11

The overhead light dazzled Cal. He gazed around his windowless office as though for the first time. His eyes stopped briefly on particular objects: his camp bed, an open rucksack spilling clothes, the gantry of metal shelves where he kept his collection of flotsam – driftwood, sea beans, lobster-pot tags which crossed the Atlantic from Maine and a green turtle shell recovered from a beach on South Uist.

Next he glanced at the walls, at three large charts of the North Atlantic, the west coast of Scotland and the North Sea. The last two were stuck with different-coloured pins from which matching strands of wool stretched to a double row of newspaper cuttings. Among the headlines were ‘Trawler skipper lost overboard’, ‘Body parts washed up on Cornish coast’, ‘Mother’s beach vigil for child lost in storm’: a yellowing, curling record of disaster and death. Other pieces of wool extended below the charts to a gallery of photographs: stark images of bloated, broken-jointed bodies on various Atlantic or North Sea coasts. Some of the prints were crooked, about to fall. Others had dropped to the grey-coloured vinyl-covered floor and been left to gather dust.

Cal wondered at the kind of person who would choose to work with suffering and tragedy as wallpaper, also as a haphazard, dog-eared floor covering; how strange not to have had that thought before.

Any other time he’d walked into his office he had a sense of achievement at all of his possessions being contained in this twenty-by-twenty brick box with adjoining garage/store. Everything he owned could be loaded on the back of his pickup, which had 124,000 miles on the clock and a rusting dent in the front passenger door. Before, that had been his ambition: not to be tied down by things, objects, people or commitments as others were; for everything to be uproot-able, portable; for his footprint to be slight and shallow.

He made an attempt at rekindling his former enthusiasm for that way of life – ‘sustainability’ and ‘self-reliance’ had been his ambitions then – but found he couldn’t. Something had changed, and he thought that something was Alex’s death or, to be precise, not knowing that Alex had been ill and was dying. Surely friendship was more important than living like this.

He recalled the letter his ex-wife Rachel had written as their marriage was disintegrating, bitterly describing him as just another geek with a hobby. Women knew what to expect when they got involved with a trainspotter or some dimwit who boosted his testosterone by watching repeats of Top Gear, but Cal’s oceanography, his solitariness and his habit of sleeping under the stars on some faraway beach, made him out to be a romantic when he wasn’t. As soon as he was in a relationship he tried to escape. A distant, deserted coast was where he ran to. It wasn’t deliberate on his part, she’d conceded, but still, breaking up with him had left her with a nasty aftertaste of deceit. ‘Whoever wrote “no man is an island” clearly hadn’t met you.’

Cal didn’t want to be that person any more. Could he be anybody else?

He sat heavily in the second-hand swivel chair at his worktable which he’d constructed from driftwood, adding later extensions, so that now it was five metres long, reaching almost from one wall to another. He studied the room once again, perhaps in the hope a different perspective might lead to a different opinion.

Not only was it unchanged but it begged an unsettling question: what kind of person would have placed greater value on this, this horror show, than on Alex’s friendship? Cal gazed around the room again, his expression one of distaste. He’d blanked Alex, omitted to return his calls, was unaware of Alex dying, and for what? This: a business so fragile it was undone by one woman’s tearful appearance on television; an environment so grotesque that Detective Sergeant Helen Jamieson, another long-suffering friend, now his only friend, said she’d attended murder scenes less disturbing.

An exasperated sigh escaped from him. He hadn’t returned Helen’s call from a few days ago, hadn’t even checked whether she’d left a message.

In frustration, he kicked out at a leg of his worktable. The impact set off a slow-motion landslide of books, charts and files. Some fell to the floor with a succession of bangs. Others toppled sideways. Before, it had resembled a miniature shanty town, every available space occupied and each ramshackle edifice defying logic and gravity. Now it was a shanty town after an earthquake had struck. And, just as in real life when a baby is brought screaming from the rubble – a survivor, life carrying on – so Cal witnessed his own unexpected, if minor, miracle. Where once a towering pillar of reference books had stood, there was wreckage – and poking from it a twenty-pound note.

The money acted as a distraction. He peered into the new landscape of his table, pushing his fingers into dark hollows below collapsed paper masonry, finding another £14.03 in coins which he put with his other money, the residue of his survival fund, in a cleared space. He counted twice, arriving at the same total, £280.15.

He turned on his desktop computer, the only object on his worktable which had remained upright. A quick scroll through the first two pages of emails – there were 3,327 unread in his inbox – was sufficient for a conclusion about his business being unlikely to make a recovery despite Harry Fowler’s reappearance. His uninvited correspondents were attacking from a different direction. Having previously accused him of assisting an old man to kill himself, now their unanimous opinion was that Cal had had a lucky escape, not just because Harry Fowler had turned up alive but because the old man’s loss of memory also meant he had no recollection of anything that had passed between him and Cal, apparently even of having ever met him.

Cal thought about looking for a phone number or address for Harry’s daughter Kirsty. Should he ring Harry or write? Should he urge Harry to tell the truth about their night-time encounter on the bridge, also about his lost love, Angela? Cal decided not to. If the old man’s memory loss was genuine, that was that. If it wasn’t, Harry was just being Harry, once again choosing not to be reckless or wholehearted. After all, Harry had warned Cal. Also, Cal thought there was justice in Harry’s behaviour, a punishment for Cal being similarly self-centred for the last years of Alex’s life.

Cal crossed his office to the kitchenette, took everything out of the cupboards which was edible or drinkable, as if taking stock in preparation for a siege. On the counter were:

A litre of milk (less than half full).

A loaf of stale supermarket bread (unopened).

A jar of instant coffee (new).

A pot of Marmite (almost full).

A small tin of baked beans.

A large tin of plum tomatoes.

A packet of rice, another of dried pasta.

A pack of oatcakes (three left).

A box of decaffeinated green teabags (eight remaining).

He had enough food for two or three days, possibly enough money for two or three weeks. In the past he might have regarded that as evidence of success, his ability to survive without over-taxing the planet’s resources. Now he thought how little he had, how precarious and tenuous his hold on ordinary life.

He put water into the kettle, switched it on and, while he waited for it to boil, he turned on his phone. While he’d been away, he’d had six texts and seven missed calls, all from Helen Jamieson.

Cal rang her.

‘Where are you?’ she demanded as soon as she answered.

‘In my office.’

‘Why didn’t you get in touch, let me know you were all right?’ She sounded exasperated. ‘I’ve sent text, emails. I’ve left voice messages. God’s sake, Cal, you’ve got a phone.’

‘It’s been turned off,’ he said. ‘I didn’t have it with me.’

‘God, Cal, what’s wrong with you? When anyone else is in trouble, they rely on friends. Not you, no, not Cal McGill. When you’re in trouble you cut yourself off, disappear. Where did you go this time?’

Cal said, ‘Sandwood Bay.’

Helen made a sighing sound, exasperation.

Cal said, ‘By the way, I didn’t advise Harry Fowler about killing himself.’

‘No, Cal, I know. Of course you didn’t. But your disappearing act makes it look as though you did.’

The lid of the kettle was rattling so much that Cal said, ‘Hold on.’ After switching off the plug at the wall, he turned back to find a young woman standing inside the door: five ten, as tall as Cal, with red hair breaking free from a loose ponytail that was hanging over her right shoulder. She wore a blue mac, jeans and silver trainers, and was looking around Cal’s office, appearing disorientated. ‘I didn’t mean to barge in. Sorry. The door was open.’ She glanced at Cal. ‘Are you Caladh McGill?’

The use of his unabbreviated name by a stranger surprised him. ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Hi, I’m Kate Tolmie.’ She lifted her right hand uncertainly in greeting. ‘I’m looking for my sister, Flora.’

Cal said, ‘Helen, call you back?’

Helen stared at her phone, experiencing a conflict of emotions: relief at Cal having turned up, hurt at being cut off and dissatisfaction at things – Helen’s shorthand for the undefined nature of their relationship.

Helen threw the phone on to the bed and gave herself the usual talking-to. How hard was it to say she hoped to be more than his friend? But did she? Did she really? If she did, surely she would have found an opportunity to tell Cal. Since she hadn’t, the reason might be because, for her, romance was safer as occasional fantasy. Being friends with Cal, their relationship being no better defined, stopped her from minding there was no one else. She sighed. Sooner or later someone would walk into Cal’s life. Maybe someone just had, this Kate Tolmie. Then she would mind. Or would she? Perhaps she wouldn’t.

Could anyone live with Cal McGill?

Helen looked at herself in the full-length bedroom mirror. She tried to see the person others saw or said they saw: a Helen Jamieson who was handsome in an old-fashioned way rather than modern pretty, with natural curls and a peachy complexion. Instead, as her eyes flicked here and there, finding fault, she saw a woman who was too large, with unruly, thin hair; and skin which was only smooth and unblemished from being stretched tight.

Unhappy, she padded to the shower while muttering about her bad habit of concentrating on negatives, imagined or real, when she should be celebrating her advantages: an IQ of 173, plus her achievements, a law degree followed by a Masters in criminology. Stop acting as if you’re stupid, Helen. The hot water flowing over her face, back and shoulders was soothing, calming. She imagined Kate Tolmie walking unsuspecting into Cal’s office and stumbling into a nightmare – all that mess and gore and rotting flesh, those photographs of bodies and newspaper reports about violent death, his macabre wallpaper. Most likely by now Kate Tolmie would be running and thinking she’d had a close call with a psycho and was lucky to have escaped with her life.

As Helen dressed in a work skirt and shirt, something else nagged at her. Those names, Kate Tolmie and her sister Flora: they rang faint bells. In fact, the more she thought about them, the louder the bells were. Something about a mother?

The memory was vague, distant, out of reach.

An object in the far corner caught Kate’s attention. It appeared to be a half-sized man – a creature – made of driftwood and bits of tin and blue fishing net for hair, a mouth made from a circular piece of pink-coloured plastic and smoothed sea glass for eyes, eyes that seemed to stare back. Its presence, its malignancy, surprised Kate so that when she asked Cal whether or not her sister had been in contact she was momentarily off balance.

‘No, no she hasn’t,’ Cal replied. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know where she is.’

‘But …’ Kate said, ‘she’d written down your name and “Speak to Alex about him” with a question mark. Alex, that’s her boyfriend, was her boyfriend. Why would Flora have wanted to speak to Alex about you?’

‘Possibly –’ Cal shrugged, pulling a face to let Kate know he was guessing – ‘because Alex was seriously ill, dying, and Flora didn’t know if I’d been told.’

‘What, you know Alex, knew Alex? You know Alex is dead?’

‘Yes, he was a friend.’

‘And Flora? Do you know her?’

‘I met her once, briefly.’

Having experienced a rush of optimism driving to Cal’s office, Kate now felt a plunging sensation, of hope draining away, as though a plug had been pulled inside her. In her pent-up state about Flora, it seemed to her that Cal, for some reason, was being unnecessarily taciturn. Surely the natural thing would have been to admit to having met Flora as soon as Kate mentioned her name? Something was off, wrong, and Kate wasn’t sure what. Was it her or him?

‘Did you,’ she asked, ‘attend the funeral?’

‘Alex’s?’

There it was again, Kate thought, Cal being guarded, as though his intention was to tell her as little as possible.

‘No,’ Cal continued, ‘as I mentioned, I didn’t even know he was dying.’

To conceal her confusion at what she now regarded as Cal’s obstruction, she found herself being caught by the stare of the driftwood man, creature. ‘What’s that horrible thing?’

‘That was given to me by a Norwegian called Olaf. He’s a beachcomber. He makes them.’

Hurriedly looking away, Kate’s attention was caught by a wall display of photographs. One, in particular, was transfixing, a large colour image of a beached torso minus its head, hands and feet.

‘Would you like coffee?’ Cal asked, apparently oblivious to Kate’s growing alarm. ‘The kettle boiled as you came in.’

His voice sounded muffled to her. She managed a nod.

‘Milk?’

Kate didn’t respond. By now her gaze had shifted to other similar photographs: beached bodies, bloated, grotesquely misshapen and with missing limbs, bones protruding. She looked quickly at Cal as he was pouring water into a mug. She attempted to reconcile this man – who was probably two or three years older than her, whose nose skewed to the right, whose hair was dark brown, cut short and who wore jeans and a T-shirt – with the horror story unfolding around her.

Suddenly he seemed capable of anything, including encouraging an old man, Harry Fowler, to jump into a river as well as holding back information about the disappearance of her sister. Was he also the sender of those anonymous postcards?

Cal, sensing her alarm and thinking he knew the reason why, said, ‘I have a friend who’s in the police and she says this place is only fit for a serial killer. If you’re not familiar with these sorts of photographs, they’re a shock … I’m sorry. I’m afraid, to me, they’re work. I’m used to them.’

Kate barely heard the explanation. Everything in the room, this box of grotesque surprises, frightened her. Clearly, Cal didn’t mind living among pictures of bodies, sleeping among bodies. She noticed his camp bed. Would he lie about Flora being in contact, about knowing where Flora was?

‘Kate,’ she heard him saying, ‘as I mentioned, I’ve only spoken to your sister once. That was a year ago. She was with Alex. Then all I said was “Hi” and she said “Hello” to me. We were in each other’s company for about five minutes. I understand why you’re worried about her. I would be too. I know how much Alex loved her. I imagine she loved him as much. But you’ve got to believe me. I don’t know where she is. If I did, I would tell you.’

Then: ‘Here, here’s your coffee. I’ve put some milk in.’

She stared at his outstretched hand and the mug. Tiredness, gnawing worry about Flora, the unnerving effect of McGill’s office, his belated openness and apparent sincerity, unravelled her. ‘You’re the last person,’ she said. ‘Where else am I going to look? My God, I’ve lost her.’

She turned and ran for the door.