The Driftwood Girls Read online

  Mark Douglas-Home

  * * *

  THE DRIFTWOOD GIRLS

  Contents

  Twenty-three Years Ago

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Four Months Later

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Mark Douglas-Home is a journalist turned author, who was editor of the Herald and the Sunday Times Scotland. His career in journalism began as a student in South Africa where he edited the newspaper at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. After the apartheid government banned a number of editions of the paper, he was deported from the country. He is married with two children and lives in Edinburgh.

  By the same author

  The Sea Detective

  The Woman who Walked into the Sea

  The Malice of Waves

  For Colette

  Twenty-three Years Ago

  Her glower was as scornful as any sixteen-year-old girl had directed at a boy all that long summer. ‘Go with you? On a boat? You kidding me?’

  ‘No,’ he replied coolly. ‘I’m serious. I don’t joke.’

  ‘Is that right?’

  He lit a cigarette, exhaled instead of answering.

  ‘Tell you what …’ she said, turning away, the crowds on the seafront appearing to interest her more than him.

  ‘What?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘Fuck off, yeah?’

  If he was disappointed at her rejection, he was encouraged by the thought that here, at this exact place, other teenaged boys had danced this same dance, this clumsy choreography, and some had been successful. He would try again.

  ‘Why, what else are you doing?’

  Her head jerked backwards. ‘I’m going to the gig.’ Behind her, on an empty shop window, a poster announced ‘Carter Emery Entertainments presents Crazy Stupid Dreams’. Tickets were three pounds fifty. The start was seven thirty.

  He checked his watch: seven thirty-eight. ‘Going with someone?’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think he’s late.’

  ‘She.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Not he, she. Her name’s Sarah.’

  ‘OK, she’s late.’

  For a few moments neither spoke. They stood side by side, a study in opposites: the white-blond, curly-haired, muscular boy with the broad, suntanned face and the lean, pale-skinned girl with long, lustrous auburn hair, big eyes and wide mouth.

  ‘I thought …’ he said at length, coughing to clear his throat. ‘I thought you looked nice. That’s why I asked you on my boat.’

  Another glower from her: ‘What age are you? Eighteen?’

  ‘Seventeen, yesterday.’

  ‘And you’ve got a boat?’

  ‘We could go to France.’ He gave her a sideways glance. ‘We could go tonight.’ His voice lifted at the prospect.

  ‘Sure we could, if you had a boat and I wasn’t going to the gig.’

  He nodded, seeming to acknowledge a problem.

  ‘Have you,’ he said, after consideration, as if proposing a solution, ‘ever had a crazy, stupid dream that, one day, someone will take you from here, will ask you to run away?’

  ‘Run away?’ She frowned at the question, also at not knowing whether to engage with him or to rebuff him again. ‘Why would I?’

  ‘It’d be an adventure. That’s what I’m doing, running away, running away from home in a boat. Come with me.’ He added, ‘I dare you,’ which made him sound younger than seventeen.

  To look older, he sucked his cigarette and blew smoke.

  ‘I don’t dream about that,’ she said.

  ‘What then?’

  Her eyes narrowed. She watched him, making up her mind about him, noticing how a curl of hair tucked behind his right ear, how his eyebrows and lashes were also white-blond. ‘Why am I telling you this?’

  ‘Go on,’ he said.

  She took a deep breath. ‘I dream I’m on a beach with my mum. There’s sand stretching for miles and miles and a beach hut with a blue door and windows. It’s just me and her. She’s in a deckchair. I’m making sandcastles.’

  A twist of her mouth: ‘My mum’s dead.’

  ‘Mine too,’ he lied before realizing he had.

  He should have said, might as well be dead; was dead to him. He would have corrected himself except for the difference he sensed in her now their lives were joined by tragedy.

  ‘Hello, I’m Thomas.’

  He held out a hand.

  So, hesitantly, did she.

  Her fingers stubbed against his before they managed a handshake; each, it turned out, as awkward as the other.

  ‘I’m Ruth.’

  ‘Hi, Ruth.’

  Instead of a glower, her expression, he noticed, was curious, amused.

  ‘You’re an odd boy, Thomas,’ she said, ‘with all your questions, handshakes and stuff.’

  He smiled.

  ‘Are you serious?’ she asked.

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Having a boat? About France?’

  ‘I don’t joke.’

  ‘No, you said.’

  She turned towards the seafront, looking for Sarah. ‘Where is she? She’s never late.’ After searching the crowds for someone hurrying she found her eyes lifting to the horizon. ‘This boat of yours … You do have a boat, right? You’ll bring me back?’

  ‘If that’s what you want?’

  ‘Tomorrow night or I’ll be missed.’

  ‘Tomorrow night, I promise.’

  First a lie, then a promise he would break.

  1

  The television camera went close up, lingering on Kirsty Fowler’s rubbed-red eyes, a nervous flickering of her mouth and her blotched face framed by lank, mousy-brown hair: a study in misery.

  A male voice said, ‘I can’t imagine the state I’d be in if that was my father. Do you know if he’s been in touch with anyone, anyone at all?’

  Kirsty’s expression changed from abject to accusing. Her eyes flashed in the lights of the studio and with something else, something feral and fierce. ‘A man called Cal McGill,’ she replied. ‘He talked to Daddy. He spoke to Daddy on that bridge. He drove Daddy’s car.’

  ‘They went to a café. Do you know what was discussed?’

  ‘No,’ Kirsty wailed. ‘McGill won’t say.’

  The camera zoomed out as Greg Lane, the show’s host, leaned closer to his guest and said something inaudible, apparently reassuring because she mumbled, ‘I’ll try.’

  Their proximity accentuated their differences: Greg, tanned, with short-cut black hair, neatly parted, wearing a pink shirt and dark blue trousers; and Kirsty, whose clothes were as messy as her emotions. She wore an oversized moss-green sweater, blue-denim skirt and scuffed white ankle boo
ts.

  ‘Before he went missing,’ Greg continued, ‘your father had some very bad news about his health?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s important he has medical treatment as soon as possible. That’s right, isn’t it?’

  Kirsty nodded.

  ‘And your father going off like that, telling no one in the family, that’s totally out of character, yes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Greg turned to the camera. ‘Kirsty’s done all she can to find her father. Now it’s over to you, our wonderful and, more to the point, vigilant viewers.’

  On a large screen behind Kirsty flashed a photograph of a silver-haired, stooped man in a tweed jacket. Greg said, ‘As you know, Kirsty’s father is called Harry Fowler. He’s seventy-six and this is what he looks like.’

  Beside the picture of Harry appeared a maroon-coloured Vauxhall with the registration number enlarged. ‘And this is his car. It hasn’t been found, has it, Kirsty?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you see this car or Harry, please ring the phone number at the bottom of your screens.’

  Kirsty blurted, ‘We’re so frightened. Please come home, Daddy.’ She paused and looked straight at the camera. ‘Please help us find him.’

  Greg squeezed Kirsty’s hand and said, ‘On Kirsty’s behalf we tracked Cal McGill to a light industrial estate in the east of Edinburgh where he appears to be based. Here’s what happened.’

  On the same screen a youngish man with short, dark brown hair, wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, opened then quickly closed a door. It banged shut.

  ‘As you can see, he’s not exactly helpful …’

  Greg picked up a sheet of paper from the sofa. ‘This is what Cal McGill said when one of our researchers reached him by phone. “I have assisted the police to the best of my ability. Any questions about Mr Fowler should be addressed to Mr Fowler himself. He is, after all, an adult, has every right to privacy and, when we parted company, was in full command of his faculties.”’

  Greg let out an exaggerated sigh. ‘Isn’t that the point, Cal McGill? We can’t ask Mr Fowler. Nor can Kirsty, nor the police. No one has the faintest idea where he is, with the exception, perhaps, of you.’

  He referred again to the printed sheet. ‘You might be interested to know more about Mr McGill, or should I say Dr Cal McGill? He runs a rather unusual business called the Sea Detective Agency.’ One of Greg’s black eyebrows arched like a crow swooping on rotting carrion. ‘I’ll say it is …’

  Newspaper headlines flashed behind Kirsty. ‘Sea detective tracks body of drowned schoolgirl’. ‘Hebridean murder mystery solved by oceanographer detective’. ‘Marine scientist joins hunt for missing fishermen’.

  Greg said, ‘Apparently, Dr McGill finds bodies which are lost at sea by being able to calculate the different effects of tides, currents and winds on their speed and direction of travel. He’s been involved in murder inquiries, marine accidents …’ He glanced at Kirsty. ‘And suicides.’

  Kirsty blurted, ‘If Daddy’s dead, it’ll be that man’s fault.’

  Greg’s mouth twisted in sympathy. ‘Your father isn’t the kind of man who’d cause anyone unnecessary trouble or distress, is he?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He said as much to you before this latest diagnosis. What did he say, Kirsty?’

  She blinked.

  ‘Take your time, Kirsty.’

  ‘He said if he was ill, seriously ill, he’d go off and hide himself away …’ Kirsty sniffled, wiped her eyes.

  ‘That must have been difficult for you to hear.’

  Kirsty nodded.

  ‘You told him you’d look after him?’

  ‘Yes, yes …’

  ‘Of course you did.’ Greg waited before carrying on. ‘Kirsty, you have a particular worry about this Dr McGill. Would you share it with our viewers?’

  ‘I think Daddy might have … I’m worried he might be …’ The final words of the sentence were too hard to say.

  Greg prompted, ‘You think your father might take his own life? Is that right?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And, knowing your father as you do, you think he arranged to meet McGill?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why would he have done that, Kirsty?’

  ‘I … I …’ A tear rolled down her cheek, followed by another.

  ‘Correct me, Kirsty, but you think your father met Dr McGill on that bridge for advice …’

  Kirsty nodded.

  ‘The river was in flood that night …’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Kirsty wailed.

  ‘That part of the river is also tidal, isn’t it?’

  Kirsty nodded.

  ‘You think your father was asking Dr McGill when or where he should jump into the water so his body would be carried out to sea and wouldn’t ever be found, wouldn’t cause anyone distress. You think that’s why they were together on the bridge. Is that right?’

  Another tremulous ‘yes’ emerged from Kirsty.

  ‘And you think that’s why McGill is unwilling to talk, because he was giving a sick old man advice on how to kill himself?’

  Her eyes flashed wide. ‘What other reason could there be?’

  ‘Kirsty, do you have a message for your father, in case he’s watching?’

  ‘I love you, Daddy.’

  The camera closed on Kirsty’s doleful face as Greg announced, ‘Time’s up, I’m afraid. Tune in next week and let’s hope there’s good news about Harry Fowler. This is the show which lets the missing know their families still love them and want them back. Isn’t that right, Kirsty? Thanks, folks, for watching Missing Not Forgotten.’

  Cal slammed shut his laptop, swore. The next time he drove across a bridge at night and saw someone staring into a river he’d be the one shouting, ‘Jump, you mad old bastard.’ He wouldn’t park on the far bank, return on foot and talk to the man. He wouldn’t play the Good Samaritan or concerned citizen.

  He clicked on his inbox. New emails were arriving by the second.

  He read two.

  If Harry Fowler’s found dead, I don’t know how you’ll be able to live with yourself.

  Sea detective? Fucking wanker more like. Why don’t you find a nice high bridge and take a leap off it yourself?

  He deleted both before scrolling from one screen of bile and invective to the next, 427 unread emails since Kirsty Fowler’s Facebook appeal for her father, which included the Sea Detective Agency’s email address and an invitation to ‘Let McGill know what you think of his refusal to say what he and Daddy discussed and why they met.’

  Cal’s phone rang. He glanced at the screen – the caller was Alex Lauder, a friend from Cal’s student days. Like Cal, Alex was a marine scientist. Unlike Cal, Alex was sociable. He enjoyed long ‘catch-ups’, inquiring about Cal’s work, telling Cal about his. Cal, increasingly, preferred not talking. Recently, he’d ducked Alex’s calls. He did the same now. He’d ring Alex later, he told himself: his usual, insincere get-out. Too much else was going on.

  His attention returned to the angry emails, mesmerized by their rush to judgement and, worse, hatred. He paused at a familiar name: Jim Arthur. Jim was a retired head teacher, who’d asked Cal to look for his missing daughter, Maureen. A fortnight ago, after a storm, her dinghy had been found abandoned and empty off Portsoy, north-east Scotland. Her body hadn’t been recovered.

  Dear Cal (if I may),

  In view of the publicity about Mr Fowler, I would be grateful if you did not involve yourself in trying to find Maureen. I am concerned about your sudden and, I am sure unjustified, notoriety drawing the wrong kind of attention to your search.

  With sadness,

  Jim

  Jim was the fifth client lost in the last thirty-six hours. Only one remained. Her name was Elaine Mawhinney. Her sister, Cath, had been on holiday on the Scottish island of Islay and had gone night swimming as the tide ebbed. She’d been carried away.

  As Cal refreshed his inbox, an email
from Elaine appeared with the other new arrivals.

  I think it will complicate matters for you to be involved in looking for Cath right now. The police assure me her remains are likely to appear in their own time. In the circumstances, I’ve decided to let nature take its course. For all I know, Cath might prefer not to be found since she was always so in love with swimming and the sea.

  Cal’s final client had gone.

  He leaned back in his chair. Under his breath he said, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck.’ Then, throwing himself forward, he crossed his office, stopping by the door and pressing his eye to the spyhole: was another gang of accusers gathering outside? All he could see was bare tarmac and brick-built shuttered units opposite. Moments later, in the dim yellow glow of a streetlamp, he was hurrying from the industrial estate to stone steps which descended to a long-disused rail line. By day it was busy with walkers and cyclists. By night it was a netherworld, sunk between deep and overgrown cuttings, a haunt of foxes, owls and, when the walls of his office appeared to be closing in, of Cal. Sometimes he would stay out until sunrise, traversing the city unseen. This night, as he walked beneath a dome of skeletal branches interlocking like bare, bony fingers, he thought of Harry Fowler (he couldn’t have killed himself, could he?) and how arbitrary life was. A virtual mob was baying for his blood because he’d shown consideration for another human being. Yet Alex Lauder, who had reason to complain about Cal’s evasive, probably hurtful behaviour, was never critical, always dependable.

  Guilty conscience made Cal turn back. Even though it was late, past midnight, he would contact Alex. Cal would apologize for being a stranger. He’d let Alex talk, even if the prospect made Cal resentful, then reflective. Was he becoming more solitary in his habits, too comfortable in his own company and silence? He thought so.

  After opening his office door, he noticed a light on his worktable: someone ringing his mobile phone. The call ended as Cal approached. One of five during his absence, he discovered. Three were from Alex, one from Helen Jamieson, a detective sergeant with Police Scotland who was another friend – his only other friend – and the last from Olaf Haugen, a beachcomber, Norwegian by origin, who lived on the island of Texel off the Dutch coast. Olaf was a mutual acquaintance of Alex’s and Cal’s. The sea was their connection; for Cal and Olaf there was also a particular interest in the movement of flotsam.