The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (21 page)

He had wakened before sunrise to a ruckus in the front field: sheep calling out in distress and Tommy going mental yapping and growling. Jim had jumped from his bed and gone to the window. In the grey light of early morning he saw a collie rounding up his blackface sheep. It wasn’t Tommy, who was where he always spent the night, on the tractor seat. Jim pulled down the window and shouted, ‘Hey. Hey.’ The dog stopped its herding and looked at Jim who shouted, ‘Away with you, go away.’
Devil
, he muttered under his breath and banged on the window frame to frighten the animal. He imagined the dog to be a stray from Poltown or perhaps it belonged to a camper and had escaped. Just as he wondered whether it might have been abandoned, he heard a man’s confident voice instructing the dog to carry on. Jim went downstairs, threats issuing from him, and he put on his boots and pulled up his overalls, only managing to hang one strap over his shoulder while struggling to open the door. As soon as he was outside he shouted again. ‘Hey, hey. What do you think you’re doing?’ By now the gate was open and the collie was going backwards and forwards behind the sheep driving them towards it. A man holding the gate didn’t even bother to look up.

Jim shouted again. ‘Hey. Hey.’

He had started down the path when a voice seemed to come from behind him.

‘Morning, Jim.’

Jim stopped and looked round. Davie White was leaning against the corner of the house. ‘What’s going on?’ Jim shouted.

Davie waved his arm airily. He had a cigarette in his hand. ‘Don’t you find it’s always so rewarding to get out of bed early,’ he said looking across the glassy water of the loch towards Poltown. ‘Best part of the day don’t you think, Jim?’

‘What are you doing with my sheep?’

‘Your sheep, Jim?’ He sucked on his cigarette and blew the smoke out of the side of his mouth. ‘I don’t think so, Jim, not anymore.’

By now the sheep were on the track, running. Davie held up his hand and the other man instructed his dog to get ahead of them and to hold them where they were.

Tommy was going demented in the tractor cab. His claws were scrabbling against the plastic sheeting which covered the broken window. ‘Tell your dog to stop that,’ Davie ordered.

Jim looked at Davie and then at the tractor which was parked beside the hayshed. ‘Settle down now Tommy lad,’ Jim shouted. ‘Settle down.’ The dog whimpered and fell silent.

‘That’s better. We can talk.’ He wandered over to Jim and threw his cigarette stub at his feet, as if throwing down a challenge. ‘You know why we’re here?’

Jim said nothing.

Davie shrugged. ‘Interest soon builds up on £2,000, doesn’t it Jim?’ Davie glanced at the house and the sheds. His expression suggested he didn’t see much of any value. ‘£428 interest after five weeks,’ he’d said, shaking his head. ‘I thought it might assist you if I took a payment in kind now before things got out of control.’

Jim’s world was falling around him. He felt winded. Words wouldn’t come without a struggle. ‘I’ve been driving around doing the posters for Ross.’

‘So you have, Jim and Mr Turnbull is very grateful. Thing is, the money you borrowed is mine.’ Davie put his arm round Jim. ‘Lovely here isn’t it?’ He looked at the view. ‘Tell you this – I wouldn’t mind a place like this myself one of these days.’

He went towards the garden gate and waved to his colleague. The sheep started bleating again as the collie resumed its herding. Tommy barked and scratched at the tractor windows. Davie looked back at Jim. ‘Next time it’ll have to be the van or the tractor. The dog too.’ He tried to look concerned. ‘You don’t have much of value do you, Jim? I can’t see you having anything left at all in six months.’

Davie started along the track, hesitated and stopped. ‘Tell you what,’ he called back. ‘There’s a job that needs doing.’

‘What?’ Jim said.

‘What about you making some coffee later and we’ll have a chat?’

‘When?’

‘Let’s say nine o’clock. That’s when I like to have my breakfast.’

The first thing Jim did on returning indoors was to open the store cupboard, grab the coffee jar and throw it across the kitchen. The glass smashed against a wall; the granules spilled on to the floor. He drowned his sorrows in tea and whisky and added to the breakages and mess. Looking at the disarray all around him – soaked and shredded paper, shards of glass, fragments of pottery, and coffee – Jim shook his head, his anger turning to resignation, the impotent gesture of a man who was already finding reasons to choose appeasement over defiance. Jim had sometimes wondered if his aversion to confrontation, of his inability to go ‘toe to toe’ at the drop of a hat like some men do, would disappear if his life or someone or something dear to him was under threat; whether he too would stand his ground. In the last few minutes the answer had gradually made itself known to him. He wouldn’t; he couldn’t. He let his head drop and closed his eyes. The dog’s howling provided a distraction from his thoughts about cowardice.

‘I’m coming, Tommy lad,’ he said, going to the open door. ‘You hold on there.’

Tommy cocked his head, lifted his ears in expectation as Jim took the side path from the house. When he opened the tractor door, the dog leapt out and ran backwards and forwards in excitement. It curled its body around the back of Jim’s legs and lifted its nose towards Jim’s searching hands.

‘There you are Tommy boy. Did you think I wasn’t coming to get you?’

Jim patted the squirming dog’s neck and ears. ‘I wouldn’t leave you, Tommy boy. Course I wouldn’t.’ He knelt, and buried his face in the dog’s hair. ‘I won’t let them take you from me Tommy boy. Course I won’t.’ Jim let the dog slobber over him then stood up to slam the tractor door.

In the half second his back was turned Tommy sprinted along the stony track. The dog jumped the wall into the field and began searching for the sheep. Without any commands from Jim, he went through his morning routine, running into the corners in case one of the ewes had slunk off on her own, quartering the grass as the flock was brought to the gate where Jim would be waiting and watching, checking to see if any had gone lame overnight. In his bewilderment at the empty field, Tommy added a few tricks. The dog lay still in the grass as if a recalcitrant ewe was standing its ground, stamping its foot, Mrs A more than likely. Then he squirmed forward, legs bent, belly flat to the grass, ears pricked. Jim contemplated Tommy’s performance, wishing he had a fraction of the collie’s courage. He called out to the dog. Tommy obeyed quickly, running across the field and jumping on to the stone wall. The dog looked back at the empty field, as if the missing flock might suddenly have reappeared. Jim did the same, wondering whether he’d ever see sheep in it again.

‘Come on, Tommy boy,’ he called sadly. In a few bounds the panting dog was lying at his feet. Jim knelt on one knee and Tommy rose to meet him, licking his hands and face.

‘What are we going to do Tommy, eh?’ Tommy’s breath was hot on Jim’s face. ‘What are we going to do?’

When Jim had gone back inside, Tommy slunk away to the hen coop by the hay shed. He lay beside it, his neck and head flat in the grass, his eyes following every movement of the clucking mother hen and her chickens behind the wire mesh. Meanwhile his master set about tidying the kitchen for Davie White’s second visit of the morning.

Luckily for Jim, only some of the shattered coffee jar’s contents had scattered across the floor. The rest had settled into a heap, like a miniature mole hill, at the base of the wall. Jim scooped up half a dozen spoonfuls into a mug before taking it to the safety of the store cupboard. He placed it carefully on a shelf, the exact place where the coffee jar had been, before searching other shelves for the pot of marmalade he’d been given by Mrs Youngson in exchange for two boxes of eggs, but it didn’t seem to be there. Instead he found a jar of honey, from his own bees, and a damaged packet of digestive biscuits from the bargain box at the store. He felt through the packaging and was reassured to discover a few intact. Putting the honey and the biscuits on the sideboard, he lifted the bread-bin lid and checked the loaf for mould. Then, he sniffed the butter dish. Surprisingly, it was all right, if sweating a little. He picked up the broom and started sweeping, its stiff bristles causing broken bits of glass and pottery to skitter across the slab floor. While he gathered it all into a tidy pile, something that Davie said came back to him. ‘Business, after all, is business.’

Jim crouched beside the rubbish and picked out the torn sheets of paper. He studied each one before either binning it or saving it. The half dozen or so that he kept were laid out on the slab floor. Bending over them, he tried to decipher his writing, some of which had smudged or lost definition. Three fragments of paper more or less fitted together. Apart from a jagged tear at the bottom, Jim managed to reassemble the sheet – the top copy with his polytunnel calculations – while dishing out muttered reprimands about his impetuosity.

In the kitchen table drawer by his right shoulder, he found a clean sheet of paper. He placed it beside the one he had reassembled and retrieved a pencil from the bib pocket of his overalls. He wrote down the figures and put the sheet of paper for safe-keeping on the kitchen table.

By the time he had cleared away the rubbish, washed the dirty dishes left over from his meal the night before and laid the table for breakfast, he had rehearsed ‘a proposition’ which he would put to Davie. At first, it did little to lift his spirits but mulling it over, speaking it out loud so that he was word perfect for his visitor, he persuaded himself of its good common sense and he managed, too, to resuscitate a notion that had shrivelled and died round about the time Jim last saw his flock of sheep. Briefly stated, it was that the events of earlier that morning had been a misunderstanding, a failure of communication. The proof, Jim told himself with increasing certainty, lay in Ross Turnbull’s proposition – there, that word again – for Jim to grow salads and vegetables for the new village store. Ross had even suggested a supplier of polytunnels in Inverness and had told Jim to mention his, Ross’s, name to be certain of being quoted the company’s ‘best price’. As Davie White worked for Ross Turnbull, an accommodation must surely be possible.

Jim put the sheet of figures in front of the table placing he’d laid for Davie. With ten minutes to go, he rehearsed his pitch. He would tell Davie he had a business proposition. If Davie would provide seed capital for a new polytunnel business, Jim would hand over all the projected profits for the first two years (he slid the paper closer towards the seat where Davie would be sitting) – a figure of £10,000, sufficient to pay off his enlarged debt if they could agree a lower interest rate. In subsequent years they would share the profits 50-50. Jim was still undecided whether to conclude by holding out the prospect of expansion – say three polytunnels by year five – when Tommy started to bark. Jim looked at the clock. Davie was seven minutes early. He flicked the switch of the kettle, checked that he’d put coffee granules into the mugs and went to the door. As soon as he saw Davie – he had changed into jeans and a short-sleeved tee shirt revealing tattoos on his arms – Jim’s confidence began to drain away. It disappeared altogether when Davie barked at Jim to get his dog to ‘shut the fuck up’. He shoved Jim from his own front doorstep out into the garden. ‘Well, what the fuck are you waiting for?’

The sight of his master being manhandled startled the dog. Instead of yapping and howling, Tommy emitted a rumble of growls and rose to greet Jim, but with none of his usual exuberance. The dog knew something was badly wrong. Jim grabbed him by his scruff and led him to the tool-shed, opening the door and closing it, whispering in Tommy’s ear that he must be good and quiet. Retracing his steps, Jim felt a stab of fear at the pit of his stomach. His breathing quickened so that by the time he had returned to his kitchen and saw Davie lolling back in a chair, legs splayed, he was panting. He swallowed, thumped at his chest as though he had something in his throat and coughed. What made everything worse was the way he started jabbering. A jumble of words emerged from his mouth and ‘proposition’ wasn’t one of them, nor ‘partnership’, nor ‘profit’, nor even ‘polytunnel’. Jim heard himself begging for another chance, promising to do whatever Davie wanted of him, if only . . .

‘If only, what? Davie sneered.

‘If I can have my sheep back. They’re my livelihood. I’ll do anything.’

Davie smirked. ‘You don’t get it do you Jim?’

‘No,’ he agreed, hoping even now that conciliation might help.

Humiliation followed humiliation. His bladder let him down next. He felt the wet and warm urine spread out from his groin and run down his right leg. He cried out, ‘Oh God, leave me alone.’

An expression of disgust crossed Davie’s face. ‘See all this,’ he said. Jim lifted his head and looked around the kitchen with Davie. ‘This house, this place . . . you’re going to lose it, Jim.’

Then, from nowhere Jim found his voice, the one he’d rehearsed. ‘I’ve been working on a proposition, a business plan,’ he said, surprising himself.

Davie thumped his fist on the table, making the plates and Jim jump. ‘I’ve got a fucking proposition for you Jim.’ He paused, waiting for Jim to pay proper attention. ‘Either you do what I’m going to tell you or you lose all this, and if you tell anyone you’re fucking dead and buried Jim.’

His fist banged down again.

‘You’re a fucking corpse.’

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ Cal wrote in pencil. ‘Gone for a walk. Back soon.’ He looked in the pickup’s window. Violet was curled across the back seat, the top of her head poking from the sleeping bag. Cal prised the page from his notebook and secured it to the windscreen with the wiper blade before taking the coastal path to Boyd’s Farm. When he arrived at the steading it had the same odd atmosphere as the beach the night before, of something missing, of something untoward having happened. Cal shouted Duncan’s name and waited for a reply, for any sign of life. He peered into the shed into which he had previously been ushered like a courtier. Nothing had changed apart from Duncan’s absence. The Neptune Scroll was still nailed to a beam. The Cuvier’s whale skull and the barnacled post were exactly where Cal had left them. He shouted Duncan’s name again. The barn deadened his voice. ‘Duncan, it’s Cal, Cal McGill.’

He crossed the steading yard to the back door of the house. To his surprise it was shut. It had been open the previous times he’d been there and he remembered Violet saying it had also been open when she found the room Duncan had filled with Megan Bates’s possessions. He tried the handle. It was stiff but the door sprung free and his nostrils filled with the stench of cats and an unpleasant mustiness. The inside door was also closed. Knocking on it, he called out ‘Duncan it’s Cal’ if only to reassure him that it was someone he knew and not a stranger or one of BRC’s money-men trying to bully him into selling. He recalled Violet telling him how the open door and the emptiness of the house seemed to draw her in, as though it wanted her to discover the secrets of Megan’s room and he felt a similar impulse to go further, to inspect the room for himself.

Walking along the dark passageway towards the front of the house, he continued to call for Duncan, adding by way of explanation, ‘I thought you might like some help clearing the beach.’ He stopped, as Violet had, where the passageway met the hall. He looked from one scene of dilapidation to another: from an explosion of plaster scattered across the hall floor to the water-stained paper hanging like a partly-sloughed skin from the wall. Like Violet, he found it hard to imagine a human being living there, even one as idiosyncratic as Duncan. The house had an aura of terminal decay and a temperature to match. Crossing the hall to the bottom of the stairs, Cal gave up shouting for Duncan because it struck him as futile. Nothing living was within earshot, with the exception perhaps of a cat, a rat or a mouse. Nothing human; of that Cal was certain. The same feeling of absence and death assailed him when he opened the door to Megan’s room. Cal put himself in Violet’s position, to imagine what he would be feeling if these were his mother’s possessions, if he had been separated from her at birth and this, to all intents and purposes, was the closest he would ever come to her. Even for him it was a peculiar and unsettling feeling: this pristine room in a house that was falling down; everything present and correct apart from the woman herself.

He crossed to the bed and picked up the teddy bear. Holding it, he examined the room’s artefacts, wondering if all they signified was Duncan’s enduring attraction to Megan Bates and, of course, his eccentricity. He went to the wardrobe, opening the door and letting his eye track along the clothes rail. Like Violet, he stood on the dressing table stool to find the two boxes. Unlike her, he opened them where they were, lifting one lid then the other, checking their contents, confirming his view that two such different objects were most unlikely to have gone into sea at the same time and later to have been washed ashore together. Their shapes and weights would have sent them on different courses. A small dissimilarity was all it would take. Cal replaced the lids, returned the stool and went to inspect the cot. Once again he considered Violet’s reaction, what a powerful symbol this would have been of her lost childhood, indeed of everything she had lost. He touched the wooden frame and went back to the door.

Opening it slowly, he emerged onto the landing. The main staircase lay ahead of him, descending, but another smaller, ascending, flight lay to his left. It was at the far end of the landing and spilling down its bare wooden steps was a length of nylon rope. The colour, a faded orange, caught Cal’s eye. There were others like it in Duncan’s rope pile outside the steading. Approaching the stairs, Cal saw they led to a short corridor at the far end of which appeared to be an attic room. The door into it was half-open and through the gap Cal could see the slope of the ceiling and a skylight. As far as he could tell, the room was empty. At least there was no movement that he could see, nor sound he could hear. At the foot of the stairs he bent to pick up the rope. It was a coil about three metres long, and it was damp. Cal ran it through his hands, concluding it had been carried indoors sometime during the night or early morning. He glanced again at the attic room. Although much of it was still hidden from him by the door, he had a clearer view of the back wall. What he assumed from further away to be stained or grimy wallpaper, or a combination of both, he realised was graffiti. Then it dawned on him what this room was. Violet had mentioned it: how it was a rite of passage for teenagers from Poltown to run through Duncan’s house, how those who signed the back wall of the attic, the room furthest away, were regarded as having shown the most daring. It was the means by which the village had come to know of Duncan’s continuing obsession with Megan Bates.

A stair creaked when
Cal put his weight on it, making him start. How
many of Poltown’s teenagers had taken fright at the
same place and had gone no further? In two more
strides Cal was in the passageway. The rope made him
hurry. Despite appearances, the house could not be quite as
abandoned as it felt. Duncan or someone else had been
there not many hours before. Cal nudged at the door
with his left toe, letting it swing slowly open, revealing
the back wall to be a jumble of signatures, hearts
with arrows through them; a romantic and social history of
Poltown over three decades. He stepped into the room and
let out a gasp. Duncan, his face leathery and vacant
, was hanging from a hook in the ceiling. The rope
around his neck was orange, like the piece Cal had
found on the steps. A chair lay on its side
, where Duncan had kicked it. His boots lay below him
, discarded in his death throes by the involuntary thrashing of
his legs. His eyes stared sightlessly. His mouth was locked
open as though in the act of speaking. Cal was
overcome by shock and sadness for this creature, half child
, half man, who had chosen to die in this room
of all places.

Had he done it there to let his tormentors know they had won?

* * *

On her way into Poltown for her weekly surgery, Dr Fiona Bell noticed a police car turning down the single-track road to Boyd’s Farm and South Bay. She slowed as she passed the turn-off and wondered if it had anything to do with the public meeting two nights before, whether there had been any spill-over of unpleasantness against Duncan Boyd. Fiona had attended the gathering and even before punches started to fly she’d become concerned for his safety. Some of the people sitting around her, patients of hers among them, had been making threatening comments about Duncan whenever Boyd’s Farm was mentioned, about his refusal to sell-up putting in jeopardy the windfarm development. As she’d been sitting at the back of the community hall, she’d been able to escape the ensuing fracas but she spent the next half an hour patching cuts and bruises, using her emergency bag from the boot of her car, and offering comfort.

Afterwards, driving home to Ullapool, she had an uneasy feeling about Duncan. She wondered whether someone should warn him about the passions being stirred up, about the personal risk for him. What stuck in her mind was a tweedy man behind her describing Duncan scornfully as a ‘useful fool’ for the alliance of incomers, white settlers and second home owners opposing the windfarm plan. Back at home, she told Nick, her partner, about the violence and her concerns for Duncan whom she’d encountered a few times at South Bay. She’d taken to walking Pepe, her terrier, there after surgery and sometimes at weekends too. In her short acquaintance, Duncan didn’t seem to be as weird as his reputation implied. Indeed, she found Duncan’s shyness rather endearing, especially on those occasions when she was close enough to say hello and he’d responded by going off and finding a piece of flotsam to show to her, rather like Pepe bringing back a crab or mussel and dropping it at her feet, expecting a pat and some praise for being so clever.

Maybe someone should have a quiet word with Duncan, she suggested to Nick. So he could take some precautions. It was one of those conversations to which Nick hardly paid attention. She persevered because it helped her work it all out. At the meeting, she told him, she’d seen a community pushed close to boiling point. Until then, she hadn’t imagined there was any threat to Duncan, not really. Now she had changed her view.

‘He’s such an odd man that he’s probably not aware how intense the hostility has become,’ she said.

Nick cautioned her against interfering: ‘Which is really what you’re asking isn’t it?’

She agreed it was. She didn’t like to stand by when she might be able to prevent something horrible happening, but she knew there were other considerations, such as her patients thinking she was taking sides, which was why she was asking Nick’s opinion. He had grown up in Ullapool and had a better understanding of the area’s customs and taboos than a newcomer like her, who’d only been in residence eight months and still needed a map to find her way about the roads let alone the twists and turns of the communities she visited on her rounds of weekly surgeries. Would there be a risk of her patients getting to know about it if she did speak to Duncan? If there was, of course she wouldn’t interfere.

Nick laughed. ‘In that case, stay out of it. Nothing stays secret in Ullapool for more than two days. Somewhere like Poltown, you’re talking two hours. At the most…’

At the time she’d known he was right. She had patients who supported each side of the argument. On the evidence of the public meeting, some of them did so with a passion bordering on fanaticism. Apart from applying witch hazel or antiseptic to their bruises and scrapes, she couldn’t afford to become involved. But seeing the police car she felt a twinge of conscience. ‘God, Pepe,’ she said to the dog lying asleep on the passenger seat, ‘I hope nothing’s happened.’

She made a silent promise to listen to her instincts more and to Nick’s cautions less. Ever since she had come with him to Ullapool – he was following his guiding star to set up a furniture-making business in the town – she’d been aware of swallowing her tongue more than she was used to. Perhaps it was the difference between a city practice – she’d met and fallen in love with Nick in Norwich – and being a community practitioner working among scattered villages and townships. Still, it was a matter of concern.

As she drove on into Poltown, she took her left hand off the steering wheel and ruffled Pepe’s wiry coat. The dog stirred and opened his eyes. ‘Well, would Pepe like a walk on the beach at lunch-time?’ Pepe gave her that intelligent, longing look he always managed to conjure up whenever he heard the word walk. ‘You would, wouldn’t you?’ She ruffled his hair again. ‘Good boy.’

She parked in front of the surgery – a converted ground floor flat in Sir Harry Lauder Gardens. Her space had been marked ‘Reserved for Doctor’, unnecessarily as she had learnt since most of her patients were too destitute to afford a car.

Already she was feeling better for the decision she had made. If Duncan was on the beach at lunchtime she’d say something about the atmosphere in the meeting, about the hostility and anger, just in case no-one had told him. She wouldn’t mention it to Nick.

Her first two appointments were in the waiting room. Mr Mackie was standing by the window as usual and Mrs Simons was perched upright on the hard chair while her boy Tom bounced on the old sofa. All the waiting room furniture had been a legacy from a Mrs Keane who had died a few months before Fiona’s arrival. In Fiona’s opinion, the sofa and its two matching arm chairs would have been better buried with Mrs Keane, or set alight on a memorial bonfire. However, on this as on other things she had to keep her thoughts to herself and to tolerate their presence, at least for the time being, until she was certain of the sensitivities involved. A framed notice pinned askew in the waiting room offered posthumous thanks to Mrs Katherine Keane for her generous gift. One of these days, Fiona thought, she’d swab the chairs to discover whether they were as unhygienic as they looked. ‘Give me a couple of minutes,’ she said, bidding good morning to Mrs Simons and Mr Mackie, ‘and I’ll be with you.’ She carried on along the passage to the kitchenette where Janice McGhee, the caretaker-cleaner, was boiling the kettle and dropping tea bags into a pot.

‘Morning, Janice.’

‘How are you, Dr Bell?’

In Fiona’s opinion, Janice was a frustrated nurse. Every time she greeted someone she asked how they were, or whether they were keeping well. ‘Good, thanks Janice,’ Fiona answered. ‘Ooh, can I have tea, please?’

‘It’s for you, Dr Bell. I’ll bring it in.’

Since Janice was older by twenty years, Fiona found it odd to be addressed so respectfully. Generally she corrected Janice by saying ‘Fiona, you must call me Fiona’ but today she let it pass. ‘Janice?’

‘Yes Dr Bell?’

‘Is there something going on at South Bay?’

‘No that I’ve heard.’ A look of puzzlement accompanied her answer.

‘I saw a police car there, that’s all.’ Fiona
shrugged and went into her ‘consulting room’ as Janice liked
to call it. Fiona hoped she’d started a hare
running. If anyone could find out what was going on
, it was Janice. As it happened Fiona herself discovered the
first piece of information. As she prodded circumspectly at a
weeping sore on Mr Mackie’s big toe and mused
aloud at its stubbornness to heal, her mobile phone rang
. Apologising for forgetting to put it on silent, she fished
it from her bag and apologised again because it was
the group practice ringing. She would have to answer. Fiona
was still mouthing ‘I’m sorry’ when Mrs Findlay, the
practice receptionist began speaking. As normal, she was brusque and
rather disapproving (whether of new, female doctors or from habit
, Fiona had yet to work out).