‘We’ll try the Ship first,’ Gil decided, at which Patey brightened noticeably
Leaving the horses safely stabled and his man sampling the ale in the inn’s public room, Gil walked on along the curving shore and out towards the point on the western side of the bay. The scene round the saltpans came into view as he approached, a chaos of heaps of coal, heaps of ash, wooden sheds with baskets of salt visible in their shelter. The wide pans of rust-coated iron stood in a row under a long thatched roof, the red glow of the fires beneath them, with dark figures moving to and fro in the drifting smoke and steam. Seagulls swirled screaming over their heads. It made Gil think of a vision of hell by that mad Flemish painter Bosch. Almost he expected to encounter half a dozen devils with lolling tongues and extra faces, prodding a fat bishop into the boiling sea-water.
Instead, he found two weather-beaten men and a woman, armed with bleached wooden rakes and long scoops, trudging back and forward along the pans of bubbling white liquor, plying first rake and then scoop in each. Gulls swooped and mewed and pounced on what was spooned out of the pans and there was a tang of rotting fish in the smoke.
‘Aye, you get a’ things in the pans,’ agreed the eldest salt-boiler, a gnarled man with one red-rimmed eye, leaning on his rake. ‘A’ thing but coin,’ he added, and laughed at his own joke. ‘Crabs, o’ course, and whelks and that. A glove or a shoe, often enough.’
‘Never in pairs, but,’ said the woman, who appeared to be his wife. ‘Are they, Wullie?’
‘I found a drowned bairn,’ said the younger man. ‘Din’t I no, Mammy, I found a — ’
‘It wasny a bairn, Jock,’ said his mother repressively ‘The gentleman doesny want to hear about it.’
‘Aye, but it was,’ said Jock. ‘It was a’ green — ’
‘Jock! Get back to the pans!’
‘Can I help you, maister, or was ye just wanting to see the salt-boiling?’ asked the older man. ‘There’s many folk likes to see where their salt comes from. Ye see here,’ he said, without waiting for an answer, ‘we gather the water here wi’ the tide, in yonder tank in the rock, and lift it wi’ the bucket-gang and the auld pony, into the pans. We’ve a great system wi’ sluices to let the water run the length o’ the pans, and then we shut it off and set the fires.’
‘Two days, it takes, to come through the boil, doesn’t it no, Wullie?’ said his wife. ‘These was the first pans on the Forth to have sluices,’ she added proudly. ‘Ye’re looking at the best salt-pans in the Lothians, maister.’
‘I never knew there was so much involved,’ confessed Gil, looking round him. ‘Do you live down here on the shore? Is that your house?’
‘That? That’s no but a shelter for when the weather’s bad. We dwell up yonder.’ Wullie pointed to a cottage crouched some yards back from the shore. His wife turned back to the pans, and he continued to show Gil the process with a fluency which made it clear he was used to visitors. Gil heard him out, fascinated and appalled, peered into the shed at the straw skeps of dry salt waiting to be sold on, learned about creech and bittern and the use of bullocks’ blood to clarify the brine. ‘Swine’s blood’s no good,’ the man informed him, leaning on his rake, ‘the reason being, swine’s flesh has a natural affinity with salt, ye see, so the blood takes up the salt out the brine instead of drawing up the lees. Or so Peter Nicholson our clerk tells me. Ye need to let the blood stand till it turns rotten, o’ course, it’s no use when it’s fresh.’
‘Of course,’ echoed Gil, wondering if he could ever put salt on his food again.
‘I’ve heard there’s salt-pans at Ayr,’ conceded Wullie, ‘but the best sea salt comes from the shores of the Forth, maister, mind that. The coal’s handy, the sea-water’s good, and we get rock salt in from the Low Countries to strengthen the brine.’
‘How many salt-boilers are there along this shore?’ Gil asked. ‘I heard of a fellow called Lithgo one time.’
‘Simon Lithgo? Aye, that was a bad business.’ Wullie shook his head, and Gil made a questioning noise. ‘Oh, a bad business. Died at the pans, didn’t he. Found in his own Number Two pan, boiled to a turn. Coffined burial,’ he added with relish.
‘How did that happen?’ Gil asked, his thoughts racing. Surely the trouble at the Pow Burn couldn’t reach this far, he told himself, but -
‘Peter Nicholson reckoned his heart gave out. He should never ha’ been tending the pans on his own. And the worst o’ it was,’ Wullie added, ‘he’d no long got his last daughter wedded, he was working for hisself at last. More than ten year syne, that was. I’d no recalled Simon Lithgo in a many year. A bad business,’ he said again.
‘I never thought of it being a dangerous trade.’
‘That’s a good one!’ Wullie guffawed. ‘A dangerous trade! That’s a good one! Aye, you’re right, maister, it’s a dangerous trade. Now, I need to get back to my pans,’ he announced, scanning the line with his red-rimmed eye. ‘Number Fower’s about ready for skimming, I’d say. Ye’re welcome to take a dander about, maister, afore ye go.’
‘Thanks, I will,’ said Gil. ‘Are the Paterson lads here, by the way? Jock and Tam, I mean, the two sinkers. I was hoping to get a word wi’ them.’
‘Jock and Tam.’ The man stared at him, and rubbed at his closed eye-socket. ‘Aye, they’re here wi’ me. Jess’s nephews, they are. What was ye wanting them for? They’re up at the house, but they’re likely asleep the now. Here, is it you they’re looking for these last two week or more, to talk about the small coal from Lanarkshire? They’ve been right concerned for ye, maister.’
‘No, that’s not me, but I’m looking for the same fellow. I want to ask Jock and Tam about him. I’m hoping they can tell me where they parted from him.’
‘I wouldny know about that,’ said Wullie doubtfully. ‘They’ve never said.’
‘You’re telling me they’re asleep? How long before they’re stirring?’
‘No long.’ Wullie glanced at the sky. ‘They’ve been watching the nights for me while they’re here, since our Jock’s no to be depended on, poor laddie. Will I rouse them, or will ye wait, maister?’
Gil elected to wait, and strolled on along the shore a little in the evening light, leaving the man to get on with his work. Once he rounded the point the shouts of the men by the ships dwindled, and all he could hear was the bleating of sheep and lambs in the pastures inland, and the cries of the seabirds, and the steady swish of the tide beyond the expanse of mud. The east wind blew in briskly from the German Sea, and across the firth the salt-pans of Fife flew similar plumes of smoke.
He sat down on a bank of rough grass to consider what he should ask the Paterson men. He was still not sure whether he was investigating a murder. On previous occasions there had been a body to identify, or at least in one case a head; here he had a body which was not Murray, and Murray whose body was not to be found, whether the man was alive or dead. Perhaps he has been spirited away, he thought, grinning to himself. Maybe Fleming is right about witchcraft. But Alys had seen no sign of such a thing up at the Pow Burn.
And what had taken Alys into Carluke this morning? She had discovered a great deal for him, one way and another. He found himself smiling again at the thought of her, her endless capacity for surprising him, her incisive mind and astonishing competence. And the warmth of her skin under his hands, the way her lips clung to his. As always, he marvelled at his good fortune. An hendy hap ich habbe yhent, he thought. I wonder if she learned anything in the town?
The light was beginning to fail, and the tide was coming in across the wide stretch of mud before him. He rose, stretched, rubbed at the seat of his hose. The grass was not as dry as he had thought, and he must have been sitting here for quite some time.
Wullie and his wife and son had vanished, presumably into their house, and been replaced by two men who were on their knees checking the fires below the row of pans, raking at the hot coals with clanging iron implements. One of them noticed Gil walking in along the tide-line, and spoke to the other; they rose and came forward to meet him, big broad-shouldered men with the same economical walk he had noticed in the colliers.