By then Grace Ann’s eyes were closed tight, her Bible at her lips, her chin lifted, as if in defiance. Cal said goodbye but she seemed not to hear him. He tried goodbye again but still she didn’t answer. He went to the door, closing it quietly behind him. On the way to his bus-stop he tried to rid himself of the suspicion she was behaving like that for a purpose. Was there something she wasn’t telling him?
At low tide, at the base of Cnoc a’ Mhonaidh, a beach of sand extends into the wide mouth of a cave. To one side of it is a rock, smooth on the top, with mussels and limpets clinging to its pitted flanks. Grace Ann observes herself, a young woman, sitting there. She feels the wind on her face. She sees how furtive her manner is: how she looks back at the hillside she has descended; her anxiety in case Ishbel is following her. Grace Ann shuffles backwards, crab-wise, on the rock until an overhang conceals her. She can no longer be spied on from above. She opens the book she is carrying: it is a Bible, the Bible which she is holding to her lips all these years later. She sees herself take from it a single sheet of loose paper. She unfolds it, reads it quickly, kisses it, folds it again and returns it to the book. She moves forward, observing the hill again. There’s no sign of Ishbel, who was some distance behind her on the path. Grace Ann remains there for half an hour or more, never moving. She feels the thrill of possession as well as guilt at what she has done. Her eyes close as if she is in prayer. Suddenly, she leaps up and climbs the slope of the hill, cutting diagonally across it.
Long after Cal has gone, Grace Ann remembers all of this as though it is happening to her now. She wonders at her jealousy of long ago, the continuing force of her unrequited love which has made her do such a terrible thing.
The Bible is now on her lap, the same Bible. Her hands shake as she opens it. She holds the same piece of paper in arthritic fingers. It is the colour of parchment, though flimsier. She reads it, folds it and returns it to the book which she closes and lifts to her mouth. She kisses its cover. She sits there with her eyes shut. Then she sighs, a long soulful sound. She berates herself as if her resolve is already weakening. ‘You must tell him Grace Ann. You must.’
The warning bell for the start of the second act had rung. The smokers outside the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh had filed back to their seats. The café bar on the ground floor had emptied, arguments about the soprano postponed until the next intermission. Had the orchestra drowned her out deliberately or was her voice insufficient for the role? The exodus of opera-lovers revealed Cal sitting alone at a table by a window overlooking the street. The emptiness of the place seemed to affect him because he drained his coffee, said ‘thanks’ to the waitress who was clearing glasses from the next table and left the theatre by the side door.
He crossed the street before turning left into a terrace of Victorian tenements. Music was spilling from a house further along. The louder it became the slower he walked. He texted, ‘Not sure it’s my kind of thing, Kate. What about lunch next week?’ Kate Simpson was a master’s student in geophysics and meteorology at Edinburgh University, in the department which he visited every so often to collect historical weather data for his ocean tracking work. The last time he’d seen her he’d promised to ‘look in’ at the party her housemates were planning. On the journey from Galashiels to Edinburgh, she’d messaged, reminding him.
He’d replied, ‘I won’t know anyone.’
‘You’ll know me.’
Now he was standing outside the house. His impulse was to slink away before Kate saw him. He wanted to go to his apartment to mull over Grace Ann’s story, look at an atlas and check out the Lofoten Islands. Something was wrong. He’d known it the moment Grace Ann had mentioned them.
His phone beeped. It was Kate messaging again. ‘Where are you?’
‘I’m outside, getting cold feet.’
‘Come on Cal. Just for a few minutes. Please me.’
He groaned. He owed her. She’d helped him so much working through the department’s old files. ‘Where are you?’ he texted back, looking apprehensively at the three storey tenement where every window seemed to be filled with light, music and drunk or stoned students. A banner flapping over the front door announced ‘Tom, Fiona, Orlando and Kate welcome you to their FISH PARTY’.
‘You’ll have to find me,’ she replied.
‘Shit.’ He put his phone away. Now she wanted him to play hide and seek.
Cal walked up the gravel path to the door of the house, sidestepping the smokers gathered there. A man in a long blond wig and wearing a mermaid costume was standing by the door, dragging on a cigarette he had cadged from someone returning to the party. ‘I could have tried a bit harder,’ Cal said looking at his jacket, tee shirt and jeans. ‘I didn’t realise it was fancy dress.’
‘A bit harder? Doesn’t look to me like you’ve tried at all.’ The man in the wig was Australian. ‘Don’t worry mate. It wouldn’t have mattered. You should see some of the other guys. There’s a great white on the first floor and a sailfish on the third.’
The hallway led to a stairwell draped with fishing nets and lobster pots. As Cal climbed the stairs, he was assailed by a sickly smell of fish, chips, vinegar, tobacco and marijuana. On the first landing, he edged past four girls in silver wigs and cardboard sardine tin costumes. They were standing beside a table covered with plastic tumblers of wine with plastic fish floating in them. Cal took one and wandered slowly through the crowds looking for Kate. Every room was a babble of shouted conversations, music and dancing. A black female saxophonist in a shimmering gold body stocking moved through the crush. Cal followed her, breaking away after four rooms to go to the top floor. He was drawn there by cheering and clapping. Edging past a group of students gathered round a doorway he saw two young men, one dressed as a shark, the other (Cal thought) as a marlin, leaning over a bath. They were plunging knives into the water. Their target was a large trout which was swimming with frantic jerky movements round a metallic reef of cooling beer cans. The men took it in turns to stab at it. The crowd heckled every time they missed. Cal tried to leave but the jeering had drawn others to the bathroom and he found his exit blocked. It was then he saw Kate. She was sitting on a shelf between mounds of white towels. On her head she wore a home-made hat in the shape of a lobster. He waved and she saw him too, clapping her hands in pleasure that he’d found her.
Another cheer went up and Cal turned to see the marlin hold aloft the skewered trout. The blade had pierced its side. The fish’s tail flapped and its mouth gaped. When marlin shook the knife, it fell back into the bath. A chant of ‘Kill it, kill it’ went up.
Cal was propelled forward by a surge behind him. More and more people were pressing into the bathroom, drawn there by the shouting. There was a tugging at his arm and it was Kate, smiling. ‘You made it,’ she yelled. Cal leaned towards her and said into her ear, ‘I can’t Kate, I’m sorry. Let’s have lunch, soon.’
The last he saw was her disappointed face. He felt bad about it. Yes, he’d have to make it up to her. But as soon as the music faded behind him his thoughts turned to the Lofoten Islands. If they were where he thought, no way could Sandy’s body have been washed up there. Not in a million years.
Ryan parked 200 metres from the entrance to police headquarters. He rolled down his window, lit a cigarette and waited for Tessa Rainey. She texted: Just finishing a report. Meet at 11pm?
He replied: I’ll be across the road from Waitrose
Good plan.
Ryan liked that about her. She was pretty and smart with it. Smart enough to know the rules of this game. Don’t hump in office hours. Don’t kiss. Don’t touch. Don’t give each other knowing glances. Don’t pick up outside. Park some distance away, as he’d done. Keep it cool around the office and hot away from it: in his flat, a penthouse with a roof garden in Leith. She understood that. He didn’t need to tell her. They were two of a kind. They’d have fun while it lasted. No tears at the end; no regrets. That was the deal. Tessa knew that. Of course she did.
Ryan
sucked on his cigarette and watched the Waitrose shelf-stackers through the side window. But his thoughts drifted back to Tessa to block out the frustrations of the last 24 hours: since McGill’s media blitz Ryan had done nothing but take calls from politicians making their excuses. ‘I’d like to help the prosecution but …’
Screw them.
After Ryan and Tessa had sex for the first time, she had asked if she could partner him on a case and he agreed. Why not? He had worked with Jamieson and every other new recruit to criminal investigation. Wasn’t it his job to guide them, show them the ropes? Everybody expected it. Wouldn’t it be more of a signal in the office if he didn’t let Rainey work with him? He could trust her to be professional about it. Tessa had been so grateful when he said yes – he’d remember what she did to him long into his old age, though he hadn’t conceded anything at all, not really (not that he told her).
A movement across the road caught his attention.
A figure, female, was crossing the ramp entrance to the Waitrose car park which was in darkness. Ryan wondered if it was Tessa and hooked his finger round the headlight flasher to let her know where he was. But the figure was smaller than Tessa, and heavier, with none of Tessa’s elegance. (It gave Ryan a buzz to watch the way she appeared to glide with her midriff, like a model or a dancer.) Soon the woman was in the pool of light from the supermarket’s side window and Ryan recognised Helen Jamieson. His eyes followed her as she walked to the corner and crossed the road, his expression changing to disgust. A feeling of frustrated rage replaced his anticipation of another amorous night with Rainey.
What was Jamieson good for? Yes, she was clever. University clever. Book clever. Not street clever like him. Street clever was what you needed in the police. His temper was rising again now as it did every time he saw her. How did someone like her climb the career ladder quicker than guys who’d worked their way through the ranks from school, putting offenders behind bars? He wasn’t against women in the force. Rainey, for example, was street-wise in the right way, athletic and physically strong. But Jamieson?
Ryan spat through his open window as if ridding his mouth of a bad taste. Yet she’d be a sergeant soon and an inspector by the time she was 33. He’d done it the hard way; in his opinion, it was the only way. He was three times the copper and he hadn’t made inspector until he was 37, after 18 years service. Why did she get it so easy?
Because she had a law degree, an MSc in criminology and she was female. It made the Chief Constable look good. On paper. Not where it mattered. Ryan banged his fist against the steering wheel. Go back to university, get a job in a library; leave the police to people like him and Rainey. Christ, Jamieson wasn’t even good for shagging.
‘Lofoten Is, Norway. 48, C3’ Cal turned to plate 48 in his Times Atlas of the World. He checked the map reference and planted his finger on an archipelago of islands jutting like a ragged dorsal fin from the Norwegian coast, south-west of Tromso. He found Moskenesoy at the south western end of the islands, and grunted as if in vindication. He wrote down the approximate coordinates and went to his big wall map of the north Atlantic and the Arctic. He put one index finger on 72°30′N, 18°03′E where his grandfather Uilleam and Sandy MacKay had been washed overboard, and found the Lofoten Islands. He double checked the coordinates and referred again to the atlas index, just in case there were two groups of islands with the same name in the north-east Atlantic. Lying back in his swivel chair he studied the map again. After staring at it for ten minutes, he shook his head and began to pace up and down the flat, occasionally stopping by the windows, or the wall map to check another theory. After an hour he slumped back into his chair. ‘No fucking way,’ he shouted.
Across the road from The Cask was a row of concrete garages with sloping and rusted corrugated iron roofs. They were used by traders for storage and by men who liked to tinker with cars at evenings and weekends. Dog walkers also came here at night to let Buster or Rover roam the concrete waste ground behind the garages. Nobody cared what happened here. It was derelict, neglected buddleia-colonised land, which once belonged to the deserted flour mill on its far side. Here, dog owners were freed of the obligation to clear up after their canine charges.
Basanti lay on the garage roof long after the light had gone from three top floor windows in the building opposite. She had seen the man whose photograph was in the newspaper standing at one of the windows, and now she was lying on her back studying the few flickering stars which shone through the night glow of Scotland’s capital city. Had her mother also gazed at the stars during these past months, years? Had she wondered about her lost daughter as her daughter wondered about her? Had her mother laid awake pleading for forgiveness even as Basanti meekly submitted to male desire and nightly renewed her vows of vengeance?
Against the men who abused her.
Against her rich uncle who ordered the sale of her virginity.
Against her mother who acquiesced?
Her mother’s betrayal raised a storm of passions in the girl: rage, yearning, hatred, pity, even love. Her mother had been grief-stricken, newly widowed and besieged by her dead husband’s creditors. Her mother had been weak. Her mother hadn’t been able to envisage an alternative. How would she have provided for her other, crippled daughter without the protection of her husband’s brother? The well-being of one of her daughters had to be sacrificed. Which one must it be?
Basanti had decided long ago not to take revenge on her mother, but nor would she forgive her. Even though she had hardened her heart, sometimes she longed for the warm wrap of her mother’s arms. Lying here now she couldn’t imagine anything more thrilling.
Basanti shut her eyes, blacking out the stars and cutting off a new and threatening flood of emotion. She inhaled deeply, finding unexpected solace in the darkness and in her solitariness. She’d have to move from the garage roof before the exposure of daylight. She’d have to find shelter away from the risk of haphazard encounters with men. But for these few minutes she would remain there, at last free, at last calm, at last a little closer to Preeti.
She had travelled to Edinburgh on a late bus. There had been random reasons for not getting earlier ones: an inebriated man bumping against her at the bus station; a gang of boys pointing her out; a leering driver; a girl telling her friends a joke about ‘Pakis’.
The bus station crowds unnerved her and in her confusion she kept on making wrong decisions. She abandoned two bus queues almost at the point of boarding. Once she ran from the building only to encounter a police patrol car parked outside and she turned and went back inside. She knew she was drawing attention to herself but she was unable to control her urge to run when she felt the claustrophobia of a confined space with so many other jostling, threatening people. She joined the queue for the 11pm bus. Because she feared there wouldn’t be another, she forced herself up the steps. To her relief, her matted, cropped hair and dirty clothes provoked little attention. Most of the passengers were too drunk, exhausted or drugged to notice. The fare had been £6. She had £4 left.
In Edinburgh she waited for everyone else to disembark before asking the driver to direct her to Granton, ‘a building called The Cask?’ She showed him the line in the newspaper. ‘There … The Cask, overlooking Granton Harbour.’ She read it aloud for him.
‘That’s the place by Lower Granton Road, isn’t it, by the old flour mill?’ he remarked. ‘I used to drive that route.’
‘I think so,’ she said uncertainly.
‘Are you walking?’
She nodded.
‘On your own?’
She nodded again.
He pursed his lips and shook his head. The risks kids took nowadays. ‘At this time of night. You sure?’
‘Yes.’
‘Keep going that way until you reach the sea.’ He pointed out of the side of the bus. ‘Stick to the main roads mind, where it’s well lit.’
She said she would, though she’d dipped into the shadows and dim side streets where she felt invisi
ble and safe. She asked again for directions in a 24-hour store. She’d gone a little off course, but 10 minutes later she had found The Cask and the garage roof opposite.
Tomorrow night she’d find a way in. Now she had to scavenge for food and find somewhere to lie up during the day.
She wriggled off the garage roof and dropped into the darkness below.
It was daylight when Cal awoke. The arm of the chair pressed against the stitches in his side and he arched his torso, turning sideways, settling on his hip. He slumbered on, listening to the shrieks of the gulls and the passing buses. He’d slept badly, restlessly turning over Grace Ann’s story in his head, wondering whether he had imagined her stubborn reticence at the end, or misinterpreted it. What bemused him more was the unexplained discrepancy over Sandy’s body. Cal had spent a good part of the night trying to find a plausible explanation, at one point getting up to search his databases for any seasonal quirks of current in the area of ocean where Sandy and his grandfather had been swept overboard. He came across an Oslo University research chart displaying average October offshore winds and prevailing surface currents for the Norwegian, Greenland and Barents seas. He traced 72°30′N and 18°03′E, where Sandy and his grandfather had gone overboard on September 29 1942. It was more than 100kms south of Bear Island, which lay between the rest of the Svalbard archipelago to the north and Norway to the south. Then he drew a line from 72°30′N and 18°03′E to Moskenesoy, the most south-westerly of the large Lofoten Islands. This was where Sandy’s body had been found, though on the island’s sheltered south-east coast which only added another inconsistency. The line Cal drew cut across the shoals of arrowheads on the chart signifying the direction of current. His line went south-south-west. The currents tracked north-easterly, as he expected. Next he checked an archive of historical weather data, which he’d gathered for his childhood researches. It was as he remembered: there were recordings of frequent westerly gales in the North Atlantic in September/October 1942. Like the currents, these would have pushed Sandy’s body further east not south. Even allowing for occasional days of northerly winds, Cal found no explanation for Sandy’s body travelling south across more than 300 kms of ocean, against the prevailing currents.
The Sea Detective Page 12