Brodmaw Bay

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘You said that Robert O’Brien was scared to death. I want to know what it was that scared him.’

  ‘Cocaine killed Robert O’Brien,’ McCabe said. ‘You’ll be reading as much over your breakfast cornflakes, if you’re one of those quaint people who still buys a newspaper. You probably do, since you now live in so quaint a place. He only took a gram, but it wasn’t street stuff. It was top Bolivian product, 98 per cent pure and it caused a valve in his heart to rupture.’

  ‘The scene of crime people thought he might have died of fright. Could anything have scared him?’

  There was a pause. James could hear his own heart hammer in his chest. Then the detective sergeant said, ‘This is privileged information because there is some ethical concern over whether the source should ever have revealed it. I will therefore not name the source. But O’Brien saw a psychiatrist in the afternoon on the day of his death. He told her that he had been plagued by an apparition. He thought he was being haunted, James.’

  ‘Did he describe this apparition?’

  There was another long silence. Then McCabe said, ‘The reason the shrink breached patient confidentiality by telling us about it is that after O’Brien’s departure, she thought she herself saw someone who strongly resembled the person he had described, looking up at her from the street.’

  ‘It was a little girl, wasn’t it?’

  ‘She was dressed in the grey pinafore and purple of what appears to have been a school uniform of the more traditional sort. She was blonde and pigtailed and wore a straw hat. Best guess as to age is around eight. Don’t tell me you’ve seen her too.’

  ‘I can do better than that. I can tell you her name, Alec,’ James said. His mouth felt dry. ‘She died more than ninety years ago and I do not think that she died willingly or well. In life, she was called Madeleine Gleason.’

  He started the engine, put the car into gear. If he put his foot down, if the Wednesday traffic cooperated, he could be in the bay by one. It would not seem a sinister place on a sunny, early July afternoon, would it? It would look charming and picturesque and in the detective sergeant’s slightly contemptuous word, the bay would look quaint.

  Lillian had been lured back exactly as Adam Gleason had been. Both had returned with the fresh blood of their respective families. Gleason had followed the lure of a job after diphtheria had killed his son and poisoned his mind against London, a city he subsequently saw as tainted and sought to escape.

  London was not afflicted with diphtheria in the early twenty-first century. It did, though, have plenty of other potentially fatal hazards. The white-flight impulse James had first felt in the hospital had been triggered by the attack on his son. The mentally unstable ringleader of the gang that had carried it out had been responding, he said, to instructions he heard in his head. He had been ordered to carry out the attack on Jack. There had been nothing random or even really feral about it. The voice in his head had commanded and he and his acolytes had obeyed, too terrified to consider doing otherwise.

  How far back did all of this go? How much careful magic had been employed to impel them west to the place his wife had been conceived in a tryst between Richard Penmarrick and an underage Angela Heart? The book he had found about Brodmaw Bay on a hospital shelf had been deliberately planted there. The seed had been deliberately sown. And after that it had all been made very easy for them, hadn’t it? They had been welcomed as incomers surely never were in the far reaches of a county notorious for its insularity. Except that Lillian had not been an incomer. Not really, she hadn’t. Lily had been coming home.

  They embarked from the small harbour sheltered by the breakwater to the right of the Leeward Tavern. The water was quite calm there, the anchored boats rolling gently on a modest swell. Beyond the harbour the sea looked much rougher than Lillian had so far seen at the bay. There was a keen offshore breeze that felt chilly for July. The air was damp. The morning sky was grey and the sea dull and greenish and vast under flecks of white foam on its turbulent surface.

  Richard approached and put an arm around her and gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. He was wearing jeans tucked into canvas boots and a blue wool sweater. A red and white bandana was knotted around his neck and he had on a seaman’s blue cap. He smelled of Eau Sauvage aftershave and looked strong and handsome and capable. ‘It’ll clear up,’ he said, blinking at the sky. ‘Don’t worry, Lillian.’ He grinned and winked. ‘This is just the storm before the calm.’

  She thought his witty wordplay amusing enough but was not really comforted by his prediction concerning the weather. The quayside was busy with children and supervising adults going up and down the gangplank of a large, turbine-driven craft, loading the day’s provisions and the band’s instruments and various items of equipment to be used for outdoor games. They were not attired in wetsuits for the voyage aboard this larger vessel. They were wearing dun-coloured attire, like Scouts. Hers were the only children dressed as civilians.

  When in Rome, she thought. But Rome was sited on seven hills on dry land under a southern Italian sun. So the saying did not really apply. She had a sort of presentiment, imprecise but uneasy, about the day to come. She thought it must have been provoked by the sea and the stiff wind scouring off it and the pervading greyness of the light. The conditions were raw and slightly gloomy. She was aware for the first time since moving there of the elemental force of the sea, of its capricious moods and potential for violence. They were intent on recreation but the sea was a place of peril, to those upon it, much of the time.

  She thought of the fate of the boat built for Thomas Cable and blessed by the Reverend Baxter. She had been called the Sally-Anne. She had foundered in the fog and lost all hands in these waters. They had been expert mariners but had died helplessly, catching the sea in a vindictive mood.

  Lillian sighed. She knew that she had to shake this despondent perspective she really did not have sufficient justification for. She looked at Olivia bouncing back down the gangplank intent on another load and all she saw was excitement and anticipation in the sparkle of her eyes. The day was a treat, not an ordeal or some looming tragedy. It had been devised purely for enjoyment. There was no sinister subtext for her to be concerned about.

  As the children laboured and jostled, as the adults ordered and joked, she could not help remembering what she had said on the phone to James the previous night, prior to the reassurance of Richard’s buoyant call. She had described the event they had witnessed that evening on the east shore as magic. She had said to her husband that magic exacts a price. The trouble was that she really was well on the way to believing that and, in a way becoming less vague all the time, growing in the conviction that they had made a terrible mistake.

  Megan stood in front of her. She had on a flat-brimmed hat with a chinstrap like the one Baden-Powell habitually wore in archive photographs. There was a kerchief secured with a leather toggle around her neck. She smiled and saluted and Lillian wondered suddenly what the future held for this girl with her luminous beauty and promising gift.

  ‘Time to get aboard, Mrs Greer.’

  ‘I’m Lillian to you, young lady.’

  ‘I know. And I can’t quite believe you’re here.’ Megan smiled and her cheeks flushed and Lillian remembered that she was still in the throes of hero-worship. She picked up her bag off the quayside next to her and followed her worshipper up the gangplank on to the boat.

  She was reassured when she got aboard. The smell of diesel fuel and the deep chug of the engines were mundane and secure realities and the deck felt immensely solid, riveted steel vibrating with the power of the turbines beneath it under her feet. She looked out over the bow for a pilot boat, but there wasn’t one. Then she looked back along the length of the vessel and saw that Billy Jasper was at the wheel. He could probably get them safely beyond the hazards of the harbour wearing a blindfold.

  Richard was suddenly next to her. ‘We’re brewing coffee below,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t deserve it,’ s
he said. ‘I was daydreaming just now while everyone toiled to load up.’

  ‘You were daydreaming very decoratively,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s enough on a grey morning just to stand there looking beautiful.’

  Was he flirting with her? She didn’t think he was, really. It was just a gracious compliment, coming from a naturally gracious man. If anyone could charm her out of her mood of pessimism and uneasiness, it was him.

  ‘I’d love a cup of coffee,’ she said. She followed him down the companionway.

  Below decks, the boat seethed with youthful chatter and activity. Lillian had not supposed, before they set off, that there would be the leisure time for coffee in their crossing. Her children, novices both, had paddled to the island in kayaks. She had imagined it would be no distance at all in a vessel like this. It wasn’t as if a detour was necessary, was it? Didn’t ships sail as the crow flew?

  She mentioned this to Richard. He smiled and said, ‘Reefs, Lillian, sandbanks too. A kayak has a draught of about four inches. Our keel runs rather lower in the water than that.’

  He said it in a diplomatic tone, but it made her realise just what an idiot she was concerning matters nautical. She was a seafaring ignoramus. She was quite literally out of her depth. She nodded and smiled what she hoped was a warm smile and climbed back up to the deck. She had felt queasy and bilious in the humid confinement of the ship’s bowels. She was a practical woman who tended towards a degree of forward planning and should she need to puke, she thought she was better off within heaving range of the gunwale.

  Waves slapped and shuddered off the hull. Spray broke on to the deck in salty droplets and mist. She thought that, if anything, the weather was getting rougher. The swell looked high to her and the wind out in the exposure of the open sea had risen from brisk to strong. The cloud was just a gunmetal shroud stretching to an uncertain horizon. It was too heavy for her to be able to guess at the position of the sun it concealed.

  Her coffee rose in her throat and she emptied her mouth over the side. She stayed like that, bowed and feeling a bit defeated, while her breakfast followed, welling sourly out of her. Her nose stung with the sharp trickle of vomit and she wiped flecks of something sticky off her chin. Down below, the children were singing. They had begun ‘Ten Green Bottles’. It was a long and monotonous vocal trek, that one. Lillian wondered blackly, with a nauseous churn of her stomach, if she would live to hear the end of it. Then she felt warmth on her back and turned and saw that the sun had broken through.

  It beamed through a patch in the cloud and the sea glittered and danced in a bright blue dazzle under it. There were several ragged spots of blue, she saw, in the sky. The clouds were thinning, moving slowly because the wind had all at once almost died down completely. The surface of the water was calming, azure in broad brushstrokes now competing with the green.

  ‘You were right,’ she said to Richard, who was approaching her along the deck. In his fist, he held a packet of wet wipes. He plucked a couple free and handed them to her. The wood fittings of the boat were warming. She could smell beeswax and tar and metal polish and hemp. From through the hatch, they were down to seven green bottles.

  ‘I’m usually right about some things. It’s a question of experience.’

  ‘But not everything.’

  ‘Not everything, no.’

  ‘How old are you, Richard? Do you mind me asking?’

  He grinned. ‘I don’t mind you asking. And the colour is returning to your quite lovely face. But I think if I answered that question truthfully, you might faint dead away.’

  She laughed. She balled up the used wet wipe and went to find a bin for it. She felt much better with the hull shifting less underneath her, warmed by the sun and with her stomach empty of food. She would get a drink of water. She was thirsty and needed to get the sour taste out of her mouth. Vomit was acidic and corroded the tooth enamel. She could not remember having been sick since the early part of being pregnant with her daughter. She was healthy and her constitution was, thankfully, strong.

  The island had come into view. In this light, seen from the deck of a boat, it really did look as Jack said it did, like somewhere out of a Famous Five adventure. It was sandy and then verdant where it rose beyond its shoreline and then craggy at its quite high summit. Seabirds wheeled in the sky above it.

  It was a beautiful little place, the perfect spot for a childhood adventure. The kids below must have sighted it through the starboard portholes. She heard a huge cheer from down there and the clatter of excited feet up the companionway. Then they were all on the deck, cheering and whooping.

  She saw Jack put his fingers in his mouth and gather a big breath to let out a celebratory whistle and she saw Megan Penmarrick give him a sharp look and he froze. He took his hand from his face. Lillian remembered that of course it was considered unlucky to whistle aboard a boat. Megan’s expression towards her landlubber son had been quite severe. It occurred to her for the first time that there might be a bit more than sweetness and light to this particular girl.

  Getting everyone and everything ashore took a while. They dropped anchor and then lowered two rowing boats from davits fixed to either side of the vessel. They lowered a rigid inflatable from the stern, Billy Jasper shouting precise commands all the kids seemed schooled to obey. Phil Teal was in nominal charge of the Club, she remembered, but obviously his area of expertise was dry land and he deferred to others on the water.

  The sense of community shared among the people of the bay was so strong it seemed almost tribal to Lillian. When an urban school had an inset day the kids attending it would mostly mooch about the local shopping centre or drag themselves off to the skate park on their skateboards or astride their BMX bikes. The boat they had come here aboard was probably thirty years old. But she was a large and therefore fuel-thirsty vessel and she required a crew and considerable maintenance. Did she have a day job? How did she finance herself?

  Phil Teal had the day off because he was the Mount’s headmaster. Richard Penmarrick seemed a good fit for the old-fashioned gentleman of leisure role. He possessed independent wealth, James had told her. But Billy Jasper had a boatyard to run and Martin Sharp a chandlery and Ben Tamworth a building firm. Nevertheless, they were all present for the jamboree. She wondered how the economics of the bay quite added up. Did Penmarrick simply subsidise things with a bottomless coffer of regal largesse?

  The butcher, the baker and the candlestick maker. That sensation of gloomy presentiment dispelled by the sunshine came upon her again despite it. There were things about the bay, mysteries and contradictions and anachronisms, weren’t there? And all this should have occurred to her much sooner than it was doing, shouldn’t it?

  It was her turn to disembark. She climbed down a metal ladder hung over the gunwale to where the rigid inflatable waited with its outboard idling to take her ashore. Martin Sharp’s son Ricky, who had inherited his father’s stocky physique, was sitting at the tiller. He grinned at her from under his flat-brimmed hat. His neck was so thick that there wasn’t much of the kerchief wrapping it left to toggle beneath his throat. Jack had spoken highly of this boy, calling him modest and approachable. But Lillian did not really care for the way in which his eyes roamed across her body before his expression glazed into a smirk.

  On the shore they were unpacking griddles and piling food and unlatching cases to check on the instruments inside. A bugle was experimentally blown and there was the rat-tat of a drum tattooed with sticks. All the children seemed excited. Lillian wanted to go and look at the carving on the hut door but did not want to be obvious about it. She did not really know the reason for her caution over this. She put it down to instinct, which she generally trusted.

  She felt that she was being observed. It was done in a fairly sly and subtle way, but she was self-conscious, which she wasn’t usually, and she thought that the feeling was a consequence of being under scrutiny. It was not just Richard and Martin Sharp and Billy Jasper, now that he was no longer
engaged with steering a large seagoing vessel. It was Ricky Sharp and Megan Penmarrick too. She did not think it was her imagination. She was imaginative, but the fanciful part of her nature restricted itself to her refined visual sense.

  Olivia approached her. She looked subdued. She trailed a stick in the sand, leaving a damp line wavering behind her. In a whisper, she said, ‘It isn’t there, Mum.’

  ‘What isn’t there?’

  ‘The spookmeister, the Harbinger thing. It’s no longer on the door, it’s disappeared.’

  ‘That’s strange,’ Lillian said. ‘I wonder where it has disappeared to, Livs.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s strange at all,’ Olivia said. ‘It’s gone because it’s done its job, Mum.’ She sounded very forlorn. ‘It’s gone because it granted my wish and did away with those boys.’

  James was on the A30, the traffic light, Dartmoor a brownish, barren wilderness to his left, having just passed the Meldon Viaduct. The needle was hovering between seventy and eighty on his speedometer and Stevie Nicks was hectoring her way through ‘Sarah’ on the radio, the Fleetwood Mac song putting him in mind of Charlie Abraham and the warmth, improbable in retrospect, of his initial greeting on his first visit to the bay. Pub landlords were a suspicious breed. Their experiences did not encourage them to take anyone at face value.

  If the Leeward publican had been any more welcoming, he could only practically have done so by going down on one knee and presenting him with a bouquet. And yet he had seen nothing suspicious in it. It was vanity, James thought. Vanity deluded people into believing they deserved to be liked. He had been as prey to it as anyone.

  If anything that thought made him accelerate slightly in the moment just before the front nearside tyre blew and the car slewed left in a screech of ribboning rubber and rim steel and he braked and then thudded from tarmac on to earth and through the tearing wire and plucked wooden posts of a fence and into the ditch beyond. There, a hundred and twenty metres from where he had punctured, the car abruptly jiggered to a halt.