by Clare Carson
Sam couldn’t help laughing. ‘Well, I suppose he wasn’t all bad then.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that. Of course he wasn’t all bad. Your father had some very impressive qualities, even if in his later years they were...’ She trailed off, shook her head. ‘I don’t know what happened; he wasn’t always that difficult. He didn’t always drink that much.’
‘Do you think he might have suffered from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder?’
‘Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? What’s that?’
‘It’s when you suffer from some sort of physical or emotional shock and it traumatizes you, and you have flashbacks and get angry and think you’re about to die all over again.’
She could see Liz frowning, the moonlight highlighting the deepening lines on her face. She sighed, said nothing.
‘Didn’t he have nightmares?’ Sam persisted.
‘Yes, he did. He used to wake up thinking he was drowning, fighting for air...’
She remembered. Her recurring dream – waking up and hearing somebody shouting, not knowing whether it was real or in her head.
‘Why didn’t he do anything about it? Why didn’t he get help?’
‘I don’t know, Sam.’ Her voice had an edge to it. ‘Nobody offered him any help. We didn’t think about things like that at the time. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It’s life, isn’t it, and you have to get on with it. People deal with things in different ways. I suppose I dealt with it by getting on with my job and trying to jolly you lot along and looking for comfort in literature. Jim dealt with it by drinking and going for long walks and, I suppose, telling his stories...’
‘The Fisher King.’
‘Yes, the Fisher King. Or his version of it.’
Sam wiped her eye. ‘When he told me that story I thought he was talking about somebody else, but now I think the Fisher King was him. He was saying he was wounded and I didn’t realize it.’
‘Of course you didn’t. You were only a child. And maybe he wasn’t talking about himself, maybe he was trying to amuse you with an interesting story.’
‘What was the healing question again?’
‘Who does the grail serve?’
She tipped the tiles out of the Marmite pot, replaced them in her pocket. ‘I’ll take them back to Blackstone.’
‘Good. Look at the moon. It’s so bright, and the craters are so clear.’
‘It’s a perigee moon.’
‘A what?’
‘Perigee. The moon looks bigger when it’s at its closest point to the earth – and tonight the perigee has coincided with the full moon.’
‘Perigee moon. That’s the kind of thing Jim would have known.’ Her voice cracked. ‘People aren’t perfect. People get things wrong and make mistakes. Of course they do. Sometimes you just have to let these things go.’
She leaned, lifted the turnip lantern’s lid, snuffed the candle with her fingers. ‘Let’s leave the lantern here. The squirrels can eat it.’
‘Do you think the squirrels have given up hibernating?’
Liz stood. ‘I’m not sure they ever did hibernate. Maybe I’ve forgotten the details.’ She smiled, started back along the path and glanced at the moon, high in the indigo sky, as she left.
*
ONE OF HER tutors had the name and number of the Blackstone site director, which she had given Sam after she had made up some story to account for her sudden, desperate interest in Roman villas. The director was called Lucy. The site was closed to the public from October through to March, but after Sam had explained the issue, Lucy agreed to meet her there on the fifteenth. Sam drove to the site. She thought she’d be able to find it on autopilot, but they had built a new bypass – a feeder road for the M25 – and it confused her. Eventually she found the lane which she used to cycle along. It had been tamed; overbearing privet hedges cut down to size, newer, blander houses sprawling up the hill. Creeping urbanization, the periphery seeping south. The site of the villa was more orderly too – the straggling riverbanks cut back, the golf course swallowing the land which had once been wild. Men in Rupert Bear trousers dragging caddies over the places where she had once played, built dens, pretended to be a Celtic rebel with Anna.
And the site itself had been tarted up, made into a more appealing tourist attraction with a shop selling crap Roman-style jewellery and Airfix models of centurions. It was a positive change, though, that it was a woman who came to greet her, not some leering bearded man. Lucy, she said, and offered Sam her hand to shake. Mid-thirties Sam reckoned, in DMs, jeans, with a pierced nose and cropped hair. She wasn’t judgemental or too inquisitive, although Sam still wasn’t inclined to tell her the whole truth. She said she had a friend who had a brother, and the friend had found the tiles in his bedroom and he had boasted about taking them from a mosaic at Blackstone.
As soon as Lucy saw the tiles, she identified the part of the mosaic where they belonged. She laughed, more concerned about getting them back than creating a fuss about how they had gone missing. Very sensible. Sam followed her around the walkways to the mosaic; the rampant bull running off with a passive naked woman on its back, some diaphanous wisps of cloth across her stomach. The sea was blue, the bull was white and the woman was outlined in red, a gap of bare earth where the woman’s butt joined the bull’s back.
Lucy removed her boots, lowered herself, trod lightly around the edge of the mosaic, then across to the bare patch. She ducked and arranged the tiles Sam had handed her. They filled the space exactly, apart from one missing square in the woman’s outline.
‘There.’ She stood back, hands on hips. ‘What do you think?’
‘Good fit.’ She didn’t say anything about the missing piece, neither did Lucy.
Lucy retraced her steps, joined Sam on the walkway.
‘To be honest,’ Sam said, ‘I’ve never been entirely sure about this mosaic.’
‘Why not?’
‘It gives me the creeps. What’s happening to that poor woman on the back of the bull? Who is she?’
‘The woman is Europa.’
A gust of wind howled under the eaves of the building, rattling the roof.
‘The bull is Jupiter. It’s a Greek myth that the Romans adapted. I suppose it’s a foundation story, an origin myth of sorts. It was originally Zeus and Europa, but the Romans changed Zeus to Jupiter. The gist is the same, though – Jupiter saw Europa, fancied the pants off her, turned himself into a bull, abducted her, carried her away on his back and raped her. Then made her queen of Crete.’
Sam frowned. ‘And they wanted to celebrate that story in a mosaic?’
‘It’s not a particularly enchanting tale, I grant you. But there haven’t been many societies where violence against women isn’t the norm, and women aren’t regarded as second-class citizens.’
She half wished she hadn’t brought the pieces back, kept Europa’s backside forever safe from Jupiter in a Marmite pot on Jim’s grave. Anna, Sam remembered, had insisted the tiles were loose at the edge of the mosaic, which wasn’t quite true. She suspected Anna had deliberately taken the tiles marking Europa’s private parts, trying to protect her from the violence of Jupiter.
Lucy dusted her hands. ‘Well, thank you for returning the tiles.’
*
SAM DEPARTED THE villa and wandered along the riverbank. The water level was much higher than it had been in the drought of ’76, but everything else seemed diminished. Less magical. Perhaps it was because she was older. Or maybe it was simply because the year was dwindling and the grotto of overarching green leaves was now a ribcage of bare branches. Or maybe it was because she didn’t have Anna by her side. She found a gap between the trunks of an ash and a willow, slid down the bank to the river’s edge, the swollen brook carrying twigs and fag packets from the wood at the top of the hill. This was where they had played that summer, Anna and her, the defenders of the Fisher King, recovering his lost treasures from Blackstone. What was it Liz had said about the story’s resolution? The young knig
ht was supposed to ask the healing question – who did the grail serve? Anna had always known that whoever the grail served, it wasn’t her. Or Valerie. Or Sam, or Liz. Or Karina. They were all collateral. She crouched by the water’s edge, dabbled a finger in the brook, swirled it around, withdrew it when she spotted the serpentine body of a pike, hanging in the shallows. Still, Anna had nearly got her revenge. After all, it was Sam’s account of the tile on Betty Corrigall’s grave that had helped Anna deduce Pierce’s location. The thought cheered her; Miranda had almost upended the story with the tiles she had stolen and distributed, used Ariel to disarm Prospero and rid him of his sorcerer’s dark powers. A fat rain drop pocked the river’s surface. Then another, and another, the brook a mass of bubbles and ripples. Time to go.
CHAPTER 33
London and Orkney, December 1989
SHE PULLED HER edition of The Collected Poems of T. S. Eliot from the shelf and found the page and line she was after. The Waste Land, the verse about the Fisher King, the one Pierce had pointed out to her when he was explaining Lamb’s code. The king fishing in the dull canal with the arid plain behind him and the shipwreck of the king’s brother ahead. He liked those lines, he said, which joined the myth of the wounded Fisher King with Prospero, the patriarch exiled on his island. He liked them so he could have them back. She would chuck them in his face. Lamb’s code. She wrote the alphabet and each of the corresponding letters taken from the lines of The Waste Land underneath, and then used the key to send Pierce the message. She wanted to let him know she had something that might interest him – an envelope she had found. It contained a photo and a used chequebook in the name of Davenport. She didn’t add that on three of the stubs somebody had written cash for Freeman, that all the payments were made in 1974 and, in total, they amounted to a hundred thousand pounds. He didn’t need her to fill in the details: that Freeman was Reznik’s code name and that Pierce had paid him cash for his information. And probably sold him some of his own secrets too.
Spies. They were all the bloody same. Seriously. Who would trust a spook? He wasn’t even competent – he’d lectured her about the superiority of Intelligence tradecraft, scoffed about police spies and then he’d left the envelope with the crucial evidence that revealed his duplicity and a photo of his daughter in his own safehouse. He’d sent a police spy to retrieve the envelope. And then she, the copper’s daughter, had found it when she lifted a plank in the back garden because she wanted to be Charles Darwin and liked looking for beetles. But his main weakness, his Shakespearean flaw, was not incompetence. It was cowardice. According to Pierce, he was a hero. As far as she was concerned, he was a coward and a violent bully. She slipped the coded note in an envelope, addressed it to his PO Box number, dropped it in the gaping red mouth of a letterbox, hoped that nobody would intercept it or, if they did, wouldn’t be able to decode the message and would pass it on anyway. All she could do now was wait. Not quite all she could do. She called Anna, collected the Browning and five rounds. Pierce’s parting gift to Valerie in case she ever needed to defend herself. Bit late, Anna had said, given that the person who caused her the most harm was him, and he was leaving.
*
THE DAYS WERE getting shorter, the light seeping away. The dead leaves had all been swept away from the gutters, Vauxhall Park bald and cracked from frost and rain. Still no response. Perhaps he hadn’t taken the bait. She bought an Advent Calendar; she managed to find one with no Christian imagery at all – woodland creatures sprinkled with glitter – and had checked with the shop assistant that none of the pictures behind the doors contained a baby Jesus. No, it was all fluffy animals. She pinned it to the kitchen wall and draped a string of fairy lights around the shelves. Becky objected – her family had celebrated Christmas along with everybody else, but she wasn’t entirely comfortable with overt signs of Christianity in the house. Neither was Sam. She said that Advent was a pagan ritual, an ancient urge to mark the dwindling of the light, count the days one by one until the darkest day of the year. The winter solstice. Becky bought her line.
She had almost given up on Pierce. Almost decided it was probably for the best if nothing happened. She was opening the first window of her Advent Calendar – robin with a sprig of mistletoe – when she heard the flap as the postman dropped something through the letter box. She sauntered down the hall. Plain white envelope. Postmark Ripley – a place she’d never heard of – but she recognized the writing. She retreated to her room with the letter, located her copy of T. S. Eliot’s Collected Poems. The numbers at the beginning of the note referred her to page 77, line 359. The Waste Land, ‘What the Thunder Said’. She wrote the alphabet on a piece of card, found the equivalent letters starting from the line he had given her, completed her key. And then she decoded his message.
*
MEET ME AT the croft. December 21st. I will be there all day. Will reimburse. Keep this between you and me.
*
DECEMBER 21ST. THE shortest day. Six hours of light. At least he was offering to reimburse her expenses. Keep this between you and me. What did that mean – don’t tell Anna? Don’t tell Harry? She couldn’t think of anybody else who would give a toss or believe her anyway. She wondered whether he had told anybody about it, passed the decoded message on to his mates in Intelligence. No. He was trying to keep the information she had from them, not reveal that the daughter of a police spy had a piece of paper which might confirm he wasn’t quite the hero he would have them believe. The real danger for her wasn’t his colleagues, it was him. Now Pierce knew she had the cheque stubs with Freeman’s name on them, she was a threat to his reputation. Which was his life. And she already knew he used violence in order to control. She felt safer with the Browning. He wouldn’t expect her to have a gun, still less be capable of using it, which she was, because she’d learned how to fire one from an expert.
*
SHE REMOVED THE envelope from The Secret Island. She hesitated, and decided to take the matchbox with her treasured dung beetle in it as well; it reminded her of Jim and she wanted him by her side. She didn’t want to catch the plane – the Browning might alarm the metal detector. She went by train to Thurso, the Cairngorms white with snow, the birches skeletal in the cold dawn light.
The sky was inky by the time she boarded the ferry and the wind was strengthening. The purser had announced that the crossing could be rough. Pitching and rolling as they headed north. She clung to the railing, fixed her eyes on a distant light – star? lighthouse? – and tried to calculate how many times she had made this journey. All those wet and windy summer holidays; sandcastles, cairns, puffins, stone circles, skuas, Vikings, seals. The years blurred. Seventy-six stood out. The only summer it didn’t rain. The year they went to Hoy. The drought that shook the earth and the summer that changed Jim, marked a downward shift in his behaviour. And then there was the summer of ’84; that one stood out too. The midsummer trip to Orkney with Tom and Jim. She’d never forget that holiday in Orkney because Jim had been killed on the journey home. Her last conversation with him had been on the train from Inverness, the evening not yet dark. She had asked him then why he had invited her to go with him, fearful he was manipulating her in some way. He had looked surprised at the question, replied it was because he thought she might enjoy the trip. She had trouble taking his comments at face value then, when she was eighteen. And now? And now five years on, she could return to the conversation in her mind and believe him. He had been trying to bridge the gap that had grown between them she realized now. And, belatedly – posthumously – she felt she was moving closer to him as well, more able to understand his behaviour. Less quick to judge. She leaned over the ferry’s railing, watched the water foaming and white as the brow of the ferry cut through the waves, the cross-currents of the Pentland Firth tugging below the surface.
*
THE GREEN NUMBERS on the digital bedside clock glowed: six fifteen. 21st December. She had booked the hotel room for two nights using Pierce’s cash. She had to get m
oving. She retrieved the Honda 50 from the archaeologist’s garage, while he stood and shook his head. ‘In this wind?’ But he hadn’t tried to stop her. ‘Oh, the grant came through,’ he shouted as she walked the bike to the road. ‘We’ve got enough for another survey of the Bu next summer.’ She gave him a thumbs up and headed east to Houton. Still dark; everything draped in brown; the hills, the heather, the houses.
*
THE HORIZON LIGHTENED as she headed towards the jetty. Eight thirty and the ferry was waiting. She wondered whether the wind was too strong to make the crossing. The swell of the waves was ominous. The boat lurched and yawed as it pulled away from the coast. The ferryman appeared.
‘There’s a passenger lounge down below.’
She didn’t want to be below the deck. She wanted to keep her eyes on Hoy.
‘What time will the ferry do the return crossing today?’
‘Two o’clock.’
She had five hours on Hoy.
‘So long as the wind doesn’t get too much stronger,’ he added. ‘Where are you going today then?’
‘Moaness.’ Did everybody lie as easily as her?
‘I was worried you were thinking of going to Rackwick and hiking to the Old Man.’
‘No.’
‘Good thing too. I wouldn’t go near the cliffs today. You think the wind is bad here, we’re in the shelter here. I had an aunt who lived near Rackwick,’ he said. ‘My brother and I stayed with her when my mother had to go and work in Thurso. We used to climb the cliffs in the wind. We liked to pretend we could fly. One of us would lie on the grass, crawl to the edge and peer over to watch the waves crashing below, but the one who wasn’t looking had to keep hold of the wave-watcher’s ankles in case the wind took us away. Or the sea – the sight of it can pull you over if you’re not careful.’
She flinched, felt the waves crashing over her head, her lungs filling with water.
‘We must have been mad.’ He chortled, shook his head.