by Weaver, Tim
The man shifted from side to side, one hand pressed against the stool between us, the other flat to the marble of the bar. He was missing nails on the first two fingers of one hand, like they’d been torn off. ‘You know what they call that?’ he asked quietly.
‘Call what?’
‘The mathematical advantage?’
I glanced over the man’s shoulder. Still no sign of Lee. It must have been five or six minutes since he’d left. The man moved in closer when he didn’t get a response, his fingers inches from mine. I glanced down at his missing nails, then back up at him.
‘It’s called “the edge”,’ he said.
He finally moved his other hand off the stool and on to the marble, as if waiting for service. At the other end of the bar, the barman started to come over but then the man made eye contact with him – a tiny, fractional swivel of the head – and the barman stopped immediately, as if he’d been hit by a truck. When I looked back at the man, something had changed in him – something subtle – and a flutter of alarm took flight in my chest.
We stayed like that for a moment, the ding, ding, ding of the slots ringing around us, then I slid off the stool, pulled a couple of ten-dollar bills out and left them on the counter for the barman. I turned back to the man. He was about five inches shorter than me, but it didn’t make me feel any easier around him.
‘You off to bed?’ he said.
‘Something like that.’
I went to step around him – but then he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me into him. His grip was like a vice. I stumbled, completely knocked off balance. Then instinct kicked in: I pushed back at him and ripped my arm free.
‘What the hell is the matter with you?’
He realigned himself: both hands flat to the counter. ‘Let me give you a piece of advice.’
‘Let me give you one: don’t ever touch me.’
I went to leave.
‘Someone will always have the edge over you, David.’
I stopped. Turned back to him. ‘What did you say?’
‘You’re just flesh and bones like everyone else.’
‘How do you know my name?’
There was a threat in him now, as if he’d completely changed his appearance somehow. His eyes seemed darker. His face was twisted up like an animal about to strike. ‘Go back home to your wife,’ he said, looking me up and down. Then he leaned in and dropped his voice to a whisper: ‘And do both of you a favour: stay out of our business.’
‘What? I don’t even know you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘But you know Lee Wilkins.’
He nodded once, eyes fixed on mine, then pushed past me and headed out into the casino. Inside a couple of seconds, he was disappearing into the crowds.
Inside ten, he was gone.
Part Two
NOVEMBER 2012
2
The boy trudged across the shingle beach, six feet from where the waves were breaking on the shore. Their noise was immense: a roar, like an animal, and then a deep, visceral boom which passed right through him. When the tide began its retreat again, sucked back into the sea, the pebbles became caught in the wash and he could hear a soft, chattering sound, as if thousands of voices were calling from beyond the sea wall. On the other side of the eight-foot wall was the village: old fishermen’s cottages, a pub, a few shops and businesses. This side of it were boats, lined up on the beach, masts chiming in the wind.
He adjusted the straps of the backpack and heard the equipment clatter around inside: the line, a new net he’d bought with the money from his paper round, and some old bacon his mum had given him that morning. He was carrying the bucket in his hand. It was early November, freezing cold, but this was always the best time to go crabbing. At this time of year there were no tourists – which meant he didn’t have to share the crabs.
The village was set in a bowl, with coves cut into the faces of the hills on either side. In order to get to the coves, you had to climb over a series of rocks that rose up out of the shingle at both ends of the beach. To the boy, the rocks – hewed and polished by the relentless power of the sea – looked like the tail of a dragon, the bulk of the creature still submerged somewhere beneath. On the other side of the tail, in the coves beyond, hundreds of rock pools had formed in the grooves and chasms of the beach. That’s where the crabs would be, washed up and spat out by the tide.
The boy started the climb.
Carrying the bucket at the same time made it harder. Normally his dad hauled all the equipment for him, but he was away with work and had told the boy he was big enough now – at almost thirteen – to go by himself. ‘As long as you’re careful,’ his dad kept saying. The sea spray and the rain could make climbing more difficult but he was doing okay: after five minutes he’d got up on to the top of the tail and was looking down at the first of the coves. It dropped down about sixty feet from where he was, a thin sliver of shingle running from the shoreline to where the hills at the back started their steep ascent. The rest was just rock pools, sea washing over them, foam bubbling in the clefts and rifts. He started down, bucket – gripped in his hand still – clattering against the rock, his eyes fixed on where he was placing his feet. Wind roared in, once, twice, pulling him around like it had reached out and grabbed him – but then he jumped the last few feet, on to the shingle, and the wind died instantly as he stepped into the protection of the cove. All he could hear now was the sea breaking on the beach behind him.
Placing the bucket down on the shingle, he removed his backpack, unzipped it and started taking out the equipment. Crab line. Short-handled net. Bait. He attached the bait to the line, grabbed the net and the bucket, and made his way across the cove to the rocks at the back. As long as you’re careful. He placed his feet down just as deliberately as before, not wanting to have to explain to his dad how he had managed to snap the line, or cut himself, or both. Halfway across, he heard the sea crash again behind him, an even louder and longer roar than before, and when he looked back he saw a wave rolling in towards him. He wasn’t worried about getting wet, but he was worried about getting knocked over, so he reached forward and grabbed hold of a thin column of stone. The sea washed in, almost knee high, soaking his trousers and boots, and flattening out in the space ahead of him. Once it started drawing out again, he looked to the backpack and saw it was safe, perched in a high groove where he’d placed it after getting the equipment out. He headed to the rock pools right at the back of the cove where it would be too far for the sea to reach him. There, he could drop the line into the pools without fear of being soaked a second time. High tide had been an hour ago. The waves may have been loud, may have been fierce, but they were slowly retreating. In another hour, they’d be weakened. An hour after that, they’d hardly make it to him at all.
He placed the bucket down next to him, made sure the bait was secure and sat next to the deepest rock pool in the cove. It was about five feet down. The boy dropped the line in, feeding it out of a box his dad had made for him. It was like a fishing reel, with a small handle on the side that he could use to draw the line back in. He held the box with his left hand, and let the line run over the first two fingers of his right hand so he could feel any movement, however slight, if a crab went for the bait.
Then he noticed something.
Twenty feet away from him, right at the back of the cove, between the last of the rock pools and the sharp incline of the hill, it looked like someone had left some bait behind. He shifted on the rock, trying to get a better view from where he was sitting, but all he could see was a white slab of meat. Chicken maybe, or pork. His dad always said bacon was best, but the boy had caught loads of crabs with pieces of old chicken. Oily fish was good too, but not as good as meat. Generally, crabs weren’t fussy eaters.
As his eyes moved around the cove, he realized there was even more of the bait, a foot to the left of the other lot, just below his eye line. He placed the line box down – securing it in a crevice it couldn’t escape from – and got
to his feet. The surface down to the bait was slick with seawater. He took a couple of careful steps, then dropped down on to his backside and slid the rest of the way. Up close, he realized the bait was wrapped in plastic – like the type he kept his bacon in – and was longer than he’d first thought: it dropped away into a gully, the rest of it half-disguised by shadows. Beneath the plastic, he could see evenly cut strips of meat, identical seashells – bizarrely – attached to each one.
He reached forward.
Then stopped.
He glanced between his hand – still hovering over the plastic covering – and the meat inside; back and forth, as if his mind had made some sort of connection but he hadn’t quite caught up.
Then, a second later, it hit him.
A whimper sounded in his throat as he scuffled back on his hands, reversing as far from the bait as he could. He tried to gain purchase on the rocks but his feet kept slipping, the heels of his boots sliding off the surface. ‘Dad!’ he yelled, an automatic reaction, even though his dad was at work, miles away, and the boy was out here on his own. ‘Dad!’ he screamed again, tears forming in his eyes as he desperately tried to claw his way back up to where he’d left his line.
Thirty seconds later, he got there – but he didn’t even stop for the line. He didn’t stop for his bait, or his bucket, or his backpack either. He just clambered across the rocks, back over the dragon’s tail, and ran as fast as he could along the shingle to his house at the end of the sea wall. His mum was in the kitchen, organizing cakes for his sister’s birthday, and when she looked at the boy, at his tears, at the wide-eyed terror in his eyes, she grabbed him, brought him in close and made him recount what he’d seen.
And he told her how the seashells had been fingernails.
How the strips of meat had been fingers.
And how the bait had been a hand.
3
Half a mile away, as the boy was telling his mother what he’d found, Colm Healy pulled his Vauxhall up alongside a cottage he’d been staying at for the last four months. On the passenger seat were two shopping bags. He grabbed them, got out and headed inside.
After putting the food away and making himself a coffee, he sat at the window and smoked a cigarette. The view, even in late autumn, was beautiful: the gentle curve of the shingle beach; a long line of pastel-coloured fishermen’s cottages; the high sea wall and the masts rising up from behind it. Sea spray dotted the glass and wind cut in from the water, swirling and buffeting the cottage – yet, to Healy, after twenty-six years in the Met, and even longer in the city, this was as close to silence as he had ever known.
A minute later, the silence broke.
On the table in front of him, his phone started buzzing, quietly turning circles. He didn’t have a ring tone these days, which he preferred because it meant he missed a lot of calls. His ex-wife. The people he’d worked with. Men and women from his old life he’d happily never see again. But there was always a risk he might miss the one call he cared about: the call from his boys. So he brought the phone towards him and turned it over.
Liz Feeny.
He thought about letting it go to voicemail. Any conversation with Feeny was a conversation without a conclusion. She’d been phoning him constantly for the past couple of months, looking for any kind of closure, any kind of answer. But there wasn’t one.
There was no happy ending.
He pushed Answer and flicked to speakerphone. ‘Liz.’
‘Colm.’
Her voice was soft. It sounded like she’d already been crying. ‘This isn’t really a good time,’ he said, lying. He looked around the kitchen. Dishes stacked up in the sink. Cereal boxes left on the worktops. ‘I’m right in the middle of something here.’
‘Why do you still answer my calls?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘When David described you, he always said you were difficult to break down. Angry. Aloof. When I first started calling you, that was the man I expected to find.’
Healy didn’t say anything.
‘But I’ve never found that man.’ She paused. ‘You’ve never been like that. I know you hate talking to me, but you still answer my calls.’ Another pause, this time for longer. She sniffed, stopped, sniffed again. ‘Why do you answer my calls, Colm?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
‘Do you feel sorry for me – is that it?’
There was nothing in the question, no malice, but there was no right answer: yes, and she would cling on to it and use it as some kind of excuse to call him more often; no, and he would be telling her never to call again. So? If you hate her calling so much, just tell her. Except he couldn’t do that. Because, deep down, he wasn’t sure he did hate her calling.
Reaching across the table, he lit another cigarette and opened the window. Smoke drifted out through the gap, vanishing into the rain. For a moment his thoughts turned to David Raker. Everything Raker had told Liz was right. And maybe when the pressure was turned up, Healy would become that man again. But here, in this place, miles away from the life he’d once known, Healy felt like a different man. She may only have been using him, may only have been calling him because he was a vessel for something else – some sort of connection to Raker – but, in her own way, she needed him. And that was the first time anyone had needed Healy, for whatever reason, for a very long time.
‘Colm?’
‘It’s hard to understand,’ he said.
‘What is?’
‘Why what happened, happened.’
‘Is it hard for you to understand?’
He looked out through the window. ‘Yes.’
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes.’
She didn’t sound like she believed him.
‘Listen, Liz, I know this is tough to hear, but–’
‘I know what you’re going to say,’ she cut in, her voice quiet. ‘I know what you’re going to tell me to do. Accept it. Move on. Try to forget about what happened to him.’
He didn’t respond. She’d second-guessed him.
‘Right?’
‘Right.’
‘Well, it’s not so easy for me,’ she said. ‘I’m still here in London with all the memories, living next door to his empty house. I haven’t got myself a nice little holiday cottage in Devon to disappear to and forget about everything that happened.’
‘I haven’t forgotten about what happened.’
‘Haven’t you?’
‘No.’
Outside, the wind came again – harder and more forceful than before. The house seemed to wheeze, like the foundations had shifted.
‘He was so similar to you,’ she said.
‘Yeah, you said that before.’
‘He was chasing after ghosts, just like you.’
‘Look,’ Healy said, trying to maintain the composure in his voice, ‘I know what it’s like to lose someone. Remember that. I’ve been where you are – I’ve been through worse than you – so I know how it is.’
She cleared her throat, but didn’t say anything.
‘You can’t forget about it. I understand that. But you need to try. You need to start processing what happened. Sooner or later, you need to start facing it down.’
Silence on the line.
‘Because Raker’s gone, Liz. And he’s never coming back.’
4
An hour later, Healy was sitting in the corner of the pub, a small, dark, two-room building with pebbledash walls and a thatched roof. A fire was going in the corner and locals were lining the bar, perched on stools. They all had their backs to him, which he liked, and there was no music being played or TV on – just the murmur of conversation – which he liked even more. Nothing made him more depressed than being forced to listen to some landlord’s CD collection. When he looked up from the paper he was reading, he could see the regulars were all in; a mix of old sea dogs, their skin etched and weathered like the rocks on the beach, and younger couples in their thirties, part of the new money tha
t the affluent surrounding areas had brought in. Healy was neither, but he had fitted in pretty well here by keeping himself to himself and only speaking when he was forced to.
About ten minutes later, as he sank the last of his beer, a man in his fifties entered the bar. Healy recognized him, just from having been in and around the village for the last four months, but he didn’t know him. Didn’t know his name, or what he did. The man was wearing a green waxed jacket – soaked through from the rain – and had wild, grubby hair, and a beard like coils of twine. As he came in, his wellingtons slapped against the stone floor, puddles of water and mud following in his wake as he moved first to the bar, eyes scanning the locals, and then out into the middle of the room. A couple of the regulars greeted him, but the man didn’t respond in any way; instead he continued looking around the bar, into the barely lit coves, where other regulars – alone, like Healy – were hunched over their drinks, either reading or just staring into space.
Then the man locked eyes with Healy.
He came over, stopping in front of the table Healy was sitting at, and stood there, rain dripping off him. The locals had all turned on their stools. There was no gentle hum of conversation any more. Just silence.
Healy closed his newspaper. ‘You all right, pal?’
‘You the copper?’ the man said.
‘Not any more.’
‘You used to be, though, right?’
Healy looked out beyond the man. All eyes were on him.