Orkney Twilight (18 page)

‘Okay then,’ he said abruptly. ‘I’ve had enough of you lot. I’m off. If you’re hungry, turn left out of the car park and there’s a café just down the road. Proper coffee. None of your gnat’s piss. See you back at the house.’

He hoofed away inland, diagonally across the slope in the direction of the car park.

‘Where are you going?’ she shouted after him. ‘I need to know in case you don’t come back and I have to send the old bill out to search for your body. Are you going to see a man about a dog?’

He turned, shouted back, the wind trying to snatch away his words. ‘Not a dog. I’m going bird-watching.’ He waved the back of his hand dismissively and headed off over the fields at a cracking speed.

‘He’s given us the slip again,’ said Tom. His face had reverted to its normal shade of pale now. ‘He’s led us on a merry song and dance up and down the cliffs and tired us out with his mushrooms and now he’s disappeared. Anyway, do you think that was a sort of confession?’

‘What?’

‘Bird-watching. A bad joke. He was telling you he’s going to meet a woman.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Men sometimes ask to be found out,’ he said undeterred. ‘Usually when they get fed up with the other woman because she wants more commitment. That’s when they need a get-out, so they start dropping huge hints, hoping to be found out by their wives. And possibly daughters.’

She didn’t respond.

‘So what do you think he’s going to do?’ Tom needled.

‘I’ve no idea.’

‘Have a guess.’

She stuck her hands in her pockets, put her head on one side, glanced at Tom; he wasn’t what you would call good-looking, but he was quite attractive in an unconventional sort of way, now that he was more angular.

‘Well, he probably was telling the truth in a funny kind of way,’ she said. ‘Because he does sometimes, tell the truth. Just not all of the truth. So maybe he is heading to a bird-watching place, a reserve or something like that. Although God only knows what he is going to do when he gets there.’

‘Maybe we should try and follow him and find out?’

She hesitated. ‘Why?’

‘Why not? It could be fun. Come on. Let’s find out what he’s really up to.’

She glanced over Tom’s shoulder to the ocean, saw the distant predatory form of
The Inquisitor
chasing through the waves and felt a twinge of fear for Jim.

‘Okay, but we’ll have to move quickly; otherwise we’ll lose track of him.’

They raced down the hill, a tailwind harrying them along now. She pushed her arms down straight and held her hands out horizontally to the ground, gliding effortlessly, feet hardly touching the ground, floating over red clover, white clover, ragged robin, heart’s ease. ‘The prevailing winds,’ she shouted, ‘are carrying me away. I’m flying.’

‘What makes you so sure that you won’t turn out like your dad?’

‘Half of my DNA may come from him, but I reckon all his genes are recessive. That’s why I don’t look anything like him.’

She tried without success to barge Tom and knock him over. He stuck his foot out to trip her up. She jumped over his trainer, escaped, running down the hill laughing, just in time to catch sight of the roof of the Renault as it slid along the hedgerow and sped down the road.

‘He’s travelling south,’ she shouted.

‘We’ll have to see if we can work out where he’s heading,’ said Tom.

They sat in the car with the map spread out between them.

‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ said Tom. ‘You’ll have to make an educated guess.’

She pondered for a second, pictured
The
Inquisitor
drawn away by Jim’s mushroom-picking escapade to the northwest of the island.

‘This is the way I see it. Jim’s going to a bird reserve. Probably somewhere to the southeast, and I would imagine it’s a place I will recognize, somewhere we went to together when I was young, because he seems to be revisiting old haunts. So we have to look for one of those bird symbols somewhere on the other side of the island in a place that sounds familiar to me.’

‘Good deduction.’

‘Elementary, my dear Watson.’

She studied the map through the shimmer of her eyelashes and felt light-headed: contour lines, roads and grid marks twirled, kaleidoscope patterns formed in front of her face and dropped like dust on the paper, the day trips of childhood summers danced across the map’s creases. And suddenly she realized everything was a bluff for Jim, nothing was what it appeared to be, even their bloody summer holidays. She felt a fermenting anger in her stomach, swallowed it down and told herself to concentrate; she searched the map coldly this time, a geomancer reading the landscape, ruling out various places because they were too close or because they didn’t ring any bells. Something clicked.

‘I know that beach.’ She prodded the map. ‘Waulkmill Bay. There’s a bird reserve there. That’s the one, I’m sure. Jim used to take us there to look for mussels. I still have a scar on my knee from tripping on the rocks because we had to scramble back when Liz pointed out the tide was coming in.’

The corners of Tom’s mouth sagged. ‘God, I nearly got more than a scarred knee out there on the cliff face just now. I thought at one point the wind was trying to rip me away from the rock. Jim is a bit…’ he started to say.

‘I did warn you,’ she shouted. ‘Anyway you’re eighteen. You are an adult. You didn’t have to follow him over the edge of a cliff in a force nine gale. It was your stupid choice.’ She reached for the car door, about to flounce away and tramp off over the cliffs, when she caught sight of herself in the wing mirror, realized she was on the verge of acting like a nutter. Like her dad. She fastened her seat belt.

‘Why are you getting angry with me?’ Tom asked.

She couldn’t answer. She had no idea. She saw herself momentarily through his eyes: Sam Coyle, a bar-brawler in a pub called Emotion, flinging random punches at no apparent target before making a dive for the saloon door and legging it off into the night. She let her temper subside and fizzle out. Smiled sheepishly.

The wind dropped as they drove and was almost non-existent by the time they reached Waulkmill Bay. They crawled around the tyre-rutted car park of the bird reserve a couple of times, but there was no trace of the Renault or of Jim. She was beginning to think her instincts were wrong, she couldn’t read the signs after all. They agreed they had better give up the chase, call it a day, and head back to Nethergate. Driving along the main road, it was Tom who spotted the Renault parked outside an ugly breeze-block building, a tacky reproduction of a crofter’s cottage that had ended up looking like a public toilet. A salt-rusted board by the road clanked in the breeze: the Oyster Catcher Café.

‘That was where we used to go for tea after we’d collected the mussels.’ She yelled with the relief of being right after all. ‘Do you think he would have heard the Cortina go past?’

‘Doubt it. The café’s too far from the road. What shall we do then? Turn around and drive back to the café?’

‘No.’ She wrestled frantically with the folds of the map. ‘Turn up here. Left. Park there, behind that hedge.’

They pulled in at the side of the road by a stile and a footpath, hidden from sight by a stubby hawthorn.

Standing by the car, debating what to do next, she felt uneasy. She scanned the hill ridge behind, searching for the brief flare of a match, the warning cry of a crow. Nothing. It must have been the breeze. She was imagining things; Jim had lured the Watcher out on the seas beyond Marwick Head, shaken the shadows.

‘Perhaps we should run back to the café and look inside,’ Tom said. ‘We can peer in through the windows.’

‘What if he spots us?’

‘We’ll just say we were driving past, saw the Renault and thought we’d take a peek in to see if he was there because we fancied joining him for a cake and a cuppa. Okay, let’s get moving,’ he said. Taking charge. Enjoying the chase. ‘Zero hour. We’re going over, men.’ He set off down the road at an officer-like clip before she had time to object.

She caught up with him at the café car park, crouching behind a mud-splattered Land Rover.

‘Down,’ Tom hissed. ‘You might be seen. We have to rethink,’ he added as she squatted next to him. ‘The windows are too high to look in.’

She stuck her head up above the bonnet of the Land Rover, took in the narrow windows pushed up against the eaves.

‘You could hold on to a windowsill and pull yourself up,’ she said. ‘If we go round the back, no one will be able to see us.’

They trampled through the nettles, inspecting the windows.

‘See if you can lift your head above the ledge.’

He stretched, clutched on to the windowsill, hauled himself up, pushing his feet against the wall for leverage, momentarily raising his chin above the sill before dropping back to the ground.

‘What did you see?’

‘Jim. He’s with a woman.’ He sounded smug. ‘They are sitting alone at a table in the corner talking.’

‘What did she look like?’

‘Late twenties, I would guess. Long blonde hair. It’s hard to see clearly through the net curtains.’

‘You’re making it up.’

‘I’m not. It’s what I saw.’

‘I have to look.’

‘You’ll never reach up there.’

She cast around for a solid object to stand on, an old milk crate perhaps, but couldn’t locate anything that would hold her weight.

‘You’ll have to lift me. I can sit on your shoulders.’

Tom crouched down while she clambered on; he swayed and grunted with the effort as he stood up, staggered the few steps to the window. She steadied herself by holding on to the sill as she peeked through the mucky netting. The interior of the café was the same as it had been eight years before: flustered teenage girls in too-tight black skirts, three-tiered cake-stands, dour couples in drab hiking gear scouring the room irritably to see if their food was on its way. Jim was sitting in a corner, leaning in close to a woman with straggly dirty-blonde hair. She couldn’t quite make sense of it all. She blinked and the scene shimmered and danced, everything solid seemed to melt into air and just for that moment she doubted her own existence; her whole life was a cover. She was the shadow, a figment of Jim’s imagination, conjured up to provide a bit of depth to his fake backstory and the true reality, the solid Jim and the relationship that meant something to him were there in front of her eyes, on the other side of the window.

Her eyes were watering. She took in a gulp of air, told herself to get a grip, to concentrate. The molecules rained down around her and settled into an understandable order. She wondered then how Jim managed this life, shifting from one identity to another, one world to another, without everything colliding. But of course, he wasn’t managing; he was letting things slip and slide. She wouldn’t be here watching him play this part if he were still in control. He was losing his grip. Or maybe he was tightening it in some perverse way that she didn’t quite understand. She brushed her eyes with her hand, scrutinized the scene in front of her, concentrated on identifying the key to this meeting: the give-away detail, the anomaly, the piece out of place. Her vision locked on to a biscuit-brown rectangle. An A5 envelope. It was lying on the red-and-white checked plastic tablecloth, halfway between Jim and the woman. She watched as Jim’s hand moved to cover it, then paused momentarily before sliding it off the table and into his open haversack, ready and waiting by his feet. That was it; that had to be the key. He had arranged to meet this woman here to pick up whatever information was in that manila envelope.

‘What’s going on in there?’ said Tom.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Let me have another look.’

‘Okay.’

She pushed herself back from the windowsill. Tom swayed with the sudden movement. She leaned the wrong way and he lost his balance and stumbled as she moved the wrong way again and they fell down to the ground in a heap. They lay still for a moment, limbs tangled, winded among the nettles.

‘What happened there?’ Tom asked. ‘What made us fall?’

‘I don’t know. I lost my balance somehow. We’d better get back to the car,’ she said, with a sense of urgency in her voice. ‘Jim was getting ready to leave. Let’s go back up the hill and watch what he does from there.’

Tom plucked at the strands of goose-grass sticking to his jeans, still slightly befuddled.

‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We have to skedaddle.’

He looked at her, thoughtfully.

‘Come on.’ She said it more firmly this time, grabbed hold of his arm.

They jogged across the car park. She checked nervously over her shoulder to see if Jim was coming out of the café door, but they made it back along the road before there was any sign of movement behind them. They followed the footpath up the side of the field along the hedgerow, halted in its lee, and surveyed the café through the tangle of hawthorn and wild roses. Jim emerged alone through the café door, lingering in the shadow of the doorway, scanning the low hills, sniffing the air like a hunted animal before making a quick dash for the Renault. He drove right, headed down the main road, back towards Nethergate.

‘Here comes Jim’s friend,’ said Tom.

The woman walked nervously across the car park: black combat trousers, green-and-black striped mohair jumper, army issue canvas bag slung across her chest. She looked, Sam could see now, like a woman who might go to Greenham. She wondered whether she might even have met her there, and couldn’t work out whether that possibility made her feel better or worse. What if she was an informant from the peace camp? Filling Jim in on the activities of his errant daughter. Letting him know that Sam was the enemy within, the home-grown domestic subversive who had unearthed the top secret information about the hotline to the White House and had very nearly been caught investigating the critical cable. She was over-dramatizing. Tom was right. Nobody would care about a couple of teenage girls breaking into Greenham.

The woman clambered into a beaten-up red 2CV and reversed out on to the main road.

‘She’s put her indicator on,’ said Tom. ‘She’s turning left, up the road that runs by the side of this field. We’d better duck. She might see us.’