Slapton Sands (25 page)

‘I'm going nowhere until I've nailed you,' Alice said. But she said it to herself. Because it was not an announcement. Nor did she mean it as defiant rhetoric. She felt the threat would be heard and understood without it needing to be voiced. Grief had taught Alice Bourne a forlorn economy when it came to the shedding of tears. She didn't easily let them go. She was angry now, at having been frightened into crying. In life, Johnny Compton had evidently hated women. In death, Alice now determined she would be one he would be made to fear. He would hear words, would Johnny Compton. He would sense the determination in her threat.

He had already. It was why he was here.

That night, for what was to be the last time, Alice dreamed the cormorant dream. She was aboard the same uneasy, flimsy-bottomed shudder of a boat. Its course was the same bewildering slough through peaks and troughs of emerald sea. She felt the familiar lurch of panic as it lost sight of shore. And the great bird seemed more prehistoric than ever, fish scales oozing through reptile talons as it settled on the gunwale and it fixed her with its glare. The bird shifted, but did not take flight when she began to climb
up the side of the hull. She gripped the gunwale next to where the cormorant perched and gained purchase with the toes of her boots on the tails of the unfinished bolt screws that held the hull plates together. She slipped feet first into the water, aware of the height of the swell and the cold shock of it as the Higgins boat swayed from her reach and the instant weight of water in her clothing and boots and ammunition belt and pack dragged her under. Salt burned her nose in the water, filling her throat and lungs. She opened her eyes and saw a trail of small bubbles rise towards the opaque light receding above her. She didn't know if they were from her body or her clothing. She sank, steadily, and the receding light diminished into dark. She remembered no last thoughts when she awoke. Just an absence, growing colder and colder in her, with diminishing light.

Her father had told her that most men were creatures of habit. The worst of them became criminals. Most of the criminals were caught and convicted eventually for their crimes. They were given long, harsh sentences in maximum-security prisons. On occasions, some of them managed to escape. And it didn't matter how brutal or desperate the means of escape, or how long and desperately they ran to evade recapture. Men were creatures of habit, and eventually they went home. Wait long enough, her dad told her, and you'll find them there. You'll discover them sleeping in their own bed or reclining on their own porch.
The staying away hurts them more than the thought of recapture. They return to their loved ones and the routine they knew. To the smells and sanctity of home. It's what they escaped to find again. It's the thing they missed. It's the great and enduring paradox of the absconded criminal. They spend years plotting escapes of breathtaking ingenuity, only to go back in the rare event they succeed to the one place they know we're guaranteed to go looking for them.

Dartmouth was a welcome contrast to the emptiness of Start Bay. The harbour itself was an open rectangle of old stone, a drop of twenty feet to the crowds and clusters of boats berthed in mud and silt below, with the tide out. The stones from which the harbour walls were constructed were big, dank things plugged by the rings of mooring chains and pitted where others had broken free in violent weather. Sea moss hung from the stone in dripping green beards. Under the strengthening sun, the harbour smelled of mussels and seaweed and oozes in the mud of escaping outboard and engine fuel. To the rear of the harbour, shops and hotels formed a handsome, higgledy-piggledy terrace Alice thought was probably mostly Georgian. There were tourists in Dartmouth, absent in their droves from Slapton Sands. They were English tourists. Or more accurately they were British. Leaning against the painted iron rail around the harbour, Alice heard voices from Scotland and Wales and the harsh accent of Ulster. It was an odd accent to hear in play, hearing it as she had, always venting
hatred and indignation on the English television and radio news.

They were not affluent tourists, these. Their shoes and their clothes were cheap, and there were lots of elderly people and family groups. A number of the older tourists limped, the legacy of childhood rickets or polio epidemics. The visitors here reminded her a bit of her summer vacations with Bobby and her dad to Atlantic City. The same cheap sandals and sunglasses. The same awkward sunburns from the beach. The same air of privileged anticipation. Christ, he'd been a good father, her dad. He'd been the best. The best. How the missing of him burned in her still.

She heard passing cricket commentaries on little transistor radios clutched to the ears of liver-spotted men. Some of the youths carried huge cassette players on shoulder straps. In the Georgian huddle of Dartmouth, her ears were assaulted by Queen and Rod Stewart and the Quo. They were the aural equivalent of tribal banners, these cassette players, she thought. It was a conclusion reached when a boy in a wedge cut limped by under his colossal burden of tape player and the batteries needed to power the thing into life, playing the new Bowie single, ‘Golden Years'.

Rory Carnegie was easy to find. He was one of her father's creatures of habit. But he was not an escaped felon. He had no requirement here of a disguise. And he looked much the way Rachel Vine had described him. He wore a
tam-o'shanter, as he always did, to protect his bald head from the sun. A thick, full moustache covered his top lip. He'd been something in rugby called a prop forward in his youth, and his nose had been flattened, compressed. It looked like a boxer's nose to Alice, and gave Rory Carnegie's face a pugnacious cast. He sat on a bench at the side of the harbour with a sea rod extending over the top rail from between his feet. He showed the interest in the rod a spear-carrying extra might in his weapon on a movie set in a lull between scenes. The clincher was the tattoos visible on his crossed arms. The ink had faded over time, but they were high-class work and deeply and confidently etched. Alice could see the coil of a mermaid's tail, make out the scales and tailfin shape on the left arm, the one nearest her. He turned his head and looked at her. His eyes were very blue, very pale in the ruddy tan of his face.

‘I'd guess you're not looking for the time, lass,' Rory Carnegie said. His voice sounded as though its owner had never departed Aberdeen. Men are creatures of habit, Alice reminded herself. He never would have left Aberdeen if he hadn't been exiled by the other trawlermen. He'd fetched up here before the outbreak of war, after a false start in Penzance. And here he'd stayed.

‘Have you caught anything?'

‘What do you think.'

‘I don't think you're trying.'

‘They're not biting. You're nibbling, though. Why?'

‘I want to know what happened at Slapton Sands.'

Carnegie didn't blink. The nerve that had allowed him to net fish in forbidden waters in wartime had neither diminished nor deserted him. There was a large watch on a metal bracelet on his wrist. It was a Rolex, like the watch David had been sent by his father. Only this one had seen a lot less wear. Time had been kind to Rory Carnegie.

‘You should play poker,' Alice said. ‘You'd have a lot more success than you do with that rod.'

He looked around. He had the bench to himself. Nobody was particularly near them. No one was paying them undue attention. He's acting like a spy in a movie, Alice thought.

‘How did you find me?'

‘Rachel Vine.'

Carnegie let out a long breath between clenched teeth. He looked at Alice again. His eyes were an astonishing colour, almost turquoise, like the Iroquois jewellery Joni Mitchell and the like wore when their brief bouts of social conscience forced the real, Tiffany's stuff from off their wrists, from around their gilded throats.

‘You know,' Carnegie said, ‘you look a little bit like that singer.' He unfolded his arms and lifted a hand, flicking the fingers close to his cheek, thoughtful.

‘You remember Rachel Vine?'

‘Not so bonnie as you are,' Carnegie said, still in apparent thought. ‘Though I doubt a more seductive creature ever drew breath.'

‘Can we talk?'

He stood. He was burly, but fat hung nowhere on him. He extended his hand. ‘Rory Carnegie.'

Alice shook hands with him. His palm felt like heavy wood roughed with sandpaper. ‘Alice Bourne.'

‘We'll go somewhere quiet. My house is in walking distance, or there's a hotel with secluded space in its lobby, if you'd prefer. I've been waiting for this encounter for thirty-two years. Though I have to say I'd have bet on its being with a man.'

Alice allowed him to lead her to his house. He was a primary source, after all. She could not gain and might well lose from insisting on neutral ground. It wasn't why she was here, to be timid and cautious. She knew from shaking hands with him that his fingers, strong enough still to crush bone, had only dabbed at the formality of gripping hers in introduction. Rachel Vine had described Carnegie to her as a remorseful man, a man who had learned his lesson in the careless fishing tragedy for which he'd been responsible, before the war, off the Scottish coast. And she trusted Rachel's judgement. There was no warmth, admittedly, in Carnegie's eyes, but she was looking for truth, not consolation.

‘How is Rachel?'

Carnegie's house was not what she'd expected. Alice had half-anticipated some nautical mausoleum, a place full of brass and mahogany Jack Tar souvenirs. She'd expected the
Scotsman's home to look a bit like the interior of the Neptune pub. But it didn't. It was devoid of clutter, empty of artefacts. There was nothing here to suggest a shipborne past. Nothing, except the man. The walls were stripped and painted and the furniture low-slung, Scandinavian. He had a reel-to-reel tape machine and floor-standing Wharfdale loudspeakers. The texture and tonality of the room were tasteful and entirely masculine. There was no woman sharing Carnegie's life. A turned wooden bowl of fruit on a tabletop was his sole concession to softness. But the plums and apples and grapes in the bowl were polished spheres remote from bruising or rot.

‘The rod is a prop,' he said to her, returning from the kitchen with drinks. ‘As you rightly surmised. Cheers.'

‘Cheers.'

The room was cool and shaded. It gave no indication of the tormenting heat outside, the wincing brightness. It might even have been air-conditioned, though there was no hum. Rory Carnegie had not yet sat. He coughed. ‘This is harder than I thought,' he said. He seemed to waver, then, physically, between two directions, and Alice feared he was about to change his mind, keep his long-claimed secret, show her the door with the ice still clinking in her untouched glass on its coaster on the table. Instead, he dropped to his haunches and opened a drawer in the table and took out a rack of pipes. He began to fill a pipe from a tobacco pouch taken from the drawer.

‘The rod is so I won't be taken for a child pervert. It gives
me an excuse to sit and ponder with a blameless view of the harbour. And of the sea.'

His pipes all had those twin metal stems that were supposed to cool the tobacco and at the same time channel spit away from the mouthpiece and bowl. Alice was always seeing advertisements for them in the Sunday supplements. They were a clue to his character, like the Grundig reel-to-reel and the Rotel amplifier on the shelf underneath it. Like the Rolex on his wrist and the radio sets he'd had his ocean-going boats fitted with all those years ago out of apparent remorse after some salty tragedy in the waters off the Scottish coast. He was a man attracted by precision. If he'd been at all interested in sea angling, he'd have had a better rod to fish with. A more complicated reel. He'd have had a bait box full of cunning lures and binoculars and all sorts of other shit. Sonar, probably. Sonar for the sharks.

‘You're gay, aren't you, Mr Carnegie?'

He was puffing on his over-engineered pipe. Her dad had been an occasional pipe smoker. Carnegie's pipe didn't look like it delivered very much of what the Sunday adverts promised.

‘That was why you left Aberdeen. You were indiscreet there. There was some scandal or something. You were ostracized, and you brought your boats south.'

‘I wasn't ostracized, girl. I was driven out.'

‘You bought those radio sets off the guy in Liverpool because you like high-end stuff. You think it's neat.'

‘Neat?'

‘You get a buzz out of technology. When it works.'

‘Oh it worked all right. It worked too bloody well,' Carnegie said. ‘And that makes me queer?'

‘No wife. No kids. Being queer gives you the time and money to indulge your interest.'

‘You're very perceptive.'

‘My dad was a cop.'

‘Nevertheless. You're very perceptive.'

She felt sorry for him. It had been better for Rory Carnegie, more acceptable, for deadly negligence rather than sexual inclination to have driven him from his home to seek work elsewhere. And so he'd invented the lie Rachel Vine still propagated. Even now, presumably because he was a single, childless man, he had needed to invent a hapless excuse just to sit and enjoy a vista of the sea. Worse, this pantomime was obliged to be acted out in a town the man had called home for better than thirty years.

‘It's why I prefer the term “queer” to “gay”,' Carnegie said. ‘Yes, Alice Bourne, I can read some of your thoughts.' She nodded.

Puffing at his pipe, he sat down. Whatever barrier had existed had been broken between them now. He coughed again, to clear his throat. ‘We should talk about Slapton Sands. More accurately, we should talk about an incident that occurred on the way to Slapton Sands. Have you heard of Operation Tiger?'

Alice shook her head. Her heart was beating with a hard insistence. This was the moment at which truth was
delivered into history. She was witnessing history's birth. Better, she was herself delivering it.