Read Online Gently North-West by Alan Hunter - Free Book Online Page A

dirk-happy patriots – just straight, honest, wholesome revenge.’
    Gently puffed. ‘We’ll agree on that. I think the Nationalist angle is a blind.’
    ‘Stop right there,’ Brenda said. ‘Then I won’t have to say I Told You So later.’ She snuggled a little against him and slanted her face to his. ‘Now forget it, George,’ she said. ‘Leave mighty Blayne to sort out the pieces. I want to get back to being on holiday.’
    Gently smiled at her. ‘Have you noticed anything?’
    ‘No. I’ve been wasting my time talking.’
    ‘It stopped raining two minutes ago.’

    But when they got back to the cottage they found neither Geoffrey nor Bridget much inclined to stir. Geoffrey was painting; Bridget had her feet up and was knitting and avidly reading a novel. Geoffrey had his gear on the table by the window and was slopping about lushly with Prussian Blue. The braes had come into sight a moment before and he wanted to catch them before they vanished again. All the while Gently and Brenda were reporting their visit his brush was teasing, blotting, scrubbing, and at intervals he exchanged it for a palette-knife and scraped raw, smarting patches out of the pigment. But he was listening, and Bridget surmised and asked questions enough for two; and the subject continued until, to Geoffrey’s chagrin, his inky braes turned suddenly green-gold, and there could be no more doubt that the morning’s rain had finally retreated westward.
    ‘Come on,’ Brenda said. ‘Let’s get in the cars. It’s still only half-past eleven.’
    But Geoffrey looked wistfully at his unfinished sketch, and Bridget turned a page firmly.
    ‘You two go out,’ Geoffrey said. ‘We were planning on lunch at the Bonnie Strathtudlem. We’ve had two days on the road, you know, and a day doing nothing would suit us best.’
    So it was agreed, and Gently and Brenda set out again on their own, in a Sceptre with windows still misted and its Whitehall polish yet pebbled with rain.
    They drove northward through the village between braes now flashing and brilliant with colour. A sky of soft blue fire extended above the sharp-etched tops. Ahead, a group of more naked peaks were unfolding purplish cliffs and blued shadows, and to the left the Braes of Skilling, the tributary glen, lifted roundly and greenly above smoking thickets. Soon they came to Lochcrayhead, the village at the top of Glen Tudlem, from which Glen Cray and its burnished loch drove a wedge eastward through the hills; then they were up in the bare rocks and black crags of Glen Donach, where no man lived, and where the crooked road was blasted and riven from sheer cliffside.
    ‘Where do we eat?’ Brenda asked, the map unfolded over her knees.
    ‘There’ll be a hotel somewhere,’ Gently grunted. ‘Towards Loch Torlinn. We’ll take that road.’
    ‘There’s the Leny Hotel under Ben Leny and the Vrachan Hotel under Ben Vrachan.’
    ‘We’ll see where we finish up. You can’t go very far wrong in these parts.’
    Brenda spread the map wider, and still it was blotchy brown panelled with blue. Occasional touches of grey, now growing more frequent, indicated peaks rising above four thousand feet. The roads were contorted and illogical and ruthlessly dictated by the massifs, and the place-names, except those by the roads, were uncouth and unpronounceable. If you strayed from the road you stepped into country as foreign as the moon. These few thin veins of red on the map were the only lifelines of civilization.
    ‘It’s a far country, and it keeps getting farther,’ Brenda mused. ‘Really, it’s a shock to us poor southrons who live in and out of each other’s pockets. We’re used to thinking of our country as urban, with every square yard recorded and occupied – everything cosy. Then we drive up here and suddenly run slap into Outer Mongolia. It’s almost frightening. It’s like turning round to find your house has only three walls.’
    ‘Doctor Johnson was much of your