Cruachan nestled a couple of feet lower than the Bitter Wind, and they looked warily onto the deck and into the cabin.
'Hello! Everyone OK in there?'
A metal chain clanked against a bar. The boats nuzzled together, gentle bumping noises. One of the men looked up at the clear blue sky, feeling a shiver of trepidation.
'No seagulls,' he said.
'Come on, you've got ten years on us. You can climb aboard.'
The youngest of the three men looked rueful, then put his feet up on the railing of their yacht, put his hands on the side of the Bitter Wind and hoisted himself up and into the fishing vessel.
Safely aboard he stopped and looked around. Everything in order, the boat had not been worked since the last time it had left port. The nets were packed away at the side, ropes neatly stored, the deck uncluttered. It was as if the owners had been wanting to sell the vessel and they'd been paid a visit by the Boat Doctor.
'Hello,' he said, looking into the cabin. Still expected three or four angry fisherman to suddenly appear brandishing machine guns, accusing him of being a pirate.
That kind of thing happens on the Clyde.
'Go into the cabin,' said one of the others.
'Get the log,' said the other.
The man on the fishing vessel nodded and walked forward.
'Hello?' he ventured again, but he knew that there was going to be no one there. At least, no one who was going to answer him.
As he reached the door he got the first hint of death. Not a smell, nothing tangible. He could just feel it. He hesitated, stopped himself glancing back at his crewmates. I don't want to go in because it doesn't feel right...
He ducked down through the door and entered the small cabin. Stopped, took it in. Nothing out of the ordinary. A chart of the firth of Clyde and Kyles of Bute laid out on a small table. An empty mug, its insides tea-stained, set beside it. Three macks hung on the pegs on the back wall, two yellow, one green. A hat on another peg. Chair in the corner, a newspaper on top. From the headline, America Invades Itself As President Confuses Iowa With Iran, he knew that it was a couple of days old.
From outside he could hear a radio playing. His friends must have turned it on, he thought. Break the stillness. What was the music? Mahler? Maybe it was Mahler, he wasn't sure.
He made himself approach the doorway at the back. A small space behind. As soon as he changed his angle, however, he could see the feet, propped up, in a pair of well-used boots. Not sailing boots. An old-fashioned pair of hiking boots.
He paused, then finally made himself look in through the doorway.
The body was sitting up against a wall, head slumped down over the chest. The eyes were open, dead grey eyes, staring. The legs were straight out in front, propped on a coiled rope. It wasn't obvious how he'd died. There might have been bruising around the neck, but in the dim light of the cabin, he couldn't be sure.
He turned away and stepped quickly out onto the deck and breathed in the sea air, his eyes squinting against the sun.
He stared at the low green hills rising in front of him up from the bay, and remembered scout camps from forty years earlier. Happy days.
The thought of the corpse in the hold suddenly drenched back over him and he turned and looked at his two friends. One of them held his hand out to help him back down onto the boat. The other was already on the radio to the coastguard.
The Storyteller's Tale
The sky is brilliant, a sheer blue that almost defies colour. It is as if iridescent blue angels had collected in heaven and were advancing across the sky in one great, striking mélange of blue. This is blue as must have been defined by the gods when they drew up the colours. This is a blue which would defy any paint chart. This is blue as warmth not cold, blue as exuberance not apathy. Just to look at it is to make one's heart soar and one's eyes to reflect in the giant blueness, turning all those who gaze upon it into other-worldly Paul Newmans.
'What d'you think, chief?'
Barney stared at Keanu, then glanced out at the blue sky, which was very blue, right enough. The door to the shop opened and Igor, Barney's deaf, mute hunchbacked assistant entered, carrying some fresh rolls and a packet of bacon.
They'd been open for just under an hour, the customers had been non-existent, and so he'd sent Igor out to get something interesting for breakfast.
'Blue sky,' said Barney.
Igor smiled, said something that, no matter what was intended, sounded like arf, held aloft the bacon and walked into the back room to get on with the job.
'Maybe I haven't emphasised the blue quite enough, you know,' said Keanu, looking back at the laptop.
Barney glanced at him, Keanu with his unruly blonde hair over his face as he bent down over that morning's blog.
'You're probably right,' said Barney, not one to curtail creativity. 'Perhaps you could compare it to other well-known blues. The sea around Pacific atolls, the blue in blue cheese.'
Keanu nodded, the spark of inspiration having been struck.
'Cool,' he said, and immediately his fingers began to whiz over the keyboard. Barney smiled, then rose, deciding that he'd kill the time he had between now and the arrival of his bacon sandwich by standing at the door and enjoying the cold of a beautiful November morning. Under a particularly blue sky.
The door burst open, no warning, and they were confronted by Rusty Brown, one of the old fellas of the island, looking flushed around the chops, his hair still well cropped from his cut three days previously. The man wasn't here for a haircut.
'You hear the news?' he asked breathlessly.
Barney and Keanu looked at each other.
'Hold the front page,' said Barney.
'Something's actually happened in this dead end town?' said Keanu. 'Awesome.'
'They've found the Bitter Wind adrift in Kilchattan Bay,' said Brown, the words shooting out like they'd been fired from a whale gun.
'Crew?' asked Barney.
There were three of a crew, all of whom lived in Millport. Barney had cut the hair of Ally Deuchar the previous week. Colin Waites was another regular. Only Craig Brown had never been into the shop, and that was because he remained irresolutely shaggy, rather than the fact that he took his business elsewhere.
'They found Ally's body on the boat. Dead. The rumour is his head had been cut clean off, he'd been disembowelled, and the head was sitting in his stomach, his penis stuffed in the mouth.'
Keanu was open mouthed. Barney raised the universal eyebrow of scepticism.
'You made some of that up yourself, didn't you?'
Brown finally came down from the frenetic high of being self-appointed, door-to-door town crier, and looked a bit sheepish.
'The story may have grown in the telling,' he muttered, unused to anyone questioning the tale.
'Tell us what you've been told,' said Barney. 'No frills. These are people we know.'
The seventy-eight year-old Brown, the look of the scolded child about him, held his flat cap in his hands. Somehow alerted to the stramash out front, Igor appeared at the back door.
'Three guys out sailing this morning came across the boat. Everything looked normal, no sign of fuss, no sign of anything having gone amiss. But she was drifting. They called out, one of the fellas went aboard, found Ally dead. And to be fair to the lad me, I don't actually know yet if they've even worked out how it happened. Could have been bird flu.'
'Wow, that's way less exciting,' said Keanu.
'What about the other two?' asked Barney quickly.
'No sign,' said Brown. 'It was like the Mary Celeste.'
He said the last two words very slowly and let them hang in the air. A silence came upon the shop, and the four men looked at each other.
'Arf,' said Igor.
'There were no dead bodies on the Mary Celeste,' said Barney.
'I thought it was the Marie Celeste,' said Keanu.
'Mary,' said Barney. 'Conan Doyle wrote a story about it twenty years after it happened, he called it the Marie
Celeste in his story, and it stuck. But it was really Mary.'
'Cool,' said Keanu. 'The power of fiction.'
'Are they bringing the boat back here or taking it into a harbour on Bute?' asked Barney.
'Here I believe,' said Brown. 'Right, I'd better get going, there are others who'll be wanting to know.'
'Keep it straight,' said Barney.
Brown hesitated at the door, gave Barney a salute, pulled on the flat cap and headed out into the fine November morning. The door closed behind him; the shop came upon silence.
Barney stared at Igor and Keanu. The Three Amigos.
'Cool,' said Keanu.
'Arf,' muttered Igor from the back of the shop.
'You know,' said Keanu, 'I'm still not picking up on them. What did he say?'
Barney looked back out at the day, as the first hint of wind out at sea began to break the tranquillity of the flat calm.
'The police will be coming,' said Barney.
Keanu smiled curiously at Igor, nodding his head. There was going to be an actual police investigation on his doorstep. How cool was that? Maybe they'd even want to interview him. He had been the last person to cut the hair of one of the crew members after all.
'And the press,' added Barney, with some melancholy. 'They'll be round here like flies round...' and he let the sentence drift off.
A pause. Stillness. The possibility of murder had once again crept into Barney Thomson's life. He sat back, his heart sinking like an anchor.
It wasn't about him; he wasn't involved; he didn't need to take it personally. Yet, here he was, Miss flippin' Marple, and everywhere he went, someone was guaranteed to get murdered sooner or later.
'...overripe fruit?' said Keanu.
***
The police from Glasgow arrived within the hour. There had been some initial confusion in Strathclyde Police about who would take charge of the investigation, because on the face of it, all they had so far was a missing persons and a not-yet-confirmed-as-suspicious death. There was a minor struggle between the police in Largs and their superiors in Glasgow, and it seemed the only person who didn't want to protect his corner and was more than willing to give up as much authority as he could, was the resident policeman on the island of Cumbrae, Constable Thaddæus Gainsborough.
In the end, the constabulary in Glasgow had won the battle, as had been immediately inevitable. This was partly as the Chief Constable wanted to justify the use of the extra helicopter he'd manage to finagle out of that year's budget, and so had sent four police officers down to the scene of the possible crime by the quickest means possible.
As the Sea King HAS6, bought for a snip from a downsizing Royal Navy, came in to land on the helicopter pad in the middle of a small field just across the road from the Millerston Hotel on the west side of the island, the Bitter Wind was just being towed to the pier at Millport, as its home port, barely quarter of a mile along the shore.
Constable Gainsborough was there to meet them, as the helicopter thunderously landed, disgorged its passengers, and then immediately whizzed off back up into the blue sky of a perfect autumnal day. Almost as if it had other things to do.
Gainsborough stood on the edge of the grass waiting for the noise to die down, before coming forward to introduce himself to the three men and one woman who had come to the island.
The four visitors stood and watched the helicopter, as it turned north and began to head back up the Clyde. For all of them it had been their first helicopter trip. Once it had finally become a dot on the horizon, they turned towards Gainsborough and made their way off the grass.
'Welcome to Millport,' said Gainsborough.
The man at the head of the four looked at the gloriously picturesque scene around them – nuclear power station notwithstanding – and said, 'Aren't you supposed to say that after we've found a pit full of dead bodies or we've been in a shoot-out with fourteen masked bank robbers?'
Gainsborough looked a little nonplussed.
'We don't usually get that kind of thing on Millport, Sir.'
'But you do get abandoned fishing boats with dead bodies on board?'
The man held Gainsborough's gaze to see which way he would crumble. Gainsborough shrugged.
'So it seems,' he said.
The police officer walked past him and looked up and down the road. A few cars parked, no moving traffic. An old guy on a bike heading towards them. The gardens of the large Victorian houses all looking neat, tidied for the winter.
'I'm DCI Frankenstein,' he said. 'Any jibes about the name, I'll have heard them before, and I'll break your legs.'
Gainsborough looked at him and then glanced at the other three, as if looking for someone normal to talk to. The woman smiled at him, deciding it was time to put him out of his misery.
'Hi,' she said. 'I'm Detective Sergeant Proudfoot, this is Watkins and Peters, our SOCOs for this job. They'll give the boat the full going over, and then be gone for the time being. The professor and I will stay around for a while, see what we can dig up.'
Frankenstein turned and looked at his sergeant.
'You know I hate it when you say that,' he said.
'You stop threatening to break peoples' legs,' she said, 'and I'll think about it.'
She turned her back on him and looked along the road towards the town, the sweep of Kames Bay in the distance behind it. A scene which would not have looked too different had she been standing there a hundred years earlier.
'As you can see, we're a happy bunch,' said Frankenstein to Gainsborough in a low voice. 'Where's you car?' he added abruptly.
Gainsborough pointed towards the white Land Rover, sitting outside the police station, quarter of a mile along the road. Frankenstein followed his gaze.
'I walked,' said Gainsborough, unnecessarily.
Proudfoot smiled and started walking along the road towards town, the two SOCOs following.
'God's sake,' muttered Frankenstein as he fell into line behind Gainsborough.
'Nice day for a walk,' said Proudfoot, looking out over the blue sea to the island of Little Cumbrae.
'Nice day to find a dead body in a fishing boat at the arse end of the fucking Clyde,' muttered Frankenstein.
Three Men In A Boat
As with all small towns up and down the coast of Scotland, there had once been a thriving fishing fleet working out of Millport. However, in time it had dwindled and died, until finally the last trawler had gone out of business and the fishermen had moved on. Then, in the previous year, Ally Deuchar, a local man trained in the arts of crisis loans and job centre applications, had managed to acquire for himself a business plan, a grant from Ayrshire Enterprise and a fishing boat, and had started making short trips out of Millport searching for whatever fish he could find off the coast of Ayrshire and Argyll.
It was a small business, but after initially thinking of the whole enterprise as some sort of scam to acquire business grants, he had discovered a love of the sea and a talent for finding fish when others couldn't. Then one episode of watching Rick Stein charge about Britain meeting people who make garlic toffee and honeyed mince had persuaded him that there was a niche market for the iconoclastic fisherman. He had begun to sell himself as some sort of localised Jamie Oliver to the rich business widows in Helensburgh and to the hotels on Loch Fyne and on down the coast. He still worked out of Millport but had begun to think that maybe it was time to move to somewhere that was a bit more of a hub. Had also begun to think of a bigger boat and more crew.
And now Ally Deuchar was dead.
His girlfriend, Seattle Henderson, discovered the news when Rusty Brown burst into Mapes toy shop and bicycle hire, full of renewed enthusiasm for an extravagant tale, and said, 'Have you heard the news?'
Seattle Henderson, preparing the shop for another sleepy November day, looked up from a small display of Top Trumps cards.
'I know,' she said.
Rusty stopped in his tracks, suddenly realising who he was speaking to, and deciding that the
new post-Barney tale that he'd begun telling – of the giant eight-foot lizard which had been discovered on board, dismembered limbs strewn around the cabin, the monster having choked on the head of one of the crew – probably wouldn't be appropriate.
'You know?' he said weakly.
'Yeah,' said Seattle Henderson, 'Britney's pregnant again. I mean, like, what is she doing?'
Rusty Brown wasn't the quickest.
'Britney...?'
'Duh,' said Seattle.
'Not that,' said Rusty Brown. 'The Bitter Wind.'
The enthusiasm had completely gone from his voice. Despite the telling off from Barney, he had carried on expanding the story where he saw fit. But now he was about to tell an innocent young child of a girl that her boyfriend, her true love, was dead.
'The Bitter Wind?' said Seattle. 'The trawler?'
'Aye,' said Rusty Brown.
Cap in hand again, a solemn look on his face, he took a further few strides into the shop, almost knocking over the Lord Of The Rings crossbow, which had been propped against a pillar, un-bought, for five years now.
'She's been found at sea. Deserted.'
Seattle Henderson stopped wiping the dust off the Buzz and Woody models which had gone un-bought for eight years now.
'You mean, like the Marie Celeste?' she asked.
'Mary,' said Rusty Brown.
'Whatever,' she said, looking away from him and returning to the dust.
'Well, the ship wasn't completely deserted. There was one of the crew on board. Dead. I'm not sure which one,' he lied.
Seattle Henderson brushed away at the dust on Woody's brown waistcoat.
'So Ally's missing, maybe dead?' she asked.
'Aye.'
'I mean,' she said, looking up again, 'how many times did I say to him that the whole fishing thing was stupid? How many times? He's such a muppet.'
Rusty took a step or two back.
'I expect he'll turn up,' she continued, turning and placing Woody high up on a shelf. 'If he doesn't, it'll free me up to have a go at Dougie, 'cause he's going to be right pissed off at Britney for getting up the duff.'
'Ah, I thought you meant Britney, you know, the Britney.'
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