by Lorna Gray
They let me take the funicular railway to the summit of the hill where this path began. I had long since give up the pretence that I had any control over this. If I had, I might have convinced myself that the inspector had made them wary or that perhaps they didn’t know about this path to Borth and I might really have this chance to get away. But I didn’t believe that. They were playing out a plan of their own while I occupied myself with mine.
All along the seafront the Royal Wedding celebrations were still running. The bandstand was open and this was where the crowds were. The clifftop was quieter. After the neatly ordered streets, the landscape up here was shockingly wild and open until it came to an abrupt end a dizzying hundred yards or so above the sea. There was a stiff breeze that cut through my flapping coat. Suddenly this bleak granite coastline teetered on the brink of winter. The hilltop path stretched from left to right, south to north, with the distant grey of the next town just discernible through the smudged sea air. The alternative train station was there; only about six tantalising miles of deserted landscape stood between me and it.
The green surf moved and sucked at the foot of the cliffs. I could see now why they might have been willing to let me stray up here. It was the incident on the pier all over again and this time the distant sea didn’t need Jim to plant the thought of falling in my head. The hiss of rolling surf was mesmerising, crawling, alluring and it whispered of lonely visits to high waterfalls and dead husbands. I kept moving and I kept well back from the edge. It was the only way to cope.
Luckily, I had no intention of making a madcap dash along the clifftop today. I stepped into the tearoom beside the busy Camera Obscura and had a hasty discussion with the serving boy about directions for the route to Borth. Then, trail safely laid, I found the crude, narrow track that ran left – in precisely the wrong direction for Borth – and followed it cautiously downhill back to the town between thorn bushes that snatched at the case in my hands.
My watch must have stopped while I was up there. I noticed it when the next clattering funicular carriage rose, suddenly very close, and I found myself a few seconds later lying in the grit with my hand by my face. Then I was safely down and hurrying alone and unseen up the short rise onto the back street that ran behind the high seafront hotels towards the town.
There was a brief flash of red ahead. An old car with a canvas hood was crossing the junction at the end of this street, ready to make the long run inland. I won’t describe what I felt when I saw Adam go.
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I hadn’t lost Clarke. There is a method of hunting that is practiced, I am told, by people with a taste for big game. It is the sort that picks up a scent and trails it, sometimes for days, herding its quarry away from food, away from rest, away from all hope, until the desperate prey is so bewildered that it simply forgets it is a wild free thing and goes patiently to its death.
Clarke was doing it now.
He was alone so he must have believed my decoy enough to send his companion up to the hilltop and tracing the cliff path to Borth. But he had not gone up there himself. From the moment my feet had regained level ground at the foot of the cliff, he’d been there, about ten yards behind me, and he must have decided there were more subtle ways of avoiding another fuss. Now he was driving me, goading me, letting me exhaust myself amongst all these people until I had no intelligence left to even beg for help. And he was enjoying it.
He was amused when I rebelled and attempted to defy him by drawing attention from a passerby. I did it twice, once to a strong-looking man and once to a woman with her family. The man was middle-aged and he turned his head just in that perfect way that tricked my mind into thinking he was Jim. I was used to the apparition that was my husband – Rhys’s presence was so familiar now that it was almost a game to see when my mind would make him pop up – but it was considerably less pleasant to imagine I’d plucked at the sleeve of Jim Bristol in yet another disguise. The man didn’t understand my incoherent request for help anyway. The woman only made a protective snatch for her gawping child. It fleetingly occurred to me that Mary might believe me but I lost my nerve when finding her meant braving the trap of the hotel. I didn’t waste the effort on anyone else.
Clarke smiled when I tried instead to become invisible. I walked everywhere; anywhere where there was a chance I might be lost within a mass of people. I took Clarke on a tour of the town’s sights, even to the oppressive ruins of the castle, and finally followed the rush as the tourists returned to modern shopping streets with their minds fixed on the prospect of an afternoon pot of tea. Clarke stayed with me, an unshakeable extension of my own footsteps, but my attempt at invisibility must have been more successful than I’d realised because the postcard seller with his small trolley of gaudy souvenirs didn’t notice me at all when he stole my path with me still in it.
The blow to my ankle was agony and we both tangled in a heap, the trolley and I, and painted seashells and pebbles spilled everywhere. I barely waited to see the carnage. It was enough that the blow had reawakened my senses. I was a person, alive and ready for flight.
There was an instant rush of people eager to look, to help the man pick himself up and no doubt help themselves to some of his fallen cargo. No one helped me to my feet, not even Clarke. He was somewhere at the back, jostled aside by merry elbows.
I shook off the last of the seaside debris, snatched up my poor battered bags and dived into the first place I found.
Chapter 19
Clarke lost me for about three hours. For three long hours, I had nothing to do except calculate my options and then dismiss them all in turn. My space was dank and musty and the hymnals that made up my perch smelt faintly of mildew. I was hiding in the cupboard of a Methodist chapel and the wide wooden floor in the centre led the eye to the demure altar in its recess ringed with elegant lettering. I stayed there until the tinted light that shone through tall graceful windows across the vacant gallery had faded to match the heavy black of the town outside.
I sat there while Clarke came in and searched and I stayed there when he left again. I found the dregs of the water flask I used for painting in the bottom of my handbag. It was stale but I drank it all the same.
Night had fallen by the time I slipped out through a side door that led through a silently sleeping schoolroom. It was probably only about five o’clock but my weary body thought it was midnight. My muscles were hollow in that way they have when you’re down to your reserve energy but I didn’t have the strength to brave a meal somewhere. It would be tantamount to consigning myself to another night in this town.
So instead I set myself a new target and it wasn’t one I had tried before. I think I might have thought of running to Devil’s Bridge in passing once, but I’d never intended it to be a serious plan. Now it was the only route that seemed to make any sense. I’d take the little train that was timed to ferry the workers back home to their hillside homes and I would spend the night in the hotel there. In the morning I wouldn’t run. I might not have the choice anyway. But if I did, I would do what I would never have been brave enough to attempt before. I would see how far I could climb down the river gorge and try to be the one to find Rhys’s body.
This wasn’t about escape any more. Or logic. This was about knowing. And defying with every ounce left of my existence this impulse they had to hound me to despair.
It was driven by exhaustion and hunger and the improbable dream that tomorrow I would have the strength to attempt such a rough descent of that valley. It was made possible by deliberately deluding myself into believing that if only I managed to get onto the little narrow gauge train and escaped Aberystwyth at last, everything else would be just that little bit better. It didn’t matter that I knew it was a lie. It was enough that it kept my body moving.
The Rheidol railway line hugged close to the towering bulk of the mainline station. The last Birmingham train was long gone but all the same, when I finally neared the wide street that held the big station building, I was careful
to keep myself out of its line of sight.
Some people passed me, shop girls and visiting hillmen walking purposefully towards their homeward bound train. Clinging to the deep recess of a dirty doorway, I examined each of their faces in turn. They each gave me the shock of seeming to be Clarke or Reed or Jim or Rhys, but they weren’t.
After a while I followed a group towards the turn onto the little road beside the station. Everything was dark except the railway station. The few streetlights made the station clock tower shine white. My little group of serving girls were hurrying. The train must be nearing its time. I scurried with them, trying to look youthful and businesslike. Then there was a shrill whistle.
It wasn’t from the station master; it was closer by and it dragged my head round like a shot. They were there. One was in a shabby hotel doorway as lookout, the other breaking cover from the space behind their car where it lurked against a distant kerb.
I abandoned the little train. I abandoned Rhys. I ran again.
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My flight this time took me steeply uphill and it finished me. Reed’s whistle had been badly timed. They must have been as tired as I. I heard them shouting abuse at each other and making a general agreement to get the job done this time and play no more games. Then suddenly I had nothing but the pounding of my heart and rasping breath because they must have lost me in the dark stretches between streetlights.
I wouldn’t have got away otherwise. I doubt my pace even equalled a walk and perhaps I might have got along quicker if I had treated it like a stroll rather than a run. But a sharp turn and then another and suddenly here was sanctuary that had not occurred to me. The tall buildings of the area around the station had given way to the long terraces of the shipwright’s quarter and their neat regular frontages were a little breath of hope. No doubt I would be as unwelcome here as I was unexpected, but I defied my ex-mother-in-law to actually turn me from the door.
I slackened my pace and sought out the right one; it was blue. I always remembered the woodwork was blue. I found the knocker and gave it a rap.
The street was silent for a moment. Then the lights of a car went slowly past the top junction. I heard the pitch of the engine throb change as the pressure was taken off the accelerator. This was why they’d drawn back from following me on foot. They had a tool that could outpace me. The muted squeak of brakes being applied brought a sharp internal grind of despair that sent me staggering into the house wall. No one moved behind the barred front door. There were no lights on inside. No one had heard my second urgent rap. I was already peeling myself away from the comforting solidity of the cold stone wall and plunging blindly on.
I ran into a man who was walking up. He made my heart lurch and I’d have cried out if I’d been able to muster the breath. I must have terrified him too. He wasn’t Reed, if Clarke was the man driving the car. I rebounded off a solitary parked car and shied past him, both of us angling our bodies away to give each other room. I suppose the gleam of streetlight on a bloodless face probably made my features singularly fearsome. For me the dirty yellow light did that awful thing of making me think he was my husband. I couldn’t bear it. I span away. Blind. Numb. I couldn’t look a second time. And then I did and found he’d gone with a sharp bang like a cannon going off that was probably the sudden slam of a house door shutting me out.
It was very odd but I was finding it suddenly hard to see my way. It was very dark, that was why; and there wasn’t even a hint of starlight up above. The steps down onto the harbour were black and strangely musical. The yards of the boats in the dry dock were jangling like tiny bells against their masts in the chill air. I picked a clumsy path above them along the high dock wall and skirted the drying lobster pots with half my mind on the fearsome drop that was only discernible by the subtle variations between textures of gloom. My lungs ached. My footsteps echoed as the single robust reminder that I was still on solid ground.
Then that sound changed. Wide wooden planks met my feet. I followed their course purely because the weathered wood shone very dull silver. I think I must have been growing a little disorientated. I didn’t realise immediately that I’d stumbled onto a jetty. Somewhere I must have lost my suitcase and then my handbag but I’d barely noticed. I didn’t realise that I’d walked myself into a dead end either until it was too late. I was lucky there was a robust rail at the end.
The sea was beautiful in the night time. The river ended its run here where ghostly boats rocked and jet black swells with turquoise crests lapped against the distant sea wall. The breeze that had been building all day was ice against my skin and a light was blinking out to sea. A fishing boat or perhaps just a trick of the eye.
The steady inrush of the tide was hypnotic. It distracted me from paying too much attention to the brief flare of car headlights before they were extinguished in the dark void beyond the harbour buildings. My hands clutched the barrier. It was wooden and it met me securely across the middle. The rolling mass of water below was mesmerising; an inky lure that sucked and sighed beneath the salt-encrusted boards. I caught myself in the midst of seriously contemplating the practicalities of trying to swim my way to freedom. The sheer madness of the idea made me laugh.
The water whispered death. This was the voice that had called to Rhys when he had looked down at the gaping void of the gorge. No human hand had done the work for him. No mortal speech had goaded him to his end that day. He’d been driven to that place by desperation and found every sense shrouded by the incessant calling of the waterfall. I knew now how he had answered.
Oh Rhys.
If only he’d left me a note, a sign, an explanation for what was to come. Clarke would have what he wanted now. Distantly I heard the thud and creak behind of weight on wood and braced myself to meet him. I had nowhere else to hide. And it hurt most of all that this was it, and I still didn’t know why.
Only instead of the impatient tramp of eager footsteps, there was just one step and then another and a rough voice that I recognised, that I had thought never to hear again.
“You little fool.” And a curse and a hasty approach when I whipped round and cried out as the small of my back came up hard against the barrier.
It was hard to see him. Hard to see anything in this meagre light. He loomed. My hands met the wood behind me. Gripped bloodlessly. I don’t think I could have contained the impulse to shrink screaming to the floor otherwise. He wasn’t taking any chances anyway. He didn’t take hold of me but the force of his presence was such that he might just as well have done.
“I’ve used half a tank of fuel looking for you.” His voice was angry. Everything about him was angry. I shrank against my barrier. My heart was pounding. I hadn’t prepared for this … hadn’t the reserves left to stave off the sheer uncomprehending panic. I wasn’t afraid of him. I was afraid that this was a mistake and Clarke had come and tipped me in, and the water was already claiming me, leaving me with only the dream that this man was here in their place. The savagery in his voice was real. It told me flatly, “You’re coming with me. I’m not letting you go again. You can’t run away from this any more.”
Despite the intense darkness I saw his hands move restlessly by his sides as if he were wrestling with the impulse to take hold of me and give me a bit of a shake. But he contained it. Just. After that sharp unexpected introduction to the real Adam Hitchen this morning, I didn’t know who this man was. He stood there, shadows marking his face and scowled me into speech.
I dug up my last bit of faith in life. I couldn’t look at him. I clung to the secure anchorage of that wooden rail and kept my head down as I said it.
“All right, Adam,” I told him finally. “Yes.”
Chapter 20
I was right to fear a method of hunting that depended on running the prey until it had no fight left. I think at that moment of admitting his mastery of my mind, my body must have strayed into the dangerous wilderness somewhere between defeat and unconsciousness. He’d had to steer me into the passenger sea
t of his car. Now I was awake but I think even my eyes forgot how to blink. I had never really believed before that I could be driven to the kind of physical breakdown that robs a person of their wits, regardless of what various people had been saying about my general state of mind, but in hindsight I think this came very close.
Then we stopped briefly somewhere on a blank stretch of road in the mountains behind Aberystwyth, and it probably saved my life.
Adam had stopped to empty the last drips of his last can of fuel into the tank. My salvation came from the little nudge he gave to my wrist after he climbed back in with a glass bottle of water that he must have retrieved from the rear seat. The bottle jarred against my arm so that the contents swirled and then settled.
My body could remember how to move after all. I clumsily took it. My hands fumbled to open the stopper. The water was warm and stale from a day in the car but it allowed me to think again. And once I was able to think, I was able to sleep. I let my head fall back against the low seat and shut my aching eyes. I opened them again. My driver was tense. The winding roads between the Welsh coast and England were being taken so quickly that trees and hedges smacked past with a violence that made the roof shudder. But the road behind was entirely vacant. They were probably ahead of us.