About the Author

Anbara Salam is the Palestinian-Scottish author of Things Bright and Beautiful and Belladonna. Her novel Hazardous Spirits was shortlisted for Fiction Book of the Year at Scotland’s National Book Awards. She has a PhD in Theology and now lives in Oxford.

Also by Anbara Salam

Hazardous Spirits
Belladonna
Things Bright and Beautiful

The Salvage

Anbara Salam

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First published in Great Britain in 2025 by Baskerville

An imprint of John Murray (Publishers)

Copyright © Anbara Salam 2025

The right of Anbara Salam to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

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For Struan

1

Saturday, 20 October 1962

WHEN I ARRIVE at Port Mary Harbour, there are already men in the fishing boats. Their oilskin aprons creak as they winch in ropes and haul rusted cages, seawater rolling down their arms. Nudging one another, they fall silent as I walk along the pier. I raise my head, keeping my eyes on Colin’s boat. He’s sitting on the stern, drinking from the cup of a plastic thermos, the radio tuned to a drama. As I approach, he leans into the wheelhouse and clicks the dial to the BBC World Service for the news.

‘Is that you ready, then?’ he says, looking me over.

I’m wearing a dirty fleece and holding a margarine tub containing two jam sandwiches, likely not what he imagined of a professional diver. ‘Yes, I’m all ready.’

‘Thought there’d be more’ – he gestures – ‘bits.’

‘All my bits are already here.’ I point to the wheelhouse, where my equipment was locked overnight. My tone is sharp and I try to offset it with a smile.

‘Aye, fair enough.’ He tips his head. ‘Come on, then.’

Colin starts the motor and as we pull through the harbour, the fishermen stop working to watch us – lines go slack, ropes slop into the water. I check that the batteries are in the camera, the pressure gauge is set, the seals around the mouthpiece are intact, my torch is working. When I turn to look over my shoulder, the eyes of the men are still on us. A young man in a green pullover lifts his cigarette butt overhead, like a javelin, and tosses it in our direction. Behind us, Port Mary’s coastal street stretches into view – a row of cream pebbledash houses, two splintered benches, the boarded-up windows of the old pleasure pavilion. The roof of the Grand Hotel looks shabbier from this distance; the whole island seems improbably exposed, a scribble on slate. Colin’s boat knocks through the waves, and as Cairnroch Island grows smaller, my heart starts jittering. It’s my first dive down to survey the shipwreck and I have to get it right. This is my chance to do something right.

After nearly an hour Colin must feel me looking at him, and he slows the engine, checks the map, the compass. ‘Here.’

I’m looking down at my own map and compass. He’s further away than I’d like, but I nod. Colin looks deliberately away while I shrug off my fleece. I check the camera again, the pressure gauge, the fit of my regulator, the torch. Heaving on my air tank, I’m gripped by sudden paranoia. Alex mixed my tank up for me before I left Edinburgh. I check the taste now through my regulator – he wouldn’t – no, it just tastes normal, like rubber. Surely even Alex doesn’t hate me that much. Sitting on the gunwale, I squeeze into the flippers, attach my belt. Oily water from the motor splatters over my knees as Colin lobs the anchor overboard.

‘Do you feel confident with the signals we discussed yesterday?’ I ask.

‘Aye,’ he says.

I wait a moment, but he doesn’t offer more detail. Realistically, Colin’s not going to be able to do anything if I have a problem while I’m down there, anyway. It’s forty miles and an unreliable ferry between me and anyone qualified to help me if my equipment fails. Diving alone is against every code of honour in the trade, but clearly my safety isn’t Alex’s priority right now.

‘I’ll see you in about half an hour,’ I say, giving Colin a thumbs up which, even while I’m doing it, makes me feel foolish. He nods at me. I strap on my mask, click my neck, breathe out and push myself back, over and down into the water.

It’s even colder than I’d expected, a blow that knits my muscles together. Pushing all my strength into kick kick kick, I swim down down, concentrating only on moving. My heart is racing from the slap of cold. As I reach ten feet, I paddle in place, circling my arms, waiting for my heart and breathing to settle. I unfold the waterproof map, check the compass again. I was right, Colin was off – stupid of me to waste time and air. The pain of the cold pulls back, replaced by a fizzing in my limbs. My breath is loud and regular in the mask, and I have a strange urge to do a somersault. I’d forgotten how much I missed this. Kelp towers above me, collared with fluffy crimson algae. I weave through the boughs, the wet lick of the fronds against my legs, slim fish flashing tin in the bubbles. Kicking through a patch of seaweed disturbs a cloud of trembling jellyfish the size of buttons, and they shimmer alongside me as I swim north-east, following the dip of the seafloor.

The seabed drops abruptly to a plateau. I’m down on the shelf now; it’s darker here, sheltered by the kelp forests to either side. I descend four more feet, into the shadowy water near the seabed. A flickering, gloaming light filters through the kelp. I switch on my torch. And there she is.

HMS Deliverance.

None of the scoping material did her justice. The Arctic waters where the ship was found have preserved her like she was stoppered in a bottle. The greenheart wood planks are intact; the name plaque on the stern is barely tarnished. My skin is tingling. I knot the end of the guideline to the clip of the inflatable buoy, then put my mouthpiece to the balloon, tie it and let it float to the surface. Hopefully, Colin is watching and will bring the boat around. I try not to imagine what will happen if I surface and he has just sailed away.

The camera is weightless in my hands and I steady it to take the first photograph. The flash lights up the name plaque, the fresh lichen the ship has collected since being towed to Scottish waters. Swimming towards the aft deck, I take more photos – the dents in what I can see of the retractable rudder, the ice scarring on the greenheart, the clamps along the gunwale from the towing gear. The main hatch is already open, a small mercy for my purposes, and my torchlight shines back on a wooden ladder, paint worn in the centre of each rung where the crew’s footsteps buffed it away. I pull myself down through the hatch and into the ship.

The first dive into a ship is an otherworldly experience. It’s travelling into a moment that has been paused in time. When Jenine and I were young, we used to play a game where we peeked through other people’s windows and made up stories about their lives. It was a winter game, best played after the brooding Glasgow sunset, when strangers’ front rooms would be lit up by the fire, tea kettles whistling from back kitchens. The boards of HMS Deliverance are lacy with algae, and I trace my fingers over knots in the wood. It gives me the same kind of thrill I felt back then, as the unseen observer of someone else’s world. Like I have become both invisible and all-powerful. Being the first diver to visit the ship after her relocation means that I’m exploring a place almost nobody has been in for over a hundred years, since she sank. I have her all to myself.

Inside the passage, the lips of water beyond my torchlight are coal black, stippled with freckles of sediment. Slowly, I ease myself along the narrow corridor that leads to the crew quarters. The cabins along the right-hand side are frozen in Victorian grandeur. They look exactly as they must have in 1849 when the boat last left Port Mary harbour: wooden panelling, narrow bunks built into the walls. I expected there would be breakage from when the ship was towed back here, but she was made for movement: furniture nailed to the walls, drafting pens fixed to writing desks. I take photographs of the crew quarters, the flash glinting on shaving mirrors shrouded in webs of algae. I’ve never seen a site like this before – it seems almost staged in its completeness, like a doll’s house. Through the silt I spot an ivory-handled clothes brush and a tin spectacle case tucked into the rail of the first officer’s bunk. Lord and Lady Purdie will have their pick of trophies for their museum. After taking pictures in the next three rooms, I kick gently down to the far end of the starboard side. A copper-coloured pollock has slipped in from the kelp on the seabed and darts in startled zigzags as I approach the reason for my trip to Cairnroch Island: Captain Purdie’s bunk.

The door is sticking to the floorboards, and I deliberate for a moment before sliding my knife through the algae and dragging it open, a fog of silt seeping into the water. I float against the ceiling of the passage until it’s settled enough for me to see my own hands again, and pull myself through into the room. The skeletal remains of Captain James Purdie appear in the frame of torchlight. Curled on the bottom bunk, his knees are drawn to his chest, wisps of hair drifting softly around his skull. His skeleton is well preserved, his bones dappled with gooey-looking sediment. Nestled under the remains of Purdie’s hands is a chunky golden ring – unusual for a Calvinist of this era, but perhaps it was a guild gift. I have to focus at close range to take a photograph, illuminating the faint outline of a barque engraved on the bezel. The Purdies will lose their minds over the ring – there couldn’t be a more perfect museum showpiece. Through the speckles of silt I peer through the doors of a glass-fronted cabinet which contains a pair of bone snow goggles, a horn comb and a toothbrush, the bristles still intact. There is no porthole, but dents in the wall mark where nails must once have held up maps or schedules, maybe photographs from home, and slotted into a niche in the wall is a small gilt mirror. On the table next to Captain Purdie’s bunk is what looks like a copper coin, a fringe of glutinous seaweed smothering it to the surface of the wood. The discovery report recorded that the top drawer of the desk contains the provisioner’s ledger and the captain’s expedition journal, but the Danish team who found the ship were pessimistic about the likelihood of the books surviving the tow. The drawer has become gummed with seaweed, and I carefully drag my penknife through the fronds, praying I haven’t accidentally cut the material. When I prise open the drawer, the two leatherbound books inside seem to have held up much better than anticipated. Gingerly, I open the books and take photos at random to send back to Sophie, the textual expert at the museum in Edinburgh, for review. The captain’s diary contains preruled boxes for recording the latitude and longitude, as well as wind speeds and temperature. But I can’t make out the writing – visibility is too poor, and deciphering handwriting isn’t my strong suit in any case.

Swimming away from Captain Purdie’s remains, I squeeze through the passageway into the galley kitchen, where two metal spoons still hang from pegs on the wall. There is a horn cup engraved with Captain Purdie’s initials attached by a snap hook above the grate. It must have been his personal drinking vessel. I haven’t seen this type of fixture before; it’s a clever little grooved latch to stop items from falling during bad weather, and I take a couple of extra photographs. The pantry is stacked with corroding tins and stoneware jugs nailed into position with wooden dowels. It’s odd the crew would have left this many tins here before abandoning the ship, but I suppose they must have taken the dried pemmican with them. Maybe one day their remains will also be discovered. I wonder if Lord and Lady Purdie will pay for their repatriation, too, or if their generosity only stretches to their ancestors.

My regulator glitches; it hiccups with a start and I brace myself in the corner of the room. Don’t panic, I say to myself, release the valve, and it cocks back again. For a moment, I give myself permission to miss Alex, knowing that we could always rely on each other during a dive, if not above water. On the other side of the kitchen is the saloon, the only space on the ship large enough for group meals or socialising. The walls of the saloon curve inwards, and it feels smaller than I’d expected, silt gently coasting in the water like snowfall. It must have been claustrophobic for the crewmates to spend the dark Arctic winter cooped up in here while they planned their escape across the ice. The table riveted to the floor has gouges cut into it, someone marking downtime, measuring wins or losses. As I take a picture of the grooves, a cupboard door on the far side under the porthole smacks open. I jump and the circle of torchlight swings to the ceiling. The bubble of my laughter echoes in my mouthpiece. I right the torch. The storage cupboard is only knee-high and set at an angle with a latch to prevent it from knocking open on rolling seas. In my surprise, I’ve unsettled the sediment and it is rippling in creamy ribbons that fill the room, like ash. It’s hard to take photos in such poor conditions so I lever myself against the table to swim back the other way. As I begin to pull myself from the saloon, a flicker of movement behind me catches my eye. The cupboard door is closing again. Slowly, this time. I must have created an eddy of pressure. Or it’s a fish, knocking against the wood. I blink back into the room through the ripples of silt, raising my camera.

And there, underneath the window, a man is crouching.

2

Sunday, 14 October to Monday, 15 October 1962

TO CATCH THE ferry to Cairnroch Island, I’d driven from Edinburgh up to Inverness and spent the night in a cheap bed and breakfast near the railway line, headlamps from freight trains chattering in the gap between the curtains. I was the first customer in the co-op in the morning when I went in to pick up supplies for the island, eliciting an arched eyebrow from the girl at the till who must have supposed I was preparing for an eccentric breakfast of batteries and sanitary towels. As I set off along the coast, a belt of fog rolled over the road and I drove slowly, hearing rather than seeing the waves against the rocks. Every so often, a box of late-season apples left by the side of the road appeared out of the mist and I stopped near Greenacre and stood over the hot bonnet of the car, the apples limp and leathery between my teeth.

Signs for the Cairnroch ferry appeared after Galen, and the turning revealed a black and gold teahouse shaped like a pagoda, sitting improbably in a loading station clogged with oil drums and lobster crates, slick, gritty puddles of cigarette stubs and sluiced water from dripping mackerel. Mr Tibalt, the manager of the Cairnroch Grand Hotel, had told me over the phone that it was hard to come by petrol on the island, so I’d decided against bringing my Ford Prefect for the sake of only a few weeks. There were no other patrons in the tea shop, and through the window I watched people calling to one another from amid the jumble of fishing wire and felt self-aware that I was the sole ferry passenger sheltering indoors. My skirt, which had seemed positively modest in Edinburgh, now felt far too short. An old woman wearing a maid’s mob cap delivered the tea in a teacup made of such thin china I could have read the Bible through it.

Half an hour before the ferry was due to leave, I asked for the bill, and when the woman came back she lingered, hovering over me so that I felt compelled to add an extra shilling to my plate.

‘You’re it, are you?’

I looked up, bemused.

‘The diver.’

‘Yes, that’s me. I’m me.’

‘Thought they’d send someone at the top for something as important as this?’

I gave her an insincere smile. ‘Well, I volunteered for this assignment. Don’t worry, my boss is still in charge.’

She nodded but didn’t move. I wasn’t sure what she wanted from me, so I said, ‘Are you from Cairnroch yourself?’

‘Oh, no. We used to go on holidays as a child, but not since . . .’ She gestured at the faded pictures of Rathdunon Castle framed on the walls. The castle was destroyed by a German strike during the war, now apparently not much more than a pile of rubble. Cairnroch never recovered its place as an affordable summer holiday spot. Even now, the paintings of the Purdies’ ancestral home have the same nostalgic dolour of a cardboard memorial photo of an airman gunned down by the Luftwaffe. Lewis had a well-thumbed souvenir postcard of the castle on the cage of his electric meter in his flat. A relic from the last trip home before his dad died, the last summer he was happy, he said. Never passed up an opportunity for a bit of melodrama.

‘And is it true that he’s down there?’ She leant forward.

I licked my lips. ‘Captain Purdie?’

She tutted, as if I’d said something stupid. ‘Yes, Auld James. He’s really come home?’

As a corpse, I thought. Out loud I said, ‘In a sense.’

She looked around the tea shop. ‘Imagine. Sailing back home again in his own ship. And now he’s getting to his rightful resting place.’ She reached out and gripped my hand. ‘God bless the Purdies. Everything round here will be changed. Like the good old days.’

It occurred to me she might have been working in the tea shop since before the war. Twenty years of boiling the same kettle, wiping away other people’s lipstick smudges. The thought depressed me. ‘You might get a better uniform,’ I said, aiming for a joke.

Her expression tightened then. ‘Better get going. They’re punctual around here.’

I looked out the window. If they were punctual, it would be the first island I’d ever visited in my life that didn’t have a magnanimously long-era sense of time. A man wearing a waxed cap appeared at the door and gave me a hard stare before leaving again.

I hurried after him. ‘Are you looking for me?’

He chuckled. ‘No, hen. Get one of the men on the dock to help you with your bags.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I don’t need help with my bags. I’m the diver. Mr Tibalt mentioned I should check in with someone.’

He jerked his head back. ‘Oh. That’s you, is it? I heard the Purdies were sending someone. I thought . . .’

I could guess what he thought – that he was looking for a man. ‘No, yes, no,’ I said.

Running his tongue over his teeth, he said, ‘I wouldn’t have expected a nice girl like you to be in this line of work.’

‘Well, that’s me.’ Then I added, ‘Sorry.’ Although I wasn’t sure what I was apologising for. Not being a nice girl, perhaps. A squirm of self-hatred passed through me.

‘Right, well, I’m supposed to load the . . .’ He looked around me.

‘My equipment.’

He tipped his cap at me, winking. ‘Right you are, then. No one says no to a Purdie.’

Overcompensating for being the only indoor patron at the loading dock, I sat outside on the deck of the ferry for the journey, which I should’ve known would be an error from how the locals huddled inside. The fog doused me in frigid droplets, the waves below the colour of pencil lead, and the other ferry-goers watched me curiously through the window. I braced myself against the drizzly veil and tried not to think of Alex, back at the museum. How by now he’d be drinking coffee at his desk. How by now he would no doubt feel relieved that I was gone.

It was three hours before Cairnroch came into sight. A sudden gleam of sun on the red and white ice-cream swirl of the Captain James Purdie Lighthouse, a hint of a rainbow in the sea spray. A row of pastel-coloured houses stretching along the waterfront puffed coal smoke from narrow chimneys. As we entered the deep bowl of Port Mary harbour, the ferry slid through oily slicks in the sheltered water, drawing up into a waiting crowd.

Clearly the arrival of the ferry was something of an occasion – little boys in school shorts were crouching on the jagged stone walls, and behind them were perhaps twenty women with overcoats blowing aside to flash glimpses of sherbet-coloured pinafores. People muttered to one another and gestured to me with raised eyebrows. Mr Tibalt, a thin man in his sixties with a carefully trimmed moustache, was waiting to meet me off the ferry. He was wearing his hotel uniform of a double-breasted navy jacket and braided cap, standing to attention next to an old-fashioned chrome luggage trolley onto which he insisted on loading my equipment. As Mr Tibalt wheeled the trolley along the path to the hotel, I was forced to walk behind, feeling somehow like the sole mourner at a funeral. Between the gulls and the chatter of the ferry passengers, I struggled to understand his accent – the Cairnroch manner of speaking, as if one is holding in the mouth a sweetie that is in danger of leaping out unless kept in place with the tongue.

‘‘Course the war . . .’ I heard. Then, as we began passing the row of pastel-coloured houses: ‘Used to be a fish and chip shop . . . now it’s gone.’ Later, as we approached a shuttered stand overlooking the harbour: ‘. . . ice cream . . .’ and then a long sigh.

The breeze blew salty and sour with gull droppings, and as Mr Tibalt sighed and pointed, I scrutinised the seafront. Lewis is the only person I’ve ever known from Cairnroch. After a few drinks he would get misty-eyed about donkey rides and the pleasure pavilion and the dark thrill of trips to the outdoor privy in winter. Now, the pleasure pavilion was boarded up and the beach littered with abandoned bathing huts bleeding rusted crab cages. But maybe not for long, if the Purdies’ plan works.

Mr Tibalt stopped in a shallow heather garden at the front of the Grand Hotel to give me a hotel history lesson which I wasn’t much listening to. The building was fashioned out of the island’s grey stone, and it looked much more severe than the luxurious spot for local honeymooners that Lewis had described. But then as a child I’d thought that sugar sandwiches were luxurious.

As Mr Tibalt opened the hotel doors, the purpose of my trip to Cairnroch was reflected back at me. The mahogany-panelled lobby was in the process of being renovated from a loose hunting theme to a nautical one. Oil paintings of stags in majestic, steaming splendour were propped carefully on the floor, ousted to make way for paintings of majestic, steaming ships being tossed on roiling seas. On my left-hand side, a man in overalls was at the top of a ladder, nailing an anchor over the counter of an Art Deco–style cocktail bar.

Mr Tibalt led me towards an imposing staircase and, next to that, a desk with a single amber-bulbed lamp. I gave him my old address at first, out of habit, and as I was double-checking the bedsit phone number, I looked up to see a maid in a white apron watching me over the banister, before quickly withdrawing.

‘Purdie hunting tartan,’ Mr Tibalt said, pointing to the sash around his desk. I had been idly running my fingers around the seam and pretended now to admire it.

‘Oh, so do the Purdie family also own the hotel?’ I asked. He gave me such an astonished look that I gathered the answer to this question had formed most of his earlier lecture about the building. He blinked into the small coal fireplace before recovering. ‘Forgive us . . . no television.’

I felt my face drop. ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘I’ll have time to read.’ But there was already a sense of panic creeping over me. The ferry to the mainland only runs every five weeks. Stuck here for over a month with no television and no fresh newspapers. Feeling Lewis everywhere. ‘Can I send telegrams?’

‘Post office, main street, most Thursday afternoons. Telephones . . . lobby. Lady Purdie can reach the American airbase for anything urgent.’

I nodded, pretending to be reassured. No one would need to contact me urgently; even my parents and I hadn’t spoken since my birthday in February.

‘Your luggage already . . . room. Flora . . . upstairs,’ Mr Tibalt said, gesturing to the maid in the white apron.

I gave him a polite goodbye and followed the maid along a strip of worn teal carpet to the doors of a lift that she cranked open with some effort.

‘There’s no need,’ I said. ‘I can take the stairs.’

‘Mr Tibalt insists,’ she said, primly. As the doors closed with a juddering series of screeches, her voice became more conspiratorial. ‘We only use it for guests,’ she said. ‘It gets stuck.’ The gears wound and she crossed herself.

‘Do you get a lot of guests here this time of year?’ I said.

She laughed. ‘Oh no. We have longer-term residents, but you’re the only tourist.’

‘I’m here for work.’

‘Yes.’ She looked me up and down. ‘The diver. I didn’t think you’d be a girl.’

I shrugged.

Flora withdrew a strand of hair from her bun and pulled it across her lips. ‘They’ll have to bring more people on at the hotel, won’t they? Once people start coming back here to visit like they used to.’

‘Perhaps.’

She nodded, as if I’d said something wise. ‘I’ve been telling my sister she doesn’t need to leave to find work. That there’ll be more jobs coming here soon, but she won’t listen to me. Maybe you can tell her, she might believe it coming from an outsider.’

‘I don’t know,’ I stuttered, but the lift doors finally creaked open on the second floor. Flora pointed out the bathroom at the end of the corridor, and I spotted a green-veined marble floor and a chipped claw bathtub.

‘Here you go, number 7.’

The floorboards outside the room squeaked underfoot and the door opened onto a large L-shaped room tucked into the corner of the building. The window on the far wall overlooked the still cup of the harbour, and in the corner was a ceramic-tiled coal fireplace nursing red embers. A modest walnut bed underneath the second window offered an easterly view over the ballroom roof, the cracked lights of the old pleasure pavilion just beyond. My luggage had already been delivered to the room and I hurried to pull my diving tank away from the fireplace. Above the writing desk was a painting of HMS Deliverance set fast in Arctic ice, a pearly, endless sunshine glinting off the rime. It was clearly newly installed for my arrival since a border of unfaded green wallpaper surrounded the frame. The blotter held a few thin sheets of writing paper that looked suspiciously as if they had been crumpled up and then ironed. I sat on the edge of the bed. It wouldn’t be worth writing to Alex since I’d probably arrive back in Edinburgh in advance of the post. It wasn’t as if I could say anything to make things better between us, anyway.

Back down on the ground floor of the hotel I made my way to the cocktail bar. The man with the ladder was now twisting a braid of marine rope over the fireplace on the far side of the room. A blonde woman was stocking bottles in a cupboard behind the counter, and when she turned, I saw she was roughly my age, a little shorter than me. Pretty, in a full-fat milk sort of way, with heavy cheeks and thick brown lashes.

‘Oh, it’s you!’ she said.

I looked behind me in confusion.

She laughed. ‘I’m sorry, I just was expecting the new guest today. You must be Marta.’

I came forward and sat at the counter. ‘Nice to meet you.’

‘Elsie,’ she said. Her handshake was strong, and up close, the fullness in her face and figure afforded her a kind of sulky languor.

‘The diver,’ she said, leaning her elbows on the counter. ‘I thought . . .’

‘You thought I’d be a man?’

She frowned. ‘I thought you’d be taller.’ She motioned to the wall behind her. ‘A wee dram as a welcome?’

Gratefully, I received the whisky, trying not to gulp down the whole glass at once.

‘So, will you need to get rubbed all over with oil?’

I laughed, coughing on the whisky. ‘I’m sorry, what?’

She kicked the bottom of the counter, and my glass wobbled. ‘Goose fat or oil. For the cold.’

‘Oh.’ I grappled with the spectre of a joke, something about massaging the fat on me, or me being slippery; something coy and flirtatious. ‘Sometimes I put a little Vaseline on my face. Suits only come in men’s sizes so mine doesn’t fit me very well at the best of times, without adding oil to the equation,’ I said instead.

Elsie nodded. ‘When do you have to go down there?’

‘I’ll need to find a fisherman to take me out to the site. Perhaps a week or so? Then the captain’s bones will go straight for burial.’

She edged down the bar towards the open cabinet and recommenced filling the shelves. The way she moved was deliberate and weighted, as if she were swimming against a strong current. ‘Funeral.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The Purdies will prefer if you say “funeral”.’

‘Ah, good point.’

‘And he’s Auld James around here, not “the captain”. Only outsiders call him Captain Purdie.’

‘I don’t feel like I know him well enough for a nickname,’ I said.

Elsie raised her eyebrows. ‘Digging up his skeleton ought to get you two acquainted.’

I waited until I was sure she was joking before laughing.

She turned to me, a bottle of lemonade in hand. ‘I don’t know how you could do that for a job. Going down into that dark water. It would scare the hell out of me.’

‘Everything that’s down there is already dead,’ I said, and she winced. Through the glass of the cabinet door, I saw her figure flicker as she made the sign of the cross.

Latitude 60°, 0' N, Longitude 9°, 18' W
Men already yearning to return to Port Mairi. Rather foul breeze and heavy pitching . . . insubordination . . . The men would not look upon me in the face but grumbled.