BY the time my watch was ended I was cold, hungry and aching in every bone. I needed a large drink and a quiet supper and a long, long sleep. I got my drink and my supper: hot cocoa and a dish of cheese sandwiches. I also got a surprise. Ruarri and Lachie McMutrie and Daddy Burns and Athol Cameron and Calum the cook were playing a game of poker, noisy and as cheerful as though they had never had a cross word in their lives.
Now, if you have played poker, you will know it for gospel truth that you need only to watch a few hands before you know the name of the game and whether it is being played for fun, money or grudge stakes. I swear to you now – as I had once to swear it in affidavit – that this was a friendly game, for poor man’s money, with lots of banter and random jokes and no tension at all. I sat in on it. I played a dozen hands and came out winning ten pence – and wondering if I had gone quietly mad in the wheelhouse. Only the cut on my cheek told me I hadn’t.
Yet there was Lachie, the Judas of the band, who had put everyone in jeopardy, shouting and laughing and scooping in his winnings, with never a twinge of fear or a word of resentment from his shipmates. Each man had a drink beside him, so tongues were loose enough. They weren’t all actors. Ruarri, yes. But not the others – not Athol Cameron, or Daddy Burns, or Calum, who was a simple fellow, rowdy as a cock at sunrise. It made no sense at all, and after a while I was glad it didn’t. So long as they landed me dry in the Faeroes, they could all go buccaneering for the rest of their lives – and whether they traded guns, women, shrimps, or salt herring, bless ’em all!
Just before ten-thirty, I tossed in my cards and went to bed. I tried to read for a while, but the effort to focus made me feel queasy; so I switched off the light and lay wakeful in the dark, listening to the buffet of the sea and the creak of the timbers and the muted gabble of voices from the galley. I thought of Kathleen McNeil, alone in her bed in Harris, and wished I were there with her; but there was small comfort in wishing and less in the fact that I would have to travel two thousand miles to get back to her.
Then I began to be obsessed by the bleak geography of the northern seas and all their legendary terrors of gales and fogs and drifting ice floes and black cliffs rearing out of mill-race waters. I remembered the toll of ships and men exacted every year by the black widow-maker to pay for the harvest of fish. I saw the longships putting out from Norway and the coasts of Jutland, square sails bellying, shield bosses gleaming in the thin sunlight, serried oar blades striking the water to the rhythm of the helmsman’s chant. I saw them scattered and labouring, rimed with ice from the driven spray, the sails shredded, the masts broken, the oarsmen furred like animals, blotched with frostbite, peering through the murk for a landfall in the dark. I saw them battling through the tide rips of the Faeroes, desperate for a beachhead where they could land their beasts and their women and begin to breed again to replace the lives taken by the sea. I saw Ruarri among them, always the survivor, the red wolf, run down to skin and bone, but snappish still and savage, howling defiance at the winds. Then, because I was deep in dreaming, I saw him changed: to the seal-boy with fur on his back, the love child of sailor and sea beast, who in the end must go back to the deeps….
I woke in darkness, blear-eyed and unrested. The rhythm of my world had changed. The wind had dropped. The engines were running dead slow and we were slopping in a long, greasy swell. Then I heard the long, hoarse bleat of the fog siren repeated every half-minute. I groped for the light switch, and when I had rubbed the gravel out of my eyes, I saw it was six-twenty in the morning. Ruarri’s bunk was empty and rumpled. I washed perfunctorily, climbed creakily into my sea clothes and went into the galley. There was no one there, but there was coffee still warm on the stove. I drank two cups and felt better. Then I climbed up on deck and stopped dead in my tracks.
The fog, so thick that I could not see the tips of my own fingers, stretched in front of me. It swirled and eddied like floating wool, stifling, blinding, solid enough to chew on. Even the sound of the hooter was muffled by it, and when I shouted it was as if I had fur in my throat and wadding pressed against my lips. Then I heard Daddy Burns’ warning cry:
‘Dinna wander aboot. Get up to the wheelhouse!’
I groped my way, inch by inch, to the companionway and climbed into the narrow lighted box where Ruarri stood, one hand on the wheel, the other on the button of the klaxon. He looked pale and strained and his eyes were bloodshot. He greeted me with a curt nod and announced:
‘We’ve had this lot four hours and more. And we’ve lost Lachie.’
‘What do you mean, lost him?’
‘Look outside. That’s what I mean. I was on watch from midnight. He was due to relieve me at four. He didn’t show. I cut engines and went below to roust him out. His bunk was empty. He must have come on deck before his watch and walked overboard. It’s happened before on other ships. We’ve had all hands on deck and we’ve been cruising in circles ever since, hoping to find him. I’ve called all ships and coast-guard stations.’
‘Can he swim?’
‘I don’t know. Even if he could, that water’s bloody cold. He couldn’t keep going for too long.’
‘Christ! Can I help?’
‘Take the wheel. Make a slow turn, full circle to starboard. Watch the radar screen. Sound the hooter every thirty seconds. I want to make a round of the deck.’
‘Take care!’
‘I will.’
He left me then, and I could hear his calls and the answering voices receding into the fog:
‘Athol?’
‘Here.’
‘Calum?’
‘Here!’
‘Donan?’
‘Here, Ruarri!’
Then there was silence except for the slow, ponderous beat of the engines and the hooter sounding out across the invisible sea. Mercifully the radar screen was clear; so, for the moment, we were out of hazard from collision with rocks or passing vessels. By the time I had completed one long, sluggish circle, Ruarri was back in the wheelhouse.
‘Nothing. Not a sound. And you can’t see a foot in front of you.’
‘What now?’
‘Square search to port, two miles on each leg.’
He left me at the wheel and bent over the chart, plotting the search areas with calipers and slide rule, making notations on each so that they could be read in concord with his log. Then he set to work on the log itself, writing slowly and meticulously the account that he must present to the Board of Inquiry. The log completed, he switched on the transmitter and called again, on the distress frequency, to all ships and coast-guard stations from Tórshavn to Stornoway. He gave his latest position and a curt account of the loss of Lachie McMutrie and ended with the ominous words, ‘Search continues in visibility zero. If no success by 1000 hours will proceed to Tórshavn, Faeroes, for refuelling and filing of accident report. Please acknowledge….’
Then he switched to receiver and jotted down the acknowledgements: from the Shetlands, from Tórshavn, from a Danish merchantman, from the coast guard at Streymoy, and finally from Stornoway itself. After that he sat a long time with the headset still clamped over his ears and his chin buried in his fists, staring out into the fog. At last he took off the headset and stood up. ‘I’m going to pass round a grog to the deck watch. Could you use one?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Do you understand the routine?’
‘What routine?’
‘When we get to T6rshavn I file an accident report, accompanied by extracts from my log and my chart entries. The report is countersigned by Athol Cameron, with or without comment. The crew will be asked to make depositions. You may be too. When we get back to Stornoway there’ll be a Board of Inquiry. It’s not incumbent on me to show the log to any but the mate. As a matter of courtesy I’ll show it to the other boys. You can see it if you want.’
‘Kind of you to offer, but there’s no need.’
‘You’ll still leave us at Tórshavn?’
‘I think it’s better, don’t you?’
‘Probably.’
‘Do you have any hope at all?’
‘Precious little. But stranger things have happened. We might find him.’
‘I’ll pass round the grog if you like.’
‘No. They need to see the skipper at a time like this. Steady as she goes, eh?’
Steady as she goes, two slow miles on one leg, then port again, and another two miles, checking the screen, sounding the hooter, blind searchers in a cloud world, listening for a cry from nowhere, hoping against hope that somewhere we might fish up a sodden bundle of flesh and clothes and find life in it still.
Was it Ruarri’s hope too? I wanted to believe it was. I had seen him in many moods, bitter, mocking, murderously angry; but I had never seen him so ravaged as in those ghostly hours. When, a long time later, he came back to the wheelhouse with a grog for each of us, his hands were unsteady and a nerve was twitching at the corner of his mouth, drawing his lips upward in a grin that had no humour in it at all. Even his voice had changed to a husky, tired monotone, as if his gullet were choked with fog.
‘You know what this means, don’t you, seannachie?’
‘I can guess.’
‘They’ll never believe it was an accident.’
‘Can they prove otherwise?’
‘Never.’
‘So?’
‘So like good Scotsmen they’ll return an open finding: death by misadventure, circumstances unknown.’
‘Which leaves you in the clear.’
‘But never clean, seannachie. Never quite clean again.’
‘Do you care?’
‘You’re damn right I care. I’m owed as much respect as the next man.’
‘You’ll have it, from those who know the truth.’
‘But who does know it? My boys? You…?’
‘I know only what you’ve told me.’
‘And that leaves a lot of room for doubt, doesn’t it?’
‘Some.’
‘And you know I’m a good liar when I want to be?’
‘For God’s sake, man! Drop it!’
‘You told me, seannachie, if anything happened to Lachie, you’d be a hostile witness. Now it’s happened. Where do we stand?’
‘I think my position is very clear. I was on watch from four in the afternoon till eight. When I came below Lachie was alive and happy. I played poker with him and his shipmates until ten-thirty. The game was friendly. I was in my bunk from ten-thirty till six-twenty this morning. End of testimony.’
‘And the rest of it?’
‘The rest is words spoken between you and me without witnesses. As testimony it’s useless. I would see no reason to present it.’
‘And your private opinion?’
‘I have none. I accept what you’ve told me as the truth.’
‘Because you have to?’
‘Because I want to.’
‘Well…!’ The word came out on a long sigh of relief. ‘Thank Christ for that. Ever since it happened I’ve felt your hands on my neck choking me. I’m grateful.’
‘Forget it.’
‘Can you cook, seannachie?’
‘Why?’
‘You’d do me a favour if you could fry up a breakfast for the boys. They’re damn near frozen out there. Call ’em down two by two. Send mine up here.’
‘Aye, aye, Mr Matheson.’
‘Thank you, Mr Christian.’
The joke was flatter than barley water, but it got me out of the wheelhouse and into the galley and took the sharp edge off a very uncomfortable stretch of dialogue. Now I had time and solitude to think through the events of the night.
At first blush, the story of a man walking off the deck of a trawler into the sea made incredible nonsense. Yet every sailorman had a sackful of such tales and many of them were true. There was the strange case of the Flannan lighthouse, found deserted in 1900 with the light trimmed, the boat intact, a meal on the table – and three men disappeared into thin air. In a fog like this one, on a stern trawler like the Helen II, where the deck fell away into a steel slide over the transom, a man, drunk, sleepwalking or unwary, could tumble overboard, and even if he cried out, his voice could be lost in the stern wash or the beat of the engines or the sound of the klaxon. On the other hand, he could as easily be taken by an assailant and toppled overside with no one to see or hear what was done.
Accident or assassination? There was no evidence either way. Except that a motive existed, and a strong one at that, for wanting Lachie McMutrie dead. I knew it. Ruarri knew it. If my reading of the poker party was correct, no one else on board knew it. Which meant that Ruarri had lied to me about the confrontation with Lachie – or had he? He had suggested, intimated, created an impression that a confrontation had taken place; but he had not said so, word by word.
Why didn’t I ask him and settle the matter out of hand? Because it was safer and easier for me to take everything at face value and absolve myself from responsibility. After all, that was what Duggie Donald had recommended, and Duggie Donald was the representative of the Crown. If he couldn’t make a case for Regina against Matheson, why should I do his dirty work for him? I couldn’t prove Ruarri guilty. I could only suggest that he might be. Why make the suggestion when I knew that proof was impossible? Which was, of course, a highly correct point of view. A man is innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof rests squarely on the Crown. Somewhere out in the grey mist Lachie McMutrie was floating dead and heedless, with his lungs full of water. I was safe and warm in the galley, cooking bacon and eggs and making myself a big fellow with his shipmates. Poor Lachie. Lucky me. All I needed was a bowl of water and a towel and I could be the most proper Pilate in the seven seas.
And Ruarri? Once again he would be off free, with profit in the bank, simply because he was as clever as a whore with that changeling talent of his. I could see the pattern of it now: the rage first, then the penitence, then the wheedling charm, each one a step towards the prize he wanted at that moment. He was like a child, but a child confirmed in selfishness, cold, cruel, infinitely seductive, with a perpetual promise of innocence, provided he got what he wanted. Well, today, tomorrow at the latest, I would be quit of him. Let Brother Wolf go range his own timberline; I would have him no more in my pastures.
Yet, when I carried his breakfast up to the wheelhouse and saw him grey and lonely on watch, my heart went out to him; and when he told me his thought, I was as haunted as he was.
‘…He’ll never be buried, seannachie. The sea birds will peck out his eyes and sharks will eat the rest of him. He was a silly young truaghan, but he didn’t deserve this. We’ll hear him for a long time now, whenever the gulls cry, because his ghost will be restless. Do you believe in ghosts, seannachie?’
‘No.’
‘Neither do I. But I’m scared of them, still. Over in the west where I live, they say a drowned man must be buried high enough on the beach so that he can shake the brine off himself at low tide. If he can’t, he’ll come flopping on someone’s deck, just to be dry for a while… I wish this bloody fog would lift.’
‘Why don’t you go below and get some rest?’
‘I can’t. Not till we break off the search. After that, if the weather clears, we’re going to trawl.’
‘No!’
‘Why not, seannachie? Something to do to take our minds off Lachie. Besides, we’re fishermen, and if we don’t catch we don’t eat. That’s why the sea laughs at us. We always have to come back… Thanks for the breakfast. Get the others fed, eh?’
Athol Cameron and Donan, the Barra boy, were the first to come below. They ate hungrily, in silence; and I ate with them, waiting for their reaction to the tragedy.
When it came, it was a terse epitaph from Athol Cameron:
‘He’s gone for sure. God sleep him quietly.’
The Barra boy crossed himself and murmured something in Gaelic. I asked Cameron what it meant.
‘It’s a prayer they say: “Saint Brendan, wish the fog away. God lift it for the sake of Holy Brendan.’”
‘What do you think happened, Athol?’
‘Man, I couldn’t guess.’
‘Was he drunk?’
‘Not when he went to bed. But he could have been tippling in his bunk, which he did sometimes, under the blanket.’
‘Could he have walked in his sleep?’
‘Could have. Though I’ve never known him do it.’
‘If he were sober, could he still have fallen overboard?’
‘In a fog like that, anything can happen.’
‘It’s like a wall.’ Donan gave voice in a swift, stammering rush of words. ‘You think it’s solid. When you lean on it, you fall through… My uncle walked off a tanker near Hatteras years ago. My grannie had a vision of it the same night. She had the second sight and all. She said there was voices singing at him all the time, calling him to come….’
‘Stow it lad!’ said Athol Cameron curtly. ‘Let’s get up on deck. There’s others to be fed. Thanks for the breakfast.’
From Daddy Burns and Calum MacMillan I got the same story in other words. At sea the improbable always happened. There were men blown sky-high out of tankers who lived to tell the tale. There were ships found adrift, with no living soul on board. Airmen flew upside down in cloud and never knew it. There were sailors who went into a kind of whirling madness when they lost their sense of direction. The yarns spun out interminably, with never a hint of malice or violence. There was pity always for the man lost, and some left over for the good-luck skipper whose fortune had turned sour overnight. Work? Of course they must work. The sea cared for its own dead. The living must make shift for themselves.
So, at ten in the morning, with the fog still down, Ruarri broke off the search and headed us northwards to T6rshavn. Then he handed over the wheel to Athol Cameron and went below to rest. An hour later we were free of the fog, in clear, bright air, with the trawl out and the first fringe of the cold front chopping up the sea again. By mid-afternoon we had taken half a ton of fish – cod, mostly, for which there was a good market in the Faeroes – and Ruarri was on deck, a new man, brusque, efficient, confident, watching the fish packed, ordering the decks hosed down, the nets stowed, so that we would come shipshape and worthy into Tórshavn. When the first islands came abeam, he read me a little discourse:
‘This is the land of kanska, seannachie, and kanska means maybe. Maybe the sun will shine, maybe the sea will be calm, maybe the fish will run – but nobody knows for sure. This is the place where men fled from oppression into hardship and were glad just the same. They have their own currency and their own flag, and by courtesy they let the Danes handle their defence and their foreign affairs. They’re dry, too, because a man can’t buy liquor until he’s paid his taxes. So when you go ashore you’d best take a bottle to keep the cold out. There’s only one airport, at Vágar, and you’ll have a scary run by sea and land to get to it. There’s one plane a day to Copenhagen – which reminds me I must give you a note to Maeve O’Donnell – and they grow rhubarb and potatoes and eat dried mutton, which tastes like tallow. Sometimes there’s a killing of whales and the bays run red with blood, and after that they dance and drink all night, so there’s a flush of births nine months afterwards… There’s a song they sing which goes back to Viking days: “We are strong men, we love the killing of whales.” – And I wish you wouldn’t leave, seannachie. I wish you’d finish the run with me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘I know you can’t. But what’s the harm in wishing? I feel safer with you on board.’
‘You’re not.’
‘I know that too. But listen.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘Don’t shut me out, brother.’
‘I haven’t.’
‘Not yet. But you want to, and you can’t because I’ve still a foot stuck in the doorway. I need you, seannachie. With you I don’t have to pretend.’
‘But you do.’
‘That’s habit, and I’m not proud of it.’
‘Hear me, Ruarri. I’m older than you. I’m tired. I want a nice, quiet life, taxes paid, no sweat, no problems, the words meaning what they say, the bed warm and the waking happy. I’ve got ghosts of my own. I don’t need yours.’
‘So, no ghosts. Just today. And tomorrow maybe a letter or two that says a greeting and that there’s a place at table if I come.’
‘I wish I could trust you, Ruarri.’
‘I wish I could trust myself, for Christ’s sake. But I can’t. Don’t you see that’s the core of it?’
‘Give me one straight answer.’
‘What’s the question?’
‘Did you kill Lachie?’
‘I don’t know, seannachie. I’d swear it to you if I had anything to swear by. I just don’t know.’
And there it was, tied with a pink ribbon and laid in my unsteady hands.
It was like a death or a wedding, when there’s nothing to do but drink a toast to the dear departing and hope that everything turns out for the best – which it generally doesn’t. I didn’t have a drink, so I couldn’t make a toast; and, besides, I had no words to frame it. I braced myself against the bulkhead and gaped at him.
His mouth dragged upwards in that lopsided, humourless grin. ‘It’s the truth, big brother.’
‘I believe you.’
‘So what should I do now?’
‘You need help.’
‘That’s what I’m asking – from you.’
‘I’m not a doctor.’
‘You don’t have to be. I’m not sick, seannachie. I’m a man who’s lived twenty lives, all of them violent. They run into one another, and I don’t know which is which. What’s the dream? What’s the real thing? How can a doctor tell me that?’
‘How can I?’
‘You can. Because you’re a seannachie. You live in two countries at once. You know how to keep them separate.’
‘Not always.’
‘But at least you understand the confusion when it comes.’
‘Mine I understand …not any other man’s.’
‘But you write about other men and not yourself.’
‘What do you want from me, for God’s sake?’
‘Nothing. Just to know that you’re there, that I can reach out and touch you and say, “This at least is real, solid, a reference point that doesn’t shift.’”
‘It’s too much.’
‘I still ask it.’
‘Tell me something.’
‘What?’
‘If you knew now, for certain, that you had killed Lachie, what would you do?’
‘Walk up forward with me.’
We left the shelter of the wheelhouse and pushed our way up to the bows with the wind in our teeth and the spray beating against us with every pitch and yaw. Then, as the black cliffs of Sandoy thrust out ahead of us, he told me:
‘If I knew, seannachie, if I knew truly, beyond all doubt, I’d finish whatever I was at. I’d write my log, cast up my accounts, pay my bills, leave everything tidy, call the police and the undertaker and blow my addled brains out.’
‘Why for this and not for all the other things?’
‘You don’t give any change, do you?’
‘Not now.’
‘Then I’ll tell you, and I hate you for making me say it, because I thought you were wise enough to know. When I came home – it was home, and it is, in spite of everything – I said to myself, “This is a new day, a good place. The past is dead and buried. There’s only tomorrow!” But it wasn’t like that. Every man I met, and every woman, put a label on me from the first meeting. I put some on myself too! I’ll say that, so you won’t have to say it for me. But I did want the slate clean…’
‘So you run guns to Ulster! Come on now!’
‘What’s a few guns, for God’s sake?’
‘You put a bullet in the breech. You pull the trigger. The bullet comes out the other end and kills a man. Who’s the murderer – the gun, the man who pulls the trigger, or the man who sold him the gun in the first place?’
‘I didn’t ask for a sermon. I want help.’
‘You don’t. You want to be Ruarri the Mactire morning, noon and night, but you don’t like the price you have to pay for it.’
‘Meaning I killed Lachie?’
‘Meaning you could have and you would have if it suited your book. And whether you did or you didn’t, I don’t have enough blood left to bleed for you.’
‘So you’ll sell me out?’
‘There’s nobody to sell. Nobody to help either, until you tell me who you are.’
‘I’m trying to tell you.’
‘You’re lying, Brother Wolf.’
‘Then read behind the lie.’
‘Why tell it in the first place?’
‘Because it’s the only currency I know, seannachie. It’s the coin I got for my birthday: Morrison’s lie and all the others that were spawned out of it afterwards. After a while the lie becomes a truth, which is the way history gets written – and books like yours, seannachie. You’ll give me that much, won’t you?’
‘Yes. I’ll give you that much.’
‘So now I’ll answer your question. The difference between Lachie and the others? Lachie was a friend, a follower. Maybe I pushed him too far and he turned traitor, but he was still my man – mine! The others were just shapes in a gunsight, shadows against the rising moon, not men at all.’
‘So why do you doubt whether you killed him?’
‘I’ll tell you that, too, big brother. You’re right, you see. Sometimes I’m nobody. I’m the shadow. I’m the shape in someone else’s sights. When that happens, I don’t remember. How can I? Nobody is nobody is nobody… That’s why I do wild things and say wild things, to get myself back again. Do you see that?’
‘A little of it, yes.’
‘So what is it with us – good-bye or come again?’
‘I’ll be back to the Isles.’
‘And we’ll have our ceilidh?’
‘Let’s wait and see. How long now to T6rshavn?’
‘An hour. It won’t be too rough. The Faeroese are pleasant folk. And they understand the way of the sea.’
They couldn’t have been pleasanter. The Customs man gave us a perfunctory inspection and the freedom of the port. The fish broker offered a reasonable price for the catch – just a shade under the odds, to keep the locals happy. The harbour master found a bed for me in his sister’s house. The British Consul – no Britisher, but a Faeroese – came on board and shared a bottle of whisky in the galley while he took our depositions. He was sympathetic, tactful and obviously impressed by Ruarri’s careful logging of the incident. He engaged to airmail copies of the documents to Stornoway, to inform Lachie’s next of kin, to do all else that law and decency required after a death at sea. Then he went home to dinner.
Ruarri collected a cheque for his fish, paid out another for fuel and announced that he was ready to put to sea again. It was still only eight o’clock. He had the long, sub-Arctic night to cruise in, and he wanted to be far away from the islands before the cold front came down. Of his rendezvous with Bollison he made no mention at all. He gave me a note to deliver to Maeve O’Donnell at the Hotel d’Angleterre in Copenhagen. We wished each other luck. I stood on the dock and watched the Helen II bouncing her way across the choppy harbour to the open sea. I was glad to see the last of her. She had a ghost on board and I did not want to be there when his drowned body came flopping on the deck, shaking the brine off itself at midnight.