The Rocks Below (6 page)

     Whatever it was, she was convinced she’d never seen anything like it before. That she was about to expand the frontiers of geology and take the science in a new direction. That the results would tell her what she needed to know and take her a step closer to that Nobel Prize.
 

     With her 8 slides in place, she stepped back and closed the doors, catching sight of her unkempt grey hair and the biro she always seemed to carry behind her ear when she was in the university.
 

     She pressed start and stepped back to admire her work, not that there was anything to see. She’d shown many a student how to work the machine and had noted the disappointment in their faces on many occasions as nothing appeared to happen.
 

     They had little imagination, the youth of today, according to Jenny Wilson. They had to sense the x-rays. Get in tune with their invisible powers. Trust in the technique she was demonstrating.
 

     She sat on a padded stool at the computer monitor and waited for the first results with an eagerness that even she wasn’t used to. Her fingers raked at her palms and wiped away the films of sweat that had formed there.
 

     The computer started to draw its line, slow as a sundial’s shadow.
 

     Wilson willed it to work faster, but this would require patience.
 

     She tapped her pencil to the rhythm of one Abba tune after another as the line of the graph was sketched out until everything came to a halt.
 

     The spectrum that had been drawn out had the look of the Himalayan mountains, peaks and troughs of varying heights. It wasn’t easy to read at a glance.
 

     There was pyrite and graphite and muscovite and quartz just as might be seen for slate.
 

     Wilson’s stomach dropped inside her like it was lurching. As if an elevator dropped five floors in one go.
 

     After all her hopes, to find nothing but slate wasn’t going to win her anything.
 

     On the keyboard she typed in the commands to get an overlay of the slate spectrum so that she could make her comparison.
 

     They were practically identical.
 

     Wilson screwed her eyes tightly shut, and when she opened them again she made herself focus.
 

     And there it was. Right in front of her. Just as she’d hoped it might be.
 

     Yes, the peaks were there, but not in the way they should be.
 

     Not enough of anything.
 

     Not as much inorganic matter as there should be.
 

     Something was definitely not right and the only way to make sure of that was to work her way through the other seven samples in the case.
 

     It was going to be a very long night.
 

     Wilson took out her phone and dialled the number for the Kalpna Indian restaurant. While she listened to the ringing, she decided on asking for the vegetable biryani.
 

Whisky Galore

Dougal came to the end of another fruitless patrol of the town.

     All he’d achieved was clearing off a bunch of unruly teenagers from the benches by the red friars’ tower at the store and the helping of Mrs Simms with her mobility buggy which she’d managed to get stuck in a muddy puddle when trying to take a short-cut over to her home.
 

     Not a gang of crooks or a stray dog in sight.
 

    It had been so uneventful that he was done and it was barely half past 7.
 

     Before going down to pay Doc Brown an early visit, Dougal stopped at the wall of the sea-cadets’ building.
 

     He pulled Sheba to heel and she flopped to the floor, her pink tongue lolling outside of her mouth and dripping saliva onto the pavement.
 

     Dougal reached inside his jacket and pulled out the silver flask he’d put there earlier without his wife seeing. He wasn’t in the habit of carrying around whisky, but he hadn’t felt right since the Thumper incident. He’d never harmed a creature that didn’t deserve it in his life and knowing that Thumper was still in isolation at the vet's and remained in a critical condition made the muscles of his stomach twitch. He may not have pulled the trigger, but he felt the weight of the guilt nonetheless.
 

     It was a fine Aberlour that he’d filled his flask with. As he took his drink he felt the sting on his lips, soaked up the flavours of peat with his tongue and relished the burning sensation of the alcohol as it trickled down his throat.
 

      “
Kaaaaarh, that was good.”  He raised his flask to Sheba and took another huge gulp. Another “Kwaarrrh.”
 

     The knots in his stomach were untied immediately and he placed his flask back in his pocket. He reached down to Sheba and unhooked the lead from the collar. “Off you go girl.” 
 

     Sheba ran off down to the beach with only the white tip of her tail to be seen bobbing as she went.
 

     By the time Dougal caught up with her, she was sitting up with her ears pricked and staring into the Doc’s cave.
 

      “
It’s me, Doc,” Dougal shouted up, but there was no response other than the flickering of the orange fire-light on the stone wall. “Come on now. You wouldn’t want to be making an old guy like me climb that wall, would you?”
 

     If the silence were anything to go by, he apparently would.
 

      “
Then I’m coming up. You wait here, Sheba. Lie.”
 

     Sheba obeyed the command, but she maintained her state of alert.
 

     Dougal stepped over to the cliff.
 

     The climb didn’t look like anything much, but there weren’t many who could get up there without breaking a sweat.
 

     Dougal reached up to the highest finger hold he could reach, placed his foot on a jutting rock at knee height and pulled himself up. He repeated this until his chin was higher than the cave’s floor and he could get a look in.
 

     It was the way he remembered it from the last time he’d visited – a sleeping bag unrolled over a blanket that covered the floor, a half-finished packet of mints, a paperback book folded open and the fire contained within a set of bricks laid in a square.
 

     The only thing that was missing was the Doc.
 

      “
He’s not here Sheba.”  He knew she understood from the way she stretched her nose into the air. “Now where on Earth?”
 

     He turned and looked along the beach.
 

     The green of the warning light flashed on and off and allowed him to see the sand and pebbles below.
 

     Between flashes all was dark, but with the light on, he could make out the footprints from the rocks below leading out across the bay. They carried on until they reached the boulder that had arrived there with the storm and that was as far as he could make out.
 

     He didn’t take any time in getting down again and jumped from a point about half way up.
 

     When he landed, Sheba got up and barked. She went straight over to the prints and took a sniff, then ran along them to the end of the trail.
 

     Dougal wasn’t far behind, the exertion telling on him and his lungs feeling a burn.
 

     The footprints disappeared into nowhere.
 

      “
Not possible,” he muttered.
 

     Sheba just barked.
 

     The last print was smudged in the sand, like Doc Brown had fallen over. At the next flash of green light, Dougal noticed the imprint of a body, as if the weight had fallen on the shoulder and make a strong impression.
 

     With the next flash, he saw the drag in the sand, like the Doc had been pulled along into the boulder itself, as if it had opened up and swallowed him up.
 

      “
Too much Dr Who.”
 

     That was the moment the tide chose to reach him, the frothy white of the advanced party of waves lapping around Dougal’s shoes.
 

      “
You cannae do this, it’s a possible crime scene.”
 

     He kicked at the water like he was King Canute and with about the same result.
 

     The water poured into the indentations left by the Doc’s body until they had completely vanished.
 

     Sheba danced around in the sea like it was party time. Dougal fiddled in his pockets to try and find his phone so he could take a picture or get someone from the station to come down and get a look and to prove that something was amiss.
 

     Instead of the phone, he found his flask.
 

     He became aware of the cold chill in his bones. The whisky would be the perfect antidote. And when he’d finished, he give the old-folks’ home a call. Maybe Doc Brown was having a night off from the outdoors and was safely wrapped up in a proper bed for a change.
 

Round Midnight

The midnight news tagged the area as the East Lothian Triangle.

     Strictly speaking, that was poppycock. Poor maths. It wasn’t as if there were three points to join together. Still, the goings on there had been strange.
 

     First it had been the dogs, then the twins at Tyninghame. Now it was the old doctor, missing from his Dunbar nursing home in the most unusual circumstances.
 

     The reports stopped short of calling Doctor Brown a tramp, but they hinted at an eccentric way of life that meant where he’d got to was anyone’s guess.
 

     Jenny Wilson scooped pot-noodles into her mouth, dripping beef and tomato sauce down her chin and not bothering to wipe it away. It wasn’t the perfect dessert to go with her Indian takeaway, but it felt good anyway.
 

     The news was making her increasingly anxious about her chances of keeping whatever discoveries she was about to make to herself, which made her swallow her food pretty much without chewing.
 

     In between gulps, she downed sips of strong coffee. Going to sleep was completely out of the question. She’d be able to sleep as much as she wanted once she’d analysed the thin sections of her rock and worked out where to go from there.
 

     Her hands had the shakes, partly from being in an under-heated building and partly from being thrilled at the prospect of becoming a leading scientist overnight.
 

     Top of her wish list was that she’d discover a new element that would be the key to cancer cures. She also fancied that she might be on the verge of solving the world’s energy problems.
 

     Worst case scenario?  The filling in of one of the many gaps in the evolution of the Earth theories. That should still get her the approval she’d always sought.
 

     With the Pot Noodle carton empty and the caffeine making her feel queasy, she fell back in the chair and slapped her face to get the blood flowing again while the man on the TV went on about how Celtic would be champions by Christmas if none of the other teams found some form pretty soon.
 

The slides of the sections of stone that she’d had prepared seemed perfect.

     She slipped one of them under the powerful microscope and saw a purply-blue haze when she took a look down the lenses.
 

     A few tweaks with the focus and things became clear.
 

      “
Stupid fool. How could I have trusted a technician to get it right?”
 

     The truth was that by getting the technician to make the sections for her, she’d saved at least 2 hours of her own time. Without George, it would have been even later than it already was.
 

     Even so, they’d clearly managed to contaminate the sample. No way would there be animal cells in a rock sample unless someone had cut themselves and not bothered to clean up the mess.
 

     She snatched at the slide and it slipped from the base and from her fingers to crack into pieces on the floor.
 

     Without bothering to clear up the mess, she pulled out another slide and put it into position.
 

     There was the same bluish smudge and another fiddle with the controls until things came into focus.
 

     Jenny Wilson slapped the table hard. Hard enough to snap the top of the badly-chewed nail of her right, index finger.
 

      “
Ouch.”
 

     The pain she felt didn’t make her feel any better, so she took her foot from her slipper and kicked hard at the desk leg nearest to her.
 

      “
For crying out loud.”  This time the pain was up to the job. It took her mind from the frustrations of watching the Nobel Prize disappearing from her.
 

     She hopped around for a moment then looked down to see the blood on her big toe leaking out onto the floor.
 

     She took a tissue from inside the sleeve of her lab-coat and wrapped it around her wound, then sat on the floor and went through her breathing exercises.
 

      “
I am special,” she told herself. “I’m a very special girl with a very lucky life.”  Even to her, the words sounded hollow.
 

     How they could have messed up the samples like that was beyond reason. Schoolboy errors these were. A disgrace to the university.