Tombstoning

by Unknown

  He hadn’t been here in God knows how long, but nothing much seemed to have changed. A line of low sandstone cottages with small windows crouched along the single street which ended abruptly at a cliff top. A couple of more recent houses had been built at the cliff end, presumably because the older ones had been battered to death by the elements. He looked south, the colossal slate expanse of sea taking up most of his vision, with the small pebble beach of Auchmithie Bay and the harbour two hundred feet below him, both dominated by the adjacent headland, the lumbering, lonely Castle Rock, worn away almost to the point of being detached from the mainland altogether. In the bay, slabs of spotted pale brown rock jutted out of the sea like broken bits of oatcake. Beyond that were three or four derelict old cottages perched precariously atop the next headland, looking as if they might crumble into the waves at any minute.

  He turned the car and headed back through the village as small spots of rain started appearing on the windscreen. Didn’t there used to be a hotel with a bar here somewhere? He had planned to start asking around in there, as he didn’t fancy going door-to-door, but the hotel seemed to have disappeared, at least there was no sign of it now. As he drove back down the tiny street he noticed the lane – a rough, grass track really – which came off the road and headed steeply down the ravine next to the headland, winding its way down to the stony beach and harbour hundreds of feet below. From here he could only just make out a couple of small fishing boats draped in ragged tarpaulin and hauled up above the high-water mark next to two tiny lock-up sheds and a line of lobster and crab pots.

  Opposite this lane was the one building in the village which wasn’t a house, the But ’n’ Ben. If there was no hotel and no bar in Auchmithie any more, this was going to have to be where David started asking around. He parked the car and went inside. The But ’n’ Ben maybe called itself a licensed restaurant, but really it was just two twee cottages knocked through, with a scattering of tables, chairs and some frilly patterned curtains framing the windows. The low-ceilinged space was full of random seafaring junk, and the walls were lined with local artwork, all seascapes and all for sale. The pine furniture was pure country kitchen and as David looked around he noticed that he was the youngest person in the place by a good thirty years. The room was packed with old folk, either posher sorts from elsewhere in Angus sporting Berghaus fleeces and enjoying a quaint evening out, or more seasoned, spirited locals getting fired into the drinks menu as much as the old-school granny cooking on offer. The air was thick with the smell of smoked fish and noisy with the chatter of three dozen patrons at varying stages of deafness. A doddery old man in filthy blue overalls with grey hair sprouting from his ears was standing at what passed for the bar, really just a till on a bench with a couple of whisky optics mounted behind. He was chatting to the old dear behind the till who was dressed in regulation restaurant uniform of white blouse and black skirt, making her smile and laugh so that the wrinkles on her forehead bunched up together in a way that reminded David of curtains being drawn open to let sunlight in. She spotted David in the doorway and cut short her conversation with the salty dog.

  ‘Can I help, dear?’ She gave him the once-over. Clearly thirty-somethings in T-shirts, jeans and trainers were a novelty in the But ’n’ Ben. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have any tables free at the minute.’

  ‘That’s OK, I’m actually trying to find someone. I wondered if you knew of a Neil Cargill living around here?’

  ‘There have been plenty of Cargills pass through over the years, dear,’ said the woman. ‘But I’m fairly sure there isn’t a Neil Cargill in the village at the moment.’

  ‘If Edith doesn’t know him, then he’s not from Auchmithie, that’s for sure,’ said the old man at the bar. ‘She makes it her business to know everything about everyone, don’t you, Edith?’

  ‘Och, away and boil yer heid, you,’ said Edith with a laugh, before turning back to David. ‘He’s making me out to be a terrible gossip, so he is.’

  ‘Are you saying that you’re not?’

  ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying, Fergus. I’m just interested in people, that’s all. There’s nothing wrong with that, is there?’

  ‘So, neither of you have heard of a Neil Cargill, then?’ said David. ‘He’s about my age, stocky with a square jaw, and I think he used to fish for lobsters here a few years ago.’

  ‘Jesus!’ said Fergus. ‘That guy? Is that who you’re looking for? He was a right strange one, so he was.’

  ‘Oh, I remember him,’ said Edith. ‘He was a Cargill then, was he? He was never from the village, though. And he kept to himself – never spoke to anyone around here, not even to say hello in the street. A right unsociable sod. To be honest, we were glad when he stopped turning up.’

  ‘When was that?’

  ‘Oh, a good couple of years now,’ said Fergus. ‘We were glad to see the back of him. There was no law against him fishing these waters, you understand, but there’s an agreement amongst the villagers that this little patch is just ours to fish. He turned up one day and started laying down his pots. We tried to reason with him, but he just ignored us. There was nothing we could do, really. So when he stopped showing up, we never asked any questions, we just got on with it.’

  ‘If he didn’t live in the village, do you know where he stayed?’

  ‘For a while, I think, he stayed in one of the coastguard cottages, over on Meg’s Craig,’ said Edith.

  ‘Where’s that, exactly?’

  ‘I’ll show you,’ said Fergus.

  The old-timer headed out the door, motioning for David to follow. For a moment, he thought the old guy was actually going to take him there, but as soon as they were outside he stopped and pointed. Across the ravine and a row of muddy brown fields, David could just make out the short line of houses, almost floating at the edge of the land, balanced precariously over the sea’s edge.

  ‘How do I get there?’ he asked. The old man was already walking inside, as the rain started to thicken a little, becoming a solid drizzle, and David followed.

  ‘Oh, he’ll not be there any more,’ said Fergus, settling back down at the bar. ‘Those cottages have been abandoned and boarded up for two years now.’

  ‘That’s right, dear,’ said Edith, who hadn’t moved to serve anyone in the place. ‘The Thompsons – they’re the farmers who own all that land from Meg’s Craig down to Tanglehall and inland to Windyhills – they were using the buildings for storage for a while. Not sure what they were keeping in there, right enough, but then apparently one of the roofs fell in, and they didn’t think it was safe any more, so they’ve just been boarded up and left.’

  ‘And that’s where this Neil Cargill stayed, before all that?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Edith. ‘But he never spoke to anyone, so I’m not entirely sure.’

  ‘But how do you get there? Just out of interest. Do you have to go across the fields?’

  ‘No, son,’ said Fergus. ‘There’s a farm track leads out there. Don’t know what state it’ll be in these days, but it should still be useable. You’ll have gone past the start of the track just before you came into the village. But there’s nothing out there, not now. If that’s where your man Cargill was staying, then he’ll be long gone years ago.’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ said David, ignoring the curious looks he was getting from both of them. ‘You’ve been a big help.’

  He headed outside, where the wind had picked up and the rain was settling in for the evening, it seemed. The sky had turned into a solid, low bank of grey above his head. He looked over at the cottages on the next headland, about a mile or two away, but you couldn’t get there directly. From here it looked like a remote and abandoned place, thought David, just the kind of place Neil might’ve liked the seclusion of. What the hell, he thought, as he got in the car, started the engine and headed back out the village.

  The farm track was easy to miss, hidden by some overgrown bushes along the roadside, and once David reversed back a littl
e to drive down it, he noticed a rusted old sign warning it was a private road and no unauthorized vehicles were allowed. Past the bushes and the sign the track opened out a little, but it was full of potholes and rocks, with large clumpy tufts of grass and weeds sprouting up the middle. Maybe in a four-wheel drive or a tractor this was easy going, but not in his wee town car, creaking and clunking as he trundled slowly over stones and divots, rocking the car from side to side. The rain was coming down heavily now, and the rhythmic wheeze of his windscreen wipers made his car sound asthmatic.

  At five miles an hour, it took him longer than expected to reach the cottages. Once there, he wondered why he’d bothered. There were three houses, terraced together. The one nearest the sea was only really half a house; the roof had collapsed in on it, and the sea-facing wall was little more than a pile of sandy red rubble. The other two houses were in relatively good nick, their roofs a little saggy but still intact, and their windows boarded over with plywood. The paintwork had peeled and damp areas were spread over the exposed walls.

  David switched off the engine and the car’s heartbeat stopped, leaving just the sound of the rain and wind outside gently rocking him in the driver’s seat. He got out and started to walk around the cottages. He could see through the rubbled wall that the tumbledown house had nothing in it – bare internal walls now exposed to the elements, a fireplace full of masonry debris and an old bird’s nest. He walked round its far wall, and was amazed at how close to the cliffs this side of the terrace now was. He wondered when the houses had been built, and how much the erosive battering from the sea had dragged the buildings towards the precipice they now stood on. The rain was even heavier now, and from here he could barely make out Auchmithie back across the ravine. Between them was Castle Rock, and from here he could see how it got its name: it looked like a giant sandcastle that a kid might have made on a beach, its edges beginning to crumble and decay. He looked down at the sheer drop from the headland he was on, and felt dizzy for a moment as he imagined himself as a raindrop, plummeting down into the frothy, yellowy foam that ebbed and flowed, occasionally crashing into the rocks below as wave after wave gradually beat the land into submission. He looked in the opposite direction from Auchmithie and thought he could just about make out another bay, cutting its crescent shape into the land beyond Meg’s Craig. This was completely hidden from Auchmithie, and he didn’t remember seeing it from the sea when they’d been on the boat trip, but he must’ve done because it was completely exposed to the sea. He tried to remember that trip, in the summer heat, laughing and joking with Nicola and Amy, and it seemed like a different country to the one he was now inhabiting, miserable and isolated, with the rain beating down on it and the wind making the high grass and weeds around his feet jerk this way and that in protest.

  He rounded the tumbledown house and examined the backs of the other two cottages. The windows and small back doors round this side were also boarded up. As he looked closer, though, through the rain, he saw that the corner of one of the boards on a window was loose, slightly peeled away from the window frame at the bottom. He went over to it, having to tramp through a tangle of nettles, weeds and dandelions to get there. He tugged at the corner, and the whole board came away quite easily in his hands. Behind it there was no glass left in the window frame, and beyond that only the gloomy darkness of the house’s interior. He thought he smelled something, a smell which reminded him of the But ’n’ Ben, a smoky sensation, but with the underlying scent of something unmistakably from the sea behind it. He peered into the house. As his eyes got accustomed to the dark, he started to make out shapes inside – a doorway here, an empty fireplace there. Then he spotted something in the corner furthest away from the window. As he gazed at it, David’s eyes widened. It looked like a bed with a sleeping bag on it, and there was a large holdall lying on the floor next to it. Further along the same wall seemed to be a small, portable gas stove. Jesus H! Someone was living here!

  He thought he heard something through the whoosh of the wind and the sound of rain hammering the ground around him. He turned to look behind him but before he’d even got halfway he felt an unbelievable and shocking pain shooting from the back of his head, down his neck and shoulders and tunnelling down into his spine. Sudden sparkles of light filled his vision as he reeled forwards, smacked his head off the gritty, crumbling wall of the house and passed out into unconsciousness, a dark emptiness filling his mind completely.

  The first sensation he felt was pain, unfocussed but brutal pain, ebbing and flowing through his body, coming in wave after wave, making him feel nauseous and dizzy. He drifted like that for a while, surges of overwhelming sickness and aches pulsing through him so that he could do nothing at all except have his mind battered about like a piece of flotsam caught in a tidal rush. After a while he started to drift in and out of consciousness, the pain becoming more focussed, more localized. His head. His head throbbed agonizingly, and it felt as if his pulse would burst his eardrums. His back ached too, lower down and to the side; more than just muscular, it felt like some organ or other was collapsing. And his wrists, his wrists felt as if they were slit.

  He suddenly jerked awake with the thought. His body spasmed, causing each of his now distinct pains to increase, and as he tensed his arms he realized that his hands were tied behind him with some kind of wire. That explained the wrist pain. His head continued to pound so that it was the only thing he could hear. He opened his eyes but all he could see were little explosions of light bursting out of darkness like sub-atomic reactions creating particles out of nothing. He was hit by another wave of nausea and felt himself drifting back into the hole of unconsciousness. He tried to fight it, but the hammering of his head became too much and he passed out.

  He dreamt he was standing on the ocean floor with Colin, Gary and Neil. Somehow it was the bar of Tutties Neuk, except underwater. They could see a torrential storm happening way above them on the sea’s surface, but down here they were safe from harm, quietly supping their pints and chatting about the football as crabs scuttled past and fish meandered in between them. The puggy flashed invitingly next to them. It felt good. He wondered why more people didn’t live underwater when it felt this reassuring. All pubs should be like this, he thought. The storm raged overhead, and they kept drinking their pints and laughing. They stayed like that in comfort for a long time.

  Suddenly he felt wet. Had the storm managed to penetrate their haven after all? Another splash, this time more real, more cold, across his face and chest, and his lungs froze momentarily in shock. A third drenching and he was awake. His head was pounding with pain again, somewhere at the back of his skull and on his forehead, the pain seeming to pass back and forth between the two via the backs of his eyes and through his brain. He opened his eyes again. This time there were no flashes, but he couldn’t focus on the grey around him. Gradually he started to differentiate the sound of the sea shushing against the shore from the rhythmic throbbing of his head. He distinctly heard a gull cry somewhere nearby. The swimming grey in front of him started to separate into shapes. There was the disused fireplace, the one he’d seen earlier when he looked in from outside the house. That meant that over there must be – there they were – the bed and the portable stove. The holdall was gone. The board was removed from the window he’d looked in through, and the empty window frame was casting a tepid, soupy light into the room. Outside the rain was still falling, but he could just make out patches of lighter sky overhead.

  ‘Thank fuck.’

  It had been fifteen years, but he recognized Neil’s voice straight away. It was coming from behind him. He tried to turn but the pain in his head threatened to overwhelm him, so he jerked forward uncomfortably. He realized now he was sitting on a chair, or more accurately, he was tied to a chair by his wrists and ankles.

  ‘Neil? What the fuck is this?’ He tried to indicate his wrists and ankles, but could hardly move, and just shunted the chair a little sideways.

  ‘Do you always sl
eep that long when you get knocked out? I’ve been bored out of my fucking mind waiting for you to come round. If I’d known, I wouldn’t have hit you so hard. But then you did bang your head off the wall on the way down. Apologies for the water to wake you up, by the way, but I got tired waiting.’

  ‘Why are you doing this, Neil? Untie me, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Sorry, no can do.’

  ‘I came here to find you.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means I knew you would come and find me eventually. I’ve been waiting. I’m surprised you weren’t here sooner.’

  ‘Well, you seemed to have disappeared off the face of the earth.’

  ‘Good. That’s the way I like it.’

  ‘But I found you. And so will others. In fact, there will be people coming here looking for me soon, if I don’t report back tonight. They knew where I was going, and they knew to come and look for me if I didn’t check back with them.’

  David heard laughter behind him, a full-throated laugh with a chesty rattle to it, and Neil walked round to face him.

  David didn’t know what he’d been expecting, but the figure in front of him wasn’t much different to the boy he’d last seen that Saturday night all those years ago. He wasn’t as heavy-set as he used to be, but his muscles were more clearly defined under the plain green T-shirt he was wearing. His forehead had more lines across it and his eyes were darker and sadder than they ever were before. His close-cropped dark hair had flecks of grey through it, as did the week or so of stubble on his jutting chin. His face still fell naturally into a frown, even, as now, when he was laughing. He had the look of a man who knew a hundred different ways to kill someone, but he also looked as if that knowledge weighed heavy on him. His forearms were covered in tattoos, and he wore a chunky watch, combat trousers and heavy black boots.