The blood tide again. ‘What does that mean? Why did you lie to me?’
‘Never mind that. Can’t you see it’s happening, Fi? It’s coming now.’
He was touching me again. It was like water in the desert. His hands on my shoulders, pushing, showing me. And I looked. I tried to see, for his sake. Out in the ocean, nothing but the dazzle of the dying light, and the black shadows it cast. No blood. A vague blur of dark, maybe.
And that’s when I realised that it was too late for Matt and me. Even if he stopped this, if we got off the bloody island, I could never find my way back to him. I would always resent it, these nights and days he’d made me suffer. There would always be a tumour of hate inside me, lurking, ready to grow and kill us. Even if I got him back, tore him away from this darkness, there had already been a pink line on a stick, one I couldn’t cross back over or explain.
Matt would know. He’d know what I’d done to him. And I couldn’t bear that. Going back to London alone, having to explain how our picture-perfect life had rotted from the inside out.
‘I’m sorry, baby,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ And then I stood back, and when he leaned over again, trying to see whatever it was he saw, I just pushed. It didn’t even take much. His eyes opened in surprise, and he fell, just as easily and completely as I had fallen for him all those years ago. We began and ended in the sea.
I was very calm afterwards, almost like the plan was already there and waiting. You learn this, rushing around A & E with someone’s life in your hands. Maybe it’s easier for doctors. We’re so used to it, that when the time comes, you find you have the skill there and ready, like a scalpel snug in your hand. I locked the front door from the inside, made sure my key was in my pocket. I washed up the mug I’d used at breakfast. Wanting everyone to see how good my life had been. How well I’d done, before this fucking island. I got my wetsuit and climbing gear. For this to work, it had to seem like I hadn’t been here. I’d take the boat out, maybe. I’d been capsized. I’d struggle back to shore in the storm that was coming later that night. The story was there and waiting for me, if only I knew how to tell it right. So I put up my ropes, the way I’d learned, and I climbed down the lighthouse to where he’d fallen. It was easier than lots of climbs we’d done, and the adrenaline was singing in my veins, spurring me on.
Matt looked peaceful. There was only a small amount of blood, spread out on the rocks under his head, but his eyes were open, and he was smiling. I filled his pockets up with small stones, and I got him into the boat, dragging him into it, heavy and limp, and we sailed out to sea, and then I let him slip under and I dived in after him. It was just like the moment we met – under the water, in its cold arms, Matt’s hair waving like seaweed, his face carved like coral, and I let him go from me. Nothing left of him but an outline of blood in the boat.
It would have been fine. The boat would drift out to sea and maybe get wrecked in the storm. Maybe I’d have got off the island somehow, or surfaced in a day or two and said I had a sailing accident. Matt must have fallen off while I was away. Or jumped, maybe. He hadn’t been well, everyone knew that. I would have thought of something. I’m sure of it. But then I swam back to shore and Rory was waiting for me on the slip, in the dark. Holy God, Fi, what have you done? And then it came to me. There was another way to tell this story. Another way to frame it, if only I was smart and quick and sensible. And Rory would do anything to help me. He’d already said as much.
In the end, I will always do something instead of not doing something. I will always make the wrong choice instead of no choice at all. I will always kill before I let something kill me, as slowly and stealthily as a boat becalmed at sea. And maybe, when my baby is born and grown up and I get out of this place they’ve put me in, and I explain everything, how I really had no choice but to do what I did, maybe then I will tell her what really happened, what I did for her, and I know she will understand.
Acknowledgements
A big thank you to everyone at Headline for producing such a beautiful book, and to my agent Diana Beaumont for her unstinting help and support.
Huge thanks to everyone who takes the time to read or review the Paula books, and keep up with her ongoing adventures. I couldn’t do it without you!
A big thank you to Scott Bramley, for coming all the way to Scotland with me in February, so I could research islands and ferry timetables. The island in this book is not real, but there are many similarly beautiful ones off the coast of Ireland and Scotland – Iona is a good place to start for beauty and eeriness, minus the actual murderous strangeness that happens in this book.
I love to hear from readers, so if you have any comments, please do drop me a line on Twitter at @inkstainsclaire or via my website www.ink-stains.co.uk.
Blood Tide (Paula Maguire 5) Page 28