The Trawlerman

by William Shaw

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I stopped by to say hello to him on my way home and he was sitting on that bench at the back of his house. He told me to go away. I think he’s angry with me about something.’

  Alex felt her grief. ‘Oh no, love. He’s not angry with you. He’s had some very bad news.’

  ‘What kind of bad news?’

  ‘He lost some money in an investment that went wrong.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound so bad. It’s only money.’

  ‘Well . . . maybe it is for him.’

  ‘It’s no reason to be rude, though, is it?’

  Alex was shocked. ‘Was he rude?’

  ‘He was drinking whisky and he told me to just go away.’

  Alex went to put her arms around Zoë, but her daughter backed away.

  ‘Whisky?’

  ‘I don’t know why people drink it. It tastes absolutely disgusting.’

  This time she had been right; a bad thing had been about to happen. And now it had. When Bill South had come out of Maghaberry Prison he had started drinking and it had taken him a while to get sober. He had stayed that way for two years; until now.

  Nineteen

  Terry Neill’s house was whitewashed; from the road it looked square and unprepossessing, but these were houses that faced out onto the beach beyond.

  She rang the bell and Terry appeared at the door in shorts, a white T-shirt and bare feet.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘You.’

  ‘You weren’t at the golf club, so I thought I’d come here and try my luck.’

  ‘How did you know where I . . . ?’

  ‘I’m a police officer, remember?’

  He stood back. ‘Actually, your colleague was here this morning.’

  ‘Jill? So you heard already then? I’m sorry. I just thought you ought to know . . .’ She half turned to go, then said, ‘How are you?’

  He shrugged and smiled. ‘It’s more that I feel really stupid and that people like you know how stupid I’ve been.’

  ‘It was obviously a good con.’

  ‘Yeah, well. That’s me. Only the best. Why don’t you come in and have a coffee?’ He stepped back to let her in.

  She hesitated, then stepped inside. If it was unimpressive from the road, inside the house was very different. The 1930s interior had been obliterated and replaced with a male modernist fantasy. The ground floor was a long rectangle with a kitchen at one end and an enormous desk at the other, with a pair of Eames armchairs facing a free-standing wood burner in the middle of the room. White bookshelves lined the wall to the left; on the right hung pictures, a mixture of large modern abstracts, smaller landscapes and a few prints. What saved it from looking like a glossy executive magazine spread were the unwashed dishes in the sink, a scuffed rug, and a pair of socks, discarded on the tiled floor.

  ‘I realise, of course, that I’m the classic fraud victim. I think I’m clever.’ He poured coffee beans into the top of a silver machine on his kitchen counter. ‘There’s plenty of research to show that victims of financial fraud aren’t little old ladies who hide their cash under the mattress . . . Is that sexist?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The most common target of financial fraud is in fact a middle-aged man like me who thinks he knows a bit about money. We think we’re smart enough to think we can game the system so instead it games us. Do you like it strong?’ he asked.

  When he’d made the coffee, he opened up the doors beyond his enormous wooden desk to a deck that looked out onto the dunes.

  ‘Who was it who told you about the scheme?’

  ‘You know who it was? And you know why I can’t feel bitter about it? Because it was poor Ayman. He really thought he was doing me a favour.’

  He had cut himself shaving, she noticed. A small nick just below his lip.

  ‘I gave your colleagues some other names too. Other people from the club. We all feel kind of stupid.’

  The marram grass was almost silver in the high summer light. She looked directly at him. ‘Do you think someone might have been angrier than you about what happened?’

  ‘That’s exactly what Detective Constable Ferriter asked me.’

  ‘And what did you tell her?’

  ‘All I’ve learned is that anyone is capable of anything, given the right stimulus. These people are my friends, though. It’s hard for me to imagine any of them doing it. Do you and your daughter often come here . . . to this beach?’

  ‘We live at Dungeness. You take your life in your hands, swimming there.’

  ‘And how are you?’

  She had come to ask him questions; instead he was asking them of her.

  ‘So-so. My counsellor says he thinks I keep seeking out situations which put me in danger.’ She looked directly at him.

  He smiled back at her. ‘Maybe you are. Back in the sixties, when you could still do these kind of experiments, these two American psychologists took some dogs and divided them up into two groups. The first they gave electric shocks to. The dogs could stop the pain by pressing a lever. The second they also gave electric shocks to, but when these dogs pressed the lever, the shocks kept on coming.’

  ‘Poor dogs.’

  ‘Poor dogs, yes. They did this for a little while, then they put both sets of dogs into boxes which they could escape from just by jumping straight out. When they gave the shocks to the first dogs, out they jumped. But the second dogs just lay there whimpering, even when they were being shocked, doing nothing.’

  ‘The dogs didn’t want to leave the situation that caused them pain?’

  ‘Trauma had effectively rewired the dogs’ brains so that they became incapable of taking the kind of action they needed to take to stop themselves being hurt.’ He stopped.

  ‘Are you saying I’m like the dogs in the second box?’

  He lowered his head a little, as if looking over the top of glasses that weren’t there.

  ‘That’s a scary thought,’ she said.

  ‘You’re a police officer. You must have dealt with victims of abuse. Have you ever noticed how they return to their abuser? Or find new partners who are just as bad as the old ones? Freud called it the compulsion to repeat. Trauma rewires your brain.’

  ‘You make my emotions sound like parts of a car engine.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, with a small smile.

  ‘Don’t apologise. I like it. It somehow feels less scary if it’s just about faulty fuses.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  She thought about this for a while. ‘If you’d asked me a week ago I would have said I was pretty much OK, bar the odd bit of unscheduled weeping. I am coming to realise that I’m not OK.’ She looked down at the deck. ‘I’m not myself any more and I find that scary. My counsellor just told me I was hyper-vigilant.’

  ‘I can try to explain that in terms of fuses too, if it helps.’

  ‘It helps. Go on.’

  ‘Will you have dinner with me if I do?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  He barely registered the refusal. ‘Shame,’ he said. ‘Wait there. I need some props.’

  A conceited man, she thought. Good-looking, but too sure of himself, like most of the men she regretted sleeping with.

  He returned after a while, with a stem of broccoli, a small potato and a banana.

  ‘I said no to dinner,’ she said, attempting a joke.

  ‘Sorry. I spent a while looking for the right vegetables. I was looking for almonds which would have been more appropriate in shape and size than a potato. These,’ he said, laying them out on the glass-topped table, ‘represent various parts of your brain.’

  More flippant remarks occurred to her, but she stifled them.

  ‘We think of the brain as a single organ, but it’s useful to think of it as many separate organs working tog
ether. This –’ he held the banana – ‘is your thalamus. Among the many things it does is act like a kind of wireless hub, taking in signals from your eyes and ears and distributing them to your frontal lobes . . . here.’ He picked up the broccoli. ‘That’s your conscious brain. So that when you see something that is particularly frightening, the thalamus routes the signal there and, ta-da!’ He waved the broccoli. ‘You can act rationally in response to the danger.’

  ‘Like, is this a murder weapon or just a cake knife?’

  He frowned, not understanding. ‘Yes. I suppose.’

  ‘Sorry. Continue.’

  ‘However, it also sends signals here –’ he picked up the potato – ‘to the amygdala. If the thalamus is like a wireless hub, this is like a smoke alarm, activating the so-called unconscious brain. Up goes your heart rate, and it triggers the release of stress hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Fight, freeze or flee? Those reactions are all taking place before your frontal cortex –’ he put down the potato and shook the broccoli – ‘has even had time to process what’s going on. You’ll have noticed that in an emergency you start to act before you even know what’s going on?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because the thalamus has spoken to the amygdala and triggered a reaction. But then your rational brain kicks in and decides whether that course of action that you’re already halfway through makes sense. That’s kind of how it’s supposed to work. But sometimes the trauma is so great that it appears to overload the—’

  ‘The broccoli.’

  ‘Yes . . . and all the usual social and rational responses to danger are overwhelmed. Now you’re in trouble. All you are left with is the alarm bell . . .’

  ‘The panic.’

  ‘Exactly. You lose it. And because the rest of the brain has been overwhelmed, the bell keeps on ringing.’ He picked up the potato this time and shook it.

  ‘It’s as if the brain had forgotten the code to reset the alarm?’ suggested Alex.

  ‘That’s perhaps one way of looking at it.’ He spoke with the caution of an academic attempting to explain something complex to a layperson. ‘Another effect is that in some situations that alarm keeps going off. Even long after the car accident or the rape, it’s as if that traumatic incident hasn’t actually ended. Those people become stuck in this kind of fight or flight response. People with PTSD carry their trauma with them, as if it’s still happening. Some people talk about having lost a sense of time. Something that should be in the past is still firmly in their present.’

  Alex realised she was nodding to everything he said.

  He stopped. ‘You recognise that?’

  ‘Exactly that. When I think of what happened it’s not a memory at all. It’s now.’

  ‘That’s very hard for you.’

  ‘Why doesn’t my counsellor tell me any of this?’

  ‘Because it’s of no use to them, I suppose. It doesn’t solve the problem. Is it of use to you?’

  She thought about that for a while. ‘I believe it is. It helps me understand what is happening, at least.’

  When she told him about what she had done two nights before in the restaurant in Rye, he laughed briefly, stifled it, then apologised. ‘I’m sure it probably wasn’t funny at the time.’

  ‘We hadn’t even started on our main course.’

  ‘How is your daughter coping? The naturalist.’

  ‘She’s OK,’ she answered.

  ‘Are you sure? It can be very tough on children. They don’t always understand why we behave the way we do.’

  Alex stood, realising she was irritated by the implication that she was somehow failing her daughter. ‘We’re fine,’ she said. ‘We always have been. Look. I should go. I just came because I thought you ought to know . . .’

  ‘Before you go, I need to ask. Do you think someone killed Ayman because of what happened with the money?’

  ‘Revenge, you mean, because they lost their money because of his enthusiasm for Biosfera? It’s a possibility.’ She peered at him. ‘Are you worried you’re in some kind of danger too?’

  ‘Constable Ferriter asked me if I’d received any threats.’

  ‘And have you?’

  ‘No. Nothing at all.’

  That prickle again, at the back of her neck.

  At the front door, she said, ‘Thank you for the . . . vegetables. I mean it.’

  ‘Any time. Really.’

  She left, glad to be away. It wasn’t that she didn’t like him; the opposite, in fact.

  In the daylight, she cycled home again, via the murder house.

  This time it was deserted.

  In the daylight, the copse seemed much less sinister.

  She found an old rake handle propped against the side of the garage to prod into the vegetation and it took her a couple of minutes to find what she was looking for. It had slipped down onto the dry soil below laurel leaves.

  She picked up the black disc she had seen on Saturday night and held it up. It was a lens cap.

  Twenty

  Georgia Coaker was a freelance photographer and freelance photographers always need work, so she was easy to track down.

  ‘Oh. It’s you.’

  ‘I found something that I think belongs to you.’

  The address Georgia Coaker gave turned out to be an old pub. The Prince George Hotel had closed but the ground floor had been taken over by an architectural salvage company. Alex peered inside what had been the lounge bar. It was now crammed with old tables, lamps, electric fans, glass carboys and ship’s fittings.

  ‘Can I help you?’ A man too young for a beard and wearing tortoiseshell glasses was sanding down a door at the back of the shop. The place smelt of wood dust and old paint. He wore a denim woodworker’s apron.

  ‘Just looking.’

  The shopkeeper returned to his work. He was sanding by hand, paper wrapped around a small wooden block. There were machines that did this kind of thing much quicker, thought Alex, suspecting that the activity was intended more for ambience than function.

  At the back, she found an old small square sink on a plain white china column. The plughole had been filled and a copper cup-stand, verdigrised and slightly bent, had been fitted with a small feeder, filled with peanuts.

  ‘It’s been upcycled into a bird bath,’ explained the shop owner. ‘Or bird sink, if you prefer.’

  And he resumed his sanding.

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Two hundred pounds.’

  ‘You’re kidding,’ she said. ‘That’s absurd.’

  When she had enquired about Georgia Coaker, he had directed her to a door to the right of the pub’s side entrance. What had once been hotel rooms for travelling salesmen had been rented out as small flats. Alex checked the number then pressed the bell. The door buzzed.

  Georgia lived upstairs in a small one-bedroom apartment whose walls were decorated with black-and-white photographs from the fifties and sixties.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Do you have coffee?’

  As she waited in the living room, Alex looked at the framed photos crammed onto two of her walls. A couple on a London bus, a woman standing on a wooden roller coaster, her skirt flying up in the wind, two women in a smoke-filled pub arguing.

  ‘Quite a collection,’ said Alex.

  ‘I love that stuff. Real people.’ The third wall was windows, looking out onto the street. The second was blank; painted white. ‘Not just the people in the photos either. Nobody wants to pay for pictures like that any more. I do quite a few like that, street photographs, but these days nobody wants them. I just do them for my Instagram, which is a joke.’

  ‘So you take photos for the scandal sheets instead?’

  ‘Like you love everything about what you do for a living.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it to come out li
ke that, I’m sorry.’

  Georgia put the coffee down and drew the curtains, turning the room dark, then switched on a projector and Alex realised what that third white wall was for.

  They sat together on a big old brown leather sofa that had been covered in blankets. Georgia pulled a laptop towards her. The home screen showed a photograph of her with a young fair-haired man in a wheelchair. She was behind him, smiling.

  ‘That’s your brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She opened up a folder and clicked on a file. Projected onto the wall opposite them, Callum Younis sat in another wheelchair, this one more sophisticated, with big pads for his head and arms. It had been taken on the day when Alex had met Georgia on the footpath that ran alongside Loftingswood Grange. Callum’s head was slightly to one side, his hands pressed tightly against his own chest. It was the first time Alex had seen Ayman and Mary Younis’s child.

  ‘Are you going to shop me for taking that?’

  ‘Not as long as you don’t try to publish it anywhere.’

  ‘Pinkie promise,’ Georgia said. ‘So he’s all right then? Or is he going to have to give up living there now his father’s dead?’

  ‘They had insurance, apparently. There’s no reason why he can’t carry on being cared for there.’

  ‘Bully for him.’ She pressed the next photo. A care assistant was sitting beside him in a chair, holding a spoon to his mouth. ‘I shouldn’t be bitter. It kills my family, paying for care for my brother. Callum’s lucky to have rich parents. Or to have had them, at least. It’s cleaned us out and I bet we don’t pay the half of what they’re paying for Callum.’

  The photos were all similar. She must have squatted there on the path photographing him for a while before Alex had disturbed her.

  ‘It’s not like we’re complaining. We’re proud to do it. And the carers at his home are just as good.’

  ‘What about the pictures you took at the house in New Romney? From by the garage.’

  ‘How did you know that?’