The Sea Detective (27 page)

‘I was concerned about you,’ he said.

‘I was going to tell you,’ she said, looking embarrassed as though he might think she had spurned his hospitality. ‘I can’t be inside when it’s daylight. I’ve been locked away for so long I have to be outside, or I feel trapped,’ she tried to explain.

Cal said she must do whatever suited her.

‘When it’s dark I’ll come in again,’ she said.

‘It’s ok, really.’ He noticed some bread and fruit at her side, and she saw him noticing. The fruit was overripe and the bread was crushed in its wrapping. She had scavenged it from the rubbish bin at the back of newsagents before dawn. He left before he made her any more ill at ease. ‘See you later then,’ he said.

Cal spent the remainder of the afternoon keying information from Jamieson’s Bembo emails into his computer and launching tracking programs, each calculating the probable course of a disarticulated foot floating away from any coordinate where he had a report of an unrecovered body going into the sea. The program automatically selected the relevant weather and ocean current reports from Cal’s database.

Soon after 5pm Bembo sent him details of scores of maritime accidents, mostly minor, where there had been no reported loss of life. He had asked her to provide this information. Cal searched through them for those which involved impact between two vessels – most involved yachts and small boats – or unexplained contact between bigger boats or ships colliding with unidentified floating objects, usually flotsam cargo.

Bembo: ‘Why do you want all this? Shouldn’t you be concentrating on missing bodies?’

Cal: ‘A ship at night can run over a small craft without knowing what it’s done. Say a tanker runs over a drug smuggler’s speed boat or a people trafficker, who’s going to report it missing?’

By 9.30pm he’d inputted the coordinates of dozens more incidents for tracking. He switched on his lamp and yawned. Soon after, the door to the roof opened and Basanti came to sit in the chair opposite him. ‘It’s dark outside,’ she said, explaining why she’d come indoors. ‘I’d like to look at some more pictures now?’

He switched on the other computer and reminded her how to access the sites he had bookmarked. ‘Maybe today we’ll find it, Basanti.’

She said, ‘I hope so.’ Then she started searching.

For the next two and a half hours, they worked at their separate computers, with Cal taking a break to bring her coffee and a slice of cold pizza. She hadn’t asked for it but she ate it. Soon after midnight, Cal’s monitor screen of thumbnail icons – one for each of his computer tracking exercises – showed 49% beginning to veer off course, with 23% going north of Shetland, 14% washing up on the west coast of Ireland and 12%, mostly those incidents within a mile or two of the UK, beaching on the Welsh or Scottish west coasts. He fell asleep in his chair. When he woke later, Basanti was no longer at her computer. She was curled up on the landing by the roof.

On his way to bed he stopped by the Belfast sink and removed the stones from the shoes now that they were saturated with sea-water. One by one the trainers rose to the surface where they floated, sole up. Cal knelt down and scanned across the surface. None of the shoes floated higher than the others. He checked the fake Air Max 360 in particular. It had come ashore in East Lothian. He pushed it under the water and let it rise again. It settled like the others; flat in the water.

He went back to his desk and emailed Bembo. ‘Increased exposure to wind does not explain the extra distance travelled by the counterfeit Air Max 360. It sits no higher above the surface of the water than the Shetland shoes. The explanation for it beaching earlier has to do with the timing of disarticulation. The Air Max 360 foot must have disarticulated and floated free some days/weeks before the others. I am still working on the theory all three feet disarticulated in approximately the same place.’

He took the shoes out of the sink and left them to dry on his bathroom towel rail.

He woke soon after 6am, stumbling out of bed, looking for Basanti, but dawn had long gone and she had gone with it. He slumped into his chair and tapped the return key on his computer. The grid of icons came up showing most of his simulations had gone off course, leaving 8 within his margins of tolerance. He’d entered two instructions: the drift track from any of the starting coordinates had to pass within 32 kms of Shetland or be in the North Atlantic Current waters which flood into the North Sea through the Fair Isle gap between Shetland and Orkney.

He composed an email to Jamieson.

‘Dear Bembo, you should concentrate on these incidents from last year and one (number 8) from earlier this year:

1. May 13: Submarine reported night-time collision with unidentified ‘contact’ in The Minch. 58°15′N, 5°45′W.

2. May 29: Unconfirmed report of yacht capsizing, west of Dingle Bay, Eire. 52°01′N, 10°58′W

3. July 23: Drowning of father and teenage son rescuing a dog, Aran Islands, Eire. 53°07′N, 9°55′W

4. August 16: May Day emergency. Two sea kayakers lost following collision with cruise ship, west of Tiree, 56°31′N, 7°05′W

5. September 4: Grain carrier ran aground Achill Island, Eire. Five men lost overboard. 54°N, 10°12′W

6. September 24: Prawn boat sunk off Western Isles. One body recovered, two missing. 57°16N, 7°31′W

7. October 26: Oil tanker struck unidentified object west of Benbecula. 57°28′N, 8°12′W

8. February 7: Bulgarian coal ship. Three men lost overboard west of Eire. 53°16′N, 12°18′W

‘Please check with aviation authorities, UK and Ireland, about aircraft incidents for the same general search area as before.’

He made coffee, two teaspoons of instant and half a mug of hot water poured from the tap, and spent the next two hours inputting more of Bembo’s data – his reserve list of possibilities. He watched the simulations begin, pulsing dots tracking slowly northwards on miniaturised ocean maps, before going for a shower. When he emerged from the bathroom ten minutes later his phone was ringing. It was a number he didn’t recognise. There’d been three missed calls. He answered it, with misgivings. ‘Hello.’

‘Is that Cal, Cal McGill?’

It was the nurse from the hospital. She apologised for ‘troubling him’ as she put it.

She wasn’t, Cal reassured her. ‘How’s Grace Ann?’

‘She passed away this morning, poor soul.’

‘I’m sorry.’ It came out automatically. He didn’t feel anything for her now, not after what she’d done, though something about the fierceness of her love for his grandfather had impressed him.

‘It didn’t seem right for an old lady to die like that and for no-one to be told.’ She was still apologising for ringing.

‘It’s all right,’ Cal said.

‘She never spoke again, not after your visit. She closed up, didn’t say another word, the poor dear …’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘Seeing you, it was the last thing she had to do. That’s all it was. You come across it all the time in my job.’

‘Yes, I suppose you do.’

After they said goodbye, Cal collected up his grandmother’s journals, his laptop, the photograph frame with the picture of his grandfather and a chart of the North Atlantic. He packed them carefully into his backpack, zipped it and placed it by the door, along with the counterfeit trainers which he put into a carrier bag. He rang the courier company for their collection and climbed the spiral stairs to the roof. Basanti’s shelter was empty. The clothes he had bought her were neatly folded beside a growing pile of drawings of a hill with a tree on its left flank. He took a clean sheet of paper and wrote on it, ‘Have to go away for a day or two, something I’ve got to do. I’ll ring. Make yourself at home.’ He added his mobile phone number and his email address, username and password with instructions for opening his googlemail account. ‘If you can’t reach me by phone – the signal can be unreliable where I’m going – send me an email instead. I will pick it up when there’s reception.’

He put his message to Basanti on the computer keyboard she’d been using and dug into his pocket for some money. He unfolded the only two notes he had, £20 and £10, and put them beside the message.

The buzzer went. It was the courier company.

As he was leaving his flat, he turned back, going to the gantry of shelves where he kept his collection of flotsam and jetsam. He picked up a large black Mary’s Bean, the seed of Merremia Discoidesperma, a tropical vine of the Morning Glory family. He’d found it on Orkney’s west-facing coast, at the tide line, concealed under sea-weed, the day he’d met Rachel.

He dropped it into his pocket, went downstairs, handed the shoes to the waiting courier and rang for a taxi to the station.

He slept on the train waking an hour before Inverness. He tapped the return key of his laptop which was on the seat beside him. There were three emails generated automatically by the computer in his flat. Each contained a map and a blue line tracking the Atlantic to the west of Ireland and the Outer Hebrides towards Shetland and the Fair Isle gap. They were the successful simulations from his second run. He emailed the details to Jamieson, with the suggestion that they take a lower priority than the first list of eight because he had widened the margin of error.

An acknowledgement arrived in his inbox three minutes later. ‘Thank you. Aviation data will follow shortly. There are no recorded crashes or planes ditching in the search area for the relevant dates, though there are a number of unexplained ‘incidents’, reports of bright lights in the sky, UFOs etc.’

When the train arrived at Inverness, Cal changed platforms and caught the local service to Lairg. He copied the 11 successful simulations, eight from the first run and three from the second, on to a single ocean map. Each dotted line was a different colour; each showed the probable course of a floating shoe containing a severed foot. The track from simulation 10, one of the second group, was coloured purple. It started at 55°51′N, 10°48′W, north-west of Eire, and travelled north-east before passing through 57°28′N, 8°12′W, another of his starting coordinates from the first batch. One line then merged into the other as they followed exactly the same course north and then east to the south of Shetland.

Cal checked the two incident references. On October 6 the previous autumn a container ship sent out a May Day call reporting it was listing after some of its load slipped in a south westerly gale. Later it reported the emergency a false alarm. It had secured its containers and would ride out the storm at sea before proceeding across the Atlantic to New York. Twenty days later an oil tanker struck an unidentified object which was large enough to inflict a sizeable dent in its hull. Cal measured the distance between the two sets of coordinates. It was about 250kms. The current off the west of Scotland moved at between 10–15kms a day. If a container had fallen overboard on October 6, it was plausible Cal thought for it to have travelled 250kms in 20 days, at 12.5kms a day.

He emailed Bembo. ‘Pay attention to a connection between possibilities 7 and 10. You’re looking for a container going overboard on October 6 and the tanker colliding with it on October 26.’

Bembo: ‘Do containers float?’

Cal: ‘They can do, yes. Check the loading and offloading manifests for discrepancies and also check satellite tracking data. Some companies which own containers put tracking devices in them.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘Call it a gut feeling.’

When he’d found the Mary’s Bean, a surfer in a wet-suit passed him on the beach. ‘Wow what’s that?’ she’d asked, her smile rippling from the edges of her mouth to small vertical dimples on each cheek.

He told her the folklore of Mary’s Beans; how they were good luck charms; how they were also known as crucifix beans because of the cross etched on one side; how pregnant women prized them for their beneficial influence on childbirth; how currents carried them from Central America across thousands of miles of ocean, their hard outer casing protecting them from sea water, their internal cavities giving them buoyancy; how he’d searched beaches in the Outer Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland for just this discovery; how he’d found other tropical beans but this was his first Mary’s Bean.

They walked back up the beach together, him asking about surfing; her rubbing at her hair to dry it and answering his questions with a mixture of enthusiasm and self-deprecation. ‘I only came in because I didn’t want you watching me fall off another big wave.’ They stopped where the sand gave way to grass, neither one of them knowing quite what to do next. She laughed at their sudden reticence. ‘Hi, I’m Rachel Newby.’ She’d held out her hand. ‘I’m from London. I work for a television production company. And you?’

They spent the weekend camping together on the beach, his sleeping bag and her tent side by side. After the first night, one or other was empty. When it was time for them to part – she was attending a concert at the St Magnus Festival in Kirkwall before flying south to London – they kissed and Cal gave her the Mary’s Bean, awkwardly, self-consciously. She understood the gift’s emotional significance even though Cal left it unspoken (typically, as she would discover). It was to be a symbol of the bond between them, of the good fortune which brought them together, which made their marriage five months later on the same Orkney beach in a wild November gale seem as though it had somehow been arranged, even ordained, by nature.

‘I’ll keep it, always,’ she said, ‘Always.’ Thereafter, when they were apart, either because of his work or, as became mostly the case, hers, she slept with her fingers folded around it. Gradually, the Mary’s Bean changed into being a symbol of everything that separated them instead of that which bound them together.

Shortly before their second anniversary, after another fractious phone call, the third in as many days, Rachel rang late one night from New York where she was working. She was sorry about what was happening to them; she worried she wasn’t the right partner for Cal; she didn’t like to think of him being unhappy; did he want to take time out? He responded by accusing her of dishonesty, of preparing her pretext for deserting him. Rachel didn’t argue. She was tired of arguing. He was wrong was all she said.