'Could you tell me where I would find Mr Sinclair?' Murray asked. He had seen the name on a board at the gate.
The only response was a tightening of the lips. At a distance, Murray had imagined this might be the minister himself, but the cuffs of the trousers were frayed, the boots cracked, a curve of torn lining showed below the old jacket. Close up, white hair and deep lines scored on the cheeks marked him as old.
'What about that then?' the old man asked.
'Mr Sinclair,' Murray repeated. 'I was wondering where I'd find him.'
'That's a berberis bush. Would you describe that as bonnie?
Sometimes we just have to take a minute to look at things.'
Spiders' webs by the hundred were strung between the narrow spiky branches. Each line was beaded with drops of moisture that caught a fraction of the light so that the webs made a shawl thrown across the bush.
'I haven't seen that before,' Murray admitted, recognising the need for diplomacy.
'It's the kind of thing you miss if you're aye in a hurry.' Honour satisfied, he took account of the question. 'You want the minister?' Murray nodded.
'I doubt you'll not catch him. Did you try the manse? '
'I will if you tell me where it is.'
'Down the road a bit – behind the wall on your left. Before you come to the village. Here, you know why it's out there and not in the village?'
Professionally patient, Murray said, 'No idea.'
'So he'd never have to pass a fisherman's door to get to the kirk. A minister passing the door when the boat was out being bad luck, you ken. In the old days, the only time a minister would be in a fisherman's house was for a funeral – and then it was all right for all the boats would be in the harbour. The young men don't bother about that stuff. They've been too lucky for too long.' He eased the spade to and fro in the earth. 'It's a gey while since a man's been drowned out of this village.'
'You've been here a long time. You must have heard of a couple called Fletcher.'
The old man coughed sardonically and hawked a loop of green phlegm among the silver webs. 'Only a hundred first to last. It's all Fletchers, did you not know that? Or Thomsons. Two families of Hillises, but they're incomers. Or Grahams. There's aye Grahams,' he offered grudgingly with the manner of a man making an admission.
'The couple I'm thinking of adopted two girls. This would be more than twenty years ago.'
'Sandy Fletcher: And Grace – that was Grace Hillis before she married.'
'I had an address, but the house is empty.'
'That whole row's empty now. And will be till the winter's by. They're all holiday cottages.'
'Where have the Fletchers gone? Have they left the village?'
'I'll show you Sandy's place.'
With the slow rolling gait of a ploughman, he led the way, offering obliquely phrased enquiries that Murray parried with the ease of practice. At the church porch, they came on a younger, more rumpled version of Murray's guide, standing with his head back staring upwards. The chain for the bell hung from the tower down the wall, but the hook that should have held it up out of reach was twisted and sagging loose.
As they came up, the man lowered his gaze to them. 'Aye, Bob,' he said. 'I've been thinking – all this talk about the Lower Paid Worker,' he gave each word an emphatic capital, 'it's awful degrading, ken.'
Murray walked on a few steps. The white marker stone in front of him was incised: To a Merchant Seam: Of the Second World War August 1940, Known Unto God
Behind him he heard the man's complaint, ‘even if they do get a productivity agreement, it's not right. You're digging a grave and he's there with the stop-watch. And you stop to itch your brow and the watch stops. And it starts when you start – but it's just impossible to dig out a hole without catching your breath. And then he says to me, Now the box is such – and– such so I'll allow you a time that takes that into account.'
At last the old man plodded to join him. Taking it for granted that Murray had been listening, he said, 'Oh, it's sacrilege' – the word took Murray by surprise – 'just sacrilege. Folk should be allowed to go in peace, not pestered with watches over their coffins and burial places.'
'You were going to show me where the Fletchers stay.'
'Ah... where Sandy bides now.'
His tone gave it away for Murray even before he pointed to the stone. It stood beside the one to the dead seaman. Sacred to the Memory of...
'That's Sandy. Grace lives with a sister now – somewhere down South Shields way I've heard, but I couldn't swear to that. He turned Catholic when he married her, but he turned back later – and that's why he's there.'
'Did Mr Sinclair know them?' Since there was no Catholic church in the village or even near, the minister – assuming he had been here and possessed even of normal curiosity – remained the likeliest source of information about the Fletchers ' adopted children.
'Certainly. And he knew his father as well – he's buried over there.'
'I'll try the manse then.'
'Ah, but he's not there. He's away down to Miss Sturrock's. You can see the gable end of her house from here. You'll have missed them though. He was in an awful hurry.'
But as he came to the house, a stout white-haired woman in a tweed skirt and anorak was drawing the door shut behind her. She had a stick tucked under her arm and a binocular case of scuffed leather slung over her shoulder. Only her ankles, disappearing into sturdy boots, seemed vulnerable. She directed at him the look of a woman who would not welcome an interruption.
'Miss Sturrock?'
For an uncharacteristic moment under that steady gaze, he wasn't sure if he had caught her name correctly.
'Should I remember you?' she asked.
The oddness of the question made him hesitate. 'My name is Wilson. It's the minister I'm looking for – Mr Sinclair.'
'You've missed him by about half an hour.' At his look of frustration, she relented. 'But we'll catch him, if you don't mind a walk.'
Despite the thin ankles and the boots, she set a brisk pace. 'If I hadn't been in the middle of a baking, you wouldn't have caught me either. He's had a sighting of a yellow-browed warbler up by the loch.' She gave him a sharp glance, looking for a reaction. 'You're not a birdwatcher yourself.'
'I'm a city man,' Murray said with a sour private smile.
They turned off the road on to a grudging space left between the barbed wire edging a field and the grey stone of an eight-foot high estate wall. He fell into single file on the path behind her. 'I used to take the children up here on summer days,' she remarked over her shoulder.
He grunted.
They squeezed through a gate swung in a half circle of iron guards to keep out sheep. It was like stepping from a room into the open air. Below them, the sea was patterned light and dark from the scoured valleys that lay under its calm surface.
'We're high up,' he exclaimed in surprise. They were standing at the top of a cliff.
'We'll be higher still before we're done. All the way up by there, and then down again to the loch.'
The path took a long upward curve, close all the way to the edge of the drop, towards the summit of a sheer face of rock whitened by generations of guano. He recognised common gulls, herring gulls, guillemots, razorbills, kittiwakes, stirring and squabbling and swooping from it. Farther out, a gannet folded its wings and plunged towards the water. His breath began to come faster. Striding on, the woman pecked at him with her glance. 'You don't get a climb like this among city streets. I've walked this Head in all weathers for thirty years. And, since I've retired, my time's my own.'
At the summit, they turned their backs on the sea and jolted down a slope towards a rocky shore. They skirted a steep hill rubbed with slides of stone among the coarse grass.
'Over there – to your left. It's the only decent shelter on the Head. Everywhere else the winter winds are too cruel for trees. Alex Sinclair should be somewhere about there – that's where the sighting was.'
On
the side they approached, the ground sloped down sharply into the loch. The trees were thinly ranked on the other side; and they made their way round, jumping a meagre stream. The loch was about a mile in length and beyond it to the north there was a glimpse of the sea. Among the trees, they could hear the noise of water lapping into the loch over a little weir. They went slowly through the thin cover without a sight of either quarry, man or bird.
'Never mind,' Miss Sturrock whispered, crouching to peer up through angled branches of willow.
As Murray contemplated the forbidden possibility of planting a kick on her tweed-bound rump, the connection that had been niggling at him fell into place.
Up here with the children, Miss Sturrock, retired...
'Were you the teacher? In the village school?'
'Sh-ssh,' she hissed. 'I wonder – could that be – if it would move – I think it might be...'
But it wasn't, and she admitted, moving cautiously between the bare trunks, and not distracted but freed by the other activity of searching for the bird, that, yes, she had been the teacher, later the head teacher and at last the sole teacher in the village school. 'Do you have any memory of two girls who were adopted by Sandy and Grace Fletcher?'
She stopped so abruptly that he almost touched her. 'Aah.' Her breath sighed out. 'What has Alice done?'
'Alice?'
'Francesca and Alice,' she said impatiently. 'The Fletchers adopted them.'
'Frances, yes. But the other child's name was Urszula.'
'Oh, Grace Fletcher wouldn't have that. It was foreign. Grace couldn't have felt she belonged to her – not with a name like that. It seemed such an odd name anyway – I mean, I knew the mother was Belgian. Alice is such a pretty name, I told the child. It's the name of a little girl like you who passed through the mirror into Wonderland.'
'Did everyone know who their mother had been?' If that was so, Father Hurtle's vision of setting them free of the past had gone wrong from the start.
'How do you keep a secret like that? How do you keep any secret at all in a village where everyone's related on one side of the blanket or the other?' With the binoculars, she swept the opposite bank as she continued, 'After his brother's wedding last weekend, Jack Graham gave his wife a beating – hands and feet – because she'd danced with Peter Hillis. Of course, poor Margaret didn't even know they'd fallen out. They quarrel over fouled nets or over berths in the harbour – one thing or another incessantly. And it was the wrong time of the month for Jack. All that family go funny at the full moon. It's the in-breeding. I'm not local here, you understand.'
After thirty years?
'The village knew that the mother had been murdered?'
'I don't know how much difference it made. Perhaps the damage was there already. But, of course, people did know. And then Sandy Fletcher had his accident – not on the boat, but in his car coming back from the Harbour Inn. Drunk naturally – but before that he wasn't a heavy drinker. Just normal for a fisherman, there are no drinkers like fishermen. But after his accident he couldn't work, they left the house in the village – for a while they lived over there,' she pointed between the bare hills across the loch, 'in a miserable place. Afterwards they went to Braefoot – that's about twelve miles up the coast. By that time, Sandy was a different man altogether, pathetic really. It's one thing to want to be good and another to be good. And I always suspected it was Sandy who dropped the first hint of where the girls had come from. One night in the Harbour Inn just before he fetched them. So maybe, as well as the accident, it was guilt. He wanted to be a good man, but he could never be a wise one.'
'When I mentioned them, why did you ask ifAlice had done something? What were you expecting me to say?'
'You didn't say anything though, did you?' They had come almost to the end of the trees. 'I didn't miss that.'
'I'm a private enquiry agent. I've been hired by a relative to try to trace them.'
'After all this time?' She looked at him sceptically.
'An uncle – in Belgium. There were reasons for the delay. He had troubles of his own. He was too friendly with the Germans during the Occupation.'
'Why would he want to find them now?'
Murray shrugged. 'He doesn't seem to be short of money. He may want to help them.' It was a reasonable cover story; on the way down, he had worked out a different one on the assumption no one would know their background.
'It might be better for him if you don't find them,' Miss Sturrock said abruptly. As Murray glanced at her, she turned her face away from him. 'I never met another child like her. She would say to the others, "When I go outside, you will all hit me and I shall cry – but you will get into trouble." A child of six. It was like an invitation to them to hit her. She was so strange. Sometimes I think of her and wonder if one day I'll open a paper and read that she's been murdered. Unless, of course, by this time she's learned some protective coloration. Learned to pretend to be like other people.'
'You said she was only a child.' Murray's voice was tight with suppressed anger. It took him by surprise; but he did not want to think about why he felt it.
'I don't understand why Alex Sinclair isn't here,' Miss Sturrock said. In every direction they were alone. 'I think I'll go back. There isn't any point in looking.' After a step or two, however, she swung about and faced him. 'There isn't anything I could tell you that would help you to find them. They were glad to get away and that was the last we heard of them. Alice went first although she was the younger, only sixteen. The man left a wife and child behind. Frances went too, but that was later. I always thought Frances was fond of Grace Fletcher.'
'It was – Alice you found strange.' He remarked on it casually, spoke quietly, trying to undo the harm he had done; yet he saw her hesitate. The wind came up, rattling the branches, so that he had to raise his voice, 'You must be curious about what happened to her. And that's what I'm trying to find out.'
'She was...clumsy,' Miss Sturrock said. 'Such a little girl and she kept bumping into people. The boys would kick her with their heavy boots. Spat, she spat when she was talking. She sprayed them and they got angry. Yet she was pretty, like a doll – and intelligent. More intelligent than they were which didn't help. She would say, "You are only the son of a common fisherman." Stupid was a favourite word of hers. I've never met another child like her before or since. She seemed to know what the weak spot would be.' The old woman gave a laugh that after so many years had not lost its edge of irritation. 'Don't imagine I was exempt. "You don't speak like the lady on the radio – you speak like the village children.” She had no sense of self preservation.' Again she fell into the precise, oddly assured child's voice she reproduced for each of the girl's utterances. ' "You know Princess Andrea in the story? She is me." Not "I am she"– it's the ordinary boastful childish statement gone wrong. "She is me". She lived in a fantasy world and none of us mattered.'
'None of that sounds so bad to me,' Murray said. 'She was only a kid, and she was having a bad time.'
She shook her head, a brief sharp movement. It occurred to him it was the gesture she had used when a child was being slow; as if she might cry to him, 'Don't you see?'
Instead she said, 'You've missed the minister. He's not retired like me, perhaps someone caught him before he could escape on to the Head.'
'That's all right. I don't suppose he could have told me more than you've done.'
'You're a good listener,' she said grimly. 'I'm going back. You go on over the hill – that way – and you'll get a look at the house they lived in after Sandy Fletcher's accident.'
'I don't think,' Murray began, 'it would be worth –'
'I don't want you walking back with me. You make too much noise. Go on over the hill, if you want to understand the life they had.'
After a moment he shrugged and began to walk in the direction she had indicated. 'I say!'
He turned.
'What have you seen while we've been talking?'
He stared back uncomprehending.
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'A wheatear – there with rust on its throat. Didn't you see?' Triumph reddened her leathery cheeks and she watched him maliciously. 'Or the moorhen ? Or the coot there ?' A dark bird tugged a caravan of ripples under the bank. 'And so much to hear! You don't know where to look unless you listen. Don't preen yourself,' Miss Sturrock cried. 'Don't preen yourself on being clever about getting a silly old woman to talk so much. Of course, I think about her. But I can't see how anyone would have made a difference.
27 The Knife
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 13TH
They hadn't drawn the curtains in the house across the road. He could see, as if held in a frame, a table uncleared from the evening meal and a woman with a boy who might have been her son, their heads close together as if sharing a joke. In a moment, the father, shirt-sleeved, came through the open door from the kitchen and with his hand raised to his mouth bit a piece from something and stood watching them as he chewed. Dull suburban home movie; but in Murray's fatigue it had an hypnotic effect that was hard to break.
'Travelling,' he said without turning his head. 'I spent some of the day travelling. And I went for a walk along a cliff.'
At his back Irene said, 'You're so tired you can hardly talk straight.'
'I've had a long day. I went looking for a minister and found a schoolteacher.'
'And then you came to see me.'
Armoured by routine or indifference, the actors in the playlet across the street seemed to have no need of privacy. Reaching up with his arms on either side, he drew the curtains shut. 'I came anyway,' he said, 'but I wasn't sure you'd be here.' When he turned, he moved abruptly as if to take her by surprise. He had thought she was standing, but she had seated herself on the couch and he had not expected that. 'You might have been at the hospital. Or at Mother's.'
'He hasn't made up his mind whether he wants me to visit,'
Irene said. 'He thinks I should have stopped him from going to Frances when she phoned.'
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