‘This is the note I left for Mary Kinnaird on the morning I arrived here,’ I said. ‘It startled me to see it on your desk.’
‘You are canny,’ he said again, breathing out. ‘That’s got Housman’s work address in Oxford on it. I couldn’t find anything in his room; all his paperwork is over at the library. Miss Kinnaird passed this on to me so I could write to his people at the museum where he’s employed. And they’ve given me the address of a sister, his … Well, this is unpleasant, but she’s his next of kin. Your mother and the police – at least, the Strathfearn Water Bailiff – came to see me, both hoping I might have seen Dr Housman this week. But his room and mine are at opposite ends of the east wing, so I rarely run into him coming and going. We do sometimes eat together in the evening. I have so much space in this office, and he likes to talk; he gets excited about things – he’s excited about –’
Here Dunbar checked himself and took a drag on his cigarette. Then he laughed.
‘He thinks your grandfather’s Bronze and Iron Age assemblies of spear tips and arrowheads are exceptional – “of British Museum level importance to typological dating,” he said. He’s a man who loves his work. It made me a little envious, actually.’ He glanced away, suddenly boyishly and appealingly shy.
‘Haven’t you missed him?’ I asked. ‘If you’d become friends, and you haven’t seen him for nearly a week, aren’t you lonely?’
The contractor laughed. ‘With this job?’ He waved an arm around him, taking in the pile of blueprints on his desk, the churning cement mixer and wheelbarrow-loads of stone which men were hauling up and down the garden, and distant hammering somewhere in the bowels of the house itself. ‘I’m too busy to get lonely. Sometimes I don’t go up to my own room until well past midnight, and Dr Housman isn’t even in this building most of the time.’ He paused. ‘He might have run into trouble with the Travellers, I suppose.’
‘They really don’t go around causing trouble,’ I said. ‘Not any more than anyone else does, anyway. Not on purpose.’
Frank was finished with his cigarette. I’d neglected mine for so long it had gone out, and I didn’t want to draw attention to my inefficiency by asking him to light it again, so I discreetly stubbed it to pieces. Then I realised I was still holding the brown envelope with Dr Housman’s Oxford address on it, so I stretched out my hand to put it back on Frank’s desk.
And a little pearl dropped out into my lap. Frank, still standing, didn’t notice it, and neither did I until I looked down.
I thought it dropped off me at first – as if I’d been wearing it in my hair, or as an earring. It was the size of a barley grain and perfectly round. It lay there in the cradle of woollen skirt between my knees. It was beautiful and perfect.
Why was it in that envelope anyway? Had Grandad sent it to Dr Housman? Or just put it in there for safekeeping? Or had Dr Housman put it there himself – had he found it in the Murray Collection? The last of the Murray pearls?
I picked it up – it was so smooth I had to wedge it beneath my fingernail to get hold of it.
And I remembered.
I remembered leaving the library. I remembered walking to the beachy place in the burn, and lying on the rock there with my arm in the water, and falling asleep. And I remembered the splashing that woke me.
When I opened my eyes there was a man standing in the burn. He hadn’t been there when I lay down, but I had been dozing and dreaming and feeling sorry for Mémère for having to leave Strathfearn at the end of the summer, and for Mother who’d grown up there, and a little sorry for myself perhaps; and I’d been looking up at the sky, and he must have worked his way downstream. The beachy place is at a bend, and you can’t see around it when you are lying on the rocks hidden by hazel shoots, like I was.
I looked up and saw him standing over by the tall Drookit Stane in the middle of the stream. He was in water up to his waist. He was bearded, with wiry whiskery sideburns the exact same horse-chestnut colour as the clear river depths. He had a soft wool cap. That’s the only thing I remembered about his clothes – not their colour, not their pattern, not if they were tweed or tartan or oilcloth. It was his face that startled me most. One eye was swollen shut and his lip was split – fresh, red blood oozing beneath his nose. But the reason I noticed his face wasn’t because it was so battered but because of how discs of light played over it, dappling his pink, shining skin with moving spangles of brightness, as if someone were sitting on the bank throwing gold coins at his head.
I thought: He’s not stealing salmon. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He’s not hard enough to be a poacher.
Then I realised he was fishing for pearls. But he wasn’t a proper pearl fisher, either. He had all the kit for pearl fishing – glass-bottomed jug, shoulder satchel, pearl stick – but he carried it awkwardly, as if it were getting in his way, as if he were in costume. He was as ignorant as the man I’d caught with Grandad, but unlike the one who’d pointed the gun at me, this man was comical.
He took a deep breath, bent over and put his battered face in the water for a good long half a minute. Then he stood up, gasped and did it again. His head went the whole way under. His cap came off, and he splashed about as he tried to grab it back. It drifted away downstream.
I sat up, snickering behind one hand, and dabbled my feet off my rock to watch the show. He looked up when he heard me. We stared at each other in astonishment.
And then the explosion in my head.
‘Julie?’
Francis Dunbar was on his knees beside me, holding my hand. The wave of memory had submerged me for a whole minute, while I’d just sat staring and let it all come flooding back. Now I looked down at our hands clasped together, and then at Frank’s face. He wasn’t being forward – he was concerned and, I think, a bit frightened.
‘Oh!’ I said, pulling my hand back.
He let go of it instantly. ‘I’m sorry – I …’
I knew. There was no question in my mind that the bloodied man I’d seen in the river had been Hugh Housman.
I needed to tell Mother, but I couldn’t share this tremendous strange vision, like a remembered dream, with someone I scarcely knew. Not that moment.
‘It’s my head.’ I swallowed. ‘Every now and then the headache starts up and I get dizzy.’
He stood up quickly. ‘Your maid’s just come back. I’ll go next door and get her.’
‘She’s not a maid. She’s my grandmother’s companion.’ I stood up. I was fine – physically, I was all right. ‘She’s been making lunch for me. I’d better go and let her know I’m here.’
‘Thank you for helping me with the terrace door,’ Frank said.
‘It was my pleasure,’ I answered, smiling up at him as he ushered me out.
He was careful not to touch me again.
The pearl was still stuck beneath my fingernail, invisible.
No one knew it was there but me.
This time I thought I’d keep it.
4