by C. J. Cooke
I can’t tell Jeannie, but as we drive away from our house I shudder with relief.
The morning is bright, a sloe-blue sky with rich sunlight that falls on the cathedral spires, coming to rest in the valleys and fields that are beginning to burn golden. Autumn is my favourite time of year in Northumberland. Michael’s too, not least because the bookshop sales spiked. Author events and book groups are always well attended, too, and we installed a wood burning stove in the café with two sofas beside it for customers to sit down with a hot drink and a new book.
I ask Jeannie to take me to the bookstore on the way to visit Saskia. Outside, I make her turn off the engine so that I can get out and look at the exterior of the shop. It is heart-breaking to see it so damaged. Sunlight makes the destruction all the more painful, a syrupy light swirling across yellowing leaves on the cobbles in acute contrast to our pitifully incinerated bookstore. Weeks after the blaze, a throat-clutching stench of black smoke still on the back of the wind. Our cosy book-filled haven morphed to a blackened wreck. Everything Michael worked for gone overnight.
Jeannie gets out of the car and reluctantly stands beside me, looking the place over. She wraps her arm around me.
‘I’m so sorry, love,’ she says. ‘Maybe we can get it fixed up again soon.’
I take a step towards the door, pulling back the police tape and trying the handle. It’s unlocked. I push it back.
‘What are you doing?’ she says. ‘Helen …’
‘I want to go inside.’
‘Helen, you can’t go in there!’ she says loudly, but I have to. I have to see if they’re still there.
The shop is unrecognisable. The floorspace is littered with charred books, toppled bookcases and debris from the floor upstairs, which had partially collapsed on the far side. The books that remained on the shelves are all but turned to charcoal, the till table stacked high with burnt papers and ash. It hurts less than I’d anticipated, to see it like this. Saskia’s life hangs in the balance; the shop can be replaced. And I didn’t come here to work out what could be salvaged. I came here to find something I hid a long time ago.
‘Helen …’ Jeannie says, placing a hand on my arm, but I want to see it. I want to take it in, absorb the mess. Remember it. I want to see if any trace of the fire’s origin had been left.
‘You’ve got to be careful,’ Jeannie calls after me as I shuffle through the papers and book spines scattered on the floor. ‘You don’t know what structural damage has been done.’
I take the stairs slowly, clutching the thick wooden banister. The banister and stairs are remarkably intact, and although the stair runner has been obliterated by a heavy layer of soot, it looks as though the fire ventured close enough to lick the first step before turning away. The staircase was what made Michael fall in love with the shop – it was the original mahogany staircase, dating back to the 1830s and sweeping up to the next floor in a dramatic twist. The newel post at the bottom of the stairs is about twenty inches in diameter, a proud, hand-carved signature of the shop’s former purposes. The inscription of a cross to mark its years as a hospital, a quill to signify its time as a school. Michael will be glad that the stairs had survived.
‘Where are you going?’ Jeannie calls after me as I continue upstairs. ‘Helen, half the floor is gone up there! You need to come down right now!’
‘I’ll only be a minute,’ I tell her, and I move faster in case she thinks to come up after me.
Upstairs is even worse than the ground floor. The beautiful leather sofa and chairs I bought at the beginning of the year are destroyed, the springs sitting up out of the bowels of black chairs. The air is thick with soot and already I can feel it on the roof of my mouth. Scattered amongst the ash and dust are odd things that have somehow survived – a single plastic polyester lily, still white, lying amongst a pile of ash. Coffee mugs, a copy of Mary Oliver’s Selected Poems almost pristine, a browned edge the only sign that it was here during the fire.
I cover my hand with my mouth and move to the next staircase, a narrow spiral that leads to Michael’s office. I’m taking a risk going up there, I know it, but I have to look.
The attic is like a coal mine, the chipboard wallpaper that we were unable to remove now the texture of charcoal, though a celestial-bright ray of sunlight fingers through the shattered Velux window, providing a source of breathable air. Michael’s desk is badly burned, the computer and paperwork turned to ash. The filing cabinet is warped, too, locking it tight.
I move towards the narrow end of the room and reach up into one of the exposed rafter beams. I have to see if it is still there. The box that I placed there, hidden.
My fingers strike tin.
It is still there.
‘Helen, what are you doing?’ Jeannie shouts. ‘I’m getting filthy down here! Can we go now, please?’
I don’t answer her but lift the box down and blow ash off the lid. Although the beam it sits upon is badly burned, the box has remarkably escaped damage. I pull the lid off, hold my breath. Blood thuds in my ears. Downstairs, I can hear Jeannie still urging me to come down. She’s on the first floor. I can’t tear my eyes away from what’s inside the box. I had placed all the letters we’d received over the years there, always addressed to ‘Michael King’ instead of Michael Pengilly.
I only opened one letter. The rest I stored intact.
But all the letters have been opened, their envelopes torn and placed back inside the box.
With shaking hands, I unfold the letter at the top of the pile.
K. Haden
Haden, Morris & Laurence Law Practice
4 Martin Place
London, EN9 1AS
25th June 2012
Michael King
101 Oxford Lane
Cardiff
CF10 1FY
Sir,
I await your response to our previous letter.
We are growing impatient.
We are prepared to do whatever it takes to bring you to justice.
Please respond within forty-eight hours of receiving this letter to avoid consequences.
Sincerely,
K. Haden
Most of the letters were redirected from our Cardiff address. When we moved from Wales to Sheffield – then Belfast, London, Kent, and finally here in Northumberland – I had our post from Cardiff re-directed to a PO Box. And every June, when the letters came bearing the same postmark, the same addressee – Michael King – I hid them away. Someday, I thought. Someday, when life slowed down enough for Michael and me to be able to face up to things, we’d read them together. We’d put it right.
But ‘someday’ never came. The years spun away from us like a ball of wool flung into the distance. And I never once suspected that Michael might find the box, that he might actually open and read the letters.
But it seems he has.
I unfold another letter, the one sent in January. A letter comprised of a single word in black marker, the letters screaming off the page.
Murderer
My stomach churns, my veins run cold. I force myself to stay focused, to not let the panic overcome me. I remember opening the letter with confusion, wondering why or how they’d sent it here. I knew it was from Luke’s family. No invitation to come forward, no polite hint of threat. Just this hideous accusation. They’d found us.
At the time I was so paralysed with fear that I didn’t know what to do. Who could I tell about it? I couldn’t go to the police. Reuben was going through a really rough patch at school and his behaviour had become more challenging. He lashed out at me one night and then wet himself in the supermarket the next. When we looked into the cause we discovered he was being bullied at school. I got caught up in that and managed to push the letter to the corner of my mind. I didn’t dare look at it again. As long as I kept it hidden, out of sight, I could almost pretend I’d never come across it.
Shaking, I look over the envelope. It’s badly crumpled but I can make out a French postmark. A row of stam
ps bearing the Eiffel Tower. And on the back is a water-damaged label with something scribbled for customs. A name. The writing is a scrawl, but I squint closely, turning to the light at the window to see it better. I can just make out a name:
Chris Holloway
‘Helen? Where are you?’
Jeannie’s voice sounds from the bottom of the spiral staircase, making me jump and knocking me out of my memories, back into the charred attic.
‘Coming,’ I call. ‘Don’t come up here, Jeannie. It’s too dangerous!’
Quickly I lift the letters out of the box and stuff them inside my coat. I haven’t told Jeannie about them. How could I? How could I even begin to explain what they relate to?
‘What the hell do you think you were doing?’ Jeannie says once we’ve hurried out of the shop to her car. ‘Honestly, Helen, do you really think my heart is up to something happening to you, too? What could possibly be so important that you had to go all the way into the attic?’
Discovering who paid Jonas Matus to crash our car.
Chris Holloway.
That’s who I have to find.
39
Michael
25th June 1995
We get up at 2 a.m. and start walking an hour later, once we’ve re-fuelled and geared up. Theo tries to kill the palpable awkwardness by being extra talkative about the route and attempting some jokes. What do you call a pile of kittens? A meowntain. What’s the difference between a guitar and a fish? You can’t tuna fish. What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta.
Finally, he shuts up and talks about the summit. It’s a big day, one we’ve planned for almost a year.
‘How’d you sleep?’ I ask Helen.
A tentative smile. ‘Fast.’
Luke’s stare is beginning to burn a hole in my back, so I leave it at that.
We have only a thousand metres of elevation to clear before reaching the summit, but the air is so thin and the snow so dense that every step feels like a mile. Even so, once the darkness lifts, we have to stop and look out in silence at what stretches out in front of us.
The blanket of clouds that has been adjacent for so long is now far below, the sunrise a bright red sliver across the horizon, the moon a white dot in the blue. The peaks snake out of the cloud like the spine of an ancient monster, like fossilised waves.
We reach the summit at nine. It is an incredible moment, a feeling of relief and disbelief. Looking down on the world so far below is dizzying and exhilarating. Even the clouds are hundreds of feet beneath us, a thick white carpet. Mists rise and fall from the peaks as though the mountains are breathing. I’ve already decided they are living entities instead of rock and stone. As for the four us, we no longer look human but like aliens, our faces obscured by sunglasses, face scarves, and helmet straps. The whole thing feels surreal. And yet we’ve done it. We are here.
‘Woo!’ Theo shouts, both arms high above his head. ‘We made it! We actually made it!’
Luke takes a French flag from his backpack and plunges it into the snow, crossing himself once before high-fiving Theo.
I find a space far enough away from everyone so I can do my summit thing in peace. As has been my plan for ten whole months, I recite the poem that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote when he visited Mont Blanc in 1860.
The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark—now glittering—now reflecting gloom—
I stop when I see Helen about thirty yards away. She’s built a small pillar of snow, and quietly takes something out of her pocket, sets it on top. A piece of sea glass. I can’t take my eyes off her. I want to know so much about her, to ask question after question. I want to tell her everything.
I see Luke approach her, his arms out wide. My gut flips. He leans in for a kiss but she pulls away sharply. Theo turns his head to me, watching on. I turn away. In that small series of gestures I read the signs: our relationships are over. I never want to see Luke or Theo again, and I’m sure the feeling is mutual.
But, there’s a minor problem: we still have to get back down. It will take two days, maybe three. We all have to put our differences aside and work together if we want to reach Chamonix in safety.
Fortunately, the thin air and physical exertion has knocked the fight out of us, Luke included. When the adrenalin hit of reaching the summit begins to subside we approach the edge of the route that will take us across the shoulder of the mountain and back to Chamonix.
‘Can’t we just ski back down?’ Luke says, looking over the snowfields below, the thick white carpet that sweeps before us for what seems like miles. I know how he feels: looking up at the mountain from the emerald, sun-swept valley of Chamonix, it hadn’t seemed that far. Walking through snow – upwards or down – is the single most difficult thing I’d done in my life. These snowfields are like being on the moon, a completely different realm to the rest of the planet. I will never take walking unencumbered for granted again.
We have to keep moving, though the urge to sit down and sleep is constant. After an hour, we reach an outcrop which seems a good place to boil up some snow for our noodles and refuel, but by the time we finish eating a dense fog has closed in. There is no warning. No thundercloud, no rain. Just a creepy grey veil drawn across the sky, the valley, the black faces of the mountains studying their guests.
‘I think we should wait it out,’ Helen says, glancing around. ‘It’s too thick to see anything.’
‘No,’ Luke counters. ‘We keep going.’
He turns and starts walking. He only takes five or six steps before the fog gobbles him up. We follow after. I turn on my headtorch to cut a path through the fog but it merely bounces back. We have to use our poles to tap a way forward.
Two hours of blind walking later, the fog lifts, like a chorus of silver curtains lifting in a vast theatre. Blue skies again, though heavy mists marble all around us, potent with threat.
‘Dude, we got a problem,’ Theo says quietly.
‘What’s that?’ Luke says, wiping sweat off his face.
Theo has the map out. He looks at it with his nose scrunched, then looks up. Looks down again, turns, looks up.
‘We are completely and utterly lost,’ he says.
We all turn around in a circle on the spot, as though a sign will appear telling us the way to go.
‘We seem to have reached the end of the path,’ Helen says, and I can see that ahead of her is a sharp drop of rock. A cliff, basically.
‘Unless we develop the power of flight, we ain’t going nowhere,’ Theo surmises.
‘You seriously don’t know where we are?’ Luke asks.
A cough. ‘We’re, uh, meant to be on a gradual decline. Not a rock face,’ Theo says, squinting at the map.
Helen approaches, takes off her backpack and traces the map with her index finger. She turns and squints into the distance.
‘Is that where we should be?’
She points at an angle of the mountain some distance away that winds down to another refuge hut. Theo’s silence suggests she’s right. We’ve taken the wrong path. But no time to start blaming anyone, though we all know who’s at fault.
‘We should head there,’ I say, panting. ‘This descent is too steep. And look.’
I point at black cloud behind us.
‘Storm’s coming,’ Helen says. There is fear in her voice.
Luke kneels to inspect something at the edge of the cliff. ‘This is a faster way down. Look. Anchor points right here.’
‘Check the bolts,’ Theo says. ‘Are they spinning or secure?’
‘They’re secure,’ Luke says, though I don’t see him check the bolts. He takes some carabiners from his rucksack, then his rope.
‘What are you doing?’ I say.
‘Avoiding the storm,’ Luke says. ‘You got a better option?’
I don’t answer. Luke sets about making a quad anchor with the carabiners and rope. I am not convinced. There are anchor poin
ts in the rock all right, but they looked old and rusty, and there is no fixed line.
‘This isn’t safe,’ I say.
‘It’s completely safe,’ Luke counters.
‘What’s going on?’ Helen says, glancing from me to Luke.
‘We are getting ourselves down the mountain,’ Luke says cheerily. ‘We’re creating an anchored line that we’ll harness ourselves to and gently lower down, using our crampons and axes as leverage. Okey dokey?’
‘How far is the drop?’ Theo says, hesitating.
‘It’ll be about a hundred feet, mate,’ Luke says.
‘You’re guessing,’ Helen says. ‘Seb said not to guess anything but always to …’
‘I don’t think we have much alternative,’ Luke says, and I take a walk up and down the path to find one, but can’t.
‘We’ll have to rope together,’ Theo says finally. I can tell that he’s suddenly nervous, reluctant.
‘Look, we aren’t experienced in this,’ I say. So far we’ve managed to avoid such steep descents. Something in my instinct says we are best heading back to the original route, but it is so, so far away, and every single step is exhausting.
‘Michael, there is a storm,’ Luke says testily, pointing at the wall of black cloud behind us, inching closer.
‘Yes, but …’ The air has become so thin that it’s difficult to speak. Every word requires more breath than my lungs can manage.
‘Tell you what, Michael,’ Luke says, panting. ‘You go and take the path. We’ll call it a race, eh? Off you go.’
I watch silently as Theo steps forward and harnesses himself, then lowers down over the edge of the cliff.
‘I’ll go next,’ I say when Luke steps forward.
‘Too scared to go off on your own?’
‘No,’ I say, lowering myself down.
Luke tries to help Helen harness to the rope but she does it herself. Silently, he follows.
I’m relieved to find it is OK, at first. The footholds are decent, with nice deep hollows to get a grip. As long as I don’t look down I’m hunky dory.