Chapter Nine

George Malcolmson didn’t like chaos. He’d been a keeper at the Muckle Flugga Light until it had been automated in 1995 and that had suited him well. Lighthouse work was all about routine. There were seasons for painting and seasons for maintenance. A time for being sober, when you were on duty, and a time for drinking, during the month onshore. The helicopter had brought them to the rock for their shift every four weeks and had taken them away at the end of it, as long as the weather allowed. George had always been more upset about being grounded onshore than about being stranded on the rock. In Muckle Flugga the keepers had worked in threes. If you had two men on their own in a small space that could be the recipe for disaster – for ill will, fighting and madness. George had a reputation as a peacemaker because he was controlled and never lost his temper. The other men had liked to work with him. He was calm, methodical.

The patterns and rituals of his lighthouse life had made him superstitious. It had pleased him that the rock was the most northerly station in the UK. There was clarity about the fact and that gave it special significance. He still thought that three was a lucky number, didn’t whistle in a boat and sometimes planted his crops at full moon – he knew the power of the tide.

Now he sat in the bar of Springfield House with a pint on the table in front of him. His house at Voxter was in chaos because a woman, a friend of his son, had died. He tried to work out what might have been behind the death. George hated random tragedy and looked for patterns here too; for whatever could lie behind Eleanor Longstaff’s dying. He couldn’t imagine that anything they’d done could have led to the woman being killed, but it was a difficult time and he couldn’t be certain. Lowrie had been influenced by the woman when he was a student, but surely all that nonsense was long finished. George went over and over the events of the previous day in his head, searching for a reason, for any small episode that might explain what had happened.

His wife couldn’t understand his need to organize his life into patterns and rhythms and he no longer tried to explain his obsession to her. Grusche would have liked more children, but he’d known that three was a good number for a family and had made excuses to stop after Lowrie was born. He’d tried to discuss his worry that another child might not be healthy, that she was getting on in years and he feared for her safety too, but she’d laughed at his anxiety. In the end, though, she’d stopped trying to persuade him. He could be stubborn and his wife had had to come to terms with what she called his ridiculous superstitions. And she was so close to Lowrie that perhaps she realized that another child might feel left out.