Orkney Twilight (30 page)

The reek of brake oil heralded their early morning arrival at Kensington Olympia. She stood awkwardly on the platform with Tom, slightly further apart than when they had stood awkwardly a week ago, waiting to board the train. Jim materialized. There was something odd about his appearance; he didn’t seem quite solid, he was blurred at the edges, misty. Or perhaps it was her eyes. Jim was looking over Tom’s shoulder as he held out his hand to say goodbye. Sam spotted a guard heading towards them. She glanced at the forearm below his rolled-up sleeve and noticed the slightly grown back shaved patch, the dark lines of the tattoo underneath; the guard with the scorpion on his arm.

‘Inspector Coyle, there’s a phone call for you. It came through to our office.’

Jim raised one eyebrow, followed the guard down the platform and disappeared through a doorway. Her stomach churned. Hands clammy. She faced Tom, unsure how to end their holiday, no longer certain of the terms of their friendship. Too anxious to care.

‘I’d better go,’ he said.

‘Sure.’

‘I’ll give you a call.’

‘Right.’

He pitched towards her. She leaned back. She smiled faintly before she turned away. She didn’t look over her shoulder, didn’t watch him leave. Anyway, he lived at the other end of the country so she would never have to see him again.

Everything was running in slow motion now. Down the track a red light stopped a northbound train. A double-decker crawled over a traffic-jammed bridge. Behind her, car doors slammed. Engines revved as people reclaimed their keys, returned to their vehicles, drove away. A single cylinder motorbike fired somewhere near the station, struck an odd nerve. She flicked her wrist. Five forty-five: how long had Jim been gone? Her gut lurched again. She panicked. Some instinct made her run to the car park. It was half empty. She scanned the remaining rows of cars, located the Cortina. Something wasn’t right. She blinked; she couldn’t clear her mind, couldn’t think straight, couldn’t spot the anomalies. Tired teary eyes not focusing properly. Maybe there was nothing to see. She ran back into the station, sweaty, nauseated, spotted Jim emerging from the office at the far end.

‘Dad,’ she said as he approached.

‘I have to go. Business. Something has come up. You’ll have to make your own way back.’

‘It’s okay. I’m going into town anyway. Mum asked me to… but Dad…’ He wasn’t listening. He never listened to a word anyone said. He was his own worst enemy. He strode towards the car park with his haversack slung over one shoulder.

‘Dad!’ she shouted after him.

He turned briefly, smiled, waved his hand, not dismissively this time, a friendly shake, a warm gesture, walked off to collect the car keys from the guard.

‘Bye Dad,’ she said quietly.

The sense of foreboding engulfed her as the southbound train halted above the leaden path of the Thames. A cormorant shot upstream and landed on the rusty rails separating the high-tide waters from Battersea Power station. Downstream, the far end of Vauxhall Bridge was just visible against the pewter sky. She removed Ruth’s birthday present from its Foyles’ bag, hoping for a little light relief.
The Golden Bough
by James Frazer. She flicked through the pages and listlessly skimmed the introduction.
The Golden Bough
: a classic study of the beliefs of mankind from the ancient Greeks to the modern day, from the ages of magic and religion to the rationality of the scientific age. An exploration of the mythical figures woven through the folk stories and fertility myths, disappearing and reappearing in different forms and guises throughout the centuries and the continents; a reassurance that life is born from death and the cycle of the years is never-ending. In her sleep-deprived haze, she struggled to understand what Frazer meant, sensed that somehow
The Golden Bough
held a truth about Jim, about her life, a significance for her that was tantalizingly just beyond her fingertips. Stories told, retold and transformed with every telling. Different characters, different settings. Hugin and Munin. Ravens. Spies. Harry and Jim. As the train pulled away from Herne Hill, she tried to cast her mind back to that day at Tilbury and replay Jim’s walkie-talkie conversation in her head. Hugin. Munin here, he had said. He had laughed. Was there something else? Was she missing something? Had she overlooked some crucial part of the story? She couldn’t think, too tired. Head heavy. She left
The Golden Bough
lying open on her lap, shut her eyes, weary, drifting, being pulled down by the undercurrents: the repeat patterns, the lies, half-lies and cover-ups, the predictions and the self-fulfilling prophecies.

A solitary magpie crossed her path. She turned the corner into her street and saw the panda car sitting outside the house. She opened the door and stepped into a bedlam of grief. Liz was teetering above a scattergram of broken household objects littering the kitchen floor. Closer inspection revealed them to be a selection of Jim’s finest bar-room deals: the perpetually incorrect clock, the lamp that only worked when its wire was jiggled, and the American emergency transistor radio for which no batteries could be found. Liz must have culled them from dusty corners of the house and thrown them, with some force, against the hard tiles. She was shouting wildly at the inanimate objects, cursing them for being a pile of worthless crap. The dog was in a corner, growling menacingly at Jim’s empty sports bag. Two WPCs were hovering around Liz, trying hard to look sympathetic, but managing only to fill the room with faint embarrassment. She assessed the scene, decided it was best to leave Liz to her own devices, and picked her way through the rubble to the back garden.

Jess was sitting beneath the Bramley, staring into space. Her eyes were red, puffy.

‘What’s going on?’ Sam asked. As if she didn’t know. As if Jim hadn’t foretold his own demise. As if she hadn’t sensed that she was saying her final farewell to him when he left her at the station.

Jess didn’t reply, just shook her head. Sam squatted down beside her sister among the premature windfalls and the wasps.

Jess tried to smile, crack a joke. ‘Well, he wasn’t being over-dramatic this time: he’s not going to see your next birthday.’

A tear rolled down Jess’s face. She didn’t bother to wipe it away.

Sam poked an apple with her foot, smashed its maggot-eaten flesh with the back of her heel. Jim had always loved baked Bramleys; he wouldn’t taste that year’s crop. The thought filled her with desolation. Bleak sadness for Jim and the shadows that had darkened his life and overwhelmed the everyday small pleasures. But she couldn’t cry. Not then. Her eyes were dry. She’d already cried herself out on the train back from Inverness.

‘How did it happen?’ Sam asked. Eventually. When Jess had swallowed down the sobs.

‘Car crash,’ Jess said. ‘Vauxhall.’

Vauxhall. His favourite bridge. Always a bit of a hotspot. Gateway to the other side.

Jess sniffed, dug in her pocket, removed a Rizla packet. ‘I could do with a spliff.’

She licked the gluey edge of a paper, attached it at an angle to a second, struck a match and set fire to the vertical seam. The flame flared for a second, dimmed and curled through the paper, extinguished itself at the licked line, leaving in its wake a perfect white winding sheet.

‘So what happened with that friend of yours then?’ Jess asked after a couple of puffs, searching for a distraction. Trivial pursuits to take her mind off Jim.

‘What, the one who came to Orkney with us?’

‘Yes. What was his name?’

‘Tom.’

‘Yes, him. What happened?’

‘Nothing.’

Jess tugged on the roach. ‘Men.’ A cloud of blue smoke drifted from her mouth. ‘Men are like a tin of Quality Street. You have to keep going until you find the one you fancy.’

‘But you can’t be too choosy,’ Sam added, ‘or you’ll end up left with nothing but the nutty ones.’

Jess exploded with manic laughter. Sam too. Sudden release of pent-up emotion. Cackling wildly, lost in the no-man’s land between life and death. Uncharted territory. No signposts here. And then Sam stopped laughing, as suddenly as she had started, sensing she was being watched. One of the WPCs was standing by the kitchen door staring at a spot just above their heads, trying to avoid looking directly at the reefer Jess was waving ostentatiously in her hand.

‘Could you come with your mother to identify the body?’

‘Hang on a minute,’ said Sam. She raced upstairs to her room, emptied the contents of her coat pockets – her Orkney findings – into a shoebox and shoved the cardboard sarcophagus under her bed. Although she kept hold of the raven’s feather she had picked up from the wood in Tirlsay, stuffed it back in her coat pocket. She wanted that close to hand. For comfort.

The green-tinged light of the subterranean morgue made even the living look half-dead. Surreal. Jim’s body was lying on a silver gurney, covered with a pristine white cloth that came up to his chin. She couldn’t connect the corpse in front of her with the living being she had said farewell to five hours previously at Kensington Olympia Station. It was him but not him, exactly the same and yet different in an absolute and unquantifiable way. Lifeless. He seemed calm, seraphic, his skin pallid but glowing with an unearthly radiance, the cynical creases around his mouth had softened, the habitual sneer of his lips had loosened. Almost angelic.

Liz glared angrily at her dead husband. ‘That’s an imposter.’ She started to cry. The WPC looked baffled.

‘I’d better take her out,’ Jess said. She put her arm around Liz’s shoulder, steered her towards the door, the WPC behind uttering soothing phrases mechanically.

Sam was alone now with Jim and the tall white-coated mortuary assistant. An administrator of death. He was young yet gaunt, dark rings round his cavernous eye sockets. He gave her a questioning sideways glance.

‘Mum didn’t mean it literally,’ she said. ‘That was an emotional response.’

The mortuary assistant nodded, seemingly satisfied with her explanation. She stared down at Jim. It was, she thought, the first dead body she had ever seen. Then she remembered that it wasn’t. The first corpse she had ever seen belonged to Lenin: school trip to Moscow the previous year. She had queued in Red Square for hours to see him, traipsed into the darkened mausoleum, filed slowly past the recumbent Snow White figure on its plinth, trying not to giggle in case one of the guards poked her in the kidneys with his baton for being disrespectful. Jim looked less waxy than Lenin. And yet. She stared again at Jim draped in his white cloth; something niggled about his appearance but she couldn’t quite articulate her concern.

‘That is Jim. But he looks very…’ she searched for the right word, ‘smooth.’

‘That often happens. Before rigor mortis has set in completely.’

The mortuary assistant spoke with an Essex drawl. She also detected a hint of nervousness in his voice. Perplexed, she closed her eyes for a moment and tried to clarify her thoughts.

‘It’s odd,’ she said, ‘I was expecting him to be more beaten up than that. He doesn’t look as if he died in a car crash.’

‘That’s because…’ He stalled. Shot an anxious glance over his shoulder at the door behind. ‘He didn’t.’

Her stomach dropped. ‘But we were told.’

He put a fleshless index finger to his thin lips. ‘Car crash. Drink driving. That’s what they say,’ he whispered, ‘when it’s a hit job.’

She flicked her head nervously. She couldn’t quite make sense of it all. ‘But how?’ she started to ask.

‘Wet-worker,’ the assistant hissed. ‘If you know what I mean.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Contract killer. Someone with military training. Technical capability. The old trick, hiding in the back of the car. Low-calibre weapon. Two bullets. Lodged in his brain.’

Too much information.

‘Faked the car crash,’ he continued.

‘Faked the crash? But—’ She stole a suspicious glance at the assistant. He was clenching his hands in the pockets of his lab coat. Why was he telling her all this?

‘Are you sure?’ she started to ask.

‘Jim used to keep a lookout for me,’ he interjected. ‘Watched my back. I always promised him I’d return the favour. So that’s what I’m doing. Returning the favour. Just letting you know. Don’t ask me any more questions. Don’t tell anyone I told you.’

He raised a warning eyebrow. ‘Somebody somewhere has been doing a lot of fixing,’ he said. ‘That’s all I’m saying. Wouldn’t want to have my name on their list, that’s for sure.’

The room was starting to spin. She inhaled deeply and the smell of formaldehyde mingled with the taste of vomit in her throat, black and orange dots swimming in front of her eyes, cormorants flying at her, the amber flare of fags being lit, swirling. Through the thickness in her head she heard the WPC returning, asking if everything was in order. She put her hand to her mouth, barged past the blue uniform, pushed her way through the door, made it to the corridor and barfed a three-dimensional Jackson Pollock splatter on the clinical whiteness of the tiled floor. She puked and puked some more, head hanging down, hands on knees, carrot lumps coming out of mouth and nostrils.

Liz sat upright, unspeaking, in the passenger seat of the panda car next to the WPC, while Jess and Sam slumped in the back. Her life was passing before her eyes as her mind rummaged desperately among her old files, looking for a map, a clue, a sign, anything that pointed to an escape route.

Jess interrupted her racing thoughts with a sharp nudge in the ribs, leaned close and whispered. ‘He didn’t look that bad.’ She paused and then she added, ‘for a man who drove into a brick wall at fifty miles an hour.’

‘No, not bad.’

Jess hissed. ‘It wasn’t anything to do with you, was it?’

‘No. Nothing,’ Sam blurted. ‘I don’t have the technical capability to do that kind of thing anyway.’

‘Technical capability?’

‘You know. Military training. Guns. Faking a crash.’

Jess nodded sagely. She whispered, ‘Roger.’

‘Roger?’

‘He used to be in the SAS.’

‘No way.’

‘That’s what he told me.’