11

Although Rebecca had spoken to Chaz Wymark many times on the phone, she had never met him face-to-face. She knew he was two or three years younger than her, perhaps twenty-two or twenty-three, but his enthusiasm made him seem more like a teenager. When she phoned him from the hotel to tell him that she was on the island, his voice was filled with excitement, and he insisted on coming to see her immediately. He knew she had taken sick leave and she had to extract a promise from him that he would keep her presence a secret from the office. She didn’t know if he was capable of it but she had no choice. This was his story, after all, and his island. She stopped to consider that. His island. It wasn’t hers, despite her father being born here.

It was a beautiful afternoon and she felt like getting some air, so he told her there was a bench beside the old harbourmaster’s office overlooking the harbour. She waited for him, her head tilted back to catch the rays of the sun, hoping to be lulled by the sounds of the water lapping gently against the stone jetty and the clink of cables against the masts of the boats bobbing languidly in the marina. She still felt slightly on edge, as if there was something dark looming just ahead of her. The warm autumn sunshine helped but she couldn’t fully shake the sensation.

She kept seeing the face of the woman at the church darken at the mention of her father. It was just a shadow, really, and she’d tried to hide it, but Rebecca had caught it. It had troubled her as she walked back to the hotel. What had Dad been hiding all these years? What had forced him to leave, and why would people turn skittish at the mention of the family name?

She opened her eyes, looked across the harbour to where the mainland was, at this level, little more than a dark line rising from the water. Was it the woman’s reaction that was bothering her, or was it lingering shame about lying to Barry? Illness was something she hated to submit to; feigning it was much worse. Maybe it was Simon? She didn’t like treating him the way she did, but she couldn’t help herself. He just reminded her too much of what had happened. Chromosomes, they told her afterwards. Not enough chromosomes, and the foetus hadn’t developed properly. Nobody’s fault, just one of those things, not that any of the medical professionals used those exact words. She hadn’t done anything to endanger the pregnancy. She hadn’t been drinking, she’d never smoked or used drugs, she wasn’t obese. She’d even cut down on coffee. But it still happened.

There had been bleeding before, but she was told it was common during the first trimester. But then it grew worse, the pain increased, and that was it. She woke up that morning pregnant, went to bed not pregnant. One in ten mothers under thirty suffer a miscarriage, they said, as if that was supposed to make her feel better. She’d received counselling, of course, and they kept telling her no one was at fault. It was just one of those things. She was the one in ten.

When she’d first discovered she was expecting, Simon had proposed, because that was the kind of man he was. She declined because even then, when she was carrying his child, she was not certain he was the one for her. She liked him, had even told herself that she loved him, but deep down she was never fully convinced. He was handsome and he was caring and he was a good man. Her dad would have liked him, her mum certainly did, but Rebecca knew that despite their shared experience there was no future for them. Rebecca never told her mother she’d been pregnant or that she’d lost the baby. She didn’t tell anyone outside the health service, apart from Simon, because it wasn’t something she wished to talk about. She didn’t want the pity or the sympathy. She simply wanted to get on with things: move on, nothing to see here.

But sometimes, lying alone in her bed in her little flat, she thought about what might have been. Of the baby—was it a boy or a girl? Of what it would have been like to have been a mother, to raise a child, to watch the child grow and become an adult. And on those nights, in the darkness of her room as Inverness slept beyond her windows, she wept softly.

Once she awoke to find her father sitting on her bed, watching her. Her rational side told her she was dreaming, he had been dead for two years, but it seemed so real. He didn’t say anything, merely smiled that kindly smile he had, and she swore she felt him tuck a strand of hair from her forehead, the way he always used to do.

‘Daddy,’ she’d said, once again a little girl.

But all he did was smile. That was reassuring enough for her.

And then he was gone. She knew it was all right to grieve, to be sad, but it was also all right to carry on.

A slight disturbance in the water made her look down. The large, dark eyes of a seal were staring back at her. It pleased her. As a child she recalled her parents taking her from their home in Glasgow down the west coast for the day, to the small village of Ballantrae in the south of Ayrshire. They would walk along the beach, finding mangled branches that had been stripped raw by the water and the wind and the salt, then thrown up onto the shingle as if the sea had taken everything it needed and was done with them. They would skirt around dead jellyfish and rotting seaweed and, as they reached the far end of the beach, at a place called Bennane Head, her mother would talk of the legend of Sawney Bean and his family of cannibals said to live in a cave nearby. It was there Rebecca saw her first seal in the wild, a number of them stretched out on rocks hidden just below the surface of the water, as if sunbathing. Occasionally a head would appear, little more than a lump in the surface of the water, to regard with curiosity these strange creatures of the land, just like the one with which she was exchanging a stare now. Although this one was perhaps hoping she would throw it something to eat.

‘Rebecca?’

Chaz Wymark was walking along the quayside towards her, his camera bag slung over his shoulder. His hair was blond, his face finely tanned as only blonds seem to manage, his frame trim and fit. He was, she had to admit, pretty damn gorgeous. Enthusiasm bounced in his blue eyes and he gave her a tight hug as soon as she stood up. Rebecca wasn’t much of a hugger, but she let it run its course because she didn’t sense anything sexual in the young man’s approach. This was the way he was—tactile, eager and boyish. He made her feel old and jaded.

‘We finally meet,’ he said. When he smiled he reminded her of a young Robert Redford, her mum’s favourite.

‘Remember, I’m not here,’ she said.

The smile broadened. ‘Right, gotcha. Your editor will come around.’ His tone was confident. ‘There’s something in this, Rebecca. I can feel it. This Roddie Drummond thing is big, everyone’s talking about it.’

Rebecca didn’t reply. She hoped Chaz was right, but she knew she was walking a fine line. A newsroom was a collaborative area but it was not a democracy, even in the weeklies. The industry had changed but the editor’s word was still law and she had broken that law. If this didn’t pan out the way Chaz said it would, Rebecca would be out there looking for a new job. And in a world where any crackpot with a camera phone could call himself a journalist, jobs were hard to come by.

‘I saw a seal just now,’ she said, her hand waving vaguely towards the water.

‘Not surprising,’ he said. ‘Portnaseil means “port of the seal”.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

He looked surprised. ‘I thought you were from the island?’

‘My father was from the island. I’ve never been.’

Chaz was puzzled. ‘He never brought you back home?’

‘He didn’t speak about the place. He left when he was a teenager and never came back.’

Chaz took this in. ‘Never said why?’

She shook her head. ‘That’s another reason I’m here. I want to find out why. Do you know of any other Connollys on the island?’

He thought about it. ‘If there are I’ve never met them. We can ask my mum and dad, though. But your dad would’ve left here long before we arrived.’

Rebecca knew Chaz’s father had moved from London thirteen years before, to become one of the island’s two GPs, although there was no trace of his roots in the young man’s accent. He sounded island to the bone.

She sat down on the bench again. ‘I’m going to talk to the minister about my father. She knew him.’

‘Fiona? She’s away just now, at a Church of Scotland meeting in Edinburgh.’

‘I know, but she’ll be back in a day or so, I’ve been told. I’ve got to start somewhere and she seems logical. But let’s talk about Mhairi Sinclair. And Roddie Drummond.’

Chaz sat down beside her, set his camera bag on the ground. ‘Okay, remember I’m only passing on what I’ve been told. This all happened two years before I got here.’

‘I know. I just want some background. I’ve read what reports I could but I want to hear what you’ve heard.’

He gathered his thoughts. ‘They say she was a beautiful woman,’ he said. ‘Stunning, is what I was told. Her mum and dad run the village store and post office, back there in the Square. Mhairi’s daughter lives with them.’

‘Sonya, right?’

‘Yes, Sonya. She’s what, sixteen now? Something like that. She was obviously just a baby when her mother was murdered.’

‘But she’s not Roddie Drummond’s child?’

‘No, her father is Donnie Kerr. Him and Mhairi and Roddie Drummond were all pals as kids.’

‘So Sonya doesn’t live with her father?’

‘No. Donnie’s had what you might call a chequered history, I’m told. Drugs. He’s clean now, operates an excursion boat, takes tourists out to see the marine life in his dad’s old fishing craft. Dolphin spotting, whale watching, that sort of thing. Some deep-sea fishing now and then. Takes them over to Staffa and down to Iona, too, during the summer. You’ll see him tonight.’

Chaz had told her on the phone there was to be a meeting in the community hall to discuss the proposals regarding the big house and estate. The local laird was going to present his plans and had enlisted the local MP and a TV star to back him up. Chaz was going to take photographs. A telly star was always news.

‘It’s a shame for the girl, it really is,’ Chaz said. ‘She only knows her mother through photographs. I can’t imagine how that must feel.’

‘Where is the cottage Mhairi shared with Roddie?’

‘Outside Portnaseil, a wee bit down the Spine.’

‘The Spine?’ Rebecca asked.

Chaz explained. ‘Our only real road. It runs the full length of the island, like a spine. The cottage is a holiday home now—the island is becoming quite the attraction these days for incomers. Second homes, people retiring here. The owners got it for next to nothing, apparently. At the time it was owned by the estate, but they offloaded it as soon as they could. The fact that a violent death occurred inside doesn’t seem to upset the current owners at all. It’s unlikely to happen again and they know it. The island’s a peaceful place, really.

‘There’d not been an incident like that for fifty years or so, is that right?’

‘There’s not much crime here at all. We’ve got police, of course. A handful of officers, working shifts naturally, and a sergeant. But there’s not that much for them to do by way of violent crime.’

‘Paradise, is it?’

He laughed. ‘In many ways. There are problems, of course there are. Youth crime. Domestics. Alcohol abuse. Drugs.’

‘Drugs?’

‘Oh yes. Paradise we may be, but the islands all have their . . . erm . . . issues, shall we say. We’re not immune from the pressures of modern life. Some even argue they’re amplified here. Still, it’s a nice place to live. I like it, anyway.’

Everywhere has its problems, her dad had once said. You can live in the most beautiful place on earth but under the surface there is always something unpleasant.

As the words came back to her, she wondered if he had been obliquely talking about the island. Had he dug under the surface—and found something nasty?