THREE

The twelve students were waiting for Leo on the Institute’s pier. Jacob Sylvester and Rachel Ginsberg helped him carry on board the large tape deck containing the recording equipment. They lowered the machine, which was waterproofed with a crude plastic cover, on to the deck using Leo’s lifejacket to provide some padding.

He ran through a checklist of names, carefully ticked them off on his clipboard and handed out packed lunches and a bottle of water each. There was nobody missing, and Leo was gratified that for once they seemed pleased to see him. He corrected himself. That was too harsh. On the whole his students were usually pleased to see him. He had had coffee with Gunbrit once in the commissary, and had asked her what the students thought of him. She smiled at the question, looked into her coffee mug and said shyly, ‘They think you are a little unusual.’ He took that as a compliment.

Most of the students were carrying smart digital cameras with pop-out lenses that took brilliant pictures even at a distance. There were seasick pills for those who wanted them. Only two did.

On board he assembled the group on the rear of the transom deck and handed out lifejackets and oilskins. This was to be a six-hour trip, he told them, during which they would be listening to, and recording, underwater communications among seal rookeries up the coast, but mainly at Monomoy Island. Lifejackets were to be worn at all times, there was to be no smoking, no use of mobile phones, and in an emergency they were to do exactly what the captain told them. They all knew Buck, who waved from the upper deck.

Leo had already asked the group to read the Herald profile of Buck, and he wanted them to spend some time with him. ‘If you want to understand the ecology of the sea,’ he had told them, ‘you need to know what’s happening to fish stocks, and for that Buck is your man. Talk to him. Take him out for a coffee, a drink maybe.’

The weather was fine, as the sky had promised the previous evening. Leo checked his watch and steadied himself as the tug rocked in the swell of a departing Martha’s Vineyard ferry. The big 1,000-ton ferries were still running off-season schedules, and thankfully the whale-watching, dolphin-spotting tourist boats had yet to begin operating. In The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald described Long Island Sound as the busiest body of water in the western hemisphere. He had obviously not seen the stretch of sea between the Cape and Martha’s Vineyard in the summer. But today they would mostly have the sea to themselves.

The tug nosed out of the harbour, passing Penzance Point to the west with its $10-million homes. That was where Tallulah Bonner lived, and Leo swung his binoculars along the shoreline, searching for her house. But they all looked the same, big two-storey houses with swimming pools, green carpet lawns and white flagpoles, all built after the First World War when the big money came down from Boston to find weekend retreats to rival the Hamptons.

Several of the students gathered at the stern watching as the boat rode a gentle swell, trailing a white wake of foam and a flock of seagulls that fell upon the small fish churned to the surface. The Antoine headed out to sea for half a mile, and then turned north-east, leaving Martha’s Vineyard to the south-west to run up the coast.

Leo looked at the horizon. A ridge of grey nimbus was building where the sky met the ocean. He climbed the steps to the top deck where Buck was fiddling with the radio. Buck had been the first person Leo had met outside his colleagues at the campus when he arrived all those years ago, and they had worked together on these research trips ever since.

It was Buck who had opened his eyes to the power of the fishing lobby when they took his boat out to the Stellwagen sanctuary, 842 square miles of federally protected ocean between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, ten miles north of Provincetown at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay. They had made the first of several trips to Stellwagen a month after Leo had arrived on the Cape. The point about Stellwagen was that it wasn’t a sanctuary and it wasn’t protected, as Buck showed him. On calm days Buck would turn the engines off over the bank, a kidney-shaped shelf that rose to within 100 feet of the surface, and let the boat drift. Around them were the whale-watching boats, and as the day drew on the fishing boats working out of Gloucester, Portland and Portsmouth up the coast.

They would open their beers, unwrap cold steak sandwiches, and Buck would tell his story. The shallow waters of the bank were the heart of the sanctuary, but beyond lay deeper water, dropping at some places to a depth of 600 feet. The steep sides of the bank created rising currents which brought nutrients into the shallows. In turn the fish followed, and they brought the whales.

The fish brought the fishermen, and the whales brought the tourist boats. And both were killing Stellwagen. But the main culprits were the fishermen.

‘That’s me,’ said Buck. ‘Well, people like me. We’ve fished this place to hell and back. Know what? They should have no-take zones in every marine sanctuary, especially here. No fishing. Full stop. But the politicians daren’t do it. Gutless cowards.’

As Leo discovered, it was all true. The fishing industry along the coasts of Maine and Massachusetts could easily withstand the creation of a fully protected reserve over Stellwagen, but all that happened was a seemingly endless series of studies commissioned by the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration – and the continuation of bottom-trawling over the bank.

So 80 species of fish and 22 species of marine mammals were being studied to death by Federal bureaucrats, fished to extinction by the local boats, and all the while gawped at by the 300,000 tourists who cruised these waters in the summer months.

That was the way Leo put it in his lectures, and in a guest column for the Herald.

Leo watched Buck at the wheel, his deeply lined face jutting out from an old captain’s cap, his rough hands almost stroking the polished wooden casing of the compass. He wanted to tell Buck that he had been fired. This would be the last trip they would make together on the Antoine, and Buck needed to know. Now seemed as good a moment as any. He watched the older man’s face as he registered the news. Like most Cape Codders, Buck was intensely proud of the Institute, the work it did and the jobs it created. He had lived in its shadow most of his life.

Buck peered ahead, rubbing a cloth on the windscreen.

‘How come?’

Leo explained about his interview with the Herald and how the Boston Globe had picked it up and how in the age of the 24-hour news cycle his words were soon out on the wires on radio and television.

‘What did you say in the interview?’ Buck kept his eyes on the sea and a hand on the wheel.

Leo told him he had used the example of Hoover the talking seal, long dead but still the subject of some controversy, as a metaphor to expose the arrogant mindset of the marine science establishment in general. And he had thrown in the fishing lobby and Stellwagen and all that stuff.

When he had finished, Buck slapped him on the back.

‘Congratulations! No more students, no more getting up for nine o’clock lectures. Now you can get a real life. You never could stand all that hassle up there, could you?’

‘I like teaching, Buck.’

‘You can teach anywhere,’ said Buck, spinning the wheel and bringing the bow of the boat around so that it pointed shoreward. ‘We’ll be there in twenty minutes.’

Monomoy Island appeared out of the haze, a low-lying smudge on the horizon that gained shape and colour as the boat drew closer to it. As Leo scanned the white, yellow and pink of the island’s sand and rock, covered in the grey-green of coarse sea grass and gorse, he made a mental note to sign up for a week’s watercolour course with Gloria Gulliver.

She was a Cape divorcee in her mid-fifties who wore startling low-cut one-piece swimsuits in the summer, revealing a heart-shaped strawberry birthmark on her right breast. Leo focused on the image of her breasts, holding them in his head as he had in his hands. Her breasts in his hands, his mouth on her lips, the unforgettable Mrs Gloria Gulliver.

He looked back at the strangely unfamiliar shoreline. Wind, tide and the autumnal Atlantic gales had reshaped the island since he had last seen it. It happened to the whole Cape coastline almost every year, rendering charts outdated almost as soon as they were published. Navigation depended on local knowledge and every spring, fishermen working out of Chatham, Coldharbor and Hyannis had to plot the new shoals, skerries and channels carved out by tide, current, and wind.

Back in 1942 a whole island had vanished. It was called Billingsgate, after the old fish market in London, and had a school, a lighthouse and a small fishing community. The sea took them all, as it will the whole Cape in time. Occasionally winter storms would excavate an old wreck from the depths, bringing it perilously close to the surface.

Buck had lost his last fishing boat that way. The nets snagged on the funnel of a tramp steamer that had gone down in a sudden autumn storm in 1917. In the heavy sea the stern of Buck’s boat had been pulled under. It went down in seconds as the sea flooded the rear deck. Buck and his three crew had got off in their liferaft, and had been picked up two hours later. He bought another boat, of course. He always had a fishing boat but it was the tug that brought in the steady money.

Kemp had already decided that he would ask Buck to help him with his appeal. He was the only fisherman he knew who would stand up and tell the truth about the fishing lobby. Fish stocks were in freefall because of overfishing. Seals were being culled in their hundreds of thousands because they were blamed for the declining stocks. The fishing industry and the powerful politicians behind them were slaughtering seals for no purpose.

If there was going to be an argument, Buck was a good guy to have on your side. He had done it before at a conference in San Diego that Leo had persuaded him to attend as a guest speaker: the raw voice of the sea telling a gathering of marine biologists what was really happening to fish stocks and why.

That was how Joe Buckland, nervously clasping and unclasping his hands, desperate for the large rum that Leo had refused him and wishing himself rather in the eye of a hurricane at sea than in that place, came to stand in front of 300 delegates at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California. Leo had told him that Scripps was the oldest, biggest and most important centre for marine research science in the world. Looking at the large, oak-panelled auditorium with its motto inscribed in Latin on the proscenium arch, he believed it.

Buck had wowed them from the start.

‘I have been asked to talk to you about why fish stocks are falling, why the cod has gone, why other fish are going too. Halibut, marlin, you name ’em, they’re going. The problem is simple. You’re looking at it right here in front of you. I’m a fisherman. But I’m only half of the problem. You ladies and gentlemen are the other half. You eat too much fish,’ he said.

‘I’ve been told to get to the point early, and here it is. Hands up who knows what a steaker is.’

Not a hand in the hall went up

‘Steakers are what fishing people call the best cuts of fish, the ones with real big steaks on them. And you know what? Fishermen throw back dead into the sea any fish that doesn’t look like a steaker. Every fishing boat does it. They’ll deny it, but they do. Fishermen throw more fish back into the sea dead than they land for market. Not just us here in the US. They do it everywhere. That’s why the stocks have collapsed.’

Buck was applauded as he left the stage, and afterwards some very charming women smiled sweetly at him and pressed drinks into his hand. He told Leo he reckoned he made a wrong career choice all those years ago. He should have become an academic. The money was easy. They paid you to stand up and talk sense, and they even gave you a drink afterwards.

Kemp turned towards the stern and looked down at his students, all of them working towards a degree that would lead to the further study of the minutiae of the ocean rather than of the warm-blooded mammals that lived in it. Endless papers circulated within the academic community – and then what? Maybe Margot was right. It was all nothing but chatter on the academic networks. But maybe all the research, the lengthy dissertations and those closed conferences so beloved by academics might lead to a new way of thinking about the seas from which we all crawled so many millions of years ago.

Some hope, thought Kemp. And he wasn’t putting much faith in his own book setting the scientific world to rights either.

Buck turned the boat, slowed the engine and moved towards a series of sandbanks that had risen above the waterline on the back of a falling tide. Already grey seals and harbour seals were hauled up on them, dozing under a darkening sky. One or two of the females were still pregnant, but most had already pupped, and the young were nervously flopping towards the water, having caught sight of the intruder.

In the channels between the sandbanks grey-whiskered heads turned as the Antoine approached, then vanished beneath the waves, reappearing a few feet away, ducking, diving and resurfacing. It was too early in the year for the young seals to have got used to boats, and many had not seen or heard one before. The older ones paid less attention.

In their identical black oilskins and yellow lifejackets the students looked like outsize penguins as they trained their binoculars on the seals. Kemp knelt down and pushed the tape deck firmly under the slight overhang of the enclosed deck rail that ran around the transom. He plugged in the leads to four headsets and attached four other leads to a set of hydrophones: large cigar-shaped microphones encased in thick transparent plastic casing.

The technology was a big improvement on what he had been used to in those early days at St Andrews, but it was still petty crude compared to the latest equipment being used by the military. In the 1960s the US Navy laid a grid of underwater listening posts around the world to track Soviet submarines. The fixed hydrophones were linked to onshore listening stations by cable, and the Navy called the whole thing the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS). When the cold war ended the system was made available to marine scientists studying whale communication. But the more rarefied area of seal communication did not get a look-in, and Leo had to make do with an off-the-shelf version. It was expensive enough, as the treasurer at Coldharbor had pointed out when he signed it off.

‘A ten-thousand-dollar recording outfit just to listen to seals – right?’

‘Right,’ replied Kemp, and that was that.

Kemp paused as a larger swell than usual lifted the boat, causing his students to stumble and clutch each other. Gunbrit Nielsen seemed to have more than her fair share of helping hands.

A casual glance towards shore brought one of those surprises that could lift these trips from the routine to the extraordinary. There, on the furthest sandbank, was a small pod of hooded seals. Normally found only in Arctic waters, they were rarely seen at this time of year on the Cape. The inflatable hoods on top of the heads of the adult males made them look comical, like circus creatures.

When excited or nervous the seals closed their noses and pumped air into these hoods, which swelled up to the size of footballs. That was what they had done now, and Kemp shouted to his group to take a look and to get some photographs. He handed his binoculars to Jacob Sylvester, who took a quick look before passing them back and joining the others in taking photographs that would be uploaded on to computers and winged around the world to friends and family, showing inhabitants of a cold Arctic world sunning themselves within sight of some of the Cape’s most popular summer beaches.

Kemp raised his glasses and swung them seaward; the cloud base had darkened and thickened. Over Chatham harbour a mile away the skies were still clear, and he pointed out to the students the old Marconi radio masts moved there from Wellfleet up the coast, where in January 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt had sent the first radio message across the Atlantic, to King Edward VII in the village of Poldhu in Cornwall. A king emperor conversing with an American president who liked to talk softly and carry a big stick. Leo always wondered what they had talked about in that first brief transatlantic conversation: probably that great British default topic of conversation, the weather.

The masts had now been adapted with wooden platforms on which ospreys built their stick nests. The birds had almost been wiped out by DDT poisoning in the 1960s, but were now increasing in numbers; an example of old technology infrastructure being used to repair the damage done by what had once been hailed as the new wonder chemical herbicide.

‘See what I mean,’ Leo told his students, although more accurately he told Gunbrit and let the others listen in. ‘Take nothing for granted. DDT wasn’t a modern miracle, it was poison. But everyone fell for it, like asbestos.’

No sooner had he said this than he wished he had kept quiet and let them work it out for themselves. Maybe he was banging on too much; becoming a bore, a one-track mind with a message that had lost all its potency through endless repetition. Maybe he should just shut up.

He shook himself out of these thoughts and turned his mind to the task at hand. ‘All right, everyone, gather round. Bring your mikes and pair off.’

He helped the students lower the hydrophones into the water. They needed to be positioned carefully so that the sensors were facing the source of the sound. There was one headset for every two people.

‘What’s the depth?’ he yelled to Buck.

‘Thirty feet.’

‘OK, lower the hydros to twenty feet and turn the sensors to face the sandbanks. And get your headphones on,’ he shouted to the students.

Seal talk, Kemp called it. Down there in the waters around the sandbanks the seals would be sending their rumbling signals to each other, warning of dangerous intruders. It was a language he knew well, and there were times when he felt he could half guess the meaning of these long underwater conversations. But the real code he had yet to crack.

He had made his name at St Andrews, where an unusually generous subsidy from a government determined to prove it cared about its maritime heritage had led to the establishment of the Sea Mammal Research Unit. Out of curiosity, on a field trip to the north of Scotland he had lowered his hydrophones into 100 feet of water below the mile-long Cromarty Firth Bridge that carries the A9 road north from the Black Isle. The waters there were rich in fish and heavily populated with seals. With Loch Ness only a few miles to the west it was no surprise that the coast was also rich in marine mythology.

The fishermen working out of the deep-water ports of Inverness and Aberdeen had plenty of stories about seals and how they could talk and sing. Even today the older generation who crew the deep-sea trawlers out of Scotland recount the Celtic myths about the selkies, the seals who come ashore, shedding their skin to take human shape as beautiful women. The stories vary little among the fishing communities around the Celtic rim of Britain – the Orkneys, the Hebrides and the Aran Islands off the Irish coast: a seal in human form bewitches and marries a local fisherman only to flee back to the sea, sometimes years later, leaving behind motherless children, broken hearts and empty beds.

Science paid no attention to such fantasies, of course, and at first Kemp thought his own discoveries would be treated in the same light. No one had ever identified and recorded the language of seals until that day in 1992 when his hydrophones had picked up low rumbling noises. At other times he picked up a crescendo of noise, like a bowling ball and the crash of skittles. At first he thought that it was trucks passing over the Cromarty Bridge above him. But the strange rumbling noise continued after the trucks had gone. There, 100 feet down in the darkness of the estuary, harbour seals were making sounds no one had heard before – or if they had heard them, they certainly had not been identified as seal talk.

Kemp had taken his tapes back to the university and played them to his boss at the research unit. Professor Melrose Stubbs had listened, eyes fastened on the revolving spools of tape, smoke from a clenched pipe drifting out of the window.

‘No one’s heard this before?’

‘If they have, they didn’t know what it was.’

‘And you do?’

‘Harbour seals. There was nothing else down there.’

‘And if I said, “So what?”’

Typical Stubbs. He was as impressed as hell, but hated showing it. He delighted in the counter-intuitive challenge, and always insisted on making his students work hard for the answer that he already knew.

So Leo told him what they both knew: that identifying the language of creatures that had been on the planet longer than humans was the start of a scientific journey to unlock the minds of those with whom we share this earth.

They had had a celebratory drink that night, first at the small bar next to the old Cross Keys Hotel, and then back at Stubbs’s flat in Hope Street. It was four o’clock in the morning and light when he and a few collegues straggled down to the West Sands and fell down on the dunes to watch the sun come up over the bay. Freezing cold, of course, but with that much whisky inside them it didn’t matter.

And then, their darkened heads just visible over the waves, a pod of grey seals appeared with the sun, slipping through the water, hunting for sand eels and flat fish that had come in with the tide.

It was a magical moment. And Margot had been somewhere in the crowd that had collected as the party gathered pace throughout the evening; a young primary-school teacher who hung out with the junior academics looking for a little intellectual stimulation and a break from the boredom of cramming maths into the minds of 9-year-olds.

After the publication of his paper ‘Underwater Vocalisation of the North Sea Harbour and Grey Seal’, Kemp’s reputation in the small and cloistered world of sea-mammal research was born. Invitations to speak came from the most prestigious institutions, the ocean sciences department at the University of California Santa Cruz and the Australian Institute of Marine Science among them

But as Stubbs had said after a final few puffs on his pipe: ‘Finding a new language is one thing – now you’ve got to decode it, laddie, and tell us what it means.’

Mating signals, flirtation, the language of sexual desire and long-distance communications between pods of seals as much as fifty or sixty miles apart – that was what it meant. Using mikes attached to old lobster pots, Kemp had been able to plot the position of the seals below water by listening to the rumbling exchanges that would continue for thirty to forty minutes at a time.

As he eavesdropped on three or four seals talking to each other over an area of two square miles, Kemp did not know who else was listening in on this amorous chit-chat. But he was certain that others were joining in the conversation. Sound travels long distances underwater. Far out in the North Sea, female harbour seals would hear – and, who knows, respond to – the love calls from the Scottish coast.

The vision had stayed with him. There in the Cromarty Firth, seals swimming 100 feet below the surface had been talking to each other, singing love songs and what else? He knew seals had developed acoustic predator recognition. Their sensitive whiskers were like radar scanners and could detect the presence, even miles away, of killer whales. So amid the love talk there would also be warning signals sent rumbling over the seabed: a pod of whales had been detected heading north two miles offshore, maybe mammal-eaters, maybe not.

Later, diving off the Isle of May off the Fife coast, Kemp had seen harbour seals sitting on rocky outcrops fifty to eighty feet underwater. He could not see any facial signs of conversation, or hear their signals, but he knew they would be sending out those extraordinary sounds to alert other seals in the area to his presence. The sight of a diver in their own territory evoked a playful response from the seals, which swam up and peered through his face mask, gently nudging him with their snouts, pushing him back out of their kingdom.

Leo switched his attention back to the exercise. The students were now absorbed in their work, squatting on the deck, heads bowed as they listened to the sounds below the surface. On the Sony recording deck needles flickered on the dials, showing that recording was in progress.

Leo loved this part of the field trips. He wanted his students to feel the same thrill he had when he first dropped his probes into the peaty waters of the Cromarty Firth. He wanted them to experience the fascination of a world below the waves where seals, whales and dolphins communicated in the languages of their species. Once you had heard that submarine conversational chatter, exchanging information about mating, eating and danger – and who knows what else – the questions never ceased.

Buck was having a cigarette behind the cabin and sipping a mug of wozza – his little joke: it wozza cup of coffee before I put some rum into it. But the rum was no joke. Good 40 per cent proof with a kick that came all the way from the Caribbean. Old sea dogs only drink rum, Buck said, although he did sometimes use Diet Coke as a mixer, proving that even old dogs can learn new tricks.

The sea was choppier now, and the sky had darkened. The students were intent on their task, and Leo could see from their faces and the furious notes they were scribbling that they too were coming under the spell of the underwater world they were listening into.

There were sixty or seventy seals hauled up on three sandbars; as many again would be in the water around the banks. Kemp checked his watch. It was three o’clock. They had been out almost four hours.

On the sandbanks, one or two of the older seals had stiffened and raised their heads, looking seaward. The sky was darkening fast. The horizon was closing in. Where cloud and water met in a palette of grey and black, a thin white line had formed.

A sudden swell, six feet or so from trough to peak, lifted the boat, sending students sprawling and sliding across the deck.

As the wave struck, Buck was already moving quickly towards the cabin.

‘Haul up the mikes!’ Kemp yelled, lurching across the transom deck as another swell lifted the boat.

‘Get in the cabin – now!’ shouted Buck. ‘Leave the mikes!’

The tug’s engines kicked into life. Kemp reached the cabin as Buck was spinning the wheel, bringing the bow round to face seaward.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ said Kemp. ‘Those mikes cost money!’

Buck tossed him the binoculars.

‘Small-bore tsunami. It happens now and then. Get everyone into the cabin, and dump the mikes.’

Kemp didn’t need binoculars to see the thin white line of surf moving fast a mile or less away. A flash of lightning lit the foam-flecked waves. It began raining hard, grey stair rods falling from the lowering cloud base.

Kemp saw the last of the seals, a mother heavy with pup, waddling urgently into the water.

‘In here!’ Kemp shouted at the students. The Norwegian girl was bent over the transom being sick. One of the British students tried to put his arm around her, but she shrugged it off.

Kemp ran down to the deck and pulled the girl round. Her face was white, and she doubled up and retched over his shoes. The deck surged below them as he half dragged her up the steps into the cabin, where the rest of the students were now jammed in behind Buck.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Jacob Sylvester, a faint trace of alarm in his voice.

‘Nothing. It’s OK, just weather,’ said Buck, his voice thick and heavy.

Christ, he’s drunk, Kemp thought.

The tug was still swinging round to seaward when the sandbanks suddenly emerged from the water as if propelled upwards by a hidden hand.

Kemp and Buck exchanged a glance: the tidal pull of a tsunami gathering the sea to strengthen the wave that would break over them.

Kemp had heard of freak waves rolling out of the Atlantic and overwhelming fishing boats. He had heard old men’s tales of small-bores when the tide, wind, waves and maybe the marginal movement of the seabed in the deeps between Greenland and Newfoundland combined to start a ripple 1,000 miles off the coast that quickly became a fast-moving wave. Very rare, he told himself, and nothing like the great tsunami in the Far East that crashed into the headlines in the last days of 2004, leaving thousands of dead washed up on the evening news.

Down on the transom the $10,000 tape deck lay with its mikes and headphones still plugged in, getting wet, very wet. Leo pushed through his students and took a look out of the cabin window. Dump the mikes? What was Buck talking about? He wanted his job back. He needed that tape deck. Insurance? My tape deck got soaked in a sudden storm. Forget it.

He could make it. He had thirty seconds maybe. The wave was still about 400 yards away, its foaming crest gleaming bright in the gloaming that had descended. He had time.

Above the engine noise he heard Buck shouting as he leapt down the stairs to the deck. He slipped as he ran across rain-slicked decking. At the exact moment that he reached the far end of the transom and raised the $10,000-worth of recording equipment to his chest the bow lifted, the wave broke over the foredeck and surged the length of the vessel. The last thing he saw was white, frightened faces peering at him through the rear windows of the cabin.

Everything went dark and he felt himself being sucked down, pushed sideways and tumbled head over heels. The tape deck was torn from his grasp.

Hold your breath, he told himself. Don’t panic. Don’t flail around. Kick off your boots. The old lessons drilled into him on research trips to the Hebrides in his Scottish days. Someone had scrawled some helpful advice on the first page of the marine safety book they had to take with them: ‘What do you do if you’re washed overboard? Answer: Never let yourself get into that situation.’

Kemp broke the surface and breathed a lungful of salty air and spray; the sky and sea seemed to have merged into watery darkness. He couldn’t see the Antoine in the murk. The sandbanks had vanished into a mist of spume and spindrift, whipped off the wave tops by the wind.

He kicked off his boots, feeling a ridiculous pang of regret that his recently bought expensive footwear should be abandoned to the ocean. Then he thought of the $10,000 recording machine that even now was heading for the ocean bed, and his boots didn’t seem so important after all. A flash of deeper, darker pain came with the realisation that he was never going to see Sam again, never going to watch her grow up and get married, have children, his grandchildren. He wriggled out of his jacket, fingers tearing at the buttons. Freed up, he began to swim towards where he reckoned the sandbanks had been. Hard rain was calming the sea, smoothing the waves down to three to four feet between trough and foamy crest.

Beside him in the water the head of a seal appeared briefly, and then vanished. Its long, elongated snout gave it an equine appearance and made it easily recognisable as one of the grey species. Seals can ride out any rough weather, but usually in these circumstances they will make for land and haul up.

Ahead in a trough between the waves two more seal heads appeared. Kemp kicked into a looping crawl, throwing his head right back to avoid swallowing too much water. He remembered being told that people drown at sea long before exhaustion sets in followed by the easy slide beneath the waves. They swallow sea water, panic and choke to death.

He was tired, but he felt no cold, probably because the shock had anaesthetised him. The sea was calmer now, and he could see the island shoreline about 800 yards away. The waves weren’t so high now, and a pod of seals broke the surface in a circle around him. Grey seals again, with well-whiskered roman noses, their heads bobbing up and down on the waves. Their two inches of blubber and their waterproof coat of short thick hair made them impervious to cold; they had also made them an attractive prey to man through the millennia. Early man used the oily blubber as fuel for crude lamps, fashioned seal skins into clothing and ate the red, musky flesh. The lamps of Europe and America had been lit with seal and whale blubber for centuries.

No blubber on me, thought Kemp. But he didn’t feel cold as he swam more slowly, conserving energy. The seals’ circle widened until they were about two or three yards distant on either side. They slipped through the water with sinuous, graceful ease. Occasionally surfers had told stories about being bitten by seals, but such cases were very rare, and only when pups had been directly threatened.

Kemp kicked hard to bring his head above the wave line, but there was no sign of the Antoine. He guessed that Buck would have kept heading straight out to sea, to keep his bow into a second wave. The first rule of tsunamis and earthquakes is that there is usually a second one. The rain had eased off and the seals were now close, as close as Kemp had ever been to them in the wild. Long whiskers, sleek skins that looked like wet leather, and those big eyes.

They were making no sounds that were audible to him, but he knew they were communicating with each other, signalling somehow on an agreed destination, or maybe commenting on this strange addition to their pod.

Kemp kicked down, and touched something soft and yielding. He found the bottom with one foot, and then the other. He was on the sandbank. He stood chest deep in the water and took a step forward. Another step, bringing him waist deep now. A few yards ahead the waves were breaking over a bar of sand. The sea was calming; the rain had eased off.

‘I’ve made it,’ he told himself. ‘I’ve survived.’

Kemp dropped to his knees and breathed in deep lungfuls of air. He looked at his watch. He had been in the water ten minutes. But he felt no cold. The shock will soon wear off, and then I’ll die of exposure, he thought. Where was the Antoine?

About fifteen square yards of sandbar had been uncovered as the waves subsided. He looked shoreward. A fast-flowing channel 300 yards wide lay between him and land. He’d never make it in sodden clothing. He unzipped his trousers and pulled them off.

On the seaward side of the sandbank a dozen seal heads rose and fell in the swell. The seals were now in a semi-circle around the sandbar, paying no attention to the stranger in their midst. Kemp was surrounded by creatures that his species had slaughtered throughout the millennia, yet their presence seemed reassuring, almost welcoming.

He shivered suddenly. The wind was cold, the water warmer. He would be better off in the ocean, maybe. He crawled forward on all fours and slipped into the water, beginning a slow breaststroke towards the ring of grey-whiskered heads that turned as he approached and began to move away from the sandbanks. No longer tired, he swam with ease as the seals around him began to arch and slide through the water like their distant cousins the dolphins. They moved easily though the waves towards their apparent destination, a rocky outcrop on the shoreline about half a mile distant.

Kemp swam with them. He seemed to have no difficulty keeping up, using half breaststroke, half sidestroke. What was happening to him was inexplicable, magical even, but it felt quite natural. Logic deserted him as he accepted the reality that he was at sea, swimming among a pod of seals who seemed to regard him as one of their own.

He had no wish to turn shoreward, or towards the island. Why question something that seemed so natural? If this was the afterlife, or a mad dream world that was a prelude to it, why not accept it?

Or maybe, he thought, this is the dream sequence before death. Maybe this is what happens: the body shuts down, the brain goes into cold storage, leaving a flicker of life, leading to phantasm and madness; like those tanker crews torpedoed in the Atlantic during the war and left lying for days on liferafts, badly burnt and delirious with pain and dehydration. Most of them were mad when they were picked up, and spent the rest of the war, indeed the rest of their lives, in mental homes.

When Buck was safely a mile out to sea, he turned the tug. He had put out a mayday call moments after Kemp had gone overboard. He knew – and he knew that Kemp knew – that he had no option but to seek the safety of the open sea. That was thirty minutes ago, and the response of the rescue services had been slowed by weather. Now he saw the 44-foot lifeboats butting through the waves about a mile to starboard. These were the workhorses of the coastguard fleet and as always they worked to a grid pattern, boxing off the ocean into squares and assigning boats to each square. A helicopter from Hyannis airport would soon join the search. A radio message had alerted the Institute. Kemp had been in the water almost half an hour, and the water temperature at this time of year meant that he could still be alive.

Buck radioed the coastguard his position and informed them that he would take the tug as close inshore as possible and work up the coast from a point just north of the sandbanks. He manoeuvred the Antoine to within fifty yards of the shore, as close as her nine-foot draft allowed on a falling tide.

The students all seemed to be in shock, but he had little time to worry about them. Two or three of the girls were crying. He gave them his binoculars and told them to scan the shoreline, because that was most likely where Kemp would be. He would probably have swum ashore by now, but the currents around the sandbanks meant that he could have been taken a mile or so up the coast.

This was reassuring news for the students, but Buck didn’t actually believe it. If Kemp had survived being swept overboard, if he had not been knocked unconscious and drowned straightaway, he would surely have made for the sandbanks. And there was no sign of him either there or on the shore beyond them.

A coastguard boat found Kemp’s sea boots and jacket. But it was Gunbrit Nielsen who spotted his trousers floating in the water. Buck fished them out with a billhook. The students stared dumbly as he went through the pockets and then squeezed out the water, balled up the trousers and threw them in the back of the boat. ‘Keep looking,’ he growled, and climbed the stairs to the top deck. Gunbrit began to cry, brushing the tears away with the back of her hand. The rest of them pretended to look at the shore, but their eyes kept sliding back to the sodden pair of trousers – a graphic reminder that something terrible had happened to their teacher.

Tallulah Bonner was in her office when the head of the coastguard station at Coldharbor phoned with the news that Leo Kemp had been lost at sea. There was a small but rapidly diminishing chance that he would be found alive if he hadn’t managed to swim ashore. The coastguard had deployed both their older boats and their latest rigid-hull fast-moving 42-foot craft and a helicopter. The search was now concentrating on the shoreline. The best hope was that he had been washed up on the island. Three fishing vessels from Chatham harbour had been called to make the short trip to Monomoy to join the Antoine in searching the foreshore. Everything possible was being done.

‘And his family?’ asked Bonner.

There was a pause at the other end of the line.

‘We thought it appropriate for you to call…’

‘OK, I’ll call his wife. Keep me in touch,’ she said.

Damn. This was going to be horrible. How on earth was she going to break the news to Mrs Kemp? From time to time she had to tell senior colleagues that they were no longer wanted at the Institute. She always praised their work, thanked them for their contribution and then worked around to the ‘new challenges’ ahead, i.e. the challenge of getting another job. That was bad enough; this was awful. She rehearsed her opening remarks. ‘Your husband is missing, but we’re sure we’ll find him. I can’t tell you how sorry we are, Mrs Kemp, but I want you and your family to know you are in our prayers. Can we offer you any help?’ That was the best she could do, and at least it had the advantage of being honest.

She had met Margot Kemp at the usual functions, and had spent some time with her at the last annual staff picnic. A nice, bright woman, good-looking in a way that men probably thought sexy. But she had been very guarded and quiet since the death of her son. How on earth was she going to take this?

Then there was the press to think about. There would have to be some sort of statement. The papers would make a fuss. Kemp had media friends, newspaper friends. That man Sandy Rowan. They would make a meal of it. But did they know about the decision to remove him from the staff? She hoped not.

She got up and walked to the wall of her office, which was lined with framed citations of the Institute’s great achievements. Pride of place went to a UNESCO award for building the deep-sea submersibles that were the first to examine the hydrothermal vent fields in the mid-Atlantic ridge. She remembered Kemp’s excitement when they showed staff a film of the black mineral-rich fluid spewing from the ocean floor.

‘Damn. What a waste,’ she said out loud, surprising herself.

She didn’t dislike Kemp. It was just that he wouldn’t play by the rules. A paid-up member of the awkward club, as one of the Board directors had told her. Great institutions can tolerate anything but damage to their reputation, because it is on the integrity of their reputation that fund-raising programmes are based and talented staff attracted. And she had built that reputation. In so doing she had raised the whole profile of oceanography at a time when the White House was betting the ranch on manned flights to Mars.

She had made sure that the Coldharbor story was out there, a story of teamwork, intellectual endeavour and innovative research. How many times had she hammered home those themes to her management team? How many times had she told them to impress on all their colleagues that the golden rule of any media campaign is that everyone has to sing from the same hymn sheet?

Nothing, she knew, nothing devalues a brand more than confusion over a great corporation’s vision and values. Vision and values, that’s what people like Kemp never understood. That’s why he had to go. And now it appeared that he had gone.

For good.

She calmed down, and wished she hadn’t stopped smoking. Nine months, three weeks and four days. She really could use a cigarette now.

This was going to be a horrible call to make. She would telephone the Board after she had spoken to Mrs Kemp.

Why, oh why, had she given up smoking?

She phoned the janitor at the front lodge. Yes, he did have a pack – would Marlboro be all right? He would bring them up.

Margot was on the road north out of Falmouth, and had just passed Betsy’s Diner, with its ‘Eat Heavy’ sign set to flashing red, when her cell phone chirped. Jamming it to her ear, she checked her rear-view mirror. When they weren’t issuing tickets for parking or speeding, the Cape police loved nothing better than to catch a driver using a cell phone behind the wheel; that and busting the young for smoking dope.

‘Mrs Kemp, it’s Tallulah Bonner from the Institute. Can you talk?’

‘Sure,’ said Margot, with that sick feeling you get in your stomach when the wrong person phones at the wrong time and asks if you have time to talk.

Bonner was commendably clear in describing what she had been told had happened, and very encouraging about what she thought would happen. But it didn’t make sense. Margot found herself shouting down the phone.

‘Overboard? But what happened? This was a field trip, for God’s sake! They were only going to Monomoy Island, a couple of miles offshore. What do you mean, “small tsunami?” We don’t have tsunamis here. This is Cape Cod, not Sumatra or wherever they have tsunamis.’

Bonner inhaled deeply and blew out a cloud of smoke, thanking God for the janitor and making a note to look upon his salary kindly at the next pay review.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what caused it, but I’m told it was the combination of wind and wave, maybe something way out under the sea. But the important thing, Mrs Kemp, is that there’s every chance he’ll be found alive. He’s a strong swimmer. He should have made it to the shore.’

Margot turned the car round and headed home. No point worrying Sam just now. Of course Leo was all right. But she would call Jenny Hathaway, their family doctor and her best friend on the Cape, and a fellow founder member of the WALL club, membership of which Margot regarded as an essential antidote to the long Cape winters. There were only two members, because Margot had never found anyone else suitable to join. WALL stood for Wine And Laughter Lunches, which was a misnomer, because they usually met in the evenings, since, as Jenny pointed out, doctors could not really drink at lunchtime. Not that Jenny drank much anyway. She supplied the laughter, and Margot did the drinking.

Leo would probably have turned up by the time she got home, wouldn’t he? But suppose he hadn’t? Suppose he had drowned? She held the thought in her mind, turned it over, polished it like the apples that Grandma had shone for her with an old kitchen cloth when she was a child. They always tasted better that way, Grandma said. Suddenly the thought of Leo’s death gave her the same pleasure as had that first bite into a polished apple; but the pleasure came gift-wrapped with guilt. By all means lead me into temptation, but deliver me please from the troubled conscience that comes with it. She could go back to Scotland. With the insurance money, she and Sam could be free of this place. A warm, welcoming thought, freighted with guilt.

She bundled the thought away. She must tell Sam, but not now. Wait until she had news. Of course he’s not dead.

At home she ignored the welcoming barks of Beano, Sam’s dog, and went straight to the kitchen, feeling as if she had stepped into a new and unreal world. She poured a drink, just the one, a decent-sized glass of Chardonnay. She had to pick Sam up from school, and it might be a long night. Her husband was not dead, she told herself.