Hebrides Tide

By H H Inglis

A dark tide washes the shore of an island in the Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland, as Jamie stumbles upon an old secret. As he unravels the mystery, he becomes entangled in the threads of a new secret, which knots tightly around him. A black menace haunts him. The life of a child is threatened. Will Jamie be in time to save him?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Dec 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781738488001

Book preview

Part One

He kicked hard at the door. It juddered. He kicked harder. The rusted lock yielded and the door broke open in a hail of splinters. He could hear Catriona laughing in disbelief. He turned to her, squinting his eyes against the sun, and laughed too.

The light spooling into the dark interior drew them inside. They were hit by waves of dust and marine damp long entombed inside the boathouse. Towards the front of the boathouse near to the large wooden doors, he could see the shape of a boat tucked under a tarpaulin. Saying to himself ‘I wonder if that is…’ he began tugging at the tarpaulin. Catriona joined him and they dragged it off to reveal a small coastal sailing boat, still crisply painted orange and black with the sail wrapped like a mummy in the well of the boat. An outboard motor was attached to the rear.

‘It’s the Papa Westray’ he exclaimed in delight. Memories flooded in. ‘Do you remember those picnics in the Papa Westray?’

Catriona smiled ‘Of course. I remember sailing to the little Isle of the Standing Stone. We played hide and seek in the shadow of the large stone and you proposed to me there. Bet you have forgotten that’.

He could not remember but he laughed anyway ‘What did you say?’

She screwed up her face in fake concentration, saying ‘I think I said ‘Yes’ but, as we were only ten years old, I won’t hold you to it.’

In the gloom they could see the carcasses of four or five canoes stacked against the far side wall. Sprawling coils of rope impregnated with dried seaweed created hazards all over the floor. In the rear corner under the ladder stairs were rusting drums of diesel. Scattered around were twisted branches of bleached wood, punctured buoys and broken plastic toys which had been scavenged from the beach.

‘Where does the ladder lead?’ Catriona asked, pointing at the ladder stairs.

‘Maybe a loft room of some kind, probably to store more boating tackle.’

He went over to scrutinise the ladder to see if it was intact and tentatively tested the bottom step. It looked quite solid and had clearly been securely fixed at the top. He cautiously began to climb up with Catriona following close behind him. He emerged into a room with high arched rafters which extended the full length of the boat house. Sun was streaming in through a window in the apex of the roof.

What greeted them was wholly unexpected and took their breath away. Three of the walls were covered by large painted panels. On the two long walls the paint had been delicately handled in tones of blue grey and silver from which emerged shadowy shapes of a forest fringing a ghostly lake. The waters of the lake rippled and shimmered from the reflective glow of a harvest moon painted in thick orange impasto. It was eerily beautiful and had a hypnotic effect upon Jamie. He felt for a moment he was there standing alone on the shore of the lake staring into the swirling depths of its icy waters. The forest trees of birch, spruce and aspen crowded round him, their branches almost brushing his neck. He could sense the timelessness of the forest stretching for mile after mile into an unimaginable infinity, constantly raked by bitter winds sweeping in from the Tundra plains. His imagination left him momentarily untethered. The words ‘Always dance the orange’ played round in his head. Catriona whispered in his ear ‘Jamie, what have we stumbled on?’ Jamie understood what she meant. It felt as if they had entered some mystical chapel or hushed sanctuary where speaking out loud seemed a defilement. Candles in glass jars placed along the walls added to the sense of a chapel.

In the centre of the room was a small bench made out of driftwood. There was no other furniture in the room. The bench was placed to face the painting which entirely filled the third wall. This painting was a complete contrast to the other paintings in style and mood. It was a crowded nativity scene. The figure dominating the centre of the scene was a seated Virgin dressed in a luminous blue robe. She had a beautiful, Botticelli shaped face which she inclined towards a smiling baby Jesus sitting on the edge of her lap. He was holding out his chubby arms to a kneeling figure of Joseph who was wearing a shabby leather jerkin; his lowered face obscured by a mass of tangled hair. What was unexpected was that the figures flanking the traditional biblical scene were not shepherds or kings but fishermen in their oilskins and crofters holding mattocks for cutting the peat.

Catriona was peering intently at the various characters thronging the scene. She suddenly cried out ‘Jamie, look. I swear that’s my father in his favourite Harris tweed jacket’.

Jamie stood close to the surface of the painting and scrutinised each of the faces. ‘It is definitely your father and there are my grandparents,’ he said, pointing at an elderly couple with happy smiles, who stood to the right of Mary.

They both spent the next few minutes taking it in turns to identify the various local characters who had peopled their childhoods: The Reverend MacCloud, the stern Minister, and his two bespectacled, school mistress daughters, Miss Cecily and Miss Jean; Mrs Bessie Dalbeith the matronly post mistress; Finlay McDougall, the lobster fisher and his two strapping sons, Davie and Will, and old Ben Gillespie, whose hilltop croft had the best view of the bay. There was a host of other familiar faces. Jamie was especially charmed by striking images of his grandparents, who were sweetly holding hands. Not only were the portraits good likenesses but they had captured the essence of their different personalities, Grandfather’s excitability and Grandma’s practical calmness.

Catriona clapped her hands in delight ‘Look, there’s you, me…and Isla and Finn.’

Towards the bottom right of the painting was a group of four children with skinny legs wearing baggy T-shirts, shorts and oversized sandals. Three of them were sitting in a huddle over a game of squares which the fourth, who was standing to their right, sideways on to the viewer, was marking out with a long stick in the sand. They were taking no notice of the nativity but were absorbed in their own world.

‘How old would we have been there?’ he asked as he scrutinised their younger selves.

‘Seven or eight, maybe’ guessed Catriona.

‘These are really extraordinary portraits’ he said, ‘I wonder who on earth painted them?’ He stepped back from the mural and scanning the whole scene, looked puzzled ‘Someone is missing? Where is Miss May? There are Miss Cessie and Miss Jeanie, but I can’t see Miss May’. The three sisters had been inseparable, living their whole lives together in the Manse.

Catriona was not listening as she was still minutely examining the gang of four children. Isla’s elfin face peeping out of her long silver hair was unmistakeable. You could feel Finn’s ungainliness by the spiky awkwardness of his pose. She herself looked like a proper little urchin with a rag mop of black curls. In contrast, Jamie, the fourth figure, with his shoulder length light auburn hair and Grecian features, had the grace of Donatello’s David.

‘He always was a beautiful child’ she said to herself. She stole him a glance. He had not lost that extraordinary grace in the way he held himself. He remained tall, long limbed and slender but his shoulders had now broadened. His finely chiselled features were handsome in a conventional way but carried a depth of character, a quality which had become more pronounced as he had grown older. His looks could have made him arrogant but he was the opposite, a blue eyed dreamer, who could suddenly turn on you a startlingly clear gaze, which drew you into his world of imagination. He was constantly animated by a stream of ideas, only his hands betraying his nervous energy by their restless, unselfconscious motion. His hair still flopped too casually into his eyes.

It troubled her that she still felt so wholly attuned to him. This was despite the anger she had felt towards him in her teenage years. She had so wanted to run free with him but found that he had placed her in a box with Isla and Finn under the category of ‘childhood friends.’ However hard she tried, there was no way she could claw her way out of the box. She partly blamed her moody teenage years on Jamie’s indifference towards her. He failed to notice that she was growing up with deep feelings for him. She was unable to recover her natural equilibrium until she was well away from the island. University had been a fresh start for her and had finally put on end to her moping. There she had met Paul, who had loved and wanted her.

The light pouring through the window drew Jamie like a magnet and he was rewarded with a panoramic view. The perimeters of the window captured, like a camera obscura, the full sweep of the large bay, Bagh a Tomara, with the ragged peaks of the Torrenish mountains fringing its distant shore. As the sun was shining and there was little wind, the sea and the sky formed a mirror image of pure silver. Eilean na-h Fhada was the northernmost island of an archipelago off the north west coast of the Scottish Highlands, unspoilt and paradisiacal with its constant play of rain, rainbow and sun, a glittering jewel in the Hebridean crown.

‘What a wonderful view to paint’, he murmured to himself, ‘Strange that the painter chose to paint an imaginary place of lakes and forests rather than this magical seascape’.

Catriona was looking closely at the Joseph figure. ‘Jamie, there are some letters here. Can you make out them out?’ she asked.

He went over to where she was standing and peered closely at a tiny area of paint which she was tracing with her index finger. Letters had been scratched into the paint along the bottom edge of the leather jerkin. He could make out an A and an R but the other letters were so faint as to be barely there. ‘Aron or maybe Arna’ he said tentatively. ‘It must be the artist’s name. Do you know of any local artist who may have used the boathouse as a studio?’

Catriona shook her head ‘No but we can ask my father. As the local GP he knows every one. the good and the bad from the cradle to the grave. as he puts it himself.’

‘Whoever he was, he was one hell of a painter’. Jamie was musing out loud to himself, as he scanned the face of the Madonna. ‘So sensuous, so tender…The way he painted her is ravishing.’ He continued to stare at the painting, ‘To paint like that the painter must have felt deeply’. He had a momentary flash of recognition as he gazed at the perfect oval face but it was lost almost immediately and he could not summon it back.

Catriona was looking round and said ‘There’s a radio or something in that corner’. She went over and picked up a bulky, oblong shaped object which she brought over to Jamie. It was an old fashioned tape recorder. He fiddled with the knobs but the batteries had long since worn down. He opened up the back of recorder and showed her that the batteries had begun to leak inside.

‘What do you think this room was used for?’ Catriona said.

‘It looks like a chapel or some place of worship or maybe a place for meditation. It must have taken years to paint the panels.’ said Jamie, ‘They must have been painted in situ. It looks as if ship canvas was used rather than primed artist’s canvas. What is clear is that these paintings were created by a painter of extraordinary power and passion.’

Jamie looked back at the swirling orange moon and suddenly the vibrant orange triggered a picture. It was a complete recall in his head of the picnic on the Isle of the Standing Stone, which had failed to materialise when Catriona had first mentioned it. Images now came vividly into his mind. He could see the two of them standing with the megalith looming over them, intimidating but companionable. Miss May came up to them and clasped their hands together. She softly repeated to them again and again like a mantra ‘Always dance the orange.’He did not understand what she meant. He recalled being too frightened to ask. Miss May, always so gentle and kindly, had transformed into something slightly weird and out of control which he found unnerving. He remembered later asking his grandmother what the words meant. She said that she thought it was a quote from something, maybe a poem but she could not recall which. She told him that he was not worry