The silt and mudflats in the Tay just beyond the mouth of the Fearn were all exposed, like a distant sandbar, and the water of the Fearn lapped in shallow waves against it. There was a delightful little breeze keeping off the midges. There was no one about but us and the birds.
This summer the ground had been dug up and replaced and pipes laid down and hoardings put in and taken away, and Hugh Housman’s body had got cut in half somehow during all the activity. But it was all smoothed over now: finished.
Jamie was critical.
‘Stupid how they did all the work underwater. If they’d just waited until today, or this week at any rate, it would have saved them a load of trouble.’
‘Well, remember that when you’re in charge!’
We walked along the edge of the reed beds which rose like a jungle of giant grass, with blue sky and scudding clouds overhead. Reed buntings flashed and chattered. On the other side of the Fearn, the willows made a low smear of whitish green against the greener fields and the Lomond Hills rising behind them.
Between us and the willows lay a strange riverine landscape of round humpy sandbars, mostly exposed, gleaming darkly in the sun like the backs of a shoal of wet seals. A heron stood motionless at the water’s edge, intent on fish.
And the tide was still going out.
Among the smooth humps, sections of the riverbed had been disturbed by the digging of the pipeline; great chunks of it had been lifted out and dumped back in by the diggers and dredgers.
‘We can’t walk across that mud,’ I objected. ‘We’ll sink!’
‘Don’t you do geography in whatever posh school they ship you off to?’ Ellen said scornfully. (They bloody don’t. We are made to take elocution lessons. The German language is the closest I can get to anything scientific.) ‘That’s peat,’ Ellen told me. ‘It doesn’t drift like sand or mud.’ She pointed to another mucky lump so we could see the difference. ‘That’s mud.’
Pinkie started to whine.
‘Shaness, you daft dog,’ Ellen scolded. ‘What are you greeting for? It’s just tree stumps.’ She pointed again.
The heron spread leisurely wings and flapped away from us, low over the drained riverbed, and disappeared among the reeds.
Before us, where Ellen was directing us, one of the islands of peat erupted in twisted, curving tentacles, like half-buried dead branches. The strange smooth coils were the same colour as the uncovered river bottom. Another tangled eruption lay beyond the first, and then another. They seemed to be growing from the tidal flats, growing through them, the worn roots and stumps of a forest we’d never seen. They were the skeletons of trees.
But no trees as large as once these were could have grown and died and disappeared in any living person’s memory. They were part of the Tay’s thousands of years of ebb and flow and drought and flood.
Pinkie stopped whining, but slunk close about my legs, spooked.
‘How old are they?’ I asked. I had no doubt now that Ellen would know.
‘The peat’s maybe three thousand years old. Or older … or not so old. Anything stuck through it like that is older than the peat – the peat got laid down over it. Like the boat. The peat preserved these stumps.’
‘It’s amazing.’
‘You’re saying those tree stumps are all three thousand years old?’ Jamie asked incredulously.
‘More or less,’ she agreed. ‘But now they’re uncovered, the air and tide will eat them away. They need to be wet and covered up. Every time the tide goes out this far it’ll wear them down some more.’
Pinkie cowered, silently hugging my legs. Then she lay down beside me.
She knew. The stubborn, beautiful yellow dog suddenly refused to go forward another inch.
Flat on her belly on the wet silt, Pinkie was focused on the disturbed mud pile just to our right, on the side of us that was the River Fearn as we crossed its mouth. She simply wouldn’t budge, and eventually I went to give the offending pile of mud a kick.
It came to pieces beneath the toe of my tennis shoe and Ellen suddenly dragged me backward, away from it, holding me tightly from behind with her arms across my chest, and then Jamie clutched at one of my arms as well.
For a moment the three of us stood staring in appalled horror at what we’d found: the top half of Hugh Housman.
It wasn’t really a whole half of him. It was his head and neck and shoulder, and a bit of the other arm that hadn’t turned up before.
It was indescribably awful.
You wanted and wanted to look away, but for the longest time you just couldn’t. The only thing recognisable in the blackened, shredded face was the wire scrubbing brush of his whiskers. But the most truly horrific thing was the rope coiled close and tight around his neck.
Jamie whispered, ‘That wasn’t suicide. You can’t strangle yourself and then go and jump in a river.’
We all glanced at each other at last, released.
‘What do we do?’ I whispered back. ‘The water will cover it up again and there won’t be another spring tide for a month. It’ll fall apart. No one will be able to find it.’
‘The water preserves it,’ Jamie reminded me. ‘Remember how the doctor complained about them leaving his legs to dry out?’
‘It’s like the log boat,’ Ellen said. ‘We should cover it with mud again to protect it. And mark the spot so the lifeboats know where to look.’
The thing was so far from being human it didn’t actually seem foul – it didn’t make me feel sick, not like the time we took the dead deer to the abattoir to see how they cut up the venison. This was different – it felt horrific but faintly unreal, the way you sometimes feel in a nightmare when you think you’re drowning or being buried alive. Your brain keeps insisting: THIS CAN’T BE REAL.
‘I’ll do the mud,’ I said through my teeth. Because I was very ready to hide it. ‘I’ll put the mud back on.’
‘Ellen, have you a knife?’ Jamie asked.
‘Aye,’ she choked.
‘Can you cross over to the willow bank and cut four or five withy wands? Stout and tall as you can get, and we can drive them into the riverbed here around it so they’ll stand above the water when the tide comes in and the police will know where to look for it.’
‘Aye.’
‘Julie, let me do that,’ Jamie said, but I wasn’t going to be babied by him.
We reburied the corpse together, trying to treat the hellish thing as if it were as fragile and exquisite as Sandy’s boat.
Not one of us had the stomach to go and gape at the exhumation that followed.
Not so the rest of humanity. There had been no interest in an English antiquities scholar supposedly suffering an accidental drowning, and a little public interest in the discovery that part of our glorious Scottish past was under threat and might or might not be salvageable; but the press announcement that someone working on the Glenfearn School renovation had been garrotted and shoved in the Tay to decompose brought out the whole of Eastern Scotland.