The Stalking Party Page 6

  ‘All set, then?’ Fergus rejoined them. ‘We’ll have one up the spout now, sir, to be on the safe side.’ He slid the rifle from its sleeve, and loaded it with quick, sure movements. For all his respectful bearing, he was in charge, and Sir Archie content to let him take decisions.

  A gleam shone through the clouds, transforming the dull landscape into subtly glowing shades of bronze and gold, purple and pink.

  ‘Ready, sir? Mrs Alec?’

  They nodded, and Maya lowered the binoculars through which she had been scanning the far slope of the corrie. The stags were grazing, spread out over a grassy ledge about halfway up the hillside. They looked very small and far away, and she could not pick out the big switch, who might be anywhere in the broken ground between. Lying cudding, rolling in the hags, grazing some hidden gulley. It would be so easy to pass without seeing him.

  Sir Archie guessed her thought and smiled. ‘Don’t worry. If we go cannily we’ll spot him before he sees us. It’s steep, though, so tell me if you need a breather. No need to kill yourself! All right, Fergus, let’s go.’

  Forty minutes later, they lay on a rocky ledge near the summit of Ben Shallachan, an icy wind stinging their eyes as they looked down on the stags a couple of hundred feet beneath them. They were still grazing quietly, undisturbed, scattered along a grassy runner above the bracken line, with the big switch conspicuous among them, blacker and heavier, the one lethal antler contrasting with the other stags’ branched heads.

  This was the view that Alec had wanted her to see: hills and islands rising like emeralds from a sapphire sea, stretching in a blue-and-silver haze towards the Outer Isles; but by now she was too caught up in the drama of the chase to give the great panorama more than a cursory glance.

  She had lost all sense of direction as they zigzagged back and forth, but after the sweating, scrambling climb, cold air acted as a tonic, banishing the lethargy of the lower slopes. As they moved stealthily over rocky outcrops sparkling with chips of mica, she felt full of running still; her only worry was that the slow, careful approach had taken too long, and that the stags would suddenly gallop away.

  Fergus crept along warily, his tweed fore-and-aft cap moving continually as he scanned the ground ahead. Suddenly he dropped to all fours, gesturing to freeze the others. Alone he crawled to peer over a rock, then turned a jubilant face.

  ‘They’re there,’ he mouthed.

  They inched down to join him. Fergus slid the rifle out silently, and checked it again. ‘Safe. Right, sir?’

  ‘Give me a minute.’

  Maya glanced at Sir Archie and felt a stab of anxiety. His broad face was running with sweat and blotched red and white. He breathed fast and heavily, with a little grunt at the end of each exhalation, and she remembered her mother-in-law’s worried look last night when he opted to take Everard’s place.

  ‘Take your time, sir. They’ll no’ move yet awhile.’

  In tense silence they waited, while below them the stags chose sheltered places to lie, their backs to the slope, gazing out across the sea-loch. A flurry of rain swept in, blotting out the view, stinging their cheeks with icy needles. When it passed, Fergus planted his stick in the ground at an angle, and slid out of his knapsack, retaining only his telescope.

  Maya ferreted in her pockets and found a long-forgotten stub of Polos, which she offered to Sir Archie. For a moment he hesitated and she thought he was going to refuse; then his hand reached out to take one. Rapidly he crunched it up.

  ‘Thanks.’

  Like Fergus, he divested himself of extra equipment.

  ‘Stay here,’ he whispered to Maya. ‘You’ll be able to see most of what happens, but don’t on any account move until you see one of us waving you forward. Understand?’

  ‘Sure.’ She swallowed her disappointment. A moment ago, she had been one of the team. Now she was again reduced to the status of faithful dog.

  ‘Even after the shot, don’t move.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘We may have a bit of a wait. Keep out of the wind.’

  She nodded. ‘Good luck.’

  He grinned and raised a thumb, and she thought with relief that he looked himself again. She watched them slither downhill on their stomachs, the soles of their boots the last things to disappear. Then the mist swirled in, and when it lifted again, they were gone.

  Chapter Five

  UNDER A LOW heather bank near the summit of Carn Mhor, Nicky and Ashy huddled companionably shoulder to shoulder, eating sandwiches.

  ‘Swap you bacon for cheese-and-chutney?’

  ‘Done.’

  They munched in silence, the wind tearing at their clothes and teasing blonde wisps of hair from under Ashy’s cap.

  The relief of the confessional warmed Nicky to his core. An hour earlier, when Sandy left them and crawled away to reconnoitre the ground ahead, she had said, ‘Tell me, Nicky. Now!’ and almost without thinking he had unburdened his soul. She had put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed hard enough to make him wince.

  ‘I thought it must be something like that.’

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Stop worrying,’ said Ashy calmly. ‘Don’t do anything. Just leave it to me: I’ll fix it.’

  ‘But how?’

  Her blue-green eyes crinkled. ‘Don’t ask.’

  Uneasily he had studied her profile. Ashy had a reckless streak and sometimes went too far. ‘You won’t do anything – well – dangerous?’

  ‘Nicks! What do you think I am? Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me.’

  ‘They can, though.’

  ‘Balls! I’ll talk to her – that’s all. It’ll work, you’ll see.’

  Now he lay back out of the wind, gnawing an apple, glad to leave his problem with someone else. Ashy propped elbows on knees and studied the hill opposite, sweeping her binoculars in a slow arc to scan it section by section.

  A thin plume of smoke rose from the chimney of the cottage far below, set back from the silver thread of river. The old white pony was a cottonwool blob against the woodshed. Her binoculars swept across it, paused, came back.

  ‘Hullo! Kirsty’s got a visitor,’ she said quietly. ‘No car, though.’

  ‘M or F?’

  ‘Can’t tell. Sandy!’ she called to where the head stalker sat eating his own piece at the distance required by convention. ‘Can I borrow your glass a moment?’

  No answer. Sandy didn’t like lending his telescope, and he often found it convenient to foster the myth that he was hard of hearing.

  ‘Deaf as a post!’ Ashy rolled her eyes, pushed herself upright, and strolled the few paces to where Sandy was sitting, his baggy tweeds a perfect match for the sedgy grass around him.

  ‘Lend me your telescope a minute?’

  Ashy was a favourite. Reluctantly he handed it over. ‘Dinna go dropping it, now.’

  ‘As if I would.’ She returned to her place under the bank and pulled out the heavy brass sections, frowning with concentration until the image leapt into brilliant focus. ‘Guess who?’ she murmured after a moment.

  Nicky shrugged and shook his head, the sun glinting on his golden eyelashes. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘No. Take a butcher’s.’

  Nicky opened his eyes, took the telescope, and stared. Before he could comment or hand it back, Sandy’s guttural rasp behind him said, ‘Now if ye’ve done wi’ ma glass, Miss Ashy?’

  ‘Thanks.’ Hurriedly she gave it to him, and he snapped it shut with three decisive clicks, his face stony. Without another word, he picked up the rifle and pulled down the peak of his cap. In single file, they followed him over the shoulder of the hill.

  *****

  For twenty minutes after the men crawled away, Maya watched the stags through binoculars, but when her wrists began to ache and her fingers to turn a sinister grey, she withdrew behind the rocks that kept off the worst of the wind, and tucked her hands into her armpits to retain all the body-heat she could.

  She eyed
the heap of jackets and sweaters. After a brief hesitation she stripped off her sodden nylon blouson, and put first Sir Archie’s and then Fergus’s wool sweaters on top of her brushed cotton shirt. The blouson would not zip over such a bulk, so she substituted Fergus’s rolled waterproof cape, pulling down its hood and curling up her legs until it covered her from head to toe.

  Half an hour passed, but the stags still lay peacefully, unmoving. Maya hunched more tightly, knees to chin, resigned to an indefinite vigil.

  A bit of a wait, he had said. How long was a bit?

  Forty minutes crawled by. An hour. The wind blew shredded wisps of cloud past her eyrie, and she hugged her knees ever more closely. Nothing to read, nothing to look at, nothing to do but worry. What had gone wrong? That awful streaky look on Archie’s face: should she have tried to stop him? Would he have listened if she had?

  ‘You’ll love my stepfather.’ She remembered Alec’s voice. ‘What’s more, he’ll love you. He’s always had an eye for the girls. He and my father were best buddies at school, and shared digs at uni. They used to rent this forest between them, and when old Lord Strathtorran went on the rocks in the early ’80s, they scraped up the money to buy Glen Buie from him, fifty-fifty. The only pity is that they couldn’t raise the cash to buy Strathtorran as well. There are two McNeil boys, the Auld Laird’s sons, and they’ve inherited what’s left, but they’re having uphill work trying to make it pay its way. If they do decide to sell up, they’ve promised me first refusal. I’d like to own the whole peninsula: it should never have been split up in the first place.’

  Even in the first flush of love, Maya had found this a daunting prospect.

  ‘Then, when Dad died, my mother married Archie,’ Alec had explained. ‘He and I have always got on like a house on fire, and so will you.’

  Not quite like a house on fire, she thought. The fact remained that sooner or later Archie would want to know what she meant to do with her half-share of Glen Buie.

  ‘There aren’t many places like it left in Scotland,’ Alec had said seriously. ‘I see it as my duty to protect it.’

  From Nicky and his flaky girlfriend? ‘Poor Nicky! He does hang out with the most disastrous people!’ Alec had said, then checked himself, half-laughing. ‘There I go – just like the rest of the family. We all say Poor Nicky, but he’s not poor at all. In the financial sense, quite the opposite. He’s had millions in trust ever since he was a schoolboy. That’s why these frightful people latch on to him, I suppose.’

  Maya shivered. Nothing Alec had told her about deerstalking had prepared her for being abandoned on a freezing mountain. But then, she thought wryly, he would never have been abandoned. He would be up there with the others, discussing, advising, planning the next move. No one would dream of parking Alec behind a rock and forgetting all about him.

  Rebellion stirred in her. If ever she did this again, she meant to be at the sharp end, but for the moment she was effectively trapped. Stuck where the men had left her. If she broke ranks and made for home, could she be sure of walking in the right direction? In a couple of hours it would be dark, and she was not equipped for a night on the hill.

  Think of something else. Consider her fellow-guests, that bunch of oddballs who made up a North British stalking-party. Take Gwennie, with her large calm blue eyes and dewy complexion, her seated tweed skirts and triple strand of pearls that made her almost a caricature of an English lady. Yet there were aspects of Gwennie which undermined that image.

  On her first evening at the lodge, Maya had opened a door by chance and found her mother-in-law and Mary, the cook, standing ankle-deep in feathers, plucking small birds that smelt as if their Best Before date was long past.

  ‘That bloody pompous fart! Too mean to bring whisky, so he gives me these and expects me to thank him,’ Gwennie had been saying. ‘God damn all guests who bring high grouse with them!’

  Mary, dragging out a handful of blackened entrails, had clapped her on the shoulder and screeched with laughter. Gone was the deference that made Maya’s toes curl. For the moment they were simply two women sharing a distasteful chore which they scorned to foist on the maids.

  ‘Dinna fash, my leddy, dinna fash! What eye doesna see, hairt won’t grieve ower,’ Mary declared. ‘By the time I’m done wi’ them, none will ken when the wee birds were shot.’

  Silently Maya had withdrawn, and in due course the grouse had appeared at table, sauced and unrecognisable, accompanied by fulsome compliments from Gwennie to Everard Cooper, who had brought them; but Maya, remembering that gory scene, had felt her appetite vanish.

  In Lady Priscilla, too, there was a hint of hidden steel. ‘Not such a fuddy-duddy as she looks,’ had been Alec’s view. ‘She can be damned sharp at times. Everard’s her second husband – a bit of a bully, and a bit of a shark. Archie doesn’t like him, but puts up with him for Lady P’s sake. When they were younger, Everard used to knock her about, but he’s too scared of Lucas to try that nowadays.’

  ‘Lucas?’

  ‘Their son. A human pit bull terrier. No one in his senses gets the wrong side of Lucas.’ Alec had smiled. ‘When Glen Buie is ours, we’ll invite our own friends, but until then, we’ll have to put up with Archie’s old gang...’

  Boom! Boom-boom-boom!

  At last! Shaking with cold and excitement, she knelt up and focused the binoculars. The stags were all on their feet, the big switch among them, apparently undamaged. Their heads faced the wind. They moved restlessly, trying to locate the danger.

  He must have missed, thought Maya, waiting tensely for the rifle to crash again. Had there been two shots close together, or one and the echoes? She imagined the men creeping forward, finding another firing point.

  Then she saw the switch was weaving and staggering as he tried to follow the other beasts. He took a few uncertain paces, then sank down gently, legs folding under him, as the rest of the herd streamed away across the slope. For a moment the wide antlers were visible against the pewter dazzle of the sea-loch, then they bowed slowly until just a single tip could be seen. She watched it through binoculars for a full minute. It did not move.

  She found she had been holding her breath, and let it out on a long sigh. Stiffly she rose and looked for the men, then remembered she had been told to stay where she was until she saw them signal. Whereabouts would they be? She had no more idea than the switch where the shot had come from.

  Sinking back on her heels, she scanned the ground impatiently. Why didn’t they show themselves? The switch was dead. Surely they could now release her from this freezing vigil?

  Ten minutes passed, and still nothing moved. The light was beginning to fail, but she could just make out the tip of antler sticking up from among the stones. What on earth were they doing? Had they lost her? Forgotten about her?

  Better stand up and show herself. She collected the kit they had jettisoned – sticks, ropes, thermos flask, satchels, jackets – shuddering convulsively as she draped the straps about herself. Just as she was about to emerge from her lair, a movement caught her eye. In the nick of time she crouched and froze, as five more stags trotted into view.

  They halted, heads up, and she barely had time to register that the one at the rear was holding a hind leg off the ground, when it suddenly bounded forward. A split second later, the rifle’s heavy explosion sent shockwaves across the hill.

  The lame stag gave two stiff-legged bounds, then pitched down the steep slope, the body rolling over and over until it came to rest some fifty yards below the dead switch.

  This time Maya remained motionless, horrified by how close she had been to spoiling the shot, or being shot herself. There, at last, was the white flash of a handkerchief, and two small figures far below, gazing upward, trying to spot her.

  She rose and waved back. Her feet were numb, and the sticks and binocular-cases made an awkward bundle, constantly threatening to trip her as she began to stumble downhill.

  By the time she reached the ledge where the dead swi
tch lay, Sir Archie was barefoot, sitting on a lichen-covered rock and wringing black, peaty water from his stockings. Fergus had taken off his coat and rolled up his sleeves. He bent over the carcase, heaving out steaming coils of intestines. Both men were streaked with peat and sweat, but at least they looked warm, thought Maya, her teeth still chattering.

  ‘Nice shooting!’ she said.

  ‘My dear girl, you’re frozen. Sorry we were so long. Here, take a dram.’ Sir Archie offered a dented flask. ‘We spotted the little lame staggie when we began to crawl in on the switch, and decided to try for them both.’

  ‘How did he get that way?’

  He shook his head. ‘Looks as if he’s been in some wire. We’ll see when we get down to him. He’s only a knobber – a two-year-old. Callum can come back for him tomorrow.’

  They sat relaxed, sipping single malt, watching Fergus about his work. A glint of late sun slanted under the grey bank of cloud, waking pink tints across the sweep of hill and water. A good place to live and die, thought Maya. Beverley was mistaken: there was nothing cruel about this.

  She felt neither pity nor triumph, only satisfaction for a difficult job well done. A blue film spread across the stag’s large liquid eye, and his long slender legs looked impossibly delicate for their task of carrying the big body over rough ground. In the coarse, gingery hair about his neck, black insects crawled into the light.

  ‘How much would he weigh?’ she asked.

  ‘What d’you think, Fergus? Fourteen stone? Fourteen and a half?’

  ‘Aye, sir. He’ll be all of that.’ He was serious and professional, intent on his task, but now that the adrenalin had stopped running, Sir Archie looked terrible. His skin was grey, with a purplish tinge about the upper lip.

  ‘I’m all right,’ he said firmly, reading her expression. ‘Don’t go worrying Gwennie, now – promise?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I know how to pace myself.’

  She didn’t contradict, but nor did she believe him.

  Fergus twisted a rope round the switch’s nose and antlers, and attached another to the slender hind legs. Finally he slit open the pale, bulging bag of stomach that he had removed, revealing a mass of coarse greenery.