A Kind of Drowning, page 10
“Just get the fuck off my property, yeah? Snooping around – are you the fucking press?”
“No. I used to work with her in The Boogie-Woogie,”
Andrew Farrell spun without a word and marched to his front door,
“If I catch you around here again, y’jackass. You’ll wake up in A and E, yeah?” he yelled over his shoulder
Crowe slipped out and away down the street, memorising the van’s number plate as he walked. Grace was right; it just didn’t feel right.
A trick of the atmospherics made Inishcarrig appear closer, looming large and ominous in the sea. Beyond the island, gunmetal coloured thunderheads churned, and the first smatterings of rain peppered the concrete as he walked. As he passed The Boogie-Woogie, the brightly chalked sandwich board gave him an idea.
He mulled over it as he climbed the stairs to his garret.
17
The Boogie-Woogie’s cooks Maciej and Pavel lived together along with four other Polish nationals at the edge of the town in a refurbished two storey house. Bunk beds were stacked in pairs into two cramped bedrooms. The toilet facilities were rudimentary at best and the rent affordable, but that was about to increase now that the summer season was almost here. In the confined space of the old house, they moved around. Both downed high protein shakes, sourdough bread and coffee for breakfast. Both shrugged on their clothes. Both moved in unison out of the house, down the road passing the field hands returning at dawn to their own tightly packed accommodation. Each group passing the other with the barest of nods.
Like two young hounds they walked to the Boogie-Woogie. Pavel ran up the shutters while Maciej input the alarm code and turned on the power. They hung up their jackets, reversed their peaked caps, donned their aprons, and stared in wonder at the gap left by the missing whiteboard where Mel drafted her master plans, rotas, and menus for the day. Screws and rawl plugs gone and a dusting of wall plaster on the floor.
“Maybe she won’t notice?” murmured Pavel.
They both burst out laughing.
***
Crowe propped the whiteboard on the mantlepiece. It would be his case board from now on. The TV now consigned to the floor. Fishing the white board’s pens out of his cargo pants he began to write.
On the table, now cleared of plates, whiskey glass and cutlery, he had an A4 pad, the napkin with Cutts’ notes and a stack of bright red pens lifted from the betting shop in the town. It wasn’t lost on him that all of these were technically stolen. Purloined. Requisitioned.
NTDK - Not the drowning kind was scrawled at the top of the board – this would be his code for Thea.
S = Suspects was the first heading of 3 rough columns.
The other two columns were E = Evidence and C = Cutts.
On the A4 he had jotted down a shopping list: a map of the area, rubber gloves, plastic bags, tie-wraps, and indelible pens. He wondered where he could get details of the tides and currents.
He lit a B&H and stared at the board. His next stop was going to be the library.
He checked his watch, only to find he still didn’t have one.
He tried Cathal’s number only to see NUMBER BLOCKED appear on the screen.
He googled the Library opening times and saw he had missed the opening hours. It was closed.
Clodagh Robertson had said she was a kayaker, maybe she could provide some answers.
Which reminded him. He brought the better pair of runners from the ledge; the smell of Pernod had disappeared after a scrubbing in the sink. The offering to the fox below, a full single had been opened and devoured without a gull in sight.
He had a plan and for the first time in months, a purpose. Today, he was a detective again. Two women had touched him – Robertson on the hand and Cutts’ peck on the cheek – he began to feel alive again, like the world was returning to technicolour. It was going to be a good day.
18
The more Crowe thought about it, the more he became convinced that the answer had to be on the island. The dead always give you an answer, it was just a question of deciphering their clues. Crowe was sure now. He had walked the length of the coast, starting from the harbour and made his way along the stone and shale in a westerly direction. The runners were leaking, and his socks now, were just a mash of water and sand around his heel. Sometimes he slipped traversing the rocks. He would have to add Wellington Boots to the shopping list, he thought.
Inishcarrig loomed across the water. He stopped and took photos on his phone. From the pocket of his fleece, he pulled out a small jotter. The clutch of betting slips discarded now. Another step toward recovery; a notebook. With a wire spine. He sketched the island roughly with a pencil. How did Thea Farrell get out there? He wrote, THEA, THEA, THEA, THEA, THEA – it became a scrawl, the blunt nib smearing the page.
Fuck it, he thought.
From the bulky pockets of his cargo pants he tugged out his cigarettes and lighter and lit one. He inhaled the tobacco and held it down in his lungs. He exhaled slowly through his nostrils, watching the plumes snatched by the breeze and swirled into the sky.
A local girl, Thea probably knew every nook and cranny, the safe areas and the dangerous ones. Every kid in the world had a hiding place, a bolthole, somewhere to get away from the family. Somewhere they shouldn’t be, which added to the thrill. Thea Farrell was an adventurer to the core.
Did she swim out to the island? The distance might be achievable for a trained swimmer. Thea had guts. It was possible. Coming over a gradual rise, he found a cove. It scalloped out into two craggy horns offering protection from the breeze. A thin pathway of flattened grass led to a smooth stretch of beach and Crowe revelled in the solitude. The clouds had broken, and a high vault of blue appeared over the sea. It was warm and sheltered enough for Crowe to sit and smoke. He shrugged off the fleece and spread it out like a blanket and eased himself down. High up on the tideline was a stack of lobster pots, weather-worn and covered in seaweed. He lit another smoke and closed his eyes.
How had she got out there? For a split second, he thought about the helicopter. Fell from a height. Bone damage and fractures would be worse though. Cutts couldn’t give him a specific height and knowing Liv, her schedule would be too full for another meeting. She had spelled it out to him, he was a civilian now. With suspension from duty, he had no power of arrest, anything he did wouldn’t hold up in any court case. His suspicions would have to be presented as that. Suspicions. The get-out-of-jail card of a serving member of a police force was gone.
He was Joe Public now.
He riffled the pages again. On paper in the cold light of day, it was an accident. Perhaps after she had been verbally attacked, he had become overly protective towards her? Taken it to heart? Why was he making assumptions in the face of facts; accidents happen? Scotoma, he shrugged; a blind spot, only seeing what his mind wanted to see.
You are a valuable human being…
Thea was valuable but the world had already moved on. Her voice was silenced. For that alone, she deserved this digging. Dredging for the truth. Andrew Farrell had diminished her value by leaving her medals off her coffin. Diminished an achievement greater than his. It was ugly. Controlling. If members of Special Olympics Ireland had been at the funeral, their presence had been muted. He thought about Grace’s rage at Farrell. The screeched invective.
Every family has its secrets.
Plant seeds in Thea’s lungs. Samphire, sounds like sapphires, he thought. Had she been pushed face first onto the ground? Had she been forced into the ground? The sea damage to her face would’ve masked any superficial bruising. The gulls taking out her eyes too would have added more damage. No DNA under her fingernails.
Cutts had also said Thea was missing a running shoe. A white NIKE. If little else, it gave Crowe a reason to walk along the beach again. He checked his watch to tell the time, only he didn’t have a watch.
He needed to get onto the island.
Crowe rose, dusted himself down and shook out the fleece. He folded away the jotter and checked the cigarettes – he was down to two. He lit one and put the other behind his ear, pushing his cap down to hold it secure. Ambling up the jagged horn of rock and grass, he bent down and pulled up a few plants that had begun to bloom. He turned them over in his hands, holding them up; what exactly was he looking for? He tried Googling ‘Samphire’, but the signal was non-existent. He placed the few plants in the cigarette box and hoisted himself back towards the harbour.
At the top of the dune, he looked down into the sea, the concertinaed rocks glowed in the sunlight’s refraction. Deep green and blue blended into the darkness of the deep channel. Buoys bobbed lazily on the currents and the sea was smooth like glass. He panned his view slowly. Roscarrig; the sprawl of housing, old fisherman crofts and newly built starter homes with washing lines fluttering bright pennants of clothing. His eyes followed the dune lines to the rows of back gardens, greenhouses, and public parking areas. In one of the gardens the faint barks of a dog drifted across the sand.
Somebody must have seen her. Thea by her very nature would draw attention, she was noticeable.
A young woman walking alone at night.
Crowe slid down the far side of the rise, stumbling at the bottom and giving his ankle a hearty twist. Cursing and swearing, he limped along the shore on the look-out for a solitary shoe.
What else were Sundays for?
19
It was a suicide Monday when Clodagh spotted Crowe loitering at the library entrance. A morning that had felt like limbo as she left her house. As she free-wheeled toward the library, she had a momentary flashback of throwing up on his shoes. The same ones he was wearing today.
She felt exhausted. Her mother, Mary, had left her bed at two in the morning to start cleaning down the kitchen and had knocked over the mop and bucket, spilling suds, and detergent over the floor. Mother, Old Woman, Burden, turning on every light in the house as she went about her business. She didn’t have a name now; she was an object, a diminished outline - a ghost. By the time she had settled Mother down, returning The Old Woman to bed and cleaned up, The Burden had left Clodagh sitting at the kitchen table watching the hands of the clock crawl around to morning. She would be forty-one next month and the sands were accelerating through the hour glass with nothing at the end to show for it. Breakfast had been a double vodka followed by another. Neat. Then a sugar-laden instant coffee. In the shower, Clodagh had pendulumed the water from freezing to scalding and back. Her skin bristled from the harsh towels. Perfect for her purgatory.
She left a small bowl of cereal and milk on the table. She wrote a note to the oldwomanburden upstairs, sleeping ever longer into the day, that she wouldn’t be home to prepare lunch. There was a sandwich in the fridge and some scones in the bread bin.
Clodagh was too drained mentally and emotionally to kayak today. The vessel exorcised her shame and loathing in precise strokes, forcing her pace each morning against the current and the tides.
Crowe must have really gone to town on the dye as his hair was still a wild, matted bubble-gum colour. It poked out from under the cap in jarring sparks. Under the battered fleece, which looked suspiciously like the one she had seen hanging on a rail in the charity shop a few days earlier was a book. He was cradling it like a child.
She had thought of him amid her early morning chaos, that slow appearance in the mind of someone you sensed was like you. A kindred. Someone who crept into your mind unannounced that you knew was thinking of you. He stood less awkwardly, as if the conversation between them was already half-way through. He dropped his cigarette into a disposable coffee cup, and she watched him scan around for a bin.
“Library will open in fifteen minutes,” she said.
“I’ll wait,” he replied.
She locked the bike with the heavy chain she carried in her handle bars basket. In her reflective yellow back pack was a carton of microwaveable soup and her bottle of water.
“There’s a bin on Main Street,” she said, eyeing the disposable cup Crowe was about to drop on the ground, “those cups aren’t recyclable,”
Crowe seemed uncertain; a flash of confusion slid across his face.
“I’ll wait,” he said.
“Then wait,” replied Clodagh.
Fifteen minutes later, he was on the opposite side of her desk. He handed her the book.
“You can scan it…” she started.
“You said you saw me every day on the beach? During the search?” said Crowe.
The book in his outstretched hand waivered slightly. He had big hands. In his lifetime, Crowe, the battered barn door, had performed heavy labour.
“I said that?” she said
“You did,”
“I can’t remember, yes, possibly,” she said as she took the book.
The plastic cover had a fresh cup ring right in the middle of it. It hadn’t been there when he had taken it out.
“Would you have a map of the area?” he asked.
“Map?” she thought about it, “yes, there should be one in the town records on the second floor, far right-hand side, after the biography section.”
“Not in a book. A fold-out? Is that one?”
She hadn’t noticed it before, but Crowe had started living up to his name – the slight tilt of the head as his eyes with their anthracite glint scanned and filed everything. He had already spied the large ordinance map of the town and island mounted on the wall behind her desk. His mastiff mouth was set to a grin.
“You can’t have that Crowe.”
“Can I borrow it?”
“No. Don’t force me to ask you to leave.”
“It’s a library – I see DVDs, CDs, Magazines to borrow…?”
“The answer is still no,”
Her ‘No’ sounded like biting down on tinfoil. It sliced across the desk.
“Thanks. One other thing,” said Crowe
“Yes?”
“I need to get out there. To the island.”
“It’s private property,”
“It’s for sale.”
“Win the lottery?”
“Derry has connections, apparently, I’d like to visit,”
“I’m sure one of the fishermen would charter a boat out for the day. Derry, bless him, thinks he has his finger on the pulse, but the world just side-steps him,”
“I’d like to charter you,” said Crowe
“In my kayak?”
“Boat, whatever. You know the currents, the tides, the best time to go.”
“You could just Google all those details you know.”
“I tried, but the signal is poor – next stop is here. Do you have anything bigger…?”
“Crowe, there is no way I could take a man of your size out to that island and back on my own – have you ever been in a kayak before?”
“No, but it doesn’t look hard… I’ve… good upper-body strength.”
Clodagh stared at him.
“I’m not talking to you anymore – town records upstairs, have a nice day.”
Crowe climbed the staircase to the second floor. Rows of waist-high shelves spanned the wall. Perched above them hung the Rosscarrig Art Group’s paintings. A myriad of still lives, seaside sunsets and one superb study of a boat hung in pastel and acrylic hues. He slid past ‘History’ to the small corner table with a reading light and docking port for a laptop. The forlorn looking shelf of leather-bound town records offered little by way of the island. Two volumes contained a few old plans: sheep crofter cottages, the Martello tower and a seemingly long list of British owners before the Canadian Billionaire bought it in the late 1960’s. It then seemed to have been forgotten about, as if the family had put its acquisition in a wall safe somewhere. Apart from caves on the northern side where seventeenth century smugglers had plied their trade, the island, like the town it was tied to seemed to have always been the bridesmaid, but never the bride.
Between the books a laminated triptych fell onto the floor. Crowe folded it out; The Rocky Shore Trail was the title. Opened out, it showed all the varieties of shore-life and flora of Ireland and The British Isles. Starfish, urchins, and crabs lined up in neat rows with seaweed and his gaze fell on ‘varieties of samphires’.
Rock Samphires. found on the Eastern seaboard of Ireland. A salt-tolerant plant. Marsh Samphire grows on muddy sandy flats, like estuaries. Rock Samphire, less common, found only along cliffs...
He looked at the photograph.
What he had collected along the shore during the search and sealed in a cigarette box, jammed in with the frozen pizzas didn’t look like anything in the pamphlet. He turned it over. Nothing.
Cutts had said Rock Samphire. If anything, his need to get to the island intensified; as if another light had gone on in his dimmed consciousness. Thea’s remains had traces of it. Inishcarrig didn’t have a beach. It was sheer cliffs all around apart from the old stone jetty and slipway. Crowe pulled back down the last record he had skimmed and thumbed to the page with the image of the island coiled in soundings and indecipherable maritime numerals.
He ran his finger around the outline of the island - and then he spotted it.
A long thin line that joined Inishcarrig to Roscarrig. A causeway.
A strip of sand.
A rat-run. A way to and from the mainland. He was certain now.
Crowe creased up the laminate and jammed it into the pocket of his cargo pants. Looking around, he tore out the page from the book.
He took the stairs two at a time, his lumbering gait reverberating around the library.
Clodagh looked up from her computer.
“Whatever it is, the answer is no,” she said.
Crowe reached inside his fleece and from the top pocket of his shirt pulled out the folded page.
“You tore a page out of a library book? For fuck’s sake, Crowe,” she hissed.
“It was covered in dust. Hardly the end-of-the-world now is it?”
“I could have photocopied it for you. Jesus, you could have even photographed it?” she muttered.
