Stonemouth

The Deep Blue IV is only just able to fit into the old harbour; another half-metre across the beam, or drawing another twenty centimetres, and it’d have to share the New Docks with the rig supply boats and the Orkney — Shetland — Stavanger ferry. Deep Blue IV is due to head out in an hour or two, at the top of the tide, on another month-long mission to hoover untold tonnes of fish out of the North Atlantic and into its hangar-sized freezer holds.

Mike MacAvett could probably just sit at home with a cigar in his hand and his feet up and watch the ship depart into the haze from the comfort of his armchair, but he obviously feels the need to be here on the bridge, to check everything’s going smoothly and to content himself all the supplies are on board, and the captain and crew are all happy and motivated men.

The trawler crews are Mike’s main supply of muscle, his forces in reserve. Neither of his sons showed any interest in the family business, legal or otherwise, so he has one of my old school pals as — supposedly — chauffeur and home handyman, a couple of grizzled, ageing though still useful-looking guys in the docks office of the MacAvett Fishing Company, and he can call upon pretty much any of the trawlermen not actually at sea. Boats like the Deep Blue IV have two crews to let them fish almost continually, so there’s never a shortage of Mike’s guys in the Toun. It’s a looser structure than Don and his four — now three — bampot sons, and Mike worries more about informers and infiltration by SOCA or the SCDEA than Don does, but, even there, the local cops have proved useful.

Things are running a little late so Mike phoned me to say come to the docks rather than the house. Partly, though, I think he still feels the need to impress people with the sheer scale of the new boat — the Deep Blue IV ’s only a couple of years old, and I haven’t seen it before — and remind them that this is where the money came from, this is what made him well off: fishing. He’s not just some number-two player on the shady side of life in Stonemouth; he’s a legitimate and highly successful businessman who came up the hard way, setting out to sea in tiny, deck-heaving, wave-pounded trawlers for the first twenty years of his working life, risking death and mutilation in one of the most dangerous working environments in the world.

Anyway, it’s no sweat for me; always a nostalgic pleasure to visit the docks. My dad’s worked here since school and I always liked coming to soak up the smells and sounds and sights of the harbour. The walk from the centre of town — BB and I had our quiet pint in the Old Station Tavern — took less than ten minutes.

‘Stewart, Stewart, good to see you,’ Mike says when I finally climb to the vessel’s bridge. It’s bright and sunny up here, certainly sunnier than down on the quayside; you’re above most of the remaining mist, which is still settled over the town, the nearby industrial and housing estates and the more distant fields and low hills like a sort of glowing grey membrane. Perched above everything, blinking in the bright sunlight, the moodily lit darkness of Regal Tables already feels a long way away.

Mike shakes my hand and I try not to wince; these guys all seem to have super-firm, ultra-manly handshakes and my hand is still feeling a bit bruised after Powell Imrie’s parting grasp.

Mike MacAvett is a fairly short, stocky guy with a big bald head and very dark eyebrows. Early fifties. Always bustling, always very bright-eyed and overflowing with enthusiasms.

‘You’re looking great, looking great,’ he tells me. ‘Just let me get things sorted here and I’ll be with you asap. Make yourself at home. Have a look at some of the gizmos; or head down to the galley and get Jimmy to rustle you up something — you hungry?’

‘Good to see you, Mike. No, thanks; I’m good.’

‘Right, right. With you in a sec,’ he tells me and he’s off, across half the width of the very wide, gizmo-crammed bridge to talk to the captain. By common consent ‘It’s like the Starship Enterprise’ in here. That’s what everybody says, anyway. Actually, the bridge of the spaceship I’ve seen, stumbling over ancient episodes on obscure channels, has far fewer buttons and keyboards and screens, but there you are. Different series, maybe; I wouldn’t know.

I wander along the bridge, trying to keep out of the way. Besides the captain there are a couple of other officer-class guys in neat blue fleeces with the Deep Blue IV’s logo embroidered on them, taking notes: one on a clipboard, one on an iPad, plus there are a couple of guys in yellow hi-vis jackets and pants stamping about talking into radios.