“I don’t mind,” I say to him. “They can all hear it.”
He nods a tad reluctantly, and I see that he had meant to interview just me, without an audience, but it’s a nod nonetheless. He crosses to my end of the oval table and pulls out a chair at the head of it, a deliberate choice. His minion lounges against a pillar, arms crossed. Jem has put himself against a different pillar, just within Jimi’s field of vision. It’s a statement: he’s claiming authority by not sitting at the table. Not as much as that of Jimi or Mini-Jimi, but certainly more than the rest of us.
Jimi looks round the group, then clears his throat and starts with the questions. Where was I, what happened, what did I see: exactly the questions you’d expect, in a calm, encouraging manner. Though one of his first questions is the hardest of all: what was I doing at Kanu Cove?
“Pardon?” I ask, playing for time. Why am I feeling put on the spot, when I’ve done nothing wrong?
“Kanu Cove. What were you doing there? You left the dinner to go there. Were you meeting someone?”
I shake my head. “No.” It feels like every set of eyes is resting upon me. “I was just . . . getting some air.”
He raises an eyebrow. “All the way over at Kanu Cove?”
I raise my chin. “It’s a good place to go. To feel closer to Lissa.” He blinks and moves on, like I knew he would; it’s hard to challenge other people’s grieving mechanisms. And besides, what I’ve said is true, even if I didn’t want to say it. But I can feel Jem’s gaze fixed on me, heavy and dark and injured, somehow—though how can I have injured him?—yet when I glance at him, his face is deliberately expressionless.
The questions move on. When I mention the lights going out, Jimi glances at Jem, who nods and immediately pulls out his mobile and murmurs orders to find the maintenance engineer. It’s not my first recital of the incident, and by now I’ve got the hang of it: I don’t try to describe in precise detail the panic I felt, which still seems only a short step away—far too easy to stumble into. There’s no need to render in words the specific moments I can recall in vivid clarity, like stills from a film in ultra-saturated color: wrenching myself sideways to avoid the shadow bearing down on me; crying out as I dropped hard onto my knee; scrabbling desperately for my phone. Those are burned into my mind, yet I know I couldn’t string together a coherent narrative of exactly how he grabbed me, or which direction I twisted in, or which hand was where; it all happened so fast. Instead, I stick to broad brushstrokes that seem wholly inadequate to me as a description of the event, but seem to satisfy Jimi.
“What happens now?” I ask.
Jimi spreads his hands, and it’s clear he’s going to do nothing. Perhaps there really is nothing he can do—to be fair, I can’t think of anything myself—but nonetheless it rankles. “We are looking, of course, but with such a vague description . . .” He trails off as he sees my expression, then regroups. “But we will be sending regular patrols until the hotel is shut down. You will be safe.”
Safe. I think of those viselike arms. I’m not sure I will ever be safe again. In truth, I never really was; I was just deluding myself.
Adam speaks up. “The hotel shutdown: when is that happening?”
“Right after you leave,” Jem says expressionlessly, as if he has lost the energy to show emotion.
“Would you be able to show us where it all happened?” Jimi asks me.
I nod. “Now?”
“Yes please.” His open, friendly demeanor, never far from a smile, has returned; I feel my fingers clench in irritation. No amount of pleasantries can wipe away what happened or the fact that he plans to do absolutely nothing about it.
“I’ll come, too,” says Adam. I extricate myself from the chair, a little awkwardly as my knee stiffens whenever I sit for long; Adam reaches out a hand to steady me. I take it, but I think: I should never have started down this path. And, having started, I should never have come this far.
“I wanted to ask: are you still looking for Lissa’s body?” Duncan asks Jimi as the policeman passes behind him, in a casual aside that I only just catch.
Jimi’s smile has dropped. “No.” He shakes his head sadly. “There’s no point. With the currents . . .” He spreads his hands wide. “The area to search is just too great. Like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“If the needle was wearing a bright red swimsuit and all the hay was blue, you mean,” I say. Both Duncan’s and Jimi’s heads swing toward me; both, I think, were unaware they were being overheard.
“But bodies don’t always float at the surface,” Jimi says, his tone carefully regretful. “They actually sink to start, but the gases from decomposition make them go up and down.” He waves a hand as if mimicking a plane moving up and down, but I think instead of the undulating serpent. “When the gases escape, they sink again, but the decomposition continues, so they sometimes resurface.” Bron takes an audible breath in, one hand touching her lips. “Apologies,” Jimi says quickly, turning to her. “I didn’t mean to cause distress.” Except he did, I think. He meant to distress me in particular, to shut me down. His eyes, flatly expressionless against the general goodwill of the rest of his visage, slide back over me again.
Jem levers himself off the pillar. “I’ve got a few things to do,” he says to Jimi. “Come to my office afterward; the maintenance guy should be there by then.”
Adam, myself and Jimi-Junior start along the sandy path by the restaurant, but Jimi-Junior calls to us to wait, and I realize that Jimi hasn’t followed us. I look back to determine what the holdup is and see Duncan standing, talking urgently with his serious business face on. Bron, still seated, is looking upward at them both. I glance at Adam and see that he’s clocked it, too. Then Jimi looks across at the three of us hovering on the path and calls out: “Go ahead, please. I’ll catch you up.”
Jimi-junior turns to me. “Can you take me to where you were when the first rocks started falling?” he asks, in almost unaccented perfect English.
“Um, sure.” I look back at the restaurant tableau. The three of them are seated now, Duncan and Bron side by side, and Jimi in his head-of-the-table interviewer chair. “I—uh, I didn’t properly catch your name,” I say, stalling.
“The equivalent in the United Kingdom would be something like sergeant. Sergeant Lenny.”
“Lenny?”
He half nods, half tips his head, in a way that tells me I haven’t quite got it right, but it’s close enough. I look back again. Bron is speaking now, and Chief Jimi is listening intently.
“Is it this way?” presses Lenny.
“Ah. Yes, that way.” I reluctantly turn away.
“What’s that all about?” asks Adam under his breath.
I shake my head: No idea. No idea at all, but a deep, cold unease is soaking through me, permeating every cell in my body and only adding to the icy lead in my belly. What can Bron and Duncan be saying to a policeman—the chief of police, no less—that they wouldn’t say in front of the rest of us?
The walk is more than I would have chosen for my knee, given I’ve already swum with it today, but it doesn’t complain too much. There’s nobody at Kanu Cove when we get there, which shouldn’t have surprised me but somehow does. I find myself looking around from the vantage point of the stone pier, as if scanning the area for someone; perhaps I subconsciously expected the old man to be there again? The water looks clean and clear and glassy in the middle: a perfect deception. Who could guess at the lethal undertows beneath such an idyllic scene? Or perhaps I’m focused on the wrong danger. Perhaps even now the serpent is there, stretched languorously in the depths, hidden by the light scattered off the deceptively innocent surface.
“You were standing here when the power cut happened?” Lenny asks.
I try to judge it, looking back at the inland curve of the cove, where the path lights must have been shining before they abruptly snuffed ou
t. “Yes, around here.” I look at the ground. There’s plenty of loose gravel on the stones that could have been dislodged by the intruder, but there’s no way to prove it; I don’t see that it helps. Adam is looking up at the cliff face. “There’s a path there, I think,” he says, squinting even though he’s wearing sunglasses.
I look at the water again. I wonder if whatever lies beneath can hear us talking. Can sea creatures hear the strange and alien—to them—beings that only ever briefly visit their world? “There was an old man here, once, when I came.” Lenny looks across at me, surprised. “Oh no, not last night. It was when I came in daytime. He told me . . .” Lenny’s eyes, so dark that they almost seem entirely black, are fixed on me, waiting. He isn’t wearing sunglasses. “He told me Kanu takes who wants taken.” I enunciate each word clearly. I want him to hear it as it was said. Adam looks across at me for a second, as if measuring me for something I don’t understand, then back at the almost-path he’s trying to trace.
“Ah.” Lenny nods slowly, seriously. I was wrong to pigeonhole him as being just like his superior. This, now, is his natural demeanor, I think; the other was an act. Ordinarily, I would imagine his smiles are slow and hard-won. “It’s a well-known local spot. You have, I think, Beachy Head?” I stare at him, flabbergasted. How does he know about a suicide spot on the south coast of England? “It’s like that.”
“Is that what you think Lissa did? Committed suicide?”
“It’s recorded as an accidental death.” His face is shuttered. That alone tells me what he thinks.
“Kanu takes who wants taken,” I mutter again, but to myself. Then, to him, “Kanu takes: do they mean the cove, or the serpent?”
He shrugs. “Does it matter? They’re the same thing, really.”
Metaphorically, he’s right, of course, but that shadow that slid through the water beneath us was not remotely metaphorical. “It matters,” I say defiantly. “Accidental death and suicide are not the same thing.”
“Of course,” he agrees, and yet somehow, despite the shutters, I know he doesn’t agree with me at all. If he spoke freely, he would say that anyone who climbed into these waters was committing suicide, one way or another. I want to shake him and shake him and shake him until he sees the truth, the self-evident truth, that Lissa did not commit suicide, could not have committed suicide, would not have committed suicide. I look to Adam for assistance, but he’s some distance away, his eyes still tracing the almost-path; I have to turn away from Lenny before I erupt with the frustration and anger that’s boiled up inside me with frightening speed. “Do you need to rest?” he asks politely, from behind me.
By the time I turn back, I have my face under control. “No, thank you, I’m fine,” I say, and the words sound as they are meant to: polite, indifferent, calm. But he looks at me for a moment, and I see that neither of us is fooling the other, and we both know it.
“Presumably the attacker came from up here,” Adam calls. I turn to see he’s ascended a number of stone steps on a narrow staircase in the cliffside that I hadn’t paid much attention to before. “There’s a couple of paths leading from the top of this staircase.”
Lenny starts toward the stairs. “I’ll stay here,” I say, gesturing with a grimace toward my knee.
“Perhaps stand on the pier,” Lenny suggests. “Then we can check if you could have been spotted from above.”
I nod and move myself back to where I must have been standing, looking out over the water, and wondering yet again about the serpent. Does it sleep at night, or during the day? Does it sleep at all, in fact? Perhaps it’s watching me, even now, from its watery kingdom. I take a step toward the edge of the jetty to peer into the depths. The heat is rolling up off the baking-hot stone of the pier; ordinarily I would sit on the edge and dangle my feet in the cool of the ocean. Would the serpent see those feet; would it uncoil from its resting place beneath the waves as it sensed the intrusion into its underwater world? I have an urge, reckless and nihilistic, to try it—like the urge to step out into the void when at the top of a very tall building. My feet take me a step closer to the edge, I even start to slip off my sandals—and then I hear Adam’s voice, calling indistinctly to Lenny, and it’s like a shock of cold water: What am I doing? I step back hurriedly, shocked at myself. I should be afraid, like Bron—wild horses couldn’t drag her into the sea right now—and I am afraid, but I’m other things, too: terrifying things. Curious. Defiant. Still a loose cannon, however much I might have thought I’d grown past that.
I have an urgent desire to escape from here, before any more ridiculous notions take hold of my mind, but Adam and Lenny are engaged in conversation high on the cliff, almost at the top; it looks like they will be a while yet. I could leave them both to it—but perhaps that would be interpreted badly; perhaps better to stick it out on the pier, though staying well away from the edge . . . There’s a tiny piece of shade at the farthest end, the end that’s closest to the open ocean, where a fold in the cliff face casts a shadow: it’s not much but surely better than nothing. I move that way, and a small breath of wind dances around me; I stand still for a moment and close my eyes, savoring the brief sense of cool as the breeze licks at my damp skin. All too soon the breeze dies, and I reluctantly open my eyes again and turn for the small patch of shade—but something snags at my gaze, something on the rocks at the base of the cliff. I shade my eyes with one hand and look again. An indistinct bundle, too distant to make out, though I can see that it’s moving—wait, no, it’s not moving independently, it’s merely rising and falling with the movement of the sea. It’s so far away I might never have seen it except for the movement and the color: red. My stomach lurches. I blink, then rip off my sunglasses to see the color unadulterated by any filter, but it’s not the red of the TYR swimsuit; it’s a different red, only I know this red, too. It’s the red of the reception staff uniforms.
“Adam,” I yell. I’m turning to look for him. “Adam, there’s something there; come quickly. Adam, Lenny.” I hobble back along the pier to find them both clattering down the stone steps at pace, Adam ahead of Lenny. “There’s something at the base of the cliffs; something red. I can’t quite see what it is, but I think . . . I think . . .” I stop. Adam has reached me now.
“Where?” he asks, shielding his eyes to look in the direction of my pointing finger. “I can’t—”
“Farther left. There.”
“I can’t—wait, yes.” I hear his sharp intake of breath, then he turns to Lenny. “We’d probably get a better view from the path.”
“I’m coming, too,” I say quickly. I can’t countenance being left alone on this pier again. Adam looks down at my knee and opens his mouth as if to say something, but whatever my face holds stops him, and instead he offers an arm to lean on.
The climb is grim. Every step results in stabbing pain. The treads are uneven heights and roughly hewn; even without a bad knee it would be an awkward climb. In places there’s a rope balustrade to hold on to, but more often than not there’s nothing but loose rock or bushes on either side. One could slip and land tens of meters below on the jetty, with only the hope of a bounce or two on the rocky staircase to break the fall. Lenny is climbing quickly and is far ahead of me in seconds. Behind, Adam takes to unceremoniously shoving me upward with a strong hand under my backside, and I’m horribly, humiliatingly, grateful. Still, the top is miles away and not getting any closer.
But Lenny doesn’t go to the top; he takes a path that looks like nothing more than a rabbit trail, which, whilst uncomfortably narrow, is at least more or less flat. I adopt a sort of uneven shuffle which covers the ground at a reasonable pace and try not to think of where I’ll end up if I slip. Ahead of me Lenny has stopped and is peering down the cliffside to the sparkling blue waters below. As we approach, he takes his phone out of his pocket and starts to dial. He turns as he hears us and starts to shake his head, one hand outstretched, but at the same time his call
connects and he has to speak—and then it’s too late for him to stop us; we are peering over the cliffside, too. From this vantage point some thirty meters above, we can see the red bundle clearly, and it’s not a bundle. It’s a person, except that it can’t be a person any longer; no person would lie like that, awkwardly rising and falling with the water, half on and half off the tumbled heap of rocks at the base of the cliff, occasionally partly submerged by the brilliant white foam of the waves that intermittently break and froth over the red skirt fanning out in the water, tugging insistently at the scarlet material, and at the long, dark hair that clouds around an indistinct face; tugging her out to sea. The waves will win in the end, I think. The rocks cannot keep her. She isn’t theirs.
Adam is gripping my arm. I’m not sure when he took hold of it. “Cristina?” I ask, and the word sounds absurdly clumsy and loud.
“I can’t be sure at this distance but—probably.” I look at his face, at the grim white line of his tightly pressed lips, then back at the dazzling riot of color at the base of the cliff: the turquoise blue of the sea, the scarlet red of the skirt and the snow white of the foam. It’s hypnotically striking. “Georgie. Georgie, come on,” Adam is saying, though it sounds as if he’s far away. In another land, perhaps. “We should get you down from here; get that knee some ice and some rest.”
I’m still looking over the cliffside, my eyes narrowed against the sunbeams that lance off the waves. “I suppose there’s no chance that she’s still—”
He’s shaking his head. “I doubt it, but the boat will be here as quick as possible.”
“Boat?” Boat. They will drag her out of the water, flopping her over the side like a dead fish, but she isn’t theirs. She should be left for the sea. Or for Kanu, or maybe that’s the same thing . . .
How to Kill Your Best Friend Page 17