The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (14 page)

The emotion of the moment acted as a goad and she set off along the farm track. Before she had gone half way to the farmhouse and steading, her eyes welled up and her breathing became laboured. Her transformation had been brought about by a notion so unexpected and compelling that it almost choked her. For as long as she had dwelt on the misfortunes which accompanied her in adulthood – since the day of her marriage forty-seven years before – she had regarded herself as the guileless victim of other people’s selfishness. If she had been guilty of anything it was of giving her loyalty too easily and too well. Yet now, on these acres where she’d spent her childhood, another narrative insinuated itself into her thoughts. Following her humiliation at Diana’s memorial service, she saw the course of her life as a repeating pattern: one in which she had invested unwisely in people who repaid her trust by abandoning her and – this, the deadliest realisation of all – of her complicity in it. Was there any other explanation possible when someone time and time again laid themselves open to the same injustice?

It happened here first.

Wasn’t this where she learned about sheep and cattle, about hay and silage, about the growing seasons, about the business of farming in the expectation that one day Boyd’s Farm – its name for three generations – would be hers? Wasn’t this where she suffered the worst of her betrayals, the one that would set the pattern for all the others?

Her childhood at Boyd’s Farm had been content. It marched along to the seasons and with a growing understanding of her place in the world. Being the only child of Archie and Catherine Boyd, she imagined the farm would be where she lived out her life. A shepherd’s expression used by her father explained it best. The sheep, he used to remark, were ‘hefted’ to the place: in other words they belonged to Boyd’s Farm, and so in her view did she. She was ‘hefted’ too, knowing the farm’s character and moods better than her own, believing there to be an unbreakable bond between her and its acres and animals, her bloodline and theirs. She’d assumed her father knew it too, since there was no sibling for there to be rivalry over the legacy. Yet, she had been wrong, as she had continued to be wrong thereafter on the question of bonds, belonging and the giving of unconditional love.

Boyd’s Farm was where it had begun, with her father,a man who was as knowledgeable about the whims and wiles of nature as he was ignorant of the jealousy and competition that was conducted daily between Mary – once she became a teenager – and her mother. By the time Catherine Boyd died, Mary was forty-five and divorced, but still she remembered the frisson of excitement at having her father to herself at last. The sentiment had been short-lived. When Mary had suggested moving from Gardener’s Cottage to Boyd’s Farm to take her mother’s place, her father appeared troubled, inquiring why she would want to give up her home when he wouldn’t be alive for long – his heart was failing and his lungs filling with fluid. Didn’t she know the house and the farm would soon belong to his brother’s younger son, Duncan? The farm had always gone to a Boyd. Farming was a man’s business. Who else but Duncan could it be? Surely she had known, and anyway why would she have expectations of the farm when she wasn’t a Boyd? She had become an Anderson by marriage. Despite divorcing, didn’t she call herself by that name still?

Mary had fallen silent with hurt and rage and he’d shuffled off to find his will among the papers on his desk. Returning with it, he’d shown her the paragraphs detailing how he intended her to have 15% of the farm, a share that Duncan would purchase from her once he’d turned a few years of profit. Her father had looked at her with hurt bewilderment. He had provided for her better than any Boyd had provided for a daughter. Her charge of unfairness had been unjust. Didn’t she owe him an apology?

Beginning with her father she had always loved jealously. It was true of her husband, who left her after eight years of marriage, two miscarriages and a still birth. It had also been true when Mr William brought Diana to Brae. How Mrs Anderson relished the time the two women spent together over morning coffee in the kitchen or tea by the east wall of the garden or at South Bay where Diana liked to swim (Mrs Anderson following later with the picnic basket and tartan rug and watching Diana’s athleticism admiringly). It had never been enough. Mrs Anderson would have contemplated anything to secure Diana for herself.

Mr William’s affair with Megan Bates had given her that opportunity.

At the open gateway
to the steading Mrs Anderson looked around her at the
gaudy and untidy hillocks of buoys, rope, piping, plastics and
pots, and at the ‘Wall of Lost Soles’, hardly believing
how much it had extended since her last visit six
months before. She carried on into the steading courtyard, on
three sides of which were barns with sagging slate roofs.
Despite knowing what to expect, she was astonished at the
sheer volume of rubbish, astonished and upset. ‘And all for
what?’ she muttered angrily, ‘The ruination of my farm.’ Under
Duncan’s thirty year stewardship, there had never been a
profit and her share remained at 15%.

On the fourth side of the quadrangle was the back door to the house. When she’d lived there with her parents it had been the only entrance they used. It was the same with Duncan, possibly the only tradition that had remained unchanged. As she crossed to it, two black and white cats stirred from the porch roof. They stretched, arched their spines and raised their hackles. One after the other they jumped down on to an old kitchen chair beside the back step and went careering, back legs askew, as if blown by a gale, across the yard. Mrs Anderson took a deep breath, preparing herself for the shock of what she would find inside. It was always a shock. Every time she came.

The door was unlocked as she expected. It had been the joke of the village for years: how Boyd’s Farm was an open invitation to thieves; how none had ever accepted it because the house contained nothing worth stealing. The boys of the village regarded it as a rite of passage to run in and scrawl their names on the wall of the attic room before running out again.

Mrs Anderson closed the door behind her.

She went from dusty corridor to dirty hallway, from chaotic room to still more chaotic room, satisfying the urge that every so often drove her to visit the farm and to wander the house. As usual, she chewed at her cheeks at the evidence of her father’s wickedness in preferring a man like Duncan over his only child. If anything, with each succeeding visit, the case against Archie Boyd grew along with the increasing decay she witnessed. And so it was today. Ten minutes after going indoors she was back in the yard, her face white, her mood sour, the creeping tendency of a daughter to blame herself and to exonerate her father laid to rest for another while. Usually she would hurry away to the Poltown road to avoid an encounter with Duncan on his way back from the beach. On this occasion, however, she took the old kitchen chair from the back door and placed it in the shade against the wall by the steading entrance. There she waited for Duncan, for the cousin she hadn’t addressed since he took up residence at Boyd’s Farm. She sat erect, and with her hands folded on her lap, her demeanour composed even when she saw him approaching across the field.

‘Hello Duncan,’ she said before he realised she was there. Her voice startled him. He lifted his face, the first time she had looked on it in three decades. She could hardly find anything remaining of the good-looking young man she recollected.

The creature before her now resembled a scarecrow. His clothes were nothing but rags and his face scored with deep fissures as well as being blotched with stubble. His eyes were red-rimmed and sunken, his nose bigger than it should be and oddly bulbous at the end, his face somehow smaller. While he gathered himself, she examined him as a pathologist would a corpse, looking for cause and effect. How, she wondered, could a man’s skin be so lined? What limit was there to the degradation of a living human body?

Duncan peered at her. ‘Is that you Mary?’

No-one had called her by her first name for years; it caught her by surprise to find she was still known by it at Boyd’s Farm.

‘Yes, it is,’ she replied. ‘How are you Duncan?’ She looked him with disapproval and Duncan seemed at a loss to know what to say next. He coughed and fidgeted and looked at the sky.

‘I hear you’ve had a visitor,’ she said.

‘I have?’ His eyebrows arched as though confused by which of his many visitors she might have meant.

‘Yes.’

‘About the windfarm?’ he asked. ‘I told them not to come back.’ He pointed towards her father’s old tractor. ‘This land is NOT for sale.’ He smirked at his cleverness.

She had heard this about him, that he was just a boy at heart, a show off. ‘No, not about the windfarm,’ she said. ‘A young woman, a pretty young woman.’

A worry frown formed across his forehead. Mrs Anderson found it surprising there was room given the competition from all the other lines and wrinkles.

‘Her name is Violet Wells, Jim tells me. At least I think it was Jim. Well, someone told me . . .’

Duncan held his head to one side, listening

‘. . . that she’s been asking you about Megan Bates. You remember Megan don’t you Duncan? Didn’t you take quite a fancy to her?’

Instead of answering the question, he fidgeted some more, one moment picking at his fingers, the next becoming side-tracked by the cats which had reappeared to welcome him. They rubbed against his legs, tails raised, and made a chorus of meows.

‘You’re not very forthcoming, are you?’ she scolded. ‘Well, Duncan, has Violet Wells been asking you about Megan Bates or has she not?’

Duncan picked at his teeth, rubbed at
his lips and blinked. She could tell he wanted to
run away –
so
like a child.

‘I wonder why, after all this time. How long would it be, Duncan? Twenty-five years, more? A long time anyway.’

Duncan had folded his arms. He hugged them to his chest. ‘I didn’t kill her. I didn’t kill her.’ He shouted it at her, his eyes angry, his neck bulging. After his outburst, he seemed anxious at what he had done as if he hadn’t meant to say anything, certainly not that.

Mrs Anderson raised her eyebrows. ‘My goodness Duncan. Where did that come from?’

There was silence for a moment.

‘Poor Duncan, you didn’t really know what you were getting into, did you?’ she said eventually. ‘I do hope Violet Wells doesn’t start it up all over again, all that nastiness with the police. Oh, I do hope not Duncan, for your sake.’

She scowled at him, then stood up and brushed down her coat. ‘Well, I must leave you, Duncan. A lovely day like this deserves a good walk.’

Examining the field in front of her she said, ‘What a mess you’ve made of the farm.’ Then, looking back over her shoulder: ‘I always knew you would.’ She took a few steps. ‘If you want my advice, you should sell up while you have the chance, before the police come searching through Megan’s things again, before they come looking for you, Duncan.’

His head was still shaking.

‘Duncan,’ she snapped. ‘Are you listening to me?’

‘Yes Mary,’ he replied, a chastened boy.

‘I hope you are because this land will never be worth anything again if BRC takes its money elsewhere.’

Without further ado she started back across the field. When she passed the gate-pillars, her hand reached out to touch the smooth curve of the stone. She read the sign:
Boyd’s
Farm
, her farm. She’d had to bear its loss. Why shouldn’t Duncan suffer in the same way? Returning along the Brae driveway, she appeared a figure revived, her head high and defiant. She had found other uses for Violet Wells. Alexandra’s nemesis could also be Duncan’s torment and, just possibly, Mrs Anderson’s salvation. By all accounts, BRC had raised its ‘final’ offer for Boyd’s Farm to half a million. Her share would be £75,000, sufficient to sustain her in Gardener’s Cottage for her life-time. If only Duncan would sell.

The northwest tip of Orasaigh Island overlooked the narrow entrance to the sea loch. Cal leant against a large boulder which stood sentry at the shore. From force of habit he watched the lethargic progress of seaweed floating on the ebb tide. Not even two knots, he estimated, maybe only one. Violet was nearby on a little gravel beach, gazing towards distant mountains. His assessment of her had changed in the time it had taken to traverse the island. He’d started out imagining she might be having some sort of personal crisis, that she’d escaped to the west coast (why else would she rent an isolated cottage on a tidal island?) only to find trouble had followed her. He didn’t know precisely what form trouble took: he imagined an ex-lover or an ex-husband, maybe a stalker, something of that kind. Whatever it was, he’d assumed she was the one being pursued.

Now he wasn’t so sure.

When they set off along the track, Cal said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to say another word about last night.’

She sounded relieved. A rest from it would be good, she replied. It would be nice just to enjoy the day.

‘So what should we talk about?’ he asked.

‘Anything,’ she said. ‘Anything apart from me.’

The track narrowed and he hung back to let her go first. When he caught up again, she said, ‘Tell me. How do you always know when the tides will be?’

It was his business to know, he said. But it was also his interest. As a boy, he had always been mad on everything to do with the sea. He had studied oceanography at university and had recently completed a PhD. His enthusiasm had never left him, though sometimes it got the better of him. That was why he’d shouted when the woman from BRC was speaking at the public meeting. He didn’t believe in big corporations being handed large areas of sea. Nor did he like what happened to people like Duncan Boyd who got in their way.

She nodded, seeming to agree with him, and asked, ‘Is it what you do for a living, science of the seas, that sort of thing?’

‘When I was studying it used to be that but now most of what I do is ocean tracking – using tide and wind data and computer programs to calculate where all kinds of flotsam originated, where it will go.’

She asked him if he worked for the government or a laboratory. Neither, he told her; he was self-employed. He had a variety of clients – from environmental organisations who hired him to identify ocean polluters to distraught parents, husbands or wives desperate to recover the body of a drowned and missing relative or spouse. The balance of his work had changed in the last year or two: more of it was bodies lost at sea, less of it environmental work. The change happened because he had been involved in some high profile missing body cases which had attracted media attention. People had got to know his name. Also, because of the recession, fewer marine charities had spare money to mount investigations. His business was called Flotsam and Jetsam Investigations because of his environmental work but he was thinking of changing the name. The media dubbed him ‘The Sea Detective’, so he was toying with
The Sea Detective Agency
.

‘I’ve already changed my email but I’m not sure about it. Maybe a name with detective agency in it would attract more cranks and hoaxers.’

Violet thought it was a good name, easy to remember. ‘Do you prefer environmental work to tracking bodies?’

‘Yeah,’ Cal said. ‘I suppose I do, or did. Identifying the tanker that has spilt oil or the container ship that has lost cargo overboard and hasn’t bothered to alert anyone. There’s a satisfaction in that. Finding the guilty . . .’

As they walked on Cal said that missing bodies cases were ‘well, a bit different.’

‘How different?’

‘Oh, just about in every way. The clients for a start.’

It was his rule, he said, to emphasise that nothing was certain. All he could provide were possible search areas. A few metres of sea could make all the difference to where a body would beach,
whether
it would beach.

‘More often than not all that’s keeping people going is the hope of finding a body.’ He sighed, a long exhalation. ‘I don’t know what’s worse anymore, finding a body after it has started to decompose or
not
finding a body.’

Those were the only outcomes possible by the time he was called in. Either he found a horror story and destroyed someone’s happy memories of their child, spouse or lover, or he drew a blank and robbed them of hope.

‘I didn’t realise that at first. Now I do, I dread the effect, one way or the other. I suppose that’s why I’m here.’ He glanced at her again, checking her reaction. ‘Avoiding the issue . . . running away.’ He hoped this would give her an opening to talk about herself.

She went quiet after that and they walked on. He assumed he’d lost her until she asked, ‘How does it work, tracking things I mean?’

Normally he wouldn’t take on a job, he explained, unless he had three pieces of information: the ‘what, where and when’. He needed a description of the target object. For example, if it was a body, whether it was wearing a life jacket or not; if it was a boat or a yacht, what type and size, whether it had a sail up; and so on. Knowing exactly where the target – he apologised for using the word – went into the sea or where it was last seen was also crucial. Finally, he needed to know the time: when it went into the sea. Having the precise position and time allowed him to work out the tides and the winds.

‘What happens if you know ‘what’ but you only have an estimate of where and when?’ she said.

‘There’s more risk of error. Otherwise there are too many variables. Where things go and at what speed depends on the strength and direction of the currents and the wind, on the size and shape of the object you’re tracking, how much of it is above the water, how much below. The Coastguards will tell you wind has a bigger influence on where things go than the current.’

He looked at her to check she was still interested. She was.

‘Go on,’ she said.

‘Well, very few things go straight down the wind. A lilo does because it has no traction in the water. But something with traction will go off at an angle to the wind. The divergence can be 5 degrees to 90 degrees. Once an object starts to diverge it will continue on that course until the wind changes speed or direction.’

He gave her the example of an oil tanker with a wall of steel above and below the water going off at anything up to 80 degrees, and described how at the opposite end of the scale small differences had significant consequences on an object’s destination.

‘What about a person?’ she asked.

‘You mean a body?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a small target for the wind, even a body that’s wearing a life jacket and bobbing up and down. It’ll tend to go with the current though that doesn’t mean one with a life jacket will end up in the same place as one without. Look at shoes. A left shoe will beach in a different place to a right. It’s because of the different curve of the soles and the way the sea works on it.’

They had arrived at the tip of the island and Violet peeled off to the pebble beach. Cal stood by the boulder, watching her. He felt he’d been taking a test and was in the unsatisfactory position of not knowing how well he’d done; whether he’d passed or failed.

Whether trouble was pursuing Violet or whether Violet was pursuing it.

After a while, she came to join him,
following a sheep’s trail through low bracken, apparently deep
in thought. He registered the easy way she moved, the
white curve of her neck, the billow of her shirt.
When she was close he said, ‘The tide’s
out now, if you want to cross the causeway.’

She looked up and smiled. The tension seemed to have dropped from her. Perhaps it was just getting away from the gloomy atmosphere of the cottage.

‘We’ve got half an hour haven’t we?’

‘About that, yes.’

She held up her right hand. In it there was a smooth white stone. ‘My daughter paints them,’ she said. ‘She gives them to me as presents. She’s called Anna. She’s a sweetie. Her father ran off when I was pregnant.’ She looked across the loch. ‘I’ve never seen him again.’

He said nothing.

‘Anna’s being looked after by my friend Hilary. Her flat is below mine. Hilary’s daughter is called Izzy. She’s Anna’s best friend. What else should you know? I live in Glasgow. I went to the art school and stayed on. I was brought up in Inverness. I don’t have any brothers or sisters. My mother is dead. . . .’ She paused. ‘Oh, and I have a night job in a pizza restaurant so my education paid off big- time.’ She smiled. ‘That’s some of the important stuff. Most of it really . . .’

Her smile faded. ‘Actually, there’s more. But you’re better off not knowing it.’

Cal watched the reflection of the hills in the loch and wondered at the significance of the last few minutes, of Violet telling him the day-to-day details of her life. Had he passed the test? What did it mean when a woman volunteered her life story when not so long before she had been monosyllabic and resentful. If he asked her about last night would she revert to resentful silence?

‘Last night . . .’ He risked it. ‘Was that Anna’s father?’

‘No. Absolutely not. ’ She answered easily and without umbrage. ‘He’s never even seen Anna. She’s four. He’s gone. I don’t know where he is and he doesn’t know where I am. Last night . . . I don’t know who that was.’

‘Do you know what it was about?’

She shook her head. ‘No. No I don’t.’

‘Not some guy trying it on . . .’

‘I don’t know. It might have been. I don’t think so.’

‘What else is there?’

‘Something to do with why I’m here . . .’

‘Which is?’

She glanced quickly at him again, as if weighing up whether she should tell him or not. She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’

Cal waited. ‘Ok, so what now?’

Violet said she had something to ask him. ‘What you were saying . . . about things floating on the sea . . . I hadn’t thought about it before . . . how likely is it that a hat and a handbag would come ashore together . . . a raffia sunhat with a broad brim and a shoulder bag, quite compact, leather, with a zip-up container?’

‘They went into the water together?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did they come ashore at the same time?

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘Was there a wind?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Were they near each other or just in the same general area?’

‘They were close.’

‘Where?’

‘In North Bay.’

‘Do you know the time and date?’

‘I know the date.’ She studied him. ‘They were found on Sunday September 11. Late morning . . . I don’t have an exact time.’

‘Last week, you mean?’

‘No.’ She hesitated. ‘You’ll think I’m weird. It was 1983.’

‘Not weird. Unusual,’ he replied. The temptation was to say more. Pretty. Attractive.

‘It just never occurred to me,’ she said. ‘Not until the walk over here and listening to you, the stuff about objects with different shapes following different courses.’

‘I don’t suppose you have the hat and bag.’

‘No.’

‘Do you know where and when the hat and the bag went into the water?’

She appeared relieved at the question, at him taking her seriously. ‘Not precisely. Somewhere in South Bay. When? Around 8am on September 10 . . .’

‘And you’re sure about 1983?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you want to know how likely it is these two objects would turn up together?’

She nodded.

‘You’re not going to tell me why?’

‘No.’

‘But you will if there’s any more trouble, if you’re in danger?’

‘I don’t know.’

He wanted to hold her, to kiss her.

‘Ok,’ he said. ‘I’m going to need my laptop, and some oranges.’

* * *

At Violet’s request, he stopped the pickup at the entrance to Brae. She said she would walk the rest of the way. The driveway was pretty and anyway she was early – her appointment to pick up her shopping wasn’t for another twenty minutes. She might only have met Mrs Anderson the day before but she was certain she knew this much about her: she preferred visitors to be punctual. ‘And she disapproves of everyone given the opportunity.’

‘You’ll be all right?’ Cal asked.

‘With Mrs Anderson?’ She misunderstood him deliberately.

‘You know what I mean.’

She did, she said. ‘I’ll be fine . . . Really I will.’

He considered offering to stay with her but instead said ‘ok’ and told her he planned to drive to the general store. Then he would try out a few things at North Bay, to get a feel for the way the sea worked. He would buy something for lunch while he was shopping in Poltown. They could have a picnic on the beach, light a fire, whatever.

‘I’d like that,’ she answered, climbing out and shutting the door.

‘Give me a call,’ he shouted through the open window.

A smile lit up her face, a look of happiness, the first he’d seen. He was still working out what it meant when she disappeared into the shadows of an avenue of ash trees.

Driving into Poltown, he reminded himself of Rachel, his ex-wife, how similar in looks if not character she was to Violet. He banged his open hand against the steering wheel. Why didn’t he learn from his mistakes? There had been enough of them. The names came to him like a parade of failure. Apart from Rachel, there were Lydia, Maria and Kate. He remembered Rachel writing bitterly to him before their divorce, saying he was just another geek with a hobby, that girls knew what to expect when they got involved with a train-spotter or some dumb bloke who boosted his testosterone by watching repeats of Top Gear, but with Cal oceanography and all his ‘crap about the sea’ was a masquerade. It made him out to be some kind of romantic hero when he wasn’t. As soon as he was in a relationship he tried to escape from it. It wasn’t deliberate on his part, she had conceded, but still, breaking up with him had left her with a nasty after-taste of deceit. ‘Whoever wrote no man is an island clearly hadn’t met you.’

At that stage, she hadn’t even known about his affair.