The Interpretations Read online

  The builder also smiled briefly. Then he said, ‘Do you think . . .’ He stopped. ‘It’s an awful business, minister, as you know. Him disappearing and everything. But, do you think he really is dead?’

  ‘It grieves me to say so, Alec, but yes, yes, I do,’ the minister replied. He regretted the surety of this response. But there was no doubt about it. Very little, anyway. ‘Yes,’ he said again, more slowly this time. ‘Yes, it’s awful. Awful. But it’s more than likely he’s dead. And that bridge responsible again.’

  The minister’s feet were now wet and cold. As he walked back to the main door of the church with the builder he lost the feeling in his toes. The gravel of the forecourt fired little points of pain into sole and heel.

  They stood for a moment beside the dark blue van the builder had arrived in. SKINNER BUILDER was painted in large white letters edged in black along the side.

  ‘I can’t come today,’ the builder said. ‘I’m sorry but I just can’t. But I can come over in the morning and fix it then. That’ll be in time for the weekend services.’

  The minister nodded.

  ‘I want to do what’s right just as much as you do, you know,’ the builder went on. ‘There’s different ways, that’s all.’

  ‘There’s just the one way, Alec. Just the one.’

  ‘Aye, well . . .’ He turned to the van and slid back the driver’s door. ‘I’ll be over in the morning.’ He got into the van and drove away, leaving two wide arcs on the gravel of the forecourt, each arc splitting in two and joining again as the rear wheels strayed and then fell once more into place behind the front wheels. The minister watched as the van reached the end of the drive and turned left towards South Mossfield and the new bridge beyond.

  From where he stood he could see the Duie Firth, the gentle hills on the north side, the view now marred of course by the abominable bridge with its two enormous towers, one of which, he remembered with disgust, had its base on Inchduie Island. There was a tiny cemetery on the island, with only one grave in it, that of Elsie McKillop. But they had to desecrate the place by planting one of the towers on it. And why did they have to make the bridge so big? If they had to have a bridge, why not a causeway like the one on the Cromarty Firth?

  The cold in his feet made him turn once again to the door of the church. He halted at the threshold and took off his shoes and socks. The stone floor of the church felt no colder than the water of the lawn had felt. In fact, he could feel very little; his feet were almost numb. He walked barefoot through the church to the vestry where he found a plastic bucket. Back in the west aisle he placed the bucket in the middle of the pool of water to catch the drips from above. He could not understand why the roof still appeared to be leaking at the same rate even though it had stopped raining some time ago. More mysteries. Goddish, he thought. No, he didn’t like it. Godlike. No, not for things. Goddic? Now that sounded positively silly. He shook his head.

  Back at the entrance to the church he switched on the heating but only on the right-hand side, the dry side. The church would be colder for the evening communion but at least no one would be electrocuted.

  Standing on the worn stone of the threshold he stretched his arms forward and wrung out his socks, the now stained grey water dripping onto the edge of the gravel forecourt. A chill ran through him as he put his socks back on, struggling to pull the damp cotton over his cold white feet. Then he put on his shoes and with cold fingers tied the wet slippery laces as tightly as he could.

  He locked the door of the church, repeating with meticulous care the tiny events of key retrieval and return that made up this process. And with the key residing again upon his inflamed chest he said to himself that soon, soon he would need a new piece of string. An enGodded piece. EnGodded. That was it. That was the word. It was a new word and he had made it and it was good.

  4

  What Mike Delvan decided to do a few weeks after Tom’s disappearance was something that McCall, the recently promoted police inspector, might have called a reconstruction of events but it wasn’t so much reconstruction as the re-creation of a person. He would become Tom for a while, just to see what would happen.

  On the first day of this new life he got up at twenty to seven as Tom had always done. He washed and dressed and then cooked the same breakfast that Tom did every day – a couple of fried eggs on toast. He left the flat at twenty past seven and walked to the bus stop where he stood in bright sunshine for seven minutes until the 328 turned up. The fifteen-minute bus ride got him to WattWays, the fish processing plant on the outskirts of Dalmore where Tom had worked, just as the eight o’clock shift was starting to arrive. Someone directed him to the supervisor’s office.

  To Mr Dundas he explained what he was trying to do. He faltered before Dundas’s face which was without expression. The supervisor wore a brown trilby hat even though they were inside his office. The white cotton coat he wore over his tweed jacket was stained with dark red threads of fish blood and the front was speckled with fish scales which looked like haphazard clusters of sequins. The place smelled of fish.

  ‘Tom,’ Dundas said when Mike had finished his breath-lessly delivered and, he now believed, unlikely story. ‘Tom,’ he repeated and Mike said, ‘Could I maybe just see where he worked?’

  Dundas led him out of the office along plasterboard-lined corridors to the stone floor of the loading bay where the smell of fish was heavy and inescapable. Half a dozen men were unloading boxes of mackerel from an articulated lorry, stacking them up on wooden pallets. As they did so, crushed ice and mackerel spilled onto the greasy stone floor which was puddled with water and fish blood. One fish skidded across the wet slippery surface to land a few inches in front of Mike’s feet, the sheen of its blue and green stripes contrasting against the grey that surrounded it.

  Dundas stepped forward and flicked the mackerel with his foot back towards the fish boxes. ‘Mind and no lose any!’ he shouted but it was unlikely that he could be heard above the clatter of boxes piling on boxes and the slow whine of the forklift trucks that picked up the laden pallets and took them through to the freezing room. But someone retrieved the mackerel anyway and dumped it in an empty box which was flung on top of the last pile of boxes on the last forklift truck once the entire lorry had been emptied of its cargo.

  ‘Mackerel?’ Mike said. ‘Not herring?’

  ‘The herring’s fucked,’ Dundas said sourly. ‘Over-fished. Soon there’ll be bugger all left. We’re hungry bastards, you see. Hungry bastards.’

  ‘So the same thing’ll probably happen to the mackerel, then?’

  ‘More than likely.’

  Mike and Dundas followed the forklift and entered the freezing room, a huge cold hall with seven vats in it for freezing the fish into slabs. There was loose ice on the floor here too and a few dogfish carcases, long and thin, strewn across the concrete like discarded ribbon. The two men stood side by side as the pallets were unloaded and the fish were tipped out of the boxes into the freezing vats.

  It was quieter in the freezing room and Dundas began to speak. ‘There was no special place for Tom, you understand,’ he said. He didn’t look at Mike as he said this; his attention was fixed on the men attending the vats before him. ‘He just worked with the rest of the men on all the jobs – unloading, freezing, stacking. That’s about it. He was good, though, I’ll give him that. I mean, I’m not just saying that because he’s dead, like . . .’

  ‘You think he’s dead?’

  ‘Isn’t he?’ Dundas moved his head slightly as he asked this question but he didn’t turn to face Mike. It was as if he wasn’t concentrating particularly on the meaning of the words or perhaps the issue was really of little interest to him. He pulled out a handkerchief and blew his nose noisily. ‘Can’t stand the fucking smell in here,’ he said. ‘Try and stay out.’

  They walked back to the office. It was a small room that looked newly constructed. Like the corridor outside, the plasterboard walls were bare, spotted by ragged circles of pl
aster scuffed on to cover the heads of nails. Although there were only four items of furniture – a desk, a chair, a coat stand and a filing cabinet – the office looked cramped and cluttered. The swivel chair was positioned at one end of the desk which had been placed across a corner, leaving a triangle of free but unusable space behind it. The desk was piled with documents and loose items of paper – reports, newspapers, invoices, catalogues – and it didn’t look as if anyone ever sat at it, least of all Dundas who made no attempt to sit down or even move the chair to a more appropriate position. The placing of all four pieces of furniture suggested something arbitrary and unplanned; they might have been thrust into the room by the delivery men and not subjected to any further arrangement.

  ‘Aye, difficult to replace,’ Dundas said. ‘Hardworking you know. Punctual, like. Never missed a day. And him so educated as well. There’s lots of chancers in this place, you know. Half of them through there are blazin’ at the weekend, totally miraculous, from Friday at six till midnight on Sunday. And they canna make it in on the Monday. Fuckin’ wankers. Oh, they ken fine I know who they are. But there’s not the people, you see. No, there’s not the people. So we have to keep them on. Dirt, some of them, just plain dirt.’

  Dundas stepped over to the door and spat out into the corridor. Whether this was an exercise to cleanse the mouth or a comment on the workforce Mike could not tell.

  ‘Aye well, Gilfedder, for example,’ Dundas said when he came back into the small, stuffy room. ‘Gilfedder, now there’s a case in point. Not that I had a problem with his work, you understand. Far from it. No, he was maybe the best worker we ever had. But he was a bad bastard. Just terrible altogether. The men hated him. And then there was all that business with Tom, as you know . . .’

  ‘Well, actually . . .’ Mike began.

  But Dundas ignored him. ‘I thought that was maybe the problem, with Tom leaving, like. I said to him, Tom, take a couple of weeks off. Maybe you came back too quick . . .’

  ‘But just a minute . . .’

  ‘. . . I mean he was signed off for a fortnight but he was back within a week. So I said to him, don’t quit, just take a wee holiday . . .’

  ‘You mean . . .’

  ‘. . . just take a break, come back when you’re feeling . . .’

  ‘Hold on! Hold on!’

  Dundas stopped speaking.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ Mike said, ‘that Tom actually quit his job here?’

  ‘That’s right, yes.’

  ‘Before he disappeared?’

  ‘Well, it would hardly be after, would it?’

  ‘Well, no . . . I mean . . . I mean . . . I just thought that he worked here right up until he disappeared. I mean . . . that there was no warning.’

  ‘No, no. He left about a week before.’

  ‘Are you absolutely sure?’

  ‘Oh aye. I mind it fine. It was just a few days after thon awful business with Eileen Tulloch and her lad. Hold on . . .’ Dundas approached the gun metal grey filing cabinet and pulled out a drawer. He took out a file and examined it carefully, holding it close to his face, muttering, ‘Forgot my specs . . .’ Then he said, ‘When was the race again?’

  ‘The twenty-eighth.’

  ‘Well, there you are. He left on the twentieth. That was . . . let’s see . . . the Saturday before . . . before it happened.’

  Mike said, ‘Eight days.’

  ‘Eight days,’ Dundas repeated and Mike said, ‘Exactly.’ Then he thanked Dundas, left the plant and caught a 328 bus for the trip home.

  On the five and a half working days between quitting his job at WattWays and running the Duie Bridge Race, Tom had got up as usual, breakfasted as usual and (Mike believed) gone to work as usual. He had also returned to the flat at eight thirty, from Monday to Friday, which was the time he usually got back from work. But now it was clear that he hadn’t gone to work that week at all.

  Tom had been preparing his disappearance. Surely it was obvious. Then, on Sunday he’d left to do the race, the first to take in the mile and a half span of the new bridge. He’d started. He’d run from South Mossfield up along the approach and onto the bridge.

  And then something happened. Because Tom had run onto the bridge but he hadn’t emerged at the other end. Nor had he run back to the start. Something had happened on the bridge. And what everyone believed was that Tom had jumped. Up, over the side and then a drop of a hundred and fifty feet into the Duie Firth. He’d killed himself because of all that business with Gilfedder. That’s what everyone believed. Everyone, including McCall, the police inspector. But Mike didn’t believe it.

  Back at the flat, Mike began again to examine the things that Tom had left behind. He decided to concentrate on clothes. He had made a list, of course, of everything – socks, underwear, coats, jackets, shoes, shirts, trousers, jeans, hats, gloves, anoraks, suits, pullovers, running gear – every item of clothing that Tom had left in his room, plus a couple of shirts in a laundry bag in the hall, plus his running shoes by the back door in the kitchen.

  He tried hard to figure out if anything was missing.

  He knew, for example, that Tom had only two jackets, both of which were still in his wardrobe. He was quite certain also that Tom had only two pairs of leather shoes – one brown, one black – and they were both there. He couldn’t be sure about trousers or shirts. He recognized the track suits – a light summer one and a heavier one for winter – and he was fairly sure there wasn’t a third. Then he went to the kitchen to check the running shoes again. Tom had four pairs – two training pairs which he alternated day about, a pair of spikes for cross-country and a pair of light trainers for road racing. All four pairs were there. And there was a ninth shoe, the surviving right shoe of the pair he’d worn on that cross-country race where the left shoe had been wrenched off in the mud. He’d never quite managed to throw this right shoe away.

  Mike went back to the living-room and picked up his notebook. Then he returned to the kitchen and looked at the running shoes again. So stupid. So stupid. All four pairs were there! So what was Tom wearing when he ran the Bridge Race?

  The sports shop where Tom usually bought his running gear had closed down a couple of weeks before but Mike found the private number of the ex-owner, Gavin McBraith, and rang him. He found out that Tom had bought a new pair of running shoes there the day before the Bridge Race.

  5

  ‘People who are depressed to the point of wanting to kill themselves . . .’

  ‘Yes. What about them?’

  ‘Well, they don’t go out the day before and buy a pair of shoes, do they?’

  ‘A pair of running shoes, you mean?’

  ‘So you knew about that then? You’ve known all along?’

  McCall stood up. He was tall but round-shouldered. This engendered in him a slight stoop which made him look tired and worried. He wasn’t hugely fat but he was certainly a stone overweight. His uniform had been made for the slimmer man of five years before. He had had the waistband of the trousers let out as far as the seams would allow. His jacket bulged at the front, the buttons under pressure to retain management of his stomach. The cuffs were worn but not yet frayed. ‘Of course we knew,’ he said. ‘Give us a bit of credit, eh?’ He half-opened the door into the hall and said, ‘Janice, any chance of a couple of coffees?’ He looked back over his shoulder at Mike Delvan. ‘Coffee OK for you?’

  Mike said, ‘Fine.’ He looked round the room as McCall made his way back to his chair. In contrast with Dundas’s office this one was larger, older and almost everything it contained seemed faded and worn. It was full of objects as if the contents of two offices had been crammed into one. These items were almost exclusively the product of the ardent collection of data – files, documents, charts, maps, handbooks – arrayed around the walls on shelves, in cabinets and dangling from hooks. The predominant colours were greys and browns and the walls, where you could see them, were a variety of brown also, the pale faded brown of wallpaper on which a flor
al pattern in washed-out pink was barely discernible.

  But McCall’s desk was clear of papers. It was a large mahogany desk with a dark green leather inlay on the top. The only items that sat on it were a white telephone, a round open-ended tin which had been decorated with coloured paper by McCall’s ten-year-old daughter Mairead and which held a dozen pencils and ball-point pens, and what appeared to be a lunch box, a plastic Tupperware container made up of a translucent base and a white, press-down top. It was difficult to see what the contents might be.

  ‘Do you know that he quit his job a week before he disappeared?’ Mike asked as McCall made his way back to his seat.

  ‘I do, yes.’

  ‘And you still believe he killed himself?’

  ‘Yes.’ He eased his bulk slowly down into his chair.

  ‘But how can you?’

  ‘Simple. There’s no other explanation. You see, I’m more interested in the practicalities of the matter. For example, let’s take a look at the race itself. I mean, it was a bit of an odd one, wasn’t it?’

  ‘What do you mean, odd?’

  ‘Well, let’s say unusual. Everyone starting at different times.’

  ‘That was just because we had to use the footpath, as you know – your suggestion, in fact – and it’s only ten feet wide. There’s no chance of a mass start, even with only thirty or thirty-five runners.’

  ‘So they started at intervals of . . . what was it . . . thirty seconds?’

  ‘That’s right. It means that the biggest group of runners you’d get would be maybe four or five as the faster ones caught up with the slower ones. The faster ones started later – it makes it a bit more exciting.’

  ‘All right. I understand that. So . . .’ McCall placed his hands on the desk, fingers spread out on the dark green leather inlay. ‘So . . . Tom being one of the fastest, he started second from last.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thirty seconds after Patrick Thomson and thirty seconds before the very last man who was Brian Mitchell.’