Once things quieted down, only the waves remained, and if there was one thing Sergeant Bell had plenty of time for it was the waves.
Had it not been for Bell’s characteristic sedateness, the man who found the bottle might have hurled it back whence it came. But since the sergeant happened to be sitting there in his neatly pressed uniform with the wind in his hair and his cap on the rock beside him, handing it to him seemed the obvious thing to do.
The bottle had been caught in a trawl and had glinted slightly, though time and the sea had dulled its sheen, and the youngest man on board the Brew Dog had seen right away there was something special about it.
“Chuck it over the side, Seamus,” the skipper had shouted when he discovered the message inside. “Those things are bad luck. Wreckage in a bottle, we call them. The Devil’s in the ink and waiting to be let loose. Don’t you know the stories?” But young Seamus didn’t, and he decided to take it ashore.
When Bell finally got back to the station in Wick, one of the local drunks had trashed two of the offices and the duty staff were rather weary of trying to keep the idiot pinned to the floor. That was how David Bell came to remove his jacket, whereupon Seamus’s bottle fell out of its pocket. And it was how he came to pick the bottle up and put it down again on the windowsill so he could concentrate his attention on planting his full weight on the chest of this drunken oaf in order to squeeze some of the air out of him. But anyone treating a full-blooded Viking descendant in such a fashion is liable to get more than he bargained for. And so it was that the drunk delivered such a blow to David Bell’s testicles that any recollection of the bottle was engulfed by the blaring sirens and flashing blue lights his nervous system frantically emitted as a consequence.
And so the bottle remained undisturbed in the sunny corner of the windowsill for a very long time indeed. No one paid it any heed, and no one worried that the paper it contained might be damaged by the sunlight and the condensation that with time appeared on the inside of the glass.
No one bothered to try to read the collection of semi-obliterated letters that appeared uppermost, and for that same reason no one gave a thought to what the word “HJÆLP” might mean.
The bottle did not come into human hands again until a young man who felt himself unreasonably treated on account of a measly parking fine swamped the intranet of Wick Police Station with a veritable tidal wave of viruses. In such a situation, the routine was to get in touch with a computer expert called Miranda McCulloch. When pedophiles encrypted their filth, when hackers covered up all traces of their online banking transactions, and when asset-strippers wiped their hard disks, it was Miranda McCulloch they kneeled before.
She was given an office. The staff were moved to tears and treated her like royalty, filling up her thermos with scalding coffee, throwing open the windows, and making sure the radio was tuned in to Radio Scotland. Miranda McCulloch was indeed a woman appreciated wherever she went.
Because of the open windows and the billowing curtains, she noticed the bottle on her first day.
What a fine little bottle, she thought to herself, and wondered at the shadow inside it as she dredged through cipher columns of malicious code. When on the third day she got to her feet feeling well satisfied, her job complete, and with a reasonable idea of what kind of virus might be anticipated next time around, she stepped across to the windowsill and picked the bottle up. It was a lot heavier than she had thought. And warm to the touch.
“What’s that inside it?” she asked the secretary next door. “Is it a letter?”
“I’ve no idea,” came the answer. “David Bell came in with it a long time ago. I think maybe it was just for fun.”
Miranda held the bottle against the light. Was that writing on the paper? It was hard to tell because of the condensation on the inside.
She turned it in her hands. “Where is this David Bell? Is he on duty?”
The secretary shook her head. “No, I’m afraid he’s not. David was killed not far out of town a couple of years back. They’d given chase to a hit-and-run driver and it all went wrong. It was a terrible thing. David was such a nice chap.”
Miranda nodded. She wasn’t really listening. She was certain now that there was writing on the paper, but that wasn’t what had caught her attention. It was what was at the bottom of the bottle.
On close inspection through the sand-blown glass, the coagulated mass looked remarkably like blood.
“Do you think I could take this bottle with me? Is there anyone here I should ask?”
“Try Emerson. He drove with David for a couple of years. I’m sure it’ll be all right.” The secretary turned toward the corridor. “Hey, Emerson,” she yelled, rattling the panes in their frames. “Come here a minute, will you?”
Miranda said hello. Emerson was a pleasant, stocky man with sad eyes.
“You want to take it with you? Be my guest. I’m certainly not wanting it myself.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s probably just nonsense. But just before David died, he remembered the bottle and said he’d better get it opened and do something about it. Some lad off a fishing boat handed it in to him in John O’Groats, and then the boat went down with the lad and everyone else on it a couple of years after. David felt he owed it to the lad to see what was inside. But he died before he got around to it. Not exactly a good omen, is it?”
Emerson shook his head.
“Take it away, by all means. There’s no good about that bottle.”
That same evening, Miranda sat down in her terraced house in the Edinburgh suburb of Granton and stared at the bottle. It was some fifteen centimeters tall, blue-white in color, slightly flattened, and relatively long-necked. It could have been a scent bottle, though rather on the large side. More likely it had contained eau de cologne and was probably a good age, too. She tapped a knuckle against it. The glass was solid, that much was apparent.
She smiled. “And what secrets might you conceal, dear?” she mused, taking a sip of red wine from her glass before using the corkscrew to scrape out whatever it was that sealed the neck. The lump smelled of tar, but the bottle’s time in the sea had made the exact nature of the material hard to determine.
She tried to fish out the paper inside, but it was clearly in a state of decomposition and damp to the touch. Turning the bottle in her hand, she tapped her fingers against the bottom, but the paper budged not a millimeter. This prompted her to take the bottle into the kitchen and strike it a couple of times with a meat tenderizer.
That helped. The bottle splintered into blue crystals that spilled out over the work surface like crushed ice.
She stared at the piece of paper that lay on the chopping board and frowned. Her gaze passed over the shattered glass and she took a deep breath.
Maybe it hadn’t been the best of ideas after all.
“Yes,” her colleague Douglas in Forensics confirmed. “It’s blood all right. No doubt about it. Well done. The way the blood and the condensation have been absorbed into the paper is quite characteristic. Especially here, where the signature’s completely obliterated. The color of it, and the pattern of absorption. Aye, it’s all typical.”
He unfolded the paper using tweezers and bathed it in blue light. Traces of blood all over, diffusely iridescent in every letter.
“It’s written in blood?”
“Most certainly.”
“And you agree with me that the heading is an appeal for help? It sounds like it, at least.”
“Aye, I reckon so,” Douglas replied. “But I doubt we’ll be able to salvage much more than the heading. It’s quite damaged, that letter. Besides, it might be very old. The thing to do now is to make sure it’s properly treated and conserved, and then maybe we’ll have a stab at dating it. And of course we’ll need to have a linguistics expert take a look at it. Hopefully, they’ll be able to tell us what language that is.”