Chapter 7 The Bell Buoy

The bell buoy went missing on the Friday, and by Saturday morning three people had told Nell about it, which meant it had been agreed in the harbour office that she would hear about it, and that the harbour office had decided she was the person to hear about it because she was here with a case of instruments and a chart of the channel. "Isle of Man Bank," Padraig said. "North cardinal. The one that rings." "The one that rings is a bell buoy," said Nell. "North cardinal marks are can buoys. There is no bell on a cardinal. There hasn't been a bell on that mark since it was a cardinal." Padraig put his mug down. "She's a bell buoy. She's been a bell buoy since before your office. There's a man goes out to wind her every second Thursday and rings a hammer on the plate to test it, same as any church, and you can hear it from the far side of the bay on a still day, and there is no bell on that mark this morning and there's no plate and there's no hammer and the plate is not what I said, she's a black-and-yellow spar with a light on the top, and if that's a cardinal then I'm a cardinal." Nell opened her case on the chart table, on the high side this time, and got out the chart of the bay, and looked at where the mark should be, and then at the light list, and then she said, to nobody in particular, "Where's the buoy now." "That's the bit," Padraig said. "That's what's been doing. She's where she should be, more or less. It's the bell's gone. Somebody's cut the bell off her and left the spar and the light, and the light's burning, and the plate's gone, and the hammer's gone, and whoever did it did it in a night with a boat." Somebody had indeed done it in a night with a boat. There was nowhere on that mark to stand and do it in daylight, and there was a swell on the Friday night that would have put an unpaid man on the stones. But that was not the thing that sat wrong in her chest as she bent over the chart. What sat wrong was the position. She got the fix on the mark herself with the handheld, standing on the end of the slip at first light, and it came out forty metres north of where the chart had it, and she checked it twice, and it was not her error, the mark was where the mark was. "South," she said. "It's moved south. Forty metres." Padraig sat down. "There's nobody out there," Nell said, "there's nothing to move it, it's an anchored mark. You don't move an anchored mark. It either drags or it doesn't." "Unless somebody takes a chain off it in the dark." "Then there's a boat, and a diver, and a torch, and about six hours, and it's the tidiest piece of work I've heard of in this bay in my entire working life. And the fact that it's tidier than the last three men who tried to steal that mark says something about who did it." "Would you know that from a chart fix." "I would know it from the fact that the light is still burning and the plate is gone," said Nell. "If you were going to steal a bell buoy you take the whole buoy. You don't leave a spar and a working light and a chart mark for the harbour office. You'd leave the chart mark because you want it kept." Padraig did not answer, and Nell did not like the way he had not answered, and she was about to ask him the second question when Emmett Roache came in through the door without knocking, which was not a thing he did. "You'll want to come out to the north end of the loch," he said. "Now. Not in an hour. Now, while the tide's making." "Why." "Because there's a man out there with a boat who thinks he's about to be all right," said Emmett. "And I've been up there at seven and there's a light on the water where there shouldn't be one, and if he's got a plate in the bottom of his boat and the tide's making, he's got about a hundred minutes to decide what he's going to do about it, and I'd rather you were standing there when he decides." Nell took the case off the table and stopped. "Emmett. What is it to do with the road?" "Nothing," he said. "It's to do with the fact that there's a man on a boat in the dark with a stolen plate in him, and you're the one who'll be asked to write it down, and I'd like it written down by somebody who was standing there." He looked at her. "That's the whole of it. I'll not pretend there's more. I'm not going to standing on your slip in the rain asking you to come and look at a man. If it was the road, I'd not have said anything at all, and you know that, and that's why you asked." The man on the water at the north end of Loch Skerry was called Ferryman Enoch and he was sixty-one, which meant he had been on that water since before Nell's certificate, and he was sitting in the bow of a decent boat with a plate of cast iron about eighteen inches square bolted to the deck at his feet, and he had a bottle of something on the thwart beside him that was not water. "You're the surveyor," he said. "You're the one that's going to write it." "Mr Enoch—" "Enoch. Everyone calls me Ferryman and I'd rather you didn't because it's a name for a job and not a man." He did not look anxious. That was what Nell had not expected; she had prepared for frightened and she got bored. "You'll write that I took it and I'll sign it and that's the end of it, and in return I'll tell you the true thing about the bell." "The true thing about the bell." "Belts," said Ferryman Enoch. "Every fifty years the tide does a thing to a mark in this bay. Not to this one, to all of them, all along the line, and the belt on a mark goes in the same year it goes in everywhere else and the tide takes it and it's gone, and there is no man alive who has seen it happen twice because nobody's kept a mark long enough. That bell went in the winter and the plate went with it and the mark is exactly where the chart says it is, and if somebody's moved her forty metres, then somebody's moved her, and it wasn't me, and if you write down that I did it I'll give you the winter tide tables and you can work out your own answer." Nell looked at the plate at his feet, and then at the mark, and then at the mark again. "Who told you about the forty metres," she said. "That's the question, isn't it," said Ferryman Enoch, and drank some of what was in the bottle, and set it down, and did not answer it, and that silence went into her notebook the way all the silences in this bay were going into her notebook, which was to say that she was not going to write it down and was going to remember it for a very long time. Emmett was at the wheel of his own boat and had not got out of it, and he had not said one word for the whole of it, and when she stepped into the stern of his boat with the case under her arm and the wind coming round the headland into her face, he simply took the throttle out and let the boat drift, and waited, the way a man waits who is used to waiting for something to finish happening.