The Sound of Whales (22 page)

CHAPTER 39

I
told you,' Fraser said, a note of troubled triumph in his voice. ‘Sail for the mainland, Ben. We can still make it.'

Ben gave each of them a withering, weary look and said, ‘This is just madness.' He moved past them back to the wheelhouse, flung open the door and resumed his position behind the old circle of wood.

Hayley faced Fraser and said, ‘
You
can sail the boat to shore. Jonah can take care of Ben.'

Fraser shook his head. ‘Ben will do it. He knows now that we're telling the truth. He'll do what's right.'

The engine roared as Ben worked the throttle and fired it back up. Jonah wasn't quite home and dry, but at least he had a fighting chance now, and Ben could worry about the police. They were just local teenagers on an innocent boat ride: what did they know about illegal immigrants and people traffickers and smuggling rings? Not even Mr Wallace could prove anything, not before Jonah was on the London train.

The boat began to move again and Fraser waited for the rudder to start a slow turn towards the mainland. It didn't happen. He looked back at the wheelhouse and saw Ben's face at the window, his eyes narrowed, his face twisted as if he had a bad taste in his mouth, his hands gripping the wheel as if someone was trying to prise his fingers from the wood. He was not heading for the far shore; he was sailing up the sound to make his rendezvous.

Fraser spun around, looked in anguish at Hayley and Jonah. ‘He hasn't listened. He doesn't care.'

He knew what he had to do. He was going to wrench the wheelhouse door off its hinges, drag the self-destructive fool on to the deck, pummel his head, then toss him overboard as chum for sharks and orcas.

Jonah grabbed his shoulder.

‘Leave it be, Fraser,' he said in a quiet voice. ‘I will try again some other day.'

‘No, it can't end like this!'

Fraser looked at his brother. Dunny stood in the bow like the figurehead on a pirate ship, his face to the ocean, with an imperious air as if here was his dominion, his subjects scattered beneath the waves. And then he stretched out his arms, his fingers uncurled and he lifted his chin to the sky. His eyes closed for a moment and then he opened them wide and he repeated the musical phrase, the wavering note – rising from low to high – that coaxed or cajoled or commanded the whale.

‘That's it, Dunny,' Fraser whispered. ‘Do something.'

For a few seconds the boat ploughed on, the engine thumping away, the distant shore a line of black, unreachable hills. The water was calm, stirred only by the arriving pressure wave of the oncoming boat, but then, a hundred metres or so ahead, ripples began to form, then a froth of foam and then the black, pitted back of the humpback whale emerged once more above the surface. Its giant tail fluke flicked into the air, then slapped hard against the sea, sending up a spume of ocean with a loud crack.

‘Way to go, Dunny,' Fraser said.

Ben would surrender now, he had to. There was no other choice when a whale was in the way.

But the thump of the engine didn't change; in fact the pitch rose slightly, as if the throttle had been pushed beyond the mark that said maximum. The boat didn't turn; instead it seemed to straighten so it was dead-on to the whale.

‘No!' Fraser cried, spinning round to face the wheel-house, realizing now how events were about to play out.

Ben's face was pressed to the glass, his eyes wild, his mouth between a smile and a sneer, his small boat at ramming speed, the only course, collision course. The boat was a whale-seeking missile; the whale was an iceberg, a skerry, a reef of vulnerable flesh and blubber. There would be no winner here. The boat's hull would splinter against fin and fluke. The whale's back would gash against propeller and keel.

Fraser clutched the rail and watched, paralysed with horror, as the boat steamed at full speed towards the floating whale. Ben was not for turning, was no longer for stopping. This was how it was to end, as it had ended throughout history, with sinking boats and dying whales and bodies floundering in the water far from shore.

The ocean sliced apart as boat and whale converged. The whale's head was above the water. Fraser saw the big, black eye staring straight at them and for a moment he imagined a flicker of fear. He braced himself against the rail, looked over at Jonah and Hayley. Both could also see clearly what was coming. The African raised his eyes to the sky, thinking perhaps of his absent brother. Hayley looked at Fraser in anguish. He turned back to the whale, dead ahead and close. It gave a great blow, as if steeling itself for the impact, and Fraser felt its breath break over him. He tried to say something, felt himself mouth,
I'm sorry
, but he was all out of words.

Then came the cry.

‘Stop!'

It was loud and desperate and wretched. And it came from Dunny.

As the cry echoed across the water the lobster boat pulled hard to port. At the same moment the humpback ducked beneath the surface, its tail fluke lifting from the water. Fraser felt the boat tip, thought it was going over, waited for the collision, clung to the rail, heard a smack like a cannon. He was engulfed by a wave of water, felt the boat tip back, was swirled around as the ocean drained from the deck.

And then all was still and quiet.

He lay on his back, breathing hard, and realized slowly that the boat was afloat and he was alive. There had been no shipwreck, no dying whale. A cry had averted disaster. As he blinked in the sunlight he remembered whose cry it had been. Fraser grabbed the rail and hauled himself to his feet. The boat pitched slightly in the swell it had created, its engine dead. Hayley, Jonah and his brother stood on the deck, dripping with water. The wheelhouse door banged and Ben emerged. He looked broken.

‘I couldn't hit a whale.' He slumped against the gunwale. ‘I love whales, that's why I'm here. I couldn't hit one.'

Dunny was breathing hard and his whole body was shaking. Fraser reached over and wrapped a hand around his arm. He wanted to say something, couldn't muster anything, recognized the irony that words wouldn't come.

‘The whale is saved,' Jonah said. ‘As are we.'

Dunny leant over the rail to check but the whale was gone. His breathing slowed and he looked at the ocean, nodded and smiled, turned to Fraser, nodded and smiled again.

‘That was
 . . . 
brilliant, Dunny,' Fraser said.

He waited for his brother to reply, as if that first word would open the floodgates to many more, but Dunny simply turned back to the ocean. Perhaps he only had one word in him.

And now Fraser remembered the police boat. He looked behind him and the vessel was almost upon them. Figures could be seen on the deck and he wondered if somehow Mr Wallace had managed to get on board.

‘Your friend is finished,' Ben said flatly. ‘We all are.'

‘I'm sorry, Jonah,' Fraser said. ‘I thought I could get you away.'

The African shook his head. ‘No, I am the one who is sorry. You did more than I could have asked, more than I should have asked. If all I achieved in landing on this shore was finding a friend
 . . .
' Jonah looked around him, ‘
. . .
finding three good friends, then it is a trip I am glad I made.'

For a moment four of the five souls upon the small boat stood thinking of dreams dashed and adventures ended. Only Dunny looked the other way, up the sound, across the water towards the far horizon, his dream perhaps only beginning.

‘I cannot stay here,' Jonah said. ‘I put you all in danger. I bring trouble.'

‘No, not for us,' Fraser said.

Ben gave a scornful laugh. ‘Oh, I think the African is right. There is trouble coming to us all, even your brother, when word gets out about his special gift.'

Ben said ‘special' as if the word was distasteful and Fraser saw the harsh truth in the statement. If the world discovered that Dunny was a
gairmie
, then the world would descend on Skulavaig. He pictured the newspaper headline above his brother's photograph: ‘Last of the
Gairmies
'. Dunny would be a freak show, a circus act – as if he wasn't sometimes those things already.

And yet
 . . . 
Dunny's gift could bring jobs and money to the island along with the whales. Tourists would flock to see the spectacle of orca pods and breaching humpbacks. The island economy could be revived and young people would no longer have to leave to find a life.

Fraser thought,
I won't have to leave
.

And it dawned on him that maybe this was why Dunny had summoned the whales in the first place. To save the island. To keep his brother at home.

‘No one need know about me, Doctor McCaig,' Jonah was saying. ‘And no one need know about the boy. And if I am gone, no one need know about you.'

‘Oh, I think I'm going to jail,' Ben said, bitterly scoffing. ‘Someone will grass.' He looked at Fraser and Hayley.

‘Give it all up,' Fraser said. ‘Go back to Aberdeen and do your whale research. And never come back.' He looked at the man he had so admired and there was anger but there was also pity. ‘Do that and I won't tell.'

He looked at Hayley and an unspoken agreement passed between them.

‘No one will hear anything from me,' she said. ‘This time, I truly promise. Not even my mom.'

Fraser believed her. Gone from her face was that superior look; her hair was bedraggled from the wave that had crashed over the boat, her face was smeared with dirt from crawling across the deck. She looked like an island girl just come in from a storm. She had never looked more lovely.

‘I deserve to be whale food,' Ben muttered, looking at the deck. ‘Why would you stay quiet?'

‘It's a simple deal,' Fraser said. ‘Don't mention Jonah, don't mention Dunny, and give up the smuggling. Then we won't tell.'

‘But I owe these people money. I haven't delivered my package.'

‘That's your problem, not ours. Go back to being a whale scientist, you're good at that. This, not so much.'

Ben sighed and nodded, said quietly, ‘I never stopped being a whale scientist.'

‘I must go,' said Jonah, looking at the approaching police boat.

They were adrift in the middle of the sound, the coastline of mainland Scotland far in the distance, a black line beneath the endless blue sky. The sun was warm and the sea was calm but the water would be cold and they were a long way from land.

‘You'll never make it,' Fraser said.

‘I have made it before.'

‘Not from this far out. You were much closer to shore that first night. We all were.'

‘Today there is no wind, there are no waves.'

‘It doesn't make the water any warmer.'

Dunny moved across to where Jonah stood. He fished in his pocket and Fraser expected a shell but instead Dunny pulled out a small glass-like object. He held it out in the palm of his hand.

‘You!' exclaimed Ben. ‘I might have known.'

Fraser was hit by a sudden memory. He remembered a shell sitting on his bed that Dunny had left. And inside the shell was a small piece of glass. Except it wasn't glass, it was the diamond from the belly of a dead man. Ben didn't have the diamond, Jonah didn't have the diamond, Dunny did. And if Dunny had taken the diamond then he had taken the knife and planted it by the body, maybe even dipped it in blood first to implicate Ben.

His brother had always seemed on the periphery of life, on the edge of things, sometimes quite literally in the way he stood on a high cliff with the drop below. Now Fraser was certain that Dunny was actually at the centre of every incident, at the heart of every event. Dunny had known everything, had seen everything; observing, directing, controlling.

‘Thank you, my young friend,' Jonah said. He took both of Dunny's hands in his and bowed, tears in his eyes. He held himself there for a moment then put the diamond in his pocket. ‘With this I can find my brother.'

He moved towards the edge of the deck and wrapped his fingers around the rail. ‘It is time to end this. End it the way it began.'

Hayley cried, ‘No, Jonah!'

She looked to Fraser for support. The voice of reason whispered in his ear, urging him to grab Jonah and tie him up again with the old rope, let him take his chance with the authorities. In the other ear was a stronger voice, more compelling, which willed Jonah to give it a try, to swim across the sound to freedom.

‘Jonah is right,' Fraser said. ‘We should end this how we began it.'

He remembered that first night, the night of the storm. They were all there. He and Ben were on the water, Jonah was
in
the water, Dunny and Hayley were on the clifftop. They all saw the same breaking waves, they all felt the same wind, the same rain whipped their faces. That night a man had drowned. It couldn't end like that.

Fraser gave a long sigh, like a whale blowing.