The Sea Detective

by Mark Douglas-Home

  She stands, turns, and walks slowly towards the steps leading to the door into Cal’s apartment. She opens it slowly, now worrying that Cal will be offended by her delayed arrival. Night is more than two hours old. He will have been expecting her. Has he cooked for her? Does he think her ungrateful? Now she scolds herself for lacking consideration. So when she sees the room in darkness, she experiences a fluttering of relief. Thank goodness I have not let him down, she thinks. Her light-headedness lasts only until she reaches the bottom of the stairs. From here, in the glow of the street lights, she can see the note he has left, his handwriting in big legible letters. Some money is beside it resting on the keyboard she has been using. She walks towards it, reads the message and emits a howl of anguish.

  The sound is as strange to her as the immediate and abject despair from which it has sprung. Why is she behaving this way when finally she is safe? She lets her head fall and covers her face with her hands, trembling. A flood of tears soaks her face and fingers. She has not cried at all since she laid her head in Preeti’s lap in the car taking them from their villages. Now her crying is for everything that has happened in between: the loss of childhood, the daily degradations, the vileness of the men, Preeti’s death; the unrelenting savagery. She has not allowed any of this to touch her until tonight. Didn’t Preeti tell her to be brave? Didn’t Preeti suffer the same, worse, for all Basanti knows, with uncomplaining fortitude?

  She continues to weep beyond any consoling for twenty minutes, longer. After her tears have stopped, her sobbing and whimpering continue. When, finally, she exhausts these too she sits, eyes closed, the pads of her fingers pressing gently against her swollen face. She shakes her head as if she cannot believe what has overcome her. A small act of kindness, the first for so long – the clothes Cal bought for her – penetrated her emotional defences. Then his unexpected absence for a day or two, maybe more, (his message doesn’t make it clear) has dismantled them completely. She is dazed by it. After all the hurts she has borne with such resilience how has she allowed two such small events to devastate her so completely?

  In her bewilderment, she feels more alone now than ever, more exposed to danger, though she is rational enough to know that neither can be true. Still, it alarms her because to avenge Preeti, she must be like those who killed her young friend, merciless, murderous. She must be the way she was when she was in captivity: without emotion.

  She reads Cal’s message again, this time without tears. He has written down his mobile phone number, also his email address, with his password and instructions for logging on. ‘If you can’t reach me by phone – the signal is unreliable in the north of Scotland – send me an email instead. I will pick it up when there is reception.’ She turns on the desk lamp and the computer. While she waits for it to warm up she walks to the window and looks out into the darkness. She sees little apart from street lights and the silhouetted bulk of the deserted flour mill across the wasteland opposite.

  What she cannot see is the man who is watching her. He is in the shadow of a wall on the other side of the road. As soon as he sees her he holds his cigarette in the cup of his hand in case she notices the burning tip. When she leaves the window he takes a puff from it, exhales, drops the stub to the ground, and grinds it with the toe of his boot. He flips open his phone and rings a number. ‘It’s her.’

  Another voice replies. The tone is questioning.

  ‘Course I’m sure,’ the first man says. ‘The light went on and there she was.’

  Another question.

  ‘I dunno. Only saw her. There could be others up there.’

  Another question.

  ‘I dunno why she’s only turned the light on now. Maybe she’s been asleep.’

  The other man replies and the watcher sneers.

  ‘Mind she’ll get a slap if she’s been giving it away.’

  Both men guffaw.

  Then the watcher asks, ‘How long?’ After the reply, he adds, ‘Soon as you can.’

  The watcher puts his phone into his pocket and brings out a pack of cigarettes. He takes one out, puts it in his mouth, glances up at the window, and turns his back before lighting it.

  Basanti is examining a photograph, the sixth in this folder that Cal has stored for her. The previous five were also of hills, but unlike this one they were the wrong shape: too rounded, too steep, too flat, too wooded or with different combinations of features she doesn’t recognise. The sixth one has a familiarity to it, though there is a single ledge on its right side where she remembers a ripple of descending ridges, like rolls of stomach fat. Also, there are occasional trees dotted across it but she recalls only one tree. Could her memory be faulty? She tries to imagine it at different angles. Could this be it? She begins to think so. She reaches for a copy of her drawing which is lying on Cal’s scanner and she holds it beside the screen for comparison. There are similarities but also differences. She reads the caption. Knoydart.

  She goes to Cal’s map and looks for the name, tracing her finger up and down the Scottish coast line. There are so many strange names that she doesn’t find it, but she decides to tell Cal. Sitting back in her chair she reads his message again. She follows his instructions: first type ‘gmail’ in the search box; click on ‘gmail: email from Google’, enter ‘flotsamandjetsam’ in the username box and ‘caladh1’ in the password box. Then hit ‘return’. Cal’s inbox appears in front of her and she notices the most recent message is from someone she has heard Cal mention – DLG. The first line of his email begins ‘The hill. This is it.’ She hesitates but clicks on it. A photograph appears in front of her, of a hill and a tree.

  Staring at it she lets out a shocked cry. Then she writes DLG’s location details: ‘North-east of Seil Island, on the mainland, a mile or two from Kilninver, south of Oban’. She returns to the wall map and traces her finger along the coast again. She finds Oban, then Kilninver. Below them and to the left, in the blue of the sea, there is a pin marking where Preeti’s body was recovered. Basanti remembers Cal telling her the police thought Preeti had gone into the sea further south still (he’d mentioned the Clyde Estuary as a possibility) and had drifted up the coast with the current. Oban and Kilninver are further north, in the wrong direction. This discrepancy puzzles Basanti. She returns to the computer screen but there is no mistaking the photograph. It is the hill. The tree is there just as she remembers it. Basanti wishes Cal was there to explain the significance of the discovery to her. Then she is glad he isn’t.

  Isn’t this her score to settle? Preeti will be her companion, her guard.

  Now she breathes more slowly. She feels her old emotional coldness returning. She welcomes it as a reliable and strong friend. She takes Cal’s money from the table, clicks to shut down the computer and as she does so notices the lettering of DLG’s email in Cal’s inbox has turned from bold black to something lighter. He will know she has read it, she thinks. She feels a pang of regret. Will he think she was prying? She hesitates for a moment wondering whether she should send him an explanatory message but she decides not to. After all, he will understand why she had to look at it.

  She switches off the table lamp and the watcher outside sees the light go out. It’s good, he decides. Perhaps, she’ll be sleeping when we come for her. Perhaps she’ll be screwing a guy. Either way she’ll be distracted.

  He smirks with his thin lips.

  He’s now looking forward to having her. She has to be taught a lesson. All the girls do sooner or later. He’ll ask the boss to let him have her first.

  He imagines what he will do her. What won’t he do to her? It’s his payback, he reckons, for standing out there all day, in the cold. The boss’ll be here soon, any minute in fact.

  Basanti goes to the roof, takes off her new clothes and leaves them folded tidily inside her shelter. She puts on her old green shirt, baggy black jeans and the grey hoodie. She folds the money and slides it into the back pocket of her jeans. Then she slips her hand under a loose slate and brings out Cal’s kit
chen knife. She cuts a rectangle of cardboard, about the same length as the blade and folds it around the sharp steel. She places it in the zip-up pocket of the hoodie and feels through the fabric to make sure the blade is still in its rudimentary sheath. She goes into the darkness, exhilarated by her sense of purpose, by her determination for revenge. Finally, she will be the warrior she was born to be. She shivers when a breeze touches her cheeks. It is not the cold, but excitement at the prospect of retribution.

  At the top of the fire escape, she watches for movement below. She waits for a few minutes, not because she expects anyone to be there, but because she knows she must take nothing for granted. She has trained herself to be careful. She stalls again at the landing above the ladder and listens. Then she drops silently to the ground and crouches. The corner of the building is twenty metres away. When she reaches it she watches again before walking in a long pool of shadow under the gable wall which stretches to the street. Half way along it she stops suddenly. She crouches and lies flat. There is a tiny ember of light which has just flared brighter. It is a cigarette. The light moves. It fades. It moves, then burns bright red again.

  She studies it with the concentration of a raptor. From the roof she has watched dog-walkers stop for a cigarette while their animals range across the waste ground. She imagines this is one of them. She waits. She has time.

  A car pulls up, inserting itself between Basanti and the burning cigarette end. She hears two male voices, perhaps three. She hears McGill’s name. Suddenly the car swings down the lane towards her. Its lights are about to expose her. She cannot risk being trapped against the wall so she breaks across the lane, across the beam of light, into the bushes on the other side. She hears a cry, a man’s voice. ‘It’s her. Get the tart for Chris’sake.’

  She hears a door slam. She scrambles over a wall and jumps to the pavement below. She runs away from danger, past the newsagent shop where she scavenges fruit.

  Only one thought occurs to her. Has Cal betrayed me? Is that why he had to go away so quickly? Who else knew I was here?

  As she reaches the corner, she looks back. A man is pursuing her. He is young and fit. He is gaining on her. She runs fast, as fast as she can. Ahead of her, an office worker in a suit, carrying an executive case, is crossing the road. He steps on to the pavement and approaches her, going slower as he tries to work out what this is coming towards him. When he realises it is a girl he relaxes a little.

  Basanti pleads with him.

  ‘Help me, I’m in danger,’ she cries.

  But the suit steps back from her. His attention switches to her pursuer who is rounding the corner. He realises her danger will soon be his danger and he mutters ‘I’m sorry, I can’t’. As he steps off the pavement to go back to the other side of the road, he adds, ‘my wife …’ as if in those two words there is an explanation of some kind for abandoning a distraught girl who has just begged him for help. The suit is hurrying now, putting distance between himself and her, between his conscience and the scene of his cowardice.

  At the top of the road, the suit stops and watches. The girl has fallen to her knees. She has her back to her pursuer who stops just short of her, seemingly to catch his breath. He bends, straightens, steps towards her, and lifts her easily with one bare arm hooked around her torso. Everything accelerates after that. There is a flash of silver. The man screams and curses. The girl falls to the pavement. The man sits back heavily beside her. He shakes his head and he grabs at her with his other arm. She swipes at him again. There is another flash. And another. The man slumps, his head lolling in the gutter. There is a squeal of tyres. A car speeds downhill. A door opens before it stops beside the fallen man. Another door. Two hooded figures jump out. The doors slam. The car races away. The man with the lolling head has gone.

  What has happened to the girl the suit is not sure. Has she made her escape when his attention was drawn by the squeal of tyres? Is she in the car too?

  The suit clutches at his executive case and hurries up the road. He feels his ordered world hanging by a precarious thread. He thinks about ringing the police, anonymously, but rejects the idea. If he uses his own phone, his number will be logged.

  Better keep out of it, he thinks.

  Play it safe.

  Not my business.

  He imagines what might be the cause of what he has just seen: a prostitute cheating on her pimp; a drugs mule double-crossing a dealer. It happens. It’s low life. Other people. The more he convinces himself it belongs to a different milieu to the one he inhabits the safer he feels and the more certain he becomes he played it right. By the time he is putting the key in the lock on his mahogany front door he is congratulating himself on his instincts and he decides not to mention it to his wife, in case she frets about him. She’s always fretting about him, given half a chance.

  Basanti is crouching between parked cars in a second-hand garage forecourt. She is watching the road in a car’s wing mirror which she has tilted towards her. She is breathing heavily. Her shoulders rise and fall with her gasps. The knife is on the tarmac beside her. She picks it up and wipes the blade clean with the cardboard sheath before replacing it in her pocket. She looks at the wet blood stain on her sleeve and is pleased she isn’t wearing her new clothes.

  Her head is full of only one thought. Cal has betrayed me. Who else knew where I was? It’s a question she keeps asking herself.

  Cal didn’t sleep, didn’t want to sleep, didn’t even feel tired. He sat on the cliff watching for the white ‘v’ of the Rib. Every so often, he glanced back towards the museum and the light shining like a beacon from one of its two front windows, and then looked towards the mainland again, at the sheltered stretch of sea between him and it. The Rib would come. He was sure of it, at first light if not before. He felt excited at what was about to happen. Wasn’t he this close to solving the mystery of his grandfather’s death?

  He knew now that Uilleam hadn’t died on September 29th, 1942, not if the coordinates in Hector MacKay’s logbook that day were correct (and he had no reason to doubt they recorded accurately Sandy’s death). Not if Uilleam’s body washed ashore on the Lofoten Islands, which it had. Somebody must know what Hector MacKay had written on the logbook’s missing pages. Somebody must know why Uilleam’s name had been added later to the September 29th entry. Somebody must know the truth.

  Just after dawn he went to sit on the top step above the pier, where his great-grandmother and grandmother waited for Uilleam when the Eilean Iasgaich returned home in its new livery as an anti-submarine trawler. He hadn’t been there long when a white bow wave began to spread across the Kyle. The Rib was coming. Cal nodded when he saw it, wishing it closer. The sooner this started the better. His only misgiving was Rachel. How would she react? If this played out the way he expected, there’d be media. The story would be everywhere: his notoriety as the eco-warrior who raided the gardens of politicians would make sure of that. He was relying on it. Would it wreck Rachel’s documentary, or make it? He wasn’t certain which it would be. All he could do, he persuaded himself, was to fight this in his own way. After all, it was his battle, not hers, his territory. Hadn’t he warned her?

  He watched the Rib. As it approached the base of the cliff, he made out three people on board. Two of them were wearing uniforms. This turn of events pleased him. It was better than he expected. He stood as the Rib reached the pier. Two policemen climbed towards him. Douglas Rae, he noticed with interest, remained behind on the boat.

  Chapter 25

  ‘He has confessed; everything, all of it, tutto.’ Enthusiasm was running away with Inspector Giancarlo Costantini of the anti-mafia police in Calabria. ‘This Anglo-Italian collaboration of ours has got the gangsters on the run.’

  Detective Constable Helen Jamieson considered correcting him (Scottish-Italian, Inspector C) but she let it pass. ‘We have them bamboozled, Giancarlo.’

  Inspector Costantini sounded perplexed. ‘Indeed we have.’ The safest thing for him to do was to agree
with this British detective who used strange-sounding English words.

  Jamieson loved saying bamboozle. The effect always pleased her. ‘We have, Giancarlo, bamboozled them good and proper.’

  Inspector Costantini hummed uncertainly, a nasal sound like a bluebottle caught in a glass tumbler.

  ‘But it’s important you remember, Giancarlo.’

  ‘I do, I do, Helen.’

  ‘There are some loose ends here in Scotland.’

  ‘You have gangsters of your own?’

  ‘A very bad man, Giancarlo, who’s got what’s coming to him.’

  ‘You’ll be … bamboozling … him too?’ Inspector Costantini surprised himself by flourishing the word with even more flamboyance than Jamieson.

  ‘I hope so, Giancarlo. I do hope so.’

  ‘Good for you, Helen Jamieson.’

  ‘Good for Cal McGill you mean.’

  ‘Bravo your Cal McGill. Bravo for his computer program. Bravo for sharing it with us. Bravo, Helen Jamieson!’

  ‘Bravo, indeed. But not a word about me or collaboration with police in Britain.’

  ‘Not a word, Helen Jamieson.’

  ‘I have one more request.’

  ‘Please. I have a – how do you say – a rule.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Always to say yes to a woman, whatever she asks. It is a man’s privilege. No?’

  Would he say yes? Would he really if he saw her?

  ‘Not a word to your media, not for 24 hours,’ she said.

  ‘Not a word about Anglo-Italian police cooperation, not ever, not a word about Helen Jamieson, my lips are sealed, and not a word to Italian media for 24 hours. How do you say … your wish, my command?’