Lie of the Land

by Michael F. Russell

  Exasperated, Dennis groaned. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake, behave yourselves.’

  Everyone ignored him.

  Adam smiled at Gibbs. ‘Gav’s right. We’re busy here, so why don’t you go and hassle the Dutchman for his eggs – impound his grass plants while you’re at it. Now there’s a real criminal for you, Constable, a real menace to the community. I assume you’ll be arresting Terry Sullivan for rape, once the doc’s finished patching him up?’

  Outside, through the open end of the boatshed, only the birds and the sea made their noise. Gibbs would lose what was left of his authority if he backed off; yet there was no way he could handle the three of them. A dignified exit was the only option.

  ‘This is not the end of the matter,’ he said gravely. ‘There will be consequences, guys. And I’ll be having a word with your father, Adam.’

  ‘I’m a bit too old to get my arse slapped, Mr Gibbs.’ Cutler turned back to his work. ‘Carry on.’

  29

  There had to be a chance. His son and the grandkids were in a village in Buckinghamshire. Maybe there, too, was a notspot. There was always a chance. They were in the countryside, maybe far enough away from a mast or a town. Maybe they were all okay and the boy just wasn’t able to get in touch. Maybe they were alive. Gibbs tried to believe it.

  On the computer screen, the slideshow of photos kept scrolling, though the accompanying soundtrack had been muted. Music could always push those buttons, switch the emotions off and on. Gibbs heard his wife come through the front door. He turned off the computer, picking up his needle and thread again as he wiped his eyes. Ellen appeared in the living-room doorway, watching her husband for a moment. Her hair was greyer, thinner now, and her face was lined; she looked years older in just three months.

  ‘Have you told anyone yet, about the girl?’

  Gibbs carried on sewing. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m going to fix this first. I noticed the pocket had come loose earlier.’

  He glanced up at his wife. ‘Do you think I should still wear it? I mean, do you think there’s any point?’

  Ellen considered the uniform spread out on the table, knew that the confrontation with Cutler the other day had shaken him. ‘If you feel you have a right to fill it.’

  Gibbs put down the needle and thread. ‘Does it make sense any more?’

  Ellen touched the uniform. ‘Maybe it makes more sense now than ever.’

  ‘I’ve got a gun, of course.’ He felt his wife hold a breath, then relax.

  ‘A gun . . . what an excellent idea,’ she said. ‘Casper’s got one too, and I’m sure Adam Cutler does as well. Why don’t you go and shoot it out with them? I’ll come along and cheer you on.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do, Ellen. There’s no easy . . .’

  There was a loud knocking at the front door.

  ‘Now that doesn’t sound very friendly,’ Ellen muttered wearily. ‘I think I know who that might be.’

  •

  Up at the edge of the redzone, Carl had felt his resolve waver. Could you still cling to the old idea of the law taking its course? But now he felt angry again, and Gibbs’s frosted-glass front door took the brunt of it.

  ‘I want to know if you intend to arrest Casper for what he did to Terry,’ he said, as soon as the door opened. ‘If you’re not, I want to know why. No more excuses. I’m not leaving until you tell me what you’re going to do.’

  Gibbs took Carl into the living room. A glass of Amaretto was offered.

  ‘It’s been sitting in the cupboard for years. No one likes it.’

  Carl refused.

  ‘So,’ said Gibbs, ‘you’d like me to arrest Casper – all six feet four of him – by myself.’

  ‘I’ll come with you. Maybe we can get one or two other guys.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Gibbs, inspecting his patched uniform by the light of the window. ‘Casper’s in his mum and dad’s house. They might not take too kindly to seeing their son carted off – and to where? There are no cells in Inverlair.’

  ‘We can lock him up somewhere. I don’t know . . .’

  Gibbs nodded. ‘Maybe we can. Casper’s dad’s in his sixties but he’s still a big fit man. Maybe his mum will weigh in as well. Do you think we can handle the three of them if Casper doesn’t want to co-operate?’

  ‘We can get others to help us.’

  Carl wished he’d taken the offer of a drink, even if it was disgusting. He unzipped his jacket. The list of options all seemed to lead to painful, if not impossible, outcomes.

  ‘Who should we ask?’ continued Gibbs. ‘Offhand, I don’t know of anyone who would volunteer to tackle Casper and his old man, never mind Cutler and Gavin Marshall.’

  Carl sat down in the soft armchair, staring straight ahead at the space in the corner where a TV had once stood.

  ‘Now d’you see the problem?’ said Gibbs. ‘If they all stick together, we’ll need at least five or six other guys to help us. Do you really want to start all that? A posse?’

  ‘Do you have a gun? I’ve got one now.’

  Gibbs stiffened. ‘Don’t be daft. Yes, I have a gun, but so does Casper, a shotgun, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Adam Cutler had one too.’ He looked around the room and sighed. ‘They’re just ordinary guys, Carl. There’s nothing bad about them. Cutler’s full of himself, but Casper . . .’

  ‘Has Catharine Morgan examined the girl yet?’ said Carl.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s none of your business, Mr Shewan.’ Gibbs put his hands on the windowsill, looking out.

  There was a rain shower on its way into the bay, a fine haze drifting over Heron Point and the headland.

  Clearing his throat, he studied his meaty fingers, splayed out on the sill.

  ‘Seems it was consensual, to begin with, then Terry went a lot further than Gemma wanted. Casper is her cousin, and he found her crying, and not exactly sober. You can imagine how someone like Casper reacted. She told Dr Morgan all that earlier today. And Dr Morgan told me.’

  Sleety rain slapped its first dabs onto the living-room window. In normal circumstances, Terry and Casper would be facing jail sentences. But the actual scenario, the chain of offence and revenge, was playing out in fast-forward. Carl could see it, understand it – accept it, even – until anger got the better of him. Terry had been disfigured for life, and there was nothing to show that he was guilty beyond reasonable doubt. He thought of Gemma, caught up in the moment then unable to stop it, and he felt revulsion at what Terry had done.

  Carl zipped his jacket up, unsure of his next move. Gibbs told him about the confrontation with Adam at the boatyard, and Carl felt his anger and frustration rise again. Adam and the rest would make fucking mincemeat of him. He knew it. As he headed out into the squall, action and reaction formed a plausible truth, one he felt obliged to accept.

  30

  A few days later, a strong wind swung to the north-east, and it turned colder, drier. Clutching the deltameter, Carl trudged back over the northern ridge from the furthest edge of the redzone. One day, the signal would not register. One day, the horizon would recede, and he would be able to travel further than 2.26 miles. Right now, he would happily have left this hole of a place and never clapped eyes on it again.

  He’d read somewhere about the fear of a north-easterly wind, back when the Vikings were doing their stuff as the latest incarnation of invincible power. A north-easterly pushed the Scandinavians where they wanted to go, across the North Sea, and they didn’t need to waste so much muscle-power rowing the few hundred miles. Such a wind meant big trouble for the locals.

  Folk would have seen the longships from up here, the first masts rounding the headland. Now there was terror for you, having that lot slide into view. What would he have done? Fight or flight? Where would he have run to? This would have been home, in the bay, with domesticated animals and shelter and family, so the men would stay and fight. And get slaughtered. Plenty of eyes gouged out in those days. Enough gri
ef and death to go round. No scarcity as far as they were concerned.

  He felt the nip of a wind that was pushing the clouds south-west, clearing the sky for night frosts. Three and a half months ago the land had looked like a green Mars. Now it was more like the real thing: barrens of brown, grey summits of scalped winter rock, ochreous mattresses of bog. The Vikings were welcome to Inverlair. They could have it.

  In those houses without photovoltaics on the roof, or solid-fuel stoves, it would now be turning very cold. The community centre would be warm though, with bunks laid out for those who needed them. Maybe the winter wouldn’t be that cold. Maybe everyone would survive; even the oldest ones who chose to stay in their unheated homes.

  Dr Morgan said Terry was fit enough to go home today as the skinplast had taken. His cracked ribs were bandaged. Now all Gibbs had to do was let him. It wasn’t as if he was going to run away, and Carl doubted he was a danger to anyone. All Terry had to do was walk home, along the shorefront, past the hotel and the community centre and the boatyard, a gauze plaster over his eye announcing to everyone that the rumours were true. They would assume he was a rapist. Maybe they’d lynch him from one of the ash trees at the graveyard. Then they could just drop him straight into a hole in the ground.

  Gemma was full of herself; cocky and whip-smart. But when it came right down to it she was only a girl. The rules couldn’t be that different; some of them had to be kept. They had to be. It couldn’t just be the appetites that ruled. There had to be safeguards, a veneer of measured responses. There had to be control.

  As he made his way down from the broch, picking up the forest track behind Alec John’s, Carl remembered what Terry had said a couple of weeks ago, a conversation that had started off about sex, but which had strayed onto more emotional ground. To begin with it was sex and hunger – where people are most like animals. The worst was hunger, Carl had said, because you can go without sex for ages. Party World avatars more or less gave you the same thing anyway, if you had all the kit and the lenses and enough money for your own spraysuit. Hunger, on the other hand, was a different beast altogether. People could turn nasty if they were hungry. A day would do it: four missed meals, wasn’t that what they said? Kill their own mothers for a slice of toast then, most folk would. He’d seen it happen. Well, maybe not mothers, but at Kelvingrove, before CivCon took over security at the rationing centres, he’d seen kids get elbowed out of the way for a few slices of bread by fully grown men.

  So, there they were, talking about sex and death. Terry had been sitting stoned in the caravan in front of the tiny stove. He’d been talking about how people were clinging to each other and how that daft marriage was still going ahead, even though he’d heard the bride-to-be had been on the verge of calling it off before the redzone happened. Obviously, the groom was none the wiser about any of that. He was delighted, the sap, talking about how love and life have to go on. A nice speech, by all accounts. If only he knew how close he’d come to being an ex-fiancé.

  ‘Maybe you can’t blame the woman for reappraising her situation,’ Terry had said. ‘Her options are kind of limited now, unless she wants to shack up with a meathead like Casper or Gav. Instead of doing that, she’s making the best of a bad situation.

  ‘What’s your least worst option, Carl? And what’s mine? We both have to think about that – because we’re men, not monks, you know what I mean? As long as we’ve got enough food to keep us alive, and a roof to keep the rain off, the other big appetite will need satisfied, sooner or later. That much never changes. Maybe you could be with Simone, I don’t know. But what about me? What are my options in the female department?’

  He should have taken the hint then, and at other times as well – those little silences and awkward moments between Terry and Gemma. Maybe the normal rules didn’t apply any more. Maybe it was okay for a thirty-three-year-old man to have sex with a fifteen-year-old girl. Perhaps it was time to get back to a more basic version of human behaviour. Was nature that perverted? Did the Vikings worry about the age of consent?

  There would be no legal ramifications, that much Carl was sure about, unless Gibbs decided to pick the easy target this time and arrest Terry for underage sex. Somehow, as Jess bounded across the field to meet him, Carl doubted that would happen. Gibbs, he figured, would probably prefer to forget all about the whole thing.

  A coughing fit told Carl that Alec John was in his workshop. He didn’t appear to be doing much, just moving things around. Carl watched him through the window, listlessly moving to and fro, picking up tools and opening drawers.

  Without turning around, Alec John said, ‘So . . . you’re back.’

  ‘Well, only to say that maybe it’s not working out. Maybe I’m not the right man for the job.’

  ‘Is that so? Why d’you say that?’

  ‘The gralloching, I don’t know if I can do it. And . . . the other day, this huge animal was alive, and then it was dead. I don’t know if I can handle doing that.’

  ‘So you’d rather not eat venison, or grouse?’

  ‘I can live without them. Look, I’ve been thinking about what happened to Terry, and what he did. It’s . . . brutal. It sickened me.’

  ‘It is brutal, yes. But the world can be brutal sometimes. You can hide from that or you can accept it.’

  ‘I’m not hiding from it.’

  ‘Of course you are. Your job was hiding in the shadows, and now you’re out in the open and you don’t like it. You need something to do, something to occupy your mind. If you can think of another job besides this one that’s more useful, go right ahead – knock yourself out.’

  Alec John wiped his hands on his padded checked shirt. ‘How’s Terry?’

  Carl picked an adjustable spanner from its place on the wall, feeling its cool weight in his grip. Alec John had gone to the trouble of drawing a felt-tip outline around each tool. Every one had its allotted place from which to hang.

  ‘Dr Morgan said he was well enough go home,’ replied Carl. ‘Gibbs said he could go home.’

  ‘Has he spoken to Terry about what happened?’

  Carl shook his head. ‘He tried to, but Terry wouldn’t say a word. I don’t know what happens now. I don’t think anyone does. I wonder if we should go and see him.’

  Alec John stiffened. ‘He might have raped that girl.’

  ‘He might have, yes. But the only thing we know for sure is that he’s been scarred for life.’

  Alec John said nothing. The two men set off down the track to the main road.

  ‘One day, maybe sooner rather than later, I won’t be able to do this,’ said Alec John. ‘The doctor told me that herself.’

  ‘I thought she couldn’t say for sure?’

  Alec John shook his head. ‘The timing of it, no, no one can be sure of that. But without the medicine it’ll come back. It already has.’

  Carl glanced at him as they walked. ‘Not bad enough to keep you indoors though.’

  ‘No, not that bad. But I can feel it all the same, even on the lower slopes now, never mind the ridge. A shortness of breath that wasn’t there a few months ago, before . . .’

  They walked a little further along the main road, crossed the bridge at the head of the bay, the river in spate beneath it.

  ‘There must be other people, better suited to it,’ said Carl.

  ‘There are. But it would benefit you the most.’

  ‘I’m not ready for it.’ But even as he uttered the words, Carl knew how weak they sounded. He wasn’t ready for a lot of things. Stuff like tolerating the disfigurement of a friend, and the perpetrators getting clean away with it. He thought of young guys in Glasgow, getting killed in gang fights, and the coppers hardly bothering with a proper investigation, even if CivCon actually told them the murder had happened.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ said Alec John.

  They walked past Cutler’s boatyard and there was nothing doing, no sign of activity at all. Maybe folk knew that Terry could go home today and they didn’t want
to have to look at him. You’d think someone would come out, though, someone who cared to see how the man was feeling. Perhaps Terry had sacrificed the right to any such display. People could slake their curiosity from behind their fucking curtains.

  Carl knocked on Dr Morgan’s door. She answered, her face set hard, and told Carl and Alec John not to expect too much from Terry.

  ‘He’s still in shock,’ she said. ‘Post-traumatic stress, I’d say, though I can’t be sure. He doesn’t speak much.’

  She led them through to the sitting room. Carl couldn’t help but stare.

  ‘All right, mate,’ he said quietly to Terry, who was sitting, slouched, on a hard-backed chair, fingers splayed on his thighs.

  After a second Terry looked up at the voice. ‘Hi,’ he said. There was something he wanted to say, but he wasn’t sure what it was or why he should say it. He looked at the ceiling, down at his hands. No clues there. There was a pain in his eye. He was wearing a bandage. There was a reason for it all that he wanted to forget.

  ‘Is there any more tea?’ Terry asked Dr Morgan. ‘Maybe they want a cup of tea.’

  She nodded.

  ‘They gave me half an ounce, so I should be able to squeeze another few cups out of it.’

  Nice gesture from the committee, thought Carl: a few cups of tea for the inconvenience of losing an eye, the dependable fixer-upper that can soothe away all the bad things in life. He accepted the offer anyway, as did Alec John. Dr Morgan fetched the cups and teapot on a tray. Barely moving, Terry sat, head bowed.

  After an awkward half-minute, Dr Morgan asked, ‘Any luck with the deer today?’

  Alec John took a quick breath. ‘No,’ he said, repositioning his baseball cap. ‘Not today. They’re mostly in the other end of the forest now, the part we can’t get into. Maybe they’re getting wise to where we can go and where we can’t. Think I’ll try out towards the Needles for a spell, give the forest a rest.’ He glanced at Carl. ‘One of us will, anyway.’

  Carl tried to sound as upbeat as he could. ‘So, will you be allowed to come home today?’