The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (29 page)

Cal listened impatiently, trying to interrupt. ‘Where are you?’ he broke in once Fiona stalled. ‘I’ve been waiting for you, by your car.’

Fiona stared at Pepe after
Cal ended the call. ‘Is it me,’ she asked the
dog, ‘or is everyone bad tempered today? I mean couldn’
t he have
mentioned
he’d get here so quickly?’
The more she thought about it, the more she felt
a mug. First Aggie, then Jim shouting at her, now
a complete stranger getting stroppy when they’d already arranged
to meet in another twenty minutes to hand over Violet’
s phone. Heading back inland from the loch shore towards
the road, she saw an old red pickup parked beside
her car. A man – McGill she assumed – was pacing backwards
and forwards on the road. She resented the way his
restlessness made her hurry: typical of her, she thought, always
the one putting herself out and trying to make things
right. However, on meeting him, she found her pique beginning
to fade. He was quite good looking with a squint
nose (if he was her patient, she’d advise him
to get it fixed) and he was apologetic for being
short-tempered and thanked her when she handed over Violet’
s mobile. Could she show him where she found it?

‘Beyond that bend.’ Fiona pointed along the road which was shaded by the cover of trees. ‘On the left hand side of the road, about two or three hundred metres round the corner.’

Cal looked there too. ‘Where does the road go?’

‘To Jim Carmichael’s place,’ she replied. ‘The guy I was telling you about, who lost the sheep.’

‘So if she was walking from this direction,’ Cal said, ‘that’s where she would have gone.’

Fiona picked up the concern in his voice – he didn’t appear to think Violet had dropped the phone by accident. ‘You’re worried about her?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think I’ll have a word with this Jim Carmichael, ask him if he’s seen Violet.’

‘In that case,’ Fiona said, ‘I’ll come too and show you where I found her phone. We can stop on the way.’ She omitted to mention the real reason for accompanying him. She hoped her presence would deter Jim from another display of drunken temper. She thought she’d save Cal from that.

In the event, she needn’t have fussed. As the two vehicles pulled up at the house, Jim appeared from a shed beside the big barn and Fiona was relieved at the change in his demeanour. The bull-headed aggression had gone. Trepidation had replaced it, or so it seemed. Perhaps he’d sobered up a bit. She hoped that was it. ‘Me again, Jim,’ she called over, stopping short of him, keeping a distance in case of another flare-up. Pepe, she was pleased to see, was of the same mind. He sat obediently at her feet. ‘This is Cal McGill,’ Fiona said. ‘He’s looking for a friend of his and wondered if you’d seen her.’

‘Haven’t seen
anybody apart from the doctor here,’ Jim replied, and Fiona
realised she had mistaken his mood. Rather than trepidation, she
picked up a wary watchfulness.

‘She lost her phone on the road,’ Fiona continued. ‘I found it when I was walking Pepe, or rather Pepe found it. I mentioned it in the note I left you.’

Obviously, he hadn’t bothered to read it because he shook his head and closed and opened his eyes evasively. ‘Not a soul’s been here,’ he said. ‘Apart from the person who let my sheep out between eight and nine.’ He gave Cal a hostile look. ‘Would your friend have been here then?’

Cal said, ‘It’s possible.’

‘Oh, I can’t imagine it was her,’ Fiona blurted trying to keep Jim’s attention, praying he wouldn’t notice what Pepe was up to. While she’d been watching Jim, the dog had wandered off and was now crawling under the door of the barn. She hated to think what he’d find to eat in there but she didn’t dare call him back in case Jim had another of his fits and lashed out again.

One moment Violet welcomed the pain which radiated from her leg because it signified life and the possibility of holding Anna again. The next she begged to be spared its torture. Through her agony she heard voices. One was familiar: Cal. Hope at last. She screamed. The sound filled her head yet her mouth hadn’t moved. Had she made any sound at all? She listened for Cal again and heard a rustling noise close by. She strained to escape the whisky spit that would soon be spraying across her face. From somewhere she found the strength to strike out and rake at him with her nails, before falling into unconsciousness again.

Fiona knelt at the bottom of the barn doors where they’d splintered and broken. It was where Pepe had disappeared, where the whimpering seemed to be loudest. ‘He’s hurt.’ Fiona glanced back at Jim then put her face close to the gap. ‘Pepe,’ she shouted, ‘Pepe, love.’ When she looked at Jim again, he had a peculiar and abject expression. Beads of sweat were running down his face which had become pale and oily. A tic pulsed at the side of his mouth. Fiona rattled the chain and padlock which held the doors closed. ‘Jim, the key, where’s the key?’

Jim’s head sagged and his clenched right hand opened. A key dropped at his boots. It hit a stone with a tinny sound. Cal picked it up. ‘In case you hadn’t guessed,’ she whispered as Cal opened the padlock, ‘he’s been drinking. A lot by the smell of it.’

Fiona untied the chain and Cal pulled it free. The wooden doors opened a metre or two before sticking on rubble. A shaft of sunlight penetrated the gloom falling on a woman’s body. She was lying on compacted earth, one of her legs splayed below the knee, her jeans bloody, her face bruised and swollen and her right hand gripping Pepe. The dog squirmed and whined.

‘It’s Violet,’ Cal said.

Fiona knelt and eased Violet’s fingers from the dog. She handed him to Cal. ‘Put him in my car and get my bag.’ She crouched over Violet feeling at her neck for a pulse, checking on her leg, at the loss of blood. ‘Can you hear me Violet? I’m Dr Bell.’ She glanced at Cal. ‘And call for an ambulance, hurry.’

Outside, Jim hadn’t moved but instead of looking at the ground he was staring across the loch, at the hills which extended into one another like drawn curtains, light and dark catching in the folds.

‘What happened? What did you do to her?’ Cal studied Jim’s face, his mottled skin, his stubborn, stupid muteness. He clenched his fist and swung it. The crack of knuckle on bone made Fiona turn round.

‘For God’s sake,
hurry
.’

The police arrived within
minutes of Cal speaking to the emergency operator. One car
with two officers was followed soon after by another. Cal
answered questions about Violet and Jim Carmichael, and volunteered information
about Mrs Anderson knowing about the baby’s hair. Only
later, once Jim had been led into the house, a
policeman at each arm, did Cal inquire how they’d
managed to get there so quickly. There’d been another
call, a constable told him, a tip-off, about ‘another
matter’, not something he could discuss except to say the
first two cars had been responding to that. More were
now on the way. So was a detective inspector from
Inverness. He would take charge of the operation. ‘If you’
d just wait in your vehicle until Mr Macrae arrives,
sir.’

Mr Macrae was the detective inspector.

‘Can’t I see Violet?’ he asked.

‘There’s nothing you can do, sir,’ the constable said, walking towards Cal, holding his arms wide and guiding him towards the pickup, as though practising for marshalling a crowd. ‘The doctor’s got everything under control.’

Just before the ambulance arrived, the constable moved in again, standing by the door of Cal’s pickup, providing an intermittent commentary on what was going to happen. Dr Bell would be travelling with the patient. Another doctor would join the ambulance on its journey, a consultant who specialised in road accident injuries. ‘Miss Wells doesn’t seem to be in danger.’

‘What about Anna?’ Cal asked, after the ambulance had departed under police escort, blue lights flashing.

Another vehicle was being despatched to pick her up with Hilary and Izzy, the constable said. It would take them to the hospital.

‘Which hospital?’

‘Raigmore.’

Cal smiled ruefully at the tricks fate played. The constable regarded him with a puzzled expression. ‘Did I say something, sir?’

‘It’s where Violet was abandoned as a baby,’ Cal explained as a police van arrived and parked close to his pickup. Ten officers disgorged from it. A uniformed sergeant divided them into three groups. Cal overheard him relaying DI Macrae’s orders: three to search the barns, another three to search the house and outbuildings, and four to fan out across the fields. What were they looking for, asked one of the field quartet? The sergeant looked sideways at his questioner before shaking his head in wonder at recruits nowadays.
What do
you think you’re looking for?

Four sheep skulls were arranged in a row, their empty eye sockets staring sightlessly onto a crime scene. They lay on black plastic sheeting which covered the grass near where the police had been digging. Around them was a scattered collection of other bones – all ovine as far as Detective Inspector John Macrae could tell: legs, ribs and spinal vertebrae – and six packages wrapped in bin-bags and waterproof tape. One packet had split open, ruptured accidentally by a spade. An assortment of different coloured tablets and capsules had spilled out, pinks, greens, browns and blues, some in packets, some not. A drugs officer was on his way to collect the haul for laboratory analysis. Other police had been despatched to detain Davie White.

‘And that’ll all need to be bagged and taken away too.’ Macrae indicated a mound of dug over earth from which more sheep bones were protruding. Then they’d have to wait for the forensic team to expose the rest of the skeleton. Once they’d done that, the pit would have to be dug out, the soil and animal remains removed for sieving and sifting. As a precaution, Macrae said, in case any human material was mixed up in it. A scavenger might have burrowed down, might have displaced a bone. Twenty-six years had passed. This time they were going to be thorough. No stone unturned. He winced at his unintended bad joke.

‘So this is where nice old Jim Carmichael used to bury the carcases of his sheep is it?’ The detective inspector surveyed the packages, the skulls and the dug-up bones until the horror of the pit drew him back. A shadow seemed to pass across his face, greyness on the white skin which accompanied his slick of red hair: dismay at man’s inhumanity to man. He turned away and glared at the loch and mountains, as if they too were culpable, their magnificence nothing but a shimmering distraction for the unwary in their dealings with cold-hearted country folk.

‘Get him up here.’ Macrae barked, starting off across the field, as if he had to put distance between himself and what had happened there. ‘Show him what we’ve got. See if it’ll loosen his tongue.’ Then, an afterthought: ‘And
make
him look at it.’ Macrae stopped by a stone wall and smoked one cigarette after another. All the time he examined his shoes. Scenery had never held much charm for him, or fields, or wide-open spaces. Give him a dingy pub, an ugly street and people he knew he couldn’t trust. Not this pretence at something natural and finer.

By now Jim was standing at the edge of the pit, staring down into it. Staring into his rotten soul, Macrae hoped too, glancing over at him. The scene reminded him of a film he’d watched recently. An Iraqi had dug a grave for the victim of a car-bombing and his reward had been summary execution with a militia bullet to the back of his head. Macrae held up his hand, shaped it like a gun and pointed it at Jim. An exploding sound came from the back of his throat. His hand jerked up with the recoil. He imagined Jim toppling, just as the Iraqi had done.

‘Right . . .’ He dropped his smoking cigarette into the grass, stamped on it and walked slowly back to the pit. He gestured to the constables to move away before taking his place beside Jim, bowing his head like him. Macrae looked at Jim, at the set of his jaw, at the bruise from the punch turning purple by his mouth. Jim’s eyes were fixed on the arm, pelvis and leg that had been exposed. Macrae waited for a moment. When Jim began to shuffle uneasily, he said, ‘The way she’s holding her hand, do you see it?’ Macrae held up his own hand, the fingers and thumb bent, the palm still exposed, adjusting them until they were the same as hers. ‘It makes you wonder. Well, it makes
me
wonder.’ His hand clawed at the air, and again, and again. ‘Whether Megan Bates was dead when you put her in there . . . you or Mrs Anderson, or whoever else was involved.’

The walk had exhausted her, and the upset. By the wall, she hardly had the energy to open the gate let alone to carry on to the intersection of the paths, to the wooden bench. Yet on she went, propelled by the worry which had pursued her from Gardener’s Cottage all the way along the moor path; the thought of being prevented from spending her last evening in the tranquillity of the graveyard. Finally, taking her seat on the right of the bench, her place of silent contemplation, she gazed at the panorama of hills and water and surrendered her life. Occasionally she turned her head to glimpse the flat meadow by Boyd’s Farm or the canopy of leaves which concealed Brae but mostly she sat as she always did: her knees together; her hands folded one on top of the other, looking straight ahead, observing the coming and goings on the road, and wishing for death to take her away before the police did. The sun set and darkness fell. The autumn chill of a September night turned Mrs Anderson’s skin as cold as the gravestones as the breath went from her.

* * *

The headlights of Ross Turnbull’s car blazed across the beach. Leaving his engine running and his door open he walked over the sand to the water’s edge where Cal was standing. ‘The police told me where I could find you,’ he said. Cal didn’t move, didn’t reply. Ross tried again. He’d been upset to hear about Violet. This time Cal said ‘Yeah.’

‘You’re not going to make this easy for me are you?’

‘No.’

Ross put up his hands. The shadow of his arms extended over the sea. ‘I’m sorry. Is that what you want?’

Cal shrugged.
It’s something.

Ok, Ross said, he
should have realised the significance of Violet’s visit but
he hadn’t. He’d been living and breathing the
BRC deal every minute of every day, making the case
for Poltown, arranging with Duncan’s brother for the sale
of Boyd’s Farm rather than worrying about some woman
who had died a quarter of a century ago. He
sighed, resignation, regret and apology in a single exhalation. ‘Ok,
Violet turning up at my door should have rung a
few alarm bells.’

So should her questions, when she came to see him.

When had he and Alexandra written their
names on Duncan’s attic wall, what time of day?

Early evening, he had told her.

Had he seen Duncan
later?

Yes, he had. Duncan had been on the beach until late at night.

How late, close to midnight
?

Yes, around midnight, and later too. Duncan had been collecting flotsam using a helmet with a torch, like miners used. Ross had seen him.

Then Violet had left.

Ross’s head had been so full of worrying about what could go wrong at the meeting he hadn’t fully realised what he had told her. Half way to Ullapool he got it,
boom
. The night he and Alexandra went to Duncan Boyd’s attic Violet must already have been a few hours old. So Duncan couldn’t have driven the baby to Inverness, as Jim Carmichael said, couldn’t have abandoned her at Raigmore Hospital. Ross paused. ‘Couldn’t have had anything to do with Megan Bates’s death either, come to think of it.’

Ross had watched Duncan write a message to Megan below the tide line a long time after midnight. ‘Stay with me LOVE you Duncan’. Ross remembered the capitals in particular. ‘He wrote it so that Megan would read it when she went for her early morning walk on the beach, before the next high tide washed it away.’ Ross looked at Cal. ‘Why would Duncan be writing luvvy little messages to Megan Bates if he’d already killed her as he’s supposed to have told Jim? Or am I missing something?’

Ross had been there because he had broken up with Alexandra. After going to Duncan’s attic, they had a row, ‘something about nothing’. She had been drinking and typically she’d shouted and screamed at him before disappearing into the night.

‘God knows where,’ he said. ‘I spent the night on the beach to avoid running into her but also to make a big decision. It was only Alexandra keeping me in Poltown.’

He realised he had no future there apart from following in his father’s footsteps. But father and son didn’t get on: too similar in some ways, too different in others, like night and day, and his old pa was definitely night, a bad man.

‘The only way I could escape was just to go without telling anyone. It took me an hour or six to pluck up the courage. I stayed on the beach until daylight then I hitched to Inverness and caught the train to London.’

He hadn’t returned for four or five years and then only for a weekend. He couldn’t remember when he’d heard about Megan Bates’s death but it was some time later.

‘And I couldn’t have told you what week or month it happened so there was no reason for me to connect it to that night.

‘Then after Violet asked me all those questions, I got it. I made the connections. I knew there was something wrong with Jim Carmichael saying Duncan had confessed.’

He had pulled off the road because he was early for his meeting and called one of his guys, someone he trusted. He had asked him about Jim, whether there was anything going on he should know about. The answer was one he’d been half expecting.

‘Nothing about Duncan Boyd or his confession but a whisper about Jim borrowing money, and being leaned on to hide stuff while the police were about the place.’

Stuff meant drugs, Ross told Cal.

‘Which one of the boys,’ he had asked. ‘Davie?’ His guy hadn’t said no, hadn’t said anything. That was the way it worked. Silence meant yes.

‘Davie White worked for my old pa,’ Ross explained, ‘and I inherited him.’ He shook his head at another oversight. ‘When I returned to Poltown I told them all there were new rules.’

He didn’t want to know what had gone on before but if he heard of anything illegal he’d call in the police, whatever it was, whoever was doing it.

‘Because I’ve been offshore, Africa, other rough places, they know I can look after myself.’ He showed Cal a long ragged scar on the underside of his right forearm. ‘I’ve been in a few scraps. They know I’m not kidding them.’

When his meeting in Ullapool ended, he told the police they might find a stash of drugs at Jim’s small-holding. They had too, heroin, marijuana and a ‘load of pills’. He also gave them the nod about having a chat with Davie White.

‘Stupid,’ Ross said, thinking again of Violet, how he could have stopped her if only he had been quicker off the mark. ‘Of course she would have gone to Jim’s next, after what I told her. Thank God she’s going to be OK.’

‘Yeah.’

He shot Cal an angry look. ‘Give me a break for Christ’s sake. I’ve said sorry.’

* * *

In Ullapool Police Station DI Macrae was explaining why he had asked to see Cal. Violet had refused to see the police. He understood the reason. The force hadn’t acquitted itself well. They had been too slow and sloppy to mount a proper investigation twenty-six years ago, and too quick to lodge an official complaint about Mr Anwar. Would Cal be an intermediary? Would he reassure Violet that everything was proceeding to a prosecution of Jim Carmichael?

‘Someone has to tell her how her mother died,’ Macrae said, ‘and under the circumstances that probably shouldn’t be a police officer.’

‘You want me to do it?’

Macrae deflected the question. ‘It’s been long enough already.’

Cal nodded, and Macrae did too, acknowledgement as well as gratitude. He tapped his keyboard and turned his computer screen towards Cal. ‘I want you to hear it for yourself so you can tell Violet that nothing’s being kept from her. There’s no conspiracy, not this time.’