use a local man for this kind of job. Strangers could still find a barrier of silence once the cities were left behind.
Frazer took the hairpin bends with exaggerated care. On one of the turns he stopped, and reversed, to pull tight enough to avoid the snow-banked ditch. But the blue BMW stuck with us, following patiently. Following more patiently than was natural for a man who drives such a car.
Frazer glanced in his mirror again. ‘I think we should,’ he said, voicing our unspoken thoughts, and Ferdy wrote down the registration number in his crocodile-covered note pad. It was a Düsseldorf registration, and even while Ferdy was writing it, the BMW gave a toot and started to overtake.
Whatever was the extent of his intention, he’d chosen his moment well. The BMW squeezed past us in a spray of powdery snow from the drift on our left, and Frazer’s nervous reaction was to swerve away from the flash of light blue and the hard stare of the bearded man in the passenger seat.
The road was downhill and the ice was still hard and shiny up here on the top of the Hamish. Frazer fought the wheel as we swung round – as slowly as a boat at anchor – and slid almost broadside down the narrow mountain road.
We gathered speed. Frazer pumped the brake pedal, trying vainly to snatch at the road. I could see only the sheer drop, down where a clump of firs were waiting to catch us a thousand feet below.
‘Bastards, bastards,’ mumbled Frazer. Ferdy, flung off-balance, grabbed at the seat back, the roof and the sun visor, so as not to grab at Frazer and kill us all.
There was a thump as the rear wheel struck some stones at the road edge, and the tyres for a moment gripped enough to make the differential whine. Frazer was into bottom gear by now, and at the next patch of stones the car whimpered and ceded to his brake pedal enough for him to narrow the angle at which we were sliding. The road was more steeply downhill and the low gear had not slowed us enough to take the steep bend ahead. Frazer hit the horn in two loud blasts before we hit the banked snow that had collected around the edge of the hairpin, like piped icing round a birthday cake. We stopped with a bang of hollow steel, and the car rocked on its suspension.
‘My God,’ said Ferdy. For a moment we sat still. Praying, sighing or swearing according to inclination.
‘I hope you’re not going to do that every time someone tries to overtake,’ I said.
‘Just foreign registrations,’ said Frazer.
Frazer started the engine again. Gently he let in the clutch and the car waddled out of the drift. He took the middle of the road, and at no more than twenty-five miles an hour we went all the way down to the bridge and up the next climb all the way to The Bonnet.
He pulled into the yard there. There was a crunch of gravel and a soft splintering of ice. The BMW was already parked but none of us remarked upon the way its driver had nearly killed us.
‘I’m not sure I’d enjoy it,’ said Frazer, talking of the voyage but studying our faces as if to see the effect the near-accident had had on us. ‘I’m a destroyer man myself … like to keep my head above water.’
I would have described Frazer as an office-boy, but if he wanted to play Long John Silver it was all right by me.
‘Peace time,’ pronounced Ferdy, ‘a submarine trip north is no different to trailing Russians round the Med in an intelligence trawler.’
‘In winter the Med’s a damned site rougher,’ I said.
‘You’re right,’ said Ferdy. ‘As sick as a dog, I was, and I could see that Russian cruiser as steady as a rock all the time.’
‘Your second trip, wasn’t it?’ asked Frazer.
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, you chaps never do more than one a year. It’s over and done with, eh?’
‘Are you buying?’ Ferdy Foxwell asked him.
‘Then it’ll be small ones,’ said Frazer. The wind bit into us as we stepped from the car but there was a fine view. The hills at the other end of the valley obscured the anchorage, but to each side of the summit I could see the Sound and the mist-shrouded islands that continued all the way to the grey Atlantic breakers. The wind sang in the car aerial and tugged at the chimney smoke. We were high enough to be entangled in the fast moving underside of the storm clouds. Ferdy coughed as the cold wet air entered his lungs.
‘All that air-conditioned living,’ said Frazer. ‘You’d better take your briefcase – security and all that, you know.’
‘It’s only dirty underwear,’ said Ferdy. He coughed again. Frazer went around the car testing each door-lock and the boot too. For a moment he looked down at his hand to see if it shook. It did, and he pushed it into the pocket of his trench-coat.
I walked across to the BMW and looked inside it. There was a short oilskin coat, a battered rucksack and a stout walking-stick: a walker’s equipment.
It was a tiny cottage. One bar; a front parlour except for the warped little counter and flap scorched by cigarettes and whittled with the doodles of shepherds’ knives. On the whitewashed walls there was a rusty Highlander’s dirk, an engraving of a ship in full sail, a brightly shone ship’s bell and a piece of German submarine surrendered in May 1945. The landlord was a shaggy-haired giant, complete with kilt and beer-stained shirt.
There were two customers already drinking, but they had taken the bench near the window so we could stand around the open peat fire and slap our hands together and make self-congratulatory noises about its warmth.
The beer was good: dark and not too sweet, and not crystal clear like the swill that the brewers extol on TV. The Bonnet’s had flavour, like a slice of wheat loaf. Frazer knew the landlord well but, with the formality that Highland men demand, he called him Mr MacGregor. ‘We’ll have another fall of snow before the day’s through, Mr MacGregor.’
‘Is it south you’re heading, Mr Frazer?’
‘Aye.’
‘The high road is awful bad already. The oil delivery could not get through that way: he made the journey by the road along the Firth. It never freezes there. It’s a wicked long journey for the boy.’ He prodded the peat fire with a poker and encouraged the smoke to turn to flame.
‘You are busy?’ asked Frazer.
‘Travellers. People walk, even in winter. I don’t understand it.’ He made no attempt to lower his voice. He nodded impassively at the two customers by the window. They were looking at large-scale walker’s maps, measuring distances with a tiny wheeled instrument that they rolled along the footpaths.
‘Travellers, walkers and spies,’ said Frazer. The wind banged on the tiny window panes.
‘Ahh, spies,’ said the landlord. He came as near as I’d ever seen him to laughing: the two men in the window seat looked like some inept casting director’s idea of Russian spies. They had black overcoats and dark tweed hats. Both wore coloured silk scarves knotted at their throats and one man had a closely trimmed grizzled beard.
‘We’ll have the other half, Landlord,’ said Ferdy.
With infinite care the landlord drew three more pints of his special. In the silence I heard one of
