Craig Russell - Dead men and broken hearts

Sliding over to the passenger side, I opened the door and swung my legs out, out of sight of the traffic. I slipped a heavy pair of socks over the silk ones I already had on and laced up the hiking boots. After my barefoot experiences, it felt good to have something so solid on my feet. I took off my jacket, slipped on the oiled wool turtleneck and planted the waxed flat cap on my head. I left the smock-anorak for the moment. My new outfit opened up the opportunity to be worn with either the duffle coat or the tweed jacket, as well as the anorak, depending on the particular rugged dash I was trying to cut.

The main thing, though, was that my new outfit and equipment had been chosen for purely practical reasons. Scotland — this real Scotland — in November could be lethally unforgiving.

My main hope was that the bivouac in the trunk would not have to be pressed into service, but if my mission lasted longer than I hoped, then I was going to have to take care of my own accommodations. And, anyway, I had in my time spent plenty of nights under canvas with more than the inclement weather to worry about.

I drove up the side of Loch Lomond, a massive expanse of water and the biggest lake in Britain. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, but I had to drive carefully as the roadway sparkled white with frost. After the gloom and grime of Glasgow, it made everything look fresh and crisp and clean. It was funny, I thought, how any sun — even hard, warmth-less sun — lifted your mood.

Halfway up the loch, I stopped at a roadside tearoom with a view out over the water and ordered some cheese sandwiches with coffee. The woman who served me was in her early forties, with fresh, pale skin and dark blonde hair. She was slim but sexy and I promised myself a return visit in happier times; but there was something about her nagged at my gut. I realized that she reminded me, in an odd way, of Fiona White. She had only one other guest in the place and I had to dance around her questions about where I had come from, where I was going, what I was going to do there… the routine building blocks of conversation she must have used with every guest she chatted with. I had given up on trying to sound Glaswegian or Scottish and simply sought to neuter my speech to a standard English.

She had probably seen the way I had looked at her and it was obvious she didn’t mind at all and we chatted about nothing, all the time laying out our stalls in the indirect and abstract way you do before you seal the deal.

What the hell, Lennox, I suddenly said to myself, do you think you are doing?

I paid her and left.

I may have been picking up many of the skills of the fugitive; making myself forgettable was not one of them.

I cleared the top end of Loch Lomond and was well into the Highlands by the time the sun started to play peek-a-boo behind the mountains.

I stopped a couple of times to check Ellis’s map and make sure I didn’t miss my turning, but in the event I did. In the gloaming the landscape had started to melt into soft shapes and splashes of dull red light and shadows, and I drove past the exit and had to drive farther along the ribbon of lakeside road before I found a spot safe enough to execute a three-point turn.

It wasn’t really surprising that I had missed it — a narrow, bush-flanked mouth that led off the main highway and up and away from the loch. I turned and followed it up a steep hillside and across an empty, darkening landscape of umbrous hills and deep gorge. There was one thing that was for sure: I wasn’t being tailed. This was the Scotland of glens empty of anything other than sheep, wildcats, adders and eagles, and I would have spotted other headlights ten miles away.

After the adventures of father-and-son Catholic pretenders to the British throne, the lairds and lords of the Highlands had followed, with enthusiasm and vigour, the Hanoverian edict that the Highlands had to be cleared of troublemakers. Scotland’s loss had been North America’s gain, with whole Gaelic families of every generation being driven to the sea, then across it, to the colonies of what was now Canada and the US.

The Scots, I knew, liked to paint this pretty episode in their history as English domination and cruelty. The truth was that the conflict had been primarily Scot against Scot: Protestant against Catholic, Lowlander against Highlander. And the lairds and landowners who had driven the masses from their crofts had been their own kind. And often the Chiefs of the clans they belonged to.

Every now and again, I would pass evidence of the purge: roofless croft cottages, more like piles of roughly assembled stones, standing empty and barely perceptible in the gloom, in the middle of a trackless landscape or looming suddenly at the roadside.

The sky turned violet and the stars sparkled like the frost in my headlights. Up here, there was no city streetlight glow to obscure the stars, and the night remained bright and sharp and cold. Again, I had to stop a couple of times to fix my bearings with the map I had taken from Ellis’s shed. The road here was only wide enough for one car to pass and was intermittently blistered with marked passing places, just wide enough to fit a car or tractor in to allow oncoming vehicles to pass. Some passing places came perilously close to where the edge dropped away steeply and suddenly into a gorge which, in the growing dark, turned into a bottomless chasm.

The narrow ribbon of road ahead of me became reduced to a frost-edged pool of light from my headlamps, and I found that bends would appear without warning. Some were unexpectedly sharp. Driving here in the daylight would be challenge enough, but in the dark it was a nightmare.

I just didn’t see it coming. The road had been perfectly straight for half a mile, then took an almost right-angular twist. I slammed on the brakes, but the Cresta simply skated along the road, not responding to anything I did with the steering wheel.

The world slowed down. I took my foot off the brake, reapplied it gently, took it off, reapplied it.

Nothing worked.

Straight ahead of me was darkness, the road gone.

It was the strangest thing: to feel nothing beneath the wheels. To know you were in a motor car suspended in space. Another weird thing was that all that went through my head was McBride’s pride in his car. The way it had been polished and cherished.

‘Sorry, Twinkle…’ I said out loud, and waited for the impact.

When it came, the first impact, I felt it in every bone in my body. The Cresta had come down hard, but not nose first, instead landing not quite squarely on all four wheels. I was thrown upwards and collided with the roof. The car bounced and jolted, each impact crushing and tearing metal, tossing me around its inside. Every now and then I would see a flashbulb image of grass and rock in the headlights. More noise. Sound that seemed to fill the universe.

The windscreen shattered and showered me with glass.

Silence.

The engine had died. Or been killed by the crash. There was no more light from the headlamps and I guessed they too had been smashed by the impact.

I tried to work out where I was hurt. Which was difficult, because I hurt all over. Sprawled on the bench seat, I lay still, drinking in the silence and the dark. I was pretty sure I was alive, and I was going to stay that way. Or at least stay alive until I had to tell Twinkletoes what I’d done to his precious Cresta.

I slowly reconnected with my body. I made two fists and then flexed my fingers. Worked my elbows. Rotated my shoulders, getting a jab of pain from the right but not enough to indicate anything more serious than a strain. Tilting myself up slowly, using the steering wheel as a lever, I eased up into a sitting position before running my hands down each leg, rotating each booted foot at the ankle.