The Darkness and the Deep (2 page)

Normally she didn’t mind decorating. Normally. She would have said there was always something deeply satisfying about obliterating the battle-scars of daily life and starting all over again with clean, fresh walls, unsullied as yet by accident, carelessness or a stray rugby ball misfielded, something symbolic, even, if you cared to think it through. Something to do with renewal and hope and putting the problems and mistakes of the past behind you.

Today the symbolism was uncomfortably insistent, and it didn’t make her happy. Here, in the pretty pink-and-white bedroom under the eaves of the Mains of Craigie farmhouse, the room which had had bright gingham curtains and a patchwork quilt her mother had made, she was obliterating her daughter’s childhood with matt black paint.

She blamed herself on two counts: first for promising, six months ago, that Cat could choose her own decor, and second for not getting round to doing it at the time, when Cat’s choice would probably have been blue or perhaps, daringly, yellow. Catriona Fleming had never been an adventurous child; her final primary school reports had depicted a model, positively old-fashioned pupil.

God forgive her, Marjory had even said to her husband Bill, over the ritual dram they had at night before his final checking round of the farm, that she couldn’t understand how the two of them had managed to produce such a middle-aged child.

Bill, laconic as always, had suggested that perhaps they hadn’t been quite as radical in youth as they might like to think now.

‘Speak for yourself!’ Marjory had retorted, peeved. ‘Remember that poster of Alice Cooper I had on my wall?’

‘Yes, but did you actually like him, or were you just doing it to wind your parents up?’

After a pregnant pause, Marjory had said venomously, ‘Did I ever mention how much I dislike you on these occasions?’

And perhaps that was all Cat was doing too. But black paint!

In the six months between the promise and its fulfilment, at the age of going on thirteen, puberty had hit Cat with the force of a ten-ton truck – breasts, spots, mood-swings, self-absorption and the sort of teenage deafness which means that music is only audible when played at a decibel level which cracks plaster. The abruptness of her metamorphosis had left her parents reeling.

Their first Parents’ Evening after Cat’s starting at Kirkluce Academy had been another shock. They’d gone in feeling – well, perhaps smug would be the unkind word for it, and emerged shaken and bemused. Her Year Teacher was first, saying delicately that Catriona was, er, undoubtedly an able pupil, at which Bill had smiled and nodded and Marjory, veteran of a thousand interviews where reading between the lines was a required professional skill, stiffened. It got worse from there on: inattention in class, poor time-keeping, sloppy work, unfortunate friendships . . .

And that, Marjory reflected grimly as she put the lid back on the paint tin and immersed the brush in a jam-jar of white spirit, was where the problem lay – with the dreaded Kylie.

Kylie MacEwan had attended one of the dozen or so primary schools that came within the catchment area for Kirkluce Academy, the secondary school in the main market town in Galloway. She lived with her mother, grandmother and two of her uncles in a small estate of council houses on the outskirts of Knockhaven. It was home to many characters of sterling worth, but in Marjory’s experience the adult members of the MacEwan clan could not be numbered amongst them. The child’s father, whoever he was, seemed to be out of the picture completely.

Kylie had a row of metal hoops round the top of each ear and a glittering nose-stud; there were rumours of other, more intimate piercings too which, in a child of thirteen, was disturbing. Especially when your quiet, innocent daughter was her new best friend.

Marjory could understand how it had happened, and she felt guilty about that as well. The police force was not in general regarded with affection by the young, and after the problems over the foot-and-mouth epidemic last year, Cat had been punished for her mother’s role by other farmers’ daughters she had known all her life: not with anything as blatant as bullying, just with hurtful exclusion. She had found herself something of a loner in the large secondary school and Kylie, whose precocity made many of the girls uneasy, was in a similar position.

And Kylie, even Cat’s mother could see, had a certain glamour. The henna-dyed, short-cropped hair, the plum lipstick and black imitation leather chic she favoured when out of school uniform was heady stuff for an impressionable country girl. And she had charm too; there was a sparkle of mischief in her kohl-outlined brown eyes and the pert little face had a wide mouth which smiled with engaging warmth. Given the family background, Marjory would have had a lot of sympathy with the child if she hadn’t so feared her influence on her daughter.

The black bedroom was evidence of this. All black, Cat had said defiantly, as the family sat over supper in the farmhouse kitchen.

‘
Black!
’ Her mother’s astonished response was enough to provoke an explosion.

‘Oh, I knew you’d rat on your promise! You didn’t mean it, did you, unless I chose something really sad to suit you. I expect you get some sort of tragic kick out of it – ruining my life?’ Furious tears pouring down her cheeks, Cat pushed her chair back and jumped up from the table.

Her brother Cameron, still more or less normal at eleven, looked up to say, ‘Hey, chill, why don’t you?’ before returning to his unsophisticated attack on the mountain of spaghetti bolognese on his plate.

‘Cat, I didn’t say you couldn’t have black. You just took me by surprise. But if you’re going to behave like a toddler throwing itself into a tantrum, I’m not prepared to discuss it with you. If you want to storm out of the room, do that. You can think it over in your—’ The slam of the door interrupted her sentence and Marjory finished it, ‘nice pink bedroom’, with a rueful grin at Bill.

‘Dear God!’ he said piously, making a quite unnecessary business of twiddling strands of pasta round his fork.

So black it was, after Cat had cooled down sufficiently to mumble something that could almost, with extreme goodwill, be construed as an apology. Rejecting Cat’s offer to do it herself, with Kylie’s help, Marjory had introduced a white ceiling and white woodwork which hadn’t featured in the original colour scheme. Still, if Cat didn’t like it, there was always the traditional alternative.

Marjory gave a last look round the half-finished room, shuddered, and shut the door.

The windows of Jackie’s, the little hairdresser’s salon in one of the warren of narrow streets off the High Street, were opaque with condensation. Inside, there was a cosy fug created by the heat of the hairdryers, and the sickly smell of shampoo and hair-spray almost masked the acrid, ammoniacal fumes from the old-fashioned permanent wave which was being inflicted on old Mrs Barclay, whose thinning white hair was a hedgehog mass of pink curlers and flimsy tissues.

The eponymous Jackie, in a shocking-pink overall like her two assistants, was a woman in her forties, elaborately coiffed herself with improbably black, brittle-looking hair in a French roll. Even through her pancake make-up her cheeks were flushed with the heat as she flicked a steel tail-comb to neaten the wispy strands before soaking them with a sponge and wrapping them in tissue. She was just clamping the last of the curlers in place when the first maroon went off.

‘That’s the lifeboat!’ Her eyes went to her seventeen-year-old daughter, Karyn, who had looked up from her task of sweeping up hair-clippings.

‘Oh mercy, that’ll be Willie away, will it?’ quavered Mrs Barclay. ‘It’s an awful dangerous business, yon!’

‘Och, away you go!’ Jackie said robustly. ‘They’ve that many safety features these days it might as well be a pleasure steamer. And a night like this, it’ll be a flat calm out there. It’s likely just some poor souls run aground maybe in the fog, and with the radar they’ve got on the boat it’s like working in broad daylight.’

But despite her confident tones, there was some sort of anxiety in her face as she asked Karyn if she’d heard her dad’s bike going past.

Karyn shook her head. ‘But it’s him would have set off the rocket, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right.’ The second report sounded as she turned with studied calm to fetch the bottle of lotion to be applied to Mrs Barclay’s exposed pink scalp. ‘Did you – did you see him at all at lunchtime, Karyn?’

It seemed a casual enough enquiry but her daughter’s look was understanding. ‘Aye, I did. He was fine, Mum, busy working at the shed and chatting to a couple of the visitors.’

Jackie relaxed visibly. ‘That’s all right then. Now, don’t you fash yourself, Mrs Barclay. Willie’s a good cox after all these years being skipper of his own boat, and they know what they’re doing.’

‘I hope you know what you’re doing with that cold stuff you’re putting on my head,’ the old lady retorted querulously. ‘Catch my death, likely.’

Luke Smith stood on the pier, his hands in the pockets of his waterproof trousers, his narrow shoulders hunched, looking disconsolately at the retreating wake of the
Maud and Millicent Dalrymple
. The Knockhaven lifeboat was an Atlantic 75 rigid inflatable, known affectionately as the
Maud’n’Milly
after the two maiden ladies whose generous legacies had provided the money to commission it.

For once, as reserve, he’d actually managed to get there ahead of Rob Anderson – owner of the Anchor Inn in Shore Street, a former naval officer and second cox to Willie Duncan – and had even started to get kitted up by the time Rob arrived. Luke had hoped Willie might have said he’d take him instead; he’d been out on enough training trips, for God’s sake, and surely this would have been ideal as his first chance to go ‘out on a shout’, as the jargon had it – it sounded as if it was just some idiot who’d got himself stranded in the bay. But no, with a jerk of the head Willie, who was never exactly chatty, indicated that there was no point in finishing his preparations. Rob had given him a sympathetic glance as he pulled his own kit out of his locker, but he hadn’t offered to stand down, had he? And of course Ashley Randall had been the first crew to arrive after Willie, as she nearly always was. She must cut her patients off in mid-sentence, sometimes.

It was a wonder Willie had accepted her as a permanent member of the crew. A doctor might be useful occasionally but certainly wasn’t necessary, and Willie’d been known more than once to repeat the adage that there were three useless things on a lifeboat – a wheelbarrow, a woman and a naval officer. But there he was now, putting out to sea with two out of the three. When Luke had been unwise enough to remark on it to Ashley he’d got the tart reply that Willie was clearly drawing the line at taking the wheelbarrow, which Luke had taken as a gibe about his own competence. And of course where Ashley was concerned it hadn’t done her any harm to be a protégée of the Honorary Secretary. If that was all she was, which was a whole other question.

Things really weren’t going well for Luke right now. It had all looked so promising on his move to Galloway two years ago; with his interest in outdoor activities, the job teaching geography at Kirkluce Academy had seemed perfect. He was almost at the end of his tether teaching in an inner-city school in Glasgow, a baptism of fire for a first job which had all but broken his nerve. He’d been looking forward to teaching his subject now instead of spending every lesson trying vainly to get the class quiet enough to be able to hear his pearls of wisdom on the subject of the volcanic geology of Iceland.

Somehow, though, it hadn’t quite worked out like that. It had been another illusion shattered when he discovered that the gentle country children he’d envisaged were just as unruly and disrespectful of him as their urban counterparts had been. And what was even more galling was that the only thing different was that in Glasgow no one had been able to do much with the kids whereas here he was one of very few members of staff who had serious difficulties with discipline.

He’d assumed, too, that here there wouldn’t be the same problems with what was categorised as substance abuse, but the under-age drinking culture was well established and he could see that even in the time he’d been here the drug problem was getting worse. It was seriously depressing.

All in all, if it hadn’t been for his involvement with the lifeboat, he’d have been packing it in and looking for another job by now, preferably one which meant he would never again be forced to speak to anyone under the age of twenty. But he’d rented a cottage in one of the higgledy-piggledy lanes which seamed the old part of the fishing town, hoping he might be able to afford to buy a dinghy and do a bit of sailing, and then heard the lifeboat legends in the pub, tales of rescues and failed rescues, of waves like walls of water and winds that tore the breath from your throat – high romance, in this pedestrian age! And these men were respected, heroes, almost. Luke hungered for respect.

It was the proudest moment of his life when he got the letter accepting him for training. It made you one of them, entitled to sit around the crew room at the station, to take training courses at RNLI Cowes, to go out on exercises as one of the crew, waving to people who stopped to watch the launch admiringly, and it all gave you back some of the self-respect that seeped out of you day after day in the classroom.

Yet here, too, he was beginning to doubt himself. ‘Always the bridesmaid, eh?’ a grinning mechanic had said to him as they assisted at the launch, checking the chains as the
Maud’n’Milly
was eased down the slipway into the deep water at its foot. It wasn’t fair, after all his hard work to pass every training course he’d been to.

The
Maud’n’Milly
was out of sight now. Luke turned gloomily to walk back into the shed, then hearing a burst of mocking laughter looked round. A small group of spectators – about fifty, perhaps – was still gathered at the head of the pier and among them, he could see several youths. It was too foggy to identify them clearly, but he didn’t need to – it would be some of his Year 12 pupils, including, most likely, his bête noire, Nathan Rettie, who was Rob Anderson’s sixteen-year-old stepson. Luke had had a major run-in with him resulting in Nat’s suspension, which had looked like a victory at the time. But Luke had paid for it afterwards – oh yes, he had paid.