Tombstoning (23 page)

The conversation was going on around him, and Alex had just finished saying something. Nicola was staring at him as if he should be listening, as if he’d just missed something important.

‘Sorry, what?’

‘I said he used to do the lobster pots,’ said Alex. ‘Gerry, that I know from the snooker club, said that he just turned up one day with a boat and a few pots and started fishing for lobsters. It’s a pretty tight-knit community out there, and they didn’t take too kindly to having an outsider pitch up and start fishing the same water as the rest of them. They tried to speak to him about it, but he just brushed them off. After that he pretty much kept himself to himself. Fished his own little corner and never spoke to the rest of them. Gerry reckoned it didn’t impact on the rest of their catches much so they just let him get on with it.’

‘I’m sorry, who are we talking about?’

‘Your friend, Neil Cargill. We were talking about how hard it must’ve been for him to lose his parents, after what had happened to his brother and all, and I was telling Nicola that he just turned up one day in Auchmithie, started fishing for lobsters.’

‘Is he still there, do you know?’ David couldn’t prevent his voice rising a little in pitch.

‘That’s the thing. One morning he just didn’t turn up at the harbour. He stopped the fishing as suddenly as he started it, according to Gerry, and they never saw him again. They didn’t think too much about it, and they weren’t sorry to see him go, since all he’d done was take a few of their lobsters and never said anything to anybody.’

‘When was this?’

‘Oh, must be a couple of years ago, now,’ said Alex. ‘Would that be right, Bel? All that business was before Gerry’s daughter’s wedding, so it would be almost two years ago, I think.’

David thought about the past. He wondered how the past had affected Neil, how the events of his life had played out, and how that had shaped him. What was he like now? Where was he now? Still alone in the world? Parents dead, brother long dead. He’d left the army, left the police and left the fishing. What was he doing now? David thought about those collapsing possible universes. Surely that meant there were infinite possible future universes ahead of him? That every decision he made from now on could take his life any direction he wanted? There were infinite futures for him, for him and Nicola, for him and the rest of the world. But actually it didn’t feel like that. He felt like he was getting drawn into something that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be drawn into, a future that somehow was going to involve Neil. Although theoretically he was free to choose whichever path he wanted, the past bore down on him with magnificent graceful pressure, guiding his hand, pushing him towards the one person left alive who could try to make some kind of sense out of all the death and hurt around him.

The conversation had moved on. He looked at Nicola, who was laughing and joking with Amy. She was serenely beautiful, he thought, and his heart swelled with admiration, with lust, and with the beginnings of love for her. He wanted a future with her, with her and Amy. He felt as if he knew that for the first time now, but he couldn’t see how it was possible until he sorted out the past. He had to untangle everything, the knotted threads that linked the death of Colin with the death of Gary, the past with the present.

He had to find Neil Cargill.

The Condor base was an unprepossessing green expanse set back from the Forfar road, surrounded by a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire and razor wire. David drove right up to the front gate and, without having to show any ID, was ushered through by a teenager in camouflage gear pointing a rifle at the ground. The road wound past an airfield, an artificial ski slope and an assault course before coming to a complex of dozens of small brick buildings, their corrugated metal roofs glinting in the sunlight.

David had been here once before when he was a kid, about ten or eleven. Every now and then the Marines had an open day, when locals were encouraged to go along and presumably see the human face of the killing machine that was the 45 Commando Unit. He’d had a go on the assault course, and needed a leg up over the climbing wall from one of the marines watching over proceedings. There had been ice cream and games to play, as well as a tank they were allowed to clamber over and pretend to drive. The incongruity of it all had passed him by as an eleven-year-old. A year later kids in his class had dads who were fighting in the Falklands War on the other side of the world, but he never equated them with the friendly guy helping him over the wall.

Before he’d left the Fairport David had found a couple of local maps on a bookshelf in the residents’ lounge through the back. He looked for Condor on both and while the buildings and airfield were outlined, there were no names anywhere for what they might be. Was this down to security? To prevent terrorists from blowing the place up? If so it wasn’t much use, and the same went for the razor wire and fence surrounding the place, if you could just drive right up to the headquarters of the place with a bomb in your car. He momentarily felt a bit unnerved by the fact he was on military soil under false pretences, but since he’d come this far he might as well get on with it. He got out the car and went into the building he’d been directed to at the front gate.

Two minutes later he was sitting opposite Sergeant Major Wilkins, a clean-cut man with a Home Counties accent, muscles bursting out of a casual camouflage uniform and a turquoise beret perched at a clinically precise angle on his head. The only previous experience of sergeant majors David had was watching the guy with the ’tache who shouted at everyone about being a bunch of pooftas in
It Ain’t Half Hot Mum
when he was a kid. This man in front of him seemed an altogether more real and balanced prospect. He was poised and composed, polite but firm, and almost immediately David knew he wasn’t going to get anything out of him.

He started by asking general questions about the Marines and the 45 Commando. It turned out they were back on base after having spent time in Iraq, and before that, Afghanistan. David tried to equate this with the pictures of both conflicts he’d seen on the television, but here, with the sun beaming in through the blinds of a neat and tidy office, and a view of typically nondescript green rolling Scottish fields out the window, it seemed impossibly far away.

Wilkins was clearly media trained, thought David. He answered questions efficiently and pleasantly, but without giving anything much away. David asked about the relationship between the marines and the local community, and got the expected platitudes in response. It turned out that the 45 had been awarded the Freedom of Angus a couple of years ago, a symbolic gesture from the local council, but one which meant that any member of the unit was technically entitled to march ‘bayonets fixed, drums beating and flags flying’ anywhere in the county. David laughed as he thought of the running battles between the casuals and the marines that used to go on down the West Port when he was a teenager. A gang of casuals, in a spectacular display of idiocy that only mindless thugs could muster, would jump a marine and batter him one night, only to have the whole unit descend on the centre of town the following night, picking fights with anyone who looked even vaguely like they might know a casual. The fact that these men were trained to kill with their bare hands seemed to pass the casuals by, or maybe that was the whole point. Either way, David learnt quickly to keep his head down and keep out of trouble. Around that time Arbroath had featured in a centre-spread story in a national tabloid under the headline ‘Arbroath: A Town in Conflict’. A framed copy of the article had found its way behind the bar in the Malacca, the casuals’ favourite haunt which sat right across the road from the Waverley, where the marines used to hang out. He imagined the faces of casuals sitting drinking their bottles of Grolsch in the Malacca, if dozens of marines had come marching out the Waverley towards them, ‘bayonets fixed, drums beating and flags flying’. He wondered what had happened to the casuals. It was a frightening phenomenon of Thatcher’s Britain in the 80s. The guys he knew that ran with the Arbroath Soccer Society had been well educated, well turned out, aspiring young men who just happened to turn into animalistic thugs every Saturday, using a football match as a thinly-veiled excuse. They used to phone rival gangs – either one of the local crews from Montrose or Forfar, or bigger gangs like the Aberdeen Soccer Casuals or Hibs’ Capital City Service – for orchestrated fights in town centres. It was ritualistic, violent madness. It seemed to have died out, from what David could tell, although maybe it had just moved elsewhere, moved underground, changed from being organized into sporadic pockets of random violence. After all, it was the same attitude which now pervaded Lothian Road in Edinburgh, and the main drinking streets of towns and cities all over Scotland, on Friday and Saturday nights.

David drifted back to the conversation. Wilkins was still talking, emphasizing the unit’s close links with the local community, all that dull jazz, and David started thinking about last night. As if by telepathy, both he and Nicola had been slightly cooler towards each other than the previous night of blustery, passionate sex, as if two successive nights of that sort of thing was somehow not quite where they were at yet. It didn’t mean they weren’t somewhere, although they didn’t talk about it, and David could feel that Nicola hadn’t regretted anything they’d done together; she was just taking it easy, needed an early night, something which also suited him, despite the hardening in his trousers when they’d kissed goodnight at the Cruickshanks’ front door.

As he walked round the inky teardrop of the Keptie Pond towards the Fairport, David had been unable to get the thought of tracking Neil down out of his head. How do you get hold of a private detective? How do private detectives actually do their job? Isn’t there something he could do himself to find the guy? Was Neil still in Auchmithie? There weren’t that many houses there, say a few dozen – what if he just went door-to-door, see if anyone knew him?

Here, sitting in Wilkins’ office, he was getting nowhere. He wasn’t going to be told anything useful by the mouthpiece of an organization only too used to warding off bad publicity. There had been more than one case, when David was growing up, of a marine losing the plot and killing himself, or worse, taking his wife and kids with him. The stress of actual combat on men with a tendency towards violent killing had some pretty terrible consequences, but it seemed to be a price the military were prepared to pay. Just don’t expect them to shout about it. And anyway, he had realized last night that it no longer really mattered to him what this sergeant major told him. Even if he told him the details of Neil’s discharge from the unit, it wouldn’t make any difference. Either way he knew now that he definitely had to find him, to talk to him about everything, to try to make sense of it all.

But he’d come this far with the whole undercover bullshit, so he asked anyway.

‘What about instances of trouble with individual marines? Either with other soldiers or local people.’

‘I’m not sure what you mean.’

‘There have been incidences of marines fighting with locals, or fighting with each other while on base, haven’t there?’

Wilkins gave him a look which said he knew all along that this was why David was here, and that he wasn’t going to get anything.

‘Very occasionally,’ he said with a small sigh. ‘But we deal with any kind of insubordination swiftly and through the proper channels.’

‘Is that what happened with Private Cargill in 1992?’ David thought he might as well go for it, just to see Wilkins’ reaction.

‘I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to talk about individual cases,’ said Wilkins with a smile. ‘And besides, that seems like a very long time ago, so I wouldn’t even have that sort of thing to hand, even if I wanted to tell you about it.’

‘But you were Sergeant Major of the 45 back then?’

‘I was.’

‘So you might remember.’

‘I might.’

‘But you won’t talk about it.’

‘I won’t.’

And that was pretty much that. David asked a few more questions to try and disguise the fact that he obviously wasn’t really a journalist. He didn’t know if Wilkins had him pegged, but he thought he might. He didn’t much care. He now just wanted to be away from here, away from this pristine, unreal office, with its dagger-and-globe coat of arms on the wall, its framed pictures of men in uniforms standing on parade or hunkering down in a foreign land on some training exercise. He wanted to be away from the smug authority of the sergeant major, the easy assuredness, and the face which knew that he could kill this little shit sitting opposite him given half a chance and different circumstances. So in the best form of undercover tabloid journalists everywhere, he made his excuses and left. Sergeant Major Wilkins saw him to the door with a toothy smile, and David felt like punching him in the face. Instead he shook hands and headed out the door, away from the base and back towards town, where Nicola and Amy were waiting to be picked up and taken back to Edinburgh. As he drove past the kid at the gate with the gun he tried to imagine Neil handling a similar weapon. He found he could picture it all too easily.

The drive back to Edinburgh seemed to take forever. The sun slowly baked them in the rusty can of David’s car, and roadworks on the Forth Bridge left them stationary for an hour amidst angry drivers, shimmering tarmac and clammy exhaust fumes. Amy seemed sullen in the back, quietly sighing in between picking up and putting down a book about witches, wizards and trolls. David told Nicola that the visit to Condor had been a waste of time, and she didn’t pursue it.

When he dropped Nicola and Amy off, David wanted to go inside with them, but he could clearly see that some mother-and-daughter time was needed, that things were maybe moving too fast between him and Nicola for Amy’s liking, so he reluctantly left them to it.

Nicola was grateful that David had got the message. Whether Amy was cranky about David, or about being taken up to Arbroath all the time, or about all the talk recently of death and funerals, or just about having to go to school tomorrow, she didn’t know, but she felt as if she had been neglecting her daughter over the last couple of weeks, as if this whole thing with David had taken over. She silently chastised herself for it. When they got in the house, Amy seemed to cheer up, especially when they ordered out for pizza, got the ice cream out and put the
Shrek
DVD on. Snuggled up on the sofa, Nicola tried to put all thoughts of David out of her head for the evening, leaving behind the grown-up world of sex, flirting, death, police stations, funerals and all the rest, at least for a few hours. She didn’t want David to think that she thought shagging him at the weekend was a mistake, so she didn’t want to totally cool off on him, but she sensed somehow that he got it, that he realized she had to spend some time with Amy, her number-one priority, that she had to take at least a breather from him, from whatever was going on between them, for both her own sake and for Amy’s. This relationship (she was using that word to refer to herself and David now, that was a step in itself) was going somewhere, but she sensed it was still fragile, and they were going to have to take it easy if they didn’t want to spoil it, damage it, break it early on, before it had barely got going.