Safe House

by Chris Ewan

  The white hulls of the yachts in Douglas marina were gleaming beneath the electric street lamps that surround the quay by the time Rebecca drove us past the ferry terminal and swung left on to the narrow road climbing the side of the headland. We passed terraced houses and a small industrial yard. Then the view opened up and we could see the sweeping horseshoe curve of Douglas Bay below. The fairy lights strung across the prom glowed a soft, vibrant yellow, and hundreds of lights were on in the windows of the hotels and apartments that lined the seafront. The ferry dock was aglow beneath powerful floodlights. Up ahead, a squat block of luxury flats enjoyed the best of the view from just above the Victorian Camera Obscura.

  I had Rebecca drive around to the right, where we approached a crumbling brick structure that had the appearance of a castle turret with two archways cut through it. Above the archways the words MARINE DRIVE had been painted in faded white lettering. The road was completely dark, with no white lines or street lamps, and Rebecca had to switch to full beam as we passed beneath.

  We didn’t have far to go. After following a bend for a few hundred metres, Rebecca’s headlamps picked out a swathe of clear plastic by the side of the road. The plastic was wrapped around the dying remains of a bunch of white roses. Mum had placed the flowers there to mark the spot where Laura had pitched herself over the cliff.

  I hadn’t been up here since the accident, but it was pretty much how I’d expected it to be. There was an obvious gap where some of the concrete posts and wire fencing that ran along the edge of the road were missing. Of the posts that remained, one was bent at a sharp angle, half ripped out of the ground by the force of Laura’s car bursting through the wires. Glassy fragments glittered in the light of our headlamps on the low gravel pavement. They looked like broken pieces of headlamp reflectors.

  Rebecca stopped a short distance away. The engine idled. I powered down my window and felt the coastal wind on my face. I could hear the surf far below. The swirl and crunch of the waves striking the base of the cliffs. The cry of nesting gulls.

  Rebecca cut the engine and dimmed the headlamps and stepped outside, walking through the slanted beams towards the flowers. She bent down and read the card, then straightened to peer over the cliff.

  I hadn’t planned on joining her and I was still inside the car when she turned and walked back to talk to me through the gap in my window.

  ‘Can you pass me my torch?’ she asked. ‘It’s in my bag.’

  The torch was a weighty Maglite. It had a dimpled metal shaft, cold to the touch. I powered the window right down and handed it to her. She compressed the switch with her thumb and headed back to the gap in the fence, the beam swinging from side to side. I watched her shine the flash into the darkness below. She took a series of sideways steps, like she was conducting a careful survey of the drop. I caught a blink of white in the glare. A seagull taking flight.

  A few moments later, Rebecca beckoned to me with the hand holding the torch. The dazzling flare lanced into the night sky.

  I thought about staying where I was. I thought about shaking my head and signalling that this wasn’t something I could do. But she was insistent, as if she’d found something I really needed to see.

  I shoved my door open. Stepped out of the car. My legs felt stiff, unbending, like my knees were locked in place. My shoes scuffed in the gravel at the side of the road. The air felt raw and wild up here. I could hear the caw of the gulls. The crash and shuffle of the surf. The darkness seemed to have swallowed the yellow light of the headlamps completely.

  ‘Something to show you,’ Rebecca called.

  My throat was dry. I worked my cheeks. Swallowed some saliva.

  ‘It’s not so bad,’ she told me.

  Easy for her to say. For weeks now, I’d fought to keep the reality of this place shut off from my mind. I hadn’t wanted to think about the long drop to the jagged rocks below, or to count the awful seconds Laura would have endured as her car tumbled through the air. I hadn’t wanted to know how unforgiving the impact would have been. How sudden and absolute the outcome.

  The grass verge was torn up where Rebecca was standing. The result of a combination of factors, I guessed. The jolt of Laura’s car digging into the soft turf. The bite of her wheels in the mud. The snag of the wires holding her back for the merest fraction of a second before momentum and gravity took over and the concrete fence posts were yanked free in a spray of compacted earth. Then the stamp of the heavy machinery used by the rescue services to haul the remains of Laura’s car back to the road.

  ‘See this?’ Rebecca asked.

  She was aiming her flashlight over the side. I don’t suffer from vertigo. Not in a big way, at least. But I was feeling unsteady. My legs had a treacherous urge. I kept picturing myself slipping. Or falling. Like invisible hands were pushing me forwards.

  I whipped my head down and snatched the briefest of looks, but the drop wasn’t what I’d expected. I looked again. It was steep, no question, but it wasn’t a sheer cliff. The ground sloped at an acute angle for fifty or so metres, then evened out, then plunged sharply, before ending in a shallow grassy bowl at the top of a spit of land sticking out into the sea. The powerful light of Rebecca’s torch picked out whitish debris and bits of metal at the bottom of the second drop. Two rough trenches had been scored into the earth. I had no doubt that I was looking at the site where Laura’s car had ended up.

  ‘Now look at this,’ Rebecca said.

  She guided me away to the right, through the beams of the headlamps, and played her torch over the edge once again. The fence was still intact at the point she’d chosen and I rested my hand on a concrete post and teetered forwards. The drop rushed up at me out of the dark. A straight plunge to the foaming depths way below. The cliff face was rough and craggy, jammed with shards and fissures of broken rock.

  Rebecca said, ‘It’s the same on the other side.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So your sister’s car went over at an interesting point. It’s the only section along this stretch of road where there isn’t a sheer drop.’

  I backed away from the edge and looked to where Laura had driven over. ‘There’s still a hell of a fall.’

  I waited for Rebecca to respond. She was distracted. Absorbed in thought. She walked past me, towards the flowers.

  ‘It’s not like she would have known what was on the other side,’ I called after her. ‘Look at the speed she must have been going to break through the fence.’

  Rebecca pivoted at the waist and played her torch over the spit of land again. The halogen bleached the scraggly grass. The area of debris looked like someone had been fly-tipping.

  ‘What’s the rest of the coastline like along here?’ she asked.

  ‘The same, pretty much. We’d have to come back in the daytime. Why?’

  She ignored the question. Chewed on her bottom lip.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘You think you could get down there?’ She swung the flashlight over the loose shingle at the beginning of the drop.

  ‘Not with my arm like this,’ I said, lifting my sling. ‘And I wouldn’t want to do it now anyway. Too dark. Too windy.’

  She made a humming noise. ‘Laura’s crash was when? Five in the morning?’

  ‘Just after. Mum heard her go out. She just assumed Laura was having trouble sleeping again.’

  More humming. More lip chewing.

  ‘What is it? Rebecca?’

  She blinked. Like she was coming round from a daze. ‘Let’s get back in the car.’

  She switched off her torch and turned from me, pacing around the reverse of the Fiesta, the cherry red of the brake lights colouring her jeans. I looked back through the broken fencing at the clotted blackness beyond. The concealed spit of land. The pounding of the waves. Then I followed her to the car and folded myself into the passenger seat and powered up my window as Rebecca pulled away.

  She flipped her lights to high beam and crouched forwards over the steering wheel, p
eering hard towards the grassy fringe at the side of the road. Our route coiled around to the right and the headlamps coiled with us, illuminating a parked car. Two figures were huddled together in the front. They broke apart and I could see their faces. A young lad and a flustered girl. There was an R plate on the front of the car. You can learn to drive at the age of sixteen on the Isle of Man, but your car has to be fitted with an R plate for your first year on the road.

  Rebecca dipped her lights.

  ‘Doesn’t go on much farther,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll turn at the top.’

  There was a gentle gradient ahead of us, climbing towards the locked gates at the crest of the rise. Farmland was on our right. A lone sheep grazed behind a barbed-wire fence.

  ‘There’s something I think you should consider,’ Rebecca said. ‘Something you might not have thought about just yet.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘I want you to think about your own role in all this. How you came to be involved in the first place.’

  ‘You know how. It was my bike crash. Lena’s disappearance.’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘Before that.’

  The car’s headlamps picked out the pale timber of the gate. It was closed and bolted. Alongside it was the cliff edge. In the far distance, I could see the milky ray of a southerly lighthouse sweeping the open sea.

  Rebecca heaved the steering wheel to the right and turned the car around, setting off down the hill again. The glow of the instrument panel bathed her hands and her jaw in a green luminescence.

  She said, ‘You went out to fix the heating, correct?’

  ‘You know I did.’

  ‘And you were called to do that, yes? You picked up a message from one of the guys. The one called Lukas.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure it was him.’

  ‘And how many plumbers are there in the phone book over here?’

  Her question threw me. ‘I don’t know. Close to a hundred, maybe.’

  ‘Anything special about your ad?’

  ‘I paid extra for a coloured box.’

  ‘Other people do that too?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Around half of them, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, coincidence is one thing. And we shouldn’t dismiss it completely. But seriously, what are the chances of them picking your name out of the phone book?’

  She looked across at me. Reading my reaction. The sickly green light bathing her face from below.

  ‘Don’t you see?’ Rebecca lifted a hand from the steering wheel. ‘We’re assuming Laura was connected to Lena in some way. Assisting her. And then, out of all the plumbers they could possibly have called, they called you.’

  I let go of a breath. It sounded more like a sigh. ‘So maybe Laura gave them my card.’

  ‘Tell me about the fault with the boiler. What was the problem?’

  ‘It needed a good service.’ I shrugged. ‘But other than that, it was nothing serious. Some wires had come loose. One connected directly to the circuit board. I didn’t have the right connector plug to fix it. That’s why I needed a spare.’

  ‘And how often do you see a problem like that?’

  ‘Couple of times a year, maybe. When the burner kicks in, if the boiler isn’t grounded properly – say it’s on sloping ground – it can shake. Over the course of a few years, that shaking can work a wire free.’

  We eased by the parked car with the young couple in it. This time, they didn’t break apart as we passed. Maybe they figured we’d come up here for the same reason.

  Rebecca said, ‘But isn’t it also possible that if someone wanted to sabotage a system, that would be a good way to do it?’

  ‘Why would anyone want to sabotage their own heating system?’

  ‘Maybe so a plumber would have to come out. A particular individual.’ Rebecca emphasised her words, like she was handing them to me one by one and asking me to weigh them, feel their shape, try to fit them into the slots of a specific puzzle she’d constructed. ‘I think maybe Laura gave Lena your card.’

  ‘You think Lena sabotaged the boiler?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘For what purpose?’

  ‘Based purely on the facts? So that you’d take her away from the cottage on your motorbike.’

  ‘All that just for a bike ride?’

  Rebecca slowed as she passed under the archway in the brick tower, then accelerated around the curve. Douglas promenade appeared from below, bright and gaudy, like Blackpool without the tower.

  She shook her head. ‘You’re forgetting that your journey was cut short. Who knows where she wanted you to go?’

  And that’s when the penny finally dropped.

  ‘I do,’ I said.

  Chapter Thirty

  Lukas turned the laptop around so that Mr Zeeger and Anderson could see the document he’d called up on screen. It was the memorial sheet for Laura Hale’s funeral – the one with the soft-focus image of Melanie Fleming on the opening page.

  ‘That’s her for sure,’ Anderson said, tapping his finger against the glowing screen.

  ‘Agreed,’ Mr Zeeger said.

  ‘So she gave us a false name. One that checked out. Which means she was smart. Question is, how smart?’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘What I’m thinking,’ Anderson said, ‘is how can we be sure if she’s really dead?’

  Lukas spun the laptop back around to face him and got busy with the trackpad. It was a problem that had already occurred to him and one that he’d done his best to answer. He scrolled through his browser history and called up a page from the local newspaper.

  The article was brief, but clear. It stated that Laura Hale, aged thirty-one, had been killed in a car accident on a coastal road more than three and a half weeks ago. No other vehicles were involved and police were not treating her death as suspicious. It stated that Laura, who lived in London, had been on the island visiting her parents and her brother, Rob. It also noted that her father was a one-time motorbike racer by the name of Jimmy Hale, who’d triumphed in the Isle of Man TT races on a couple of occasions back in the late 1970s.

  ‘Doesn’t prove anything,’ Anderson said. He straightened and propped his knuckles on his hips.

  Mr Zeeger leaned back in his chair. The light from the standing lamp blazed down on him. He contemplated Lukas. His blue eyes burned with intensity. ‘When was the last time she visited the cottage?’ Mr Zeeger asked.

  ‘I don’t remember for sure,’ Lukas told him, aware that it didn’t sound good.

  ‘Would the dates fit?’

  Lukas nodded, keeping his eyes down.

  ‘We should have moved Lena sooner,’ Anderson said. It sounded like he was repeating an argument he’d made many times before.

  Zeeger waved his hand. ‘I’m not interested in what we should have done. I want to know what you’re going to do. How you plan to find Lena?’

  Anderson was silent for a moment. Then he reached a decision. ‘Melanie Fleming. Laura Hale. Whatever you want to call her, it’s too much of a coincidence for her brother to be involved in this. And not just him, but a private operative, too. I don’t like that. Not even a little.’

  ‘So what do you suggest?’

  ‘I already bugged the girl but the feedback is dead. I’m guessing she read my move. Next best thing is we watch them. See what they might be up to.’ Anderson turned to Lukas. ‘It’s going to take two of us. Think you can find your way back to his place?’

  Lukas toggled to a fresh Word document on the laptop. It was one of the invoices from the man’s plumbing business. He copied the address information over into a mapping tool and hit Search. He handed the laptop to Anderson before the processor had finished whirring and the graphic had appeared on screen.

  Anderson nodded. ‘I have a vehicle downstairs,’ he said. ‘I’ll drive. You navigate.’

  *

  Anderson had asked me if Lena had given me anything when we’d met. I�
��d told him that she hadn’t. And it was true. But it was also a lie.

  Lena had given me something. It was just that she hadn’t passed it to me directly. She hadn’t taken me aside and told me what she was doing. She hadn’t closed my hand around the item and explained its significance, or asked me to hang on to it for safekeeping. So when I told Anderson that Lena hadn’t given me anything, it was true.

  But it was also a lie.

  It was a lie because Lena had given me a very simple, very modest object. So simple and so modest that it had taken me days to spot it.

  When I first went up to the cottage, Lukas had tossed me a key to the garage. The key was relatively small. A touch flimsy. But it had fitted the lock on the garage door just fine and I’d been able to access the boiler.

  Later that afternoon, Lena had come up with her plan for the following morning, involving my van and my motorbike. She’d told me to take the garage key with me, so that I didn’t need to ask Lukas for it when I returned.

  I did as she suggested and the key had worked just as well the following day. I had it in my pocket when we rode away on my bike. It was still there after the crash, when my leathers were cut away from me and my belongings were collected together in the plastic bag that Dad had carried from the hospital.

  That was how I’d been able to hand Rebecca the garage key when we’d walked up to take a look around the cottage. Just an ordinary key. Attached to a simple plastic key fob. I should have spotted it by then. I should have seen what I was looking at. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t because I hadn’t been expecting it. Because it was so commonplace. So obvious.

  There was a second key on the fob. I didn’t even register that it was there until Rebecca had finished searching the cottage and had passed me the keys. But as I looked down at my palm, I finally understood that there were two keys. There’d been one originally. For the garage. And now there was another one.