The Malice of Waves

by Mark Douglas-Home

  Cal had seen similar behaviour before. Whenever he found a body and his clients had insisted on joining him in the search, there would be that same instinct to stand apart, the living finding reassurance in the living, as if putting death on watch and keeping it at some remove delayed its next visit. And in the men’s faces, as Cal approached, he saw that same mixture of awe and fear, as though the discovery of a body on a beach, or here on a barren landscape, posed a particular threat that one found in a house did not, as if it was unnatural, disturbing. Instead of going up to the men, he went to where they had been looking, an area of grass and rock among heather. The colours were pale yellows, greens and black, similar to Joss’s clothes, so it took Cal a few moments before he saw her.

  She was lying on her front, away from him, her body shaped by the scoop of ground on which she had fallen. Her neck was stretched, her blonde hair still tied, her arms splayed in front of her, as if she had stumbled and attempted to break her fall. Cal went closer and saw a cut on her shoulder, a rip in her green shirt and bruised flesh showing through the tears in her black jeans – wounds inflicted by the caravan, he thought; all that sharp metal. He imagined the terror with which she must have fled from one assailant – whoever cut the hawser – only to encounter another, a merciless and cold wind. No one, not even the hardiest of islanders, could have survived in so few clothes. He pictured her falling, frightened, weak, soaked through and frozen. She wouldn’t have had the strength or the will to lift herself. Even if she had, she would have fallen again. If not here, ten, twenty, thirty metres further on: there was no escape; not dressed like that, barefoot, in that storm, that night.

  Cal noticed her fingers. They were bent and shaped like claws, just as they had been when she raked his face. He saw how her nails had scored the ground. If that was her last act, it was one of fight, not exhaustion. If she had strength, why hadn’t she got up? He knelt beside her and began talking while he looked for other clues. It was what he did when he found bodies on the shore. Usually, he would introduce himself, describe his work, his methods, and say how long and hard had been the search, how missed the person had been, and how pleased the family would be at the prospect of reunion. To Joss, he said, ‘Joss, we’ve been looking for you. Everyone’s been worried.’ Then, leaning across her torso to inspect her other side, he put his hands close to her and felt a sticky wetness that was neither rain nor sodden earth.

  His fingers were stained dark red with blood. Cal looked where his hand had been, and where her shirt had snagged on heather he saw exposed flesh. There was a gash four centimetres long. The rim was red and purple. Cal glanced at the men, who seemed to shrink away because they too had made the same discovery and understood its meaning. One by one, they looked into the heather closer to them and Cal saw the knife. It was wooden-handled with a rusted blade that had been worn away by sharpening and use. At first Cal noticed how clean of blood it was – the rain had washed it. Then, when he went closer, he saw the initials carved on to the handle, DG.

  ‘Who’s DG?’ he shouted.

  None of the men replied. They shrank from him again and Cal thought he knew why.

  ‘Donald Grant,’ Cal said. ‘DG: does that stand for Donald Grant?’ The men stared back blankly. ‘He was Ewan Chisholm’s uncle, wasn’t he?’ Cal asked. ‘Well, wasn’t he? Can’t any of you speak?’

  After despatching two men to the road, to find DCI Beacom, he waited beside Joss. He sat at arm’s length from her, with his back to the wind as well as the four remaining men, and talked to her again. He said he was sorry about ‘that flare-up’ between them outside the Deep Blue. He wished they could have met in different circumstances. He told her about Beacom and the case they had worked on before. ‘A good policeman; saved my life,’ Cal said. ‘If anyone can find out what happened to Max and who attacked you, he will.’ He told her too about Helen Jamieson and her undercover role, how she had won the confidence of Catriona and how the immediate puzzle concerned Ewan Chisholm. ‘The chief suspect in your brother’s disappearance,’ Cal said, ‘and now, the chief suspect in your murder too.’ Not only had he gone missing on the night her caravan turned over but she’d been killed by a knife belonging to his dead uncle. ‘But I’m sure he was on Priest’s Island so I don’t see how it could have been him.’ He stopped speaking as though giving her the opportunity to tell him who had stabbed her.

  A voice behind him said, ‘The dead don’t talk, Cal, more’s the pity.’

  Cal turned to see a slight man with a sharp face and small mouth standing and looking at Joss’s body. He wore a blue baseball cap, a flapping raincoat, a hood and black wellington boots. Cal nodded: acknowledgement as well as agreement. DCI Richard Beacom squinted into the wind, the direction from which Joss had come. ‘Have you ever had one of those nightmares?’ he asked, turning back to Cal. ‘It’s dark and there’s a storm and you’re running, running for your life.’

  Although Beacom said, ‘Don’t go away’, Cal would have stayed anyway. It was too soon to go, to leave Joss. This feeling, if hard to express, wasn’t unfamiliar. Cal experienced it whenever he found a body. Sometimes, he wondered whether his own subconscious didn’t force him to stay, whether a hidden fear of dying alone was the cause. Was this his way of stacking the odds in his favour of having people around him when it was his turn? But mostly he thought the body itself exerted the pull. It wouldn’t let him go. It wanted him there and took the decision away from him, not just whether to stay but when to go. That was his common experience of bodies that had suffered violent deaths. In Cal’s work, that was them all. The bodies pulled him to them and then, suddenly, they didn’t, like a gravity field being switched off. When the release came it was total. There was no indecision, no lingering doubt. Cal could and did walk away, always. It was as if the body had no more use for him. Then, just as it had been wrong to leave before, it would be wrong to stay. Where each body was different was in the time that Cal was detained, from an hour to as much as a whole night. The body, in that case a child, released him when it was daylight again.

  Though Cal didn’t believe in any god or an afterlife, he had come to think that a person’s spirit might live on for a while after death and if that required him to stay close, while the process of dying was completed, body and soul, he was prepared to assist. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he felt he had a choice. In that respect, he disagreed with Beacom. In a manner of speaking, bodies could talk and Joss Wheeler was asking – no, insisting – that he stayed.

  A uniformed policewoman was at one side of Joss, that closest to the road, Cal at the other, towards the sea. While he waited for his release, he watched the comings and goings of the township’s inhabitants; men who had been searching the night before and that morning. They approached in ones or twos, their heads bowed until they were close enough to see the flap of Joss’s clothing or the dark straw colour of her wet hair against the grasses that had been drained almost white by the Hebridean winter. Then, they shook their heads or mouthed a prayer and departed. None lingered. None ventured close enough for the policewoman to warn them away. They stood apart, each stopping a similar distance from the body. If Joss would not let him go, not yet, neither would she let them close, only near enough to witness the consequence of their community’s hostility towards a young woman and no further.

  Chloe and Hannah Wheeler arrived to a different choreography. Instead of walking from the road, they were brought by Land Rover. Instead of drab greys and greens, the neutral tones of the township men, the Wheeler girls were dressed brightly, a red anorak for Chloe, electric blue for Hannah. The nautical wardrobe, Cal supposed, of two young women in shock and ill prepared for death. In another way, too, they differed from the previous visitors. The township men had walked slowly, respectfully, looked and gone away. Chloe and Hannah approached with faltering resolution. Only when they became used to seeing their sister’s body from one point did they draw closer. To begin with they held hands but, after, they folded into each other, the ordeal
too much for them singly. The closer they approached, the tighter they held on so that when they sank into the grass as close as Beacom would allow, they seemed to be conjoined. From inside her anorak, Hannah removed a framed photograph. Together, using one hand each, they propped it against a stone to face Joss. Cal recognized it from the Jacqueline’s saloon and he wondered again at the Wheeler family’s habit of using photographs as memorials – Max Wheeler’s smiling face in the ruined chapel, now this. Did the photographs lie, were the memories false? Cal questioned again whether this was ever a happy family. While the sisters sobbed and comforted each other, Beacom stood by Cal. ‘Wheeler wouldn’t come.’ Beacom spoke from the side of his mouth so the sisters couldn’t hear. ‘Can you believe that?’

  Cal said, ‘He told me last night he didn’t consider Joss his daughter.’

  Beacom didn’t react and Cal added, ‘Mind you, he was drunk, on whisky. He threw the bottle at me.’

  ‘He’s sober today – no excuses.’

  When Chloe and Hannah got to their feet, Beacom made to leave. ‘I’ll pick you up on the road. We need to talk.’

  ‘You might as well put a notice in the Deep Blue and tell everyone I’m working with you,’ Cal told him.

  ‘Or,’ Beacom said, ‘that we’re just doing our job.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘From what I hear we’ll find your skin under Joss Wheeler’s fingernails. That’s motive. Didn’t you find the caravan overturned? Doesn’t that make you a suspect, someone we have to eliminate from our inquiries? Apparently some people in the township think you’re guilty.’

  Beacom followed Chloe and Hannah. Cal said to the body, ‘Who did this, Joss? Who?’

  He didn’t ask again or stay any longer because there wasn’t that pull. Joss had released him.

  Beacom’s makeshift headquarters was the size of a large garage. Inside was a pile of grit, bags of salt and, against a wall, half a dozen shovels. A sign at the entrance announced that it was a property owned by the ‘Community Roads Department’. Another inside warned of the danger of letting engines idle with the depot door closed. Laid out on the concrete floor were the contents of the searchers’ bin bags: two white plastic cups, a piece of orange fabric, the ripped pages of a book that had become translucent in the rain, a towel, a jersey, a pillow, a box of matches, the torn cover of a magazine, assorted broken fragments of the caravan’s bodywork, a strip of chrome, a sock, a bottle of shampoo, an empty carton of milk, a black bra, a sodden and misshapen box of tissues. ‘The usual detritus,’ Beacom said. He sounded disappointed at the familiar routines of murder even in so remote a place, at the poking and lifting through the victim’s effects. He bent down: ‘Apart from this.’ It was a piece of lined paper, a crease where it had once been folded, and wet through. It was torn on its left side. Cal bent too, to read the faded writing.

  Joss, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again. Ewan.

  There was a phone number underneath.

  Beacom said, ‘That’s the landline for Grant’s Croft, Ewan Chisholm’s place.’

  He stood straight, and Cal did too. ‘Here’s the difficulty,’ Beacom said. ‘There’s a young woman lying dead out there. She’s been stabbed with a knife that bears the initials DG – Donald Grant. Detective Sergeant Jamieson has been told by Catriona Mackinnon that Ewan Chisholm had the hots for Joss Wheeler. “Joss, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” What was Ewan referring to? A row? Had he lost his temper? Maybe she’d turned him down and he’d been violent, slapped her. What if it happened again? What if Joss had told him where to go? Wheeler’s oldest child: imagine the effect on Ewan and that grievance of his about Priest’s Island being stolen from him. What if he thought she was his chance of being able to have sheep on the island again and suddenly it was snatched away? The psychologist that assessed him as part of the investigation into Max’s disappearance found Ewan had a potential for violence and that a moment of stress, particularly if it involved the Wheelers or Priest’s Island, could be a trigger.’

  Cal said, ‘Except …’

  ‘Except,’ Beacom interrupted, ‘there’s that difficulty I mentioned. You say he spent the night on Priest’s Island.’

  ‘I think he did.’

  ‘All of it? You saw him?’

  ‘No, not once it was dark.’

  ‘So you didn’t see him?’

  ‘Not all night. But he was there. He must have been.’

  ‘So, for most of the night you didn’t actually set eyes on him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He could have crossed the sound, killed Joss Wheeler and returned.’

  ‘The sea was too rough,’ Cal said. ‘He’d never have made it in the dark. Not even crossing it once, let alone twice … Anyway, his boat hadn’t moved by the morning. He’d pulled it up the night before. It was still in the same place at daylight.’

  ‘And you’d say so in court?’

  ‘If I had to.’

  Beacom grimaced, a police officer preparing for trouble. ‘Here’s my problem, Cal. The first ferry from the mainland will have police reinforcements but also the media. They’ll rip me apart if the killer hasn’t been arrested by the time they get here. I’ve put in a request for the first ferry to be commandeered by the police and for the media to be held on the mainland and briefed there for a day or two, until I’ve been able to interview everyone in the township and carry out searches.’

  He shook his head.

  ‘No go?’ Cal asked.

  ‘No. After the fiasco over the Max Wheeler case, all the damage to the police reputation, the chief constable is concerned about the perception if we try to keep the media away.’

  ‘They’ll accuse you of a cover-up …’

  ‘Yeah.’ Beacom swore. ‘I’ve got till this evening then this island’s going to become a fucking circus, with media everywhere. The population’s going to double. I’ve got four officers – myself, Willy Clarke, a DI, who’s out searching for Chisholm, and two constables to guard the body and the Wheelers. There’s Helen, but I want her to stay under cover.’ He looked at his watch. ‘That’s six, maybe seven hours, if the forecast’s right and the ferry sails on time. Who gives a damn about transparency and media access when there’s a murderer on the loose and a family being picked off one by one?’

  ‘Did you say that to the chief constable?’

  ‘Don’t get me started on that man.’ Beacom walked across the depot and back, his chin on his chest, deep in thought. ‘So, let’s stay with Ewan Chisholm. Say sometime during the night when you were asleep …’

  ‘I didn’t sleep much.’

  ‘But you did sleep?’

  Cal shrugged. ‘On and off.’

  ‘How close were you to the boat?’

  ‘Once Ewan and his companion had gone inland I moved further away. I didn’t want them coming back in the night and falling over me.’

  ‘Could you have heard if Ewan had taken the boat?’

  ‘In that wind, I don’t know.’

  ‘So, for the sake of argument let’s say Ewan did cross the sound during the night.’ Beacom held up his hand to stop Cal’s objection. ‘He went to Joss Wheeler’s caravan but he found she’d barricaded herself in. She wouldn’t let him in, so, in anger, he cut the hawser. When the caravan turned over, she managed to escape. That’s why she ran in the direction she did, away from Grant’s Croft even though it was the nearest house. She ran towards the Deep Blue because she was running away from Ewan. He killed her and crossed back over to Priest’s Island.’ Beacom threw up his hands and pretended to be Ewan: ‘Who, me? Kill Joss Wheeler? I was on Priest’s Island. And I have a witness.’

  ‘He didn’t know I was going to be there.’

  ‘I mean his companion.’

  ‘Ewan put on a balaclava in the morning when he went to look for the guy. Why would he do that?’

  ‘He was cold.’

  ‘Or they didn’t know each other and wanted to keep it that way. If that’s the case, Ewan doesn’
t have much of an alibi.’

  Beacom screwed up his face. ‘The knife worries me too.’ He thought again. ‘Let’s stay with Ewan being the killer. OK, so Joss pulled away from him with the knife still sticking in her. She ran off and it fell out, or she pulled it out, just before she died. He didn’t run after her because he couldn’t see her in the dark.’ Beacom kicked at the wall. ‘Fuck. Why would he use a knife inscribed with his uncle’s initials? He has a croft. He’ll have other knives.’ He kicked again. ‘So who, if it’s not him?’

  ‘The ex-girlfriend Catriona?’

  Beacom tried it out. ‘She kills her rival and takes revenge on her ex-boyfriend by stabbing Joss with his uncle’s knife and leaving it behind. Well?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  ‘I’d say it was.’ Beacom stared at Cal. ‘But why did she tell Helen about Ewan breaking up with her because he fancied Joss? That doesn’t make sense if Catriona’s the murderer. Why would she let it be known she had a motive?’

  The chief inspector paced back and forth. ‘It’s one or other of them.’ He stopped. ‘This is what we’ll do … When we pick up Ewan we won’t tell him we know he was on Priest’s Island that night. We’ll see if he tells us.’ Still thinking aloud, Beacom said, ‘Yes, that’s it. We’ll pretend we don’t know. We’ll arrest Ewan and hold him as the suspect for murder. We’ll do what the township expects us to do. Meanwhile Helen will stick close to Catriona – and we’ll see what happens next. We’ll have a conspiracy of our own.’

  For a while neither spoke. Then Cal glanced at Beacom. ‘By the way, I don’t want your money.’

  Beacom nodded. ‘Helen mentioned it, did she? I thought she might.’

  ‘For the record, I should have been told at the start.’