‘Found her.’
Iona’s voice. Light lancing in through the shed door. Surtsey scrunched her eyes and sat up. Her back ached and her neck was stiff. She raised her hands straight up like she was praying, then slid her palms along her shoulders, her body creaking as she stretched.
‘And you think I’m the unstable one,’ Iona said.
‘I don’t think that.’
Iona was silhouetted in the doorway like an avenging angel. ‘Sure you do. But I’m not the one sleeping in the boatshed.’
Surtsey pushed the blanket aside and sat up. She saw the mobile phone on the seat next to her and slipped it into her pocket as Iona offered her a hand to get out.
‘What’s going on, Sur?’
‘Nothing.’
Surtsey clambered out, stumbling on the motor block, still half asleep.
‘OK,’ Iona said. ‘That’s why your boyfriend and BFF have been running around for half an hour looking for you. And that’s why you’re sleeping in a boat.’
Surtsey rubbed her eyes and looked outside. Cloudless sky, calm. ‘I couldn’t sleep last night so came out to get some air. Ended up here. No big deal.’
‘Whatever.’
‘I was drunk and stoned.’
Iona smiled. ‘That’s more like it. Speaking of which I’m making Bloody Marys for breakfast. Want one?’
Surtsey shook her head. Her hand went to her leg, felt the phone in her pocket through the material.
‘Suit yourself,’ Iona said, swaggering out of the shed.
As soon as she was gone Surtsey took the phone from her pocket. No messages.
‘Hey.’ Halima was at the door, still in her pyjamas.
Surtsey put the phone away. ‘Hey.’
‘You OK?’
‘Fine.’
Halima raised her eyebrows. ‘This is me you’re talking to, not skankypants.’
Surtsey sighed. ‘I just fell asleep.’
‘Out here?’
‘Maybe I was shaken up by yesterday, that’s all.’
Halima rubbed Surtsey’s arm. ‘Don’t make a habit of it. Brendan has been panicking since he woke up and you weren’t there.’
‘I’m allowed to do things without him.’
‘He was just worried,’ Halima said. ‘You seem a bit spaced.’
Surtsey laughed. ‘That’s thanks to your grass.’
Halima held her hands out. ‘Fair point.’
‘Where’s Brendan now?’
Halima nodded past the house. ‘He went along the beach, thought you might’ve gone for a walk to clear your head.’
‘That’s not a bad idea.’
‘He tried calling but you didn’t have your phone with you.’
Surtsey resisted the urge to touch Tom’s mobile in her pocket. Had Halima seen her slip it in there when she came in?
‘I’ll go find him,’ she said.
*
She didn’t bother to get changed, just threw her old hoodie on and tied her hair up in a bun. She called him but he was way along at the west end by the amusements. She padded up the prom in her crocs, staring at the phone messages from last night. She stopped at the green van and got two coffees then slipped through the gap in the sea wall and onto the sand. The prom was busy with commuters, cyclists, old folk heading to the swimming pool, in comparison the beach was nearly empty. The tide was way out and she scuffed down to the wet sand, squishing the squirmy piles left by lugworms, squelching over bladderwrack. There was something about being the first one to spoil a stretch of flat sand, to leave your mark. She looked at her trail of footprints and thought about the sand on the Inch, her walk away from Tom’s body. Below high tide, no trace. Maybe.
She saw Brendan at the groyne at the bottom of Bath Street, held the two coffees up for him to see.
When she reached him he put on a self-deprecating smile. ‘There you are.’
Surtsey tilted her head and handed him a cup. ‘Here I am.’
‘I was worried sick.’ He was joking, laughter in his voice, but she could tell he really had been worried.
She sipped coffee and linked her arm through his as they walked back along the sand. A handful of mallards were bobbing on the water. They looked too small for the expanse of the firth. The Inch was over to their left, a thin haze stretching from Burntisland and blurring its edges, making it more like a ghost than a solid presence.
‘It’s mad to think we were out there yesterday,’ Surtsey said.
‘Is it?’
‘How many millions of tons of water are in the Forth, do you think?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘Do you think there will ever be other new islands?’
‘Maybe.’
There had been several major eruptions since the Inch was born but none had created landmass above sea level. Each had formed underwater humps that meant shipping channels had to be changed, and maritime authorities constantly checked and updated their maps as volcanic matter eroded or shifted. Most ships avoided the southern side of the firth altogether, heading north around Inchkeith on their way to the oil terminal.
‘Imagine the land always changing under your feet,’ Surtsey said.
‘What?’
‘If none of this was solid, if the land shifted and moved.’
‘It does,’ Brendan said. ‘It’s called geology. It’s what we study.’
Surtsey smiled and shook her head. ‘No, I mean all the time, like the tides. If we woke up in the morning and everything outside the window had changed, the landscape altered when we weren’t looking, all the maps of the world constantly out of date. What if we didn’t know the shape of the world at all, how would we do anything? How would we know where we were?’
Brendan stopped walking and Surtsey did too, their arms still entwined.
‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ Brendan said.
‘I wish people would stop asking that.’
Something caught Surtsey’s eye, a dozen people clustered around the boat lock-up next to the Beach House. A couple of police officers appeared at the end of Bath Street and headed towards them in no hurry.
Surtsey began walking towards the activity, Brendan in her wake. She trudged up the sand leaving deep heel prints, slowing as she hit the dry sand.
It was the Children of New Thule protesting by the fenced-off yard where the Edinburgh Uni boat was stored, along with all the boats and kayaks of the sailing club. Two young women were chained to the gate, stopping someone getting in. Red paint had been thrown through the chain links of the fence, splattered on the grass, streaked across three boats, including the Geophysics Department one. The police were shaking their heads, speaking into radios, fingers tucked under armpits. They were wearing too many clothes for summer. One of the cops approached Bastian, standing to the side of the rest. Surtsey noticed that he hadn’t chained himself to anything.
As she came off the sand onto the promenade she recognised the cop speaking to Bastian, it was Ferris from yesterday, the tall cute one.
‘Hey,’ she said.
Ferris turned and looked surprised. ‘Surtsey, right?’
That name always got remembered. Or maybe it was her flirting that stuck in his mind.
She realised now that the other cop was the female one from the Inch yesterday too. She was on the radio trying to arrange for someone with bolt cutters to come and get the women off the gate. The guy with the keys was on his phone too, relating the incident to his boss, most likely. A small smattering of people drinking breakfast coffee at the tables outside the Beach House next door were eyeballing the whole thing, a piece of extra street theatre to keep them entertained.
‘Are you going to arrest these idiots?’ Surtsey said.
Ferris scowled at her. ‘We’re handling it, thank you.’
Surtsey pointed at Bastian. ‘Have you asked him about Tom.’
Bastian looked amused.
The cop was confused. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘He’s a suspect.’
‘Why?’
Surtsey pointed at the protest, the whole scene. ‘Are you nuts? They want the Inch left alone, so a dead body found there is pretty handy for them.’
‘That’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think?’ Ferris said.
‘Thank you,’ Bastian said.
‘Shut your face,’ Surtsey said.
She thought about last night’s texts and turned to Ferris. ‘Check his phone.’
Ferris shook his head. ‘I’m not doing that.’
‘Go on, you might find something.’
Ferris held a hand up to Surtsey’s arm, ushering her away.
‘At least ask him his whereabouts,’ Surtsey said, shrugging him off.
‘Please leave the police work to us,’ Ferris said. ‘Thank you.’
So the flirting thing hadn’t made a difference after all.
Bastian moved closer to the cop. ‘If you want to investigate anyone, it should be her. She assaulted me on the beach yesterday.’ He opened his palm to take in the crowd around them. ‘I have many witnesses.’
Ferris sighed. ‘Look, I’m not investigating anyone. I’m just a PC. We’re here to get these women off the fence and let this guy do his job, that’s all.’ He turned to Surtsey. ‘I’m sure the DCI will be looking at all possible leads in the case.’ Then he faced Bastian. ‘And unless you seriously want to press charges for assault, I suggest you shut up too.’
Surtsey stood staring at Bastian, who looked as smug as ever.
Ferris put his hand back on her arm. ‘Now, if you could move along please, Miss.’
Surtsey shook her head, but let herself be guided away by Brendan, who she’d only just realised was there beside her.
She walked away reluctantly, glancing back at the scene, trying to make sense of it all.
‘What a bunch of idiots,’ Brendan said. ‘You don’t really think they’re involved, do you?’
They were twenty yards away now.
Surtsey shrugged. ‘Why not? Someone has to be.’
‘Do they?’ Brendan said. ‘It could just have been an accident.’
Surtsey thought about the texts on the phone in her pocket. The messages from the Inch itself. It was sorry to have taken a life. It knew everything about her and Tom.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I suppose it could’ve been an accident.’
She looked back and saw Bastian talking to the female police officer, hands out in supplication. People passing by were slowing down to watch, herding their children away from the strange people making a disturbance. The boatyard guy was complaining to Ferris now but getting nowhere. Somehow this would all get sorted out, Surtsey thought. If everyone just communicated the world would sort itself out, maps would stay the same and we would all know what we were meant to do.
17
She stared at the spectral analysis numbers on her laptop. Three pages of spreadsheet, six columns of data, some secret hidden amongst the digits. That was one of the things she usually liked about her work, pulling meaning from seemingly random information, filtering the raw chaos of the universe into something you could understand. But some chaos couldn’t be filtered, couldn’t be made any sense of.
The data was about the relative density of a certain type of tuff within the rock samples they’d taken. It should give an idea about how this volcano had behaved on eruption, and that could be compared to other eruptions around the world. Was the Inch like the others, or unique? She wanted it to be a one-off but that’s not the way science worked. What you wanted didn’t come into it, you had to make sure not to skew the information with your own bias.
She looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. She’d been staring at the same page of numbers for twenty minutes. She wondered if she’d ever get back to normal, ever get the picture of Tom’s sandy body out of her mind. If she would ever finish this PhD and get on with her life.
Tom’s empty office didn’t help. It was a black hole sucking in attention from all students and staff, their dead boss a presence because of his absence. Surtsey smiled at the paradox. It was the kind of thing she would’ve shared with him over a drink after work in one of the bars at the other end of town they used to go to, the boutique hotels in Stockbridge and New Town that felt like a different planet to the salty breeze of Joppa or the student-filled Southside.
The office around her was quiet, just Kez, Halima and Brendan clacking away on social media or answering emails, doing as much work as she was. She needed to focus, the numbers in front of her were the only way to get through this, a distraction from the shitstorm, something concrete she could hold on to.
She stared out the window at nothing, birch and oak rustling, wood pigeons flapping, traffic wheezing up and down West Mains Road.
She heard her email ping and turned back to the screen. It was probably just the usual junk from some geophys blogger, but she was conditioned to check by the noise. The email was from an address she didn’t recognise, and when she read it she froze. It was from [email protected], and the subject was ‘Tom Lawrie and Surtsey Mackenzie’. She could see there were three jpegs attached, could make out the top of her own head in the first one already in the preview of the email. She felt like someone was controlling her finger as she clicked on the email to open it large on her screen.
And there they were, her and Tom, standing kissing outside the Roxburgh Hotel on Charlotte Square, her in one of her little summer dresses, him in a blue shirt, jacket and jeans. It was from two weeks ago, they’d been out for dinner in a new place on George Street round the corner, and were heading back to the hotel for a couple of hours of pretty feisty sex if Surtsey remembered correctly. They were just buzzed enough from the wine at dinner to be all over each other in the street, right when the picture was taken from across the road, by the looks of it.
The second picture was from a few moments later, both of them pulling back to look in each other’s eyes after the clinch, sharing an intimate joke or comment, Surtsey laughing and throwing her head back, Tom with clear devotion in his eyes, like he couldn’t believe his luck. The third picture had them with their arms around each other, Tom with his hand resting gently on Surtsey’s buttock as they walked up the steps into the front door of the Roxburgh like a normal couple after a night out.
She looked at Tom’s face in the second picture, it captured so well how he looked at her, why she had kept things going. Such a stupid ego boost, being adored like that by someone with authority just for being yourself, such a selfish reason to fuck him and fuck everything up.
Her heart was racing as she scrolled up and down through the pictures, she couldn’t stop looking, remembering that night, the way they’d laughed at how bad his pork belly was in the restaurant, the cheesecake she’d made him order with two spoons, the single malt whiskies they’d had with coffee afterwards, joking about how he shouldn’t get too drunk in case he couldn’t perform later. Not that that was ever a problem, the sight of her was enough to get him hard in their room, and she knew exactly what to do to keep him going.
It was like he was back from the dead, and for a moment she imagined she would look up and see him sitting at his desk, smiling at her.
She checked the email for any more information but it was just these three pictures, no text. She checked the email address it came from again, and only then realised there were other addresses in the CC line. Halima, Brendan, Rachel. She clicked to show the rest of the addresses and her breath caught in her chest. Everyone in the department was on the list, then two more email addresses at the end, [email protected] and [email protected].
Holy shit. His wife.
She thought for a moment, couldn’t work out the last one, then it registered. DCI Yates, the cop investigating Tom’s death.
No.
She stood up and her chair went flying behind her. Halima was staring at her with wide eyes, as was Kezia. Brendan was already heading towards her desk.
‘What the fuck, Sur?’ he said
, his eyes wet already.
‘Wait, Brendan, I can explain.’
He was at her desk now, fizzing with anger. ‘Oh please. Don’t you fucking dare say it’s not what it looks like.’
Surtsey looked down at her desk for a moment, then realised the pictures were still on her computer screen. She wanted to click them away, but that would be crazy now, pointless.
Brendan had a hand on her desk, knuckles pressed against the wood.
‘You were fucking him?’
Surtsey shook her head, just a tiny movement.
‘You weren’t fucking him? Is that what you’re saying?’
Surtsey lifted her head. ‘It wasn’t like that.’
‘Oh really? Just what was it like, Sur?’
She didn’t speak. His body was leaning towards her, and she wondered for a moment if he would lift his fists from the table and hit her.
‘Well? What the fuck was it like?’
Halima was out of her seat but standing back, look of amazement on her face.
Surtsey felt tears come to her eyes.
Brendan’s face turned hard. ‘Fuck off, you don’t get to cry.’
He stood watching her in disgust.
‘Unbelievable.’
He turned and walked out the office and down the corridor without looking back.
Kezia stood across the room, eyebrows just about at the roof.
Surtsey turned to Halima. With the light from the window behind her Surtsey couldn’t make out her expression, but her hands were clasped together like a prayer.
‘Holy shit, babes,’ she said. ‘Holy fucking shit.’
Surtsey grabbed her bag from under the desk.
‘I have to get out of here,’ she said.
18
Her feet pounded on the pavement, taking her out of King’s Buildings and up the road to Blackford Hill. The adrenaline in her veins made her shake and she dabbed at the tears in her eyes, felt her breath jolt and shudder as she tried to compose herself. She turned off at Craigmillar Park golf course and up the steep slope, past the last few houses then she was at the old observatory with its green copper dome, building work along one side for a new lecture theatre. She went round to the right and up the grassy slope till she got to the trig point, then stopped, wheezing at the effort, and looked out over the city.
Fault Lines Page 7
