Call of the Undertow (18 page)

The waves near them were sucked back and thrown forward; a rhythmic breathing, catching in their motion a dancing light. She saw the flashes of something feral again between foliage, careering
in this direction.

‘He looked like he hadn’t slept,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘He’ll not be a good sleeper. Those that the tides wash through, eh?’

‘Sorry?’

‘It’s not restful.’

Mobility Man’s wrists rested on the bars, still wide. And then as she gathered herself again for departure, he let them fall away from each other, allowing the contained world he’d
created between them to collapse. He seemed even more mad than the last time she’d met him.

Back at the cottage her work lay waiting for her; a message on the phone was signalled by a red flashing light. Richard. She ignored it.

She picked up the phone and dialled. The voice that answered lilted with anxiety.

‘Nora?’

‘Yes?’

She didn’t know what to say, and a silence hung awkwardly for a moment. ‘It’s Maggie. I met your husband on the beach this morning.’

There was a pause, then, ‘Yes, he told me.’ Her voice gave nothing away.

‘I wondered from what he said if Trothan was not exactly missing, but...’

Breathing on the line.

‘I just wondered.’

‘How can I help you?’ The mother’s voice was level compared to her own.

‘I just wondered if he’d turned up.’

Silence again. ‘Don’t worry about it, please.’

‘I was just concerned.’ And then she added into the silence, ‘as a friend.’

‘There’s no need.’

Relief began to flood in. ‘He’s back, then?’

She heard muffled voices as though the mother had turned from the phone, her hand over it while a discussion took place. There were some scuffling noises and then a man’s brisk voice, the
softness of this morning grazed off. ‘There’s no need for you to bother.’

Impatience was rising in her now. ‘Is he still missing?’

‘He’s not missing.’

‘Well, do you know where he is?’ She sounded like Carol.

Silence.

‘Hello?’

‘It’s nothing you need get involved in, this.’

‘Well, surely it’s time to involve the police?’ she said.

‘We’ve just said goodbye to them,’ he said. And then there was a click at the other end. The dialling tone again. Maggie slammed the phone down.

Charged up with strong coffee, she sat down to work. She opened all the relevant files and made a list of tasks.

Ignoring the unresolved problem of Lagos’s expansion, she decided to start with a small map representing the flow of cocoa exports between countries. It was similar to one she’d
already done to show the dispersal of slaves from West Africa during the Atlantic Slave Trade. Arrows swept across the oceans like irrepressible currents and drifts. But cocoa involved the whole
world, and the density of the arrows needed to represent statistics.

She imported a world map file and started to fill the polygons for each country with the relevant colours, orange for ‘Main Consumers’ and green for ‘Main Producers’,
which made a stark division between northern and southern regions of the map. Then she started to pay attention to the statistical charts which Richard had provided, sitting with the calculator in
one hand and her head in the other.

A car settled on the gravel outside; the engine cut. She leapt up. Anderson and Small were getting out of a police car, holding on to their hats.

‘Is there are any news? Have you found him?’ Maggie looked from face to face as they reached the open door.

‘May we come in? It would be helpful if we could take a statement from you,’ Small said.

‘Of course.’

Anderson sat down on the sofa, ready to take notes; Small on the armchair with the questions. ‘We’re obviously very concerned about the gun and where it came from.’

‘Not about the boy?’ she blurted.

‘We assume that you helped Trothan Gilbertson with the incriminating information he put on the map.’

‘Most of it was as much of as a surprise to me as anyone.’

‘Come now,’ said Anderson. ‘Why did that child have a gun?’

‘What?’ She felt the blood flash up to her face.

‘I think you must’ve known a little of what he was up to. You got him making the map by all accounts.’

‘Whose accounts?’

‘They all credit you,’ Small said. ‘The headteacher, even the boy’s parents.’

She felt a weary, downward pull. ‘It wasn’t loaded, was it? The gun.’

She saw Small’s hands tighten around one knee. ‘No, the gun wasn’t loaded, thank goodness, or we might have had a major tragedy on our hands. Now. His mother tells us the lad
had a hide-out of some sort in the old farm buildings here.’ He indicated over his shoulder.

‘Did he?’ Maggie asked.

Small looked at her and bit his lip, apparently irritated.

‘I’ve seen a collection of things in there,’ she said. ‘Bones, shells, things from the beach. But I didn’t know it had anything to do with Trothan.’ A glimmer
of possibility stood her upright. ‘So maybe that’s where...’

Small gestured at her seat. ‘It’s already been checked.’

She sat down again.

‘What took you in there, then?’ Small asked.

Why did she explore anywhere? ‘I’m naturally inquisitive, I suppose.’

‘Intrusive?’ Anderson looked up from her note-taking as if about to make an amendment.

Maggie enunciated each syllable: ‘“Inquisitive”, I said.

Small breathed deeply, as if allowing this insolence. ‘And when was it you took him to the old church?’

‘He took me!’ she said.

Small stared at her. ‘Which one of you was the child?’

She let this beat through her. He was right. ‘It was about ten days ago,’ she said.

‘And did you go inside on that occasion?’

‘No.’

‘But the lad did?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he seem to know it, to have been there before?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you go back? Together? Separately?’

‘Not that I know of.’

‘Any indication that he found anything there when you went with him?’

‘He came out holding a bone. At the time I thought it couldn’t be a bone. It looked a bit like a finger bone. But perhaps it was, after all, from the Viking burial. Is that where
they were storing the sand from the beach?’

Small ignored her question. ‘No sign of a gun?’

‘That’s where he found it?’

‘Might he have carried it out? In a coat or a bag?’

She shook her head, noticing in this light that Small’s eyes were blue, very clear, very sharp. He was enjoying his power.

‘How do you know it came from there?’ she asked.

‘Let’s say Rab McNicholl owed us a favour.’

‘It was his?’

‘Best not to speculate. Likely he was letting someone else use the place for their tools or whatever.’

‘Shouldn’t you be out pursuing them?’

Small edged forward in his seat, lips pale. ‘We have our procedures.’ He glanced at Anderson. ‘That will be all for now. PC Anderson will just write up your statement for you
to sign.’

Maggie looked over at Anderson’s head bent like a primary pupil with a biro plodding across a jotter.

‘Please don’t go anywhere without telling us,’ Small said.

Maggie found herself on her feet, but sat down again quickly. ‘So what about the boy, the missing child?’

A glance shuffled between the two officers.

‘Mrs Thame,’ the tall man said. ‘When you’ve lived and worked here as long as we have. Well,’ he paused. ‘The boy’s whereabouts isn’t police
business at the moment. We don’t get involved unless necessary in domestic matters.’

She stared at the man. ‘But his own father doesn’t know where he is.’

‘Noone has reported a missing person. Not at this stage,’ Small said.

‘But he’s not at home?’

Small pursed his lips.

‘And he’s not here,’ she said.

‘As you know he likes to wander. And I think the parents know what to expect, and when things are out of the ordinary. Naturally we intend to interview him just as soon as...’

‘So where is it you think he is?’ Maggie interrupted.

‘Forgive me, Mrs Thame, but I understand you don’t have children yourself?’

She flopped back in her chair, defeated.

‘There are different styles of parenting. We have to respect that as police. They believe, and so do we, that the lad will turn up once he’s licked his wounds. He’s an
independent sort. And this is a rural area, not Oxford.’

A little electric shock connected her to her past. Swallowing her hurts, she asked: ‘What happens now?’

‘As I said, please don’t leave without telling us,’ he said.

‘The house? The country?’ she asked.

The phone rang at about four.

‘How’s it going, Maggie?’

‘Getting there.’

‘I’ll be leaving the office in just under an hour, right?’

‘I know,’ she snapped. Why did he phone her? She’d never missed a deadline in her life. ‘Sorry, Richard. Too much caffeine.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can hear it bubbling.’

‘Can you bear with me on the Lagos population graphic? I need to think about it a bit more.’

‘Sure,’ he said.

She simply couldn’t raise enough creative concentration for it at the moment. She sent everything else off to him at one minute to five and sat back, relieved to have finished but now
aware of opening a door for something else to prowl through.

Carol phoned.

‘What children need is constant supervision from a caring and responsible parent,’ she lectured.

Carol had asked so many questions that Maggie had eventually admitted that Trothan seemed to have gone into hiding.

‘Do you think they’ll take him away?’ Carol asked.

‘Who?’

‘The authorities. Take Trothan from his parents. If he comes back, I mean,’ Carol added.

Maggie was stunned into a few seconds’ silence. ‘Is that likely?’

‘Well, they haven’t even reported him missing?’

‘No.’ But Maggie had to admit to herself now that she didn’t even know if he was missing.

‘If they’re not parenting him properly, letting him wander to unsuitable places. Hang around unsuitable people.’

Maggie thought for a moment. ‘Are you talking about me?’

After putting the phone down, she googled: ‘Boy missing, Quarrytown’, but nothing came up, except the story that Trothan had told her about Peter Barker disappearing with a woman in
green.

Evening wouldn’t come. It was the longest Longest Day she had ever known. When she raised her head, the first thing she registered was Trothan’s usual seat at the table –
empty. The absence took a strange, dark, rounded shape. She wondered if being a parent felt like this; even when your child was away from you, their presence so visceral it could raise the hair on
your arms?

Perhaps Lizzy Ginner lived on for her parents through the shadow of what she might have become. A gymnast perhaps, or an assiduous reader of Harry Potter books. An ear to the door of her empty
bedroom might betray the breathing of a radiator as if she were still sleeping there. In the sea on holidays her memory would swim close to her parents; a bump against a hip, the wash of displaced
water.

Maggie recalled how after the accident a woman had run out of her front door and then gone back in again, returning with a high visibility fluorescent coat, a huge one. They’d wrapped the
tiny child in it as she lay on the mother’s lap.

In her daydreams, Maggie’s car wouldn’t start that day. She’d have walked to work or caught the bus, drifting sleepily past Oxford’s spires and Pakistani shops. Another
daydream had her as the hero, two cars behind the accident. She’d run forward, be kneeling within the tight circle of helpers with the mother. Her quick thinking in bringing the wool rug from
the car would help maintain the child’s life till the ambulance came; quite possibly save her. In her daydreams she wasn’t the one standing apart with urine-soaked trousers, watching
helplessly.

Lit up by evening sun beaming through her sitting room window, she sat with her head in her hands. The only one apparently concerned about Trothan’s whereabouts, she had to act, search,
call his name, protect him. But how? Then Maggie suddenly remembered the archaic script on the OS Map that identified a churchyard at the foot of Olrig Hill.

Trees threw long crisp shadows across the lush grass; trees that enclosed and sheltered Saint Trothan’s graveyard. It was as if she’d stepped into a different day,
still and hazy with hovering insects, the sharp tap-tapping of stonechats. High above her the swishing of foliage recalled the blustery evening continuing beyond the walls.

With hope spreading its wings, she was drawn towards the shade at the back of the graveyard where the dampest, deepest grass grew, beyond the enclosures of iron railings decoratively wrought,
once in manufacture and then again by tangled ivy. Climbing steps up onto a low stone platform towards the church, supine gravestones offered themselves like great paving slabs, some moss-covered,
some hinting at an engraved letter or number. The place seemed miniature in scale compared to everything else in Caithness with its expanses of flat, wet moorland. It was like some jewelled enclave
of Cornwall, where you could reach out and touch stone and moss, and the land closed tightly around you.

The slabs led her to a series of closely-packed, upright gravestones carved with skulls and crossbones and names like Donald Swanson, Elizabeth Manson, Sinclair Waters, and even some
Gilbertsons. One stone in the shadiest, dankest spot near the back wall stopped her; a flat stone with a deep hollow in it and no inscription. It was filled with greenish water. The sight made her
catch her breath.

Once through the low doorway of the church, she looked up to see huge branches criss-crossing the sky where the roof had been. Trothan flickered there briefly, perched high up with his hair
swinging, laughing at her. Then gone. It was a curious thing that she found herself equally able to picture him as an angel or a gargoyle.

She stood in the open church listening. There was a sense of murmuring, and it was hard to say whether it came from the birds or the sigh of foliage or from the old stone walls themselves.
Ancient bells echoing far off, booming through watery curtains.