Tombstoning Read online

  ‘I’m hungry,’ said Amy, turning to her mother and spotting David’s stray hand which had come to rest on Nicola’s waist. He removed it, not quickly enough but Amy ignored it and asked: ‘David, do you want to come to Granny and Grandpa’s for tea?’

  David looked at Nicola who just smiled and shrugged.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he said, as Arbroath appeared from behind the headland at the start of the cliffs, looking from this distance at once beautiful and serene in the soft late afternoon sunlight.

  12

  The Search

  ‘There’s more of everything, so don’t be afraid to get stuck in.’

  A massive, steaming plate of steak pie, roast potatoes and veg was plonked down in front of David and he smiled.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Cruickshank.’

  ‘Oh, for goodness sake, call me Bel, everyone does.’

  Isobel Cruickshank was a handsome, petite woman in her mid-fifties with an air of amused and friendly authority about her. Her long brown hair had flecks of grey through it and was tied up in an untidy knot at the back of her head with a pencil sticking through it. She looked considerably younger than she was, as if bringing up five kids had been the easiest thing in the world. She was at least six inches shorter than Nicola, but that aside there were striking similarities – the wide mouth, the slight frame, the animated nose all clearly linked Bel to her eldest daughter. David watched as she headed back towards the kitchen and considered the notion that looking at a girl’s mum tells you what she’ll be like when she’s older. He liked what he saw, and he smiled again.

  Nicola’s dad appeared from the kitchen drying his hands on a towel. He was a stocky man with thick forearms and greying hair swept back from his forehead. He wasn’t much taller than Bel, so Nicola’s height was just one of those strange genetic quirks, David supposed, but he wasn’t lacking in authority either. A lifetime of engineering lent him a keen analytical mind, something he applied as much to people and conversations as to the aircraft parts he dealt with at work, or the motorbike he was currently trying to reassemble in the back garden.

  ‘Know anything about bikes?’ he asked David.

  ‘Afraid not,’ said David.

  He had met Alex Cruickshank a few times as a kid, and always been slightly intimidated by him, but so far today he’d seemed a perfectly likeable character. Admittedly he had been stuck out the back tinkering with gaskets and spark plugs with oily hands since David arrived, but still, he didn’t seem nearly as ominous a man as David remembered. He wondered what Alex would make of the fact he had screwed his daughter less than twenty-four hours before, in a public park no less. But then Alex had five kids, three of them girls, and umpteen grandchildren, so he supposed you got over that sort of thing eventually.

  Alex sat at the head of the table. Nicola was opposite David, with Amy next to her, and Bel bustled back through and sat at the opposite end from Alex. The table was one of the extendable types, and had clearly seen plenty of usage over the years – gouges here, scuffs there, scratches covering the faded varnished wood – but it was at its most compact these days, all of the kids having left home except the youngest, Andy, still sponging free board and rent from his parents at the age of twenty-three. Andy had already skipped out to meet mates and go out on the piss, something David was glad of because he knew Nicola and Andy didn’t get on. So it was just the five of them for a cosy family dinner. It made David think about his own parents, no doubt sitting sipping the local vin de pays in the garden of their converted barn. As an only child, he’d never had the noisy security of big family meals, familiar chaos ringing in his ears, it had just been him and his rather bohemian parents who, outnumbering him two adults to one child, had pretty much treated him as a grown-up through most of his childhood, boring adult conversations and all.

  ‘So you were back for the funeral,’ Alex was saying. ‘Terrible business, really.’

  ‘Alex, I’m sure David doesn’t want to talk about that,’ said Bel, although she was looking at Amy as she said it. It must be good, having grandparents looking out for you, thought David. He had never known any of his own grandparents, something which led to inevitable self-pity, although thinking about it now, for the first time he thought about how it must’ve been for his parents, having their own folks die at an early age. He felt slightly ashamed he had never considered it before, but then he rarely considered his parents at all these days, something they’d made easy by living in another country.

  ‘It’s all right, Mum, Amy knows about what happened to Gary,’ said Nicola.

  ‘He fell off the cliffs when he was drunk,’ said Amy, matter of fact.

  ‘Were you good friends with him?’ said Alex, looking at David.

  ‘Not really. We were mates at school, but I hadn’t seen him in years until last weekend.’

  ‘Awful business,’ said Bel, seemingly resigned to the topic. ‘His parents must be distraught. How were they at the funeral?’

  ‘As you might expect,’ said Nicola. ‘In shock, I think.’

  Nicola’s dad seemed to be considering something as he chewed a lump of steak.

  ‘David, you were friends with the Anderson boy at school as well, weren’t you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Another shocking business,’ said Bel. ‘Such a waste. Such a terrible waste.’

  ‘It always is,’ said Alex, taking a swig of Guinness from a can. ‘Remember when that Cargill boy killed himself in his car, Bel? It was the same for his parents.’

  David realized straight away that this was Neil’s older brother, Craig, who had died when he and Neil had been about ten. The name Cargill just kept cropping up.

  ‘Did you know the Cargills, then?’ asked David.

  ‘We did a little, back then,’ said Bel. ‘Of course they’re both dead now.’

  ‘Are we talking about the same people, here?’ asked Nicola, a little wide-eyed. She’d clearly never heard this chat from her parents before. ‘The parents of Neil who was in our year at school?’

  ‘And his older brother Craig, who crashed his car – yes, that’s them,’ said Alex, looking to Bel for agreement.

  ‘Connie and Jim,’ she said. ‘Jim died years ago, now, maybe ten years ago? Lung cancer I think it was that got him. Connie died a few months later, from a massive stroke.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said David under his breath.

  ‘Bit of a cursed family,’ said Alex, wiping his plate with a slice of bread. ‘I feel sorry for Neil, being the only one left.’

  ‘I never knew you knew the Cargills,’ said Nicola.

  ‘Everyone knows everyone around here, dear,’ said Bel. ‘Anyway, we didn’t really know them too well by the time Craig died. We knew them from when we were all at school together. Jim was quite a hard man, with a temper. I felt sorry for Connie sometimes. I don’t really think she knew what it was going to be like, with him and the two boys in the house. I met her occasionally in the street, but she never really said much.’

  ‘Well, people change, Bel,’ said Alex, ‘and circumstances change. None of us really know what it’s like in anyone else’s home.’

  ‘It must’ve been terrible when Craig died, though,’ said Bel. ‘Just like it must’ve been awful for the Spinks, and for the Andersons back when Colin had his accident.’

  There was so much death around, thought David. He had never really considered how the deaths of the young affected everyone in a community like this, in the spider’s web of lives intertwined genetically and geographically and spread across the generations. He hadn’t ever given much thought to how Colin’s parents, or his two younger sisters, must’ve felt when Colin was found dead. He had been so young and selfish at the time, and his tunnel vision shamed him now. He wondered what Colin’s sisters were doing. He struggled even to remember their names – one was called Jude, was it? Or Judith? And the other was Emma or Emily – definitely Emma. He had carried Colin’s death around for years, but for them it must’ve been – must still be, p
resumably – a thousand times worse. They would only just have been in their teens, if that, when he died. How did the uncertainty of his death affect them? How did the death affect them, full stop? He hoped they’d found a way to work through it all.

  Was he over it? What did that even mean? The event had irrevocably changed his life, but then every other event in his life had also affected him in some minute way. He felt dizzy as he imagined the infinite twists and turns his life took every microsecond of every minute of every day, how all other possibilities vanished, all other alternate universes collapsed into the one existing one, all potential futures simply fizzled out of being once every infinitesimal decision was made, moment by excruciating moment. It terrified him, both the myriad of possibilities his life could take at any moment, and the way those possibilities were only that, just possibilities, and then they were gone, phut, quicker than the blink of an eye.

  He thought about what Nicola had said about the past making us what we are. He had disagreed with her back then, insisting in his obstinate naivety that you made yourself up every morning brand new, you could reinvent yourself with every second of every day. And in a sense maybe that was right, you could be an entirely different person from moment to moment, with each event that occurred changing the concept and reality of the you that existed from then on, but it was all built on the bedrock of past experience, it was all down to what had gone before, it was all based on the person you were the moment before that, and the moment before that, right back to when you were conceived, and beyond, into the past of your parents, their parents and your ancestors further back beyond that, right back to the creatures crawling out the primeval swamp and breathing the air around them. The past did make you who you were, and not just your own past, but the history of the world, the way people had struggled to survive for centuries, all so that he could be sitting here right now, sticking a forkful of steak pie into his mouth and thinking about the endless terrifying possibilities of life. He felt idiotic for ever suggesting to Nicola – this wonderful girl sitting across the table from him – that human beings were clean slates, that reinvention was easy, that the past didn’t matter to the present. It was a revelation, and he felt the weight of the generations suddenly pressing down on his shoulders. All those millions of eyes from the past watching him from the ether, waiting to see what he was going to do next. He didn’t know what he was going to do next. But whatever it was it would change him, it would change the world, it would change the future. He felt sick at the thought.

  The conversation was going on around him, and Alex had just finished saying something. Nicola was staring at him as if he should be listening, as if he’d just missed something important.

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘I said he used to do the lobster pots,’ said Alex. ‘Gerry, that I know from the snooker club, said that he just turned up one day with a boat and a few pots and started fishing for lobsters. It’s a pretty tight-knit community out there, and they didn’t take too kindly to having an outsider pitch up and start fishing the same water as the rest of them. They tried to speak to him about it, but he just brushed them off. After that he pretty much kept himself to himself. Fished his own little corner and never spoke to the rest of them. Gerry reckoned it didn’t impact on the rest of their catches much so they just let him get on with it.’

  ‘I’m sorry, who are we talking about?’

  ‘Your friend, Neil Cargill. We were talking about how hard it must’ve been for him to lose his parents, after what had happened to his brother and all, and I was telling Nicola that he just turned up one day in Auchmithie, started fishing for lobsters.’

  ‘Is he still there, do you know?’ David couldn’t prevent his voice rising a little in pitch.

  ‘That’s the thing. One morning he just didn’t turn up at the harbour. He stopped the fishing as suddenly as he started it, according to Gerry, and they never saw him again. They didn’t think too much about it, and they weren’t sorry to see him go, since all he’d done was take a few of their lobsters and never said anything to anybody.’

  ‘When was this?’

  ‘Oh, must be a couple of years ago, now,’ said Alex. ‘Would that be right, Bel? All that business was before Gerry’s daughter’s wedding, so it would be almost two years ago, I think.’

  David thought about the past. He wondered how the past had affected Neil, how the events of his life had played out, and how that had shaped him. What was he like now? Where was he now? Still alone in the world? Parents dead, brother long dead. He’d left the army, left the police and left the fishing. What was he doing now? David thought about those collapsing possible universes. Surely that meant there were infinite possible future universes ahead of him? That every decision he made from now on could take his life any direction he wanted? There were infinite futures for him, for him and Nicola, for him and the rest of the world. But actually it didn’t feel like that. He felt like he was getting drawn into something that he wasn’t sure he wanted to be drawn into, a future that somehow was going to involve Neil. Although theoretically he was free to choose whichever path he wanted, the past bore down on him with magnificent graceful pressure, guiding his hand, pushing him towards the one person left alive who could try to make some kind of sense out of all the death and hurt around him.

  The conversation had moved on. He looked at Nicola, who was laughing and joking with Amy. She was serenely beautiful, he thought, and his heart swelled with admiration, with lust, and with the beginnings of love for her. He wanted a future with her, with her and Amy. He felt as if he knew that for the first time now, but he couldn’t see how it was possible until he sorted out the past. He had to untangle everything, the knotted threads that linked the death of Colin with the death of Gary, the past with the present.

  He had to find Neil Cargill.

  The Condor base was an unprepossessing green expanse set back from the Forfar road, surrounded by a ten-foot fence topped with barbed wire and razor wire. David drove right up to the front gate and, without having to show any ID, was ushered through by a teenager in camouflage gear pointing a rifle at the ground. The road wound past an airfield, an artificial ski slope and an assault course before coming to a complex of dozens of small brick buildings, their corrugated metal roofs glinting in the sunlight.

  David had been here once before when he was a kid, about ten or eleven. Every now and then the Marines had an open day, when locals were encouraged to go along and presumably see the human face of the killing machine that was the 45 Commando Unit. He’d had a go on the assault course, and needed a leg up over the climbing wall from one of the marines watching over proceedings. There had been ice cream and games to play, as well as a tank they were allowed to clamber over and pretend to drive. The incongruity of it all had passed him by as an eleven-year-old. A year later kids in his class had dads who were fighting in the Falklands War on the other side of the world, but he never equated them with the friendly guy helping him over the wall.

  Before he’d left the Fairport David had found a couple of local maps on a bookshelf in the residents’ lounge through the back. He looked for Condor on both and while the buildings and airfield were outlined, there were no names anywhere for what they might be. Was this down to security? To prevent terrorists from blowing the place up? If so it wasn’t much use, and the same went for the razor wire and fence surrounding the place, if you could just drive right up to the headquarters of the place with a bomb in your car. He momentarily felt a bit unnerved by the fact he was on military soil under false pretences, but since he’d come this far he might as well get on with it. He got out the car and went into the building he’d been directed to at the front gate.

  Two minutes later he was sitting opposite Sergeant Major Wilkins, a clean-cut man with a Home Counties accent, muscles bursting out of a casual camouflage uniform and a turquoise beret perched at a clinically precise angle on his head. The only previous experience of sergeant majors David had was watching the guy with th
e ’tache who shouted at everyone about being a bunch of pooftas in It Ain’t Half Hot Mum when he was a kid. This man in front of him seemed an altogether more real and balanced prospect. He was poised and composed, polite but firm, and almost immediately David knew he wasn’t going to get anything out of him.

  He started by asking general questions about the Marines and the 45 Commando. It turned out they were back on base after having spent time in Iraq, and before that, Afghanistan. David tried to equate this with the pictures of both conflicts he’d seen on the television, but here, with the sun beaming in through the blinds of a neat and tidy office, and a view of typically nondescript green rolling Scottish fields out the window, it seemed impossibly far away.

  Wilkins was clearly media trained, thought David. He answered questions efficiently and pleasantly, but without giving anything much away. David asked about the relationship between the marines and the local community, and got the expected platitudes in response. It turned out that the 45 had been awarded the Freedom of Angus a couple of years ago, a symbolic gesture from the local council, but one which meant that any member of the unit was technically entitled to march ‘bayonets fixed, drums beating and flags flying’ anywhere in the county. David laughed as he thought of the running battles between the casuals and the marines that used to go on down the West Port when he was a teenager. A gang of casuals, in a spectacular display of idiocy that only mindless thugs could muster, would jump a marine and batter him one night, only to have the whole unit descend on the centre of town the following night, picking fights with anyone who looked even vaguely like they might know a casual. The fact that these men were trained to kill with their bare hands seemed to pass the casuals by, or maybe that was the whole point. Either way, David learnt quickly to keep his head down and keep out of trouble. Around that time Arbroath had featured in a centre-spread story in a national tabloid under the headline ‘Arbroath: A Town in Conflict’. A framed copy of the article had found its way behind the bar in the Malacca, the casuals’ favourite haunt which sat right across the road from the Waverley, where the marines used to hang out. He imagined the faces of casuals sitting drinking their bottles of Grolsch in the Malacca, if dozens of marines had come marching out the Waverley towards them, ‘bayonets fixed, drums beating and flags flying’. He wondered what had happened to the casuals. It was a frightening phenomenon of Thatcher’s Britain in the 80s. The guys he knew that ran with the Arbroath Soccer Society had been well educated, well turned out, aspiring young men who just happened to turn into animalistic thugs every Saturday, using a football match as a thinly-veiled excuse. They used to phone rival gangs – either one of the local crews from Montrose or Forfar, or bigger gangs like the Aberdeen Soccer Casuals or Hibs’ Capital City Service – for orchestrated fights in town centres. It was ritualistic, violent madness. It seemed to have died out, from what David could tell, although maybe it had just moved elsewhere, moved underground, changed from being organized into sporadic pockets of random violence. After all, it was the same attitude which now pervaded Lothian Road in Edinburgh, and the main drinking streets of towns and cities all over Scotland, on Friday and Saturday nights.