To the Hilt Read online

  After a time of floating I felt their hands on me again.

  “Is he alive?”

  “No thanks to you, but yes, he is. He’s breathing.”

  “Just leave him.”

  “Chuck him over there.”

  “Over there” turned out to be the edge of the plateau, but I didn’t realize it until I’d been dragged across the stones and lifted and flung over. I went rolling fast and inexorably down the steep mountain slope, almost bouncing from rock to rock, still incapable of helping myself, unable to stop, dimly aware of my body flooding with whirling comprehensive pain.

  I slammed down onto a larger rock and did stop there, half on my side, half on my stomach. I felt no gratitude. I felt pulverized. Winded. Dazed. Thought vanished.

  Some sort of consciousness soon came crazily back, but orderly memory took much longer.

  Those bastard hikers, I thought eventually. I remembered their faces. I could draw them. They were demons in a dream.

  The accurate knowledge of who I was and where I was arrived quietly.

  I tried to move. A mistake.

  Time would take care of it, perhaps. Give it time.

  Those bastards had been real, I realized, demons or not. Their fists had been real. “Where is it?” had been real. In spite of everything, I ruefully smiled. I thought it possible that they hadn’t known what they were actually looking for. “It” could have been whatever their victim valued most. There was no guarantee in any case that delivering up “it” would save one from being thrown down a mountain.

  It occurred to me to wonder what time it was. I looked at my left wrist, but my watch had gone.

  It had been about eleven o’clock when I’d got back from the post office...

  Hell’s teeth, I thought abruptly. Mother. Ivan. Heart attack. I was supposed to be going to London. Or the moon.

  The worst thing I might feel, I considered, was nothing.

  Not the case.

  With fierce concentration, I could move all my fingers and all my toes. Anything more hurt too much for enthusiasm. Outraged muscles went into breath-stopping spasms to protect themselves.

  Wait. Lie still. I felt cold.

  Bloody stupid, being mugged on one’s own doorstep. Embarrassing. A helpless little old lady I was not, but a pushover—literally—just the same.

  I found the casual callousness of the walkers extraordinary. They had appeared not to care whether I lived or died, and had in fact left it to chance. I supposed they could truthfully say, “He was alive when we saw him last.” They could dodge the word “murder.”

  The ebb tide in my body finally turned. Movement could at last be achieved without spasm. All I had to do from then on was scrape myself off the mountain and go catch a train. Even the thought was exhausting.

  I was sure, after a while, that by immense good fortune I had broken no bones in my helter-skeltering fall. I’d been a rag doll. Babies got lucky through not trying to help themselves. Same principle, I supposed.

  With an unstoical groan, I raised from prone to kneeling on my rock and took a look up at where I’d come down. The edge of the plateau was hidden behind outcrops but was alarmingly far above. Looking down was almost worse, though from five or more years of living there, I understood at once where I was in relation to the bothy above. If I could traverse to the right without losing my footing and plunging down another slope, I would come eventually to the uneven but definable path that meandered from the road below up to my home: the challenging half-hidden ascent that brought walkers to my door.

  The four hiker-demons had probably come up that way. I certainly didn’t want to meet them if they were on their way down. Hours had probably passed, though. I knew I had lain helpless for a long time. They must surely by then have left.

  Realistically, I was going nowhere except uncontrollably downwards again unless I could reach that path. Hikers or not, it was the only possible route. Trying to go in the opposite direction, to reach the road-track up from the post office, was pointless, as it involved an overhang and a perpendicular rock climb, neither of which could be managed without gear.

  I was well used to moving alone in the mountains, and I was always careful. I would never normally have attempted what now confronted me without an axe and crampons, let alone with every move a wince, but fear of a less lucky fall, of a broken leg or worse, kept me stuck like glue, with fingernails and tiny cautious shifts of weight, to every protruding scrap of solid rock. Loose stones rattled and bounced away. Scrubby earth gave too little purchase. Rock was all.

  I made the journey sitting down, looking out over the perilous drops to the valley, digging in with my heels; careful, careful... careful.

  The path, when at last I reached it, was by comparison a broad highway. I sat on one of its rocky steps and felt as weak as thankful: sat with my forearms on my knees, head hanging, trying to be cool about a degree of strain and discomfort far beyond the easily bearable.

  Those bastards, I thought. The helpless rage of all victims shook in my gut. My physical state was shaming and infuriating. Somehow or other I should surely have put up a better fight.

  From where I sat I could see most of the long path down to the road. No scarlet, orange or blue backpacks moved on it anywhere. Curse them, I thought; and damn them; and shit.

  There was silence behind and above me and I had no sense of anyone being there. The inescapability of having to go up for a look was only a shade worse than actually making the effort; but I couldn’t stay where I was forever.

  With reluctant muscles and a fearful mind I got laboriously to my feet and began the climb.

  No evil faces grinned over the plateau above. My instinct that I was alone proved a true one, and I crawled the last bit on hands and knees and raised my head for a cautious look without anyone pouncing on me with a yell and kicking me back into space.

  The reason for the silence and the absence of attackers was immediately obvious: my jeep had gone.

  I stood erect on the plateau, figuratively groaning. Not only had I lost my transport, but the door of my home stood wide open with heaps of my belongings spilling out of it—a chair, clothes, books, bedclothes. I walked wearily across the plateau and looked in at a sickening mess.

  Like all who live purposefully alone without provision for guests, my actual household goods were few. I tended to eat straight out of the frying pan, and to drink all liquids from a mug. Living without electricity, I owned none of the routinely stolen things like television, stereo or computer, nor did I have a mobile phone because of not being able to recharge the batteries. I did own a portable radio for checking that interstellar war hadn’t broken out, and for playing taped music if I felt like it, but it was no grand affair with resale value. I had no antique silver. No Chippendale chairs.

  What I did have was paint.

  When I’d moved into the tumbledown building five and a half years earlier I’d made only the center and largest of its three divisions habitable. About three yards by five, my room had been given a businesslike new roof, a large double-glazed window, and a host of anti-damp preservation measures in its rebuilt walls and flooring. Light, heat and cooking were achieved with gas. Running water came from a small clear burn trickling through nearby rocks, and for bathroom I had a weathered privy a short walk away. I’d meant at first to stay on the mountain only during the long northern summer days, but in the end had left my departure later and later that first year until suddenly the everlasting December nights were shortening again, and I’d stayed snug through a freezing January and February and had never since considered leaving.

  Apart from a bed, a small table, a chest of drawers and one comfortable chair, the whole room was taken up by three easels, stacked canvases, a work stool, a wall of shelves and the equivalent of a kitchen table covered with pots and tubes of paints, and other essentials of my work like jugs of brushes and painting knives and jam jars full of clear or dirty water.

  Lack of space and my own instincts
dictated order and overall tidiness, but chiefly the disciplined organization was the result of the very nature of the acrylics themselves : they dried so fast when exposed to air that lids had to be replaced, tubes had to be capped, only small quantities could be squeezed onto a palette at a time, brushes had to be constantly rinsed clean, knives wiped, hands washed. I kept large amounts of clean and dirty water in separate buckets under the table and used tissues by the jeepload for keeping mess at bay.

  Despite all care I had few clothes free of paint stains and had to sand down the wood-block floor now and then to get rid of multicolored sludge.

  The mess the four demons had made of all this was spectacularly awful.

  I had left work in progress on all three easels, as I often painted three pictures simultaneously. All three were now facedown on the floor, thoroughly saturated by the kicked-over buckets. My worktable lay on its side, pots, brushes and paints spilling wide. Burst paint tubes had been squashed underfoot. My bed had been tipped over, chest of drawers ransacked, box files pulled down from the shelves, ditto books, every container emptied, sugar and coffee granules scattered in a filthy jumbled chaos.

  Bastards.

  I stood without energy in the doorway looking at the depressing damage and working out what to do. The clothes I was wearing were torn and dirty and I’d been bleeding from many small scrapes and scratches. The bothy had been robbed, as far as I could see, of everything I could have raised money on. Also my wallet had gone and my watch had gone. My checkbook had been in the jeep.

  I had said I would go to London.

  Well... so I bloody well would.

  Mad Alexander. Might as well live up to the name.

  Apart from moving back into the room the chair and other things that were half out of the doorway, I left the scene mostly as it was. I sorted out only the cleanest jeans, jersey and shirt from the things emptied out of the chest of drawers, and I changed into them out by the burn, rinsing off the dried trickles of blood in the cold clean water.

  I ached deeply all over.

  Bloody bastards.

  I walked along to the privy, but there had been nothing to steal there, and they had left it alone. Of the two original but ruined flanks to my habitable room, one was now a carport with a gray camouflage-painted roof of corrugated iron; the other, still open to the skies, was where I kept the gas cylinders (in a sort of bunker) and also trash cans, now empty, as I had taken the filled black trash bags down to the post office for disposal that morning. Let into one tumbledown wall there were the remains of what might have been a fireplace with a small oven above. Perhaps the place had once been a kitchen or bakehouse; but I’d been happier with gas.

  Nothing in these two side sections had been vandalized. Lucky, I supposed.

  From the jumble on the main bothy floor I harvested a broken stick of charcoal and slid pieces of it into my shirt pocket, and I found a sketch-pad with some clean pages; and armed with such few essentials, I left home and set off down the wandering path to the road.

  The Monadhliath Mountains, rising sharply to between two and a half and three thousand feet, were rounded rather than acutely jagged, but were bare of trees and starkly, unforgivingly gray. The steep path led down to heather-clad valley slopes and finally to a few pine trees and patches of grass. The transition from my home to the road was always more than a matter of height above sea level: up in the wild taxing granite wilderness, life—to me at any rate—felt simple, complete and austere. I could work there with concentration. The clutching “normal” life of the valley diminished my awareness of something elemental that I took from the Paleolithic silence and converted into paint: yet the canvases I sold for my bread and butter were usually full of color and lightheartedness and were, in fact, mostly pictures of golf.

  By the time I reached the road there was a hint in the quality of light of dusk hovering in the wings getting ready to draw together the skirts of evening. It was the time of day when I stopped painting. As it was then September, watch or no watch, I could pretty accurately guess at six-thirty.

  Even though it had been bypassed by the busy A9 artery from Inverness to Perth, there was enough traffic on the road for me to hitch a ride without much difficulty, but it was a shade disconcerting to find that the driver who stopped to pick up a long-haired jeans-clad young male stranger was an expectant-eyed fortyish woman who put her hand caressingly on my knee half a mile into the ride.

  Lamely I said, “I only want to go to Dalwhinnie railway station.”

  “Boring, aren’t you, dear?”

  “Ungrateful,” I agreed. And bruised, tired and laughing inside.

  She took the hand away with a shrug. “Where do you want to go?” she asked. “I could take you to Perth.”

  “Just Dalwhinnie.”

  “Are you gay, dear?”

  “Er,” I said. “No.”

  She gave me a sideways glance. “Have you banged your face?”

  “Mm,” I said.

  She gave me up as a prospect and dropped me half a mile from the trains. I walked, ruefully thinking of the offer I’d declined. I’d been celibate too long. It had become a habit. Bloody feeble, all the same, to pass up a free lunch. My ribs hurt.

  Lights were going on everywhere when I reached the station and I was glad of the minimum shelter of its bare ticket office, as the air temperature was dropping alarmingly towards night. Shivering and blowing on my fingers, I made a telephone call, endlessly grateful that this instrument at least was in fine working order and not suffering from a clone of Donald Cameron.

  A collect call via the operator.

  A familiar Scots voice spluttered at the far end, talking first to the operator, then to me. “Yes, of course I’ll pay for the call.... Is that really you, Al? What the heck are you doing at Dalwhinnie?”

  “Catching the night train to London. The Royal Highlander.”

  “It doesn’t go for hours.”

  “No ... What are you doing at this moment?”

  “Getting ready to leave the office and drive home to Flora and a good dinner.”

  “Jed...”

  He heard more in my voice than just his name. He said sharply, “Al? What’s the matter?”

  “I ... um ... I’ve been burgled,” I said. “I’d ... um ... I’d be very glad of your help.”

  After a short silence he said briefly, “I’m on my way,” and the line went quiet.

  Jed Parlane was my uncle’s factor, the man who managed the Kinloch Scottish estates. Though he’d been in the job less than four years we had become the sort of friends that took goodwill from each other for granted. He would come. He was the only one I would have asked.

  He was forty-six, a short stocky Lowland Scot from Jedburgh (hence his name), whose plain common sense had appealed to my uncle after the turmoil stirred up by an arrogant predecessor. Jed had calmed the resentful tenants and spent maintenance money oiling many metaphorical gates, so that the huge enterprise now ran at a peaceful profit. Jed, the wily Lowlander, understood and used the Highlanders’ stubborn pride; and I’d learned more from him about getting my own way than perhaps he realized.

  He came striding into Dalwhinnie station after his twelve-or-more-mile drive to reach me, and stood four-square in front of where I sat on a brown-painted bench against a margarine wall.

  “You’ve hurt your face,” he announced. “And you’re cold.”

  I stood up stiffly, the overall pain no doubt showing. I said, “Does the heater work in your car?”

  He nodded without speaking and I followed him outside to where he’d parked. I sat in his front passenger seat while he restarted the engine and twiddled knobs to bring out hot air, and I found myself unexpectedly shuddering from the physical relief.

  “OK,” he said, switching on the car’s internal light, “so what’s happened to your face? You’re going to have a hell of a black eye. That left-hand side of your forehead and temple is all swollen ...” He stopped, sounding uncertain. I was not, I
guessed, my usual picture of glowing good health.

  “I got head-butted,” I said. “I got jumped on and bashed about and robbed, and don’t laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  I told him about the four pseudo-hill-walkers and the devastation in the bothy.

  “The door isn’t locked,” I said. “They took my keys. So tomorrow maybe you’ll take your own key along there... though there’s nothing left worth stealing ...”

  “I’ll take the police,” he said firmly, aghast.

  I nodded vaguely.

  Jed pulled a notebook and pen from inside his jacket and asked for a list of things missing.

  “My jeep,” I said gloomily, and told him its number. “Everything in it... food and stores, and so on. From the bothy they took my binoculars and camera and all my winter padded clothes and four finished paintings and climbing gear and some Glenlivet... and my golf clubs.”

  “Al!”

  “Well ... look on the bright side. My bagpipes are in Inverness having new bits fitted, and I’ve sent my passport away for renewal.” I paused. “They took all my cash and my credit card... I don’t know its number, though it’s somewhere on file in your office... will you alert them? ... and they took my father’s old gold watch. Anyway,” I finished, “if you have a credit card with you, will you lend me a ticket to London?”

  “I’ll take you to a hospital.”

  “No.”

  “Then come home to Flora and me. We’ll give you a bed.”

  “No ... but thanks.”

  “Why London?”

  “Ivan Westering had a heart attack.” I paused briefly, watching him assimilate the consequences. “You know my mother... though I suppose you don’t actually know her all that well... she would never ask me to help her but she didn’t say not come, which was as good as an SOS ... so I’m going.”

  “The police will want you to give a statement.”

  “The bothy is a statement.”