The Malice of Waves

by Mark Douglas-Home

  Cal noted her use of ‘disappearance’. He imagined Mr Close would have written ‘murder’.

  ‘Does the township mark it?’

  Catriona nodded. ‘When Mr Wheeler and the family say prayers on the island the whole township turns out. Every 2nd March, that’s tomorrow, everyone’ll be in their best clothes, paying their respects.’ Catriona indicated the harbour wall with her cigarette. ‘They’ll be standing down there, sun, wind or rain, and usually there’s wind and rain. If they stopped at home or treated it like any other day, the newspapers would call us callous and cold-hearted.’

  ‘You’ll be there too?’

  ‘Not me.’ Catriona shook her head. ‘Anyway, someone’s got to clear up the cups and plates in the tea room while they’re all down by the harbour.’ Cal had the impression of another, unstated reason, maybe something to do with Ewan Chisholm, her on-off boyfriend, being the main suspect. Cal would have asked her more but for a dinghy appearing in the middle of the sound.

  ‘That for you?’ Catriona nodded in that direction.

  ‘I think so.’

  Catriona sucked on her cigarette and stared at the boat. ‘Wheeler, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He thinks one of us killed Max.’

  ‘So I’ve heard.’

  ‘Is that what you think?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Cal said. ‘I’ve been asked to test some new theories. If Max did go into the water, where might he have ended up given the tides and winds that night and the next few days? If he was disposed of – let’s say weighted down and dumped in the water – are there places where the body wouldn’t be disturbed? I’m looking at different possibilities. It’s not my job to say whether Max Wheeler died in an accident or was murdered.’

  Catriona dropped her cigarette, squashed it under her foot and kicked the butt away from the door. ‘Shall I tell you what people are saying about you?’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘Well, some people think you might be OK because you’re looking in the right place – the sea – and there’s your background too.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your mother’s family has island blood?’

  ‘North coast, near Tongue, yes.’

  ‘Your name’s Gaelic?’

  ‘Caladh, harbour,’ Cal translated. ‘But I don’t speak Gaelic. I was born in Edinburgh, raised there too.’

  ‘Aye well, there is that.’ Catriona stared at him as if making up her own mind. ‘My Auntie Bella says it doesn’t really matter whether you have island blood since you’ll be doing Wheeler’s bidding.’ She held out her hand to take his empty mug. ‘And all that bastard wants is to put one of us away for murder.’

  She went inside and Cal collected his backpack from the front passenger seat of his pickup. He walked to the harbour wall and waited by the stone slipway. He was surprised by Catriona’s strength of feeling against Wheeler and wondered how long it would be before his conversation with her would be relayed through the township – a day at the most. She’d tell Bella MacLeod first, perhaps Ewan Chisholm. Soon word would spread. Within a day the township would know about him, how he would be investigating theories and possibilities. Would that be enough to persuade anyone to talk to him?

  By now the dinghy was at the harbour entrance. Cal recalled Mr Close’s telephone message of the night before. ‘Mr Wheeler will collect you tomorrow at three. Be punctual. He will deliver you back at six. This will be the only meeting you will have with him. Afterwards, if you have any questions, you will deal with me. You must not contact Mr Wheeler or his daughters.’ Then, as an afterthought: ‘My client regards Priest’s Island as a shrine to his dead son, Dr McGill. That must be respected at all times.’

  4

  Everything Cal had read about Wheeler portrayed a man of single-minded determination. Descriptions like obsessive or resilient frequently cropped up. Even his financial difficulties – the collapse of his company, his family home in Southampton being put up for sale – hadn’t appeared to deflect him. By all accounts he was as relentless as ever in Max’s cause, in his efforts to find his son’s killer. The subtext in Mr Close’s warning telephone call of the night before had been quite clear: Wheeler was not to be obstructed in his purpose or to be provoked. Yet the man Cal met barely forty minutes ago bore little resemblance to this caricature. Rather than being demanding and purposeful, as Cal had expected, David Wheeler gave the impression of being preoccupied. Only his general description fitted his advance billing. He was five ten or eleven and, by his clothes, a blue skiing jacket and cashmere scarf at his neck, still prosperous. His features told a different story. The ginger hair, always so perfectly parted in his photographs, was untidy, uncut and greying. The flesh of his face seemed drawn back and tight as though he was walking into a brisk wind. His eyes were dull. Wheeler might have the wardrobe of his previous life but somewhere along the way the personality that once inhabited the clothes had gone missing.

  Why was Cal surprised? He had seen this often before. First the child was lost, then the parent. Only the shell, the flesh and bones, remained to carry on the life which had been lived before. Cal had been blinded by everything he’d read about Wheeler. The man himself was so changed he was almost unrecognizable.

  After meeting at the harbour by the Deep Blue, they had crossed the sound in the dinghy. Only fractured conversation had been possible against the noise of the engines. Cal asked about the sea around them, its hazards and quirks, and Wheeler had shouted replies as they crossed to Priest’s Island. Bypassing the Jacqueline, Wheeler landed at the wooden jetty. Their next destination, the chapel, was two hundred metres away. It took a while because Wheeler had a habit of stopping to recite another chapter in the building’s history. He seemed eager to impress on Cal how important a structure it was, despite its semi-ruined condition. The chapel, Wheeler said, had been the work of a hermit priest in the twelfth century. Other priests on retreat had lived on the island since. The last record of the building having a roof was 1874, though irregular services had continued to be held there. Mostly they’d been organized by groups of pilgrims or baggers of remote and unusual churches. They’d come to a halt after ‘my son’s murder’ – Cal noted the extra charge of emotion invested in the words. Afterwards, Wheeler said, the chapel became Max’s memorial, his private shrine. The walls had been stabilized, a door of toughened glass fitted, a stone bench installed. Otherwise it had been left untouched. Twice a year – 2nd March, ‘the day Max was taken from us’, and 14th August, his birthday – a priest led the family in memorial prayers.

  Wheeler became lost in thought. Cal tried to fill the gap by tactfully complimenting the chapel’s positioning by the sea and its intimate size. But Wheeler made no attempt to respond. He appeared miles away. Cal doubted he’d even heard.

  As they climbed the grassy mound to the ruin, Wheeler asked, ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘You were telling me about family prayers twice a year,’ Cal prompted.

  Wheeler nodded. The chapel, he carried on without embarrassment or apology, had become a place of solace for him and his daughters. It was where they felt Max to be, where they went to talk to him, where the family could be together again. The girls sensed their mother’s spirit there too.

  ‘The island,’ said Wheeler, ‘is the last place they remember the family being happy. The first time we came here, their mother was alive.’

  Going there had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, an adventure for the children. They’d been cruising off the west coast of Scotland – Wheeler putting the boat through its paces after a refit – when a sunny morning and a stable high pressure system tempted them across the Minch. By chance they dropped anchor off Priest’s Island, in the bay, and they stayed until the weather changed, almost a week.

  ‘I remember Jackie watching Max and the girls swimming by the jetty and saying “David, wouldn’t it be wonderful if they had somewhere like this, where they can be free?” Five weeks after we went hom
e Jackie was killed in a car accident.’

  Wheeler fell silent and Cal watched a raven tumbling above the hill at the island’s western end.

  ‘I bought the island,’ Wheeler said, as though he was replying to an unspoken accusation, ‘because it was Jackie’s last wish for the children. Now, I own it because I have no choice.’ He sounded as though he wished he had.

  ‘Because this is where Max is …’ Cal suggested.

  ‘Yes.’ Wheeler clasped one trembling hand to the other and looked to see whether Cal had noticed this frailty. Then he said, ‘Is Max in heaven? Will we meet up when I’m dead? No, I don’t think so.’ A silence followed. ‘That sort of afterlife? I don’t believe in it.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I do either,’ Cal replied. ‘Nor do most of the parents like you that I meet. If they had a faith before, they lose it afterwards.’

  The mention of other parents had an effect on Wheeler. He searched Cal’s eyes, as if he wanted to confide. ‘They talk to you?’

  ‘Some of them do,’ Cal replied. ‘When they’re ready.’

  Wheeler turned away and seemed deep in thought as he approached the glass door of the chapel and unlocked it. Before going inside, he started speaking as though making a confession. He addressed himself to the chapel but his words were intended for Cal.

  ‘I misled you. Jackie wanted the island for all of the children, the girls too, but I wanted it for Max. If it hadn’t been for Max I wouldn’t have bought the place, no matter their happy memories. No, for me Priest’s Island was for Max, for the boy to grow up with a free spirit, to be daring.’ He turned to Cal. ‘I bought it for Max’s son, for Max’s grandson, for posterity. That’s the only afterlife a man can expect, to have a son and a grandson.’

  Cal said nothing and Wheeler went inside. When Cal followed after a judicious delay – he thought Wheeler might prefer a few moments alone – he found him standing by a stone bench, his fingers searching the back for the engraving of Max’s name.

  ‘That’s Max.’ Wheeler nodded towards a small niche in the west gable. ‘The photograph was taken the first time we came to the island.’

  Behind a glass screen was a colour image in a silver frame of a fair-haired boy in a sea-pool bounded by rocks. He was treading water, splashing with his right hand and holding an upturned crab in his left. A face mask had been pushed back on to his forehead. A grin extended across his small face. Cal remembered that feeling of exhilaration. He had photographs of himself like that taken by his mother.

  ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ Cal was angry with himself for sounding trite. He sensed Wheeler tensing, the slightest of tremors in the stillness of the ruined chapel, a flitter of irritation. How often must Wheeler have heard ‘sorry’? How little it must mean to him, how inadequate an expression of feeling.

  ‘He was eleven then,’ Wheeler said. ‘Look at his face, that’s why I bought the island. What father wouldn’t give that to his son if he could? That sense of life being something to live, of freedom and possibility.’ He fell silent and stared at the photograph. Then he asked, ‘Do you have a son?’

  Cal took time to answer. He studied Max’s face. ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Then you won’t understand.’ Wheeler’s tone was quieter and admonishing, sadder too, as if he was disappointed with himself as well as Cal, as if this was a lesson he should have learned by now, that nobody could properly understand, least of all someone without a son.

  Cal said nothing. Better that, he thought, than saying the wrong thing. He’d met enough parents in Wheeler’s situation to know how quickly the mask of emotional control could crack, how close pain lay to the surface, how it never went away. A dead child was the worst, a dead child whose body was lost the worst of the worst, an affront to parental instinct, the last rite of loving denied. Cal understood. What he could never know was how that felt. Perhaps he could have made the point, but would Wheeler have been listening? Although he was within touching distance, he seemed to be far away, beyond reaching. Without warning he walked out of the chapel.

  Cal continued to study the photograph. A few minutes later, he too went outside and found Wheeler still in a kind of trance and looking across the sound to Eilean Dubh. ‘I’m going to find you,’ he said, ‘I’m going to make sure you’re punished for what you’ve done.’ Wheeler, Cal realized, was talking to the township, a father bent on retribution as well as redemption. Cal cleared his throat to let Wheeler know he was there. ‘Would you like a few minutes alone?’

  Wheeler stared at Cal. ‘Why would I want that? Let’s get on, shall we?’ His voice and manner were brusque, the David Wheeler Cal had expected to meet. ‘There’s more of the island to show you and you’ll have to come on board the Jacqueline. The girls will want to hear what you’re going to be doing.’

  A signal passed between the sisters, from Chloe to Hannah. Don’t, it meant. Don’t what? Cal wondered. Was Hannah upset? Was it something he’d said in his explanation of the natural forces at work in the sound? Perhaps Wheeler’s youngest daughter had imagined Max’s dead body being thrown about. Chloe had glanced angrily at her sister. Don’t make a scene, Hannah: was that what it meant?

  After Wheeler’s introductions, Cal had spread a chart across the table in the Jacqueline’s cramped saloon. He’d talked about the reefs, islets and skerries, the tidal currents as well as Atlantic storms: the interplay between them, the power that would be generated. ‘So strong the sea bottom will be scoured daily, the sand and silt will shift and churn. Even boulders will be dislodged.’ He hadn’t used Max’s name or words like body, remains or corpse. That hadn’t been necessary. The implication was clear enough: if Max had been dumped into the sea between Priest’s Island and Eilean Dubh he wouldn’t have remained where he was, even if he had been weighted down.

  ‘Think of the sound as a washing machine,’ Cal said, ‘but many times larger and just as turbulent.’

  On reflection he wished he’d been more circumspect. Had he been too graphic for sixteen-year-old Hannah? He glanced to his right, where she was sitting but no longer staring with an agitated expression at the chart. After Chloe’s warning, she had turned away. All Cal could see was the back of her head.

  ‘Should I go on?’

  ‘Of course,’ Wheeler said and Chloe gave Cal a reassuring smile as if nothing had happened, or nothing that should concern him. She pushed closer to her father until their shoulders were touching, the similarities between them easier to see: the same high forehead and wide-apart eyes, similar colouring too. Chloe’s ginger hair was cropped short. ‘It’s interesting,’ she said, ‘isn’t it, Pa, what Dr McGill has been saying?’

  Cal was wary of blundering further into an unfolding family drama. If only there was a script he could have read. He glanced at Hannah again, her attention apparently caught by the aerial acrobatics of the raven Cal had seen earlier. It was flying over the bay, close to the Jacqueline.

  ‘Well, if you’re sure,’ Cal said slowly, to give Hannah an opportunity to object. She didn’t react. Feeling ill at ease, he hurried the details of his investigations. ‘I’ll map the sound’s currents including the various eddies, and research its underwater structures. I’ll be looking for hiding places, where a wall of rock or some other barrier to the currents prevent scouring, where the bottom is relatively undisturbed. In layman’s language, I’ll be trying to find an underwater hiding place.’

  He’d glanced again at Hannah. She still appeared distracted by the ravens.

  Cal continued. ‘After five years all I can do is propose theories and suggest possibilities. On land, there might be some …’ he hesitated, ‘remains to be found. At sea, that’s improbable. Especially as disposal …’ Cal winced at the word, ‘will have been rushed and likely to have been completed that first night under cover of darkness, before the start of the search the following day. Even if a makeshift container had been used it would have been broken open by the sea long ago.’

  Cal looked from Wheeler to Chloe. He ho
ped the inference was clear without his language becoming too graphic: the body would have been broken too.

  ‘One of the unusual features for me,’ he carried on, ‘concerns the flood tide which starts strongly straight after slack water and, after a ten-minute time delay on the Minch side, flows into both entrances to the sound. I’ll be trying to work out what effect that has – whether an object would be contained within the sound or whether the earlier start of the flood on the Atlantic side would expel it into the Minch. That might be important, because there was a bigger than normal tide the night Max went missing.’

  Cal was aware of Hannah moving. He turned to his right and found her staring at him. Her thin face and blonde hair reminded Cal of the photograph of Max in the ruined chapel. Instead of grinning with pleasure, as Max had been, her face was serious and wet with tears.

  She looked at her father. ‘I can’t stand any more of this,’ she shouted.

  Cal noticed the set of Chloe’s face, the way she pushed close to her father, as if shielding him from Hannah’s attack, as if that was why she had drawn nearer to him before, to protect him from his youngest daughter.

  Hannah shouted again, her voice trembling with emotion, ‘Why … why do you make us go through this every year?’ She let out a cry of frustration and anger. ‘Why?’ She pushed past Cal to the door. ‘Anyone would think Max is the only child that matters … the only child you’ve lost. Oh, but I forgot, Joss, your other lost child, is only your daughter. She doesn’t count. Only Max matters to you, your darling, angel son …’ By now, her face was red with shouting. With a final cry of anger and frustration, she rushed outside.

  Chloe put on a shocked expression. ‘That was seriously out of order.’

  Wheeler said nothing. As he stood up and followed Hannah, Chloe called after him, ‘Pa, tell her she can’t behave like that.’ She looked at Cal, the shocked expression forming again. ‘Well, she can’t.’