The email was from an address she didn’t recognise, and when she read it she froze

As Surtsey came off the sand onto the promenade she recognised the policeman speaking to Bastian. It was Ferris from yesterday, the tall cute one. “Hey,” she said. Ferris turned and looked surprised. “Surtsey, right?” That name always got remembered. Or maybe it was her flirting that stuck in his mind.

She realised now that the other officer was the female one from the Inch yesterday too. She was on the radio trying to arrange for someone with bolt cutters to come and get the women off the gate.

The guy with the keys was on his phone too, relating the incident to his boss, most likely. A small smattering of people drinking breakfast coffee at the tables outside the Beach House next door were eyeballing the whole thing, a piece of extra street theatre to keep them entertained.

“Are you going to arrest these idiots?” Surtsey said. Ferris scowled at her. “We’re handling it, thank you.”

Surtsey pointed at Bastian. “Have you asked him about Tom.”

Bastian looked amused.

The cop was confused. “Why would I do that?” “He’s a suspect.”

“Why?”

Protest

Surtsey pointed at the protest, the whole scene. “Are you nuts? They want the Inch left alone, so a dead body found there is pretty handy for them.”

“That’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think?” Ferris said.

“Thank you,” Bastian said.

“Shut your face,” Surtsey said.

She thought about last night’s texts and turned to Ferris. “Check his phone.”

Ferris shook his head. “I’m not doing that.”

“Go on, you might find something.”

Ferris held a hand up to Surtsey’s arm, ushering her away.

“At least ask him his whereabouts,” Surtsey said, shrugging him off.

“Please leave the police work to us,” Ferris said. “Thank you.”

So the flirting thing hadn’t made a difference after all.

Bastian moved closer to the cop. “If you want to investigate anyone, it should be her. She assaulted me on the beach yesterday.”

He opened his palm to take in the crowd around them. “I have many witnesses.”

Ferris sighed. “Look, I’m not investigating anyone. I’m just a PC. We’re here to get these women off the fence and let this guy do his job, that’s all.”

He turned to Surtsey. “I’m sure the DCI will be looking at all possible leads in the case.”

Then he faced Bastian. “And unless you seriously want to press charges for assault, I suggest you shut up too.”

Surtsey stood staring at Bastian, who looked as smug as ever.

Ferris put his hand back on her arm. “Now, if you could move along please, Miss.”

Surtsey shook her head, but let herself be guided away by Brendan, who she’d only just realised was there beside her.

She walked away reluctantly, glancing back at the scene, trying to make sense of it all.

“What a bunch of idiots,” Brendan said. “You don’t really think they’re involved, do you?”

They were 20 yards away now.

Surtsey shrugged. “Why not? Someone has to be.” “Do they?” Brendan said. “It could just have been an accident.”

Supplication

Surtsey thought about the texts on the phone in her pocket. The messages from the Inch itself. It was sorry to have taken a life. It knew everything about her and Tom.

“Yeah,” she said. “I suppose it could’ve been an accident.”

She looked back and saw Bastian talking to the female police officer, hands out in supplication. People passing by were slowing down to watch, herding their children away from the strange people making a disturbance.

The boatyard guy was complaining to Ferris now but getting nowhere. Somehow this would all get sorted out, Surtsey thought.

If everyone just communicated the world would sort itself out, maps would stay the same and we would all know what we were meant to do.

She stared at the spectral analysis numbers on her laptop. Three pages of spreadsheet, six columns of data, some secret hidden amongst the digits.

That was one of the things she usually liked about her work, pulling meaning from seemingly random information, filtering the raw chaos of the universe into something you could understand.

But some chaos couldn’t be filtered, couldn’t be made any sense of.

The data was about the relative density of a certain type of tuff within the rock samples they’d taken. It should give an idea about how this volcano had behaved on eruption, and that could be compared to other eruptions around the world. Was the Inch like the others, or unique?

She wanted it to be a one-off but that’s not the way science worked. What you wanted didn’t come into it, you had to make sure not to skew the information with your own bias.

She looked at the clock in the corner of the screen. She’d been staring at the same page of numbers for 20 minutes.

She wondered if she’d ever get back to normal, ever get the picture of Tom’s sandy body out of her mind. If she would ever finish this PhD and get on with her life.

Tom’s empty office didn’t help. It was a black hole sucking in attention from all students and staff, their dead boss a presence because of his absence.

Surtsey smiled at the paradox. It was the kind of thing she would have shared with him over a drink after work in one of the bars at the other end of town they used to go to, the boutique hotels in Stockbridge and New Town that felt like a different planet to the salty breeze of Joppa or the student-filled Southside.

Distraction

The office around her was quiet, just Kez, Halima and Brendan clacking away on social media or answering emails, doing as much work as she was.

She needed to focus, the numbers in front of her were the only way to get through this, a distraction from the turmoil, something concrete she could hold on to.

She stared out the window at nothing, birch and oak rustling, wood pigeons flapping, traffic wheezing up and down West Mains Road.

She heard her email ping and turned back to the screen. It was probably just the usual junk from some geophys blogger, but she was conditioned to check by the noise.

The email was from an address she didn’t recognise, and when she read it she froze. It was from The.Inch@gmail.com, and the subject was “Tom Lawrie and Surtsey Mackenzie”.

She could see there were three jpegs attached, could make out the top of her own head in the first one already in the preview of the email.

She felt like someone was controlling her finger as she clicked on the email to open it large on her screen.

More on Monday.