The Sea Detective (19 page)

She stood, bending to pick up her walking boots. Her socks were tucked into them. When she came towards him, bare foot, tentatively on the stones, he saw the lapping tide had wet the bottom of her jeans. She looked good, better than the last time, when they’d had coffee at the Television Festival in Edinburgh. Then she’d seemed manicured; today was how he imagined her: in jeans and a white tee shirt, a red over-shirt unbuttoned and flapping in the light breeze; her hair short and pretty, catching the light, not styled just-so as it had been then. Today, she was natural, more herself.

‘Rachel …’ he began. He was going to say, ‘Can we talk later?’

But she shook her head. ‘Don’t.’

There was that brief brittle smile again. It told him she was resigned, not accusing. Would he have been the same?

‘Ok.’

‘No arguments today. Is that a deal?’

Cal held his hand out.

She contemplated it and said, ‘Shake hands with the devil?’

‘It’s not that bad.’ He knew it was. In fact it was worse than she knew. But what else could he say?

‘Isn’t it?’ and she turned away. He withdrew his hand, feeling stupid for offering it.

She preceded him up the path to the road, stopping on it. ‘I’ve found your grandfather’s old house. Number 14. It’s a bit of a ruin, but they all are.’

‘You’ve been out to the island.’

‘Yes, a few times; I’m trying to match families to houses, so that if we bring surviving relatives back to the island we know where to take them.’

He didn’t say anything. The subject made him uncomfortable.

They crossed the road. The other boat passengers were gathered in a semi-circle around the man in yellow, who was handing out life-jackets while making his introductions. His name was Mike Thomson, ‘but I’m Mike from now on’. He was ginger-haired with a broad smile and, Cal noticed, the same wind-whipped red face as Sally the Postbus driver. He’d started his safety spiel when he saw Rachel and Cal approaching and handed them the last two jackets. ‘When you’re ready, climb aboard,’ he said. ‘There’s room for two on the bench up front for those who don’t mind a bit of spray.’ An elderly couple followed Rachel and Cal down the slipway to the Rib. The man was reading aloud to his wife from a guide book. He stopped when he saw Cal watching him. ‘We’ve picked a good day for it. …’

‘Couldn’t be calmer,’ Cal replied.

‘And so lovely and warm,’ his wife added with a sweet smile.

‘Tom and Sandra Parsons, from Wiltshire,’ the man said.

Cal introduced himself and Rachel before Mike interrupted them. ‘There’s room for two more here and two at the back.’ The seats were arranged in pairs: rounded saddles of black with padded back supports on tubular metal frames. Rachel sat behind the wheel seat and Cal behind her, his rucksack by his feet. When Mr and Mrs Parsons had settled, Mike untied the boat and let it drift from the shore before starting the engines. Rachel said to Cal. ‘Looking forward to seeing it at last?’

‘I think so.’

She looked at him quizzically. ‘Only think so?’

The Rib accelerated, twin engines roaring, across a calm backwater. It sped through a narrow gap between sand spits and suddenly it was in the fast tidal stream flowing under the bridge. As the Rib appeared on the other side, the skipper of the fishing boat stopped lifting boxes and watched them go by, waving lazily. When they’d passed, Mike cut the engines and leaned back to Rachel. ‘That,’ he jerked his thumb back over his shoulder, ‘is the grandson of the skipper who went down with the Eilean Iasgaich in the war.’

She leaned back to tell Cal. Both of them turned to watch his red wool hat bobbing up and down as he resumed unloading his catch.

Mike said, ‘He’s Hector MacKay too, like his grandfather, though everyone calls him Red because of the hat. He’s never without it.’

Rachel shouted back to Cal. ‘He won’t speak to me.’

Cal didn’t reply. He continued to watch Hector MacKay’s grandson who belonged here, whereas Uilleam Sinclair’s grandson did not, could not. Not without betraying his grandfather. Cal hadn’t expected to mind quite so much.

The boat swung almost to the eastern shore where the channel split into two, divided by a sandbank. Mike steered the Rib within five metres of the rocks where the water was deepest. The rushing tide and the breeze whipped up waves.

‘Hold on,’ he shouted. The boat buffeted against the rearing water, showering spray over the passengers. ‘Another one’s coming.’ Then the Rib was in calmer deeper sea. A group of small islands appeared on the port side: three hummocks of grass and rock.

Mike cut the engines temporarily. ‘They’re called The Rabbit Islands.’ The boat picked up speed again and Cal stood. Ahead, lying broadside across the bay was Eilean Iasgaich. Mike shouted, ‘We’ll go round Eilean nan Ron, the Island of Seals first …’ he pointed to starboard where a large grassy island had appeared. Ruined houses were silhouetted on its skyline. ‘… and then we’ll go ashore.’

‘It was occupied too?’ Cal asked.

Mike shouted back, ‘Yeah, it was abandoned in 1938.’

‘Before Eilean Iasgaich?’

‘Seven years before.’

‘What happened?’

‘The fishing was past its peak and the young men went looking for work on the mainland. Eilean Iasgaich stayed viable for longer because of the trawler: it had the range to go where the fish were; it could follow the cod and haddock.’

The engines roared again. Seabirds circled overhead as the Rib swept round Eilean nan Ron and approached Eilean Iasgaich from the east. A low outcrop of rock lay 20 metres off the main island. Mike cut the engine and let the Rib idle past. ‘Eilean Iasgaich Beag … it means Little Fishing Island.’ He shouted so all the passengers could hear. ‘Only the tip shows at high tide. The main island is called Eilean Iasgaich Mor or Great Fishing Island.’

Now the Rib cruised sedately below suddenly soaring cliffs until, rounding a buttress, it entered a natural harbour. A pier jutted out into the sea and from it a line of steps ascended a rocky gully to the island plateau.

‘It’s deep here and sheltered from the gales and swell.’ Mike said.

Cal wondered if this was why he had been called Caladh: harbour in Gaelic.

The Rib was now less than 50 metres from shore. From a shadow under the cliff, at the back of the pier, a sculpture began to emerge. It was a circle of men in bronze, linking arms, on top of a stone plinth. There was an inscription on it but the boat was still too distant for the words to be legible.

Mike noticed Cal paying attention to it. ‘That’s the memorial to the fifteen heroes of Eilean Iasgaich.’

‘There were sixteen,’ Cal snapped.

The carved inscription read:

In memory of the brave men of the anti-submarine trawler Eilean Iasgaich who laid down their lives in the service of their country and their island.

On 17 September 1942, five men died protecting the North Atlantic convoys from German U-boats and fighter bombers.

On 29 September 1942, the youngest member of the crew was swept overboard in a storm returning from Archangelsk.

On 6 July 1944, nine men were killed in action east of Orkney after engaging a U-boat which had surfaced to shell a fishing vessel transporting Norwegian resistance fighters. The U-boat and the Eilean Iasgaich went down with all hands.

In June 1945, a month after the return to power of the Norwegian Government in exile, the nine were awarded posthumously Norway’s highest gallantry decoration, Krigskorset med Sverd (War Cross with Sword), in recognition of their extraordinary heroism.

Let their deeds be remembered always.

Hector MacKay, skipper, aged 53, died 6 July 1944

Donal MacKay, aged 47, died 17 September 1942

Angus MacKay, aged 45, died 17 September 1942

Robert Rae, aged 45, died 6 July 1944

Iain Rae, aged 43, died 6 July 1944

Murdo Rae, aged 38, died 6 July 1944

Alexander Gunn, aged 35, died 17 September 1942

Sinclair Gunn, aged 34, died 17 September 1942

Duncan MacLeod, aged 29, died 6 July 1944

Robert MacLeod, aged 27, died 6 July 1944

Alasdair Murray, aged 26, died 17 September 1942

James Murray, aged 24, died 6 July 1944

Alexander (Sandy) MacKay, aged 16, died 29 September 1942

Hamish Sutherland, aged 49, died 6 July 1944

Donald McIntosh, aged 27, died 6 July 1944.

May God abide with them and may their souls rest in peace.

Cal prayed for his grandfather. Uilleam Sinclair, aged 21, died 29 September 1942. God abide with him and may his soul rest in peace.

Mike was attending to the other passengers, who had begun to climb the stone steps up the cliff from the pier. Tom and Sandra Parsons from Wiltshire, the least agile of the group, asked if they could take it ‘at their own speed’. Mike said he would follow them up ‘to catch them in case they slipped’.

‘Can we stay here a bit longer?’ Rachel read Cal’s mood.

‘Sure no bother,’ Mike said. ‘Come up when you’re ready.’

Cal had been the first ashore. He had studied the inscription and then stood with his back to it looking out to sea as Mike told how the surviving members of the MacKay and Rae families commissioned the memorial in 1949, the year they took title to the island, and unveiled it the following year.

‘The Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland stood on this rock,’ Mike turned towards the sea, ‘and held a service of thanksgiving. The bay was full of boats at anchor from all the surrounding townships and beyond. The navy sent a minesweeper. The decks of all of them were packed with people. The sun shone that day, like it is today.’

It was here, Cal thought, the Eilean Iasgaich moored when it returned from its refit as an anti-submarine trawler. It was here the men came ashore, Uilleam Sinclair among them, and climbed the steps where the island’s women and children were waiting, his wife and mother separate from the others. How had Grace Ann described his progress past the islanders that day? ‘Untouched’: all the other men had been embraced as they went by, all except his grandfather. Cal read the memorial inscription again.

‘I couldn’t believe it either, when I saw it the first time,’ Rachel said. She was waiting apart from him at the bottom of the cliff. By now the others were nearing the top.

‘Will they be going to the museum?’

‘I expect so. Normally they go there first and after that the houses.’

‘The log book’s there?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to see it.’ He was reading the inscription again. ‘Then I’m going to build a cairn, for my grandfather. It’s time he had a memorial.’

‘Where?’

‘Oh, on one of the hills, overlooking the sea. I don’t know, away from here.’

‘You could use some of the stone from your family’s house,’ Rachel had started to climb the steps. ‘There’s enough of it lying about.’

At the first turn, where the second flight started, she went behind a boulder. Cal looked again at the memorial, leaned close, and spat on it.

From the top of the steps Cal surveyed the grassland which stretched across the centre of the island. It was slung like a hammock between its two hills, Cnoc na Faire to the east and Cnoc a’ Mhonaidh to the west. Extending along the north side of the island were scattered ruins of houses in the shelter of a rising bank of heather. Many had lost roofs, some had collapsed gables, and others had become rubble. None was intact, or none that Cal could discern. For the most part they were single storey structures with a door in the centre and a window at either side. A few had a second floor, with two windows in the roof and a skylight in between. Around the houses were other geometric remnants of human settlement: a line of fence posts, a section of boundary wall, the course of a drainage ditch clogged with rushes. Rachel was walking along one of these when Cal next saw her. She’d gone ahead of him to finish her research on the houses. ‘Come and find me once you’ve seen the log book. I’ll show you the Sinclair croft.’ It rankled that she’d been there already and he hadn’t, but he let it ride.

The rest of the boat party was a long way ahead of him, below Cnoc na Faire, following a track up a grassy slope to the old school, a single storey building set apart from the others. Like them, it faced south with a window either side of the doorway. Unlike them, its roof appeared intact though matt in texture, not slate, and the windows reflected sunlight instead of being lifeless black holes.

Cal hurried to catch up, running along a path on the top of the cliff. When he reached the museum whose roof he now saw was thatched with heather, the others had been inside for five or six minutes. A sign was attached to the bleached wooden lintel: ‘Eilean Iasgaich Museum’, and underneath, ‘Opened 23 May 1952’. The door, made from rough planks, was held open by a rope loop. Cal heard snatches of Mike’s commentary inside describing the island’s subsistence agriculture. He ducked below the lintel, following in his schoolboy grandfather’s footsteps, and entered a passageway with a doorway on either side and uneven whitewashed walls which were cluttered with framed black-and-white photographs and modern paintings. All were depictions of island life. Cal stopped by a water colour, about 20 by 12 centimetres in a deep frame of dark wood. It was of a fishing boat ramming a submarine. In the distance was another boat around which shells exploded. Cal read the printed card accompanying it.

‘The heroes of Eilean Iasgaich by Elizabeth Rae, whose father Robert was one of the nine island men killed saving a group of Norwegian resistance fighters from certain death. This frame was constructed from one of the trawler’s recovered deck timbers. Prints can be purchased inside – £75 each.’

Next to the painting was a photograph of the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland blessing the memorial at the pier. Other photographs were grainier and even older: of family groups mostly, dressed in their Sunday best. The men and boys wore caps and the women and girls bonnets tied under their chins. Cal walked along them searching for something familiar about the faces: a likeness to Margaret, his great grandmother, Uilleam, or even Ishbel, his grandmother. Just as he was nearing the end of the corridor, Mike appeared at the doorway on the right. ‘Ah there you are. I was just demonstrating the tools they used for growing and harvesting oats, hay and potatoes.’