Aggie had scooped up all Knacker’s discarded clothes and put them into the drier, and gave him Gaz’s dressing-gown, and passed him a mug of tea. Neither of them had flinched, looked away, registered a reaction while Knacker had been naked: Gaz had noticed. He was good at noticing, always had been.
She said, “You’ll do that – you will, won’t you?”
Gaz nodded.
Aggie kissed him and he saw the fleeting, half-hearted smile of Knacker, like taking kids’ sweets was nothing to be proud of, and was kissed again. He went into the bedroom to fill a grip, and the drier churned in the kitchen, and he heard his Aggie and his tormentor talking history: she was on Orkney’s old monuments and he was gently explaining his love of the Roman artefacts that the archaeologists dug up near Hadrian’s Wall. He could not have refused, wouldn’t have known how, and remembered the officer – what the officer had done.
Doubt from her, fleeting, “You’ll be all right, won’t you? Just ‘in and out’. Yes?”
And remembered how it had been and how the illness had scourged him and felt Debbie’s chin against his fist, and the pain of the handcuffs on his wrists, and the shaking and shame of standing in the dock of a magistrate’s court, and coming to the island and the hope that the past was buried deep and could not resurface.
“I expect so…”
Chapter 4
Gaz walked down the path to the gate, over the gravel where Knacker had sat through the night, and Aggie trailed after him. The island’s taxi waited for them and Knacker was by the open rear door, and his clothes – after a fashion – had dried in the machine and were almost wearable.
The wind had dropped and the rain was now far out to sea, and the sun glinted between powder-puff clouds. Gaz thought the weather had been a theatrical effect and exploited by Knacker, as if the limit to his resources was not easily measured. He had been told to leave the bag he had packed but had been advised what to wear. Just bring some rough ground walking boots, what you’re comfortable in. No clothing. All will be given you. Passport, papers and credit cards? Not necessary, we handle all that, and a float for cash. We’ve had a passport put together. Which meant that his acceptance of the job had been taken for granted and that no one had ever seriously considered that he would stand up at his full height and say, ‘Sorry and all that, but I don’t care a flying fuck for what happened at that village all that time ago, and have no interest – none whatsoever – in seeing a young Russian officer, FSB you tell me, face any form of justice, of the legal kind or extra-judicial. So, please, get off my property and travel back to where you came from because I have important work to be getting on with, decorating and home repairs and mowing. Goodbye…’
What to say to Aggie? Usually, when uncertain, he said little, less if possible. He thought that Knacker had played her consummately. There were anglers who came to the Orkneys for wild brown trout, and none could have coaxed a beast on to a barbed hook with such skill. She had floundered and had spoken the spiel, and he had not been able to fight her. Her use was over. She stood by the taxi, her head drooping, and had learned much of him that he had wanted concealed, and had blurted out that he should go as asked. Maybe she appreciated that what was done and what was said could not be revoked.
Knacker said to her, “Thank you Aggie, and I’m obliged to you for making my clothes presentable. We’ll take good care of him. Have a nice day.”
She caught Gaz’s hand, squeezed it. A kiss and a cuddle beside the taxi with old Lachlan eying them? Did not seem appropriate. Gaz nodded to her. He felt haunted, and betrayed, and isolated.
They drove away and Knacker said that he’d a bag to collect at the hotel. Gaz knew Lachlan because he did pickups for the holiday owners that Gaz worked for, and some crab fishing, was useful at plumbing and helped kids with football, so the news of Gaz going away would be round the island, and round again, within the hour. Saw Murdo out with his sheep but close to the road and he’d have seen Gaz, and saw Lisa who cleaned many of the houses where Gaz worked. The whole island would have known that an aircraft had made a sharp descent at the core of the storm overnight, and known that if it had come for Gaz then there was much he had hidden from them. At the hotel, he sat in the back of the taxi while Knacker went for his bag and to pay his bill and Lachlan waited for him to speak, but he didn’t oblige.
He thought of a great man who used to slip away from the islands 1000 years before, so Aggie had told him. The times of Sweyn Asleifsson, cunning and clever, and living as a pirate off deceit and subterfuge, using an island as a safe haven; a predator and a plunderer, and taking Ingirid as his wife after slaughtering her lawful husband, and unable to settle and restless and chasing excitement and the whiff of risk, probably chained to his past and unable to put down roots, and talked of but rarely seen… Gaz doubted he would last long enough as an Orcadian to feature in its past, be subject to a saga.
Knacker came out, carrying a grip, had changed from his suit into casual dress, an olive-green wax coat and rough corduroys and heavy brogue shoes, a tattersall shirt and a flat cap and might have been going to a gymkhana. They were driven to the airstrip, out on the northern shore, and the wind-sock hung limp. Knacker seemed to add an extra bank note to the sum required for payment to Lachlan and murmured something about meeting Gaz when he came back, made it sound as if he were off for a visit to a mainland dentist. He carried Knacker’s bag, because he was a subordinate, no longer a civilian handyman and running from the past. Back in uniform and subject to those disciplines and Lachlan’s eyes seemed to beseech an answer. Gaz asked his own question.
“There was a hard man here, centuries ago, Sweyn Asleifsson. What happened to him – I never read that, his end.”
“You’d not want to know his end. Safe journey.”
“What was his end? In his bed?”
“And with his woman warm beside him? Want to believe it… He went away, didn’t have to. Should have stayed for a harvest. Went over the sea and seemed to win a battle but not a war, died fighting. The last man to fall. It’s in the saga… No good came of him.”
On the island, as Gaz had learned, they told stories as if the events had happened yesterday, and they had read them in a newspaper or seen them on a TV news bulletin… had a different sense of the past. A young pilot greeted them and seemed to carry Gaz farther back in his life and he climbed up into the Cessna as if he were scrambling on to a Chinook ramp or into a Puma hatch. They took off. No bullshit from the pilot and no nostalgic looping circle of the coast line so he might spot his bungalow or find Aggie making her way to the hotel where she’d offload her pottery, no chance to spot the various properties he looked after and the lawns he was supposed to cut. He wondered if he would ever come back, ever want to, and left behind in his temporary home was little that was precious to him, nothing that was permanent. Knacker was on a call, less than a minute, and his hand shielded his words, and all that Gaz heard of it was “… good luck then, Arthur, and give it them hard…”
He was on his way and Knacker said nothing to him but sat beside the pilot, ignored him… He could remember the officer, the Russian, would never forget him.