Free Gently North-West by Alan Hunter

blocking the way ahead. Then it turned, narrowed, lost its metalling, lost its hedges, lost its innocence; became at one stroke a brutal rock-track with a gradient that made Brenda catch her breath. Gently slammed into second and the Sceptre grovelled its way upwards. The ground fell away sharply on the right, to the left rose menacingly above them. The Sceptre moaned and bumped and grumbled, heaved itself round an S-bend, lifted its bows to a suicidal hairpin, stalled, and refused to restart.
    ‘And that’s that,’ Brenda said. ‘You’ll never get her out of this, my son. You can’t go up and you daren’t back down – you’re stuck, period. And serve you right.’
    ‘I’ll have to drop her back,’ Gently said. ‘You can get out if you like.’
    ‘Oh,’ Brenda said, ‘I’ll die young too. This or the bomb, it doesn’t matter.’
    Gently took reverse and very delicately braked-and-powered the Sceptre down. Then he restarted on the lesser gradient, and this time the Sceptre gnawed round the hair-pin.
    ‘Which is more than you deserve,’ Brenda commented scathingly.
    Gently chuckled and kept going.
    The track improved. Obviously the trick had been to get through the steep going at the commencement. Now they rose by straight, moderate gradients which the Sceptre took easily in second. Hill-pasture, grazed by sheep, swelled up on the one hand and lapsed gently on the other, permitting, as they climbed, a series of viewpoints into a tremendous glen eastwards. The glen was filled with trees but at times one glimpsed a river serpenting through it, and twice they caught sight of a castle, or castellated house, suggesting a picture snatched from a child’s book. Then the glen receded behind the expanding hillside and suddenly was gone like a dream.
    They came to a fieldgate of steel tube and beyond it the track levelled between shallow banks. On the left, among stunted trees, was the farmhouse Gently had seen on the map. It was a respectable, two-storey, stone-and-slate building occupying a site in a fold of the tops, with nothing but its ragged oaks and thorns to suggest the location was out of the ordinary.
    As they approved it they heard a rushing and barking and sheep came pouring out of a gateway. A flock of them spread across the track in a trotting river, sweeping round the Sceptre and forcing it to halt. Men, dogs appeared, running. A youngster dashed along the bank to open a gate. There was an uproar of baa-ing, barking, shouting, along with the rustling drum of small hooves.
    ‘Foo!’ Brenda murmured. ‘Truly rural. I’m not sure I appreciate tweed on the hoof.’
    ‘Hush,’ Gently muttered. Perhaps we’re not welcome ourselves. The gaffer over there seems to want a word with us.’
    An erect, hard-faced man, dressed in a sagging jacket and muddy jodhpurs, stood apart from the others, waiting for the sheep to go by. When they had cleared the Sceptre he came striding over to it. Gently wound down his window. The man stared at him, at the car.
    ‘Are ye freends o’ the laird’s, like?’ he demanded, tapping his palm with a thick ash-stick.
    ‘Just tourists,’ Gently said. ‘This is a public road to Glen Knockie, isn’t it?’
    ‘Ay, you may say it’s public,’ the man said, his eyes roving about the back of the car. ‘But it’s not a usual road for tourists – who would be puttin’ you on to it, now?’
    ‘We saw it on the map,’ Gently said shortly.
    ‘Ay, it’s on the map, that’s richt.’
    ‘And we wanted to try something out of the way.’
    ‘Somethin’ out o’ the way,’ the man repeated. He caught his palm a smack. ‘Ye ken where ye’re off to?’ he asked.
    ‘To Glen Knockie.’
    ‘Very true. But d’ye ken through what sort o’ country?’
    Gently shook his head.
    ‘I’ll jist tell you then – in case your map didna give ye the information – ye’re headin’ into a deer-forest, man – so go canny – that’s a’.’
    He stared again at Gently, very hard,