Oddly enough, close in to the east and south coast of Dubh Sgeir, one could have taken Aunty Gladys out. In those tidal races between islands a common but not yet clearly understood phenomenon frequently leaves an undisturbed stretch of water close in to one or other of the shores, calm and smooth and fiat, a millpond with a sharply outlined boundary between h and the foaming races beyond. So it was here. For almost a mile between the most southerly and easterly headlands of Dubh Sgeir, for a distance of two or three hundred yards out from the shore, the waters were black and still. It was uncanny.
“Sure you really want to land here?” Williams asked.
“Is h tricky?”
“Easy. Helicopters often land on Dubh Sgeir. Not mine – others. It’s just that you’re likely to get the same reception here as you got on Eilean Oran. There are dozens of privately owned islands off the West Coast and none of them like uninvited visitors. The owner of Dubh Sgeir hates them.”
“This world-famous Highland hospitality becomes positively embarrassing at times. The Scotsman’s home is his castle, eh?”
“There is a castle here. The ancestral home of the dan Dalwhinnie. I think.”
“Dalwhinnie’s a town, not a clan.”
“Well, something unpronounceable.” That was good, considering that he like as not hailed from Rhosllanerchrugog or Pomrhydfendgaid. “He’s the clan chief. Lord Kirkside. Ex-Lord Lieutenant of the shire. Very important citizen but a bit of a recluse now. Seldom leaves the place except to attend Highland Games or go south about once a mouth to flay the Archbishop of Canterbury in .the Lords.”
“Must be difficult for him to tell which place he’s at, at times. I’ve heard of him. Used to have a very low opinion of the Commons and made a long speech to that effect every other day.”
“That’s him. But not any more. Lost his older son -and his future son-in-law – in an air accident some time ago. Took the heart from the old boy, so they say. People in these parts think the world of him.”
We were round to the south of Dubh Sgeir now and suddenly the castle was in sight. Despite its crenulated battlements, round towers and embrasures, it didn’t begin to rank with the Windsors and Balmorals of this world. A pocket castle. But the side had the Windsors and Balmorals whacked to the wide. It grew straight out of the top of a hundred and fifty foot cliff and if you leaned too far out of your bedroom window the first thing to stop your fall would be the rocks a long long way down. You wouldn’t even bounce once.
Below the castle and a fair way to the right of it a cliff-fall belonging to some bygone age had created an artificial foreshore some thirty yards wide. From this, obviously at the cost of immense labour, an artificial harbour had been scooped out, the boulders and rubble having been used for the construction of a horseshoe breakwater with an entrance of not more than six or seven yards in width. At the inner end of this harbour a boathouse, no wider than the harbour entrance and less than twenty feet in length, had been constructed against the cliff face. A boathouse to berth a good-sized row-boat, no more.
Williams took his machine up until we were two hundred feet above the castle. It was built in the form of a hollow square with the landward side missing. The seaward side was dominated by two crenulated towers, one topped by a twenty-foot flagpole and flag, the other by an even taller TV mast. Aesthetically, the flagpole had it every time. Surprisingly the island was not as barren as it had appeared from the sea. Beginning some distance from the castle and extending clear to the cliff-bound northern shore of the island ran a two hundred yard wide stretch of what seemed to be flat smooth turf, not the bowling green standard but undoubtedly grass of the genuine variety as testified to by the heads down position of a handful of goats that browsed close to the castle. Williams tried to land on the grass but the wind was too strong to allow him to hold position: he finally put down in the eastern ke of the castle, close but not too close to the cliff edge.
I got out, keeping a wary eye on the goats, and was rounding the landward corner of the castle when I almost literally bumped into the girl.
I’ve always known what to look for in a suddenly-encountered girl in a remote Hebridean Island. A kilt, of course, a Hebridean girl without a kilt was unthinkable, a Shetland two-piece and brown brogues: and that she would be a raven-haired beauty with wild, green, fey eyes went without saying. Her name would be Deirdre. This one wasn’t like that at all, except for the eyes, which were neither green nor fey but certainly looked wild enough. What little I could see of them, that was. Her blonde hair was cut in the uniform peekaboo scalloped style of the day, the one where the long side hair meets under the chin and the central fringe is hacked off at eyebrow level, a coiffure which in any wind above Force i allows no more than ten per cent of the face to be seen at any one time. Below hair level she wore a horizontally striped blue and white sailor’s jersey and faded blue denim pants that must have been fixed on with a portable sewing machine as I didn’t see how else she could have got into them. Her tanned feet were bare. It was comforting to see that the civilising influence of television reached even the remoter outposts of empire.
I said: “Good afternoon, Miss – um——”
“Engine failure?” she asked coldly.
“Well, no——”
“Mechanical failure? Of any kind? No? Then this is private property. I must ask you to leave. At once, please.”
There seemed to be little for me here. An outstretched hand and a warm smile of welcome and she’d have been on my list of suspects at once. But this was true to established form, the weary stranger at the gates receiving not the palm of the hand but the back of it. Apart from the fact that she lacked a. blunderbuss and had a much better figure, she had a great deal in common with Mr. MacEachera. I bent forward to peer through the windblown camouflage of blonde hair. She looked as if she had spent most of the night and half the morning down in the castle wine cellars. Pale face, pale lips, dark smudges under the blue-grey eyes. But clear blue-grey eyes.
“What the hell’s the matter with you?” she demanded.
“Nothing, The end of a dream. Deirdre would never have talked like that. Where’s your old man?”
“My old man?” The one eye I could see had the power turned up to its maximum shrivelling voltage. “You mean my father?”
“Sorry. Lord Kirkside.” It was no feat to guess that she was Lord Kirkside’s daughter, hired help are too ignorant to have the execrable manners of their aristocratic betters.
“I’m Lord Kirkside.” I turned round to see the owner of the deep voice behind me, a tall rugged-4oofcing character in his fifties, hawk nose, jutting grey eyebrows and moustache, grey tweeds, grey deerstalker, hawthorn stick in hand. “What’s the trouble, Sue?”
Sue. I might have known. Exit the last vestige of the Hebridean dream. I said: “My name is Johnson, Air-Sea Rescue. There was a boat, the Moray Rose, in bad .trouble somewhere south of Skye. If she’d been not under command but still afloat she might have come drifting this way. We wondered——”
“And Sue was going to fling you over the cliff before you had a chance to open your mouth?” He smiled down affectionately at his daughter. “That’s my Sue. I’m afraid she doesn’t like newspapermen.”
“Some do and some don’t. But why pick on me?”
“When you were twenty-one could you, as the saying goes, tell a newspaperman from a human being? I couldn’t. But I can now, a mile away. I can also tell a genuine Air-Sea Rescue helicopter when I see one. And so should yon too, young lady. Fm sorry, Mr. Johnson, we can’t help you. My men and I spent several hours last night patrolling the cliff-tops to see if we could sec anything. Lights, flares, anything. Nothing, Tm afraid.”
“Thank you, sir. I wish we had more voluntary co-operation of this kind.” From where I stood I could see, due south, the gently rocking masts of the Oxford field expedition’s boat in Little Horseshoe Bay. The boat itself and the tents beyond were hidden behind the rocky eastern arm of the bay. I said to Lord Kirkside: “But why newspapermen, sir? Dubh Sgeir isn’t quite as accessible as Westminster.”