Fortunately, there were not too many people on the road at seven in the morning, apart from the local shopkeepers and the market folk who were all up and about, setting up for the day’s trade. He rode along Habour Street nodding right and left to several of them.
Then the unexpected happened.
‘Hey! Look out, you silly billy!’ He cried as a canary yellow camper-van shot out of Weir Street and skidded for several feet as the driver slammed on his brakes. It stopped a yard over the halt line. Ewan had instinctively swerved and narrowly managed to swing round the front of the van just in time. He drew to a halt by the kerb, dismounted and switched off Nippy’s engine. Hoisting the machine easily on to its stand he walked back as the driver slowly wound down his window.
‘Ah! Sorry,’ the man blustered. ‘You are the – er – the hammer chappie, aren’t you?’
Ewan eyed the two men appraisingly. Unlike the last time he had met them they were both smiling, albeit nervously. They both seemed embarrassed and concerned that they had almost knocked him off his moped.
‘Aye, we are really sorry, Officer,’ said the stocky, surly-looking one with the ear-ring who was sitting in the passenger’s side. ‘We are just anxious to get off to a place called the Wee Kingdom. We heard that there are sea otters off the coast there.’
‘Eyes peeled!’ Ewan said emphatically, causing both men to stare back at him in confusion. The truth was that he had verbalized the words that Torquil was forever telling him.
‘Eyes peeled?’ the driver repeated.
‘Aye, you need to keep your eyes peeled,’ Ewan told him firmly. ‘That is what a good driver needs to remember. It doesn’t matter if it is on one of those fancy motorways that they have on the mainland, or one of these back streets in Kyleshiffin. You have to be prepared for anything.’ He gave them both one of his sternest looks. ‘Please do not think of us as a bunch of yokels. We respect the law here on the island – and we impose it!’
The driver nodded. ‘Understood, Officer. And we’ve learned our lesson. We’ll have our eyes peeled from now on.’
Ewan gave them a final steely look then returned to Nippy to continue his journey up on to the moor.
Five minutes later he was doing his series of warm-up exercises. Then, after another five minutes he was whirling his hammer round and round before letting it fly up, out and away over the moor in a pleasingly long parabolic path to disappear in the heather. He grimaced at the splash of its landing, for there was always a chance of him losing it. But fortunately, its pole was sticking up in the air; a decided advantage that the Highland hammer had over the ball and wire design of the Olympic hammer.
He immediately started to pace out the distance, a grin spreading across his face as he did so, since it was a big throw.
‘The porridge is working well today,’ he mused to himself, as he reached the spot where his hammer was protruding from the other side of a tussock of gorse and heather. He reached over thigh high gorse and prepared to pull the hammer out of the bog. He grasped the handle and tugged so that it came away with a sucking, squelchy noise.
But, as it came out, so too did something else. A hazy cloud of midges suddenly rose from the bog and within moments Ewan was enveloped.
‘Away with you all!’ he cried, running backwards a few paces and almost tripping up. ‘This new deodorant I have on is supposed to repel you little scunners.’ He slapped himself where he felt bites and scratched his mane of hair. He turned and lifted his hammer so that he could beat a hastier retreat. Then he noticed that the ball was covered in a thick red fluid. He winced.
‘Ugh! Blood?’ he asked himself. ‘Don’t tell me I managed to land it in a dead sheep or something?’
Gingerly he crept back towards the tussock, waving his free hand for all he was worth to try to cut a swathe through the midge swarm. He peered over the gorse and then gasped in horror.
A man’s body was lying face down in a bog pool, the brackish waters of which had been turned dark red by blood that had oozed out from a nasty head wound.
Ewan felt bile rise in his throat, for it was an ugly sight. He recognized the clothes only too well.
‘My God! I killed him with my hammer!’ he muttered, as he stared at the blood-soaked ball that dangled from its pole, then at the crushed head injury.
He stood for a moment in total shock, oblivious to the innumerable bites of the midge swarm.
Cora had been almost dead on her feet by two o’clock in the morning when she and Calum had finally written up all of the articles and columns for the special issue of the West Uist Chronicle. Although it was officially a twice-weekly newspaper, whenever Calum felt that a special was needed, he duly produced it and the good folk of the island readily paid up and avidly read the extra gossip. Some weeks it was a daily event.
The main news that Calum wanted to impart related to the events surrounding the calamitous Flotsam & Jetsam TV show the previous evening. This in itself would not justify a whole paper, so he had shown Cora how to produce copy at the drop of a hat. To her delight he had allowed her to contribute, by writing up about the vandalism at the Chronicle office, as well as a short column about Crusoe the abandoned dog that Torquil McKinnon had found. He had been encouraging in his comments about her flowery style, which somewhat sweetened the bitter pill that she was forced to swallow as he slashed her 2,000 word article to a mere 1,000 with a few strokes of his blue editorial pencil.
‘Brevity, lassie! That is the thing that you must concentrate on in a local paper. When you are the editor of a paper then you can let your literary juices flow freely. Until then, be concise, accurate and pithy. Like me!’
Cora had taken his words and his editing on the chin. She was determined to make a success of her journalism and was sure that her great-aunt Bella’s advice to listen and learn from Calum Steele made great sense. She recalled the old lady telling her that although Calum Steele could be a puffed up little pipsqueak, yet he had a knack for telling the news. She remembered the exact expression she had used to describe his journalistic manner: ‘He could speir the inside out of a clam!’
Cora had laughed at her great-aunt’s use of the vernacular, for the word ‘speir’ actually meant to ask, to badger, rather than to use a weapon. Effectively, Calum could hector someone so mercilessly that they would give him a story as if their life depended upon it.
When Calum had insisted that she go home at two o’clock she had gone with some reluctance, promising to return by seven at the start of the new day. Calum had bartered for eight, which he thought would give him an extra hour to recover from the very large whisky that he had mentally promised himself once he had completed and printed the special issue, then mobilized his paper boys.
As it happened, it was three large whiskies, so he was in a deep sleep when Cora mounted the stairs in a state of great excitement at eight in the morning with a copy of the Chronicle bought from Staig’s.