The Sea Detective (34 page)

How did he know I was coming?

Cal had read DLG’s email.

Cal had betrayed her again.

Cal.

A woman was walking along the shore towards Basanti. She wore denim dungarees and a cap and had a red bucket in her hand. A white and tan dog ambled ahead of her, sniffing at shells and seaweed.

Basanti looked at her and back at where the man had been. If she ran to the woman across the shingle beach the man would see her. If she didn’t, the man would find her when the woman had gone. Hadn’t only men touched her, harmed her or betrayed her since she left India? She ran to the woman.

The dog barked when it saw Basanti, bouncing up and down on its front legs, as if held back by an invisible lead.

‘Please help me,’ she gasped.

The woman ordered her dog to be quiet. A sympathetic smile stretched across the ruddy fleshiness of her face. ‘What’s wrong, pet?’

‘There’s a man.’ Basanti glanced nervously behind her. She could see the sweep of heather and grass back to the base of the hill. But no-one was there.

‘Is he following you?’ the woman said, looking too.

‘Yes. He was there.’ Basanti pointed to the rise where she’d last seen him.

‘Well, why don’t you come with me?’ the woman said. ‘I’m finished here.’ She swung her bucket full of mussels. ‘My caravan’s up that way. The road’s just the other side. You’ll be safe with me.’

Basanti kept on looking behind her as she and the woman walked side by side. The woman told her about her dog, Alfie. He was a terrier, a Jack Russell, four years old, and ‘always hunting, rabbits, mice and rats you name it’. The beach narrowed and a path forked left from it between two sand dunes. The woman, who said her name was Barbara, went first. Basanti followed. They emerged on to a flat, sandy piece of ground overlooking another bay where a small boat was moored at a short wooden pier. The beach round the bay was shingle. There was a cottage close by it and another across a flat of heather, closer to the hill.

Basanti’s heart beat loudly. This had been her prison.

‘The caravan’s along there.’ Barbara nodded towards a single track road which was just coming into view. Basanti yelped in fright. The man was on it, running towards them. Every so often he stopped to search the surrounding terrain. He had binoculars round his neck.

Basanti said, ‘That’s him’. She felt for her knife.

Barbara put a reassuring hand on Basanti’s arm. ‘You’re all right with me, pet.’

The man saw them and ran in their direction. He was big, at least six feet, and broad, the same build as the man who’d carried Basanti when she’d last seen the hill. Barbara felt for Basanti’s wrist and held it tight.

‘It’s ok,’ she said, reassuring her. ‘He’ll be looking for a lost dog or something.’

Basanti tried to shake off Barbara’s grip. But Barbara squeezed tighter, preventing her from putting her hand in her pocket.

The man stopped a few metres in front of them, panting; his face screwed up with the effort of running. Barbara said to him, ‘What are you waiting for? Take the little bitch.’

She yanked her arm and propelled Basanti forward. She sprawled on the ground at the man’s feet. ‘Watch out,’ Barbara said, ‘She’s got a knife.’

It was 8pm before Cal’s driver parked on the verge by the single track road to the headland. From the landward side, the hill was a series of ascending humps and knolls with occasional trees scattered across them. But on its right flank, Cal’s present view of it, there was a single tree, a Scots pine, at a precarious angle of 45 degrees.

‘There’s no need to wait,’ Cal said getting out of the car.

The driver didn’t acknowledge Cal or alter his expression. When Cal slammed the door, the car swung back towards Kilninver and Oban. Would a tip have made their parting any more amicable? Cal started along the single track road to the coast. About half way there, the road passed a disused quarry. In it, were a rusted white Volkswagen and a mobile home supported on foundations of brick. A woman sat on a boulder beside the caravan steps, picking mussels out of a bucket and scraping sea weed and barnacles off them with a pen knife. She wore a man’s blue and brown check shirt, patched denim dungarees and a denim cap. A dog yapped repeatedly from inside the caravan.

‘Anything I can help you with?’ she called out to Cal. She squinted at him in the setting sun, covering her eyes with the hand which held the knife.

He stopped a few paces from her. ‘Lovely evening.’

‘So it is.’ She continued to regard him, her fleshy face inquisitive, waiting for Cal’s answer.

‘I’m looking for a friend,’ Cal ventured. ‘We’d arranged to meet up here. We’re walkers.’

‘Lots of walkers round here,’ she said, picking up another mussel but continuing to stare at him.

‘Any down there?’ Cal gestured towards the sea.

‘There wasn’t half an hour ago, when I was collecting these.’ She sounded Geordie.

‘Well I’ll take a look.’ Cal said, ‘Thanks for your help.’

She watched him for a moment before continuing to scrape mussels.

Inside the caravan, the man took his hand away from Basanti’s throat. She tried to shout, to warn Cal, to beg forgiveness from any god who would listen to her for suspecting him, but the gag filling her mouth choked her. The terrier stopped yapping and went to sniff at her shoes and trousers. The door opened and Barbara said, ‘Make sure the knots are tight. We’ve got work to do.’

The man yanked at Basanti’s wrists, checking the rope, before following the woman out of the door. A padlock snapped shut after it had closed.

His smell remained behind.

If not Cal, then who?

The road stopped at a turning circle some 200 metres from the shore. The hill was now further inland and up the coast from Cal and he struck out across aromatic bog myrtle towards it, following a sheep’s trail up an incline. Over it two cottages came into view. Both were modest, two-roomed ‘but and bens’ with slate roofs. The nearest was down by the sea, beside a shingle beach with a pier and a boat moored at it. The second cottage was further from the bay, closer to the base of the hill. Was this where Preeti and Basanti had been brought ashore and imprisoned?

The first cottage was enclosed by a wire fence and had the appearance of being unoccupied. The gate to the front door was padlocked and the gravel path was overgrown with grass and weeds. Cal climbed the fence and looked in the nearest window. It was a sparsely furnished sitting room with one sofa, an arm chair, a cheap coffee table and a standard lamp with a fabric shade frilled at the bottom. He tried the door before going on to the next cottage which had a similar atmosphere of neglect. From here the hill was almost as Basanti had drawn it. Half of the Scots pine was now visible on its left hand side.

The path stopped at the second cottage but Cal tramped across heather until the angle of the hill was exactly as Basanti had seen it, with the leaning Scots pine fully in view. He found what he was looking for off to his left, after a couple of hundred metres. Here, there was a depression in the ground with a large lichen covered boulder at one side of it. Attached to the boulder was a rusted ring sunk into cement in a crevice of rock. He touched it as if the warmth of his fingers might coax it to impart its story.

This was where Basanti had been taken that night.

This was where she’d seen the hill.

By now it was dusk and Cal cut across the headland to the sea, stopping only when he reached the little bay by the first cottage. The gravel beach crunched under his feet as it had for the man who carried Basanti ashore. Cal inspected the boat which was wooden, again as Basanti had recalled it. As the sun dipped behind Mull, he sat on the end of the short pier, listening to the lapping of the sea.

He remained there until it was dark and then he tried to ring Basanti. If she was still in Edinburgh, she’d be inside his flat now. He was tapping in the number when he noticed his phone had no signal. He continued to walk around the bay glancing every so often at his mobile: still no signal. He swore and resolved to wait for her there, in case she was on her way. At a part of the bay where the sea had eroded the bank, spilling a chute of sand across the gravel, he sat down. He watched the rise and fall of the waves and the pink sky fading on the horizon, fighting tiredness. Somewhere out there, three years ago, a ship unloaded its cargo of two virgin Bedia girls for something unimaginably awful.

Cal was dreaming. Hands held him by his legs and arms, tying them with rope. A knee pressed into his chest. A cloth was being forced into his mouth and he choked. Now it wasn’t a dream. He was turned on his front, a blindfold tied tight around his eyes. There were two of them holding him, one his legs, one his torso. They carried him across the gravel, their feet crunching into it. He kicked and twisted but they held him. He attempted to scream but only a low, muffled grunt made it past the gag. Then he was in the boat. Another rope was wound round his body and legs and tied under the bench seat, stopping him from moving. He heard them go back across the gravel and he strained at his knots until they cut into him. Then he heard their feet approaching. Something was put on to the seat beside him. He felt the warmth of another body and a tremble of fear through cotton clothes. Basanti. Cal jolted with the shock of her. He fought against his ropes. He tried to shout.

Soon the boat was out at sea, rolling with the swell. They came for Basanti first. He heard them untying her ropes, her pleas for mercy after they removed her gag, her begging Cal for forgiveness, her prayers for Preeti and their families, then his own screaming but only a strangulated squeal emerging. Then they took off Cal’s blindfold. There were two of them. They wore balaclavas, with only their eyes showing. Did they want him to witness what they were about to do? The taller one held Basanti under her arms; the other gripped her legs. Cal saw the fright on her lovely young face, her silent pleading for Cal to help her, and then she was gone, tumbling into the sea, a cry of terror, followed by a splash. He saw Basanti’s face once more, lit dimly by the sea’s phosphorescence, before it was lost in the darkness. Cal prayed she wouldn’t scream again and she did not.

Now they started on Cal, working silently and methodically, untying his knots. They left the ones at his wrists till last, as he was being lifted up, as Basanti had been. He kicked out but he was held tight by strong hands. The gag was pulled from his mouth. He saw a shirt cuff: the same check the woman by the caravan had been wearing. Next he was in mid air. Then he was in the water, the cold shock of it making him gasp. His mouth and nose filled with it. When he surfaced the sound of the boat’s engine was faint and distant. He shouted for Basanti: the soft syllables of her name a small sound in a vast blackness. He listened for a reply but none came. Between calling and listening, he swam back towards where she had gone into the water.

But the further he went, the more disorientated he became. The waves were bigger now and he was tired swimming against them. When exhaustion overcame him he trod water, crying out her name, over and over, turning one way then another. Finally, he let out a scream of rage and frustration before falling silent. It was then he realised he was caught in a strong current, the direction of which he calculated from a single distant light on the Argyllshire mainland east of him. The sea was pushing him south-west, and quickly. He’d been dropped into one of the tidal streams between the Firth of Lorn and Corrievrechan. For Preeti and Basanti it had been a drowning stream; and so it would be for him. He was too weak to swim across it or against it. It was pushing him further from land. All he could do was let it take him. Cal closed his eyes imagining his grandfather beside him, being his guide through the stages of drowning: the struggle after submersion, the physical exhaustion, the vomiting, and the loss of consciousness. After Basanti’s death he tried to resign himself to it as his fate, his atonement for failing her.

A wave broke over him, filling his mouth with salt water and he surfaced again, choking. The sea was becoming a frenzy of little waves. A powerful downdraught buffeted him. Someone was shouting to him, a male voice, close to his ear, sliding a harness under his arms. Then he was free of the water. Hands grabbed at him. Then he was inside a helicopter. A survival blanket was wrapped around him, a mask placed over his face. A voice said, ‘You had us worried there. We thought we’d lost you, would have done without thermal imaging.’ The last thing he did before falling into unconsciousness was to call for Basanti.

When he came round he was in hospital. A nurse was checking the monitor screens and Detective Constable Jamieson was sitting in a chair beside his bed. ‘We have signs of life,’ Jamieson said. ‘Welcome to the living, Cal.’

‘Where’s Basanti?’

Jamieson asked the nurse to leave them alone. When she shut the door, Jamieson said, ‘We’ve told the media that a 17-year old female is missing, feared drowned.’

Cal cried out, an echo of the scream that had stayed suppressed inside him since he felt Basanti close to him on the boat. Then he saw Jamieson was holding up a drawing of a hill and a tree on its left hand flank. ‘Dear Cal, Thank you so much, Love Basanti’ was written across the bottom of it.

‘She wanted you to have it,’ Jamieson smiled. ‘She’s alive. She’s fine. We picked her up before we got you. You were a bit more difficult to find. You had us worried there. The current had taken you away. We cut it fine but we couldn’t move any sooner because we didn’t know if they had Basanti until she was taken to the boat.’

Cal looked uncomprehending. ‘But you said she had drowned.’

‘We’ve told the
media
she’s missing feared drowned because we didn’t want the men who abused her to think she’s alive. Not yet.’

Jamieson told him the rest on the journey back to Edinburgh. She talked as she drove, though Cal wished she would do one or the other, not both. Most of the way her head was turned towards him instead of the road, or so it seemed to Cal. Quite quickly they settled into a routine. She briefed him on the investigation and he interrupted with warnings to her about sharp bends or slow moving tractors or caravans.