Into the Blue

by Robert Goddard

  15

  THE PREMATURE DARKNESS of an overcast December afternoon was descending on Weymouth when Harry arrived. He followed a well-remembered route from the station to his old lodgings in Mitchell Street, through knots of sauntering, larking schoolchildren, past brightly lit, Christmas-decorated shopfronts; here too an electronic chorus of carols was ready to welcome the prodigal.

  Away from the main street, fragments of a discarded life began to claim his attention. A few, late, wheeling gulls contested a sodden slice of bread. A whiff of the sea reached him from a turning that led to the bay. Then the soaring flank of a cross-Channel ferry moored at Custom House Quay loomed ahead, blocking, it seemed, the very end of the street, its funnels dwarfing the tiny, jumbled terraces.

  Harry turned into Mitchell Street and crossed to the other side. At this time of year, the Loves were unlikely to have a lodger. Before Harry’s arrival on the scene – and after, he assumed – they had relied on holiday-makers and ferry-goers. Indeed, they had originally told Harry he must be out by Whitsun. In the event, he had stayed five years. Beryl had grown fond of him, Ernie had learned to tolerate him and Harry, even when he could have afforded better, had not bothered to seek it.

  Yet there was no VACANCIES sign displayed on the door. And, when Harry rang the bell, Ernie, not Beryl, answered it. He seemed even shorter, grimmer and shabbier than Harry recalled: a shrunken, ferret-eyed man with a roll-up glued to his lower lip, wrapped in an over-sized cardigan and an air of self-imposed misery.

  ‘Hello, Ernie. Remember me?’

  For answer, Ernie tapped his forehead. ‘Forgotten more’n you’ll ever know. Harry bloody Barnett. What d’you want?’

  ‘My old room for a couple of nights, if it’s free. Beryl in?’

  ‘Beryl’s in Weymouth bloody Crem. Cancer. Three years ago. Don’t take lodgers. Not since.’

  Beryl was dead. That ever-laughing, ever-working, warm-hearted blancmange of a woman was dead. And her work-shy, gloom-devoured ingrate of a husband was still alive. It was only to be expected, of course. Harry should have known. Given a choice, life was generally unfair.

  ‘Bugger me,’ said Ernie. ‘You look proper cut up.’

  ‘I had no idea …’ Harry leaned against the doorpost for support, struggling to come to terms with this further sadness that fate had reserved for him.

  ‘A couple of nights, you said?’ A hint of softness had entered Ernie’s expression, like a stubborn flower blooming on a granite cliff.

  ‘Yes, but …’

  ‘Reckon you’d best come in, then. For Beryl’s sake, like.’ He led the way down the narrow, cluttered passage and Harry followed, noting as he went the odour of fried onions which had replaced the beeswax aroma of Beryl’s day. Ernie paused as they turned into the parlour, looked back at Harry and said: ‘She treated you better than she ever treated me, y’know.’ It was as if he felt the trace of affection in his earlier remark required instant correction, as if this least uxorious of husbands was determined to prove he had not become a sentimental widower.

  The parlour was in chaos. Dust had settled thickly on Beryl’s china animals and jugs. Ash was piled in old take-away trays and scattered across the newspaper-strewn settee. The embroidered antimaccasars were torn and stained, the potted plants shrivelled and sickly. The curtains, hanging from alternate runners and half-drawn across the windows, added their filtered gloom to the soiled glumness of the scene and the contrast with what had formerly been struck Harry dumb with depression.

  ‘Want a cup o’ tea?’

  ‘Er, no thanks.’

  ‘Or a beer?’

  ‘Actually, I’ve got to go straight on somewhere.’

  ‘Have you, though?’

  There was nowhere, it seemed then to Harry, nowhere he could go in this country he called his own, without finding the past trampled on, his memories insulted, his assumptions contradicted. Beryl dead, her home neglected, her husband in festering decline: if Harry had known, he would have walked on by.

  ‘Why d’you come back?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Somebody in the Globe said they’d read about you in the papers. Something about—’

  ‘Was Beryl … Did she suffer a lot?’

  Ernie’s glare conveyed his meaning better than any words: the subject was taboo. ‘I’d have to charge … for the accommodation, like. Fiver a night. In advance.’

  Harry shrugged the rucksack off his shoulders and deposited it behind the door. Then be took a ten pound note from his wallet and pushed it into Ernie’s waiting hand. He knew Ernie to be mean, yet he suspected this was not what had motivated his request. The cash was intended to distance them, to purge their relationship of anything that might smack of commiseration. Ernie required no companion in his bereavement.

  ‘Where you off to, then?’

  ‘Er … Mallender Marine.’

  Ernie’s perpetual frown deepened. ‘They’ve not taken you back?’

  ‘No. I just want to see one of the staff. It could take a couple of hours.’

  ‘Then you’d best look in at the Globe when you get back. I’ll be there by that time, like as not.’

  Harry nodded. ‘Yes. Like as not.’

  It was as well, Harry reflected as he sat aboard the Portland bus ten minutes later, that Ernie Love was the least sociable of men, his interest in gossip entirely confined to form talk in the betting shops. He at least could be assumed never to have read a copy of The Courier.

  The bus moved slowly through the rush-hour traffic, indecisive rain spitting against the windows. For all the hundreds of journeys Harry had made on this same route from Town Bridge to Mallender Marine, for all the years he had lived in Weymouth and for all the years he had believed he would remain there, he felt for it no fondness, no kinship of any kind. Nothing, he knew, but the irresistible necessity by which he was bound, could or should have drawn him back.

  It was, then, with an awareness of his own reluctance as much as a consciousness of how ill-advised his behaviour might be, that Harry rose, pressed the bell and stepped off the bus at the appointed stop. He gazed after the illuminated shape of the vehicle as it headed on along the arrow-straight road towards Portland and let his sight and memory absorb the distant, neon-lit profile of the Naval Base, its lights refracted and extended in the black, unseen waters of the harbour. Then he crossed the road and re-entered with determined tread another precinct of his past. Mallender Marine was a two-storeyed office building with a car park at the front and workshop and loading bay at the rear. In its way, it was the quintessential unprepossessing workplace of every man’s acquaintance: drab, utilitarian and wholly unremarkable.

  But, for Harry Barnett, standing outside in the drizzle, this place was, for good or ill, the starting-point of his quest after Heather Mallender’s secret: the first photograph on the film she had taken, the first intersection of their interwoven destinies. The car park was mostly empty, as he had hoped, with lights on in only half the offices. This late on a Friday evening, he had judged, none but the desperate and the dedicated would still be working. Roy Mallender, for one, would be long gone. But Nigel Mossop, timid naïve laborious Nigel, was likely, if Harry’s memory served, to be found even now at his desk.

  Harry began to trace a path that would lead him past all the ground-floor offices. Mercifully, the window of what had once been his was in darkness: there was no need to confront whatever alterations his successors had made. In the next, two girls he did not recognize were joking with a cleaner. It was strange to think how oblivious they were to being observed. There followed an empty room and two more darkened windows. And then, as expected, an office of four desks, only one of them occupied, but occupied by Nigel Mossop.

  Grey-suited and tousle-haired, thin and hunched as if weighed down by his own inadequacy, frowning and fretting over a scatter of papers, Nigel Mossop appeared entirely faithful to Harry’s recollection of him: earnest, well-intentioned and essentially good-hearted, but cripp
led by insecurity and obtuseness. Not a man to inspire either affection or confidence and certainly not a man to be relied upon, in or out of a crisis, he was nevertheless the one sure witness to what Heather had been about when she had taken his photograph.

  Harry stepped closer to the window, so that he was no more than a yard from Mossop, though still invisible to him. He could discern every tiny symptom now of the other man’s unaltered character: untidy, hesitant, inclined to panic, consumed by uncertainty. His nose had wrinkled in bafflement as he tapped the keys of a calculator, his brow had knotted itself in unavailing concentration. Harry reached out and rapped his knuckles on the glass.

  Mossop reacted like a rabbit to a shotgun report. He leapt back in his chair, mouth open and eyes starting in his head. When he looked at the window, and saw Harry’s face, it was clear that he did not, for a moment, believe the evidence of his senses. Then Harry mouthed and motioned for him to open the window. Mossop glanced around as if afraid he was overlooked, though Harry could see that he was not. Still he hesitated. Then, at last, he reached across the desk, released the stay and gingerly pushed the window ajar.

  ‘Harry,’ he said, breathless with confusion. ‘What are you … I mean … This isn’t …’

  ‘Hello, Nige. Surprised to see me?’

  ‘Well … I certainly didn’t … What … what are you doing here?’

  ‘I was hoping to have a few words with you.’ Though the chances of those words being coherent, Harry thought, did not seem good.

  ‘Oh … Really? What … what about?’

  ‘Heather.’

  Shock now convulsed Mossop’s startled expression. ‘Heather? You mean H-Heather … M-M-M—’

  ‘Heather Mallender,’ Harry interrupted, finishing Mossop’s sentence as he had always done when the young man’s stammer became too much for him.

  ‘I don’t … didn’t, that is … Didn’t really know … Heather … at all. ‘

  ‘That isn’t strictly true, Nige, now is it?’

  ‘Yes, of course … Of course … it is.’

  Harry drew the wallet of photographs from his pocket, selected the one of Mossop and held it up for him to see. ‘Remember her taking this one of you?’

  Mossop’s jaw sagged. ‘Oh … Oh yes …’ He reached out as if to take it, but Harry snatched it back before he could.

  ‘Are you going to let me in?’

  Again, Mossop looked anxiously over his shoulder. ‘No … That is … I’ll come out.’

  Harry watched as the young man bundled some papers and an empty sandwich box into his briefcase, pulled on an anorak and headed for the door, switching the light off as he went. As he walked round towards the main entrance to meet him, Harry wondered if any significance was to be attached to the furtiveness which seemed to have compounded Mossop’s natural timidity. It was understandable, he supposed, that he should not wish to be seen fraternizing with Roy Mallender’s sworn enemy, but his feeble attempt to deny knowing Heather implied some deeper-seated fear.

  Mossop appeared in the porch just as Harry reached it, but he did not pause or even glance in Harry’s direction. Instead he hurried across to his car, unlocked the door and climbed in, then waved for Harry to join him. As soon as he had done so, Mossop started the engine and pulled out of the car park with choke roaring, attracting, Harry suspected, all the attention he had been hoping to avoid.

  ‘Where are we going, Nige?’ They had started south towards Portland, but, in Harry’s day, Mossop had lived with his mother in Radipole and it was hard to imagine that he had moved.

  ‘Well … Well … I thought somewhere private … would be best.’

  ‘Is driving without lights intended to add to the privacy?’

  ‘Oh God.’ Mossop grabbed at the headlamp switch and Harry noticed, as he did so, how much his hand was shaking. ‘S-Sorry.’

  ‘There’s no need to apologize. Just tell me why you’re so nervous.’

  ‘I … I’m not.’

  ‘Have it your own way.’

  Clumsily, Mossop changed the subject. ‘A lot … A lot’s altered … since you left the firm.’

  ‘I’ll bet it has.’

  With this minimal encouragement, Mossop embarked on a gabbled and stumbling account of who had come and gone, who had prospered and who had fallen by the wayside, in the ten years since Harry’s departure. None of it should have been or was surprising. Charlie Mallender had begun to take a back seat, leaving Roy to impose his own philosophy on the company. This meant more low-risk sure-profit Defence contracting and fewer speculative ventures into the private leisure market. It also meant recruiting sycophantic nose-to-the-grindstone staff in preference to anybody with an ounce of flair or individuality. Not that Roy’s methods had been unsuccessful. Commercially, Mallender Marine had gone from strength to strength. As for Mossop, though he evidently missed the earlier pioneering times and had gained precious little personal advancement under Roy, ingrained humility ensured he was not about to complain.

  Mossop’s babble finally expired where the road ended, at Portland Bill. He pulled into the empty lighthouse car park, stopped, turned off the engine and seemed at last, in this remotest and darkest of refuges from prying eyes, to grow calmer in both speech and expression.

  ‘We all heard … read, that is … about you and Heather, of course.’

  ‘Did you?’

  ‘I didn’t believe … what they suggested. Not … not for a moment.’

  ‘What who suggested?’

  ‘Well … The papers, of course … and …’

  ‘Roy Mallender?’

  ‘He never liked you, Harry … You know that …’

  ‘He never liked you, either.’

  ‘No … No, he didn’t … But things are … different now.’

  ‘Are they?’

  ‘Oh yes … Yes, of course.’

  ‘Does he know you were going out with Heather?’

  ‘I … I wasn’t.’

  Mossop’s relative composure had ended now. A sudden spikey rush of odour told Harry that he was sweating in the deepening chill. ‘Come on, Nige. The photograph, remember?’

  ‘Where did you …? How …?’

  ‘After she disappeared, I had the film in her camera developed. Don’t worry. I haven’t told anybody that you’re on it … yet.’

  ‘What do you m-m—’

  ‘I mean that, strictly speaking, I ought to hand the photographs over to the police. They might want to know, of course, why you’re in one of them.’

  ‘It’s just … just a snap.’

  ‘Taken when, may I ask?’

  ‘Back in the, ah … back in the summer.’

  ‘And taken where?’

  ‘Oh … I’m not sure. I can’t—’

  ‘Can’t remember? Perhaps I can help. I think the house in the background is at Tyler’s Hard. I think it’s Alan Dysart’s cottage in the New Forest. You have heard of Alan Dysart, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well … yes, of course.’

  ‘So, why were you there?’

  ‘There was … nothing to it. Just a … d-d-day t-t-trip.’

  Harry felt suddenly sorry for his companion. Poor Mossop could not withstand the pressure he was under. Time had not bolstered his self-confidence. If anything, it had undermined it. But, sorry or not, Harry could scarcely afford to be squeamish. ‘If Roy ever found out you and Heather were friends, it wouldn’t do a lot for your career prospects, would it?’

  ‘Oh God.’ Mossop’s head sagged onto his chest. ‘I never thought … not for a moment …’ His voice thickened, as if tears were not far away.

  ‘Why not just tell me all about it, Nige, eh?’ To his own ears, Harry’s gentle encouraging tone sounded reminiscent of Miltiades: the same implication of sympathy, the same flavour of the confessional.

  ‘I suppose … I might as well.’ Mossop spoke now without the strangled note of earlier indecision. He had abandoned the unequal struggle. ‘You know Heather had this … breakdown …
that made her give up teaching?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, after she’d recovered … she came to work at Mallender Marine … Just as a temporary arrangement, of course … Ease her back into everyday life … I suppose that was the idea … They put her in the … the same office as me … April, it must have been … when she arrived. Well, we got to know each other, like you do … when you work with somebody.’ His voice was gaining strength and fluency as he spoke. ‘We had a drink together on a few Friday evenings after work, that was all … There was nothing to it … I think she liked talking to me because I didn’t, well, didn’t ask her … about her sister, about her breakdown. Probably she liked me because I was … no threat, you know?’

  ‘I know, Nige, I know.’ It sounded disturbingly similar to what might have appealed to Heather in Harry himself.

  ‘Well, last August … the Sunday of the bank holiday weekend … she asked me if I’d drive her to the New Forest. She said she wanted to see … to see where her sister had died … Tyler’s Hard, like you said. She didn’t want to go alone and she didn’t want her family to know about it. That’s why … she asked me.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Nothing. We drove there … had lunch at Beaulieu … and looked at the stretch of water where … where the boat blew up. Then we … came back.’

  ‘That was all?’

  ‘Yes … of course. Wh-wh—’

  ‘What else?’ Mossop’s stammer had betrayed him. ‘Out with it, Nige. What else happened?’

  ‘Well, we … we visited a couple of p-people. An old woman who, ah, cleaned for Dysart. Mrs D-Di—’

  ‘Mrs Diamond?’

  ‘Yes. Heather had her address. She … wanted to look her up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I don’t know. I … waited in the car while she went in.’