“I asked the local editors to look around, but no one has seen this Osvald guy,” said Mackay. “Axel Osvald, right? There was a bulletin that went out, too, and obviously we checked then too-a foreigner who dies in Moray-but nothing about the man.”
“Okay,” said Macdonald.
“Your colleagues over at the Ramnee haven’t seen or heard anything either,” said Mackay.
“I know. I called a few days ago.”
“Have you been there?”
“Not yet.”
Mackay read from his paper again.
“There’s just one thing…”
“Yes?”
“Billy in the editorial department in Elgin did a thing about the fish market’s new dismal numbers, and he interviewed people up in Buckie. That was before the bulletin.” Mackay looked up. “Billy’s a little slow, but he’s good. But slow. Okay, he was talking to some of the old forgotten guys at the shipyard and he had parked the car on one of the little streets right across from there, and when he came back and he was going to drive home he saw a Corolla parked on the same street. It had been there when he arrived, too. Metallic green.”
“Did he get the number?”
“Hell no. Why should he have? He wasn’t even thinking about that then. He didn’t remember it until after the bulletin came out. No. Not then. It was when I called him yesterday. And actually, not even then. He called this morning and said that he’d seen the car.”
“Is he sure?”
“He’s pretty good with cars. And of course it appeared to be new, he could see that. A new car in Buckie… well, you don’t see that every day. At least not on those streets.”
43
He had made a journey he hadn’t planned on. It was a farewell. If you saw it on a map it looked like a circle, or at least part of a circle.
When had he last walked down Broad Street? Years or days or hours. A red sky. Down toward Onion Street and toward the harbor the sky was always red, always.
Four hundred boats per year!
Biggest whitefish port in Europe.
And out there, there were people he could have been close to. Maybe. No.
The smell. It was the sea, as it has always been, and then something more, which he hadn’t smelled then but did now: oil.
This city had changed after the oil. The trawlers were there, still a forest of masts, but people who walked the streets came because of the oil too.
The city had grown. The entrances were different, that was a sure sign of everything that had happened.
He stood on one of the western breakwaters. The trawlers here were largest. There was a blue one twenty yards away. He saw a man moving on the quarterdeck. He read the name on the trawler, which was made of steel.
That was something else, a hull of steel.
He heard a yell from the man down by the mess, a few words.
He lingered outside the Mission.
It was here.
The next-to-last night.
Meals 7:00-2:30, then and now. The Congregational church. Sick bed. Emergency facilities.
A notice that hadn’t existed then:
Everyone knew almost everything here. There were exceptions. There was one.
He walked in but turned around in the outer room. He was pushed away by the memories, and by something else: A man looked up from the counter, an expression on his face.
He was on his way out, didn’t look around, he wasn’t invisible here, he was deaf to the voice behind his back, the shout.
Caley Fisheries was still there. The fish market. There was a new notice at the entrance. Prohibited: smoking, spitting, eating, drinking, breaking of boxes, unclean clothing, unclean footwear. A guide for life, too.
Men in blue rubber garments and yellow boots were loading boxes of flounder or lemon sole. A truck to Aberdeen, and on to the south.
He walked on Crooked Lane; it was as crooked now as it had been then.
He walked toward the summit. The sky opened out. It was windy.
He felt the weapon against his thigh. It was just as cold. He wanted to fire it.
Half an hour later he was on his way, straight across and to the north. A long farewell. He drove through Strichen. He looked in his rearview mirror. Was anyone following him? It was possible, but he didn’t think so.
The weapon was under his jacket in the front seat.
He drove along the narrow roads to New Aberdour and through the village and stopped three yards from the formidable edge down to the sea. Three yards. He let the motor race. From where he was sitting he could only see sea and sky. Everything was one. The sea and the wind roared. He opened the car door. He got out. He held the pistol in his hand. He shot at the sky.
There were two roads down Troup Head. Over the slope and down the road to the community that hid itself from the world.
He knew. He had hidden here when the houses were still red like the cliffs, when the smugglers still defined life there. That was why no one had asked any questions.
When the cameras came he ran away.
Like now.
He sat in the car again.
He felt his foot on the pedal, a longing. A
Jesus.
Now he could see only the sky.
44
Spey Bay was still. Buckie Shipyard was empty and silent. Two trawlers from before were rusted in place in the shipyard frame, like a symbol.
It wasn’t an entirely unfamiliar sight for Winter. He came from a city with dead shipyards.
They had parked on Richmond Street. This was where the local editor Billy had seen the green Corolla.
“How many people in Buckie own that kind of car in this year’s model?” Macdonald asked straight out during the drive north, and he called Craig in Inverness.
Craig had put a guy on it. The answer came while they were still driving through the harbor.
No one.
There were sixteen front doors on Richmond Street, eight on each side. The row houses looked like they were built out of one stone block. Only one car was parked on the street. It was a wreck from the seventies.
“What the heck,” Macdonald said, and rang the first doorbell.
People were home at all but one of the addresses; they were all women. They would have been happy to be at work. No one drove a new Corolla and no one had any immediate plans to do so. No one knew exactly what that model looked like. No one had had a visit from anyone in a Corolla.
