‘She thinks you must be in a state.’
‘She’s right.’
‘She says to give her a ring when you’re ready. Not before.’
‘Good or bad?’
‘You’re asking me?’
‘I am.’
Golding nodded. Stared out of the window. ‘Houghton told me the way you played it last night,’ he said at last. ‘You pushed it to the limit. I thought that was gutsy.’
‘And Oona?’
‘She thought the same.’
Suttle spent the evening alone. He bought himself a bottle of wine from the Co-op in town, returning to the shelf from the queue at the cash desk to make it two. He had no appetite for either food or football, preferring to sit at his window and watch the sun expire over the smoky ridge lines of the Haldon Hills. It was a beautiful evening, more swallows against the last of the light, and after darkness had fallen he fetched the parcel from the kitchen.
It was from Amazon. It was addressed to Lizzie. It had a return address in Seattle. He unwrapped it. Dr Gemma Caton, Native Indian Rituals on the Pacific Coast. He opened the book, looked at a photo or two and poured himself another glass of wine. The writing was brighter and more fluent than he’d anticipated. This woman could compel attention on paper as well as in the flesh. She had the knack of recreating an entire way of life, of taking you there, of making you aware of just how precious, and just how precarious, life in the wild could be.
Then salmon leaped into the story. How important they were. How they held the promise of survival. And how the elders of the tribe awaited the moment when they appeared offshore, nosed up the river and began the last stage of their journey to their spawning grounds. On a bad year they were late. Once, on the Fraser River in the 1840s, they didn’t come at all. The elders conferred. It was, they concluded, a question of propitiation. The spirits were troubled. The spirits demanded a sacrifice. And so they found the most pregnant woman in the tribe. Killed her. Opened her belly. And offered the child’s head to the river. The salmon, wrote Caton, appeared next morning. And there was much rejoicing.
Three days later, with Lizzie still unconscious in hospital, Suttle phoned Oona and asked her to come down for the evening. Her car was in for servicing, so she took the train. Suttle met her at the station. She gave him a hug and then another, and linked her arm through his. En route home, a detour took them to a pub called the Bicton Arms. Suttle had used it a couple of times and knew the landlord was a fishing fanatic.
Oona, intrigued by the place, perched herself on a stool while Suttle waited for the landlord to appear. There were a couple of trophy specimens in glass cases behind the bar. When the landlord finally arrived, Suttle asked him about current prospects on the river. The landlord said the fishing was good. Promising bass. Plenty of mackerel. Even a decent show of pollock.
‘And the salmon?’
‘Came late this year. Unheard of.’
‘And now?’
‘Back. Loads of them. Strange, eh?’
Acknowledgements
I owe this book to a series of storms that hit the West Country just after the Christmas before last. Neither Lin nor I – both connoisseurs of extreme weather – had ever seen anything like it. The force of the wind was beyond belief. The sea wanted to eat you alive. On a couple of wild nights the highest of tides exploded over the promenade and threatened to flood whole areas of the town. Scary.
A couple of months later I was talking to a friend, Mark Martineau, who knows the Exe estuary intimately. For the first time in living memory, he said, the salmon had failed to show. This phenomenon, in some respects, was as alarming as the weather. Might there be some link between the two? Did the salmon know something we didn’t? Thus does a book like this begin to shape itself.
Speculation, though, is barely a start. For a hard-core brief on the study of climate change I had to turn to experts in the field and happily the Met Office was just down the road in Exeter. Dr Debbie Hemming and Phil Bentley gave me an extensive tour, answered endless questions, and set me on the road to Chapter One. From the moment I stepped out of the building, I knew exactly where the book would lead.
Other contributors to this wild adventure? To Dr Amy Todd I owe a big thank you for sharing some of the secrets of the world of the GP. To Amy’s dad, Peter Todd, an equally warm round of applause for introducing me to the Fureys. An unforgettable evening. My eldest son, Tom, happens to be a gifted – and fearless – photographer. He lives round the corner and whenever my memory of those winter storms became a little hazy he’d send me a video or two he’d managed to shoot as the ocean came roaring out of the darkness.
This book was finally completed in the depths of rural France and I owe Marie-Josephe Tolufu and Florence Fremont a warm merci beaucoup for plugging the edited manuscript back into the world of Internet connections and e-mail in time to meet the publishing deadlines.
Finally, a well-earned thank you to Oli Munson, my indefatigable agent, to Laura Gerrard, who kept a firm hand on the editorial tiller, and to Hugh Davis, who copy-edited with his usual attention to the rogue commas. Jenny Page steadied the ship when it mattered most and Diana Franklin worked her usual magic with the proofs.
Lastly, my wife Lin. We’ve both fallen in love with the Touraine. The weather is superb. Cloudless skies. Constant sunshine. Barely a whisper of wind. Don’t be fooled, I tell her. Just you wait …
Civray-sur-Evres
June, 2015
Also by Graham Hurley
Fiction
Rules of Engagement
Reaper
Thunder in the Blood
Sabbathman
The Perfect Soldier
Heaven’s Light
Nocturne
Permissible Limits
Detective Inspector Joe Faraday Investigations
Turnstone
The Take
Angels Passing
Deadlight
Cut to Black
Blood and Honey
One Under
The Price of Darkness
No Lovelier Death
Beyond Reach
Borrowed Light
Happy Days
Detective Sergeant Jimmy Suttle Investigations
Western Approaches
Touching Distance
Sins of the Father
Non-Fiction
Airshow
Copyright
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Orion Books
This ebook first published in 2015 by Orion Books
Copyright © Graham Hurley 2015
The right of Graham Hurley to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All the characters in this book, except those already in the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978 1 4091 5344 3
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
Carmelite House, 50 Victoria Embankment
London EC4Y 0DZ
An Hachette UK Company
www.orionbooks.co.uk
Table of Contents
Dedication
Title Page
Contents
Prelude
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Afterwards
Acknowledgements
Also by Graham Hurley
Copyright