The Sea Detective (28 page)

Another long period of silence followed, during which he went to Knoydart and met Catherine Sale, who was compiling a botanical map of the peninsula. They were together for two weeks, becoming lovers, before Cal returned to Edinburgh. Rachel’s work took her to London and then to Madrid, while Cal went to North Uist with Catherine. The flat was empty and cold when Rachel visited Edinburgh for a long weekend before another working trip to New York. She hoped Cal would be there. Instead she found a brief letter asking her to go. ‘You’re never here. I’m sorry I can’t live like this. It’s over, please leave’ were the only reasons he gave. She put her keys on his table, packed her clothes and left the Mary’s Bean on the shelf along with his other beach discoveries. She wrote a label for it, just like all the others in his collection.

‘Skaill Beach, Orkney, West Mainland, 18 June 2005’.

‘Where’s Jamieson? Get her in here now.’ Detective Inspector David Ryan barked his instruction to Joan, his PA, through the open door of his office.

‘Yes Mr Ryan.’ Joan cupped the phone to prevent him overhearing her. ‘Helen, he wants to see you and look out – he’s raging.’

Jamieson was in the detectives’ room. She closed her lap top, locked it in her drawer and gathered up her case file. It was 13.50. The conference call with the detectives from Shetland was scheduled for 14.15. What was Ryan panicking about now?

Jamieson winked at Joan as she passed. Joan held in her smile because Ryan was looking at her, drumming his fingers on his desk.

‘Good afternoon sir. You asked to see me.’ Jamieson stood just inside the doorway from habit forged by Ryan saying daily, sometimes twice daily, to her ‘I can hear you from there Jamieson.’ As if ugliness was catching on closer contact.

‘Have you seen this, Jamieson?’

Good afternoon Detective Constable Jamieson. How are you today? I’m well thank you sir. I’m following some good leads sir. Well done Jamieson.

‘What sir?’

‘This statement from Nike …’

‘No sir. I haven’t seen it sir.’

‘They’re saying the trainers are counterfeit.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘You don’t seem surprised Jamieson.’

‘No sir.’

‘Did you know they were counterfeit?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘What are you playing at Jamieson?’

‘Nothing sir.’

‘As senior investigating officer don’t you think I should be told something like that?’

‘Yes sir. I do sir. I did sir.’

‘You’re a liar Jamieson. I’m not a fucking imbecile.’ He banged the desk with his fist.

No sir and neither am I sir.

‘It’s in my report, on page 2. Didn’t you read it, sir?’

Ryan blinked.

‘If that’s all, sir, shall I come back for the conference call?’

‘No.’ His eyes narrowed as if he was seeing something for the first time. ‘No, I don’t need you for the call, Jamieson. Brief me on what you’re doing.’ Jamieson opened her file.

‘Here’s a list of all the inquiries I’ve initiated, sir. There are rather a lot of them as you can imagine.’ She glanced at the page and was about to approach Ryan to hand it to him when he said, ‘Give it to Joan on your way out.’

‘Yes sir. I thought you wanted me to brief you sir.’

‘Well get on with it. I don’t have all day.’

‘I’ve worked through the DNA databases north and south of the Border. There are no matches with the feet, at least none with any of the missing people for whom we have a DNA sample.’

‘So what are you doing now?’

‘I’m running checks on a variety of different maritime incidents to the west of the UK. They’re a combination of suicides, drownings, shipwrecks, collisions, you name it we’re investigating it sir.’

‘Any leads?’

Yes sir.

‘No sir. It’s like searching for a needle in a haystack sir.’

Ryan’s look was withering and contemptuous. ‘You’d better find it, Jamieson.’

‘Yes sir.’

He sneered at her. ‘Have you ever heard of something being career-changing?’

‘Yes sir.’

‘Well this is career-changing for you, Jamieson. If you let me down …’

And for you sir

‘… Now get out of my sight.’

‘Yes sir.’

Later in the afternoon, Jamieson walked by Ryan in the corridor outside the detectives’ room.

‘Very elegant sir.’ Ryan reared back at the idea of Jamieson paying him a compliment on his new blue suit. ‘What?’

‘Very elegant sir, the press statement saying you were aware the shoes were counterfeit and you were keeping it confidential for operational reasons.’

‘Get out of my way Jamieson.’

Yes sir, no sir, you can fool Joe Public sir but not the SCDEA’s interviewing panel, sir.

The tide was full and the creel boat nudged against the low bridge spanning the Kyle between Tongue and Eastern Township bay. The skipper looped the mooring rope round an iron railing and pushed his red woollen hat off his forehead. The time was 5.18 in the evening. The hotel van was due at 5.30. He stretched and pushed back his shoulders. For a blissful moment the ache low in his back went away but when he bent to pick up the next box of lobsters it stabbed at him again and he screwed up his face. With a heave and another spasm he raised the box shoulder high and slid it on to the side of the road. Back pain ran in his family. His grandfather had it. His father had it. Now he had it. The other family legacy was his name, Hector MacKay, though he’d managed to rid himself of some of its burden of expectation. Everyone called him Red after his hat which he wore indoors and out, winter and summer. His surname and back pain had proved more dogged inheritances. When he got lonely, which was seldom, he consoled himself with the knowledge that he would pass on neither to a son.

He was childless and a widower and likely to remain so though he was 38 years old and good-looking. His hair under his red hat was blond and curly; his eyes were blue, his nose aquiline, his cheek bones prominent and his cheeks concave. The women of the crofting townships found two faults with him. One was forgivable: his height. He was five feet seven inches which was judged disappointing for a man with such fine features. The other was not. His young wife had killed herself, an overdose of pills. Some said his cruelty was to blame; others that he had administered the dose himself.

In the aftermath of her death, while he was still unwelcome in the community, he encountered God. He found him in nature, in the seas, the landscape, the birds, and the whales and dolphins which slipped like oil on late summer evenings across the bay by his home. Over time, he abandoned his Bible and stopped praying. The less he asked of God, the more he felt his presence. He was everywhere. Late one night he found a name for this type of religion. He was, according to ‘Amos’, an American internet chat room acquaintance and sometime evangelist, a pantheist.

Red looked up pantheism in a long undisturbed Oxford English Dictionary and found a definition to his liking: ‘The belief or theory that God and the universe are identical (implying a denial of the personality and transcendence of God); the doctrine that God is everything and everything is God.’

(If God is not transcendent, he thought, why had the OED written God with a capital G?)

By the time he had heaved the fourth and last of his shellfish boxes on to the roadside, Kenny, the driver of the van from the hotel, was opening the boot doors. ‘Good catch today Red?’

‘I can’t complain.’ Red pushed his shoulders back and pulled a face.

‘Back getting to you again?’ Kenny shook his head in amusement at Red’s contortions. For as long as he’d been collecting Red’s catch, seven months on and off, he’d been complaining about his back.

‘It’s been murder today.’

Kenny swivelled his San Francisco Giants baseball cap back to front, stuck his hands in the pockets of his blue overalls and spread his legs in an ‘I told you so’ stance. ‘Don’t blame me.’ Kenny, the hotel’s trainee chef, had offered to crew for Red three mornings a week when he wasn’t working in the kitchen.

‘Yeah, yeah …’

‘Just say when and I’ll do it.’ They both knew it wouldn’t happen. Red enjoyed fishing as much for the solitude as for the catch.

‘Chef’s looking for two boxes of prawn tomorrow, and a dozen crabs, good big ones. There’s a special do on.’

Red screwed up his face again. ‘I’ll see what I can do. I’ve got a physio appointment in the morning which’ll delay me no doubt.’

Kenny was accustomed to Red’s grumbles and pessimism. ‘Same time, same place tomorrow.’

‘If the body’s willing. The tide’ll be good for landing here for a few evenings yet, then it’ll be back to the old pier.’

‘Is the road fixed?’

‘They say it will be. They were working on it today.’

Kenny snorted. ‘Sure thing it won’t be. See ya tomorrow Red.’

Kenny turned the van in the middle of the bridge and sped away westwards. As the sound of its engine faded, squealing brakes from the other direction made Red turn. A lorry juddered twice before stopping. Bellows of distress came from the cattle it was carrying in the back. Their hooves slithered on the wet, dung-slicked corrugations of the floor as the animals fought to keep their balance. A youngish man with short dark hair and wearing jeans dropped to the road from the passenger door. He reached into the cab for a backpack, slammed the door and banged on it with the flat of his hand. The driver let out two loud blasts of the horn in answer before accelerating slowly away, the engine straining under its load, the cattle still bellowing.

Red looked at him with curiosity.

‘Hi, can you help me?’ the stranger said, politely.

‘I’ll do my best, I’m sure.’

‘I’m trying to get to Eilean Iasgaich tonight.’

Red was loosening the knot on the rope securing his boat. He studied the younger man’s face. ‘Are you now?’

Red didn’t need to ask the next question. His expression did it for him: why?

Cal shrugged. ‘I was wondering if you might be going that way.’

Red kept on staring, his eyes narrowing a fraction, his face giving nothing away. ‘Well that depends doesn’t it?’

‘On what?’

‘I guess on why you want to go there.’

Cal looked towards the island and back at Red. He recognised him from his first trip to the island. Red had been moored in the same place at the bridge when the Rib had gone past. He decided to take a chance.

‘Uilleam Sinclair was my grandfather.’

A look of understanding passed from Red to Cal, a silent acknowledgement of a shared heritage, of Cal’s right to visit the island without having to answer any more questions. Red said, ‘Aye, that’ll do. I’ve heard of him all right.’ He pulled on the rope and the boat nudged back against the bridge. ‘Jump in.’

‘Thank you.’ Cal handed down his backpack and Red winced at its weight. Inside it were Cal’s laptop and his grandmother’s diaries.

‘Bad back?’

‘Don’t get me started.’

Cal sat on the road bridge, his legs over the edge, reaching for a firm footing on the deck. He jumped and landed awkwardly.

Red grabbed him.

‘Ok?’

‘Thanks.’

‘I’m Red, by the way, after the hat. My other name’s MacKay.’

Cal said, ‘I know.’

‘And how would you know that?’

Cal told Red how Mike had pointed him out to the boat party.

‘Did he now?’ It seemed to tickle him, becoming a local tourist attraction. ‘So you’ve been out to the island before?’

Cal said he had. ‘A few days ago, my first visit …’

Red considered asking him another question but instead said ‘No, you’re fine’ and started the engine. He asked Cal to gather up the mooring rope and the boat nosed out into the tidal stream. Cal joined Red in the wheel house. ‘Nice old boat.’

‘She suits me.’

‘What’s her name?’

‘The Eilean Iasgaich …’

‘After the trawler that went down in the war …?’

Red nodded. ‘You know the story?’

‘Yes.’ Another look passed between them.

‘Tide’s turning,’ Red said and spun the wheel to starboard. The boat veered towards the wide mouth of the bay. ‘So you’ll know my grandfather was the skipper.’

‘Yes, of course.’ He hoped there wasn’t any animosity in his voice.

Red didn’t appear to detect any because he carried on, ‘After his death, my grandmother and father went to the new settlement.’ He pointed east, to the headland behind which was New Iasgaich township. ‘Over there, just beyond the point. The Norwegian government gave the land to the surviving islanders.’

Cal said, ‘Does your father still live there?’

‘No, he’s long gone. He married an island girl and they lived there for a time, but he was a drinker and fell out with the neighbours, not to mention his wife, my mother,’ Red shrugged. ‘It can happen around here.’ He laughed. ‘And how. My grandmother was in her coffin by then and just as well for him, because he sold the house and his share of the island. He bought this boat with some of the cash. So the name is the only bit of the island we’ve still got. My grandfather’s descendants are the only ones allowed to name a boat The Eilean Iasgaich.’

‘Where’s your family now?’

‘My family’s me. I’m all that’s left.’ He glanced at Cal. ‘Me, the boat and the house my father built over there to the west. You’ll see it when we get to the island. There’s no road in or out, only the sea.’

‘Your father’s dead?’

‘The bottle did for him 17, 18 years ago.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I was at university in Glasgow at the time. We’d been estranged because of his drinking. When I went to the house after the funeral there were empty bottles everywhere, sheep and hen muck in every room. God knows how he lived like that.’

Cal wondered what happened to his mother: it sounded as if she was dead too.

‘It’s got a lot to answer for …’ Red nodded towards the island. ‘All those ruined houses. A broken human spirit in every fallen stone, I say.’

Cal kept his view to himself.

The island was close enough now for Cal to pick out the pier. Red was steering further to the west. ‘D’you mind if I drop you in Seal Bay?’

‘Anywhere’s fine.’

‘It’s on the north of the island, more sheltered when the wind’s blowing from the south-west. I’ve got some creels to drop along that shore this evening. You’ll find there’s a path up the back of the hill. It’s steep but the footholds are easy enough.’