Hell's delight, lights! An unlit boat was certainly suspicious. I hunted for, and found the switch, got the masthead lights on, and decided one light was as bad as another and put the cabin light on, too.
Still the harbour remained quiet. No other vessels were under way; there was no sign of movement, no running up and down the quayside, no pointing or shouting. I opened the throttle a bit and, looking round the cabin saw a sink, a stove, lockers. Food perhaps? A few tins. Bully beef and beans, soup, a couple of bars of chocolate, tea and coffee and a great treasure, a half-full bottle of The Grouse beautiful elderly Scotch Whisky. I had a mouthful of that, for starters, then crammed some chocolate into my mouth. It's scarcely a gourmet combination, but I felt the benefit as the whisky warmed my windpipe and the chocolate filled chilly little corners of my gut.
Nipping back and forth between the wheel and the stove, I put on a kettle of water and lit the Calor gas. I opened a can of beans and ate them hungrily, with a spoon. When the water boiled, I made tea, laced it thoroughly with The Grouse and began to feel like the man I remembered.
By this time, I'd also found the charts and was considering my route. Across the channel from Lerwick lay the island of Bressay. On the far side of Bressay lay Noss. On the far side of Noss lay the Holm of Noss. If Anderson had decided to get out of everybody's way, he could hide there as well as anywhere and the missing boat had half confirmed my guess.
But I was by no means sure of what I was doing. I'd told Elliot and Willingham that Anderson could be in any
one of a million places and that remained true. All the same, I had a kind of mental picture of the man now : he had an instinct for high and lonely places, plus strong independence of spirit. Anderson would choose his own way, and follow it. And the Holm of Noss was his by conquest if not by title. More than that: scarcely anyone knew he'd done it. He'd kept it quiet because of the snowy owls. There, he would not be found unless he chose to be.
I headed south down the channel between Mainland and Bressay, watching the dark Bressay cliffs climb high and black above and sticking as close to them as I dared. I realized suddenly that I'd no idea how much fuel was in the tank and there seemed to be no way of finding out. I prayed there would be sufficient. Certainly the engine mumbled steadily enough, but then it would, of course, until the last drops had burned. I shrugged to myself. There was nothing I could do about it now.
I used more of the hot water to make more tea, added a generous slug of whisky and thought about Marasov. He'd certainly got here fast from Gothenburg. How? Then I remembered my geography; The Shetlands lie closer to Scandinavia than to Aberdeen. That accounted for the strong Norse links; also accounted, of course, for Marasov's quick trip across. A big fishing boat going flat out wouldn't take very long to cross and Marasov probably had even faster transport at his disposal. But what he said was less easy to understand. He knew I was in the Shetlands: his men at Sandness had radioed the information. Okay. He'd kept watch for me, spotted me, grabbed me. But why, after that, had he let me go? The more I thought about it, the more I returned to one, simple conclusion : that Marasov must think I was his best chance. He must believe I was more concerned about Alsa than anything else. Well, he was certainly right about that! But there was an awful finality about his warning. The transparency must be returned without anybody else seeing it. Or else it was curtains for Alsa! I wondered what the transparency showed. Was it, like some nineteen-twenties melodrama with a touch of technology, a photograph of the plans? Or the ship itself? Would it be possible to tell, from a single photograph, what kind of ship she was? I thought of the characteristic flaring hull of an air, craft carrier and decided it would, if construction was far enough advanced. In which case, I realized grimly, a sight of that transparency would mean curtains for me, too. And not even a sight. To have touched it would be enough. Marasov wasn't going to say, if I did succeed in getting hold of it, `Thanks for your help and here's your girl friend.' He was going to say to himself that if I'd had a chance to see it, I must be put out of the way, permanently, before I had the chance to describe what I'd seen. So either way we were done for, both of us. And James Anderson too, if he so much as touched the lens case addressed to him!
Marasov had himself a work-horse and knew it. As long as I believed Alsa was alive, he knew I'd go on chasing. And I daren't not believe it.
Ahead of me a red light glowed a warning. I checked Lincoln's chart and found a red-ink cross marked and beside it, heavily underlined, the words oil rig wreck. Minutes later, I passed close to a tangle of steel girders sticking out of the water, with the waves washing at them. The waves were getting bigger now as Catriona came out of the shelter of Bressay Sound and became exposed to the wider sea. Beneath my feet she began to rise and fall disconcertingly and I held tight to the wheel as she rolled and pitched beneath the high cliffs. Had I bitten off more than I could chew, trying to make this trip? I remembered all the radio warnings I'd heard over the years, of all the gales in Orkney and Shetland, force this and that. Even the names on the chart now had a sinister flavour; something called Geo of the Veng lay just behind me, above towered Bard Head, beyond lay Hamar and Muckle Hell. I was warmer now, but I shuddered and forced myself to concentrate as I brought Catriona round the towering headland and turned her slowly through heavier seas to head north for Noss.
Clinging to the wheel one-handed, I held the chart with
the other and stood swaying as I tried to work out What I must do. The chart's legend showed Noss to be all cliffs apart from two tiny sandy beaches, one on each side of a narrow neck of land at the extreme west. The island itself stretched about a mile and a half, east to west, a mile north to south. At the western end, where the two beaches were marked, the land was low, as a fifty-foot contour line showed. Looking ahead, I found I could dimly see Noss now and its dark wedge-shape confirmed what the chart showed. The land rose steadily from that low western tip towards a towering cliff named The Noup, at the extreme east. The Holm of Noss lay a little less than half a mile south of the Noup. I thought about continuing in Catriona to the Holm, but reluctantly decided against it. Lincoln had said the sea stack was two hundred feet high..If I got there, what would I do? Shout? The sound of the sea alone would make me inaudible. I could hardly climb the bloody thing. So the only way was to go ashore, to cross the island. In spite of the hot drinks, the spirits, the food I'd consumed, I felt weak as a kitten. The long day had drained my physical and mental strength. I hadn't slept the night before. I ached to pull this pitching boat in somewhere, just to lie on one of the bunks and let the world drift away. But there wasn't a chance. For a start, there was nowhere for the boat to go except that little beach on Noss. And I must go on!
I needed energy above all things. Sugar gave quick energy, didn't it? And there was a container of sugar in the food locker. The remaining water in the kettle was still warm and I half filled my cup with sugar, managed to pour some of the water on to it, then half-drank, half-ate the sweet revolting result and came close to vomiting it straight back. But, rather precariously at first, then more easily, it stayed down. By the time I was bringing Catriona cautiously in towards the little dull stretch of moonlit sand the chart called Nesti Voe, I'd stopped thinking about my stomach and was trying to think how to get ashore dry-footed. There wasn't any way, as it turned out. I just had to run the boat up on to the sand and jump down into the shallows clutching