The Darkness and the Deep (3 page)

With what he hoped was dignity he straightened his shoulders and turned to go in. He heard something whistle past his head and as a pebble struck the wall of the shed in front of him, spun round. The boys, still laughing, were moving off and there was nothing he could do, nothing that wouldn’t make him look even more foolish and impotent than he already did.

‘There’s that car coming back up again, Ron.’ The woman dropped the curtain and came away from the window of the cottage at the top of the road down to Fuill’s Inlat.

Her husband, engrossed in a football match on television, grunted.

‘Wonder what it would be doing there, a night like this? Driving too fast, anyway, when you can hardly see your hand in front of your face. It’s barely been five minutes down there – what do you think it’s doing?’

He sighed, then said repressively, ‘One of the workmen, probably, from those new houses they’re building. Forgotten his hammer or something and gone back to fetch it.’

‘I suppose that’s the sort of thing we’ll have to put up with all the time once they sell them.’ Her tone was fretful. ‘That’ll be the end of our peace and quiet. It’ll be like Piccadilly Circus before they’re finished.’

The exaggeration earned her an exasperated glance, then Ron went back to his football, sunk in gloom. Ayr United were losing again.

2

A wind had got up, pulling and tearing the fog to rags of wispy cloud, dull grey against the night sky, with the first stars starting to show through. The
Maud’n’Milly
was roaring back across the harbour, a small speedboat bouncing jauntily on a tow-line behind her.

Waiting on the pier under the arc lights, Ritchie Elder, Honorary Secretary of the Knockhaven lifeboat, made an imposing figure in his navy and red lifeboat sweatshirt: a big man, broad-shouldered but spare, with a fine head of well-cut iron-grey hair and a complexion still tanned from his most recent Caribbean cruise. His eyes were very blue and his uncompromising jawline suggested a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it, a suggestion confirmed by his success in having Elder’s Executive Homes built the way he decreed, at the price he set and in the time he specified. His business methods, he was wont to remark, might not make him popular but they had made him rich, and you could always buy friends.

It was a relief every time to see ‘his’ boat’s safe return. Acceding to the coastguard’s request to launch the lifeboat hadn’t been a difficult decision tonight but sending a crew out into savage seas on a mission of mercy could sometimes be a heavy responsibility. In the ultimate analysis the cox had the final say on safety, of course, but he’d never yet heard of a cox who’d refused to take the boat out in answer to a distress call.

The
Maud’n’Milly
came alongside and tied up. A middle-aged man and woman, wrapped in silver survival blankets, were sitting in the stern; the woman got shakily to her feet as Willie Duncan cut the engines then came forward to help her climb the iron rungs of the ladder up to the pier. Overweight and clumsy, she had almost to be hoisted up, and Elder went forward to crouch at the top, holding out his hand for her to grasp as she negotiated the awkward gap between the ladder and the pier.

‘There you are, safe now,’ he said, putting a comforting arm round her shoulders to steady her as she tried to find her land legs again.

Baleful eyes glared up at him. ‘No thanks to
him
if I am,’ she said, directing a smouldering glance over her shoulder at the sheepish-looking man who had followed her up the ladder, rather unfortunately still sporting a yachting cap with ‘Skipper’ on the front in large letters.

Stifling a grin, Elder escorted her to the shed where she could get a cup of tea and the chance to pursue her quarrel in comfort, then went back to the boat. ‘How did it go?’ he called down.

Ashley Randall had taken off her helmet and her hair was curling wildly in the damp. With her cheeks pink from the fresh wind, she looked up smiling from her task of coiling ropes. In the harsh illumination he could see her eyes sparkling, with excitement, probably. Retrospective or in anticipation?

‘Piece of cake,’ she said. ‘Believe it or not, he ran out of petrol, then they drifted and the fog came down and he’d no charts or anything, so she decided they were going to drift on to rocks and be wrecked. She’d been announcing this at the top of her voice for about an hour before we arrived, as far as I could gather.’

‘Can’t say she looked the sort of girl I’d choose to run out of petrol with myself, but there’s no accounting for tastes. OK, Willie? Shall I get them into position to winch her up?’

Duncan had started the engines again. ‘Fine,’ he said over his shoulder, and Ashley climbed neatly up the ladder to stand beside Elder on the pier, her yellow oilskin open under the orange Crewsaver life-jacket. Rob Anderson, who had jumped aboard the little speedboat to tie it up, appeared from a ladder further along and came towards them, unfastening his.

‘I’ll just get off now if you don’t mind, sir. Katy’s single-handed in the bar tonight and I’ll get Brownie points if I’m back before the evening rush starts. You’ll get the full report from Willie.’

‘Now
there’s
a thought,’ Elder said dryly and the other man laughed.

‘Well, from Ashley, then. Not that there’s much to tell, really – just the standard incompetent stuff. Shouldn’t be let out without a keeper, some folk.’

He disappeared into the shed to take off the rest of his kit. People were gathering by the slipway now to watch Willie perform the skilled operation of lining up the keel so that the winching cable could be attached, leaving Elder and Ashley alone together. Instinctively they moved out from the pool of light where they had been standing but took up positions an ostentatious two feet apart. That was close enough, though, for her to hear him murmur, ‘Tonight?’

Her eyes danced up at him. ‘I’ll need to phone my husband to tell him I’m back.’ She spoke loudly enough to be heard by anyone interested enough to be listening. ‘He always worries, bless him.’

This time, instead of his mobile, she dialled their home number and after a moment switched off. ‘Oh dear,’ she said carefully, ‘he must have gone round to his mother’s for supper. I’d better not disturb them, in case they’re eating.’

Her eyes met his in perfect understanding, then they both went over to watch as the cable tightened and the
Maud’n’Milly
was winched gradually out of the water.

‘How was Willie?’ There was a shade of anxiety in his voice. She had shared her concerns with him some time ago.

‘No problem tonight,’ she assured him. ‘And look at the way he brought her in there – Rob’s all right for a second cox, but he’d make a meal of doing that. Willie knows the coast like the back of his hand too – you can’t have the same knowledge after living here for only three years. And in any case Rob’ll never be half the seaman Willie is, whatever state he’s in.’

‘Difference between spending your life at sea on a destroyer and being skipper of a trawler, I suppose. Still, don’t take any risks with your personal safety – or anyone else’s.’

‘Oh, I promise. But there isn’t anyone to touch him when it comes to tricky manoeuvres.’

‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He wasn’t looking at her, but he was smiling. ‘I rather fancy myself in that field as well.’

‘And that’s
another
one, away down!’ The woman reached the window a little too late to see the car which had passed on the road down to Fuill’s Inlat. ‘There must have been a gey lot of hammers forgotten, according to you, Ron!’

‘It’ll be rare exercise for you, Jeanie, jumping up and down all evening after they’ve sold those houses.’ He was in a thoroughly bad mood after his team’s defeat. ‘You’d better get used to it, that’s all I can say.’

‘And look – that’s someone else turning in off the main road!’ Jeanie’s voice was shrill. ‘One of these great big daft things like wee lorries on great big wheels.’

He was almost interested. ‘That’ll be the Heid Bummer – that man Elder. He’s got one of those big Mitsubishis. They’ve that showhouse down there that’s opening soon – he’s maybe giving someone a wee keek at it.’

‘So we’re going to have to thole them being up and down the road all night as well as all day? The works traffic’s been bad enough but if it’s starting at night now too – well, I’ll just have to phone the Council again, though they’re nothing but a set of useless articles.’

Suddenly, Ron jumped to his feet and went out of the room. She stared after him; he reappeared a moment later with a wodge of cotton wool in his hand.

‘Shove that in your lugs so you can’t hear them,’ he said brutally. ‘Either that or the next time I go to that bathroom cabinet I’m bringing back the sticking-plaster to put across your mouth.’

He looked, Dorothy Randall thought, tired and somehow strained tonight, and the eternal flame of her hatred for her daughter-in-law burned that little bit brighter as she sat over supper with her son in her Victorian villa, The Hollies, up at the back of Knockhaven. She had lit the candles in the plate candelabra on the reproduction Georgian dining-table; the room, with its Regency-striped wallpaper, always looked particularly warm and welcoming, she thought, with the candles lit and the thick red velvet curtains drawn across the bay window.

It had been a real scramble following his phone call, with all she had to do, but somehow she’d got his meal prepared and still had time to change into a smart blue twin-set, with her pearls of course, and its matching wool skirt, but she’d managed. She always prided herself on looking calm and well turned-out for her son – without, of course, in any way compromising her standards. Ashley’s idea of taking trouble over food seemed to consist of scooping a ready-meal on to a dish instead of serving it straight from its foil container, and Lewis, poor love, did enjoy proper home cooking, nicely presented.

Tonight, with only a couple of hours’ notice, she’d just had to take an apple pie out of the freezer and put two steaks into the microwave to defrost. She didn’t like doing that, but at least it was quick, and she’d served it daintily with a sprig of parsley and a cheese sauce for the cauliflower – he’d always enjoyed that. And she enjoyed watching him eat, watching his clever, doctor’s hands slice so neatly across the grain of the meat. She devoured her son with her eyes, her own steak barely touched, as if the sight of him were sustenance enough. He was so beautiful, with his dark waving hair and blue eyes with those long, thick lashes like a girl’s – and such a good boy too, coming back to be near his mother in the teeth of opposition from the harpy who had somehow managed to snare him. Oh, he didn’t say much – Lewis had always been one to keep his own counsel – but his mother could guess what That Woman would have put him through. He was too good, that was the problem, allowing her to walk all over him with her constant demands. Oh, she heard all about the way she behaved in the surgery from Muriel Henderson – and how she behaved outside it too, by all accounts.

Did he know what they were all saying, know how she was making a fool of him? And of her mother-in-law too; no one would say anything to Lewis directly, but there were people bold enough to make broad hints, veiled in mock-sympathy (‘It can’t be easy for poor Dr Lewis, his wife being so taken up with her lifeboat friends’), which had necessitated some cold and steely snubbing.

She hadn’t dared tell him herself. She and Lewis were close, but she had never been invited to discuss his marriage. Though she could see sometimes that things were difficult, he kept his problems to himself, just as he always had even as a little boy, and she had spent years concealing her opinion of Ashley so that the woman could have no excuse for creating a breach. If she’d got it wrong, if Lewis blamed the messenger for the message, it would have undone the careful work of years without any certainty of success in ending this disastrous marriage which was obviously never going to provide Lewis with the son he deserved, the grandchild she so hungered for. Ashley, as she had laughingly told Dorothy, wasn’t the maternal type.

‘It was your day off today, wasn’t it? Did they have to call you in to cover for Ashley?’ Muriel had told her how often
that
happened.

He shook his head. ‘She did warn me to expect a phone call, but it would have been a bit tricky if they had wanted me. I’d been walking from St Ninian’s Cave over to the Isle of Whithorn – looking down towards Burrow Head it was quite spectacular to watch the landscape disappearing as the fog started rolling in – but by the time I got back from there surgery would probably have been over.’

‘What time will the poor girl get home tonight?’ Dorothy spoke with determined brightness. ‘It’s such a
demanding
hobby, isn’t it?’

Lewis sighed. ‘I don’t think she sees it quite in those terms. A hobby’s something you can give up if it stops being amusing. She describes it as being almost a vocation – the call of the sea, that sort of thing.’ He gave a wry smile. ‘Frankly, from the symptoms it looks to me more like an addiction.’

‘I suppose it must be like belonging to a very special club, isn’t it? Now, that is very addictive – do you remember how when you were little it was always terribly important to belong to whichever secret club was the thing of the moment, with all the passwords and secret rituals?’

‘Good gracious, Mother, how long ago was that? But yes, I do remember – what fun it was!’ He smiled reminiscently.

She cut a piece off her own steak with apparent concentration, saying casually, ‘And, of course, you do form very close friendships when you’re involved in something like that, don’t you? I’m sure, with that atmosphere of excitement and tension, dealing with life-and-death situations, it creates special bonds with the people you’re working with, very
intimate
relationships—’

She had gone too far. Lewis looked up sharply, his blue eyes cold. ‘Oh, I think Ashley’s pretty savvy about handling that sort of thing.