The Dark Isle

by Clare Carson

  She processed Harry’s comments about Pierce, the watchers guarding their asset. ‘He didn’t work for MI5. He worked for MI6.’

  ‘Yeah, but the point is, he didn’t work for the Force. He’s not a plod. He worked for Intelligence and he produced the Freeman tape.’

  Rivalries. Office politics. Pierce had hinted at that too; his comments about Jim, the Force’s wisdom. Fault. She ventured one more question.

  ‘How did Jim and Pierce meet? Were they working together?’

  He didn’t look at her when he replied. ‘Something like that,’ he said. ‘Jim was... attached to some organization that was also in contact with Reznik, after weapons. Pierce insisted that Jim use him as a middle man with Reznik. So that’s how they ended up working together. Pierce wanted to be Reznik’s gatekeeper.’

  Pierce’s hints about Jim’s involvement confirmed. She snapped. ‘Oh god, so what did he do exactly?’

  He turned, swiftly. ‘You don’t need to know that.’

  She was taken aback by the fierceness of his response.

  She persisted. ‘Yes, but was his involvement... did it have anything to do with the Firm’s sting going wrong, and Reznik’s grudge against Pierce?’

  Harry’s face reddened, his lips folded in. She didn’t care if she had annoyed him, she wanted to know whether Jim had harmed Pierce in some way.

  Harry shouted suddenly, ‘Don’t do it, Sam.’

  She was confused, uncertain what he meant.

  ‘Don’t chip away at your father’s memory. Don’t let anybody undermine him in your head.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Take the tomatoes. You look as if you could do with some extra vitamin C. What are you studying now anyway?’

  She was relieved to be on safer territory again; his outburst had alarmed her.

  ‘I’m doing an archaeology PhD.’

  ‘Ha. Perpetual student. Well, if you’ve got the aptitude then good luck to you, that’s what I say. Are you doing any excavating?’

  ‘Sort of. I was in Orkney over the summer helping with a survey of a Norse site. I might use that as the basis for my thesis.’

  ‘Orkney?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘The place you used to go on holiday when you were a kid?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  He thrust the spade into the ground, stood back, left it standing in the soil. ‘Why are you going all the way up there? Scotland, overrated I reckon. What’s wrong with Wales?’

  He was joking, but she could detect a note of aggression which perturbed her.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with Wales. I’ve always been interested in Norse history and Orkney is a good place to go for Viking ruins.’

  ‘Do you know people up there?’

  He knew she knew where Pierce was hiding.

  ‘I’ve made a few friends.’

  He crossed his arms, his belly sticking out below. ‘You should think about Wales. I could introduce you to a few people there.’

  ‘Harry, that’s very kind. But the Vikings weren’t big in Wales.’

  ‘That’s cos we fought them off.’ He leaned on the handle of his spade, stared at her, pale eyes sharp in the folds of his skin. ‘Maybe you should give Orkney a break. Think about going somewhere else. Wales is nearer.’

  She laughed politely.

  ‘I’m serious Sam. Leave it. Keep away.’

  *

  SHE RESTED ON a fallen log when she reached the top of the hill. A gust rustled the leaves and drops of rain pattered above her head; a sudden shower from nowhere. She dipped her hand in the bag, selected a tomato, bit its flesh; pips squirted, juice dribbled down her chin. The tone of the conversation with Harry disturbed her. She suspected that his earlier note of scorn about Pierce’s heroic reputation was sour grapes – Pierce was in favour and he was out on his ear. And the lecture about Jim – what was he on? Telling her what to think about her own father. She wondered, in retrospect, whether Harry was being upfront about Anna. Did he know something that he wasn’t telling her? And then there was the warning not to go back to Orkney. He was overstepping the line. There was something threatening about his suggestions that she didn’t like. Perhaps there was a good reason why he was on gardening leave, she mused, perhaps his new boss – a woman, she had noted – was fed up with all these ageing men who threw their weight around. No wonder she preferred the yuppies. Leave it. Keep away. That’s what he had advised Jim too, all those years ago. Jim hadn’t listened to him either. He hadn’t been able to keep away from Orkney, whatever Harry’s warnings. They’d gone there for a holiday in the August of ’76, and that was when she glimpsed Pierce again. The second time that summer.

  CHAPTER 12

  Orkney, August 1976

  THEY WENT TO Orkney later than usual that summer. They hadn’t planned a holiday at all, because nobody seemed to know what Jim was doing. Was he lurking around the house for ever? Hoping for a transfer? Leaving the Force? Liz said she needed to get away; the heat, the water restrictions, the presence of Valerie and Anna were all fraying her nerves. Jim’s behaviour too, she said one afternoon when she had taken Sam shopping for a pair of sandals. Everybody was on a short fuse because of the weather, but Jim’s short fuse appeared to be attached to a grumbling volcano. His eruptions increasingly explosive. Drinking too much, even by his standards. She’d tried to talk to him about it, but he had refused to listen. He never was very good at confronting reality, she said; he had always preferred a good story to the hard truth. She sometimes worried what effect it all had on his daughters, she added. Sam didn’t reply. The day after they had been to visit Harry, Liz announced she was going to find a cheap deal to Spain. The idea of a package holiday seemed to provoke Jim; he made a phone call, said he’d found a place for them to stay in Orkney and booked last-minute tickets on the motorail to Inverness. Liz, Sam suspected, was disappointed. She always wanted to go to the Med but deferred, every year, to Jim’s desire for the north, distance from London. Away from people. He was weird like that; if you saw him in a crowd you would think he was sociable, chatting, having a laugh, always a drink in hand. But the fact was, he was more at home by himself, combing shores and mountains. Far out wasn’t far enough for Jim.

  Valerie and Anna had found another temporary home with a friend in a different part of south London, and she came round to pick them up a couple of days before Sam and her family were due to leave for Orkney. It was Valerie who gave Liz their next address and insisted Sam should come and visit. Anna was too busy trying to attract Jim’s attention for anything other than a casual goodbye, let alone a thank you to Sam for letting her share her room all those weeks. She watched Anna give Jim her charming smile and heard her ask whether he could find a way of passing a small present to Pierce. Jim reacted strangely to the request, shuffling his feet like a naughty schoolboy, but eventually he said he might be able to fix something. She dug in her pocket and produced the two white mosaic tiles, and handed them to Jim. They are very precious, she said, quite seriously; magical stones that are supposed to protect the person who owns them. He looked at the tiles, perturbed, and Sam thought he had sussed their origin and would throw a wobbly, but he didn’t say a word. They waved Anna and Valerie off and she watched Jim remove the tiles from his pocket, examine them again, stroll over to their Cortina and slip them in the glove compartment.

  *

  THE CROFT WAS at the end of a track on the headland beyond Swanbister Bay, overlooking fields bleached by the sun. Even Orkney was suffering from the drought. According to The Orcadian, it was the driest August since records began and Orkney Council had issued a notice banning the use of hosepipes for watering gardens and washing cars. But Orkney’s record-busting seventy degrees was a relief from the eighties and nineties of the south. The first day was cloudless, a scorcher. In the morning they swam in Waulkmill Bay. Helen and Jess sunbathed, which was, Helen pointed out, a new experience for them in Orkney because they usually spent their time sheltering from the wind and rain.

 
; The price for their lazy morning came in the afternoon when Jim suggested a walk along the coast path. They ambled, sluggish in the heat. The path cut through the heather and past a dilapidated fisherman’s hut, its drystone walls white with spindled lichen, before rounding the headland. Jim stopped abruptly, hand shading his eyes as he surveyed Scapa Flow. He stared at the dark island rising from the water on the far side.

  ‘Is that Hoy over there?’ Sam asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s Hoy,’ Jim said. ‘It makes me think of the island in The Tempest.’

  ‘The Tempest?’ Liz’s attention grabbed by the mention of Shakespeare. ‘That’s an interesting comparison. Why the island in The Tempest?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Jim rubbed his cheek, as if some insect had bothered him. ‘Let’s keep moving.’ He stomped off.

  Liz stood for a minute, watching his back before she followed without a word. Helen and Jess dawdled behind. Sam tried to match Jim’s pace. Skuas shadowed their path. She swiped the towering cow parsley, sent clouds of midges flying, stung her arm on a nettle, then searched fruitlessly for a dock leaf to soothe the lash of welts marking her skin. Orkney wasn’t as much fun at this time of year. Not enough birds. Too hot.

  The path turned inland along a harvested field, bales of hay awaiting collection on the hard-baked soil, and arrived at a wooden gate in a high wall. On the other side there was a graveyard, weathered limestone crosses marking grassy mounds. A dilapidated tower grew among the tombs, topped with a scalp of parched turf. A movement caught her eye; a face at the one small window, staring across the fields. She squinted. The face had vanished. She wondered whether she had been mistaken, but Jim had noticed it too. He frowned, strode across the graveyard. She caught up with him, examining the drop to the interior of the ruin. The window was about six feet off the ground; only a tall person could have hauled themselves up to look out. Jim was making the same calculation, she reckoned. His face clouded. He sensed her watching, and pulled himself together. Getagrip.

  ‘The great drinking hall of the Vikings,’ Jim said. He swept a hand in the air, indicating the shadows of buildings long gone, the ghosts of the departed. ‘It’s described in the Orkneyinga Saga. And this,’ he pointed to the tower, the window at which the face had appeared, ‘is the apse of the Round Church, built by Earl Hakon after a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He was searching for redemption because he’d ordered the hit on Magnus.’

  He was trying to behave as if nothing had happened, but she could tell he was edgy.

  ‘St Magnus? The one who has a cathedral named after him in Kirkwall?’

  ‘Yes. That’s him. The sainted Magnus.’ He examined the apse again. ‘I suppose Earl Hakon had a lot to feel guilty about.’

  Liz joined them and assessed the ruin. Jim put his arm around her. She pulled away from Jim’s embrace, left him standing with his arm dangling at his side, a broken wing.

  ‘I’ll go and sort the picnic things out with Jess and Helen,’ Liz said.

  ‘Let’s have a look around,’ Jim said to Sam.

  They moseyed about the tombs; Jim reading epitaphs, Sam finding metallic weevils sheltering in the limestone cracks. A breeze blew up out of nowhere and swayed a canopy of trees beyond the graveyard wall. Jim froze, eyes narrowed. He had almost supernatural powers of seeing; he could identify a hawk high in the sky when she couldn’t distinguish it from the sun spots dancing in her vision. She looked in the direction he was staring and glimpsed a flash in the shadows of the dancing branches. Was that the white of somebody’s shirt? She looked again and saw a figure retreating. Jim set off, past the remains of the Norse drinking hall. She jogged behind, down a rutted track to a shady lane. A collie barked from behind a farm gate, leaped and rattled the bars. A car engine revved, then its bonnet emerged from behind the hedgerow. Jim stopped in the middle of the road, dappled light shining through the sycamores and falling on his face, revealing the tense line of his jaw. The car eased away, disappeared around the bend. Jim didn’t move. The dog lost interest, ceased barking, trotted off in search of more exciting scents.

  ‘Who was that?’ Sam asked innocently.

  ‘Dunno.’ He said it without looking at her. ‘Some bloke or other.’

  Some bloke who drove a navy Volvo estate, she had noted. She looked at her feet and noticed the rock in the road at the same time as Jim. She leaned, but he was faster, kicked it with his boot, dropped and retrieved the piece of paper underneath, stuffed it in his back pocket.

  *

  THEY FOUND LIZ and Helen and Jess, sitting beyond the graveyard wall. The stray clouds had gathered, muffled the sun, casting the headland in a bleaker light.

  ‘We waited for you,’ Liz said. ‘We haven’t started eating yet.’

  They sat on the grass and peeled the eggs that Liz had boiled, dipped them in a pot of salt. A hooded crow stalked the graveyard wall, waiting for leftovers. Nobody said much. Sam watched Liz fiddling about with plastic bags and tin foil, producing tomatoes, bread rolls. A packet of Penguin biscuits, the chocolate coating melted. Sam felt sorry for her then, always waiting for Jim to return.

  *

  IN THE EVENING, Sam wanted to play cards. For once she managed to persuade Helen and Jess it would be a good idea – there wasn’t much else to do, Helen had noted grumpily. Liz never played cards. Jim loved a good game; anything except bridge, which he considered too middle class. But that night he wasn’t interested. Restless, pacing the room, stopping to gaze through the window to Hoy. Liz suggested they should go for an evening stroll. He didn’t want to do that either. He needed to make a phone call, he said. There wasn’t a phone in the house so he had to drive up the road to the village.

  The sisters played blackjack and poker and when they stopped playing she realized Jim hadn’t returned. Liz was trying to read a book, but Sam could tell from the cast of her eyes and the lack of page movement that she was tracing the same line over and over again. It was near dark by the time Jim returned. Even in late August, after the night-long twilight of midsummer, the darkness was red tinged. He strode into the kitchen without greeting anybody, opened cupboards, rootled around, slapped doors shut, came back with a whisky tumbler in his hand, settled himself in an armchair. Helen and Jess had their eyes glued to the television, the idiot’s lantern Jim called it, except when he wanted to watch a match. Liz observed him over the top of her book, noting the speed with which he knocked back his drink. Eventually he said, ‘I want to go to Hoy tomorrow.’

  ‘Hoy,’ Liz repeated. She sounded resigned.

  Helen lifted her head, howled. ‘I don’t want to go to Hoy.’

  Jim said, ‘I wasn’t inviting anybody else.’

  Helen turned her back on him and spoke to Liz. ‘Can we go to Kirkwall?’ She always gravitated towards towns and shops, even if they only sold Norwegian cardigans and fish.

  ‘Will you be taking the car?’ Liz asked Jim.

  ‘Yes. There’s a bus to Kirkwall from Orphir.’

  Liz raised a resigned eyebrow. ‘We’ll go to Kirkwall then.’

  Sam protested, ‘I don’t want to go shopping.’

  ‘We all have to do things we don’t want to do sometimes,’ Liz said. ‘That’s what being in a family is all about.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what families are like,’ Jim said.

  She suspected he was thinking about a different kind of family – his shadow family of spooks and agents. Although, maybe the same rules applied.

  ‘Can I go to Hoy with you?’ Sam asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I want to look for the bloodstones at Pegal Bay.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t want to go to Kirkwall,’ she wailed.

  Liz covered her face in her hands, which made Sam feel awful. She hadn’t meant to provoke despair in her mother.

  ‘Sorry.’

  Liz tipped her head back as if she were consulting the heavens, removed her hands and looked at Sam. ‘Don’t apologize. You’ve got nothing to be sorry about.’ She coll
ected the dirty cups and plates scattered around the room, retreated to the kitchen. Water spurted; a tap turned angrily. Crockery clinked and banged. Jim leaned back in the chair, muttered to himself, pressed his palms down on the worn arms, levered himself to standing.

  ‘OK, you can come with me if you are up early enough.’ He shouted. He wanted Liz to hear. ‘But you have to do exactly as I tell you and no whinging.’

  ‘I don’t whinge.’

  ‘I don’t whinge.’ He mimicked her voice in a whiny way. She wanted to kick him.

  ‘The ferry goes at eight from Stromness. I’m leaving at seven. If you’re not ready I’m not waiting.’

  He marched outside, his back to them, facing the sea, a black silhouette against the bloodshot sky.

  ‘What’s eating him?’ Jess said.

  Nobody answered. Sam wasn’t sure why she was insisting on accompanying him to Hoy when he was in miserable git mode. She traipsed outside to tell him she wasn’t going. He was standing, hands in pockets, staring at the heavens; Venus shining brightly in the twilight.

  ‘I’ve only seen the Northern Lights once,’ he said. ‘Finland.’ Finland? What was he doing there? ‘We’d been drinking, there was snow on the ground so I was watching where I put my feet, and then something made me look up and I saw strange lights dancing across the sky. I thought at first I’d drunk too much vodka, but then I realized what they were. There’s something uplifting about luminescence; the hand of God, the touch of grace. Unexpected lights in the darkness.’ He sighed, turned to look at her then. ‘I hope you see the Northern Lights one day.’

  She watched the beams of a car’s headlamps as they swept along the coast of Hoy, and decided she would go with Jim after all.

  CHAPTER 13

  London, October 1989

  SHE SAT ON the dodgy flat roof of the Vauxhall house with Becky. They had signed a contract with the housing co-op promising they wouldn’t use it because it was unsafe. They used it all the same; everybody in the square used the roof terraces on summer evenings, sitting out there smoking weed. Neighbours’ candles flickered in the dark. The shadow of a Heathrow-bound plane crossed the waning moon. A police siren wailed. She rolled a spliff and puffed a few times, tilted the roach to Becky.