The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (23 page)

‘I’m so glad I made the effort,’ she said, gawping at the buildings and the scenery with exaggerated appreciation. ‘It’s perfect here Jim. You’ve been keeping this a secret.’

Jim, meanwhile, gave a good impression of being appalled at Mrs Anderson’s appearance. He stood in front of her with a pleading expression and as he did so the door of the Land Rover opened and a thuggish-looking man with tattooed arms got out. Jim started talking to Mrs Anderson rather too loudly and in a most peculiar way. He called her Mary, something he had never done before, and made out that she visited his small-holding on a weekly basis; indeed had done so for many years to pick up an order of eggs. Unfortunately, he added with an apologetic shake of his head, his ducks had stopped laying for the moment. ‘But it could be they’ll have started again by next week . . .’

She watched his performance without saying a word and saw that his pleading look had become even more pronounced. It was clear that something was amiss and that she had to play along. As luck would have it, she remembered she had two empty egg boxes on the back seat of her car. She put the fingers of her right hand against her forehead and complained about her forgetfulness. It’d be her name next, she said. While she was at the car she kept an eye on the driver of the Land Rover who had sauntered over to join Jim. Mrs Anderson recognised the man’s face and the name that went with it: Davie White. She knew him to be one of Turnbull’s men and he looked the part too: muscled, with dark stubble over his head and sharp face, as well as an unpleasant swagger. It was also obvious that Jim was uncomfortable in the man’s company. Remembering Jim’s debt to Turnbull, his odd behaviour started to make a little more sense. Perhaps he’d been alarmed at the possibility of Mrs Anderson being her usual outspoken self, of her taking Davie White to task for preying on unfortunates like Jim, of making Jim’s difficulties with Turnbull even worse. She had been so wrapped up in her own concerns that she had forgotten Jim’s.

Returning from the car with an egg box in each hand, she bid good morning to the unpleasant-looking man, who didn’t respond, and otherwise held to the script Jim has outlined for her.

She inquired whether she might have bantam eggs if he didn’t have duck and to have six medium sized hen eggs – the browner the better, as usual. ‘They do taste so much better.’ She smiled as though this was a continuing but good-humoured dispute between them.

She was relieved to see Jim relax. He blinked once, then again, which she interpreted as encouragement to continue in the same vein before going off to fill her egg boxes. ‘If I had a place like this I’d have hens too, and geese. I’ve always had a soft spot for geese.’ She addressed herself to Davie.

‘Is that right?’ His tone was mocking and was accompanied by a smirk as well as a contemptuous shrug. He walked away, waving and shouting after Jim, ‘Be good now. Make sure you’re only giving her eggs.’ The Land Rover’s engine clattered into life and the vehicle, pulling its trailer, drove slowly past. The thug nodded at Jim who was coming back with the full egg boxes but ignored Mrs Anderson.

‘Not a nice man,’ Mrs Anderson said.

Jim looked embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry Mrs A.’ He pressed the eggs on her.

‘There’s no need . . .’

But Jim insisted. So she took the full boxes with a mild protest: ‘I’m the one who owes you a favour because you’re always helping me out when I’ve trouble with the car or the boiler.’

The mention of trouble set Jim off again. He started to gabble on about Davie having done him a good turn, rescuing his sheep from the road where they’d wandered during the night, and about the unresolved puzzle of who had left open the gate into the field. It couldn’t have been him because he had trained Tommy, his collie, to run round last thing in the evening, before the light faded, and if he found a gate open he’d wait by it barking until Jim came to close it. Bright as a button was Tommy, Jim said. So bright it wouldn’t surprise Jim if Tommy could be taught to close gates on his own. Maybe Jim would give it a try in the winter months when he had more time.

‘Talking of Tommy,’ Jim said, ‘Where is the lad?’ He whistled and a few seconds later the dog appeared in the open gateway to the pasture where the sheep had been unloaded. And sure enough he stopped and barked.

‘See there he goes, calling for me to shut the gate,’ Jim remarked. ‘He keeps me right, he does. Sometimes I wonder whether he’s the master and I’m the one who does the bidding. Well, I’d better go and do as I’m told, hadn’t I?’

‘Indeed you had,’ Mrs Anderson replied. ‘It wouldn’t do to keep the master waiting.’

Jim muttered another apology, this time about leaving her standing all this time. He’d be quick, he promised.

‘No need to hurry,’ she said, intending to put him more at ease, ‘I’m enjoying the view.’

She made a point of looking admiringly at the loch, a shiver of a ripple on its surface, and at the hills around. But as soon as Jim departed to appease Tommy, she went to the stone wall enclosing the garden and looked over it in the hope Jim would take the hint and maybe, after showing her around his meagre borders, would offer her a cup of tea or coffee. It was her best chance of having a sensible conversation with him.

When Jim returned, Tommy at his heel, she steered him away from another discussion about the dog by saying ‘I’ve just been admiring your garden, Jim, and your house’. She needn’t have bothered because the Jim who addressed her now was a different character to the one who had gone to shut the gate. What
is
going on, she wondered.

Instead of Jim’s face being a mobile display of tics, flushes and evasiveness – he hadn’t once looked Mrs Anderson in the eye before going to close the gate – it had become one of settled grimness with his flesh the colour grey to match his mood.

‘You’ll have heard about Duncan,’ he said.

‘I have.’ She was watching for Jim’s reaction. ‘And I’ve heard what you’ve been saying.’

Jim rubbed his hands around each other, a display of guilt. ‘If only I’d stayed with him a bit longer. He talked about Megan, what he’d done to her. It was eating away at him.’ He sighed. ‘Who’d have thought Duncan capable of murder?’

‘Who, indeed?’ Mrs Anderson’s features matched Jim’s for severity. ‘Since I know Duncan didn’t kill Megan Bates. And,’ she said, ‘what’s more to the point, so should you.’

Jim stared blankly at the loch.

‘Tell me Jim,’ Mrs Anderson continued, ‘how many times has Duncan told you about keeping the beach clean for Megan, about keeping her room neat and tidy? About being ready for her when she came back?’

Jim shrugged. ‘He must have been lying.’

‘He thought Megan was still alive, so why would he confess to her murder?’

Jim said nothing.

Mrs Anderson’s eyes formed little hoods. ‘Jim,’ she snapped. ‘Well?’ She studied the returning tic in Jim’s cheek and slowly her mouth fell open at the thought that had just occurred to her. ‘Jim, you haven’t . . .’

‘Haven’t what?’ Jim said.

‘Made up this cock and bull story about Duncan because Turnbull told you to?’ Her head shook slowly at the dawning realisation, at a Jim she hadn’t encountered before. ‘Is that why Davie White was here? Is that why he was bringing back your sheep – because you’d done Turnbull’s dirty work?’

Then something happened that Mrs Anderson hadn’t thought possible. Jim became defiant – with
her
.

‘No-one put me up to anything. Duncan murdered Megan Bates. He said so last night. He fooled everyone, you too. Now if you don’t mind I’ve got my sheep to attend to.’

The egg boxes lay where she threw them. One was the right way up; the other splayed open after falling on its side. Jim’s bantam eggs were cracked and broken. Albumen and yolk oozed from the ruptured shells and membranes. Mrs Anderson watched the liquid slipping and sliding while her hands searched out the edge of the kitchen table, its wooden reliability a reassurance after the tremors of the day. From having been the person in control of events she found they were now spinning away beyond her reach. The thought of Turnbull being behind Jim’s intervention added another and worrying consideration. Why had Turnbull done it? What did he know?

The sound of an engine and the bang of a car door made her jump, at first with surprise – she hadn’t noticed the vehicle’s approach – then fright. What new shock awaited her? She remembered too late she hadn’t locked the door, hadn’t even closed it properly in her rush to reach sanctuary.

‘Mary,’ a man’s voice called out. It was followed by knocking. ‘Mary Anderson, are you there? It’s Hamish. Hamish Boyd.’

To stop him finding her in the kitchen and her having to explain the broken eggs, she went to the hall before attempting a reply. Duncan’s older brother was looking through the gap in the door when they saw each other. ‘It’s you is it?’ she said coldly.

Hamish was thick-set and weathered; his frame and features shaped by a life-time of physical work and exposure to the elements. His face was ruddy-brown and his cheeks latticed with broken veins. His eyes were small, blue and darting below a ragged dome of home-cut greying hair and overgrown black eyebrows.

‘You’d better come in, I suppose.’ Her umbrage at being disturbed, at his failure to call her first, was evident and eloquent though left unsaid.

‘You’ll know why I’m here,’ he said, stepping from the porch after going through the motions of brushing his shoes against the coconut door mat. He had the lumbering heaviness of a man burdened by sadness.

‘Yes, I imagine I do.’ She preceded him into the sitting room, or thought she had, but he held back in the hallway. Seeing him hovering there, she said, ‘Well, do you want to come in or don’t you?’

He mumbled his appreciation at being invited into her house, then stopped in the doorway. It was a reminder of the previous times he had called and she had kept him standing outside, like a salesman or itinerant.

‘This is about Duncan I assume.’

Hamish pulled at the lapel of his tweed jacket and glanced down at grey flannel trousers. Usually he wore overalls and two or three shirts, the number of layers depending on the temperature. ‘I’ve been to identify the body,’ he said, ‘Thought I should be decent.’

‘I see.’ Mrs Anderson’s mouth hardly opened so locked was it in disapproval.

Hamish paid attention to Mrs Anderson’s furniture, the window, his feet, anything but meet her gaze. ‘Duncan brought disgrace to a good name,’ he said eventually.

‘He ruined
my father’s farm, my farm.’ Her tart reply made
clear the family name was a lesser consideration for her
.

Hamish nodded. ‘I won’t keep you, Mary.’

‘What would keep you?’

‘Well then, I’ll tell you why I’m here,’ he went on uncertainly. ‘I’ve decided that Duncan should be cremated when the police release his body . . .’ The sentence trailed away, as if he expected an interjection from Mrs Anderson, her approval or otherwise. ‘We’ll scatter his ashes away from here . . .’ He paused again. A frown line creased his forehead. ‘As for the house and farm . . .’

If he had been expecting Mrs Anderson to put aside her grudges and hurts because he had lost his only brother he realised now his miscalculation. She glowered at him waiting for what was coming next.

‘The house and the farm,’ he repeated. ‘Duncan left his majority share to me.’

‘I see,’ she said.

‘I would keep it for the boy Graeme if I thought he wanted it.’

‘Not Margaret?’ Margaret was the older of his two children.

‘What would she want with a farm when she can go off to the city, get a nice clean job and get married?’

‘What indeed,’ Mrs Anderson said tersely.

‘No life for a girl.’ Hamish realised too late his explanation had only propelled him further into the family minefield, ‘No, no.’ He shuffled from foot to foot. ‘No. It’ll be sold . . . that’s for the best.’

‘To BRC?’ Mrs Anderson inquired.

Hamish nodded. ‘No-one else will want the house. The police think the woman might have been murdered there.’ Hamish shook his head again at the shame of it. ‘And the land has been ruined. Pulling down the buildings and covering the place with concrete – what else is it good for?’

Mrs Anderson reminded him of her 15% shareholding, pointing out that a man with any decency in him would seek to correct that wrong when it came to dividing up the sale proceeds. And then she asked him to leave, without saying goodbye, without going to the door to see him off. Being confronted again with the Boyd tradition of passing land to male heirs threw her back to her father’s betrayal, where this all began.

* * *

The sight and sound of the digger unnerved Violet. She hated the way the boom moved, how it jerked like a bony finger, and she loathed the squeal of the engine as the bucket met the rock-like resistance of undisturbed soil. ‘Are they sure she’s buried there Cal?’ she asked for the umpteenth time.

‘I don’t know,’ he replied again

Watching and waiting like this was agony. Though she longed for her mother’s body to be found so she could take possession of her, she dreaded the moment of discovery. She couldn’t help but recall television programmes, documentaries as well as dramas, where skeletons had been unearthed and the skull or ribs had been fractured by an axe or some other weapon. Is that what they would find?

Cal said nothing. There was nothing he could say.

After a while she asked, ‘Where did she die, Cal?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘The police didn’t tell you?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing,’ she said turning to him, ‘is worse than not knowing.’ She studied him for evasion. ‘Nothing . . .’ She left it hanging, the implication clear. Her imagination churned with all the bloodiest possibilities so she might as well be told the truth.

‘I don’t think the police know,’ Cal said.

The noise of the digger’s engine drew her back to the spectacle which had kept her mesmerised for the past hour and half.

‘From what they said to me,’ Cal carried on, ‘Duncan didn’t say anything about how she died or where he hid her. Not in his confession to Jim Carmichael . . .’

The last of these omissions puzzled Cal. If Duncan was guilty wouldn’t he have left behind an explanatory note to guide the police to the woman’s remains? Cal would. Wasn’t it the only redemption available to a self-confessed murderer on the edge of hanging himself: to allow a daughter to bury her mother? Despite Violet’s plea to be told everything, he kept this thought to himself. After all, he was only guessing. Perhaps Duncan judged himself past redemption when he slipped his head into his orange noose. Or perhaps he wasn’t guilty.

Violet interrupted his thoughts. ‘Would you do something for me?’

‘Of course.’

‘Would you go to Orasaigh? Get my things from the house, and bring the tent?’ She found the key in the pocket of her jeans and handed it to him. ‘I can’t go back.’ She looked at him, her eyes filling with alarm. ‘The atmosphere there. . . .’ She shuddered. ‘I can’t.’

Should he try to reassure her it was like a thousand other properties in the West Highlands without damp proof courses and windows too small for sunshine to penetrate the morbid chill? He decided against. Perhaps the cottage had the atmosphere of a crypt because Duncan did kill Megan Bates there, as Violet seemed to fear.

He touched her on the arm. ‘You’ll be ok?’

‘Yes.’

‘I won’t be long.’

As it happened he was away the best part of an hour waiting for the tide. On his return, he found her sitting exactly where he had left her. ‘This had been put through the door.’ He held out a postcard, one side of which was a photograph of Brae House. She stared at it and then at him as if she had forgotten he’d been away or that she’d asked him to go.

‘I found it at Orasaigh Cottage,’ he explained. ‘It’s for you.’

She looked away, at the digger, at the restless searching for her mother’s remains: the trucks, vans and a score of police in white or blue overalls.

‘Shall I read it?’ Cal asked. Violet nodded, a little movement of her head, her focus remaining on the hunt. ‘It’s from Alexandra Hamilton,’ Cal said. ‘She wants to meet. She says, would Brae House 5pm tomorrow be convenient?’

‘Anna is coming tomorrow.’ Violet flashed him a brief smile. While he’d been away she had rung Hilary. There was a 6am bus from Glasgow with a connection in Ullapool. They – Hilary, Hilary’s daughter Izzy and Anna – should arrive early afternoon. Hilary was bringing another tent. They could all camp at South Bay, couldn’t they?

After a moment Violet asked Cal if his mother had taken him to the beach as a child, and he said she had.

‘I wish I’d had that,’ Violet said with feeling. ‘Right now I wish it more than anything else.’ She’d never done it with Anna. Never paddled in the sea. Never made sandcastles. Never collected shells. Never picked up seaweed and looked for sand-hoppers. Never fished in rock pools for crabs.

Hilary had often told her about a beach on the east coast, near St Andrews. It was a mile or two from Hilary’s family home. Hilary played there when she was a child. So did her father, and her grandmother. Now Izzy played there too. Violet wished she had that continuity, the simple pleasures of one generation being handed down to the next. It was too late for her. She saw her life as one loss building on another: first her mother, then Anna’s father. But she could break the pattern for Anna. Playing on the beach her grandmother loved: it was a small thing but important. For the first time in her life Anna would know she was following in her grandmother’s footsteps. For the first time, she would have something to remember her by which wasn’t about loss, or death, or now murder.

At dusk, Cal brought Violet a sleeping bag. He expected
her to be stiff and unaccommodating, but she was the
opposite, allowing him to wrap it around her without protest
or resistance whilst remaining mute. Otherwise, he kept his distance
, observing her from across the beach road where he’d
parked the pickup. He alternated between leaning against the bonnet
and sitting in the driver’s seat with the door
open. When the police abandoned their search for the evening
he stood behind her, in readiness to intervene should any
of the officers try to move her on. The vans
trundled past in convoy without stopping. Each policeman had the
same expression of sombre respect that funeral mourners reserve for
a relative of the deceased who remains beside the grave
as the crowd departs.

As night fell, he found the scene more affecting than ever with darkness creating the illusion of threat, of looming shapes emerging from the land and sea, of Violet defying monsters. Of all the thoughts he had about her, one impressed itself on him more than others. At times of crisis she preferred solitude to company and silence to conversation. In this, Violet and he shared a characteristic. His inclination was to turn in upon himself and so, it seemed, was hers.

At one o’clock, he retired to the pickup and pulled the door shut. He dozed restlessly, his sense of duty preventing him from dropping off, or so he imagined until he was awoken by the sound of the passenger door opening. He pretended still to be asleep as Violet settled beside him.