Orkney Twilight (28 page)

‘Could have done really well for himself,’ Bill continued. ‘But somewhere along the way he wandered into another line of business.’

‘Security fact-checker for Intelligence,’ she said.

Bill jumped, startled, caught unawares by her assertion. She assumed from his reaction she had scored a direct hit. His face darkened and she realized that he might appear amiable, but you wouldn’t want to find yourself on the wrong side of him.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realize you knew… I hope you’re not getting yourself… You have to steer well clear.’

He caught her eye. ‘You are like Jim in some ways. You don’t back off even when you would be better off well out of it.’ He rubbed his wedding ring with his thumb, searched her face intently again. ‘I don’t know how you found out about Crawley and I don’t want to know, but I’m warning you, if Jim hasn’t already done so,’ he said. ‘Keep out of his way.’

She nodded.

He wrinkled his nose. ‘He has a reputation for being fairly dogged when it comes to unearthing the dirt. Tenacious.’

She didn’t need Bill to tell her that.

‘Some would say it’s a bit of a compulsion of his. Can’t help himself. He has his own peculiar peccadilloes. Voyeur. Bit of a sadist.’

Give me the child, she thought, and I will mould the man.

‘We had complaints about him years ago. When I was still working for the police. When I was stationed in Glasgow. Nasty complaints. But we couldn’t ever make anything stick. Everybody knows he still keep his contacts with the press, uses them when it suits him. Sells his surplus information when he’s short of cash. Everybody knows, but nobody can do anything about it.’ He folded his arms. ‘Stay away from Crawley. He’s dangerous. Men who have nothing to lose are always dangerous. Leave Crawley for Jim to sort out.’

The scrape of the kitchen door on the hard floor tiles made them both turn towards the croft. She could see Bill taking a mental note; the hinge must have dropped, repair needed.

Jim emerged, waving a bunch of green notes in his hand. ‘Sorry I took so long. Just looking for a piece of paper I left somewhere. Had a phone number on it. Seems to have disappeared.’

Sam scuffed the courtyard gravel with her plimsoll.

‘Doesn’t matter,’ Jim continued. ‘I’m sure it will turn up somewhere.’

She could sense him scrutinizing her. She kept her eyes down.

‘Been having a good old chin-wag have you?’ he asked Bill.

‘Yes. It’s nice to catch up with your brood.’

‘What were you talking about then?’ Jim demanded as he handed over the wodge of cash.

Bill didn’t miss a beat. ‘Oh, the usual. Families. I was just trying to work out whether Sam had inherited any of the Coyles’ fine features. It’s odd, isn’t it, the way family resemblances work. Strange how the genes play out. I can’t see any real likeness between you and Sam. Sometimes the physical traits seem to skip a generation, jump a few squares on the chessboard.’

‘Oh, she’s a Coyle all right,’ said Jim. ‘Can’t judge a book by its cover.’

Bill laughed. ‘You’re an odd clan. You Coyles.’

Jim grimaced, flicked his wrist. ‘Time to leave if we’re going to catch this ferry.’

The crow on the roof cawed.

‘I’m going to have to do something about that bird,’ Bill said. ‘It’s buggering up the rendering on the chimney.’

‘It’s a bit of a smart-arse,’ Sam said as she walked towards the kitchen door to collect her bag. It made sense now though – Jim’s views on journalists. She should have paid more heed to his allergic reaction, worked out sooner that it was connected to the Watcher.

The return journey across the Flow country had been painful. She had avoided speaking to Tom. Jim had avoided speaking to anyone. Tom had made some joke or other about silencers as they passed the point where Jim had stormed off over the moorlands on the way up. Nobody had laughed. Now here they were, back at Inverness station, Cortina on trailer, killing time before they had to board the train heading south. She had said in the vague direction of Tom that she needed to phone Liz. She was walking away when Jim called after her.

‘Do you have a spare stamp on you?’

Sam shook her head.

‘Shit,’ he said. ‘I’ve left it too late to look for a post office.’

‘What do you need it for anyway?’

‘Harry’s postcard. I’ll just have to hope it gets there on the stamp I’ve got.’

She gave him an exasperated look; not Harry’s bloody postcard again.

Jim grinned. ‘Harry’s always been my second man,’ he said.

‘I’m sure he won’t cry if he doesn’t get a postcard.’ She couldn’t quite contain the seeping resentment.

‘I have to go and find a guard,’ he continued. ‘Need to see if I can arrange my sleeping quarters for the night. Twist a few arms.’

They went their separate ways.

Inside the phone box outside Inverness station, she fumbled around for loose change in the bottom of her coat pocket. Liz’s voice crackled down the line.

‘Hello. Hello.’

The phone beeped like a juvenile herring gull demanding food from its mother. She rammed the coins she had finally located down its gullet.

‘Hello. Is that you?’ said Liz.

‘Yes, it’s me.’

‘Are you on your way home?’

‘Yes, we’re at Inverness Station.’

‘You don’t have to get a lift back with Jim from the station tomorrow, do you? You’re not in any hurry.’

‘I don’t know. I hadn’t really thought about it. Why?’

‘I want you to go to Foyles and pick up a book on the way home.’

‘Mum, Foyles isn’t on the way home.’

‘The book is for you anyway. It’s from Ruth. She phoned this morning. She said she’d ordered a book for your birthday. She has an account there. All you have to do is go and pick it up.’

‘Oh, okay. I’ll see how I feel in the morning.’

‘Sam, just go to Foyles. For Ruth’s sake, show her you appreciate her efforts. It won’t take you very long. And Sam, there’s one other thing you could do for me. Could you just nip down to the theatre department and see if you can pick up a couple of copies of Marlowe’s…’

‘Beep, beep, beep. I’m out of coins, Mum. See you tomorrow.’

She pushed her way out of the phone box, ambled slowly back across the station concourse, noticed a man standing in a newsagent holding a copy of
Private Eye
, watching her over the top of the pages.

She managed thirty minutes in the sleeper with Tom, fending off any attempt at conversation with her pointedly monosyllabic replies before even she, the mistress of the prickly silence, could take it no longer and had to abandon him on the muttered pretext of needing to check up on Jim. She swayed along the corridor as the train wended through the green and purple cutting, its butt kissing Inverness goodbye, its face squinting up at Aviemore. Dusk, proper dusk; the darkness was rising behind the jagged peaks of the mountains. Somewhere in the distance she thought she saw a stag.

Jim was in the saloon carriage, stretching back in the seat he had claimed as his own for the night. He had leaned on the guard, but had failed to secure a berth. The haversack was slumped on the table in front of him. The bright overhead light bleached his features, smoothing over the boozer’s blemishes, tinting his face with a chalky pallor. His mottled hands clutched a tumbler of whisky. The translucent amber disc slithered and slipped around its glass casket with the movement of the train; or perhaps it was the tremor in his fingers. His puffy extremities alarmed her. Forty-six. He was only forty-six. In her mind he was going to age disgracefully, not waste and wither. He caught her scrutinizing him. She glanced away. She didn’t want him to see that she had noticed his failing strength, the parting of image and reality, shadow and substance.

He placed the tumbler carefully on the table and tilted back in his seat.

‘Where’s your journalist friend?’ he asked.

‘In the sleeper.’

‘He was very quiet on the drive back. Something up?’

‘No.’

‘Did you check his pockets before we left then, like I told you to?’

She nodded.

‘Find anything?’

She raised her shoulders into a semi-shrug, half expecting him to demand she hand over anything she had confiscated from Tom. He didn’t. He smiled and changed the subject.

‘Anyway I’ve been thinking,’ he said.

‘About what?’

‘About what you asked me.’

‘What did I ask you?’

‘What I thought you should do with your life.’

‘Oh.’ That conversation. ‘And?’

‘I think you should be an archaeologist. Do your history degree, then go and train as an archaeologist.’

‘Archaeologist?’ She’d had her fill of ancient ruins. ‘God, I’m not sure I want a job sitting in a hole in the middle of nowhere digging up skeletons.’

‘You’ll have to deal with skeletons, whatever job you do.’ He laughed cynically. ‘One week in an office and I reckon you’d be pleading to be sent to a hole in the middle of nowhere with a couple of skeletons for company. If I had my life over again, I reckon that’s what I would do. Archaeology. Has to be more rewarding than my bloody job.’

‘I don’t really see the point of being an archaeologist. They don’t exactly do anybody any good.’

‘Good? What do you mean good?’

‘
Tikkun olam
,’ she said.

‘Ah.
Tikkun Olam
. Repairing the world. Leave the world a better place than you found it. Doing good. I’m not sure I’d worry about that too much. Doing good is a bit of a mug’s game. No one will thank you for doing good. You might think you’re doing good but everybody else will think you’re serving the enemy.’

He stared morosely into the bottom of his glass. Oh God, he was on the downward slope.

‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I will think about archaeology.’

She paused. ‘But you could still do it.’

‘What?’

‘Archaeology. You could finish the history degree and do an archaeology course.’

He studied the remains of his drink. ‘I’d like to think it’s possible,’ he said. ‘I suspect I’ve left it too late now though.’

A spit of rain splattered and rolled catawampus down the pane and then another and another, tearing across the glass. Maudlin. He was being maudlin. Or plain bloody stubborn. Selfish, buggering up everybody’s life with his sheer pig-headedness, unwillingness to let go of his lot, his other lives. He turned to face her, but his eyes were focused somewhere far away.

‘You know I’ve always felt I’ve been lucky,’ he said, ‘privileged to see so many sights and places that other people never have the chance to see. The desert. I remember the silence of the desert, and I remember the earthy smell of the first rains in the savannah, the vastness of the night skies, the Milky Way overhead and the Southern Cross just visible above the horizon. And I can still hear the whisper of the hippos grazing in the night.’

He stalled. Jim and his other worlds, faraway places.

‘Where did you hear the hippos?’ she asked.

‘The Pungwe, far end of Honde Valley – the borderland between Rhodesia and Mozambique. Out in the bush, black mamba country. We came in through the back door, up from Beira, through the forests of Mozambique. Crossed the Pungwe in canoes hollowed out from tree trunks, and trekked northwest. Overland all the way.’

‘What were you doing?’

‘Gun-running.’ He pointed under the table to his foot; the withered stumps of his half toes, the sign of the devil blasted into his digits.

‘Explosion,’ she asserted. ‘Landmine.’

He pulled a wry sort of smile. ‘I was a rookie then,’ he said. ‘Out for the crack. Chance was in control.’

She thought for a moment he was saying his life was in the hands of fate, a soldier of fortune, live or die, in the end it is all down to chance. Then she realized he was talking about a person.

‘Chance?’

‘Yes, Don Chance. He had all the contacts, he always did. Still does. He was the fixer. Chance. American. In fact, he ended up marrying an English woman. But she left him, couldn’t put up with his ways, never spoke to him again after she walked out the door. They had a daughter though,’ he added. ‘And he kept in touch with her.’ Yes of course, she thought as she glanced down at her watch, she had read the signs correctly: Avis Chance was the daughter of a military man.

‘Fathers and their daughters…’ he said, as if she had spoken out loud. He rested his head against the fuzzy fabric of the seat, icy blue glinting through the creases of his face. She waited.

‘Funnily enough I bumped into him not so long ago,’ he continued eventually. ‘Not an entirely coincidental meeting. The Commander suggested I contact him, in fact.’

‘The Commander knows Don Chance as well?’ Her brain couldn’t quite comprehend the spider’s web.

‘Military connections. It was Chance who introduced me to the Commander in the first place. Long time ago. Once upon a time.’ He paused, took a deep breath. ‘Anyway, the Commander thought I might need a bit of assistance with the job I’m doing at the moment. He suggested Chance might be able to help. So we met up in a bar for a chat. Of course, he’s running a private security company these days; managed to turn the mercenary adventures into a successful business.’

Ventura Enterprises, she thought. It had to be.

‘What do private security companies actually do anyway?’

‘Bit of this. Bit of that. Bit of the other. In Chance’s case, not much in the way of keeping things secure. More like oiling wheels, greasing palms. Digging around for information.’ Jim rubbed his silver-stubbled chin. ‘Delivering documents. Taking things to other people for you when it might prove tricky to take them there yourself.’

‘Courier services.’

‘Exactly. That sort of thing. That’s why the Commander suggested Chance might be able to help me. Wanted me to use a safe pair of hands for a delivery.’

Her guess had been correct. So much for freelance journalism: Avis Chance was working for her father’s private security company. She had been employed as a courier to pick up the manila envelope from the Ring of Brodgar and take it back to the Commander. But her services hadn’t been used. Jim had failed to make the drop at the assigned location because he guessed that Sam had sussed it. Or was there another reason for his reluctance to leave the envelope? Had something happened to make him suspect Avis? She opened her mouth to ask about the drop, but she couldn’t formulate her questions correctly in time.