Gently North-West Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. ‘Much better.’
    Gently was quiet then for a space of minutes; but now the sun on the tops was plainly waning. Soon even their lavish Highland evening would be stealing into a night. The dagger of the loch had grown harder, whiter in its thrust down the glen, and a haze was settling in the witch’s pot and dulling the clean lines of the braes.
    ‘Damn these mountains,’ Brenda sighed. ‘They’re damp too, into the bargain.’
    ‘Up then,’ Gently said. ‘When you notice that, it’s time to go.’
    He helped her rise. For a few last moments they dallied to take a farewell look, Brenda resting on Gently’s arm with a hand curled inside his. Behind them the crag, splintered and fissured, lifted in dizzying pitches to the Keekingstane, and on the right the ‘guid path’ departed untamed into a fresh torment of trees. Suddenly Gently felt Brenda go taut.
    ‘What is it?’ he asked.
    ‘Ssh. Just look.’
    ‘Look where?’
    ‘There. Up the crag. Then get ready to tell me I’m a liar.’
    Gently looked. The crag rose perpendicularly for perhaps another two hundred feet, ending in a cloven shaft or tooth of rock which could be no other than the Stane. The Stane leaned outwards from the line of the crag and was silhouetted by the paling sky. In the cleft of the Stane Gently saw a man’s head. The man was staring intently through a pair of glasses.
    ‘I see,’ Gently breathed. ‘That explains all the boot-prints.’
    ‘Don’t you see who it is?’ Brenda whispered.
    ‘No. Nor do you at this distance.’
    ‘But I do!’ she hissed. ‘I’d know him anywhere. I know the shape of his head.’
    ‘Whose?’
    ‘Redbeard’s.’
    ‘Dear Brenda!’
    ‘Look,’ she said. ‘He’s lowering the glasses.’
    The glasses sank, and very briefly they glimpsed a broad, bearded face; then the man apparently caught sight of them and his head vanished from the cleft.
    ‘There,’ Brenda said. ‘Now call me a liar!’
    Gently hunched a shoulder. ‘It’s him if you say so. Maybe I was wrong about him being a farmer. Maybe he’s a Forestry man instead.’
    ‘Do Forestry men sit around with glasses?’
    ‘He could be the laird from the big house. He was training the glasses in that direction.’
    ‘A laird,’ Brenda said. ‘Yes, that’s more like it.’
    She gazed back interestedly up the crag, but the laird, if he was one, failed to oblige. Only the chill evening sky showed emptily through the cleft.
    Brenda shivered.
    ‘Let’s go,’ she said. ‘He’s probably on his way down.’
    ‘Don’t you want to meet him?’
    ‘Some other time. Right now I’ll settle for that dram at the local.’

CHAPTER THREE
    Then the justicing-man wi’ his fule bodies
    Cam’ gawkin at Willie like a wheen auld hoodies.
    ‘Willie loupit o’er a linn’, Lady Coupar
    W HEN GENTLY WOKE in the morning a grey twilight was pervading his room and a low susurrous buzzing sounded continuously in his ears. He stirred uneasily. Could the Bonnie Strathtudlem’s whisky really be so potent? But no, he’d only had time for a single tot, and apart from the buzzing his head felt clear enough. What, then . . . ?
    The hissing wheels of a passing vehicle explained the matter. It was raining out there – Highland rain, which sends down three drops for one of any other sort.
    He rolled out of bed and padded to the window. Yes, it was whirring down like a new Flood. The braes were sheeted in smoky wrack and the Hill of the Fairies was lost to view. Just outside the window the gleaming Hawk had spray dancing frolics on its roof, and each fresh car that swished by travelled in a screen-high swathe of water. Highland rain! Why was it inspiriting, when London rain only depressed?
    He found Geoffrey in a dressing-gown in the kitchen, drinking tea with Mrs McFie. Mrs McFie was stirring porridge in a black iron saucepan. Both were looking rather solemn, Geoffrey through the window at the rain, Mrs McFie at the porridge, which bubbled fatly as she