Orkney Twilight (11 page)

‘I passed my test when I was seventeen.’

‘Not as useless as Sam then.’

‘Well, maybe if you’d offered to help pay for the lessons,’ she said, ‘like everybody else’s dads, I might have learned by now.’

Jim ignored her. He said to Tom, ‘Why don’t you use this car while we’re in Orkney? That’ll give you two a bit of independence. I can borrow another car from my mate in Stromness.’

Jim and Tom started chatting about problems with cars as if they were both expert mechanics. She watched in the mirror and noticed that Tom appeared to be taking it at face value, this man-to-man chat. She glanced sideways at Jim and spotted the corner of Jim’s mouth forming a sly smile that made her wonder why he was so keen to offload the Cortina. Was he setting them up as a decoy? Allowing them to drive around in the hard-to-miss noisy old Cortina while he slipped off silently in a less conspicuous vehicle? She sighed. You couldn’t even take his kind offers at face value; he really was a bastard.

Jim slung the car around the hairpin bends, feeding the wheel furiously, zigzagging down to the coast. ‘Don’t want to miss the ferry,’ he said.

She clung to the door handle, reluctant to upset the delicate balance of Jim’s fragile temper again, closed her eyes as they swerved around an acutely sharp loop in the road, barely hanging on to the corner. ‘Dad. Do you have a licence to kill?’

He fed the wheel aggressively. ‘Yes. Do you have a licence to be totally bloody irritating?’

‘Actually I do.’

‘Well it’s been revoked. So you’d better watch it.’

A ray of sun pierced the cloud blanket and lit up the Cortina as they advanced noisily over the final stretch of the headland and descended to Scrabster, its granite harbour walls like fingers clutching at the outflowing tide. A line of vehicles was already waiting to drive on to the ferry. The rickety old
St Ola
that had ferried them across the Pentland Firth every summer of her childhood had been replaced with a larger, roll-on roll-off of the same name. She felt a wave of nostalgia; it had always been a bit of a thrill watching the cars being hoisted on to the boat by crane, the exciting touch-and-go tension as the Cortina was lifted up in the air like a toy and swung over the quay into the hold.

‘Pity. I wouldn’t have minded if they’d dropped it in the water this time,’ Jim said, as he surveyed the new ferry. ‘At least I could have claimed the insurance. Still, the old banger might prove to be useful while we’re here.’ He smiled to no one in particular.

Despite Jim’s disappearing act out on the moors, they still had more than an hour to spare. Jim announced he wanted to talk to a man about a dog so Tom and Sam headed to a café built up against the rocky headland, pounding across the flagstones, pushing against the strengthening wind that was whipping anything light and loose into horizontal lines, thrumming the cables of tightly moored lobster boats. They reached an oilskin-clad fisherman pulling the slack out of a wrack-covered rope, feeding it into a neat coil on the quayside.

Tom stopped. ‘Is it rough out there today?’

The fisherman didn’t bother to look up from his task.

She elbowed Tom in the ribs. ‘It’s always rough in the Pentland Firth,’ she whispered. ‘Didn’t you know?’

She ran off, smirking as she climbed the wooden stairs to the café; her black overcoat flapped behind her like a witch’s cape. At the top she turned, stared commandingly at the sea beyond the harbour walls and conjured up the sun and the waves and the wind. A herring gull squawked aggressively and a splat of green shit strafed the plank next to her foot. ‘Missed,’ she shouted into the air. It squawked again.

Tom joined her at a table by the window.

‘That’s how the professional does it,’ she said indistinctly, her mouth thick with oozing crab sandwich. She nodded her head in the direction of the harbour. Jim was visible in the distance, distinct yet blending in with his surroundings, always at home in the hinterlands, the places between land and sea, weaving his way around the ropes and the fishermen; talking, listening, laughing. She wondered whether it was the product of being in the army, his ability to conjure up an instant camaraderie with strangers.

‘It must be his Scottish accent,’ said Tom, echoing her thoughts.

‘Do you think Jim has a Scottish accent?’

‘Actually, no. He uses short vowels, so he’s obviously not southern, but it would be hard to pinpoint exactly where he came from on the basis of his accent. Are you sure he’s from Glasgow?’

‘That’s what I’ve always been told.’ In the corner of her eye she spotted a massive bonxie high up in the sky being hectored by a flock of terns.

‘Haven’t you ever met any of Jim’s relatives?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you think that’s odd?’

‘Not really.’

‘So you’ve never seen a picture of any of them?’

She hesitated. In fact, she had seen a picture of one of Jim’s brothers. It was in a newspaper of all places, years ago when she was about nine, and she had come downstairs one Friday morning and spotted a redtop lying open on the kitchen table. It only caught her attention because Liz didn’t usually allow tabloids in the house.
BUST
UP
! the headline declared. Beneath the bold type was a small blurry picture of a man who looked a bit like Jim, and below that was a large clear picture of a topless woman and two paragraphs explaining that Ian Coyle had been sentenced to do time at Her Majesty’s Pleasure for his part in a fracas involving bars, booze and birds. Including the one in the picture who worked as a topless model for the
Sun
. Liz had pointed at the fuzzy image of the man. ‘That’s your uncle, in case anybody asks,’ Liz had said. As if they would. ‘Your other uncle is just as bad,’ she had added when she passed through again, fussing around, getting ready for work. Sam recounted the story to Tom through a spluttering of breadcrumbs. And as she did so, the picture of Jim’s crashed van on the front page of the
Southern Advertiser
appeared in her mind. Her stomach churned slightly, for no clearly discernible reason, except the vague sense that there was something of a repeat pattern here that she hadn’t noticed before.

The snippet amused Tom. ‘So you come from a long line of bar-brawlers. I suppose that might explain why he doesn’t stay in touch with his relatives if half of them have got criminal records. But if it were my family I think I would just be open about it all. I can’t see the point of keeping secrets.’

She licked a blob of mayonnaise from her finger. ‘All families have secrets. I’m just more aware of the secrets than most people. At least I know there are lots of things I don’t know about my dad.’

Tom pulled his sceptical expression. It had been appearing with increasing frequency. The investigative journalist look, she decided. Question everything.

She said, ‘Did you know that every time there’s a major plane crash they always find the body of at least one man whose partner had no idea he was on the flight?’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Jim.’

He laughed and they slurped their coffee in amiable silence, watching Jim going about his business. She noticed him tilt his hand to check his watch on the inside of his wrist; she was about to point out the almost imperceptible action to Tom, tell him it was a sure sign of military training, when Jim turned towards the café window and beckoned them down. As if he had known all along they were watching him perform.

They sat in the Cortina, waiting for the man in the fluorescent jacket to direct them on to the ferry. She put her foot on a black plastic bag lying next to the haversack on the floor under her seat, prodded it with her heel. It twitched. She emitted the first note of a scream, cut it abruptly when she caught sight of Jim smirking.

‘What’s in that bag?’ she demanded. ‘It moved.’

‘Crab. What did you think I was talking to the fishermen about?’

She frowned. ‘Is it still alive?’

‘Of course.’

‘Won’t it die if you leave it in that bag?’

‘Should be okay until we get to Orkney. I’ve put a damp cloth over it. That normally helps.’

‘Seafood paella,’ she suggested.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘No point messing about with seafood. If it’s fresh, eat it straight. And if it isn’t fresh, don’t bother eating it.’

She nodded slowly. The rear lights of the car in front glowed red and the line moved forwards.

‘Are you going to boil it alive?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘That’s cruel.’

‘It doesn’t hurt.’

‘How do you know?’

He huffed, exasperated, and steered the car towards the gaping mouth of the ferry.

‘Only a cop would claim it doesn’t hurt to be plunged in boiling water,’ she said.

Jim gave her a filthy glare and she feared for a moment he was about to wallop her, but the man in the yellow jacket was gesticulating, making urgent turning signs in the air with his finger and he had to keep both hands on the wheel. They clanked over the metal flaps bridging the gap between harbour and ferry, a glimpse of roiling green sea churned by propellers below.

‘If you have to be a smart-arse,’ he said, ‘I’d try not to do it while you’re sitting next to open water.’

She peered down at the narrow boarding bridge. ‘You’re closer to the edge than me.’

‘Possibly. But I’m professionally trained. I’m prepared to deal with the consequences of my smart-arsery and I’m not sure you are.’

She shrugged and, as she did so, some instinct, a bristle, made her look back. She glimpsed a movement in the furthest edge of her vision; a dim blur advancing across the headland. A car? Or was it just the shadow of a scudding cloud? She craned her neck, trying to get a better view. But it was too late; the Cortina was swallowed down into the cavernous belly of the
St Ola
, engulfed by the miasma of engine oil and darkness.

Stromness filled the view, the gable ends of sombre houses hiding their faces from the wind. The Cortina breached the peace as Jim rolled off the ferry, steered around the quayside, through the narrow streets and out into the farmland beyond. Sam was surprised by how much was familiar, how easily she could navigate the green and grey contours without conscious effort. Past and present, living and dead, woven together in fields and hills; ghosts of summer holidays past playing among the standing stones, whalebone arches, burial mounds. Around every bend, the sea appeared. She licked the salt from her lips, stole a sideways peek at Jim and wondered whether he was happy to be revisiting old haunts. His mouth was set in a grim slash across his face, his eyes fixed on the road. She checked the wing mirror; the road stretched away behind emptily to the straggling edges of Stromness. The backward glance; it was becoming a bit of a nervous tic.

They found Nethergate halfway up a hill behind Tirlsay, a crofter’s dwelling long and low, perpendicular to the road. It exuded melancholia, a sense of abandonment. Although, as they stood in the gravel courtyard waiting for Jim to locate the keys, she noticed small signs of life everywhere: a manky donkey looking sorry for itself in the thistle-filled meadow behind the croft; a sleek black cat patrolling the garden perimeter; a dumpy bird with a black executioner’s hood glaring malevolently from its rooftop perch. The bird cawed as Jim returned, waving the key he had retrieved from one of the outhouses clustered at the far side of the courtyard.

‘Hooded crow,’ he said. ‘You have to be careful here. There are eyes everywhere. Corvids: rooks, crows, ravens. Intelligent birds. But a bit mischievous. Not to be trusted.’

Jim grinned and the crow cocked its head on one side, as if it were taking the measure of him.

She asked, ‘Who owns the cottage?’

‘Bill.’

‘Who is Bill?’

‘Don’t think you ever met him. He only moved up here a couple of years ago. He used to be a policeman. Uniform. Sergeant.’

Of course.

‘This is his grandmother’s cottage. He inherited it when she died and decided to give up policing, move here, see if he could scrape a living as a smallholder. Then he decided to buy another place over by Stromness. Flatter. More usable land. Kept this place on as a holiday let. Luckily for us, he doesn’t get much business before the start of the school holidays.’

‘So you know him from the police.’ she said.

Jim paused. ‘He comes from Glasgow. I went to school with him.’ He glanced up at the crow before walking briskly towards the croft, leaving her standing open-mouthed, gobsmacked by his straightforward divulgence about a person from his past.

They followed him into the cramped galley kitchen. Jim opened the window to let in fresh air; the donkey’s snout appeared, snuffling hopefully. He offered it one of the apples they had purchased at a corner shop on their way over. It crunched in time to the insistent ticking of a wall clock.

‘God, that’s really irritating,’ she said.

‘What?’ said Jim.

‘That clock. Ticking.’

‘Doesn’t bother me. I’ve made my peace with the passing of time.’

He pushed open the door leading off from the kitchen and assessed the adjacent bedroom.

‘I’d better take this room then. You two can have the far end.’

Up three concrete steps to a homely sitting room: fraying forest-green cord sofa, two mismatching armchairs with crocheted antimacassars. She picked up the handset of the dirty cream Bakelite telephone sitting on a nest of side-tables. No dial tone on the line; incoming calls only. The shelves on one side of the chimneybreast held the usual holiday cottage odds and sods: a couple of board games, a row of read and discarded paperbacks, a pile of well-thumbed copies of the
Reader’s Digest
and something more unusual – an ivory whale’s tooth, finely etched with a three-mast ship sailing towards a sea-serpent rearing up from the water.

‘Scrimshaw,’ said Tom, peering over her shoulder.

She nodded, edged away, sliding along the tiled edge of the hearth to get a closer view of the print hanging above the mantelpiece. It looked like an illustration from a children’s book,
Grimm’s Fairy Tales
perhaps. It had that sinister edge: a shadowy streak of horses, hounds and birds chasing across an indigo night sky – a phantom hunt led by a cloaked rider, brimmed hat shielding his face, horn in hand. The image seemed out of place among the conservative homeliness of the rest of the room, a reminder of stormy nights pressing in, the wildness of the wind. She checked Tom; he was examining the reading matter. She backed quietly out of the room, through a short hallway with a door that opened on to the garden. She claimed the dim gable-end room with its one front-facing window, a moth-eaten candlewick-covered bed and a tatty wardrobe. A small mirror hung at an awkward height on one of its doors. She stood on her toes to look at her face, saw her khaki eye staring back at her unblinkingly and, behind her, another mirror on the wall. She shifted position slightly until she found the spot from which she could see a line of faces, reflections of her eye watching into infinity.