The Sea Detective (14 page)

The street at the bottom of this lane is Buchanan Street. Basanti has seen the sign on the wall. But where is the bus station? Where will she get the money for the fare?

She is exhausted. Her limbs are aching. Her stomach is tight. Her head is spinning with this unfamiliar city and its people. She is frightened. Since leaving her shelter on the railway embankment she has been tense with worry and fear. The men who own her will find her. The men who abused her will be in the crowds; somewhere. They will recognise her. The police who are patrolling the streets will arrest her. By now they will be looking for her, for stabbing the Albanian.

Only the thought of Preeti keeps her going. She is her strength. She is what makes her get up and walk along the lane. She is what gives her the courage to approach a man in white overalls sitting on a step, outside the back door of a restaurant. He is smoking and he watches her coming towards him with surly indifference.

She isn’t looking at him when she speaks. She studies the space between them. There’s a pigeon’s feather floating in a pool of greasy water. She watches it. ‘Please can you tell me the way to the bus station?’ There is a tremor in her voice.

He detects her fear. He gives her directions. It’s no more than five minutes walk. He says, ‘Are you ok?’ She hears what she thinks is sympathy so she asks him if he will lend her money. £8 she mentions. She’s still not looking at him so she doesn’t know he’s looking at her, or the way he’s doing it.

‘I’ll give you £10 if you do something for me,’ he says and his voice changes, a tone she recognises. She feels her body go torpid, like a lizard’s when the sun dips before night. It’s a feeling to which she is accustomed. Isn’t this how she has coped these past months, years?

As he penetrates her she makes a solemn promise.

No man will do this to her again, ever. But she needs the money. For Preeti. To travel to the address she’s read in the newspaper, to find the man with a picture of Preeti on his wall.

He pushes into her. Basanti’s face conveys no emotion or feeling. Her hand tightens around the £10 note. Otherwise she is quite still.

There had been a reason after all.

Cal recalled his childhood complaint, ‘Why can’t we go to Grandpa Uilleam’s island?’ His mother answered him with more questions, a family failing. ‘Why on earth would you want to?’ or ‘why waste precious holiday going all the way up there?’ This response left Cal perplexed. Driving for hours to damp cottages on remote coasts was what they did for their summer holidays. Eventually his father said to him, ‘Don’t keep bothering your mother, Cal.’

Cal had asked why.

‘Well, grandpa died before she was born and your grandmother’s side of the family is all she’s known. Aberdeen is where she’s from, not Eilean Iasgaich. So let it drop, eh?’

There was an undertone of warning in his father’s voice, and Cal did let it drop, though his mother’s odd reticence and his father’s caution only stimulated his interest. He was 11, and two years into his attempt to solve the mystery of his missing grandfather after coming across the unnamed graves in Ardnamurchan. All his calculations now pointed to his grandfather’s body being encased in Arctic sea ice. The Norwegian government had to be notified, or so he thought, but he needed advice on the appropriate recipient of his carefully typed letter.

‘Can I ask mummy?’

His father didn’t answer his question, not exactly.

‘Oh, can’t I help you?’ He’d sounded disappointed. ‘After all, I’m the one who knows about coordinates, longitude and latitude and so on.’

Which, of course, was the case: James McGill was head of geography at the senior school of Edinburgh Academy – Cal was still in juniors. But once more there was that insistent undertone in his father’s voice.

From then on he made sure he had his father alone whenever he discussed his latest theories about currents or the location of his grandfather. Recollecting it now, Cal appreciated his father’s patience. A less sensitive man might have tried to dissuade him from the very idea of his grandfather’s body still being intact and incorruptible so many years after his death. Cal’s father never attempted to do so, nor was it strictly necessary. By then Cal understood the process of decomposition but he was so accustomed to regarding his grandfather as a benign and continuing presence that in his imagination he was still happy, smiling and wearing a hat like the photograph of him on his mother’s dressing table.

Uilleam was like a make-believe friend: both real and fantasy but most of all a companion for the solitary child Cal had already become. His father understood or at least recognised his son’s need and indulged it.

Of course, he was also protecting Eilidh, Cal’s mother.

Cal knew that now, after listening to Grace Ann. Once more, and only once more, had he tried to probe his mother for information. He must have been 13 or 14 and he was on an end of holiday break with her on Skye (on another remote coast). His father had stayed behind to prepare for the new school term. They were walking along the beach by their B&B when he said to her, ‘Don’t you love the sea?’

It was a sly question he hoped would lead somewhere.

‘It’s curious isn’t it Cal? I was brought up in Aberdeen which is beside the sea and we live in Edinburgh which is beside the sea but I think of myself as someone who comes from the city, not the sea-side.’

‘But you were born beside the sea.’

She didn’t reply immediately. Cal remembered his anticipation of her response, hoping it would let him ask another question without making his intentions obvious.

‘Yes, I suppose I was.’

He decided on another foray despite his father’s warning.

‘Why did you leave?’

‘I suppose it was time for a change that’s all. I was ten and my mother wanted to send me to a good secondary school. The one she knew best, where she’d gone to school, was in Aberdeen. My grandfather was ill by then and the shop wasn’t the business it had been. My mother had friends and cousins in Aberdeen too.’ They walked on for a few steps and she added, ‘There’s no mystery to it, Cal.’

Straight away she challenged him to a race along the sand and that was the end of that. As he lay gasping for breath by the rocks, while she gave up winded 20 metres before the finish, Cal thought he believed her. Its mysteriousness had lain in her silence but now it seemed ordinary, not mysterious at all.

The next year she was diagnosed with breast cancer and his father took him aside one day and said ‘we must do all we can to avoid upsetting your mother.’ So he hadn’t attempted to broach it again, slyly or otherwise. She died when he was between school and first year oceanography. She was 53, coincidentally the same age her own mother, Cal’s grandmother Ishbel, had been when she died, also from breast cancer. His mother’s death left his father incapable and turned Cal into his unqualified counsellor. The reversal of roles made him resentful and intolerant of his father’s fragility. They weren’t emotions he’d expected. His father took bereavement leave from school and moped at home all day. When he pulled himself together, he announced he was going to join VSO and teach in Papua New Guinea. ‘I’m no good to you like this Cal,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back before you know it.’ But other destinations had followed: the latest a two year stint in Swaziland. Cal’s small family had disintegrated about him.

He had never seriously considered visiting Eilean Iasgaich since his mother’s death. Something warned him against it. Perhaps it was loyalty to her or simply that her passing had severed his only living connection with the place. Whatever the reason, these vague half-feelings had deterred him.

There were other islands, other oceans, after all.

Now, in Grace Ann’s bungalow, a different set of conflicting feelings assailed him: sorrow for his mother’s unspoken memories which must have been too painful for her ever to confide in him; shame at the unintentional distress he inflicted on her every time he mentioned Uilleam’s name; anger at the injustice of it all. There was another sensation too, one that had been dormant since his mother’s death. Rachel talking about her documentary had disturbed its sleep; Grace Ann’s story had awoken it. The island had an emotional pull on him again.

‘Do you think my mother knew?’ He asked Grace Ann.

Grace Ann was looking out of the window, distracted. ‘I dare say she knew some of it,’ she said after some consideration, without turning to Cal. ‘She would have attended primary school in Eastern Township. There would have been talk. But your grandmother and mother went back to Aberdeen after the war. The Raes opened a garage in Eastern Township, and then a general store. They put poor Ishbel’s parents out of business. I heard her father had a stroke and her mother had to sell up to the Raes of all people.’

Neither spoke for a few minutes until Cal said, as though thinking aloud. ‘It’s odd my parents never mentioned your brother’s body being found.’

Grace Ann still didn’t look at him. ‘The letter about Sandy arrived the spring after he died. By then Uilleam’s mother had gone to Thurso and Ishbel, your grandmother, was on the mainland. No-one from the island had anything to do with her family after what happened so it’s likely she never knew.’

Now her voice had an irritable tone which seemed to discourage more questions.

‘You’ve been kind, telling me the story.’ Cal said in case she had become impatient with him for staying so long. ‘Thank you.’

He wrote his address and phone number on the notepad pad on her trolley. ‘I’d like to come and see you again; talk some more …’

By then Grace Ann’s eyes were closed tight, her Bible at her lips, her chin lifted, as if in defiance. Cal said goodbye but she seemed not to hear him. He tried goodbye again but still she didn’t answer. He went to the door, closing it quietly behind him. On the way to his bus-stop he tried to rid himself of the suspicion she was behaving like that for a purpose. Was there something she wasn’t telling him?

At low tide, at the base of Cnoc a’ Mhonaidh, a beach of sand extends into the wide mouth of a cave. To one side of it is a rock, smooth on the top, with mussels and limpets clinging to its pitted flanks. Grace Ann observes herself, a young woman, sitting there. She feels the wind on her face. She sees how furtive her manner is: how she looks back at the hillside she has descended; her anxiety in case Ishbel is following her. Grace Ann shuffles backwards, crab-wise, on the rock until an overhang conceals her. She can no longer be spied on from above. She opens the book she is carrying: it is a Bible, the Bible which she is holding to her lips all these years later. She sees herself take from it a single sheet of loose paper. She unfolds it, reads it quickly, kisses it, folds it again and returns it to the book. She moves forward, observing the hill again. There’s no sign of Ishbel, who was some distance behind her on the path. Grace Ann remains there for half an hour or more, never moving. She feels the thrill of possession as well as guilt at what she has done. Her eyes close as if she is in prayer. Suddenly, she leaps up and climbs the slope of the hill, cutting diagonally across it.

Long after Cal has gone, Grace Ann remembers all of this as though it is happening to her now. She wonders at her jealousy of long ago, the continuing force of her unrequited love which has made her do such a terrible thing.

The Bible is now on her lap, the same Bible. Her hands shake as she opens it. She holds the same piece of paper in arthritic fingers. It is the colour of parchment, though flimsier. She reads it, folds it and returns it to the book which she closes and lifts to her mouth. She kisses its cover. She sits there with her eyes shut. Then she sighs, a long soulful sound. She berates herself as if her resolve is already weakening. ‘You must tell him Grace Ann. You must.’

The warning bell for the start of the second act had rung. The smokers outside the Festival Theatre in Edinburgh had filed back to their seats. The café bar on the ground floor had emptied, arguments about the soprano postponed until the next intermission. Had the orchestra drowned her out deliberately or was her voice insufficient for the role? The exodus of opera-lovers revealed Cal sitting alone at a table by a window overlooking the street. The emptiness of the place seemed to affect him because he drained his coffee, said ‘thanks’ to the waitress who was clearing glasses from the next table and left the theatre by the side door.

He crossed the street before turning left into a terrace of Victorian tenements. Music was spilling from a house further along. The louder it became the slower he walked. He texted, ‘Not sure it’s my kind of thing, Kate. What about lunch next week?’ Kate Simpson was a master’s student in geophysics and meteorology at Edinburgh University, in the department which he visited every so often to collect historical weather data for his ocean tracking work. The last time he’d seen her he’d promised to ‘look in’ at the party her housemates were planning. On the journey from Galashiels to Edinburgh, she’d messaged, reminding him.

He’d replied, ‘I won’t know anyone.’

‘You’ll know me.’

Now he was standing outside the house. His impulse was to slink away before Kate saw him. He wanted to go to his apartment to mull over Grace Ann’s story, look at an atlas and check out the Lofoten Islands. Something was wrong. He’d known it the moment Grace Ann had mentioned them.

His phone beeped. It was Kate messaging again. ‘Where are you?’

‘I’m outside, getting cold feet.’

‘Come on Cal. Just for a few minutes. Please me.’

He groaned. He owed her. She’d helped him so much working through the department’s old files. ‘Where are you?’ he texted back, looking apprehensively at the three storey tenement where every window seemed to be filled with light, music and drunk or stoned students. A banner flapping over the front door announced ‘Tom, Fiona, Orlando and Kate welcome you to their FISH PARTY’.

‘You’ll have to find me,’ she replied.

‘Shit.’ He put his phone away. Now she wanted him to play hide and seek.

Cal walked up the gravel path to the door of the house, sidestepping the smokers gathered there. A man in a long blond wig and wearing a mermaid costume was standing by the door, dragging on a cigarette he had cadged from someone returning to the party. ‘I could have tried a bit harder,’ Cal said looking at his jacket, tee shirt and jeans. ‘I didn’t realise it was fancy dress.’