Читать книгу Storm Warning - Jack Higgins, Justin Richards - Страница 5
ОглавлениеBarquentine Deutschland. 9 September 1944. Lat. 25°.01N., long. 30°.46W. Fourteen days out of Belém. Wind NW 6–8. Hove the log and found we were going twelve knots. In the past twenty-four hours we have run two hundred and twenty-eight miles. Frau Prager still confined to her bunk with the sea-sickness which has plagued her since leaving Belém. Her increasing weakness gives us all cause for concern. Heavy rain towards evening.
The morning weather forecast for sea area Hebrides had been far from promising: winds 5 to 6 with rain squalls. Off the north-west coast of Skye, things were about as dirty as they could be – heavy, dark clouds swollen with rain, merging with the horizon.
Except for the occasional seabird, the only living thing in that desolation was the motor gunboat making south-west for Barra, her Stars and Stripes ensign the one splash of colour in the grey morning.
Dawn was at six-fifteen, but at nine-thirty visibility was still bad enough to keep the RAF grounded. No one on board the gunboat could have been blamed for failing to spot the lone Junkers 88S coming in low off the sea astern. The first burst of cannon shell kicked fountains of water high into the air ten or fifteen yards to port. As the plane banked for a second run, the 13mm machine-gun firing from the rear of the cockpit canopy loosed off a long burst that ripped into the deck aft of the wheelhouse.
Harry Jago, in his bunk below trying to snatch an hour’s sleep, was awake in an instant, and making for the companionway. As he reached the deck, the gun crew were already running for the twin 20mm anti-aircraft cannon. Jago beat them into the bucket seat, hands clamping around the trigger handles.
Suddenly, as the Junkers came in off the water for the second time, heavy, black smoke swirled across the deck. Jago started to fire as its cannon punched holes in the deck beside him.
The Junkers was making its pass at close to four hundred miles an hour. He swung to follow it, aware of Jansen on the bridge above him working the Browning. But it was all to no purpose, and the Junkers curved away to port through puff-balls of black smoke and fled into the morning.
Jago stayed where he was for a moment, hands still gripping the handles. Then he got out of the seat and turned to Leading Seaman Harvey Gould, who was in charge of the antiaircraft cannon.
‘You were five seconds too late, you and your boys.’
The men of the gun crew shuffled uneasily. ‘It won’t happen again, Lieutenant,’ Gould said.
‘See that it doesn’t.’ Jago produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and stuck one in his mouth. ‘Having survived the Solomons, D-Day and the worst those E-boat flotillas in the English Channel could offer, it would look kind of silly to die in the Hebrides.’
The pilot of the Junkers, Captain Horst Necker, logged his attack as having taken place at 09.35 hours precisely. A hit-and-run affair of no particular importance which had served to enliven an otherwise boring routine patrol, especially for a pilot who in the spring of that year, during the renewed night attacks on London, had been employed by the elite pathfinder Gruppe 1/KG 66 with the kind of success that had earned him the Knight’s Cross only two months previously.
It had been something of a come-down to be transferred to KG 40 based at Trondheim, a unit specializing in shipping and weather reconnaissance, although the JU 88S they had given him to fly was certainly a superb plane – an all-weather machine capable of a top speed of around four hundred miles per hour.
His mission that morning had one purpose. To look for signs of a convoy expected to leave Liverpool for Russia that week, although the exact day of departure was unknown. He had crossed Scotland at thirty thousand feet to spend a totally abortive couple of hours west of the Outer Hebrides.
The sighting of the gunboat had been purest chance, following an impulse to go down to see just how low the cloud base was. The target, once seen, was too tempting to pass up.
As he climbed steeply after the second attack, Rudi Hubner, the navigator, laughed excitedly. ‘I think we got her, Herr Hauptmann. Lots of smoke back there.’
‘What do you think, Kranz?’ Necker called to the rear gunner.
‘Looks like they made it themselves to me, Herr Hauptmann,’ Kranz replied. ‘Somebody down there knows his business and they weren’t Tommis either. I saw the Stars and Stripes as we crossed over the second time. Probably my brother Ernst,’ he added gloomily. ‘He’s in the American navy. Did I ever tell you that?’
Schmidt, the wireless operator, laughed. ‘The first time over London with the port engines on fire, and you’ve mentioned it on at least fifty-seven different occasions since. I suppose it shows that at least one person in your family has brains.’
Hubner ignored him. ‘A probable then, Herr Hauptmann?’ he suggested.
Necker was going to say no, then saw the hope in the boy’s eyes and changed his mind. ‘I don’t see why not. Now let’s get out of here.’
When Jago went up to the bridge there was no sign of Jansen. He leaned against the Browning and looked down. The smoke had almost cleared and Gould was kicking the burned-out flare under the rail into the sea. The deck was a mess by the port rail beside the anti-aircraft gun, but otherwise things didn’t look too bad.
Jansen came up the ladder behind him. He was a tall, heavily-built man and in spite of the tangled black beard, the knitted cap and faded reefer coat with no rank badges, was a chief petty officer. A lecturer in Moral Philosophy at Harvard before the war and a fanatical weekend yachtsman, he had resolutely defeated every attempt to elevate him to commissioned rank.
‘A lone wolf, Lieutenant.’
‘You can say that again,’ Jago told him. ‘A JU 88 in the Hebrides.’
‘And one of the Reichsmarschall’s later models, to judge by his turn of speed.’
‘But what in the hell was he doing here?’
‘I know, Lieutenant,’ Jansen said soothingly. ‘It’s getting so you can’t depend on anyone these days. I’ve already checked below, by the way. Superficial damage. No casualties.’
‘Thanks,’ Jago said. ‘And that smoke flare was quick thinking.’
He found that his right hand was trembling slightly and held it out. ‘Would you look at that. Wasn’t it yesterday I was complaining that the only thing we got to fight up here was the weather?’
‘Well, you know what Heidegger had to say on that subject, Lieutenant.’
‘No, I don’t Jansen, but I’m sure you’re going to tell me.’
‘He argued that for authentic living what is necessary is the resolute confrontation of death.’
Jago said patiently, ‘Which is exactly what I’ve been doing for two years now and you’ve usually been about a yard behind me. Under the circumstances, I’ll tell you what you can do with Heidegger, Jansen. You can put him where grandma had the pain. And try to rustle up some coffee while I check over the course again.’
‘As the Lieutenant pleases.’
Jago went into the wheelhouse and slumped into the chart-table chair. Petersen had the wheel – a seaman with ten years in the merchant service before the war, including two voyages to Antarctica in whalers.
‘You okay?’ Jago demanded.
‘Fine, Lieutenant.’
Jago pulled out British Admiralty chart 1796. Barra Head to Skye. South Uist, Barra and a scattering of islands below it, with Fhada, their destination, at the southern end of the chain. The door was kicked open and Jansen came in with a mug of coffee which he put on the table.
‘What a bloody place,’ Jago said, tapping the chart. ‘Magnetic anomalies reported throughout the entire area.’
‘Well, that’s helpful,’ Jansen said. ‘Just the thing when you’re working out a course in dirty weather.’
‘Those islands south of Uist are a graveyard,’ Jago went on. ‘Everywhere you look on the damned chart it says Heavy Breakers or Dangerous Seas. One hazard after another.’
Jansen unfolded a yellow oilskin tobacco pouch, produced a pipe and started to fill it, leaning against the door. ‘I was talking to some fishermen in Mallaig before we left. They were telling me that sometimes the weather out there is so bad, Fhada’s cut off for weeks at a time.’
‘The worst weather in the world when those Atlantic storms start moving in,’ Jago said. ‘God knows what it must be like in winter.’
‘Then what in the hell is Admiral Reeve doing in a place like that?’
‘Search me. I didn’t even know he was up here till I was told to pick up that dispatch for him in Mallaig and deliver it. Last I heard of him was D-day. He was deputy director of operations for Naval Intelligence and got himself a free trip on the Norwegian destroyer Svenner that was sunk by three Möwe-class torpedo boats. He lost his right eye and they tell me his left arm’s only good for show.’
‘A hell of a man,’ Jansen said. ‘He got out of Corregidor after MacArthur left. Sailed a lugger nearly six hundred miles to Cagayan and came out on one of the last planes. As I remember, he went down in a destroyer at Midway, was taken aboard the Yorktown and ended up in the water again.’
‘Careful, Jansen. Your enthusiasm is showing and I didn’t think that was possible where top brass was concerned.’
‘But this isn’t just another admiral we’re talking about, Lieutenant. He’s responsible for an excellent history of naval warfare and probably the best biography of John Paul Jones in print. Good God, sir, the man can actually read and write.’ Jansen put a match to the bowl of his pipe and added out of the side of his mouth, ‘Quite an accomplishment for any naval officer, as the Lieutenant will be the first to agree?’
‘Jansen’, Jago said. ‘Get the hell out of here.’
Jansen withdrew and Jago swung round to find Petersen grinning hugely. ‘Go on, you too! I’ll take over.’
‘Sure thing, Lieutenant.’
Petersen went out and Jago reached for another cigarette. His fingers had stopped trembling. Rain spattered against the window as the MGB lifted over another wave and it came to him, with a kind of wonder, that he was actually enjoying himself, in spite of the aching back, the constant fatigue that must be taking years off his life.
Harry Jago was twenty-five and looked ten years older, even on a good day, which was hardly surprising when one considered his war record.
He’d dropped out of Yale in March 1941 to join the navy and was assigned to PT boats, joining Squadron Two in time for the Solomons’ campaign. The battle for Guadalcanal lasted six months. Jago went in at one end a crisp, clean nineteen-year-old ensign and emerged a lieutenant, junior grade, with a Navy Cross and two boats shot from under him.
Afterwards Squadron Two was recommissioned and sent to England at the urgent request of the Office of Strategic Services to land and pick up American agents on the French coast. Again Jago survived, this time the Channel, the constant head-on clashes with German E-boats out of Cherbourg. He even survived the hell of Omaha beach on D-day.
His luck finally ran out on 28 June, when E-boats attacked a convoy of American landing craft waiting in Lyme Bay to cross the Channel. Jago arrived with dispatches from Portsmouth to find himself facing six of the best that the Kriegsmarine could supply. In a memorable ten-minute engagement, he sank one, damaged another, lost five of his crew and ended up in the water with shrapnel in his left thigh, the right cheek laid open to the bone.
When he finally came out of hospital in August they gave him what was left of his old crew, nine of them, and a new job: the rest that he so badly needed, playing postman in the Hebrides to the various American and British weather stations and similar establishments in the islands in a pre-war MGB, courtesy of the Royal Navy, that started to shake herself to pieces if he attempted to take her above twenty knots. Some previous owner had painted the legend Dead End underneath the bridge rail, a sentiment capable of several interpretations.
Just for a month or two, the squadron commander had told Jago. Look on it as a kind of holiday. I mean to say, nothing ever happens up there, Harry.
Jago grinned in spite of himself and, as a rain squall hurled itself against the window, increased speed, the wheel kicking in his hands. The sea was his life now. Meat and drink to him, more important than any woman. It was the circumstance of war which had given him this, but the war wouldn’t last forever.
He said softly, ‘What in the hell am I going to do when it’s all over?’
There were times when Rear Admiral Carey Reeve definitely wondered what life was all about. Times when the vacuum of his days seemed unbearable and the island that he loved with such a deep and unswerving passion, a prison.
On such occasions he usually made for the same spot, a hill called in the Gaelic Dun Bhuide, the Yellow Fort, above Telegraph Bay on the south-west tip of Fhada, and so named because of an abortive attempt to set up a Marconi station at the turn of the century. The bay lay at the bottom of four-hundred-foot cliffs, a strip of white sand slipping into grey water with Labrador almost three thousand miles away to the west and nothing in between.
The path below was no place for the fainthearted, zigzagging across the face of the granite cliffs, splashed with lime, seabirds crying, wheeling in great clouds, razorbills, shags, gulls, shear-waters and gannets – gannets everywhere. He considered it all morosely for a while through his one good eye, then turned to survey the rest of the island.
The ground sloped steeply to the southwest. On the other side of the point from Telegraph were South Inlet and the lifeboat station, the boathouse, its slipway and Murdoch Macleod’s cottage, nothing more. On his left was the rest of the island. A scattering of crofts, mostly ruined, peat bog, sheep grazing the sparse turf, the whole crossed by the twin lines of the narrow-gauge railway track running north-west to Mary’s Town.
Reeve took an old brass telescope from his pocket and focused it on the lifeboat station. No sign of life. Murdoch would probably be working on that damned boat of his, but the kettle would be gently steaming on the hob above the peat fire and a mug of hot tea generously laced with illegal whisky of Murdoch’s own distilling would not come amiss on such a morning.
The admiral replaced the telescope in his pocket and started down the slope as rain drove across the island in a grey curtain.
There was no sign of Murdoch when he went into the boathouse by the small rear door. The forty-one-foot Watson-type motor lifeboat, Morag Sinclair, waited in her carriage at the head of the slipway. She was trim and beautiful in her blue and white paint, showing every sign of the care Murdoch lavished on her. Reeve ran a hand along her counter with a conscious pleasure.
Behind him the door swung open in a flurry of rain and a soft Highland voice said, ‘I was in the outhouse, stacking peat.’
Reeve turned to find Murdoch standing in the doorway and in the same moment an enormous Irish wolfhound squeezed past him and bore down on the admiral.
His hand fastened on the beast’s ginger ruff. ‘Rory, you old devil. I might have known.’ He glanced up at Murdoch. ‘Mrs Sinclair’s been looking for him this morning. Went missing last night.’
‘I intended bringing him in myself later,’ Murdoch said. ‘Are you in health, Admiral?’
He was himself seventy years old, of immense stature, dressed in thigh boots and guernsey sweater, his eyes grey water over stone, his face seamed and shaped by a lifetime of the sea.
‘Murdoch,’ Admiral Reeve said. ‘Has it ever occurred to you that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying precisely nothing?’
‘So it’s that kind of a morning?’ Murdoch wiped peat from his hands on to his thighs and produced his tobacco pouch. ‘Will you take tea with me, Admiral?’ he enquired with grave Highland courtesy.
‘And a little something extra?’ Reeve suggested hopefully.
‘Uisgebeatha?’ Murdoch said in Gaelic. ‘The water of life. Why not indeed, for it is life you need this morning, I am thinking.’ He smiled gravely. ‘I’ll be ten minutes. Time for you to take a turn along the shore with the hound to blow the cobwebs away.’
The mouth of the inlet was a maelstrom of white water, waves smashing in across the reef beyond with a thunderous roaring, hurling spray a hundred feet into the air.
Reeve trudged along in the wolfhound’s wake at the water’s edge, thinking about Murdoch Macleod. Thirty-two years coxswain of the Fhada lifeboat, legend in his own time – during which he had been awarded the BEM by old King George and five silver and two gold medals for gallantry in sea rescue by the Lifeboat Institution. He had retired in 1938, when his son Donald had taken over as coxswain in his place, and had returned a year later when Donald was called to active service with the Royal Naval Reserve. A remarkable man by any standards.
The wolfhound was barking furiously. Reeve looked up across the great bank of sand that was known as Traig Mhoire – Mary’s Strand. A man in a yellow lifejacket lay face-down on the shore twenty yards away, water slopping over him as one wave crashed in after another.
The admiral ran forward, dropped to one knee and turned him over, with some difficulty for his left arm was virtually useless now. He was quite dead, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, in denim overalls, eyes closed as if in sleep, fair hair plastered to his skull, not a mark on him.
Reeve started to search the body. There was a leather wallet in the left breast pocket. As he opened it, Murdoch arrived on the run, dropping on his knees beside him.
‘Came to see what was keeping you.’ He touched the pale face with the back of his hand.
‘How long?’ Reeve asked.
‘Ten or twelve hours, no more. Who was he?’
‘Off a German U-boat from the look of those overalls.’ Reeve opened the wallet and examined the contents. There was a photo of a young girl, a couple of letters and a leave pass so soaked in sea water that it started to fall to pieces as he opened it gingerly.
‘A wee lad, that’s all,’ Murdoch said. ‘Couldn’t they do better than schoolboys?’
‘Probably as short of men by now as the rest of us,’ Reeve told him. ‘His name was Hans Bleichrodt and he celebrated his eighteenth birthday while on leave in Brunswick three weeks ago. He was Funkgefreiter, telegraphist to you, on U743.’ He replaced the papers in the wallet. ‘If she bought it this morning, we might get more like this coming in for the rest of the week.’
‘You could be right,’ Murdoch crouched down and, with an easy strength that never ceased to amaze Reeve, hoisted the body over one shoulder. ‘Better get him into Mary’s Town then, Admiral.’
Reeve nodded. ‘Yes, my house will do. Mrs Sinclair can see him this afternoon and sign the death certificate. We’ll bury him tomorrow.’
‘I am thinking that the kirk might be more fitting.’
‘I’m not certain that’s such a good idea,’ Reeve said. ‘There are eleven men from this island dead at sea owing to enemy action during this war. I would have thought their families might not be too happy to see a German lying in state in their own place of worship.’
The old man’s eyes were fierce. ‘And you would agree with them?’
‘Oh no,’ Reeve said hurriedly. ‘Don’t draw me into this. You put the boy where you like. I don’t think it will bother him too much.’
‘But it might well bother God,’ Murdoch said gently. There was no reproof in his voice, in spite of the fact that, as a certificated lay preacher of the Church of Scotland, he was the nearest thing to a minister on the island.
There was no road from that end of Fhada, had never been any need for one, but during the two abortive years that the Marconi station had existed, the telegraph company had laid the narrow-gauge railway line. The lifeboat crew, mostly fishermen from Mary’s Town, travelled on it by trolley when called out in an emergency, pumping it by hand or hoisting a sail when the wind was favourable.
Which it was that morning, and Murdoch and the admiral coasted along at a brisk five knots, the triangular strip of canvas billowing out to one side. The dead boy lay in the centre of the trolley and Rory squatted beside him.
Two miles, then three, and the track started to slope down and the wind tore a hole in the curtain of rain, revealing Mary’s Town, a couple of miles further on in the north-west corner of the island, a scattering of granite houses, four or five streets sloping to the harbour. There were half-a-dozen fishing boats anchored in the lee of the breakwater.
Murdoch was standing, one hand on the mast, staring out to sea. ‘Would you look at that now, Admiral? There’s some sort of craft coming in towards the harbour out there and I could have sworn that was the Stars and Stripes she’s flying. I must be getting old.’
Reeve had the telescope out of his pocket and focused in an instant. ‘You’re damned right it is,’ he said as the Dead End jumped into view, Harry Jago on the bridge.
His hand was shaking with excitement as he pushed the telescope back into his pocket. ‘You know something, Murdoch? This might just turn out to be my day after all.’
When the MGB eased into the landing-stage a woman was sitting on the upper jetty under an umbrella, painting at an easel. She was in her early forties, with calm blue eyes in a strong and pleasant face. She wore a headscarf, an old naval-officer’s coat, which carried the bars of a full captain on the epaulettes, and slacks.
She stood up, moved to the edge of the jetty, holding the umbrella, and smiled down. ‘Hello there, America. That makes a change.’
Jago went over the rail and up the steps to the jetty quickly. ‘Harry Jago, ma’am.’
‘Jean Sinclair.’ She held out her hand. ‘I’m bailie here, Lieutenant, so if there’s anything I can do …’
‘Bailie?’ Jago said blankly.
‘What you’d call a magistrate.’
Jago grinned. ‘I see. You mean you’re the law around here.’
‘And coroner and harbourmaster. This is a small island. We have to do the best we can.’
‘I’m here with dispatches for Rear Admiral Reeve, ma’am. Have you any idea where I might locate him?’
She smiled. ‘We have a saying in these islands, Lieutenant. Speak of the devil and you’ll find he’s right behind you.’
Jago turned quickly and got a shock. When he’d received his Navy Cross from Nimitz at Pearl, Admiral Reeve had been one of those on the platform, resplendent in full uniform with three rows of medal ribbons. There was no echo of him at all in the small, dark man with the black eye patch who hurried towards him now wearing an old reefer coat and sea boots. It was only when he spoke that Jago knew beyond a doubt who he was.
‘You looking for me, Lieutenant?’
‘Admiral Reeve?’ Jago got his heels together and saluted. ‘I’ve got a dispatch for you, sir. Handed to me by the Royal Naval officer in command at Mallaig. If you’d care to come aboard.’
‘Lead me to it, Lieutenant,’ the admiral said eagerly, then paused and turned to Jean Sinclair. ‘I found Rory. He was with Murdoch at the lifeboat station.’
Her eyes were lively now and there was a slight amused smile on her mouth. ‘Why, Carey, I thought you were going to ignore me altogether.’
He said gravely, ‘I found something else down there on Traig Mhoire. A body on the beach. A German boy off a U-boat.’
Her smile died. ‘Where is he now?’
‘I left him at the church with Murdoch.’
‘I’d better get up there then. I’ll pick up a couple of women on the way. See the lad’s decently laid out.’
‘I’ll be along myself later.’
She walked away quickly, her umbrella tilted to take the force of the rain. ‘Quite a lady,’ Jago remarked.
The admiral nodded. ‘And then some. As a matter of interest, she owns the whole damned island. Left it by her father. He was a kind of feudal laird round here.’
‘What about that naval greatcoat, sir?’ Jago asked, as they descended the ladder.
‘Her husband’s. Went down in the Prince of Wales back in forty-one. He was a Sinclair, too, like her. A second cousin, I believe.’ He laughed. ‘It’s an old island custom to keep the name in the family.’
The crew were assembled on deck and as the admiral went over the rail, Jansen piped him on board. Reeve looked them over in amazement and said to Jago, ‘Where did this lot spring from? A banana boat?’
‘Chief Petty Officer Jansen, sir,’ Jago said weakly.
Reeve examined Jansen, taking in the reefer, the tangled beard and knitted cap. He turned away with a shudder. ‘I’ve seen enough. Just take me to my dispatch, will you?’
‘If you follow me, Admiral.’
Jago led the way down the companionway to his cabin. He took a briefcase from under the mattress on his bunk, unlocked it and produced a buff envelope, seals still intact, which he passed across. As Reeve took it from him, there was a knock at the door and Jansen entered with a tray.
‘Coffee, gentlemen?’
Reeve curbed the impulse to tear the envelope open and said to Jago as he accepted a cup, ‘How’s the war going, then?’
It was Jansen who answered. ‘The undertakers are doing well, Admiral.’
Reeve turned to stare at him in a kind of fascination. ‘You did say Chief Petty Officer?’
‘The best, sir,’ Jago said gamely.
‘And where may I ask, did you find him?’
‘Harvard, sir,’ Jansen said politely, and withdrew.
Reeve said in wonderment, ‘He’s joking, isn’t he?’
‘I’m afraid not, Admiral.’
‘No wonder the war wasn’t over by Christmas.’
Reeve sat on the edge of the bunk, tore open the package and took out two envelopes. He opened the smaller first. There was a photo inside and a letter which he read quickly, a smile on his face. He passed the photo to Jago.
‘My niece, Janet. She’s a doctor at Guy’s Hospital in London. Been there since nineteen-forty. Worked right through the blitz.’
She had grave, steady eyes, high cheekbones, a mouth that was too wide. There was something in her expression that got through to Jago.
He handed the photo back reluctantly. ‘Very nice, sir.’
‘You could say that and it would be the understatement of the year.’
Reeve opened the second envelope and started to read the letter it contained eagerly. Gradually the smile died on his face, his eyes grew dark, his mouth tightened. He folded the letter and slipped it into his pocket.
‘Bad news, sir?’
‘Now that, son, depends entirely on your point of view. The powers-that-be are of the opinion that the war can get on without me. That, to use a favourite phrase of our British allies, I’ve done my bit.’
Jago opened a cupboard behind him and took out a bottle of Scotch and a glass which he held out to the admiral. ‘Most people I know wouldn’t find much to quarrel with in that sentiment, sir.’
He poured a generous measure of whisky into the glass. Reeve said, ‘Something else that’s strictly against regulations, Lieutenant.’ He frowned. ‘What is your name, anyway?’
‘Jago, sir. Harry Jago.’
Reeve swallowed some of the whisky. ‘What kind of deal are you on here? This old tub looks as if it might be left over from the Crimea.’
‘Not quite, sir. Courtesy of the Royal Navy. We’re only playing postman, you see. I suppose they didn’t think the job was worth much more.’
‘What were you doing before?’
‘PT boats, sir. Squadron Two, working the Channel.’
‘Jago?’ Reeve said and his face brightened. ‘You lost an Elco in Lyme Bay.’
‘I suppose you could put it that way, sir.’
Reeve smiled and held out his hand. ‘Nice to meet you, son. And those boys up top? They’re your original crew?’
‘What’s left of them.’
‘Well, now I’m here, you might as well show me over this pig boat.’
Which Jago did from stem to stern. They ended up in the wheelhouse, where they found Jansen at the chart table.
‘And what might you be about?’ Reeve demanded.
‘Our next stop is a weather station on the south-west corner of Harris, Admiral. I was just plotting our course.’
‘Show me.’ Jansen ran a finger out through the Sound into the Atlantic and Reeve said, ‘Watch it out there, especially if visibility is reduced in the slightest. Here, three miles to the north-west.’ He tapped the chart. ‘Washington Reef. Doesn’t it make you feel at home, the sound of that name?’
‘And presumably it shouldn’t?’ Jago asked.
‘A death trap. The greatest single hazard to shipping on the entire west coast of Scotland. Two galleons from the Spanish Armada went to hell together on those rocks four hundred years ago and they’ve been tearing ships apart ever since. One of the main reasons there’s a lifeboat here on Fhada.’
‘Maybe we’d be better taking the other route north through the Little Minch, sir.’
Reeve smiled. ‘I know – it’s a hell of a war, Lieutenant, but it’s the only one we’ve got.’
Jansen said solemnly, ‘As long as war is regarded as wicked it will always have its fascination. When looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular. Oscar Wilde said that, sir,’ he said helpfully.
‘Dear God, restore me to sanity.’ Reeve shook his head and turned to Jago. ‘Let me get off this hooker before I go over the edge entirely.’
‘Just one thing, sir. Do you know a Mr Murdoch Macleod?’
‘He’s coxswain of the lifeboat here and a good friend of mine. Why do you ask?’
Jago unbuttoned his shirt pocket and took out an orange envelope. ‘The Royal Naval officer in command at Mallaig asked me to deliver this telegram to him, sir, there being no telephone or telegraph service to the island at the moment, I understand.’
‘That’s right,’ Reeve said. ‘The cable parted in a storm last month and they haven’t got around to doing anything about it yet. In fact at the moment, the island’s only link with the outside world is my personal radio.’
He held out his hand for the envelope which he saw was open. ‘It’s from the Admiralty, sir.’
‘Bad news?’
‘He has a son, sir. Lieutenant Donald Macleod.’
‘That’s right. Commanding an armed trawler doing escort duty on east-coast convoys in the North Sea. Newcastle to London.’
‘Torpedoed off the Humber yesterday, with all hands.’
Reeve’s voice dropped to a whisper. ‘No one was saved at all? You’re certain of that?’
‘I’m afraid not, Admiral.’
Reeve seemed to age before his eyes. ‘One thing they obviously didn’t tell you, Lieutenant, was that, although Donald Macleod was master of that trawler, there were four other men from Fhada in the crew.’ He passed the envelope back to Jago. ‘I think the sooner we get this over with, the better.’
The church of St Mungo was a tiny, weather-beaten building with a squat tower, constructed of blocks of heavy granite on a hillside above the town.
Reeve, Jago and Frank Jansen went in through the lychgate and followed a path through a churchyard scattered with gravestones to the porch at the west end. Reeve opened the massive oaken door and led the way in.
The dead boy lay on a trestle table in a tiny side chapel to one side of the altar. Two middle-aged women were arranging the body while Murdoch and Jean Sinclair stood close by, talking in subdued tones. They turned and looked down the aisle as the door opened. The three men moved towards them, caps in hand. They paused, then Reeve held the orange envelope out to Jean Sinclair.
‘I think you’d better read this.’
She took it from him, extracted the telegram. Her face turned ashen, she was wordless. In a moment of insight, Reeve realized that she was re-living her own tragedy. She turned to Murdoch, but the admiral stepped in quickly, holding her back.
Murdoch said calmly, ‘It is bad news you have for me there, I am thinking, Carey Reeve.’
‘Donald’s ship was torpedoed off the Humber yesterday,’ Reeve said. ‘Went down with all hands.’
A tremor seemed to pass through the old man’s entire frame. He staggered momentarily, then took a deep breath and straightened. ‘The Lord disposes.’
The two women working on the body stopped to stare at him, faces frozen in horror. Between them, as Reeve well knew, they had just lost a husband and brother. Murdoch moved past and stood looking down at the German boy, pale in death, the face somehow very peaceful now.
He reached down and took one of the cold hands in his. ‘Poor lad,’ he said. ‘Poor wee lad!’ His shoulders shook and he started to weep softly.
