Evil for Evil

For Xander with fondest love

The island. He stood at the window in the half-dark, looking out to where it lay in the bay, no more than a shape in the early mists.

The landscape was all grey: dark-grey land below his window, then smooth pale-grey sea and sky which had just a hint of silver there in the east where light was dawning.

It was so near! Only five hundred yards away in distance, but in reality … He chewed his lip in frustration. It might be all grey, but what he was seeing was gold, gold, among the cold, ancient stones.

The island. She turned in her sleep, crying out, but only a muttered groan emerged. She started awake when his hand touched her shoulder.

‘All right?’ he said, half asleep himself.

‘Fine. Sorry.’

She waited for his breathing to become regular then slipped out of bed in the darkened room. She dared not risk going back to sleep again.

The island. She watched the light strengthen as she lay in bed, looking out at it through the window whose curtains were never closed.

Its outline was becoming clearer as the early mist lifted to hang in the tops of the trees at the blunt seaward end; from there it sloped down to a tail of rocks, covered by the incoming tide. Its image was etched in her mind and she could see it even when her eyes were shut.

Tears gathered, gathered and silently spilt over. She made no attempt to wipe them away as they trickled down the side of her face and soaked the pillow. It was always hardest in the morning when she woke from sleep and remembered with a fresh shock of despair the tiny grave that lay over there across the water.

The island. He glanced at it as he passed in his boat, on his way out to check the pots for crab and lobster. Just another of the Isles of Fleet – Ardwall, Murray, Barlocco and this one, Lovatt, though the locals knew it by its old name, Tascadan. He didn’t like thinking about it, and mostly he succeeded. But recently …

He grimaced slightly, then headed out into the bay.

The island. She was there, in her dreams, the peace weaving magic around her, the only sounds whispering waves and the soft rustle of a gentle breeze shivering the leaves on the trees. She walked on soft turf, her feet barely touching its surface, and as she went towards the wood a dappled fawn stepped out of the shadows, unafraid, and walked beside her. She stroked its soft ears and smiled in her sleep.

The island. The swelling tide rose into the little cave on the seaward side, the waves sweeping round in the confined space, scouring away at its walls, breaking below one of the rocky shelves up at the back.
Only at the highest tides could the spray reach it, to continue the cleansing work on the skeleton that lay there, leg and arm bones still shackled to the rock.

It was a milk-opal morning now: the sea still, pearly, shot with sparks of fire from the sunrise; the sky palest blue, with low clouds tinged pink and apricot. The bulk of the island was still shadowy in the dawn light.

The man swimming from there to the shore in an arrowhead of spreading ripples, his dark head sleek as a seal’s, powered his way across the shallow channel to the sandy bay. Above, on the springy turf beside a tangle of bracken and briars, his dog watched him.

Beside the little jetty where a couple of boats and a flat barge were moored he waded ashore naked, brushing water from his shoulders and arms and shivering in the morning chill. His last swim of the year, he decided. Though the forecast was for a few more days of this golden September, there had been a vicious hint of autumn in the water temperature this morning.

The dog bounded to his side and he fondled its thick ruff, then picked up a towelling robe from the jetty, rubbing his dark hair with it and wiping his face before he shrugged it on. The smooth, plastic feel of the burn tissue under his right eye gave him the usual tiny shock of distaste. He tied the belt round him then stood looking towards Lovatt Island. His island.

The air seemed full of memories today. It had been a morning just like this three years ago when Matt Lovatt had taken his first swim across the narrow strip of water that isolated Lovatt Island except at low tides. Then, though, it had been late spring, the perfect weather an early promise of summer; today the trees in the wood on the island were showing red and russet, the bracken was brown
and dying and the later sunrise spoke of the journey into long, dark nights, of endings not beginnings.

Melissa had been sitting on the jetty like a mermaid on a rock with her long brown wavy hair. She was singing, and as he came out of the water he saw the round heads of two or three seals bobbing about in the bay.

She smiled over her shoulder but didn’t stop singing: ‘
I am a man upon the land,
I am a silkie in the sea
…’

The seals turned their great mild eyes on her, then when she finished the plaintive ballad submerged again with breathy sighs and a whirl of bubbles.

Lissa’s own eyes were lit with happiness. ‘I didn’t believe it, you know. I thought it was just a pretty myth, that they liked music. Oh Matt, this is an enchanted place! It’s paradise – I could be happy here.’

He had agreed, laughing at her shining face. It was all he had hoped for, but even then he had misgivings. Lissa was so volatile, so fragile! He had seen that unhealthy excitement before, that enthusiasm so quickly quenched by cold reality. Happiness wasn’t a natural state for either of them.

And it didn’t take long for the serpent to show itself in Paradise: a crude daubing in whitewash on a wall saying, ‘White settlers go home’. They had shrunk into themselves, like snails at a sprinkling of salt; they were oversensitive, perhaps, seeing general hostility in places where there might only be shyness or indifference, but the petty persecutions left them with little will to struggle for local acceptance.

Paradise turned to purgatory. The tragedy of a stillborn child, now in his little grave on the island, might have brought them together but instead drove them into separate grief. When they did talk, the words seemed weighted with too much significance, and the mourning silence spread and spread until there was nothing between them any more
but echoing space. Matt could see the destructive darkness drawing closer and closer around her once more, and this time he could only watch, powerless.

Kerr Brodie’s arrival had been a relief. There were, to quote, three people in their marriage now, but if it hadn’t been for him there would have been no marriage at all. For all that stresses were inevitable in any relationship involving three people, they could have conversation and even laughter over the kitchen table, before they went to their separate rooms to wrestle with their individual demons.

The dog, digging aimlessly in the sand, grew bored and loped over to its master, looking up at him expectantly.

‘Yes, I want breakfast too,’ Matt said, shoving his feet into broken-backed deck shoes and heading off up the hill.

He wasn’t looking forward to the day. In fact, he decided, he’d take off somewhere till it was all over, go for a long walk. He’d agreed to the TV interview after they’d somehow heard about his rehab idea but he wasn’t going to appear himself, like some sort of freak show. He was unconsciously fingering the disfigured side of his face as he let himself in through the gate to Lovatt’s Farm.

The woman talking to camera was standing in front of a backdrop that looked as if it had come straight out of the VisitScotland Galloway tourist brochure. The sky was blue with dinky fluffy clouds, just like it should be, the grass was implausibly green and out in Wigtown Bay the Isles of Fleet looked as if they were auditioning for the precious-jewels-set-in-a-silver-sea cameo part.

A stocky grey-haired man, with soldierly bearing but an awkward, limping gait walked beside the reporter, saying, ‘So Major Matt and I discussed it and felt that what this place had done for me, it could do for others.’ He had a strong Glasgow accent.

The camera swung to a square-faced young woman with tousled light-brown hair, smiling as she stroked a red deer hind that was nuzzling her with what came across to the viewers as affection rather than greed for the carrot she was holding out of shot. Then it closed in again on the reporter.

‘So here on the deer farm, amid all this tranquil beauty, courtesy of Major Matt Lovatt – and with Dancer’s help, of course,’ she smiled as the camera panned back to the deer, nudging impatiently now, ‘—troubled former soldiers like Christie here can find peace, and healing for the wounds, visible or invisible, which have poisoned their lives.

‘Carla Brewer,
News at Six
, Innellan, Galloway, south-west Scotland.’

Eddie Tindall was studying his wife, under cover of reading his evening paper. Even after eight years, she still seemed a marvel to him and when they were in the same room his eyes were irresistibly drawn to her. He knew she hated being watched, though, so he had developed a range of subterfuges: a mannerism of putting his hand to his forehead to shade his eyes, looking up under his brows with his head bent over paperwork or, as now, pretending to read a newspaper.

The
Six O’Clock News
was showing on a huge plasma screen above the marble fireplace of their Salford Exchange Quay penthouse. The polished floor was honey-gold, the soft leather sofas were biscuit colour and the most expensive interior designer around had used a palette of warm, creamy shades for the paintwork with a feature wall of glowing bronze and gold wallpaper. Even Eddie had blinked at the cost of that wall.

He had bought the flat for Elena three years ago. They had been
living until then in the house where he and his ex-wife had brought up their family, still unchanged from the day Debra and his son and daughter had left, hurt and angry, for a new life in London. Naturally, he’d told Elena she could gut the place if she liked, but she hadn’t liked – nor even, apparently, cared – that nothing in it was her choice.

Her indifference began to bother him. Eddie had no confidence in his hold on her heart and without material things she cherished to anchor her, she might just walk out of his life as randomly as she had come into it. Choice, too, was personality given concrete form and he had offered her the Exchange Quay flat as a blank canvas, in hope if not expectation that her decisions would give him an insight into the mystery that was Elena, even after all these years. If he understood her better, he might obsess about her less.

Elena’s one decision had been the designer, picking him, Eddie guessed sadly, purely on the basis of his reputation among the Salford ladies who lunched – you couldn’t call them Elena’s friends – and giving him a completely free hand. Looking round the room, Eddie could not see a single object she had chosen herself.

She was sitting watching the news. Elena never fidgeted; she had a quality of stillness which to Eddie seemed to permeate the room, so that coming back from a bruising day he felt his cares slipping away as he stepped into the pool of tranquillity she created. Just at this moment, though, he noticed tension.

Not that it was obvious. Her slate-blue eyes didn’t blink, her manicured hands lay folded in her lap, her long, slim legs in the well-tailored black trousers were crossed, just as they had been five minutes before. But there was a tiny pulse flicking just at the corner of her eye and now she put up her hand to try to quieten it.

She turned her head, as if she had felt his eyes upon her. Eddie
leant forward hastily to pick up the remote control as the music for the end of the news came on, switched it off and stood up.

‘Drink, doll?’

‘Please.’ Elena smiled up at him and he smiled back, his heart as always skipping a beat at her loveliness.

He had bought it all, of course – the neat, tip-tilted nose, the shining caramel bob with its subtle highlights, the white, perfectly aligned teeth. But those had been her decision, not his; he had seen beauty in the Elena he had first met as one of her clients, when the hair was peroxide and stringy and those eyes had looked too big for her pinched face and had bruised-looking shadows beneath.

She had been suspicious as some little feral cat, happier in the familiar gutter than with the promise of a silk cushion and a saucer of cream, because in her experience any change was a threat. Eddie had bought hours and hours of her time, taking her out to feed her, to talk to her, to amuse her, until at last she trusted him – as much as she ever would trust anyone.

He would never know just what had at last brought her to agree to marry him – the ugly death of another prostitute, perhaps. In a rare, treasured moment of closeness, she had quoted a favourite story from her childhood, the childhood she would never discuss: ‘
I am the cat who walks by himself and all places are alike to me
.’ She was that way still.

The thirties drinks cabinet had a mirrored interior and as Eddie got out the triangular glasses to make vodka Martinis he caught sight of himself: a balding middle-aged man with a roll of fat forming round his neck and a face like Les Dawson on an off day. How could someone like Elena love that?

She never said she did, and he never asked her. It was enough that she was there, that she was his. She had cost him his marriage and his
children, who had not spoken to him for ten years. But if her smiles were bought, they were sweet even at that price.

He brought Elena a glass. She was pressing her cheek again, and he felt a sense of disquiet. He needn’t bother asking her what was upsetting her; she would laugh and say it was nothing. But he would be watching nervously to see if the wide cuff bangles that covered her wrists would appear again.

The Smugglers Inn was quiet this early on a Friday evening. Most of the visitors had gone, though the belated apology of a mellow September after a disappointing summer was drawing back some owners of the many chalets and caravans tucked into the rising ground above Fleet Bay for the weekend. The sun was warm enough during the day, but the evenings had a chill which was already bringing autumn livery to the trees, and lengthening nights were a reminder that the decline into the long dark winter had begun.