Billie's Kiss

by Elizabeth Knox

  ‘What kind of woman is Billie Paxton?’ Geordie wrote to Ian. ‘Now that she has found her feet, and has at least half her family, she is, I think, a woman who knows her duty and her place, but expresses herself incorrectly. She is helping Mr Maslen to work, to sink himself in his work. But she’s like a dog in a dinghy above a diver. She is above her brother-in-law, defending his boat, the place he’ll again occupy once he’s completed his dive, once he’s come up for air. Billie Paxton is a dog in her master’s dinghy, barking at all comers. But, Ian,’ Geordie wrote, ‘why do I disapprove of behaviour I’d find acceptable in Minnie Hallow, who can be just as assertive and uncomfortable? Is it only because Minnie’s portion, her share in the world, and her place in it, is so much larger?’

  Geordie tapped his pen on the page of his letter, which slid to show the sheet below it. A list of names. Geordie remembered there was something he meant to talk to Murdo about, when he had him alone. He pushed Murdo’s letter and coin into his pocket and followed Murdo out of the castle.

  MURDO HEARD Geordie hurrying after him in the high street. He had just parted ways with the investigator of the Gustav Edda’s insurers. He saw that Geordie was out of breath. Geordie came to a stop, his hand on Murdo’s arm, blowing hard. He said, ‘What did that man have to say?’

  Murdo asked for his letter.

  ‘I have undertaken to post your letter, Mr Hesketh.’

  Murdo told the elder Betler not to be so testy. He said he was losing conviction about his own ideas faster than Geordie was losing body heat. There was another northerly, and Geordie had hurried out in shirt and waistcoat. Murdo took off his own jacket and wrapped it around Geordie’s shoulders. Ian’s brother wasn’t mollified, but he did give Murdo his letter and – ostentatiously – his penny. Murdo went into the post office, bought a stamp, sealed his letter, and passed it across the counter. He went back out to Geordie. ‘We have to hurry.’ He took Geordie’s arm and walked him briskly up the road toward Mr Mulberry’s church. He explained that the insurance investigator had said he was now focusing his investigation on a passenger, one of the missing. ‘One of the three sportsmen from Stockholm who occupied the other cabins. They were supposed to be in their cabin when the ship berthed – but their bodies weren’t found.’

  ‘They are all on my list,’ Geordie said. ‘The list I’ve pressed on you, time and again, wanting you to sit down and go over it with me. But you insist on thinking that someone planted a murderous device in the ship’s hold with the intention only of sending a cargo of small gauge rails, wire-reinforced windows, telephone equipment, batteries, cable, and a car to the bottom of the sea. For myself – when I see corpses I see either an act of God, human mismanagement, or the intent to kill.’

  Murdo said, ‘And what do you see when corpses aren’t found where they should be?’ He said that, apparently, the insurance investigator was suspicious of only one of the Stockholm sportsmen, because, before they arrived at Luag, the man asked – as he had before – for warm water to wash and shave, but hadn’t, as before, merely tidied the edges of his beard. When the steward removed the cold water from the empty cabin he found the basin full of a soup of soap and long red whiskers.

  ‘He shaved off his beard?’

  ‘Yes. He shaved off his beard, then went ashore at Luag, and came back in the dark of night. He said he’d forgotten his keys, and the steward let him into his cabin. That was an hour before the Gustav Edda sailed.’

  Murdo stopped in the church porch and removed his jacket from Geordie’s shoulders. He put it back on, straightened Geordie’s tie, and his own, and cupped his hands to scrape back his hair – slick, almost transparent with macassar but still too thick to lie flat. He said to Geordie that, naturally, when the investigator ran into him outside the post office they talked. ‘His English is good – but the islanders have a knack for making any mainlander feel like an interloper. He was a little lonely. He wanted to speak Swedish. Wanted to ask me who would have the effects of this drowned sportsman, the effects themselves, or the responsibility for shipping them back to his family. I sent him up to the castle to speak to Gutthorm.’ Murdo shouldered the church door open and walked through the chapel to Mr Mulberry’s study. He said, ‘Of course, if they haven’t been sent to his family, the fellow’s belongings will still be here.’

  THEY FOUND three flat-bottomed leather bags with three boxed fishing rods above them, propped upright against the panelled wall of the vestry, like swords over graves, swords in lieu of crosses.

  Mr Mulberry said, ‘They all kept rooms at a club in Stockholm. We directed our letters there – but there’s no answer yet.’ He said he’d leave them to it; he had a christening at two o’clock.

  When Mulberry had gone Geordie stepped up by Murdo and put his list into Murdo’s hands. A list of the names of the dead. Eighteen lives. The black gang, the six stokers and two greasers who were in the boiler and engine rooms; the seamen at the gangplank when the explosion occurred, who went into the sea unconscious; the three-year-old girl who had spent the trip from Luag to Stolnsay sick in the salon; the girl’s mother, who came out of the sea alive but died several hours later; Ian – the ship had rolled over on him. The remaining five had – like the black gang – been below when the Gustav Edda sank. There was another steward, who had been at the hatch with Henry Maslen’s luggage, he’d kept his hand on it when he went into the sea, and had been found pinned between the pier and Henry’s trunk. That left Edith Maslen, and the three sportsmen.

  They had come for the fishing, had rented a bothy on Loch Nurry, and hired ghillies. None of them had been to Kissack before. They made all arrangements by mail. They were never seen in the salon. They liked each other enough to play cards for the full five days of the voyage, to take their meals together in one cabin or another, but not to share cabins.

  ‘We scarcely saw them,’ Murdo told Geordie. ‘When Rixon and Elov came aboard at Thurso – they’d come up by rail from Invershin, where they had spent a week with another school friend – we were rather cramped. That is why I took rooms at Luag, one for Rixon and his friend, one for me. Ian kept our cabin. That evening, before the ship departed, we gave our cabin up to Mrs Maslen.’

  Mrs Mulberry came into the room. She said that her husband really hadn’t any idea where anything was. ‘I had to take everything out of the bags in order to preserve what I could. It wouldn’t do to send the poor souls’ linen back to their people in the state it would be in if it was left soaked and packed.’ She opened one of the bags. It was empty. ‘Of course the fishing gear could take the weather. It was soon dry.’

  She opened a series of long shallow drawers where she kept altar cloths and the choir’s smocks. She removed several piles of shirts and undergarments. Then she opened a closet and slid her husband’s soutanes aside to show suits, jackets, and trousers. ‘All these clothes belong to two of the gentlemen. They are all washed and ironed.’

  Murdo and Geordie fingered collars, read the embroidered names. Then Geordie’s hand crossed Murdo’s to look through the shirts Murdo had. ‘Ha!’ Geordie said. He snatched up two shirts and held them together, the collars kissing, the names cheek to cheek, each an initial and a surname. Different surnames.

  Murdo was unimpressed. ‘Well? They had the same tailor, and the names are the work of some girl in his shop whose embroidery is as distinctive as handwriting.’ He was tired, and exasperated with Geordie.

  ‘I took trouble for the sake of their people,’ Mrs Mulberry said. ‘But also because of the quality of the clothes. All new, or nearly so.’

  ‘Yes. That’s it.’ Geordie shook the two garments, just once and hard, under Murdo’s nose. ‘What was in the third bag?’ he asked Mrs Mulberry.

  ‘A blanket. It was marked with the name of the ship. I washed it, too, and gave it, with a few other things, to the poor captain when he went back to Stockholm to give an account of the accident.’

  ‘A blanket?’

  ‘Yes, Mr Hesketh, bundled up and
stuffed into the bag, which was otherwise empty.’

  ‘Perhaps the same man who shaved,’ Geordie said. ‘And why are these clothes all new?’

  Murdo closed his eyes. ‘You can’t possibly suspect all three men.’

  Geordie told him that while suspecting all three sportsmen and Macleod wasn’t at all commonsensical, common sense hadn’t got them very far. Miss Paxton jumped from the deck of the Gustav Edda before the explosion, so common sense said that she was responsible for it – though she had no more motive than the three sportsmen.

  Murdo said that they should concentrate on two men. The man who shaved, who took his clothes but left his luggage and fishing tackle – who went ashore at Luag and didn’t return. ‘He set the charge,’ Murdo said. ‘Then Macleod attached the fuse and lit it.’

  ‘God save us,’ said Mrs Mulberry. ‘Why?’

  Murdo was amused, and malicious. ‘Why should God save us? Now there’s a question.’

  ‘IF HE was at all prepared to answer his own question, he’d answer Mrs Mulberry’s, too,’ Geordie wrote to his brother. ‘He has to accept the element of chance, the insults of bad fortune, and of good. In your last letter to me you said you were going with him to Stockholm, where he intended to place a stone on the Borgs’ grave. To seal it, like a half-cooled jar of preserves. You said you weren’t sure whether he was doing “the ordinary decent thing”, or trying to keep a grief alive – to preserve it, to remind himself. I think Murdo Hesketh is suspended with his dead, with his sister Ingrid and her husband Karl Borg, and with Ingrid Hallow – if she was his – and you. He won’t ask “Why am I alive? Why has God preserved me?” because he regards his life as a temporary difficulty. He’s alive because he wants to know who took you from him. But he won’t ask “Who meant to kill me?” in case the question makes him jealous of his life and desirous of living.’

  BILLIE AND Alan left Henry, in a state of rapt inquiry, in the circle of standing stones on Alesund Head. Alan led Billie down a precipitous track to a cove where, he said, people would come in search of timbers for gables, or tables, or boats. ‘From wrecks,’ he said. ‘They still come, that’s why the path is clear.’

  It was a stony cove, and hidden from view in every direction but seaward. Billie and Alan stripped down to their underclothes, balancing on stones greened by algae, and among burst crates and hunks of greyed, unravelling rope. ‘At least we’re out of the wind,’ Alan said, shivering.

  They walked into the sea, Alan to his armpits and Billie only to her waist. Alan lifted his feet off the stones and dropped down into the clear water.

  Billie told him that if he pushed his hands down he’d bob up, but he must remember that it was far more effective to move his arms like this. She demonstrated above the water. Alan copied her, and the water closed over his crown. He stood up again.

  ‘Let your head go under between breaths. Rise up on the stroke,’ Billie said. ‘Try it.’

  Alan tried it, bobbed up and down and propelled himself forward. He looked back, grinning to incite her praise, and tried to stand again. He found he was out of his depth. He thrashed about a bit, made a jerky rotation, and struggled in again.

  ‘Good,’ said Billie. ‘Watch my legs.’ She put her shoulders under, gasped, and swam out past him, around him, and back under his nose. Then she stood and held his hands while he stretched out in the water and tried it for himself. Billie had him push her backward for some distance, then she let him go and he followed her.

  Billie, with her greater body mass, buoyant and relaxed, wove around Alan’s agitated course. She saw him gradually becoming more synchronised. After a time she bumped him, and said, ‘Go back. I’m cold, and I haven’t had my head under.’

  They swam back in, side by side, and she helped him out. They pulled their boots back on and, hunched with cold, carried their clothes up the track to a place where the sun lay. They inclined against a bank of sea thrift and thawed themselves. Billie was wearing a knitted shift, which drained well, and warmed while still damp. She basked, her eyes closed and her whole body, it seemed, bundled in the rosy cradle of the space under her eyelids. After a time she said, sleepily, that one day she’d own something to swim in.

  ‘A loch?’ said Alan.

  ‘A bathing costume.’

  Alan said he’d like to swim again that evening, by Kiss Castle if he had to. Billie didn’t need to get wet herself, but he’d be happier if she was there. He began to put his clothes back on. Billie listened with suspense to stitches popping in his jacket. She dressed herself and unpinned her plait. It dropped to largely conceal the wet tendrils at her nape. She warned Alan not to walk as if his drawers were damp. ‘Remember – we were only stretching our legs.’

  It was a strenuous twenty-minute climb back up the track to Henry. But they found him still content, sitting beneath a stone. It was thicker at its top than its base, and seemed to curl over him in a motherly way.

  ‘This isn’t the famous stone circle,’ Alan said. ‘That one is in the west. The Stolnsay fishermen use these to fix their position.’

  ‘But that’s not what they were for,’ Henry said.

  ‘Without trees they seem very tall,’ said Billie.

  Alan asked, ‘Are they religious?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘They stand out so,’ Billie said. ‘They remind me of a lighthouse on a long sandspit.’

  ‘Lighthouses are for navigation,’ said Henry.

  ‘So are these,’ said Alan.

  ‘Or they’re religious,’ Billie said. Then, ‘Churches are tall.’

  Henry said, ‘Billie,’ fondly. He raised a hand to Alan, who helped him up.

  MURDO AND Geordie went through everything: Geordie’s list, the bags, tackle boxes, every pocket of the jackets, topcoats, and trousers. Then they hurried back to Kiss, along the promontory road. It was the dinner hour, eight, but the sun was still forty degrees above the horizon, a hand above the mountains and high bogland behind Stolnsay. There would be light till ten-thirty or eleven, a long twilight, then a twilit night, the sun rolling along below the horizon, cool and white, radiant, but with no great heat.

  Geordie walked briskly, and the sleeves of Murdo’s jacket sailed behind him. Murdo went along in Geordie’s steps, not looking where he was going but at the paper they had found, an envelope, empty, but addressed to one of the sportsmen at that gentlemen’s club. On the other side there was a tally, in three columns, a running record of wins and losses in a card game. The amounts were in pounds, not kronor. Large amounts.

  Geordie argued that of course the Swedes had pounds. They were coming to fish on Kissack, where the currency was as sterling as the rest of Britain.

  ‘But this much?’ Murdo insisted. ‘They couldn’t possibly require this much money for a month’s fishing.’ Everything about these people made him suspicious. Especially since he’d seen none of them alive – or dead. There were no corpses, nor claimants come to complain to the authorities about defaulting corpses.

  Rory Skilling intercepted Murdo at the gatehouse. He flushed red, with embarrassment or with drink. Fiona was behind him on the threshold, her hand draped over his shoulder and pinching his lapel.

  ‘A new coat, Rory?’ Murdo said. ‘It looks well on you.’

  Rory’s flush faded, but only in patches, a lattice of pale skin appearing, so that the drink showed only in bloody cobbles. Rory said he’d found Macleod. Macleod’s boat had come in the night before but the man had gone to his people down at Ernol on the Atlantic coast. ‘Macleod told a friend he has here that he expected to be at Ernol for a week or two. His cousin is poorly, the one he means to marry.’

  Murdo thanked Rory and told him to go on in. But before Rory went, Murdo asked if Alan was with them. He thought he saw the makings of a family in the gatehouse doorway – a father, a stepmother, but no son. Rory said he’d seen Alan in the cove below the castle – nasty place – with that young lady. She was teaching Alan to swim.

  AT THE dinner table
it was obvious to anyone that Billie Paxton’s hair was still damp at her nape. It was piled, pinned, and drooping over one ear, and with one lock escaping at the back like a serpent making a quick exit from a beehive. Murdo, who was opposite her, could even see the dull patches on her skin where salt water had dried in the air, leaving its residue.

  James was talking. He was very pleased with Henry Maslen – an inquiring mind, an intellectual, a man who could talk in ways that were apparently congruent with James’s own thinking. At least that’s how it seemed to Murdo. What a pair, Murdo thought, sullen. Henry Maslen reminded him of a man whose job it was to go about a rubber plantation refreshing the wounds on trees. Henry tapped James, and James oozed talk all evening.

  THE BALLROOM: around ten in the evening. Geordie apologised – he’d had to talk to Alan Skilling. He and Mr Hesketh hadn’t been able to beg off the planned picnic, and the visit to Lord Hallowhulme’s salmon hatcheries. Instead they would set out very early for Ernol on the west coast, and would rendezvous with the picnic party later, inland. That was the plan. Geordie said to Minnie that he was sorry they hadn’t asked first whether they could borrow her odd boy. ‘We need him for his Gaelic. I’m as late as I am because I walked the lad back to the gatehouse.’

  ‘He’s not in any danger, you know,’ Minnie said. ‘He’s a wee lad, but he goes about like the spirit of the place.’

  ‘Of course,’ Geordie said. ‘Again I apologise. I’m all yours for the next hour. But I must go at eleven – with our early start.’

  ‘We hadn’t begun yet, Mr Betler,’ said Anne Tegner. ‘We’ve been puzzling over Elov’s letter.’ She nodded at Elov, who got up off the floor and gave his letter to Geordie. Elov explained that it had been sent on first from his school, and then again from the house of his friend at Invershin where he and Rixon had stayed before meeting Mr Hesketh at Thurso. ‘My friend sent it on. I got it Tuesday, but I sat on it. I didn’t want to cause any trouble.’