CHAPTER I
Saturday–
the 28th of April
HOWIE WATCHED THE BIRD CLOSELY THROUGH HIS BINOCULARS. The eagle rose from her nest with hard strokes from her heavy, damasked wings. The outer, primary feathers looked like thrusting fingers as they forced the air downward. Then the whole bird left Howie’s field of vision.
He saw a single, startled eaglet left in the nest; its sharp, wobbly, little head craning to follow its mother’s ascent. Surprised to see only one chick, he focused hard on the nest, looking for any sign of another. Howie was rewarded by being able to glimpse just the upper edge of an egg, half concealed by the eagle’s down its mother had left around it, keeping it warm.
Neil Howie took the binoculars away from his eyes and stared at the mountainside below the eagles’ eyrie. Treeless and bleak, the rolling foothills of gaunt Ben Sluie stretched like an ocean swell of purple heather towards the craggy, limestone face of the mountain. Beyond was a strip of indigo sea capped by the fleeced heads of waves, choppy in the easterly wind that blew from mainland Scotland, whose hilly coast was the merest smudge on the horizon. Interrupting the gentle undulations of the heathered hills was a single pile of huge, oblong rocks perched on one of their summits. They looked like the tumbled pillars of an ancient edifice but seemed, on closer inspection, to be so eccentrically shaped as to have been, quite by hazard, strewn there through some geological accident. Here two rare golden eagles had chosen to nest.
Howie wished, as he vainly searched the landscape for what had startled the brooding mother, that they had chosen a safer place. Yet nothing seemed to be moving in the heather below the nest. Saint Ninian’s Isle, in late April, was still fairly free of tourists and the area around Ben Sluie was six roadless miles from the ferry to the mainland. But Howie had been warned. There was someone abroad who planned to rob the nest.
‘Still can’t see anyone!’ he said to Mary Bannock, his fiancée, who lay beside him in a thick patch of green, spring bracken, a safe distance from the eagles’ eyrie.
‘Will you look at her now, Neil? She’s surely seen something to disturb her!’ Mary’s soft, Highland Scots voice was pitched deliberately low. Neil Howie had taught her, when they had started their birdwatching together, that the creatures were less likely to hear a human voice that used a lower register. Just as humans could not hear the higher notes of a songbird unless they recorded them mechanically and played them back at a slower speed. The eagle was too far away to hear her, of course, but speaking in low tones was a ‘drill’ they practised when out ‘birding’. And birding was one of the activities that Mary and Neil most enjoyed doing together. Lying on the bed of bracken that served them as their own eyrie, they had laid out sandwiches and a Thermos. For, today, theirs was a waiting game.
Howie looked up at the eagle, soaring now on the warm air currents that rose from the earth after a day of sunshine, her head poised watchfully over territory she considered her own. He knew that someone must be there. For there was only one predator that could threaten a golden eagle on Saint Ninian’s Isle, and that was ‘man’.
‘Aye, I think this is it, Mary,’ agreed Howie slowly. ‘Will you look carefully to the right of the nest there, love. In the heather. Take the foreground first, then the middle distance, then the distance … working away from the nest,
d’you see? I’ll do the same on the other side. And keep your head down, love. If chummy’s out there, I don’t want him to see us!’
‘Yes, Sergeant!’ she said, and there was the faintest hint of rebellious sarcasm in her voice, but she did as she was bid using the shiny, new binoculars he had given her for her birthday. ‘Her Neil’, as she had thought of him since the day they had become engaged, was, after all, a sergeant of the West Highland Constabulary, responsible for one of the largest police precincts in Scotland and, in matters such as this, worthy of being obeyed.
Nor was her pride in him misplaced. At twenty-six his bailiwick consisted of one not-so-small town, Portlochlie, on the mainland, and some nine populated islands stretching westward far out into the Atlantic.
Mary searched the territory she had been allotted carefully, but could see nothing suspicious. The eagle was still hovering watchfully, but now quite high over the nest.
‘If there was anyone hiding there in the heather, wouldn’t she dive at him?’ she asked.
‘Not dive … you say “stoop”,’ corrected Howie without answering her question. He continued his meticulous search of the landscape.
She sighed. When he was after ‘chummy’, which she knew was police slang for the ‘wanted criminal’, he was as hard to distract as a hunting dog that thinks it has found the ‘scent’.
‘Maybe she’s just searching for a wee bit o’ food,’ said Mary mischievously, adding, ‘or maybe she’s “searching for haddock’s eyes amongst the heather bright … To make them into waistcoat buttons in the silent night”?’
‘Lewis Carroll,’ he said automatically, participating in another favourite game in which his schoolteacher fiancée won more often than not.
‘It’s my teatime, I know that!’ said Mary, and she undid the plastic cup on the Thermos. ‘And I think she’s just after feeding her bairn.’
‘No, her mate’s away hunting for food. You’re forgetting him,’ Howie reminded her quietly. He shivered slightly. ‘It’s getting cold. She’ll be wanting to get back to brooding that eaglet. You were right first time, love. Something … and someone, most like, disturbed her.’
Mary looked curiously at her Neil as he patiently searched the hills through his binoculars. She allowed herself the luxury, as she sipped some strong, sweet tea, to stare at his profile
and love it, detail by detail. His tanned outdoorsman’s face had planes and surfaces that reminded her of the physical map in an atlas. Ben Howie she’d nicknamed his rather prominent, aquiline nose–‘Ben’ being Gaelic for mountain. She noticed that his eyes crinkled with the concentration of gazing through the binoculars, but they crinkled, she thought, into the same laughter lines that came with his frequent smile. She wanted to put her hand out and feel the soft, brown hair that curled slightly at the nape of his neck. She loved the eagerness and passion of her policeman who spoke in such a fatherly, husbandly way of eagles. Yet, it saddened her that they had now been engaged for three years and he had still not asked her to name the day. Still had not attempted to make love to her. She longed to ask him why but could never find the words. When it pricked her pride that he might not find her as attractive as she would wish, then she reminded herself of his Christian principles. How could she (and why should she), a well-brought-up Presbyterian girl, try to force this good, kind man into sex before marriage? Or so she persuaded herself. Even though the ache of this incompleteness in their relationship sometimes seemed intolerable.
His passionate nature Neil Howie showed her in so many other ways. In his love of birds. In the quiet, but incandescent joy his religion gave him. In the deep involvement with the quality of justice that he brought to his police work. Mary knew that these were not really separate facets of her Neil but logically, spiritually linked parts of the whole man. Knowing the law, in Christian Scotland, to be based on the teachings of Christ, he saw his work, in the police, as an opportunity to give a practical expression to his faith and convictions. What her Presbyterian church called ‘bearing witness’ and what his Episcopalian church called ‘living your life in Christ’. His love of birds, for instance, he expressed practically, not sentimentally, and yet he had told Mary that birds, their lives, their beauty, and the many mysteries still attached to them (that baffled scientific explanation), all this was, to him, an endless reminder of the wonder of God’s creation. Neil Howie used his knowledge of the creatures, and his power as a policeman, to watch over them and, wherever he lawfully could, to protect their environment.
He rested his eyes for a moment and took a sip of hot tea while Mary gazed watchfully towards the mountain.
‘There’s another bird!’ she cried suddenly, entirely forgetting their voice drill. ‘It’s coming from Ben Sluie. Could it be the male?’
‘It won’t be any other bird. Not on an eagle’s territory,’ said Howie, searching the sky where Mary was pointing. Then he found the bird and refocused his binoculars fast.
‘That’s him all right. Och, will you look at the speed of him, Mary! But he’s still quite high. Wait till you see him stoop. More than a hundred miles an hour they can do when they stoop. If chummy’s out there hidden in one of those ravines in the heather, this’ll be a grand way to winkle him out,’ and Howie spoke as if he identified strongly with the male eagle about to stoop on the wrongdoer.
The female eagle was slowly descending towards her nest while her mate slowed his approach and hovered high over the eyrie. Then suddenly he seemed to fall out of the sky, diving tangentially towards a fold in the hillside below the pile of rocks and the nest.
‘Dear God!’ exclaimed a surprised Howie. ‘The bastard’s only a hundred feet from the nest. He must have …’
Howie had no time to finish his sentence, for a man stood up in the heather pointing a shotgun straight at the diving eagle. The two watchers could see the man’s shoulder take the kick from firing the gun before they heard the shot. But the blast echoed all around the hills when the sound came, and it was followed by a second shot an instant later. The stone crags of Ben Sluie seemed to answer with a fusillade of echoes.
Then the diving eagle hit the man, knocking him out of Neil and Mary’s sight.
‘Mary, get, as fast as you can, to the telephone at Taskpool!’ said Howie. ‘Call the police station in Portlochlie and tell them I want two officers on the very next ferry. Tell them chummy’s armed, right now. They’ll get the magistrate’s permission to use a gun, if we need it.’ He saw her anxious face. ‘But we won’t, we won’t! So don’t worry!’ he added urgently.
Mary hesitated. Howie was already sprinting out of the bracken and across the heather towards the spot where both eagle and man had disappeared. She felt she had to just ‘register’ his departing body in her mind’s eye. The thick shoulders, tapering waist, and long legs of her Neil in his raw wool sweater and faded jeans. How absurd of him, she thought, to say ‘don’t worry’.
‘Please take care!’ she called after him and then started running down the long sloping plateau that led back to the ferry at Taskpool, which linked the barren scenic isle of Saint Ninian’s to the busy fishing port of Portlochlie. Try as she would she could not stop the tears that kept coming to her eyes. She tried to remind herself that no criminal in his right mind risks shooting a policeman in Britain. So universal is public approval of an unarmed police force that the criminal world would nearly always ‘hand over’ a cop killer. The nagging worry in the back of Mary’s mind was that the people who rob rare birds of their precious eggs are not normal criminals. Some, she knew, did not even do it for profit (although a golden eagle’s egg would be very valuable) but out of a collector’s insatiable acquisitiveness. Such a person might not act as would an everyday criminal. This last thought made her run even faster, though her lungs were almost bursting with the effort.
Howie, meanwhile, was running with a trained athlete’s sense of pacing himself. Although rugby football was his sport, Howie played on the ‘wing’ and was used to a couple of hours, at a stretch, of almost incessant running. He watched the place where the man had disappeared but he kept a careful eye on the terrain around him. If the man had killed the eagle, and it was almost inconceivable that he hadn’t, why, he wondered, hadn’t he reappeared?
Then he saw that the female eagle had left her nest again and was hovering above the spot where her mate had stooped. Instants later Howie had reached ground high enough for him to be able to see both the man and the male eagle.
The man had evidently only wounded the bird for he was kneeling on the ground using the butt of the shotgun in a desperate attempt to keep the great, fluttering creature away from him. But the eagle kept attacking again and again, his claws and beak outstretched, only to be warded off with another swingeing blow from the gun. He hasn’t had time to reload, thought Howie, calculating that around four hundred more yards lay between him and the eagle’s attacker.
Howie was sickened to see that the man had just broken the great bird’s wing. Gamely, the eagle made another attempt to fly at the man’s head but toppled pathetically sideways leaving his enemy a chance, at last, to stand up and fumble hurriedly for cartridges with which to reload his shotgun. He had just broken open the gun and was
about to reload, when the female eagle stooped on him. She came so fast that only the sound of her wings made him start to raise his head before she had him by the shoulders, exactly as she might have grasped a hare or a lamb, her talons sinking straight into his flesh. The man shrieked, dropped his gun, and tried to shield his head against the she-eagle’s hammering beak.
Howie had about two hundred yards more to go and used the distance to check the terrain ahead of him. He could see now that the bed of a stream had been used by the man to approach the eyrie. About a quarter of a mile away the stream disappeared over the hillside. Here, Howie knew, the hill descended steeply for another mile to the coast road that led to the small village of Talleter on the west side of the island.
The man struggling with the eagle had flung himself to the ground, twisting his body to try to make the bird get off his back. It was the right manoeuvre because, after a savage peck at his face, the she-eagle soared away heading straight for her nest. The man grabbed his gun, which lay still ‘broken’ but with one cartridge in the breech. He snapped it closed and was cocking it when, for the first time, he saw Howie.
‘’Ullo there!’ gasped the man in a Londoner’s sharp, nasal whine. ‘That f—g bird f—g near killed me … Hey. What the f—!’
Howie had never paused for an instant in his run. On the contrary he had increased his pace as if he were coming around the goalposts for a touchdown. The man just had time to bring the gun up and try to ward him off, or perhaps even to shoot at him, when Howie left the ground in a flying rugby tackle that gripped the man’s thighs just above the knees, and brought him to the ground with a bone-jangling crash. Howie had snatched hold of the gun, expelled the cartridge, and hurled the weapon away into the heather before the man could catch his breath. ...
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