A basic grocery store on the outskirts of Campbeltown provides a loaf of bread, cheese, apples, cans of lager for Jim and ginger beer for me. Once we’ve bought provisions, we turn the car round and drive due east to Loch Lussa.
Armed with our rather pedestrian picnic, we walk to the shallow beach at the loch’s edge. The sand is too wet to sit on, but we find a log big enough for the two of us, which Jim drapes with his coat. The air is freshly washed and clear as crystal, and there’s no sound at all, apart from the dripping of rainwater from the fir trees behind us.
‘Beautiful isn’t it,’ I sigh with pleasure, looking across at the heather-clad hills on the far side of the loch. ‘It reminds me of the holidays we used to have, camping near Pitlochry. We used to fly-fish and kayak on the loch.’ I hold up the bottle of Old Jamaica ginger beer. ‘We even used to drink this on our picnics.’
‘Very Enid Blyton.’ Jim looks at me thoughtfully over the rim of his lager can. ‘Was it a happy childhood?’
‘Yes, it was.’ I smile at the memory. ‘We were the perfect nuclear family: mother, father, son and daughter. Of course, we bickered occasionally, as all families do, but most of the time we got on well.’
‘The Famous Four.’
‘Yes. Exactly. Until my dad died suddenly when I was seventeen.’ We hadn’t thought to acquire a knife, so I tear off a chunk of the bread. ‘How about you – were you happy as a child?’ Even as I ask the question, I still can’t imagine the self-contained, impassive Jim Cardle being a child.
He shrugs and pulls out a cigarette packet and lighter from his jeans pocket. I frown at him as he goes to light it, and he sighs and slides the cigarette back into the carton.
‘My dad buggered off when I was six. Left my mum and my brother and me and had another family. I only saw him once after that, just before he died, and we had fuck all to say to one another.’
‘How about your mum?’
‘She’s still alive. She worked as a legal secretary and studied at night school for her solicitor’s exams; ended up becoming a lawyer. Although we were almost finished at school by the time she qualified. But still, we were all right financially. We didn’t go hungry.’
I bite into an apple so hard that it hurts my gums. ‘But it must have affected you in some way. Your dad walking out.’
Jim stands up, picks up a pebble and sends it looping across the water. ‘I expect it did. According to my ex-wife, it gave me trust issues. Always living with the assumption that anyone you’re close to will bugger off too. So you don’t let your guard down.’
I think about this for a while. ‘I think I had the opposite problem.’
He skims another pebble and turns back to look at me. ‘How so?’
‘I’m too trusting.’ I sigh and busy myself searching for a pebble of the right size and shape. ‘My dad was incredibly protective of me, and after he died, my brother took on that role. So I suppose my assumption was that that’s what men always did. I blindly trusted Alex, my first fiancé, and he dumped me out of the blue. I trusted him – Dominic, or Ben – and chose to believe him. I accepted his behaviour even when…’
Jim sits down on the log again. ‘When what?’ he asks sharply.
Slowly, and haltingly, I tell him about the night in the summer of 2017 when he raped me. ‘It still feels wrong calling it rape, because… you know… we were married. I convinced myself it was just a failure of communication and that he just didn’t realise I didn’t want sex.’
‘Ever since 1991, it’s still classed as rape,’ Jim says quietly. ‘It doesn’t even need to involve violence. Just lack of consent. Did you tell the police about this?’
I shake my head.
‘You should do. You should tell Alan Sutherland or one of his colleagues.’
‘There’s no point now. As they’ve already told me: you can’t prosecute a dead person.’
I hesitate for a few seconds, and then I tell him the rest. About Dom being the man in the red-soled trainers who was following me on my way back from work. And my suspicion that the atropine the police found in his car was in some way meant for me, because of my heart condition.
Jim stares at me, appalled. I stand up and start thrusting the remains of the food into the carrier bag so that I don’t have to make eye contact with him.
‘Alice. Stop, stop…’ He blocks me with his large body, placing a hand on my shoulder. ‘Why didn’t you mention this earlier?’
‘Why do think?’ I say angrily, snatching up his empty lager can. ‘Because I felt ashamed. And because I didn’t want to believe it. Your mind can’t really accept that it’s rape, even though you know it really is. If he wants it and you don’t.’
He takes the bag of picnic detritus from me and puts it to one side, enveloping me in a hug. He smells of hops and old-fashioned shaving soap, with a faint whiff of nicotine. I twist my head to avoid getting snot on the shoulder of his jacket.
‘The thing is, though,’ Jim’s Yorkshire accent makes him sound matter-of-fact, though I know he means to be reassuring, ‘ultimately he couldn’t go through with doing you serious harm. He ran off that night in the street, and the night he died he’d made the decision to leave the country rather than do anything to hurt you and the baby. You’ve got to try and focus on that.’ He releases me and pats my shoulder again, awkwardly. ‘Come on, let’s get back to the fleshpots of Campbeltown.’
The Sheep’s Head is open when we return, but not exactly a hive of activity.
A couple of old boys sit near the fire sipping drams of malt and playing dominoes, and a disconsolate couple still wearing their coats hunch over their drinks, not speaking to one another. We approach the bar and Jim orders half a pint of draft ale for himself and a tonic water for me. The man who serves us is stout, with thinning white hair and a face as smooth and pink as cut ham.
‘Are you Tavish?’ Jim asks, although there are no other candidates.
‘Aye, that’s me.’
We go through the photograph routine again.
‘That’s Dougie MacAlister.’ Tavish stabs a plump finger at the man in the photo. ‘And that’s his daughter Ellen. I was at school with her.’
‘D’you mind us asking how old you are, Tavish?’ Jim asks.
‘I was born in 1945. Ellen was a little bit older than me; she’d have been born during the war. She married up at St John’s Kirk, the other side of Glenbarr.’ Tavish looks at the photo again. ‘This must have been taken, ooh 1966, 1967?’
Ellen MacAlister. I take the photo back and examine her image: the full-skirted gown with three-quarter length sleeves, the dark blonde hair teased into a beehive, with a short veil pinned at the back. Was this my real mother-in-law?
‘Do you remember the name of the man she married?’
‘Aye, of course. She married someone called Malcolm Henderson. His family came from up in Tarbert.’ He speaks as though it was Mars, rather than a mere twenty-five miles away at the top of the peninsula.
‘Did they have children?’ I ask, forcing myself to sound casual even though my heart is pounding.
‘Now that I can’t tell you.’ Tavish pulls a cloth from the straining waistband of his trousers and starts polishing glasses. ‘They moved away from the area soon after they married. Dougie MacAlister was widowed about a year later and he moved too, to be near his daughter and son-in-law. People round here lost touch with them after that.’
‘Where did they go?’
‘Down south, as I recall.’
‘You mean London?’ Jim asks.
He receives a withering look from Tavish. ‘Dumfries.’
We make a detour to Edinburgh on our way back to London, to visit the National Records of Scotland on Princes Street.
‘We’ll find what we need here,’ Jim tells me confidently. ‘They’ve got all Scottish births, deaths and marriages, as well as other kinds of data.’
A couple of hours’ work turns up Ellen and Malcolm Henderson’s wedding certificate, for the 23 July 1966.
‘We already knew that, more or less,’ I point out to Jim.
‘Yes, but now we also know for sure that Ellen was born in 1941, and Malcolm was born in 1939. That will help us locate their offspring.’
We run several searches of birth records, but there are no matches. Ellen and Malcolm do not have children.
‘We must be doing this wrong,’ Jim tells me, getting visibly frustrated.
I queue at the Enquiries desk and eventually enlist the help of a Records Office staff member, but she also draws a blank. She can’t find any corresponding adoption records either. ‘Although back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, private adoption was more commonplace, so that could be the explanation. Why don’t you look at the census record? That will tell you exactly who’s living in the household.’
We pull up the 1971 census and, sure enough, Ellen and Malcolm are living in Craigs Road, Dumfries. Malcolm is listed as a farm labourer and Ellen as a clerical worker, but there are no other members of their household. No children.
‘Let’s keep on trying,’ I suggest desperately, but when we search the national census records for 1981, 1991 and 2001 not only are Ellen and Malcolm no longer in Dumfries, they’re not to be found anywhere. The trail has gone cold.