Sail of Stone

Farther down the street was a red telephone booth, as old as the one in Pennan. As Winter passed he listened for rings.

Hundred-year-old stairs had been carved out of the wall down to the docks. Smaller fishing boats were on shore now, during the ebb. Their bellies shone white, like fish on land. The sky had darkened and was blue on the way to black. The moon was faint, but it was there. The horizon covered everything the eye could see. The houses in Seatown were luminous. Children’s clothes waved at them with short arms from a clothesline.

“Where are all the people?” said Winter.

They walked back, past the church and the phone booth. A curtain moved in one of the windows of a house that looked like it would soon collapse. The house was black. The curtain moved again. Who wouldn’t be curious?

They encountered a child walking along the western house walls with his eyes on the ground. It was a boy of about ten, in short pants and a cap. He could have been from the 1950s. All of this could have been from the 1950s, in some cases even the 1850s.

Winter thought of the smell that existed in almost every British building. It was a smell from the past.

They walked up the stairs again and took a right onto Bayview and walked in the shadow of the viaducts and took a left on North Castle Street. The Three Kings pub was there.

Macdonald looked at his watch.

“One for the long road back to the hotel?”

“Of course,” said Winter.

Inside it was dark; the windows were small and couldn’t let very much light in even on a brilliant day. There was a middle-aged woman behind the bar. Apparently all the bartenders in Cullen were women. A man was sitting at one of the tables by the windows. He had his back to them. There was a glass in front of him. He had a knitted cap on his head. A fisherman, thought Winter.

Macdonald ordered two glasses of ale. The woman tapped them up and served them. They remained standing on the bar as the ale cleared. The woman appeared to be looking out through the window where the man in the cap was sitting. He hadn’t moved while they had been inside.

“Skaal,” said Macdonald, raising his glass.

They drank. Winter couldn’t help watching the man’s back, which was thin and hunched forward. He still didn’t move. The whisky glass in front of him was empty; the pint glass was empty. The man was like a frozen figure. One of many who’d frozen into place in these coastal towns and slowly crumbled away from wind and salt as the economy sailed away with the fishing industry. Macdonald drank again. Maybe he should be glad that his grandfather, or maybe it was his great-grandfather, had left the coast. Otherwise perhaps he would be sitting like that. At the same time, I’m from the coast myself. But I am from another world.

The tradition at Seafield was that dinner guests were shown into the bar while the table was prepared, and the headwaiter handed out menus and wine lists.

Winter and Macdonald didn’t protest. They sat down in the two leather chairs by the fire.

Another female bartender came to their chairs to take their predinner drink order. Winter let Macdonald choose.

“What do you say to Springbank, the twenty-one-year-old, of course?” said Macdonald.

Winter nodded as he lit a Corps.

There was a gentle strain of a melody in the bar. Winter recognized “Galveston,” Glen Campbell. It was probably a coincidence, or was the singer a distant relative of the owners?

Glen as in Glen Deveron, GlenDronach, Glen Elgin, Glen Garioch, Glen Keith, Glen Mhor, Glen Moray, Glen Ord, Glen Spey, Glen Scotia, Glenrothes, the unknown celebrities from the secluded distilleries.

The headwaiter arrived with the menus, handwritten and bound in red leather.

There were few other guests in the bar: a younger couple on a small sofa in front of one of the windows, two older couples sitting together around a coffee table in the middle of the room, a solitary younger man in front of a solitary glass at the bar.

The bartender returned with the whisky, two tumblers beside it, and a small carafe of water.

Macdonald poured a few drops of water into his malt whisky. Winter waited. They drank. It was good. A touch of coconut in the finish. Yes. Sherry, toffee, seaweed, grass, peat on the tongue. Yes. A complicated flavor.

Winter ordered Cullen skink as an appetizer. He thought he liked the taste of smoked haddock boiled with potatoes and milk and onion. Steve grinned behind his bouillabaisse. Winter thought of Arne Algotsson again. How could this still be in his crumbling brain? Why had the name Cullen skink gotten stuck there? Was it just Cullen, just the first part? Was that why? I’ve thought about it before. Why was it this strange little town that stuck with Algotsson forever? Did he even have time to come here? Did anyone else come here? Had someone mentioned the name to him recently?

The dining room was also done in Scottish colors and polished wood and offered innovative dishes in the Scottish tradition. Macdonald smiled a bit:

Grilled herring with pan-fried porridge cake.

Black pudding en croute with calvados and apple glaze.

Venison with black pudding.

Winter ordered grilled sole with pesto and garlic; Macdonald ordered a steak. They tried the wines.

“I thought Craig would have called by now,” said Macdonald, putting down his glass.

“Mmhmm.”

“Three calls,” said Macdonald. “Two women.”

“Well, we know that Johanna called him twice,” said Winter.

“Craig ought to have been able to check that by now,” said Macdonald. “And the third one.”

“I don’t think we can trace it,” said Winter.

“Why not?”

“They probably thought of that,” said Winter.

“Who is ‘they’?”

Yes. Who is “they”? Winter drank the white wine. He smelled the scent of a charcoal grill.

Who is “they”?

A surviving fisherman and a woman who made his phone calls.

Or a former acquaintance of Axel Osvald. He had been here before. Or a new acquaintance.

The food arrived. They tasted it. It was good.

Winter noticed that the young couple from the bar was already getting up from their table in the dining room. The woman nodded shyly in their direction and Winter nodded back. The younger man turned around. Winter noticed his profile. It suddenly looked like John Osvald’s profile in the photograph from Winter’s thin portfolio, the photograph in faint sepia tones. The man over there was still standing, in profile like an Egyptian mural. Winter saw it. He saw the photograph in his mind’s eye, he saw the stranger’s profile, Osvald’s profile, the hotel walls, he saw a red wall, a staircase that led…

“God!” he said loudly, and Macdonald gave a start with his fork halfway to his mouth and the other guests turned sharply around.

“I’ve seen him!” Winter said.

Macdonald lowered his fork.

“Have you suddenly been saved, Erik?”

“Osvald! He was there!” Winter said, and Macdonald put down his fork.

“Where was he?”

“What was that town called… Buckie, right? Where we were looking for the rental car?”

“Yes. Buckie.”

“We had tea at the old hotel.”

“The Cluny Hotel.”

“We walked up the stairs.”

“We walked down them, too,” Macdonald said.

Winter moved his hand as though he were waving away Macdonald’s comment.

“I think it was as I was walking up. I… we looked at all of those old framed photos that were hanging on the wall in the stairway.”