'Think about it,' he said over his shoulder. 'All you need tell the police is that it was too dark to see who they were.'
'And if I tell them the truth?'
He swung round on me. Then you'd be a fool.' And he added, 'You keep your mouth shut and I'll see our witness does the same. You understand?' He stared at me a moment. Then he nodded and went out, Scunton following, their footsteps sounding hollow as they went down the ladder and across the deck to the gangway. And after that I was alone again, still in my pyjamas and feeling cold.
I got myself a drink, my hands trembling, wishing, as I had done so often in my life, that I had somebody to fall back on, not just the legendary figure of my father, but somebody, something, to give me strength. And suddenly I was thinking of the islands seen the previous evening black against that green strip of sky. Shetland, the land where my father had been born. I had never been so close to Shetland before, and sitting there, the brandy warming my guts, it gradually came to me that now was the moment. I would go north to the islands — now while I had the chance.
CHAPTER TWO
My first sight of Shetland was a lighthouse sliding by the window and green lawn slopes falling from rock outcrops, everything fresh and clean, touched with the luminosity of evening light. The Highlander landed and I saw the remains of old wartime buildings as we taxied in to park beside a large British Airways helicopter. There was a light drizzle falling, and as I stood waiting on the apron for my baggage, the smell of the grass and the sea all about me, I had a deep sense of peace, something I hadn't felt for a long time.
Most of my fellow passengers were oil men returning to the Redco rig. For ten minutes or so they filled the little prefab terminal with colour and the babble of their accents; then they trooped out to the waiting chopper and in a buzz-saw whirr of engines and blades they were lifted up and whirled away. Suddenly everything was very quiet, only the rattle of crockery as a woman went round the tables collecting empty cups, the murmur of voices from the BA desk where the dispatch clerk was talking to the crew of the Highlander. There was an Ordnance Survey map on the wall. I got myself another cup of coffee and stood looking at it, refreshing my memory based on the Shetland charts I had pored over on the bridge of Fisher Maid.
Sumburgh Head is the southernmost point of the whole island chain, the tip of a long finger of mountainous land jutting south from the main port of Lerwick. The distance by road looked about thirty miles. A voice at my side said, 'Can I help you?' He was a small man in blue dungarees, dark-haired with bright blue eyes and a ruddy face.
'I want to get to Hamnavoe,' I said and pointed to the little port, which was at the north end of the island of West Burra, a little below Lerwick, but on the west coast.
He ran a car hire business, but when I said I couldn't afford to rent a car, that didn't seem to worry him. 'Hamnavoe.' He shook his head. 'Don't know anyone going to Hamnavoe. You'll have to go to Lerwick first. There's a bus in the morning, or maybe I can fix you a lift. Either way it means staying the night.' And he added, 'My wife can fix you bed and breakfast if that's any help.'
His name was Wishart and I stayed the night with them, in a small house above Sumburgh village with breeze-block outbuildings in which he kept his cars. He had been a mechanic servicing local farm vehicles until the oil companies started drilling off Shetland.
'Now I've got a real good business, not just tourists, you see — it's all the year round, oil executives, contractors, technicians, commercial travellers. We've never known it so good.' His face was beaming.
'Yes, but how long is it going to last?' his wife said quietly, and behind her words was the experience of hard times.
'Ah!' His eyes glanced quickly round the neat little parlour with its gleaming new furniture and bright chintz curtains. 'That's the question, isn't it?' We had finished the meal and were sitting drinking whisky out of a gin bottle. The whisky had a strong peaty flavour. 'You being from Aberdeen, maybe you know the answer to that.'
I shook my head. 'I'm a trawlerman.'
'Trawlers, eh? You looking for a job up at Hamnavoe?'
'Maybe,' I replied cautiously.
'It's a lot smaller than Lerwick, you know. You'd do better in Lerwick.' He poured himself another finger of the pale liquor, topping my glass up at the same time. 'Only this morning I rented a car to a man wanting to get hold of a trawler chap — something to do with one of the rigs. But there aren't any big boats up here, only peerie ones, and there's none of them going cheap. Anyway, the fishermen here, they hate the oil companies. They're scared of what could happen. The Torrey Canyon was bad enough, but suppose one of these production rigs blows? Particularly if they strike oil to the west; then all of the Shetland fisheries could be destroyed, millions of tons of oil polluting the seas for miles around. That's what scares them.' He looked at me, his eyes very bright. 'Dangerous bloody game, anyway. Trawling, I mean. There's just been one of them wrecked, went ashore yesterday in a north-easterly gale. Skipper dead and two of the crew injured.'
The Duchess of Norfolk?'
He nodded. That's right. Drifted into South Nesting Bay… Hear they beached her in the East Voe of Skellister. That's all right until another north-easter piles the seas in. You mentioning Hamnavoe reminded me of it. The skipper came from Hamnavoe. Now what the hell was his name? Not a Shetlander. Norwegian, I think. You ever been up to Graven?' And when I told him I had never been in Shetland before, he nodded, staring into his glass. 'An old wartime base, like Sumburgh here. But bigger. They had seaplanes — Catalinas — and a big airfield. And Scalloway, that's where the Norwegian boats were based after they moved from Lunna, landing men and arms in Norway, bringing refugees out. I was only a peerie boy at the time, but my Dad was up there. A blacksmith, fixing armaments, all sorts of odd jobs.' And he went on to talk of his father, the stories he had told, until it was almost midnight and his wife chased him off to bed.
It rained all night. I could hear it drumming on the slates. But in the morning the sun was shining, a magnificent view of sea and rocks and greensward, all sparkling in the freshness of that early northern light. I left with the post van that had brought the mail down from Lerwick, the washed brightness of land and sea calling to something deep within me. We passed under Ward of Scousburgh, Mosey Hill and Hallilee, the road dropping down to the sea, vistas of blue water stretching away to Bressay and the Isle of Noss. It was all new, an island world, yet I felt at home, and the remoteness of it seemed suddenly to cut me off from all the rest of my life. It was a strange feeling, and I sat there beside the postman hardly saying a word.
He dropped me about three miles from Lerwick, where the Scalloway road came in from the west. 'You won't have to wait long. Anybody will give you a lift.' A breeze had sprung up, a cold little wind from the north. I lit my pipe, watching the red van disappear. I was alone then, the hills all around me, sheep noises and the sea down in the valley. Would anybody at Hamnavoe remember my father? I didn't even know when he had left the place. My mother might have been able to tell me, but I hadn't written to her in years, and anyway she was dead now. She had never been to Shetland, never talked to me about his early life.
A builder's truck loaded with breeze-blocks took me to the outskirts of Scalloway, where the road to Hamnavoe turned off to the south along the placid waters of the East Voe. A small drifter was anchored under the castle, sea birds lying to their own reflections, and I could see water stretching away beyond the bridge that joined Trondra Island to the Mainland shore. I was there about twenty minutes before a tourist gave me a lift into Hamnavoe. It was lunchtime then. I bought some biscuits and cheese, left my bags at the stores, and strolled up a grass track to sit on a bank below some cottages. A purse-seine fishing boat was coming in round the headland, another moored at the concrete pier, both of them wooden-hulled and painted black.