‘Go on,’ I told Jamie enthusiastically, anticipating an excellent variety performance. ‘The water’s pretty low. The chap I saw fishing here two weeks ago was up to his waist!’
‘The Fearn’s tidal right the way past Brig O’Fearn village,’ explained Alan McEwen. ‘It’s coming up on a spring tide just now. Makes the high tides extra high and the low tides extra low.’
Jamie undid a couple of buttons at his throat and shrugged out of his shirt. He handed it to me for safekeeping and, just like Pinkie, slid off the flat rock and sloshed into the burn. Euan passed his pearl-fishing glass across to Jamie so he could look below the surface of the water.
Jamie’s arms and shoulders were fair as flax, as though he’d spent the last ten years in a dungeon. He bent over by the flat rock, and as he leaned down, light from the river caught his face and light from the sky gleamed on his bare back, and – incredible. Incredible the way it comes back. Just like that. It happened in a flash, in an instant of clarity – sparked by another pale body standing in the River Fearn.
The man in the river on the day I’d fallen – there was a reason I’d thought he was comical. There was a reason I hadn’t been able to remember his clothes.
He hadn’t been wearing any.
That man had been stark naked. Seeing Jamie with his back stripped bare, with the reflected light off the water on his face, made me remember.
I could see the other man perfectly now, splashing about when he lost his cap, the lenses of his glasses spangled with drops of water after he submerged his face. Those shifting dots of light on his skin like gold coins – I’d seen those because he’d been wearing glasses. The lenses had reflected in the river as he moved. I hadn’t been able to see his eyes, focused on something below the surface of the water.
I stood quite still, remembering. It was a bit like being hit on the head all over again. It made me go quiet for a moment.
But then Pinkie came crashing out of the stream, romping up devotedly to keep me company, since everyone else was in the water. I took a deep breath. Jamie peered intently at his feet, or something, through the glass jug. I wondered what he could see. The McEwens stood by watching, indulging him.
‘What happened after Euan brought me up to your camp?’ I asked. ‘Did you try to find where I’d come from? I was here when I hit my head. There was a man – I saw someone in the burn here, over by the Drookit Stane in the middle of the stream. We think it was the scholar who was working at the library, and no one’s seen him since that day, either.’
‘Aye, the police have been sniffing around here looking for him,’ said Alan McEwen. ‘We knew him because he’d been in about the place last month, wanting to know the good fishing spots for Fearn pearls. Nice enough gadgie and a friend of Strathfearn’s, but none of our business.’
‘How did I get up the path to Inchfort Field before you found me, Euan – did Dr Housman carry me?’
‘He might have,’ Euan answered. ‘It was Pinkie found you. Your scholar might have been frighted by the dog, and put you down, and gone away again.’
Alan McEwen laughed. ‘Frighted by that!’
‘Well, Dad, some people don’t like dogs. And Pinkie was with her when I found her.’
‘Did you see the other man?’ I asked.
Jamie straightened up to listen, intrigued.
Euan shook his head.
‘We found that cap, lad,’ Mr McEwen said. ‘The Water Bailiff took it away with him for the police to look at, remember?’
‘So we did.’
‘What did he look like, your man in the stream?’ Jamie asked suddenly. ‘Was he wearing gold wire-rimmed specs?’
My mouth dropped open. Because he had been.
‘Why?’
Jamie bent over, using the jug to pinpoint something at his feet, and reached into the water with his free hand. He came up dripping, holding something that glinted gold between his fingers.
It was a thin metallic wand, slender as a stem of wheat and about as long as Jamie’s hand. It curled at the end like a giant fish hook. It was a shape that made no sense, a thing that had no business being in the river, and yet there was also something perfectly ordinary and familiar about it.
‘It’s a temple,’ Jamie said.
‘It’s a what?’ said Euan.
‘It’s one side of a pair of spectacles. It’s a temple. You know, the arm thing that holds your glasses on your head – it hooks over your ear.’
‘There’s all sorts rubbish in the burn,’ said Mr McEwen. ‘Folk are careless.’
I didn’t consciously remember that Dr Housman had been wearing broken glasses. But when I’d doodled that pair of spectacles, they’d been missing one side.
Jamie’s small gold twist of wire was the piece that had come off – the piece I hadn’t seen.
It had to be a trace of Dr Housman. But it didn’t tell me a damned thing more than I already knew.
‘This sun is burning me already – I can feel it,’ Jamie said, hauling himself wet and gleaming as a selkie on to the flat rock. ‘Give me back my shirt before I am entirely grilled.’ He looked up at me. ‘Are you all right?’
I nodded. I didn’t quite trust myself to speak.
‘I expect we’ll have to hand that in to the police to go with the chap’s cap,’ Jamie said.
‘We’ll let you do that,’ said Alan McEwen. ‘They’ve been round here twice already poking their nebs in about, and they dinnae like us. No point in looking for trouble.’
‘Well, the Water Bailiff is a terrifying man and no mistake,’ said Jamie. ‘He’s thrashed me and every one of my brothers at some time or other – our Sandy used to dive to look at the log boat sticking out of the peat near the mouth of the Fearn, and the Water Bailiff hauled him out of the river once and thrashed him with a birch switch without even letting him get dressed first. I’ll take this in to the police and leave you out of it.’
Mr McEwen strode through the water and waded out on to the little beach, where I was standing with Pinkie. ‘Come along up to the camp and meet Mrs McEwen,’ he invited. ‘You can thank her yourself for the care she gave you; she’ll be happy to see you well again, lass. And now that we know you’re one of Strathfearn’s – well, I knew your grandad, and he’d have done the same for any of my bairns. A fine man, Strathfearn. The finest.’
‘And maybe we’ll find a pearl or two inside the crooks we’ve got for Mammy,’ Euan said. ‘Come and watch her open them.’
5