Naming the Bones (22 page)

‘Yes, but I’m not willing to travel the distance.’

‘So you know where he is?’

‘Not exactly. He’s recently deceased.’

‘That’s not funny, Murray. I’ve been phoning the hospitals all morning looking for your brother.’

He said, ‘You’re too good for him.’ And meant it, but he promised to get in touch if Jack rang. He reckoned it wasn’t a pledge he’d be forced to keep.

Murray hung up and put a chip into his mouth. It was cold and tasted of the cheap fat it had been cooked in. He pushed the plate aside.

He’d emailed Audrey Garrett the photo he’d snapped of Bobby Robb’s lone mourner late the previous night; now he found her number and pressed
Call
. The line rang out, and then Audrey’s voice said,
Hi, you’ve reached the answering service of Audrey and Lewis. We’re having too much fun to come to the phone right now, but leave a message after the beep and
. . .‘Hi!’

She sounded out of breath and Murray wondered if she had been expecting a call. The thought made him awkward and he stuttered slightly as he spoke.

‘Hi, Audrey, sorry to interrupt you. It’s Murray Watson here.’

‘Ah, yes, Murray.’ There was no trace of antipodean accent in her telephone voice, but he thought he could detect a note of caution beneath her clear tones.

‘I was wondering if you got my email?’

‘Hang on.’

He heard the sound of her feet against the bare floorboards and pictured her walking through the chaotic sitting room to the tranquillity of her office. He asked, ‘How are you?’ but perhaps the phone was away from her ear, because she made no reply. Instead the receiver clunked onto a hard surface and he heard the singsong jingle as the computer came to life.

‘Right.’ Audrey picked up the phone. ‘I’ve got it in front of me.’ She read his message out loud. ‘“Dear Audrey, this may seem like an odd request, but I have attached a rather poor photograph of a woman I think may be Christie Graves to this message. Would you mind having a look and letting me know if it’s her, please? I’m going to be on the road for a while, so will give you a call sometime over the next couple of days. Best wishes, Murray Watson.” This is all rather cloak and dagger.’

‘I suppose it is.’

There was another pause. In his mind’s eye he saw Audrey at her desk, dressed in the same casual clothes she’d worn the evening they met. Then she came back on the line, her voice brisk and the vision was dispelled.

‘Well, I don’t think David Bailey has anything to worry about.’

‘Photography isn’t one of my talents.’

It could have been a cue for Audrey to mention what his talents included, but her voice remained businesslike.

‘Yes, that’s her. Where was it taken?’

‘The funeral of one of Archie’s old friends.’

‘Another funeral? She seems to make a habit of them.’

‘I guess people begin to at her age.’

‘Perhaps. Why didn’t you approach her?’

‘I should have, but I wasn’t sure if I’d got the right person, and it didn’t seem like the ideal moment.’

The excuse sounded lame to his ears, but Audrey said, ‘No, I can see that.’

Encouraged, he asked, ‘How’s Lewis?’

The memory of the small boy’s stare had stayed with him. But perhaps Audrey thought he was trying to ingratiate himself, because her response was cool.

‘Fine. We were just heading out.’

He wanted to ask where they were going, wanted her to ask him why he was on the road, but instead said, ‘I won’t keep you then.’

Her goodbye sounded final.

Murray sat for a moment, holding the still-warm mobile phone in his hand, then pulled his plate towards him and splattered it with tomato ketchup. He’d forgotten to shake the bottle and a clear liquid that put him in mind of blood plasma ran onto his food before the red stuff dripped out. He dunked a chip in it anyway and put it in his mouth. The taste of sugar and cold potato made him want to spit. He swallowed it down and pushed the plate aside, just as the waitress placed his bill on the table.

She looked at his uneaten meal.

‘What was wrong with it?’

‘Nothing, I let it get cold.’

Murray busied himself with his wallet, but perhaps his face betrayed him yet again, because the woman put her hand back on his shoulder and gave it another squeeze.

‘Plenty more fish in the sea.’ She looked at the untouched battered cod on his plate and laughed, ‘It’s true. No quota on how many you can catch in your net either’. She caught the eye of the fish-fryer and went lyrical for his benefit. ‘It’s full of promise for a lad like you. Just you remember that.’

Chapter Eighteen

THE WOMEN IN
the tourist board had told him his B&B was about twenty minutes from Achnacroish pier, where the ferry docked. Murray drove slowly along the one-track road that climbed away from the bay, the sea receding in the rear-view mirror as he travelled inland, the mountains ahead in the distance, getting no closer.

The crossing had been smooth, but a faint nausea stirred in the depths of his stomach, as if his own tides had been disturbed. The sky was a palate of grey, iron smudges shifting against gunmetal. The wind was getting up, but there was still a possibility the grey skies might yet blow beyond the island, taking their cargo of rain with them.

Sheep grazed stoically in the fields beyond, their fleeces grey and shit-stained, ruffled by the same wind that bent the tall grasses edging the roadside. He’d left the village behind at the pier, but now and again he would pass a cottage built out of stone as grey and uncompromising as the sky. He slowed to take a corner and saw two children staring at him, hand in hand from the edge of the road, their hair matted, faces bronzed by sun and dirt. They looked like the kind of feral kids that might commune with faeries, and he was almost surprised to notice their stout Wellington boots. Murray raised a hand in hallo and was met with incurious stares.

A few drops of rain smeared the windscreen, but there was no need for the wipers yet. The radio had died, the signal left behind on the mainland. He turned on the CD player and Johnny Cash croaked into ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’.

Murray had a sudden memory of his father singing the song in the kitchen one evening as he dried the dishes, his father’s inflections the same as Cash’s, but his words slower, his voice leaving the tune behind on his adapted chorus,
I’ve been to Fraserburgh, Peterburgh, Bridge of Weir, very queer. Dunoon, whit a toon, Aberdeen where folks are mean. I’ve been everywhere, I’ve been everywhere.

Murray turned the music off and, as if on cue, saw the sign for his B&B swinging bleakly at the edge of the road.

He offered to pay in advance, but Mrs Dunn the landlady laughed.

‘It’s all right, son, I trust you. Anyway, you’d not get far if you tried to do a runner. Peter wouldn’t let you on the ferry.’

She was a pensioner of a type he thought HRT and aqua-aerobics had rendered redundant: broad-beamed, big-busted and solid-corseted, dressed in a heather-coloured two-piece too stiff to be comfortable. Her hair looked freshly set, a tinge of blue livening the pewter. He hoped it hadn’t been done for his benefit. He felt as morose as Peter, the sullen ferryman, guardian of the island.

Mrs Dunn got him to sign the visitors’ book, and then started up the small staircase.

‘Your room’s up here.’

He followed her to the tiny landing, careful not to knock his rucksack against the photographs of long-grown-up children lining the walls. The smell of damp reminded him of his father’s house towards the end, before he and Jack had agreed a care home was the only option.

‘You’re on the left. The bathroom’s in the middle and I’m on the right.’

He had a vague sense that he should say something to assure her he was no madman come from the mainland with mayhem and pensioner murder on his mind. But the old lady was ahead of him, pushing open the bedroom door as if there was nothing left to be feared in the world.

The little room was suffused with the sickly glow of a Disney sunset, its small twin beds draped in shiny satin spreads that almost, but not quite, matched the princess-pink walls, the rosebud-sprigged carpet and blushing curtains. A portable TV inscribed with a Barbie logo sat in one corner next to a towel rail decked with rosy towels.

‘Well?’

It took Murray a second to realise she was awaiting his verdict. He tried to put some warmth into his voice.

‘Very nice, thanks.’

Mrs Dunn nodded gravely, as if agreeing with him on an important point of scripture, and then asked, ‘What time do you want your dinner?’

The journey still sat uneasily in his stomach.

‘Don’t go to any trouble, I’ll get something in the town.’

The old woman snorted.

‘There’s no town, son. No café, no pub, come to that. It’s my cooking or nothing.’

The small room seemed to do a quick pulse as the house took an inward breath, closing around him. He drew in the rose-tinted air, silently blessing the impulse that had sent him into an Oban off-licence for a bottle of whisky.

‘What about seven?’

‘Seven’s fine.’

Murray said, ‘I’ll look forward to it.’

But he mustn’t have sounded convincing because Mrs Dunn added, ‘Don’t worry. It’s a while since I poisoned anyone’, and shut the door smartly behind her.

Murray sat on the bed nearest the door, wondering again at his talent for alienating every woman he met. Maybe it was losing their mother early that had done it, though Jack had always managed to use the motherless-boy stuff to good effect.

Murray slid his computer from his rucksack and switched it on, vaguely hoping a wireless signal would appear on the screen. It didn’t.

No café, no pub.

The pink room took another inward pulse. He’d imagined a tourist brochure cliché, a leather armchair pulled close to a crackling fire, a crystal glass of malt in easy reach as he worked on his opus.

The colour of the room was surely irrelevant. He needed to make progress, to start writing, continue with the research, sure, but move on to the text, begin ordering his thoughts before they spiralled out of reach.

He still knew next to nothing about Archie’s childhood, had got ensnared instead in the episodes leading to his death. He could begin with the end, of course; have the poet’s head dip beneath the waves, the fronds of his long hair floating free in the water, air bubbles nestling in his beard, lips parting as he welcomed oncoming peace.

Murray took off his shoes and went into the small
bathroom on the landing. He had to rid himself of this Hollywood vision. Drowning would be no better than other deaths. Painful and nasty, with shit and vomit clouding the last moments, a desperate clinging to a life already lost.

The smell of damp was more intense here. The shower was hemmed in a tiny, plastic cubicle sealed with a concertina door. He wondered if it leaked, wondered if he would be able to wash in the small space without breaking anything. The thought made him realise he’d forgotten to pack any soap. Maybe there was a local shop where he could buy some (he hoped to God it was licensed), otherwise he’d be forced to lather himself from the same bar that had slid around his host’s aged body. The disgust the thought brought with it made him feel guilty and he washed his face in the sink, avoiding his reflection in the mirror.

Back in his room he unpacked the box folder that held his notes. Here were his analyses of Lunan’s poems (these, at least, he could be confident of), some notes on suicides he’d managed to glean from Dr Garrett’s research, his interviews with Audrey, Meikle and Professor James, each neatly transcribed and assigned its own plastic envelope. He laid them across the spare bed, mourning the bedroom’s lack of a desk.

So far his work had amounted to little. Maybe Fergus Baine had been right and he should limit himself to a discussion of the poetry, rather than the man. After all, that was what counted, wasn’t it?

He picked James’s folder from the pile. In retrospect, he was surprised the professor hadn’t raised the same objections as Fergus. Murray remembered James being close to fanatical on the importance of divorcing writers’ lives from their work.

He could still conjure the sound of ripping paper that had shocked the tutorial room as James tore a student’s essay concentrating on Milton’s blindness to the detriment of his poetry both verbally and physically to shreds. But the projected biography of Lunan had raised no barbed comments. Despite the ready excuses offered by retirement and failing health, James had welcomed Murray, granted him hours from the depleted bank of time reserved for his own researches. The professor might simply have changed his opinion on the significance artists’ lives had on their art, or been motivated by a sense of collegiate duty; but holding the folder in his hand, Murray was struck again by a suspicion that the old man hadn’t been as forthcoming as he might have.

Maybe he had simply asked the wrong questions. There was no obligation to help those too stupid or lazy to help themselves, and James had always been impatient of anyone whose standards or intelligence didn’t match his own. The snowstorm of tattered pages he’d scattered into the bin before the author of the Milton essay’s less-than-dry eyes had shown that.

Murray slid the transcript from its folder, feeling again a sense of something unspoken. He took his pencil and put a star next to something James had said:
those of us who were left could have served his poetry better.

Perhaps it was guilt at an unfulfilled obligation to posterity that had made the old man reluctant to explore the intersection of his and Archie’s past – especially now he was facing his own death, the prospect of his own un-assured legacy.

Murray drew a squiggle through the star. It was important not to give too much weight to words spoken casually.