in my office.’ He glanced at me, with a tiny smile. ‘Bob, if that’s what you’d do to people who annoyed you by accident, how would you deal with someone who went out of his way to piss you off?’
I laughed. ‘That hasn’t happened for a long time.’
He finished his beer and fetched two more. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to marry my sister?’ he murmured, just as Rory appeared to tell us that the food was ready. ‘I’d love to have you in our gang.’
Eden and I got on like a house on fire after that. We ate below decks, then took a late evening walk around the marina before we turned in. There were some very impressive boats there, but nothing beat the Palacio de Ginebra for sheer class. ‘Where are we going tomorrow?’ I asked, before we turned in.
‘Nowhere too ambitious,’ Eden replied. ‘Alison and I reckon that since it’s your first trip, we might just sail down to Campbeltown, moor there for the night and come back up on Sunday.’
‘Great. Like Ali says, I’m only the deckhand.’
I hadn’t been sure about sleeping on something that was moving about all night, even if gently. I was still wondering whether I’d manage when I woke next morning, aware of the light that had found its way into the cabin in spite of the heavy curtain over the porthole. Alison was smiling at me, her eyes still fuzzy. ‘We’re turning into a couple,’ she murmured. ‘You fell asleep on me.’
‘Well, baby,’ I whispered, ‘I’m awake now.’
Even at that we were still up and ready to go by seven fifteen, although we were the last into the dayroom. I was excited. I couldn’t remember how long it was since I’d done something absolutely new, that wasn’t related to work. I couldn’t remember how long it was since I’d been as separated from the job, mentally as well as physically.
Sailing turned out to be far easier than I’d expected, or feared. Life jackets were mandatory equipment on board, so falling over the side wasn’t a big deal, and all I had to do was… whatever I was told. Once the sails were set they had to be adjusted every now and then, but mostly the real work was left to whoever was keeping us on course. As Rory proved, that was child’s play… provided, as his aunt pointed out when I remarked upon it, that the child knew what he was doing.
Eden set a course out of Inverkip that took us west of the Isles of Cumbrae, Great and Little, views I’d never seen before, since my few trips there had been from Largs, on the east, and then out into the open Firth of Clyde. I’m not a hugely travelled man, but I’m a patriotic Scot and every so often I’m struck with a burst of pride in my country’s beauty. Too many of us, me included, spend too little time in its contemplation.
The wind wasn’t strong but we still made decent time, until Eden decided that we’d moor off Lamlash for lunch. Once we’d eaten, he took Alex, Rory and me across to the Holy Island in the motorised inflatable that the Gin Palace towed behind it, leaving Alison on wash-up duty. We walked around the lovely wee island for an hour; my daughter and I each shot a full roll of film. The place is a centre for world peace these days, and I can understand why, although I wonder how its students feel when they see a missile-carrying nuclear submarine go by, out of the base at Faslane.
Back on board, we spent the afternoon cruising round the south of Arran and on towards the Mull of Kintyre and Campbeltown, our destination. We sailed into its loch, which is really a big bay, then found our pre-booked mooring on the pier and tied up for the night. Dinner hadn’t been planned, so I went ashore and found a restaurant that had one table left for five, my contribution to the trip. ‘You’re lucky to get in at such short notice on a Saturday night,’ the owner advised me, ‘but Paul’s not here just now, and so that makes a difference.’ At the time I didn’t have the faintest idea of what she meant, but Alex explained later.
The food, local shellfish and beef from Northern Ireland… we were closer to the Irish mainland than to our point of departure… was outstanding, but the greatest memory I have of that night is one of enlightenment.
As I looked at my surroundings, at my companions, and considered how we’d got there, I felt an epiphany, a realisation that I’d been shown a world outside that in which I’d been immersed for the previous fifteen years, and by which I’d become completely consumed. The evening is locked away in the treasure chest of my mind like a movie shot in soft focus, and every so often I close my eyes, take it out, and replay it.
Later, when everyone else had turned in, leaving Alison and me alone on the afterdeck, I told her what I was feeling. My excitement of the morning had grown into an understanding that all things were possible, and that my life need not necessarily be set on a course that was unalterable. ‘I could do this,’ I said to her. ‘I could sell my place in Spain, buy a boat like this, and operate it commercially. It is possible. This is just, so different, so… so damn nice.’
She smiled. ‘And what about Alex? Do you think she’ll settle for a life as a boat girl?’
‘In four years’ time,’ I pointed out, ‘Alex will be gone, off to university, to study law, she says, at Glasgow, same as me. A friend of mine at the golf club once said to me that a son will never leave home, truly, until he marries, but with daughters, once they’re gone, they’re gone. They need their own space.’
‘I’ll grant you that,’ she conceded.
‘There you are then. When that happens, I will barely have cleared forty. I will be a relatively young man. I could do this.’
We were still talking about it after we’d turned in for the night; I gave free rein to my liberated imagination, while Alison stayed practical. ‘Bob, this is the Firth of Clyde,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s been lovely today, but wet and windy is the norm. I’ve been out in those conditions, you haven’t, and believe me, when the weather is rough, the last thing you want is the worry of bloody passengers.’
That didn’t put me off. ‘Okay, then we won’t charter it out. We’ll just live on it.’
She laughed. ‘You couldn’t, not all the time. You’d go mad.’
‘No I wouldn’t. If we didn’t take passengers, I would write. There are a couple of true crime books I could do right now, and who’s better prepared than the likes of me to do crime fiction? Or we could sail the bloody world, and do travel books. I could make television programmes.’
She laid a hand on my chest and kissed me. ‘Calm down, big boy,’ she whispered. ‘If wishes were horses we’d all get a ride.’
‘But we can. Maybe we have to, Ali. You talk about going mad; there’s a far greater chance of that happening if I stay in the job than if I leave it. I began this week looking at dead people, some left where they had been killed. I saw a man who’d been disembowelled, in his own home, his own fucking castle. On Thursday I interviewed a kid who’d been systematically crippled with a baseball bat, for reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me. Later on that same day I had a confrontation with a guy who tried to pull a gun on me. I dealt with all that, love. I switched off from all the blood and the suffering, and I met the violence with greater violence. Then I went home to my daughter, and we had fish for tea. That is my life, and it’s yours; it’s how I live, it’s how you live. This weekend I’ve been shown a way of changing it, and you’re trying to talk me out of it?’
She stroked my cheek, my forehead, my hair. ‘No, lover, I’m not. If that’s how you feel and if that’s what you want, then I want it for you. But will you still want it on Monday morning? And what’s this “we” all of a sudden?’
‘Surely you can’t believe that I’d save my own life and leave you lost in the deep, dark jungle.’ I kissed her. ‘Besides, I’ll need someone to teach me how to sail the thing. Come away with me.’
‘Ask me again, when you’re really ready to do it.’
‘What will you say when I do?’
‘Surely you can’t believe that I’d let you head off into the sunset without a bloody clue how to set the sails?’
But I never did buy that damn boat. I never did ask her. If I had, I’d have saved her life. Ultimately she was someone else I betrayed.
My last great romantic vision endured through that night and into the morning. It stayed with me well into the afternoon, all through the cruise up the windward coast of Arran, and until we were within sight of Inverkip. For all that time, my mind was still set on sailing boats and sunsets.
And then my mobile sounded. I was in the cabin at the time, packing my bag. I retrieved it from the jacket I’d worn at the funeral, where it had spent the last two days. It was at the limit of its battery life, but there was just enough juice left for me to answer.
‘Bob, is that you?’
The voice threw me for a second or two, until I realised that it was Sergeant Payne. ‘Yes, Lowell, what’s up?’
‘I’ve done that checking up for you, on the McGrew family. It’s pretty much as reported in the Tizer. They
