Gurkha kukri, various firearms. He showed her to her room and retreated with a flourish, bowing. She suspected that she was the oldest guest and he assumed he’d found a kindred spirit.

  They had put her on a south-west corner and she had two windows; one, a bay with a window seat, looked over the lawn and a meadow to miles of shining sea, the Isle of Canna and the cliffs of Rum. Through the other she was startled to see Colin Irwin, across the river, feeling for the key above the lintel of Largo’s door. She watched him enter, to emerge in a moment without his pack and carrying a bucket. He went to a burn which, from this distance, was nothing more than a line of stones. On its northern bank the conifers, which stretched all the way down the western side of the glen, climbed to the skyline.

  She turned to her room. One corner had been partitioned for a bathroom which was in itself commodious, yet it left enough space that the massive Victorian furniture was not obtrusive. The colour scheme was off-white with touches of plum and sage-green. The ceiling was high, drawers ran as if on ball bearings, the bath water was scalding hot. There remained only the food. That, and the colonel’s lady, were unknown quantities. So were the other guests, but at the moment Miss Pink’s thoughts were concentrated on her dinner and she hoped devoutly that Mrs Hamlyn could cook.

  *

  It was no forlorn hope. As she went downstairs there was a smell of herbs, hot wine and roasting mutton. She was in nice time for sherry. Voices guided her to a large room with a wide window and a bar. A group of people stood at the bar and a man detached himself, extending his hand. She recognised Ken Maynard.

  He introduced her to his wife, a thin woman perched with a youthful air on a bar stool. Lavender Maynard might have been a striking redhead once but now her hair was deeply tinted above the face of an ageing squirrel. She wore a bright green jersey sheath which emphasised her sharp angles distressingly.

  The other woman in the room was introduced as Betty Lindsay. She was large and solid with a loud voice, lavish gestures and unquiet eyes. Her husband was small and preoccupied. As he took Miss Pink’s hand, his lips did little more than twitch in the semblance of a smile.

  She accepted sherry from Maynard and remarked that she understood Madge Fraser was staying at the hotel. He nodded, his warm brown eyes fixed on hers. Behind him Lavender stiffened. Miss Pink realised that she should have tested the temperature first. Her eyes wandered vaguely to Hamlyn who was emptying an ash tray. Betty Lindsay said: ‘The energy of that girl! And she’s not all that young—’

  ‘And a mother.’ For some reason, perhaps an impediment, Lavender threw her voice so that every syllable appeared to be jerked
out of her. At first hearing this was painful and embarrassing, and Miss Pink looked vacuous as she observed that even grandmothers climbed nowadays. She glanced at Hamlyn who responded roguishly.

  ‘In my opinion it is the older people who have the energy, ma’am, but then, they’re the ones who enjoy life.’ His face fell. ‘I’m very depressed when I look at today’s youngsters; it’s not just their long hair and the terrible manners—it’s their aimlessness. We had to work to make our way in the world; these actually prefer to live on National Assistance!’

  Murmured agreement came from Maynard. ‘There’s no discipline,’ he assured Miss Pink earnestly.

  She recognised the game immediately. He was a bear-baiter—but apparently Hamlyn was not unaware of this.

  ‘That’s a generalisation,’ their host admitted, referring to his own comments, ‘not all youngsters are layabouts—’ he regarded Maynard distantly, ‘—not all adults are useful members of society.’

  ‘How right you are,’ Lavender put in, addressing the end of her cigarette.

  Betty Lindsay came in with a rush: ‘You missed a fabulous climb today, Ken. Didn’t he, Andy?’

  Her husband nodded. She hesitated, then went on, to the company generally: ‘Archer Thompson’s Route; it’s a classic.’

  ‘George didn’t think much of it,’ Lindsay said.

  ‘Oh, Andy! George was miserable because we had to walk three miles to the cliff! He thought it was wasted climbing time.’

  ‘Rock gymnast,’ Hamlyn muttered.

  ‘Gymnast? Watkins?’ Maynard was clowning again. ‘You have to be joking.’

  Lindsay turned on him furiously. ‘He leads harder stuff than you’ll ever be hauled up!’

  ‘Led them once,’ the other corrected, unperturbed. ‘In his remote youth. But even there, you’ve only got his word for it. I doubt if George ever did anything harder than a Severe—with a following wind.’

  Betty hooted with laughter. Lindsay’s face, which had been quite pale to begin with, was flushed and ugly. Miss Pink moved across the room to contemplate Sgurr Alasdair and Sgumain: a far vista beyond the end of a rough avenue of trees. In the sunset the black rock had a magenta tint and she remained there, staring, while behind her the colonel remarked judiciously: ‘Watkins was never a brilliant climber, Andrew; I doubt if he would get his certificates in these days. The tests are pretty searching.’