by F. G. Cottam
James revived knowing two things. The first was that the impact had knocked him unconscious. The second was that he’d been a victim of deliberate sabotage. He knew this because his air bag had not deployed. That was why his head had hit the door pillar unimpeded with the impact of the crash. He felt his right temple and it was sticky with blood.
He had not been out long. The blood had not yet congealed. He looked at his watch and it told him, after a short struggle to bring the dial into focus, that the time was just after midday. Then he heard the wail of a siren and saw a police car approaching on the road behind through the few reflecting fragments that were left of his smashed right wing mirror.
He unlocked his seatbelt and struggled out of the car. He felt slightly numb and confused and wanted to see whether a change of wheel would be enough to get him back on the road and his journey. He staggered when he got to his feet and steadied himself with a hand on the car roof. Then he threw up. That was normal, he thought. People with concussion did tend to vomit sometimes and he knew he was lightly concussed. He wasn’t seeing double, but everything he looked at had a bit of ghosting, like a faulty television picture, when he tried to clarify it. He felt nauseous and he had a thumping headache.
Two police officers, a male sergeant and a woman constable, left their patrol car on the hard shoulder and approached him on foot. He felt grateful that they had turned off their siren. But the light bar was still flashing on the roof of the car and in the overcast light was almost painfully bright.
One of the officers, the woman, sat him down on the Jag’s back seat while her colleague walked around the car to see what had caused him to crash.
‘Strange your air bag didn’t deploy,’ the constable said, when they had checked his licence and breathalysed him. She was slender inside her stab-proof vest and blonde and barely looked old enough to vote. ‘Have you owned the vehicle from new?’
‘Yes.’
‘You could probably sue.’
He did not think he could. He would not share his sabotage theory. It would only cloud the issue and consume more time than he felt he had. It was only half past twelve but he had lost his only means of transportation and he wanted to get to his destination as soon as he could. ‘Are you local to this area?’
‘We’re based in Okehampton,’ the sergeant said. He was dark-haired and looked slightly older than the constable, but not much.
‘Could you give me a lift there? Is there a car hire place?’
‘You’re going to the hospital in Okehampton, sir. You need a medical examination. At best, you have suffered a mild concussion. At worst, you could have sustained a skull fracture. With respect, you’re not driving anywhere.’
James nodded. The important thing was to act rationally and remain calm. He had plenty of time before darkness fell. He had the best part of eight hours. He thought that it was very important to get to the bay before dark and was sure that someone had done something to his car to prevent him from succeeding in that, but panic would be counter-productive. He said, ‘How long before the ambulance arrives?’
The constable answered him. She said, ‘It should be here within half an hour. We’d take you there ourselves, but we’re instructed not to risk conveying accident victims who have suffered a head injury. Do you have breakdown cover, sir?’
James nodded. He could do that. He could call the AA and arrange for a recovery vehicle for the Jag. Or he could pretend to do it and come back for the car himself once he got away from the ambulance crew. There was a spare wheel in the boot and the only damage seemed to be to the wheel and the front bumper and one side mirror. And to him, of course; there was some slight damage to him. He could get a minicab to bring him back. Failing that, he could steal a bicycle.
A paramedic strapped him to a stretcher in the ambulance and then carried out a preliminary examination of his head wound. James pondered, for the first time really, on his daughter having found the last testament of the poet-soldier Adam Gleason at Topper’s Reach. The young policewoman, who wore her hair in plaits, had reminded him of Gleason’s daughter, O’Brien’s ghost, Madeleine.
She was his ghost too, though he had seen her only once, at the standing stones, and then but fleetingly. Her appearance had been a warning, hadn’t it? He had not known to heed it. He had not seriously considered the anomaly of the uniform she had worn, even when the Penmarricks had told him it was the livery of a school that had closed fifty years ago. He should have thought that ominous but had chosen to ignore it.
She was Olivia’s ghost possibly more than she was anyone’s, he thought. She must have told Livs where to find what her father had written. It meant that she was on their side. She was their ally but she had returned with the black and white perception of an eight-year-old child, ruthless and without compunction. She had scared O’Brien to death.
That part of it he did not understand. He could not see why the ghost of a murdered eight-year-old would seek the death of a man born sixty years after the crime that ended her own life. O’Brien had been guilty of something, but it had not been an offence that had impinged upon Madeleine in the slightest. Adultery was a very grown-up sin. O’Brien’s philandering had not affected her at all. If she had deliberately frightened the writer to death, her reason for doing so remained a mystery.
He spent two frustrating hours in the A&E department at Okehampton General waiting for his skull to be X-rayed. He did not feel that he could do what he was tempted to do and simply flee the hospital before his examination. If he did that, the local constabulary would be informed and his intentions guessed and he would return to a slightly damaged Jaguar sitting in a field with a police guard and going absolutely nowhere any time soon.
The wait was anxious as well as frustrating. Despite the throb of pain from the blow to his head, he did not feel that badly knocked about. But there was always the possibility of a hairline fracture. The temple was a vulnerable spot. If he had sustained a fracture they would detain and admit him and he would not reach the bay for several days and by then he felt sure it would be too late.
A gloomy certainty had settled in James Greer. It sat like something dark and heavy and unwelcome in his heart and soul. It occupied him completely and it was the conviction that if he did not get back that day, he would not see his family in this lifetime again.
Their deaths would be accidental. They would be mundane and barely worthy of attention. It would be a cautionary tale of sorts; a warning that inexperienced people should not go out in boats in unpredictable weather without someone knowledgeable to accompany them. It would be a small tragedy of the domestic sort. It might make a story in the middle-brow tabloids on the strength of Lillian’s professional profile and glamour in the accompanying publicity shot. What it would not do was raise any suspicions that it was anything other than a slightly pathetic mishap.
The irony was not lost on him that he was sitting in a hospital and his concern was once again a head injury. You could crudely regard what the Greer family had done, he supposed, as white flight. It had been a bit more complex and contingent than that though, hadn’t it? They had required a fresh start really after his wife’s adulterous affair. They had needed to do something pretty drastic about their son’s disillusionment with school. When they had seen the bay, it had seemed far less like flight of any hue than fate.
There was an old saying, that the road to hell was paved with good intentions. James thought that their intentions as a couple and as parents had basically been good. Their relocation to the bay had been less about escape than transformation, though he was prepared to admit to himself that a fair bit of wishful thinking had probably played a part in their decision to move. He remembered what McCabe had said about Rupert Brooke not coming to tea no matter how many crumpets he buttered. He had thought the detective was being a killjoy at the time in pointing it out. The expression on Lillian’s face had told him that his wife had, too.
He thought glass embedded in the tyre the probable cause
of his own automotive mishap of a couple of hours earlier. A small, sharp fragment of glass, slyly pressed into the tread, would gradually pierce even the highest grade of rubber compound and cause a blow out.
Disabling the air bags was a bit more grown-up than provoking a puncture. But both acts had been deliberate and malicious and intended to incapacitate him. Everyone in the bay had known he was soon to undertake some serious road mileage at the wheel of the Jaguar. His trip to the States, via Heathrow, had been one of the dominant subjects discussed on Sunday evening at the party held to welcome them in the Leeward Tavern.
It could easily have been a fragment of Leeward glass. There was no shortage of the stuff in the vicinity of Charlie Abraham’s bar. The landlord probably swept broken glass with a brush and pan from the pub floor every day of his working life. He did not think, though, that Charlie had been responsible. When he pictured someone in his mind, tinkering with his car, it was not a man but a woman doing it. And she wore the beguiling face of Angela Heart.
When the doctor came and told him his X-rays were clear and that he was free to resume his life, James quickly walked to the bank of payphones he had seen earlier in the entrance lobby. He would make the call on his mobile. But where there were payphones there were usually cards left by minicab firms touting for trade. He was relieved at what the doctor told him. But so dark were his premonitions of death by then that he could not raise a smile at the news.
There was a game of hide and seek being played in woods on one side of the island by the younger children. It was restricted to years seven and eight among the Mount pupils, the eleven- and twelve-year-olds, but Olivia was allowed to play because it seemed a bit mean to leave her out. The other children were very friendly to her despite the age difference. Hiding was harder for her, though. Their dun-coloured outfits meant that they could blend into the trees really easily. She had on blue jeans and a bright red sweater and as far as she was concerned, she stuck out like a flag waving on a flagpole.
Megan Penmarrick did not play. She qualified age-wise. But some of the kids had been chosen to collect driftwood for a large bonfire they were going to build. Olivia had tried to discover the reason for the bonfire, but everyone, Megan included, was a bit vague as to its exact purpose. She ended up thinking that it might not actually have one. Big fires were exciting and spectacular. Grown-ups thought so too. You didn’t really need an excuse to build one, just permission. Mr Teal was the permission-giver on the island and therefore could do whatever he liked.
The wood was quite dense. It was a mixture of trees and ferns and vicious-looking thorn bushes that it would be best to avoid. It was cool and surprisingly dark after the brilliance of the sunshine, when you took a few steps into it. The ground was sandy and there were pine cones everywhere on the sand under the trees. It was very quiet. You could strain and hear the waves breaking on the shore a few hundred feet away because the breeze carried the sound. But apart from that, the wood was silent.
It came to be Olivia’s go to hide. She felt a bit nervous about taking her turn. Some of the other kids had managed, in their blending-in clothes and by staying perfectly still, to hide for a surprisingly long time. One of the Tamworth twins, the boy, had managed not to be found at all. They had given up and called him eventually and he had swung down from the branches of a high tree looking very pleased with himself, if a bit scratched around the face and neck and arms and legs.
She had their count of one hundred in which to conceal herself. She could hide behind a tree, but that was pathetic and they would find her straight away. She could climb a tree, but that had been done. They’d be looking out for that and anyway, it seemed too painful to be worthwhile. Hide and seek was only a game. The same argument applied to hiding in the thorn bushes. She might get in, but the thorns were great vicious curved things and she was not confident she would ever get out again.
She looked around. They would be down to about thirty in their count. They would be upon her and she was too panicked to move. There was a ridge, she remembered, she thought it lay to her rear. She turned and saw the ridge and saw that a pale figure with a straw hat in a pinafore stood atop it. She looked frail and so wispy she was almost see-through. She curled a finger just the same and as Olivia always did when Madeleine summoned her, she climbed obediently to where her oldest friend stood.
Madeleine looked more frayed than ever. She had become truly scary, now. She was a genuine fright. Olivia was brave. She knew that. She was less afraid of the dark than her wuss of a big brother, Jack. But Madeleine was in decline and the decline was not a comforting sight. Her oldest friend was looking her age. ‘Can you hide me?’
‘They will find you, Livs. They are going to take you.’
This sounded ominous to Olivia. It was not just the words themselves. Madeleine’s voice was the low shriek of the wind over something vast. It was a sound you might hear on the sea at night, she thought. It was a lonely and gloomy sound and not remotely human. It was the creak of rigging, the distant moan of a whale. Her imaginary friend’s face was cracked like old brick mortar and her eyes could no longer keep up the pretence of being alive at all.
Madeleine turned and walked and Olivia followed her. Beyond the ridge there was a sort of dip or hollow. The hollow was filled with gorse and thorn bushes and ferns all jumbled densely together. Madeleine, the frail and disturbing thing that had once been Madeleine, wound a path through all this undergrowth. She stopped when she reached a thick tree trunk lying on its side. The tree had shallow roots that looked to Olivia like a great circle of writhing snakes. They formed this shape because the trunk itself was hollow.
‘We’ll be safe here, for a while at least,’ Madeleine said. She bent and walked into the tunnel of the hollow tree trunk, a dank den of bark and decayed wood with toadstools growing palely in the thin loam on its floor.
It was a chilly little refuge, Olivia thought, kneeling rather than sitting down inside. It was quite dark, which was a blessing, given how dead Madeleine looked in daylight with her straw plaits and clothes now mouldering into rags.
‘Is it lonely, being a ghost?’
‘I’m a poor sort of ghost, Livs. It would be different had I been buried on land. I’d have more substance and wouldn’t be fading like this. The memory of life is far stronger on the land. But the sea claimed me. It is a struggle. I cannot do it for much longer. And in what little time I have left, I will be confined.’
‘Confined?’
‘To the bay, Livs. I cannot roam beyond the bay. I am now confined to a few favourite places from my life.’
‘Was this a favourite place?’
‘It was. I played hide and seek here just as you are doing. My life was very happy right up until my death. I missed my daddy, away a lot at the fighting at the front in the war. But I loved my mummy very much and we were happy when we moved here.’
‘You were not born in the bay?’
The thing that had been Madeleine Gleason laughed. It was an awful sound, to Olivia. It was an emptying drain of a sound. She had not known that a ghost could perish, but she thought she had just heard the laughter of someone undergoing a sort of second death.
‘We were fresh blood,’ Madeleine said. ‘That is what they told us, at the finish.’
‘I’m afraid, Maddy,’ Olivia said. She had not known she was going to say it until it was said and it was not Maddy she was afraid of and she knew it was true. Something was wrong and her dad was not around and she was frightened. She began to cry.
‘Hush,’ Madeleine said. ‘You must try to be brave, Livs. Your father is coming back and he might be in time.’
Outside their makeshift den, she could hear gleeful cries as they crashed through the glade. She turned her head to the noise. They had discovered her. They had found the trail of bruised and trampled undergrowth that must lead to this spot, left by her boots as she followed her imaginary friend.
She turned back again, but Madeleine had gone and she was alone now and
felt it, felt alone and isolated and not a part of a game at all but prey, coldly pursued, hunted down like a timid woodland creature by hunters with only hunger and murder in their hearts.
Chapter Thirteen
Jack Greer was worried about his mum. She did not look happy to him at all. He thought that her distracted mood might have to do with his dad and what had happened in America. His dad had been working on that bloody game for ever. Jack had played a few prototype levels and thought it probably in his top three games of all time in terms of excitement and difficulty and the way the hours flew by when you were involved in it.
But the grown-up world was a ruthless place and his experience of football had taught him that his dad was not really a very ruthless man. Jack had played at the elite level for as long as he could remember. All his coaches had tried to instil in him the winning mentality. To a man they had been winners and they had possessed an edge he had never been aware of in his dad. He feared his dad might have been humiliated or given the run-around or just the bum’s rush in the States and his mum had got word of it. He hoped he was wrong.
Being a winner wasn’t everything. Robert O’Brien had been a winner and he had been a tosser too, messing about with a married woman, reliant on drugs to stimulate his imagination so that he could keep on writing his stories. The was the rumour, anyway. Alec McCabe had been a winner. But he had deliberately turned his back on a life of competition because he thought other things were more important.
It did not matter in the slightest to Jack whether his dad was a winner or not. He just wanted him to be happy. He wanted his mum to be happy too and she did not look it at the moment on the island, staring at the high, steep hill of driftwood they had constructed to burn as a bonfire later. They had draped it in fronds of kelp. Jack did not know why they had done this. Apparently it was a custom. He actually thought it was somewhat weird. It made the whole haphazard wooden construction look somehow alive. Perhaps it was just the way the kelp glistened and flapped in the breeze.