The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (28 page)

And again.

It came from the direction of the birch trees below the road. Fearing the worst Jim followed a trail of broken and bent bracken stems downhill. Where the ground flattened, a bare expanse of moss, he came across the body of a woman. She was on her side, her right leg at an unnatural angle and there was blood on her jeans. Her head had also taken a blow. More blood was seeping into her hair. For a second, Jim didn’t know what to do. The taste of whisky was fresh in his mouth; an empty bottle on the roof of his van. Another that he’d finished a few hours before was in his kitchen.

Just as he was wondering whether there was any way out of this mess for him, she moaned again. ‘Help . . . please.’

‘Hold on there,’ Jim answered. ‘I’m almost with you.’

Resigning himself to losing his licence and worse, he knelt by her side. ‘What happened?’ he said, and when she didn’t answer he decided to tell her a lie, his last hope of avoiding punishment. He had been driving along, he said, and he’d seen her bag on the road. Had she slipped and fallen? Had a car hit her? He’d passed one on the road. He touched her clenched right hand. ‘Can you speak to me? Can you tell me what hurts?’ He looked at her broken leg, at the odd angle of it. He wondered if he should try to straighten it, whether a make-shift tourniquet above the break would stop it bleeding, whether he should move her. What did he know about it? When any of his sheep broke a leg, his only other experience of something like that, he cut their throats.

He checked the wound on the back of her head.
It seemed to be a graze rather than a deep
cut; the blood oozing rather than flowing. He leant over
her body so that she could see him. The right
half of her face was pressing into the moss. ‘It’
s ok Violet,’ he said. ‘You’ll be all right.
I’ll get you out of here.’ He squeezed her
clenched hand to reassure her.

‘Is it just your leg?’

She tried to speak, the corner of her mouth opening.
Sounds, not words. ‘It’s ok,’ Jim said. Her open
left eye watched him. Although bloodshot, it seemed to be
able to follow his movement. A good sign, he thought. ‘
Can you do something for me?’ Jim remembered a scene
from Casualty on the television. ‘Can you flex your fingers?’
He touched Violet’s clenched hand to prompt her. The
index finger started to open, the others slowly followed. ‘That’
s good,’ he said. ‘Can you go all the way?’
As the fingers stretched out, a small box fell from
her hand. The lid sprang open spilling a brooch, the
violet of the flowers framed by the bright green of
the moss. Jim grunted as if he’d been winded.
His expression altered too; shock, guilt and fright, one reflex
after another. He glanced at Violet. Now her bloodshot eye
watched him coldly and accusingly.
You’ve seen it before
.
Jim wiped the back of his hand across his face. ‘
Damn,’ he said. ‘What’ll I do with you now?’

Not the first entrance. Not the second. At the third, Cal turned left. The sign on the corner house said William Wallace Drive. Someone had spray-painted a line through William Wallace and had scrawled above it Alec Turnbull. At the far end of the cul-de-sac were three bungalows. A woman pushing a pram told Cal which was whose. The one on the left, ‘the posh one with a conservatory’, was Alec’s. The middle one was where Alec’s sister-in-law Marjorie lived. The one he wanted was on the right, with the fresh render around the window. Cal parked outside as Ross Turnbull appeared at the side door. He was tucking in a blue shirt. A patterned tie was hanging undone around his collar. He threw a suit jacket on to the roof of his car while he opened the passenger door and put an executive case on to the seat. Then he noticed Cal.

‘I haven’t got time for this.’ He watched Cal walking up to the gates. ‘Whatever it is. Sorry but I just don’t.’

Ross shut the door with his knee and picked up the jacket. Walking round the car, he pulled it on.

‘Has Violet Wells been to see you?’ Cal demanded.

Ross stopped. ‘And that’s why I don’t have time for this. I’ve lost too much time already.’ Opening the driver’s door, he said, ‘Come and see me later. Whenever. Happy to chat. But I’ve got to go.’

‘What did you tell her?’

Ross raised his eyebrows and sighed. ‘Why don’t you ask her?’ He straightened his jacket and pulled at the cuffs. The sleeves were too short. ‘Sorry, but I’ve got to be at a meeting, and if I’m late Poltown’s going to lose a big opportunity.’

He got into the car, shut the door and opened the window. Reversing down the short driveway, he said, ‘By the way I owe you an apology.’

‘What for?’

‘Some of my guys trying to frighten you off . . . They thought you were doing work for Boyd, feeding him data on how the windfarm would interfere with the currents. Someone Googled you, they put two and two together and made five. They thought you should be warned off. It’s the way things used to be done around here. Not now. Not on my watch.’

‘Did you apologise to Violet?’

‘Why?’

‘Because one of your people had a go at her too.’

Ross shook his head. ‘Nope, not as far as I know. Look, I wish I could stay and talk but I have to go. This afternoon, this evening, whenever. Just ring the bell.’

Walking back to the pickup, Cal rang Hilary. He told her about Anna’s picture, what happened at Mrs Anderson’s, about Violet going to Boyd’s Farm, finding the names on the wall and then her disappearing act. ‘Listen,’ he said, interrupting her complaint that Cal should have told her earlier, ‘has Violet got her own phone with her?’

Hilary said she thought so. In fact she remembered seeing it in the backpack.

‘She’s not answering,’ Cal said.

The hill track became steeper and rougher. It was gouged and gashed by the streams of rainwater that poured down it nine months of the year. Fiona Bell had already banged the car’s underside three times and the next stretch looked even worse. The doctor and her dog peered through the windscreen; Pepe in his usual pose, back legs on the passenger seat, front paws resting on the dashboard, his body spanning a relative chasm. To Fiona’s amusement, dog and driver seemed to be adopting similar strategies. The car’s front left wheel was balancing on the remnants of the ridge that ran down the centre of the track, the front right on the sloping verge, one or other threatening to slip into an abyss. The canine and motoring equivalents of a high wire act, Fiona told Pepe. ‘At any moment we could plunge to our doom.’

As she rubbed the dog’s head she noticed a stone shed with a tin roof coming into view around the left of the hill, the direction in which the track was veering. Wisps of smoke drifted from the single chimney and cut peat was stacked in a lean-to by the gable. ‘Aggie’s Croft’ was painted in white on a stone by the door. ‘This
is
it,’ Fiona exclaimed, hardly believing a woman in her eighties lived on her own in so remote a place. Parking the car, she instructed Pepe to stay where he was and reached into the back for her bag. Through the window she glimpsed a sheep with corkscrew horns standing inside the low stone wall around what appeared to be Aggie’s vegetable garden. It saw her too and stamped its left foot with increasing frequency as Fiona proceeded from the car to the croft’s door. The animal’s recalcitrance brought to mind Aggie’s mood on her last visit to the surgery. Difficult hardly described it, Fiona recalled gloomily as she lifted the old-fashioned latch. ‘It’s only the doctor,’ she called out, letting herself in, as Aggie had instructed in her message.

An impatient ‘what took you?’ issued from the fug of peat smoke and drying clothes. No wonder Aggie complained of rheumy eyes, Fiona thought, but she replied cheerfully, ‘Oh, just the landslip and the track being half washed away. No excuse really.’

Once her eyes had acclimatised to the murk, Fiona saw Aggie McPherson in a chair by the small window, the only one in a large rectangular room which seemed to be where she spent her days and nights. There was a bed along the opposite wall, pans above the stove in the fireplace and long-johns and grimy vests were hanging out to dry on a length of farmer’s twine.

‘How are you Aggie?’

The old woman barely acknowledged Fiona, except to display irritation at having to pay attention to anything else apart from what she described as ‘that beast eating my garden’.

‘Isn’t it one of yours?’ Fiona put down her bag and taking Aggie by the wrist felt for her pulse.

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Aggie’s beaky little face turned towards Fiona. Even with corkscrew horns, the sheep in question could hardly have looked fiercer.

‘Is it your eyes again?’

Aggie bridled. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my eyes apart from what they’re seeing.’

‘What’s that Aggie?’

‘That animal . . .’

Fiona looked from the sheep to Aggie and back again. ‘Aggie, you haven’t called me out because a sheep is eating your garden?’

Aggie’s shoulders slumped. ‘You said I could.’ She glanced at Fiona to see whether this new doctor was more gullible than the last. ‘Anything, you said. Just ring and you’d come.’ Her eyes had become dull. ‘You said it wasn’t right someone old like me having to travel all that way.’ She sounded alone and defeated.

Fiona sighed and regretted being so sharp. She patted Aggie’
s hand. ‘I do remember saying something like that.’ Resignation
seeped into the admission. ‘But in future . . .’ Fiona tried to
look stern. ‘Not sheep. Never again. Promise.’

Aggie mumbled something inaudible and turned again to stare at the creature. It was moving from her cabbages to her sprouts, its progress marked by the old woman’s renewed complaints.

‘If it’s not yours,’ Fiona said, watching it too, ‘whose is it?’

‘It’s Jim’s.’

‘Have you rung him?’

Aggie shrugged, managing to look weak and helpless again.

‘All right Aggie, just this time.’ Fiona stood up and looked from patient to sheep. She wasn’t sure which was worse, and said so, hoping her pretence at grumpiness would deter Aggie from pulling the same trick twice.

After saying goodbye, Fiona closed the front door, and advanced on the animal. Despite her shouts, it seemed determined to stay exactly where it was. It stamped its front legs alternately and with such rapidity they reminded Fiona of pistons. She imagined a Yukon gold prospector defending a claim with less resolve.

‘I’ll go and get Jim,’ she shouted at Aggie’s ghostly face peering through the window. Doubting she’d be able to hear, Fiona waved, indicating the direction of Jim’s small-holding. ‘I’ll get Jim,’ she tried again.

Back in the car, she told Pepe he was in for a treat: he was going to visit Tommy. The two dogs had met a few times, usually when Jim and Fiona passed in the road, each on their rounds. But, as it happened, Pepe had already seen Tommy. The little dog was transfixed by the sight of Jim’s collie circling a group of sheep higher up the hill, close to the forestry. There was no sign of Jim and anyway no prospect of getting nearer in the car to check if he was there. Fiona decided instead to leave a note at his small-holding and take Pepe for a walk. She could leave the car by the cattle grid, go along the road to Jim’s and return by the path which ran along the loch-side.

It took her ten minutes to reach the bottom of
the hill and another minute or two before she was
at the cattle grid. Soon she and Pepe were striding
along the road, the dog darting into the bracken, sniffing
out the scents of deer and pine marten. Fiona relished
being alone in such a wild place. Not for the
first time, she doubted she would ever be able to
go back to England’s domestic landscape, pretty and comfortable
though it was. Where in England could she go for
a walk and be among such wildness, so many changing
vistas: now loch, now mountain under a magical September blue
sky; so pale it looked ethereal?

Snapping back from her daydream she wondered where Pepe was. She swivelled around and spotted him behind her at the edge of the road, nosing excitedly at some bracken.

‘Pepe, stop that,’ she shouted. ‘What are you eating?’ She hurried back to deter him from rolling in whatever foul-smelling corpse or excrement he had uncovered. Scattered sheep droppings were on the tarmac, shiny black and fresh. ‘Ugh, Pepe leave it.’ She hoped she wasn’t too late. ‘Pepe.’

Unlike the sheep in Aggie’
s garden, the dog responded as though he had been
falsely accused. His plaintive expression tugged at Fiona, much as
Aggie’s charade had done. Ruffling his head, she slipped
the lead around his neck and promised to let him
off again as soon as they were at Jim’s.
Then she parted the bracken with her foot where Pepe
had been sniffing and something shiny caught her eye. A
mobile phone. Silver. A model similar to hers. She picked
it up and checked it was still working. The screen
lit up and she saw there had been a missed
call. After unlocking the phone with the pad of her
thumb, she returned the call. A man answered. ‘Hi Violet,’
he said, sounding relieved. ‘Have you had a good walk?’

‘Who’s speaking?’ Fiona inquired hesitantly.

‘Violet?’

‘No, I’m sorry. My name is Fiona Bell . . . Dr Bell,’ she added without thinking.

‘
Dr
Bell . . . Has something happened to Violet?’

‘Let me explain,’ she replied hastily, realising her error. ‘I’m walking my dog and I found this phone lying in a ditch beside the road.’

‘Where?’

‘On the road to Jim Carmichael’s small-holding,’ she said. ‘Beyond Poltown, at the loch-side. Do you know where that is?’

‘You haven’t seen Violet?’

‘No. That’s why I’m ringing you. You’d called her.’

‘Where is she?’

‘You said Violet.’ Fiona thought there couldn’t be many women with such an old-fashioned name even in Poltown. ‘Would that be Violet Wells?’

Someone was talking, a man’s voice. Was there more than one? Violet thought so. A wild cry was followed by an angry rumble of complaint, only the change in pitch and volume penetrating her delirium, not the words. Now there was another voice: it was self-pitying and close-by. Inside her head the kaleidoscope of shapes and colours changed again. A pinhead of brilliant white light expanded and became lips which contorted and spat as words came from them. She was to blame. He’d saved her once. Hadn’t he warned her too? After the public meeting. She’d had her chance. Why had she done this to him? What was he supposed to do with her? The lips faded. The light drew away. The sputter of his saliva on her lips and face accompanied her return to unconsciousness.

As Fiona Bell expected,
there was no sign of Jim at the small-holding
or of his little van. He’d be on the
hill somewhere, because Jim and Tommy were never far apart.
By now it was even possible he could be at
Aggie McPherson’s. She wrote a brief message anyway, letting
Jim know about his stubborn ewe as well as the
mobile she’d found where the road looped close to
the loch shore. She added her phone number ‘just
in case the owner comes looking for it’, and she
debated letting Jim know the phone belonged to Violet Wells.
Would it be a kindness to warn him she might
be dropping by, or would it alarm him? Given his
walk-on role in the drama of Duncan Boyd’s
death, she decided to leave it out, erring on the
side of caution. She folded the paper and slid it
under the door when someone yelled, ‘Hey, what do you
think you’re doing?’

She didn’t recognise the voice but looking up she realised it was Jim. Not only was she surprised to see him but she was taken aback by how aggressive he sounded. This was not the mild, obliging, chatty man she often passed on the road. Jim was still thirty metres away, but even without his angry bellow she could tell something was wrong. It was the hurried way he was walking and the blotchy red of his face under his denim cap. She waved, calling out ‘hi’ in case he hadn’t recognised her, and waited for him to draw closer. If she thought recognition would soften his mood, he proved her wrong. Stopping by the garden gate, he demanded, ‘What the devil are you doing Dr Bell?’ The red of his cheeks had spread to his throat.

Fiona bristled in return. ‘Well since you’ve asked so nicely Jim I was just leaving a message under your door. One of your sheep is chewing its way through Aggie McPherson’s garden.’ Then she regretted taking umbrage because she smelt the whisky – Jim reeked of it – and he seemed suddenly to be lost for words, a poor soul if ever she’d seen one. She wondered if Tommy had taken advantage of Jim’s drunkenness to sneak away and find some sheep. Tommy was always herding something, chickens, ducks, even children given the chance. Perhaps Jim didn’t know where the dog had gone.
And
there had been all the upset about Duncan’s death. Did Jim blame himself for not preventing it? In her experience, men became fractious and short-tempered with worry. And they drank. Her father had and her male patients were the same. She had gathered from Jim’s medical records that he had stopped drinking. Obviously not.

‘Have you lost Tommy?’ she asked, trying to sound sympathetic.

The question seemed to startle him.

‘Why?’

‘I saw him on the hill. He was rounding up some sheep,’ she added unnecessarily. Would Tommy do anything else?

His reply was slurred. ‘I know where he is.’

‘Oh, ok.’ Suddenly she noticed Pepe. He was licking a wet stain at the bottom of Jim’s dungarees. She called the dog to heel but too late. Jim kicked out, catching Pepe in the ribs. The dog let out a yelp.

‘Jim, what’s got into you?’ Fiona knelt to comfort the retreating animal. ‘For God’s sake, you’re like a bear with a sore head.’

‘Ach . . .’ Jim took off his cap and rubbed it over his face. ‘It’s been a day.’

‘Why, what’s happened?’ Fiona’s tone suggested his explanation would have to be good.

‘A walker left a gate open.’ He looked around, as if he was still searching for the culprit.

‘Is that why your sheep are up on the hill?’

‘Aye, it is. Tommy’s gone after them. He’ll get them all right.’ He shook his head, as if there was more to it than that. ‘I lost one – it broke its leg on some wire. Been skinning it.’ He showed her his hands.

Fiona noticed how grimy and bloody they were. ‘I thought it was blood.’

‘What was?’

‘That,’ she pointed to the bottom of his dungarees, at the stain which had attracted Pepe.

He looked too. ‘Aye, it’ll be blood all right. The wire tore a hole in her, broke a leg as well. Had to put her out of her misery.’ Again he rubbed the cap across his face.

‘In that case, we’d better let you get on.’ Fiona couldn’t bring herself to excuse Jim even though he’d had a trying experience.

As she passed him on the path, Jim reached out and patted Pepe’s head. ‘I shouldn’t have done that, Dr Bell.’

‘What?’

‘Taken it out on the dog.’

‘It’s done now.’ An uncomfortable lull followed: Fiona anxious to be going; Jim fidgeting and making grunts of remorse. Eventually the smell of whisky and sweat was too strong a mix for her. ‘I’ll be off then,’ she said.

By the loch, reflecting on Jim’s temper and commiserating with Pepe, it occurred to Fiona she should ring Cal McGill. Might it have been Violet who let the sheep escape? Perhaps they’d taken off down the road and she’d run after them to bring them back. Was that how she had lost her phone? There had been fresh droppings on the road where she’d found it.