It seemed to me that he was protesting too much, that he wasn’t absolutely sure about this or anything else, and it was the uncertainty that really frightened him.
We lapsed into a troubled silence, accentuated by the growling of the wind. I made more coffee and slid a cup in front of him. Abruptly, he looked at the time. ‘Is it half past yet? I should go and check the tide again.’
‘You’ve still got five minutes.’ While I had his attention, I said lightly, ‘Someone told me that you’d decided to keep the Gun after all.’
‘Huh?’ He was about to give one answer when he remembered whose sister I was and gave another reply altogether. ‘Edward isn’t too pleased with me, I’m afraid.’ He raised an eye-brow, making no effort to pretend he felt terribly concerned about it.
‘You hadn’t signed the transfer?’
‘No.’
‘An agreement?’
‘No.’
‘Well, then, there isn’t much he can do about it/
‘He’s muttering about a verbal contract.’
‘Verbal contracts are almost impossible to enforce in property deals. People break them all the time.’
‘Well, he doesn’t seem too worried about the finer points. He’s talking about suing.’
‘You know what he’s like. He’ll simmer down in time.’ Though even as I said this, I had serious doubts. The concept of surrender was anathema to Edward, an indignity that weak people were forced to endure because they’d been feckless enough to be outmanoeuvred. For him, every slight, large or small, real or imaginary, was like an open wound; it gaped, raw and painful, it stung unbearably, until the moment when he could turn the tables and get the upper hand again. At the best of times there had never been any love lost between Edward and Will; for Ed-ward, this reversal would be a red-hot barb in his flesh.
‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about it now,’ I said. ‘Even if Edward does decide to pursue it, it’ll take months and months to get the action off the ground.’
‘Can’t have you as my lawyer, I suppose?’ And a wry grin twitched at his mouth.
‘Wouldn’t do you any good, anyway. Hopeless at contract law.’ And I smiled back. ‘May I ask…why did you change your mind about the Gun?’
He stirred his coffee roughly, so that it almost spilt. ‘Couldn’t let it go, Ali. Just couldn’t. Would have finished the farm, would have finished me. So…I’m restructuring the finances instead. New mortgage and all that.’ He met my eyes with a touch of defiance.
‘I’m glad.’ I was glad about the marsh, very; but, far more than that, I was glad he wasn’t relying on luck or the vague hope of a windfall to cover his debts. It would have looked bad, and this wasn’t the time to be looking bad.
There was a pause. The wind thrummed its warning on the window.
He glanced at his watch. ‘I must go.’
I followed him to the front door. He pulled on his jacket and boots again and, with a short wave, went off into the darkness.
He was gone for only five or six minutes, but it was long enough for the last of his nervous energy to have given way to exhaustion. Throwing off his jacket, he sprawled on a kitchen chair, legs extended, head dropped back, eyes closed. ‘God, I’m tired, AH.’
‘Why don’t you sleep for a while? Let me keep watch.’
‘If I go to sleep I’ll never wake up again.’
‘Well, sleep, then. I don’t mind staying up. How much longer is the tide high? An hour? Two?’
‘An hour.’
‘I can last that long. Easily.’
‘Ali…’ He whispered my name softly, with the languor of fatigue or affection. ‘Ali…’
I felt a pull high in my chest.
For an instant I thought he’d fallen asleep there in the chair, but then he murmured, ‘Remember the storm? In seventy-eight?’
‘I remember.’
‘Old man Kemp, pie-eyed on all that whisky. If the place’d flooded I don’t think we’d have been able to shift him, I don’t think anyone would have been able to shift him. I think he’d have slept straight through the whole thing. Or drowned. What a wild old boy!’ When I didn’t reply he turned his head and squinted at me.
‘I was in love with you that night,’ I said.
His gaze didn’t waver, he stared at me with great seriousness, and said in a tone of fond bewilderment, ‘I missed that. How did I miss that?’
‘I think I made it rather obvious.’
He echoed, ‘How did I miss that?’ And this time he smiled.
‘Long time ago.’
‘I was nineteen. You were…’
‘Sixteen.’
‘Bad at picking up signals, I suppose.’ He sat up and regarded me with an expression that was both teasing and shy. ‘Just that one night, that you loved me?’
‘It could have been two.’
‘Oh, Ali. What happened?’
‘What happened was that you went away to college, then I went to college…And when I came back…’ I splayed a hand.
‘Grace.’ The shadow descended again, and there was no going back for either of us.
Getting up suddenly. Will took the brandy bottle from the side and, offering me a glass, poured himself another measure.
‘She set out to get me, you know,’ he said.
‘Sorry?’
‘The car in the ditch. She did it on purpose. Driving ahead of me back from a party, she simply drove into the ditch. She was laughing when I pulled her out. She’d gone in slowly—just a shallow ditch—never any danger of hurting herself. The car wasn’t even dented.’ He smiled darkly. ‘Made for a good story, though. And Charlie…’ He looked down at his hands. ‘She said she was on the Pill, got pregnant straight away, probably that very night…Oldest trick in the book, you might say. Married within two months.’ He threw some brandy down his throat. ‘What you might call a whirlwind job!’
‘Still, you have Charlie.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed softly, ‘I have Charlie.’
He looked exhausted again.
‘Let me stay up,’ I said.
Beyond argument suddenly, he nodded and, sliding forward over the table, dropped his head onto his arms. By the time I turned off the brighter lights he was asleep.
Alone with the storm, my mind began to paint a landscape of rising water and flooding banks. I found a warm hat of Maggie’s and a pair of boots one size too big, which I padded out with extra socks, and, in the pocket of Will’s jacket, a powerful torch. Emerging from the shelter of the cottage I thought at first that the wind had eased a little, but when I climbed up onto the embankment it was like a giant hand pushing at my face and grabbing at my clothes and snatching the air from my mouth. Leaning my weight into it, I shone the torch downwards and saw water that surged and clawed restlessly against the bank, like an echo of the giant breakers on the dunes.
The water was high but I couldn’t tell if it was dangerous. I walked west along the marsh edge, past the Salterns where windows also blazed, until I could make out the blurred lights of the houses above the quay. Sometimes the water seemed much closer to my feet, sometimes it touched the path itself, but nowhere did it actually threaten to cross the bank. Near two spots—a small bush, a raised stone at the side of the path—I pushed a twig into the bank to mark the water levels and it occurred to me that somewhere along this stretch of bank Will had probably done the same.
Retracing my steps, I went back along the marsh edge, past Reed Cottage and the light glimmering in the kitchen window, and onwards until I reached the Gun Marsh. Climbing up onto the embankment I shone the torch downwards onto the Gun, and made out clumps of reed and patches of meadow but no sign of water that shouldn’t be there.
I turned to face the full blast of the wind. Behind, the warmth of Reed Cottage was just two minutes away. Ahead, the long arm of the Gun Marsh embankment stretched away into the darkness for one and a half miles to the sea.
Not sure what I was hoping to achieve, I lowered my head and started al
ong the embankment.
To the left, the salt water lapped and worried at the bank, emitting the occasional fierce ripple, a hissing note that rose briefly above the bass of the wind. To the right, the low expanse of the Gun meadows stretched away into the darkness.
I came to the first sluice.
I shone the torch into the tunnel and saw the tide high against the brickwork. On the Gun side, small rivulets flowed down the slots that held the gate, while from a point high up in the mounting a tiny jet of water spurted out at an angle into the darkness. The total leakage amounted to no more than a trickle which collected in the pool at the foot of the gate and oozed away towards the drainage ditch. Whatever repair Will had made, it had been a good one.
There was no point in going further, and I wasn’t feeling that brave anyway. Out here, the storm had a dark and lonely sound. Heading back with the gale hard on my shoulders, I was pushed along almost faster than I could walk. With the wind roaring in my ears, my mind on the events of the day, I was oblivious to everything but the torchlight on the path ahead, a pale cone dividing two worlds of darkness.
I faltered, I wasn’t sure why, and looked up. Off to the right I could see the lights of the Salterns glimmering above water, and further to the right, the lights above the quay, hanging like lanterns in the night. Ahead, there was only blackness.
I started off again, only to stop a second time with a dart of alarm made sharper for having no obvious cause.
The darkness ahead seemed to move and break up. My senses reached out. I jerked the torch beam higher.
A shadowy figure loomed out of the darkness, head down, approaching fast.
The head came up. Will’s face met the beam of light and, flinching, ducked down again.
My relief was rapidly overtaken by anxiety. ‘Is something the matter?’ I called.
He barely paused as he walked past, slowing only to make sure I had turned to follow him.
‘What is it?’ I cried.
If he spoke I didn’t hear him.
‘Will?’
‘Just come with me, Ali!’ he shouted. ‘I just need you to come with me.’
His voice was blunted by the wind but I caught enough in his tone to make me follow without another word.
He walked fast and I had a job to keep up.
He was carrying a long wooden pole on one shoulder and a short angled metal bar in his right hand. I recognized the sluice handle. It occurred to me that he might think the sluice was broken again, that I should tell him it was all right, but something told me he wouldn’t listen, and we were almost there anyway.
As the sluice came into view, Will transferred the handle to his shoulder and reached back to take the torch from me. Leaning over the gate, he flashed the light downwards and around the sides of the sluice. Almost immediately he straightened up again and, before I realized it, he was off at the same rapid pace, heading further along the embankment towards the dunes.
I didn’t attempt to stay abreast of him this time, but followed in line behind, led by the outline of his body silhouetted against the pool of light on the path ahead.
It was some way to the next sluice, perhaps a quarter of a mile, and I soon fell into the mindless rhythm of keeping pace.
Above the rushing of the wind I began to pick out the faint reverberation of thunder. The sound seemed to merge into the wind for a time, only to rise above it and grow steadily, a deep resonant roar that slowly filled the air. There was something terrible and thrilling in the sound of such a sea, a sea of nightmare and destruction, a sea which beat and dragged incessantly at the dunes, seeking an opening.
Will slowed up and moved the torch to his other hand. In the dance of the beam I glimpsed the frame of the second sluice ahead. Striding up to it, Will leant over the side and shone the torch down the front of the gate for perhaps three or four seconds.
When he spun round, he turned so abruptly, with so little warning, that he almost knocked me over.
‘Hold the torch, would you?’ he yelled.
Taking it from him, I saw in the gleam of light that his expression was very grim.
‘I’m sorry about this! I’m sorry!’ he cried, and now I saw that his face was contorted with something far more terrible, like dread.
‘What is it? What do you mean?’ I shouted.
‘God help me, Alex, but I have to look! I have to look!’
My stomach tightened, I felt a lurch of fear. I stared at him, I tried to speak, but before I could say anything he swung away and, striding towards the sluice, jammed the handle onto the spindle and began to crank it with fierce energy.
Dazed, uncertain, I forced myself to go to the edge of the sluice.
‘Shine it down, Alex. Down.’
I echoed weakly, ‘Down,’ and, gripping the sluice frame, shone the light down over the surface of the gate. The pool at the foot of the gate was already gurgling and stirring as water began to flow underneath the gate. As the slab of metal rose further, the pool erupted into a gushing spout that pushed a cascade of water out onto the meadows of the Gun.
Staring at the hypnotic rush of water, I tried to persuade myself that I might be looking for anything at all, but the chill in my stomach, the dryness in my throat told a different story.
And still the gate came up. Now the water was spewing out in a massive torrent, straight onto the meadows.
A glimmer of white appeared, deep down under the gate, deep under the water. The torch shook in my hand; I steadied it.
A white something.
Oh, God.
I shouted then, I shouted Will’s name.
He came and crouched at my side. He had the long wooden pole in his hand. He pushed the pole down into the cataract, down towards the white thing. The pole had some sort of hook on the end of it and he tried to get it under the white thing. He missed once, twice. I heard him shout, then he twisted round and lay full length on the ground, and, his shoulders hanging precariously over the torrent, tried again. This time the hook found something to catch onto. The white thing rose up, took shape, became—
I felt a rush of horror, I dropped my head onto my chest, I forced myself to look up again.
A leg, and behind it, rising slowly but inexorably, as though freeing itself from the ooze beneath, the rest of her body.
Will gave a great bellow. I shouted too. Someone was crying, ‘Oh, God! Oh, God!’ and it might have been him or me or both of us.
I grabbed the torch so that the scene below was plunged into darkness.
I heard him moving, I heard him scrabbling, but in the dim light from the deflected beam it took me a moment to understand what he was doing. By the time I realized, he had one foot over the edge and was lowering the other, ready to jump down into the water.
‘No!’ Abandoning the torch, I grabbed his shoulders and tried to hold him back. We struggled. He threw up an arm, trying to elbow me away, trying to slip downwards out of my grasp. Dropping onto my knees, I hooked an arm around his neck and pulled against his throaty and somewhere, as though at a remove, I heard myself crying again and again, ‘You mustn’t! You mustn’t!’ It sounded wrong, there were better things to say, but before I could say any more he was clawing at me, trying to pull my arm away from his neck. With one last effort, finding a strength I didn’t have, I gave a powerful wrench and managed to force his head back. Suddenly he gave in, there was no resistance any more and he fell back, half on top of me.
We lay entangled for a moment, panting hard, then I wriggled from under him and clambered to my feet.
I picked up the torch and went and shone it down into the pool again. Rushing water, no whiteness. Nothing at all. The body had gone, swept out onto the meadowland of the Gun.
I shone the light back towards Will. He lay on his side, face turned into the ground, retching and sobbing.
Then, sobbing a little myself, shivering violently, I went unsteadily to the sluice handle and began to lower the gate.
Chapter Eight
&nbs
p; ‘It’s too much, Alex! Too much!’ Maggie exclaimed in sudden exasperation. She had been monosyllabic until now, almost withdrawn; her outburst came from nowhere.
We were sitting side by side at a white-topped table in a bare interview room at King’s Lynn police station, sipping machine coffee out of plastic beakers while we waited for Ramsey, who was now ten minutes late.
‘I warned him we wouldn’t wait long,’ I said firmly. ‘I told him you weren’t up to it.’
She tore her eyes from a point above my head and gave me an uncomprehending look. ‘What?’ Following her gaze, I realized that her irritation had been directed not at the time but at the no-smoking sign on the wall beside me.
Tutting defiantly, shooting the notice a last reproving glance, she pulled a cigarette from her bag and, lighting it, drew on it hard.
I found a battered tin ashtray on the window ledge and slid it onto the table in front of her. It pained me to hear the wheezing in her lungs, the loose cough, the breathlessness that mingled with the inhalations in a series of rasps. Yet within moments the nicotine had begun to work its magic on her, she exhaled with a sigh of contentment, and a calm of sorts spread over her face. ‘They go too far, these people,’ she muttered at the non-smoking world in general.
Taking another lungful, she emerged from the last of her trance. ‘Alex, this will be the end, yes? This will give them what they want?’
This was the sort of question that was almost impossible to answer. ‘I would hope so, yes.’
‘And Will? Do they have all they need from him?’
‘I think so. For the moment, anyway.’
‘And then…?’ She lifted her brows wearily, wanting reassurance, expecting none.
‘Early days yet, Maggie.’
She gave a small nod of acceptance.
It was four days since Grace had been found. The preliminary post-mortem findings had been inconclusive, which, short of a stomach full of barbiturates, was exactly what I had hoped for. There was a bruise on the side of the head, but it could have occurred in a fall; there was no evidence of violence. The final report was awaiting some lab tests. I knew from a drowning case some years back that after long immersion there was a good chance that the lab results would produce nothing significant; I also knew from experience that it would be unwise to bank on it.
A Dark Devotion Page 23