The Darkness and the Deep

by Aline Templeton

  So black it was, after Cat had cooled down sufficiently to mumble something that could almost, with extreme goodwill, be construed as an apology. Rejecting Cat’s offer to do it herself, with Kylie’s help, Marjory had introduced a white ceiling and white woodwork which hadn’t featured in the original colour scheme. Still, if Cat didn’t like it, there was always the traditional alternative.

  Marjory gave a last look round the half-finished room, shuddered, and shut the door.

  The windows of Jackie’s, the little hairdresser’s salon in one of the warren of narrow streets off the High Street, were opaque with condensation. Inside, there was a cosy fug created by the heat of the hairdryers, and the sickly smell of shampoo and hair-spray almost masked the acrid, ammoniacal fumes from the old-fashioned permanent wave which was being inflicted on old Mrs Barclay, whose thinning white hair was a hedgehog mass of pink curlers and flimsy tissues.

  The eponymous Jackie, in a shocking-pink overall like her two assistants, was a woman in her forties, elaborately coiffed herself with improbably black, brittle-looking hair in a French roll. Even through her pancake make-up her cheeks were flushed with the heat as she flicked a steel tail-comb to neaten the wispy strands before soaking them with a sponge and wrapping them in tissue. She was just clamping the last of the curlers in place when the first maroon went off.

  ‘That’s the lifeboat!’ Her eyes went to her seventeen-year-old daughter, Karyn, who had looked up from her task of sweeping up hair-clippings.

  ‘Oh mercy, that’ll be Willie away, will it?’ quavered Mrs Barclay. ‘It’s an awful dangerous business, yon!’

  ‘Och, away you go!’ Jackie said robustly. ‘They’ve that many safety features these days it might as well be a pleasure steamer. And a night like this, it’ll be a flat calm out there. It’s likely just some poor souls run aground maybe in the fog, and with the radar they’ve got on the boat it’s like working in broad daylight.’

  But despite her confident tones, there was some sort of anxiety in her face as she asked Karyn if she’d heard her dad’s bike going past.

  Karyn shook her head. ‘But it’s him would have set off the rocket, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right.’ The second report sounded as she turned with studied calm to fetch the bottle of lotion to be applied to Mrs Barclay’s exposed pink scalp. ‘Did you – did you see him at all at lunchtime, Karyn?’

  It seemed a casual enough enquiry but her daughter’s look was understanding. ‘Aye, I did. He was fine, Mum, busy working at the shed and chatting to a couple of the visitors.’

  Jackie relaxed visibly. ‘That’s all right then. Now, don’t you fash yourself, Mrs Barclay. Willie’s a good cox after all these years being skipper of his own boat, and they know what they’re doing.’

  ‘I hope you know what you’re doing with that cold stuff you’re putting on my head,’ the old lady retorted querulously. ‘Catch my death, likely.’

  Luke Smith stood on the pier, his hands in the pockets of his waterproof trousers, his narrow shoulders hunched, looking disconsolately at the retreating wake of the Maud and Millicent Dalrymple. The Knockhaven lifeboat was an Atlantic 75 rigid inflatable, known affectionately as the Maud’n’Milly after the two maiden ladies whose generous legacies had provided the money to commission it.

  For once, as reserve, he’d actually managed to get there ahead of Rob Anderson – owner of the Anchor Inn in Shore Street, a former naval officer and second cox to Willie Duncan – and had even started to get kitted up by the time Rob arrived. Luke had hoped Willie might have said he’d take him instead; he’d been out on enough training trips, for God’s sake, and surely this would have been ideal as his first chance to go ‘out on a shout’, as the jargon had it – it sounded as if it was just some idiot who’d got himself stranded in the bay. But no, with a jerk of the head Willie, who was never exactly chatty, indicated that there was no point in finishing his preparations. Rob had given him a sympathetic glance as he pulled his own kit out of his locker, but he hadn’t offered to stand down, had he? And of course Ashley Randall had been the first crew to arrive after Willie, as she nearly always was. She must cut her patients off in mid-sentence, sometimes.

  It was a wonder Willie had accepted her as a permanent member of the crew. A doctor might be useful occasionally but certainly wasn’t necessary, and Willie’d been known more than once to repeat the adage that there were three useless things on a lifeboat – a wheelbarrow, a woman and a naval officer. But there he was now, putting out to sea with two out of the three. When Luke had been unwise enough to remark on it to Ashley he’d got the tart reply that Willie was clearly drawing the line at taking the wheelbarrow, which Luke had taken as a gibe about his own competence. And of course where Ashley was concerned it hadn’t done her any harm to be a protégée of the Honorary Secretary. If that was all she was, which was a whole other question.

  Things really weren’t going well for Luke right now. It had all looked so promising on his move to Galloway two years ago; with his interest in outdoor activities, the job teaching geography at Kirkluce Academy had seemed perfect. He was almost at the end of his tether teaching in an inner-city school in Glasgow, a baptism of fire for a first job which had all but broken his nerve. He’d been looking forward to teaching his subject now instead of spending every lesson trying vainly to get the class quiet enough to be able to hear his pearls of wisdom on the subject of the volcanic geology of Iceland.

  Somehow, though, it hadn’t quite worked out like that. It had been another illusion shattered when he discovered that the gentle country children he’d envisaged were just as unruly and disrespectful of him as their urban counterparts had been. And what was even more galling was that the only thing different was that in Glasgow no one had been able to do much with the kids whereas here he was one of very few members of staff who had serious difficulties with discipline.

  He’d assumed, too, that here there wouldn’t be the same problems with what was categorised as substance abuse, but the under-age drinking culture was well established and he could see that even in the time he’d been here the drug problem was getting worse. It was seriously depressing.

  All in all, if it hadn’t been for his involvement with the lifeboat, he’d have been packing it in and looking for another job by now, preferably one which meant he would never again be forced to speak to anyone under the age of twenty. But he’d rented a cottage in one of the higgledy-piggledy lanes which seamed the old part of the fishing town, hoping he might be able to afford to buy a dinghy and do a bit of sailing, and then heard the lifeboat legends in the pub, tales of rescues and failed rescues, of waves like walls of water and winds that tore the breath from your throat – high romance, in this pedestrian age! And these men were respected, heroes, almost. Luke hungered for respect.

  It was the proudest moment of his life when he got the letter accepting him for training. It made you one of them, entitled to sit around the crew room at the station, to take training courses at RNLI Cowes, to go out on exercises as one of the crew, waving to people who stopped to watch the launch admiringly, and it all gave you back some of the self-respect that seeped out of you day after day in the classroom.

  Yet here, too, he was beginning to doubt himself. ‘Always the bridesmaid, eh?’ a grinning mechanic had said to him as they assisted at the launch, checking the chains as the Maud’n’Milly was eased down the slipway into the deep water at its foot. It wasn’t fair, after all his hard work to pass every training course he’d been to.

  The Maud’n’Milly was out of sight now. Luke turned gloomily to walk back into the shed, then hearing a burst of mocking laughter looked round. A small group of spectators – about fifty, perhaps – was still gathered at the head of the pier and among them, he could see several youths. It was too foggy to identify them clearly, but he didn’t need to – it would be some of his Year 12 pupils, including, most likely, his bête noire, Nathan Rettie, who was Rob Anderson’s sixteen-year-old stepson. Luke had had
a major run-in with him resulting in Nat’s suspension, which had looked like a victory at the time. But Luke had paid for it afterwards – oh yes, he had paid.

  With what he hoped was dignity he straightened his shoulders and turned to go in. He heard something whistle past his head and as a pebble struck the wall of the shed in front of him, spun round. The boys, still laughing, were moving off and there was nothing he could do, nothing that wouldn’t make him look even more foolish and impotent than he already did.

  ‘There’s that car coming back up again, Ron.’ The woman dropped the curtain and came away from the window of the cottage at the top of the road down to Fuill’s Inlat.

  Her husband, engrossed in a football match on television, grunted.

  ‘Wonder what it would be doing there, a night like this? Driving too fast, anyway, when you can hardly see your hand in front of your face. It’s barely been five minutes down there – what do you think it’s doing?’

  He sighed, then said repressively, ‘One of the workmen, probably, from those new houses they’re building. Forgotten his hammer or something and gone back to fetch it.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the sort of thing we’ll have to put up with all the time once they sell them.’ Her tone was fretful. ‘That’ll be the end of our peace and quiet. It’ll be like Piccadilly Circus before they’re finished.’

  The exaggeration earned her an exasperated glance, then Ron went back to his football, sunk in gloom. Ayr United were losing again.

  2

  A wind had got up, pulling and tearing the fog to rags of wispy cloud, dull grey against the night sky, with the first stars starting to show through. The Maud’n’Milly was roaring back across the harbour, a small speedboat bouncing jauntily on a tow-line behind her.

  Waiting on the pier under the arc lights, Ritchie Elder, Honorary Secretary of the Knockhaven lifeboat, made an imposing figure in his navy and red lifeboat sweatshirt: a big man, broad-shouldered but spare, with a fine head of well-cut iron-grey hair and a complexion still tanned from his most recent Caribbean cruise. His eyes were very blue and his uncompromising jawline suggested a man who knew what he wanted and how to get it, a suggestion confirmed by his success in having Elder’s Executive Homes built the way he decreed, at the price he set and in the time he specified. His business methods, he was wont to remark, might not make him popular but they had made him rich, and you could always buy friends.

  It was a relief every time to see ‘his’ boat’s safe return. Acceding to the coastguard’s request to launch the lifeboat hadn’t been a difficult decision tonight but sending a crew out into savage seas on a mission of mercy could sometimes be a heavy responsibility. In the ultimate analysis the cox had the final say on safety, of course, but he’d never yet heard of a cox who’d refused to take the boat out in answer to a distress call.

  The Maud’n’Milly came alongside and tied up. A middle-aged man and woman, wrapped in silver survival blankets, were sitting in the stern; the woman got shakily to her feet as Willie Duncan cut the engines then came forward to help her climb the iron rungs of the ladder up to the pier. Overweight and clumsy, she had almost to be hoisted up, and Elder went forward to crouch at the top, holding out his hand for her to grasp as she negotiated the awkward gap between the ladder and the pier.

  ‘There you are, safe now,’ he said, putting a comforting arm round her shoulders to steady her as she tried to find her land legs again.

  Baleful eyes glared up at him. ‘No thanks to him if I am,’ she said, directing a smouldering glance over her shoulder at the sheepish-looking man who had followed her up the ladder, rather unfortunately still sporting a yachting cap with ‘Skipper’ on the front in large letters.

  Stifling a grin, Elder escorted her to the shed where she could get a cup of tea and the chance to pursue her quarrel in comfort, then went back to the boat. ‘How did it go?’ he called down.

  Ashley Randall had taken off her helmet and her hair was curling wildly in the damp. With her cheeks pink from the fresh wind, she looked up smiling from her task of coiling ropes. In the harsh illumination he could see her eyes sparkling, with excitement, probably. Retrospective or in anticipation?

  ‘Piece of cake,’ she said. ‘Believe it or not, he ran out of petrol, then they drifted and the fog came down and he’d no charts or anything, so she decided they were going to drift on to rocks and be wrecked. She’d been announcing this at the top of her voice for about an hour before we arrived, as far as I could gather.’

  ‘Can’t say she looked the sort of girl I’d choose to run out of petrol with myself, but there’s no accounting for tastes. OK, Willie? Shall I get them into position to winch her up?’

  Duncan had started the engines again. ‘Fine,’ he said over his shoulder, and Ashley climbed neatly up the ladder to stand beside Elder on the pier, her yellow oilskin open under the orange Crewsaver life-jacket. Rob Anderson, who had jumped aboard the little speedboat to tie it up, appeared from a ladder further along and came towards them, unfastening his.

  ‘I’ll just get off now if you don’t mind, sir. Katy’s single-handed in the bar tonight and I’ll get Brownie points if I’m back before the evening rush starts. You’ll get the full report from Willie.’

  ‘Now there’s a thought,’ Elder said dryly and the other man laughed.

  ‘Well, from Ashley, then. Not that there’s much to tell, really – just the standard incompetent stuff. Shouldn’t be let out without a keeper, some folk.’

  He disappeared into the shed to take off the rest of his kit. People were gathering by the slipway now to watch Willie perform the skilled operation of lining up the keel so that the winching cable could be attached, leaving Elder and Ashley alone together. Instinctively they moved out from the pool of light where they had been standing but took up positions an ostentatious two feet apart. That was close enough, though, for her to hear him murmur, ‘Tonight?’

  Her eyes danced up at him. ‘I’ll need to phone my husband to tell him I’m back.’ She spoke loudly enough to be heard by anyone interested enough to be listening. ‘He always worries, bless him.’

  This time, instead of his mobile, she dialled their home number and after a moment switched off. ‘Oh dear,’ she said carefully, ‘he must have gone round to his mother’s for supper. I’d better not disturb them, in case they’re eating.’

  Her eyes met his in perfect understanding, then they both went over to watch as the cable tightened and the Maud’n’Milly was winched gradually out of the water.

  ‘How was Willie?’ There was a shade of anxiety in his voice. She had shared her concerns with him some time ago.

  ‘No problem tonight,’ she assured him. ‘And look at the way he brought her in there – Rob’s all right for a second cox, but he’d make a meal of doing that. Willie knows the coast like the back of his hand too – you can’t have the same knowledge after living here for only three years. And in any case Rob’ll never be half the seaman Willie is, whatever state he’s in.’

  ‘Difference between spending your life at sea on a destroyer and being skipper of a trawler, I suppose. Still, don’t take any risks with your personal safety – or anyone else’s.’

  ‘Oh, I promise. But there isn’t anyone to touch him when it comes to tricky manoeuvres.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ He wasn’t looking at her, but he was smiling. ‘I rather fancy myself in that field as well.’

  ‘And that’s another one, away down!’ The woman reached the window a little too late to see the car which had passed on the road down to Fuill’s Inlat. ‘There must have been a gey lot of hammers forgotten, according to you, Ron!’

  ‘It’ll be rare exercise for you, Jeanie, jumping up and down all evening after they’ve sold those houses.’ He was in a thoroughly bad mood after his team’s defeat. ‘You’d better get used to it, that’s all I can say.’

  ‘And look – that’s someone else turning in off the main road!’ Jeanie’s voice was shrill. ‘One of these great bi
g daft things like wee lorries on great big wheels.’

  He was almost interested. ‘That’ll be the Heid Bummer – that man Elder. He’s got one of those big Mitsubishis. They’ve that showhouse down there that’s opening soon – he’s maybe giving someone a wee keek at it.’

  ‘So we’re going to have to thole them being up and down the road all night as well as all day? The works traffic’s been bad enough but if it’s starting at night now too – well, I’ll just have to phone the Council again, though they’re nothing but a set of useless articles.’

  Suddenly, Ron jumped to his feet and went out of the room. She stared after him; he reappeared a moment later with a wodge of cotton wool in his hand.

  ‘Shove that in your lugs so you can’t hear them,’ he said brutally. ‘Either that or the next time I go to that bathroom cabinet I’m bringing back the sticking-plaster to put across your mouth.’

  He looked, Dorothy Randall thought, tired and somehow strained tonight, and the eternal flame of her hatred for her daughter-in-law burned that little bit brighter as she sat over supper with her son in her Victorian villa, The Hollies, up at the back of Knockhaven. She had lit the candles in the plate candelabra on the reproduction Georgian dining-table; the room, with its Regency-striped wallpaper, always looked particularly warm and welcoming, she thought, with the candles lit and the thick red velvet curtains drawn across the bay window.

  It had been a real scramble following his phone call, with all she had to do, but somehow she’d got his meal prepared and still had time to change into a smart blue twin-set, with her pearls of course, and its matching wool skirt, but she’d managed. She always prided herself on looking calm and well turned-out for her son – without, of course, in any way compromising her standards. Ashley’s idea of taking trouble over food seemed to consist of scooping a ready-meal on to a dish instead of serving it straight from its foil container, and Lewis, poor love, did enjoy proper home cooking, nicely presented.