第13章 Keepers

The eighth stone was not where the ledger said it was, and finding that out took three days, and the reason it took three days was that she could not go out on the water without Emmett, and she could not go out with Emmett without it becoming the thing that it was going to become, and so they negotiated it without either of them ever once saying the word. He was at the slip at seven on the Friday with the boat already down and the engine warm, and he did not ask her anything, and she got in, and he took her out, and neither of them mentioned that it was the first time they had been in the same boat since she was nine years old and had been taken out to look at the fourth marker by a man who was not his father. They worked the bay from the north end round to the south. Nell did the buoys. Emmett did nothing at all that had any professional justification, and did two things that did, and neither of them said so. The first was at the mouth. He held the boat on the last of the ebb, with the boat's nose up into a swell that was coming from nowhere, and while she was bent over the chart he put his weight on the tiller and watched the mark. "They've put a lamp on her," he said. "I saw the light report. That's a fault, I'll raise it." "That's not a fault light." He did not take his eyes off it. "Look at where it is. She's burning it in a white sector, and it's the wrong one, and she's burning it in daylight, and a fault light doesn't do any of those three." Nell looked at the notebook instead of the mark, and wrote the time down, and did not look. The second was at the north end of the loch, in the shallows off Ardra, where the bottom comes up to four feet and you can see it, and where there is nothing on the chart or on any chart, and where he took the boat slowly in to the place where the water is eight feet and looked down at it for a while. "They're not all the same stone," he said. "I know." "That's not a road," he said. "That's a set of stones set in a line going out, and the pairs of cuts go all the way out, and there's one in the middle with no pair to it, and it's a different colour, and I've known that since I was twenty and I've never once written it down or said it to a person in a boat, and I said it to you because you're going to go and look for it, and I'd rather you went looking for it knowing." "How many of them have you never told anybody about." "Two," said Emmett Roache. "The one at the middle and the fourth. And now you, and that's three, and there was a woman in 1994 who worked it out on her own and told me and I never asked her a single question about how, and she's dead, and that's the last one that's ever going to happen in this bay unless you're the person I can't stop." The boat sat in eight feet of clear water and the bottom was in front of them, and Nell put the tape in and got the depth off a white stone with a small round mark in the top of it, and the mark was not a chisel mark and it was not a drill mark and it was not worn, and it was too regular to be natural and too shallow to be functional. "That's a survey mark," she said. "That's the fourth," said Emmett. "That's the fourth," said Nell, and shut the book, and did not write in it, and they sat there in eight feet of water over a white stone with a mark in the top of it for long enough that the tide turned and began to make itself felt under the hull, and neither of them said anything at all about what they should do next, because they both already knew, and one of them had been knowing for twenty-six years. On the way back in, with the tide making under them and the boat lifting a little at the bow, Emmett said: "Two things and then I'll leave you to your afternoon." "Go on." "The first one's a question and you're not to answer it on the water." He took the boat a little off the throttle and let her see that he meant it. "The eight of June, 1998. There was a man in Ardra called Peat who went missing off a boat of his own and they found the boat. And there's a line in your gran's book for the eighth of June, 1998, and it isn't *nothing*, and there isn't one for any of the months either side, and I've had thirty years to work out how a woman with a bait business and a tide table ends up writing about the eighth of June of 1998." Nell looked at the water going past. "That's the name of your man who was released," she said. "Aye." "And you think he went out on the road." "I think your gran wrote it down, and I think she wrote it down in the same hand and at the same length as every other line, and I think there is a man alive in this county who went out on the fourteenth of April of 1998 and came back and had eleven hours' sleep in him and would not say, and that if you are going out on the fourteenth then you ought to know his name before you go, and that is what I have spent this week deciding to say to you, and I have been sick about it since Tuesday." "What is it." "Hector Peat." He said it to the water. "Forty-one years old. He was my mother's cousin and I have not spoken to him since I was eleven, and he is a decent man who was not there, and I know that the same way I know the tide, and I have not been able to make myself go and say so, and that is the worst thing about me and it is not the road." "And the second thing." "The second thing is that the harbourmaster's office keeps a book," said Emmett Roache, "of every mark in the bay, and the dates they were laid, and by whose hand, and in that book there are eleven entries for a mark that is not on any chart, in a hand that is not any of the harbour board's, and the dates on all eleven of them are the fourteenth of April, and the earliest of the eleven is 1946." He shut the throttle off and the boat lost way and lay to the sea and the two of them sat in it. "That's your gran's book," he said. "He's had it the whole time. That's what the plate was for. That's what all of it was for. He was not stealing a bell, Nell, he was copying a ledger, and he has had your family's tide table in his drawer since before either of us was born, and on Tuesday night he put a false mark in the water to see what you'd write down about it."