“There,” Williams pointed. We were about half-way along the south coast of Torbay. “A likely set-up, wouldn’t you say?”
And a likely set-up it was. A large white three-story stone-built Georgian house, set in a clearing about a hundred yards back from and thirty yards above the shore. There are dozens of such houses scattered in the most unlikely positions in some of the most barren and desolate islands in the Hebrides. Heaven only knew who built them, why or how. But it wasn’t the house that was the focal point of interest in this case, it was the big boathouse on the edge of a tiny land-locked harbour. Without a further word from me Williams brought the big machine down neatly in the shelter of the trees behind the house.
I unwrapped the polythene bag I’d been carrying under my shirt. Two guns. The Luger I stuck in my pocket, the little German Lilliput I fixed to the spring clip in my left sleeve. Williams stared unconcernedly ahead and began to whistle to himself.
Nobody had lived in that house for years. Part of the roof had fallen in, years of salt air erosion had removed all paintwork and the rooms, when I looked in through the cracked and broken windows, were bare and crumbling with long strips of wall-paper lying on the floor. The path down to the little harbour was completely overgrown with moss. Every time my heel sunk into the path a deep muddy mark was left behind, the first made there for a long long time. The boatshed was big enough, at least sixty by twenty, but that was all that could be said for it. The two big doors had three hinges apiece and two huge padlocks where they met in the middle. Padlocks and hinges alike were almost eaten through by rust. I could feel the heavy tug of the Luger in my pocket and the weight made me feel faintly ridiculous. I went back to the helicopter.
Twice more in the next twenty minutes we came across almost identical situations. Big white Georgian houses with big boathouses at their feet. I knew they would be false alarms but I had to check them both. False alarms they were. The last occupants of those houses had been dead before I’d been born. People had lived in those houses once, people with families, big families, people with money and ambition and confidence and no fear at all of the future. Not if they had built houses as big as those. And now the people were gone and all that was left were those crumbling, mouldering monuments to a misplaced faith in the future. Some years previously I’d seen houses in plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, houses widely dissimilar but exactly the same, white-porticoed ante-bellum houses hemmed in by evergreen live oaks and overgrown with long grey festoons of Spanish moss. Sadness and desolation and a world that was gone for ever.
The west coast of the Isle of Torbay yielded nothing. We gave the town of Torbay and Garve Island a wide berth and flew eastwards down the southern shore of the Sound with the gale behind us. Two small hamlets, each with its disintegrating pier. Beyond that, nothing.
We reached the sandy cove again, flew north till we reached the northern shore of the Sound, then westwards along this shore. We stopped twice, once to investigate a tree-overhung land-locked harbour less than forty yards in diameter, and again to investigate a small complex of industrial buildings which had once, so Williams said, produced a fine-quality sand that bad been one of the ingredients in a famous brand of toothpaste. Again, nothing.
At the last place we stopped for five minutes. Lieutenant Williams said he was hungry. I wasn’t. I’d become used to the helicopter by now but I wasn’t hungry. It was midday. Half our tune gone and nothing accomplished. And it was beginning to look very much as if nothing was going to be accomplished. Uncle Arthur would be pleased. I took the chart from Williams.
“We have to pick and choose,” I said. “We’ll have to take a chance. We’ll go up the Sound to Dolman Head, opposite Garve Island, then go up Loch Hynart.” Loch Hynart was a seven mile long loch, winding and many-islanded, that ran more or less due east, nowhere more than half a mile wide, deep into the heart of the mountain massif. “Back to Dolman Point again then along the southern shore of the mainland peninsula again as far as Carrara Point Then east along the southern shore of Loch Houron.”
“Loch Houron,” Williams nodded. “The wildest waters and the worst place for boats in the West of Scotland. Last place I’d go looking, Mr. Calvert, that’s for sure. From all accounts you’ll find nothing there but wrecks and skeletons. There are more reefs and skerries and underwater rocks and overfalls and whirlpools and tidal races in twenty miles there than in the whole of the rest of Scotland. Local fishermen won’t go near the place.” He pointed at the chart. “See this passage betwen Dubh Sgeir and Ballara Island, the two islands at the mouth of Loch Houron? That’s the most feared spot of all. You should see the grip the fishermen get on their whisky glasses when they talk about it. Beul nan Uamh, it’s called. The mouth of the grave.”
“They’re a cheery lot, hereabouts. It’s time we were gone.”
The wind blew as strongly as ever, the sea below looked as wicked as ever, but the rain had stopped and that made our search all that much easier. The stretch of the Sound from the sand quarry to Dolman Point yielded nothing. Neither did Loch Hynart Between Loch Hynart and Carrara Point, eight miles to the west, there were only two tiny hamlets crouched against the water’s edge, their backs to the barren hills behind, their inhabitants – if there were any inhabitants -subsisting on God alone knew what. Carrara Point was storm-torn desolation itself. Great jagged broken fissured cliffs, huge fanged rocks rising from the sea, massive Atlantic breakers smashing in hundred foot high spray against the cliffs, the rocks and the tiny-seeming lighthouse at the foot of the cliffs. If I were Sir Billy Butlin looking for the site for my latest holiday camp, I wouldn’t have spent too much time on Carrara Point.
We turned north now, then north-east, then east, along the southern shore of Loch Houron.
Many places have evil reputations. Few, at first seeing, live up to those reputations. But there are a few. In Scotland, the Pass of Glencoej the scene of the infamous massacre, is one of them. The Pass of Brander is another. And Loch Houron was beyond all doubt another.
It required no imagination at all to see this as a dark and deadly and dangerous place. It looked dark and deadly and dangerous. The shores were black and rocky and precipitous and devoid of any form of vegetation at all. The four islands strung out in a line to the east were a splendid match for the hospitable appearance of the shores. In the far distance the northern and the southern shores of the loch came close together and vanished in a towering vertical cleft in the sinister brooding mountains. In the lee of the islands the loch was black as midnight but elsewhere it was a seething boiling white, the waters wickedly swirling, churning, spinning in evil-looking whirlpools as it passed across overfalls or forced its way through the narrow channels between the islands or between the islands and the shore. Water in torment. In the Beul nan Uarnh — the mouth of the grave — between the first two islands the rushing leaping milk-white waters looked like floodwater in the Mackenzie river rapids in springtime, when the snows melt. A yachtsman’s paradise. Only a madman would take his boat into these waters.
Apparently there were still a few madmen around. We’d just left the first of the islands, Dubh Sgeir, to port, when I caught sight of a narrow break in the cliffs on the southern mainland. A small rock-girt bay, if bay it could be called, about the size of a couple of tennis courts, almost completely enclosed from the sea, the entrance couldn’t have been more than ten yards wide. I glanced at the chart – Little Horseshoe Bay, it was called. Not original, but very apt. There was a boat in there, a fairly big one, a converted M.F.V, by the looks of her, anchored fore and aft in the middle of the bay. Behind the bay was a little plateau, mossy or grass-covered, I couldn’t tell which, and, behind -that, what looked like a dried-up river bed rising steeply into the hills behind. On the little plateau were four khaki-coloured tents, with men working at them.
“This could be it?” Williams said.
“This could be it”