Night Falls, Still Missing

by Helen Callaghan

  But this was a lighthouse, she realised. There must be a radio.

  And there was some form of electricity, at least, enough for interior lights, and therefore a chance to switch on the radiator, perhaps even boil the tiny kettle for a hot drink if she could find a tea bag.

  She wandered over to the radiator, moving aside the upended medical box with her hand.

  On the concrete floor in front of her, dark red smears and drops of dried blood trailed a thin, ragged pattern.

  Fiona’s breath caught in her throat.

  Her gaze tracked the smeared blood to a corner, where a pile of discarded clothes and blankets huddled around the radiator.

  Her heart froze.

  Poking out of this pile, palm upwards, fingers slightly curled, was a single human hand.

  Fastened around the icy-white wrist was the rose-gold Ted Baker watch she had bought Madison for her birthday.

  Fiona’s hands drifted up to her mouth in horror.

  Oh no, no, no …

  ‘Mads? Madison!’

  And she was kneeling down by the hand, as if in a nightmare, and the storm and the cold and her own danger were all forgotten.

  The smell intensified as she lifted the blanket up. Yes, there was Mads curled up into a foetal huddle, in her indigo Anthropologie jumper and dark jeans stained with blood. Her right leg was so badly broken that it appeared to have two knees, the foot in its workboot twisted around at an unnatural angle.

  Madison’s spilled hair lay over the concrete, her cheek resting on her other hand. She was utterly still, almost peaceful, though the white hand beneath her was laced with dried blood. Her face was hidden.

  ‘Mads?’ breathed Fiona, reaching forward to move her hair away. ‘Mads?’

  And then she felt it – a tiny puff of breath against her fingers.

  ‘Oh God,’ said Fiona. ‘Mads! Mads? Can you hear me?’

  No answer.

  She’s freezing, Fiona thought. She needs warmth. And water.

  The radiator was already plugged in, and when Fiona snapped on the button, a kind of low ticking began, and almost immediately it started to warm up.

  It was stuck on a two-hour timer, presumably to limit the electricity it used. The lighthouse ran on solar power, and most of that must go to the lantern.

  She would have to stay awake to keep pressing it on.

  With a start, she realised that this was what Madison had failed to do. Madison, with her snow-pale skin and motionlessness – Madison was dying of the cold.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Mads, can you hear me?’

  The only reply was silence. A silent Madison was somehow more horrifying, more unnatural, than a dead one.

  ‘It’s going to be okay.’ Fiona ignored the internal voice that wondered how she knew this and reached down for the full cup of water next to her. An abandoned bottle of it, half-drunk, had been lying upended nearby. ‘You’ll see.’

  The quiet mocked her, interrupted only by the purring tick of the radiator timer.

  Fiona shivered, aware that she too was freezing, was possibly in danger.

  She was beginning to guess what had happened.

  Madison had broken in here somehow, crippled and desperate. Perhaps she had been trapped on the islet like Fiona. She’d been wet, soaked – the coat she’d worn lay nearby and was still sopping, the pockets full of the sea. Her jeans and jumper were damp.

  Perhaps she’d been waiting for some opportunity to go for help, but slowly, over the next four, maybe five days, the cold and her injuries had overtaken her. Perhaps she’d tried to get out, leaving those bloody smears on the floor, found that with her swollen, shattered leg she could no longer reach the screwdriver to remove it?

  Perhaps it was easier to huddle up, to try to sleep, clicking on the radiator every two hours to drive the cold away, waiting for her strength to return, but growing weaker and weaker, the ice creeping ever deeper and deeper into her …

  How long had she been here? Fiona felt her face harden. Had she been here the whole time that Fiona had been drinking and flirting with Jack, moaning about her to Adi, cursing her with every new revelation?

  It was pointless to think of this now.

  ‘Mads,’ said Fiona, trying to keep her voice cheerful, upbeat, despite the horrified tears that kept threatening to break through. ‘I’m going to try to give you a little water, okay?’

  Nothing.

  ‘You have to drink something. I might have to move you. Tell me if it hurts.’

  Madison’s head was surprisingly heavy as Fiona wrested it on to her thigh – a dead weight. This thought came unbidden and unwelcome. Brushing aside her hair, Fiona nearly choked.

  Madison’s face was a mass of clotted blood, her lips horribly swollen, a gash in one. Stuck to it were pieces of medical dressing, sticky and filthy.

  ‘Oh God! Mads …’

  Pull yourself together, she told herself sternly, as the frightened tears rolled down her cheeks. This is not helping.

  Gently Fiona pulled at the dressings with trembling fingers, which came away, revealing white, white skin beneath. Madison’s beloved face was so cold – like her silence, this coldness terrified Fiona. Apart from the slash in her lip, Fiona could see no other wound, though there was a larger piece of bandage crushed inside her mouth, almost like a gag.

  ‘I’m going to take this out, babes,’ she said, and gave one end of it a delicate tug.

  It didn’t move, having dried against Madison’s mouth.

  She tried again, a little more forcefully, wincing all the while, and two things happened almost immediately.

  The first was that a blood-darkened spool of bandage emerged from Madison’s torn lips.

  And the second was that Madison gave a little choking cough and opened her eyes.

  They were mere slits, cloudy and lost, with no hint of recognition in them.

  Through dint of tender trying and patience, Fiona managed to persuade Madison to let her wet her lips with the water, and at one point to even take a tiny sip, her throat trembling with the effort of swallowing.

  But Madison would accept no more. She did not resist even as Fiona stripped off her damp jumper and bra, gently forcing her arms inside one of the yellow waterproof jackets she was lying on top of, trying to lever her off the cold floor as far as possible. As for her jeans … Fiona could not bring herself to touch that twisted, bulging leg, could barely bring herself to look at it.

  Madison must have been in agony. Perhaps it was a mercy that she was unconscious now.

  Once Madison’s top half was curled around but not touching the radiator, as dry as Fiona could make her, her head pillowed with a fire blanket, Fiona sighed, sat back on her haunches, shivering with exhaustion and ringing cold.

  She swallowed, forcing herself to face facts.

  Madison could die – was probably near death even now.

  Somehow, Fiona had to get back in contact with the outside world.

  She couldn’t walk or swim off here to fetch help. But it was a lighthouse. There must be a radio in here, to contact the coastguard, to contact ships …

  She stood up, trying to ignore the tiny internal voice that said, but if there was, surely Mads would have found it.

  Rubbing her cold hands against her wet jeans, she surveyed the room. There were cupboards and cabinets, all lying open and jumbled, but nothing that looked like …

  Wait.

  In the far corner, almost in the crook of the L-shaped room, a small wooden desk was pushed up against the wall, with a flimsy plastic chair nearby. A pair of yellow waterproof trousers lay over it.

  Why else would you need a desk in here?

  She pulled the trousers off, and saw it then – a squat black box, the handheld microphone attached to it by a coiled plastic cord.

  It was silent, but the light on the dial glowed red in invitation as Fiona reached for it.

  ‘It won’t work.’

  Her voice was slow, quiet, hideously muffled a
nd slurred, but within Fiona could hear the essential Madison.

  ‘What?’ Fiona turned to her. ‘But it’s got power. There’s a light …’

  A long, breathy sigh from the blankets. ‘The antenna on the roof’s broken.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘No antenna means no signal.’ That sigh again, as though Fiona was being deliberately obtuse. ‘Try, if it makes you feel better. I already have.’

  Fiona didn’t. Of the two of them, Madison was the sailor, the one most likely to know.

  Instead she came back to the radiator, sat down next to Madison. A paltry amount of heat glowed out from it as she raised her hands towards it.

  ‘Maybe I could fix the antenna,’ she said, trying to ignore the doubt and dread that crept into her voice at the mere idea of going outside again.

  Madison lay on her side, anchored in that position by her broken leg. Her chest rose and fell gently, and Fiona thought she might have drifted off again, until she said, after a long moment, ‘Don’t be daft, Fee.’ A weak chuckle. ‘You wouldn’t know where to begin.’

  Fiona bit her lip. ‘I suppose not.’

  Silence, then another weak, bruised chuckle.

  ‘Morning can’t be long. And if you fall off and break your neck, what will happen to me?’

  ‘Well, you can’t be that hurt,’ said Fiona drily. ‘Your priorities are back to normal.’

  Again that ghost of slurred laughter, drifting into the echoing quiet.

  ‘How did you end up in here?’ Fiona asked, glancing down at Madison’s pale cheek. ‘Did you break in?’

  Madison moved her chin, the shadow of a nod. ‘I was thrown off the boat.’

  ‘What?’ asked Fiona, horrified.

  ‘I went into the sea.’ A pause, as though Madison was considering making a joke, but somehow couldn’t bring herself to. ‘I should have died. But the waves threw me on to some rocks. Climbed back up …’

  ‘With a broken leg?’

  ‘Not broken then. I broke it when I slipped going up the hill.’ She winced, licked her sore lips. ‘If it had been broken when I was in the sea, I wouldn’t be alive.’ A pause, then, in a high, distressed voice, ‘Does it look very bad?’ She swallowed, the tiny noise echoing in the concrete room. ‘You don’t think they’ll cut it off, do you?’

  Fiona realised, with a little start, that this had probably been tormenting Mads for days, perhaps even more than the idea of her impending death.

  Yep, your priorities are just like normal, she thought, this time with a tiny burst of affectionate anguish. You silly, silly mare.

  ‘No. Well, I mean, your leg looks broken. Which it is,’ prevaricated Fiona. ‘I mean, they can sew on legs that have been severed nowadays. A broken one is just …’ She shrugged, trying to sound nonchalant, to swallow her own numb terror. ‘Neither here nor there.’

  It was a lie, she knew – she still could not bring herself to look at the mangled leg, to remember how swollen yet cold it had felt as her fingers brushed it, but Madison seemed to accept this as truth.

  ‘Right,’ she said.

  Silence fell, while both worked to hide their fear from one another.

  ‘Mads,’ Fiona said, trying to master her grief, her anger, ‘why didn’t you tell me anything about what was going on here? About Dom and Jack and …’

  ‘I couldn’t,’ she said instantly, as though this was a question she’d been expecting, one she’d prepared for, as though for an exam. ‘I just couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you anything. I couldn’t tell you about Jack because you’d just go off on one about Caspar and how I deliberately screw everything up. I couldn’t tell you about Dom because you just would have gone mental and you’d’ve been right. And you might have called the police and I absolutely couldn’t have you do that right then. I needed everything to look normal. I just needed you to come.’

  Fiona was stunned. ‘What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense. Was Dom …?’

  ‘Forget about him.’ Madison flicked one cold hand with a weak but undeniably contemptuous gesture. Her nails were a pale blue. ‘I couldn’t tell you why I needed you up here. I couldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t even believe it myself. It was insane. It is insane.’ She turned her stiff head, despite her obvious pain, and that cat-like green gaze blazed. ‘Fee, it’s … it’s just so huge. I thought, if I said anything and got it wrong, it would all be over for me.’ She licked her mashed, cut lips again with a dry tongue. ‘And it would have been over for you too, if people thought you were mixed up with me. You’d have been ruined.’ Her voice ratcheted upwards. ‘I had to be absolutely sure before I said anything. You work so hard – it’s going so well for you. I couldn’t have borne it if I brought you down. I’m so sorry, Fee. You have to believe me …’

  ‘But Mads, I do believe you.’

  Her eyes narrowed, confused. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I believe you.’ Fiona shrugged. She ran her hand through Madison’s damp hair, brushing it out of her face. ‘So stop wriggling and try to relax.’

  ‘What … how?’

  Fiona leaned down and whispered, even though they were both alone and miles from any other human: ‘I did what you wanted. I looked.’

  ‘And?’ asked Madison, her eyes huge, the question tight despite her blurred speech.

  Fiona smiled at her. ‘And I saw the Valkyrie.’

  WEDNESDAY

  * * *

  45

  Helly Holm Lighthouse, Orkney, January 2020

  Fiona would have thought it impossible, what with the broken door that banged ever more furiously as the wind rose, gusting freezing wind in at her, but eventually she napped next to the sleeping Madison, wrapped in the damp plastic grip of the waterproofs, her body lying semi-curled around the radiator, like a dog before a fire.

  It was relentlessly uncomfortable, and she kept shivering herself awake to restart the timer – her head aching, her throat parched. Every so often she would urge Madison to drink more water, move a tentative hand above her mouth and nose to check if she was still breathing.

  As Fiona lay there on her back, staring at the water-stained ceiling, she let her mind wander, drift over the nightmarish last hours.

  The archaeologists – surely they must know she was missing. The police would have been expecting her at Kirkwall Police Station. They would know that someone had tried to do her harm …

  Wouldn’t they?

  After all, she had taken all her clothes and effects from Nordskaill House. With her keys, it would be a simple matter to move her car, perhaps send it crashing into the sea too. Perhaps everyone would think that she, like Madison, had chosen to vanish. Jack had guessed that she had no plans to return there and would doubtless tell the others that.

  And Hugo would not have hesitated to share his theory of her and Madison as artefact thieves with the police.

  Fiona sat upright, her head aching, finding any more sleep impossible.

  She felt like a boat lost on the breast of a trackless ocean. Somehow she was here with Madison, trying not to freeze to death in an unmanned lighthouse on a rocky, uninhabited island, because somebody had found a Valkyrie.

  And with that, the lights in the room clicked off, and she nearly screamed, flinching against the radiator.

  Something had changed. Instead of the utter blackness, there was now a kind of thin, cool daylight, in a pale pinkish-grey. The sensors had reacted to it, had shut off.

  What time was it?

  Impossible to say without her phone, but probably no earlier than seven o’clock.

  It would be low tide eventually. She wasn’t injured, other than the crack on the back of her head. If she was lucky, and brave, she might be able to walk out of here the way she’d come in.

  It wouldn’t hurt to get up and look.

  She glanced over at Madison, who was still locked in sleep. There was no question of Madison walking anywhere.

  Fiona fought her way back to her feet in slow increments – her h
ead had worsened in the night, and if she moved too fast she felt sick, dizzy, her skull full of throwing knives. She was in the waterproof coat and trousers she had found, which were made for somebody larger and didn’t fit her particularly well, but at least were dry.

  Her new boots rubbed against her feet, welts of forming blisters stabbing her as she pulled them on.

  ‘Where are you going?’

  Madison sounded faint, muzzled, but as though she’d been awake for hours.

  ‘Just to look.’

  ‘Is there a plan?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Fiona. ‘It’s not a good one, but all I can think of without a phone. The minute the causeway is clear I run, as fast as I can, to the Fletts’ farmhouse and get every ambulance and policeman in the world up here. If I can flag someone down on the way there, so much the better.’

  ‘How long will that take?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Fiona. ‘It’s what, maybe one, two miles …?’

  ‘It’s five miles to Grangeholm if it’s a minute,’ said Madison.

  Fiona’s heart was sinking. Madison was right, of course. ‘I’ll hurry,’ she said.

  ‘I hope so,’ said Madison. ‘Because I can’t stand up and seal that door after you.’

  ‘I’ll prop something up against it. That chair, maybe. Nobody will think of coming up here anyway.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Madison.

  The question hung there.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ was all Fiona said, since the things she did want to say were too portentous, too alarming. Too final. ‘Try not to worry.’

  Before her, the broken door shook violently against the improvised bolt she had made for it. Despite the tenuous dawn, the weather had become no less aggressive.

  Don’t go out there empty-handed.

  She searched through the tumbled contents of the room, but could find nothing helpful. She didn’t need the big electric torch. Even the first aid pack on the wall contained only a tiny pair of bandage scissors, which she stuffed into her pocket anyway.

  ‘You should keep this. You know, just in case.’

  She pressed the screwdriver into Mads’ cold hand, trying to hide the way her own hand trembled as she did so, trying not to notice the way Madison’s did as she took it.