The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (7 page)

‘I’ve told you I won’t.’ He puffed out his chest.

‘Yes, you have, haven’t you?’ She laughed again.

Instead of replying he pulled something else from the pile of flotsam, some wire netting, and started humming.

‘Are you Duncan Boyd?’

The humming stopped. ‘I am.’

‘Hi, my name is Violet . . . Violet Wells.’ She extended her right hand. ‘I’m visiting, just here for a day or two.’

Duncan busied himself rolling up blue rope and eyed the outstretched hand with suspicion until Violet withdrew it.

‘I was wondering,’ she carried on, ‘if you ever came across someone who used to live here, a friend of my mother’s. . . . Her name was Megan Bates.’

Duncan dropped the rope. He pressed his hands to his ears. Violet noticed his head was shaking.

‘Mr Boyd, are you all right?’

‘I want you to go now.’ He sounded petulant, as though Violet had spoiled a game and her punishment was to be banished.

She said his name again and touched him on the arm to let him know she hadn’t intended to provoke him.

‘I want you to go now . . . I want you to go now.’ With every repetition he said it louder. Violet thought her departure was the only thing that would calm him. She retreated through the dunes to the beach road where she stopped and looked back. Duncan was half-running, half-walking towards North Bay, where her mother’s hat and bag had drifted ashore.

A little unnerved, she wondered if he was having a fit of some kind and whether she should tell anyone. Going along the road, by the stone gate pillars of Boyd’s Farm, she was relieved to come across a blue van. A man in work overalls was getting out of the driver’s door holding a cardboard box which was full of groceries.

‘Hello,’ Violet said. ‘Can you help me?’

The man was balding, red-faced and with a friendly expression He pretended to be surprised by her sudden appearance. ‘Oh, you gave me a fright.’ He clutched his spare hand to his heart, coughing and spluttering before giving up the pretence. ‘What can I do for you, Miss?’

‘You know Mr Boyd?’

‘Indeed I do, I’ve been delivering the same order of groceries to this farm for more years than I can remember.’ He noticed Violet’s worried expression, the way she kept looking towards the beach. He thought he understood what had happened. His tone changed, becoming confiding. ‘Duncan’s not quite like everyone else if you know what I mean. . . . But there’s no harm in him, no harm at all.’

Violet said, ‘I think I’ve upset him. He’s run off towards North Bay.’

‘Did he now? He must be out of sorts then.’ He put down the grocery box in the shelter of the pillar. ‘Always leave it here.’

‘We were just talking,’ Violet said. ‘I didn’t mean anything.’

‘I’m Jim, by the way.’ He held out his hand after wiping it on his overalls. ‘Jim Carmichael.’

‘Violet . . . Violet Wells.’

‘Nice to meet you Violet.’ He glanced in the direction of North Bay. ‘Now don’t you worry yourself about Duncan. We’re used to his ways. He’ll be up there, standing on the beach like he does, and in an hour or two he’ll come back, right as rain.’ He looked at Violet. The same confiding voice. ‘He’s been a bit overwrought recently about this windfarm business.’

Jim drew Violet’s attention to the ‘NOT for sale’ sign on the old tractor through the gate. ‘People trying to get him to sell . . . The electricity’s coming ashore over there.’ He looked toward the bay. ‘And see this field…’ Jim nodded past the tractor. ‘They’re going to cover it with a shed, massive so they say.’ He glanced up the coast, frowning as though Violet might have reason to worry. ‘Still he hasn’t gone up there for a while. Usually sticks around South Bay, does Duncan.’

They were where he was standing now: the raffia sun hat with its broad band of red ribbon, and her leather shoulder bag. Duncan had gone from one to the other, not wanting to pick them up, fearful of what they signified. He’d looked behind him, hoping it was a practical joke of some kind, willing her to be hiding among the boulders which tumbled down to the little beach. Hoping it was a game and she would suddenly jump from behind a rock laughing. Knowing it had been a portent of something else.

The tide was beginning to ebb. The hat and the bag beside each other, both wet. He looked up hoping against hope to see her swimming in the bay, knowing she wouldn’t be there. She didn’t like North Bay because of all the rocks, and because the beach shelved away too quickly. She preferred the wide and flat expanses of South Bay. He touched the hat and then the bag, feeling them with his outstretched fingers, as nervously as if he was touching her flesh. He hadn’t picked them up or taken them away. Later the police asked him why not. He could tell from their faces he hadn’t been able to provide a satisfactory answer.

He backed away, until he was among the rocks. Scrambling across them, he fell and cut his hands and knees, and then he ran to Megan’s. Her cottage on Orasaigh, the tidal island inside the mouth of Poltown Loch, was the other side of Duncan’s farm. He waited at the causeway calling for her, cursing his inability to swim, waiting for the ebb to quicken, for the narrow channel separating Orasaigh from the mainland to be shallow enough for him to cross. He went up to his waist wading it, still shouting her name, so by the time he arrived at the cottage he knew she wouldn’t be there. He banged on the door before going inside. The cottage was still, still and empty, her spirit gone. He pressed his hands to his ears and closed his eyes tight When he calmed down, he went round the sitting room touching the places he remembered she’d been, the arm chair, the rug at the corner of the coffee table where she’d poured the tea, feeling again the brush of her fingers when she’d told him he was ‘a sweet man’ for offering to look after her and her baby if the father didn’t. If she felt she had no other option but to leave Orasaigh so that she wasn’t living under a roof owned by him. She had kissed him too, on the cheek. He told the police he’d been there half an hour or so. He judged it by the causeway when he left. By then the water was only at his knees.

Later the police asked him why smears of his blood had been found on her desk, the arm chair and the rug. He said he’d cut himself on the rocks at North Bay. They asked whether he loved her and he said he did; whether he was jealous of the other man and he said he was, a little; whether he’d killed Megan, whether he’d been destroying evidence when he’d been in her cottage, whether he’d taken her things to North Bay to make it look like she’d gone into the sea. Hadn’t there been two sets of footprints in the sand, both his from when he carried her things there, and when he departed? Didn’t he have a reputation for being, no offence intended, unlike other people? In his case, they weren’t dealing with a criminal mastermind but someone who’d been caught up in the emotion of the moment, who didn’t have the ‘resources shall we say’ to resist male impulse, who wouldn’t have the guile to cover his tracks, who would make elementary mistakes because he wasn’t ‘overly blessed in the intellect department’?

A crime of passion, one of them said. Yes, the other had agreed. A crime of passion.

He went to the corner of the interview room, facing the wall. ‘I love her,’ he said.

‘Did she love you?’

‘I love her,’ he repeated.

They registered the tense. One wrote down ‘love’, underlined it and added a big question mark. His colleague glanced at it, raised an eyebrow and tapped an index finger against his temple.
Screw loose.

The interrogation continued. ‘Did you have sex with her?’

‘No.’

‘Did you hate her for carrying another man’s baby, because she’d let another, older man thumb his prick into her, like you wanted to?’

‘No.’ He wailed at the sudden crudeness. ‘No.’

‘You knew you’d lose her as soon as the baby was born, so you killed her didn’t you? You took her somewhere and killed her. Did you put her into the sea, Duncan? Did you bury her? What did you do with her, Duncan?’

By then his hands were over his ears and he was stamping on the floor. He told them to stop talking about her like that, about the woman he loved. Later, when they persuaded him to sit at the table with them, to have some tea and a cigarette, they said they had always believed him, in their hearts they had, but they had to be sure, they had to test him. It wasn’t personal, it was routine. They were sorry if he felt they’d been rough with him. They didn’t like coming on strong like that. But the job was the job. Was there anything he could tell them about Megan that would help them with their inquiries? When had he last seen her?

Two days before.

Where?

In her cottage.

Had she asked him over?

No.

What time was it?

The middle of the afternoon. He’d gone then because it was low tide.

Had he washed beforehand? Had he put on clean clothes? Had he wanted to look his best for her?

He agreed he had.

They smiled. They would have done so too their expressions seemed to suggest. Pretty woman like that.

What was the purpose of his visit?

He’d wanted to tell her something.

What?

He told them how he’d promised to look after her, her and the baby, if the father didn’t. She could have lived with him at the farm.

A happy family, they said, and he smiled and repeated it. ‘Yes, a happy family.’

And what happened?

‘When?’ he asked suddenly confused.

When you said that to her, about her living with you, being a happy family?

She’d said he was sweet.

They looked at each other and smirked. Sweet, they said.

Yes, sweet, he replied.

Bit of a kick in the teeth, they said. For a man who’d gone to all that trouble, smelling nice and getting all dressed up, laying it on the line like Duncan had done. ‘Sweet? I’d have slapped her,’ one said. ‘Me too,’ the other agreed. Sweet, they both said in unison. For fuck’s sake, they said. It was as if they had a script.

‘I’d have smacked her, no question.’

‘Wouldn’t blame anyone, not after that. Sweet. What an insult. What kind of woman would treat you like that?’

They were speaking so quickly, one then the other, that Duncan wasn’t able to say anything. It confused him and worried him that these two policemen were taking his complicity for granted.

‘No question Duncan; I’d have done the same.’

‘She had it coming,’ the other said.

By then Duncan’s hands were shaking so much he spilt his tea over the table. They let him fuss over it, covering it with a newspaper, but when he looked at them again their faces were hard.

‘Afterwards, when you left the cottage, you met a fisherman, didn’t you?’

He had or thought he had. He wasn’t sure.

‘What did you say to him?’

He couldn’t remember, he said. He was upset, he remembered that.

‘Do you remember if you were crying?’

He thought he had been.

‘Do you remember what you said?’

He shook his head.

One of them read from a notebook. ‘Duncan said, “Megan’s gone” and when I asked him where she’d gone he said he didn’t know. He told me about the hat and bag and I returned to Poltown to raise the alarm.’

‘Why didn’t you call the police, Duncan?’

He didn’t know, he said.

‘Where did she go Duncan?’ one of his interrogators asked.

‘After you’d killed her?’ the other added.

‘Where did you put her, Duncan?’

Tweedledum and Tweedledee again.

‘I loved her.’

Each looked at the other, significance in their expressions. They had noticed the change of tense.

‘Loved her, Duncan?’

‘That’s better Duncan. Now we seem to be getting somewhere.’ Then they started up another conversation, how people like Duncan didn’t have the control panel ‘up top or down below’, how the police and the courts knew that, how he’d get psychiatric help and maybe that would be a relief to him, because ‘old mother nature’ hadn’t played fair with him, giving him urges and no mechanism for keeping them under control.

Duncan slammed his hands on the table and told his questioners he wouldn’t talk anymore because they confused him, made his head muddled, twisting his words. ‘I love her,’ he said and turned his back on them.

Silence was the same as an admission of guilt, they told him, then they left him alone. He spent the night in a cell. In the dead of night, when no-one was at his door listening, he talked to her. Hadn’t he shown her the strength of his love? Hadn’t he kept her secret? Hadn’t she said she would leave something behind, something for him, something to let him know she would return? One day. Hadn’t that been the hat and the bag? You’re a sweet man, Duncan. He felt her soft lips on his skin.

He was released the next morning by the custody sergeant who said more evidence had come to light. The police were following a new and positive line of inquiry.

When he returned to the farm in a police car ‘for his own protection’ he discovered they’d searched everywhere, all through the house and the farm buildings. As he walked around, unable to settle to anything, unable to feel anything except Megan’s kiss and the bitter contrast of what had happened since, his two interrogators dropped by to see how he was, to let him know they’d be watching, every minute of every day, until they got him for what he’d done to Megan Bates.

‘Sticks in here,’ one said, pointing at his throat.

‘And mine,’ added the other.

‘Out there,’ the first one said with a sweep of his hand which encompassed the landscape beyond his few fields, ‘is hostile territory for a wee shite like you.’

A chocolate sponge cake was on the table. Two places had been laid, at each a plate decorated with a brown quail pattern, matching cup and saucer and an ivory-handled knife. The tea pot was warming beside the kettle which Mrs Anderson would bring back to the boil as soon as Jim Carmichael’s blue van turned up the road to the cottage. She waited by the window watching for it, beginning to fret. Usually he delivered to her by half past eleven but it was already twenty to twelve and she was worried he wouldn’t be able to stay more than a few minutes, long enough to take a swig of tea and cram some cake into his mouth. It was typical of him. When she didn’t want him cluttering up the kitchen, spilling crumbs on her floor and telling her his gossip he had all the time in the world. When she had some use for him he was late. Her anxiety betrayed itself with sighs, muttered complaints and restlessness. Twice she’d left the window to bring the kettle back to the boil, as if the steam coming from its spout or the click of the switch as it turned itself off would act as a summons to Jim, making him hurry.

When, finally, the van did appear it was almost noon and Mrs Anderson had the beginnings of a headache. She attended to the kettle, checked she had put away her bottle of ‘medicinal’ whisky – it wasn’t fair to Jim otherwise – and called out ‘come on in’ when she heard the latch on the door. She put three tea bags into the pot, poured in water and as she took the tray to the table Jim backed into the kitchen, pushing against the kitchen door with his left thigh, holding Mrs Anderson’s grocery order in a cardboard box.

‘You’re late, Jim.’ There was a note of reprimand.

‘Morning, Mrs A.’ It was the name he’d called her ever since he began working part-time at the general store, fitting his deliveries around odd jobs and the demands of his small-holding at the far end of the sea loch. He’d been in his twenties then and Mrs Anderson, in her forties, was the housekeeper at Brae House. Calling her ‘Mrs A’ was as familiar as Jim thought he dared to be. The same still applied. Mrs Anderson enjoyed the respect and status the abbreviated form of her name implied.

‘Is this right, Mrs A?’ Jim had swung the door shut behind him with his foot, leaving a muddy mark on the paint (Mrs Anderson wished he wouldn’t do that), and placed the box on the worktop by the kettle. ‘It’s not your usual is it?’

The remark caught Mrs Anderson on the raw. Under normal circumstances she would have snapped at him, saying something chilly like ‘If I had wanted more I would have ordered more’.

Instead she said, ‘Have I missed out a few things? I must be getting forgetful.’

‘Oh, not you, Mrs A.’

Mrs Anderson was listening for any sign Jim had heard talk about her having to pay rent and her other bills, of her finding it harder to make ends meet from now on. But he didn’t appear to be that interested: his attention had turned to the table. ‘You’re not in a hurry, Jim, are you?’

‘Not in a hurry at all, Mrs A,’ he replied, looking at his watch, the prospect of cake and conversation taking precedence over the other deliveries he still had to make.

Mrs Anderson poured his tea and inquired whether it was strong enough before inviting him to sit down. Usually he stood with his back to the cooker, a cup in one hand, biscuit or piece of cake in the other, his flow of chat hardly stopping for a sip or a bite. However, the invitation to sit threw him, as if it required forewarning as well as a different standard of behaviour. He inspected his overalls and apologised for the state they were in. Unzipping them, he let them drop to his feet, saying something about not wanting to leave any marks on ‘Mrs A’s chairs’. Then he examined his hands and decided they needed to be washed. He asked if he could use her bathroom but she directed him instead to the kitchen sink, taking a clean towel from a cupboard and placing it beside the soap tray which she pushed closer to the taps. Standing back to make way for him, she began to wish she hadn’t laid the table after all as he waddled past her duck-like, his overalls threatening to trip him.

‘Come and sit down, Jim.’ She sat herself, wanting to get on with things. ‘Shall I cut you a piece of cake? It’s your favourite.’

‘Please, Mrs A.’

She removed a big wedge and put it on his plate. Then she cut a slither for herself. While he shuffled back round the table, falling into his seat with a thud and a groan as he took the weight off his feet, she asked, ‘How are you keeping, Jim?’

In her experience, it was a question guaranteed to start him talking. Normally he’d say something like ‘I’m fine but have you heard about so and so?’ and he’d launch into the details of some other person’s misfortune. However, on this occasion, he pulled a face, followed by a frown and wiped the back of his hand across his mouth. ‘I don’t mind telling you Mrs A that I’ve been better.’

The last thing she wanted to say was, ‘Why, what’s wrong?’ but form seemed to demand it so she did, adding, ‘It’s not like you to be under the weather’. She hoped that might deter a lengthy flow of personal revelation.

‘The thing is Mrs A,’ he scratched his head, looking uncomfortable. ‘I’ve made a bit of a mess of things recently.’

He wrung his hands and shuffled in his seat. She hadn’t seen him like this for a long time, since his troubles with the bottle, so she looked interested. ‘Go on, Jim, you know you can trust me.’

He nodded, agreeing with her. ‘I can Mrs A and there’s not many you can say that about nowadays.’

Mrs Anderson acknowledged the compliment as well as his meaning. Ever since Nato’s withdrawal from Poltown and the sale of surplus MoD houses to charities, the village had changed. Few of the older residents stayed on after the base closed. The exodus was accelerated by empty houses in the cul-de-sacs being allocated to anti-social tenants and the homeless from fifty miles around. ‘It’s not the place it was,’ she agreed.

‘I’ve borrowed from the Turnbulls.’ Jim blurted, shaking his head in agitation and wonder that he’d done such a stupid thing. All Mrs Anderson could manage in reply was a lament, ‘Oh Jim’.

His shoulders drooped, and he gave a long deflating sigh.

‘Oh, Jim,’ she repeated. ‘What will you do?’ If she sounded hopeless on his behalf it was because of the reputation of the Turnbulls, and also because of Jim’s previous experience of borrowing money from the family. He had been badly beaten up. According to village rumour, Diana had rescued him, paying off his debt in return for Jim doing odd and ends of carpentry in the big house and helping out at lambing.

‘Oh Jim . . .’ She fell into silent contemplation.

‘I don’t know what to do.’ Jim pushed his plate away.

‘You can’t repay them?’

Jim shook his head and accompanied it with the baleful expression of a condemned man awaiting his fate.

‘I wish I could help,’ Mrs Anderson said with feeling.

He shook his head again, this time to let her know he wasn’t asking for money.

‘£2000 that’s all it was, to fix the van so it would pass the MOT. Suspension, brakes, new tyres . . .’ He threw his hands up in exasperation at this simple shopping list leading to such trouble. ‘I’d be sunk without the van.’ The irony of it brought a fleeting smile: he was sunk with it.

Mrs Anderson sympathised but the sight of Jim’s transformation from ebullience, his usual mood, to emasculation reminded her of her own fragility and financial predicament: was this the fate that awaited her too? The thought unnerved her. ‘There’s no good in the Turnbulls,’ she snapped, as if trying to ward off an encroaching evil. ‘There never has been, and there never will be.’

Afterwards, the heat of the moment past, she realised her outburst wouldn’t have helped Jim’s frame of mind. ‘I’m sorry but those wretched girls . . .’ She didn’t have to say anymore because Jim knew the story. In the 1980s, eight or nine years after Mrs Anderson had moved from Poltown to Gardener’s Cottage, the military asked her to be a ‘wise head’ for the young women on the base, to pass on her experience of setting up home in a remote corner of Scotland, with a husband away on training exercises for days at a time. She’d agreed as much for the extra money as for having something to do during the week when Mr William and Diana were in Edinburgh. Until then she’d known of Alec Turnbull, the depot’s head store-man, only through his son, Ross. She remembered Diana’s dismay when he and Alexandra started going out together. Hadn’t she told Diana every teenage girl tested her mother with an unsuitable boy?

She grew to dislike the father every bit as much as Diana disapproved of the son. Alec, she discovered from her counselling work, bombarded the base’s lonely wives with presents and flattery and, after submission, with blackmail threats. Given her head Mrs Anderson would have reported him to the base authorities but for the tearful pleas of his victims who were terrified of exposure and of their husbands.

As a result he continued his campaign of conquest and blackmail until a snap audit in the stores uncovered how he funded his seductions. He’d been skimming military rations and clothing and selling them. The scandal was hushed up and Turnbull summarily dismissed. The village found it harder to rid itself of his malign influence since he also ran a money lending business (at one time or another at least half of Poltown had been in debt to Turnbull). The profits were laundered through a portfolio of other businesses. There was a taxi company, the static caravans which were rented out to backpackers and the fleet of mobile cafes which patrolled the West Highlands in summer selling burgers and ice creams to holidaymakers and locals alike. Even a car accident, in which Alec Turnbull’s spine was crushed, didn’t release the village from his grip. Though confined to a wheelchair, he carried on running his operation. He was the brains, the muscle he hired from elsewhere. And so it continued until a stroke rendered him all but helpless. Rather than let the father’s hired hands take over the business, Ross had returned to Poltown six months ago to claim his inheritance. Despite the intervening years of working and living abroad, and the impression Ross tried to give of being different from his father, in Mrs Anderson’s opinion the apple hadn’t fallen far from the tree.

‘You’ve thought about the police, have you, Jim?’

Jim grimaced and Mrs Anderson was thrown back to all those pitiable young women who let Alec Turnbull have a hold over them and to Jim’s battered and bruised face after he’d missed a repayment the last time he was in debt to him. ‘Someone should stop them,’ she said. ‘Someone must.’

What then passed between them was a look of understanding. Each had heard similar stories about the Turnbulls, how anyone making a report to the police had always suffered retribution and how the family seemed to enjoy protection from the authorities, both council and legal. For as long as Mrs Anderson could remember there had been talk of bribery or blackmail, but it was speculation that stayed within Poltown. From bitter experience, the villagers knew what was good for them.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs A, shouldn’t have bothered you with it.’ He looked forlornly at his cake. ‘Eyes bigger than my stomach, I’m afraid.’ He pushed against the table and stood up. Mrs Anderson said, ‘Jim, do you mind my asking what’s going to happen?’

‘I’ll be running errands in the van I imagine . . . whatever Davie tells me.’

Davie’s name brought another exclamation from Mrs Anderson. Davie White had been Alec Turnbull’s enforcer for two or three years. There had been talk of friction when Ross had returned, of Davie running freelance operations while Ross negotiated for concessions from BRC, the consortium behind the windfarm proposal. These included the ferry service which would shuttle personnel between the land base and the windfarm site. Ross had been involved in something similar offshore in Nigeria, though in the opinion of many people, Mrs Anderson’s included, it would be a front behind which the Turnbulls operated and expanded their criminal activities.

‘Not drugs. You won’t be carrying drugs will you?’ Mrs Anderson asked

‘I don’t know.’ She could tell he was thinking that too. They’d heard the same stories about Davie White.

‘Oh, Jim . . .’

‘Ach well,’ he sighed, saying he’d better be off because he was poor company and anyway he had other deliveries to make. As he pulled up his overalls and fastened them, Mrs Anderson had the presence of mind to ask about Duncan Boyd, whether Jim had seen him recently. ‘Poor Duncan.’ She said it so Jim wouldn’t think it odd. It was what she usually said whenever Duncan’s name cropped up.

‘Funny you should mention him,’ Jim said. ‘He was a bit upset this morning, up at North Bay.’

‘Is all the fuss about the windfarm getting to him?’

‘I don’t know if it was that. A young woman had been speaking to him and he’d just gone off. She thought it was her fault but I told her not to worry. Nice girl she was, brown hair, short like a boy, and a couple of ear-rings.’ Jim touched his left ear. ‘Pretty name too, Violet Wells I think she said.’

* * *

Violet followed instructions. At the bridge over the stream, she took the right fork and right again by the stables. She was skirting Brae House, approaching from the side, but she managed occasional glimpses of it through gaps in the trees and bushes along the driveway. Brae, it seemed, was a house of many parts: the main building an elegant square of three-storeys with matching pavilions at right angles to it and a floor lower. For all Brae’s beauty and the drama of its situation – a pine wood sheltered it and a rock crag appeared to overhang it – Violet was more taken with the contrast between the refinement of the property and the bad manners of its owner. If her telephone conversation that morning had been any guide, Matt Hamilton was rude and bad-tempered. It was an impression the man himself did nothing to dispel when Violet appeared in the open door of the estate office and he shouted at her, ‘You’re five minutes late.’

He was a big man, not only tall but large framed and overweight with a florid face, slicked black hair and a loud voice which he directed without a change of tone or volume at Violet and then at a woman with blonde hair and an impatient expression who was searching through a pile of papers at the desk he was hovering beside.