Now there are gulls.
They’re mobbing a small boat out on the choppy water. Jaap watches them wheel and dive, their cries carrying landward on the breeze, screams of drowning sailors.
He’d woken on Arno’s sofa worried he’d been tied in a knot, his spine complaining about the working conditions, and in the midst of an intensely erotic dream featuring Arno’s girlfriend, Kim. She’d been asleep when they’d turned up but had been woken by their pathetic attempt to enter the property quietly. She’d not seemed that surprised, had made the sofa up for Jaap then headed back to bed, Arno joining her.
After he’d shown Jaap around his home-grow operation.
Arno had explained that there was only one real dealer on the island and as he couldn’t, as a police officer, buy from him, he’d figured it would be less complicated to grow it himself. In the grow tent there were four plants coming into flower, the smell intoxicating when he’d unzipped it, pungent and almost overpowering.
Jaap had drifted off not long after, the soft fan from the grow tent lulling him to sleep.
The extra few hits he’d taken before turning in hadn’t hurt either, had mellowed things out nicely.
He breathes in and starts moving, down the same path leading to the empty beach as if it’s a rerun of the previous night.
He’d called Max first thing, checking up on the blood tests, but had been forced to leave a message.
He soon finds himself at the spot where the body was found. It’s no longer there, taken away after they’d finished, the location marked by four poles, a single strand of red-and-white police tape strung round the top.
He stares down into the marked-off area, his mind a jumble.
It looks to him like the sea has moved up several feet overnight and back again. Nothing really, but already the impression the body left in the sand is gone, a faint indent just beyond the waves’ reach the only clue she’d been there at all.
In the past he would have started thinking about the metaphor, how each individual’s life was like that, a tiny mark which would soon enough vanish as if it had never been there.
But all that had ended with the death of his baby daughter. The searing grief had consumed him for months, but it had also purged him somehow, made him less introspective, more alive to the moment.
He’d been seeing a grief counsellor – the department’s meagre apology – who’d been surprised when he confessed this to her; it was almost like she didn’t want him to have found a sort of peace, like she wanted him to struggle for longer. He got a strong impression she fed off other people’s sorrow.
After that he stopped going. Tanya had been what got him through; without her he doesn’t know what would have happened.
The breeze, up until now soft, toughens slightly and pushes at his face like the touch of invisible hands. He feels a speckle of spray, lifted off the waves, tiny microdots pinging any exposed skin. The gulls crescendo into an orgy of piercing shrieks and swooping sharp cries. The boat is moving – he can hear the blatblatblat of the outboard now – turning to the shore fifty or so metres up the beach.
The craft itself is small and made of wood, the hull painted white with an orange stripe running round the top. Jaap walks up the beach to intercept. The outboard is churning water at the stern like a jacuzzi. Gulls follow in frenzied hope.
Jaap watches as the man cuts the engine and the boat coasts forward until it’s close to the sand. He jumps over the side into the water and wades round to the front, hauling the boat landwards.
By the time Jaap reaches him, the bow’s well past the waterline and attached to a rope the man’s pulled out of the sand, stretching back in a taut arc to a stake anchored in the dunes.
As Jaap steps up, the man’s back in the boat, busy transferring lidded barrels over the vessel’s side.
‘Hey,’ Jaap says, having to raise his voice to compete with the gulls.
‘Morning,’ the man says. He doesn’t stop, keeps on offloading barrels.
‘Let me help,’ Jaap says as the man picks up one larger than the rest. The man nods and once he’s got it over the side Jaap takes the weight. It’s heavier than he’d thought it would be, and as he’s lowering it, one side sliding down the boat’s hull, he feels it starting to tip. He pushes hard against it, trying to jam it between him and the boat, but it’s not enough. It slips onto its side and the lid flies off, releasing a slick of silver fish, spreading out on the sand in a wet slither of flashing eyes and scales.
This is exactly what they’ve been waiting for; the gulls dive down, jabbing and pecking, each bird for itself, the noise deafening. The man jumps over the side with a loud roar, waving his arms about, knocking the birds up in a frenzy of wings, orange feet and dark glossy eyes.
Satisfied, he starts shovelling fish back into the barrel. Jaap goes to help, the gulls keeping close.
‘I got it,’ the man says, picking up a particularly large fish. He holds it up to Jaap and there’s movement, the gills vibrating fast, eyes twitching back and forth, aware perhaps that this new world it’s seeing for the first time is hostile. ‘Spent twenty years trading stocks, but this is better.’
‘I bet you keep that quiet.’
The man shrugs. ‘Everyone hates a banker,’ he says. ‘But really, hating bankers for being greedy is like hating a shark for eating baby seals. It’s what they do. The real people everyone should hate are the ones who allow the sharks to get anywhere near the baby seals in the first place.’
‘I’ve never liked politicians much either.’
‘Bunch of fuckers, they’re the real problem.’
He grabs more fish and tosses them in the barrel. Each one lands with a wet, slippery slap as they join their fellows.
He’s probably ten years or so older than him, Jaap decides, and has stubble on the cusp of graduating to a beard and a thin nose with peeling skin.
‘What made you change?’
‘My wife died. About six months later I took out everything, cashed it all in. Turns out it was a month before the crash. The plan was to travel the world, but I somehow ended up here.’
‘Life does that sometimes,’ Jaap says, finding a crab has scuttled in from nowhere and is challenging him to a fight, claws held aloft ready to strike, eyes, literally, on stalks.
‘Yeah, everything’s normal then one day, bang.’ The man slaps two fish together, a bit of water or fish slime hits Jaap’s cheek by his right eye. ‘It all goes crazy. Kind of like what you’re doing, I guess.’
The man looks at him; Jaap sees he has green eyes. Which makes him think of Tanya, guilty about his earlier dream.
‘What am I doing?’ Jaap says, rubbing the slime away. He’s not sure if the question is directed at the man or himself.
‘The murder, that’s what you’re here about, isn’t it?’
‘Small island community, no secrets, right?’
‘Living here, the best thing is not to have any, then you don’t get caught out,’ he says, tossing the last two fish into a barrel. ‘Hey, that’s pretty profound, you think I should tweet it?’
‘Did you see anything?’
A lone gull breaks away and makes a desperate dive.
‘No,’ he says, fending the bird off successfully. ‘I already spoke to one of your guys last night. I think the girl was a tourist, pretty sure I saw her a couple of days ago, hanging out with some of the surf crew up there.’ He points north along the beach.
This goes along with the briefing notes Arno had taken him through earlier. The fisherman was also mentioned, but had been dismissed as he’d been over at a shop on the mainland picking up several new nets at the time of the killing.
‘Any trouble with them?’
‘The surfers? No. In my day it would have been all drugs and stuff. Now? They’re all clean-living types, into Paleo and meditation, and they worship their bodies just so they’re fitter for surfing. Youth—’ He shakes his head with a grin ‘— totally wasted on them.’
‘How far?’
‘Fifteen minutes or so, the beach curves round. There’s an underwater shelf out there, so they get better waves than here. You’ll see a shack up in the dunes where they keep all their boards, but I’m sure you’ll find some out in the water already. They live by the tides.’
Jaap thanks him and starts walking, leaving behind the victorious crab.
The sky’s massive overhead, a few clouds relaxing in the blue expanse, just happy to be floating there, gazing down on the craziness below. Waves stroke the sand and the sun warms the right side of his face, and he finds it working on his body and mind, a temporary sense of respite.
A wave, not content with just working the sand, reaches for him with flecked foam, and he sidesteps further up the beach to avoid its touch. Disappointed, but no doubt willing to try for him again, the wave recedes, leaving dark sand behind it.
He stops, takes his shoes and socks off, and carries on walking just as an F-16 fighter jet storms out of the sky, right over his head, surely no more than five or so metres above him. His hands are over his ears but it’s still deafening, the whole world suddenly vibrating. He turns to watch it head south, curving up and to the left in a fast, smooth arc.
He knew there was a military training ground on the southernmost tip of the island, a vast expanse of beach which tourists were strictly forbidden from entering. What he didn’t know was that they flew the planes so goddamned low.
Once it’s out of sight, his ears still ringing, he carries on walking and soon he can see them out on the water, sitting on their boards, rising and falling on the growing swell. Which is much bigger here, the fisherman was right on that.
He pauses and wipes all the sand he can off his feet before slipping on his socks and shoes. Properly shod, he watches as one of the surfers lies down and starts paddling, head swivelling over their shoulder to check the incoming wave, arms windmilling the water. It grows behind, from slight bulge to yawning mouth, and the figure springs up just as the wave breaks, a flurry of foamy white as the water peels over and splits. The surfer rides it in, all the way to the shallows, finally stepping off their board as the wave loses momentum, melting back into the sea as if nothing had happened.
Jaap calls out, but the wind stuffing the words back into his mouth, right down his throat. He thinks of the one-way valve.
Miraculously the figure hears and turns, putting a flat hand across their brow to block out the sun, which is cresting over the dunes behind him. He sees it’s a woman, a girl really, and he waves her over.
She hesitates for a moment, glancing back out to her fellow surfers, then pulls her board round and walks out of the sea, a loop of cord attaching her ankle to the board dragging behind her. Blue stripes run down the arms and legs of her black wetsuit, and her hair, plastered back on her head, is long and probably blonde when dry.
‘Heleen?’ she asks, once Jaap has introduced himself and she’s told him her name is Kitty Paumen.
‘You knew her?’
‘Hardly,’ Kitty says. ‘I’d met her a few times, seen her around here.’
‘Surfing lessons?’
‘I think Piet took her out a few days ago. He’s just finishing up a lesson, want me to get him?’
‘Yeah,’ Jaap says, his phone starting up.
A male voice, thick with tar, introduces itself as Max’s assistant.
‘Tell me,’ Jaap says.
‘Yeah,’ says the voice, then falls silent. Jaap wonders if their connection has broken.
‘Yeah what?’
‘Scopolamine. Her blood was damn-near saturated with the stuff.’
Boards lean up against the walls of the shack.
Jaap’s on the wooden deck, the surface coarsened with sand, both wet and dry. An old brown dog lies wiry-haired by the door. It raises its head, decides Jaap’s not the food-carrying type, and rests back down again. Piet shrugs out of the top half of his wetsuit, leaving two arms dangling down to the ground whilst he towels off his very short hair. His face and neck are tanned hard, but below the line of his wetsuit his skin is like milk.
‘Seriously, she was a bit weird, you know?’
Jaap doesn’t know. He asks for clarification.
‘Just … I dunno. Not quite right. Too quiet, like she was holding something in.’
‘Was she with anyone?’
‘At the lesson? No. Just her.’
‘Didn’t we see her yesterday? Wasn’t she with someone?’ Kitty says, stepping out of the hut having changed from her wetsuit into denim hot pants and bikini top. She obviously spends a bit of time trying to even out the discrepancy between neck and body colour that Piet has, but she’s still two-tone. She puts her head to one side and wrings out her hair, a thick gush of water hitting the deck. Jaap thinks of a horse peeing.
‘Someone?’
‘Yeah,’ Piet says, nodding his head slowly at first, then getting into it. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Just over there, she was walking with this guy I’d not seen before.’
‘This was when?’ Jaap asks.
‘Yesterday, would have been about twelve, twelve-thirty.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘The tides wait for no man,’ Piet says, though Jaap can’t tell if he’s being ironic, can’t tell if he’s just playing the part of a surfer dude or he really is a surfer dude. He decides it’s probably a combination of both, like some New Age mantra, you become what you think. ‘That’s when the tide turns, waves flatten out for a few hours. Someone was screwing around with one of those remote-control flying things, we could hear it buzzing but couldn’t see it.’
‘That’s when we saw her,’ the girl says. ‘When we were looking for the flying thing.’
Jaap pulls out Francesco Kamp’s photo, the one he’d had pinned to the car’s dash yesterday.
‘This the guy?’
They both lean in to peer at it.
‘Hard to tell, bit too far away,’ she says.
‘Any reasons it couldn’t have been him?’
Piet and the girl confer with their eyes. The wind shifts direction.
The old dog sleep-barks once, then stretches out all four legs with a soft groan.
‘No,’ she eventually says. ‘I guess not.’