Orkney Twilight (27 page)

‘We keep bumping into her,’ observed Tom, unperturbed by the coincidence, obviously pleased in fact, that their paths had crossed again.

They walked towards her, met at the northern side of the ring. Sam glared at Avis and Avis glared back. Avis couldn’t quite hide her edginess.

‘What are you doing here?’ Avis asked Sam, bluntly.

‘The same as you, I would imagine,’ Sam replied. Avis’s mouth twitched. Sam watched her making a rapid assessment, repositioning herself in this unexpected situation.

‘We were just making the most of the midnight sun,’ said Tom.

‘Yes, the solstice is quite an event here,’ Avis said.

Sam watched Avis’s eyes flitting around the ring.

‘Twenty-seven,’ Sam said.

Avis wasn’t listening. Her face had frozen. Her eyes were fixed on the far side of the circle. Sam followed her gaze and saw that Avis was staring at a broken megalith, cracked and lightning-burned. The slipping rays of the sun exaggerated the shadows of the branched carvings on the stone’s flat surface.

‘The rune stone,’ Sam said. ‘Viking graffiti.’

She ran over, stooped, traced the lines with her finger, felt again the connection with the carver as she tried to crack the secret code. The age-softened edges of the runes filled her with a strange melancholy; the passing of so many years.

‘Winter trees,’ Sam said. ‘They are not letters at all. They are pictures of midwinter trees. Reminders that life springs out of death. Signs of hope in the face of bleakness.’

But even as the speculation filled her with an inward calm, she felt Avis standing over her, scouring the ground just beyond the ring. Sam automatically searched too, and quickly pinpointed the focus of Avis’s fury. Near the foot of the rune stone, a neat rectangular slab lay oddly out of place. It was resting on top of the grass, as if someone had accidentally dropped it on the way to do a bit of crazy paving. And on its rough surface, the faint scrawl of chalk was visible. A tiny zero. She pictured Jim at the Battery, chalking a sign on the doorframe of the scout hut. She stared at the cipher on the stone at her feet. It had to be a message from Jim. His sign for a failed drop. An empty dead-letter box. He was supposed to pass his information on, but for some reason he had aborted the operation. Sam recalled Jim’s odd edginess as she had left Nethergate earlier that evening. Did he know that she had clocked the folded pages of
The Orkneyinga Saga
? Had Jim realized she had worked out the coordinates of his drop? Had he decided it was safer, after all, to deliver the envelope to the Commander himself? And then she wondered what she would have done if Jim had left something under the stone. If the envelope had been lying there, would she have taken it?

‘Well, I don’t want to interrupt your celebrations.’ Avis said briskly, a touch of iciness slipping into the deep south of her tone. She gave Sam a toxic glare, turned to face Tom. ‘We should stay in touch. Perhaps you could help me out with this travel guide I’m writing. Draft one of the introductory chapters. Here, take my contact details.’

She dug in the back pocket of her jeans, handed him a business card. Sam craned her neck, checking out the address before Tom had time to snatch it away. Avis Chance. Ventura Enterprises, 196 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1.

‘Ventura Enterprises?’ said Sam. She knew she should keep quiet, but she couldn’t stop herself. ‘I thought you said you were a freelance writer.’

‘Ventura Enterprises is a company I set up with a couple of other freelancers,’ Avis replied coldly. ‘For tax purposes.’

Tom nodded. ‘That’s what freelancers usually do.’

She felt an urge to kick him and his stupid bluffing.

Avis flashed a final smile at Tom. ‘Please do get in touch,’ she said. And then she retreated, gliding away through the stones, across the ditch, over the heather, south towards the car park, the wind caressing her diminishing form. Sam stared at Tom, trying to catch his attention, but his foggy eyes were glazed, indifferent to her. He yawned.

‘You don’t know enough about Orkney to do a travel guide,’ she said.

‘That’s not the point. It’s about the writing skills.’

‘Let’s go home.’

‘Fine by me.’

They marched back to the car park in silence.

Jim wasn’t there when they reached Nethergate. It was almost two. Tom went straight to his room; he needed his eight hours. She stretched out on top of the candlewick bedspread and closed her eyes.

She heard a noise, checked her watch in the gloom. Four. She must have been asleep. There was the noise again, a rustling of fabric perhaps, coming from the other end of the cottage. She sat up. Jim? Unlikely. He had said he wouldn’t be back until the morning. Now she heard a scrape, the scrunch of a drawer being closed carelessly. Not very professional. She exhaled slowly, stealthily paced across the floor, peered circumspectly into the dimness of the hall. Tom’s door was ajar. His bed was empty. She entered his room. The beige rectangle of his notebook was lying open provocatively on the pillow. What a jerk. She grabbed it, jammed it into the back pocket of her jeans, turned and accidentally kicked a mug dumped on the floor by the bed. Half empty. She picked that up too and quietly crossed the front room carpet, pressed herself against the wall by the entrance to the kitchen and waited.

The bedroom door creaked. Footsteps crossed the tiled kitchen floor. A toe touched the bottom step from the kitchen to the front room.

‘Gotcha!’

She chucked the cold tea dregs down into his upturned face. He spluttered. Yelled. Thrashed. Arms flailing wildly around. She stepped backwards, avoided his uncontrolled punches. He recognized his attacker. Folded his arms. Mouth still gawping, chin and shirt dripping with brown tea.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘Nothing.’

‘What do you mean, nothing? You were ferreting around in Jim’s room.’

‘I wanted to help you find out what he was up to.’

‘Bullshit.’

He pulled his dismissive expression, tried to push past her. She jabbed him hard in the chest. He stumbled down the steps.

‘Well? Did you find anything?’

‘No’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes, of course I’m sure.’

‘What’s in your pockets?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Turn them out.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

‘Turn them out or I’ll tell Jim you’ve been snooping in his room and he’ll make you do it.’

He glared at her, incredulously.

‘Do it,’ she said.

‘You’ve cracked. You’re a nutter. You’re as bad as Jim.’

‘Do it.’

He sulkily emptied his trouser pockets on the floor. Pocket litter. Folded five-pound note, pencil stub, jagged Hobnob fragment, an ‘It-pays-to-increase your-wordpower’ page ripped out from the
Reader’s Digest
.

‘Is that it?’

‘Yes.’

She reached over to check. He pre-empted her move and stuck his hand into his shirt pocket, produced a torn scrap of paper, shoved it into her outstretched hand.

‘There, have it,’ he said. ‘It was sticking out of an empty Jameson’s bottle under his bed.’

She quickly inspected the scrap: an 01 London telephone number was scrawled across the paper in Jim’s spidery handwriting. Message in a bottle. She stuffed it into her pocket.

‘You’re a dickhead,’ she said. ‘A fucking gongfermor.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘You fuck off.’

‘Okay. I will.’

He skulked away to his room. Fuck him, she thought. She stalked off in the other direction, through the kitchen and out into the fresh air of the courtyard, breathed deeply, leaned against the wall, on the verge of tears but no water in her eyes. The sky was brighter now, the thick bank of horizon clouds coloured salmon pink. Red sky in the morning, shepherd’s warning. Too late, she thought. Too late for bloody warnings now. She sniffed and wiped her nose on the back of her hand. Fuck him, she thought again. She meant it this time. She pulled Tom’s notebook out of her back pocket and flicked through it. Jim Coyle, Jim Coyle, Jim Coyle, his name was written on nearly every page. What a tosser; him and his poxy journalism, his shitty writing skills, his fucking ambition. She stuck her hand in her front pocket and her fingers rasped the rough strike of her Swan Vestas. She marched across the front lawn, stood above her stone circle, ripped the pages out of the notebook, built a satisfying paper pyramid in the centre of the stones, placed a fat twig on top to pin them down, crouched with her back to the wind, used her hand to shield the matchbox. The flames flared, fizzled and died. She persisted, reigniting, puffing on the embers, striking and blowing until she had reduced the notebook to a pile of scorched paper and ash. She sat back on her heels and sighed. Wiped her forehead with her forearm, looked up to see Tom leaning against the kitchen door, watching her.

‘Is that my notebook?’ he asked. Quite calmly, given the circumstances.

‘Yes.’

‘It’s just a bloody journal. A diary. That’s all. I wasn’t going to do anything with it.’

He shook his head, retreated to the kitchen door.

‘You’d better get ready to go,’ she shouted after him angrily. ‘Jim will be home soon and then we’ll have to leave to catch the ferry.’ No reply.

She sat on the grass with her arms around her knees and gazed over the bay as an early morning curlew keened.

Her trance was broken by the low hum of a car. She stood. Hurriedly dismantled her stone circle, lobbed the sandstone rocks back into the rose bed, kicked and trampled the ashes, ruffled the grass with her plimsoll in an attempt to wipe away the scorch marks. The last remains of the notebook – a few yellow-edged papers – fluttered away in the wind. The rooftop crow cawed as the Renault steered into the courtyard. Jim bounded from the car, followed by the Renault’s driver. He was stocky with the same, dark-haired, pale-skinned colouring as Jim. But his warm smile and relaxed manner made him look completely different from her father. An easy-going version of Jim. It had to be Bill. He greeted her with a friendly handshake, said he hoped she had enjoyed her stay at Nethergate.

‘Hang on a moment,’ Jim said to Bill. ‘I’ve left the tank nearly empty. I want to give you some money for the petrol. I’ll go and dig out some cash.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Bill.

‘It does. Wait. I shan’t be long.’

Jim dived into the kitchen. Sam smiled shyly at Bill, noticed again the warmth in his mouth and it dawned on her that she had an unexpected opportunity to find out about her dad. His past. His childhood. Her gut tightened. She wondered whether she should ask. It was a perfectly normal question; it wasn’t about state secrets. She struggled to break the taboo, the silence surrounding Jim.

‘You went to school with Jim, didn’t you?’ she blurted.

She managed to make the perfectly normal sound odd. Bill frowned slightly, with puzzlement more than anything. ‘Yes. I did.’

Go on. Don’t back out now. Don’t lose the chance. ‘He was chucked out, wasn’t he,’ she stated.

‘Yes, he was.’ Bill clasped his wrist awkwardly in front of his stomach.

‘Why?’

‘Hasn’t Jim told you?’

‘He doesn’t really talk much about his past,’ she said, trying hard to keep the conversation casual, her mouth dry. She sensed Bill’s shrewd stare, digging below the surface of her expression.

‘You shouldn’t be too judgemental about your father,’ he said. ‘It’s difficult for men of our generation to talk about personal things. It’s not that Jim has anything to be ashamed of, he didn’t do anything wrong. He just stuck his neck out, that’s all.’

‘What did he do?’

‘Oh, it was a Jesuit school. The usual stuff went on. You know.’

She shook her head. He reddened slightly.

‘Please tell me,’ she said.

He must have felt sorry for her, having to ask a stranger for information about her own father. He heaved a sigh. Hesitated. Eyed the far corner of the courtyard.

‘There’s really not a lot to tell,’ he said at last. ‘There was a lot of abuse of one kind or another. We just assumed it was normal. Open secret. Unspoken. It was what we expected. We were generally relieved if it amounted to nothing more than a beating. There wasn’t anything we could have done about it anyway; nobody would have taken any notice of us complaining. Just a bunch of schoolboys. So we put up with it mostly. But there was one priest who was a total sadist. He had it in for Jim. Took pleasure in humiliating him one way or another. He pushed Jim too far, made him realize he had nothing to lose, and so he went out one night and painted a message on the school wall. He wrote the name of the priest, said he was a boy-beater. That was all.’

She blinked, absorbing the details of the story: the abuse, the priest, the protest. ‘Jim was expelled because he was a whistleblower?’

Bill nodded.

‘What happened to the priest?’

‘Nothing. That’s the way it is with the church. Same old story. The victim gets the blame. Damned for affronting the church. That’s how it goes.’

A plip-plop-plip made Sam look up. A pebble bounced down the tiles, hit the edge of the guttering, arced and landed at her feet in the courtyard. The rooftop culprit cawed and hopped behind the chimneypot.

‘How did they find out it was Jim who wrote the message?’ she asked.

‘One of the other boys grassed on him.’

She gasped indignantly. ‘Why would another boy do that?’

Bill shrugged. ‘Because he wanted to curry favour with the priests,’ he said. He inhaled. ‘Probably because he didn’t like us, and none of us really liked him. He was a bit different, an outsider. Lone wolf. Jarek Crawley. Creepy Crawley we used to call him.’

Jarek. Odd name. Polish mother perhaps. The wires in her brain touched, sparked, gave her an electric shock. Playground bully.

‘What did Crawley do when he left school?’

Bill’s eyes flickered away and back. She was unnerving him with her questions, digging too deep, cutting too close to the bone. His voice definitely sounded warier. ‘Crawley went to university and managed to land himself a stint as a trainee reporter on a national paper.’

She closed her eyes briefly, saw the repeat pattern dancing across her eyelids. Journalist. The report about Ian Coyle in
The Sun
. Jim’s Bedford on the front page of the
Southern Advertiser
. The Watcher’s threat to sell her story to the press.