‘Convince me.’
Christie’s voice was devoid of emotion.
‘Fergus lied. Miranda died of neglect. It’s a measure of your own madness that you could even contemplate the possibility I’d make a sacrifice of my own child.’
Murray looked into the dark and then back at the old woman, searching for the truth in her face. Her eyes held the reflection of the burning cottage. Murray said, ‘I’m going to go now.’
Christie nodded.
‘It’s all right. I’m not alone.’ She looked up at him. ‘Do you think I’ll meet them again?’
‘Who?’
‘All of them. Archie and Bobby.’ She hesitated and added, ‘Fergus.’
‘I don’t know. Would you like to?’
‘If we could be young again. We had a lot of fun in the early days.’ Christie smiled. ‘A lot of good times.’ She looked at him. ‘Maybe you could meet them too.’
‘No.’
‘I’ve read all your articles, Dr Watson, everything you ever published. Archie’s in every word, even when you’re writing of something else, just as he’s in your thoughts, even when he’s absent. And now you’ve lost him too.’
‘Not completely. There are papers in the library.’
‘Who do you think gifted them to the archives? I only gave away worthless doodlings. Enough to tantalise, but too little to tell.’ Her voice was soft and comforting. ‘Anything of worth went up in flames tonight.’ She lifted a hand from beneath the blanket and stroked his mud-smeared fingers. ‘Who would miss you? Your wife?’
‘No.’
‘Family?’
He looked away.
‘I thought not.’ Christie’s voice held the promise of peace. ‘I can always tell.’
She took something from her pocket and put it to her lips. Murray made no move to stop her. Christie started to choke. He held the water bottle to her lips. She drank, then raised a vial to her mouth and drank again. The coughing overtook her. He tried clumsily to ease it with more water, but most of it escaped her mouth and ran down her front. Her coughs faded to faint gasps. Murray held her head and pressed the water against her mouth, but Christie had grown limp. He let her sink back against the seat and saw her face flush in the glow of the premature dawn. He stood there for a while gazing at her body, knowing that if he lifted the blanket he might get closer to the truth of the child’s death, but unable to bring himself to.
He wasn’t sure how long he’d been frozen there when he was roused by the sound of a rook cawing. He turned and saw it treading the edge of the path like an old-world minister on his way to kirk. The crow met his stare and set its beak at a quizzical angle. The bird looked scholarly and demonic, and Murray couldn’t chase away the thought that it was Fergus, transformed and returned for his revenge. He rushed at it.
‘Go on, away with you.’
The bird flapped its wings and fluttered a yard or two before landing beyond his reach and continuing its perambulations, still fixing him with its dark stare.
Murray slammed the car door, guarding the bodies from the rook’s iron beak. He took off his scarf and wiped the handles and steering wheel clean of fingerprints, not sure why he was bothering, except he supposed he didn’t want his memory associated with any of it. Then he started to walk across the fields towards Pete’s bothy, the rook’s caws grating on in his head long after he was out of earshot.
Chapter Thirty-Three
THE WATER BOTTLE was still in his hand when he reached the bothy. Murray looked at it as if unsure how it had got there, and then launched it into a corner. The room was freezing and he fired the Calor heater into life. The flames blazed blue, and then took on an orange glow that made him think again of Christie’s cottage. He wondered how long it would burn.
Murray pulled off his jacket and saw the package James had sent him still miraculously jutting from his pocket. He took it out and laid it on the table. One end was scuffed and edged with mud, but otherwise it had weathered the dreadful adventure better than he had. It seemed that paper was more durable than flesh and blood. James had been trying to tell him something, but it didn’t matter now. He had got as close to Archie as it was possible to get. All the rest was nothing.
Murray stripped off his clothes and washed outside at the water butt, not bothering about whether he soiled his drinking water. He dried himself in front of the heater, still shivering, then slid his belt from its loops, shoved his filthy clothes in a carrier bag and sealed it. They would tell their own story.
He guessed that Pete would come round at some point to discuss the island’s finds. Murray would add to its discoveries. It couldn’t be helped. He wondered about writing an account of what had happened, but found he didn’t think that he could write; he, who had lived half his life with a pen in his hand.
Murray took the whisky from the shelf where Fergus had placed it and drank a good long swallow straight from the bottle. He started to cough as hard as Christie in her last throes and it was a battle not to splutter the precious spirit across the floor.
Archie had slammed out of the cottage, or maybe he had been slammed from it. Either way the door had crashed in its frame, expelling him from the disaster that lay inside.
Murray remembered the red corduroy notebook he had held in his hands in the National Library all those weeks ago, the list of names:
Tamsker
Saffron
Ray — will you be my sunshine?
What visions had sprung in Archie’s mind from Christie’s swelling belly? What hopes had he harboured? The poet had been right to let their loss propel him into the waves. Archie had purified himself, accepted his share of blame and escaped the future, the pain, the whole fucking uselessness of living on.
Murray sat naked in front of the fire, his elbows resting on the table, and took another deep draught. He looked up at the hook he had noticed when Pete first showed him the cottage. He supposed it had been used for drying herbs or curing meat.
What had Archie thought of as he walked down to the shore, his hair flying around his face? Had he known death was waiting for him, or had he simply given himself over to the fates in the same way Alan Garrett had? Murray raised the bottle to his mouth again and imagined Archie on the little jetty, freeing the small boat of its moorings then jumping aboard. If his fate had been a throw of the dice between Death and Life-In-Death, surely better that Death should win.
Murray gave the bottle another tilt and slid James’s envelope towards him. Fergus’s face gazed out in black and white from the book’s back cover. He’d been handsome when he was younger, a blond shock of fringe falling across his eyes, every inch the poet. Murray had an idea what lay between the covers, but he let the book fall open and began to read where fate had chosen.
A moored boat tied tight
Has more play than you
Wood and water
Earth and rope
He worked his way through the rest of the bottle, reading the poems as he went. Each swallow and every word seemed to make him more sober. There were computer programs that could decode vocabulary and syntax to show the truth of his conviction. Perhaps someone would pursue it. Rab Purvis maybe. He took a pen and wrote on the title page: These poems were written by Archie Lunan.
That would be the extent of his biography.
He drank the final dregs in the bottle and sent it across the room. It landed unbroken and rolled until it rested softly against the wall.
If there had been an open fire in the cottage, Murray would have taken his notes and consigned them to the flames. He could have spent an hour ripping them apart instead, then scattered them to the wind, but it would simply be another delay, an empty gesture in a night of weighty deeds.