Crash Land Page 6

  Ingrid pulled over and wound the window down.

  ‘Ross,’ she said.

  ‘It’s yourself, Ingrid,’ the officer said. He rested his hand on the roof of the car and leaned over. ‘And the lad.’

  ‘It is.’

  Finn caught the look the cop gave him. Blame. He’d have to get used to that. He stared at his broken hand, rubbed the splint. Felt his chest rise and fall, his ribs stretch and contract, the pain slide along them.

  ‘Terrible business,’ Ross said.

  Ingrid had her hands on the wheel. ‘Aye.’

  ‘Terrible business,’ Ross said again to himself.

  Ingrid nodded beyond the terminal building to the tarmac. ‘How’s it going?’

  ‘All right.’

  ‘What are you up to?’

  ‘We’re after the missing lassie. Stopping folk, in case they’ve seen anything.’

  ‘She’s still not turned up?’

  Ross shook his head. ‘They thought maybe she was thrown clear, but we haven’t found anything.’

  He meant a body.

  ‘Well, if she was out all night, she’ll have hypothermia by now,’ Ingrid said.

  The cop looked at Finn. ‘We just don’t know, do we? We don’t know.’

  Finn was surprised to hear his own voice bounce around inside the car. ‘I hope you find her.’

  Ross paused. ‘Me too. There’s enough dead folk already.’

  The cop thought Finn was the reason, the killer. The lad responsible for the biggest death toll on Orkney since the Vikings.

  Ross looked behind the Skoda. Finn glanced in the side mirror and saw another car coming up. The cop straightened and gave two taps on their car roof. ‘Better get this next one, Ingrid.’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘Let me know if you hear any news. And obviously if his nibs here remembers anything.’

  ‘Of course.’

  Talking about him as if he wasn’t there, treating him like a little kid. It was no more than he deserved. Finn’s face flushed.

  Ingrid wound the window up and drove on.

  Finn craned his neck to keep the runway in sight. In between fire engines he caught glimpses of the wreckage, the crumpled face of the cockpit, the ragged edge where the fuselage was torn apart, the broken wing.

  He thought about Maddie. Had she found shelter or was she lying in a ditch, frozen to death?

  They passed the turn for Tankerness then over the hill and the airport was gone. Finn closed his eyes and pictured Maddie playing with her gin and tonic at the bar, eyes flicking up, licking lime juice from her finger.

  He took a breath that stung his left lung, then coughed, pain slicing through his chest. He lifted his hand away from his mouth and there was a light spray of pink blood across the palm. He got a tissue and wiped it away, checking to make sure Ingrid hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Did you see the counsellor?’ she said, eyes on the road.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Janet’s a good woman, knows her job. She’s not had her troubles to seek.’

  They trundled in silence past Groatsetter and Veltigar, bleak brown fields on either side, sheep grazing where they could. Ingrid turned right at the Bay of Suckquoy, towards St Mary’s.

  Finn felt Ingrid’s hand on his leg. A couple of reassuring squeezes, then she lifted it to change gear. She glanced at him.

  ‘Let’s just get you home. Everything will be fine.’

  13

  They pulled up outside Ingrid’s cottage. As the engine cut, the whoop of the wind took over and the car rocked. Finn eased himself out, holding on to the door in case it caught in a gust. Ingrid looked at him over the roof of the car. He smiled and turned to gaze over the firth. He was always amazed by the view from here. High on this southern headland, they could see for miles over the Pentland Firth to Muckle Skerry, its lighthouse a thin needle against the horizon, then west to Stroma and the Scottish mainland, a muscled shoulder of land peeking through successive squalls of rain blowing across the country towards Scandinavia.

  ‘Come on in,’ Ingrid said. ‘I’ll get the kettle on.’

  Finn shook his head. ‘I need some air, I think I’ll walk along to see the old guys.’

  Ingrid frowned at him, her hair whipping in the wind. ‘You need rest.’

  Finn rubbed at his scalp. ‘I need to clear my head.’ He walked round and touched her arm. ‘It’s fine.’ He kissed her cheek and zipped his coat up as he headed back along the road.

  ‘Don’t get blown off a cliff,’ Ingrid said.

  He raised his good hand and walked away. ‘The old guys’ was a joke between the two of them, how they referred to the Neolithic skeletons along the road in the Tomb of the Eagles. About half a mile, hang a right at the visitor centre then north along the headland and you got to the ancient site, a burial cairn from five thousand years ago, full of dead bodies and the eagle bones that gave the place its name. It was found by old Eddie Lewis on his farm years ago after a storm, the wind ripping away topsoil to expose the structure. The Lewises still ran the place as a tourist attraction, one of the few on the island not tied up by Historic Scotland. Lewis deserved credit for looking after it. Everyone on the islands knew stories of farmers who’d found similar remains on their land but had kicked the mud back in place to avoid the disruption a historical find would bring. Orkney felt like it must’ve been seething with life back then, at a time when the Egyptians were building pyramids and the Greeks were marching into Persia. And here, on this little rock halfway to the Arctic, communities were living and thriving without drawing attention to themselves. Finn loved that.

  The Tomb of the Eagles was closed to the public over the winter, except by appointment. The Lewises used tourist money to take themselves off to a timeshare in Lanzarote for three months, leaving Ingrid to arrange the occasional tour. Orkney wasn’t a winter destination and tourists rarely made it to the furthest tip of the islands, preferring to canter around the more accessible Ring of Brodgar, Maes Howe and Skara Brae.

  So Finn and Ingrid had the place to themselves for the most part. Sometimes, when the weather closed in and the waves battered the shore beneath Ingrid’s cottage, it felt like they were the only people on earth. Other times, when the clouds lifted, the expanse of sea and sky was breathtaking. A couple of farmhouses further back from the coast were the only other signs of civilisation for miles, their sheep shuffling to the fence at feeding time. Finn loved the isolation, the solitude.

  He was almost there now, smears of leftover snow in the dark crannies of the field. The way the headland looped round, the sea was on his right now, nothing for hundreds of miles until Norway. Finn imagined Vikings ploughing through icy waves, preparing to land.

  He reached the tomb. Nothing much to look at from this side, just a grassy hillock until you turned the corner and saw the stone wall and small square opening. He pulled the rope out of the hole, bringing the low trolley with it. This was part of the appeal for tourists, the ramshackle spirit of the experience. They had to lie on the thing and pull the rope to get in. Finn looked out to sea at the shimmering waves then lay down, his rib aching, and pulled until he was inside and the silence shrouded him.

  It was larger than looked possible from the outside, a Stone Age Tardis. The roof was three metres high, light streaming in through plastic-covered holes. The dirt was packed down, millennia of visitors trampling the space, countless steps in and out. He’d been coming here for as long as he could remember, a space to think.

  To his left was a row of five skulls. They’d been found in a heap with others, which were now down at the visitor centre along with the eagle bones. But the Lewises had decided to leave some here in situ for the tourists, like a deathly chorus line. Finn liked to imagine them commenting sarcastically on tourists after they left, bitching and gossiping. Right now he felt they were mocking him, toothy grins laughing at his situation. He’d cheated death, but what about the others on the plane with families and friends grieving for th
em?

  He sat on the ground and closed his eyes, listened to the wind. The muffled sound of it made him feel like he was in a cocoon.

  The plink of his ringtone made him flinch. He was surprised to get a signal out here. He slid his phone out with his good hand and looked at the screen. Not someone in his address book and not a number he recognised.

  ‘Hello?’

  Silence for a few seconds, then a voice he knew.

  ‘Hi, Finn.’

  ‘Jesus, Maddie, where are you?’

  ‘I didn’t know who else to turn to.’

  ‘The police are looking for you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You left us,’ Finn said.

  ‘I had my reasons.’

  ‘Fuck’s sake, I could’ve been dying.’

  ‘You were OK, I checked,’ she said. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  Finn frowned. ‘I’m not sure what I remember. What about the others? Did you check on them?’

  Nothing down the line.

  Eventually Finn spoke. ‘Were you outside all night?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  There was a long pause.

  ‘I’m in a cowshed.’ She laughed under her breath. ‘It stinks but it’s warm.’

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Maddie said. ‘I mean, I’ve been better but I’m OK.’

  Finn looked at the skulls staring at him. ‘You need to go home.’

  ‘That’s the last place I’m going.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me you were married?’

  ‘I’m not.’

  ‘So the police have it wrong?’

  ‘I’m leaving him,’ Maddie said. ‘I mean I’ve left him.’

  ‘The police have sent someone to your house, see if you went back there.’

  ‘Christ, that’s all I need.’

  Finn walked up and down, dragging his fingertips along the wall. ‘Look, whatever’s going on, the police can sort it out.’

  ‘I can’t go to the police.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘They’ll make me go back.’

  ‘They won’t.’

  ‘You have no idea,’ Maddie said. ‘He manipulates people, twists them round his finger. He’ll persuade them we’re a happy couple, and I won’t get another chance to get away.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘You don’t know.’ Anger in her voice overtaking the fear.

  ‘Take it easy.’

  ‘He’ll paint me as some psychotic bitch and the police will believe him, especially after all this shit with the plane.’

  Finn took a breath and heard her do the same. The wind whistled outside the cairn. Finn looked up at the hole in the roof and saw clouds racing east. He put his hand to his rib.

  ‘I need your help,’ Maddie said.

  ‘Why me?’

  ‘I don’t have anyone else. All my friends are his friends. I’m alone.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to get off these stupid islands. I can’t believe what happened on the plane, this is so fucked up.’

  ‘You just left,’ Finn said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You left us there, Maddie, in the plane.’

  ‘I told you, I couldn’t go back.’

  ‘But people were injured. You could’ve helped.’

  ‘The ambulances were already on the runway.’

  ‘People died.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Seven people.’

  Silence for a beat.

  ‘Christ,’ she said.

  Finn walked the length of the chamber. The skulls smiled at him.

  ‘Give me one reason why I should help you,’ he said. ‘Why I shouldn’t just hang up.’

  ‘I need you,’ Maddie said. ‘I’ve got no one else.’

  ‘Go to the police.’

  ‘I’ve told you, I can’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘If you don’t help me, I’ll die.’

  The last word caught in her throat. Finn closed his eyes, saw two empty glasses on the bar at the airport, the shape of her legs in those jeans. He pictured the cabin jerking and twisting, ripping apart, the propeller slicing through metal like it was nothing.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘I need somewhere to lie low,’ Maddie said. ‘Until I work things out. I can’t stay in this shed, the farmer’s already been in this morning for milking, I almost got caught. Can you think of somewhere I could hide until I get my shit together?’

  14

  He was almost at St Margaret’s Hope when he saw the familiar sign for the cemetery at St Peter’s Kirk off to the right. Sod it, Maddie could wait in the cowshed another half hour. He turned at the war memorial, went past the houses of Haybrake and Brandyquoy. He smiled at the place names, Orkney was full of quirky ones. Already on the few miles from Ingrid’s place he’d passed Suckquoy, Mucklehouse, Wasbister and Quoyhorsetter. Every stretch of road was like a little found poem in your mouth.

  It was only a couple of miles over a rise in the land, sheep and cows grazing in grassy fields. The road was single-track with passing places as he went over a crossroads and past a lone, nameless standing stone surrounded by greylag geese. The North Sea was dead ahead as the road sloped down to the shore and ended at the kirk, a simple eighteenth-century block of grey stone with green moss spread across the slate roof.

  A track stretched from the church down to the beach and headland beyond. Marram grass was threatening to engulf the track, which disappeared before it reached the sand.

  Finn got out and closed the car door. He opened the low iron gate to the graveyard and went in. He felt tiny grains of rusted metal on his fingers. This was a new part of the cemetery, not like the ancient graveyards scattered all over the islands, and yet the elements had already set about the gate, the stone dyke and the gravestones.

  The area where Sally was buried was still half empty. Finn wondered where they would put people once it filled up. Burying people was unsustainable, wasn’t it? If you maintained and respected each grave forever, the whole planet would eventually be full of rotting corpses. And yet there was no crematorium in Orkney, so that hadn’t been an option.

  He and Ingrid had discussed the funeral, but he couldn’t remember much about it. At some point she’d asked about burial or cremation, Dundee or Orkney. Dundee was Finn’s home but despite twenty years living there it didn’t feel like Sally’s. Finn was fine with her being brought north and laid to rest next to her dad.

  He walked to the grave. He’d visited twice in the last week, the polished black granite so familiar to him. He looked at the headstone and tried to conjure something up in his mind. An image of Sally smiling at him over a shared double pepperoni in Pizza Express, the look on her face when he told her he’d been accepted into Duncan of Jordanstone. He remembered her crying at the end of a documentary about whales. It wasn’t even sad, she was just overwhelmed by their grace in the water. Then she laughed, called herself ridiculous as she wiped the tears away and got up to put the kettle on. He’d been embarrassed at the time, a teenager trying to distance himself from the generation that spawned him. What a waste of time it was trying to be different, trying to be original, when we’re all just the same.

  He looked beyond the kirk. He could see the next headland south of here, then the one behind that, jutting out into the water like they thought they would last forever. But they would crumble into the sea eventually, just like this churchyard and all the bodies underground. Beyond that second headland, a few miles round the coast, was the Tomb of the Eagles and Ingrid’s place. You could walk it on a good day with the right boots.

  He looked back at the grave and his grandad’s stone beside it. Ingrid would be next, he supposed, there was a space for her on the other side. What about him, what would happen to him when he died? Who would take care of that?

  He ran a finger along the top of Sally�
��s gravestone.

  ‘I don’t think I understood how much I would miss you.’

  He straightened up and looked around. No human activity anywhere, just grass and sand, sea and sky.

  ‘I’m involved in something, Mum,’ he said. ‘And I don’t know how to get out of it.’

  He breathed in and felt his eyes grow wet. He swallowed and turned his head away from the wind off the sea. He thought about the seven dead people waiting to be put into the ground. He thought about the survivors, Sean in a coma, Charlotte in shock. And Maddie hiding in a byre.

  He turned away from the grave and walked back to the car. He didn’t look back.

  15

  The wind rocked the car as he crossed the Churchill Barrier on to Glimps Holm. Just a few hundred yards then he was on the next barrier, a thin causeway exposed to the full brunt of the weather off Scapa Flow. The sunken blockships in the sea to his right always filled him with a strange melancholy, like lives of neighbours half glimpsed in the corner of your eye. Their original purpose, to stop U-boats entering Scapa Flow during the war, was long behind them now, and their skeletal remains were an unsettling graveyard, an array of rusted and decayed hulls and decks protruding from the wash. He thought of the remains of the Loganair plane sitting on the runway. How would they get rid of all that wreckage? What happens to planes after the investigators have finished with them?

  On Lamb Holm he drove past the Italian Chapel, another sobering sight. During the war the Nissen hut had been turned into a beautiful church by Italian prisoners of war in their spare time. Finn thought about those prisoners here at the top of the world, far from home, stuck in the country they were at war with. A car was parked by the side of the last barrier and Finn spotted two wetsuited figures a hundred yards out in the bay. He dreaded to think what the water temperature was like this time of year, something to stop the heart.

  On the walk back from the tomb to the cottage Finn had been working out an excuse for borrowing Ingrid’s car, but when he came into the living room she was napping on the sofa, a cold cup of tea on the table by her side. He’d lifted the key and crept out.