‘Are you alright?’ Dallin asked.
I was breathing too hard. ‘I don’t usually drive at night.’
‘Are you okay? Can you do this?’
I glanced at him. ‘Do you want to take over?’
‘I can’t drive. I lost my licence, same time as I lost my job.’
‘Oh for—’ He can’t drive, he can’t navigate – why the hell did Cora bring him along? But I bit my tongue. ‘Just hang on.’
‘Where are we going?’ Dallin asked as I took a corner too fast.
‘North. You remember Smeale beach, don’t you?’
‘Of course I don’t. I went to a bunch of beaches when I was a kid. Doesn’t mean I know where any of them are.’
‘Look, make yourself useful and call the police back. Tell them where we’re going.’
If the police had done like they’d said, and sent a car up here to search for Cora, then they couldn’t be far away. I hung onto that thought.
We barrelled up to a junction. I was hunched forwards, glaring through the windscreen, hands so tight on the steering wheel my knuckles stood out white against my skin.
A give way sign flashed past. I spun the wheel. For an instant the tyres aquaplaned. A squeal rose in my throat. I swallowed it down and yanked the wheel in the other direction. The tyres found purchase. We leapt forwards. I saw a hedgerow rear up in front of us. This time I did squeal.
Somehow I regained control of the car and kept us on the road. I accelerated, ignoring the shocking condition of the road surface. Each pothole that we hit jolted me almost out of my seat. The undercarriage bounced and scratched off the road. How many hours had I spent trying not to ding my car on the lanes around my house? What damage was being done to it right now?
But none of that mattered. All that mattered was finding Cora.
I glanced down at Cora’s map balled up in the passenger footwell. I wished Dallin could’ve made sense of the tangle of blue and pink lines that crawled across the page. Did I absolutely know where we were going? I rarely came up this way. Despite the fact I’d lived in the area for so many years, I didn’t often go out to the beach up here. Me and Beth had gone other places. Now and again we’d gone up to Point of Ayre, or down to Kirk Michael, but Smeale and Blue Point and the other beaches around there … we hadn’t often visited.
What if I got us lost?
I was worrying so much that I almost missed the signpost. ‘There!’ I shouted.
The beach was indicated by a single metal signpost that read ‘Smeale (beach only)’. A tiny sign, so easy to miss. We almost blasted past it.
I stomped on the brakes and brought us slewing to a near-stop. In the passenger seat, Dallin didn’t brace himself in time and bounced his head off something. I cranked the wheel and stamped down on the accelerator again. The back end of the car stepped out. Again, I somehow kept control of the vehicle, more by luck than judgement.
The road was even narrower than the one we’d been on before. Hedgerows scratched our windows on both sides. I hung onto the steering wheel to stop from being jostled out of my seat. The engine was making some horrible noises whenever I touched the accelerator. It sounded like someone had tipped a bag of spanners into there.
A flash of lightning washed everything into sharp black-and-white shapes. Dallin swore loudly.
All of a sudden the hedgerows dropped away and the headlights speared off into the rainy dark with nothing in front of them. I instinctively stomped on the brakes. The car bounced over another hidden pothole. Dallin whacked his head and swore again.
‘It’s a dead end,’ he said. ‘Where are we?’
I pulled the car forwards so the headlights illuminated the flat, empty car park. It was barely twenty feet wide. Beyond its edge, the ground fell away into darkness. The heavy rain and the darkness prevented us seeing the rocky beach which I knew was there.
‘There’s nothing here,’ Dallin said. ‘We’re in the wrong place.’
I drove right up to the far edge of the car park. ‘There!’ I caught a flash of something pale and angular, way down near the sea. ‘Look!’
I tried to pull forwards again but my foot slipped off the clutch and the engine stalled with a lurch. I yanked open my door and was outside before Dallin could even finish swearing.
The rain immediately flattened my hair. Outside the protective bubble of the car, the thunder of the sea overwhelmed everything. The tide was coming in. I saw a wave burst against the rocks at the edge of the car park. Some of the water hitting the car was from the surf.
I ran forwards until I was standing at the rocky slope that led down to the sea.
At the sea-line, listing at a bad angle and with its nose already underwater, was a white van. I recognised it perfectly well, because usually it was parked outside Nicole and Patrick’s house.
Its lights were off. It looked like it’d been abandoned, maybe, at the edge of the car park, with the handbrake off, and had bumped and rolled down until the sea caught it. Even as I watched, a wave broke over its bonnet, hard enough to jostle the vehicle. Within minutes it would be swamped by the sea.
I started climbing down the rocks. They were slick with rain and salt. Several times I almost fell.
Another wave lifted the van onto two wheels. I heard the creak and groan of stressed metal.
The driver’s door stood open. I angled towards it. A small amount of illumination from the interior dome light of the van showed me that the driver’s seat was empty. But there was a shadow in the passenger seat that looked like a person.
I had to wade through a foot of water to reach the door. The tide was so cold it shocked the breath out of me. If I hadn’t grabbed hold of the door I would’ve fallen. Water swirled up around my knees and tried to haul me off my feet.
I made a grab for the steering wheel. The van was moving continuously, buffeted by the waves. I felt the thrum of the ocean through the wheel.
My heart stuttered as I saw Cora in the passenger seat. She was slumped against the door, eyes closed, with a splash of red across her forehead that looked almost too bright and garish to be real.
I hauled myself into the cab of the white van. My grip on the steering wheel made the axle turn. The front right tyre slipped off its rock and plunged downwards. The whole vehicle lurched. I screamed.
With a squeal of metal we ground to a halt again.
‘Cora!’ I yelled. She didn’t respond.
I threw myself across the driver’s seat and grabbed her arm.
A wave hit the driver’s door behind me and tried to slam the door shut on my legs. I cried out in pain. I felt another lurch as another tyre slipped. It would only take a few more waves before the whole vehicle was lifted and tumbled and sent crashing into the water.
I got up onto the driver’s seat. Leaning across Cora, I grabbed for the door release. The door swung open, helped by the backwash of a wave.
The front end dipped suddenly. Part of the undercarriage sheared away in a protracted squeal.
A wave came in. Lifted us. Retreated.
As it pulled the passenger door wide open, I wrapped my arms around Cora and shoved her out of the van.
We fell. We landed in the water. I came up spluttering, blinded, with the freezing water fastened around me so tight I couldn’t breathe.
Someone grabbed my arm and hauled me up. I tore my knees on the barnacled rocks. The tide washed up and around me. Then somehow I was out of the frozen current. There was solid ground beneath me.
‘Cora!’ I yelled, with what breath I had left.
‘I’ve got her!’ Dallin’s voice came from shockingly close. ‘Help me carry her.’
I couldn’t see him at all. I grabbed onto what felt like Cora’s limp arm. Together, we pulled her up over the rocks and onto the hard tarmac of the car park.
I stayed on my hands and knees as I retched up the seawater I’d swallowed.
‘Rosalie,’ Dallin said. ‘Rosalie, are you okay?’
‘I’m here.’
I didn’t have any breath to put behind the words. ‘I’m here.’
I stumbled to my feet. The car park was lit up in two stark beams from the headlights of my stalled car. They illuminated little more than a waterlogged stretch of ground, pockmarked by rain. In its backwash, I saw Dallin hunched over Cora.
‘Is she okay?’ I asked. ‘Is she—?’
‘I’ve got her.’ Dallin was cradling Cora’s head in her arms. ‘I don’t – I think she’s okay, but—’
Cora was breathing. I could see her eyelids fluttering as she tried to come awake.
Lightning split the sky again. Again it froze us in place. Dallin let out a noise that could’ve been a sob. As the light faded, thunder rolled and boomed above us.
I searched my pocket for my phone. When I found it, it was dead, fried by the water.
‘Phone,’ I said to Dallin. ‘Your phone. Where is it?’
‘What?’
‘Call the police. Tell them to send an ambulance.’
I knelt in the wet grass next to Cora. Dallin was attempting to wipe the blood off her forehead with his thumb.
‘Lie her on her side,’ I said. ‘Don’t keep moving her like that. She might have other injuries we can’t see.’ It probably wasn’t necessary to give Dallin all those instructions, but it got him moving. He dug his phone out of his pocket. I was relieved to see it light up to his touch.
I wished I had a torch. Out there in the dark, I couldn’t begin to guess what’d happened to Cora.
Except … except I probably could guess.
Someone had driven the van out here, let it roll down the rocks, then left it there for the tide to take. It could’ve happened anytime in the last hour and a half since I’d lost contact with Cora. Whoever had done it could’ve left in another car, long before we arrived.
I had a feeling that wasn’t the case.
I straightened up. My eyes had adjusted a little but it was still too dark to make out anything except ill-defined shapes.
There was a sudden, blinding flash of lightning. This time I saw it in the sky, a jagged fork that broke the clouds right above the curraghs.
In that frozen moment of light, I saw Nicole. She was no more than fifty feet away from us, sheltering next to a hedgerow. It looked like she’d been trying to find the footpath that looped around back to the main road. In the dark she’d been as blind as us.
She met my eyes. Before the lightning faded, while the rest of the world was still immobile, Nicole took to her heels and darted off towards the road.
I tripped and stumbled over the tussocks of grass as I tried to follow. My legs felt like lead in my wet jeans. As soon as the lightning faded I could see nothing but darting after-images. I kept running.
Ahead of me, Nicole reached the edge of the grass and jumped down onto the road. She’d started at a sprint but now dropped to a hitching jog, punctuated by awkward bursts of speed. She was not used to running.
Then again, neither was I. It’d been a very long time since I’d run so far or so fast. But I wasn’t about to stop now. I ignored the pain in my ankles and hip, ignored my wet jeans dragging at my legs, ignored everything except closing the distance between me and Nicole.
‘The police are on their way,’ I yelled at her. It came out one word at a time as I gasped for breath. ‘You can’t – you – where do you think you’re going?’
Perhaps my exasperated tone got through to her. Or perhaps she realised there genuinely was no way to escape. She slowed, then stopped, then whirled to face me. Rain dripped from the flattened curls of her hair. It couldn’t dampen the anger that flared in her eyes.
‘Why’re you here?’ she demanded.
The question was so unexpected it stumped me for a moment. ‘You were going to kill Cora,’ I said.
Nicole rubbed the centre of her forehead with two fingers. ‘It should’ve never happened this way,’ she told me. ‘I planned it better than this.’
I stared at her. ‘You planned this?’
She flapped an irritated hand at me. ‘Twenty years ago, I planned how this would go. When I found that stupid girl at my house, I knew it wasn’t enough just to get rid of her. I had to make sure my own back was covered.’
I glanced behind me. Dallin hadn’t followed me from the car park. I could only assume he’d stayed with Cora. Likewise, in the other direction, the road was still dark and empty, with no sign of the police.
‘You led Simone out into the curraghs,’ I said. ‘You killed her.’
‘There’s literally no proof of that.’ Was it my imagination, or did a smug smile touch her lips? ‘But if you look hard enough, there’s plenty of proof my husband killed her.’
‘What? Why?’
‘It was a precaution. I expected someone would find the girl, sooner or later. I made sure that, if and when they came knocking at my door, there was nothing to link me to the girl, but plenty to link her to Patrick.’
‘Why would you do that?’
‘Because he deserved it.’ Simone’s eyes flashed in the darkness. ‘You know exactly what he put me through. I knew he’d been carrying on with other women. But to come home, and find a fifteen-year-old girl in our house,’ she drew a shaky breath. ‘What would you expect me to do? I wanted him out of my life. I wanted the police to find the girl and link it all to Patrick. But—’ She lifted her hands in annoyance. ‘They never did. Weeks, then months, then years, and no one missed that stupid girl at all. It was like she’d dropped into our lives like a bomb then disappeared without a trace. I came this close to phoning all the police stations in England to ask if anyone was missing her. But I suppose … that sums her up, doesn’t it? No one cared. Not even enough to raise an alert when she didn’t come home.’ Nicole laughed then, a brittle sound that was swallowed by the rain. ‘The closest anyone came to finding her was when you came out of the curraghs that day, crying about seeing a body. I thought, at last, here we go, and I was relieved.’
I remembered her hugging me on that long ago day. She’d given me biscuits.
‘After twenty years,’ Nicole said, ‘I’d genuinely given up hope of anyone coming for her. And Patrick never strayed again. Everything would’ve been fine, if your friend hadn’t stirred it all up.’
I felt like someone had kicked me in the stomach. Was this genuinely my friend, Nicole, who’d always been there with a cup of tea and a kind word when I needed it? The woman who’d responded with gentle, unspoken understanding when I’d asked her about foxglove shoots. I couldn’t reconcile that with the woman standing in front of me.
‘Cora wasn’t going to find anything,’ I found myself saying. ‘Why hurt her?’
‘There was always a chance she’d find something. I started pulling together the evidence I’d accumulated – evidence that pointed to my wandering husband – in preparation for the day some police officer would turn up demanding to hear our side of the story. I was prepared.’ Nicole wiped rain from her face. ‘But as soon as Patrick caught wind of Cora being here … he maybe wasn’t as stupid as I assumed. He knew what I’d done to his underage girlfriend. I never realised he’d seen me coming out of the curraghs that night. He’s been getting shirty. He had to go.’
I was already soaked through and shivering from the rain, but her words made me cold right to the core. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Why do you think I brought his van here instead of my own car? The police were supposed to find it in the sea and trace it back to Patrick. Not too quickly, of course.’ The faintest smile touched her lips. ‘Not in time to save him.’
I edged towards her. ‘Save him from what?’
‘He was considerate enough to write a note for me.’ Nicole shook her wet hair out of her face. ‘He wrote it twenty years ago, granted, when all he meant to do was walk out. But it serves its purpose.’
I remembered the note on the mantlepiece in her house. What had I done with it? I had a vague memory of dropping it onto the side table when Dallin had shouted to me from the kitchen. �
��What did you do?’ I asked.
‘I poisoned his dinner.’ She gave a shrug. ‘Simple, effective. Don’t bother,’ she added as I reached instinctively for my non-functioning phone. ‘It’s too late for him now. You of all people know how effective a few things from the garden can be.’
In the distance, over the noise of wind and rain, I heard the wail of a siren in the distance. ‘The police are on their way,’ I said.
‘I know.’ The smile reappeared. ‘I’ll be gone before they get here.’
‘Gone?’ I didn’t like the way she said that.
Nicole pointed to the side of the road. I hadn’t realised she’d stopped right near a stile that went over the hedgerow and linked up to the footpath back to the main road. ‘I’m going that way,’ she said. ‘You’ll let me go.’
‘What? No, you should stay here. The police will be here any minute.’
‘If I say here, I’ll tell them what happened to Beth.’
I closed my eyes. Rain pelted my shoulders. ‘Beth died. It was no one’s fault.’ My voice didn’t sound like my own.
‘That’s as may be, but she had a little bit of help, didn’t she? I know perfectly well why you came to me that week, asking about foxgloves and nightshade. I know what you did. And I’m more than willing to tell everyone.’
She turned away from me and walked towards the stile.
Without stopping to think, I threw myself at her, grabbed her around the waist, and dragged her to the ground.
We both landed badly. I hit my elbow on a sharp stone and my arm went numb all the way up to my shoulder. Nicole cried out in pain. I’d landed half on top of her, so she’d partially cushioned my fall; at the same time I’d squashed the air out of her.
For a second we both lay there, winded and bruised, then Nicole tried to struggle out from underneath me. She drove her elbow into my shoulder. I clung to her, unable to do much more than prevent her getting up.
But it was enough. Light suddenly washed over us – headlights, but also blue flashes, as the police car came bumping up the lane. It slewed to a halt ten feet in front of us.
As soon as Nicole saw the car, she redoubled her efforts to get away. She slapped at my head with her free hand. At that point I let go of her. There was no point getting hurt. I protected my head with my arms as Nicole aimed a last elbow at me. Then she scrambled to her feet and ran.
Little Girls Tell Tales Page 26