by Lorna Gray
He stopped. Instinct made me press back against the faintly sticky wall of the foyer. He wore a long raincoat over the cheap suit and a hat tipped low over his brow so that the pale brim very nearly covered his face but it couldn’t conceal the fact that he was scanning the street while trying very hard to look as though he was only waiting for a gap in the thin traffic. The whole seafront was a monotone blur. The buildings blended with the screen of the rolling mist and the only movement came from the black shapes of cars and people, looming into view and gaining colour before diminishing again to grey. I watched, waiting in my turn with every muscle and every breath stilled while he made his decision. But then he plugged for the promenade to his left and passed beneath the turrets of the college buildings towards the castle.
It was, significantly, the route away from our hotel. I could see that building to my left, two neat pillars forming a classical porch and white paint only a little shabby despite the difficulties of sourcing materials through the war. I peeped out of the pavilion doorway. It was tempting to make a dash for it. It was too tempting.
I couldn’t see Jim any more but that wasn’t reassuring. His decision to walk towards the castle felt too much like an invitation. I nearly took it anyway. But then Mrs Alderton peered out of the hotel foyer to assess the condition of the sky – low and settling – and ducked back in again.
Fifteen minutes later found me still dithering in the mouth of the pier. Twelve cars of indeterminate varieties had come, disgorged their occupants and gone again. None were the Morris and I couldn’t see Jim. No one else had shown themselves on the steps to the hotel but I wasn’t now brave enough to imagine I could get in and out unseen. The obvious thing to do would be to abandon my possessions and leave without paying my bill but aside from the questionable legality of sending payment later, it meant that I would also be unable to reclaim my ration book. Without it I wouldn’t be able to take a room anywhere else. And that meant that instead of running to ground somewhere obscure, I was left with my sister in Cirencester or the mad dash back to the trap of my parents’ deserted home in Lancaster. Neither of which were remotely tempting prospects.
But I had to go somewhere and I couldn’t stay here. Certainly not when I crept forwards enough to run my gaze across the front of the pier pavilion towards the metal railings of the promenade and stared straight into Jim’s eyes.
He was leaning patiently against a lamp post and watching me beneath the brim of his hat with a very genuine expression of amusement on his face. He had clearly been waiting there all along. As soon as he caught my eye, the face transformed itself into the blank indifference of that shabby salesman again and I had to suppress a sudden chill. Until now, I’d been confronted by an infuriatingly persistent fellow guest by the name of Jim Bristol. This man was a stranger. Now I was afraid of him.
Suddenly I didn’t want to strike out across the town, even for the hope of a train and real escape. There were too many streets between me and the station and too many chances for that black Morris to loom out of the damp air. There was too great a sense that Jim was waiting to be the man who placed me in its back seat.
So instead, when a large family of people bustled through the small eatery next door on their way to the end of the short pier, I went with them. If I was lucky they would find the view disappointing since it was only varying degrees of deepening grey – smooth grey above and rippling grey below. When they finally conceded defeat and attempted to seek better entertainment in the town, I’d go with them then too. There was security in moving as a herd, even if I knew that it would do nothing to shake off Jim.
Unfortunately, this family was not easily bored. The youngest child had a bucket and piece of string with bait attached and an ambition to collect crabs. There was space for me at the farthermost point where the metal railings met in a corner. I rested my forearms on the barrier and stared down at the water for a moment, eyes following the silver thread of a more serious fishing line to the distant spot where a float bobbed in the void. Drawing a deep breath, I braced myself and turned.
Jim hadn’t followed us. Of course he hadn’t. The pier was small so it was easy enough to discount his face from the few. This seaward end was just a narrow rectangle floored with wooden boards and fringed with sturdy metal barriers on all sides. The pavilion and its untidy tearoom stood between me and the formless void where the promenade would be if only the waterlogged air hadn’t been so thick. I could just make out the amber orbs of street lamps and passing traffic. The effect was very much like a severe smog in London except that I didn’t recall the city ever smelling of anything so pleasant as rotting seaweed and ozone.
There was a terrible sense of having walked myself into a trap. There was a very good reason, I supposed, why Jim hadn’t followed me here. He didn’t need to. I might well have succeeded in taking myself to the one place inaccessible by car, but I had also cleverly left myself only one exit. He only had to wait for me to walk back out again into whatever the real trap was.
The tide was out. Behind me the very faint swell ran shushing over angular black granite. The sound drew my thoughts unshakably to that other watery place, the waterfall. There the water roared; here it was a benign silken film rippling across lines of rock. Its call made me turn again until my eyes found the glassy sea.
Unwillingly, ludicrously, my mind revisited that other growing theory. The probability that someone else was there that day that Rhys took his life. Time and time again I was being presented with the single reoccurring judgement of Rhys’s character: it was not in his nature to succumb to desperation quietly. Here the pier was perhaps twenty or thirty feet high at low tide. It wasn’t the towering height of Devil’s Bridge but still it was perhaps just tall enough to make the attempt worthwhile for them. Particularly when my own recent past indicated there was every likelihood that the incident would ultimately be chalked up as self-determined regardless of whether or not I lived to tell the tale…
With a jolt, my mind swerved violently away from that particular line of thought. Instead I cursed, inwardly muttering to myself. If this was the great secret; if their single ambition was to push me into joining Rhys in his watery grave or an incarceration of a different sort, they could keep it. It was almost a relief when I saw Jim again and not nearly close enough to tip me over the barrier.
He was now guarding the exit into that dirty tearoom but not with any appearance of immediate violent intent. He too was leaning back against the metal barrier like any normal visitor to this seaside town and as well as taking the time to smile at a child who was pedalling past his feet on a tricycle, he had also apparently taken the time to draw out his old prop of the Aberystwyth guide book.
It was the sight of that guide book that did it. Being hunted and wet and cold was one thing, but it was asking too much to be laughed at. It was a pointed reminder of my failure to confront him last night. With one angry slap of my palm against the metal rail I propelled myself away from the end of the pier and across the wooden boards towards him.
I’m not entirely sure I didn’t mean to tip him over the barrier myself. If I did, my fury never found its release. The interval between my arrival on the pier and his had obviously been put to good use. He must have taken the time to make contact with his friends. The doubts that had for days been clouding my faith in my instincts vanished just as predicted when the first of those two men stepped out of my memory and into reality through the pavilion bar onto the decking.
Chapter 14
The man was tall and narrow, and much younger than I remembered. His businesslike suit was a little smart for a damp day by the sea and the dark pinstriped jacket was well cut and not the lumpy sack my mind had fitted to the muscle-bound thug of imagination. He wasn’t muscle-bound anyway. He had dark auburn hair and it was swept back from his narrow face in a long curling style that belonged very much to the civilian world and showed he had either dodged his national service or was just old enough that it had finished with the war. I
spied the other man as he stepped around the telescope stand on the end of the pier in a perfectly executed flanking manoeuvre.
I had always presumed that when I saw them I would have the opportunity to make a fight of it – forewarned as I was that capture meant a car ride – but disbelief ruled the day first. A giddy laughing disbelief. Because by now I was reasonably certain that a car ride wasn’t what they intended for me.
The ginger-haired man was creeping closer and reaching out cautiously towards my arm and I retreated swiftly until my back met the hard metal of the barrier. My shoulder brushed the arm of a holidaymaker. For one brief second I saw surprise and their recoil. And then the red-haired man’s hand snatched, reaching. It groped. It traced my movement as I twisted aside, sinking, clinging; anything to make that precious barrier between me and the drop higher. I was probably screaming. My body carved a line between my startled neighbours and the railing, and they gave way, jabbering, only to tut and scold instead. Everyone could see this was a joke amongst holidaymakers. They just didn’t think it was very appropriate for a grown woman to play a variation of that game the children had enjoyed on the steps by Devil’s Bridge. That inescapable reach swooped, adjusted and then abruptly the hand made contact with my elbow. It dragged me back easier than a fisherman reeling in his fly. Once the hand was sure of me, there was nothing I could do. Smiling like a good sport, his fingers locked on my arm in a grip that shut off my flight just as surely as if it were a switch and then we were moving wherever he wanted me.
Relief learned it was not over the barrier, but smoothly, calmly into silence and towards dry land.
Relief was more debilitating than their touch. The shorter fellow’s hand met my other arm. He was wearing a cheaper suit and his face was rounder beneath his grey felt hat. He was nearer my age. His grip closed more gently; perhaps he didn’t see the need to be cruel now they had me. I felt his free hand settle low upon my back just to be sure that I couldn’t duck away as I had that time at the bus stop. Everyone else relaxed. They had known all along that it was a joke. For me the days of strain and the dreaming terrors of my nights were nothing. That instant of dread and then the release of knowing it was a mistake made the advance towards the promenade a swooping plunge into the unknown.
My salesman, Jim, was passed without so much as a whisper of recognition from either party and it barely even registered as a surprise. I turned my head, looking back at him, but the gaze that met mine beneath the brim of his hat only seemed blankly ignorant before it was quickly withdrawn.
“You won’t get much help from him.” At my side, my captor broke his silence. His eyes had followed mine and that supple mouth formed a confident smile. I couldn’t tell whether he was being scathing of a poverty-stricken stranger, or respectful of his secret contact.
They took me along the seafront past my hotel and onwards along the promenade towards the cheaper hotels where the funicular railway rattled and many cars were parked. Disorientation faded. I was alive. My hair was damp enough to stick to my face. Streetlamps beamed yellow in the gloom. It was only shortly after lunch and it might well have been dusk. I was resisting every step and barking out variations of the same idiotic question; “Where are you taking me?” followed by “I haven’t got what you want.” They gave me no reply except the rasp of their breath and the heavy tramp of their feet.
Actually, someone replied. Someone’s voice answered mine. There was a squeak of my name and a sudden cold flood of seawater across my feet and then a childish exclamation of surprise as if running with a full bucket had never ended in disaster before. By my left ear, a spluttering of sharp curses clarified abruptly into a low “Why, you little …” only for the ginger-haired man to be silenced in turn by his shorter fellow with a swift caution of, “Clarke!”
All of a sudden the tall brute had a name. It made a world of difference to me. It sharpened my state of mind somehow. So did the fact that my arm was free. Clarke was in the process of giving the boy a nasty shake. To me he was considerably less formidable now that he had a child-shaped gritty imprint on his side and saltwater weaving a dark stain across his well-polished leather shoes. It took me a moment to realise what the boy must have done. With that absolute single-mindedness of the child, he had seen me and decided that I must be delighted to see the fruits of today’s hunt under the pier. Now poor Samuel looked like he was going to cry. I was instantly awake in the grip of the other man’s hands, no longer a hostage but a normal human being resenting this outrageous bullying of an amiable little boy.
The bucket, now rolling across the promenade in a graceful arc, had blessedly only housed rocks and seaweed and a small crab which was now rapidly calculating the possibility of escape. I picked up the bucket as it neared my toe and prepared to beat Clarke over the head with it.
“Clarke!” The second man relieved me of the bucket with a snatch and a scowl. He at least was looking rather more the stereotyped brute of my imagination now that his temper had been unleashed.
Clarke snarled, “What?”
His answer came from another male who was no one I had ever met. “What is going on here? Sam? What have you done?” His voice wreaked a transformation upon Clarke. By the time Samuel’s father arrived bringing salvation and a resounding contradiction of another of Mrs Alderton’s sweeping judgements – the claim that noisy children came from broken homes – Clarke’s long fingers were nonchalantly smoothing down the creases of his suit.
No one was holding me.
Clarke’s head turned towards me. He moved. He snatched. He stopped. Only his eyes followed me while I began to back away. He didn’t dare do anything else in case I made a scene. He didn’t know that I didn’t want one either; I just wanted to get away. Samuel’s father, looking very much the part of the irate father on holiday – newly arrived from his office and resplendent in warm clothes but rolled trousers and bare feet – was only too pleased to have the opportunity to vent all his stresses on a man who was scaring his son.
His glare turned Clarke’s growl to a simper and the small audience who were treating this as a stage spectacle shielded me as I turned away and began to run.
Clarke left it just a few seconds too late to hiss beneath his ingratiating smile to his fellow. “Leave this. Get after her, you fool.”
---
At the moment that Clarke snapped out his instruction to his companion I think I had a lead of about ten yards. The crowd was thicker on the street heading inland. The press of people reduced my lead to eight yards. Then, suddenly, a swarm of Liverpudlians made it fifteen, then twenty. By the time I went to ground in the first safe place I could find, I’d lost sight of the man just as surely as he must have lost me. It seemed a miracle.
The great art-deco entertainment hall loomed ghoulishly and I dodged through the hordes seeking cheap amusements in the basement and the better-dressed clientele destined for festivities on a Royal Wedding theme on the floors above. I had a wild ambition of sustaining my lead all the way to the train station but beyond the dance hall, a small stampede of people turned my ideas and my path towards the rather more achievable aim of a picture house. And besides, I couldn’t have escaped their pull if I had tried. I ducked left and followed them inside. The air on the crowded stairs was musty and the electric lighting yellow.
“One, please. Balcony.” My hoarse murmur was enough to get me a ticket and then I was pushing through the double doors marked Coliseum and casting wide-eyed glances at my fellows as I crossed the auditorium to the winding metal staircase on the other side. It seemed incredible that this little swarm of damp people had been sufficient to conceal me. The curtain was still down but the cramped rows of seats in the popular stalls were already filling in anticipation of the next showing. My ticket bought me access to the first floor and I tucked myself neatly into a seat on the tip of the arc and furthest from the screen. Instinct told me to find a shady corner in which to hide but both arms of the balcony had doors that permitted access to the stairs and
I didn’t relish the idea of anyone sneaking up behind. So instead I settled into my vantage point at the heart of the balcony with a wall at my back, two possible means of escape and an unimpeded view of the stalls. It must be said that I didn’t much enjoy this latest view over a steep drop after those intense few seconds at the tip of the pier.
My clothes dried as the seats filled around me. My hair was beyond salvation. Luckily none of my neighbours were interested in this little wide-eyed figure of a woman. These were the cheaper seats so my companions were the older locals; a cheery bunch and many showed signs of a day spent in the nearby bars.
The curtain lifted. It took perhaps another half hour for my breathing to ease and another beyond that to remember that the bag I was clutching tenderly contained a dead man’s clothes. The cartoon reels flicked through their never-ending variations of the same teasing antics and in the pause between one scene and the next, I drew out my sketchbook again and made a note in the back. Clarke.
The main showing began and the audience settled; a few hundred faces staring at the hypnotic screen. Sadly, instead of picking a day when the feature was something useful like Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps or The Count of Monte Cristo or any one of the other man-on-the-run type films that might have given helpful tips to a woman like me, I had the detailed report on the marriage between Her Royal Highness the Princess Elizabeth and her tall man of choice, Lieutenant Mountbatten. To this day I cannot endure the footage of that happy event without recalling the stifling restlessness of hiding away in that place. To me her carriage was a prison cell and the ranks of royal dignitaries in the congregation were spies and jailors. And the bells, always the ringing of Westminster Abbey bells mixing with the sweet shrill tones of the boy choir. They were the unceasing rhythm of the shallow waves passing over rock beneath the pier.