Nothing she had seen indicated more than one watcher. If he had been up all night then now was the time to sleep. Either that or he was watching her now and she was about to advance in full view across an interminable space. There was only one way to find out, and it seemed better to do it straight away before her courage failed.
She stayed low against the wall and sprinted for the peak, splashing across the field with the dog sprinting after her. She was at the gorse in no time. She rolled under the nearest bush into a shallow depression, a bowl of dry gorse needles with some sardine tins, biscuit wrappers and a water bottle. His bed. She curled into a ball, expecting blows, but none come. She glanced this way and that. The dog watched her from the lip of the depression.
He was gone. There was a trail of disturbed gorse needles leading back across the hill. She relaxed, lay back and breathed out. The dog licked her face and she pushed it away. She decided there was nothing for it but to continue.
She rolled on to her tummy and crawled forward, following the trail. After fifty metres or so the trail divided, one spur running up to the peak, the other appearing to lead towards the dunes and beyond them to the beach. She chose the route to the peak, and crawled along it. She hadn’t gone far when she sniffed the first waft of decay, the nauseating sweetness that she associated with animal carcasses found on the machair. Then there were the flies, their hum as telling as the smell. They were as big as bluebottles and they settled on her hands and face. She held a handkerchief over her mouth and nose and continued, dragging herself forward on one elbow.
The ground fell away and she dropped into a crevice, between walls of fractured rock. She moved forward, following the twists and turns of the rock, squeezing between the narrowest sections, leaving bands of lichen stains on her jacket. The flies were thicker now, hanging in a cloud in the still air of the crevice.
She turned a corner and found herself face to face with Beech. He was wedged upright so that he appeared to be standing. His body was pale, almost blue, and the choughs had been at his eyes, but there was no mistaking that it was him. He seemed to be frowning. She stumbled back and the flies surged in excitement and they were in her hair and eyes and ears. A moment later and she was scaling the rock, heading upwards out of the crevice and into the wind. She reached the top and found herself on a broad pan of rock overlooking the farm. She slumped to her knees and retched the contents of her stomach on to the rock.
She was in a state of spasm, her whole body shaking. She felt a sense of terrible risk: to her, to Flora and Calum.
She looked up and, as if on cue, a Peugeot 206 marked Metropolitan Police appeared at the junction and turned up the narrow lane to the farmhouse. It was Mulvey and Coyle. She watched its roof and blue lighting array running above the wall. Again, she must flee. If they’d just come off the ferry, she had maybe twenty minutes before the ferry left again. If she got a lift from a passing car she might make it in time to catch it.
She leapt across the gap, and descended the far side of the peak to the dunes. Soon she was stumbling along sand pathways. Her head was a blinding sheet of pain.
At some point the dog rejoined her.
The ferry rose and fell with the waves and she had to hold her glass tightly to stop it sliding across the table. It was her third vodka and tonic. It was only at the end of the second vodka that she’d stopped shaking. She could not get the image of the flies rising from Andy Beech’s corpse out of her head. She finished her drink and decided to go outside for some air.
She went out on deck with the dog following and stood into the wind so that the spray struck her face. She stood that way for several minutes. She didn’t know what to think or do. She was angry at Jonah for betraying her, but not as angry as she expected to be; she was resentful of Flora but appalled by what had happened to her husband. There was a voice that she had heard before, which was saying
Run
…
She was not incriminated by Nor’s confession. There was no reason to feel loyalty to Jonah. Why shouldn’t she just run?
As she turned to leave, something caught her attention. Another passenger, the only other passenger on the deck, was standing by the lifeboats. He had short cropped ginger hair and he was wearing a Barbour jacket. There was something frighteningly familiar about his stance. Now he was looking directly at her. Suddenly she was convinced that it was the man who had been standing in the shadows in the courtyard the night before.
Terrified, she hurried back into the bar and ordered another drink. For the rest of the journey she sat with her back to the bar, staring at the doorway.
JONAH
‘the calculating people of the prudent isle were inclined to harbour the conceit, that for those very reasons he was the better qualified and set on edge, for a pursuit so full of rage and wildness as the bloody hunt of whales’
Herman Melville,
Moby-Dick
August 2005
Jonah looked up, his hands hovering over the keyboard, as a shadow fell across his desk. A pony was pressing its lips and buck teeth against the windowpane. He reached up and tapped on the glass and the pony skittered away.
The ponies had been irregular companions to Jonah and Miranda since their arrival at Barnhill in the wake of the Iraq war. They appeared without warning and usually stayed for several weeks at a time, grazing the grass before moving on to other pastures. Jonah had also come across them now and then sheltering in the caves on the windward side of the island. He had developed a deep and inexplicable affection for them.
He was done with writing for the day. He shut down his laptop, unslotted the memory stick and secured it to the canvas sling around his neck. There were secrets on it that he would not let stray from his person. He’d found writing more difficult than he expected; too often it made him feel tired and helpless. He knew that eyewitness material was of necessity partial and incomplete, and in searching for the motivation of others he’d found that his natural inclination was towards understatement. There was meaning in pauses and glances and half-formed sentences, but he struggled to articulate it. He knew that he must overcome this if he was to unravel the threads of deception that had characterised his life. How do you explain that you have valued the loyalty of a childhood friend above the security of those nations that have offered you their protection and their citizenship?
He’d made no decision about what to do with the manuscript, although periodically he printed it and posted a sealed copy to his solicitors in Glasgow. There was really no question of publication, even as fiction – there were too many secrets. Rather, it was protection. A bulwark against the Department’s act of blackmail – the kidnapping of his ex-wife’s lover – that had blighted his relationship with his former wife; and which now dangled the constant threat of imprisonment over his head.
He drifted through the house. It was lunchtime. Miranda was still out on the moor with the dog but she would be back soon. They often had sex when she came in. There was something about the moor that made her hungry for it, that filled her with desire. Then she would open a bottle of vodka and start drinking. If the moor was where she fought with her demons then the house was where she found release. The house was yoga and fucking and vodka. And he had concluded, despite everything, that this was what kept them there. It was why they had stayed so long.
The radio made him crazy and angry. There was chaos from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. The Middle East lurched from one crisis to another. American promises of reform and democratisation had evaporated. In Iraq, a civil war between Sunni and Shiite Arabs raged. Al-Qaeda was the main beneficiary. It had evolved into a complex global network, with a decentralised structure of active and sleeper cells that had enabled it to spread across the Arab world, Africa, Asia and Europe. They could not expect to be unhurt at home.
He kept newspaper cuttings on the wall above his desk including a montage of recent pornography from the prison at Abu Ghraib: one of them was an effigy, an image of a hooded figure on a cardboard box, with his hands held out in supplication and electric wires trailing from his fingers; another showed seven bodies in a pile with their genitals exposed, a human coil like a massive turd, with Specialist Charles Graner and Private Lynndie England in the background giving a thumbs-up. He knew enough of Arabs, of his own Arab half, to know that shame is a dirty thing. It must be washed, and only bloody violence would wash it away. For him, these images, with their strange mix of cold-blooded brutality and adolescent frivolity, marked the moment when the Iraq adventure was lost, when an indelible image of American depravity was imprinted on the entire Islamic world.
A firestorm was coming.
She had said the road to hell was paved with the ambition to make the world a better place. She told him that it was not his problem any more. Neither was it hers. They had turned their backs on it, she insisted. Now she protected rare plants. She walked through the house naked. There were days when they woke, fucked and tumbled back into sleep, to start afresh a couple of hours later with the sky leaking through the gaps in the curtains; and there were days when they woke, climbed out of bed and went their separate ways and did not speak again until dusk.
He was offered her file in London on his return from Iraq but he refused the offer. He didn’t want to know anything unless she was the one who offered it to him. He knew that she had spent time in the madrasas in Pakistan, and Afghan caves; that she had spent the best part of a decade tracking her Islamist husband across the conflicts of the world; and he knew that she bore the torment of losing a child. But he had not pressed her for details. He wanted nothing unless it was freely given. Besides, he had his own secrets that, for her protection, he would rather not share.
He had reached thirty-eight. He’d been beaten up, knifed and shot at. He’d been married and divorced. He had outlived his father. He had learned something about facing adversity in life.
At the post office there was a postcard waiting for him of a stretch of deserted beach. It said –
We need to talk.
It was unsigned, postmarked the isle of Barra. He broke a five-pound note in the shop, and walked across to the phone box. He fed coins into the slot and dialled the number from memory. Beech picked it up on the fourth ring.
‘It’s Jonah. What is it?’
‘I need to talk to you,’ Beech said. ‘I can’t leave here.’
‘It’s OK, I’ll come to you,’ Jonah agreed, reluctantly.
He put the phone down and walked slowly back to the Land Rover, considering the implications of the card and the call with a creeping sense of dread. Beech was not given to melodrama. Something serious had happened. It had been naive to imagine that the world and its woes could be ignored for ever. He found Miranda stretching in the garden when he returned. She was incredibly strong and supple. She dedicated herself to things – exercise, drinking – with an intensity which at times he found disconcerting.
‘I have to go away for a few days.’
She deserved more of an explanation. He didn’t know what to say. There was a part of him that wondered if it was really Beech that he wanted to see. He wished that he could roll back time, to that night in Kuwait City, when just looking at her made him contemplate a lifelong relationship. He wished that he could rekindle that fire.
Instead he shrugged. ‘It may be nothing.’
‘And if it’s something?’ she asked, pausing with her arms out like blades. ‘This time. The next time. Are you going to keep going?’
‘What is it?’ she asked, searching his face, her eyes wide and her pupils struggling to focus. They were kneeling on the carpet in front of the fire. It was almost midnight and she was most of the way into a bottle of vodka.
‘We may not be safe here any more,’ he said.
‘You poor ragged bear,’ she said, and cupped his face in her hands. ‘You can’t help yourself. They’ve sucked you in.’
‘I won’t be gone long,’ he said. ‘I’ll come straight back.’
‘I’ll be waiting,’ she murmured. He watched her eyes go sleepy.
‘I’ll not be here when you get back off the moor tomorrow,’ he said. And then after a pause, ‘You have to trust me.’
He took her by the hand and led her up the stairs to bed. He lay awake beside her, with the windows open, listening to the sound of breakers striking the shoreline. There was one final thing, perhaps too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to obliterate the outside world and he did not. He could not.
In the morning he took his crash-bag down off the peg where it hung beside hers, and methodically unpacked and repacked it in his study, checking it for cash, passport, phones, etc. He added his laptop. He strayed for a moment, contemplating the collage on the wall, and his hand reached reflexively for the memory stick at his neck. He might have need of his leverage.
He drove the Land Rover down to Feolin and took the ferry to Port Askaig. He drove across Islay, stopped briefly in Bowmore to touch fingers with Esme through the school fence, passed his ex-wife’s Land Rover on the airport road, and made it in time to catch the morning ferry for the mainland from Port Ellen.
He spent a sleepless night in a bed-and-breakfast on the seafront in Oban, staring blankly at the tartan wallpaper. He caught the morning ferry for Barra.
‘I thought that if I didn’t see you for a while I might feel better. But I didn’t,’ she said. Flora and Jonah were standing in front of the window in the kitchen of the house on Barra. They were both holding mugs of tea. Flora was looking at him, chewing her lip, searching his face for some clue to his response. ‘It’s an inside job, I guess.’
How was he supposed to respond? Tell her that he should never have got married, and that she shouldn’t have either? That he should never have taken up with Miranda? That with each step that he took away from Barnhill, it became clearer to him the mistake that he had made?