Pig Island (20 page)

Downstairs we made a dinner from the things we’d brought from the bungalow, a bit of tomato sauce that I poured over some sausages and called a casserole. I wished I could have put some broccoli or something on the plate because she didn’t look as if she’d ever had a vitamin inside her. She ate a little bit, not looking at either of us, her head down so all we could see was that big, chapped forehead. It was only much later when I was at the window, my back to the room, peering out at the broken windows and the police car parked at the top of the street, and Oakesy was in the kitchen washing glasses, that she spoke. “I think,” she said, out of the blue, “I want to see the video.”

I dropped the curtain and turned—disconcerted to hear her voice after all this time. In the kitchen Oakesy had stopped what he was doing and was looking at her in surprise, the glass he was holding dripping water on to the floor. She was sitting on the sofa, her shoulders slumped, her head hanging, and although she’d said it quite clearly you could be forgiven for thinking she hadn’t spoken at all, because her eyes were on the floor and she was chewing her lip, that paranoid, defensive look to her as if she’d never be able to meet another person’s eyes.

“Did you say something?” said Oakesy.

“Yes. I want to see myself.”

He blinked. “You know about it?”

“I want to see it.” She raised her eyes to him. “If I’m in it I want to see it.”

There were a few moments’ silence while Oakesy took this in. He turned to me.

“She had to know,” I said, opening my hands. “Someone was going to tell her eventually.”

He didn’t say anything. I think he was too tired to argue—or maybe he could see the sense in what I was saying. He went resignedly to the hallway and picked up the laptop from where we’d leaned it against the wall. He brought it back to the kitchen, pulled one of the chairs away from the table and spoke to Angeline. “Sit down. Here.”

She hesitated, then got up and limped over unsteadily, resting her hands on the table to hold her weight and tentatively lowered her awkward body on to the tiny aluminium chair. Oakesy switched on the laptop and put it in front of her. He got a beer from one of the carrier-bags and switched off the kitchen light so the screen was the only illumination and Angeline’s face was bathed a greenish-blue.

I sat next to her at the table, hunched forward, my chin cupped in my hands. I made it seem as if I was concentrating on the computer, but I wasn’t. My eyes were rotated sideways to watch her. I got very close to her until I could see every detail of her face—the colourless skin, the big forehead illuminated by the computer, and the small nose, like a young boy’s.

“This was taken west of the island.” Oakesy leaned between us and clicked on the RealPlayer icon. The video started. “Two years ago. Before the fence went up. Here.” He pointed to the end of the tree-line. “Just here—watch this bit.”

I didn’t turn to the screen—I’d seen the video enough times before. This time I watched its mirror image reflected in the glassy curve of Angeline’s left eye: the bobbing motion of the boat, the men in their football shirts holding up beers to the camera, and then the long grey expanse of Pig Island’s flank rising above the waves, below it the woods coming down to meet the beach. I knew exactly the place on the screen where the blurry figure would appear, with its lurching walk, coming out of the trees for one or two steps on to the sand. I knew the pause, the quick turn back, the disappearance into the trees, the shouts of the men on the boat.

When it was over Oakesy leaned over and stopped the video. I sat motionless, staring at her eye, fascinated by the way it was flickering from side to side as if it were trying to escape. Then a clear disc of liquid appeared, bulging rapidly, trembled for a moment on top of the iris, then broke and fell down her face. She put her palms together, the tips of her fingers on her nose, and started trembling, as if the temperature in the room had plummeted.

“You all right there?” Oakesy said. “You want to—?”

“I was born like it,” she said. She pushed the chair back with a screech and put her fists to her eyes, pushing at them as if she’d like to punish them for leaking. ‘
It’s not my fault. I was born like it. You can’t blame me for it. You can’t
.“

Oakesy and I exchanged a look. He leaned forward a little and I think he was going to touch her, but something must have stopped him because his hand got half-way to her shoulder then stopped and went uncertainly back down to the table. “Listen,” he said, “nobody thinks it’s your fault.”

‘
They’ll think I’m trouble. Like they did on Cuagach. They thought I was a
—’ She broke off, took deep breaths. Her face was bright red now and there were two lines of snot coming out of her nose. “They said I was an abomination. That’s what they said. They said I—‘

“You didn’t really believe all that,” I said. “You’re disabled, that’s all.”

“Lex,” Oakesy said.

“Well, Oakesy, we’ve all seen it now, the three of us. There’s no point in being coy. And anyway … I’m sure there’s something that can be done for you, Angeline.”

When I said that she went really still. She stopped crying and all the colour drained out of her skin. She lowered her hands and stared at me with an odd, cracked look, her irises slightly off-centre as if her eyes had broken.

“It’s true. I see people every day with spinal injuries and deformities and I’m sure there’s a very simple operation you can have.”

“To make me normal?”

“I can help you. My friend’s a neurosurgeon—the best in the country. Would you like that? Would you want him to look at you?”

“I—I …‘ She pressed her palms to her cheeks, taking a few deep breaths, looking from me to Oakesy and back again. She was trembling so hard her teeth were almost chattering. ”I don’t know. I don’t
know
.“

Oakesy stood up and switched on the light. He rustled through the carrier-bags we hadn’t unpacked yet and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel’s he took everywhere with him. He went through the cupboards until he found a child’s plastic cup with Spiderman on it, filled it half full with JD and pushed it in front of her.

“Oh,” I said. “Alcohol—I don’t think that’s a very good—‘

She picked up the drink and without even sniffing it, or questioning it, swallowed it in one. I closed my mouth and watched her, amazed. She pushed the beaker back across the table to him. He filled it again and she drank another two beakerfuls down in one. Well, I thought, someone’s done
that
before. Oakesy kept filling it up, watching her face as she drank. A slow flush spread long fingers up her neck towards her chin and by the fourth beaker she’d stopped trembling. Instead of knocking this one back, like the town drunk, she took one or two sips and returned it to the table. Then she straightened a little and wiped her nose, gathering her courage, her eyes going nervously from me to Oakesy and back again.

“You all right?”

“Yes.” She paused. “Have lots of people seen it? The video.”

“Lots,” Oakesy said, not meeting her eyes, the way he does when he’s embarrassed. “Lots of people know about it.”

“The police? The one that said ”devil“. In the police station he said devil.”

“Yes. The police. They know too, I suppose.”

She took a long breath through her nose, letting this sink in. She looked up at the laptop screen and seemed to be putting it all together in her head. “And—and that’s why you were on Cuagach in the first place? To write about me?”

He looked awful now. Really guilty. “Uh, yeah,” he admitted. “That’s why I was there.”

“Dad didn’t know that.” She shook her head and gave a short laugh, staring at her hands on the table. Her fingers were pale and bitten, with red tips. “He thought you’d come back to haunt him.”

“To haunt him? What does that mean? Why would he think that?”

She closed her eyes and opened them, as if it were a trick question and she needed to think about her answer. She glanced over at his camera sitting on the kitchen worktop. Then she looked at the laptop, then back at him. “Um—because you’re Joe Finn?”

He stared at her, his mouth open a little.

“You are? Aren’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said hurriedly. “Yeah, I … How did you know?”

She looked surprised—as if to say, “Didn’t you know this already?” ‘But I’ve always known about you,“ she said. ”I’ve known about you all my life. I’ve always known one day I’d meet you.“

Chapter 9

There comes a time in every person’s life when an opportunity presents itself. The test of character is how one chooses to respond to the challenge…

Downstairs Oakesy was watching the news and Angeline was in bed, the door to her room closed tight. I was in the front bedroom, sitting on the damp, lumpy bed with Oakesy’s laptop open on my knees, tapping at the keys. The curtains were open with the orange streetlight coming through and falling on the computer screen. The police car was still out there—I’d checked, and a man was sitting in the dark watching us. According to Danso, we didn’t really need him: he was just there to make us feel secure.

Today I find myself in just such a position
[I wrote].
Today I have been presented with a riddle, an opportunity. And the challenge is—do I attempt to solve the riddle myself, or do I pass it to someone I trust, someone whose professionalism and skill is better suited to deal with it than mine? Someone who will benefit enormously from involvement in this fascinating, high-profile case…

I’d titled the email ‘Unusual Spinal Abnormality. High Media Interest’ and sent it under an anonymously set-up Yahoo account, because I knew if I used my real name that that witch of a secretary would leap on it and rip it out of Christophe’s inbox in a flash. I still blame her for what happened. I mean, who was it who tried to make something sinister out of my relationship with him? Turning it round, telling people I was making a nuisance of myself? That I’d ‘bombarded Mr Radnor with correspondence on the clinic’s intranet’. Which is a wild exaggeration, of course, because I’d sent little more than a few good-luck messages when he was off on one of his overseas trips, once for the tsunami and once to help a little spina bifida boy in the Ukraine. Oh, and a couple of copies of my CV. It was probably those CVs that did it. She
knew
I was a good contender for her job—she
knew
she’d need to pull up her socks with me around. And there was that poisonous little comment I overheard her whisper on the day I’d announced my resignation: ‘Jumped before she was pushed.“ It was probably her who dumped all the photos I’d framed. I found them—did I tell you?—in the clinic’s waste along with all the shredded office documents and Pret à Manger sandwich bags.

“In my opinion,” I wrote, trying hard to remember the language of the referral letters I’d seen at the clinic, trying to combine it with the article in the journal, “this anomaly will almost certainly prove to be associated with spina bifida and therefore of great interest to you. In order to decide what can be done for the patient it will be vital to assess how much ”tethering“ there is in the spinal cord. To that end I suggest we make an appointment to meet as soon as possible.”

I nibbled my cuticles, wondering if I should say anything about Cuagach, about what had happened out there. But in the end I decided ‘high-profile’ would be enough to pique his interest. I finished the email: ‘I very much look forward to working with you on this, a case that can only cement your reputation as a surgeon of repute and integrity.“ I clicked send and sat back, waiting for the out-of-office acknowledgement to pop up on the screen.

My head was tingling. I was going to be back at the clinic by the end of the year.

Oakesy
Chapter 1

I dreamed about Pig Island. Cuagach Eilean. I dreamed of dark clouds trailing long fingers down to stroke the cliffs, I dreamed of helicopters flying over the gorge in the moonlight, of tree branches, like hands, reaching up to grab them. I saw a police launch bouncing across the waves, blue lights flashing, I heard the words ‘improvised explosive device’ over and over again, echoing from the mouths of women and men, a chorus of moving lips.

I woke with a jolt on the sofa—dry mouth, stiff neck and a whisky stain on the carpet where the glass had dropped in my sleep. The curtains were drawn, the TV was on, flickering across my face—replaying my dreams: Pig Island in daylight, pictured from above, a shoreline rising up from the sea, familiar grass-covered cliffs, white tents dotted around the village. The words ‘improvised explosive device’ again. The helicopter banked and dipped above it, then the shot switched to show a small ferry bobbing in the waves close to a shingle beach. An aluminium pontoon connected it to the land. Two soldiers were winching an army truck up it.

I pushed myself upright, blearily, my body creaking, shaking myself out of the dream. On screen Danso appeared seated at a trestle table, a directional mic on the table in front of him, another on his lapel. A blue thistle, the Strathclyde Police logo, was projected on to the backdrop behind him. “Crinian is one area we’re looking at closely and—‘ He lifted his chin to listen to an inaudible interruption from the press floor. ”That’s right—from the car park of the Crinian Hotel …’

“Shit, shit, shit.” I pushed myself upright and staggered to the kitchen, hating the way it all had to come back—had to force itself back at me. I hung my face over the sink, waiting, wondering if I was going to puke. I thought of the senior identification manager, a short guy called George who’d spent two hours with me in Oban carefully filling in his yellow ‘misper’ forms, one for each missing PHM member, thirty in all. Yesterday I’d made a promise to him—a poxy promise when I thought about it: I’d promised I’d go out to Cuagach today to identify bodies. The thought of it made my head ache—like there was something hard and egg-shaped inside it.