He laughed in embarrassment as he realised he might have committed a faux pas. ‘I’m sorry. You might be taking one of the language courses. Have I just offended you? There are three other language teachers giving classes.’
She shook her head. Although the wall of rain outside meant that it was rather dark in the car, he could see that she was blushing.
‘No,’ she said, ‘I’m not taking part in a language course. I …’
She was not looking at him, but was staring out of the window. They had reached the road that led north out of Scarborough. Supermarkets and rows of terraced houses flew past outside, garages and dismal pubs, a mobile-home park, which looked like it was sinking in the floods.
‘I’d read in the paper,’ she said quietly, ‘that in Friarage School … Well, on Wednesday afternoons there’s a course, which … for the next three months …’ She hesitated.
In a flash he understood what she was talking about. He did not understand why it had not been clear to him at once. After all, he taught there. He knew about the new course. Wednesdays. From half-three to half-five. Starting today. And Gwendolyn Beckett was just the kind of person who would attend.
‘Oh, I know,’ he said, and made an effort to sound casual about it. As if it were the most normal thing in the world to attend a course for … yes, for whom? Failures? Dead losses? Losers? ‘Isn’t it a kind of … assertiveness training?’
Now he could not see her face at all. She had turned to the window. He guessed that she had gone bright red.
‘Yes,’ she answered quietly. ‘That’s it. You’re supposed to learn to conquer your shyness. To approach other people. To control your … fears.’ Now she turned towards him. ‘That must sound like a load of rubbish to you.’
‘Not at all,’ he assured her. ‘When you think you have a weakness, you have to face it. That makes a lot more sense than just sitting around and not doing anything but complaining. Don’t worry. Just try to make the most of the course.’
‘Yes,’ she said, sounding despondent. ‘I will. You know … it’s not as if I was particularly happy with my life.’
She turned to the window again, and he did not dare enquire further.
Neither said anything.
The rain eased up a little.
As they turned off in the middle of Cloughton towards Staintondale, a gap appeared in the clouds and the evening sun burst through.
He suddenly had a tingling of excitement; a certain alertness. It was a feeling that something new was about to happen to him. It might have to do with this woman sitting next to him.
It could also be something else entirely.
He told himself to stay calm. And to be cautious.
He could not afford to make too many more mistakes in his life.
2
Amy Mills needed the money that her job as a babysitter brought in. That was the only reason she did it. But she had to pay for her studies more or less on her own, so she could not be picky. Not that it was unpleasant to spend her evenings in someone else’s living room, reading a book or watching the telly, just keeping watch over a sleeping child whose parents were out. But it meant she got home late, and she hated the trip home in the dark. At least in the autumn and winter. In the summer the evenings were light until late, and often the streets of Scarborough were full of overseas students coming to the East Yorkshire coast for summer English courses.
This evening was different. The storm and the afternoon’s heavy rain had driven everyone inside and cleared the streets. What was more, after a very hot day it had cooled considerably. It was unpleasant and windy.
No one will be out, thought Amy uneasily.
On Wednesdays she was always at Mrs Gardner’s place, taking care of her four-year-old daughter Liliana. Mrs Gardner was a single mum, supporting herself and her daughter with a number of jobs, and on Wednesday evenings she taught French in the Friarage School. The class finished at nine, but then she always went out for a drink with her students.
‘Otherwise I’d never get out,’ she said to Amy, ‘and at least once a week I’d like to have some fun. Is it all right by you if I’m back by ten?’
The problem was it was never ten when she finally got in. Half-ten if Amy was lucky, a quarter to eleven more likely. Mrs Gardner apologised profusely each time.
‘I have no idea where the time went! By ‘eck, once we start chattin’ …’
Actually Amy would have liked to ditch this job, but it was her only more or less stable work. She looked after the children of other families too, but only irregularly. She could rely on the Wednesday money, and in her situation that was priceless. If only she did not have that trip home …
I’m such a coward, she often said to herself, but that did not do anything to lessen her fear.
Mrs Gardner had no car in which to drive her babysitter home quickly, and she was over the alcohol limit in any case. She had drunk a fair few this Wednesday and it was later than ever before – twenty past eleven!
‘We said ten o’clock,’ said Amy in annoyance as she packed up her books. She had spent the evening studying.
At least Mrs Gardner showed a rueful face. ‘I know. I’m terrible. But there’s a new lady in our class and she bought us a couple of rounds. She had a right few stories to tell. By time I thought ‘bout leavin’ – it were already so late!’
She handed Amy the money and was decent enough to give her an extra five pounds. ‘Here. Because you really had t’ do overtime today … Everythin’ OK with Liliana?’
‘She’s asleep. She didn’t wake up once.’ Amy said goodbye to tipsy Mrs Gardner and left. On the street she hunched her shoulders against the cold.
Almost like autumn, she thought, but it’s just mid July.
Thankfully it had not been raining for a few hours. The way home took her along the street, part of the way down St Nicholas Cliff, past the rather dilapidated Grand Hotel and then over the long iron bridge which connected the centre of town to South Cliff and went over a main road that was busy during the day. At this late hour, however, the road down there was deserted, although it was still bright under the blazing street lamps. The silent sleeping town was creepy, but Amy still had her fear under control. The stretch through the park would be worse. Down to her left was the sea and the beach, high up above were the first South Cliff houses. In between were the Esplanade Gardens, which snaked upwards along terraces. They were densely planted with bushes and trees and a multitude of little paths cut through them. The shortest way through it was up the steep steps that led directly to the Esplanade, the wide road on whose western side the hotels stood, one beside the next. This was Amy’s way home, and the dark steps were the tricky stretch. As soon as she reached the Esplanade, she would feel better. Then she had to go a good little bit further up the road and just after the Highlander Hotel she would turn into Albion Road. An aunt of hers owned a narrow terraced house here and had given Amy a place to stay while she studied. The aunt was old and lonely and happy to have company, and Amy’s parents weren’t well off and found the offer of a free place to live very welcome. Furthermore, from there she could easily walk to the campus. She was glad that some things had turned out better than she might have expected. Where she came from, a working-class estate in Leeds, no one would have believed that Amy would make it to university. But she was intelligent and hard working, and for all her extreme shyness and her fearfulness, she was determined. She had passed all her exams with good marks until now.
She was in the middle of the bridge when she stopped and looked back. Not that she had heard something, but every time she got about this far she had the almost automatic reaction, before she plunged on into the creepily empty Esplanade Gardens, to check if everything was all right – without being exactly clear what she meant by all right.
A man was walking down St Nicholas Cliff. Tall, slim, taking quick steps. She could not see what sort of clothes he was wearing. Only a few more yards and he would have reached the bridge, toward
s which he was obviously heading.
There was no one else to see, near or far.
With one hand Amy held on tight to her bag of books, with the other hand to her front door key, which she had dug out of her bag at Mrs Gardner’s house. She had got into the habit of holding it at the ready on her way home. Of course that was all part of her fearfulness. Her aunt forgot to turn the outside light on every night. Amy hated standing there rummaging around in her bag for the key, as blind as a mole. There were ten-foot-high lilac bushes to the right and left, and her aunt – with the typically unreasonable stubbornness of old age – refused to have them pruned. Amy wanted to get into the house as fast as possible. To be in a safe place.
Safe from what?
She was too easily frightened. She knew that. It just wasn’t normal to see ghosts everywhere, burglars, murderers and perverts behind every corner. She guessed it had to do with her upbringing – as the sheltered, mollycoddled only child of her straightforward parents. Don’t do this, don’t do that, this could happen, that could happen … She had heard things like that all her life. She had not been allowed to do a lot of what her classmates did, because her mother was afraid that something could go wrong. Amy had not rebelled against the bans; she had soon shared her mother’s fears and was glad to have a reason she could give her schoolfriends:
I’m not allowed …
The long and the short of it was that she did not have many friends now.
She turned round once more. The stranger had reached the bridge. Amy walked on. She walked a little faster than before. It was not only fear of the man that made her hurry. It was also the fear of her own thoughts.
Loneliness.
The other students at Scarborough Campus, an offshoot of the University of Hull, lived in halls of residence for their first year of study, then they formed little groups to rent out the inexpensive houses that belonged to the university. Amy had always tried to convince herself that it was natural and sensible for her to creep under her aunt’s wing, because no rent was naturally better than low rent, and she would have been stupid to decide otherwise. The bitter truth was that she had no clique to go in with. No one had ever asked her if she would like to share this or that flat with this or that group. Without the old aunt’s empty guest-room things would have looked bleak, and not only from the financial point of view. But Amy did not want to think about that.
From the end of the bridge it was only a few more steps to the park. As usual, Amy turned right, towards the steps. There was a new building in the bend; it was in the last stages of construction. It was not clear whether it would be residential or used by Scarborough council for some other purpose.
Amy walked quickly past it and then stopped short. Two of the tall metal mesh fences that surrounded the house were now blocking the steps and the nearby meandering path, which would normally have offered an alternative. The usual entrance was barred. You could squeeze through sideways, but Amy dithered. That afternoon, when she walked to the pedestrian precinct in the stifling heat to run an errand or two before she started babysitting for Mrs Gardner, the way had still been open. In the meantime there had been a violent storm and an almost apocalyptic flood of rain. Possibly the steps and the meandering path had been damaged. The earthworks and gravel had been washed away. It might be dangerous to take either route up.
Added to that, it was obviously prohibited.
Amy was not the kind of girl to just ignore a law. She had always been taught to obey the authorities, whether she understood their rules or not. They had their reasons; that was enough. In this case she was even able to understand the reason.
Undecidedly, she turned around.
There were other paths that led up into the labyrinthine Esplanade Gardens, but none of them led quickly and directly up to the road and to where people lived. The lowest path led in the opposite direction: down to the beach and the Spa Complex, a collection of Victorian buildings right by the sea, which the town used for all kinds of cultural events. At night, however, they were completely closed off, and not even a nightwatchman was around. Running up the cliff behind the Spa Complex there was a funicular railway, mainly to transport elderly ladies and gentlemen who were no longer willing to struggle up the steep gardens cut out of the rock. But about half an hour before midnight the cars stopped, and now there was no longer anyone on duty in the ticket office. Of course you could also go up on foot, but it was a long and difficult climb. The advantage of this lower path, though, was that it was lit. Large curving lamps, also modelled on the Victorian style, gave off a warm orange light.
There was also a middle way – the narrowest of all three. For a good stretch, halfway up the steep slope, it ran almost alongside the drop before starting to rise so gently that even walkers who were not in the peak of physical fitness were able to proceed with some degree of ease. Amy knew that this path came out right in front of the Crown Spa Hotel on the Esplanade. She would get to the top more quickly if she took the middle way than if she went along the beach, but the disadvantage was that there were no street lamps there. The path lost itself between bushes and trees in blackest darkness.
She took a few steps back, and looked towards the bridge. The man had almost crossed it now. Was she imagining things, or was he really walking more slowly than he had before? More hesitantly? What was he doing here at this time of night?
Keep calm, Mills, you’re here at this time of night too, she said to herself, although it did not make her heart beat any little bit less fast.
He could be on his way home, just like you!
But tell me, who was just going home now? It was twenty to twelve. Not the time when people normally return home from work, unless they were babysitting for an inconsiderate mum who always came in too late.
I’m going to quit. I can’t put up with it any more. Not for any amount of money, she resolved.
She weighed up her options. None of them seemed particularly promising. She could walk back across the bridge to St Nicholas Cliff and then take the long Filey Road up through town – but that would take ages. Then there was always the bus, but she had no idea if her bus was still running this late at night. And a few weeks ago she had used the bus one day when the weather was bad, and she had been picked on at the bus stop by some drunken, pierced youths with shaved heads. She had been scared to death and had sworn that in future she would rather be soaked to the bone and risk a cold than find herself in such a situation once again. Fear – yet again. Fear of walking through the dark park. Fear of waiting at the bus stop. Fear, fear, fear.
She was in charge of her life and it could not go on like this. She could no longer let herself stumble from one crisis to the next, trying to avoid one fear and so inevitably raising another. And in the end standing paralysed in a cool, rainy July night, listening to her own panting breath, feeling her heart pound like a fast and heavy hammer, and asking herself which of her fears was the least worst. In the end it was the infamous choice between the devil and the deep blue sea, and that felt terrible.
The man was now on a level with her. He stopped and looked at her.
He seemed to be waiting for something, maybe for what she would say or do, and as Amy was a girl who had been taught to meet people’s expectations, she opened her mouth.
‘The … path is closed,’ she said. Her voice croaked a little, and she cleared her throat. ‘The fencing … blocking the path.’
He gave a brief nod, turned away and took the path towards the beach. The lit path.
Amy breathed a sigh of relief. Harmless, it had been completely harmless. He wanted to go home, normally he would no doubt have taken the steps. Now he would probably walk to the Spa Complex and then up from there, and curse inwardly that the journey home took longer than expected. His wife was waiting at home. She would have a go at him. It had got late in the pub with his friends, and now this detour. Not his day. Sometimes everything happened at once.
She giggled, but noticed how nervous she sounded. She
had a tendency to dream up the details of the lives of people completely unknown to her. Probably because she was on her own too much. When you did not communicate enough with people of flesh and blood you had to dwell in your own imagination.
One more glance back at the bridge. No one to see there.
The stranger had disappeared towards the beach. The steps were closed off. Amy did not dither any longer. She took the middle path, the unlit one. The little bit of moonlight that trickled through the long veils of cloud was enough to let her guess where the path at her feet led. She would come up at the Esplanade without breaking any bones.
The closely planted bushes, whose full summer foliage was heavy with raindrops, swallowed her up within seconds.
Amy Mills disappeared into the darkness.
OCTOBER 2008
Thursday, 9th October
1
When the phone in Fiona Barnes’s living room rang, the old lady jumped. She left the window, where she had been standing and gazing out over Scarborough Bay, and walked over to the side table the phone stood on, unsure whether or not to lift up the receiver. She had received an anonymous call that morning, and the morning before, and last week too there had been two of these harassing calls. She was not even sure if what was happening could be called anonymous calls, as no one said anything on the other end of the line; all she could hear was breathing. If she did not slam the receiver down on its cradle in annoyance, as she had done that morning, then the unknown person always hung up after about a minute of silence.
Fiona was not easily scared, she was proud of her cool head and that she held her nerve. Yet these events disturbed and unsettled her. She would have preferred to just let the phone ring and ring without answering, but then of course she would miss calls that were important or that meant something to her. From her granddaughter Leslie Cramer, for example, who lived in London and was just going through the trauma of a divorce. Leslie no longer had any relatives except for her old grandmother in Scarborough, and Fiona wanted to be there for her now in particular.
The Other Child Page 2