Thunder Bay

by Douglas Skelton

  Jarji laid the folder on the plump cushion of the couch on which he sat. He leaned forward and lifted his coffee cup. ‘We have no concerns, Henry,’ he said, his voice showing barely a trace of his Georgian roots, although carrying a faint American twang. He sipped his coffee. ‘Ichkit merely wanted me to ensure that everything is on track. He has made a sizeable investment in this venture.’

  ‘I’ve never let you down before, have I?’ Henry said, giving Jarji the smile that had helped him sail through university life. ‘Everything is proceeding apace.’

  Apace. Only someone with Henry’s breeding would use such a word. ‘Good. So there are no impediments?’

  ‘Nothing that can’t be overcome.’

  Jarji slowly laid his cup back on the table, sat back and languidly swung one leg over the other. He plucked at his trouser leg to make sure the crease was straight. He crossed his hands on his lap. And then, and only then, did he look back at Henry with a smile that no one would ever mistake for being good-humoured. ‘So there are impediments?’

  Henry’s nervous laugh skittered from his throat. ‘Nothing to worry about, I assure you.’

  Jarji’s smile seemed frozen. ‘My friend, I do not worry. I never worry. I am famous for not worrying. Is that not so, Tamaz?’

  ‘He never worries,’ said Tamaz, his voice rumbling like the beginning of an earthquake.

  ‘My brother, however, he is the worrier. I tell him he’ll worry himself into an early grave. He worries about this venture—did you know he tried something similar a few years ago? On the mainland?’

  Henry shook his head, his eyes darting from Tamaz to Jarji. ‘No, I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘It is not something he likes to talk about but it ended badly. There was unpleasantness. I hope there will be no unpleasantness this time around. Memories of our previous endeavour here are also unpleasant . . .’

  ‘No,’ said Henry, a bit too quickly. ‘There is merely some resistance from a few locals, that’s all. As I said, nothing to cause concern in the slightest. They can do nothing to stop my plans—our plans—going ahead.’

  Jarji’s smile changed and would now cause the mercury to rise. ‘That is good, old friend, that is good.’

  ‘We have a public meeting tonight, in Portnaseil, and I’m sure it will all go well. We have planning approval in the bag, we even have a number of customers lined up for next year’s opening weekend—including you and your brother, of course, as guests.’

  Jarji inclined his head in acceptance. He hoped for Henry’s sake that this did go according to plan. The man was from a noble family and he and his hedge fund had proved useful in the past but Jarji’s brother was not a man to suffer any kind of failure, even from a man Jarji had been friendly with for over twenty years. They had become friends in university—Ichkit had insisted his younger brother receive a good British education. However, that youthful friendship and Henry’s past usefulness would not protect him should Ichkit feel disappointed. He did not like to be disappointed. The name Ichkit meant ‘sudden’. If there was any unpleasantness, then Henry would find out that Ichkit was well-named, for his punishment would be swift.

  11

  Although Rebecca had spoken to Chaz Wymark many times on the phone, she had never met him face-to-face. She knew he was two or three years younger than her, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, but his enthusiasm made him seem more like a teenager. When she phoned him from the hotel to tell him that she was on the island, his voice was filled with excitement, and he insisted on coming to see her immediately. He knew she had taken sick leave and she had to extract a promise from him that he would keep her presence a secret from the office. She didn’t know if he was capable of it but she had no choice. This was his story, after all, and his island. She stopped to consider that. His island. It wasn’t hers, despite her father being born here.

  It was a beautiful afternoon and she felt like getting some air, so he told her there was a bench beside the old harbourmaster’s office overlooking the harbour. She waited for him, her head tilted back to catch the rays of the sun, hoping to be lulled by the sounds of the water lapping gently against the stone jetty and the clink of cables against the masts of the boats bobbing languidly in the marina. She still felt slightly on edge, as if there was something dark looming just ahead of her. The warm autumn sunshine helped but she couldn’t fully shake the sensation.

  She kept seeing the face of the woman at the church darken at the mention of her father. It was just a shadow, really, and she’d tried to hide it, but Rebecca had caught it. It had troubled her as she walked back to the hotel. What had Dad been hiding all these years? What had forced him to leave, and why would people turn skittish at the mention of the family name?

  She opened her eyes, looked across the harbour to where the mainland was, at this level, little more than a dark line rising from the water. Was it the woman’s reaction that was bothering her, or was it lingering shame about lying to Barry? Illness was something she hated to submit to; feigning it was much worse. Maybe it was Simon? She didn’t like treating him the way she did, but she couldn’t help herself. He just reminded her too much of what had happened. Chromosomes, they told her afterwards. Not enough chromosomes, and the foetus hadn’t developed properly. Nobody’s fault, just one of those things, not that any of the medical professionals used those exact words. She hadn’t done anything to endanger the pregnancy. She hadn’t been drinking, she’d never smoked or used drugs, she wasn’t obese. She’d even cut down on coffee. But it still happened.

  There had been bleeding before, but she was told it was common during the first trimester. But then it grew worse, the pain increased, and that was it. She woke up that morning pregnant, went to bed not pregnant. One in ten mothers under thirty suffer a miscarriage, they said, as if that was supposed to make her feel better. She’d received counselling, of course, and they kept telling her no one was at fault. It was just one of those things. She was the one in ten.

  When she’d first discovered she was expecting, Simon had proposed, because that was the kind of man he was. She declined because even then, when she was carrying his child, she was not certain he was the one for her. She liked him, had even told herself that she loved him, but deep down she was never fully convinced. He was handsome and he was caring and he was a good man. Her dad would have liked him, her mum certainly did, but Rebecca knew that despite their shared experience there was no future for them. Rebecca never told her mother she’d been pregnant or that she’d lost the baby. She didn’t tell anyone outside the health service, apart from Simon, because it wasn’t something she wished to talk about. She didn’t want the pity or the sympathy. She simply wanted to get on with things: move on, nothing to see here.

  But sometimes, lying alone in her bed in her little flat, she thought about what might have been. Of the baby—was it a boy or a girl? Of what it would have been like to have been a mother, to raise a child, to watch the child grow and become an adult. And on those nights, in the darkness of her room as Inverness slept beyond her windows, she wept softly.

  Once she awoke to find her father sitting on her bed, watching her. Her rational side told her she was dreaming, he had been dead for two years, but it seemed so real. He didn’t say anything, merely smiled that kindly smile he had, and she swore she felt him tuck a strand of hair from her forehead, the way he always used to do.

  ‘Daddy,’ she’d said, once again a little girl.

  But all he did was smile. That was reassuring enough for her.

  And then he was gone. She knew it was all right to grieve, to be sad, but it was also all right to carry on.

  A slight disturbance in the water made her look down. The large, dark eyes of a seal were staring back at her. It pleased her. As a child she recalled her parents taking her from their home in Glasgow down the west coast for the day, to the small village of Ballantrae in the south of Ayrshire. They would walk along the beach, finding mangled branches that had been stripped raw by the water and
the wind and the salt, then thrown up onto the shingle as if the sea had taken everything it needed and was done with them. They would skirt around dead jellyfish and rotting seaweed and, as they reached the far end of the beach, at a place called Bennane Head, her mother would talk of the legend of Sawney Bean and his family of cannibals said to live in a cave nearby. It was there Rebecca saw her first seal in the wild, a number of them stretched out on rocks hidden just below the surface of the water, as if sunbathing. Occasionally a head would appear, little more than a lump in the surface of the water, to regard with curiosity these strange creatures of the land, just like the one with which she was exchanging a stare now. Although this one was perhaps hoping she would throw it something to eat.

  ‘Rebecca?’

  Chaz Wymark was walking along the quayside towards her, his camera bag slung over his shoulder. His hair was blond, his face finely tanned as only blonds seem to manage, his frame trim and fit. He was, she had to admit, pretty damn gorgeous. Enthusiasm bounced in his blue eyes and he gave her a tight hug as soon as she stood up. Rebecca wasn’t much of a hugger, but she let it run its course because she didn’t sense anything sexual in the young man’s approach. This was the way he was—tactile, eager and boyish. He made her feel old and jaded.

  ‘We finally meet,’ he said. When he smiled he reminded her of a young Robert Redford, her mum’s favourite.

  ‘Remember, I’m not here,’ she said.

  The smile broadened. ‘Right, gotcha. Your editor will come around.’ His tone was confident. ‘There’s something in this, Rebecca. I can feel it. This Roddie Drummond thing is big, everyone’s talking about it.’

  Rebecca didn’t reply. She hoped Chaz was right, but she knew she was walking a fine line. A newsroom was a collaborative area but it was not a democracy, even in the weeklies. The industry had changed but the editor’s word was still law and she had broken that law. If this didn’t pan out the way Chaz said it would, Rebecca would be out there looking for a new job. And in a world where any crackpot with a camera phone could call himself a journalist, jobs were hard to come by.

  ‘I saw a seal just now,’ she said, her hand waving vaguely towards the water.

  ‘Not surprising,’ he said. ‘Portnaseil means “port of the seal”.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  He looked surprised. ‘I thought you were from the island?’

  ‘My father was from the island. I’ve never been.’

  Chaz was puzzled. ‘He never brought you back home?’

  ‘He didn’t speak about the place. He left when he was a teenager and never came back.’

  Chaz took this in. ‘Never said why?’

  She shook her head. ‘That’s another reason I’m here. I want to find out why. Do you know of any other Connollys on the island?’

  He thought about it. ‘If there are I’ve never met them. We can ask my mum and dad, though. But your dad would’ve left here long before we arrived.’

  Rebecca knew Chaz’s father had moved from London thirteen years before, to become one of the island’s two GPs, although there was no trace of his roots in the young man’s accent. He sounded island to the bone.

  She sat down on the bench again. ‘I’m going to talk to the minister about my father. She knew him.’

  ‘Fiona? She’s away just now, at a Church of Scotland meeting in Edinburgh.’

  ‘I know, but she’ll be back in a day or so, I’ve been told. I’ve got to start somewhere and she seems logical. But let’s talk about Mhairi Sinclair. And Roddie Drummond.’

  Chaz sat down beside her, set his camera bag on the ground. ‘Okay, remember I’m only passing on what I’ve been told. This all happened two years before I got here.’

  ‘I know. I just want some background. I’ve read what reports I could but I want to hear what you’ve heard.’

  He gathered his thoughts. ‘They say she was a beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Stunning, is what I was told. Her mum and dad run the village store and post office, back there in the Square. Mhairi’s daughter lives with them.’

  ‘Sonya, right?’

  ‘Yes, Sonya. She’s what, sixteen now? Something like that. She was obviously just a baby when her mother was murdered.’

  ‘But she’s not Roddie Drummond’s child?’

  ‘No, her father is Donnie Kerr. Him and Mhairi and Roddie Drummond were all pals as kids.’

  ‘So Sonya doesn’t live with her father?’

  ‘No. Donnie’s had what you might call a chequered history, I’m told. Drugs. He’s clean now, operates an excursion boat, takes tourists out to see the marine life in his dad’s old fishing craft. Dolphin spotting, whale watching, that sort of thing. Some deep-sea fishing now and then. Takes them over to Staffa and down to Iona, too, during the summer. You’ll see him tonight.’

  Chaz had told her on the phone there was to be a meeting in the community hall to discuss the proposals regarding the big house and estate. The local laird was going to present his plans and had enlisted the local MP and a TV star to back him up. Chaz was going to take photographs. A telly star was always news.

  ‘It’s a shame for the girl, it really is,’ Chaz said. ‘She only knows her mother through photographs. I can’t imagine how that must feel.’

  ‘Where is the cottage Mhairi shared with Roddie?’

  ‘Outside Portnaseil, a wee bit down the Spine.’

  ‘The Spine?’ Rebecca asked.

  Chaz explained. ‘Our only real road. It runs the full length of the island, like a spine. The cottage is a holiday home now—the island is becoming quite the attraction these days for incomers. Second homes, people retiring here. The owners got it for next to nothing, apparently. At the time it was owned by the estate, but they offloaded it as soon as they could. The fact that a violent death occurred inside doesn’t seem to upset the current owners at all. It’s unlikely to happen again and they know it. The island’s a peaceful place, really.

  ‘There’d not been an incident like that for fifty years or so, is that right?’

  ‘There’s not much crime here at all. We’ve got police, of course. A handful of officers, working shifts naturally, and a sergeant. But there’s not that much for them to do by way of violent crime.’

  ‘Paradise, is it?’

  He laughed. ‘In many ways. There are problems, of course there are. Youth crime. Domestics. Alcohol abuse. Drugs.’

  ‘Drugs?’

  ‘Oh yes. Paradise we may be, but the islands all have their . . . erm . . . issues, shall we say. We’re not immune from the pressures of modern life. Some even argue they’re amplified here. Still, it’s a nice place to live. I like it, anyway.’

  Everywhere has its problems, her dad had once said. You can live in the most beautiful place on earth but under the surface there is always something unpleasant.

  As the words came back to her, she wondered if he had been obliquely talking about the island. Had he dug under the surface—and found something nasty?

  12

  Sonya had intended to allow Gus to go all the way that night, but when it came right down to it, she backed off. She hadn’t left him hanging exactly, but he still wasn’t happy.

  They sat in the silence of the pick-up truck, each staring through a different window. It had turned chilly out there beside the loch and they had retreated into the vehicle owned by Gus’s friend Alisdair, who was off somewhere in the machair with Megan Holloway. The sliding temperature didn’t seem to bother them. Megan was only sixteen, like Sonya, but she was more carefree with her favours and the blow Alisdair had brought only served to make her more liberal.

  Sonya peered through the gathering dusk towards Loch an Eich-uisge and could just make out the remains of the old wooden jetty, little more than a few support beams and a couple of rotting planks. Time was, she’d been told, some local lobster fishermen used this small sea loch as a gateway to the fishing grounds in the Sound. What was left of the Stoirm fleet sailed in and out of Portnaseil, and no one
specialised in lobster that she knew of. The loch itself was said to be too deep to measure, which she found hard to believe, and like every other part of the island it had its legend. It was reputed to be home to the water-horse, eich-uisge, which carries anyone who tries to ride it into the water, where it tears apart and eats its victim, leaving only the liver floating on the surface. Sonya didn’t know why it didn’t like liver but she couldn’t blame it. She wasn’t too fond of it either.

  Gus shifted slightly beside her but she still didn’t say anything or catch his eye, knowing it would be a few more minutes yet before he’d come to terms with the weakness of his flesh. Boys were so easy to manipulate, she’d found, even boys like Gus. They couldn’t control their bodies at all. A few touches, a rub here, a stroke there, and it was over. Her earlier resolve to let him in had come from her anger; it had made a promise her common sense had no intention of honouring. She’d wanted to hit back at everyone for keeping secret the news that Roddie Drummond was coming back to the island. Her grandparents, Donnie—they knew and hadn’t told her. She’d asked Gus and he said everyone had heard. Maybe that was why she’d ultimately decided not to shag him. To punish him, too.

  She had stormed home that afternoon, her rage having grown during the rest of the school day, and demanded to know why her grandparents, Molly and Hector, hadn’t told her that the man they all said had murdered her mother was coming back. They stuttered something about wanting to protect her but that didn’t wash. They were islanders, they knew something like that would never be kept quiet. They should’ve told her.

  She had never seen him in the flesh. She’d seen his photograph, though. Her grandparents didn’t know that, not even Donnie knew. She had been eleven and had done an internet search. She knew what her mother had looked like, there were photographs of her all over the house, it was like a bloody shrine, but she wanted to see what he looked like. She found him on a site devoted to unsolved murders. They said her mother’s case was ‘unsolved’, yet everyone said Roddie Drummond had done it.