Call of the Undertow (21 page)

Maggie felt the old sting in her stomach. To be away from this place was unthinkable anyway. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

Carol, gently now: ‘Shall I come there? I could get away at the weekend?’

Maggie wanted company, but did she want this?

‘I have to say, Maggie. I did think the set-up you had was pretty strange. Such an odd boy.’

‘No,’ Maggie said.

‘Sorry?’

‘No. Don’t come. I’m fine.’

‘But you’ve no one to talk to.’

‘Graham’s kind to me.’

‘Graham?’

‘Yes,’ Maggie said. ‘Remember. You met him at the bird centre.’

‘I know. Isn’t he married?’

‘So?’

Carol hesitated. ‘You’re not getting yourself into more bother, are you?’

Maggie put the phone down soon afterwards.

No one called. Trothan had been her only visitor. And then the police. But now that nine days had passed since his disappearance, they seemed to have finished with her and no one was keeping her
informed. The boy continued to suggest himself around the cottage; a scattering of sand and hair, hints of salt and pollen, a slight scent of woodsmoke. Sometimes she heard a voice rising, lilting
in a far away corner of the house; but it always transformed into a bird calling from the rooftop. The always-present absence. Like a packet of ham left in the fridge.

Frank had been the one to help her clear her father’s house. He’d salvaged a book of nursery rhymes that her father had himself once read to her.

‘Let’s keep it,’ Frank had said, holding it out to her. But when she took it, he didn’t let go of his end. With the book held between them they conceived in their minds
the children they would console with stories and rhymes after their first losses – teeth, hamsters, grandparents. They had smiled at each other, making a contract without words.

Maggie submitted all the final PDF files to Richard.

‘Time to celebrate soon,’ came back his email.

Very funny, she snarled back in her thoughts.

Hunger and an empty fridge now snapped her from her caged circling. She took a deep breath and strode from the house, locking the door behind her. Defiant. Leaping the barricades. No one was
waiting for her in the lane.

She went to the village. Walking along the main street, she anticipated mothers gathering their children against themselves, an elbow-clamp of safety around their necks. She felt they would do
it unconsciously as they stood chatting on the pavements with other parents; the closing army of the righteous all touched by a threat to their own children. She could see why they might regard her
with suspicion: a woman alone who deliberately chose to make her best friend a child.

‘Hormones,’ they’d be whispering behind her. What had she done with him?

A big static caravan for the incident room had been deposited in the centre of the village next to the playpark, opposite the shop. The door was open and a policewoman was visible inside,
standing with a clipboard, presumably in case anyone should remember anything. A roadside sign, visible in both directions to passing traffic, asked: ‘Have you seen this child?’ under a
huge image of Trothan tamed by a camera flash in his blue school sweatshirt, hair brushed back unnaturally behind his ears.

She was standing staring at it when Audrey appeared at her side, rustling shopping bags.

‘Maggie?’

Audrey brought the school in her wake like a following fog; the awful memory of that evening two weeks before which was the last time they’d seen each other. What platitudes could they
exchange now?

‘That’s just not him,’ Maggie muttered at Trothan’s photo.

‘Sorry?’ Audrey said.

Maggie nodded at the photo and said, ‘school doesn’t suit him.’ Then mumbled an apology.

Audrey laughed, didn’t take offence. ‘I’m not sure he suited us either.’

Maggie bit her lip when she heard the past tense. Surely they hadn’t all given up on him quite so soon?

There was a flurry at the incident room door.

Audrey looked across. ‘Better go.’

‘More questions?’

Audrey nodded. ‘You’ve seen them, I assume?’

‘Several grillings,’ Maggie said.

Audrey walked away and then turned back mid-stride and cocked her head with an attempt at a smile. ‘I expect we all feel a little responsible.’

Maggie looked at her feet. When she looked up, Audrey’s back was disappearing into the caravan.

It was then that she noticed a headline on the hoarding outside the shop:

‘FISHERMAN HAD ILLEGAL GUN TO SHOOT SEALS’

She hurried inside, bought a copy of the
John O’Groats Journal
, and read:

‘Quarrytown fisherman Jim Swanson has been charged with illegal ownership of a firearm discovered by missing schoolboy Trothan Gilbertson. It’s believed the boy found it in
Quarrytown’s disused church, property of local builder Rab McNicholl. The fisherman is suspected of using the gun to shoot seals sometimes held responsible for decimating the fish population.
Bail has been granted. The man is also under investigation for the sale of illegally landed fish.’

‘Open secret,’ Graham said about the fish sales when she went to the Centre. ‘He didn’t worry too much about sticking to his quota. They were all in on
it. No surprises there.’

‘Even me,’ she said. ‘Except I was too naïve to realise.’

He studied her face as if looking for the tern scar on her forehead. ‘At this rate I’d better keep a bottle of whisky in my desk drawer for you,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘All these licks you seem to take on the beach.’

‘Nora,’ she said. ‘You saw?’

Graham nodded. ‘I tried to catch you afterwards, but you ran the other way.’

Maggie felt her breathing crank up a notch, wondered vaguely why he looked out for her like this, and whether she wanted him to. He delivered her a cup of plastic tea in his shaky hand, and led
her outside so he could have a cigarette.

‘Why’s Nora got it in for you, anyway?’

Maggie turned away slightly. ‘Jealous maybe?’

‘Because the lad was attached to Flotsam Cottage?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Kept turning up at the door, eh?’

She stood up, walked a few steps towards the sea. Breathed the comment away. Concentrated on calm. She hadn’t wanted to contemplate that Trothan might only have been visiting her because
of a failure to readjust back home.

‘Is there any news?’ Graham asked from behind her.

She returned to the bench. ‘They seem to have given him up for lost.’

‘No sign, then?’ Graham asked.

She shook her head.

‘Strange, how the parents gave him such a long leash, considering their troubles getting a bairn in the first place.’

‘Oh?’

‘My missus says if you’re fit, there’s a better chance of conceiving. As well as not smoking. Oops,’ he hid the hand holding his cigarette below the bench. ‘So
maybe George was trying to lose weight. Every day for a year he walked the beach.’

‘A year?’

‘I always saw him at first light even on the coldest of days, even when the beach was white with snow. He’d get to the rocks at Dunnet and turn around.’

‘And then Trothan came along?’

Graham nodded. ‘No one ever seemed to know that Nora was pregnant. But I suppose there’s room for a bit of a disguise, eh?’

They both stared out to the gun-metal horizon.

‘The police have been, then?’ she asked.

‘They’ve interviewed everyone, haven’t they? The school, neighbours, bus drivers, ferry ports.’

‘Did they ask about me?’

He nodded.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘Did I know you.’ He paused.

‘And?’

‘What did I know about your relationship with Trothan.’

‘And you said?’

Graham shrugged. ‘Just that you took an interest in him and his talents.’ He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘I seem to be the only witness.’

‘To my “relationship” with him?’

‘I mean the only person to see the lad that morning.’

Maggie swung around to look at him. ‘When?’

‘Apart from you, I mean.’

‘You saw him on the beach? Are you sure it was him?’

‘From up there, aye.’ Graham indicated the upstairs look-out. ‘I was in stupidly early that day before heading out to Bettyhill.’

‘What was he doing?’

‘He was ploutering about on the edge of the surf. Way down there. But I could see it was him because of the long hair flapping about. Didn’t think much of it till the news went
up.’

She stared at him.

He turned and met her gaze. ‘I’m not going to feel bad about it, Maggie. He was aye wandering about on his own at odd times.’

Maggie was wrestling for explanations, and arrived now at one for George and Nora’s confrontation with the sea when she’d last seen them.

‘He had something wrapped about him,’ Graham said. ‘Against the wind, I suppose.’

‘What sort of something?’

Graham shrugged. ‘Too far away to see. A big coat, maybe.’

‘You think he’ll turn up again?’

Graham shrugged. ‘It’s only a few days, eh?’

‘Two weeks now,’ Maggie said. ‘And by the way it was the sealskin I found in the loft.’

‘What was?’

‘That he had draped around him. I gave it to him that morning.’

‘Good move. That’ll keep him cosy, wherever he is. He’s maybe using some of his bushcraft skills to lay low a while.’

‘You don’t think he went into the sea, then?’

‘It was a high surf. It’s not in a child’s nature to be suicidal, is it?’

‘Where would a body end up?’

‘That’s a morbid question, isn’t it?’ Graham said, taking a puff on his cigarette. ‘If it hopped aboard the North Atlantic Current from here, might end up in the
Arctic Circle somewhere.’ He gestured to his right, northwards.

Maggie didn’t reply.

He lowered the binoculars. ‘You’ll need to stop beating yourself up, you know.’

She nodded vaguely, keeping her eyes out to sea.

‘Look at it like this. He’s as likely got in a car with someone or fallen in a hole, or...’

‘Stop,’ she said. ‘That’s... too cruel.’

He patted her knee. ‘Let’s face it, it’s likely no one’ll ever really know.’

She thought for a moment, wondered how to try something out on him. ‘But what if it wasn’t like that?’

Graham stubbed his cigarette out, turned to her, frowning. ‘What do you mean?’

She was thinking of the day she’d brought Carol here, the stories he’d talked about. ‘What if he was “going back”?’ she said tentatively. ‘Escaping
human hurts.’

He chuckled, and when she didn’t join in he looked at her and his face sank. ‘Are you serious?’

‘It happened on the solstice, the longest day.’

‘So?’ He scratched his ear in an irritable way, then slapped his thighs and stood up.

‘A coincidence, don’t you think?’ she insisted.

Graham didn’t react, looked vaguely in the direction of the door to the Centre as if checking for visitors.

‘It’s when things happen, isn’t it?’ she said.

‘Things?’ he looked back at her now.

Maggie nodded, unwilling to spell it out any further.

His pale eyes held hers then, unblinking. He seemed to be trying to retrieve something. ‘Well, I mind him coming in and reading about those selkie stories we’ve got on the wall,
right enough. But he surely knew they were just stories? Any child that age has grown out of Santa and all that.’

She continued to look at him, and he began to frown.

‘Who’d put an idea like that into the child’s head?’ he asked eventually. ‘That he could swim away; turn himself into a seal?’

She pictured then Trothan’s drawing of the seals, noses down, pirouetting into free, wide waters. Finding space. Escape.

After a long silence, Graham said kindly, ‘I’m taking a wee group to Duncansby Stacks later if you want to come along?’

Returning to the cottage from the shop a week or so later, she saw that someone was hovering near her door, hand outstretched as if knocking at it. She didn’t recognise
Sally at first in a smart green coat, belted at the waist, formal, as if she was going somewhere important.

Maggie smiled as she approached, genuinely pleased to see a friendly face, and stretched past Sally to open the door wide. ‘Come in.’

But Sally didn’t move, stayed put on the decking, so that Maggie ended up half-in and half-out of the door.

‘I won’t stop, thanks,’ Sally said. ‘I just wanted to give you this.’

An envelope was in Maggie’s hand; her name on it but no address. Hand-delivered.

‘I didn’t want to just put it through your door without saying anything.’ There was a pinkish flush to Sally’s face, a hand tugging some stray hair behind her ear.

Maggie stared at the envelope.

‘We have to do it like this, just keeping things straight legally when a lease is about to expire.’

Maggie nodded, suddenly understanding. A formality. She ripped open the envelope, expecting to see a contract; the next six months’ lease with a dotted line for her signature.

‘Are you sure you won’t have a coffee?’ she asked as she unfolded the page.

But then she engaged properly, frowned down on a letter; a reminder that the lease would expire on the last day of August, six months after it had started, and in only six weeks’ time. She
turned the paper over but it was blank.

‘It is renewable, isn’t it?’ Maggie remembered discussing this in the phone calls before she’d signed up and moved in: ‘All being well, on both sides,’ Sally
had volunteered. At the time Maggie hadn’t been able to think beyond six months; she’d expected to be searching out the next white space on the map by then.

But now Sally hesitated. ‘Not this time, I’m afraid.’ She offered no further explanation. No family members in need of a home; no essential repairs that required the cottage to
be empty.

Maggie looked at Sally, conjuring up behind her the McNicholls hauled there by Brutus; Black Fish Jim in his yellow wellies somehow in less disgrace than her; Small and Anderson; George; and of
course Nora who was triumphant and red-clawed. The village gathering in sullen rows. They paused in a moment of still regard for her before starting to ebb, dissipate, break away into factions.