The Malice of Waves

by Mark Douglas-Home

  Such township opinions, Cal discovered, were reported more briefly and grudgingly as time went on. The media fell in line behind the theory posited by the police and David Wheeler that the boy’s disappearance and probable death were caused by criminality, not some unforeseen accident; a cold-blooded murder motivated by envy or unjustified grievance about land rights or a combination of the two and stoked by alcohol. Every cutting carried a photograph of Wheeler’s thirty-foot boat, the Jacqueline, and of Max with his blond hair. The stories, captions and headlines described him as ‘tragic golden boy’, a catch-all reference to his colouring, looks and the death of Jackie, his mother, in a car accident when he was eleven. The Jacqueline was named after her.

  By the time the kayakers arrived for late breakfast in the Deep Blue three months after Max’s disappearance, the media had judged the inhabitants complicit in murder. Reading the stories, Cal understood why the township had turned in on itself – behaviour which was portrayed as a conspiracy of concealment. If he had lived there, Cal would have become hostile too. Every one of the twenty-seven houses scattered around the southern tip of Eilean Dubh had been searched. So had garages, cars and boats, some more than twice and, on occasion, in the middle of the night or at dawn, as though the police had been tipped off about the boy’s body being moved or some other incriminating evidence being hidden. Dogs and mountain rescue teams had hunted hill, bog and coast. Divers had searched the many islets and skerries in the sound. Local men, including Donald Grant, the last tenant to graze his sheep on Priest’s Island, and his teenage nephew Ewan Chisholm, had been taken in for questioning. B&B bookings had been cancelled. Eilean Dubh was consistently referred to in media reports by its English translation, Black Island, as though the historic name foreshadowed the later dark deed of its inhabitants.

  The boy’s disappearance blighted the township and continued to do so five years later. This was largely thanks to David Wheeler marking each anniversary with a memorial service on Priest’s Island and commissioning a series of experts to review the evidence and to pursue fresh lines of inquiry since the police investigation had fallen dormant from lack of leads. According to the newspapers, this was Wheeler’s way of letting the township know he would never give up and that his resolve to find his son’s killer or killers was greater than theirs to keep him, her or them hidden. At first the experts excited renewed bursts of publicity but in the last two years they were limited to brief mentions of the person’s identity.

  There had been a retired chief constable from England; a US private detective referred to as T. C. Clancy; a forensic archaeologist who dug holes everywhere and was found in one of them, according to a mischievous diary piece, drunk and singing late at night. Then there was a botanist who studied both of the islands for unexpected plant growth or patches of fertility, and, last year, a former French intelligence officer whose speciality was taking and analysing high resolution aerial photography. His helicopter had clattered over the islands for days.

  The last cutting Cal read was the most recent and longer than some. It was half a dozen paragraphs and tucked away on page eight of the Herald. It said that this year the inquiry would be conducted by Dr Caladh McGill, a thirty-year-old oceanographer with ‘expertise in tracking objects at sea’. There was the usual complaint from the township about unwarranted persecution as well as linked speculation about Wheeler’s worsening financial situation and whether this would be the last investigation. The family’s home in Southampton was being sold to keep creditors at bay; his boat hire business in Southampton had gone into receivership with little prospect of resuscitation given the economic climate. According to an anonymous employee, the inattention of David Wheeler – ‘his blind obsession with his son Max’ – was to blame for the company’s downfall. The remark exuded bitterness, implying Wheeler’s duty was to the living and their families, not to the disappeared or dead.

  Cal woke to the sun shining weakly through the opaque fug of the Toyota’s windows. He yawned, stretched and upset the file of papers on his chest which set off an avalanche. A map, his laptop and torch slid on to the pickup’s floor, joining discarded food wrappers and his wet boots. Cal swore and opened the door, his unintended and uncomfortable pillow during the four hours he had been sleeping on the pickup’s back seat. His head fell into the gap. Outside, the air was fresh and still; the sky a hazy blue. Staring upwards, Cal wondered what time it was: ten, maybe eleven. Remembering the empty flask of coffee, he groaned and pulled himself up. His left hand gripped the headrest of the front seat while the right found his binoculars. Reversing out through the open doorway, he stretched one leg then the other. He squinted again at the sun. More like eleven, he thought, as he climbed on to the Toyota’s back to get some height before scanning the sound. Although it was calm, Cal noticed flares of white water and swirls of turbulence which told of submerged rocks or reefs as well as of a restless energy, as if the sea could barely restrain itself from causing havoc, even on such a gentle spring day.

  Cal spotted the orange buoy which was attached to Millie east and north of where he had left her during the night. She was still within the sound, between two skerries, and now probably sheltered from the ebb tide that was more than three hours old. Moving his binoculars along the coast of Priest’s Island his attention was taken by a boat moored in the bay. It must have arrived that morning since nothing had been there the night before. The craft had a single mast and a covered wheelhouse. Even at that distance, the disrepair was evident. Cal saw dents and scrapes on its hull as well as paintwork damage, including the name. The tail of the ‘q’ and the final ‘e’ had all but disappeared from ‘Jacqueline’. While he watched, a figure appeared at the entrance to the wheelhouse: a man. There was something about the way he held himself, a tension, which revealed his emotional torment. Like the sound itself, with its flares and eddies, he seemed scarcely able to maintain control. He stood for four maybe five minutes while Cal watched. Suddenly, he put his head back and his mouth opened into a gash extending across his face. Cal was too far away for any noise to carry but, a moment later, he heard a gull’s call, a poignant sound; as if the bird was copying the anguished cry of a father making his annual return to the scene of his son’s death. It was Cal’s introduction to David Wheeler.

  2

  One by one Linda Pryke removed the labels from the back garden. Each was made of wood, painted white and printed in black with one of Stanley’s codes, four letters followed by a forward slash and four numbers. Taxonomy, Stanley called it, whenever anyone remarked on how organized the borders looked. Typical of Stanley, she used to think. Finding a complicated word to pretend important work was being done when it was nothing of the kind. Taxonomy. She had never said the word out loud in case it encouraged him. Nor had she asked what the different letters and numbers of his various codes signified if for no other reason than she doubted Stanley would tell her. All she knew for certain was that somewhere in his room at the top of the house among his other card indexes would be one where her plants were recorded in meticulous detail. Stanley’s passion was order and neatness – putting things in their proper place, as he would say. Stanley’s order, as she referred to it with an upward roll of her eyes. Whether it was one of his collections, the books in the sitting room, the jams and chutney she made or the shrubs and roses in the garden, her garden, he labelled and recorded everything. The process was what provided his enjoyment, and the knowledge that only he could look at one of his labels and be able to identify the index to which it referred and the relevant data card.

  Still, it was better than the alternative, or so she’d thought. Stanley fussing contentedly about the house, or in the garden, was the price that had to be paid for keeping him out of trouble. She remembered this tearfully while pulling another of his labels from the cold ground and dropping it into a carrier bag. She stretched her complaining back. All the bending was making it ache, a nagging pain to add to the discomfort of a penetrating easterly breeze. Yet she had to
carry on. The garden had to be cleared. Since the telephone call at eight thirty that morning, each label appeared to Linda as a miniature gravestone under which a different part of her was buried.

  Below that one lay the carcass of her marriage; below this, trust; below that, that and that, the now decomposing remains of her reassuringly nondescript life of suburban gentility, of being ordinary and unremarkable, like her neighbours.

  She put her hands on her hips, arched her back and watched the clouds drift across the sky. How she hated March, with its nipping winds and threats. To everyone else, the month meant birdsong and longer days. But for Linda, they were harbingers of a season of uncertainty, of worrying about a knock at the door and the humiliation that might follow, of being anxious day and night. Almost from the start of her marriage, Linda had thought of spring as a snapping dog. Now she felt the creature’s sharp little teeth, ripping away at the respectability she’d come to regard as her singular achievement, and her comfort. The adjustments she’d been forced to make after Stanley’s transgression in that first year of their marriage! Hadn’t she moved towns for him, set him up in business and given him her good name? Stanley’s response had been as she’d hoped: over the next eight years he’d worked hard and done well for himself. Not that she would ever have said so to him, but the name Stanley Pryke had a certain ring to it. Honest. Solid. Trustworthy. Pryke: her father’s name.

  Better than the name she’d married.

  From the beginning people reacted to Mrs Stanley Wise as if they knew something Linda didn’t, as if it carried a bad smell, as if she carried a bad smell. Only when the police came knocking at their door that first spring did she discover what the smell was, what Stanley had been doing. Even in that short time she’d taken to being a wife. A round peg, it turned out, for a round hole. She couldn’t imagine her life as anything else, not then. She’d done what wives have to do, but even now the memory of policemen searching her house could bring tears to her eyes and make her unsteady on her feet.

  The humiliation she had suffered as they opened every cupboard and drawer and picked through her underwear! The indignity of being taken to the police station and questioned! Stanley’s conviction and fine, the stories in the newspapers, the gossip among the neighbours and wherever she went in the high street!

  She had coped, somehow. In hindsight, her dread at being alone again, aged forty-four, saved the marriage. Stanley’s remorse had also helped, his confession bringing them closer for a while. He’d told her about his childhood, how he’d lived for those few unpredictable days when Tommy Wise, his father, would visit, when knowledge would be passed from one generation to another. They’d go on biannual expeditions, scouting in autumn, collecting in spring. The thrill never left Stanley, an addiction, he’d said. He’d been shaking too, just like an addict would, when he promised to change his ways. Never again, he’d said. Never again would he put everything at risk. Unexpectedly, she’d felt pity for him and, in time, an afterglow of satisfaction at having rescued him by setting him up in his own property management company and by buying a nice house for them both in a town a hundred miles away, where the name Stanley Wise was unknown, where Stanley Pryke could start again, where Mrs Stanley Pryke could go shopping without worrying about what people were saying behind her back, without anyone really knowing who she was apart from her name.

  Until that terrible time, she’d felt beholden to him for making her, a plain woman nearing the end of her child-bearing years, his wife. Afterwards, she took the view that if anyone had an obligation to the other it was Stanley. She stopped worrying about being older than him, her thinness or her flat bosom or her old-fashioned hair. Over time, she thought the two of them had found a happy enough equilibrium. Stanley had his interests and Linda, increasingly, hers. Being Mrs Stanley Pryke in a new town gave her the confidence to spread her wings. She attended charity events, played bridge or bowls with her women friends and often thought herself fortunate when she heard them complain about their demanding, unreasonable or unfaithful husbands. There had been none of that unpleasantness with Stanley. The worst she could have said of him (though, of course, she didn’t to her friends) was that he was an absence rather than a presence. When he wasn’t at work, he spent his time indexing, classifying and recording. Mostly he was shut away in his room upstairs. She’d tolerated it, or so she’d told herself, because it kept him from his old trouble.

  Had he been deceiving her all this time? she wondered. Her hands shook as she plucked a label from beneath a viburnum plant. The thought of police coming again to the door was more than she could endure, or the horror of being taken in for questioning – the shame it would bring on her father’s good name, on her good name; the gossip it would generate, the pitying looks, the exposure; that nightmare again.

  ‘Where do you think he is, Linda?’ the man had said when she picked up the phone by her bed.

  ‘Where who is?’ she replied, still half asleep.

  ‘Why, Pinkie, of course.’

  The sound of that vile name, after all this time. Now she was awake.

  ‘Pinkie who?’ she managed to say.

  ‘Pinkie Wise, or perhaps I should say, Pinkie Pryke.’

  Her family name, the name that had sounded so respectable to Linda’s ears, now had the ring of a common criminal.

  ‘Stanley Pryke,’ she said, ‘his name is Stanley Pryke.’

  ‘Whatever you want, Linda,’ he said.

  ‘Who are you?’ she demanded. ‘Why are you ringing me?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who I am. It’s Pinkie we’re discussing. Oh, my apologies, Linda, I forgot. His name’s Stanley … Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Linda said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘He’s in Carlisle.’

  ‘Not even close,’ he said. ‘Not even the right country.’

  ‘He is,’ Linda insisted. ‘He is.’

  The man laughed. ‘When last seen, Linda, he was on a ferry from the Scottish mainland. He was going to the Outer Hebrides, Linda. Do you know where they are? Not much property for Pinkie to manage out there.’

  ‘What do you want?’ Linda cried.

  ‘Enough to stop me letting the police know about Pinkie being up to his old tricks again, something to stop your dearly beloved going to jail.’

  Linda was too shocked to speak.

  ‘Didn’t you know that, Linda? The law’s tougher now. For a second offence, he’ll be put away in prison, no doubt about that, a man like Pinkie, with his reputation. A fine, too, I’d imagine, a big one.’

  3

  In 1898, the men of the township at the southern end of Eilean Dubh built a bothy. They chose a level site beside the new harbour and used the leftover stone to build the walls. The roof was covered with turf and tied down with ropes against Atlantic storms. In summer, after fishing the night tides for passing salmon shoals, the men bunked in its one gloomy room. At other times of the year the bothy was used for storing nets or as a refuge where whisky was drunk away from womenfolk and the minister’s prying eyes.

  A century later, a fisherman’s wife by the name of Frances Mackinnon found another use for those same leftover stones. By then the walls and the roof had collapsed from neglect. She negotiated a loan and began the job of rebuilding and extending the bothy. Electricity, water and sewerage were installed. The roof was covered with corrugated zinc and painted blue. It stretched across a triple-glazed annexe where lattes, mochas, tea and cake were served daily from March to October, Tuesdays to Saturdays for the remainder of the year. An illuminated sign above the door announced ‘The Deep Blue’, though for a while, on account of the money that had been spent, the township’s name for it was ‘The Deep Red’.

  Cal McGill arrived at the tea room with time to spare. After checking the harbour for David Wheeler, he parked and went inside. There were a dozen empty tables with blue-and-yellow gingham cloths and floor-to-ceiling windows which filled half the front wall and the
entire west gable. A waitress was watching him from behind the counter. She was short with pinned-back black hair and startling white skin. An exercise pad was open in front of her. The top page, Cal saw as he approached, was covered with markings – lines, crosses and calculations. She turned the pad over. ‘Can I get you something?’

  ‘Coffee,’ Cal replied, noticing the bib of her blue apron and the name that was written across it in yellow: Catriona.

  ‘Americano,’ he added. ‘If you do such a thing …’

  ‘Uh-huh, we do.’ Her eyes flicked quickly to his face. ‘Mug or cup?’

  ‘Mug.’

  ‘Came across on the ferry this morning, did you?’ Catriona asked, busying herself at the coffee machine.

  ‘Yesterday.’

  ‘Almost a native, then.’ She glanced at him again. ‘Here long?’

  ‘A few days … I haven’t decided.’

  ‘I wouldn’t stay longer than two.’