Sail of Stone (48 page)

Her mother had never shown up in her dreams before.

Now she was driving on a beach.

Her mother was suddenly standing there, too, gesturing, raising both hands, standing in the way of the car.

Suddenly there was water all around! She tried to scream, scream. She couldn’t
breathe
.

Her own screams woke her up, or her attempts to scream. She felt an arm around her shoulders. It was warm. She heard Fredrik’s voice.

Macdonald parked on the square below the Seafield Hotel. The city sloped sharply toward the sea. Winter stood on the square with his overnight bag over his shoulder. It was twilight in the haze. Winter saw the enormous iron structures that were suspended straight across the upper part of Cullen. From a distance, the viaducts could be mistaken for horizontal cathedrals.

“Impressive,” he said.

“I agree,” said Macdonald. “But the trains have stopped running.”

They had called from the car. There were two vacant rooms at the Seafield; more than that. The season was over.

The building was of white stone, an old inn. The lobby was done in polished mahogany, silver, gold, a tartan pattern that Winter guessed belonged to the owners’ clan, the Campbell family. It had various shades of blue, black, and green, like the sea at the end of the road through Cullen.

Herbert Campbell discreetly asked them about the evening. Could he perhaps recommend the hotel restaurant? He could, and they reserved a table for eight o’clock.

They dropped into the bar for an ale before they went up to their rooms.

“Impressive,” said Winter.

“It’s famous even in Scotland,” said Macdonald.

It wasn’t only the shining wood of the bar, the leather furniture, the open fire, the heavy art on the walls. It was the bottles in a row at the bar and the shelves behind them. Winter had to ask.

“Two hundred forty-one kinds of malt whisky,” said the female bartender.

“Think about that for a drink before dinner,” said Macdonald.

Winter called Angela from his room. He stood at the window and saw the street below and half the sea and a group of small stone houses that flocked together down by the harbor.

“Found a good hotel?” he said.

“Sarah had a favorite and I agree with her,” said Angela. “I can see the castle from the window right now.”

“I can see half the sea,” said Winter.

“How is the investigation going?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Are there any traces of John Osvald?”

“Maybe.” Winter sat down and then stretched out on the bed. It was hard, but not too hard. Through the window he could see the upper portion of the stone house across the street. A seagull, or some kind of gull, was sitting above a window bay. “It’s as though he’s been here. Stayed here, if you understand what I mean. We’ve even spoken to an old man who knew him back then and claims to have seen him
now
.”

“Well, there you go.”

“I don’t think we’ll find him,” said Winter.

“You can see the sights, anyway,” said Angela.

“You too.”

“We were planning to take the train tomorrow afternoon up to that place in the Highlands.”

“We’ll probably be driving at the same time. We should be there in time to see you for dinner. A reunion dinner.”

“What are you doing tonight, then?”

“Eating dinner.” He changed position on the bed. “I’m going to try that soup. Cullen skink.”

“It doesn’t sound good.”

“Steve says it isn’t good.”

“Then I understand that you have to try it.” He heard a sound behind her, a door opening, a male voice, a female voice.

“Oops, here comes room service.” Winter thought he heard Sarah Macdonald’s voice. Angela came back. “A bottle of good white wine.”

“Have you talked to Elsa?” Winter asked.

“Only twice this afternoon.”

“I called, but no one was home at Lotta’s. And no answer on her cell.”

“They’re at the movies right now.”

“Okay. I’ll call later. See you tomorrow. Hugs and kisses.”

He dropped the phone next to him on the bed. He saw Arne
Algotsson’s face before him as the confused old fisherman said the word for the Scottish haddock soup.

He sat up and massaged his shoulder, which had grown stiff in the car. His body needed more massaging now that he was past forty.

There was a knock at the door.

He called out a “Yes?”

“Fancy a walk before dinner?” he heard Macdonald’s voice say.

They walked south on Seafield Street, passed Bayview Road at the curve, and continued down a few stairways that led to the strange little houses, which formed a small, closely built neighborhood next to the harbor. Winter could see a beach beyond them.

This was Seatown. They walked along the narrow streets, which didn’t have names. The numbers on the houses didn’t make sense.

“I think the numbers show what order the houses were built in,” said Macdonald.

They passed Cullen Methodist Church.

Farther down the street was a red telephone booth, as old as the one in Pennan. As Winter passed he listened for rings.

Hundred-year-old stairs had been carved out of the wall down to the docks. Smaller fishing boats were on shore now, during the ebb. Their bellies shone white, like fish on land. The sky had darkened and was blue on the way to black. The moon was faint, but it was there. The horizon covered everything the eye could see. The houses in Seatown were luminous. Children’s clothes waved at them with short arms from a clothesline.

“Where are all the people?” said Winter.

They walked back, past the church and the phone booth. A curtain moved in one of the windows of a house that looked like it would soon collapse. The house was black. The curtain moved again. Who wouldn’t be curious?

They encountered a child walking along the western house walls with his eyes on the ground. It was a boy of about ten, in short pants and a cap. He could have been from the 1950s. All of this could have been from the 1950s, in some cases even the 1850s.

Winter thought of the smell that existed in almost every British building. It was a smell from the past.

They walked up the stairs again and took a right onto Bayview and walked in the shadow of the viaducts and took a left on North Castle Street. The Three Kings pub was there.

Macdonald looked at his watch.

“One for the long road back to the hotel?”

“Of course,” said Winter.

Inside it was dark; the windows were small and couldn’t let very much light in even on a brilliant day. There was a middle-aged woman behind the bar. Apparently all the bartenders in Cullen were women. A man was sitting at one of the tables by the windows. He had his back to them. There was a glass in front of him. He had a knitted cap on his head. A fisherman, thought Winter.

Macdonald ordered two glasses of ale. The woman tapped them up and served them. They remained standing on the bar as the ale cleared. The woman appeared to be looking out through the window where the man in the cap was sitting. He hadn’t moved while they had been inside.

“Skaal,” said Macdonald, raising his glass.

They drank. Winter couldn’t help watching the man’s back, which was thin and hunched forward. He still didn’t move. The whisky glass in front of him was empty; the pint glass was empty. The man was like a frozen figure. One of many who’d frozen into place in these coastal towns and slowly crumbled away from wind and salt as the economy sailed away with the fishing industry. Macdonald drank again. Maybe he should be glad that his grandfather, or maybe it was his great-grandfather, had left the coast. Otherwise perhaps he would be sitting like that. At the same time, I’m from the coast myself. But I am from another world.

The tradition at Seafield was that dinner guests were shown into the bar while the table was prepared, and the headwaiter handed out menus and wine lists.

Winter and Macdonald didn’t protest. They sat down in the two leather chairs by the fire.

Another female bartender came to their chairs to take their predinner drink order. Winter let Macdonald choose.

“What do you say to Springbank, the twenty-one-year-old, of course?” said Macdonald.

Winter nodded as he lit a Corps.

There was a gentle strain of a melody in the bar. Winter recognized “Galveston,” Glen Campbell. It was probably a coincidence, or was the singer a distant relative of the owners?

Glen as in Glen Deveron, GlenDronach, Glen Elgin, Glen Garioch, Glen Keith, Glen Mhor, Glen Moray, Glen Ord, Glen Spey, Glen Scotia, Glenrothes, the unknown celebrities from the secluded distilleries.

The headwaiter arrived with the menus, handwritten and bound in red leather.

There were few other guests in the bar: a younger couple on a small sofa in front of one of the windows, two older couples sitting together around a coffee table in the middle of the room, a solitary younger man in front of a solitary glass at the bar.

The bartender returned with the whisky, two tumblers beside it, and a small carafe of water.

Macdonald poured a few drops of water into his malt whisky. Winter waited. They drank. It was good. A touch of coconut in the finish. Yes. Sherry, toffee, seaweed, grass, peat on the tongue. Yes. A complicated flavor.

Winter ordered Cullen skink as an appetizer. He thought he liked the taste of smoked haddock boiled with potatoes and milk and onion. Steve grinned behind his bouillabaisse. Winter thought of Arne Algotsson again. How could this still be in his crumbling brain? Why had the name Cullen skink gotten stuck there? Was it just Cullen, just the first part? Was that why? I’ve thought about it before. Why was it this strange little town that stuck with Algotsson forever? Did he even have time to come here? Did anyone else come here? Had someone mentioned the name to him recently?

The dining room was also done in Scottish colors and polished wood and offered innovative dishes in the Scottish tradition. Macdonald smiled a bit:

Grilled herring with pan-fried porridge cake.

Black pudding en croute with calvados and apple glaze.

Venison with black pudding.

Winter ordered grilled sole with pesto and garlic; Macdonald ordered a steak. They tried the wines.

“I thought Craig would have called by now,” said Macdonald, putting down his glass.

“Mmhmm.”

“Three calls,” said Macdonald. “Two women.”

“Well, we know that Johanna called him twice,” said Winter.

“Craig ought to have been able to check that by now,” said Macdonald. “And the third one.”

“I don’t think we can trace it,” said Winter.

“Why not?”

“They probably thought of that,” said Winter.

“Who is ‘they’?”

Yes. Who is “they”? Winter drank the white wine. He smelled the scent of a charcoal grill.

Who is “they”?

A surviving fisherman and a woman who made his phone calls.

Or a former acquaintance of Axel Osvald. He had been here before. Or a new acquaintance.

The food arrived. They tasted it. It was good.

Winter noticed that the young couple from the bar was already getting up from their table in the dining room. The woman nodded shyly in their direction and Winter nodded back. The younger man turned around. Winter noticed his profile. It suddenly looked like John Osvald’s profile in the photograph from Winter’s thin portfolio, the photograph in faint sepia tones. The man over there was still standing, in profile like an Egyptian mural. Winter saw it. He saw the photograph in his mind’s eye, he saw the stranger’s profile, Osvald’s profile, the hotel walls, he saw a red wall, a staircase that led …

“
God!
” he said loudly, and Macdonald gave a start with his fork halfway to his mouth and the other guests turned sharply around.

“I’ve seen him!” Winter said.

Macdonald lowered his fork.

“Have you suddenly been saved, Erik?”

“Osvald! He was there!” Winter said, and Macdonald put down his fork.

“Where was he?”

“What was that town called … Buckie, right? Where we were looking for the rental car?”

“Yes. Buckie.”

“We had tea at the old hotel.”

“The Cluny Hotel.”

“We walked up the stairs.”

“We walked down them, too,” Macdonald said.

Winter moved his hand as though he were waving away Macdonald’s comment.

“I think it was as I was walking up. I … we looked at all of those old framed photos that were hanging on the wall in the stairway.”

“The photos of trawlers,” said Macdonald.

“Not only that.” Winter could see now, he could
see,
it was completely clear, completely certain. “One of those pictures showed a bunch of people standing around that war monument on the square outside. In memory of everyone, et cetera. And I remember that next to the picture I read that the picture was taken at the end of the war, after World War Two, and there are people everywhere, like I said, but in the foreground there’s a guy in a cap, and you can see him in profile, and it was Osvald!” Winter leaned forward a bit. “It’s the same face I have in the picture up there in my room, the same profile. Shit, I didn’t see it then, but it’s been lying there ripening in my wonderful subconscious.” Winter looked to the side, but the young couple had left. “I realized it when I saw a guy here get up.”

“The end of the war,” said Macdonald. “Osvald disappeared four years earlier.”

“It was him,” Winter said. “I’m as good as positive.”

“Well,” said Macdonald, “it’s a little late to go check now.”

“We’ll have to do it first thing tomorrow morning,” said Winter.

He had left the window open, and his room smelled like the sea. Ringmar called as he was about to turn off the lights for the night.

“There’s no trawler from Styrsö called the
Mariana.
”

“I didn’t think there would be,” said Winter.

“And there’s no fisherman on Styrsö named Erikson.”

He had a restless night. He dreamed of many things, none of them pleasant. Everyone was scared in his dreams; he was scared.

He had called Elsa before dinner. He wished he had her voice recorded
on tape. Next time he traveled. But he wasn’t sure that he would travel without her again.