The Interpretations

  ‘Laughing,’ Weet said, sitting down. ‘It was something McAndrew said, I think. Can’t remember the actual story but it had us all in fits.’

  ‘Did it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Tell me then . . . this man here, this Tom Kingsmill fellow, laughing his head off . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Would you . . . would you describe him as being depressed?’

  ‘Depressed? Not at all. I don’t think I ever saw Tom depressed.’

  ‘Nor me. But that’s what they’re saying.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So depressed that he killed himself. Ran ahead until he was nearly up with Patrick Thomson then climbed up the fence and jumped off. Brian Mitchell too far behind to see it. And he did this’ – pointing at Tom in the photo – ‘he did this because he was depressed.’

  Weet said, ‘I know it doesn’t make sense. But then, these things rarely do, eh?’

  ‘Are you telling me you think he’s dead, too?’ Mike asked.

  ‘I think . . .’ Weet began. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know. But I think he probably is, yes.’

  7

  In the evenings, Mike ran. He decided to follow, as closely as he could, the schedule that Tom had developed for himself, running four times during the week with a long run on Sunday.

  The shorter weekday runs took him from South Mossfield over the Duie Bridge and then on to the outskirts of Dalmore. He would reach Balnie Park and turn back. Later, as he became fitter and the evenings grew longer, he added on a lap or two of the park. The distance, excluding the park itself, was about six miles. For the long Sunday run he again chose Tom’s favourite route. He ran across the Duie Bridge but instead of going on to Dalmore he turned left and ran down to North Mossfield. Then he followed the river upstream. He passed Drumdyre where the ruins of Wade’s bridge, built in 1729, were still visible, and then on to Sheeppark where he crossed the Skiach back to the south side over what was still referred to as the “new” bridge. Then he headed towards the sea again, arriving back at South Mossfield after a run of close to eleven miles.

  Crossing the Duie Bridge at roughly the same time every evening he began to notice the state of the tide, the extent of the shingle and mudflats exposed at low tide, the movement of the wading birds in the shallow pools, the oyster catchers and curlews, the crows stalking the foreshore and the herring gulls in constant argument over the least rag of edible detritus washed up on the gentle slope of the beach. At low tide the pools were scavenged for crabs and molluscs and stranded fish. At high tide he could see cormorants in the water, solid black shapes with heads like daggers of obsidian, as they patrolled the surface, dived, disappeared and returned. As the evenings lengthened he saw small groups of them standing on the Brodie Rocks, their wings spread in the sun like magicians airing their cloaks.

  He hadn’t been aware of how much movement there was on the estuary, how much careful disciplined activity by so many different contending species of bird and animal. He had looked before but he hadn’t seen. Or maybe, he admitted later, he hadn’t even looked.

  A week or so after his first visit to WattWays he was running towards Dalmore one evening through mild on-shore breezes when a car drew up beside him. It was Dundas.

  At first Mike didn’t realise who it was because Dundas was not wearing his white coat, nor his trilby hat. His hair was revealed to be thick and red. He was smartly dressed in a dark grey suit, pink shirt and pale grey tie. There was also the car, a two-seater Mercedes convertible, not at all the vehicle that Mike would have associated with the dour middle-aged man he’d met at the freezing plant. All these factors conspired towards the creation of a younger man, a man in his mid-thirties rather than his late forties.

  ‘Need to speak to you,’ Dundas said, leaning from the window.

  ‘You do?’

  ‘Well, it’s maybe something, maybe nothing. Just been thinking about Kingsmill, that’s all. Don’t get your hopes up. Can you call in tomorrow?’

  ‘At the plant?’

  ‘Yes. Ten o’clock all right for you?’

  ‘Fine.’

  And he pulled away with a burst of acceleration that scattered in noisy disaffection a group of hooded crows in the adjacent field.

  When he stepped into Dundas’s office the following morning at two minutes past ten, Mike hardly recognized the place. The walls were no longer bare but had been papered in woodchip and painted bright yellow. The door and the doorframe, the skirting-boards and all the woodwork surrounding the single window had been painted in a colour that lay somewhere between orange and salmon pink. The original four items of furniture – the desk and swivel chair, the coat stand and filing cabinet – had been rearranged to offer something of greater neatness and order and to them had been added a fifth item – another chair. But this was not a desk chair like the first; it was an easy chair upholstered in black imitation leather. Mike sat down in it.

  ‘Bit of a change, eh?’ Dundas said from his seat behind the desk which was now clear of papers. Mike could see it was quite a cheap desk, made out of veneered chipboard. It had metal legs. A set of stacked office trays sat on it, to Dundas’s right. They were all empty.

  ‘Amazing what you can do, eh? If you put your mind to it,’ Dundas said. He was wearing his trilby again and his white coat, but either this was a new coat or the old one had been cleaned. It was completely white, with not a trace of fish blood on it and no decoration of fish scales.

  ‘I just got sick of plasterboard,’ he went on. ‘All that bare stuff. Felt like living in a toilet.’

  ‘It’s certainly different,’ Mike said.

  ‘Came in at the weekend and did it myself. Papered on Saturday, painted on Sunday. Maybe should’ve left it longer. I mean, between the papering and the painting.’

  ‘You should be all right.’

  ‘Well I hope so. Doing that next.’ He pointed.

  Mike looked round. ‘The filing cabinet?’

  ‘Grey,’ Dundas said, shaking his head. ‘I mean, who the fuck likes grey? Boring, depressing . . . Jesus . . . Think of all the offices in this country where all that people have to look at is grey. Just shades of . . . of fucking grey. No wonder people go daft. Now if it was red, say, or green or blue . . .’

  ‘Or that . . . that orange colour you’ve used for the door,’ Mike suggested.

  ‘Clementine,’ Dundas said. ‘Well, that’s what it said on the tin. But no, I don’t want that. Too logical. I want something that clashes. Purple maybe, or dark green. Something so that people come in and say What the hell’s this! Wake them up, make them think. People should wake up, eh?’

  He looked at Mike who wondered, in the pause that followed, if this was just a casual observation or a question that required an answer. He decided on an answer and said, ‘Well, yes. Being awake’s better than being asleep, I suppose.’

  ‘And it’s better than being dead too,’ Dundas said. After a few moments he added, ‘I know a lot of dead people. Anyway . . .’ He stood up, stepped over to the grey filing cabinet and pulled out one of the drawers. Then he thought better of it and pushed the drawer shut again. ‘I haven’t got any great revelations,’ he said, ‘nothing like that. It’s just that I got to thinking about the last time I saw Tom.’

  ‘The day he quit?’

  ‘Well, that too. I mean, that was the last time I spoke to him, yes. But it wasn’t the last time I saw him.’

  ‘When was that, then?’

  ‘It was the following Saturday.’

  ‘The day before he disappeared?’

  ‘That’s right. Must have been. It was the day before the race.’

  ‘Where did you see him?’

  ‘On the bridge.’

  ‘The new bridge?’

  ‘Yes. I was driving in to the plant mid-morning, maybe half-ten. On my way back from Inverness. He was on the walkway . . .’

  ‘Running?’

  ‘No, just standing there, near the north towe
r. He was just looking out over the railing. When I caught sight of him I tooted the horn but either he didn’t hear me or . . . I don’t know. There was quite a lot of traffic. Anyway, he didn’t move, he . . .’

  ‘Are you sure it was him?’

  ‘Pretty sure. You can see through to the walkway fairly easy. I wasn’t going fast, either. Dark green jacket. It didn’t mean anything at the time but later . . . well, I couldn’t help thinking that that was maybe the spot he jumped from. That’s what they’re saying, anyway. That was the route of the race, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it was.’

  ‘Well, that’s what made me think. You know, afterwards.’

  Mike said, ‘He told me that morning he was going to take the bus in to Dalmore.’

  ‘Did he now?’

  Mike shrugged.

  ‘Ever eat herring or mackerel?’ Dundas asked.

  ‘Now and then. Can’t remember the last time though.’

  ‘I bet you never ate any fish from here.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, the men here take the odd fish home for their tea. A couple of fish maybe. I wouldn’t say we encourage them but we know about it and they know we know about it and as long as no one tries to take a whole boxful everyone’s happy.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Well, Tom never took any fish. Never. Never commented when the others took fish but never took any himself.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. He was very moral, maybe too much for his own good.’

  ‘Well, exactly, exactly,’ Dundas said. ‘That’s my point.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Told you he was going to Dalmore, did he?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he didn’t.’

  ‘Seems not.’

  ‘So why did he lie?’

  8

  The tenants promised to remove at the usual quitting time of Whitsun in May but the laird was adamant that they had to be gone by April the first. It is not clear if the tenants believed the laird would relent and allow them to stay till Whitsun or if they had no intention of moving out at all. It is quite possible that many of the older tenants failed to register the gravity of their situation and reckoned that nothing at all would happen to them. There was still a lot of faith in the laird’s goodwill.

  Mackenzie, the factor, knew no one at all had left by the end of February but he wished to allow everyone to pass the major part of the winter in their homes so it was not until the last week of March that he commenced the clearance of Sheeppark.

  He set forth from Dalmore on March the 26th, accompanied by the Reverend Archibald Niven of the Parish of Caulder and a platoon of redcoats that had arrived the day before from Fort George in Inverness. Within a couple of hours they reached the ferry at North Mossfield but by then a strong wind had blown up and the ferryman refused to endanger his craft on what had become a very choppy Duie Firth.

  Later, in his testimony to the Napier Commission of 1883, the Reverend Niven suggested that the ferryman, who was by then long dead, cognizant of the purpose of Mackenzie and his red-coated band, was wont to exaggerate the severity of the gale and so delay their crossing. Whatever the truth of this, they were obliged to stay in North Mossfield overnight.

  We do not know for certain why the factor rejected the idea of marching on, along the north bank of the Skiach to Drumdyre to cross the river at that point. Contemporary accounts suggest that the road and bridge, though constructed originally by General Wade some hundred and twenty years previously, had been maintained in good repair. The road certainly offered the most direct route to Sheepark.

  The view of this writer is that Mackenzie and his band were wary of the direct route. The residents of Drumdyre, for example, identified very strongly with the tenants of Sheeppark and may well have tried to delay the progress of what was clearly an eviction gang. It is likely that Mackenzie, once across the firth, wished to proceed south from South Mossfield and then approach Sheeppark from the east rather than the north, thus gaining an element of surprise.

  The next morning the wind had abated but to their dismay the weather had turned so cold overnight that the ground was now covered in three or four inches of snow. Nevertheless they crossed to South Mossfield and pressed on, reaching their destination by mid-afternoon, in a driving blizzard. The clearance of Sheeppark commenced forthwith.

  With the firing of the houses and the unceremonious ejection of all tenants, young and old alike, into the bitter cold, what followed was one of the most brutal events in the history of Scotland or any other country. One of those evicted, eighty-four year old Elsie McKillop, survived in the open for only a few hours. She died early the next morning, lying in a ditch close to her demolished home. A week later she was buried on the tiny island of Inchduie in the Duie Firth.

  He had been interrupted in his reading by McMartle, the clerk of the kirk session, who had come to talk about the Drumdyre pasture. The Reverend McFarren tried to like everyone, or at least see the good in them even if their frailties greatly outnumbered their virtues, as was the case with McMartle. He knew he was making a judgement here, and a harsh one, and that he should not make judgements; only the Lord could do that. But it was difficult not to.

  Don’t call it a judgement; call it an opinion. McMartle was a weak man, swayed by first impressions, unable to plan more than five minutes ahead. The Reverend McFarren did not like him. He did not like his bustling purpose, his inability to concentrate on anything for more than a few minutes. He disliked McMartle’s earnest insistence upon any course of action he felt might be popular and his equally forthright pursuit of a completely different objective when the first received no support. In this way he managed to claim that almost every idea the kirk session came up with had originally been his own. This made McMartle a very dislikeable man but what the Reverend McFarren hated most about him was his moustache.

  He decided that the correct word for McMartle’s moustache was equivocal, for, like the man himself, it was neither one thing nor the other. It was too wide to be a toothbrush moustache and too thick to be a pencil-line moustache. It straggled over his upper lip. And if all this were not bad enough McMartle deserved eternal damnation because of the outrageous falsehood now displayed by this objectionable piece of facial hair: two months ago he had begun to dye his moustache black.

  McMartle wanted to sell the Drumdyre pasture. A man called Bishop, from Aberdeen, had written to him, as clerk of the kirk session, and offered a thousand pounds per acre for the ten acre plot of land adjacent to the Easter Kirk. McMartle, of course, saw this money as the solution to the parish’s problems. The money could be used to repair the roofs and walls of both churches. And so much money! ‘He must be mad!’ McMartle said of Bishop several times. ‘He must be mad!’

  The Reverend McFarren allowed McMartle’s gale to blow itself out and then made the following points:

  First, if Bishop’s opening offer was a thousand pounds per acre then it was very likely that the land was worth double. At least. Second, the land belonged to the church in general, not specifically to the Parish of Caulder. Though the parish might benefit from such a sale it was likely that most of the money would go to central funds. Third, had Bishop given any indication of what he might want to do with the land? (Answer: No.) In that case Mr Bishop was probably a property developer who would transform the Drumdyre pasture into building plots for thirty or forty houses. Finally, only a few weeks ago the kirk session had authorized the renewal of the lease of the land, for grazing, to Robert McKerrel. The annual rent was twenty pounds per acre and the lease was for five years.

  As the Reverend McFarren went through these points he saw McMartle’s features and posture drain of enthusiasm and when he had finished McMartle remained seated and still and said nothing. The minister regarded with distaste the infamous moustache and noted, with even greater disgust, that its roots were now white.

 
At last McMartle said, ‘Could we not buy McKerrel out of the lease? I mean, compensate him for it and all?’

  ‘We could,’ the minister replied, ‘but only if he agreed. I wouldn’t want to force a decision on him.’

  ‘We could pay him back double and still make a huge profit.’

  ‘No doubt we could but you must remember, Mr McMartle, that money is not the most important thing here.’

  McMartle sighed. ‘Isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Oh well, and here’s me thinking it was.’

  McMartle left a few minutes later on the promise that the issue would be debated at the next meeting of the kirk session in two weeks. In the meantime he was to reply to Mr Bishop saying that his letter had been read with interest and its contents would be given due consideration.

  With McMartle gone the minister went back to his chair and picked up the book again. Maybe he shouldn’t be so hard on McMartle who, after all, had lost his wife only last year. A very sad business altogether. Very sad. But McMartle . . . no, he couldn’t bring himself to like the man. He put the book down and went through to the kitchen. He wanted a cup of tea but fretted over the making of it, forgetting how many sugars he’d put in and thereby making it too sweet. He ended up throwing away the first cup and pouring out a second. He counted the sugar in carefully, stirred the tea slowly, rinsed the teaspoon under the cold tap and placed it on the draining board to dry. Then he laughed.

  McMartle’s visits, though infrequent, always irritated him. But it was important not to let them get him down. He shook his head and smiled. What was there, really, to worry about?

  He took the tea through to the living room and sat down again. He picked up the book. He called it a book but it wasn’t. It was forty-eight pages long. Twelve sheets of folded paper and a cover, stapled in the middle. No proper spine, just a fold. It was a pamphlet, perhaps a booklet, and he knew this. But he called it a book.