Then a morning came when Hugh looked out of his bedroom window to see a sky whose blue was so deep and dark that he could have been looking at it through Polaroid sunglasses. He couldn’t imagine staying inside. He pinged Malcolm the minister’s son and Donald the rigger’s boy. About half an hour later they met in the back yard of the house where Hugh lived. The house was a mile and a half away from the wee school that overlooked the bay. It stood on the slope of a hill, the highest house in a village that, like most villages in Lewis, consisted of a cluster of half a dozen old houses, a few new ones and sites for several more, all scattered around the landscape for hundreds of metres. The road ran below it, over a culvert where a stream from a small freshwater loch at one side of the hill flowed into the sea-loch around whose shore the village was spread. Minnows swam in that burn, preyed on by an eel, long and old and black, that lurked under the culvert.
The three boys scuffed pebbles in the yard and debated the shore or the loch or the glen farther up the road, but the deep blue of the sky turned their eyes to the hills above the village, and up to the hills they went. Within the old manse’s glebe the ground was mossy and the grass long. Beyond the fence above it – the barbed wire was tufted with sheep’s wool – the lads were wading through heather, tough and springy, that scratched at their ankles and tugged at their trousers. Old ash from past muir-burnings puffed up around their feet, making them cough, and blackening their trainers within minutes. Black-faced sheep and months-old lambs gave them the yellow slot-eyed stare, chewing impassively, or panicked for no clear reason and bounded away, then forgot why they were running and stopped to graze again.
The hill was not very high, but it was higher than it looked. As soon as the boys had toiled up one slope, another would loom ahead, usually with a bog to cross before they got there. The slopes themselves were strewn with erratic boulders, some big enough to have their own overhang and cave-like declivity beneath. After about twenty minutes of climbing, the boys reached the summit, a broad plateau of rocky outcrops crusted with lichens, some of them grey-green and others orange like splashes of earth-moving-machinery paint.
Hugh stood with the others and looked around. He knew that he was near the junction of two almost peninsular promontories of the long island: the one that stretched ahead of him across moor and lochs and hills to the distant headland of Aird, and the one behind and to his right, where the sea he could glimpse beyond the little long loch in the glen – the Atlantic that broke on the bay that the wee school overlooked, and whose sand was just visible from where he stood – was the same sea as lapped the village shore, via a few zigzag miles of beaches, cliffs and headlands hidden behind the hills immediately in view. Turning farther around to his left, his gaze swept that inlet and the hills and glens to the western horizon. From this height it was suddenly obvious that the land wasn’t made of peat with rocks sticking out, but of rock with an uneven and broken overlay of peat like frayed hessian sacking over rubble. Clear too were the drove roads along the sides of the glens and across the moors, relict pathways along which cattle had once been driven and that now even sheep did not frequent. On almost every hilltop the blades of the great windmills spun like slow clockwork. The wind seldom ceased on Lewis, but today it was little more than a warm breeze.
‘No a bad view,’ said Malcolm.
‘How about we go to the lochs?’ said Donald, pointing ahead to where patches of water glittered in the middle distance.
Hugh felt a small thrill. Coming up this hill hadn’t been forbidden when he’d been smaller, but going to the lochs definitely had been. He reckoned he’d now outgrown that injunction. Certainly it hadn’t been repeated half an hour earlier when he’d told his mother where he was going. It hadn’t been lifted, either, but he reckoned he was in the clear.
‘Fine,’ he said.
On they went. Like the summit, the lochs were more difficult to get to than they looked. As they walked across the rock, the surfaces planed by the glaciers of the ice ages turned out to be deeply scoured by the same process, with unexpected cracks and dips that the boys had to scramble down and up or leap across. Then the heather and peat and bog began again.
Another half-hour and the boys stood beside the first of the lochs. Less than a hundred metres at its widest, it lay still and black under the dark blue sky, banked by metre-high overhangs of heather-covered peat and here and there a tiny shingle beach.
The silence rang in Hugh’s ears.
‘Quiet,’ he remarked, to break it.
‘Wonder if there’s a monster in it,’ said Malcolm.
‘I doubt there’s a fish,’ said Hugh.
‘Or maybe a crashed plane,’ said Donald.
Hugh and Malcolm triangulated him with scornful looks.
‘That’s what we thought when we were wee,’ said Hugh. ‘We used to have a crashed fighter jet in every lochan.’
Donald shrugged.
‘Planes went down here,’ he said, as if repeating a well-established historical fact rather than a rumour passed from cohort to cohort of primary-school kids.
‘So why would they still be here?’ Hugh asked. ‘There would have been searches.’
‘It was all secret,’ said Donald. ‘It was the Cold War.’
‘Oh, the Cold War?’ Hugh scoffed. ‘It was the Second World War I was told. And that was about the wee loch above the school. There was supposed to be a Messerschmitt under the water. With the dead German pilot’s skeleton still in it. When the sun was right, you could see the Iron Cross hanging in front of his collarbone. That’s what Lachie MacIver told me, when he was ten and I was five.’
They all laughed, even Donald.
‘It was the Cold War,’ Donald repeated, in a stubborn tone. ‘There was a MiG shot down over the sea that crashed in the hills around here. The RAF didn’t want to let on. That’s why there weren’t any searches.’
‘There must have been searches,’ said Hugh. ‘Or people might have found it by accident.’
‘Och, if a plane crashed in a loch, the authorities didn’t bother with that,’ said Donald. ‘They knew nobody would ever find it.’
Hugh stared at him. There was something baffling about his pal’s insistence. He remembered how this sort of story wasn’t the only one they’d all believed, in wee school. A few years ago he and his little sister had become convinced that there was some bogeyman – no, an actual flesh-and-blood man – living in the roof spaces behind the attic’s thin partitions, and that he occasionally hid in the big shed at the back of the house. They had somehow believed that enough to terrify themselves now and again, yet most of the time didn’t think or worry about this unseen presence at all. At no time had they ever given the practicalities of the matter a moment’s thought.
Donald was thinking no more rationally than they had been. To ask him why and how the authorities could be so blithely sure that this scandalously, secretly shot-down MiG would not be discovered, let alone how the crash wouldn’t have been noticed by any of the locals, would be as pointless as it would have been for someone to ask Hugh or his sister Shonagh how the man in the attic got his food or went to the toilet or got in and out of the house unobserved.
But thinking about this reminded Hugh of the people he’d seen who weren’t there, and of Voxy. He didn’t want to think about that. He could feel his face heat up, and he turned away abruptly.
‘Let’s get a move on,’ he said.
They made their way around the side of the loch and were then lured by the glitter of the next, a few hundred yards of heather away. Again the lie of the ground was deceptive. About halfway to the next loch they found themselves standing on the lip of a small gully. It was about two metres deep and three across, its scree-covered floor rising on either hand to be lost amid the heather after a few metres each way. The far side of it looked like peat overhung with heather. They could easily have walked around it.