This early in the season, local hotels and boarding houses had gained unexpected patronage, courtesy of the prolonged spell of fine weather. West Lochaber, however, a peninsula created almost an island by long lochs north and south, was also isolated by topography. Only the most venturesome of B-road explorers drove the area. Unsurprisingly, roads were Sunday silent, devoid of traffic.
In Strontian, a dearth of news of the fire in the wood gave no-one cause for concern. Local people knew Polloch as one of many notorious black spots from which satellite messages neither came nor went. This attuned to the perception of Polloch as a Commission labour camp for unmarried males. Knowledge of what was happening there was imparted sparingly by communication through a single corded phone in the cabin office.
By mid morning a warm breeze was filtering between Strontian’s neatly fenced gardens. Fine spring sunshine flooded through skylight windows and glittered on Loch Sunart. Sundays in the Scottish highlands were no longer the hushed Sabbaths of two generations before, but still deferred to the time when the ‘six days shalt thou labour’ passage in the James VI edition of the Good Book was strictly observed.
In the quietude, individuals sedately but purposefully converged upon a grey ashlar church. Otherwise, there was no activity about the scattering of brick bungalows and whitewashed cottages.
Excepting the lone convenience store selling Sunday papers, the shops were closed and the police station was locked.
Not all were released from their labours. Two hours before commencing his shift, the relief barman sat alone in the empty public bar at the Argyll. He had just finished reading Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus…
‘Faustus is gone. Regard his hellish fall,
Whose mindful fortune may exhort the wise
Only to wonder at unlawful things…’
and gave thought to a decision to ‘do’ English Lit. He didn’t wonder that Marlowe had been stabbed while in the company of several disreputable spies for Lord Walsingham and that his killer’s plea of self defence had been accepted and the man acquitted. A critic, no doubt, of early drama. Perhaps he should switch from English Lit. to the faculty of Law.
A shaft of sunlight fell across the bar counter. The barman pulled curtains together to extinguish it then went outside to feel a warm sun on his face.
Standing at the door, he heard singing from the homely Thomas Telford church carried on a light breeze. Sounds of praise rose and fell without disturbing the day.
He saw a solitary white car showing the blue squared Police logo drive up to the station house. Fergus, smartly uniformed in short sleeved order, unlocked the blue painted door, and disappeared inside.
The barman idled by the door. Sounds of distant singing ceased. The hotel mouser padded into view then paused to regard him with interest. He disliked cats and stepped back into the bar, closing the door firmly behind him.
Strontian resumed its Sunday stillness.
To the north, as yet unnoticed, a small dark stain was slowly spreading in an otherwise clear blue sky.