34

Cockle shells crunched under Cal’s boots. The same evocative sound had accompanied him and Olaf when, two years earlier, they’d walked the beach from De Koog towards the north of the island. They were flotsam hunting and, intermittently, talking. At one point, Cal inquired whether Texel was where Olaf felt he belonged, having lived on the island for many years; whether it was home for him and if not there, where? Olaf had rubbed his face, squinted at the sky as though an answer was difficult. To make the question easier for Olaf, Cal said he was interested in the subject of belonging because he didn’t feel he did. Anywhere. That sense of ‘knowing where to put your pin in the map’ had been taken from him, ‘not in a single violent act but a series of assaults’.

Although Olaf remained silent, his demeanour changed. He was taut, listening, interested.

Olaf attempted to disguise his alertness by lighting a cigarette. When they resumed walking, Cal elaborated. His mother, a lawyer, had died when he was seventeen. Her death triggered a mental collapse in his father, James McGill. After his recovery, he worked abroad, mostly for charity schools in Africa. He never returned to the scene of his breakdown or to Scotland to visit his son. Eventually, in Mozambique, McGill senior found a new, younger wife, a teacher called Honesty Dlamini, who had three daughters by a previous marriage. A son, Moses Ngwane McGill, was born soon after their wedding. Cal’s family home in Edinburgh was sold to pay for a Portuguese colonial-era house in Maputo. Cal and his father were no longer in contact. Cal had not been to Mozambique, nor had he met his half-brother. Cal had been replaced as well as displaced. At least, that was how it felt to him.

Cal’s flow of revelation was out of character. Afterwards, he felt awkward, embarrassed. He thought Olaf’s continuing silence might be an indication of a similar reaction. Had Cal’s confession shut up Olaf rather than encouraged him?

Cal changed the subject. He asked about the cormorants that flew from the sea over the dune to their right. It was a constant and sinister procession, four or five black-clad birds always in the air, one after the other, going in the same direction. ‘What’s happening?’ Cal inquired. ‘The forces of darkness gathering?’

Olaf didn’t answer. He was lost in his own thoughts, his expression as black as the birds.

They carried on walking to the accompaniment of two different sounds, both rhythmic – the sea’s swoosh-splash and the crunch of shells underfoot. One lulled, the other galvanized, like a marching beat.

After a while, they arrived at a breach in the dune. It was three or four hundred metres wide. Through the middle was a channel of water gouged in the sand, draining like a river towards the sea.

‘Here.’ The word burst from Olaf like a cough. ‘That place you were talking about. This is it, here, where I feel I belong.’

Cal looked around as Olaf explained that the area was called De Slufter, a rare example of the wary Dutch allowing the sea to penetrate a sea defence. The result, between the outer and inner dunes, was a system of tidal creeks which regularly flooded, creating a salt-marsh habitat for numerous birds and plants, including purple-flowering sea lavender.

Olaf spoke with an intensity which surprised Cal, with a mixture of awe and affection as well as some emotion.

Cal said he hadn’t seen anywhere quite like it and imagined how different De Slufter’s demeanour would be with the tide flowing the other way, a storm raging, waves being driven ashore by a north-westerly gale, how threatening that would be: ‘Like a warrior horde hell-bent on destruction charging through a breach in a fortification.’

Olaf didn’t express an opinion or offer a description of De Slufter inundated by the sea, even though he must have seen it.

Instead Olaf led Cal inland, going round De Slufter’s southern flank, following well-trodden paths. They didn’t talk. Rather than cockle shells, birds provided the backdrop of sound: shrills peeps of oystercatchers, the base and tuneless honks of geese and, every now and again, the sudden and cacophonous alarms of terns, which scattered and wheeled in fright at the appearance of a marsh harrier: a thousand white wings flapping, De Slufter noisy with sharp cries of panic.

At the eastern edge of the salt marsh, they climbed to a viewing platform perched on a secondary, high and intact sea wall, the last line of defence. They’d stood for a few minutes looking at the view, though Olaf’s attention kept returning to the black hulks of ships on the horizon, as sinister-looking as the cormorants had been earlier. Cal made a throwaway remark – ‘The big bad world’s out there’ – and wished he hadn’t.

Olaf gave Cal a rare unguarded look, as though he was thinking that too.

Just as Cal expected Olaf to turn back, he took off again, skirting the salt marsh to the north and west. Olaf spoke once. ‘This area,’ he said, ‘is closed off to the public at this time of year because it’s the birds’ breeding season.’ He carried on regardless, finally stopping on the crest of a dune above the beach where a natural parapet of sand had been formed. The interior was scooped out so that, standing up, Cal saw a panorama which included two seas – the North and, to the east, the Wadden – as well as the lighthouse at the northern tip of Texel, and beyond, the next island in the West Frisian chain, Vlieland. Crouching down below the parapet’s walls, the air was still, the sea’s sound muffled: a discreet, private, enclosed place. Olaf made a gesture – his thumb pressed down as though sticking in a pin.

‘Exactly here?’ Cal asked. ‘This is it, your pin in the map?’

Olaf nodded.

‘I can see why,’ Cal commented, looking round again with an approving expression. ‘And not Norway? There’s no sentimental attachment to where you were born? Norway isn’t written in your heart?’

‘Norway when I’m dying,’ Olaf replied, turning in Norway’s direction and making a paddling gesture with his hand, as though he would use the last of his strength, his last breaths, to be taken there by the sea.

Cal said, ‘Yes, I think I’d like that too, but in my case to keep going north, to drift all the way to the Arctic.’

They’d sat and Olaf lit a cigarette. The smoke eddied within the circular walls of the parapet as though caught in a vortex.

That memory was fresh as Cal, once again, climbed the parapet’s walls. He looked for signs of Olaf, but the sand was loose inside. The depressions and scoops that existed could have been caused by a swirling breeze as readily as by the imprint of a boot or foot. They could have been recent or old. Cal examined the heathland and beach to the north and, seeing no Olaf-sized shape, climbed inside the parapet. He sat in approximately the same place as he had the last time, his elbows digging into soft sand as he leaned back.

The re-enactment aided his memory as he recalled what Olaf had gone on to say.

At first he’d rambled, becoming exasperated with his inability to be coherent. He’d emitted a howl of frustration as terns wheeled overhead. Then, addressing the sand between his spread legs, he’d talked about ‘an incident’ – he wasn’t specific and Cal didn’t like to interrupt by asking him to be – which had had devastating consequences. In his case it had been a single violent event, not a series as it had been for Cal. He’d been seventeen, the age Cal had been when his mother died. ‘This is where I hide away when everything becomes too much for me.’ He’d looked straight at Cal. ‘One day I’ll tell you what happened, Caladh.’

Like Alex, he used Cal’s full name.

Olaf hadn’t waited for Cal’s response. ‘Shall we go back?’ he’d said abruptly.

The return journey was completed in silence apart from the crunch of cockle shells and the sea’s swoosh.

Cal’s memory now resonated with Sarah’s description of Olaf: It wasn’t that he didn’t have anything to say. I think it was the opposite of that. The thing he had to say was so big and difficult he didn’t see the point of saying anything else.

Had he almost said it that day to Cal?

Cal raised himself just enough to peer over the parapet’s sand walls. The big black hulks of tankers and container ships going north were silhouetted against the fading pink of the setting sun: ‘the big bad world’. Then, as darkness came, he lay back and watched the stars. Finally, he slept, dreaming vividly of cormorants and of black hulks that travelled silently, menacingly. When, suddenly, one of those black hulks loomed over him he woke. A cry escaped from him, his own tern-like call of panic at the threat of a swooping raptor or worse. Was it dream or reality? It seemed real to Cal. He sat bolt upright. His breathing was quick, nervy. His tongue tasted salt in the air and something else – tobacco; not the fresh smoke of a burning cigarette but the stale, acrid and cloying stink of a smoker’s clothes. Now he smelled it, now he didn’t, now strong, now faint. The stench swirled around him, caught in a vortex.

Slowly, he lifted his head above the parapet. To the east, dawn was turning the night sky grey. To the west, he saw ships’ lights. He searched the beach, watching for movement, for Olaf – black shifting against black, like those cormorants and hulking ships in his dream. He registered the direction of the wind. It blew in gusts from the east when before it had been a stiff breeze and westerly. Could it be? Had a change in the wind caused Olaf to visit the place where his ‘pin in the map’ belonged, to say farewell? Had the looming black shape been him? Had he known that Cal would look for him there? Was Olaf about to become a driftwood man, his dying act to be taken by the currents to Norway?

Cal scrambled over the parapet wall. Descending the seaward flank of the dune he slipped and slid, a firm footing difficult to find. At the bottom he stopped to catch his breath. A glance south made him rule out that direction. He looked in the other. If he was Olaf, he would use the easterly wind and the ebbing tide. The fastest currents would be between Texel and Vlieland. They would quickly take him out to sea. Running north, the crunch of cockle shells under Cal’s pounding boots grew louder and quicker, the prelude to a crescendo.

Flora was exasperated: Stop! Didn’t I ask you? Please stop. Her pleading was directed at her phone on which Cal’s email was displayed. Please stop before anything else awful happens. When she saw the photographs, her mood changed. She was mesmerized, examining the back of the woman Cal said was her mother. She was like Kate, broad-shouldered, and she stood like Flora, legs slightly apart, right foot turned out. Flora’s attention turned to the other people in the photograph, a young man, young woman and a boy. Flora referred to Cal’s email for names. How did her mother know Thomas Olaf Haugen Larsen or Ruth Jones? Flora had never heard of either of them. In life, as far as Flora could remember, her mother had never made any reference to them, nor were they mentioned in her papers.

Who was the boy?

She saw how her mother’s left hand rested on the child’s left shoulder. Her right was holding a small and familiar suitcase. A quick intake of breath. Had her mother been obeying Flora’s childish request: Can I have a big brother, one of those unhappy orphanage boys?

Was that why she hadn’t returned home?

Almost a quarter of a century later, another request had similarly nightmarish results. Flora had appealed for information about her mother’s disappearance and Jacques Picoult had materialized, been stabbed to death, and Kate had been remanded in custody accused of murder.

Now there was Ruth Jones. She, too, was dead.

In a daze, she examined Cal’s other photographs, close-ups of Sarah Allison, Ruth Jones’s friend, also a series of photographs of the interior of a beach hut. The doors were wide open. On the back wall was a painting of a girl playing in the sand in front of a woman in a deckchair. Cal said the scene was Ruth with her mother, Rita.

Flora gasped. In the window of the left-hand door of the beach hut was the reflection of another woman. Although the image was indistinct, the woman was hurrying, approaching. Her face had an alarmed expression, as if she’d just had a shock.

Flora enlarged the photograph. ‘It couldn’t be,’ she said.

Cal blinked away sweat, making his vision blurry. As he ran, he watched the waves rise and fall. On each crest he expected to see Olaf being lifted up, the beachcomber becoming flotsam. A distant and out-of-focus silhouette brought a shout: ‘Olaf!’ Cal’s legs and arms pumped faster until he was close enough to make out a beach-marker post, number thirty. Cal stopped running, threw his head back, gulped air and wiped his face. He shouted once more – summoning the strength to run again. After another hundred metres, he gasped ‘Olaf’ for a second time. At the edge of the sea was a solitary, still figure, a bulky silhouette. Cal kept running, then slowed to a walk. When he was behind Olaf, a few steps away, he noticed a small raft, a construction of driftwood and buoys, tied together with rope and wrapped around with netting. It was in the water.

‘Olaf?’

Olaf’s head shifted, enough for Cal to glimpse the plane of a weathered, ruddy cheek edged by unruly long and tangled hair, flashing silver in the early-morning sun.

‘Caladh.’

Cal went closer, by Olaf’s left shoulder. ‘I’m glad I’ve found you.’

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Olaf said. ‘You wanted to know about Ruth Jones?’

‘You knew her?’

‘I killed her.’

Helen studied the CCTV from Haymarket Station before Jacques Picoult was murdered, playing it back, pausing it, studying all the faces. She referred to one of the photographs forwarded by Flora: the reflection of the woman in the beach-hut window was grainy but Helen was sure she’d seen someone very similar recently. It stuck in her memory because she’d thought how well the woman was dressed, how simple and stylish, how wonderful it would be to have manageable, sophisticated-looking hair like that instead of unruly curls.

Flora wrote:

I know who this is. At least I think I know who this is. It’s Maria, my cleaner. But how can it be? She lives in Edinburgh. This photograph was taken on Texel. Not only that, she looks quite different.

Although Helen was irritated – why hadn’t Cal copied her into the email he sent Flora? – she was excited. An unexpected development like this was why she loved being a detective, why she was rigorous in always trying to answer every question, even though sometimes she tried her colleagues’ patience, as she was now by detaching herself from the investigation into the faceless, handless corpse. ‘Something has come up, new evidence, another suspect in the Picoult case,’ she told DI Ronaldsay, who muttered, ‘Fuck’s sake, Helen.’ After apologizing, she raised her eyebrows and said, ‘The boss,’ as though she’d spoken to him and had his agreement. Now she didn’t care about the other detectives giving her evil looks as she flicked from one CCTV frame to another. ‘Where are you?’ she kept on saying in a whisper. Then, suddenly, she was there, the same woman, the same hair, similar stylish clothes, an expensive-looking, mulberry-coloured trench coat, matching gloves and ash-blonde hair cut in a short bob. Helen put Cal’s photograph beside the frozen CCTV. It was the same woman, definitely.

Helen emailed Flora:

Do you have an address for Maria, your cleaner?

Flora replied:

I’m sorry, I don’t. I know she lives in the Gorgie area of Edinburgh, but that’s all. Here is her email and mobile number.

Helen emailed Cal:

Flora has forwarded your email and photographs. What’s the name of the woman who was approaching the beach hut? She was reflected in one of the beach hut’s windows. It’s not Sarah Allison because you sent a separate picture of her. Cal, the other woman is not what she seems. Do you know where she lives?

After putting in a call to the Dutch police, she drummed her fingers on her desk. She was impatient. She played the CCTV again. According to the timings from different cameras, the woman disappeared from outside Haymarket Station about the same time as Picoult, but before Kate Tolmie had reacted to Picoult’s absence. Helen wondered if the woman had chosen the dark mulberry colour of her coat because it would help to disguise bloodstains.

‘Maria Fuentes,’ Helen said, ‘who the hell are you?’

She glanced at her emails. ‘Come on, Cal, answer.’ While she waited, she googled ‘How to find a Dutch phone number’. An online directory for the Netherlands was at the top of her search results. This was a risk. Should she take it?

Moments later, she was tapping a number into her phone. ‘Sarah Allison?’ she asked when a woman answered. ‘Hello, Sarah. My name’s Helen Jamieson. You don’t know me. I’m a detective sergeant based in Edinburgh and a friend of Cal McGill’s. I think he’s in De Koog right now … He’s still there … Good, good, I thought so … This is a little bit unorthodox but I need some information. Do you know someone, a woman, in her forties, stylish, who has ash-blonde hair, cut into a short bob? You do. What’s her name? How do you know her? What’s her story? If I send you a still from some CCTV footage would you be able to identify her?’

Twenty minutes later, after telling Sarah, ‘Don’t do anything, say anything, not even to Cal McGill,’ she emailed the same CCTV grab to Kent Police with a request for it to be shown as soon as possible to Mikey Jones. She also sent a request to the police in Paris for information about a former resident called Lotte Rouhof.