Little Black Lies

by Sharon Bolton

  Closer to shore, the beach was turning into a wildlife rave, as the penguins reached the rocks and started bouncing around like balls in a bingo drum. As they left the water behind, they carried on jumping, leaping from rock to rock, getting further from the water. The younger kid burst out laughing.

  ‘These are rockhopper penguins. Can you see their big yellow eyebrows? Watch them now, they’ll leap all the way back up the cliff to their nests.’ She turned to her boys. ‘Why don’t we go up the easy way and see how the chicks are getting on?’

  She’d seen the kill the whales had made at sea, was keeping the attention of her sons away from it. As she and the boys got to their feet, I stood up too. ‘Well, it looks like you guys know what you’re doing. I’ll leave you in peace.’

  ‘It was nice to meet you.’ She stretched out a hand. For a small, clumsy moment, I wondered if she were reaching to me. I think I even started, looked down as if to take it, and then I realized she was reaching for the older kid. He grabbed her hand and walked backwards, staring at me as his mother dragged him away. When I knew I couldn’t watch them any more without looking creepy, I ran on. Another hundred yards and something made me stop. I turned to see Catrin Quinn looking back at me across the rocks.

  I knew then. She did too, although it was another four months before I made her admit it.

  * * *

  A gull flies low, screaming. I’m probably too close to its nest. Do gulls nest in November? I haven’t a clue. Catrin used to talk to me for hours about the wildlife of the islands. I didn’t take any of it in. I just loved the sound of her voice.

  I turn and head back to the car. There are no answers for me here.

  My therapist with a ridiculous name is right. Two and a half years ago, when the snow was thick on the ground, a woman whose heart and soul was broken gave birth to a tiny, stillborn boy. I need to know if he was mine and only Catrin can tell me that.

  * * *

  After the day on the beach I started seeing Catrin around town. I found out where she lived, where she worked part-time, in which department her husband worked. I learned which nursery she took her boys to on the mornings she was in the Conservation. I started being in Stanley when I was likely to see her, hanging around, watching for her boat coming and going, double-checking registrations of similar silver Land Rovers in case they were hers. Am I making myself sound like a stalker? I was. I simply couldn’t help myself.

  I started running on that same beach every day because that’s where she might expect to find me and after two weeks had gone by, she was there, alone this time.

  She didn’t make it easy. She had two young kids, a busy life. The last thing she needed was someone who could bring the whole thing tumbling down like a house of cards. When I dropped hints that I wanted more than a passing acquaintance, she backed away.

  I joined the Stanley social scene, attending dances and film nights and whist drives. Whist, for fuck’s sake, that’s how bad I had it. I was rewarded time after time by the sight of her with her husband. He was a decent enough bloke, and I felt bad about what I was doing, but I was also pretty certain he wasn’t in love with her. Not the way he maybe had been once. There was a coldness about him. He never touched her in public, never put his hand, possessively, on the small of her back, never stroked her hair, or clasped his fingers around her wrist. I never saw him kiss her. Probably just as well. I might have landed him one and that would have been tricky to explain.

  I never left a function before they did. I watched her drive them away – she never really drank – and then I’d go home, tormented by the memory of her dark hair swept up high so that her shoulders and neck were bare, by the curve of her instep when she wore heels. I’d think about what it must be like to touch her and I’d jerk off and tell myself if it didn’t happen soon I’d lose my mind.

  And then one day, after I’d known her a few months, I caught her struggling to carry some boxes up from the boat. It was raining and her hair, more like the seaweed than I’d ever seen it, was streaming down her back. I took the boxes, carried them to her car and suggested coffee.

  ‘I’d rather have a stiff drink,’ she said to my surprise.

  Ten minutes later, we were in the Victory Bar with a couple of large bourbons and she was telling me about a wreck she’d been diving. Thanking God and all his sweet angels for a scuba-diving course I’d done with the regiment, I laid on my enthusiasm for the sport as thick as I dared. Maybe it was the whisky, maybe I’d worn her down, but as we finished our drinks, she dropped her eyes to the tabletop.

  ‘I’m going out there again on Friday.’ She ran a finger through a water splash on the wood, as though her mind was loose and carefree. I wasn’t fooled. Her other hand was shaking like a maraca in a salsa band. ‘I need to collect some samples. You could come, if you want.’

  I pretended to think about it. ‘I have a call I need to take Friday morning,’ I said. ‘I can probably rearrange it though. Thanks, that’d be good.’

  For the three days that followed I barely slept. I lived on soup because my constricted throat wasn’t letting solid food through. On Friday I waited at the little-used jetty in Whalebone Bay, not far from her house. When she’d suggested picking me up there, rather than be seen leaving Stanley harbour together, I’d known. Shit, I’d known from the moment I laid eyes on her. It had never been a question of if. Just a question of when.

  She was ten minutes late. At five minutes I decided she wasn’t coming. She’d got cold feet. It had all been a big wind-up. She was, at that moment, in one of those girly coffee mornings, giggling with her mates about the gullibility of blokes. Stupid ex-squaddie blokes, at that. I honestly wasn’t sure how I was going to live through the next hour. Then her boat appeared around the headland. I couldn’t see her. The sun was glinting off the windows of the wheelhouse, but I could make out that fat little dog of hers at the bow.

  She threw me the rope, I caught it, jumped on board and pushed us off.

  ‘That’s not the way the health and safety people prefer us to moor up.’ She put the engine into reverse to clear the jetty then swung it round and we headed out to sea.

  ‘The wind’s getting up.’ I wrapped the rope around my lower arm and made it off. ‘If it gets too choppy you might not want to go down with an amateur like me, and I’d hate to miss the chance to see the Mary Jane.’

  I was a fucking liar. I couldn’t give a toss if we didn’t dive. In fact I’d prefer it. All I cared about was getting on her boat and getting far enough out to sea that nobody could get in our way. We were halfway there already.

  We did dive. Catrin was determined to keep me at arm’s length for as long as she could and if she wanted to keep up the pretence of coming out here to explore the wreck, I was prepared to go along with it. We pulled on wetsuits and tanks, masks, snorkels and fins and jumped over the side.

  The water was cold enough – almost – to cool me down. The sun had more or less gone behind the cloud by this time so visibility was poor. I followed Catrin’s hard-kicking fins and the beam from her head-torch deeper and deeper, and wondered if anyone had ever had sex at the bottom of the ocean before. I followed her into the hull of the old whaling ship, brushing the tickling kelp out of the way, sliding between iron plates, sometimes feeling my way when I lost sight of her torch beam. Periodically, she’d stop, wait for me to catch up, and direct the beam on to a brass plaque or a pile of harpoons. I pretended to be interested, when all I wanted to do was catch hold of her hair, drifting round in the water like it was alive, and pull her to me. I could see the glint of her eyes behind her mask. She was fast down there, much faster than me, a strong swimmer. Down there she wasn’t afraid of me.

  When we’d been everywhere accessible on the wreck, we swam out through a hole in its starboard hull and she turned to make sure I was following. I reached out, took hold of her hand.

  We floated, in the swirling shadows at the bottom of the ocean, our weight suspended in the water, her face on a le
vel with mine. I pulled her closer, spat out my mouthpiece and kissed her hand.

  She panicked then, reaching for the mouthpiece, pushing it towards me. I smiled, took it from her, and slowly, to show her I wasn’t worried, put it back. When I gave the thumbs up, the signal to swim to the surface, she nodded.

  Back on the boat, we chilled down fast. Shivering, we pulled off our equipment. She let me peel off her wetsuit and wrap a towel around the black swimsuit she wore underneath. Her hair hung down to her waist, dripping on the cockpit floor. When I was naked but for swim shorts, I took her through the wheelhouse and into the cabin at the bow.

  Being in the Parachute Regiment, I’d made dozens of jumps, but I’ve never forgotten the first. The near-paralysing terror as the plane soared high and I knew there was only one way back to earth and that was free-fall. The realization that the moment was upon me, that I was going out of the airplane now. The certainty that death was seconds away. And then the mind-blowing joy of being in the sky, speeding like an arrow, that sense of absolute, infinite power, the feeling that anything was possible. That’s how it was for me the first time with Catrin.

  To this day, I only have to close my eyes to remember the ice-cold silk of her skin against mine as she pressed closer, seeking warmth at first, and then because she couldn’t pull away. Or her hair, clinging like wet string. The heady thrill of having the woman of my dreams become the woman biting at my neck, running her hands down the backs of my thighs, taking me between her hands and letting her fingers play until I could barely think straight.

  She was so deliciously naïve. She’d only ever known Ben and he clearly hadn’t been the adventurous type. She gasped and squeaked and told me no, but she wriggled like an eel, bucked like a new-born foal and clung to me with a strength that surprised me.

  When it was over, when I was flat on my back in that tiny bed, looking up at the wooden panelled ceiling, and she was curled up against me, her head on my shoulder, arm possessively across my chest, I told her I loved her.

  She didn’t say it back for some time. It didn’t matter. What I felt seemed to be enough for both of us. By the end of the first month I was begging her to leave Ben. I carried on doing it, right up until the moment when he left her and she looked back at me with those empty eyes. I think that was the moment I gave up.

  * * *

  I go home and start work. The west coast of the US, where I do most of my business, is five hours behind us and it’s getting to the time when people I need to talk to will be at their desks.

  Tonight I’ll hit the town and get hammered, I decide. Stanley will be in a good mood, the worries over the disappearance of Archie West put to one side. The Globe will be packed, with locals and visitors alike. The band will play and the ladies won’t be averse to a bit of mild flirting. Sapphire is right. Catrin is not the only woman on the islands and maybe a warm, willing woman is exactly what I need right now.

  I rattle off an email to a mate called Sam in Palo Alto. I have an ISDN line in the house that my employers arranged when I moved here and staying in touch with the outside world isn’t a problem for me. Bar the military, I probably have the best IT system on the islands. Which is why I’m the first to hear about the storm breaking back in the real world, just as the one over Falkland releases its might on the land around me.

  It starts innocuously enough.

  You’ve been in the news a bit, writes Sam.

  Huh? I reply. My fingers are too big to make keyboard work easy and I rarely waste words.

  You’re all over the papers. Here and in the UK. South America’s having a field day.

  Again, Huh? I’m still not that interested. John Major will have sent the Argies a yah-boo message and they’ll have a cob on. It happens from time to time. Or the Governor might have made some entirely premature announcement about oil reserves around the islands.

  I’ll see if I can attach a pic. Stand by.

  I stand by. Or rather, I get up, make coffee, have a piss, stare at the rain bucketing down outside and come back ten minutes later to see an email with image attachment has landed in my inbox. I click it open, see the scanned image of the front page of the Daily Mirror, and realize that Catrin’s part in the safe return of little Archie West will make no difference to how she’s viewed on the islands. Her part in the discovery of Jimmy Brown’s body, and putting to rest seventeen months of agonized unknowing for his parents, won’t make the slightest impression on how she appears on the world stage. Even I, ignorant ex-Para that I am, know a golden story when I see one.

  The picture is one taken by one of the tourists on a pretty good-quality camera. The definition is excellent. He must have used a zoom lens because I don’t remember anyone getting that close. I’m in the shot, although you’d have to look hard to spot me as I’m half turned away. Pete, the other person in the foreground, is looking down, as if sickened. It’s in colour, so I get the full impact of the blood around the beach, in the water, running down the face of the woman who takes centre stage.

  It is a picture of Catrin, her flying hair giving her the look of an avenging fury, standing beside a six-metre male pilot whale. The gun is in her hand. She’s looking down at her kill. The faintest whiff of smoke floats around the gun muzzle. The animal’s jaw opens in what isn’t, but looks like, a scream. The headline says it all:

  Killer Quinn

  16

  The rain has slackened by the time I reach Stanley. It’s a temporary respite though. Out to sea, more cloud is banking up. I’m relieved to see Robert Duncan’s car parked outside the offices of the Penguin News. Tracking him down would have wasted more time. The counter from which the paper is sold once a week is empty, so I lift it and in the back room find all three regular staff of the News in the office, all on the phone. Robert sees me, holds up a finger and carries on talking.

  I do not want Catrin seeing that photograph. I don’t want anyone here seeing that photograph. I’m pretty certain that, if I have to, I can shut down email correspondence in and out of the islands for a couple of days. I can’t get near the military’s comms, of course, their security’s too good, but all civilian traffic is well within my capabilities. People will just assume there’s a problem with the telephone connection. They’ll get on to their suppliers, who wouldn’t give the Falklands top priority, and after a day or so, I’d let it all trickle through again. A couple of days, maybe three, might be enough time to let the storm die down. People soon forget and in a couple of days the world will have something else to outrage about.

  What I need to know is whether the news is already out. Whether Rob and his team have already seen the story currently in my jacket pocket.

  ‘Well, I’m sure they’ll get back to you as soon as they can.’ Cathy, Rob’s chief (only) reporter, is looking frazzled. ‘The Conservation only have a very small staff and I imagine their lines are quite busy at the moment.’

  Looks like I’m too late.

  ‘Callum, what can I do for you?’ Rob has finished his call. He steps around his desk. I take his outstretched hand in my right and with my left pull the picture from my back pocket. ‘Have you seen this?’

  He only needs to glance. ‘Phones have been going mental for an hour. Friggin’ tourists.’

  ‘Does Catrin know?’

  He nods again, unhappily. ‘She must do. I had to tip John off when we got the first call. We haven’t been able to get through to them so I imagine they’re taking more calls than we are.’

  ‘And that’s saying something.’ Mabel, Rob’s mum and the office junior, has finished her call. ‘News International are chartering a plane, Rob. We can expect them early tomorrow afternoon.’

  ‘For a bunch of fucking dead whales?’ I’m incredulous. ‘Sorry, Mabel, Cathy.’

  Rob’s phone rings again. He grimaces an apology and turns away to talk. I hear him say ‘expected environmental disaster’, and know he’s going to be some time.

  ‘It’s not just the whales, Callum.’ Cathy’s phon
e is ringing but she’s ignoring it. ‘They’re making a connection between her shooting the whales and the disappearance of Archie West.’

  For a moment, I’m stumped. ‘How the hell are they managing that? There is no connection.’

  Deep frown lines appear between Cathy’s brows. ‘Of course there isn’t. But you have to see their point. We have an abducted British child, and an island woman instrumental in a mass slaughter.’ She holds up a hand to stop me. ‘Yeah, we know it was for the right reasons, but try telling that to people whose experience of whales is limited to watching Free Willy. Added to that, the woman in question, who has a history of emotional instability, drove into town last night with the same abducted kid.’

  ‘Catrin is not emotionally unstable and she found the fucking kid.’

  Mabel stands up and crosses to the kitchen.

  Even easy-going Cathy is starting to look put out now. ‘Maybe, but that’s not how the early news bulletins are telling it. According to them, she disappeared from the beach, covered in blood, and turned up in Stanley several hours later with the kid in her arms.’

  ‘Fuckin’ bullshit! I was in the car with her. She was asleep for most of the journey. It was sheer bloody fluke we saw him when we did.’

  Mabel is back, standing directly in front of me, holding a bottle of washing-up liquid. I look down. At it; at her.

  ‘Mind your mouth, young man, or I’ll wash it out,’ she tells me. ‘This might be a newsroom but we’re not on Fleet Street and we’re not the ones writing this crap.’

  Mabel is half my height, probably a quarter my weight and yet I have a feeling that, were I to smile right now, I’d regret it. ‘But I’m allowed to say crap? Right?’

  She waves the Fairy Liquid in my face. ‘No, I’m allowed to say crap because I’m ninety-two and I don’t give a shit. You can say yes ma’am, no ma’am, sorry to give offence ma’am, but if I were you I’d be out of here and trying to find Catrin.’