The Malice of Waves

by Mark Douglas-Home

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘A storm’s coming.’ The right side of her mouth pulled to one side, a gesture of resignation at the routine drama of island life.

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘That’s what they’re saying.’ She laughed. ‘Board up your windows, nail your sheep to the nearest fencepost.’

  ‘That bad?’

  ‘Aye, so they say.’

  ‘I’ll stay then.’

  ‘Why?’ Catriona frowned and shot him a sideways glance.

  ‘I like storms.’

  Catriona paid studious attention to pouring his coffee to conceal her amusement at the odd habits of mainlanders while Cal looked around the tea room. ‘I wasn’t expecting to find something like this out here. Nice place.’

  ‘Aye, it’s all right, I suppose.’ She glanced at him again. ‘It’s been a bit slow this afternoon, but.’ She put a napkin on the counter followed by the full mug. ‘That’ll be two twenty.’

  Cal paid and dropped his change into a charity tin: holidays for the families of lost fishermen. ‘Thanks. I’ll let you get on with what you were doing.’ He picked up the mug, leaving the napkin. ‘Is it all right if I go outside?’

  Catriona shrugged. ‘Just mind you bring the mug back.’

  Leaning against the bonnet of his pickup, Cal kept a watch on the sound for Wheeler’s dinghy and recalled where he’d come across Catriona’s name for the first time. It was in the office of Wheeler’s lawyer. Cal had flown from Edinburgh to Southampton for the day. His plane was half an hour late and he’d been taken to a meeting room by a flustered PA. The lawyer, Mr Close (he didn’t offer a first name) was waiting, sitting behind a desk. His hands were clasped in front of him and resting on a red file. Cal noticed the lawyer’s fingers. They were stubby, an alarming purple colour, in contrast to his face which was pinched and a shade somewhere between grey and white. That washed-out look was accentuated by what the lawyer wore: rimless glasses, grey suit, white shirt and a diamond-patterned tie in two tones of grey. His hair was short and bristly, greyish too. Instead of standing to welcome Cal, Mr Close remained seated. ‘Ah, finally,’ he announced with a sigh, gesturing to Cal to sit opposite him. He waited for the PA to bring a glass of water.

  ‘Can we proceed?’ He took Cal’s answer for granted. ‘As I explained on the phone, Dr McGill, it’s advisable for you to read this’ – he indicated the file – ‘before you meet Mr Wheeler.’ He separated his interlocked fingers and laid his right hand flat on the file’s cover. ‘You won’t be allowed to take notes of any kind or to make copies. Nor will you be able to refer to the contents. These are Mr Wheeler’s instructions.’

  He waited for Cal’s response. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Do we understand each other?’

  ‘Yes,’ Cal said. ‘I think we do.’

  Mr Close pushed the file across the table. A damp imprint was left on the cover when he removed his hand. ‘Very well, since we are late I suggest you start reading. I will stay to answer any questions.’

  Cal thanked him coolly for his time and started at the first page. It told the chronological story of Max Wheeler’s disappearance, beginning with the Jacqueline sailing down the Solent in late February five years before. Max, on an extended half-term break, had accompanied his father with two hired hands for crew. Their names were Colin Dunmore and his girlfriend Samantha Wallace, known as Sam. Three days after the boat party departed Southampton, Wheeler’s three daughters, Joss, aged seventeen, Chloe, fifteen, and Hannah, eleven, left by road for Scotland. They were driven by Rosemary Coombs, their deceased mother’s younger sister, her only sibling. They spent one night with friends in southern Scotland and the next in a B&B in the north-west. They caught the ferry sailing at mid-morning the next day. Approximately four hours separated the arrivals of the two parties of travellers at their final destination. The Jacqueline anchored in the bay on the north side of Priest’s Island before ten a.m. on 2nd March. Rosemary Coombs parked her BMW by the harbour at the Deep Blue on Eilean Dubh, a kilometre away across the sound, soon after one p.m. Wheeler was waiting to pick them up in the Jacqueline’s dinghy having earlier disembarked his crew and their bicycles for a short Hebridean holiday. (By nightfall Colin and Sam would be thirty kilometres to the north, on the Island of Harris.)

  At one thirty, the girls and their aunt went aboard the Jacqueline where Max greeted them. According to Rosemary Coombs, he was in high spirits and looking forward to camping alone that night on Priest’s Island.

  Around two, Wheeler took Max, his tent, sleeping bag and a backpack of food across the bay to the wooden jetty. Hannah went too after making a fuss about Max having more fun than her since he’d been helping to sail the Jacqueline when she had been stuck in a car for days. Later that afternoon, Joss and Chloe crossed to the jetty in the dinghy to check that Hannah was all right. They found her assisting or hindering (depending on whether Chloe’s or Hannah’s story was to be believed) Max to pitch his tent and to light a fire with driftwood. By evening Hannah was cold and wet having fallen into a sea-pool fully dressed. Since she didn’t have dry clothes, she agreed to leave the island with her sisters. Max was happy on his own. As on previous occasions when he’d spent the night on the island, his tent had been pitched on the hillside to the west of the old shieling which was close to the southern shore. It was Max’s favourite place. Out of sight of the Jacqueline, it allowed him to imagine he was in his own private domain. From his tent he looked out over an archipelago of islands.

  At six thirty, as dusk was beginning to fall, Joss, Chloe and Hannah returned to the Jacqueline. Hannah showered and the family ate supper at eight. Hannah was first to bed before nine. Joss followed soon after – the three girls were sharing the same cabin. Chloe went on deck at nine thirty to keep an arrangement she had made with Max to signal him ‘good night’ by torchlight. Despite Chloe flashing for five minutes, Max didn’t answer. Although Chloe was concerned, her father was reassuring, saying that Max had probably fallen asleep as he would have been exhausted after his journey by sea. At ten o’clock Chloe joined her sisters in bed. Wheeler and Rosemary Coombs retired soon after to the two remaining cabins.

  The following morning, Wheeler woke early. At around eight, he went ashore with the intention of surprising Max by cooking breakfast on the fire. The boy’s tent was empty. His sleeping bag was inside but still rolled up. The fire had gone cold overnight. After shouting for Max, Wheeler searched the island. At nine thirty, he returned to the Jacqueline. Twenty minutes later he dropped Rosemary Coombs, Joss, Chloe and Hannah at the island’s jetty to continue the search. He crossed the sound to Eilean Dubh intending to ring the police on the Deep Blue’s landline. Going ashore at the harbour, he found the island’s resident officer, Constable Dyer, already there. He was investigating vandalism to Rosemary Coombs’ car. The damage had been discovered by Bella MacLeod when she opened the tea room that morning. A photograph of the BMW was clipped to the page Cal was reading. It showed the windscreen shattered and a furrow gouged across the bonnet. Two of the tyres had been slashed.

  By eleven, Wheeler returned to Priest’s Island with Dyer. The island was searched again – Dyer, Wheeler, Rosemary Coombs and the girls walking in line. They carried out three sweeps, going along the south coast, back through the middle of the island, finally the northern shore. No further sign of Max was discovered.

  At one thirty Wheeler took Dyer back to the Deep Blue so he could coordinate police reinforcements. Dyer also gave directions for boats to begin a search of the skerries and islets in the sound as well as the islands that lay immediately to the south of Priest’s Island. By nightfall no clue to the boy’s disappearance had been found. The following day, a police mobile operations room was brought to the parking area in front of the Deep Blue. A chief inspector took control. Fifty officers, including dog handlers, were deployed for two weeks. They were backed up by mountain rescue teams as well as police and navy divers. The boy had vanished without trace.

  So much Cal knew
already. He read on. The next pages included a general description of the township as well as mugshots, names, addresses and biographies of the residents. The individual entries varied in length and detail but most included information about work, family, circles of friendship and, on occasion, sexual relationships. At the end of each entry there was an assessment of who would lie for whom, who would protect whom, who would betray whom. Cal became more and more uneasy as he read the details.

  ‘Where does all this information come from?’ he asked Mr Close.

  ‘It was Mr Wheeler’s practice to send people to stay in the holiday accommodation, a chalet behind the Deep Blue, or to book B&Bs. They posed as visitors and mostly they gathered the gossip they heard in the tea room.’

  ‘You mean he hired people to spy?’

  The lawyer closed his eyes. Cal took the gesture as confirmation and a sign that no explanation would be forthcoming.

  ‘This was his practice, you said. He doesn’t do it any more?’

  The lawyer’s head shook.

  ‘Just to make myself clear,’ Cal said, ‘I’m not going to spy for Mr Wheeler. OK?’

  The lawyer’s eyes closed again. ‘That,’ he said, ‘will not be necessary.’

  Cal returned to the file. Two names had been highlighted in red.

  He showed the page to Mr Close. ‘Suspects?’ he asked.

  ‘Everyone’s a suspect, Dr McGill.’

  ‘These two more than others?’ Cal tried again.

  ‘Those two more than others,’ Mr Close agreed.

  ‘One has a black dot beside his name. What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that he’s dead.’

  The man’s name was Donald Grant. He’d been the last tenant of Priest’s Island and had died three years earlier, two years after Max’s disappearance. According to the file, he had the strongest motive for wishing the Wheelers harm. His family had grazed cattle and sheep on the island for eighty-four unbroken years. The arrangement ended with David Wheeler’s purchase.

  Mr Close watched Cal. ‘You should understand,’ he volunteered, ‘that Mr Wheeler made the cancellation of the lease a condition of sale. It wasn’t the case that he terminated it himself. The vendor did.’ The lawyer returned Cal’s stare. ‘In Mr Wheeler’s opinion, it’s an important distinction and one that has been overlooked by the township’s residents.’

  Cal thought the distinction a fine one but didn’t say so. He studied the photograph of Donald Grant. It showed a weather-beaten man with white hair, bushy eyebrows and mottled cheeks; a kindly, fleshy face, one shaped by hardship and Hebridean winds. Cal knew the type well. He had never met a man like that capable of unkindness let alone murder. In Donald Grant’s rheumy eyes Cal detected disappointment as well as the drink that killed him prematurely at the age of fifty-nine.

  Cal let his eyes drift to the other chief suspect, Donald Grant’s nephew, ‘considered by the township to be the rightful heir to the grazing rights’. Ewan Chisholm was his name. His photograph showed a stocky young man with a flushed face and cropped fair hair. He was fifteen at the time of Max Wheeler’s disappearance. However, the report cautioned, his youthfulness should not disqualify him as a suspect, ‘in fact quite the opposite’. For his age, Chisholm was physically strong and he knew the sea around Priest’s Island as well as anyone. He’d been crossing the sound with his uncle since he was seven. Navigating it at night, even in difficult conditions, would have been well within his capabilities. Also, he nursed a double grievance. Not only had the cancellation of the lease deprived him of the grazing rights in future – Ewan was Donald Grant’s only male relative – he blamed his uncle’s physical deterioration from alcohol on Wheeler’s ownership of the island. By common account Donald Grant’s spirit had been broken by the loss of the grazing rights which had been in his family for four generations. His nephew had motive as well as an instance of minor criminality in his record which pointed to him being capable of the other violent act committed that night, the vandalism to Rosemary Coombs’ car. The police said the damage had probably been done with a knife.

  Two years earlier, when he was thirteen, he had broken windows in a holiday home owned by a family from Newcastle. The house had been unoccupied at the time. ‘It was, though, evidence of an activist attitude towards empty or under-used property belonging to those regarded as outsiders.’ Another piece of circumstantial evidence against Chisholm concerned a visit by him to Priest’s Island following his uncle’s death. A rowan sapling had been found afterwards, planted close to the shieling where Ewan had spent summers with his uncle as they tended the sheep. The tree, which had later been uprooted on David Wheeler’s instructions, was proof ‘of Chisholm believing his family to have some continuing superior moral if not legal claim to the land’. In other words he had a grievance.

  After his uncle’s death, Ewan had settled in the township, having become the owner of the croft, a bungalow with two hectares. Apart from keeping six ewes and two dairy cows, he worked part-time doing odd jobs at the Deep Blue. He was saving money to increase his flock and to modernize his uncle’s croft house. His ‘protector’ was Bella MacLeod, the owner of the tea room. His on-off girlfriend was Bella’s niece, Catriona Mackinnon. It was considered unlikely that Bella would cover for Ewan if she had proof of his involvement in the disappearance or death of Max Wheeler. The same could not be said of Catriona, who had been uncooperative with the police inquiries.

  Cal turned the page to the joint biographies of Bella and Catriona. Their photographs were side by side: a study in opposites. Bella was round-faced with a cheerful, animated expression – her portrait had been taken in a crowd and blown up. She was forty-nine, divorced and childless but made up for that by being ‘a mother hen to strays’. Ewan Chisholm and Catriona were part of her brood.

  Catriona’s photograph showed a watchful teenager with dramatic jet-black hair and milk-white skin. Catriona’s mother, Frances, had built and opened the Deep Blue though she hadn’t lived to see its success. She died in a fishing accident with her husband Kenny, Catriona’s father. The girl was three at the time and had been looked after ever since by Bella MacLeod. Bella had also taken over the tea room. It seemed the older inhabitants often found Catriona sullen when she served them in the teashop, even truculent. Catriona had been fourteen, the same age as Max Wheeler, and was known to be upset about the treatment of Donald Grant and Ewan. ‘Although she claimed to have been at home that night – a story supported by Bella MacLeod – it’s likely she was involved, if not in the murder of Max Wheeler, almost certainly in withholding incriminating evidence against Ewan Chisholm.’

  After Cal had read the remaining potted biographies of the township’s inhabitants, Mr Close slid a newspaper cutting across his desk. Under the headline ‘Motive for Murder?’ it showed a picture, taken the year before, of wooden posts driven into the ground at intervals around the perimeter of Priest’s Island. The story talked of a symbolic act of protest inspired by celebrated land raids of the past. Particular mention was made of the seven men who staked claims to parcels of acres on the Knoydart peninsula in the late 1940s. It also reported a police press conference at which a detective inspector had spoken about a history of simmering tensions since David Wheeler had bought Priest’s Island. ‘Property ownership and land use,’ the detective was quoted as saying, ‘are strongly felt issues in a place like this.’

  Mr Close explained. ‘My client bought an island that Donald Grant and his nephew thought was theirs. The rest of the township supports that idea of moral ownership, and the result was a fourteen-year-old boy lost his life.’ He looked at Cal. ‘The position is clear. My client owns that land and now, after all that has happened, he is emotionally invested in it too. He will not give up ownership or his resolve to find out how his son was murdered and by whom.’

  The lawyer’s grey face had become quite flushed, almost the colour of his fat fingers. ‘Your job, Dr McGill, is to examine the evidence and to suggest how the crime was comm
itted and where Max’s body was hidden. Mr Wheeler has looked everywhere. Only the sea is left. If you had to hide a body around Priest’s Island, Dr McGill, where would you choose so that it would never be found again? You tell Mr Wheeler that and he’ll find the murderer.’

  The tea room door opened and Catriona appeared outside. ‘Do you mind?’ She held up a cigarette. ‘Thought I’d take a break. I’ll stand over here, downwind.’ Then she said, ‘Want one?’

  Cal shook his head. ‘I don’t smoke.’

  She pointed to Cal’s pickup. ‘That was you, was it, at the old slipway? Saw your pickup down there last night.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The RIB too?’

  Cal nodded.

  ‘I wasn’t being curious, mind.’ Catriona dragged on her cigarette. ‘I was walking. It’s what I do in the evenings if the weather’s OK. Once the tea room’s shut, I climb up the hill to get a phone signal or I’ll go by the old slipway because hardly anyone lives along there. Means I don’t have to see people.’ The way she said ‘people’, dropping her voice and elongating the word, suggested she needed her own company by closing time. She laughed. ‘I think I’d go mad otherwise, stuck in here all day.’

  ‘I didn’t see you,’ Cal said.

  Catriona squinted at him. ‘You’re that Dr McGill everyone’s talking about?’ She seemed surprised by her own question, by daring to ask.

  ‘Does it matter if I am?’

  Catriona blew out smoke while she considered her answer. ‘Not to me.’ The inference was it would to others. ‘Mr Wheeler’s lawyer sent round a letter about you.’

  ‘What did it say?’ Cal asked.

  ‘Just who you were and what you did,’ she replied. ‘Ach and there was the usual stuff about Mr Wheeler expecting privacy while he’s here.’ She put on a different voice, pompous and affected, her take on an English lawyer reading aloud the letter. ‘In particular, Mr Wheeler would regard as unwelcome any attempt by the township to mark the anniversary of the disappearance of his son Max.’