Blood Tide

by Claire McGowan

  ‘You think they’ve had an accident, then?’ asked Paula. Everyone out here seemed to lean that way.

  ‘I can’t imagine what else it could be. We’ll do all we can to help. Now, let’s get this poor man sorted. Is he trying to talk?’

  He breathed some words out through his cracked lips, and everyone else leaned in too, though they didn’t understand.

  ‘He did come off a boat,’ said Fiacra. ‘I think that’s what he said.’

  Paddy the fisherman nodded, as if to say he’d told them so. ‘Blow-ins is what they are. Taking the jobs from decent Irishmen.’

  ‘Whist now,’ scolded Oona. ‘Did he fall off in the wind, is that it?’

  Fiacra said something in stumbling Spanish and listened to the response. ‘He says . . . he jumped off.’

  ‘He jumped off? In those seas?’ Paula didn’t know much Spanish, but she recognised the sign of the cross the man was making. Of course, he was probably Catholic. Fiacra frowned, listening, as the man continued to cross himself. Over and over. And over.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ The nervous barman licked his lips.

  ‘He says . . . the men on the boat were mad. They started to . . .’ Fiacra frowned again, and repeated what he’d said for confirmation. He sounded doubtful. ‘He says he had to jump off, because they were going mad. They were . . . I think he said possessed.’

  Here the man sat up a little, and repeated a word in Spanish for emphasis, which they all seemed to recognise. ‘Diablo. Diablo.’ His voice came out used up, almost drowned altogether in his throat.

  Paula didn’t understand the rest. But it didn’t matter – she got the meaning. The man was saying the devil had been on his fishing boat, and whatever had happened was so bad he’d flung himself into storm-tossed seas rather than stay on it.

  Dr Monroe cleared her throat. ‘Poor man, he’s delirious. Saltwater will do that to you. Come on, let’s get him onto the stretcher. The sooner he’s in hospital the better.’

  Bob

  1986

  When he thought of her, it was always at the Christmas party, 1986. A year of hopes raised and dashed, as the Troubles seemed to settle in for the long haul. No one wanted this now, surely; no one wanted twenty years of killing. And yet the end was so long in coming, in that final decade. Another death, and then another. Another shooting, another bomb, another colleague gone. The last? No, another, and another and yet another still.

  The RUC Christmas party was a strange tradition. He’d never felt happy with it. So many years an empty seat where one of your colleagues had got blown up or shot. They had to sweep the hotel function room for devices before they could have their meal, but they went ahead with it anyway – hats, and cracker jokes, a showband playing Culture Club and Wham!; some kind of defiance, maybe. That Christmas, Bob had found himself sitting beside her. It was the first time they’d met, though Bob and PJ had been partners for a while. You kept your family out of work, that was the understanding. A woman didn’t need to know the kind of things you were facing every day. Despite their differences, there was a wary sort of respect between the Catholic Belfastman PJ and himself, Orange and staunch. Best person Bob had ever worked with, if he was honest with himself. Maguire like a dog with a bone when he knew something wasn’t right; himself slower, more measured, thinking it through. A trust, that was it, an understanding between them. That would be dead within a few years, of course, lost with Margaret Maguire. Only seven years after that dinner, Bob would betray his partner. He would tell a lie and keep it for twenty years. But back then, in 1986, none of them knew what was to come. They only knew they were deep into a bloody and intractable war, and the normal rules didn’t apply.

  Bob turned to Linda. ‘Nice food?’

  ‘Aye. Not bad.’ He could tell she was worried about the babysitter they’d got for Ian. What if he stopped breathing again? Choked on his mushed-up dinner? The worry was between them, pushing them apart like an inflating balloon.

  ‘We can ring if you want.’

  Linda said nothing. They sat in silence until he couldn’t stand it any more and turned to the woman on his right, as they ate their starter of melon with a glacé cherry. A vague impression of red hair and a black sparkly dress, her skin white against it. ‘Bob, is it?’ Friendly tone.

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Margaret Maguire.’ She nodded across the table to PJ, who was embroiled in conversation with a lad from the Bomb Squad. He looked to be using his glacé cherry to represent some kind of detonator. Bob was amazed. This was PJ’s wife? She looked like a film star.

  She was polite. She looked past him to Linda, who was pushing her melon around her plate and glancing at the big clock on the wall every five seconds. ‘Hello – is it Mrs Hamilton?’ Linda barely nodded. ‘You’ve a wee boy, is that right?’

  ‘Ian. He’s six.’ Her voice was flat. Saying Ian’s age always hurt, because it was meaningless. He may as well have been a newborn, for all he could do. But Margaret didn’t know that. She smiled.

  ‘Same age as my Paula, then. Did you manage to get a babysitter? We had all manner of tantrums in our house about that! Thinks she should come out with us, so she does.’ Bob smiled automatically as she rolled her eyes. He’d never know what it was to fight with a stubborn child.

  ‘Get a wee picture of you all?’ said the photographer, butting in. They’d hired one for the event, as if anyone would want to remember the overly bright lighting and anaemic chicken.

  Margaret reached across the table and tugged on PJ’s arm, then smiled at Bob and Linda. ‘Come on, let’s all get in.’

  Bob knew, rather than saw, that Linda was not smiling as the flash went off, leaving ghosts in his eyes for a few seconds.

  PJ went to turn away again and Margaret stopped him. ‘Enough of the fighting talk, Macho Man. Be sociable.’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’ PJ was like a coiled spring back then – always on. Bob had never seen him relax. ‘Happy Christmas, Bob, Linda.’ More nods. More clock-gazing. Bob felt shame suddenly – the drabness of Linda in her old brown velvet, her face so tired, nothing to say for herself, no healthy, rebellious child at home. And there was PJ, his wife making a face at him – Bob caught the scent of lily from her – her red hair falling over her face. It was like fire, like autumn trees, he thought muzzily, his hand twitching on his glass of orange juice. Bob hadn’t had a drink in his life, but tonight he could understand it, the need for something to steady you, dissolve you away from this shaky awareness of everything. And of her. Always her.

  They were halfway through their chicken when some officer came running over, face grey. Bob dropped his fork – you always knew what that meant. The questions that had to be asked. What, where, how many dead. The officer – what was his name? Took a heart attack in ’97 and died – whispered in PJ’s ear, and Bob watched as his partner heard the news, and stood up, very slowly. Beside him, Margaret tensed. ‘What?’ she said, quietly, across the table to her husband.

  ‘John,’ he said, briefly. ‘They’re saying John O’Hara’s been shot.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘What do you make of that?’ Paula murmured to Fiacra, as the sailor – they’d ascertained his name was José – was being loaded onto a stretcher the pub seemed to keep out the back, presumably for drunken accidents. They were standing outside now, the rising wind whipping the pub umbrellas. ‘Anything to do with Matt and Fiona?’

  ‘Doubt it. I reckon he jumped off because he couldn’t hack it. We’ve busted a fair few fishing boats with illegal workers. They don’t even let them sleep on some of those trawlers, and they hang onto their passports to stop them quitting. It’s brutal.’

  Paula believed him – immigrant labour was a big problem in the fishing and farming industries. The dark side of the Ireland the tourist board liked to promote, all happy cows and fishermen landing their catch. E
ven here, apparently, on this remote island with no phone signal, there was slave labour running the boats. ‘And what about your woman barging in like that?’

  ‘Seems she runs the Enviracorp plant out here. Lives on the north side of the island.’

  ‘Why would the company care about a random sailor, though? Enough to send their boat away when there’s supposedly a big storm heading in?’

  Fiacra shrugged. ‘Dunno. Corporate responsibility or some such. Anyway, we should go too soon. Next ferry’s gonna be the last today. Search’s been called off for the night.’

  Paula pushed back her hair as they looked out across the harbour, where the boats clinked together as the wind rose. ‘But we’re none the wiser about Matt and Fiona. We didn’t even see round the rest of the island.’

  Fiacra huddled up his shoulders against the cold. ‘We’ve done what we can for now. I want to dig around a bit back home, find out a few things. We’ll come back tomorrow – that’s if we can convince everyone they’ve not just gone into the sea.’

  ‘You don’t think that. The locked door, the broken light? And that blood? That wasn’t catching your finger doing the carrots. That’s real bleeding. You know that.’

  He looked at his watch again. ‘Aye, I do know, and I’m not buying the accident angle. But we can’t get stuck out here. I mean it, if that storm turns about we could be out here for days. Don’t you have your wee girl to get back for?’

  She did, of course. But there was something about this island, backing so bravely into the deep expanse of the Atlantic, that made her want to stay. Turn over more of its stones. Find some answers. ‘What time’s the ferry leaving?’

  ‘An hour or so. Why, where are you going?’

  Paula had turned and set off across the harbour. The stones were slick under her feet, but whether from rain or the sea it was impossible to tell. She shouted back, ‘You go with Rory and help Anne finish up, and I’ll meet you back here. Promise. I just want to see Fiona’s surgery before I go.’

  The key to the doctor’s surgery was left under the flowerpot outside – a place that small couldn’t stretch to a grumpy receptionist and a queue of people outside by eight a.m., which always seemed to be the way in London surgeries. Inside was warm and dry, with a cosy antiseptic smell, and she shut the door gratefully on the wind. The place was tiny – two plastic chairs by a coffee table with magazines three years out of date, and behind a flimsy partition wall, a space barely big enough for Fiona’s desk and one other chair. This was where she’d seen patients. What illnesses would people have on the island? Fishing injuries, maybe, or farming accidents. The odd pregnancy or two. Paula imagined it was very different to inner-city London, where Fiona and Matt had been living until three months ago. Fiona had another framed picture of the two of them on her desk – smiling on a background of brilliant white snow. A ski trip. On the wall there were posters about the usual vaccinations and washing your hands, and a tub of bright sunflower stickers on the side, maybe for kids. How many kids could there be on an island this size? It was very tidy, no dust on the computer screen – Fiona must have been here very recently. Paula had to remind herself this was why she did missing persons. When you looked at the person’s things, when you delved into their life, there was every chance they were still coming back to claim it. That they weren’t dead and stopped and never to return. So you had to treat their life with respect – it might be needed.

  Putting on gloves, she checked in the drawers – office supplies, medical books, nothing remarkable. Inside the top one was a piece of printer paper with a name written on it, in neat bold capitals. Andrea Sharkey. And beneath that name, others – Jimmy Reilly. Niamh Ni Chailean. And then, one that Paula recognised. Matt Andrews. Followed by a question mark.

  She looked at it for a moment. The point on the question mark was deep and dark, as if someone had pressed the pen hard into the page. Matt Andrews? Question mark why? What was the question? Sitting on the desk was a manila file with the name Andrea Sharkey on it – as if Fiona had been called away in the middle of something. Paula flicked it open but it was empty, the notes missing. The address and date of birth were on the front – Andrea was thirty and lived just out the road, if Paula’s sense of the island was correct. Glancing at the clock, she decided she had time to walk to the house. Perhaps there was an innocent explanation for why this woman’s name was on the list, and also on an empty file. At the very least she could rule it out.

  As Paula set off down the coast road, rain stung at her face, and the air she breathed was so pure it almost burned her lungs. She remembered the smell from that holiday, the last one. That west of Ireland tang of seaweed and salt and the smoke from turf fires, rare as some precious perfume. Along the side of the road, separated only by a strip of white sand and a rocky tumble, was the sea, green and foam. Paula tried to shrug off the memory of how it had pulled at her that summer, so cold and so irresistible at once. She’d been twelve, almost thirteen, all legs and hair, feeling constantly stretched by the world, body and soul. Young enough to still go on holiday with her parents, old enough to want something more. What, she hadn’t known.

  The number of the house, 23, hung on the huge concrete doorposts everyone in Ireland seemed to favour, topped with stone eagles. Every farmer was king of his own land out here, with acres of space and no one to tell you what to do. With some trepidation, she walked up the tarmacked drive and rang the doorbell. The house was seventies’ pebble-dash, and for a moment as she waited she held her hand against the hard stones stuck into the wall. No answer. And yet she was sure that, as she peered in the stippled glass of the door, she could see the flicker of a TV.

  She wandered round the back of the house, feeling rude but reminding herself this was perfectly acceptable in Ireland. Growing up, her friends always came to the back door to call for her. Front doors were for weddings and funerals. ‘Hello?’ Nothing. She rounded the side of the house, then jumped back with a small yelp. Something flung itself at the side of a small shed, with a sound of chewing and snarling. Dogs. A kennel, a big one, full of them. At the front of their paddock of barbed wire and chain link, she saw them gather. Two, three. Three Dobermans, or something like that, staring at her intently. Mouths slavering. She took a step closer and a furious barking chorus went up. At least she’d announced her presence.

  A small child stood in the back door of the house. About four, she guessed, and still in blue Thomas the Tank Engine pyjamas although it was now the afternoon, snot plastered to his face and a nasty red rash on his cheek. One hand was wrapped in a white bandage that needed changing. Poor kid. ‘Hi,’ Paula said, over the noise of the dogs. ‘Is your mummy or daddy here?’

  ‘Daaaaaaaddy,’ he called, not taking his eyes off her. ‘There’s a lady.’

  Paula tried to smile at him. ‘Did you hurt your poor hand?’

  He just watched her.

  ‘Those doggies are noisy, aren’t they?’

  ‘The doggies are bad,’ he said in a small voice.

  A man banged out, holding a baby in his arms. No more than a few months old, in pink pyjamas this time. Her face was shrouded in a blanket, also pink. ‘What?’

  Paula held onto the plastic edges of her ID as if it was protection. ‘I’m sorry to land in on you, but I’m with the police – we’re over for the missing persons’ investigation. Did you hear about that?’ He nodded, once. ‘I was just wondering, sir, is Andrea here?’

  ‘Andrea.’ He gave her a long look.

  ‘Yes. Is that your wife?’

  The dogs still barked. ‘Fucking shut it!’ he shouted, and they stopped, leaving a sudden silence in the air. ‘You’re from the mainland?’

  ‘Yes. They just brought me in for—’

  ‘Where did you get Andrea’s name? Did McElhone say to come here?’

  ‘No, he didn’t mention – um, no, I saw it in Dr Watts’s s
urgery. Andrea’s file was out. Dr Watts is missing, as you probably know, so I went to search her office.’

  ‘Good bloody riddance. Meddling bitch.’

  ‘Um . . . so Andrea isn’t here?’

  ‘No, she isn’t fucking here, it’s just me with two bloody weans and a farm to run and TOMAS!’ Paula jumped. The little boy, barefoot in the dirty farmyard, had strayed too close to the fence, his small hand almost at the spikes of it. He withdrew, and the dogs started to bark again, silenced to a whine when the man gave a guttural, wordless yell. The baby in his arms was disturbed into a strange, choking cry, and Paula felt a cold tide wash over her.

  Mr Sharkey put his face close to hers, so close she could smell his unwashed body and see his eyes yellow with tiredness. ‘You listen to me. You’ve got no right to come round here asking questions. I don’t want to hear a word about that bitch of a doctor. I hope she’s dead. I hope she fecking drowned. Now get off my land. Tomas!’ The boy trotted into the house, obediently, and as the man hefted the crying baby the blanket slipped, and Paula had one searing image of the scar that bisected the child’s face.

  Chapter Nine

  Paula was trotting hastily back down the road when Rory splashed up in his jeep, shouting out the window. ‘Where’ve you been? Quinn says you’ve to come now, they’re loading the ferry. What were you doing?’

  She climbed in, pleased to get her face out of the blinding drizzle. ‘I wanted to see where Fiona worked. I found a patient file sitting out, so I went to the house.’

  ‘You went to the Sharkey house? Jesus Christ. Was Peadar there?’

  ‘Is that the husband? He was, yeah. What’s the matter with them? He was pretty hostile. And what the hell happened to that child?’ Paula was turning it over and over in her head, trying to see the connections. A list of names. An empty file. A missing doctor.