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‘You’re unauthorised.’
‘I prefer to call it unconstrained. Free to ask the questions that you can’t.’
‘That’s bullshit,’ I hear, but I don’t catch the rest of Carlson’s complaint because Cyrus covers the phone and walks out of the conservatory into the garden, where the argument continues. Meanwhile, I finish another pastry and begin to feel vaguely human.
Minutes pass. They always do. When I next look up, Cyrus is standing next to me.
‘Come on,’ he says.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Radford’s lawyer is applying for the charges to be dropped. He knows the police no longer have an eyewitness.’
‘Are they letting him go?’
‘Not yet.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘To roll the dice one final time.’
11
Cyrus
Outside, the sky has turned dense blue, and sunlight glitters off glass and chrome. Days like today make you wonder if rain and clouds actually exist. We walk towards the harbour, Evie jogging to keep up with me.
‘I want you to meet Finn Radford,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Because if you remember him – he might remember you – we’ll know you were on board the same trawler.’
Evie stops moving.
‘What’s wrong?’ I ask.
‘He’ll know what happened to the others.’
‘Yes,’ I say, remembering the ghosts that haunted Finn Radford.
At the Fisherman’s Hostel I go upstairs to the same room as before but find it empty. This time, the two old guys are playing backgammon at a table in the lounge, ignoring the bright commentary of the morning TV hosts.
‘I’m looking for Finn Radford,’ I say.
They answer in unison. ‘You’re too early.’
‘Where would I find him?’
‘Home,’ says one.
‘Where’s home?’
He finally looks up. ‘Rattray Head.’ He pronounces it ‘rattery’. ‘Last place before you reach the lighthouse.’
Evie googles the location on her phone and we drive north out of St Claire, along the A90, which cuts through ploughed fields and summer crops. The road runs ahead of us, curving and cat’s-eyed, patched in places with fresh tar. We pass a makeshift shrine of flowers and a small white cross beside the road – a memorial to someone who died away from home.
Two miles past the St Fergus Gas Terminal we turn right at a signpost for Rattray and follow a single-lane blacktop between overgrown hedges and thickets of trees and open farmland. We pass a ruined church and whitewashed farmhouses, shadowed in places by clouds that have interrupted the solid blue, sweeping in from the sea. Silhouetted against the skyline, I see the ruins of a long grey building, now partially collapsed with the charred roof beams exposed and three remaining walls canted at different angles.
