by Dani Atkins
‘I’m so sorry,’ I apologised shakily to my two passengers.
Mac laid a comforting hand over mine on the wheel. ‘He pulled out without looking or indicating. It wasn’t you, Molly.’ His voice was remarkably calm for a man who’d almost seen his very expensive car written off.
I turned towards him with a less than steady smile. ‘Are you sure you still want me to drive?’
‘I’m probably over the limit, and Jamie doesn’t have a licence, so you remain our designated driver.’
I pulled back into the flow of traffic, mindful now that it was clearly a busy bus route. I crawled along at a good ten miles below the speed limit, partly because of the storm but more to make it easier for Mac and Jamie to spot Connor. My tortoise-like progress earned a cacophony of protests from car horns and a few colourful comments delivered through rolled-down windows. Jamie took particular delight in responding to those, with hand gestures you definitely don’t find in the Highway Code.
Five miles down the road there was still no sight of a small boy dressed in a canary-yellow raincoat.
‘Shouldn’t we have spotted him by now?’ I asked. ‘How far could a seven-year-old have walked anyway?’
‘Apparently just under three miles an hour – I googled it,’ Jamie said. ‘But as we don’t know when he set off, that doesn’t tell us how far he’s walked.’
I felt rather than saw Mac stiffen in the passenger seat beside me. ‘Pull over,’ he said urgently.
‘Have you spotted him?’ I cried, almost stalling the car in my haste to do as he’d asked.
Mac shook his head as I drew up beside the kerb. ‘Turn off the engine,’ he said.
I could see in the rear-view mirror that Jamie was just as perplexed as I was.
‘And the wipers too,’ Mac added. ‘I need it to be as quiet as possible.’
I bit my tongue and did what he said.
With an unreadable expression on his face, Mac reached for Alex’s phone, which we’d brought with us in the car. ‘Just don’t say anything for a moment,’ he requested.
He scrolled through the icons on the phone until he found the one to replay the message Connor had inadvertently left on his father’s mobile. Even the tick of the dashboard clock sounded too loud as I watched Mac replay the message half a dozen times, not on speaker phone this time but with the mobile pressed tightly against his ear.
After the last repetition he set the phone back down on the centre console. There was a small, satisfied look on his face that gave me a glimmer of hope.
‘I don’t think we’re going to find Connor walking down this road,’ he began.
‘But this is definitely where—’
He cut me off. ‘This is the right road, but I don’t think he’s walking any more.’
Those terrifying headlines filled my head again, making it hard to concentrate on his next words.
‘I think he’s on a bus – or at least he was.’
‘Huh? How do you work that out?’
‘Listen,’ Mac urged, setting up the message to play again and holding the phone to my ear.
As hard as I tried, I could decipher nothing from the jumble of sounds to confirm Mac’s suspicion. Even Jamie, who, being younger, presumably had better hearing, still failed to discern what Mac could.
‘It’s not just a myth that blind people can hear more acutely than sighted people,’ he explained. ‘When I lost my vision, I noticed a difference. Every sound became sharper, more defined – sometimes even magnified. And that hasn’t left me, even after the cornea transplants. I think I can hear the faint sound of a ringing bell on the recording. The kind you press when you want a bus to make a stop.’
Jamie and I each took another turn with the phone, but even with knowing what we were listening out for, we still couldn’t hear it.
‘I think I can also make out the vague sound of birds cawing in the distance. I think they’re gulls.’
‘So Connor is on a bus?’ said Jamie, already sounding as though our mission had failed. ‘Then we’re never going to find him.’
‘He was on a bus,’ Mac corrected. ‘But I think the sounds on the recording are of him getting off.’
‘Even assuming he managed to catch a bus by himself, had money for his fare, and didn’t get challenged by the driver, where on earth did he think he was going? If he’d asked to go to the train station, he’d have been told he was heading the wrong way.’
Mac sighed heavily. ‘I don’t know. But something tells me he thinks he’s heading in the right direction. My gut instinct is to keep going down this road and hope we get lucky and spot him.’
It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was the only one we had. I reached for the key and turned the engine back on. No one said much for the next twenty minutes, and my grip on the wheel tightened with every mile we travelled. Surely Connor wouldn’t have ventured this far from his home? I was on the point of suggesting we turn around and return, when Mac jolted upright in the seat beside me as though he’d been electrocuted.
‘Turn left here,’ he directed suddenly.
It was almost too late to make the turn, and I must have left a fair bit of rubber on the road as I swung the wheel sharply to the left. The car bucked and swerved, and I waited until it was back under my control before glancing at Mac. He was craned forward as far as his seatbelt would allow, both hands resting on the dashboard as he attempted to peer through the storm.
‘I think there’s a roundabout a couple of hundred yards down this road. If there is, take the right-hand exit.’
‘You know this area?’
He shook his head. ‘Not really. Well, yes and no.’
His answer told me precisely nothing, but before I could question him further, through the torrential rain the roundabout appeared, just as he’d predicted. I flicked the indicator and made the right-hand turn.
‘This road is on a steep incline, so keep your speed low,’ he advised. ‘At the bottom there’s a T-junction with a church on the left. Turn right there.’
Like the roundabout, the church and junction duly materialised.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Jamie, his head appearing in the gap between the two front seats. ‘If you don’t know this area, what’s with all the directions?’
Mac gave a troubled sigh. Something was happening here that he was clearly grappling to make sense of.
‘The road splits up ahead. Keep to the left,’ he said, still shaking his head as though even he couldn’t believe what he was about to say. ‘I’ve never been here in daylight,’ he added. ‘But last summer, after my transplant, I went through a period of insomnia that I tried to cure by driving around in the middle of the night.’
I inhaled sharply, suddenly remembering the conversation we’d had. ‘You told me you kept ending up at the same place. It was by a pier, wasn’t it?’
Mac looked like a man who could no longer trust everything he knew to be true.
‘Those drawings in your flat – the ones of the pier in the middle of a raging storm,’ I said quietly, my eyes going to the rolling grey clouds above us and the lightning forking across the sky, ‘they were of today, weren’t they?’
In reply, Mac simply shook his head, not in denial but in disbelief.
‘Mac!’ I gasped as the road curved around, because although I’d definitely never been there before, I recognised where we were from Mac’s sketches. ‘This is it. This is the place you drew.’
‘I am officially freaked out of my fuckin’ mind,’ said Jamie. ‘What the hell is going on here?’
Mac shook his head. It appeared to be his default reflex. ‘I think this might be where Connor was heading,’ he admitted. ‘Although how I knew that nine months ago, I have no idea.’
There was a small designated parking area that I pulled into, leaving the car skewed at an angle across two bays. Not that it mattered, because no one else was there. It wasn’t exactly a walking-along-the-seafront sort of day.
We jumped out and set off br
iskly in the direction of the pier. It was probably a bustling tourist spot during the summer months, and we passed a sign for a small amusement park, which was obviously closed for the season. The pathway leading to the pier was also cordoned off with a length of yellow and black tape. Tacked onto an adjacent post was a local authority notice, just in case the tape hadn’t made it clear enough.
DANGER. PIER CLOSED DUE TO WEATHER CONDITIONS.
We paused and exchanged a three-way worried glance. With perfect synchronicity we all ducked beneath the tape and continued down the path. A little further ahead, the amusement park came into view. I paused, clutching at Mac’s arm as I remembered an important detail from his drawing.
‘Over there,’ I cried, having to raise my voice to be heard above the howling wind, which kept trying to hurl my words from me. ‘Wasn’t there a miniature railway on the pier?’
The penny dropped for all three of us at exactly the same moment. Could that be where Connor was heading?
‘Perhaps he’d been here before with Lisa and thought this was the train she was talking about?’
It made a horrible kind of sense. Without saying a word, we switched direction and hurried towards the railway. This time the barricade was more formidable, with a steel gate and a sturdy padlock.
‘He couldn’t have got past this, could he?’ asked Jamie, testing the gate with his shoulder. It didn’t budge.
Where is he? I silently asked whichever deity was in charge of lost little boys who were desperately trying to find their mum. If Connor found the railway closed, where would he have gone? I tried putting myself inside the head of a child his age and came up with an answer that turned the blood in my veins to ice.
‘You don’t think he’d have gone onto the jetty, do you?’
Another fork of lightning flashed across the sky, and no one paused long enough to reply. As though a starting pistol had been fired, we headed towards the jetty; within seconds, we were all jogging.
Built in Victorian times, the jetty was a long timber boardwalk, constructed to allow small boats to dock. There was nothing on it today, and if there had been, there was a good chance the sea would have swept them away. Wave after wave crashed and broke against its pillars, sending up enormous flumes of spray.
‘What’s that?’ shouted Mac above the shriek of the wind.
I squinted into the rain, desperately hoping he was mistaken. But his restored vision had spotted something I hadn’t noticed: something small and yellow at the very end of the jetty.
‘Connor!’ For the first time in my life I screamed, but it was all for nothing. He was too far away to hear me. Mac and Jamie added their voices to mine, but the small figure in yellow still didn’t turn our way.
He appeared to be walking along the far edge of the jetty. It was hard to run and shout at the same time, but I kept trying. There was a stitch in my side as painful as a knife wound, but I ignored it as I kept on racing towards him. And then my warning shouts turned into a cry of horror as an epic wave crashed against the jetty, engulfing it in water. When the wave washed away, the jetty was empty. Connor was gone.
I ran faster than I’d ever done in my life, vaguely aware of a fast-moving blur on my right. Jamie sprinted past me, his legs pounding like pistons as he overtook Mac, who was already a considerable distance up ahead. I was totally winded, but Jamie still had enough air in his lungs – Lisa’s lungs – to keep calling Connor’s name as he ran. Without even breaking stride, he shrugged off his jacket, leaving it discarded on the boards. His trainers came next, kicked off impressively as he ran. He teetered to a stop at the very edge of the jetty, fighting against his own momentum to steady himself. He took a moment to glance down into the swirling sea and then bent his knees and jumped cleanly into the water.
Mac and I reached the end of the jetty within seconds of each other. I clung onto his arm, not just for balance but in terror as I stared down into the roiling depths. I could see neither Connor nor Jamie. Mac was already pulling off his own jacket, his intention clear. As terrified as I was for his safety, I knew I would only be seconds behind him if he went in.
And then, through the foam and waves, I saw a head, dark and sleek as a seal. It was Jamie. The water was so turbulent, it seemed impossible that he could even remain afloat, and yet he was managing to tread water without too much difficulty. He executed a 360-degree turn and then took an enormous breath and disappeared beneath the water again.
‘I’m going in,’ Mac yelled, his shoes already discarded.
‘Wait!’ I screamed, my voice hoarse with panic. ‘I think I can see something. Look!’ I’d glimpsed a yellow object bobbing up like a cork among the waves. It was gone just as quickly, only to reappear seconds later. Even from this distance I could read the grim determination on Jamie’s face as he surfaced with one arm hooked firmly around Connor’s waist. Fighting against the battering waves, he began to swim towards the jetty.
‘He’s got him!’ I cried, dropping to my knees in relief as tears mingled with the rain pouring down my face. But as I followed Jamie’s slow progress through the water, I realised the figure in his arms wasn’t moving. No! This couldn’t be happening. We couldn’t have been led to this place only to arrive too late to save him.
Mac was no longer beside me, having swung over the edge of the jetty to climb down the ladder that led to the water. With an arm looped around the jetty’s pillar, he leant out at a terrifying angle to narrow the distance between Jamie and dry land. The sea pounded both men, as though determined to claim a life that day, but with superhuman effort Jamie kicked towards the ladder and Mac reached far enough out to pluck Connor from the water.
Mac climbed back up the ladder like a fireman, with an unconscious Connor over his shoulder. There was a horrible boneless quality to Connor as Mac set him gently down on the wooden boards.
‘Is he okay? Is he breathing?’ cried Jamie, appearing at the top of the ladder and then promptly throwing up an impossible amount of sea water.
I scrabbled on my knees to Connor’s side, trying to still my raging panic. I knew first aid, it was a requirement of my job, but there was a world of difference between doing mouth-to-mouth on a plastic dummy and resuscitating a real-life child. And this was Connor; a child I loved.
Connor’s skin had an inhuman hue, like an alabaster statue, and when I bent my head to his blue-tinged lips I couldn’t feel even a whisper of breath against my face. My worst nightmare was coming true.
But then suddenly, from deep within his throat, there came an alien gurgling. ‘That’s it, Connor,’ I urged. ‘Breathe. You can do it. Breathe for me, baby.’
Jamie was still coughing up copious amounts of salt water, and Mac was speaking urgently into his phone, summoning the emergency services.
The wind and the storm seemed to fade away as I leant over Connor’s inert form, pleading with him to come back to me. And then, like a miracle, he did.
A raw spasm of coughs wracked his little body and I turned his head to one side as he ejected litres of grimy sea water. When he was done, I bundled his shivering frame into my arms.
It was only then that I began to sob. When I looked up, I saw that both Mac and Jamie were also unashamedly crying.
‘Mummy?’ Connor cried, struggling against me.
‘No, sweetheart. It’s Molly.’
He twisted in my embrace, straining to look beyond me, back towards the sea. ‘Where’s Mummy gone? She was in the water with me. She kept pushing me back up.’
I tightened my hold on him. ‘No, sweetie, it was Jamie who was in the water with you. He rescued you.’
I turned to face Jamie, overcome with awe and admiration. ‘You were amazing, Jamie. A real hero.’
‘Said I used to be a lifeguard, didn’t I?’ he muttered with a nonchalance quite at odds with his violent trembling.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ announced Mac, dropping down beside me onto the deck and wrapping his jacket around me and Connor. It was already so wet,
it didn’t provide much protection, but I appreciated the gesture.
The wind was shrieking so loudly, I wondered if we’d even hear the approaching sirens. It whipped around us, sounding like a voice crying out in despair. It took a moment for me to realise that actually there was a voice, and one I knew. Although I’d never heard such anguish in it before.
‘Connor! Connor! Connor!’
I looked up to see Alex racing down the boardwalk towards us.
‘I messaged Barbara from the car earlier,’ explained Jamie. ‘I told her we were heading for the pier.’
‘Daddy!’ cried Connor against me, and for a tiny moment I hesitated before releasing him into his father’s arms.
Alex’s words were an indecipherable mumble of shocked relief and a prayer of thanks as he held Connor against his chest. When the boy’s spindly arms came up and fastened around his father’s back, I sat back on my heels and prepared to stand. Mac’s hand was there outstretched to help me, the way I already knew it always would be, through the years ahead of us.
‘I’m sorry, Daddy. Are you very angry with me?’ whispered Connor.
The sob that came out of Alex sounded as though it had been ripped from him. ‘No, no, no,’ he cried, rocking his son in his arms, the way I imagined he’d done when Connor was a baby. ‘Never. It’s me I’m angry with. This is all my fault.’
‘I just wanted to see Mummy again. And I did. She said she’d be here today, and she was.’
Alex glanced up with an incredulous expression on his face.
‘He thought he saw her when he was in the sea,’ I mouthed silently.
Alex nodded grimly, and then stiffened when Connor added, ‘But she’s gone now. I can’t see her any more. Daddy, I think she might have died.’ He was crying now – and he wasn’t the only one.