The Sea Detective (9 page)

Rosie made a sympathetic sound and retrieved the camera from her bag. ‘Would you mind – just one more, with the ocean map and the newspaper cuttings in the background? It’s more your context.’

Cal shrugged. ‘I guess.’

When she’d taken the picture Cal went back to sit on the floor and picked up the photograph frame, wiping it across his tee shirt. She kneeled beside him, putting her recorder back in its place. ‘Tell me about him?’

‘My grandfather?’

‘Yes.’

‘He went missing during World War II, aged 21. He was on a fishing boat, a trawler, which had been converted to protect merchant ships from attacks by U-boats. He was lost overboard in a storm, swept into the sea, trying to secure a loose depth charge which was rolling about on deck. His body was never recovered.’

‘My grandfather was killed in the same war, in France. He was 21 too.’ Rosie heard the insincerity in her voice and blushed at it, not the lie. Cal didn’t seem to notice. He opened out the frame so she could see the second photograph.

‘This other picture is of a gravestone on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula on the west coast. My parents took me there on holiday, and that’s where I saw this grave for the first time, when I was nine. There are three graves together, white stone and with similar inscriptions.’

Cal read from the photograph, ‘A sailor of the 1939–1945 war. Merchant Navy. Found 19th December 1942.’ Underneath an engraved cross was written ‘Known Unto God’.

The words moved him still, Rosie noticed.

‘It made a big impression on me, the thought of these men floating ashore, anonymous, their families waiting for them never knowing really if they were dead or not, never having a body to bury. Still does.’ He glanced again at the newspaper cuttings on the wall. ‘Anyway that night, I dreamt that one of these graves contained my grandfather. I was convinced of it, even though I knew he wasn’t in the Merchant Navy. When we got home I persuaded my father to buy me maps and charts. After a while, I worked out my grandfather couldn’t have come ashore on Ardnamurchan. His body went into the sea a long way north-east of Scotland between somewhere called Bear Island and the Norwegian coast. With the prevailing currents and winds his body would have floated further north and east. I remember writing to the Norwegian government asking them to search for him …’ He smiled at his naivety. ‘I became convinced he’d been preserved in Arctic ice for the previous 47 years and that if only he could be found he could be unfrozen and he’d come back to life. The Norwegians sent me a very kind letter … it’s here somewhere.’

Cal picked up the papers in front of him and let them flutter back to the floor. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter really … I doubt I’ll find it. But it’s what got me into oceanography and being interested in currents and floating objects.’

Rosie said ‘Can I see him again?’ and Cal held out the photograph frame to her. ‘He looks like a nice man,’ she said glancing at Cal. ‘You’ve got his eyes?’

‘So people say.’

Rosie put the photograph frame beside her on the floor. ‘Show me again on the map where he went into the sea.’

When Cal’s back was turned she held her digital camera over the photograph and pressed the shutter button.

‘Do you see this dot, there by my index finger?’ Cal asked.

‘Yes. Yes I do.’ Rosie dropped the camera into her bag.

‘Well, that’s Bear Island. My grandfather was swept overboard, him and another crew member, more than 100 kilometres to the south, somewhere down …’ He checked the longitude and latitude. ‘… here.’

Long after Rosie Provan had gone, with everything returned to its rightful place, Cal sat at his table, the turtle’s carapace in front of him, a tube of glue in one hand, a broken piece of the shell in the other. He dabbed at it and pressed the shell splinter back into place. He looked around the room, as if expecting to find something malign there. ‘Fuck you, Ryan.’

Tessa Rainey wandered across the detectives’ room with an exaggerated wiggle of her hips. Detective Constable Sandra Paterson swung round in her seat to watch the show. The two of them had been talking: ‘girl talk’ Jamieson assumed.

Jamieson didn’t do girl talk, couldn’t do girl talk.

‘Helen, you’re working with Ryan on a case aren’t you?’ DC Rainey asked.

‘Yes.’ Jamieson didn’t look up. She was writing a report about what she’d unearthed in Cal McGill’s computers (nothing much, if libraries of material about oceans and their movement could be described as nothing).

‘Well, he says I’ll be working with him on his next case.’

Jamieson looked up.

‘And what will he expect from you in return?’

Rainey smirked and shrugged.

Paterson laughed. ‘Don’t be so coy, Tess. Tell her.’

‘It’s private,’ Rainey protested.

‘Ryan won’t be expecting anything from Tess he hasn’t had already.’ Paterson spoke for her and both of them began laughing.

Rainey held up her two hands with her index fingers extended until they were about 20cms apart. ‘No, it’s bigger than that.’ She corrected herself.

Paterson said, ‘I told you he was a stud.’

Rainey regarded Jamieson with exaggerated pity and bent towards her. ‘Helen you don’t know what you’re missing, really you don’t.’

Jamieson flushed red and went back to her report. The next five words she wrote were ‘fuck you Ryan fuck you’. Then she pressed delete.

She gave her a sweet: lime brittle on the outside, soft chocolate in the middle. Jamieson remembered the taste but nothing else about that day, except the ladder in Isobel Dalgleish’s tights. She’d sucked the lime brittle away, finding it a little too tart for her liking, and she’d smoothed the chocolate (a little too sugary) with her tongue, all the while wondering if she liked this sour and sweet confection, whether she should spit it out or not. Someone must have told her about her mother and father, yet she had no memory of the moment, or of the voice informing her about the motorway collision which had killed them. Perhaps Isobel Dalgleish had told her; perhaps someone else had. Was anyone else even there?

What was vivid and certain was the taste of the sweet. She’d known they were dead all right. By the time she began sucking the lime brittle. So someone must have told her.

Helen Jamieson had been ‘six and three quarters’, a plump, girl with wayward curly hair, a red face, wire-rimmed spectacles and a precocious manner which later developed into a habit of asking potential adoptive parents personal questions. (Why do you smell? I don’t have hairs in my nose, why do you?) She lost count of the times her foster parents, a kindly enough couple, said to her how unusual it was for a girl (they meant a white girl) to be left on the adoption register. On occasions they coached her in advance of prospective parents visiting for tea. The gist of it was smile more, speak less. Their intentions had been good but Helen refused to play the adoption game, as she called it. Why would she want to live with people who didn’t love her as she was? What hurt her most were younger, prettier, sweeter, stupider girls passing through the foster home. For them it was a temporary place of refuge until a childless couple and a better life beckoned. For her, it was the beginning of something permanent, an adult world which tended to judge her by her physical appearance and to reject her for it. Apart, that is, from Isobel Dalgleish who was a police inspector working in family protection; a motherly woman in her fifties, who had never married and had no children.

After the day of the crash, Inspector Dalgleish continued to visit Helen, once a month, sometimes more, taking her out to the park or the cinema, always ending up in the book shop. Auntie Isobel, as she had become, drank tea in the café while Helen browsed. ‘A clever girl like you needs books, away and see what interests you,’ she would say. To begin with she would choose a cheap paperback, and Auntie Isobel would send her back with ‘away with you Helen; what use is that to a girl like you?’ By the time Helen was old enough to leave foster care for her own half-way-house bed-sit, she was selecting four or five novels as well as two or three histories or political biographies every month. The more books she brought back the greater the pleasure it gave the older woman. ‘Good. That’s more like it,’ she’d say. When Helen was 17, and about to leave school with six ‘A’ grades, she went to Auntie Isobel and asked if it was legally possible for a teenager to adopt a parent.

‘And who might this teenager want to adopt?’ Isobel Dalgleish asked, making light of it to conceal her nervousness.

Helen suddenly found a three letter word hard to say: ‘You.’

Isobel, who was now 66, stared at her, cheeks reddening, a tremor beginning in her neck.

‘Please,’ Helen added quickly.

Isobel, as she became from that day, reached for Helen’s hands. ‘I can do better than that. I can adopt you. I’ve always wanted to.’ Her emotion made her break off. ‘They told me I was too old. That and the fact I wasn’t married and didn’t have a partner.’

They hugged, not speaking, her tears wetting Helen’s hair; Helen’s wetting her new mother’s blouse.

Eventually, Isobel said, ‘I would have asked you when you were 16, but I thought it was too late, for you.’

‘No,’ Helen said, blowing softly through her nose, tears beginning again. ‘No.’

After school, she studied law at Edinburgh University. Her First was ‘the proudest moment’ of Isobel’s life, followed soon after by another: Helen winning a scholarship to Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice to study for a Masters. Before the end of her course Isobel, now 71, had a fall which caused bleeding in her brain. Helen caught the first flight home to care for her. In spite of Isobel urging her to return to Florida, she enrolled in a part-time MSc in criminology at Edinburgh University so she could also nurse her adoptive mother. ‘It’s my turn to look after you,’ Helen said. A month before the two year course ended, Isobel died, leaving Helen, her heir, distressed and confused about her future. With the security of Isobel’s flat in Comely Bank, close to Lothian and Borders Police HQ, and some money, she volunteered to work for an orphanage in India. She was 26 when she returned to Scotland to follow in Isobel’s footsteps, joining her old police force on the Accelerated Careers Development Programme, one of only a few fast-track recruits in Scotland that year. She started as a beat officer in Wester Hailes, a 1970s estate in south-west Edinburgh, followed by a two year stint working in the sexual offence support unit. Last autumn, when she was 29, with promotion to sergeant in prospect, she began working in criminal investigations.

Was Isobel Dalgleish the reason she found Ryan so offensive? In Helen Jamieson’s opinion he discredited the police and the rank of inspector, which Isobel had graced.

Or was it that he reminded her of all those years of rejection by people like him who judged a clever girl by her looks?

Fuck you Ryan.

It was high up on the railway cutting, a construction of cardboard and branches, like a child’s den. The commuter diesel sprinters between Glasgow and Edinburgh rattled 15 metres below: the west bound trains slowing towards the mouth of the long tunnel to Queen Street Station; the east bound ones accelerating from it. If any of the passengers had craned their necks to inspect the top of the embankment they would have seen the usual track-side urban detritus: a wild tangle of brambles and elder bushes, waste paper and broken prams. They would have returned to their newspapers or their text messaging oblivious to the rudimentary shelter which was built there or the teenage girl who was inside it, waiting for dark, waiting for the safety of night to go scavenging again.

Basanti was lying on a supermarket apple box, on her side, her knees together, staring at a pencil sketch which was propped against the shelter wall. The drawing was of a hill with a flattened top rising from a plain. The sides of the hill were ridged as though at some time in its history a heavy weight had pressed down on it. Half way up the left flank, on one of these ridges, was a lone tree. It was leaning at 45 degrees to the perpendicular, away from the hill, as if frozen in the act of toppling. She’d drawn this scene more times than she could remember and still she found her representation of it unsatisfactory. At first, she’d been frustrated by her lack of dexterity: her hand seemed unable to copy the brilliant and precise picture she held in her head. Either the shape of the hill (too squat, too narrow) or the tree (too flimsy, too substantial) was wrong; and there had been a particular difficulty over the corkscrew twist of the trunk. She had drawn it over and over again before she thought she had it approximately right. Now a different worry nagged at her: had she drawn this landscape so often that her memory of it had been replaced by all her self-made representations? Was the hill really as symmetrical or the tree really leaning as much? It unsettled her. Was she satisfied with this drawing only because her memory of the scene had altered? Was she producing a caricature which nobody else would recognise?

She closed her eyes and she could see the scene again, as vivid as the first time: the hill and the tree. Just as they’d been when dawn came and she’d glimpsed daylight and the outside world for the first time for many months and the last time for two, was it three years? How could she tell?

The man had carried her, tied, gagged and blindfolded to the base of the hill. He’d run all the way in the dark and put her in a shallow scrape, passing a chain between her wrists and attaching it to a metal ring embedded in the crack of a boulder. He’d locked the chain and left her there. She’d heard sirens and shouting; then it had been quiet and she’d rubbed the side of her head against the rock until the cloth around her eyes slid down to her neck. Then dawn came. The sun lit up the hill, the tree, and the bulge of rock below the tree. She’d fixed them in her mind, consciously, studying them for detail, closing her eyes, memorising them, opening her eyes and looking again: like a camera shutter each time taking the same photograph.

Before the sun had climbed much higher the man had come back for her. As usual he wore a balaclava with slits for his eyes. As usual, he shouted at her. When he saw the blindfold around her neck he’d slapped and threatened her, putting his face close to hers. She’d smelt his foul breath through the wool of his balaclava. Then, with her blindfold tied back on so tight she’d cried in pain, he’d returned her to her windowless room with its stale, still air.