For a moment he thought she was going to go off without a word. But then Christie stopped the car and leaned out.
‘Thanks.’
‘No bother.’
He searched his pocket for a hanky, failed to find one and rubbed his glasses against his jeans.
‘Where are you headed?’
‘Pete Preston’s bothy.’
‘Jump in and I’ll take you to the crossroads, it’s only a short way across the field from there.’
Murray looked down at his mud-spattered self.
Christie’s voice was impatient. ‘Don’t worry. This car’s seen worse. Besides, I seem to have miscalculated today. I might get stuck again.’
Murray glanced at her as he got into the passenger seat, and thought he could almost detect the hint of a smile.
The landscape looked different from the vehicle’s high front seat. Now that he could lift his head and regard it without being battered by the elements, he could see that they were on a wind-blasted moor. The treeless expanse gave a long view of the depthless heavens. Murray felt like it might rain for ever.
‘Are you part of the dig?’
He had expected their drive to be conducted in silence, and her question surprised him.
‘No, just walking.’
Christie nodded, as if it was perfectly normal to tramp out to this abandoned portion of the island in a storm. She said, ‘I don’t usually meet anyone out here.’ It was unclear whether she was explaining her question or the reason why she’d chosen the lonely spot.
Christie leaned forward and wiped at the condensation misting the windscreen. She’d turned up the hot air and the car felt stifling after the damp chill of outside. Murray had drawn back his hood when he got in; now he unzipped his jacket, pulled his woolly hat from his head and mopped his wet, mud-spotted face with it. He rubbed a hand through his hair. He hadn’t had it cut since the summer break and it felt almost long enough to tie back in a ponytail. Perhaps this was how it started. The slow slide, until you became one of those blokes you used to marvel at, marking the time between giros by beating a track between the bookie’s and the pub.
He straightened his spine.
‘I walked through an abandoned village I don’t remember seeing on the map.’
‘It used to house the lime-workers.’
For a mad moment he thought of lime trees and imagined an orchard of them tended by cottagers who collected their fruit. Maybe his bewilderment showed because Christie continued, ‘You were by the limekilns when I saw you. They employed about fifty men at one time, back in the eighteenth century. It was the extraction of lime that caused the sinkholes. You have to watch out for them, they’re unpredictable and not all of them have been mapped.’
A stanza from The Ballad of Reading Gaol came into his head.
And all the while the burning lime
Eats flesh and bone away,
It eats the brittle bone by night,
And the soft flesh by day
He wiped a hand over his face, feeling the roughness of his bristles and said, ‘Lime’s what they used to use to dispose of dead bodies, wasn’t it?’
Her laugh was like a sudden bark.
‘You’ve a morbid turn of mind. It was an essential element in building-mortar. A lot of those fine townhouses and tenements in Edinburgh and Glasgow wouldn’t be standing if it weren’t for lime made on this little island. What are you doing here?’
The question was abrupt and commanding.
Murray looked at her.
‘I came to see you.’
Christie Graves smiled, and for the first time he caught a glimpse of the beauty she’d been.
‘You sent me a letter, didn’t you?’
He nodded. None of it mattered any more, but he asked, ‘How did you know it was me?’
‘It didn’t really take a master detective. I looked you up when you first sent your request — your photograph’s on the university website. I thought you were familiar when I saw you in the shop yesterday, but I couldn’t place you. The beard makes quite a difference. But in any case, I would have realised when you said that you’d come here to see me. I’m not exactly inundated with visitors.’
She stopped the car and kept the engine running. Murray started to undo his seatbelt, but she said, ‘We’re not there yet, I just wanted to show you where I live.’
The heart of Christie’s house was a two-roomed cottage of the style Murray now knew was typical of the old island, but it had been extended to form a long bungalow with a picture window at its western end, where it would be pleasant to sit with a drink in your hand, on clear evenings, and watch the sun set. The road away from the cottage was still composed of rough stone, but it was wider and more even than the track they had just travelled, and the sleek black Saab parked outside Christie’s fenced garden would have had little trouble driving down it.
‘Very nice.’
‘Are you afraid of the dark?’
It was sudden and unexpected, like all of Christie’s questions so far, and it set off a strange remembrance in Murray. He used to have a recurring dream, of waking to see his mother standing at the door to his and Jack’s bedroom, her silhouette shadowy and indistinct, but recognisably her. It was always marvellous at first, this vision of her and the waves of love that wrapped him warm beneath the blankets, but then gradually he would begin to feel her steady jealousy, because he and Jack were alive and cosy in their beds while she lay cold and dead in her grave. The conviction that she had come to take them with her would sweep over him. Sometimes when he woke the bed was wet. For years he had slept with the bedside light on. Jack hadn’t seemed to mind. Perhaps he had his own nightmares.
‘No, I don’t mind the dark.’
‘I’ll be home tonight. Why don’t you walk over after dinner and you can tell me what it’s all about?’
Murray felt like the marrow had been sucked from his bones.
‘It was about Archie Lunan.’
‘I know.’
It was what he had come for, but too late.
‘I’ve reassessed my project. It’ll focus on Archie’s work rather than his life.’
They had reached the crossroads now. Christie stopped the car and pulled the handbrake on, but kept the engine running. The wipers continued to sweep the rain from the windscreen. She turned awkwardly towards Murray. Now he could see that some of the lines on her face were from pain, and the tiredness it had brought, but her voice belied any suffering. It was mild and unsurprised, the kind of tone he used when trying to guide a slow student into realising an obvious point.
‘Why do you men always give in so easily?’ Christie switched off the engine. The wipers stalled mid-swipe and the rain began to melt into sheets, warping the view of grey sky and green scrub. ‘You went to the trouble of contacting me and then came over here to hunt me down, even though I said I wouldn’t speak to you. Now that I’m willing, you’ve changed your mind. What happened?’