A couple of weeks after the funeral, with what her neighbours and friends thought indecent haste, Margot Kemp had begun her preparations to leave Cape Cod and start a new life back in Scotland. The realty agent had told her she could expect a reasonable price for the house, probably from someone who worked at the Institute. She had made arrangements to take a house near her parents in Perth. The next step was to apply for a primary-teacher’s job.
Sam watched her mother go through the process of divorce from the Cape, cancelling membership of the gym, placing small ads in the Herald for pieces of unloved furniture, parcelling up old clothing for the local Salvation Army shop.
Margot seemed happy. ‘We’re slowly lifting the anchor, darling. Then we’ll raise the mainsail and sail home across the sea. You do understand, don’t you? We can’t stay here, not after all this.’
But she didn’t know. She wanted to stay with her school friends, in the only place she had ever known. Anyway, what about Beano? There were strict quarantine regulations about dogs. How long would he have to spend in a cage somewhere before he could join them? How was an American dog like Beano going to like it in Scotland? Come to that, would she like it there? The one time she had visited her grandparents, she found the food horrible. At around five in the afternoon they served a huge meal of cakes, waffles, sandwiches, sometimes fried sausages and a large pot of tea, and that was it – no supper. And Grandma smelt of stale talcum powder and Grandpa farted all the time.
The curtains had been taken down in the front rooms, Sandy noticed as he walked through the garden gate and up the path to the front door. He hesitated before ringing the bell. He felt nervous. Inside, he found Margot in the midst of packing. There were open suitcases in every room and boxes strewn across the floors. She had what looked like a yellow duster tied as a bandana around her head.
She told him that she and Sam were leaving in a week’s time, taking the direct Boston–Edinburgh flight. She didn’t look him in the eye as she said this, but threw the remark over her shoulder while bent over a packing case. She said it as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a widow to leave home for a new life without waiting for her husband’s body to be found.
Margot knew what Sandy was thinking. She knew what they were all thinking, even that nosey priest who kept coming round and asking how she was.
‘I’ll be bloody glad to shake the sand of this place off my feet, that’s how I am, Father,’ she had told him. It wasn’t quite true, of course. Despite the social snobbery and the stultifying boredom of the off season, she loved the violence of nature that gripped the Cape every winter. The summer landscape of beach, dunes and foreshore disappeared as the wind swung to the north-east and drove in the storms that clawed at the base of the wide summer beaches and the dunes beyond.
That was what she would really miss. Here in this north-eastern corner of America they had real weather: three-foot-deep snowfalls; storms that roared in off the Atlantic out of nowhere and just tore away a whole beach, shifting it up or down the coast. In Scotland, the tides just went in and out four times a day, and nothing ever changed.
Sandy sat down on a packing case and waited for a break in Margot’s frantic activity. Eventually he coughed politely.
‘This may not be my business, Margot…’
She straightened up, stretched, arched her back and grimaced, but didn’t look at him. Whatever it was he had to say, she didn’t want to hear it.
‘Sandy, if you’ve come to tell me I can’t leave right now, then join the queue. But I can’t stay. I’ve had enough. This place is full of ghosts for me. I’ve had good times, maybe, but there are bad memories, very bad memories.’
Sandy couldn’t think of another way to do this. He had thought about a letter, a phone call, even using his column to write a parable, but none of them seemed right. Knowing Margot, it wouldn’t work this way either, but what the hell.
So he went straight in, and told her there was talk among the fishermen down in the harbour bars about a bearded human face among the seals.
She stopped packing, and looked at him for the first time since he had arrived.
‘Come on, Sandy. Give me a break.’
‘I just think you should know, that’s all.’
She sat down and lit a cigarette, breaking her Number 1 house rule. No smoking in the house. Ever. Except now. Sandy was the second person to have told her this crazy story.
‘Know what, Sandy?’ she said. ‘Telling me that my husband, my late husband, is somewhere out there in the ocean, does that help me? Is that what friends are for?’
She was right, of course. It was crazy to have mentioned it. The whole thing was crazy.
Margot was angry.
‘You ask those fishermen, and they’ll tell you there are mermaids out there. They’ll tell you the sea can swallow a ship at night before the captain has time to get out of his bunk. They’ll tell you about squid the size of a house grabbing men off the deck with tentacles as thick as tree trunks. Fishermen have been telling these bullshit stories for centuries, because it glamorises their job, makes them heroes battling the dark forces of the unknown. We all know it’s nonsense, so why come here to my house now repeating that crap?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Sandy. ‘I just thought you should hear it from me rather than from someone else. People are talking about it. Sam will hear the stories, and I thought it best you knew.’
Margot stood with her hands on her hips, cheeks flushed, breathing hard.
‘It’s OK. I understand. It’s just that I don’t need this right now. I’m trying hard to keep everything together, but it’s tough. Sam doesn’t want to go, and I’m desperate to get out of here. Half the Cape thinks I’m a wicked witch for sounding off like that at the service, and now you come in with a story about some merman, if that’s the right word.’
She sighed, kicked a suitcase shut and unwound the yellow bandana.
‘Why don’t you get us a drink? There’s a bottle in the fridge.’
They sat down on the deck, a bottle of wine in a cooler between them. It was a warm evening, and Margot was wearing shorts and a v-necked T-shirt without a bra, he noticed.
‘You think I was wrong to say that stuff about Leo at the service?’
It was the second time she had asked him this.
‘Like I said, I’m with Jenny. You spoke your mind. Leo would have approved.’
‘That’s not quite a straight answer, is it?’ She laughed. ‘You’re too diplomatic, Sandy, too nice. Look, I had to say it. What other chance was I going to have? Anyway, that stuck-up Bonner woman deserved it. Fancy firing a man for giving a few interviews and making a few speeches. And he always praised the Institute. You know he loved the place.’
Of course Sandy knew that. He knew that Leo Kemp had been an exceptional scientist whose weakness was always to view conventional wisdom as part of the problem, not the solution. He also knew that Leo was dead. He wished he hadn’t mentioned those ridiculous rumours.
‘What are your plans when you get to Scotland?’ he asked.
‘The first thing I’ll have to do is get Sam into a school for the autumn term. In St Andrews maybe.’
‘Where you met Leo?’
‘Yeah. My good-looking Australian scientist, giving interviews about talking seals, and there was I, a little primary-school teacher.’
‘Love at first sight?’
‘Bollocks. He saw me in the bar of the Cross Keys with a crowd of other teachers and thought I had great boobs. That’s what he told me.’
‘So it was love at first sight.’
They laughed, and she poured another glass.
‘Maybe I’m mad. It’s cold, grey and rainy back there. Half the year you live in darkness, or it feels like it. In the winter you get about four hours of real daylight.’
‘So why are you going back?’
‘It’s family, isn’t it? Sam and I need to put some roots down. She’s sixteen. In two years she’ll be at university. And it may sound very practical and unfeeling, but I really am not up to doing the grieving widow act here on the Cape.’
The doorbell rang. Margot sighed and got up to answer it.
A group of Leo’s students, headed by Gunbrit Nielsen, stood in the doorway carrying a large bunch of lilies. They had come to say goodbye. They filed in and sat self-consciously amid the packing cases, saying how sorry they were and how much they would like to keep in touch.
Margot thanked them as she busied herself cutting the stems and putting the flowers in a vase. Behind the platitudes and the awkward pauses there was a sadness among the class that left Margot feeling strangely elated after they had gone.
‘He really touched their lives, didn’t he?’ she said.
Sandy drove home wishing once again that his friend had not said quite so often: think the unthinkable, embrace the impossible.
Weeks before every birthday and Christmas Sam would draw up a long list of wished-for presents, in careful order of priority. Now she had drawn up a list of conditions for her departure, and presented it to her mother for signature.
Beano’s quarantine was to be as short as legally permitted; Mum had to keep her promise that they would come back every summer; wherever they lived in Scotland there had to be a garden for at least two of those big floppy-eared rabbits she planned to keep as pets; she wanted a brand-new bike; and finally Sam insisted that they say goodbye to some of the places on the Cape that they had enjoyed together as a family.
They rented bikes and cycled the sea path from Falmouth to Coldharbor; they took the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard and biked over to Oak Bluffs, a honky-tonk town that likes to think of itself as the hippy answer to the stuffy villages of Edgartown and Vineyard Haven.
In Oak Bluffs they took photos of each other standing in front of one of Leo’s favourite places on the Cape, the memorial statue of a Union soldier erected in 1891 as an act of redemption and forgiveness by a Confederate soldier, one Charles T. Strachan of the First Virginia Regiment. Leo always said that anyone with even a vague knowledge of American history would understand what a powerful statement that was at that time, and how much better one felt about the human race having looked at it for a few minutes.
They ate the classic Cape Cod lunch at a little restaurant overlooking the harbour: a bowl of chowder and a grilled lobster, with a Budweiser for Margot and a Coke for Sam.
The final day of their farewell tour was spent in Provincetown, looking at the art galleries and ending with an argument about whether or not to make the long climb up the 252-foot Pilgrim Monument tower. Margot protested that she was tired, and that 116 steps were a hell of climb for a view of what, exactly?
But it was a clear day, and Sam insisted. She had come here with her class when they were doing a project on the Pilgrims, and this, the tallest granite tower in America, was a reminder that it was here in Provincetown that they had first landed in 1620. They spent five weeks anchored in a sheltering bay off what is now the harbour, and it was here that history was made with the publication of the Mayflower compact, drawn up to quell the rumbling dissent among indentured servants on board who, having survived the sixty-five-day crossing, now wanted their liberty and full rights. This they were granted in a document that was a forerunner to the US constitution. Therefore Provincetown could claim a more important stake in US history than Plymouth, to which the Pilgrims sailed having failed to find fresh water on the Cape.
At least, said Sam, that was the way they told it in Provincetown. Plymouth probably had a different view.
Margot listened to her daughter’s breathless history lesson and hoped that the Scottish school system was going to give her as good an education as she had clearly received at High School in Falmouth.
‘Come on, Mum. There’s a great view of the town, the beaches and the whole outer Cape, plus you can see Boston on a clear day, thirty miles across the bay.’ Sam was reading from the information chart at the bottom of the tower.
‘Who wants to see Boston on any day?’ Margot grumbled as they began the long climb.
But it was worth it. The view was panoramic, and you could peer through telescopes down at the ant-like figures in town and on the beaches. Beachcombers, dog-walkers, joggers and sunbathers populated the sands that stretched away into the hazy distance. On a small spit of sand running out several hundred yards to sea, probably flung up by some recent storm, were a score or more seals, some in the water, some hauled up dozing in the sun.
Margot swung the telescope lazily over them. They were mainly harbour seals, with a few greys among them. As they rode the waves together they would occasionally vanish beneath the surface, having sensed the presence of fish beneath them; Buck had told her that the average seal ate forty pounds of fish a day. Maybe the fishermen were right, thought Margot. Maybe they did need to be culled.
A patch of sea mist rolled, in shrouding the seals and leaving visible only their faint outlines. Margot tightened her grip on the telescope, focusing on the blurred shapes shifting gently in the swell about thirty yards away. A seal in the water in those conditions and at this distance might easily be mistaken for a human, she thought. As the mist cleared and they came back into clear view she realised how easy it would be for a fisherman to make that mistake.
There were no human heads or bearded faces anywhere out there…except for Leo, of course. He was there somewhere, floating on the tides, pulled hither and thither by the currents and the wind. What would his body be like now? Bloated, blackened flesh, unrecognisable as the husband she had known, peeling off in chunks and being eaten by sea creatures? Eyes scooped out by the waves leaving sightless sockets staring at the sky? She shivered at the thought.
Suddenly Sam was jumping up and down with excitement.
‘Hey, Mum! Look at this! Quick!’
Margot grabbed her telescope from her, almost pushing her aside.
‘Mum!’
Margot apologised. She didn’t know what she had been expecting, but Sam had only been looking at a riderless horse on the beach.
‘Must have thrown him off,’ said Sam. ‘Mum, will you buy me a horse in Scotland?’
‘No.’ Margot swung the telescope back to the sand spit. A speedboat carved through the water just beyond it.
The seals had gone.
On the way back down the steps, Margot let Sam go ahead, and paused on the landing about halfway down. The image of Leo’s body rolling in the waves would not leave her. She looked out over the beaches to the sea beyond. He was out there somewhere, and sooner or later they would find him, a body on the beach brought in by the tide like a piece of driftwood. An early-morning jogger running along the tide line would see the corpse and swerve away, fumbling in his Lycra shorts for a mobile phone.
Downstairs in the café, Margot took a deep breath and told Sam she had changed her mind. She had been very stupid. They could not possibly go back to Scotland yet. ‘The thing is, darling, people are right. Your dad’s out there somewhere, or his body is, and we have to wait until they find him. We have to bury him properly here on the Cape.’
Sam jumped from her seat, her face lit up with pleasure. She clapped the palms of her hands.
‘That’s wicked, Mum, really cool, thank you!’ she said, and hugged her mother. Margot brushed away a tear and ordered a glass of wine.
This is the time, thought Sam. The time for my surprise. She had waited, uncertain of the timing and fearful of her mother’s reaction. Now she knew the time was right.
‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ she said on the way home.
‘Do tell,’ said Margot.
‘Not now. When we’re home. It’s a big surprise.’
‘A nice surprise?’
‘Of course,’ said Sam, leaning over and giving her mother a noisy kiss on the cheek.
‘Good, I like nice surprises.’
At home Sam made Margot take Leo’s usual seat in the sitting room, and told her to close her eyes. She left the room and shuffled in backwards, holding, as Margot could see through half-closed eyelids, a square object covered by a sheet.
‘You’re cheating,’ said Sam. Margot screwed up her eyes. Sam turned and whipped off the sheet.
‘OK, open wide.’
And there Leo was, beautifully caught in an oil painting. But…Margot gasped: that half-smile on his face, that cold, hard stare, those seals in the background and that angry sea, was that her husband?
‘How extraordinary,’ said Margot. ‘Who did this?
‘Mrs Gulliver. You know, the art teacher he used to go to. She did the godwit painting for the students.’
‘Yes, of course. But who chose the setting? I mean, with those seals in the background?’
Sam looked at her mother. She had said ‘those seals’ as if they were vermin. Maybe they were to her, she thought. No wonder she and Dad used to argue all the time.
‘I didn’t ask her for that, but I think it’s great, don’t you? I mean, she knew Dad worked at the Institute and did all that stuff on seals, so that’s the way she did it. She said she thought it was a great way to remember him.’
‘Well, she was right,’ said Margot, getting up to examine the painting with care. It was technically excellent. For once that stern face of his was creased in a half-smile. When did I last see him smile, she thought? When did I last see my husband happy? He looked happy here, and of course that was where he was happy. Standing on the rocks in front of his bloody seals.
She ran her fingers over the layered oil paint, feeling the texture of his skin, the rough early-morning feel of an unshaven face.
‘Clever Mrs Gulliver,’ she said. ‘She’s really got him. When did you ask her to do this?’
Sam explained that she had gone to ask for the portrait when she knew her father wasn’t coming back. Something special to remember him by.
‘And how much did it cost?’ asked Margot, coming back to earth.
Sam looked embarrassed.
‘She wouldn’t take anything for it. She said it was a gift in remembrance of a good man.’
‘In remembrance of a good man? Well, how sweet of her. Lovely. We’ll put it up over the mantelpiece.’
‘You don’t like it, do you, Mum? I can tell.’
Margot hugged her daughter, holding her in a long embrace. Playing for time, thought Sam.
‘I love it, darling. I think it was a wonderful thing to do, a marvellous idea, and it’s been done so well. It’s just a bit of a surprise, that’s all.’
They both knew she was lying.
In truth Margot thought the portrait was mawkish, sentimental chocolate-box art; but far worse, it was an unwelcome reminder of a husband she had lost long ago, and who would now stare down at her wherever she went, in whatever house she lived in. This was not a painting she was going to be able to shuffle off to the attic. For Sam’s sake she was going to have to put up with the bloody thing.
Almost four weeks after Leo Kemp disappeared, the Cape Herald had published an investigation into his death and an appreciation of his life and work written by Sandy Rowan. The analysis of the events surrounding the accident involving the Antoine concluded that extraordinary weather conditions had led to a drowning for which no one was to blame. Buck’s seamanship was commended and he was specifically exempted from responsibility.
Even so, Buck had refused to cooperate with the investigation and had slammed the phone down when Sandy had called him. He spent his days aimlessly at sea on his 44–foot boat and his nights in the bars around Chatham. And every night he would awake from the same nightmare, bathed in whisky sweat and shouting out orders to a crew.
The second and longer article contained a large cut-out picture of Leo standing on the transom of the Antoine, with the text artfully cut around it under the headline ‘A Man for all Mysteries’. The article laid great emphasis on Leo’s fascination with the mysteries of the ocean’s deeps. Passages from his recent speeches were quoted, including one in which he said that while twelve men had walked on the moon, no one had set foot on the ocean floor at its greatest depths and only two people had ever seen it with their own eyes through the pressurised windows of a deep-sea submersible. ‘Huge creatures live at that depth,’ Leo was quoted as saying. ‘What they are, and how they live, we do not know. Why don’t we know? Because we are not looking.’
Sandy wrote that the late scientist would have been amazed that, more than a month after his death, the ocean had still not surrendered his body. The head of the coastguard in Coldharbor was quoted as saying that never in his experience – and he had been in the job for forty years – had a body that had gone missing within sight of shore failed to beach up in a few days.
Sandy had ended the article with the thought that, morbid though it might seem to some readers, Leo would have enjoyed the mystery surrounding his missing corpse.
The editor cut the paragraph on the grounds of taste.
Tallulah Bonner read the article over breakfast coffee on the deck of her Penzance Point house.
‘He doesn’t go away, does he?’ she said to her husband, who was steering his hand towards a glass of fresh orange juice while reading his own newspaper. She put the glass into his hand and watched him raise it to his lips without taking his eyes off the paper – the Wall Street Journal, of course.
‘Who?’ he said, not bothering to look up.
Tallulah had once attended a management-training course in California, on the first day of which the twenty attendees had been asked to write down the three biggest mistakes they had made in their lives. The anonymous lists were printed out and circulated for general discussion. Twelve people had said that marrying the wrong person was one of the mistakes. They were all women. Tallulah was one of them.
Leo Kemp’s replacement in the marine biology department took his first class soon after Kemp’s funeral. Adam Swift came from an old Cape family, and could claim direct descent from Elijah Swift, who in 1820 had been one of the first men on the Cape to realise the wealth to be made from the whaling industry. Generations of Swifts ever since had been brought up to uphold the maritime traditions that had enriched the family.
With that reverence for the Cape’s history came respect for the institutions that had developed from the seafaring lives of the local people. Chief among these was the Coldharbor Institute for Marine Studies. Adam Swift was therefore naturally anxious to shield the Institute from the perceived criticisms of the late Leo Kemp.
Leo’s sacking had become public knowledge soon after the funeral, much to the embarrassment of the Institute. There had been a difficult board meeting, at which the chief executive was questioned closely about the handling of Leo’s case. When she protested that it was they, the Board, who had sanctioned his dismissal, an elderly Board member said quietly: ‘We did indeed, but perhaps we did not have the full facts.’
Tallulah Bonner was forced to bite her tongue. There were no ‘full facts’ to disclose, as every Board member knew. Kemp had indirectly criticised the strategy of the Institute, and had held it up to ridicule by reviving the whole ludicrous story of Hoover the talking seal. On top of that, he had attacked government policy towards the Stellwagen Bank marine reserve. And if you really wanted to make a case that Leo Kemp was a rogue academic, look at the way he attacked the Canadian government’s entire fisheries policy. Tallulah Bonner had made the Board aware of all these factors. Now that Leo was dead they were getting snippy with her.
Adam Swift began his first lecture on what he hoped was a conciliatory note. He paid tribute to Leo Kemp as a colleague of great ability whose memory would live on in his published work and in the future careers of the students he had taught. He then proceeded, as far as the students were concerned, to attempt to demolish the intellectual basis on which Kemp had approached the entire subject of marine biology. Communication between sea mammals, he argued, was of secondary interest compared to the crucial question facing marine scientists: the effect on the oceans of climate change. The density, salinity, temperature and current flow of the waters of the seven seas were the real issues; the mammals who inhabited that universe could not be the prime focus of research, nor could they be the main intellectual consideration of the students.
Above all, he said, the notion that space exploration should take second place to the study of the oceans was at the least arguable. ‘He never said that,’ said a woman from the back but her soft voice did not carry and few people heard.
When Adam Swift advanced these views he did so from genuine belief, not in order to be provocative. Intellectual life was the endless pursuit of truth, and that required complete honesty. In Swift’s opinion Leo Kemp was a hopeless romantic who had misled his classes through his emotional commitment to a cause.
Leo’s problem, as Swift saw it, was that he had arrived at Coldharbor as a teacher and had turned into a preacher. In Swift’s view, preachers had their place, and while Leo’s cause may well have been just, indeed honourable, it had nothing to do with the teaching of marine biology.
Adam Swift was not stupid. He did not expect students who had so clearly loved their previous teacher to be swayed immediately by his new, more intellectually rigorous approach to their chosen subject. They would come round in time, he believed, because he was right, and those well-developed postgraduate minds would see the strength of his arguments. He had heard it said that Leo Kemp had the courage of his convictions, the strength of purpose to speak out for what he believed in. Well, so did he.
Swift acknowledged to the students that his views were different from those of his predecessor, and encouraged the class to discuss the differences. The debate changed direction when Jacob Sylvester stood up awkwardly and pushed his spectacles up his nose.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘for Mr Kemp, seals were the centre of a belief system. They were the intellectual beginning of a journey that led him to question the way modern marine science works.’
‘I understand that,’ said Swift, a little too obviously impatient with the patronising tone of his student.
‘No you don’t!’ shouted Jacob. The whole class went quiet, even the usual gossiping crowd at the back. The activity that goes on in the background of any academic class, the chatter, the fidgeting, note-passing and nose-picking came to a halt.
‘The point’, said Jacob, ‘is that here we are studying, researching, working up computer models, while just fifty miles away one of this country’s great marine reserves, Stellwagen, is being comprehensively destroyed. Mr Kemp thought we should do something about it.’
‘Universities are not centres for direct action,’ said Swift smoothly. ‘They—’
‘Universities should use the power of reason to allow reasonable force to be seen as a moral option,’ said Sylvester, his voicing rising with anger.
‘You mean we should advocate violence?’
‘No, I mean that Leo Kemp was trying to make us understand a reality out there, and trying to persuade us to go out and campaign. Not force. I never said that.’
‘That’s exactly what you just said, Mr…’
‘Sylvester. And that’s not what I said, not what I meant anyway. You’re twisting my words.’
The class had grown restless, and was on the verge of open anger. Swift realised that his idea for a debate had been a failure. He ended the session early.
Gunbrit Nielsen and several classmates met regularly in the Coffee Obsession – ‘a coffee house with character’, it called itself – in Coldharbor. After Adam Swift’s disastrous lecture they assembled there to decide on a strategy to rid themselves of their new teacher.
The first step was a letter to the Herald, which the editor obligingly placed in a prominent front-page position. ‘Late Lecturer’s Work Attacked’, ran the headline, and the accompanying story noted that Leo Kemp had been a bitter critic of the annual Canadian seal cull, and had warned that the commercial fishing lobby was working to overturn the 1972 Marine Mammals Protection Act.
Sandy Rowan had just taken a long call from Mrs Fiona Chadwick, and had endured a twenty-minute lecture on the iniquity of the paper’s treatment of her trainee reporter son Lewis, when a knock on the glass door of his office and a gesture of alarm from a subeditor holding a phone away from his ear told him there was more trouble on the line.
Tallulah Bonner came swiftly to the point. She did not normally talk to junior editorial staff, but since the editor was out, Mr Bowen or Rowan or whatever his name was would have to do. The Coldharbor Institute had never been subjected to such one-sided, innuendo-driven drivel in her whole experience as chief executive. The worst aspect of the case was that no attempt had been made to obtain the Institute’s side of the story. The Institute’s lawyers would be in touch, seeking redress, and not just an apology but serious damages for reputational harm.
She was about to put the phone down when Sandy said, ‘No need, Mrs Bonner. We’ll give you equal space to reply.’
‘You should have thought of that before,’ snapped Tallulah.
Sandy never understood why supposedly intelligent people like Mrs Bonner could behave so idiotically.
‘We did, Mrs Bonner. We offered Adam Swift the right of reply, and faxed the entire article to him before publication. He never came back to us.’
There was a silence at the end of the line.
‘Nice talking to you,’ said Sandy.
Lewis Chadwick had been congratulated by his colleagues on his good luck when the news editor chose him to undertake a survival mission on a desolate beach south of Provincetown. ‘Reality journalism’, the news editor called it. Sandy Rowan was put in charge of the project. The idea was to follow up the disappearance and likely death of Leo Kemp by showing whether or not it was possible to survive for a few days on the foreshore and among the dunes without help or resources. At first Lewis thought he was indeed the lucky one, guaranteed a big feature spread with a photo byline and perhaps a page-one cross reference. ‘Reporter Survives Week in the Wilderness’ was the headline he had in mind. But he did not feel quite so fortunate as he watched Sandy get back into the pick-up truck that had dropped him off on the remote beach.
For a start, he was four miles across country from the nearest road. Secondly, Sandy had made him dress in shorts and a T-shirt and had given him only a 125-millilitre bottle of water for use in emergency. His equipment was a Swiss army knife. When he complained, Sandy told him he was lucky not to have been made to begin the exercise by swimming ashore and starting off soaking wet. They had at least spared him that.
The story was that he was the only survivor of a ship that had gone down, and he had to fend for himself until he was rescued. But he was not told when the rescue would take place. The only instruction was to use his initiative.
‘This is all a bit over the top, isn’t it?’ said Lewis as Sandy prepared to leave him.
‘You’ve got it,’ said Sandy. ‘It’s completely over the top. But if you stick it you will get a great piece out of it.’