Little Black Lies

by Sharon Bolton

  I thought she looked like me. All the way home, I was seeing my own face in place of hers. And then, just as I was parking up, I saw her as Rachel.

  ‘Enough?’ I ask, more than happy to leave it there.

  Rachel shakes her head.

  Which would be worse, I wonder – knowing your child is dead, that he died quickly and painlessly, or not knowing where he is, who has him, or how much he might be suffering? How many hours of not knowing, of imagining the very worst possible, can any woman deal with before she loses her grip on reality?

  Before she suffers like I am suffering?

  Rachel drops her head into her hands and starts to sob again. I give her time. I know better than to suggest again that we stop. ‘Three years with this inside her,’ she says, eventually. ‘Does it get any worse?’

  ‘I’m afraid it does.’

  ‘OK, carry on.’

  ‘Rach—’

  ‘Carry on.’

  It was as though someone had switched the lights on, as though everything that had been in shadow was suddenly plain as day. Why couldn’t it have been Rachel standing there on the dock, falling apart? Rachel suffering as that poor bitch is doing. Why not Rachel dying inside, right now, instead of curling up on her son’s bed, rocking his warm body back to sleep? Why isn’t she staring at that bed, cold and empty, wondering where on God’s earth he is?

  * * *

  As we get closer to the end, there is a picture I can’t get out of my head. Catrin, standing pale as stone beside the body of a large pilot whale, his blood spattered across her face, the smoke still rising from the gun in her hand. I see her standing in the exact same way, over the body of a dead child, and know that, thanks to the article in the Daily Mirror, the whole world will soon be doing the same.

  The last entry is Thursday, 3 November, the day after the whale beaching. Catrin must have written it within hours of handing over little Archie West to his parents. The reunion had had everyone witnessing it in tears. It had left Catrin unmoved.

  I’ve been wondering if I have what it takes to kill. Whether I can look a living creature in the eye and take the one irreversible action that ends a life. Asked and answered, I suppose. I have no difficulty in killing. I’m actually rather good at it.

  Today is the anniversary of the boys’ deaths. It is three years to the day since Rachel’s recklessness ended their lives and mine. Three years since I began plotting how I might redress the balance. For most of that time, I’ve been thinking about how and when I might kill Rachel. Now, I’m wondering whether that might not be enough. Whether I might actually go one step further.

  There is nothing of me left. I have just taken one hundred and seventy-six lives. What’s one more?

  25

  Without any real idea of where I’m going, or what I’m going to do when I get there, I head back into town after Rachel rides away. Catrin needs a lawyer. I can call into the firm in Stanley and speak to one of the partners about representing her, in the early stages at least. Later, someone specializing in criminal cases will have to be found and flown from Britain. It will be cripplingly expensive. Fortunately, neither Catrin nor I are particularly short of money.

  Apricot-coat lady, now wearing bright scarlet, is doing what I think is called a piece to camera outside the front of the police station, so I carry on past and turn into the private car park behind. I go in through the rear door and find myself in one of the back offices.

  Neil, the desk sergeant currently away from his desk, spots me and stands in my way. ‘Out. Use the front door like everyone else.’

  ‘The film crew are blocking the way in,’ I lie. ‘You want to get them shifted or you’ll have complaints.’

  Muttering, he leaves the room.

  ‘I want to see Catrin,’ I tell Skye, the only other person in the room.

  She shakes her head. ‘She’s being interviewed.’

  ‘Does she have a lawyer present?’

  ‘She refused one.’ Skye leans across the desk and closes the computer file that she and Neil had been looking at. Not before I catch a glimpse of it.

  ‘Does she have an appropriate adult?’

  Skye blinks at me.

  ‘Catrin is emotionally very fragile. Probably mentally unbalanced. UK law dictates that she should not be interviewed without the presence of a properly trained appropriate adult.’

  It’s about 80 per cent bullshit, 10 per cent guesswork. I’m just willing to bet that Skye and her colleagues aren’t exactly up to date on the law surrounding the interviewing of vulnerable witnesses. Even so, she isn’t easily intimidated. ‘I’m sure that’s been considered,’ she tells me.

  ‘So who is with her? Who is her appropriate adult and what training does he or she have? Skye, the whole bloody world will be watching this case. You can’t afford to get anything wrong, not least because I am going to hire the best lawyer in England to defend her.’

  ‘Well, good for you.’ Skye looks like a pissed-off teenager.

  ‘You’re missing the point. How is it going to look for you and the rest of the woodentops here if she gets off on a technicality because you haven’t followed procedure? You’ll all need a posting to South bloody Georgia to get away from people here.’

  Not easily intimidated, but I get her in the end. Telling me to wait where I am, she leaves the room and her footsteps disappear down the corridor. I step to the computer. She’s closed the file, but I pull up the history and the file she was looking at is at the top. It’s the footprint found outside the Grimwood house.

  With a sense of some relief – if this line of enquiry hasn’t been closed, there may be hope for Catrin yet – I open the file and see the image.

  Oh, God no.

  I actually wonder, for a moment, whether I’m going to black out. I rub my eyes, close them for a second, then try again. It hasn’t changed. Still a print I recognize immediately.

  The afternoon I chased Catrin up the hill from town, turning around at the Grimwood house and heading back, the afternoon Peter Grimwood disappeared, I have no recollection of getting out of my car. And yet I must have done.

  My usual walking boots – the ones that made the print I’m looking at now, and there’s no mistake, I’d know an ex-military boot print anywhere – weren’t on my feet when I woke up, soaking wet, the night I had a blackout in camp. I’d changed them earlier that day. For my footprint to be in the mud outside the Grimwood house I would have had to get out of the car that afternoon. When I went back, around twelve hours later to drive Rob home, I was wearing different shoes.

  Hearing a noise in the corridor I close the file and step away from the desk.

  If I can’t remember getting out of the car, what else have I forgotten?

  Like flicking back through a video tape I run through the memories of my flashback. Noise, gunfire, screaming. Utter confusion. Terrified young eyes staring into mine. The Argentine boy I killed.

  Except these are not brown any more, these eyes staring into mine. These are bright blue, wide with shock, a scream breaking free from small red lips. I walk to the outside wall and lay my forehead against its cool smoothness. Then I bang it, gently at first, but increasingly sharply, as though I’m trying to nudge some memory free.

  Blue eyes. Fair hair. A terrified child.

  I saw Peter that day. When I followed Catrin up the hill to the Grimwood house, I saw Peter. I feel a need to sit down and know I’m running out of time.

  If I saw Peter, he wasn’t in Catrin’s car. If what I’m remembering now is real, she didn’t take him. He wasn’t in her car and he wasn’t on her boat. She didn’t kill him.

  A hit-and-run. Another car, after Catrin’s, coming along that road too fast. The driver with his mind elsewhere, not concentrating on where he was going. A small kid, escaped from the garden a second time, because if kids find something fun, they do it over and over again. A kid in the road. The daylight gone, taken away by some freaky solar event. A driver unable to stop.

 
A driver not in his right mind. Panicking when he sees the child is dead. Picking up the tiny body and hiding him away in his vehicle, perhaps wrapping him up in something, before anyone can see. Driving away. Telling no one. Wiping it from his mind, the way he has with so many other memories too dreadful to hold on to.

  I’m at the window. I can see my Land Cruiser outside. There is a large lockable box in the back that a former owner used to store his weapons collection when he was on the move. I try to remember if I’ve looked inside it since the night Peter went missing. Someone is coming. I slip outside again.

  There’s a black fly on the back panel of the car. Nothing so unusual in that. It’s summer, flies often land on hot cars. Is that was this is? Or …

  I’m five yards away. I look back. The room I left is still empty. Four yards, three. I fish into my pocket and find my keys, before remembering that my car isn’t locked. I never lock my car. Neither do I lock that box. I don’t keep weapons in it any more. Whatever is in the box is there for anyone to see, has been these last forty-eight hours.

  Two yards, one, I’m there. If Catrin didn’t kill Peter Grimwood, then …

  I press the button and open the car’s rear door.

  PART THREE

  Rachel

  I would cut off my own arm, rip my face to ribbons, if it were sufficient penance for what I did. I sometimes think there is nothing I would not do, no sacrifice too great, to get Catrin’s forgiveness.

  DAY ONE

  Monday, 31 October

  26

  The tide is out, as far as it will go today. There is just a gleam on the sand to remind me that it was ever here at all and a flickering of light, a movement on the horizon, to suggest that it might come back again. The beach it left behind is wide and gently curving, surrounded by low cliffs. A necklace of driftwood lies inches out of reach of the returning waves, adorning sand that, like a young girl’s skin, is smooth and white. Not far from me, a trio of oystercatchers tread rune-like footprints in a pattern that could be entirely random, but might hold the secret to the universe. Something catches their attention and their coral-red beaks turn in unison. They gaze in the exact same direction, as though they are three manifestations of a single soul.

  I sit on a guano-stained rock about twenty metres higher than the beach, as I often do when the weather is decent, sometimes when it’s not, and look out at a view that never changes, and yet never quite stays the same. Some days I watch surfers. When the surf is up, they appear like creatures from the deep, black and slick, only their faces exposed to the cold. Prone on boards, they paddle furiously, hovering in the spray, waiting for their moment. And then they take flight, soaring into the air, disappearing completely between frothing, turquoise waves, only to pop up again where you least expect them.

  No surfers today, just a lone logger duck, leaving a trail behind it like the wake of a speedboat. Vrrrummmmmm. I’m making the sound under my breath, like a toddler playing with a toy car. The oystercatchers regard me, warily, as if I’m a simple soul, but one who might turn around and bite.

  Around me and stretching further up the cliff are clumps of dull, grey grass. On a windy day, it will bend and sway, slap the rock like a thousand tiny whips. Today there is no wind and the grass is as still as the stones. I’m still too. I sit and stare at endless ocean until my vision blurs and it feels as though I’m on the very edge of the world.

  A cluster of birds takes flight. They are cormorants, I think, their slender arrow-shaped bodies like splinters of glass as they shoot upwards from the beach. Directly ahead of me, the refuge the cormorants are heading for is the great prow of the wrecked ship, the Sanningham. It sits motionless, dripping seawater, crumbling with age. It was a supply ship, commissioned in the early years of the twentieth century, one of the first iron and steam vessels to make the long and dangerous run to South America. A few decades ago, it sprang a leak as it battled around Cape Horn and never made it home. When the tide is high only the cabins on deck can be seen above the crashing waves but as the water recedes the hull emerges, its rust stains like dried blood in the right light. I sit here and watch it rotting a little more with every fresh tide.

  Years ago, when the boys were much smaller, when my life was very different, Catrin and I and the kids made our way out to the wreck at low tide and climbed up. Enough remained to catch a glimpse of the lives those sailors of old must have led: the narrow decks, treacherous in bad weather; the cramped hammocks, which must have been wet a lot of the time; the low-ceilinged cabins that, even decades after the ship was last used, seemed to stink of sulphur.

  Catrin tried to teach the boys about the sea life that was colonizing the wreck, but I was way ahead of her. I’d sneaked out a couple of hours before and hidden fifty gold-wrapped chocolate coins in waterproof packaging. We had the best treasure hunt ever.

  The boys loved it, of course, they’ve been begging me to go back ever since, but it’s not somewhere I can let them go alone. At high tide, it’s too dangerous, at any time it’s quite difficult to get on board. Sander has taken them once or twice. I simply can’t bear to.

  Instead I look. I sit and stare at the battered, rust-stained relic of better times and I think to myself: it’s in better shape than I am.

  There is movement at the far corner of the beach. I don’t need to turn to see that it’s Ralph Larken. Ralph always makes me think of Coleridge.

  It is an ancient Mariner,

  And he stoppeth one of three.

  Except Ralph never stops me. I don’t think the two of us have ever exchanged words.

  Now that he’s retired he wanders the length of the beach twice a day at low tide, looking for driftwood he can use as kindling, crabs left behind by the sea and even carrion: birds, penguins or fish that have been washed up whole. Rumour has it that he and the two women he lives with cook and eat what he finds, which isn’t something I’ve ever wanted to dwell on too much.

  Ralph is on the ‘blacklist’. A list of known alcoholics to whom the pubs, restaurants and liquor stores are not supposed to sell alcohol. As a system, it works, but erratically. The determined drinkers will usually find a way. Something about his movements today suggests that he might have found a way in the last twelve hours. He’s moving like a child’s puppet, every step, every swing of the arm stilted and clumsy.

  He scrabbles in the sand for a second or two, then stretches up again and seems to see me. We stare at each other, and I’m mouthing words quietly to myself.

  By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,

  Now wherefore stopp’st thou me?

  ‘Rachel.’

  My mother’s voice, behind me on the cliff. I expected her later in the day. She’s taking the boys out trick-or-treating. She’s even made their costumes, including a stuffed pumpkin outfit for the little one. They will be the best-dressed little monsters in town and everyone who sees them will think: Well, at least they have their grandma.

  The birds are making the most of the tide being out, strutting around, looking for stranded shellfish or over-confident worms. There must be a hundred or more, milling around on the sand and, for a moment, they make me think of worms on a corpse. Every now and again, something startles them. It can’t be me, I haven’t moved in the best part of an hour, and Roadkill is still too far away. But periodically they take flight, swooping upwards in a sudden storm of noise, feathers and shit. They shit every few seconds, these birds, as though the inside of their bodies is entirely fluid. You notice things like that if you watch for long enough.

  ‘Rachel!’ I can’t ignore her twice. One time, I can claim the sound of the waves and the birds masked her voice. Twice would be pushing it and I can’t fall out with my mum. I get up and turn around, to find she’s walked further down the cliff path than she needed to. She’ll be annoyed. It’s a steep climb back up and if I’d turned around sooner, I’d have saved her a good part of it. She’s breathing heavily, even though the downhill climb is easy. Not even steep enough to be ha
rd on the knees. She’s making a point. Again.

  ‘We’ve been trying to get you on the phone for over an hour.’ She breathes out a heavy sigh. It is the sigh of exasperation, the sigh of my teenage years. The one I seem to hear all the time these days. ‘Where’s Peter?’

  She steps closer than she needs to, trying to smell alcohol on my breath. She won’t. Today has been one of the better days.

  There was a time when I felt a sense of dismay as I looked at my mum. I saw her plump body squeezed into clothes that were always a size too tight, the faded blonde of her thinning hair, the loosening around her jawline and I’d think: twenty years’ time, that will be me. Now, I think twenty years might be over-optimistic, but find it rather hard to care.

  ‘Peter’s asleep,’ I tell her. I give her a smile, although they increasingly seem to hurt my face.

  She looks at her watch, registers that it’s nearly four. ‘What if he wakes up and you’re down here?’

  ‘He doesn’t. He’s a very good sleeper.’

  ‘I’d better go and get him.’ She sets off and I feel those invisible threads again, the ones that pull me away from the house, that make it so hard for me to go back. I follow her, reluctantly, trying to think of a polite way of asking her why she’s here. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ is the best I can come up with. I smile again, or try to, to take the sting from the words.

  ‘Your father sent me. There’s a child missing.’ Her voice drops low, as though to thwart eavesdroppers. ‘Another one.’

  I have a sudden picture in my head of the oystercatchers turning to each other in pretend dismay. A child missing? Another one? What are these people like?

  ‘What child? How?’ I glance back. The second child to vanish, in recent times anyway, was last seen on the beach directly below us.