“Yes,” said Becky, more insistently this time. “But why are we going there?”
I looked up. “I need to find Charlie. And it’s the only clue we’ve got. The only one I can understand, anyway.”
Becky seemed unconvinced.
“This message — it was hidden under the water tank. In the attic. She really didn’t want anyone to find it. It has to be important.”
I looked at the map again. It was like something from The Lord of the Rings. The loch was surrounded by the Cuillin Hills. The peak of Druim nan Ramh to the north. The peak of Sgurr Dubh Mor to the south. It was eight miles from the nearest village. It was hard to imagine a more isolated spot.
“Do you realize how far away this place is?” asked Becky.
I crossed my fingers. I needed her. And I needed the Moto Guzzi. “He’s my best friend. And he’s been kidnapped.”
“Maybe we should leave this to the police,” said Becky.
“Oh, yes, that’s another thing.”
“What?” asked Becky.
“There was a policeman at Charlie’s house.”
“And…?”
“He was wearing one of the wristbands. He wanted me to get into his car. I ran away and he went berserk.”
“So the police are after you as well?” said Becky.
“Actually, they’re probably after both of us now.”
“Brilliant,” said Becky. “I’m travelling to the Isle of Skye with my baby brother on a stolen motorbike, without a driving licence, looking for someone who could be in Portugal for all we know. A secret society of mystery maniacs is trying to kill us. The police want to arrest us…”
Then I had a stroke of luck. I’d been fiddling with the studs and tassels on Craterface’s jacket when I noticed a large lump in one of the pockets. I stuck my hand inside and extracted a spanner, a packet of cigarettes, a cigarette lighter, a great deal of oily fluff…and a wallet.
Becky snatched it out of my hands, saying, “Oi. You little thief.” But as she took it, the wallet popped open and a wad of ten pound notes spilled across the map.
“What did he do?” I asked. “Rob a post office?”
Becky was lost for words. Not something I’d seen very often.
“Ugly, but rich,” I said, knowing I was probably pushing my luck a bit too far.
She wasn’t listening. She was counting the money. “Two hundred. Three hundred.” She still had a long way to go. “The lying pig,” she snapped. “He told me he was broke. The stinking, two-faced, good-for-nothing, evil, self-centred…”
I let her rant for a bit. She needed to get this stuff off her chest. And I quite enjoyed it too. After a couple of minutes she ran out of steam.
I picked up a handful of tenners. “This lot will get us to the Isle of Skye, won’t it?”
Becky looked at me in silence for a few seconds, then hissed, “Too damn right it will. If that creep thinks I’m hurrying home to see him, he’s got another think coming. Let’s hit the road, Jimbo.”
On our way out of the service station we remembered that we still had parents, and they were probably not too happy at the moment. So Becky called them on her mobile. Thankfully the answerphone was on.
“Mum. Dad. It’s Becky. I’ve got Jimbo with me. We’re both fine. But we can’t come home right now. We’ll explain everything later. Ciao.”
We filled the tank, bought two pairs of dark glasses and rejoined the motorway.
Night fell and Skye was still three hundred miles away. We turned off the M6 and wove our way down a maze of narrow country lanes until we came to a small wood. We parked the bike out of view of the road, clambered through the bushes and found ourselves a good tent-sized clearing.
There was a message from home on Becky’s mobile, but we decided not to listen to it. After all, Mum and Dad weren’t going to be wishing us luck.
The food I’d packed was cold and a bit battered, but the remains of Dad’s roast potatoes and raspberry pavlova were still good.
“Know what?” said Becky, brushing the crumbs from her lipstick.
“What?”
“I take back what I said about Dad.” She smiled. “I don’t care if he has got something wrong with his hormones. He produces some quality leftovers.”
We woke at dawn to find torrential rain had hammered its way through the canvas. The bottoms of our sleeping bags were soaked in grimy water. The shoes we’d put outside the mouth of the tent had all but dissolved.
“Why couldn’t this have happened in July?” moaned Becky.
I wrung out the sleeping bags while she readjusted her make-up. Once her face was ready we squelched the tent down, squelched our belongings into the motorbike panniers, squelched onto the damp leather seat and made our way back to the M6. Watching the glistening tarmac scoot by beneath my feet, I dreamed of duvets and hot breakfasts, big jumpers and radiators.
We had double beans on toast in Carlisle and spent a long time in the loos drying bits of clothing under the hand dryers. By Glasgow the sun had come out. By Dumbarton I was starting to feel almost human.
The countryside was looking stranger now, older, craggier. We twisted and turned along the banks of Loch Lomond for twenty miles. To our left mist hung between the peaks of high hills. To our right was mile after mile of water, all rippled in the wind and dotted with knobbly little islands with scrubby trees on.
The road climbed. Crianlarich, Tyndrum, Ballachulish. The hills were barer now. In the sun it looked like a picture postcard. In the rain it would have looked like a scene from a horror movie.
My bum was beginning to hurt. We’d been driving for almost six hours now. So I was relieved when the hills started to fall away and we began making our way down towards the sea, to the Kyle of Lochalsh, and the Skye Bridge.
We pulled off the main road and parked in front of a café by the water’s edge. It was a popular place. Families were eating picnics on benches. Little kids were playing tag along the quay. Dogs were being taken out of the back of cars so they could pee on the verge.
We clambered off the bike, stretched our aching legs, then went and bought ourselves a couple of ice creams. Gulls wheeled overhead. A fishing boat chugged past.
“Cheers!” said Becky, knocking her cone against mine.
“Cheers!” I said, and for a moment I completely forgot about Charlie. I grinned at Becky. Becky grinned back at me. We were having an adventure. The sun was out, and for the first time in my life I realized that I actually liked my sister.
Then she said, “I wonder how long we’ve got.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
She stared at the tarmac and muttered, “They were nasty people, Jimbo. We don’t even know if Charlie’s still alive.”
“Shut up,” I replied quietly. “Please just shut up.”
We finished our ice creams, put our helmets back on, revved the engine and made our way back to the queue for the bridge.
11
The bad step
In Skye we stopped at a Co-op for bread, biscuits, lipstick, strawberry jam and Cheddar cheese. Becky took out her mobile and found that she had no reception. We were now officially off the map.
We headed into the hills. There was a village or two. There was a car or two. But mostly there were mountains, grass, lochs, cattle, sheep, rock and more mountains. It looked like the Land That Time Forgot. If you closed your ears to the roar of the Moto Guzzi, you could imagine a brontosaurus lumbering out of a valley between two cloudy peaks.
I thought about the men in the expensive light-grey suits. I thought about Mr Kidd and Mrs Pearce. And I simply couldn’t connect any of them with this place. I began to wonder whether it was all a mistake, whether the map was just a map, a leftover from a holiday spent exploring Scottish castles. I began to wonder whether Charlie really was in Portugal. Or whether something worse had happened.