The Malice of Waves

by Mark Douglas-Home

Cal didn’t say goodbye, nor did he speak to Hannah when he went outside. She was sitting on the deck, leaning against the stern rails. Her back was turned to her father who was close by, erect, looking in the direction of Priest’s Island. Cal cleared his throat to let Wheeler know he was there. ‘I should be going,’ he said.

  Crossing the sound, they didn’t speak. Before stepping ashore at the harbour, Cal apologized to Wheeler for choosing his words badly, for upsetting Hannah. Wheeler looked somewhere over Cal’s left shoulder. ‘You’re being paid to help me find a murderer,’ he said, ‘not to involve yourself in my family.’

  After Cal climbed on to the harbour wall, Wheeler shouted after him, ‘Make sure you stay out of the way tomorrow.’

  6

  Linda Pryke sat by the kitchen window, staring into the darkness of her back garden. Her eyes were wide and startled as if they recognized menace in the night’s swirling folds.

  The grating voice of Inspector Boyd Gillison echoed suddenly inside her head, the memory painfully vivid of the first time the police had come for Stanley, eight years ago.

  ‘What do you think your husband does when he’s away at the weekend?’ Gillison had demanded.

  ‘When Stanley’s away he works.’ She had appeared puzzled by the question, as though the answer went without saying. The inspector had replied with a cold glower.

  ‘He’s good that way, Stanley …’ Linda tried again, the inspector’s silence making her gabble. ‘Working to fit in with his clients … when their offices are empty … he’ll keep going all weekend if he has to … finish the job by Monday morning.’

  Linda knew she sounded frantic, as if she was trying to persuade herself as well as the inspector of Stanley’s industriousness. At that time, he was running his own painting and decorating business.

  The policeman sneered. ‘Likes to keep his clients happy, does he?’

  Linda nodded.

  Gillison reached for the file which was open in front of his colleague, a woman constable. He began to read – dates and places going back years, confirmed and unconfirmed sightings and records of Stanley being taken in for questioning. At the end of each page Gillison looked at Linda and Linda played with the watch on her left wrist, a gift from Stanley. After five minutes and twenty seconds Gillison stopped reading. That was the time it took Linda to realize she lived with a stranger.

  ‘You’ve been married to him for four months,’ Gillison said. ‘You expect me to believe you know nothing about any of this, zilch?’ Gillison glanced again at the file. ‘Some of these sightings occurred since your wedding.’

  He read those out again, six dates and places and commentary about Stanley. Suspect seen doing this, suspect seen doing that. Afterwards, Gillison said, ‘Doesn’t sound to me that your husband was doing much work, Linda. What about you?’

  His sneering expression was all the more distressing because the policeman reminded Linda of her father. Arthur Pryke, like Gillison, had been a big, fleshy man with exaggerated features – wide mouth, splayed nose, broken veins on his red cheeks and dark hair shorn at the back and sides. Linda had imagined similar features forging similar personalities, but instead of being retiring and considerate – her father’s attributes – Gillison was preening and snide.

  Gillison repeated the penultimate date. ‘For God’s sake, Linda, that was only five weeks ago. A goldfish can remember that far back.’

  Linda looked away in case Gillison saw the panic in her eyes. That weekend, Stanley had packed her off to London. He’d bought her theatre tickets for a musical, and booked her into a West End hotel for two nights. A treat, he’d said, for putting up with him working at such anti-social times. She loved musicals. She’d gone with Jenny, her friend who lived in Twickenham. They’d had dinner together and gone shopping.

  Linda said nothing.

  Gillison threw himself back in his chair in exasperation. ‘Why do you think he’s called Pinkie?’

  Linda looked startled. She couldn’t help herself.

  ‘I don’t believe this.’ Gillison tossed his pen on the desk. ‘Are you trying to tell me you don’t know he’s called Pinkie?’

  ‘He’s called Stanley,’ she’d said. ‘Stanley. His name is Stanley. Stanley. It’s Stanley …’ She repeated herself to stop the doubts filling her head, to cling on to the only remaining certainty about her husband.

  Stanley had a ring to it. Like Arthur. She liked old-fashioned names.

  The inspector persevered. ‘Why do you think he’s called Pinkie?’

  ‘I’ve told you,’ she said, ‘his name’s Stanley.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  Linda began to cry. ‘I don’t know what you expect me to say,’ she mumbled, the tears obstructing her words.

  ‘Well, let’s try something easy,’ Gillison said. ‘Where do you think your husband was last weekend?’

  ‘In Newcastle,’ Linda replied. ‘He was working.’

  Gillison studied her before speaking. ‘All weekend?’

  Linda stared into her lap. ‘Yes, he had a painting job, an accountants’ office.’

  ‘Pinkie was busy all right, but not painting.’

  ‘Why do you call him that name?’ Linda’s eyes flashed up. ‘He’s Stanley, not Pinkie. Stanley …’

  The day before the court case, Stanley had asked Linda if she would walk with him along the river path close to where they lived. He owed Linda an explanation. Walking would help the flow of words. He would feel less self-conscious.

  So that he would have no reason for changing his mind, Linda had let him speak without interruption.

  One by one the gaps in her knowledge of Stanley had been filled in.

  Linda had known about Stanley being an only child, about his mother being called Irene and making her living as a self-employed seamstress. Linda had seen a photograph of Irene – a black-haired woman with a blurred reddish face. She looked kindly enough. Stanley had told Linda she died eight years before their marriage.

  Now she learned about Stanley’s father. He had predeceased Irene by three years. Tom or Tommy Wise had been an itinerant agricultural labourer, moving from farm to farm as work and the seasons dictated. Every two months or so, whenever his travels brought him close to the rented cottage where Irene lived with Stanley, he visited.

  Linda bit her tongue. She longed to say: You told me you didn’t know your father; whether he was alive or dead. You told me a lie. How many more lies are there?

  She was glad she stayed quiet.

  Tommy Wise, according to Stanley, was the product of an Irish mother, poor food and hard manual work. Although he was small, he was strong. His skin was leathery from being outdoors and he smelled of straw, hay or sawdust depending on the contents of the barn where he had slept. As far as Stanley could remember, his father never spent a night with his mother, even though they were married. On his occasional daytime visits, he would dig the garden or chop logs or any other jobs his mother wanted doing. By nightfall Tommy Wise would have gone, having given Stanley’s mother money for her rent and housekeeping. While she counted the notes on the kitchen table, Stanley’s father retreated towards the front door, as if he was frightened of the ceilings and walls enclosing him, as if the outside and freedom were exerting their pull on him. According to Stanley’s mother, everything his father owned was in the pockets of his trousers or jacket or in the old army rucksack he carried.

  Stanley came to learn of an exception to that rule. It was to be the bond between father and son as well as the explanation Linda was seeking.

  When Stanley was nine, Tommy Wise said it was time for him to pass on his knowledge. Stanley imagined being taught about snaring rabbits or mending a stone wall. But the knowledge that passed between father and son was contained in a tin box that had been buried in the log shed. Inside was a hardcover notebook whose pages were filled with codes. Each referred to a point on a map and another similar tin box. By the end of that first day, Tommy and Stanley Wise had walked fourteen miles and
visited twenty map references. Stanley had unearthed and reburied the same number of tin boxes. Each had been interred six inches or more below the surface and covered by a large stone, a marker as well as protection from burrowing animals. Each box had been sealed around the lid with waterproof tape and lined with cotton wool. And each contained a clutch of wild birds’ eggs. That evening, after his father had departed, Stanley felt he had gained entry to a new and colourful world, of codes and secrets, of beautiful and often rare objects (his father called the rarest ones ‘my gems’). Only two pages of the codebook had been turned that first day. There were forty-five more still to turn.

  By the time Stanley was twelve years old, page thirty-nine had been reached.

  Father and son were by the coast. The boxes they unearthed and reburied contained the eggs of birds that nested on cliffs or by the shore: gannet, kittiwake, fulmar, razorbill, Arctic tern and eider. A box containing a single guillemot egg decided Stanley on the direction of his own collection. Although the egg’s size and shape were normal, the background was an unexpected shade of pink. The markings, a scattering of blotches, were blood-red instead of being muddy to black. It was, said Stanley’s father, an aberration thought to be genetic that occurred rarely in guillemots and some other species. Although he had only ever come across this one example, he knew that rook, magpie, house sparrow, grey wagtail, blackcap, whitethroat, black-headed gull and greenshank sometimes laid them too. The more his father talked, the more Stanley became entranced. ‘Once a hen bird lays one of these eggs, it’ll always do so, or that’s what the experts think. Every clutch will have pink or reddish colouring.’

  His father gave the rarity a name: erythrism. Then he presented Stanley with the guillemot’s egg and, for his birthday, an identical but empty notebook. Stanley reburied the egg. His father helped him write the code.

  Afterwards, his father sent him a copy of an article which had first been published in the seventh volume of British Birds in 1914. Its title was ‘Erythrism in the Eggs of British Birds’. It listed all the known species which laid pink or red eggs. From then on his father called him Pinkie instead of Stanley.

  Stanley showed Linda his codebook. It was the same one his father had given him all those years ago. Because of the rarity of erythristic clutches and the difficulty in finding them, it wasn’t even half full: forty-three entries on nineteen pages, a different species to each page. Stanley’s collection, like his father’s, was buried. Like that first egg, each clutch had been hidden close to the nest. Stanley told Linda it was precautionary. Not only did it lessen the risk of him being found in possession; it reduced the likelihood of anyone – other collectors or the police – being able to find more than one clutch.

  At the end of his story, Stanley tore up his notebook, page by page, each page being ripped in half and then in quarters, the codes and Stanley’s collection of eggs lost forever – or so Linda had thought. He threw the fragments into a stream, but first he gave her the four quarters of one torn page, for her to remember this moment, for her to be certain of his desire to change. At that moment, against her expectations, Linda had never felt closer to Stanley and found herself making excuses for him.

  It was an addiction, not a crime, she told herself as they carried on walking, now without speaking. What were forty-three clutches of eggs by comparison to burglary or stabbing a pensioner or interfering with a child? Stanley had been brought up to collect eggs. What choice had he? That night Linda lay awake and reminded herself of her lonely life before she met Stanley and of her marriage vow ‘for better, for worse’.

  In court Linda sat stony-faced at the back in an inconspicuous brown wool suit. She had persuaded herself to regard Stanley’s hearing as a brief but necessary process, almost as a cleansing. From such a test, she told herself repeatedly, good would come. Stanley and she would emerge happier, their marriage stronger.

  Linda’s mistake was failing to consider the tactics of the prosecution and believing the assurances of Stanley’s lawyer that his case would go unnoticed by the media.

  By the time Stanley appeared in the dock and had entered his plea of guilty, the press benches were full. The county’s newspapers and local radio stations had been alerted to expect a good and unusual story.

  Rather than limiting himself to the detail of the charges – disturbing the nest of a sedge warbler and being found in possession of egg-collecting paraphernalia: a hand drill and a blow tube for expelling yolk and albumen – the prosecution lawyer painted Stanley as some kind of public enemy number one: ‘a man who is far better known to the police than this, his first appearance in court, might suggest’. He glanced over at the press benches, making sure he wasn’t going too quickly, and it dawned on Linda what was happening. Since a small fine was the only possible sentence for Stanley’s offence, the prosecution appeared intent on imposing a greater punishment in the court of public opinion. Instead of the case going unnoticed, there would be stories in every newspaper, on every local radio bulletin. Stanley would be talked about in the supermarket, the hairdresser’s and doctor’s surgery. So would Stanley’s wife. Linda’s hands began to shake.

  The prosecutor directed a self-satisfied smirk at Stanley.

  ‘Mr Wise,’ he continued, ‘is well known in egg-collecting circles; in fact you could describe him as notorious, probably the most famous collector in this country. For example, it’s common knowledge among experts on this subject that the first egg in his collection belonged to a guillemot. An egg like this one …’ he held up a photograph of a rosy-pink egg with wine-red blotches, ‘started Mr Wise on his illegal career. The colouring is untypical, a genetic oddity that occurs infrequently in a limited number of species. From that beginning, if the stories are to be believed, his collection of this rare type of pink egg has become the widest ever assembled, with clutches from at least nineteen species. Its existence is not in question. What is less certain is where the collection is hidden. Unfortunately, only Mr Wise knows that. Today, at least, we have the pleasure of seeing him in court after he was caught disturbing a sedge warbler’s nest, a species known to produce these so-called erythristic eggs. The charges, which he has admitted, are in the name of Stanley Wise, but to most people who inhabit this world – other collectors, police wildlife officers and investigators for wildlife charities – he’s known as Pinkie.’

  Linda found herself shouting, ‘Stanley, his name is Stanley.’

  That night, the last of the reporters gone from their door, Linda announced they would be leaving home in the morning. They would go to a town where nobody knew them. They would make a fresh start. Linda would buy a house and Stanley would set up a new business. Linda would support him. They would change their name. They would become Mr and Mrs Stanley Pryke. Even at that first mention Linda liked how it sounded: decent, upstanding, her dead father providing for her as he had always done, with his money and his good name.

  ‘Promise me,’ she’d said to Stanley, ‘this’ll never happen again.’

  Now it was happening again.

  Linda drew the curtains across the kitchen window and shut out the night. She made herself another cup of tea and, while she waited, she did a google search for ‘egg collectors’. Her anonymous caller was correct about people like Stanley being treated more harshly now – a second offence was dealt with by a custodial sentence. Thanks to wildlife crime officers trying to justify their existence, the media always seemed to be tipped off and waiting. What was more, Linda read with alarm, for some odd reason jailed egg collectors were regarded as low-life by other prisoners. They were often attacked.

  At ten minutes to eight, ten minutes early, her phone rang. She picked it up.

  ‘Thought I might be Pinkie, did you?’

  Linda said nothing.

  ‘Haven’t heard from him, have you?’

  The man waited for Linda’s reply.

  ‘If you mean, do I know where he is, the answer is I do. He’s in Carlisle.’

  ‘Didn’t take h
is mobile, did he?’ the man said. ‘Never one to leave a trail is Pinkie. Anyway, I have a photograph that says he’s somewhere else.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The Outer Hebrides, on a ferry.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s been to the Outer Hebrides at some time or other.’

  ‘The photograph was taken early this morning. Give me your email address. I’ll ring back in five minutes.’

  The photograph was of Stanley on the deck of a large boat. Linda recognized the livery of Caledonian MacBrayne, the Hebridean ferry company. She saw that Stanley was wearing the trousers she had bought for him two days before.

  The man’s email address was ‘jailforpinkie@hotmail.co.uk’.

  ‘What do you want?’ Linda said when the man rang back.

  ‘Five thousand pounds or I’ll tell the police, five thousand to keep Pinkie a free man.’

  Linda said nothing. It wasn’t that she was rattled. Just like the last time, her shame and anger at Stanley’s betrayal was giving way to deliberation. But unlike the last time, she was thinking of her own escape, not Stanley’s. She was not trying to rescue the marriage.

  Five thousand pounds for Stanley’s freedom, five thousand pounds for her father’s good name and for Linda to buy time for herself, to work out what she would do, without the humiliation of the police knocking at her door and searching through the house: not so expensive after all.

  ‘Get the money together and I’ll tell you where and when,’ he said and rang off.

  Linda rang Stanley’s mobile and left messages. Then she tried again when she was upstairs in her bedroom. She heard a noise in Stanley’s room next door, a soft thud. When she went to investigate she found his phone on the floor. With all of Linda’s calls it had vibrated across Stanley’s desk and tipped over the edge. The ringtone, she realized, must have been turned off.

  Later that night, Linda again addressed the question that had intermittently prodded at her since her wedding: why a thirty-seven-year-old man had married a woman seven years his senior; why Stanley had chosen Linda when he could have found a woman still likely to bear him children. She’d long ago ruled out love, given Stanley’s reluctance even early in their marriage for intimacy, but what did that leave?