The Visitors (13 page)

There was a frost of sea salt on the window, speckled where the wind had lifted the waves and lashed the house with spindrift. All the village houses had this rime of salt where they faced the sea. It wasn’t worth cleaning. The next rainstorm rinsed the house clean. The next windy day left another coat of spray. Beyond the smeary glass, the ocean opened like a bowl. There was nothing between Dog Rock and the horizon
but a vast, calm sea, rippled with a thousand little waves, caught upon the sunlight like crumbs of broken glass. The size of it, the emptiness, made my eyes ache.

‘Quite something, isn’t it?’ said Ailsa.

She stood beside me, offering a cup of tea. Still feeling a little unsettled, eyes squinting with sun, I took the mug.

‘Incredible view. I mean, you can see Dog Rock from my house,’ and I felt suddenly guilty, remembering how I’d spied on them with my binoculars. ‘But you can’t see the back,’ I finished, lamely.

‘I’m glad Dad found it. I think I like this place.’

‘Not much happens.’

‘That’s fine with me. I like the quiet.’

We watched the sea for a moment longer.

‘Why here in particular,’ I said, ‘on Dog Rock?’

‘Because it was available. And because islands are safe.’

‘Bancree is an island.’

‘When you’re over here,’ she grinned, ‘Bancree is the mainland. Think about it. Out here, it’s small enough that you can see who’s coming.’

‘What do you mean, “who’s coming”? Islands keep you safe from what?’

Her smile dropped away. She looked out the window, and took a long sip of her tea.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this,’ she said, and paused. Looking out to sea, she weighed a decision, then made her mind up. ‘Come and have a look.’

Puzzled, I followed her back into the living room. Upstairs, a tiny landing split the top floor into two bedrooms. Ailsa gestured to one side, and I stuck my head round the door. There was no furniture, and no bed – just a nest of sleeping bags and blankets by one wall. Her father’s few clothes lay along one wall in piles of trousers, shirts and jumpers. The
rest of the room had been invaded by an avalanche of books, newspapers and notepads. All those office storage boxes were in his room. They lined the walls like bricks, stacked three or four deep. Some were labelled with place names, or people’s names, or dates. The small window and the crowding eaves cut a lot of light out of the room, and it was gloomy despite the sunny day.

In the middle of the room, the newspapers formed a clearing, a defined workplace on the floorboards. A very old and very battered laptop was laid to one side.

‘This is where he works,’ she said. ‘Look.’

Pinned almost floor to ceiling was the biggest map of the Western Isles I’d ever seen. When I stepped closer, I realised it was several large-scale maps trimmed and taped together. Scrawled all over it were notes and pins and different-coloured stickers, with looping, dotted lines and arrows and string showing directions, or connecting remote locations. Newspaper cuttings from island chronicles were pinned to the edges of the map, too. They covered a period of many years, but they all said pretty much the same thing:

By the dozen, yellowing newspaper clips listed fishermen lost at sea, bartenders who’d never turned up to work, missing babysitters, farm workers vanished on foggy days. I scanned through the clippings, then looked again at the map, focusing on Bancree. Two red dots marked the island, and one yellow. There was a yellow dot in Tanno, too, just across the Sound.

‘What is this?’ I said, barely breathing.

‘It sounds daft, OK? But my dad is sort of a detective.’

‘A detective?’

She pulled a face.

‘Not a real one. Well, sort of.’

‘Like a hobby?’

She grimaced. ‘More like a calling. He tries to find missing people when the police stop looking. And there’s a lot been going missing round here in the last year, so he’s moved over to have a look for himself.’

‘You mean Dougie? Doug MacLeod? The man on the poster?’

‘Aye, I think he’s one of them. Look, there he is.’

She tapped on the map. Sure enough, an arrow drawn from Bancree led to Dougie’s newspaper article, and Bill Wright was pinned beside him. Both were marked with red dots.

‘There’s others, too. Dad doesn’t talk much about it. But that’s why we move around so much, so he can look for whoever’s doing it.’

‘You’re not saying there’s someone here on the island?’ I said, incredulous. ‘Like a murderer?’

‘You tell me,’ she shrugged. ‘I don’t chose where we move to. Dad thinks there’s something going on here, so we moved here. If it’s anything like usual, we’ll be here six months, or maybe a year, then the trail goes cold and we head out somewhere else.’

‘Four people missing?’ I said, touching the dots around Bancree. ‘I thought there were only two?’

Ailsa joined me at the map. ‘He has different criteria for each missing person. Red is definitely suspicious. Yellow is a maybe. One of the things he does is join the dots. I mean, some of these people,’ and here she gestured at the clippings,
‘some of them really have just run away or fallen off boats or got lost walking and that’s that. They’ve got nothing to do with any sort of conspiracy. They were just unlucky. But Dad draws everything together, just in case.’

We studied the map.

‘Notice anything?’

‘They all point this way,’ I said, studying the arrows and lines marked on the map. From the Orkneys to the northern coast on the mainland, then west and south through the Outer Hebrides to Bancree, the lines hopped from island to island. Red dots punctuated each part of the route with reports of another missing person. There was hardly anything further south. The pattern was unmistakable.

The road stopped at Bancree.

‘This goes back a long time,’ said Ailsa. ‘Dad thinks this has been going more than twenty years. Some of these papers are from before I was born. He’s been looking for about sixteen, seventeen years.’

I scanned the map.

‘There are fourteen – no, fifteen red dots. Fifteen murders. That’s not possible. How have the police not worked it out?’

‘Time,’ she said. ‘Effort. I don’t know. A lot of the cases are a long way apart. Both in time and distance. Sometimes the cases are years and years apart, then two or three at once. Maybe they haven’t made the connection, or maybe they’re not bothered. You know what worries me most?’

‘What’s that?’

‘Despite everything, there is no connection. There’s nothing but unlucky people, and Dad’s got it completely wrong. He’d be devastated. This has become his life’s work.’

Headlines blared beside Bancree.

The context of the map made it much more real. The pins and arrows made it seem inevitable, a weight of evidence bearing down on the island. I thought about how upset Ronny
was. First Billy, then Doug. But I didn’t want to believe it.

‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Do you think it’s real?’

Ailsa looked out beyond the map, eyes glazed.

‘Dad’s convinced, but honestly, I don’t know. I tell you this much, though. I’d prefer living somewhere long enough to actually know the people who disappear.’

‘I’ve lived here all my life,’ I said.

All that moving around sounded great to me.

‘It’s a lot to take in,’ she said. ‘Come and see my room.’

A step across the landing led to Ailsa’s bedroom. It was smaller than her dad’s but far lighter. Again, there was no bed. A sleeping bag and mat lay along one wall, tucked beneath the sloping eaves. A withered wardrobe stood against the wall, and a small suitcase leaned against it. There was a big stack of books piled up in one corner. It was spartan.

‘It’s not much,’ she said, following my gaze around the room, ‘but it’s home.’

She started fiddling with a little travel radio. I crossed to the window. Her room looked onto some of the sea and some of the main island.

‘Hey. I can see my house from here.’

‘Aye?’

‘That’s my bedroom on the right. That wee window.’

‘We’ll have to get walkie-talkies.’

‘Tin-can telephones. You’d get a better signal.’

Ailsa grinned back.

It was surreal to be out there on Dog Rock, looking back at the island. Ailsa was right. From here, Bancree was the mainland.

‘If you don’t mind me asking,’ I said, ‘where’s your mum?’

Ailsa flushed a little, and wouldn’t look up. She teased the embroidered edge of her pillowcase, smoothing it between her fingertips. I wished I hadn’t asked.

‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I didn’t mean anything.’

‘No, it’s not that. It just makes me think about her, that’s all.’

She gave up on the lace, and looked me in the eye.

‘Mum’s the reason we’ve moved here, I suppose. My mum’s one of the missing people.’

It wasn’t easy to hear. Ailsa told the story so simply and plainly that it was hard to connect her to it. When she was a baby, only a few months old, her mother had vanished. She was called Annie, and she’d disappeared on a mild midsummer day. Her dad used to run wildlife tours – whale-watching, dolphin-spotting, that sort of thing. He’d been out all day, taking half a dozen tourists on the trail of a rookery of seals. He’d returned to hear his daughter crying hysterically. Puzzled, he’d entered the house, wondering why his wife wasn’t seeing to the baby, and moved through the rooms in mounting concern. He’d found the infant Ailsa in her cot, howling and inconsolable. But he couldn’t find his wife. Not in the house, not in the garden, and not anywhere. He called the police, but the police couldn’t find her either. He trawled the coast, looking for her. He looked for days, then weeks. She was gone. The police gave up the search, but John had never stopped. And the further afield he looked, the more unsolved cases he discovered. To help him track the missing people, he started keeping records. He bought pins. He bought maps.

‘And that’s that,’ said Ailsa.

‘Jesus,’ I breathed. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t know what to say.’

‘There’s nothing to say. Don’t worry about it. I’ve never known it any different. Dad’s been looking for her my entire life. He thinks she was killed.’

‘Killed.’

‘She might have run away, I guess. But I think they were quite happy.’

She moved to the window. The sun dimmed in the clouds, and the room felt suddenly, incredibly cold. My skin prickled
into goose bumps. I ran my fingers along the wooden windowsill, warped with age and damp.

‘Those are my only photos of her.’

She gestured at the wall. A single frame hung above her sleeping bag, fixing several photos into a loose collage. All the pictures captured the same woman. Annie looked a lot like her daughter, but she was bigger, brighter, happier. In one image she was hugging John, both of them turned towards the camera. They were grinning. In another picture, a Polaroid with foxed corners, she was sitting with a howling baby on her knee, cupping its seashell hands in her own. I could see Ailsa so clearly in the infant. One of the pictures was newsprint, with Annie hugging her baby close. In the last picture, she stood beside a wall, looking out the window. She didn’t know there was a photographer there, and in this image she seemed sadder. They were old photos from film cameras with the edges smoothed off, everything fuzzy, no detail.

The pictures made me feel so sad, and I didn’t know what to say. I could sense Ailsa standing close beside me, lost in the photos of her mother. There was nothing I could say to make it better. Her dad’s detective work didn’t seem so exciting or weird now I knew the truth. He’d lost his wife and maybe a little of his sanity at the same time. He was heartbroken, and it had consumed him. His quest to find his wife, or to track her killer, was – well. Sixteen years. His devotion staggered me.

The last mouthful of my tea had gone cold.

‘I don’t have a dad,’ I volunteered, lamely. ‘Ronny’s my stepfather.’

Ailsa swivelled to look at me. The story was so banal, I almost felt embarrassed to tell her.

‘My dad and Mum met young, had me too early, and he wasn’t fit for fatherhood. He took himself off when I was a baby, and Mum brought me up without him. She only met Ronny a few years ago.’

‘Is he still around?’

‘Dunno. Mum might know where he is, but she won’t be telling me any time soon.’

‘Don’t you want to meet him? To know him?’

Her eyes cut into me. I was brutally conscious that knowing her mother was not an option for her, no matter how much she wanted it.

‘No one’s ever asked me that. In truth, I don’t know. I’m like you in that I’ve never known anything different. I don’t know what I’d say to him.’

We stood in silence for a moment.

‘Do you want to see the jumpers?’ asked Ailsa, abruptly.

‘Aye,’ I said, grateful to change the subject. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Go for it. They’re all in there somewhere.’

She gestured towards the rickety wardrobe. I wandered over and pulled the doors open. Much like my own clothes rail, several dozen items were crowded on wire hangers. I flicked between jeans and shirts and vest tops, settling on a woollen jumper, green with white crosses near the neck.

‘How about this one?’

‘Perfect, aye.’

‘Certain?’

‘Suits you more than me anyway.’

‘Well, thanks, then. I love it.’

I bundled the sweater beneath my arm. As I replaced the empty hanger, I spotted a floor-length scarlet dress. It was someone’s old prom gown, out of style and just a little tatty. Ailsa saw me looking and grabbed hold if it. She draped it from her shoulders and pulled an exaggerated pose, one hip cocked, pouting for a camera. I laughed.

‘Oh, that’s you to a T.’

‘Should I wear it to school?’

‘Oh, every day,’ I said, nodding wildly.

‘I’ll start tomorrow.’

‘I’d love to see the look on Tina Robson’s face, the day you sweep into school wearing that thing.’

We both sniggered at the thought.

I looked at my watch.

‘Look, I’d better go. It’s getting on, and I should work on my History report.’