The Absent One (53 page)

She gazed into the empty, orderly rooms and pressed her lips together as the tears welled up in her eyes.

Then she heard the child stir and pulled herself together. Wiped the tip of her nose with her index finger and took two deep breaths.

If her husband was being unfaithful, then he could do without her.

There had to be more to life than this.

Her husband came into the bedroom so silently only his shadow on the wall gave him away. Broad shoulders, arms wide open. He lay down and drew her in towards him without a word. Warm and naked.

She had expected sweetnesses, but also well-considered apologies. Maybe she’d been afraid of the slight scent of some strange woman and guilt-ridden hesitation in all the wrong places, but instead he grabbed hold of her, turned her violently on to her back and began to greedily tear off her nightclothes. The moonlight was on his face. It turned her on. Now the waiting, the frustration, the worry and the doubt were all gone.

It was six months since he’d last been like this.

Thank God, at last.

‘I have to be away for a while, sweetheart,’ he said without warning over the breakfast table, stroking the child on the cheek. Distracted, as though what he said didn’t mean anything.

She frowned and pursed her lips to keep the inevitable question inside for a moment. Then she put her fork down on the plate and sat with her gaze fixed on the scrambled eggs and bacon. The night had been long. It was still with her, an ache inside her abdomen, but also the kisses and cuddles, when they had lain there all spent, and the warm looks into each other’s eyes. Until now, it had allowed her to forget all thoughts of time and place. Until now. For at this moment, the pale sun of March forced its way into the room like an unwelcome guest
to illuminate the facts. Her husband was going away. Again.

‘Why can’t you tell me what you do? I’m your wife. I won’t tell anyone,’ she said.

He sat with his cutlery suspended in the air. His eyes grew dark then.

‘Seriously,’ she went on. ‘How long am I supposed to wait before you’re like you were last night? Are we back to where we were now? Me not knowing what you’re up to, and you hardly being here, even when you’re here?’

He looked at her too directly. ‘Haven’t you known from the start that I can’t talk about my work?’

‘Yes, but …’

‘Well, then. Let’s leave it at that.’

His knife and fork clattered against the plate, and he turned towards their son with something supposed to resemble a smile.

Her breathing was steady and calm, but despair surged inside her. It was true enough. Long before their wedding he had explained to her that he was entrusted with work about which he was unable to speak. He might have hinted it was something to do with intelligence, she couldn’t really remember any more. But as far as she knew, people in the intelligence services still lived pretty normal lives alongside their jobs. Their life was in no way normal. Unless people in intelligence also spent time on alternative jobs like being unfaithful, because as far as she could see, that was the only possible explanation.

She gathered the plates and thought about giving him an ultimatum there and then. Risking his anger, which she feared, but whose full extent she had yet to comprehend.

‘When will I see you again?’ she asked.

He looked at her and smiled. ‘I’ll be home next Wednesday, I imagine. This type of job usually takes a week, ten days at most.’

‘You’ll be home just in time for your bowling tournament, then,’ she said sarcastically.

He stood up and put his arms around her, drawing her in towards the bulk of his body, clasping his hands under her chest. The feeling of his head on her shoulder had always sent a tingle down her spine. But now she pulled away.

‘True,’ he said. ‘I should be back in good time for that. So before long you and I will be reliving last night. OK?’

After he had gone and the sound of the car engine had died away, she stood for a long time with her arms folded and her gaze out of focus. It was one thing to be lonely in life. But it was quite another not to know what you were paying that price for. The chances of ever catching a man like hers cheating were minimal, she knew that, even if she had never tried. His territory was a vast expanse, and he was a careful man, everything in their life indicated that. Pensions, insurance, double-checking of windows and doors, suitcases and luggage, desk always tidy, no hastily jotted notes or receipts left behind in pockets or drawers. He was a man who left little trace. Not even the scent of him remained more than a few minutes after he had left the room. How would she ever uncover an affair unless she put a private investigator on him? And where was she supposed to get the means to do that?

She pushed out her lower lip and expelled warm breath
slowly into her face. It was what she always did just before making an important decision. On the riding ground before clearing the highest obstacle. Before choosing her confirmation dress. Even before saying her vows in the church. And before going out into the street to see if life might be any different there in that gentle light.

To put it like it was: David Bell, a convivial hulk of a sergeant, liked to take things easy, to sit and stare out at the waves as they smashed against the rocks. All the way up there at John O’Groats, Scotland’s very extremity, where the sun shone only half as long but twice as beautifully. This was David’s birthplace, and it was where he intended to die when his time was up.

David Bell was made for the rugged sea. Why should he then idle away his time sixteen miles further south in the office of the Bankhead Road police station in Wick, when this slumbering harbour meant so much to him? It was a fact he made no bones about.

It was also the reason why his superior always dispatched him to sort things out whenever there was trouble brewing in the communities up north. David would trundle up in his patrol car and threaten the local hotheads with calling in an officer from Inverness. It was generally enough to settle things down again. In these parts, no one wanted strangers from the city nosing about in their back gardens. Much rather horse piss in their Orkney Skull Splitter ale. It was more than enough having folk come through for the Orkney ferry.

Once things quietened down, only the waves remained, and if there was one thing Sergeant Bell had plenty of time for it was the waves.

Had it not been for this man’s characteristic sedateness, the bottle would have been hurled back from whence it came. But since the sergeant happened to be sitting there in his neatly pressed uniform with the wind in his hair and his cap on the rock beside him, it could just as well be handed in to him.

And so it was.

The bottle had been caught in a trawl and glinted slightly, though time had dulled its sheen, and the youngest man on board the
BrewDog
had seen right away there was something about it.

‘Chuck it over the side, Seamus,’ the skipper shouted when he discovered the message inside. ‘Those bottles bring bad luck. Wreckage in a bottle, we call them. The devil’s in the ink and waiting to be let loose. Don’t you know the stories?’ But young Seamus didn’t, and he decided to hand the bottle in to David Bell.

When Bell finally got back to the station in Wick, one of the local drunks had trashed two of the offices and folk were rather weary of trying to keep the idiot pinned to the floor. That was how David Bell came to remove his jacket so Seamus’s bottle fell out of its pocket. And it was how he came to pick the bottle up and put it down again on the windowsill so he could concentrate his attention on planting his full weight onto the chest of this drunken oaf in order to squeeze some of the air out of him. But as anyone will discover who happens to press down in such manner on the chest of a full-blooded Viking descendant in Caithness, one is quite liable to get more than one bargained for. And so it was that the drunk delivered such a
blow to David Bell’s gonads that all recollection of the message in the bottle was engulfed by the blaring sirens and flashing blue lights his nervous system now emitted into the world.

And for that reason the bottle remained undisturbed in the sunny corner of the windowsill for a very, very long time. No one paid it any heed, and no one worried that the paper it contained might deteriorate from all that sunlight and the condensation that with time appeared on the inside of the glass.

No one took the time to read the collection of semi-obliterated letters that appeared uppermost, and for that same reason no one gave a thought to what the word
HJÆLP
might mean.

The bottle did not come into human hands again until some bastard, who felt himself unreasonably treated on account of a measly parking fine, infected the intranet of Wick police station with a veritable tidal wave of virus. In such a situation, the routine was to get in touch with a computer expert called Miranda McCulloch. When paedophiles encrypted their filth, when hackers covered up all traces of their online banking transactions, and when asset-strippers deleted their hard disks, it was Miranda McCulloch the police kneeled before.

They put her in an office. The staff were moved to tears and treated her like royalty, filling up her Thermos with scalding hot coffee, throwing open the windows and making sure the radio was tuned in to Radio Scotland. Miranda McCulloch was indeed a woman appreciated wherever she went.

Because of the open windows and the billowing curtains, she noticed the bottle on her first day.

What a fine little bottle
, she thought to herself, and wondered at the shadow inside it as she dredged through cipher columns of malicious code. When, on the third day, she got to her feet feeling well satisfied, her job complete, and with a reasonable idea of what kind of virus might be anticipated next time around, she stepped across to the windowsill and picked up the bottle in her hand. It was a lot heavier than she had thought. And warm to the touch.

‘What’s that inside it?’ she asked the office lady next door. ‘Is it a letter?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ came the answer. ‘David Bell came with it a long time ago. I think maybe he just put it there for fun.’

Miranda held the bottle against the light. Was that writing on the paper? It was hard to tell because of the condensation on the inside.

She turned it in her hands. ‘Where is this David Bell? Is he on duty?’

The secretary shook her head. ‘No, I’m afraid he’s not. David was killed not far out of town a couple of years back. They’d given chase to some hit-and-run driver and it all went wrong. It was a terrible thing. David was such a nice chap.’

Miranda nodded. She wasn’t really listening. She was certain now that there was writing on the paper, but that wasn’t what had caught her attention. It was what was at the bottom of the bottle.

On close inspection through the sand-blown glass, the coagulated mass looked remarkably like blood.

‘Do you think I could take this bottle with me? Is there anyone here I should ask?’

‘Try Emerson. He drove with David for a couple of years. I’m sure it’ll be all right.’ The office lady turned towards the corridor. ‘Hey, Emerson!’ she yelled so the panes rattled in their frames. ‘Come here a minute, will you?’

Miranda said hello. Emerson was a pleasant, stocky man with sad eyebrows.

‘You want to take it with you? Be my guest. I’m certainly not wanting it myself.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It’s probably just nonsense. But just before David died he remembered the bottle and said he’d better get it opened and do something about it. Some lad off a fishing boat handed it in to him in John O’Groats, and then the boat went down with the lad and everyone else on it a couple of years after. David felt he owed it to the lad to see what was inside. But he died before he got round to it. Not exactly a good omen, is it?’

Emerson shook his head.

‘Take it away, by all means. There’s no good about that bottle.’

That same evening, Miranda sat down in her terraced house in the Edinburgh suburb of Granton and stared at the bottle. It was some fifteen centimetres tall, blue-white in colour, slightly flattened and relatively long-necked. It could have been a scent bottle, though rather on the large side. More likely it had contained eau de cologne and was probably a good age, too. She tapped a knuckle against it. The glass was solid, that much was apparent.

She smiled. ‘And what secrets might you conceal, dear?’ she mused, taking a sip of red wine from her glass before using the corkscrew to scrape out whatever it was that sealed the neck. The lump smelled of tar, but the bottle’s time in the sea had rendered the more exact origins of the material somewhat indeterminate.

She tried to fish out the paper inside, but it was fragile and damp to the touch. Turning the bottle in her hand, she tapped her fingers against the bottom, but the paper budged not a millimetre. This prompted her to take the bottle into the kitchen and strike it a couple of times with a steak hammer.

That helped. The bottle disintegrated into blue crystals that spilled out over the work surface like crushed ice.

She stared at the piece of paper that lay on the chopping board and could feel her brow as it furrowed. Her gaze passed over the shattered glass and she took a deep breath.

Maybe it hadn’t been the best of ideas after all.

‘Yes,’ her colleague, Douglas, in Forensics, confirmed. ‘It’s blood all right. No doubt about it. Well spotted. The way the blood and the condensation have been absorbed into the paper is quite characteristic. Especially here, where the signature’s completely obliterated. The colour of it, and the pattern of absorption. Aye, it’s all typical.’

He unfolded the paper with a pair of tweezers and bathed it in blue light. Traces of blood all over, diffusely iridescent in every letter.

‘It’s written in blood?’

‘Most certainly.’

‘And you agree with me that the heading is an appeal for help? It sounds like it, at least.’

‘Aye, I reckon so,’ Douglas replied. ‘But I doubt we’ll be able to salvage much more than the heading. It’s quite damaged, that letter. Besides, it might be very old. The thing to do now is to make sure it’s properly treated and conserved, and then maybe we’ll have a stab at dating it. And of course we’ll need to have a language expert take a look at it. Hopefully, he’ll be able to tell us what language that is.’