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‘That dog has a better life than we do,’ says the woman. ‘More rights.’
‘Who runs this place?’ I ask.
She nods towards the grove of trees. Through the thinner, lower branches, I notice the ruins of a wooden fishing hut with boarded-up windows and paint peeling from the planks. It looks abandoned apart from a newer plastic rainwater tank squatting under the eaves.
Evie follows me as I walk towards the hut along a compacted dirt track weaving through the trees. We emerge into an unmown yard where a bleached wooden dinghy is resting in a metal cradle. A goat is tethered to a post. Chickens wander through the yard. Odd objects stick up through the grass – the rim of a tyre, a rusting mangle, a beer keg, an old fridge without a door . . . Wire lobster pots are rusting in a clump of weeds near the open front door and a thin stream of smoke curls from the pipe chimney.
A figure emerges. Finn Radford is dressed in baggy track pants and a stained sweater. Unshaven. Hollow-eyed. Spying us, he croaks, ‘You can’t be here. I can’t talk to you.’
‘This is Evie,’ I say.
Finn shifts his attention, but his bloodshot eyes don’t seem to focus. Alcohol is oozing from his pores, forming a sheen on his face, which is alive with tics and twitches. Evie has stopped moving. Sunlight and recognition flare in her eyes.
‘Who are your neighbours?’ I ask.
‘Holidaymakers,’ says Finn.
‘That’s an illegal campground.’
‘We give them permission to stay.’
‘And you give them work?’
Finn doesn’t answer. Instead, he walks to the nearby wood pile and picks up an axe. For a moment, I think he’s going to threaten us, but he takes a log and balances it upright on a sawn-off stump. The axe swings, cleaving the wood in half.
‘We want to know what happened to the Arianna,’ I say.
‘It sank.’
‘You weren’t fishing.’
‘On our way home.’
The axe swings again and again, until his Medusa-head of tangled hair is wet with sweat. Exhausted, he sits on the stump and lights a cigarette, sucking so heavily the filter collapses between his lips. He squints into the smoke.
‘You were smuggling people,’ I say.
His eyes are slitted against the smoke. ‘Yeah. Who says?’
‘I say,’ says Evie.
Finn regards her again, more closely this time. His sallow face has the depth of a pie plate and I wonder if the alcohol has damaged his brain. He twists his neck as though releasing a crick.
‘They gave us no choice,’ he mutters, as though talking to himself.
‘Who?’
‘The Government, Brussels, Marine Scotland – all the lying duplicitous bastards who told us where to fish and what to fish and how many fish we could catch and what we had to throw back. You know how soul-destroying it is to toss dead fish back into the sea because of quotas that no other bastard country in Europe is abiding by?’
He doesn’t expect an answer. ‘We had families. Children. Mortgages. Debts. The politicians didn’t care. Not down south. We were Scottish scum. They hated us as much as we hated them, but we wouldn’t go quietly. We fought back. We found a way to survive.’
‘By smuggling.’
‘I prefer to call it free trade. The open exchange of goods and services.’
‘You were trafficking human beings.’
He looks again at Evie, cocking his head to one side. A soggy stub of cigarette hangs from his lips. ‘Do ah know you?’
