by Jane Holland
But the world has shifted.
My clawing hands meet only more water, not air, and my eyes fly open on grey-green darkness, dirtied by the churning filth of bubbles and sand in the wake of a big roller.
I can’t breathe.
I had no time to take even a quick gasp of air before being dragged under the wave, and now my lungs are running out. I have maybe a few more seconds before my desperate lungs try to take in fresh air and I drown, breathing water instead.
My mind panics. I close my eyes against the sting of salt water. I don’t understand. Where are the others? Did no one see me slip from my board and under the wave? I’m struggling, flailing my arms and reaching up for air, but I’m going nowhere.
Something seems to be tugging me down and down.
I force my eyes open and peer downwards through the dark churning. The leash on my ankle is still attached to the board, which is beneath me. How is that possible?
I stare back along the thin black line of the leash. There’s a vague shadow below me. The surf board? It must have got attached to something deep under the water. Maybe a rock. They are a few out here, hidden away in odd dips where the bay shelves steeply, but they don’t usually pose a problem to surfers.
Then suddenly I see it. A flash of white below me.
I blink, staring at the moving shadows. It’s so dark and cold this deep, my ears are popping, my lungs burning. My vision is starting to blur as my body is starved of oxygen.
Thrashing about in panic, I see the shadow move again. It’s a blackness that shifts with me, like someone in a wet suit holding my surf board down under the water, with me attached to it.
Which is insane and impossible.
I catch a flicker of light above me. The sun is shining up there, dazzling and glinting off the waves. It feels like I’m fathoms deep, but I’m probably only a few metres from the surface. I’m going to drown within a few hundred feet of my friends, lost and invisible to them under the rolling Atlantic waves.
I have to undo the leash or I’m going to die. I bend double, fumbling for the leash on my ankle, but my fingers slip uselessly over the fastening as I lose strength and sensation.
My lungs are a black pit of pain. My mouth opens, an instinct I can’t hold back a second longer, and cold salt water floods into my lungs.
My whole body jerks backwards in shock and suddenly I’m convulsing, my lungs full of water. The pain is sharp and intense, focused in my chest at first, in those fluid-filled sacs that are my lungs and are designed to carry only air, not brine. Then it explodes like a series of grenades through the rest of my body.
The ocean shifts around me, shadowy and echoing, a dark ballroom of bubbles with a high ceiling, the grey-green gloom punctuated by thin shafts of sunlight filtered by water. I can feel my brain function rapidly disintegrating, my mind full of blurred and confused memories.
I’m drowning.
And as I thrash against the inevitability of death, I stare down through the murky depths and see that odd flash of white again. And the shadowy outline of a man floating above it.
A man whose face I recognise only as darkness begins to close in.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I’m six years old again, standing with my cheek pressed to the gnarled bark of an old oak, both hands clutching the enormous trunk. My cheek is wet because I’ve been crying. I’m sobbing now, but silently, biting my lip until it bleeds, too scared to make a sound now that I’ve seen him.
The man in white trainers.
He was bending over Mummy when I crept back through the tangle of brambles and ferns. I came slowly at first, slipping from tree to tree, careful not to make a sound, half scared, half wondering if it was a game. But Mummy shouted, ‘Run!’ and I knew from the high, angry note in her voice that I’d be in trouble if she saw me coming back.
But when I got back to the path, she was lying still on the ground and he was bending over her.
Is Mummy hurt? Did he hurt her?
My skin is scratched and bleeding from where I fell among the brambles. My hands are dirty. Nasty and dirty. A bramble has ripped the sleeve on my coat. My tears fall faster. Mummy is going to be so cross with me.
I risk a quick glance round the tree. Just a peek to see if he’s still there.
The man is crouching beside Mummy now. He’s wearing a black tracksuit and clean white trainers, and brown gloves. I don’t see his face. His head is bent, looking down at her, and he’s talking under his breath.
‘You made me do this, Angela. It’s your fault. If you had kept your mouth shut … But oh no, you couldn’t just put up and shut up. You thought you knew best.’
He slaps my mum’s face, and her head flops limply towards me. Her eyes are open and her throat is red and swollen, but she’s not in there. Not anymore.
‘Now see what you’ve done. I won’t be blamed for this, Angela. This is your fault. You hear me?’
Suddenly he turns.
I gasp and duck out of sight behind the tree again.
It’s Mr Taylor.
Mr Taylor. I see him at the school gate sometimes. He’s Connor and Tristan’s dad. He often stops to talk to Mummy after school. She calls him Pete. Sometimes she sends me to play in the field with the boys while they sit in the car and talk.
But Mr Taylor likes Mummy. Why would he want to hurt her?
I hear him crash away through the trees a moment later, and wait until the sound has faded, still not daring to move in case he sees me.
I step out quietly, trembling and unsteady, deliberately not looking at the body on the path. Instead I’m staring up at the wooded slope all the way, watching for the white flash of trainers through the trees.
When the trainers have finally gone, I kneel down beside my mummy and take her hand. She’s warm, and I try to remember what you have to do in an emergency. Call an ambulance. But Mum doesn’t have a phone with her. Pump their chests so they can keep breathing. But I don’t know how. And she’s so still.
‘Mummy?’
She does not reply, lying like a rag doll on the path, knees drawn up to one side. Her lovely hair is fanned out across the dirt, a tiny piece of green fern caught amongst the fine strands. Her throat looks so swollen, and there’s a smudge of mud on her cheek. I wish I could put something under her head to stop her from getting dirty.
I stare at her, rubbing my eyes. I’m starting to sob again and can’t stop myself. Everything is so confused in my head. It’s jumbled up with odd dreams I’ve had, noises in the night, then getting up for a glass of water and finding Mummy downstairs with a man. With Mr Taylor.
‘You won’t tell Daddy that Mr Taylor came to visit me while he was away, will you? Daddy wouldn’t understand.’ I remember her hand squeezing mine, her voice urgent. ‘You must promise, Ellie. Promise Mummy you won’t ever tell anyone you saw Mr Taylor with me.’
‘Mummy, Mummy.’ Tears are running down my cheeks and everything becomes misty. I can’t see her face properly anymore. I wipe my nose on the back of my coat sleeve. ‘Tell me what to do, Mummy.’
Her voice is still in my head. ‘Daddy wouldn’t understand. Promise me you won’t ever tell.’
I’m shelving it all away behind the dark line of trees, packing the unwanted memories into a box with a lid under my bed. They can stay there for a while. Until I’m sure what to do with them. They’ll be safe enough, so long as I never forget. Never forgive.
I know she’s dead. But I have to check before I run to the village for help. You always have to check, right?
‘I promise, Mummy.’ Cross my heart and hope to die. ‘I promise, I promise.’
The birds are singing overhead. In a minute, I will drop her hand and start to run.
With one last violent effort, my body convulses. I’m flailing backwards with the last of my strength, acting on some final message to the brain that translates as escape. I jerk my foot, snapping the leash on my ankle, then I’m kicking upwards to freedom and salt air. To the promise of
sunlight.
I burst the surface, choking and spewing water from my lungs. But it’s too late, I have no strength left for swimming. The water is so heavy now it feels like thick velvet curtains, wrapping around me, hampering my attempts to stay afloat. A strong wave crashes over my head, knocking me under the water again, and the world rolls above me through a thin layer of white foam, dazzling and cold. The ocean feels so warm, a good place to rest a while, to sleep.
I begin to sink again, my head tilted to one side, arms limp, letting the water take me where it will.
‘Eleanor …’
It’s Tristan’s voice but I don’t have the energy to listen. His hands hook under my arms, pulling me up again, out of the comfortable green depths. He’s tilting my head back cruelly, forcing his body under mine, his legs kicking against the relentless rush of the tide.
‘I’ve got her, she’s over here.’
My eyes close.
Four hours later, I’m sitting up on a bed in a cubicle of the Accident and Emergency Department at Truro Hospital, Treliske, feeling very weak and foolish. My head is throbbing like I hit it on a rock, and I have a severely bruised ankle where I fought to get the leash free. But at least I’m alive. Which still feels like a miracle. I can’t remember much about how I got here – there’s a vague memory of sirens and the bright interior of an ambulance, an oxygen mask over my face – but I am glad I’m not so much flotsam in the Atlantic Ocean.
The nurses are very sympathetic and concerned, but a little wary of leaving me alone. It’s as though they think I tried to kill myself.
The curtain rattles open, and the smiling nurse with braces on her teeth pops her head back in. ‘Feeling better?’
‘Much, thank you.’
‘Cup of tea?’
‘I was wondering when I could go home.’
‘That depends on what the doctor says. You may be kept in overnight if she thinks you need a few more hours’ observation.’ The nurse busies herself with tidying away some empty packets on the trolley next to my bed, then meticulously washes her hands at the sink. ‘You may be feeling right as rain, my love, but you did have a good gargle of sea water. Not good for the lungs, you know.’ She smiles. ‘Now, are you sure I can’t get you a cup of tea?’
‘No, thanks.’
She shrugs and slips out again, drawing the curtain shut behind her.
I lean back and close my eyes, then snap them open them again. Whenever I shut my eyes, I see him again. Pete Taylor. Connor and Tristan’s dad. Bending over my mum in the woods.
I pick a point on the wall and stare at it, willing myself to stay awake until the doctor pronounces me fit to leave. Jenny is still out there, dead or alive, and she needs to be found. I have things to do. People to see.
But my fatigue wins in the end. I close my eyes, unable to keep them open any longer, and dream.
When I wake up again, it’s dark outside and my father is beside the bed. I struggle to sit up. ‘Dad, what are you doing here?’
‘Someone needs to take you home,’ he tells me. ‘No, stay still for now. I’m waiting for the doctor to check you over again.’
I stare up at him, uncertain. He’s clean-shaven, and looks sober. He even appears to have changed his clothes recently. ‘You look good, Dad. You look … better.’
‘You look awful,’ he says bluntly.
‘Thanks.’
‘What on earth happened? They told me you went surfing at Widemouth and nearly drowned.’
‘I did, yes. But I can’t remember much. Who pulled me out?’
‘Some lifeguards,’ he says, then adds reluctantly, ‘and Tristan Taylor helped too, I believe.’
‘You don’t like Tris much, do you?’
He looks away, his face shuttered. ‘I didn’t like his father much either, to be honest. Pete was a difficult character. Always saying one thing and meaning another. Maybe that’s the problem. I’ve never been able to see past my dislike for Pete where the Taylor boys are concerned.’
‘Men,’ I correct him. ‘They haven’t been boys for a long time.’
‘I still remember when they were teenagers. Always hanging round the farm, sniffing after you, making a bloody nuisance of themselves. Especially that Connor. He was very keen on you as a lad.’ He looks at me closely. ‘Is he still keen on you?’
I change the subject, nodding to the coat on the back of his chair. ‘Whose coat is that?’
He stands and lifts it up, frowning. It’s a black mid-thigh length coat, looking a little damp and rumpled, with deep pockets on either side. ‘I don’t know. Why?’
‘I think I was wearing it in the ambulance.’
‘It’s a man’s coat.’
‘Someone must have put it on me at the beach.’
An image flashes through my head. Someone draping foil over my wet shoulders. A paramedic, perhaps. Tris in the car park at Widemouth Bay, a strange look in his face, bending over me with a coat in his hands. Here, put this on. Then the ambulance doors shutting out the light.
‘I’ll ask Hannah,’ I say, leaning back on the pillows. ‘She’ll know who it belongs to.’
My father hesitates, then drapes the long coat over the chair again. ‘We’ll take it home with us,’ he says, then glances at his watch. There’s something in his voice, some quiver of emotion, but I can’t pinpoint what it is. ‘I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you in the caravan. I should never have hit you. It was unforgivable.’
I say nothing.
‘Where’s that bloody doctor?’ he demands irascibly, not looking at me. ‘You try to rest. Let me call one of those nurses back. See if we can’t get them to release you.’
While he is gone, I flex my arms and legs, wiggle my fingers and toes, and shift carefully about in the bed, trying to ascertain whether I’ve damaged myself, and where. But apart from a dull pain in my chest, and the lingering headache I’ve had since waking up, I seem to be miraculously intact.
My mind is another matter though. I haven’t mentioned to anyone that I saw a face in the water when I was drowning. Nor whose face it was. They will only think I need further psychiatric help if I tell them what exactly I saw. Or thought I saw.
I saw a man in the water who’s been dead for months. I think he may have strangled my mother when I was a child. Oh, and he just tried to drown me, too.
My father rustles back through the curtains a short while later, closely followed by a harassed-looking nurse who picks up my chart and examines it without even glancing in my direction. I watch my dad thoughtfully. He is still avoiding my gaze.
I study his face. ‘Dad, what is it you’re not telling me?’
He swallows, then shakes his head.
‘Tell me,’ I insist.
My father looks stricken then. His face just crumples. ‘It’s Hannah,’ he admits, tears in his eyes. He takes my hand and squeezes it. ‘I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m so, so sorry.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
I wake at home the next morning with a series of unanswerable questions burning a hole in my head, horribly aware that time is running out. Not just for me but for Jenny, who is still out there somewhere. There are so many things that need to be done. And I have done none of them. The worst has happened, and I feel trapped in my own bed by that truth, my arms and legs weighed down by these heavy, too hot bedclothes, by the knowledge that I have failed.
‘Ellie?’
Someone is tapping quietly at my bedroom door and repeating my name. Like a deathwatch beetle. Tap-tap-tap.
Go away.
I know who it is, because there is only one person it can be.
Mentally, I turn away from the grief waiting for me on the end of that thought, circle the terrible dark pit in my head, pushing away the reality I can’t yet accept. That Hannah is gone.
Dad puts his head round the door without asking permission.
‘Sorry, Ellie, were you asleep?’
If only I could have persuaded my father to go home last night. Instead I feel aw
kward, needing him gone but equally not wanting to hurt his feelings. He’s my flesh-and-blood, my only remaining close family, and I can’t push him away just because I desperately need to be alone.
‘Not anymore,’ I say wearily, and turn my head on the pillows to look at him. ‘What is it?’
‘Tris is here to see you,’ he says apologetically. ‘This is the third time he’s knocked at the door today. I told him you didn’t want any visitors, that he wasn’t welcome, but I have to give it to him, he is nothing if not persistent. I think he’s been standing outside for the past hour, in fact, just waiting. Should I tell him to go home?’
My sleepy brain grapples with those concepts. Tris. Here. Now.
I groan, throwing back the bedclothes. I’m in pyjamas. Baby-pink. Hannah gave them to me as a present last birthday.
‘No, I’ll get dressed. What time is it?’
‘Just after twelve. I thought you might like a lie-in.’
‘It’s midday already?’
I swing my legs urgently out of bed and sit up. My head throbs like someone’s hit it with a hammer and I have to wait a moment, head bent, eyes closed, before moving again.
I have to call the police and tell the inspector what I know. Yet how can I, when I’m not even sure of my own memories? How to explain a vision seen while drowning? How to put a hunch about a recurring nightmare into coherent words?
It all feels a bit tenuous and unlikely.
I can’t just walk into police headquarters and say, the shadow man did it. Not with my history of psychosis. They’ll lock me up and throw away the key.
I open my eyes and try to focus on the problem. ‘Has DI Powell been in touch?’
‘He rang last night to see how you were.’
‘Nothing since?’
My father shakes his head.
‘So the police haven’t found Jenny Crofter yet?’
‘I have no idea.’
I’m still groggy, but reach into my drawer for a clean pair of jeans. ‘Send Tris up, would you?’
He stares. ‘But you’re not dressed yet.’