The Turning Tide (4 page)

‘I found out this morning . . .’ he said. He held a rolled-up newspaper in one hand, a little scrap of card in the other. ‘It’s hard to explain, but I – I mean
we
– we’ve won twenty million pounds in the lottery.’

: 2 :

Cameron Bridge was a grey town wedged in the crook of a sea loch on the west coast of Scotland. For reasons no one was able to explain, the town had been built with the backs of its streets facing the sea, so that the first impression any visitor to the area had was of a town showing the world its arse.

That was how Morag Munro saw it. She made the short walk from her hotel to her office and tried not to make eye contact with anyone on the way. Under any other circumstances she would have long since left the place and never come back. But as the region’s local MP, she was obliged to pop her head in a few times a year.

The mountains that hulked above Cameron Bridge ensured that, no matter what the weather or time of year, the town was always in shadow. In winter the streets were covered with a layer of ice as fine as plastic wrap and as slippery underfoot as spilled oil. Even in summer, stubborn patches of snow on the highest mountains would chill the wind that swept through the town. Morag scowled. She hated this place.

Maybe hate was too strong a word. But she could do with fewer visits. Morag’s first few trips up after Scotland’s independence referendum had been the worst. Because she had been one of the public faces campaigning for No, constituents beat a path to her surgeries to debate the outcome. She had heard it all: accusations of fixing, uncounted ballots found in bins, a conspiracy that went past the
BBC
and all the way up to the Westminster elite. ‘It’s the settled will of the Scottish people,’ she said over and over, a serene half-smile the most she could offer in the face of their anger and disappointment.

When the general election came and she managed to hold on to her seat with the slenderest of majorities – fewer than 200 votes between her and the
SNP
candidate – that hadn’t helped put the conspiracy theorists down one bit.

Like most political fads this would pass; they couldn’t stay angry for ever, could they? Eventually life would have to return to normal. Though once or twice she had wished the stepped-up security that came when she was campaigning side by side with English MPs had stuck around here once those other politicians retreated south of the border.

Morag’s assistant Arjun came in wearing a pink wool waistcoat and flecked brown tweeds, armed with two cups of coffee from a high street café and a copy of the
West Highland Independent
tucked under his arm. Morag arched an eyebrow. She so wished he didn’t feel the need to wear hipster clobber up here. The locals would probably think he was taking the piss. ‘Decided to blend in, did we,’ she said dryly.

Arjun did a spin. ‘You like?’ Morag rolled her eyes and he laughed. ‘I’m inspired to go native. The sleeper train is fabulous. Next time I take my boyfriend on holiday we’re going first class all the way.’

Morag couldn’t help but smile. She had long ago grown weary of the rattling old carriages chugging their way on the track, the thin blankets and soggy breakfasts, but his enthusiasm was sweet.

‘And you won’t believe what I found in a charity shop on the way here this morning,’ he said, and pulled a package from his bag. It was a large plastic suit with a hood, bright white, and big enough for a six foot man with a thyroid problem.

‘Crivens, Arj, those look like my father-in-law’s cricket waterproofs. I hope you weren’t planning on going out in public wearing that.’

‘Brilliant, isn’t it?’ he grinned. ‘Vintage, and only a fraction of the cost of Gore-Tex.’

‘And not breathable, so you’ll sweat your cods off in it.’ Morag shook her head. She could imagine him gamely having a go at the local hills clad in his new white plastic suit. The locals would likely think the CSI had turned up. Or possibly a spaceman.

At least Arjun had been able to come with her on this constituency visit. Usually he stayed in London while she made her trips north, but she was short-handed this time around. Her constituency secretary had cited the barrage of abusive letters after the referendum as the source of her stress, and quit. Morag couldn’t make head or tail of it. The letters had been addressed to her, after all, not to the secretary. But she could hardly object when the woman served notice. To do otherwise would be to invite a lawsuit. She supposed that was Britain now, compensation culture all the way.

‘Newspaper headlines before we let the grannies in?’

‘Go on then.’ Morag sniffed at the cup of coffee. Any place in London offering a drink this poor would be shut in days. She sighed, tucked her silver-streaked bob behind her ears and sipped the indifferent brew. The coffee at least tasted better than it looked, but that was hardly a ringing endorsement.

‘Right, above the fold . . . Council backs option 8 on the town bypass,’ Arjun began. ‘Local protestors turn out in force.’ He looked up. ‘What’s “in force” around here?’

Morag considered. ‘Eight, maybe ten.’

‘Not twelve?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, that would be a “mob”. What else?’

Each time she came back to the Highlands, Morag felt more and more out of place. It wasn’t helped by the local memory of her predecessor in Parliament: a heavy drinking ex-boxer and leader of the Liberals who was ousted by the party for punching the Speaker. She got the feeling people would rather have an alcoholic Auld Boy representing them than someone with ambition and drive. He had died shortly after losing his seat and the funeral procession went on for five miles. Quite an achievement in a town that hardly had five miles of tarmac in it.

Not for the first time she mused that if Scotland had gone independent, it would have spelled the end of her current tenure. At least that would have freed her from any responsibilities up here. She shook the thought out of her head. Heresy. Without that referendum success, she wouldn’t have secured her place on the front bench.

Yet moving up into the Shadow Cabinet seemed to make her local detractors even angrier. What was she meant to do, aim for the middle? Settle for average? Waste time in a backwater constituency with no greater ambition than getting EU approved
terroir
status for Stornoway black pudding? That was not her style. Shadow Home Secretary was not the most glamorous brief, but she was determined to work as hard on this as she did on anything else.

Arjun kept reading while Morag checked her make-up in a hand mirror and freshened her taupe lipstick. The deep lines etched either side of her mouth gave her the look of a stern headmistress. What folks in Cameron Bridge failed to appreciate was that her rise in the party had not been easy or quick. Far from it. Sure, the odd columnist might sneer about ‘uneasy alliances’ during the referendum and MPs who ‘sold out the voters’, but whatever they thought in Scotland, London mattered more to her. Down there, which croft your granddad had worked was less important than being able to play the political game.

Not to mention looking good while doing it. Her first years in the Commons, she watched and learned. The tweed skirts and boxy dresses that had done the job at home when she sat on the town council were replaced with tailored suits that whispered good taste. She stopped trimming her own fringe and started paying hundreds for the requisite swishy bob from a salon in Covent Garden. In time her sleek style was practically Westminster legend – even if she was, as commentators never failed to note, a greyer version of the woman who had first gone down to Westminster. Funny how the men who were freshmen MPs at the same time she was elected never took any stick for having aged too.

Looking the part was only half of it. The other was never letting her schedule slow down. Morag had lost count of the times she bookended a day with breakfast radio on one end and
Newsnight
on the other, with back-to-back meetings crammed in between. If Thatcher had been the Iron Lady, then she was the Iron Maiden. She would never be caught propping up the Commons bar when there was work to be done.

It had all paid off, but at the cost of alienating the people at home. Only lack of credible opposition kept her in the seat now and she knew it. Opposing the independence campaign was a black mark against her in their eyes and being named Shadow Home Secretary hadn’t helped. They knew she wasn’t one of them any more – if she ever had been.

‘Crikey, a murder!’ Arjun rattled the paper.

‘What?’ Morag craned her head to get a better look.

Arjun pointed to the lower corner of an inside page. ‘Well, maybe. Found off the coast of Skye. Says it was brought back here to Cameron Bridge yesterday.’

‘Huh,’ Morag said. The details were scant, the paper calling the remains ‘as yet unidentified’ and stated that police ‘had not ruled out foul play’. A tingle of nerves crept up her neck. For all its craggy isolation, unidentified bodies were unusual in this part of the world, murders even more so. When killings did happen they were more often of the drunken rage variety. An unidentified body on the beach? Out of the summer season? That was . . . unusual. Worryingly so. But there were other jobs to get on with this morning. Morag made a note to herself to look into it later.

Later, as it turned out, was still a long way off. Morag’s coffee went stone cold as she smiled and nodded her way through hours of a constituency surgery with all the political verve of a slug on a lettuce.

Morag nodded in time to the cadence of mumbles and squeaks emitting from the woman opposite her, her twelfth appointment of the day. She eyed the packaged cheese sandwich Arjun had brought her for lunch, but she probably wouldn’t even be able to eat it until she was on the train back to London.

‘It’s criminal, is what it is. The access road behind the church is all but impassable.’ The lady in a bobbled cardigan as dull as her dishwater hair jabbed a finger in Morag’s direction. ‘It’s slippery and the gritters never go up there. I nearly broke my hip when I slipped on it last week. Year on year nobody does anything about it.’

Morag tapped her foot idly on the corner of the desk. She was sporting her signature navy suit and red patent kitten heels, the same ones that had caused a stir at the party conference over a decade ago when she was still one of ‘Brant’s Babes’. Well, not exactly the same ones. At the last count there were seventeen pairs in her closet.

Tales of parking woe were a common local preoccupation. Also popular were complaints about the state of the A road to Cameron Bridge, a single carriageway dented with potholes the entire hundred miles from Glasgow onwards.

The complainers had a point and she was mostly sympathetic. The dire state of the road was why she took the train to and from London. That, and the fact she could get a single sleeper carriage and doze through the entire wretched journey. There were still sections of the road where two cars would find it difficult to pass each other, and that was even before accounting for all the tourist caravans and coaches pootling up the way in summer. Still, none of these problems were technically her responsibility, and hearing about them was keeping her from doing anything productive with the day. ‘This might be better put to the council instead of me,’ Morag would gently suggest. ‘Or to your
MSP
.’

Her suggestion was part of a well-worn script. The constituents knew as well as she did that an MP could do nothing about the roads. They were simply blowing off steam. Morag was of the opinion that things in Cameron Bridge would never improve. Shops stayed closed, the road stayed riddled with holes and the occasional badly placed patch of tarmac, and the outlook stayed as grey as the place they inhabited. The economy was always worse than expected, the jobs fewer. The prospects for anyone born and raised in Cameron Bridge, save perhaps for Morag herself, were not so bright.

This had not always been the case. Only a few decades ago Cameron Bridge was busy with shoppers, drawing people in from all over the Highlands as far away as Cape Wrath and Stornoway. The forestry plantations provided valuable jobs – jobs that many young men who entered the business assumed would be for life. As the plantations came to maturity, though, the forestry companies suddenly decided that the lumber wasn’t worth the cost of cutting it down. The sawmills closed, then the paper mill. In a short time the town went from being a regional hub to a struggling backwater.

Much the same story had played out all over the Highlands, but Cameron Bridge, compared to some other towns that were quicker to adapt to the new service economy, failed to recover. The poor roads and infrequent trains were only one part of a larger problem. Chain shops that had invaded high streets elsewhere in the country caused their fair share of problems, but even they wouldn’t touch Cameron Bridge. Foreign investment schemes kept rents in the empty shops as high as a tax scam, offsetting profits in more popular parts of the Highlands. The high street was a mix of boarded-up fronts and charity shops. Most people in the area did their shopping online these days.

‘It’s the incomers is what it is,’ the woman said. ‘No respect for our way of life here.’ Morag nodded with feigned sympathy. Most likely by ‘incomers’ the lady meant families who had been in the area only two, maybe three, generations. Even those too young to have ever experienced a war talked about the Clearances and 1745 like they were yesterday.

The body found in Raasay though – now that was real news. Like many isolated Highlands towns Cameron Bridge had some local crime, though more usually drug related. The exposed West Coast was a perfect location for traffickers to smuggle in contraband, and the local police were little more than Keystone Cops in her opinion.

But a body. She was going to have to see about this.

Morag Munro drummed her fingers on the desk as her mind wandered. The drumming was a bad old habit that had started in boring lessons at school. It continued through insultingly basic lectures at university, worsened in her years on local committees and councils in the Highlands, and had since reached something of a frenzy in the tedious time-wasting that comprised ninety per cent of her working day since being elected as MP.

By now she hardly even noticed when she was doing it. The same could not be said of anyone who saw her at work or on television. Early in her career, when the political press corps had picked up on it, she laughed it off as ‘nervous energy’. As opposed to what it so often was: a thinly veiled desire to throttle whomever was talking.