Prologue

The Five

Kinloch, Scottish Highlands — October 12th, 1987. 9:04pm.

Marcus could name every bird on the loch by its call alone.

His mother said it drove her mad, the way he'd go still in the middle of a conversation and say: oystercatcher, or: that's a curlew, and she'd never heard anything at all. His father, before he left, had said it was a gift. Marcus wasn't sure what it was. It was just something he could do, the way some people could add numbers in their head or draw a face from memory. The loch spoke to him in a language he had learned without trying.

He could hear it now.

They were on the north shore path, the five of them, later than they should have been. Stuart had said it was fine, Stuart was fourteen and said most things were fine, and the younger boys had the particular faith in older boys that comes from wanting to believe the world is navigable. It was October cold, the kind of cold that came off the water and got into your collar, and the loch was very dark on their left and the hills were very dark above them and the sky was the specific blue-black of a Highland night with no moon.

'We should go back,' said Callum, who was ten and felt the cold worse than the others.

'Five more minutes,' Stuart said.

Marcus listened to the loch. A black-throated diver somewhere out in the darkness, its call like a question asked too many times. He had never heard one here before. They usually came in late autumn, when the weather drove them inward from the coast. He was thinking about this when Duncan grabbed his arm.

'There's a man,' Duncan said.

Marcus looked. There was a light on the shore, fifty metres ahead. Not a torch — something steadier. A lamp, held by a figure standing at the water's edge, looking out at the loch. A large man, and beside him a smaller one, and behind them both the dark bulk of something Marcus couldn't immediately place. A boat. There was a boat drawn up on the bank.

'So what,' Stuart said. 'People fish at night.'

'He's not fishing,' Jamie said.

He wasn't. The man with the lamp was standing very still, facing away from them, looking at the water. The smaller man beside him was speaking, though they were too far away to hear the words. Something about the scene had a quality that Marcus could feel before he could name: the specific stillness of people doing something they believed was unobserved.

'Let's go,' Marcus said.

But they had already been seen.

The man with the lamp turned.

And in the moment before everything changed, Marcus heard the black-throated diver again, out on the dark water, its call carrying across the loch and into the hills and up into the black sky, and he thought: I will remember that sound.

He did not get to remember it.

He did not get to remember anything.

* * *

Stuart Rennie was fourteen and said most things were fine because at fourteen most things are fine if you say they are enough times.

He was the oldest, so he walked at the front, torch in hand, though the torch was not much use in the kind of dark that came off the loch in October, the dark that ate light. Behind him, Jamie Rennie, thirteen, his cousin, or second cousin, the family connection complicated in the way family connections in Kinloch were complicated, everyone related to everyone else by a thread.

Behind Jamie, Duncan Mackay, twelve, who had a football in his bag that he had not taken out because the path was too narrow for football, and behind Duncan, Marcus Hale, twelve, who could name every bird on the loch by its call alone, and behind Marcus, Callum Keith, ten, who was cold and who felt the cold worse than the others and who had said twice that they should go back.

'Five more minutes,' Stuart had said, the second time, and Callum had believed him because ten-year-olds believe fourteen-year-olds when they want to believe the world is navigable.

They had been to the hide. The bird hide on the north shore, built by the council in 1984 and already half-rotted, but still standing. They had gone to look for owls, though it was too early for owls, and Stuart had said they might see a badger, though badgers did not come to hides. They had gone because it was Saturday and because the alternative was staying in the Flats on a Saturday night, which was worse than being cold.

The loch was very dark on their left and the hills were very dark above them and the sky was the specific blue-black of a Highland night with no moon. The water lapped, small sounds, the kind of sounds Marcus listened for.

'We should go back,' Callum said, for the third time, and this time his voice had a wobble in it that made Marcus look back.

'We are going back,' Stuart said. 'This is the way back. The path goes round.'

It did go round. It went round the northern shore and back toward the town, past the reeds where the burn came in, past the old boathouse that had been locked since 1983, past the stretch where the bank flattened before it met the water, the stretch that would later be Plot 4B, northern shore, transferred December 1986.

'There's a man,' Duncan said.

'So what,' Stuart said. 'People fish at night.'

'He's not fishing,' Jamie said.

'Let's go,' Marcus said.

He didn't know why he said it. He would think about this later, in the life he did not yet know was ending, and he would not be able to explain why he said it rather than something else. He just knew, with the particular clarity that sometimes came to him beside the loch, that what was in front of them required a different kind of attention than they were equipped to give it, that they were ten and twelve and twelve and thirteen and fourteen and that the men on the shore were not ten or twelve or fourteen and that the difference mattered.

But they had already been seen.

The man with the lamp turned. The light caught his face, then caught the boys' faces, five faces in a line on the path, cold, tired, too late.

He did not get to remember it. He did not get to write it down.

He did not get to remember anything.

Edinburgh — October, 1994. Seven years later.

They came on a Tuesday morning, which she would always remember because she had been watching Marcus's programme.

It was not Marcus's programme. It was a nature documentary that happened to be on at the time he would have come home from school, in the years when he came home from school, and she had gotten into the habit of watching it because it was something to do with the hour that had otherwise become unmanageable.

The men were polite. She would tell this to her daughter, years later, when her daughter was old enough to be told: they were very polite about it. Two of them, in good coats, and one carried a briefcase, and they sat in her front room and they spoke about Marcus in the past tense with a fluency that told her they had done this before.

They said: there is nothing more that can be achieved by pursuing this. They said: the investigation has been thorough and the conclusions are settled. They said: you have a daughter to consider. They said the word accident several times in the way people say a word when they want it to become true through repetition.

They placed a document on her coffee table. A sum of money so specific it was almost insulting, the specificity of it suggesting that someone had calculated exactly how much her son's silence was worth and had arrived at this number with confidence.

She looked at the document.

She thought about Marcus, who had been twelve years old and had liked birds. Who had been able to name them from their calls alone, which she had found maddening and miraculous in roughly equal measure. Who had been on the north shore path with four other boys on the night of October 12th, 1987, and who had not come home.

She thought about her daughter, who was fourteen and who needed her to be present and functional and not consumed, as Diana had been consumed for seven years, by a grief that had no resolution.

She picked up the pen.

She told herself it was for Petra. She believed this for approximately three years, and then she stopped believing it and began living with the truth, which was that she had signed because she was tired and frightened and alone, and that no amount of retrospective justification would change what she had done or what it had cost.

She signed her name.

One of the men took the document and put it in his briefcase and they stood and they shook her hand and they left.

She sat in the front room for a long time after they had gone.

The nature documentary was still on. Something about birds. She turned it off.

She thought: I will find another way.

She thought: I have thirty years at least. I will find another way.

She was right about the thirty years. She was right that she would find another way. She was wrong, in the end, about being alive to see it matter.

But she had a daughter who would be.

Edinburgh — October, 1994. Later that afternoon.

After they left she did not move from the front room for an hour.

The briefcase had left an imprint on the coffee table where it had sat. A faint rectangle in the dust. She looked at it and thought about how careful they had been, not to spill anything, not to use a coaster, not to leave a mark except the one they intended. Two men in good coats. The phrase kept coming back. As if a good coat were a credential.

Petra would be home at four.

She got up. She went to the kitchen and filled the kettle and did not turn it on. She stood with both hands on the worktop and listened to the flat. The radiators ticking. The neighbour upstairs dragging a chair. The fridge humming. The kind of flat sounds that had become the soundtrack of the last seven years, since Marcus did not come home and the house in Kinloch became too full of his absence to stay in.

She thought about the number they had written. It was not a large number, not in the way people talk about large numbers. It was enough for a year of Petra's school fees and a new boiler and the roof that had been leaking since March. It was enough to make the next twelve months manageable, which was the specific shape of temptation they had calculated. Someone in an office, probably in Edinburgh, probably in a good coat himself, had worked out exactly how much a tired woman with a fourteen-year-old daughter might need to say yes, and had written it down with a confidence that was almost insulting in its precision.

She went to Marcus's room. It had not been Marcus's room for seven years. It was a box room with a desk in it where Petra did her homework and where Diana ironed. She had kept one thing. A small field notebook, green cover, his handwriting on the first page: MARCUS HALE - BIRDS. Inside, lists. Date, place, bird, call description. His handwriting getting smaller as he ran out of space. October 11th, 1987. North shore. Diver? maybe? call like question. Underlined twice.

She sat on the edge of the single bed and held the notebook. She had not cried when the men were here. She had not cried when she signed. She had learned, in seven years, how not to cry in front of people who wanted her to.

She thought about the word accident. How many times they had said it. How they had wanted her to say it back. How saying it would have made everything easier for them, and how she had not said it, not once, even when she signed. She had signed a document that said the investigation was thorough and the conclusions settled and that she accepted a payment in full and final settlement. She had not said accident. That was hers.

When Petra came in at ten past four, Diana was in the kitchen making tea, the kettle finally boiled, the notebook back in the drawer where she kept it.

'Who was here?' Petra said, because there were two extra cups in the sink, washed but still there.

'No one important,' Diana said. 'How was school?'

'Maths test. I think I did alright.'

'Good.'

Petra looked at her for a moment, the way fourteen-year-olds look at their mothers when they know something is wrong but do not have the language for what kind of wrong it is. Then she went to her room and shut the door, not slammed, shut, and Diana stood in the kitchen and listened to the flat again.

She kept the pen they had left behind. A cheap ballpoint, black, the kind that comes in packs of ten. They had not meant to leave it. It had rolled under the edge of the coffee table. She put it in the drawer with Marcus's notebook and left it there for thirty years. It would be there when Petra found it, after the funeral, after the shallow grave at the loch, and Petra would know immediately what it was because Diana had told her, finally, three years before she died, about the Tuesday morning and the good coats and the rectangle in the dust.

She thought: I have thirty years at least. I will find another way.

She was right about the thirty years. She was right that she would find another way. She was wrong, in the end, about being alive to see it matter.

But she had a daughter who would be. And a drawer with a notebook and a pen in it that would wait.

London — September, 2004. Seventeen years later.

The file was eleven pages long.

Noah Cassel sat in the cold case review room at Scotland Yard and held the file and counted the pages three times because he kept arriving at the same number and could not make it be different.

Eleven pages. Five missing children. One recovered. One closed.

He had reviewed hundreds of cold case files in his career. He had a working familiarity with inadequacy, with the specific shapes that incompetence and negligence took in official documents. He had seen files that were thin because the investigation had been poorly resourced, and files that were thin because the detective had been inexperienced, and files that were thin because the case had simply not generated the leads that would have made it thicker.

He had never seen a file this thin for a case of this magnitude.

Five children. One of them recovered. Four not located, which was a phrase he had never encountered before in forty years of reading police documents and which appeared in the closing report without explanation or elaboration, as though not locating four children was a matter of administrative record rather than catastrophic failure.

He opened the file and read it properly.

He read it three times.

On the third reading he found what he had missed on the first two, which was not evidence but its absence: the specific shape of what was not there. No forensic report. No search personnel log. No record of family liaison beyond three brief statements taken in the first forty-eight hours. No follow-up interviews. No canvass of local residents. No inquiry into the last-known movements of the boys beyond the afternoon of the 12th.

Someone had written an investigation and removed the investigation from it, leaving only the frame.

Noah put the file down.

He thought about four boys not located.

He thought about where they were, which he did not know yet but which he intended to find out.

He thought about who had done this and why, which he did not know yet either, but which he was beginning to understand was a question that had an answer, and that the answer was in Kinloch, and that getting to it was going to require more than a cold case review.

He picked up his phone and began to make calls.

Six weeks later, he was transferred to organised crime.

He retired four months after that.

He moved to Kinloch.

He built a wall.

Edinburgh — September, 2024. Thirty-seven years later.

She had been writing the journal for two years.

It had begun as a private thing, not intended for anyone else, the way she had always begun the things that mattered most to her. A private reckoning. An account that she would keep because the alternative was to stop keeping it, and stopping felt like the last concession she was willing to make to the people who had paid her to be quiet.

She had been quiet for thirty years. She had kept her side of the transaction. She had raised Petra in Edinburgh and then in Fife and then in Inverdrum. She had worked in schools and watched other people's children grow and had been present and functional and not consumed, which was what she had promised herself she would be. She had kept that promise. It had cost her something she did not have a name for.

Now she was fifty-eight years old and she had a USB drive in her coat pocket and a hotel room in Kinloch and a meeting she had been building toward for two years.

She had found Noah Cassel through a retired policeman in Inverdrum who knew a retired policeman in Edinburgh who had heard, years ago, about a detective from London who had asked the right questions about a case in Kinloch and been moved sideways for it. The chain of knowledge had taken eight months to assemble. At the end of it was a cottage on a hillside above the town and an old man who had spent seventeen years building a wall covered in everything he knew.

She had met him four times. She had given him copies of what she had. He had given her copies of what he had. Between them, they had assembled something that neither of them could have assembled alone.

It was not finished. There were gaps that only the physical evidence could close, and the physical evidence was under six feet of soil on the northern shore that a developer was planning to excavate in the spring. She had been to the shore. She had seen what was there. She had recorded it carefully, in the fifth audio file on the USB drive, the one she had made with the proper recorder rather than her phone, the one where she had given her name and the date and spoken for just under two minutes in the plain language of someone making a record for whoever came after her.

She was not naive about what came after.

She had known, from the moment she had come back to Kinloch, that the people who had paid her to be quiet were not going to allow the undoing of what they had bought. She had known it the way you know the weather is going to change, the particular quality of the air before something arrives.

She thought about Petra.

She thought about Marcus, who had been twelve years old and had liked birds, and who was in the ground of the place where he had grown up, and who had a name, and who deserved to be found.

She thought about the USB drive in her pocket and the copy she had given to Petra and the instructions she had given with it.

She thought: someone will come. Someone will find it. Someone will know what to do with it.

She put on her coat. She left the hotel room. She walked down to the loch.

It was five in the morning. The water was very still. The mountains on the far shore were invisible in the mist. She stood at the edge of the north shore path and listened, the way Marcus had listened, and for a moment she thought she could hear something out on the dark water. A bird she could not name. A call she did not recognise.

She stood there for a while.

Then she heard footsteps behind her, and she turned, and she understood that the weather had arrived.

Kinloch — October 13th, 2024. 5:48am.

She was already awake when the call came through.

She had been at the kitchen window with her coffee, watching the strip of loch between the rooftops turn from black to grey. She had been thinking about her father's box, which was in the back of the wardrobe where it had been for fourteen months, and about the fact that she had still not opened it, and about whether the not-opening was a choice or an inability and what, exactly, the difference was.

Her phone lit up. DS Rob Firth.

She answered.

A body on the north shore. A woman in her fifties. Hands bound.

She put down her coffee and picked up her coat and went out into the October morning, and she did not know yet that the woman in the shallows had a photograph of five boys in her jacket pocket, or that the photograph had four faces circled in red ink, or that the circles had been drawn by a man on a hillside who had been waiting for someone like her for seventeen years.

She did not know that the case she was driving toward was the case her father had spent his life unable to finish.

She did not know any of the things she was about to find out.

She drove the loch road in the early grey light with both hands on the wheel, and the loch was on her left, very still, keeping everything it knew.

* *

DARK WATER

Book One of The Hollow Coast Series