The Sea Detective (4 page)

The first deluge of water was ice cold and made him gasp. As it warmed, he cut away the tee shirt until all that remained was a circle of bloodied cotton glued to his flank. He teased at it, loosening it in the stream of water, finally exposing a livid, ragged tear of flesh five or six centimetres long. Cal turned off the shower and dabbed at the wound with tissues until water and blood stopped flowing. Towelling himself, he climbed the stairs to the sparsely furnished sleeping area. A mattress was on the floor with a crumpled duvet across it, and at its foot was a trunk with the lid open from which he took a pair of white boxers. He put them on with one hand while holding on to the gantry of shelves with the other, taking care not to disturb any of the 273 (at the last count) artefacts and curiosities washed up by the sea that he stored there.

The discovery he valued most was on the top shelf: a 1.2 metre-long green turtle shell he’d come across while walking the long ribbon of beach on the Atlantic west coast of South Uist. It had been half buried by sand after an October storm. He’d hauled it to the road and thumbed a lift back to his tent. That night he’d opened up his maps and imagined the seas the turtle had travelled and by what freak of weather or orientation it had ended its journeying on the Outer Hebrides. As with his other finds, a label recorded the date of discovery and the relevant coordinates. (Like an antique collector, provenance was important to him.)

Cal rummaged again in the trunk for a clean tee shirt. He put it on and went to the kitchen which was opposite his sleeping area in an alcove with a spiral staircase to the roof. Cal leaned against the iron banister rail, waiting for the kettle to boil. He made coffee, black, and carried his mug to his work table which filled the living area. Either end of it was laden with oceanography books, rolled maps and files. The middle was taken up by his computers: two desk tops and a laptop which travelled with him on his research trips. Between the desktops were a telephone and a double photograph frame. On one side of the frame was an old sepia portrait of a weather-burnished young man wearing a woollen hat. On the other, in colour, was a photograph of a white gravestone by a curved stone wall and an azure sea beyond.

Cal sat at his swivel chair. Two maps were on the wall behind him, between large windows. One was of the world’s ocean currents. Cold currents were in darkening blues, shaded according to temperature. The warm ones were in oranges and deep reds. The second, smaller map was of the North Atlantic and the Arctic. Different coloured pins were stuck into it with pieces of string leading from them to newspaper cuttings attached to the wall. Each told the story of an unidentified body which had been washed ashore or retrieved from the sea. The largest of them reported the discovery three years before of a young Indian girl whose remains had become entangled in the nets of a fishing boat near the Island of Scarba off the Argyll coast.

Cal touched his left hand against his wound, checking it for bleeding, and with his right he switched on his desktops. Then he logged on to googlemail and scanned his inbox. There were 28 new messages. He opened one from DLG. ‘Hey guys, listen in to the radio news. Severed foot found at Seacliff beach. Mad eh?’

Cal clicked on the BBC website. There was a brief story on the Scotland news page.

‘The remains of a human foot were found this morning by a woman walking her dog on a beach in East Lothian. Police are searching the area for more body parts.

‘A spokesman for Lothian and Borders Police said, ‘Our inquiries are at a very early stage. We’d like anyone who saw anything suspicious on Seacliff beach, five miles east of North Berwick, to come forward.’

‘Seacliff is a well known beauty spot close to the ruins of Tantallon Castle.’

Cal slid the keyboard of the other computer towards him. It was his reference library. At the last count he’d stored 48,422 pictures and hundreds of folders and documents containing maps, research papers and ocean data collected by marine scientists around the world.

His search for ‘foot Columbia’ brought up seven files, one for each of the severed feet which washed up on British Columbian and US Pacific shorelines between August 2007 and November 2008. Cal remembered most of the details because they were bizarre even for someone like him accustomed to the sea’s habit of throwing peculiar objects on to the shore.

All the feet had been encased in lightweight trainers; there had been two matching pairs. Only one foot had been identified – it belonged to a depressive, a male. The theory was he drowned himself. According to local speculation, the other feet belonged to the passengers of a light aircraft which had crashed into the sea near the discoveries.

What Cal couldn’t recall was the physiological explanation. He found it in a file, named Kirkland, after the island where the fourth foot had been discovered. There was a comment from British Columbia’s chief coroner, Terry Smith. ‘This may very well be nothing more than the results of a natural process of decomposition in water and the combined effects of predation by aquatic scavengers.’

In another report of the time, an unnamed medical expert described the process as ‘disarticulation’. He told CBC News how the ankle joint could separate naturally from the leg once the body had reached an advanced stage of decay. ‘What seems to be happening here is these disarticulated feet are being brought to the surface by the buoyancy of the shoes. There’s a natural explanation for this though how so many bodies got into the water is harder to explain and may have a criminal connection.’ Cal read the remaining three files. By the time he’d finished DLG had mailed again. ‘The foot was found at about 7.30am. The woman’s dog brought it to her!’

Cal replied, ‘Thanks, DLG. Send me anything you hear. I’m interested.’ He checked his wind data: a light easterly had been blowing for a day or two. Then he traced his finger down his tide chart. High tide that morning at Dunbar, the nearest reading point to Seacliff, had been an hour and ten minutes ago, at 11.44am. The foot probably came ashore the previous night when high tide was at 23.34, about the time he’d been escaping from the Environment Minister’s garden.

A map of the North Sea now filled Cal’s screen. He magnified the area around the Forth Estuary and the East Lothian coast where a whorl of arrows displayed the direction of the currents. He considered the possibilities: the foot could have travelled long-distance down the east coast on the southerly flood of Atlantic waters which poured through the Fair Isle channel between Shetland and Orkney, or it could have been washed eastwards along the Forth. Cal looked at the file recording bodies beaching on the estuary’s coastline. There’d been six in the last nine months: five were suicides and the last, a yachtsman, had a heart attack and fell overboard.

How many more were lying submerged was anyone’s guess. They could remain on the bottom for years if the water was deep enough and undisturbed by storms or fishing boats. Had the foot disarticulated from a corpse lying in deep, calm, estuarial water? It was possible.

He opened an email from WWF Scotland inquiring about Cal’s investigation into a cluster of fishing nets found floating in the Moray Firth, near Inverness. Four bottle-nose dolphins had become caught in their mesh and drowned.

Cal replied, ‘I’m making progress. The variety of net is used widely by the Spanish fleet. I’m waiting for information from the net distributor.’

Then he emailed DLG. ‘Do you know if there was a shoe?’

DLG emailed back. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Was the severed foot at Seacliff beach wearing a trainer?’

‘Why?’

‘It could make all the difference. If the foot wasn’t wearing a trainer, it’s more likely it was dumped there.’

Cal sipped at his coffee which had gone cold. It matched his mood. Why had he looked up? It rankled still. What would the camera have caught: his mouth, his nose; perhaps not even his mouth? What use was that to the police?

Somehow he didn’t feel reassured.

Next time he’d plan it better.

Detective Inspector David Ryan lit another cigarette, his third in twenty minutes. After inhaling once, he dropped it to the pavement, squashed it under his heel and glanced again at his watch. It had gone 2.30pm. They’d already been standing there more than an hour: five officers wasting their time, because Detective Constable Helen Jamieson didn’t know the meaning of the word urgent. He sighed and kicked at another discarded, half-smoked butt which skittered smouldering across the concrete slab. The Procurator Fiscal said everything was arranged: a sheriff would sign the search warrant at 1pm. Ryan had made the call and set it up for Jamieson. All Jamieson had to do was collect the warrant from the fiscal’s office ‘any time after 1.15’. How long did it take to drive from the Fiscal’s office to Granton, for Christ’s sake? Ryan’s worry now was the story breaking in the media before he’d made an arrest. How long before the Environment Minister told his colleagues in the Scottish Parliament or his whiney wife the entire fucking world?

‘Come on Jamieson.’ He sighed again. ‘Hurry up, you ugly bitch.’

Ryan had already wasted time knocking up what turned out to be the wrong house in the city’s south side. It was owned by McGill’s father but let to tenants who hadn’t seen Caladh McGill or Cal as they called him for nine months, perhaps more. No, they didn’t have a forwarding address, though the letting agents might. The letting agents said McGill senior was abroad teaching in Swaziland and the only contact they had with McGill junior was a mobile number. It had taken another hour and a half to trace the phone’s signal to a converted whisky bond in the north of the city. Now, the hold-up was the search warrant. Ryan had rung Jamieson four times and each time he’d been told it was on its way. Christ, where was the fat cow?

Leaning against a warehouse wall, sheltered from the sea-breeze, Ryan lit another cigarette and stared impassively across an empty car park. His mobile beeped. He flipped open the phone. ‘About fucking time,’ he muttered angrily.

It was a message from Jamieson. ‘I’m by your car with the warrant.’

Ryan shut the phone without replying and crossed the street to stay hidden from McGill’s flat on the top floor of The Cask. Ryan’s car was 100 metres along the road on the forecourt of an abandoned petrol station. Jamieson watched her senior officer’s progress in her rear view mirror. There was something ungainly about him at a distance which amused her: the imperfect David Ryan. Either his thighs were too big or his lower leg too short. Whatever it was, when he was walking like that, with his chest thrust out, his feet flicking purposefully forward, his body looked too big and his legs too short.

Would she?

It was a question she asked herself occasionally.

Would she, if she had the opportunity?

Jamieson had tried to warn the new Detective Constable about Ryan over coffee in the canteen. ‘He hits on every woman sooner or later.’

Which wasn’t strictly true, since he hadn’t hit on Jamieson.

But in DC Tessa Rainey’s case it would be sooner, not later. She was a tall, slim brunette with a bob and a pretty oval face. One of the other female detectives, Sandra Paterson, interrupted Jamieson mid-caution. ‘All you need to know Tessa is he’s six foot, cropped brown hair, handsome face and narrow eyes, a mysterious green. And …’she licked her lips provocatively, ‘he’s hot, a dish, always dresses in single-breasted blue suits and white shirts, no tie, two buttons undone, always two.’

‘Sounds good to me,’ said DC Rainey.

Jamieson had smiled weakly and sipped her coffee. When the conversation drifted to another subject she leaned over to Rainey. ‘Wait till you meet Ryan and you’ll see what I mean.’

Rainey gave her the kind of pitying look she’d suffered so often before. In one exaggerated and contemptuous sweep, it took in Jamieson’s thinning curly hair, her red face and her size 18 bulges. ‘Can’t wait …’

Jamieson flushed some more.

Then Paterson chipped in, ‘Just because he doesn’t want to shag you Helen …’ and the new girl Rainey had laughed.

Jamieson was angry with herself for minding and for letting it show. Rainey didn’t have an IQ of 173, or a first class degree in law, or an MSc in criminology. Nor could she speak three languages. Jamieson had. Jamieson did, Jamieson could. Jamieson had read Rainey’s file. She was bright enough but not in Jamieson’s league. Sometimes she wanted to scream it aloud.
I’m not the person you see. I’m someone else, someone better.

Still, DC Rainey was an innocent by comparison to Ryan, a silly kid. Someone had to warn her off. ‘Listen Tessa …’ Jamieson’s kept her voice low, to impress Rainey with her sincerity. ‘Ryan’s a ruthless bastard. Watch out for him.’

Her final piece of corroborative evidence – Ryan’s continuing bachelorhood – she decided to keep to herself. She’d already said too much. Ryan was 39 and no woman hung around him long enough to marry him. There had to be a reason apart from the congestion around his bathroom mirror.

Rainey and Paterson had exchanged glances after Jamieson’s warning; and Paterson winked at the new girl. ‘The best ones are bastards. Don’t you think, Tessa?’ The two detectives sniggered and Jamieson excused herself, inelegantly as usual. Her hips stuck on the arms of her chair and when she stood it rose with her.

Would she? No, she wouldn’t. But somebody, some time would be nice.

Ryan was on the garage forecourt when Jamieson stepped out of her car. She patted her shoulder bag.

‘Got it, boss.’

‘About bloody time.’ he said, passing her without looking at her.

She started to explain the delay. ‘The sheriff spends half his lunch-time in the bookies … the fiscal had to wait,’ But Ryan wasn’t listening. He’d gone to the back of his car, opened the boot, removed his suit jacket and was putting on body armour.

When he re-emerged, Jamieson said, ‘McGill’s not dangerous is he sir?’

‘Oh, I doubt it, Jamieson.’ Ryan looked at her as if he’d achieved high enough status to be spared close proximity to a plain woman. ‘I’m sure he’s harmless. Stick by me and you’ll be safe enough.’