The Visitors (27 page)

I walked on along the road then cut off on a footpath heading south, away from Tighna, away from Grogport, away from Izzy. Even away from Dog Rock.

Ailsa. What would she think about last night? She’d been mortified, humiliated, furious. I wanted to speak to her, to piece together what had happened with her dad. My pace slowed with the realisation that I missed her. I missed my friend. A warning bell sounded in my head. I couldn’t ever
tell her about Lachlan. I didn’t want to let her down. She might call the police, though that seemed unlikely – and besides, without a body, nothing tied me to the building site. I was more concerned about what she’d think of me, or that she wouldn’t want to be my friend. No, I couldn’t tell her. This was something for me to deal with. Me and Izzy.

There was something very dark and very dangerous on Bancree.

I traipsed along the road, weaving between potholes. The sea breeze buffeted my coat, barrelling around me. Sea birds skimmed through the troughs of waves in threes and fours, and the horizon gathered into murk. I walked for an hour or so, finding my way to the southwestern tip of the island. A stone monument was dedicated to a sunken troop ship in the Second World War. Scores of soldiers had drowned. A bunch of dead flowers was wedged against the plaque, long-since withered to stalks. I sat against the forgotten concrete, looked out into the grey, and pictured their hundred hands waving upwards, drifting with the tug of the currents, and cold streams of sunlight fading to black inside the rusting hull.

For the first time, I considered the reality of Lachie being dead. Shock hit me like walking alone onto an empty stage.

Him being dead.

His skull broken open like an eggshell.

The things inside that glistened.

The life gone, the blood still. What he’d thought to do to me, scrabbling between my legs. His penis, pale and limp. My clothes ripped open. His skull. Orange lamplight. Oranges. The matter inside.

I clamped my legs tight and tried to hold the halves of my skull together. The first sob rocked me, convulsing my stomach like a punch. I stifled the second sob with my wrist, and lay there, doubled over on the concrete, replaying the night,
staring unblinking at the pieces. I cried and cried, howling at the sea, and the clouds and the sea fused into a single band of grey.

I stayed out there for hours. I walked home still numb with it all. My face was sticky with tears. Spots of rain clicked on the road all the way to Grogport. I didn’t go in for tea, but splashed my face clean in the sink, then stripped off and fell into bed.

I didn’t dream of anything at all.

Over the next days, the world around me became wallpaper. It was there, in the background, but I stopped noticing it. At school, people stared at my bruises, stared at my face, but no one asked how I’d been hurt. Tina Robson growled at me in the corridors, but I ignored her. Whenever I was alone, Lachlan breathed cold air down my neck. I expected to meet him around corners. I felt him watching from the clouds, as though he filled the sky, leering down on all my poor choices. I tried to pay attention, but couldn’t focus on anything. When I was challenged by teachers, I told them I was sick, and hid in bathroom stalls for thirty minutes at a time. Lachie was a piece of grit, festering within me, and that made me an oyster, thickening in my shell.

Ailsa didn’t go to school for a few days. Dog Rock was quiet and dark. The dinghy disappeared for hours at a time, though I never saw them take it. I didn’t see her or John at all, though I thought of them often. I thought about John’s broad back, both compelled and repulsed by the thought of reaching out to touch him. I felt magnetised against my will, attracted to the shadows like thread wound to a spool. I wanted Ailsa close, I wanted to tell her what had happened. My tongue thickened in my mouth whenever I thought to put it into words.

The atmosphere in the house remained pinprick anxious for days. We were all bound tightly in our own thoughts, and
our conversations were short and irritable. Even baby Jamie soaked up the tension. He was baffled and anxious and quick to cry. The house sweltered in an unbearable bubble, as though the walls themselves, more than a hundred years old, were gently constricting, squeezing us closer together, cramping out the oxygen.

Ronny came home late on Wednesday. We didn’t notice him standing darkly in the doorway while me and Mum bathed the baby. Jamie sat up in the tub, fascinated as I steered a wind-up frog across the suddy water, then shrieked with delight to see his daddy.

‘Oh, hello, love,’ said Mum.

Ronny didn’t respond, standing with his brow furrowed. I steeled myself for bad news.

‘Hey. What’s going on up there?’ said Mum.

‘Lachie wasn’t in the distillery today.’

‘So what’s new?’

‘He wasn’t in yesterday, either, or Monday. No one thought a thing of it, but today was a big meeting. He was supposed to be there.’

‘Maybe he’s giving you the room to shine.’

‘If I was on fire,’ snorted Ronny, ‘Lachlan wouldn’t piss to put me out. Old Munzie’s fuming.’

‘Could he sack his own son?’

‘That’s not the point, Cath. The point is, where’s Lachie? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d bunked off work. He always been a skiver. But what with everything else lately …’

He and Mum looked at each other. She reached up and squeezed his hand.

‘I know the lad has a nasty streak,’ said Ronny. ‘God alone knows how bad it’ll be with him in charge. But all this business with people disappearing. It can’t go on like this. There’s trouble afoot.’

Nobody spoke. I left Mum and Ronny with the baby.

In my bedroom, I thought of John Dobie’s wall map, that miserable, epic chart of disappearing islanders, more than a decade of clues, wrong turns and half-answered questions. With a sudden rush of shame, I realised that Lachie would become a red pin on the map. A red herring.

The island had always seemed such a safe place, such a friendly community. Dull, but safe. Even a month ago, the thought of a murderer living on Bancree would have seemed ridiculous. It no longer felt even slightly far-fetched. Not after all those poor missing people. Not after what had happened with Lachlan. Thinking of him, dead eyes glinting, made me feel ill. And like a nightmare, I had to consider that whoever killed Lachlan also murdered Dougie and Anders. It was an awful possibility, but I couldn’t shake it. If John Dobie was right, and there was a killer on the island, then they’d been standing over me with decades of blood on their hands. I’d been helpless, unconscious. There was nothing to stop them.

So why was I still alive?

I sat by the window and watched the sea, lost in the gloaming. Ronny was right. Something was happening. Something was going on. Even as the island emptied and the people disappeared, the animals were returning. Nature was reclaiming old land, good land. I thought of the Norse stones, shrouded in lichen. The moss I’d pulled free would grow back in months, sinking anchors in the rock, eroding and obscuring until the stone was just a stone like every other stone.

What had Izzy told me? All things pass in time, lass. All things fade away. And all things were passing. I was drifting on the edge of something, skirting the surface. I felt as though I could thrust out my arm and break through the crust, reach a hand into another world. It felt so tangible, growing stronger by the hour, yet I somehow never touched it.

I scoured the bay with my binoculars, playing hide-and-seek
with the seals. I watched a heron haunt the surf, lashing down at crabs and minnows. Absently, my gaze wandered to Dog Rock, and then to Ailsa’s window. I started, then grinned. For the first time in days, she was there, looking back through binoculars of her own and waving enthusiastically. She gestured at me to wait. A moment later, she held a piece of paper to the window. I refocused the glasses.

It was written in fat capitals. I fished about on my desk for an A4 pad and a marker pen.

I smiled, but my heart sank. I wanted to tell her about Lachlan. I could never tell her about Lachlan.

I’M SO SICK AND TIRED OF THIS PLACE
.

Across the bay, she grinned.

She waved again, and ducked down from her window. Could be worse, she said. Could be worse. I thought of Anders, missing, and Lachie, dead, and the ache that billowed in my heart. I reached down and in slow, careful letters, wrote on the pad:

The
Island Queen
churned and trembled as she ploughed home across the Sound, bound for Bancree. I was on the top deck, as always, ignoring spots of rain and thinking about Lachlan and Anders and Ailsa and John and everything else. The day at school had vanished, and the clouds were low. Fog cloaked the distant island, so that all the world was painted in thick bands of blue and grey. I rolled with the waves. Bancree appeared in glimpses through the mist, only to vanish again as clouds drew around the coast like theatre curtains.

We were about halfway across the Sound when Jow cut the engines. The vibration stopped abruptly and for queer seconds we coasted, a ghost ship, turning with the waves. Someone called from the back of the boat, and I turned to follow the commotion. Jow climbed down from his cabin and hurried aft. Compelled to know, I followed, slowly, fingers tracing the guard rail. A small crowd had gathered at the stern of the ferry. With a wall of mist hanging beyond them, they peered down into the water. I joined the fringes of the group. No one spoke. Face down in the water, a body twitched and bobbed with the pull of the tide. Even after days at sea, I recognised the shirt, recognised the trousers, recognised the hair. Sea water sloshed in the dent in the back of his skull. We stood in silence and watched Lachlan float. His shirt had come loose and billowed around him.
He wore one sock. His hands and feet were waterlogged and white.

‘Jesus,’ muttered Jow, ‘get back, all of you. Everyone inside. Get below.’

‘You want a hand with it, pal?’ said one of the passengers.

Jow hesitated, then nodded. He unfastened a boathook from the rail. Everyone else trooped into the little lounge. A few were glued to the windows, wiping condensation clear, watching as the two men tried to fish the body from the water. A teenage girl stood on tiptoes, taking photos with her phone. Low chatter buzzed around the room, but I sat by myself on the far side, chewing my finger and not thinking about crabs in Lachlan’s eyes.

It took them twenty minutes to catch him and haul him out. When Jow realised who it was, his voice changed. Even through the glass I could hear the new urgency. He dashed up to the cabin and the radio. The
Island Queen
had drifted on the tide, and he fired the engines back into shuddering life. Slowly, he turned the ferry back to Tanno, and we retreated from the mist into the mist. Jow gunned the engine slower, as though in respect for the dead.

The constabulary were waiting in the harbour. They stood in a grim line, both uniform and detectives. I recognised Tom Duncan right away. He had grown up, but I still saw a schoolboy. A silent crowd had gathered, witness to our arrival. When Jow tossed down the rope, the harbourmaster missed the catch and fumbled the mooring. He looked shaken. Eventually, the ferry was secured and the ramp dropped down. There was an ambulance waiting at the top of the slip. Two paramedics carried a stretcher onto the boat, and reappeared long minutes later with the body beneath a sheet. Tom Duncan and one of the other policemen stooped to look. Even from this distance I could distinguish Lachlan’s sharp features, now
bloated by exposure to the sea. They replaced the sheet, and Jow conferred with the police. The ambulance trundled away.

By the time we left, the crowd had swelled into dozens. They spoke with their heads on one side, never taking their eyes from the action. As we cast off once more, all I could sense was accusation. I couldn’t look back for fear they’d read the truth upon me. I kept to the lounge, near a heater in one wall, and looked into the floor, the ribbing on the carpet, the bolts on the table legs. The other passengers were silent on the return trip. Word had quickly spread that it was Lachlan Crane in the water, Lachlan Crane beneath the sheet. There was a stunned amazement that he was finally dead.

For the first time in years, I felt seasick.

Buoys guided the ferry into Tighna, each crowded with gulls that watched the boat. We arrived into Bancree two hours late. One of Ronny’s distillery pals drove past me on the road and gave me a lift most of the way home. I walked the last mile in misty darkness, sea chills crowding at me.

The house was belting heat, but I kept my coat on. Mum and Ronny were watching a film in the living room. He had one arm around her, and she had her legs tucked up on the sofa. The fire blazed, and Ronny’s whisky shivered in the glow.

‘Look who it is! You’re late home, lass,’ he said. ‘Hot date in Tanno?’

Mum snorted, then saw my face.

‘Flora?’ she said. Ronny caught her tone, and lowered his glass.

‘Everything OK?’

‘What’s going on, Flo?’

My tongue was too thick for my mouth.

‘They’ve found Lachlan Crane.’

‘Is he – Christ, Flora, is he alive?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘They found him in the sea. We saw him from
the ferry this afternoon. We had to turn back and go to Tanno. There was an ambulance. And police.’

‘You didn’t see him yourself?’

‘He was floating on his front, but I knew it was him. I knew.’

‘Oh, Flo.’

Mum stepped up and embraced me, tightly. After a moment, I thought to hug her back. I noticed for the first time that I was taller than her and from nowhere, I wondered what my father looked like.