A Song for the Brokenhearted

by William Shaw

He chose left, calculating that Doyle, if it was Doyle, would always pick the remoter zone.

  But the shoreline was narrow. After a few hundred yards it seemed to disappear completely. In its place, a steep, artificial bank made from rocks.

  He climbed the bank and near the top saw, through the stubby trees, a faint orange light in the distance. A hurricane lamp maybe? It was something at least. A house, perhaps, that he’d never noticed before. Or a shed? He started to work his way along the bank towards it.

  It was hard work. The bank was at an angle of roughly forty-five degrees, made of carefully laid stones. At low tide it would be easy to walk this way, along the mud and mussel beds below, but now they were covered in water. Instead he edged slowly forward, bent double to avoid the low branches above, always worried that he’d lose his footing and slide into the cold seawater.

  He stopped and tried to spot the farmhouse on the hillside above, to see if there was any activity there, but it was hidden behind the bank now. He could still hear nothing beyond the splashes of the water hitting the stones beneath him. Even if Helen had managed to get through to the police it would take them a little while to reach the farm, wouldn’t it?

  What if they didn’t come?

  A click somewhere above him startled Breen.

  A gun?

  In the panic, he almost lost his footing, sliding off the bank.

  Was someone watching him? If there was someone on the bank above him, Breen would be clearly silhouetted against the water.

  Heart clattering, he shrank slowly to the rocks, trying to make his profile harder to see. He pressed his face against the bank, listening for any noise, waiting for the gunshot. The rocks were cold and rough against his cheek.

  But instead of a gunshot, another noise. A rumble, building fast from a distance, then coming closer, until it was a roar.

  A rush of wind too. And long flashes of light, illuminating the slapping waves below. The shock of it was so great he lost his grip on the rocks and slid downwards. At the last second, his feet inches from the water, his left hand managed to grab a rock that protruded from the wall, yanking his sore shoulder but stopping his fall.

  A train, he realised, after what seemed an age. A diesel heading towards London at what seemed, at this close distance, a ridiculous speed.

  The bank was the edge of the railway line, he surmised, snaking alongside the water.

  He pulled himself back up the bank and lay against the rock, panting, trying to recover himself.

  And then he heard the click again.

  He looked up. The light that had been amber was now red. He laughed. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It had been the noise of the cable, changing the signal up ahead.

  The train was now far down the valley, a line of light outlining the course ahead.

  The house he had thought he was going towards was just a railway signal. Other than that, there was only the blackness ahead.

  Should he go back or carry on?

  There was no sign of anyone behind him. No torchlight. No other searchers. He edged on again, the cold beginning to make his fingers ache.

  Another train was coming, this time in the other direction. In the strobe of lights as it passed, he tried to make out the shape of the route ahead. There seemed to be a dark lump of land jutting into the estuary.

  Ten yards later he almost fell into a culvert cut into the bank. Water from some hillside stream bubbled underneath him as he cautiously edged his way around the top of it. If he fell in here, he would never get out.

  Forced upwards, he was now squeezing under the hanging branches at the top of the slope. They scratched him, flicking into his face.

  There was a sudden scrabble ahead of him and a bird flew out, wings scraping face. Quacking in alarm, a duck moved low over the water to his right. The noise faded as the creature travelled further across the estuary. Just when his heartbeat had slowed again, a second bird shot out, repeating the same quacking. It sounded absurdly loud.

  He had cramp.

  Something about the position he was crouched in and the cold in his limbs was making the muscles in his left foot seize up. The pain grew. He should move on. If he could reach the land ahead he would be able to stand up properly and stamp out the pain.

  He moved less cautiously now, keen to make it to flatter ground.

  Was that another light?

  He was shivering slightly now. It was harder to hold his gaze. Another small, pale, orange-ish glow in the distance.

  Was it just a distant sodium light? Or something closer?

  And then it was gone.

  He stopped and looked, straining his eyes.

  There. Again. It was not far away at all, on the dark land ahead. Yes.

  He stepped forward.

  And fell.

  His foot sliding into nothingness, his head cracking against something hard and then his body engulfed in coldness. An iron fist around his chest.

  Down into a churning current.

  TWENTY-NINE

  He sucked cold water as he sank, arms flailing, into the black.

  The cold seemed to invade him completely, filling his body with its icy weight.

  He was still travelling downwards, bumping along rocks and weed. With so little air in his lungs, this would not take long.

  At school they had made him swim in pyjamas. To dive to the bottom of a pool and pick up the rubber brick. The memory of being told to remove clothes. In panic, he realised it was the wellington boots that were sucking him down. He had to take them off.

  Bending, he struggled with one, but it was tight and he was weak now. The boot seemed to suck onto his foot just as hard as he tried to push it off.

  He thrashed his arms more desperately, trying to work against the downward pull. For a fraction of a second, striving with all his might, his face emerged from the water and he sucked in a mouthful of air, but there was not time to shout for help before the water pulled him down again.

  Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. All for nothing.

  He had grown up motherless.

  His child–and he believed more than ever that it was his child–would grow up fatherless.

  Helen for a mother; that would be enough, wouldn’t it? She was good and strong. She, at least, understood the new world for what it was. She knew how to enjoy it at the same time as not falling for its vanities.

  It was sad. Just when life was starting, he felt, it was ending.

  He tried to reach the surface a second time, but his arms were wearier already.

  Extraordinary.

  A flash of memories.

  Standing with his father on a hot day at Limehouse, looking down at a bucket of writhing eels.

  Bunking off school to play with John Carmichael in the bomb sites around Paddington.

  Never being able to march in step in the cadet parades at Peel House.

  Once, when his father was losing his memory, he had said, ‘There is a woman coming into this house without my permission.’

  ‘That is your nurse.’

  Lovely bouncy, bubbly, corkscrew-haired Sarah.

  ‘She says she’s my nurse. But she’s not.’

  ‘Yes, she is. She comes in every day.’

  The odd twist of his father’s hands as he spoke.

  ‘She does? I wish she wouldn’t. She smells awful.’

  ‘No, she does not,’ said Breen.

  And Breen would make him another cup of tea and put it next to him.

  Helen had been right. Breen was not good at trusting people. He was a policeman. Policemen learn never to trust anyone.

  He had made exceptions, at a cost. There had been Sarah, hired to look after his father. For a while he was in love with her. But he had been wrong, his trust misplaced.

  It had been 1966. Sarah was pretty, with blonde, curly hair. She didn’t smoke; said if it wasn’t Sobranie she wouldn’t touch it. ‘And I only smoke them if I’m drinking Madeira,’ she said. She wore a ring on her thumb, often dressed in polka dots,
enjoyed gambling on the horses, and liked three sugars in her coffee.

  Strange how memories rushed at you.

  There had not been many women in his life. Between work and looking after his sick father, he had had little time for them.

  ‘What have you been doing?’ he asked one day when he came back from work to find Sarah and his father sitting at the small dining table in the kitchen.

  ‘Whist,’ she said. ‘We play it every day.’

  By now his father could barely remember his son’s own name, let alone learn a new game of cards. ‘That’s impossible.’

  ‘Watch,’ she said. She shuffled and dealt. His father took longer to pick up his cards, but to Breen’s amazement was soon sorting through them.

  ‘What are trumps?’ he said.

  ‘Hearts,’ she answered. ‘You lead.’

  His father stared at his cards for a while and pulled out a three of clubs and placed it on the table.

  ‘See?’ she said.

  She played a five.

  ‘You play cards at work, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ his father answered. ‘I play cards at work. When it rains. Your go.’ She led, and again his father laid on top of hers, this time picking up the trick.

  ‘Did you win?’ she asked.

  ‘Trumped you,’ he said, even though he had laid a club, not a heart.

  ‘He always wins,’ she smiled, winking at Breen. ‘He’s very good.’

  ‘He’s very good,’ said his father.

  He was amazed by the ease of her duplicity. For once, his loss of memory seemed to work to his advantage. The next day he went to an off-licence in Baker Street before catching the bus home and bought a bottle of Madeira.

  Sarah drank only sips. He found the drink too sweet. She talked far more than he did. He didn’t mind. Tired after a day at work, he liked to listen to her. Her father had been a boatbuilder, she said. ‘Only not a good one, it turns out. He was lost at sea, in one of his own boats.’

  ‘What a terrible way to lose a father.’

  ‘Like yours, really. He’s lost at sea.’

  ‘But at least I know where he is. What’s left of him, at least.’

  His father was fast asleep in his armchair by then, hands twitching gently.

  ‘True,’ she said. ‘But we had to wait seven years till they declared him officially dead. And that’s a bit like yours too.’

  He was shocked by her bluntness, at first, but then realised what she was saying was true, too. At least she talked about his father’s illness.

  He was working up to asking her to stay the night, but in the end, with what happened between them, he never got the chance.

  Everything was slowing now. The cold made it easy not to care that he was dying.

  Sometimes Sarah took his coat when he came back, and when she did, sometimes her hand would brush against his. She learned to make coffee the way he liked it. He bought a second bottle of Madeira.

  ‘Are you seeing a woman?’ Sarah asked one evening.

  ‘No. When would I have time? Why did you ask?’

  She actually blushed. ‘Only I thought I smelt perfume when I came in this morning.’

  ‘Why would you want to know if I was seeing another woman?’ he teased her.

  ‘No reason at all.’

  The next morning, needing money to get a new front door key cut, because he had lost his spare a couple of days before, he went to the drawer, unlocked it and opened the tin where he kept a pound note for emergencies. The money wasn’t there.

  Assuming Sarah must have needed it for something, he thought nothing of it. The next day Breen replaced the money. This time he checked the drawer when he came home. It was empty again.

  Then he asked, ‘Did you need the money for something?’

  ‘I was going to take your father for a haircut. Only there wasn’t any money there.’

  ‘I left a pound note in the tin.’

  ‘No, you didn’t.’

  They went to the drawer, he unlocked it, showed her. Empty. He scrutinised her face but could see no evidence that she was lying.

  Another day, he said, ‘I left two pounds in the drawer.’

  ‘Are you accusing me of taking them?’

  ‘No. But they’ve gone.’

  ‘Maybe your father took them.’

  ‘He’d never manage the key.’ It was true. His father had lost the simple ability to connect a locked drawer with the key that lay on top of it.

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe you forgot to put anything in there.’ She shrugged and turned her back.

  The Madeira stopped. Their friendliness disappeared. One evening, when Sarah had left and Breen discovered the tin was empty yet again, he asked his father, ‘Did you take the money from the drawer?’

  His father frowned a while, then in a brief, lucid moment, said, ‘No. She did.’

  ‘Who? Sarah? Did Sarah take the money?’

  His father frowned again, picked at the stubble on his chin and asked, ‘Who’s Sarah?’

  ‘The woman who looks after you while I’m at work. Did she take the money?’

  His father looked away. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I want to go home.’

  ‘This is home,’ said Breen. ‘Remember?’

  The money kept on disappearing. So eventually he decided he had to replace Sarah.

  When he told her she shouted, ‘I didn’t take your bloody money.’ From her handbag, she pulled out her purse and dug out coins and threw them at him. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I don’t care about money.’

  And she stormed off, furiously, in tears.

  He would have loved to have been wrong about her. When he realised Sarah had not returned her set of front door keys, he changed the locks. The agency sent another nurse.

  When he got home for the next few days, he checked the tin and the money was always there. He wished it hadn’t been. He wished he had been wrong about her. But it seemed he wasn’t.

  Drowning, the facts still rushed back to him in a strange order. The day he sacked her. For no clear reason he remembered her accusing him of seeing a woman; the smell of perfume. His father, he remembered, had also complained of the woman who smelt.

  There had been a middle-aged woman who lived upstairs for a while in the rooms Elfie now shared with her boyfriend. She had worn perfume. So much that you could almost see it in the air around her.

  And Breen had lost his key.

  The memories swam together. Just because the facts fitted didn’t mean that they were true. There were other ways of seeing them. The woman upstairs must have found the key and been letting herself into his flat. She knew perfectly well how ill his father had been then. She had been coming in, taking the money, and all the time he blamed Sarah for it. The same facts that he had used to condemn Sarah suddenly pointed to a different person being the thief. He had not trusted her. So stupid not to trust.

  He would have laughed, but there was not the air.

  He wished he could beg her forgiveness. He wished he could have told Helen. She would have said, ‘I told you so.’

  But there was no time.

  And then something hit him hard in the chest, and it paused his movement long enough for him to grab hold of it.

  A rope, stretched taut. Encrusted with slime, it was hard to grip with his frozen fingers, but he held on. And then pulled himself upwards on it, desperately.

  So slippery he could hardly grip, feeling the current forcing him downwards as he tried to climb, hand over hand.

  And then his head was above the water, gasping. He may not be drowning any longer, but knew he had exposure. He had to get out of the water fast.

  He had somehow managed to grab the mooring line of a boat anchored close to the estuary shore. He looked around and worked out he was not so far from land. The question was whether he could make it there before his strength gave out.

  And then he saw it. Downstream, a small light on the shore. Dim, behind dark curtains
, but a light all the same.

  There was no time to think; his body was cooling too fast. If he stayed here holding onto the rope he would die. But if he let it go, could he reach the shore?

  There was no choice. He let go of the rope and thrashed in the water. His left arm had no strength in it at all. He had used it so little since the shooting. He pushed himself through the water, gulping air whenever he could.

  He had been closer to the shore than he imagined. His feet touched the bottom, but it was silt and there was nothing to push against. His foot sank into the oily mud. For a panicked second he became terrified that the mud would suck him down, into it. It would be doubly stupid to drown so close to the shore.

  The current was taking him past the light he had seen. With what seemed to be the last of his strength, he took another stroke with his right arm. This time, with the mud a little shallower, he seemed to find purchase on rocks under the silt. It was tough, forcing himself through the sludge, water pushing against him, but little by little he made it.

  The shore was stony and hard. He fell on it, heart thumping, shivering so badly from the cold he could barely focus. Sharp shells dug at his skin.

  ‘Help,’ he said, but he had no voice.

  The wind on his wet clothes was freezing him worse than the water had done. He lay, incapable of any further motion. He would die soon of exposure, he realised, but felt oddly calm about it.

  Help.

  He was tired now.

  And then he slept.

  THIRTY

  He half woke, shivering, cold, but surrounded by warmth. He could not move.

  I am dreaming, he thought. I am asleep. That is why I cannot move.

  Someone was singing, softly, to him. A strange, almost Middle Eastern song. He was conscious that the wet clothes that had almost drowned him were not there any more. He was naked but dry.

  Something was bothering him, though. Within the smell of woodsmoke, another familiar smell. One he couldn’t place. He didn’t want to think about it now and so he lapsed back into unconsciousness.

  Hurting, though. He must be sleeping oddly. That happened sometimes, didn’t it? The dead arm, with pins and needles. Only it wasn’t like that. His arms were aching. He tried to move them again but they were stuck