Bird-watchers, he supposed. What were they called? Twitchers. God knows why. He’d never really seen the attraction of watching birds, they were nice enough things in themselves, but watching them was a bit like trainspotting. Jackson had never felt that autistic (mainly) male urge to collect and collate.
The sun disappeared almost as soon as he reached the island, rendering the atmosphere of the place oddly oppressive. Occasionally he stumbled across the relics of wartime fortifications, ugly pieces of concrete that gave the place a bleak, besieged air. Seagulls swooped and screeched threateningly overhead, defending their territory. It was much smaller than he had expected, it took him hardly any time to walk round the whole island. He encountered no one else, something he was rather glad of. He didn’t like to think what kind of weirdos might be lurking around in a place like this. Obviously he didn’t include himself in the weirdo category. Despite not seeing anyone, he had an odd feeling- not one he was willing to give any daylight credence to-of being watched. A little frisson of paranoia, nothing more. He wasn’t about to start getting fanciful, but when a swollen purple cloud appeared from the direction of the sea and made an inexorable progress up the Forth, it seemed like a welcome sign that it was time to go back.
He checked his watch. Four o’clock-teatime on Planet Julia. He remembered a warm, lazy afternoon they had spent together last summer in the Orchard Tea Rooms at Grantchester, the two of them stretched out on deck chairs beneath the trees, replete with afternoon tea. They had been on a brief, rather uncomfortable visit to Julia’s sister, who still lived in Cambridge and who had declined to join them on their “jaunt.” Julia’s word. Julia’s vocabulary was “chock-full” of strangely archaic words-“spiffing,” “crumbs,” “jeepers”-that seemed to have originated in some prewar girls’ annual rather than in Julia’s own life. For Jackson, words were functional, they helped you get to places and explain things. For Julia, they were freighted with inexplicable emotion.
“Afternoon tea” itself, of course, was one of Julia’s all-time favorite phrases (“Good enough words on their own, but together, perfect”). “Afternoon tea” usually trailed a few excessive adjectives in its wake-“scrumptious,” “yummy,” “heavenly.”
“Warm bakery basket” was another of her favorites, as were (mysteriously) “Autumn equinox” and “lamp black.” Certain words, she said, made her toes “positively curl with happiness”- “rum,” “vulgar,” “blanchisserie,” “hazard,” “perfidious,” “treasure,” “divertimenti.” Certain scraps and lines of poetry-“Of his bones are coral made” and “They flee from me that sometime did me seek”- sent her into sentimental rapture. The “Hallelujah Chorus” made her sob, as did Lassie, Come Home (the whole film, title to closing credits). Jackson sighed, Jackson Brodie, the all-time winner of the Mr. and Mrs. game show.
His phone buzzed like a trapped bee in his pocket. He peered at the screen-having an eye test would be something useful he could do while he was up here with nothing else to do. A text message from Julia read, “How r u? comp 4 r mott 2nite at our box! Luv Julia xxxxxxxxxxxx.” Jackson had no idea what the text meant, but he felt a surge of affection when he thought of Julia laboriously tapping in all those Xs.
He was about to set off back when his eye was caught by something on the rocks, below the remains of a concrete lookout. For a second he thought it was a bundle of clothing that had been dropped there, hoped it was a bundle of clothing, but it didn’t take him more than a skipped heartbeat to know it was a body that had been cast up by the tide. Jetsam, or was it flotsam?
A young woman, jeans and a vest top, bare feet, long hair. The policeman in him automatically thought, Hundred and twenty pounds, five foot six, although the height was a guess, as she was lying in a fetal position with her legs drawn up as if she’d gone to sleep on the rocks. If she’d been alive, he would have automatically thought, What a great body, but in death this judgment was translated into a lovely figure-aesthetic and asexual, as if he were contemplating the cold, marble limbs of a statue in the Louvre.
Drowned? Fresh, not a “floater” who had gone down and come back up again as a nightmare of slippery, bloated flesh. He was glad she wasn’t naked. Naked would immediately have meant something different. Jackson scrambled down the grass and onto rocks that were slippery with seaweed and barnacles. Nothing on the body that he could see, no ligature marks around the neck, her skull looked intact. No needle tracks, no tattoos, no birthmarks, no scars, she was a blank canvas, just tiny gold crucifixes on her ears. Her green eyes-half-open-were filmy with death and as blank as the aforesaid statue.
He could see some kind of card, like a business card, poking out from the cup of her bra. It was pale pink, an extra patch of wrinkled wet skin. He tweezed it out with his fingers. In black letters it said, favors-we do what you want us to do! and a phone number, a mobile. A prostitute? A lap dancer? Or maybe “Favors” was just a helpful charity that went around doing old ladies’ shopping. Yeah, that would be right, Jackson thought cynically.
He touched her cheek, he wasn’t sure why, she was clearly dead, perhaps he wanted her to feel a friendly touch. He wanted her to know, between dying before her time and being sliced open by the pathologist’s scalpel, that someone had felt for her predicament. A wave washed over both the girl and Jackson’s boots. She was beached below the tidemark, and he was going to have to haul her to higher ground. Another wave.The rising waters were going to take her back out to sea if he didn’t do something fast. The rising waters? When he stood up and looked back toward the causeway, he realized that the rock pools were filling up with seawater and the sand and shingle were almost obliterated. “Tide turning,” the twitcher woman had said. Not going out as he had thought but coming in. Shit.
Another wave came, lapping at Jackson’s boots. He was going to be trapped in this place if he didn’t get a move on. He took out his mobile and dialed 999, but there was only the squeaky electronic noise that indicated no signal. He remembered the camera in his pocket, at least he’d be able to give the police a record of her in situ before he moved her. He took a quick shot, not the usual holiday snap of a tourist, but then he had to abandon the idea of photographing anything because the water was rising so fast now that he had to wade into the water to grab hold of her. Just as he did, however, a wave bigger than all the ones that had gone before caught her, lifted her up, and rolled her away. Oh bugger, Jackson thought. He flung the camera down, threw off his jacket, and launched himself into the freezing gray water. The cold of the water was astonishing, the swell more powerful than it looked. Jackson didn’t think that any of his Celtic ancestors had been the seafaring sort. He was a good swimmer, but water wasn’t his element, he liked earth, the ground under his feet.
He had put a swimming pool in the garden of his house in France. It was tiled with little azure mosaics, and in summer the sun on the water was so dazzling that you could barely look at it. When he lived in Cambridge he used to go for a run every morning, but since moving to France it had seemed a ridiculous thing to do. No one ran in rural France. They drank. If you didn’t drink you weren’t part of the social fabric. The French seemed able to down liters of alcohol without facing any consequence whereas Jackson felt the consequences almost every morning. So he swam in his turquoise-mosaic swimming pool, up and down, up and down, lap after lap, to swim off the alcohol, the boredom.