Then the voice started. She whipped round, just like I’d done, thinking someone was standing next to her, talking into her ear.
I snatched the band off her wrist, wrapped it in the silver foil and slipped it back into the pannier.
“OK, OK, OK,” said Becky. “I believe you. God, that totally freaked me out.”
I took another swig of lemonade. “And I think it’s got a kind of tracer on it, so we can’t hang around here too long.”
She started eating her scrambled egg. “Where are we going?”
“Loch Coruisk,” I said, burrowing in the pannier again and bringing out the Ordnance Survey maps.
“Lock what?” asked Becky.
“Loch Coruisk,” I said. “It’s on the Isle of Skye.” I flattened out map number 32 across the table.
“Why there?”
“There was a message in the biscuit tin in Mrs Pearce’s attic. It was in the same language they were using in the staff room. It said ‘Coruisk’. Look…” I pointed to a jagged smear of blue in the centre of the map.
“And there was a map reference.” I dug out the Spudvetch! notebook and read out the numbers: “Four-eight-seven-one-nine-six.” I followed the lines down from the top margin and the lines in from the left-hand margin. “Here.” Where the lines converged there was a tiny square, indicating some kind of building by the mouth of the loch, where it fed into the sea.
“Yes,” said Becky, more insistently this time. “But why are we going there?”
I looked up. “I need to find Charlie. And it’s the only clue we’ve got. The only one I can understand, anyway.”
Becky seemed unconvinced.
“This message – it was hidden under the water tank. In the attic. She really didn’t want anyone to find it. It has to be important.”
I looked at the map again. It was like something from The Lord of the Rings. The loch was surrounded by the Cuillin Hills. The peak of Druim nan Ramh to the north. The peak of Sgurr Dubh Mor to the south. It was eight miles from the nearest village. It was hard to imagine a more isolated spot.
“Do you realize how far away this place is?” asked Becky.
I crossed my fingers. I needed her. And I needed the Moto Guzzi. “He’s my best friend. And he’s been kidnapped.”
“Maybe we should leave this to the police,” said Becky.
“Oh, yes, that’s another thing.”
“What?” asked Becky.
“There was a policeman at Charlie’s house.”
“And…?”
“He was wearing one of the wristbands. He wanted me to get into his car. I ran away and he went berserk.”
“So the police are after you as well?” said Becky.
“Actually, they’re probably after both of us now.”
“Brilliant,” said Becky. “I’m travelling to the Isle of Skye with my baby brother on a stolen motorbike, without a driving licence, looking for someone who could be in Portugal for all we know. A secret society of mystery maniacs is trying to kill us. The police want to arrest us…”
Then I had a stroke of luck. I’d been fiddling with the studs and tassels on Craterface’s jacket when I noticed a large lump in one of the pockets. I stuck my hand inside and extracted a spanner, a packet of cigarettes, a cigarette lighter, a great deal of oily fluff…and a wallet.
Becky snatched it out of my hands, saying, “Oi. You little thief.” But as she took it, the wallet popped open and a wad of ten pound notes spilled across the map.
“What did he do?” I asked. “Rob a post office?”
Becky was lost for words. Not something I’d seen very often.
“Ugly, but rich,” I said, knowing I was probably pushing my luck a bit too far.
She wasn’t listening. She was counting the money. “Two hundred. Three hundred.” She still had a long way to go. “The lying pig,” she snapped. “He told me he was broke. The stinking, two-faced, good-for-nothing, evil, self-centred…”
I let her rant for a bit. She needed to get this stuff off her chest. And I quite enjoyed it too. After a couple of minutes she ran out of steam.
I picked up a handful of tenners. “This lot will get us to the Isle of Skye, won’t it?”
Becky looked at me in silence for a few seconds, then hissed, “Too damn right it will. If that creep thinks I’m hurrying home to see him, he’s got another think coming. Let’s hit the road, Jimbo.”
On our way out of the service station we remembered that we still had parents, and they were probably not too happy at the moment. So Becky called them on her mobile. Thankfully the answerphone was on.
“Mum. Dad. It’s Becky. I’ve got Jimbo with me. We’re both fine. But we can’t come home right now. We’ll explain everything later. Ciao.”
We filled the tank, bought two pairs of dark glasses and rejoined the motorway.
Night fell and Skye was still three hundred miles away. We turned off the M6 and wove our way down a maze of narrow country lanes until we came to a small wood. We parked the bike out of view of the road, clambered through the bushes and found ourselves a good tent-sized clearing.
There was a message from home on Becky’s mobile, but we decided not to listen to it. After all, Mum and Dad weren’t going to be wishing us luck.
The food I’d packed was cold and a bit battered, but the remains of Dad’s roast potatoes and raspberry pavlova were still good.
“Know what?” said Becky, brushing the crumbs from her lipstick.
“What?”
“I take back what I said about Dad.” She smiled. “I don’t care if he has got something wrong with his hormones. He produces some quality leftovers.”
We woke at dawn to find torrential rain had hammered its way through the canvas. The bottoms of our sleeping bags were soaked in grimy water. The shoes we’d put outside the mouth of the tent had all but dissolved.
“Why couldn’t this have happened in July?” moaned Becky.
I wrung out the sleeping bags while she readjusted her make-up. Once her face was ready we squelched the tent down, squelched our belongings into the motorbike panniers, squelched onto the damp leather seat and made our way back to the M6. Watching the glistening tarmac scoot by beneath my feet, I dreamed of duvets and hot breakfasts, big jumpers and radiators.
We had double beans on toast in Carlisle and spent a long time in the loos drying bits of clothing under the hand dryers. By Glasgow the sun had come out. By Dumbarton I was starting to feel almost human.
The countryside was looking stranger now, older, craggier. We twisted and turned along the banks of Loch Lomond for twenty miles. To our left mist hung between the peaks of high hills. To our right was mile after mile of water, all rippled in the wind and dotted with knobbly little islands with scrubby trees on.
The road climbed. Crianlarich, Tyndrum, Ballachulish. The hills were barer now. In the sun it looked like a picture postcard. In the rain it would have looked like a scene from a horror movie.
My bum was beginning to hurt. We’d been driving for almost six hours now. So I was relieved when the hills started to fall away and we began making our way down towards the sea, to the Kyle of Lochalsh, and the Skye Bridge.
We pulled off the main road and parked in front of a café by the water’s edge. It was a popular place. Families were eating picnics on benches. Little kids were playing tag along the quay. Dogs were being taken out of the back of cars so they could pee on the verge.
We clambered off the bike, stretched our aching legs, then went and bought ourselves a couple of ice creams. Gulls wheeled overhead. A fishing boat chugged past.
“Cheers!” said Becky, knocking her cone against mine.
“Cheers!” I said, and for a moment I completely forgot about Charlie. I grinned at Becky. Becky grinned back at me. We were having an adventure. The sun was out, and for the first time in my life I realized that I actually liked my sister.
Then she said, “I wonder how long we’ve got.”
“What do you mean?
” I said.
She stared at the tarmac and muttered, “They were nasty people, Jimbo. We don’t even know if Charlie’s still alive.”
“Shut up,” I replied quietly. “Please just shut up.”
We finished our ice creams, put our helmets back on, revved the engine and made our way back to the queue for the bridge.
∨ Boom! ∧
11
The bad step
In Skye we stopped at a Co-op for bread, biscuits, lipstick, strawberry jam and Cheddar cheese. Becky took out her mobile and found that she had no reception. We were now officially off the map.
We headed into the hills. There was a village or two. There was a car or two. But mostly there were mountains, grass, lochs, cattle, sheep, rock and more mountains. It looked like the Land That Time Forgot. If you closed your ears to the roar of the Moto Guzzi, you could imagine a brontosaurus lumbering out of a valley between two cloudy peaks.
I thought about the men in the expensive light-grey suits. I thought about Mr Kidd and Mrs Pearce. And I simply couldn’t connect any of them with this place. I began to wonder whether it was all a mistake, whether the map was just a map, a leftover from a holiday spent exploring Scottish castles. I began to wonder whether Charlie really was in Portugal. Or whether something worse had happened.
The light began to fail. I was tired and I wanted to sleep. But I knew that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Not here. Not without seeing Charlie again.
Eventually the road curved off a hill and made its way into the little fishing village of Elgol. Seeing houses on either side of the road, I felt less nervy. A bedroom light here. A flower garden there. It seemed almost normal.
We turned a last corner and Becky brought the bike to a halt on a tiny stone jetty which cut into the water. An old man was standing on the jetty tidying lobster pots and coiling ropes. Beside him, his cocker spaniel was sitting quietly, panting and scratching its ear with a paw.
Becky lifted her helmet and leaned back to speak to me. “That’s the way,” she said, pointing her gloved hand along the coast. “Now, let’s go and find somewhere to camp.”
The sky was purple and orange in the sunset. The mountains were silhouettes, like jagged strips of torn black paper laid against the sky.
“I want to go now,” I said with determination.
“Jimbo, you’re barking mad,” said Becky. “It’s eight miles. It’s a rocky path. It’s getting dark.”
“You saw them in the flat, Becky,” I said. “They’ll be following us. I know they will. We can’t waste any time. We’ve got to help Charlie. I’m going. With you or without you.”
“All right, all right,” she grumped, getting off the bike and helping me to transfer our stuff from the panniers to the holdall. “I’ll come. Not that I’ve got any choice. Mum would murder me if I went back and said I’d lost you.”
“You’re a pal,” I said, shaking her hand.
“I’m a moron,” she replied.
We’d just locked the bike, picked up the bag and started out for the footpath when we were greeted by the old man who’d been tending the lobster pots.
“Evening,” he said in a broad Scots accent.
“Evening,” we replied suspiciously.
“Ah, city folk,” he said, looking at my trainers and Becky’s black nail polish. “You’ll no be walking in that get-up, will you? With the night coming down.”
“No. We’re going to see a film,” snapped Becky. She was always rather touchy about her ‘get-up’.
“Yes. We’re walking,” I explained politely. I wanted to get away. I didn’t want to stand around chatting to strangers.
“To Camasunary? Or all the way to Coruisk?” he asked.
Then, very slowly, he lifted his pipe to his mouth, so that the sleeve of his oilskin fell away to show a band on his left wrist. I stepped backwards.
“To Coruisk,” said Becky curtly, “so we haven’t got any time to waste chatting.”
I expected the old man to come and grab me by the scruff of the neck. I expected to see his fingers light up. But neither of these things happened. He smiled. Then he chuckled.
“Well, you enjoy yourselves,” he said. “It’s going to be a nice pitch-black night for a walk along the cliff path.” And with that, he turned and walked back up the road, the cocker spaniel trotting at his heels.
“The wristband…” I said to Becky.
“I saw it,” she replied.
“They know we’re here,” I whispered, looking around to see if there was anyone within earshot, crouching behind a lobster pot or an upturned boat.
“Maybe,” said Becky. “Maybe it was just a brass wristband, Jimbo. Like people wear. Maybe we’re getting paranoid.”
“Maybe,” I said. But I was right. I knew it. He was one of them. The way he showed us the wristband. The chuckle. On the other hand, if he was one of them then we were on the right track. Coruisk was important.
So why didn’t he stop us? Perhaps he knew we wouldn’t make it along the path in the dark. Perhaps he knew we would find nothing when we got there. Perhaps he knew there were others waiting to greet us at the far end, flexing their neon-blue fingers in the windy dark.
“Well,” said Becky, “what are we waiting for?”
I fell into step behind her.
We didn’t need the torch. The lobster fisherman was wrong. The night was not pitch-black. Ten minutes after we set off, threads of grey cloud dissolved to reveal a perfect full moon suspended above the sea. It felt like walking through a scene from Son of Dracula. But at least we could see where to put our feet.
A good job too. The path was narrow and stony and cut into the steep, scrubby cliff rising high above the water. We had to duck under gnarled trunks, clamber over boulders and move fallen branches out of our way. The sea lay to our left like a great sheet of beaten silver.
To our right, rocks, trees and bushes climbed up into the night sky.
Out in the bay an island floated like a great barnacled whale. Beyond it, the ocean, blackness and stars. Everything looked mind-bogglingly big. I was lonely and frightened, even with Becky in front of me. If we tripped and fell, we’d helter-skelter down into the icy water and be swept away. No one would ever know.
To make matters worse, my city-folk trainers were not made for trekking and I was getting a large and painful blister on my right heel. I stuffed the shoe with tissues, gritted my teeth and marched manfully onwards.
After two hours we reached the bay of Camasunary. The path dropped down and the cliff flattened out into a gentle, sloping meadow of spiky grass. We crested a small ridge and the beach lay in front of us. We crossed a tiny stream and stepped into the field.
“Jeez!” I said.
“Now that does my head in,” echoed Becky.
The field was full of rabbits. A hundred. Two hundred. I’d never been frightened of rabbits before. But this lot gave me the creeps, sitting there with their powder-puff tails and their spoony ears like something from a horror film called Rabbit.
“Let’s keep going,” I said.
We began the second, more difficult section of the path.
Except there wasn’t much of a path any more. There were rocks, nettles, thorns, trees and mud, and my blister was getting worse.
After half an hour of slipping, tripping, grumbling and hobbling we came to an unexpected halt. In front of us lay a smooth, steep face of blank rock covered in patches of moss, like a giant granite nose. No mud, no branches, no clumps of grass. Nothing. Starting high above our heads, it swooped down to a ragged edge hanging over the surface of the black water. The map called it ‘The Bad Step’. You could see what the map meant.
“You first,” I said. “You’re older.”
“Thanks, Jimbo,” Becky replied. “You’re a real gentleman.”
We couldn’t go up and round. And we couldn’t go down and under. The slope was just too steep. We had to go over.
Becky shimmied up. I shimmied up behind her. We lay face dow
n on the rock, spread-eagled like sunbathing lizards, and shuffled gingerly sideways.
We were doing all right. My trainers were rubbish for walking but the rubber soles stuck to the rock pretty well. Sadly, the moss didn’t. I was halfway across when I put my foot on a clump of the stuff, and as I shifted my weight it tore away beneath me.
I shot downwards, braked only by my knees, my fingers and the end of my nose. My heart stopped and my feet slid over the bottom edge into space. I heard Becky scream and closed my eyes, waiting for the inevitable plunge through the air onto the pointy rocks half submerged in the freezing water below.
I came to a sudden halt, my legs dangling in the empty air. My fingers were jammed into a crack that ran across the surface of the stone. It was a narrow crack and my fingers were hurting and I wasn’t going to be able to hang on for long. I tried to swing my legs up onto the rock, but I was too far over.
“Jimbo!” shouted Becky. “Hang on!” I looked up. She was shifting herself slowly down the giant nose towards me with the holdall looped over her shoulder.
“There’s a crack,” I said, and at that moment one of my hands slipped free and I screamed.
The toe of Becky’s boot found the crack. She took the holdall off her shoulder and lowered it down to me. “Grab this!” I grabbed it. “Now pull.”
She pulled. I pulled. The handle stretched horribly. I swung my right leg. Once. Twice. Three times. Finally, I got it over the lip of the rock. I heaved again and pulled. She heaved again and I got my other foot over the lip and lay flat against the slope, panting.
“Crikey, Jimbo,” she said. “Don’t do that to me again. Ever.”
We waited until we’d got our breath back, then started shuffling sideways, with our toes in the crack. We rounded the curve of the rock and were able to grab a gnarly root and swing ourselves onto the safety of the damp earth.
“Holy hotdogs, Batman,” said Becky. “That was a close call.”