by Iain Banks
McDunn and I exchange looks. Detective Inspector Burall comes downstairs, saying, "Nothing up there…" as he sees Yvonne.
She lets go of my hand, taking a step back and looking around at all of us, as the cop from the first patrol car comes into the hall from the study, and I see her gaze falling on my transparently gloved hands, and on the hands of the other men.
There's an instant when I suddenly see her as a young woman in her own home, surrounded by all these men who've invaded it, just turned up uninvited; all bigger than her, all strangers except for one she's been told might be a serial killer. She looks wary, angry, defiant, all at once. My heart feels fit to melt.
"Was your husband here when you left, Mrs Sorrell?" McDunn asks, in a comfortingly natural voice.
"Yes," she says, still looking round us all, settling on me, evaluating, enquiring, before looking back to McDunn. "He was here; I only left about half an hour ago."
"I see," McDunn says. "Well, he's probably popped out for a moment, but we had a message that there might be some problem here. We took the lib —»
"He's not in the garden?" she asks.
"Apparently not, no."
"Well, you don't just "pop out" from this estate, Detective Inspector," Yvonne says. "The nearest shops are ten minutes" drive away, and his car's still there." She looks at the cop who was upstairs. "You've been searching for him, searching the house?"
McDunn is all charm. "Yes, Mrs Sorrell, we have, and I apologise for this invasion of privacy; it's entirely my responsibility. The investigation we're involved in is a very serious one, and the tip-off we had was from a source that has been reliable in the past. As the house was open but apparently unoccupied, and we had reason to believe there might have been a crime committed I thought it right to enter, but —»
"So you haven't found him," Yvonne says. "You haven't found anything?" She looks, suddenly, small and frightened. I can see her fighting it, and I love her for it, and want to hold her, shush her, comfort her, but another part of me is full of a terrible jealous despair that the person she's so concerned about is William, not me.
"Not yet, Mrs Sorrell," McDunn says. "What was he doing when you last saw him?"
I see her swallowing, see the tendons on her neck stand out as she tries to control herself. "He was in the garage," she says. "He was going to take the Honda out — the wee tractor — and sweep up leaves in the back garden."
McDunn nods. "Well, we'll just have a look, shall we?" He looks at the two cops who've just arrived and holds up one hand, flexing it. "Gloves, lads."
The two cops nod and head back for the front door.
The rest of us troop towards the garage, through the hall and the kitchen. My feet feel like they're wading through treacle and that roaring noise is coming back. I try not to start coughing.
McDunn stops at the utility room. He looks slightly embarrassed. "Mrs Sorrell," he says, smiling. "I couldn't ask you to put a kettle on, could I?"
Yvonne stands looking at him. She looks hard and suspicious. She swivels on her heel and marches towards the work surface where the kettle is.
McDunn opens the door into the garage and I see the Mercedes and I'm thinking, The car; the boot of the car. I see the packing cases; Christ, there too.
I don't feel so good. I start coughing. McDunn and the officers look in the packing cases and the car, and it's like they're not seeing the big black wheelie bin. I stand to one side and lean against the wall, listening to them talk, watching them open and lift and peer, and that big black bin is just standing there, ignored, bulking dark against the light of the day outside where a breeze stirs, swirling dust and leaves into the air, pushing a few of the leaves onto the white-painted garage floor. McDunn looks under the car. Burall and the other cop are removing some of the packing cases and tea chests against the wall to look in the ones beneath. The two cops from the second patrol car are walking up the drive, pulling on plastic gloves.
I push myself away from the wall when I can't take it any longer, just as Yvonne comes into the garage from the house; I stagger across to the fat, chest-high bin. I can feel the others looking at me and sense Yvonne behind me. I'm coughing as I put my hand on the bin's smooth plastic handle. I lift it.
A rotting, fishy smell comes out, faint and tinged with other scents. The bin is empty. I stare into it, perversely shocked, reeling back. I let the lid fall.
I bump into Yvonne and she holds me. The breeze eddies in through the open garage doors again; one of the poised garage doors creaks. Then something snaps, overhead, and the middle door swings suddenly down in the faces of the two policemen coming up the drive, making me flinch and step back, and as that middle section of the light closes off and the door slams clanging down in a cloud of dust and Yvonne gives a quick, cut-off scream, I see William; William, strapped to the internal bracing of the door with tape and twine round his wrists and ankles, his head covered with a black rubbish bag, tied tight round his throat with more black tape, his body limp.
I turn away, doubling up and coughing and coughing; blood comes suddenly from my mouth, splattering red on the white of the garage floor as, in that particular instant of loneliness, through my tears I see McDunn come forward and put a hand on Yvonne's shoulder.
She turns away from him and from William and from me and puts her hands up over her face.
CHAPTER 12 — BASRA ROAD
The little speedboat swings round the low island. The island is covered in whin and bramble and a few small trees, mostly ash and silver birch. Grey-black walls and roofless ruins and a few slanted headstones and memorials are visible through the bushes and trees, surrounded by ferns turning fawn, and yellowing grass covered by brown, fallen leaves. A gun-metal sky looks down.
Loch Bruc constricts here — amongst the low, bare hills near the sea — until it is only a hundred metres in breadth; the little funeral isle fills most of this bend in the narrows.
William guns the engine once, sending the speedboat surging ahead towards the little jetty which slants into the calm, dark water. The jetty's stones look old. They're unevenly sized, mostly very large, and on the top surface of smooth, dressed stone there are time-worn iron rings, set into circular depressions. On the shore behind us there is an identical slipway, angling out from the end of a track through the trees and the reed-clumped grass.
"Eilean Dubh; the dark isle," William announces, letting the boat drift in towards the island jetty. "Old family burial ground… on my mother's side." He looks around at the gently sloped hills and the higher, steeper mountains to the north. "A lot of this used to belong to them."
"Was that before or after the Clearances, William?" I ask.
"Both," he grins.
Andy sips whisky from his hip-flask. He offers me some and I accept. Andy smacks his lips and looks around, giving the impression he's drinking in the silence. "Nice place."
"For a cemetery," Yvonne says. She's frowning, looking cold even though she has her ski gear on: down-plump jacket and big Gore-tex mitts.
"Yeah," I say in an approximation of a down-home American accent. "Kinda morbid for a graveyard, isn't it, Bill, old buddy? Couldn't ya kinda liven it up a bit, know what I mean? A few neon gravestones, talking holograms of the departed, and — hey — let's not forget a flower concession stand featuring tasteful plastic blooms. A ghost-train ride for the youngsters; necro-burgers made with real dead meat in coffin-shaped polystyrene packs; high-speedboat trips in the funeral barge used in Don't Look Now, the movie."
"Funny you should say that, actually," William says, tossing his blond hair back and leaning out to fend the stone jetty off with his hand. "I used to run boat trips out here from the hotel." He puts a couple of white plastic fenders over the gunwales to protect the boat, then steps up onto the slip, holding the painter.
"Locals take to that all right?" Andy asks, standing up and pulling the stern of the boat closer in to the pier.
William scratches his head. "Not really." He secures the painter to one of the iron
rings. "Funeral party turned up one day while one lot were having a barbie; bit of a fracas."
"You mean this place is still used? Yvonne says, accepting William's hand and being pulled up onto the slipway. She tuts and looks away, shaking her head.
"Oh, hell, yeah," William says as Andy and I get out too; a little unsteadily, it has to be said, as we weren't totally sober when we woke up — around noon — in William's parents" house at the top of the loch, and we've been getting stuck into the whisky in first my hip-flask then his on the twenty-kilometre journey down the loch. "I mean," William says, flapping his arms. "That's why I wanted you guys to see this place; this is where I want to be buried." He smiles beatifically at his wife. "You too, blue-eyes, if you want."
Yvonne stares at him.
"We could be buried together," William says, sounding happy.
Yvonne frowns severely and walks past us, heading towards the island. "You'd only want to go on top as usual."
William laughs uproariously, then looks briefly crestfallen as we follow Yvonne onto the grass and head up to the ruined chapel. "I meant side-by-side," he says plaintively.
Andy chuckles and screws down the cap of the hip-flask. He looks thin and kind of hunched. This visit to the west coast was my idea. I invited myself and Andy here for a long weekend with William and Yvonne at William's parents" place on the shores of the loch, not so much for my own enjoyment — I get jealous around William and Yvonne when they're in their weekend-horseplay mode — but because it was the first idea I'd had for a break that Andy didn't reject immediately. Clare died six months ago and, apart from a month of night-clubbing in London which seemed to leave him more depressed than ever and certainly less wealthy and healthy, Andy hasn't left Strathspeld since; I've tried a dozen different ways of getting him away from the estate for a while but this was the only one that sparked any interest.
I think Andy just plain likes Yvonne and is sort of morbidly fascinated with William, who spent a large part of the journey down the loch telling us about his non-ethical investment policy: deliberately putting money into arms businesses, tobacco companies, exploitative mining industries, rain-forest timber concerns; that sort of thing. His theory is that if the smart but ethical money is getting out, the dividends have to get bigger for the smart but unscrupulous money that takes its place. I assumed he was joking, Yvonne pretended not to listen, but Andy was taking him quite seriously, and from William's appreciative reaction I suspect the guy wasn't kidding at all.
We walk up between gravestones of various ages; some are only a year or two old, many date back to the last century, and some are dated in the seventeen and sixteen hundreds; others have been worn smooth by the elements, their text levelled and obliterated back into the grainy nap of the rock. Some of the stones are just flat, irregular slabs, and you get the impression that if the poor people who erected these — and could not afford a stonemason — could write, and did carve the names and dates of their loved ones on such slabs, the letters and numerals must only have been scratched onto the surface of the stone.
I stand looking at some long, flat gravestones set into the ground with crude depictions of skeletons chiselled into them; other carvings are of skulls and scythes and hourglasses and crossed bones. Most of the horizontal stones are covered in grey, black and light green lichens and mosses.
There are a couple of family plots, where more affluent locals have walled off bits of the little island, and grander gravestones of marble and granite stand proud, if they're not covered by brambles. Some of the more recent graves still have wee cellophane parcels of flowers lying on them; many have small granite flowerpots, covered by perforated metal caps that make them look like giant pepperpots, and a couple of these have dead, faded flowers in them.
The walls of the ruined chapel barely come up to shoulder-height. At one end, beneath a gable wall with an aperture like a small window at the apex where a bell might have hung once, there is a stone altar; just three heavy slabs. On the altar there's a metal bell, green-black with age and chained to the wall behind. It looks rather like a very old Swiss cow-bell.
"Apparently some people nicked the old bell, back in the "sixties," William told us last night, in the drawing room of his parents" house, while we were playing cards and drinking whisky and talking about heading down the loch in the speedboat to the dark isle. "Oxford students, or something; anyway, according to the locals the guys couldn't sleep at night because they kept hearing the sound of bells, and eventually they couldn't stand it and came back and replaced the bell in the chapel and they were all right again."
"What a load of old nonsense," Yvonne said. "Two."
"Two," William said. "Yes, probably."
"Oh, I don't know," Andy said, shaking his head. "Sounds pretty spooky to me. One, please. Thanks."
"Sounds like fucking tinnitus to me," I said. "Three. Ta."
"Dealer takes two," William said. He whistled. "Oh, baby; look at these cards…"
I take the old bell up and let it ring once; a flat, hollow, appropriately funereal sound. I set it carefully back down on the stone altar and look round the walled oblong of hill, mountain, loch and cloud.
Silence: no birds, no wind in the trees, nobody talking. I turn slowly, right round, watching the clouds. I think this is the most peaceful place I have ever been.
I walk out, among the cold, carved little stones, to find Yvonne standing glaring at a tall gravestone. Euphemia McTeish, born 18 03, died 1822, and her five children. Died in childbirth. Her husband died twenty years later.
Andy strolls up, drinking from his flask, grinning and shaking his head. He nods up to where William is standing on the wall of the chapel, looking down the loch with a pair of small binoculars. "Wanted to build a house here," Andy says. He shakes his head.
"What?" Yvonne says.
"Here?" I say. "On a graveyard? Is he mad? Hasn't he read Stephen King?"
Yvonne looks coldly at her distant husband. "He was talking about building a house up here, but I didn't know it was… here." She looks away.
"Tried to persuade the local authority with a really good deal on a bunch of computers," Andy says, chuckling. "But they wouldn't play. For the moment he's had to settle for being allowed to get buried here."
Yvonne draws herself up. "Which might happen sooner than he's expecting," she says, and marches off towards the chapel, where William is staring down into the building's interior and shaking his head.
Hard rain on a soft day; it falls from the leaden overcast, continual and drenching, creating a huge rustling in all the grass, bushes and trees around us.
William's body is laid to rest in the thick peaty soil of the dark isle. According to the pathologist's report, he was clubbed unconscious and then suffocated.
Yvonne, beautiful and pale in slim black, her face veiled, nods to the mourners and their few soft words, and murmurs something of her own. The rain drums on my umbrella. She glances at me, catching my gaze for the first time since I got here. I barely made it in time; I had a hospital appointment for this morning — yet more tests — and had to drive hard across country, towards Rannoch and the west. But I got here, got to the Sorrells" home, met William's father and brother, and saw Yvonne briefly but did not get a chance to talk to her before it was time for us all to set off for the circuitous drive round the mountains and down to the far end of the loch, and the hotel there, and the drive up the track to the slipway facing Eilean Dubh and the two little boats that shuttled us across, the last one bringing the coffin.
The minister keeps the service short because of the rain, and then it's over and we're queuing at the slip while the little rowing boats ferry us four at a time back to the mainland, and Yvonne's standing on those old, smooth stones of the slanted pier, receiving the condolences of the other guests. I just stand there, watching her. We all look slightly ridiculous because as well as our formal black clothes all of us sport Wellington boots — some black, most green — to deal with the mud-slicked grass
of the island. Somehow Yvonne looks dignified and attractive even in those. Though of course maybe that's just me.
It's been a funny few days; getting back to work, trying to pick up the threads there, having a long soul-to-soul with a very sympathetic Eddie, getting embarrassing slaps on the back and we-were-rooting-for-yous from colleagues and finding that Frank had run out of amusing Scottish place-name spell-checks for me. I've been staying with Al and his wife in Leith while the police stake out my flat, but there's been no sign of Andy.
Meanwhile I've been to the doc, and been sent for various tests at the Royal Infirmary. Nobody's mentioned the C-word yet but I feel suddenly vulnerable and mortal and even old. I've given up smoking. (Well, Al and I had a pipe or two of dope the other night, just for old time's sake, but there was no tobacco involved.)
Anyway, I'm still coughing a lot and I get a sick feeling now and again, but there's been no more blood since that afternoon we found William.
I shake Yvonne's hand as I wait for my return trip in the wee rowing boat. The fine black tracery of her veil, scattered with tiny black gathered specks, makes her look at once mysteriously distant and rawly seductive, rain or no rain, wellies or no wellies.
Through the trees on the mainland, I can see and hear the cars reversing and manoeuvring and bumping away back down the track to the village and the hotel. The tradition is that Yvonne, as the widow, is last onto the last boat; sort of like a captain and a sinking ship, I guess.
"You all right?" she asks me, eyes narrowed, her sharp, evaluating gaze flitting over my face.
"Surviving. And you?"
"The same," she says. She looks cold again, and small. I want so much to take her in my arms and hug her. I feel tears prick behind my eyes. "I'm selling the house," she tells me, looking briefly down, long black lashes flickering. "The company's opening a Euro office in Frankfurt; I'm going to be part of the team."
"Ah." I nod, not sure what to say.