by A J Waines
‘It’s in for repair,’ Nancy says, too quickly.
I stare out beyond the boat into the inky black malevolence.
‘Peter, look…’
There’s a thin plume of smoke, about 200 metres away, rapidly dissipating.
Nancy reaches down in a jerky movement, attempting to hide something in a cupboard under the control panel. I stick my foot out before she can close the door and snatch the strap of a pair of binoculars. I elbow her out of the way long enough to get the lenses up to my eyes.
‘Someone’s in trouble,’ I call out, as I settle the focus on a commotion of splashes beside the trail of smoke. The boat revs with an injection of speed and we all lurch to the port side. Nancy is turning the boat the other way, but with our powerboat attached to one side, she’s struggling to control it.
Without a word, Peter grabs my wrist and drags me back towards our boat. It’s clattering against the side as we swing in a wide arc to face the way we came. I’m shaking with dread as the boat rolls and pitches all over the place. I lose my balance and bang into the side, catching my knee. The henchman comes after us, but Peter blocks his way. Having been a professional dancer, Peter’s balance is extraordinarily good and while he’s barely troubled by the turbulence, Muscleman is preoccupied with staying upright. I stumble, stagger upright, then take a running leap off the yacht, an audacious leap of faith into the darkness, hoping the boat will be there when I land. I hurtle down to the deck with a thud.
‘Undo the ropes!’ Peter calls out to me. ‘Keep away,’ he warns the guy behind him. ‘Do you want to be charged with GBH? Is it really worth it, for her?’
Muscleman turns to Nancy at the wheel, waiting for instructions, but she’s trying to control the boat and doesn’t respond. Whatever scheme she’s involved in, she hasn’t thought it through to this point.
With the ropes loose, Peter leaps on board and activates the engine. There’s an almighty surge as we power away in the opposite direction.
55
Beth
Amelia is a dead weight and her moments of lucidity are over. She’s been quiet for the last few minutes, leaving me only the lapping of the water for company. I’m not even sure if she’s still alive.
I can’t stop to check if she’s breathing and I don’t want to let go in case I’m wrong. I have to keep kicking and sculling or I’ll drop down like a stone.
Nancy wanted rid of us both: me, for my affair with the man she wanted and Amelia for killing him.
The water slams into my ears multiplying the splosh and roar of the sea, turning them into vast echo chambers.
Nancy thinks Amelia killed Carl.
At least it means Mum is out of it, beyond suspicion. No one has dragged her name into any of this. Their misguided conclusions aren’t going to be any use to me, though. The sea has me in a tight vice, crushing my limbs, squeezing the life out of every one of my muscles. There’s no way I can possibly win this struggle without help. Eventually, this briny mass will snatch us from below and take us down. That much is certain and there’s nothing I can do about it. Still, I kick.
I’m sure I’m blacking out in small bursts. The strain of staying afloat drops away for a few seconds, then it’s savagely back again trying to rip apart every sinew in my body.
I’ve become one hard block of ice and I’m overwhelmingly exhausted. My kicking has become useless, tiny spasms. We’re barely floating.
I want to stop. Every muscle in my body wants to stop.
I’m so sleepy…
I want nothing more than to let Amelia go. Her body is growing heavier, like a concrete statue, as I fight the ocean.
No one knows what we did, Mum. Even though I admitted to the affair, we’re still safe. Well…you are…I didn’t give you away.
There’s a burning in my throat like I’ve swallowed flames. They’re scorching my lungs with every breath. I almost hear my mother’s voice in my head, calling my name. It’s comforting, until I realise I’m moving away from her, drifting into a twilight place where she won’t be able to follow me.
You didn’t find me, but I know it’s not your fault. I’m sure you tried. I’m so sorry about the way things ended between us…
My eyelids flutter and close for a few seconds. My thoughts slip in and out like a torch running out of batteries. I can hear a persistent roaring in my ears, the growling of a hungry ocean, below the regular rhythm of my rasping breath.
So sleepy…
Mum, I love you. I don’t want to leave you, but…
I’m here, darling.
It’s time to let go.
It’s okay, sweetheart…let me take your hand…
I want to…but I can’t stop, I’ve got to keep floating.
Give me your hand, Beth…
It feels so real…
No…don’t take me…I have to keep kicking…I can’t give up…
That’s when I feel it. Two firm squeezes one after the other. Our special signal to each other.
‘Beth! Wake up!’
There’s a bright light shining in my eyes. A torch.
Another voice. ‘Let me take hold of you, Beth…but don’t relax, okay? Not until we get you on the boat.’
It’s Peter.
Then the faint sounds come gushing at me in an ear-splitting explosion. It’s as though I’ve just woken up on the central reservation of a busy motorway. I’m awake; trembling, gasping, aching, burning, all at once. But most of all, I’m being swallowed up, not by the sea, but by the thunderous roaring of a speedboat.
I glance down and Amelia has gone. I didn’t even feel her float away.
‘Mum…’ I reach out and hook my numb fingers around her arm. My mother is real. She’s flesh and blood and she’s right here beside me.
‘Beth. We’re here, it’s okay…it’s okay…’
I no longer put up a fight, because I’m cradled in my mother’s voice – and somehow it drowns out everything else.
56
Rachel
Saturday, April 15 – Day of the wedding
I take a long early morning walk past Winchester College to St Catherine’s Hill, with Beth by my side. We pass St James’s Church on the way back, but there are no flowers outside, no ribbons inside tied to the pews. This is the place where they were supposed to be married, but there is no wedding.
It’s one of those blank days when the sky looks empty – a bleached white, devoid of all colour. I am glad she’s not getting married on a day like today. Beth deserves sunshine.
Since her return, I’ve barely let Beth out of my sight. That first night, she shared my bed. I kept a lantern lit on the landing, like I used to when she was little. After that, we left the connecting doors to the bathroom wide open so we could call out to each other. We’ve been more or less joined at the hip.
Over breakfast this morning, I kept reaching out to stroke her face, smell her hair and when she’d left the room, I sat on the bottom stair and listened out for every sound she made; the shushing noise as she cleaned her teeth, the flush of the toilet. All the while I’m on the brink of sobbing with gratitude. The tangle of anxiety in my throat has broken apart, the dried crust on my tongue has melted. My daughter is safe, she’s back, she’s here.
Amelia’s survival was entirely down to Beth – and Amelia knew it. When we found them, Beth thought she’d let go of Amelia; feared she’d drowned, but we’d already dragged her unconscious body onto the boat. The press, too, were keen to make it clear she wouldn’t be here if my daughter hadn’t held her head out of the water with such diligence.
Nancy was arrested for abducting Beth and for the attempted murder of Beth and Amelia. Amelia’s been charged with aiding and abetting the abduction, but was allowed to make a phone call to Peter. She told him how Nancy broke down in police custody and admitted that consumed by jealousy and grief, she’d dreamt up the scheme to kill both of them.
To distract herself from her secret heartache over Carl, Nancy had launched into a camp
aign to ‘find the truth to help Amelia’, when actually it was only for her own benefit. When she found out Beth had phoned Carl, she made it her mission to discover if they’d been seeing each other. Was it a one-night stand? Was it more serious? Were promises made? Nancy was frantic. She had to get the truth out of Beth. She’d loved Carl – she needed to know.
According to Amelia, the police were still in the dark about Carl’s death. Nancy could give them no concrete evidence that Amelia was the guilty party and her own alibis meant that Nancy, too, was in the clear. Peter told us all this over coffee at the station the day he went back to London. He’d stayed around a few days to make sure Beth was recovering fully.
After we’d pulled Beth and Amelia out of the water they were taken to be checked out at A&E, but neither of them had any medical issues that a few hot-water bottles and days of rest at home wouldn’t fix.
Throughout her ordeal, one thing became resoundingly clear: Beth hadn’t given me away. She’d protected me, just like I thought I was protecting her. The doctor recommended an increase in Beth’s asthma treatment for a while, but although her lungs were bruised, he assured us she’d bounce back. Psychologically, however, the lasting effects remain to be seen, but Beth is coping well. She’s eating, has welcomed visitors and spent time sitting with me on the sofa watching television, instead of hiding away in her room.
Beth and I were on tenterhooks when Peter rang to suggest we meet before he caught his train. He’d dropped in to see her a few times, but they hadn’t had a ‘proper chat’, as he put it. She was understandably nervous at the prospect.
He was grim-faced when he greeted us. We pulled up the noisy aluminium chairs and sat down with our paper cups. The café is alongside the ticket barriers, open and public, it was hardly the right place for a showdown. All the same, he didn’t seem angry with Beth. I couldn’t understand it. Surely, he must know by now that Beth confessed to having an affair with Carl.
I glance at the departures board. We still have twenty minutes to go.
‘Nancy had been ready to pack her bags, poised to saunter off into the sunset with Carl a few months ago,’ he says, continuing his revelation, ‘but nothing happened. She thought it was because Amelia had found out about them. She thought Amelia had pressured him somehow or blackmailed him with the children, but then Nancy started to wonder if he might have been side-tracked by another fling.’
I glance at Beth, who’s showing exactly the same expression of unease that I’m feeling.
‘Amelia was adamant, though, that Beth was entirely innocent in this entire debacle,’ he says. He turns to Beth, taking hold of her hand. ‘Nancy claimed Beth signed some kind of confession, but Amelia said it was total rubbish. Nancy wasn’t able to produce it.’
I feel the slightest nudge of Beth’s foot against mine under the table. I don’t look up, but I understand her signal. Amelia lied. Not only that, she must have ordered someone to get hold of Nancy’s phone and delete the photo of Beth’s confession that she’d emailed to Amelia. She must have been so grateful for the way Beth stepped in to save her life that she protected her, knowing by that stage that the real enemy was Nancy.
Peter carries on, patting Beth’s hand in a fatherly way. ‘She said it was all in Nancy’s twisted little mind.’
It was a generous choice for Amelia to make.
Beth is off the hook. We are both safe.
Peter lets Beth’s hand go and she slides it under the table and takes hold of mine.
According to Peter, Nancy thought Amelia had more of a motive for killing Carl than anyone. When Amelia became fixated on Beth as the ‘other woman’, Nancy decided to make the most of it. All she needed to do was get the two of them in a punctured dinghy in the middle of nowhere and wait for it to sink. Amelia agreed to it, because she thought the dinghy was tied to Spellbound, she thought Nancy was giving her the opportunity to send Beth to her death, if she didn’t like what she had to say for herself.
Peter tells us this with a wry smile on his face. This is why he wanted us to meet. To give us both the facts. There’s no awkward face-off about her affair – he’s completely dismissed it.
With the wedding meant to be today, it still leaves Beth and Peter’s position up in the air. He was understanding when she’d said she was too traumatised after the abduction to possibly think of getting married straight away, but it still leaves everything unresolved between them.
But I know what she’s decided. She told me last night.
57
Rachel
Peter checks his watch. His train is due any minute.
Now isn’t the time to enlighten him, but last night Beth and I had a heart-to-heart. She’d spent a long time locked away on her own to reflect on what she truly wanted.
‘It was weird being trapped in the dark like that for so long,’ she told me. ‘Part of me was terrified about what was going to happen to me, but having all that time to think…ironically, it kind of helped make up my mind.’
We’d been watching a programme about foxes and she’d finished off the crisps.
‘You’ve made a decision about Peter?’
‘Peter wants to give me a new life,’ she’d said. ‘He makes me feel safe, but he doesn’t make me feel…alive. I want to be successful in my way, on my terms, not have someone else lay everything down for me like I’m a child. Peter doesn’t really discuss things with me, he doesn’t involve me, he decides things for me. If I marry him, I’ll literally be “giving myself away”.’
‘Are you sure?’
All this time I’d never revealed the way I’d kept the relationship going with fake texts and calls. I thought I was helping.
‘Peter is totally into me, I know that – but, I feel like he sees me as his “project” and not as his “partner”. I don’t want to be a product of his endeavours. I want to make my own path alongside someone, to be my own person. I want to have edges around me. To have someone else end and a space before I begin, next to them. Does that make sense?’
‘Yes. Absolutely.’
‘You don’t seem that shocked,’ she said, looking at me dubiously.
‘I worked it out when you went missing. After everything I’ve said about how wonderful he is, I got it wrong. He isn’t right for you, is he?’
Suddenly, I knew why it would never work. In Beth, Peter saw a glimpse of youth that would rub off on him, the promise of eternal gratitude, and a trophy wife, eye-candy who would turn heads and bestow a pride he couldn’t achieve in any other way.
And in Peter, Beth saw her passport, a step closer to the fringes of that red carpet, perhaps even the father-figure she never had.
In that moment, I knew that for both of them it wasn’t love and probably never had been.
‘I’ve handled this entire episode very badly,’ I told her.
She grabbed my wrist. ‘No, it’s my fault. I didn’t want to let you down. I knew how much the wedding meant to you and I couldn’t allow myself to have any doubts about him, at first. I thought it would destroy you if I changed my mind.’
I folded my hand over hers. ‘I didn’t see the signs. I assumed all your misgivings were about remorse, I hadn’t thought to look deeper. Or look before that night in the cellar. I thought you were in shock and I ploughed on in denial, just wanting to get the two of you married. I thought it was just guilt. I didn’t stop to think. I was too busy trying to get you over to the “other side”, to money, success, security. I pushed. I didn’t listen. I’m so sorry.’
She brought her feet onto the cushion and curled up against me. ‘It’s okay, Mum. It wasn’t just you. I’m equally to blame. I’ve been swept along by how keen Peter is on me. I think that’s the part I loved most. Feeling special, adored, his princess – I loved the feeling he gave me about myself, but I don’t actually love him. The person he is. I don’t really know him.’
She linked her arm through mine.
‘To be honest, the sex wasn’t great,’ she added, with a giggle.
It was the first time I’d seen her smile for what felt like a lifetime.
‘There’s something missing for me. I think I fancied him, but it didn’t go any deeper.’
Last night, everything seemed clear and at last we are both in agreement. The wedding is off for good. But as Peter gets up to board his train, he doesn’t know any of this. Beth is going to have to be brave one more time and find a way to tell him.
58
Beth
Mum’s been to St Andrew’s this morning to see Russell. I can tell, because she’s got that sad-yet-serene look on her face. Summer is in the air, so I set out the deckchairs on the patio to catch the precious morning rays. I order Mum to sit and bring out a tray with coffee, toast and her favourite, scrambled eggs.
‘What have I done to deserve this?’ Mum asks.
‘Just glad to be here,’ I say.
My phone buzzes as I set down the breakfast spread.
‘It’s Peter,’ I tell her with a grimace, answering the call. I point to the back door and disappear inside.
‘We’re meeting up,’ I tell her once the call has ended. I slide into the deckchair beside her. ‘For a chat about everything. In two weeks’ time.’
‘Can you wait until then?’
‘He’s busy with meetings, apparently. It’s fine by me.’
I don’t mention that I’ve been preoccupied with something else, now that it appears Mum and I are in the clear. For days, locked away on the boat, a jumble of unresolved questions about Southampton swirled around in my head. I need to know. I’ve waited long enough.
I dive straight in. ‘I found a newspaper cutting at Grandad’s…in the loft with old photographs.’
‘Yes…I saw it by your bed at Adrian’s,’ she says, without batting an eyelid.