The Dark Isle Read online

  THE DARK ISLE

  Clare Carson

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  About this Book

  About the Author

  Table of Contents

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  About The Dark Isle

  Sam grew up in the shadow of the secret state. Her father was an undercover agent, full of tall stories about tradecraft and traitors. Then he died, killed in the line of duty.

  Now Sam has travelled to Hoy, in Orkney, to piece together the puzzle of her father’s past. Haunted by echoes of childhood holidays, Sam is sure the truth lies buried here, somewhere.

  What she finds is a tiny island of dramatic skies, swooping birds, rugged sea stacks and just four hundred people. An island remote enough to shelter someone who doesn’t want to be found. An island small enough to keep a secret...

  For Rosa, Eva and Andy

  ‘These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air.’

  —PROSPERO IN THE TEMPEST, ACT IV SCENE 1

  Contents

  Welcome Page

  About The Dark Isle

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Author’s Note

  About Clare Carson

  Also by Clare Carson

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Orkney, August 1976

  ‘BLOODY HOY,’ JIM shouted. He wasn’t going to that poxy island again tomorrow or the next day or any other day ever. He’d had enough of Hoy. He stomped across the shingle to the saltmarsh at the head of the bay and left his family sitting on the beach. They had arrived there early. The heatwave had spread far enough north to transform their usual dank and windy summer break into a Mediterranean beach holiday. Helen and Jess, at least, were determined to make the most of it. They had badgered Jim to drive them over to Waulkmill Bay again because they hadn’t been there for a couple of days and he had eventually conceded even though, he had said, he wasn’t in the mood for swimming. The tide was in, the cove deserted. They clambered over seaweed-matted rocks, parked themselves on the lip of sand and watched the ocean retreat, run-off channels glistening in the sun. The rise of Hoy’s mountains was dark and hazy, a sleeping giant guarding the horizon. It was Liz who had pointed across Scapa Flow, said perhaps they should all take the ferry to the island the next day and have a look around. She seemed perplexed by his bad-tempered reaction, although she didn’t respond to his tirade. Helen was less restrained.

  ‘Miserable git. What’s got his goat?’ she asked as they watched him disappear over the ridge dividing beach from midge-infested marshland.

  ‘God knows,’ Liz said.

  Sam said nothing, eyed the island that had sparked Jim’s fury.

  ‘Let’s go for a swim,’ Jess said. She nudged her younger sister. ‘You too, Sam. Come on.’

  Liz told them not to go too far out, then stuck her nose in a book. The three sisters ran across the sand, chased the tide, jumped the waves, searched for crabs in the kelp tendrils undulating in the currents of the crystal water. Their bodies adjusted to the chill and they swam further out to sea. Sam was enjoying herself, floating on her back, the surface calm, the sun on her face; she wasn’t a bad swimmer, she reckoned, for a ten-year-old. She drifted. The splash-landing of a cormorant made her look up and she saw she was on her own, Helen and Jess far away, their heads black and round like distant seals. She put her feet down. There was no bottom. She was out of her depth, going under, water closing over her head. She panicked, splashed and flailed, seaweed tangling legs, swallowing brine, couldn’t breathe. She was sinking. Drowning. Lungs bursting. Head pounding. She’d had it. Everything went black. And then a light exploded, and for a second she thought she was dead before she realized she had surfaced. She spluttered, gulped air desperately, waved her arms, almost sank again, bobbed back and forced herself calm. She wasn’t going to die. Not then anyway, not there in Waulkmill Bay. She trod water until she could breathe normally, flipped on her back and headed to the shore.

  She was halfway home when she heard shouting. Jim. She looked around. He was right ahead, between her and the beach, water lapping at his abdomen. She put her feet down, toes touching sand this time, head and shoulders above the waves. In the five minutes it had taken her to realize she was out of her depth, panic and recover, Jim had run across the bay, waded through the shallows, met her halfway. He was angry. Face twisted, jabbing his finger in the air, yelling. She was stupid, swimming so far out. What the hell did she think she was playing at? He swung the flat of his hand at her, made her flinch, but the water broke the force of his movements anyway, converted whacks to splashes. His tirade stopped abruptly and he dived headlong into the waves and swam off to the open sea. She watched him do his purposeful front crawl, passing the spot where she had panicked and believed, for a moment or two, that she had copped it. She wanted to cry. Not because of going under, but because of Jim’s reaction; his shouting had been far worse than the near drowning. She waded back to the beach, trudged across the sand, wrapped a damp towel around her shoulders, wiped her nose on her forearm, and sat next to Liz.

  ‘Not waving but drowning,’ Liz said. ‘That’s us. That’s this family.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘It’s a poem by Stevie Smith.’

  ‘Oh, well, I was not drowning but waving. I was OK until he started shouting at me.’

  Liz was staring at her page and Sam thought she wasn’t taking any notice, then she rested the book on the sand, open with the pages face down. Liz was always telling them they should never do that with books, it would break the spine. It was usually Jim who failed to practise what he preached. Liz gazed across the sea, the sun catching her pretty features in a troubled configuration, and raised her hand to her brow, searching until she caught sight of Jim, a buoy floating far away. She waved at him and Sam could see with her eagle eyes inherited from her father that he was waving back.

  ‘So is he waving or drowning?’

  Liz heaved a deep sigh. ‘Why ask me? I’m just his wife.’

  CHAPTER 1

  Orkney, September 1989

  SAM STROLLED THROUGH the graveyard to the shore, hoping to escape the sense of being watched, but the shifting outline of Hoy made her uneasy. She stared at its treacherous north face of stacks and caves, shrouded by spray where the towering cliffs plunged into the sea and met the breakers rolling in from the Atlantic. The twilight made the isle appear more cloud than land, a storm gathering across the water. She trailed the high tide mark, her eyes still drawn to the island rather than watching where she was placing her feet, and almost tripped over the rusty corpse of the seal among the bladder wrack, starbursts scarring its abdomen where the body had bloated and exploded leaving the brine to preserve i
ts hide. She leaned and stroked the leathery skin then parked herself by the dead creature. The still presence gave her strange comfort. She waited. A pipistrelle flitted past. The mountains of Hoy blurred with the darkening sky. The North Star gleamed. Surely he would have disappeared by now. She decided to risk it, stood and retraced her steps inland along the burn. The sea breeze buffeted her from behind and she tried to hold the gusts in her mind, but the wind slipped away, rattled the deadheads of the cow parsley lining the path. Left her with a knot in her stomach.

  She reached the graveyard and heard the hurried footsteps of somebody retreating as she pushed the gate. She cut through the grey tombstones, past the yellow walls of the Round Church, surveyed the Earl’s Bu and the field beyond for signs. The Norse Earls had made their home here in Orphir on the southern edge of Orkney’s Mainland, the settlement recorded in the Orkneyinga Saga. A place of deaths and ghosts. There had been dusky evenings when she had stood here and thought she’d glimpsed the shadows of pissed Norsemen fighting among the ruins of their great drinking hall, but this evening she saw nothing apart from a hooded crow pecking among the stones. He was there, though, she could tell. Watching. She had been aware of his presence all summer. She had tried to ignore the constant prickle at the back of her neck as she grappled with the gradiometer, the new-fangled piece of kit they were using to try to locate the buried remains of the Norse settlement. They couldn’t dig because the ruins ran under the cemetery and they didn’t want to disturb the graves. Geophysical surveys were a good way of detecting sub-surface features without excavating and causing damage, the archaeologist in charge of the site had said. Like water dowsing, she replied. He laughed and said if they didn’t find anything with the equipment, perhaps she could have a go with her hazel divining rods.

  The initial results were not promising. Too many anomalous spikes in the data, either because the ruins lay too deep to be detected or, as the archaeologist suggested when the monitor went haywire, there was some strange force buggering up the readings. He had looked at Sam when he said that and accused her of having supernatural powers that interfered with the magnetic fields. It had taken her a couple of seconds to realize he was joking. She was the one who had mentioned water dowsing after all. The archaeologist had invited her to come back the following summer to help with another survey, if they could find the funding. She had recently finished a history degree and now, at twenty-three, was about to start a doctorate. She would love to write her thesis on the Earl’s Bu, she had said. It would be a relief, she had added – four years of academic study. He had raised an eyebrow. A relief? She had corrected herself. More of a retreat than a relief. A retreat from what, he had asked. Her father’s dodgy legacy, she had wanted to say; Jim had been a police spy, killed five years before, and she’d never quite escaped his shadow. She shrugged instead of speaking. He had eyed her shrewdly and said retreating was fine as a temporary strategy but eventually you had to turn and face the ghosts, assess the ruins that lay below one way or another. She wasn’t so sure. She had volunteered for the archaeological project in Orkney, drawn back by the happier memories of childhood holidays here with Jim, the darker recollections buried deeper. The presence of the watcher made her fear that somebody else was digging in the murkier corners of her family’s history, unearthing events best forgotten. Her return to Orkney had disturbed ghosts of a more solid and ominous kind, she feared, than the spectres of long dead Norsemen.

  She spotted a merlin perched on a fence post beyond the Bu, its gold-flecked belly bright in the gloom. Something startled the bird and it fled. She scanned nearby for the cause of the disturbance and her eyes locked on the figure in the mauve shade of the sycamores at the end of the path, facing her as if he wanted to be sure he could be recognized. He waited, turned and hobbled away. Her heart hammered. She had never seen him close up, but she had little doubt about his identity. Lanky. Military bearing. Limp. Tradecraft – picking his moment to reveal himself. She had known in her gut all along it was him. Pierce, the wounded hero. The Fisher King.

  She sprinted past the ruins, along the track and reached the lane just in time to see the rear end of an ancient navy Volvo estate driving towards Stromness. Still the same car. She ran to the derelict pig shed where she had parked the crappy Honda 50 she’d borrowed from the archaeologist, squashed the helmet on her head, wheeled the bike on to the pitted tarmac, swung her leg over, twisted the ignition key, kicked the start pedal. The engine spluttered and died. Fuck. Idiosyncratic, the archaeologist had said, but useful for island hopping because it was light enough to lift on and off the passenger ferries. Borrow it for the summer, he had added; he’d bought a second-hand car. She kicked the pedal again. The engine chugged, the bike leaped forward and she found herself driving in the wrong direction, away from the croft that was her temporary home, following the Volvo’s trail.

  She came to the Houton turnoff, spotted the Volvo parked by the jetty, dumped the Honda on the verge, sidled down the hill, breathless for no real reason. A lighthouse blinked its distant warning. He stood beside his car, facing the water. The ferry docked. Ramps clanked, incoming cars and vans drove past. Engines revved. Cars edged forwards. The Volvo last in line. He turned and stared straight at her again before he clambered into his car and drove aboard. She stood rooted, watching the ferry as it crossed Scapa Flow, heading to the dark isle. She had resolved not to dwell on her own history and yet here she was unwinding the past, drawn back by the lure of the Fisher King. Was he still lying low in Hoy after all this time? How many years had he been exiled in his far-flung hideaway?

  She had seen him twice before, both times in the summer of ’76; that was thirteen years ago when she was ten and Jim was – Jim was forty-six when he died in 1984, which made him thirty-eight in ’76. Grumpy old man, she had thought at the time, but now thirty-eight seemed almost young. Not old anyway. Grumpy maybe – he’d been in one of his deeper troughs that summer, his bleak mood cranking up the pressure, adding to the edginess of the sweaty, rainless days. The summer of the heatwave had left a dark mark in her memory and, although she had only ever glimpsed him briefly, the figure of Pierce coloured those troubled recollections. The first time she’d seen him hadn’t been here in Orkney but in south London, standing outside her childhood home. Funny word – home. The place she grew up was still home in her mind, despite the fact she no longer lived there and it was furnished with the memories she wanted to leave behind. Perhaps it always would be home for her, that ordinary suburban house. Jim had billed Pierce as his colleague, a fellow member of the secret state’s shadow family. A spook. Did all spies park their families in the suburbs, she wondered, the bland domestic surroundings part of their subterfuge, a cover for their cloak-and-dagger lives? He had arrived in a navy Volvo, dropped his wife and his daughter Anna on their doorstep then disappeared because, it turned out, his life was in danger. And he had left Sam to befriend Anna in the relentless sun and heat.

  CHAPTER 2

  London, July 1976

  THERE WAS NO shade and it was way too hot for a bike ride. She wished she’d stayed at home – but her sisters had told her to eff off when she had stuck her head around Helen’s door to see if she could join them. Liz had taken their side, urged her to find something to do by herself. She pressed her weight on the pedals, calf muscles aching, throat dry, forced the Raleigh up the hill, past the Rock and Fountain, the line of mock Tudor piles with long drives and high privet hedges guarding green lawns. Rotten Row, Jim called it. How come the hose restrictions didn’t apply to them? That was the worst thing about the drought as far as she was concerned: no sprinkler in the back garden, no running through the cool spray, squelching wet grass between her toes. It wasn’t fair. The front wheel wobbled. She was sweating but she didn’t want to take her hands off the handlebars to wipe her face, she had to keep going until she reached the top. She couldn’t give in. Under the pylon cables, sighing in the still air, past the donkeys looking sad in their makeshift animal rescue centre
. Out of breath, jelly legs. Finally, the summit. The very end of London, the dirty rim; the silver stream of the bypass heat-hazy in the distance and beyond that, the green belt. But this was still the edgelands, the neither here nor there.

  She turned the bike around and hurtled down the hill, faster and faster, freewheeling, almost losing control around the bends. She reached the bottom, the bike slowing as it hit the far slope of the dip, and wondered whether she could be bothered to cycle back to the top so she could repeat the exhilaration of the descent. She couldn’t. She pootled along the level, swerved right into the road that led back home. A car overtook. Brown Cortina. Jim. He had been away for months. He often disappeared, doing whatever stupid things it was that he did for his secret job that they weren’t supposed to talk about, but he had been gone for longer than usual this time, leaving them to swelter. And now he was home without warning. He pulled in ahead. She cycled up beside the door. He wound the window down, his wiry black hair plastered to his forehead.

  ‘Do you want to get yourself killed?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why don’t you use hand signals then?’

  He hadn’t even said hello. ‘I do use hand signals.’

  ‘You didn’t just then.’

  ‘I didn’t realize there was a car behind me.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He swerved away. She waited until he had disappeared, turned her bike around and pedalled furiously back up the steepness of the hill.

  *

  THE TARMAC WAS still sticky despite the dusk. Jim’s Cortina parked on the verge. Liz’s car not in the garage. Liz was often out these days too; she had been appointed as a lecturer in the English department of one of London’s colleges at the beginning of the year and Roger, the head of the department, was always calling meetings. Jim had said that meetings were for poseurs and procrastinators. Liz had replied she wanted to make a good impression in her new post, so she went.