Tombstoning

by Unknown

  And yet, what was a mysterious dead body if not exciting? The trouble was, Gary’s death could well be a mystery that was unsolvable. After all, they had never come to any conclusion about Colin’s death fifteen years ago. That was the terrible uncertainty of life – that sometimes you just never get to find out what really happened. It was nothing like a Nancy Drew story, was it? In both Gary’s and Colin’s cases, there were three possibilities. Either they’d fallen by accident, jumped on purpose, or been murdered. If it was an accident, then the trail ended there. If it was suicide, did anyone ever know the real cause? Even those that leave notes – not very many, she remembered from a forensic show on telly – leave big gaping holes in the hearts of those they love, don’t they? Big, unanswered questions, as well as anger and shame. But what were the chances? She didn’t know anything about statistics or probability, but she remembered something recently from the news about cot deaths – in fact hadn’t David mentioned it? – that once was a tragedy, twice was murder. Did that apply to other similar deaths? Maybe that was stupid, but it lodged in her brain as an idea, it seemed to logically make sense that the same thing happening to two people in the same place, two people who had the same backgrounds and who had known each other, well, that couldn’t be coincidence. Which left murder.

  But that was ridiculous as well. For a kick-off, who the hell would be murdering people? And at Arbroath cliffs, of all places? That sort of shit just doesn’t happen in a place like Arbroath. But then again, there were stories on the news every day about deaths, murders, terrible things happening in small towns all over Scotland, all over Britain, everywhere in the world, so why the hell shouldn’t it happen in Arbroath, just because it was the place where she grew up?

  She felt confused, her head cloudy with the swirling possibilities of it all. That she might never know what happened to either Colin or Gary nagged at her a little, gnawed away at her sensibilities, raised as she was on easily-compartmentalized and solvable problems, murder mysteries that were over in an hour or two on television.

  She wanted to talk to David about all this, but she wasn’t sure how to bring it up. They were both going to be heading back to Arbroath, she realized; maybe they would do it together this time, and maybe she could discuss some of it then. Their relationship was getting off to a strange start. So far they’d been to a museum, a school reunion, Arbroath Abbey and a hospital together, and their next dates were at a cemetery and a police station. It wasn’t normal, but it was interesting, she gave it that.

  She saw Amy coming round the corner with a glum look on her face.

  ‘They don’t do the penguin parade today,’ she said. ‘They only do it on special occasions now.’

  Nicola looked around her. This zoo was going to the dogs, she thought. When she was little she’d been brought here for a special treat, all the way from Arbroath, and they’d had elephants back then. Admittedly they were squeezed into a tiny enclosure and looked like fat businessmen bursting out of grey suits, so it was maybe better that they weren’t here any more. They’d also had bears which, unbelievably, some kids had fed orange juice. Recently the zoo had got rid of their giraffes as well, and most of the big cats. Now the penguin parade was being scaled down. What was the point? It had become a steep hill with some monkeys and lizards. Maybe it was for the best, she didn’t really approve of zoos anyway. Still, she regretted that Amy wouldn’t be having the kind of eye-widening experience that she’d had when she came here for the first time. She wondered for a minute whether other aspects of life were being similarly scaled down, all the risk being taken out of life in an ever more litigious world, but then she thought that was just her grumpy, thirty-something side getting the better of her. Fuck that, there was still plenty of excitement in life. Not least what had happened to Gary Spink.

  She took Amy’s hand and headed slowly up the hill in search of an animal enclosure that might also contain some excitement.

  All day the phone never stopped ringing, driving David nuts as he tried to avoid working. So when it rang just before five, as David was putting his computer to sleep and throwing things into a drawer, he considered for a moment not answering it. But then he thought it might be Nicola, and picked up.

  ‘David Lindsay?’

  Oh shit. It was Mr Bowman. David’s mind pictured the old soak across the table from him and Gary in Tutties, and fast-forwarded through the conversation that was about to happen. He knew how this was going to go, and he didn’t like it, but he couldn’t see how it could be avoided.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a heavy sigh.

  ‘It’s Jack here, David. Mr Bowman. I’m just calling because I heard the terrible news about Gary. Shocking, absolutely shocking. I can’t really believe that we were sitting chatting on Saturday, and now he’s dead.’

  ‘Tell me about it,’ said David, already wanting this conversation to end.

  ‘How on earth did it happen?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’ David felt like he was back at school for a moment, being accused by the teacher of something someone else had done. He felt his cheeks flush involuntarily.

  ‘I’m sorry, what a ridiculous thing to ask you. I do apologize. I’m just a little shocked, you understand.’

  You’re fucking shocked, thought David, but he kept his mouth shut.

  ‘What do you want, Mr Bowman?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘I said, what do you want? Why did you phone me?’ It sounded unnecessarily harsh, David realized, but he knew exactly why Mr Bowman had phoned, and he wanted to get through it as quickly as possible.

  ‘Ah, well,’ said Mr Bowman. ‘And please call me Jack. Of course you remember Gary agreeing to come to the school this week, to talk to some of our older pupils about the dangers of… well, this is incredibly awkward, I suppose, considering… but anyway. He was going to talk about tombstoning, you recall, and now… But considering what has happened, I think it’s probably more important than ever that someone comes to the school to have a chat with some of the kids about the cliffs and the dangers.’

  ‘And you thought of me.’

  ‘I know it must seem terribly heartless, considering Gary’s death, to bring it up just now. But don’t you see? Things could really get out of hand now. Word will get out about this straight away, and we could have two dead martyrs for these tombstoning idiots to worship. We both know Gary would never have been doing anything so stupid, but teenagers are very impressionable, and they don’t often take much notice of the truth unless it’s shoved down their throats, unless they’re faced with it in person. Which is where you come in, if you’d be willing. I think it would be fantastic if you would take Gary’s place, and come and talk to some of the pupils.’

  David had already decided he would have to say yes before Jack had even started to ask. He absolutely did not want to be standing in front of some belligerent schoolkids, spraffing shit about not jumping off cliffs, in the vain hope that none of them would break their stupid fucking necks in the future. He absolutely did not want to be put in that position, but for some strange reason – some masochistic instinct, some kind of penitence for the deaths of his two friends, for which he was utterly blameless but felt guilty about nonetheless – he knew he had to do it. It was his own pathetic little exhibition of martyrdom, except only he would know about it.

  ‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘I’d be happy to do it. I’m going to be back in Arbroath on Friday for Gary’s funeral. I could do it then, in the morning sometime. How about eleven?’

  Jack obviously couldn’t believe what he was hearing, and there was silence down the phone for a second’s beat.

  ‘That would be fantastic, David, really it would,’ he said. ‘I’ll make the arrangements at this end. If you just ask for me at the school reception when you arrive. I’ll take you out for lunch afterwards, if you like. It’s the least I can do. If that doesn’t clash with the funeral.’

  ‘That should be fine,’ said David. He felt exhauste
d.

  ‘Well, I’ll let you get on with things,’ said Jack. He sounded delighted with how his day had gone. David wished he felt the same way. ‘I’ll see you on Friday, then.’

  ‘See you then.’

  David had the receiver halfway down when he heard the teacher again.

  ‘Oh, I take it you met up with Neil on Saturday?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Neil Cargill. We discussed him briefly, you remember? I wondered if he was going to the reunion at Bally’s.’

  ‘Yeah, well, he didn’t show up, as expected.’

  ‘Really? Only I saw him when I left Tutties.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I saw him, just a short while after you left Tutties. I finished my drink and headed off, and I literally walked past him outside the pub. I have a good memory for faces and names, you see, and of course we’d just been discussing him, so he was at the forefront of my mind. Anyway, it was only after we’d passed each other that I remembered who he was, so I shouted after him, but he didn’t turn round. It was definitely him, though. I assumed he was in the area because he was heading along to Bally’s for the reunion.’

  ‘You’re sure it was him?’

  ‘I might be getting on a bit but the old grey matter still works, just about. My family is blessed with cancer and heart disease but not senility, so the memory remains intact, for now. It was definitely Neil.’

  ‘Well, he wasn’t at the reunion,’ said David, but then thought back to what someone had said in Bally’s, who was it again? One of Gary’s mates had claimed to have seen him in the place. His memory was hazy, soaked in the booze of the night.

  ‘I suppose some people just don’t go in for that sort of thing,’ said Jack. ‘Anyway, I’ll let you get on. I’ll speak to you on Friday.’

  David put the phone down and sat for a moment. It was only Monday but already this week had gone to shit. He had a talk to give at a school, a funeral to attend and a police statement to file before the week was out. Great. Better get home and get a drink inside me fast, he thought as he slung his jacket on and headed out the door.

  The week dragged grudgingly towards Friday, and as it did something started to creep into David’s mind. That name that seemed to keep popping up at odd moments in Arbroath finally lodged itself in his subconscious, then slowly floated up to the surface of his thoughts – Neil Cargill. He gradually started thinking more and more about Neil, mentally picking at the scab of his childhood memories of the two of them – the four of them including Colin and Gary – and how their lives had been together back in the 80s. It seemed like an entirely different universe, the 1980s. People were still worried about nuclear bombs and the cold war, for fuck’s sake, so it really was a different universe. Not that any of the four of them had been worried about that sort of thing. Most of the time all they worried about was which girl they were going to try and get off with, or where they’d get enough money to get drunk at the weekend. That was life in a small town, David thought: they were like goldfish swimming in their own tiny bowl, minuscule attention spans and flapping mouths agog, while outside the bowl a whole world was getting on with wars, love, death, famine, politics, all the stupidly important shit that teenagers everywhere resolutely ignored, never mind those in a dead-end former fishing town flung half way up the east coast. In eighteen years of childhood, David could remember visiting Edinburgh and Glasgow on only a few occasions for a gig or football match. It wasn’t that these places were impossible to get to – both were a couple of hours on the train or bus. The nearest city, half an hour down the coast road, was Dundee, seen as something of a seething metropolis by the vast majority of Arbroath residents. The fact that it was seen as a culture-free joke of a city by the rest of Scotland spoke volumes for how far adrift Arbroath and the people in it were from the larger scheme of things in Scotland, and beyond into Europe and the rest of world.

  David almost couldn’t believe he was the same human being now as that teenage boy who went drunkenly skinny-dipping at Elliot Beach, made petrol bombs on the High Common and unearthed other kids’ porn stashes from the railway embankment. It seemed impossibly distant. Not that he was exactly worldly-wise now; he hadn’t been trekking around the globe like Nicola had. They said that travel broadens the mind – well, he had only had to travel the length of Fife to Edinburgh to get plenty of broadening. Having said that, the people he met at uni were invariably like him, small-town kids with wide eyes, pretending they weren’t impressed to be walking around the cobbled Old Town where a thousand years of mischief had taken place. He had gravitated towards people of his own kind, people with the same outlook on life, the same down-to-earth demeanour, as if there was an invisible pull between them all, as if they were all destined for the same kind of life, despite coming from all corners of the country.

  These people were different from his schoolfriends. They had got out, like him, from the oppressive emptiness of their small-town origins, they had escaped the mundanity, the mind-numbing boredom of drinking on street corners, vandalizing toilets and bus shelters. His schoolfriends hadn’t. But his uni friends, like him, still carried a little of that with them, they still bridled at cosmopolitan Edinburgh and the university establishment with its swankier (almost always English) students, lecturers and professors. They showed disdain for authority, they lacked respect for, well, for just about everything, including each other and themselves. They had been brought up in a culture of disrespect, and that was something they would take with them to the grave.

  Take to the grave. The thought brought him back to Colin, Gary and Neil. Two of them dead, and now the third name kept popping up. It was so clear now that David wasn’t the only link between Colin, Gary and the cliffs. There was also Neil. Neil, who had joined the Marines, fought in the Gulf War, then quit, only to go into the police, quit that too, and who was now, apparently, living as a hermit somewhere up the coast.

  He had to find out more about Neil, about what had happened to him in the fifteen years since they’d last seen each other. When, exactly, had they last seen each other? He tried to think back, but his memories weren’t date-stamped and he struggled to piece it all together. They had been together the night Colin died, and then they hadn’t seen each other for a few days, but then there was the funeral – but wait, Neil wasn’t at that, was he? And David had left town a couple of days later. So the last time he had seen Neil was when he watched his and Colin’s backs as they walked unsteadily up the High Street in the early hours of that Sunday morning, the same morning a dog walker would come across Colin’s broken body at the bottom of the cliffs a few dawn-filtered hours later.

  He googled the name. What else would anyone do these days? he thought. How the hell did anyone find out about anything before the internet? Now, and surely more so in the future, no one ever had to remember anything ever again, now that the source of all possible knowledge, most of it wildly inaccurate, was only a mouse click away. What would happen to future generations‘ minds, if they never had to retain a single fact?

  He got millions of hits for ‘Neil Cargill’, so he combined it with all the obvious things: ‘Royal Marines’, ‘Arbroath’, ‘Tayside Police’. After five minutes he had nothing. Who in the world didn’t have an internet presence? A bit more rooting around and he eventually unearthed a tiny news story from a Dundee newspaper, dated 22 July 1992, a general round-up of army news from the Condor base which ended with a mention of a ‘Private N. Cargill’ who was apparently discharged on medical grounds from 45 Commando. Was that Neil? The dates seemed to match up with having left after the Gulf War. A further five minutes in front of the screen and he had the name of the sergeant major for the regiment and his number at the Condor base. Looking at the sergeant major’s profile, he noted that he had been in charge of the regiment back when Neil had been discharged. He decided to give him a call.

  It was all surprisingly easy. Pretending to be a journalist researching the Royal Marines in the northeast (he was deliberately v
ague), he got through to Sergeant Major Wilkins’ office straight away. Wilkins wasn’t available, but his secretary made an appointment for him to interview Wilkins on Sunday afternoon. Sunday, thought David – didn’t these people have weekends? Apparently not. He put the phone down, buzzing from his little deception. This must be what it feels like to be a spy, he thought. It wasn’t exactly James Bond, but it was pretty exciting all the same. He tried to picture the forthcoming meeting and how he would play it, face to face with a military man, trying to brazenly lie about why he was there. But why was he there? He wanted to find out more about Neil Cargill, that’s why, and there hadn’t been anything else on the internet. How did private detectives track people down? How could he find out where he lived, and what he’d been doing for the past ten years? Wasn’t there a central website for Arbroath-based gossip? Apparently not, which he thought was strange, because there had been plenty of fucking gossip around when he was a kid – it seemed at times as if the town ran on the stuff. It fuelled the conversations in shops, on streets, in offices and pubs. And now he couldn’t find out more than one small fact about the life of Neil Cargill? Strange.