The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (18 page)

At Violet’s request, Cal pulled off the road below the crest of the ridge, where Stuart, the bus driver, had introduced her to Orasaigh Island, South Bay and North Bay, the landmarks of her mother’s life and death. She’d be five or ten minutes, she said, opening her door. Her meaning was clear. She’d rather be alone.

‘Take as long as you want,’ Cal answered. He watched her in his wing mirror. She stopped at the edge of the passing place: a slight figure against a huge vista of land, sea and sky. An appropriate backdrop, he thought, since Violet had the demeanour of someone taking on the troubles of the world.

When she had appeared at South Bay, after her visit to Boyd’s Farm, she seemed worried and withdrawn. He had asked if she was all right. She confessed to feeling ‘a mess’. Could they go somewhere else for a while, away from Poltown? She needed time to think. Cal wondered whether she’d also had an encounter with Turnbull’s thugs or whether the farm’s perilous state had affected her. Under the circumstances getting her away from Poltown had seemed like a good idea.

Now he checked his mirror again. She hadn’t moved. Cal opened his door and walked towards her. She glanced back at him and shook her head, as if to stop his questions.

‘While you were with Mrs Anderson, I had a visit,’ he said, carrying on anyway.

‘Who from?’

‘Three men. They told me to leave Poltown.’ He waited before adding, ‘I was just wondering if they’re acquaintances of your friend from last night. Do you remember him? The guy who was just trying it on . . .’

She closed her eyes. ‘I didn’t want this to happen.’

‘Well, it’s a bit late for that.’ He sounded impatient, his way of letting her know he wasn’t prepared to put up with her secrets forever. ‘So what did your guy want?’

She sighed with resignation. ‘He told me to stop asking questions about things that didn’t concern me. Then you chased him away.’ She wiped her hand across her mouth, remembering the spray of saliva. ‘He spat. Ugh.’

Cal looked at the view. ‘So, what questions have you been asking?’

‘You know.’

He pulled a face. ‘About a woman who went into the sea and a hat and a bag that turned up the next day on a beach further along the coast, in 1983.’ He glanced at Violet. ‘Is that it?’

‘The woman was my mother,’ she said. ‘She was never seen again. She died.’

‘Did she take her own life?’ he asked after a pause.

‘I don’t know. I just don’t know.’

‘Tell me what you do know.’

She pointed out the faint continuous line of the coastal path from Orasaigh, her finger following it across the grass behind Boyd’s steading to South Bay. She indicated the headland, where the path seemed to end. The path went into a gully there, she said, between two sheets of rock, before descending to the beach.

‘Around 8am on Saturday 10
th
September, 1983,’ Violet continued, ‘my mother went along that path. She was wearing a white dress and the sun hat – it had red ribbon around the rim – and she had the leather shoulder bag over her shoulder. It was a route she took every morning, whenever she could, whenever the tide allowed her to leave the island.’

‘She lived on Orasaigh?’

‘Yes. In the cottage . . .’ She looked away, before he could catch her eye. Cal nodded, as though things were beginning to make some kind of sense.

‘What was her name?’

‘Megan Bates.’

‘Ok.’

‘She was seen on the path by a woman who was walking her dog on the Poltown road.’ The same woman saw her again a short time later. By then Megan was on the beach, standing at the edge of the water. When the woman turned for home Megan was walking into the sea. She told the police she didn’t think it unusual. She’d seen Megan there often. It was quite normal for her to paddle or swim. Her hat and bag turned up the next day. Duncan Boyd found them. At first the police thought he’d had something to do with her disappearance. A day or two later the witness and a letter Megan had written came to light. It had been posted just before she died. According to the police, it showed her to be suicidal. The officer in charge of the investigation told newspapers she had taken her own life ‘on the balance of probabilities’. All the usual checks had been made to see if she’d taken her passport, money, make-up, clothes, ‘things like that’.

‘She hadn’t?’

‘Her passport and purse were found in her bag.’

Violet studied the panorama in front of her as if it concealed the clue to solving the mystery. ‘She’d been pregnant, almost full-term,’ she said. ‘The letter was to the child’s father. His name was William Ritchie, a big shot lawyer who worked in Edinburgh during the week and spent weekends here. He owned Brae House and Orasaigh Cottage. Megan was his tenant as well as his lover.’ She broke off before adding, ‘He was married. Of course. He’s dead now, buried in the graveyard.’ She directed Cal’s attention to the church.

‘Pregnant,’ Cal repeated it, trying to understand the consequences. ‘So she killed the baby too?’

‘That’s what the police thought.’

‘You don’t?’

‘No. She’d already given birth. The night before my mother was seen at South Bay her baby had been abandoned at Raigmore Hospital in Inverness. The child was left at the main door, just before midnight, in a cardboard box, wrapped only in towels. There was no note, nothing to identify the child apart from an envelope taped to the side of the box. Inside it was a small rectangular section of a cardigan or a jersey, knitted from green wool, and a brooch.’

‘So the baby was your brother or sister?’

She
put her hand into the pocket of her jeans, removed
a small flat box and took from it an oval
brooch. She watched him examine it. ‘The baby was me
. The nurses called me Violet because of this – the flowers
are violets.’

She told Cal about Mr Anwar, about the
anonymous letter and the newspaper photograph of Megan Bates wearing
the brooch and about the shock of discovering her mother
’s name, discovering what she looked like, discovering she was
dead. ‘All my life I thought I’d find her
; sooner or later, if I kept looking. I never thought
she was dead. Not ever. Not once.’ A smile faded
on her lips, as though she’d been a fool
. ‘I got into the habit of taking the brooch with
me. I used to put it on if I was
going out into a crowd or shopping, or if I
saw someone I thought might be her. I’d walk
towards her so she’d be able to see the
brooch. I thought I’d be able to tell by
her reaction whether she’d seen it before.’ She paused
. ‘You see I was so certain she was alive. Some
days I could feel her.’ She pressed her right hand
against her stomach; ‘Here.’

‘Did she leave you at the hospital, come back to Poltown and walk into the sea?’

‘It’s possible.’ Her voice broke. ‘Perhaps she did. Perhaps she was just waiting for me to be born before drowning herself, so she didn’t kill me too . . .’

‘Why would she though?’

‘Revenge,’ she said. ‘At least the police thought so. William Ritchie had told her he wouldn’t leave his wife. In her letter she talked about depriving him of her and the baby. Perhaps that’s what she had in mind.’

‘She thought killing herself was the only way she could escape.’

‘She was wrong though wasn’t she? Anyway, how did she know her body wouldn’t be washed up?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Because if it had come ashore, the police would have known she wasn’t carrying a baby. They would have looked for me. They would have found me.’

For a while, neither spoke. Violet looked at the brooch and Cal retraced Megan Bates’s route from Orasaigh Island to South Bay. Eventually, he said, ‘On a day like this it’s hard to imagine anything bad happening here.’

Violet let out a bitter laugh. ‘That’s what I thought when I saw it first. I thought it was heaven.’

She told him about her meeting with former Chief Superintendent Robert Yellowlees, who had been an inspector at the time of her mother’s disappearance. ‘I made a mistake. I thought if I showed him the letter Mr Anwar brought me, he would realise something terrible had gone wrong, that he’d want to put it right.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He made a complaint about Mr Anwar, about me harassing him. Mr Anwar has been suspended. Mrs Anderson told me some people thought the police closed down the inquiry into Megan Bates’s disappearance as quickly as they could because a murder inquiry would have disrupted the Turnbulls’ business operations. The way Mr Yellowlees behaved made me think there was something in that.’

‘The local police were being paid off?’

‘If it had been a murder inquiry, detectives would have come from Inverness.’

‘Did she say anything else?’

‘She said Duncan Boyd had fallen for Megan Bates.’ Violet repeated this with distaste. According to Mrs Anderson, her mother seemed fond of Duncan too. And Duncan had offered to let her stay at Boyd’s Farm because she hadn’t wanted to continue living under a roof owned by William Ritchie. This was why the police suspected Duncan at first, before the witness and Megan’s letter turned up. ‘Have you been into Duncan’s house?’

‘No. Just the barns,’ Cal replied.

‘It’s like the rest of the place, falling to pieces, except for one room, a bedroom. It’s upstairs. Megan’s name is on the door. All of her things from Orasaigh Cottage are there; furniture, her clothes, her make-up, even the cot she bought. For a heartbeat, I actually thought she was still alive.’ She hesitated. ‘Cal?’

‘What?’

‘Duncan has the bag and the hat.’

‘The ones that washed up in North Bay?’

She folded her arms and shuddered. ‘Why has he still got them Cal? Why has he kept her clothes, everything?’

‘He’s odd. Maybe it’s no more than that.’

She had thought that too but now she had changed her mind. She’d never felt so frightened leaving the farm, Duncan staring after her. Every time she thought about it she imagined his childish smirk. She’d believed it was harmless until then. Didn’t small boys smirk like that when they were pulling the legs from a frog or piercing a living butterfly with a pin or throwing a kitten into a pond and watching it drown? Was that what he did to her mother? At school there were boys with grotesque collections of sad little corpses, boys who recorded the deaths of their victims, in diaries, private inventories of suffering. Was that why Duncan had kept her things?

‘Don’t you see,’ she said to Cal. ‘That’s why he smiles the way he does. He’s smiling because he’s fooled everyone. Duncan, the idiot, has taken everyone in. He keeps her room like that because he’s a cruel little boy cleaning his private trophy cabinet.’

Cal considered what she had told him and whether he should explain his sympathy for Duncan, one beach-comber’s affinity for another, his instinct for underdogs. Instead he said, ‘Well, someone knows what happened. Whoever wrote that letter Mr Anwar gave you, and it wasn’t Duncan, not if he killed your mother. Why would he want you back here asking awkward questions?’

‘But who then and why write it after 26 years?’

‘Guilt, bad conscience, somebody sick or old putting things right before they die. There could be any number of reasons. The anniversary . . .’

‘Maybe it is as simple as that.’ She sounded as though she hoped so.

‘But you don’t think it’s any of those.’

‘I’ve been brought here for a reason. I just don’t know what it is.’

‘Ok,’ Cal said, ‘So where now?’

‘I have to go back.’

‘I thought you wanted to get away for a bit.’

‘I thought I did.’

‘If you go back you know what’s going to happen.’

‘Some guy’s going to be waiting for me.’ She shrugged. ‘I have no choice.’

Cal said, ‘Haven’t you forgotten to ask me something?’

‘What?’

‘When’s the next low tide?’

‘Sometime tonight?’ she guessed.

‘It’s at 23.45. So what are we going to do until we can get back on to the island?’

A blue van waited at the bottom of the track to Gardener’s Cottage. Jim Carmichael rubbed the steering wheel and debated whether or not to call in on Mrs Anderson. In all the time he’d known her, he had never just dropped by. The welcome he’d received on his last visit encouraged him to think it would be all right. Indeed, Mrs Anderson might even be grateful to see him since he knew how much she disliked waste and she had a chocolate cake beginning to go stale. Maybe she would be glad of the opportunity to take it from its tin, he thought, banishing from his mind the blackface ewe he called Mrs A because of her truculent nature and haughty airs.

Having convinced himself it would be all right, he drove up the track thinking how much things had changed since his last visit. It might only be two days but it seemed like a lifetime. Then, he’d been apprehensive about the Turnbulls and what they would require of him to pay off his debts. So far all he had had to do was drive around putting up posters in support of the windfarm and removing those of the scheme’s opponents. Since Jim had become a convert to the windfarm cause, it wasn’t an imposition at all. In fact he rather liked the involvement, hearing the chat when he collected posters from the back of the shop, which had become the campaign’s headquarters. It had also opened his eyes to the advantages of keeping in with Ross Turnbull. Jim had heard yesterday about BRC awarding Ross the concession to run the new shop that would be built as part of the expansion of Poltown. Ross said local suppliers like Jim would be able to showcase their produce.

Far from debt
being his downfall and ruin as he’d feared the
last time he approached Mrs A’s door, now he
thought it might even be his salvation if Ross Turnbull
was true to his word. Maybe Jim would at last
be able to enlarge his flock of sheep, or increase
his bee hives from two to five, to supply the
shop with honey. After he’d paid off the Turnbulls
, maybe he’d be able to put money aside for
a polytunnel. He’d pitch the idea to Ross, of
Jim becoming the local supplier of tomatoes, cucumber, peppers and
lettuce.