Pig Island

by Unknown

  'How you getting on there? You feeling OK? We've got some bottled water here from the catering truck. If you want.'

  'It's Frandenburg,' I said. 'Is that what you thought?'

  He smiled and held up the yellow form on his clipboard. It read in capitals BLAKE FRANDENBURG. He took out his pen with a flourish and wrote a firm number '1' in the box. He put the pen away and nodded at me.

  'See? That makes me happy. That's two for my green compartment.'

  6

  There was a catering truck on the island, if you can believe that, and at twelve thirty everything stopped for lunch. Like I said, you'd think we were on a film set. I queued for one of the plastic shrink-wrapped trays and carried it over to where Angeline sat with her back to the others, just at the edge of the lawn where the land sloped away and you could see the open sea above the police Land Rovers.

  She was in a green director's chair, slouched on to her left side, her right leg crossed far over the other. Her dinner wasn't eaten: the tray rested on her thigh and she was sawing aimlessly at it with a serrated plastic knife. When my shadow fell on her she stopped sawing and went very still. I pulled a chair over to her, and after a moment or two she put down the knife and leaned forward, her body covering the tray, one hand crossing her chest and tucked into her armpit. The other hand she dropped to the ground and began to make idle sketches in the sand.

  'What's up?' I said, sitting down. 'Not hungry?'

  She shook her head and went on drawing in the sand. There were hot, sullen patches on her cheeks.

  I unwrapped my tray and read from the sandwich label: 'Brie and grape on French bread. I mean, the bollocks these caterers come up with.' I dropped the sandwich into the tray and sat back, folding my arms. She still wasn't looking at me. 'So? They put you through your paces, then?'

  She stopped drawing but she didn't look at me. She lifted her hand, tucked it under the other armpit and sank back down on to her thigh, crumpling the dinner tray.

  'Well?'

  'I told you – didn't I tell you?'

  'Tell me what?'

  'I said no one would trust me. They know who I am and they think I'm a liar.'

  'Them?' I nodded over my shoulder in the direction of the police. 'Why? What did they say?'

  'They definitely saw the video. It's like they think I'm...' She sighed and pulled moodily on her bottom lip. 'It's like they won't believe anything I say.'

  'Who? Danso? Struthers?'

  'Both. I showed them where I was hiding when I saw him – you know, what he did – and now they're saying because of where I was standing in that path over there, I couldn't've seen it was actually him who did it.' She sat up a bit and chewed the side of her thumbnail with her small teeth. 'Even though of course I knew it was him, because I'd followed him across the gorge and I could hear him banging in the nails, now they're saying I've got to get my story straight and the young one said—'

  'Struthers?'

  'He's going on about how I'm not a credible witness and how he's going to have to put in a supplementary statement or something.' She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. 'And I know it's because they've seen me on the video.'

  I gave a short laugh. 'No, Angeline. They believe you.'

  She looked up at me.

  'They believe you. Really. They're just being cops. They're not thinking about how to catch your dad, they're a year ahead of us – in court already, thinking how your evidence is sounding.'

  She studied me and for a while it was like she was going to say something. Then she changed her mind. She made a small, discontented grunt and went back to pushing her fingernail into the sand. Silence fell. A breeze chased through the grass and made the inflatable shelters behind us flap like sails. I unwrapped the Brie sandwich and ate. The lines in the sand at her feet got bigger and bigger, more and more complicated. I finished the sandwich, drank some coffee and ate a fruit salad out of a plastic cup with watermelon pips floating in the juice at the bottom. Then I screwed up the napkin and refitted the lid on the tray.

  'Angeline?'

  'What?'

  'No one knew Malachi had a child. Did you know that? He let them think you were stillborn.'

  She made a contemptuous snort. 'It would have been better if I was.'

  'No,' I said, and thinking about it now, I'm amazed at how gentle my voice came out. 'It wouldn't be better. It really wouldn't.'

  She was still for a moment. Then she raised her eyes. There was a guarded, puzzled expression on her face, like she was trying to decide if I was joking. Her eyes had got very red round the inside rims. For a long time the only sound was the distant roar of the helicopter, hovering somewhere out of sight, searching the forests. When she spoke it was a whisper: 'Joe?'

  'What?'

  'No one would be interested, would they, if I told them what he did to me? No one would listen?'

  I hesitated. I saw Finn, in his office, getting excited: There's a book in this.

  'They'd listen,' I said, 'if you told it the right way.'

  'The right way? What is the right way?'

  'I don't know.' I glanced casually at the tray, then up at the sky. Folded my arms. 'But I suppose you could tell it to me. I suppose that's always an option for you.'

  Danso and Struthers wanted Angeline to help them go through Dove's paperwork. I told Struthers he needed me to come too, to help with her, and he went for it without a thought. Somewhere over the last twenty-four hours I'd been appointed her minder. They put us into a police launch and took us to the south of the island.

  It was fresh and chilly and the sky was a deep blue, a string of baby-dragon-breath clouds chugging across the horizon in the west – perfect light for photos, I thought, squinting up. The launch bounced across the waves, its engine echoing back to us from the granite cliff faces of Pig Island's eastern shoreline, making flocks of black-back gulls wheel and croak out of the clifftops. The south of the island looked more parched than I remembered, a scorched red-brown after the green of the village, like a drought had come across and touched only this side. Even with the armed officers at the jetty talking on their radios a weird silence hung over the place.

  A forensics team had been out there yesterday and they'd worked fast, releasing the site this morning at eleven. They'd collected hairbrushes, toothbrushes and dirty underwear, anything that would help them build up Dove's DNA profile. While they were at it, they'd uncovered a collection of aged quarrying dynamite and drums of fertilizer in an outbuilding half a mile from the cottage. Dove's explosives arsenal. The army disposal team had been there since dawn, sealing off ten acres on the eastern flank. As we clambered off the boat we got glimpses of them in the distance, wearing flak jackets, leading dogs around on short leashes.

  Angeline hadn't said a word since our conversation. She walked around with her arms wrapped across her chest, moodily chewing the inside of her mouth, not looking at anyone. From time to time I'd get the idea when my back was to her she'd looked up and was watching me, and I'd turn, just in time to see her attention scuttle away like nothing had happened. But mostly she was still upset and embarrassed by what Struthers had said. When he stopped next to one of the galvanized-steel fence posts, and said, 'So, pet, who put this up for Dad?' she shrugged. She put her hands into her pockets and dropped her chin. Dug her toe into the soil and glanced self-consciously over her shoulder, like a teenager checking she wasn't being watched by her mates.

  'Angeline?'

  'It was him,' she muttered. 'Did it himself. Wouldn't've let anyone else come out here.'

  'Good with his hands, was he? Knew his explosives – knew how to put a hole in granite?'

  She shrugged again and stared off into the distance, like she wasn't connected with the words coming out of her mouth. 'Yeah. S'pose.'

  It was kind of embarrassing the way she kept up with these monosyllabic answers – Yes. No. Maybe – not offering any more information than she was asked. She led us round grudgingly, showing us the handbarrow D
ove used to bring the supplies dropped by the shopkeeper in Bellanoch up from the jetty, taking us to where he kept his outboard motor under a tarp near the jetty, tightly chained and padlocked.

  Up at the cottage the generator had run out of oil, and when we came inside there were no lights. We all crowded into the small room at the front where. Dove kept his paperwork, looking around ourselves at the torn curtains, the filthy windows, the two walls filled from floor to ceiling with battered notebooks and photos.

  'He's taken the photos.' We all turned to look at Angeline then, because it was the first time she'd spoken without being asked. She was staring at two stained gaps on the peeling wallpaper. 'He's taken photos from there. And he's taken ... notebooks. One. No—' She turned round, her finger out, tracing the air. 'No, two. He's taken two notebooks.'

  'Which photos?' asked Danso, standing next to her and looking at the gaps really hard, like he'd pick up some supernatural vibes if he did. 'What did they show?'

  'Him with Mother. And one of him praying.'

  'Praying?'

  'He looks dead,' I said. 'Lying on his back, hands over his chest. It was his habit.'

  Struthers rolled his eyes. He'd spent a lot of his time in uniform in Glasgow dealing with crazies. 'What about the notebooks?' he said. 'Which ones are missing?'

  Angeline lowered her eyes and pulled the coat round her like it was suddenly cold. 'The PHM philosophy on death,' she murmured. Behind her, Struthers and Danso exchanged a glance. 'It was always there – on that shelf. And another one – the PHM philosophy on suicide.'

  'I told you so,' Struthers mouthed under his breath, giving me and Danso a slow, reptilian smile. He was over the fucking moon. He thought he was the only person in the world who'd predicted Dove's suicide. 'Didn't I tell you so?'

  'If only,' I said. 'If only it was that easy.'

  7

  While Struthers, Danso and Angeline pulled notebooks from the shelves, opening up the PHM's records, finding file after file of furious hermeneutical letters to the C of E synod, reams of Bible verses, written and rewritten in Dove's looping hand, I slipped outside, muttering something about needing a smoke. No one stopped me. I just walked outside, free as a bird, into the cold, bright day.

  I went quickly, retracing our steps, getting photos of the outside of the cottage, the empty Scotch bottles piled in a mountain behind one of the sheds, the generator and the piles of rubbish. I went to the army cordon and got some long-lens shots of the explosives team working in the distance, then turned north, giving the cottage a wide berth and moving through the silent woods until I came to the mine. Today it was quiet, no wind reached the clearing, and an empty silence hung over the rusting old machinery.

  I turned to face the south. In the distance, a long way past the treetops of Cuagach, I could just see the headland of Crinian, the sky above it stained with dark clouds. I pulled out the camera, switched it on and focused on that distant coast. None of them, not Danso, not Struthers, had the instinct I had for Dove. He wasn't going to commit suicide. Not until he'd finished with me. It was like I could feel him in my brain, creeping around making his plans.

  Ardnoe Point? Crinian? What are you planning, Malachi? Why Crinian?

  I clicked off some photos of the coast, then fitted a new lens and ambled around doing some shots of the mine: rusty wheelbases of long-forgotten vehicles, ageing barbed wire strung over adits. Every now and then I'd stop and look thoughtfully out at the coast. A swarm of flies hovered round the hole where the pig was wedged. When I flicked them away I saw maggots like moving rice grains in the pig's eyes and something brown and frothy coming from its snout. I took ten shots.

  Why Crinian?

  He hadn't drifted there because he couldn't start the boat engine, whatever Struthers thought. He had meant to go there. I cranked open the aperture for the light and moved round the pig, firing off shot after shot, my thoughts rolling out like ticks on a metronome: What business have you got down there, Malachi? Why south? I was north. Does that mean you're not going to come after me direct? And if you're not going to do that, then what are you going to do? How else can you get to me? Or do you think I've gone back to London?

  A twig snapped behind me. I spun round, raising the camera, ready to swing out. It was Angeline, her face red, her breathing rapid, staring past me at the pig in the shaft. She'd got right up behind me without me hearing. She made a grab for my sleeve.

  'Hey.' She caught me off-balance and I'd hopped along a few feet before I got my footing. 'Let go. Come on – let go.' I scrabbled at her fingers, trying to unpeel them. She resisted, then let out a gasp and snapped her arm away like it was burnt.

  'Christ.' I closed my hand over the camera, steadying it against my chest. My heart was racing. 'Don't do that again.'

  She stood for a moment, half turned away, trembling, her hands crabbed up in front of her chest.

  'What's up?'

  'The pig.'

  I wiped my forehead and looked over at the dead animal. 'What about it?'

  A long shiver went up her body, something visible that travelled from her stomach to her shoulders, then kind of shook itself off into the air. She closed her eyes and put her hands over her mouth.

  'It's dead,' I said. 'It won't hurt you.'

  'It looks like it's watching me.' Her voice was quick and whispered, like she thought the pig might hear her. 'I know you'll think that sounds stupid but I mean it. It's watching me.'

  'Then walk away.'

  'It'll watch me.'

  I sighed, and clicked the lens cap in place. 'What do you want me to do?'

  She shook her head, her hand over her mouth, her throat muscles working. '7 don't know. Just stop it watching me.'

  Pigs. Turns out to be pigs that had marked Angeline's life for the last six years. By the end of the day I'd understand why she thought they were watching her, why she wanted me to cover this one. I wasn't going to bury the fucking thing, not in the state it was in, so I hauled a rusting fertilizer drum out of the pile and wedged it across the hole to cover its face, kicking and punching the drum to seal the hole. It stank, the pig, worse than I remembered from two days ago, and while I was doing it I had to keep forcing saliva into my mouth – rubbing my tongue against the hard palate.

  Angeline watched from the trees about a hundred yards away. She lowered herself awkwardly to a sitting position, using a branch to hold her weight, and was sitting there, half in the shadows, staring. When I'd finished I went and sat next to her. Her knees were pulled up, her dusty trainers tucked in tightly. The folds of the coat spread out behind her, concealing the deformity. She was still shaking.

  'So,' I said, 'not a pig person, then?'

  She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers into them, like she was trying to get rid of a picture in her head. There were beads of sweat on her forehead.

  'Going to tell me about it?'

  She shook her head, drawing in a long breath. I brushed the rust off my hands, rested my elbows on my knees, and looked up at the sky, watching the clouds. My head was racing, thinking, how the fuck was I going to get her to talk? I needed her – she was all I had. The instinct that has in the past, I admit, allowed me to put my arm round the mother of a hit-and-run victim and say, 'I feel your pain. If you give me that photo of your lovely little boy, the one on the mantelpiece, the reader will feel it too,' – my journalistic instinct – was failing me.

  'Look,' I started, but when I turned to her she was looking at me. Her whole head was twisted on her long neck. Her eyes were bloodshot, the whites round the black irises spidered with red.

  'He tried to pull me apart,' she said, 'the moment I was born.'

  I stared at her, my head buzzing, kind of knocked off-centre by this. 'What? What did you say?'

  'He thought he could pull it off me. My—' She shivered and looked out at the clouds, at the way they were gathering in a long train above the headland. 'My thing – my tail. He thought I would come apart if he pulled hard enough.'
r />   8

  There was a narrow, tree-crowded path that went from the cottage due west to the cliff edge. Angeline led me down it, going fast, determinedly, her arms swinging, sometimes steadying herself against the branches and tree-trunks as she went. Soaking bracken and rhododendron roots tugged at my calves and I had to struggle to keep up. Somehow, without me knowing exactly how or when, I'd come through the eye of the needle. Suddenly she wanted someone to talk to: she wanted me to know everything about the shitty life she'd lived out here on Pig Island. Maybe it was the way I'd hidden that pig. Stopped it staring.

  She came to a halt and put out her hand to hold me back. The path had come out at the top of a cliff, hundreds of feet above the waves. We stood in silence peering out from the trees at the open sky. We were eye-level with clouds bouncing along the distant horizon.

  'Nice drop,' I said.

  She squatted down in the dust and fumbled a stick from the undergrowth. Streaks of colour from the exertion reached up her neck along the sides of her face like flames, and her eyes were bright. Not watery any more but hard and polished like wood. She poked the stick at the edge of the precipice where hummocks of grass splayed out like fingers. 'See?' She lifted the stick and showed me a clump of grass stuck to the end. It was clotted with something tarry. 'See this?'

  'Yeah. Smell it too.'

  I wrapped my arm round a hawthorn trunk and leaned out cautiously over the drop. A hundred feet below, the waves crashed on a scrap of pebbled beach. From where I stood a wide, blackish smear extended down the screed to the beach; the one or two blighted bushes that clung to the cliff were sticky with matter. A warm decaying air rose and mixed with the stinging cold sea-smell of salt and fishing-net, making me think for some reason of kitchens. I tipped away from the edge, back into the trees.