Naming the Bones (40 page)

It was an unfortunate image, and they both fell silent for a moment. Then Christie said, ‘I don’t know if he’d ever talked about it before, but it excited him, discussing his obsession with someone who understood. I can picture his death as clearly as if I’d been there. He saw the empty stretch of road, the tree, and put his foot down, giving fate one last chance to let him make the corner or crash.’ She snorted. ‘It was one chance too many.’

Murray closed his eyes. He felt the urge to press the accelerator to the floor, to test whether she could maintain her glibness as he raced the car onwards into their deaths. But he opened them again, kept his speed level and turned the Cherokee out onto the open track at the edge of the moor.

He could see the windows of Christie’s lonely cottage burning brightly in the dark. He supposed it would look beautiful in the summertime, the small white house shining from a midst of green, but tonight it looked like a Halloween lantern, its windows blazing, door glowing like the mouth of Hell. He dropped their speed.

‘Christie, did you leave the front door open?’

He heard her rustling upright in the back seat.

‘No.’

There was a halo around the building. It rippled gently. Murray glanced at Christie in the mirror again and saw her head silhouetted against the back window, a tuft of hair spiked at a crazy angle.

‘Fergus.’ Her voice was full of wonder. ‘I always knew he’d be the death of me.’

Murray drove on, expecting to hear the sound of sirens, but nothing disturbed the night except the gentle rumble of the Cherokee’s engine. He could see the flames now. They had burst beyond the windows and were licking the outside walls of the house. Soon they would begin to consume the roof. They were less than half a mile from the cottage when Christie commanded him to stop.

Murray eased the car to a halt, got out and helped her from the back seat. The interior of the house had seemed full of natural materials – wood, paper and brightly woven rugs – but the fire smelt toxic, as if the whole place had been formed from plastic. Murray started to cough, his eyes teared, but still he stood there, Christie leaning on his arm, both of them watching the flames’ progress.

Eventually she said, ‘I should have put the photographs and my memoir in the boot of the car.’

He nodded, knowing the answer to his question, but asking it anyway.

‘They’re all in there?’

‘Yes, all your pretty chickens lost at one fell swoop. Fergus always wanted to know if I’d written any of it down. I told him no, but I guess he didn’t want to take the chance.’

Her smile was strangely peaceful, as if none of it mattered any more. She turned and lumbered awkwardly towards the car’s back seat. Murray moved and helped her in. The mud was beginning to dry on his clothes, stiffening the fabric. He wanted nothing more now than to be gone. He asked, ‘What will you do?’

‘What I was always going to do.’

It was too much in one night. He looked back towards the burning cottage, expecting to see car headlights racing towards it, half-hoping for the whole sorry mess to be taken from him. But the only brightness came from the flames. They were alone on the dark expanse of moor.

‘Why hasn’t anyone come?’

‘Perhaps they hope I’m inside.’

‘Are you really hated that much?’

‘Who knows?’ She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. ‘People sleep deeply in the countryside, and I suppose the house isn’t overlooked. They would probably come if they knew.’

‘You don’t have to do this.’

‘I want to.’

‘It would be better to wait.’

‘For what?’ She nodded towards the distant house and placed her hand on her daughter’s coffin. ‘I’ve lost everything and gained everything. Life seldom achieves such perfect balance.’

‘I won’t help you.’

‘You don’t need to. I brought what I needed with me, just in case.’

Murray took a deep breath and walked a few yards into the darkness, wondering if this had always been what she’d intended. He rested his hands on his knees and bent over, fearing that he was going to be sick again. When he returned, she was propped up against the car window with her legs stretched out along the back seat. She’d pulled the blanket up to her neck, and Murray could see that beneath it she was clutching something to her. He was reminded of a woman preserving her privacy with her child’s shawl while she breastfed in public.

She gave him a smile that beckoned visions of the girl she’d been, and said, ‘I’m sorry. The poems weren’t inside Miranda’s coffin.’

‘Were they ever?’

‘I suppose not. It was Fergus who suggested placing them beside her. I thought it was an overly sentimental gesture, but he ran back to the cottage to get them. I guess he didn’t follow through.’

Her voice was empty of rancour.

Murray said, ‘What really happened?’

She ignored his question.

‘There should be a bottle of water in the boot. Will you fetch it for me, please?’

He got it and handed it to her.

‘Tell me Fergus made everything up.’

‘I already did.’

‘Convince me.’

Christie’s voice was devoid of emotion.

‘Fergus lied. Miranda died of neglect. It’s a measure of your own madness that you could even contemplate the possibility I’d make a sacrifice of my own child.’

Murray looked into the dark and then back at the old woman, searching for the truth in her face. Her eyes held the reflection of the burning cottage. Murray said, ‘I’m going to go now.’

Christie nodded.

‘It’s all right. I’m not alone.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you think I’ll meet them again?’

‘Who?’

‘All of them. Archie and Bobby.’ She hesitated and added, ‘Fergus.’

‘I don’t know. Would you like to?’

‘If we could be young again. We had a lot of fun in the early days.’ Christie smiled. ‘A lot of good times.’ She looked at him. ‘Maybe you could meet them too.’

‘No.’

‘I’ve read all your articles, Dr Watson, everything you ever published. Archie’s in every word, even when you’re writing of something else, just as he’s in your thoughts, even when he’s absent. And now you’ve lost him too.’

‘Not completely. There are papers in the library.’

‘Who do you think gifted them to the archives? I only gave away worthless doodlings. Enough to tantalise, but too little to tell.’ Her voice was soft and comforting. ‘Anything of worth went up in flames tonight.’ She lifted a hand from beneath the blanket and stroked his mud-smeared fingers. ‘Who would miss you? Your wife?’

‘No.’

‘Family?’

He looked away.

‘I thought not.’ Christie’s voice held the promise of peace. ‘I can always tell.’

She took something from her pocket and put it to her lips. Murray made no move to stop her. Christie started to choke. He held the water bottle to her lips. She drank, then raised a vial to her mouth and drank again. The coughing overtook her. He tried clumsily to ease it with more water, but most of it escaped her mouth and ran down her front. Her coughs faded to faint gasps. Murray held her head and pressed the water against her mouth, but Christie had grown limp. He let her sink back against the seat and saw her face flush in the glow of the premature dawn. He stood there for a while gazing at her body, knowing that if he lifted the blanket he might get closer to the truth of the child’s death, but unable to bring himself to.

He wasn’t sure how long he’d been frozen there when he was roused by the sound of a rook cawing. He turned and saw it treading the edge of the path like an old-world minister on his way to kirk. The crow met his stare and set its beak at a quizzical angle. The bird looked scholarly and demonic, and Murray couldn’t chase away the thought that it was Fergus, transformed and returned for his revenge. He rushed at it.

‘Go on, away with you.’

The bird flapped its wings and fluttered a yard or two before landing beyond his reach and continuing its perambulations, still fixing him with its dark stare.

Murray slammed the car door, guarding the bodies from the rook’s iron beak. He took off his scarf and wiped the handles and steering wheel clean of fingerprints, not sure why he was bothering, except he supposed he didn’t want his memory associated with any of it. Then he started to walk across the fields towards Pete’s bothy, the rook’s caws grating on in his head long after he was out of earshot.

Chapter Thirty-Three

THE WATER BOTTLE
was still in his hand when he reached the bothy. Murray looked at it as if unsure how it had got there, and then launched it into a corner. The room was freezing and he fired the Calor heater into life. The flames blazed blue, and then took on an orange glow that made him think again of Christie’s cottage. He wondered how long it would burn.

Murray pulled off his jacket and saw the package James had sent him still miraculously jutting from his pocket. He took it out and laid it on the table. One end was scuffed and edged with mud, but otherwise it had weathered the dreadful adventure better than he had. It seemed that paper was more durable than flesh and blood. James had been trying to tell him something, but it didn’t matter now. He had got as close to Archie as it was possible to get. All the rest was nothing.

Murray stripped off his clothes and washed outside at the water butt, not bothering about whether he soiled his drinking water. He dried himself in front of the heater, still shivering, then slid his belt from its loops, shoved his filthy clothes in a carrier bag and sealed it. They would tell their own story.

He guessed that Pete would come round at some point to discuss the island’s finds. Murray would add to its dis­coveries. It couldn’t be helped. He wondered about writing an account of what had happened, but found he didn’t think that he could write; he, who had lived half his life with a pen in his hand.

Murray took the whisky from the shelf where Fergus had placed it and drank a good long swallow straight from the bottle. He started to cough as hard as Christie in her last throes and it was a battle not to splutter the precious spirit across the floor.

Archie had slammed out of the cottage, or maybe he had been slammed from it. Either way the door had crashed in its frame, expelling him from the disaster that lay inside.

Murray remembered the red corduroy notebook he had held in his hands in the National Library all those weeks ago, the list of names:

Tamsker
Saffron
Ray – will you be my sunshine?

What visions had sprung in Archie’s mind from Christie’s swelling belly? What hopes had he harboured? The poet had been right to let their loss propel him into the waves. Archie had purified himself, accepted his share of blame and escaped the future, the pain, the whole fucking uselessness of living on.

Murray sat naked in front of the fire, his elbows resting on the table, and took another deep draught. He looked up at the hook he had noticed when Pete first showed him the cottage. He supposed it had been used for drying herbs or curing meat.

What had Archie thought of as he walked down to the shore, his hair flying around his face? Had he known death was waiting for him, or had he simply given himself over to the fates in the same way Alan Garrett had? Murray raised the bottle to his mouth again and imagined Archie on the little jetty, freeing the small boat of its moorings then jumping aboard. If his fate had been a throw of the dice between Death and Life-In-Death, surely better that Death should win.

Murray gave the bottle another tilt and slid James’s envelope towards him. Fergus’s face gazed out in black and white from the book’s back cover. He’d been handsome when he was younger, a blond shock of fringe falling across his eyes, every inch the poet. Murray had an idea what lay between the covers, but he let the book fall open and began to read where fate had chosen.

A moored boat tied tight
Has more play than you
Wood and water
Earth and rope

He worked his way through the rest of the bottle, reading the poems as he went. Each swallow and every word seemed to make him more sober. There were computer programs that could decode vocabulary and syntax to show the truth of his conviction. Perhaps someone would pursue it. Rab Purvis maybe. He took a pen and wrote on the title page: These poems were written by Archie Lunan.

That would be the extent of his biography.

He drank the final dregs in the bottle and sent it across the room. It landed unbroken and rolled until it rested softly against the wall.

If there had been an open fire in the cottage, Murray would have taken his notes and consigned them to the flames. He could have spent an hour ripping them apart instead, then scattered them to the wind, but it would simply be another delay, an empty gesture in a night of weighty deeds.

Instead Murray took his belt from the floor, where he had dropped it. He used the chair as a step and climbed up onto the table, hoping it would take his weight. The belt had been his father’s. It was a good one, made from Spanish leather. Originally it had boasted a buckle in the shape of a Native American chief in full headdress. Jack had replaced it with a plain silvered one and given it to Murray. He’d given him the old buckle too, wrapped in an envelope he’d marked
Cowboy Chic
. It was an old joke from when they were teenagers. A long time ago.

Murray slid the belt’s tongue through its buckle, not bothering to fasten it. He’d never got round to getting it shortened to fit his waist and he reckoned it would be long enough.

It was better to decide your exit for yourself. You could be a long-legged, wisecracking urban cowboy, good for a laugh or a wise word, and then, quicker than you could credit, an old man unable to recognise the people you held most dear.

The people you had held most dear.

Murray wiped his eyes. He tied the belt around the hook, gripped the collar he’d made and swung on it for a moment. The knot above tightened, the buckle crushed against his hand, a painful flaw in his design.