by Emma Stonex
I’m not surprised Michelle Davies won’t talk to you. As his girlfriend she had a bad time of it after the disappearance, with everyone saying Vince had been responsible for it, he’d killed Arthur and Bill, some plan he’d been formulating weeks in advance then he made a clever escape for himself. Trident implied it, too. They weren’t allowed to say so, but they definitely encouraged people to believe that.
Michelle’s married now. Two daughters. I shouldn’t think she wants to revisit that period in her life. She and Vince were very in love. He used to come down from London before his duty was about to start. I’d see him in the harbour with his cassette player, all arms and legs and one of those big moustaches you see in American TV shows. He would’ve got keepers’ accommodation once he’d made Assistant.
Arthur spoke highly of Vince, said what a nice boy he was, decent and down to earth. It’s a shame for a person, when they’ve had a difficult start in life, and they can never get out from under because people always think the worst of them.
Trident got blamed for hiring a man with a criminal record, but they were always taking people who needed a way back into society and it was never frowned upon or worried about. Lighthouse-keeping is the best job for someone who’s used to being closed off and living in confined spaces. They’re normally a very disciplined sort too, in being accustomed to a strict way of life. It wasn’t unusual to be on a light with a borstal boy, or someone who’d been in jail. The trouble was when something went wrong, which it did, it was easy to point the finger. Michelle couldn’t argue back. She couldn’t speak up for Vince, because that wasn’t what the Institution wanted to hear. It went against their party line. That’ll be why she doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want all that scraped up and all those horrible things being said about Vince again. People went ballistic at the time, when they found out he’d been in jail. There was every rumour circling you could think of – that he’d been a murderer, he’d murdered ten people; he was a serial killer, a rapist or a paedophile. I can tell you he wasn’t any of those.
You don’t have to go to prison to know you’ve done wrong. Aren’t we all accountable, to a certain extent? What I did. What Arthur did. What Bill did. Just because someone didn’t put bars around us, it doesn’t mean those bars weren’t deserved.
Michelle told me once that Vince did many things in his life that he wanted to forget. Now you know about Arthur and me, I can admit to you that I did, too.
16
TWO PAPERS
Daily Telegraph, April 1973
PRISON EVIDENCE IN MAIDEN ROCK INVESTIGATION
As hopes fade for three men who disappeared from the Maiden Rock Lighthouse last December, new facts come to light that sources suggest implicate the youngest of them, Vincent Bourne, as a possible agent in the event. Mr Bourne, the Supernumerary Assistant Keeper, was twenty-two when he vanished from the remote South West station between Christmas and New Year, along with his colleagues Arthur Black and William Walker. It emerged yesterday that before enrolling with Trident House Mr Bourne was detained on charges of Arson, Common Assault, Assault Occasioning Actual Bodily Harm, Trespass, Theft, Incitement, and Attempted Escape from Lawful Custody.
Sunday Mirror, April 1973
SCANDALOUS SECRET LIFE OF CRIMINAL LIGHTHOUSE KEEPER
Loner lightman Vincent Bourne has been EXPOSED as a repeat offender in a series of leaks made by a former jail mate. ‘You name it, he’s done it,’ says our source; ‘he’s capable of anything.’ Unmarried Vince went missing from the Maiden Rock four months ago with two others. All three men remain unaccounted for. ‘He shouldn’t have gone anywhere near that tower,’ says our source. ‘Whatever happened, he did it.’
17
MICHELLE
She hadn’t been his girlfriend for a long time, she thought, as she bent to tie the fifty-sixth shoelace of the day. ‘Stay still,’ she told her daughter, whose hand grabbed a clump of hair in response. A lot of the time Michelle couldn’t tell whose hair it was, just that hair got grabbed in angry fistfuls and when it hurt it was probably hers.
‘Now keep them on,’ she said. ‘Please.’
The sisters went off to play Snakes and Ladders, or empty the game across the carpet and feed the dice to the dog. Michelle stayed in the hall, watching the phone.
He had called once already this morning, and again yesterday, and again last week. ‘I’m not Vinny’s girlfriend any more,’ she’d told him, which was stating the bleeding obvious, since Vinny would never again have a girlfriend as long as he lived – and he wasn’t living, was he? Or was he? To cope with uncertainty long-term, to let it get inside her and make its nest there, was the worst kind of limbo.
Dan Sharp might think he could get to the bottom of it, but Michelle couldn’t say if there was one. It just went down and down, like the sea. Why Vinny disappeared and how – these were things she would never discover. And if he wanted her to say that Vinny had been all the things he hadn’t, all the things the public hated him for, well, she couldn’t. She had her own family now. Her husband wouldn’t be glad to come home to find her talking to a stranger, breathing life back into the man she’d loved when she was nineteen, the only man, truly, she’d ever loved.
The author should go sniffing round somebody else’s door. He had no idea what he was getting himself into, dredging up memories from people who’d rather stay out of it. He should stick with his thrillers. Michelle had borrowed one last year from the library while they were in there looking for Esio Trot. Roger had called it rubbish, but he didn’t like her reading. Said it put fancy ideas in her head.
‘Mummy!’
Two minutes, the average time it took before one of the girls shouted a complaint. What would it be this time? Accusations of snatching, cheating, Fiona taking her knickers off and sitting bare-bottomed on the board game. She went in, comforted her youngest’s crying and tried to take her mind off Vincent Bourne. That was another world, one she no longer lived in. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t find a way back.
People hardly talked to her about it now. Marriage had helped, since she didn’t have the same name so they couldn’t recognize her; they couldn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s who you are, you’ll know all about that then,’ to which her reply was always the same. No, she knew nothing, no more than they did. But still they’d get that look in their eye, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, as if she did indeed know why those men had vanished, but of course she couldn’t tell. It had been her man, after all. His secret.
‘Mummy, want a biscuit.’
‘What do you say?’
‘Please.’
The children put up a wall, but that was as good as it got. Walls stopped her feeling. Hurting. Except when she managed to scale them, usually first thing in the morning when she opened her eyes and the day was a blank white page, and she had an image of Vinny in her mind that was so real it could have been a photograph. She couldn’t believe it had been twenty years since they’d touched. How had her mind held on to these details? She never talked to Roger about it. He was the jealous type anyway, wasn’t interested in past relationships, especially not that one.
On the way back from the kitchen, the telephone rang. Michelle stopped, Malted Milks in hand, paint stains down her top. It would be him again.
There were things she could tell him. Sometimes she almost wanted to, just to be free of them. But that was in the dead of night, and by the time the alarm clock shrilled, and the girls needed getting up and there was breakfast to be made and Roger’s sandwiches to go in a bag and the school runs to be done, she saw sense.
Michelle picked up the phone.
The writer started talking, but she cut him off.
‘I told you to leave me alone,’ she said, gripping the receiver. ‘I’ve got nothing to tell you about Vinny. If you contact me again, I’ll call the police.’
18
JENNY
The sand got everywhere. Jenny disliked how it felt between her toes, how it made the skin there squea
k, how it got into the picnic basket and the cheese and pickle rolls she’d prepared that morning, careful to cut them into quarters as her grandson preferred. Later she’d go home with grit in her teeth and it would be there in her food for a week.
The beach reminded her of that scene in Jaws. Little ones in sun hats patting out buckets, squealing in the shallows and shivering in towels. Jenny had seen Jaws at the Orpheus three summers after Bill went and God only knew why she’d put herself through it. Bad things coming up out of the sea, things with teeth that smelled of blood.
Jenny didn’t like to be scared. It was like being a child again, afraid of the dark and the creak on the stairs; the shadows in her mum’s garden on Conferry Road that came closer day by day. When they were little, Carol used to tell her stories about vampires and werewolves, and others she made up too, about the shrivelled thing that lived under the bed. Jenny thought there’d been enough to be afraid of in that house.
No wonder Carol had left as soon as she could. She had cut her ties. Jenny, the younger, had stuck around longer.
Hannah came back with the ice creams. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘They melted.’
The cones were soggy and green. The grandchildren got the best of them then dropped them in the sand. Jenny felt her shoulders burning.
‘Not still thinking about it, are you?’ said Hannah.
‘No.’
‘You’re paranoid.’
‘So what if I am?’
Jenny looked out at the lighthouse, cloaked in mist, the sort there is on the sea after the weather’s blown over. The more she peered into the steam, the more the tower materialized. It would always concern her how these two scenes could be part of the same world. Children on a beach, carefree and licking ice creams. And that place.
‘You think that man’s spying on you.’
‘No, I don’t.’
Jenny moved under the parasol. A couple strolled past, his hand on the small of her back. Bill had used to walk next to her with his hand on the small of her back. At the beginning anyway, when he’d still wanted to be near her.
‘You’ve got to stop curtain-twitching, Mum. It’s unhealthy. And turn some bloody lights on at home; I’m sick of coming round and finding it like a mausoleum.’
‘Then don’t.’
Hannah sulked for a minute. She said, ‘What are you worried about anyway? He’s only going to write up what you tell him.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I don’t know. I’m asking you.’
Jenny pushed a hole in the sand with her finger. It felt cooler under the surface.
‘Stop talking to him,’ said Hannah.
‘I can’t.’
‘Why?’
‘If she is,’ said Jenny, ‘I am.’ She would avoid saying Helen’s name at any cost. She hated that she even had to think it, that the woman existed at all.
‘For God’s sake.’ Hannah jumped up and ran down the beach, where Nicholas had fallen in another child’s sandpit. Sometimes Jenny wished she had never told Hannah about Bill’s affair, back when Hannah was barely a teen. The right thing would have been to keep it to herself – for her daughter to have had nice, unspoiled memories of her dad as loving and caring. After a while, though, Jenny hadn’t been able to stop herself. She couldn’t share it with anyone else because she was embarrassed.
On the outside, she and Bill had been the perfect couple, the envy of their friends. After he went, it seemed a shame to ruin it. Tragedy on top of tragedy.
Hannah came back with a bawling child. A sour taste filled Jenny’s mouth. She thought about what Bill must have tasted when he’d eaten those chocolates.
‘Who cares what that cow’s doing?’ said Hannah, sitting down next to her. She shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘You were the one who knew him, Mum.’
Hannah put a hand on hers and Jenny worried she might cry. She’d have no one left, if Hannah found out. She had only meant to teach Bill a lesson. Remind him where his loyalties lay. Just the tiniest amount of household bleach – ‘limited vomiting when swallowed in small quantities’ – disguised by the soapy flavour of violet.
It was her own fault. She hadn’t made an effort with anyone in years, just hidden herself away eating microwave dinners in front of re-runs of Blockbusters. Julia and Mark were good enough to her, but Hannah was the special one: the older she’d grown, the more like friends they’d become. Hannah believed her mother was the innocent victim. Jenny couldn’t risk her discovering that both her parents had failed.
Now this Sharp person would push and prod until she gave in. Or maybe he already knew. Maybe Helen knew; maybe Arthur had written it in a note sent back from the tower. The worst part would be explaining it to Hannah. She couldn’t.
‘You were married fourteen years,’ said Hannah. ‘Three children, Mum. Helen knew him for what? Five bloody minutes. She can say what she likes. If raking up what happened is making you miserable, don’t do it. I mean, shadowy figures waiting outside your house in cars? Come on.’
Hannah was right. Only Jenny had felt it the night before last, really felt it, someone loitering on the road. And sure enough, when she’d peered through the nets, she’d seen a car there with its engine purring. It had sat for a long time, watching her. No one had come to meet it; no one climbed out. Moments later it drove away.
Jenny stood and shook the sand off her towel. It blew back on her, stinging. She wanted to go home but the children were coming back too, and she’d have to put the oven on for chops and get to peeling potatoes, and she’d miss Neighbours now at the least. She helped to pack the bags, call the children, dust off their feet – and all the while the Maiden stood obscenely at her back, her ghastly companion.
The intruder was opening doors she needed to stay closed. Doors she’d spent years blocking, because the place beyond was one she could never set foot in again.
She had already lost her husband. She wasn’t losing her daughter too.
19
JENNY
I don’t see it as a downside, not knowing. It’s good not to know. Mum used to say, ‘Jennifer, you don’t know anything.’ She meant it meanly because she was a mean woman, but actually, it’s helped me a lot in the course of my life. They’ve never found Bill’s body and until that happens, there’s a chance he’s alive. As long as there’s a chance, there’s hope. It gets less as the years go by, but it’s never completely gone.
Until Trident House can show me what’s left of my husband, I won’t accept he’s dead. Why should I? His vanishing was a magic trick. He could come back the same way. Surprise! Like that Paul Daniels off the telly. It’d be no harder accounting for Bill popping back up than it is accounting for how he got lost.
Authors are meant to be open-minded, aren’t they? Well. Let’s see.
You’ll remember I told you about Bill’s bad feeling. He had these extra senses; he was that sort of soul. Tuned in, like me. It’s no surprise, in my opinion, what with his mother dying like that. It meant Bill got to believing – at least, he wanted to believe – that there was more to life than the skin and bone we’re given in this one.
When we first started going together, he used to leave notes for me. He’d put them in my desk at school, saying what time to meet. We had to do it in secret because of Mum. Carol had gone by then, so it was just Mum and me at home. She’d lock the door as soon as I got in and wouldn’t let me out again. There was a tree in the park, with a hole in the trunk he put presents in. A bag of sherbet lemons or a plastic ring he’d got off the market. I still think I could find one of those notes, one day, from Bill. Under my pillow or propped up by the kettle. The cottage where we used to live, Monday, four thirty, he’ll meet me there.
I’m not saying Bill’s off sunning himself on a beach somewhere. Just that if it was something supernatural that took him – better to say, borrowed him – then something supernatural might just as easily return him to me. It’s possible, and that’s enough for me.
I
don’t trust people who say they’ve never experienced something they can’t explain. They must be very closed off as people and it’s a waste to live a life where you only think about what’s in front of you and you never consider what else there is.
You have to look beyond all that. Stretch your mind out a little, if that’s what it takes.
Did you ever hear about the Silver Man? He’s a bit of a Mortehaven local legend. I never clapped eyes on him myself, but plenty I know did. Trustworthy people who you’d swear were telling you the truth. They said they saw him just wandering about as plain as day, easy as you like, just as if he belonged.
God, your publishers really picked a bright one with you, didn’t they? Because he was silver, obviously, his hair and clothes. Even his skin, sort of silvery, like a fish. And the weird thing about him, as well as what he looked like, was that he showed up in places he couldn’t have got to. Like he’d got there more quickly than he could; like there must have been more than one copy of him drifting about. There were folk who said he seemed like he was on his way to work because he was carrying a briefcase and that was silver in colour too. Some would see him at the bottom of the high street, then they got in their cars and minutes later he came out in front of them at the top of the climb or up on the cliff, three or more miles away. Pat in the Seven Sisters said she saw him one time waving at her from down on the beach, and if you ever meet Pat, you’ll know she doesn’t know how to tell a lie. He was far off and carrying his little silver bag, and she said it was just like he was inviting her over because as she got closer, he walked into the sea and carried on walking till he went under and that was the end of that.