by Emma Stonex
I should have spoken to Arthur about the affair when he was ashore. Hannah says I should’ve, and I wish I had. Now they’re gone, it’s too late.
It makes me wonder about my mum. How I could have one last try with her. Find out if she’s still around, ring her up, send her a note. See, I’m protecting myself if I do that. It’s selfish, in a way. I want to know I’ve done everything I can. I know better than anyone how it feels to have that choice taken away from you.
If I’d talked to Arthur, we could have decided on a better course of action. Because it was only a silly thing; a silly idea I had to pay back some of what they’d made me feel. What can I say but that I wasn’t thinking straight?
I didn’t ever bring it up with Arthur because I suppose I was nervous of him. Hannah was too. It’s because the PK never made himself known to us. He didn’t come over or say hello or act friendly at any time. I never could work him out.
Looking back, he did seem unbalanced to me. One of those who never says boo to a goose then one day the building goes up in flames and the neighbours go, ‘Oh, but he was the quiet one, wasn’t he? He wouldn’t have done anything like that.’
What? Hannah thinks I’ve got too many fantasies. I do make things up in my head, then I think about them so much they start to turn real.
But it’s always the quiet ones, isn’t it? Especially when they’re pushed. Helen pushed him. She pushed him with the guilt then she pushed him with her lies. Arthur was the sort to keep it cooped up inside and not say a word and then one day, pow!
The fact is, if I found out, then he might have found out too. If Arthur did hurt Bill, I suppose I can . . . I mean I suppose I can understand it.
Oh dear, is that the time? We’ve got to get in for Wendy so we can get a good seat. I didn’t travel all this way to have to sneak in the back.
All right! Hannah made me promise. I don’t want to, but she’ll be in a huff with me all afternoon if I don’t. Here goes, then. Helen used to write me letters, but she hasn’t in a while. Hang on, love, I’m getting there. Give me a chance.
Is everything OK with her? With Helen. That’s what Hannah wanted me to ask. Because you’ve been talking to her, haven’t you? So you’ll know. If there’s been anything that’s meant she’s had to stop writing her letters. Not that I care. It’s not important. It just crossed my mind then Hannah made me ask.
Good. That’s good. Satisfied? I told you.
Now, can we get on with our day? If we sit up at the front at Wendy’s, there’s more chance of a name coming through for us. They can sense you there and that makes them find you more easily. The communication is better.
44
MICHELLE
Tonight, when she made steak and kidney for Roger, he would ask about her day and she’d fib that she had done nothing much, ironed the girls’ school uniforms, sewed name tags on PE kits, pulled the weeds out of the veg bed. She would leave out the fact of coming to Clearwater Shopping Centre and drifting down the aisles at Woolworths, gazing at neon confectionery wrappers and checking her watch every minute and a half.
Part of her had known she’d end up meeting him. Her conversation with Helen started it. It matters, doesn’t it? To say what he was really like. Then those transcripts. What Pearl had claimed – unfair things that made Vinny into someone he wasn’t. Vinny wasn’t here to defend or prove himself. Michelle was.
She was tired of being afraid. Of Trident House, of Eddie Evans, of the truth.
The writer was standing beneath the clock in the atrium. She identified him from the black-and-white headshot on his book jacket. He had an agitated, restless demeanour, waiting to be approached but he didn’t know by whom: she could have been any of the women rushing past on their lunch hour.
Hesitating in Boots, Michelle wondered what ideas he had about her. Her idea of him had been wrong. She’d had him down as a Roger type, sharp suit, oiled hair, golf at the weekend, cufflinks and cognac. The writer’s clothes didn’t fit well, not because he couldn’t afford better, she suspected, but because he didn’t care much about clothes, and his shoes looked like they’d been worn every day of his life. If he was any type it was her younger brother’s, who was living back in Leytonstone with her dad and working in the local Done Bookmakers while he saved up enough money for a haircut.
She disliked this shopping centre intensely. Mainly it was the foyer part, with its chichi cafe selling overpriced grilled sandwiches, and the gigantic clock from which, on the hour, a plastic frog emerged from the cuckoo’s window and croaked the time.
She waited for it to finish its cycle before going over.
‘I’m Michelle,’ she said.
Dan Sharp smiled and shook her hand, and seemed relieved, she thought, that she had come.
45
MICHELLE
There they are. Bloody depressing, isn’t it, keeping birds in cages. It’s the worst of the worst. Normally I’d never stop at this store cos I can’t stand the squawking. Either that or them sitting there all miserable. Here you go: £3.99 to take it home with you and the cage’ll be ten times as much. There was this girl at school who kept birds in cages. Her mum’s flat smelled rank, of cat food and droppings. She had a cockatiel called Spike and a budgie called Ross. Ross was the dominant one; he was in charge.
Do you like birds? I think it’s best if you like them to just let them be, out in the trees and things. I used to think how nice it’d be to let Spike and Ross free. Open the door and say, go on, get on with it then. I’m not sure they could fly, to be fair; might’ve just flopped down on the carpet. Maybe they weren’t sad anyway. That was just me.
All right then, you wanted to meet; you’re the one who’s been asking for it, so I’ll let you have it like it is. I’ve got nothing to hide. Vinny didn’t either. It’s been years since I read those interviews and to answer your question about why I’m here, why I changed my mind, it’s cos of them. I can’t let Pearl’s lies have the last of it. No matter how many times I tell myself it doesn’t matter what you put in your book, I can’t let Pearl be the person representing him to you. She didn’t know him. I did.
People’ve made their minds up about Vinny. He was the criminal, so he must’ve done it. They can’t say what he actually did, but who minds about the details when you’ve got someone to pin it on? Those other two, Arthur and Bill, Trident’d have you believe they never set a foot wrong – but scratch the surface and the dirt comes out. Vinny’s dirt was there for anyone to see. He had nothing to hide.
Trident knows you’re writing a book. They’re nice enough on the surface but they’ve got to be worried cos now they’re getting in touch with me saying that if I speak to you, they’ll make me pay. They’ll stop my compensation, which I never thought I’d get in the first place cos Vinny and me weren’t married, but they want to keep me quiet so they kept it coming. Roger, my husband, he’s happy to take it. He can’t stand any mention of Vin but he’s fine with taking the money. I bet Helen and Jenny have had letters as well. But I s’pose the time comes you get too long in the tooth to let people scare you off.
Trident have kept their distance, making out it was nothing to do with them. They wouldn’t want people knowing they had an enemy of Vinny’s in their ranks. It was bad enough having one criminal on the books. If people saw the connection between Vinny and this man, it’d drag the Institution right back into it again.
I can’t tell you what happened. But what I think happened, that’s another thing.
It was the person Mike Senner told them about. The mechanic. I’ve never accepted how Trident did away with that. Even Helen said it was rubbish cos of Mike’s character, he was a local loop, and yeah, maybe he was, but even if a crackpot gave that kind of information, I’d still want to follow it up, wouldn’t you?
Fact is, it didn’t suit Trident to give time to anything Mike Senner said cos that made a mockery of their operation. And it does sound impossible, when you know about tower landings – that this bloke went out there wi
thout them knowing.
Only it must have been possible. This so-called mechanic wanted payback on Vinny and sure enough he got it. But I’m jumping ahead, aren’t I. Shall we sit down?
Pearl had her mind made up about Vinny from the start. I get that she was standing up for her sister cos of how Vinny came to be, but to make a child believe that no one wanted him? To tell him he’s just like his rapist dad, then lock him up and batter him whenever he gave her lip? You ask then why he wound up in prison. Well, Vinny didn’t see a point in anything else. Nobody showed him there was anything else. You give back what life gives you and what can I say but life gave him shit.
Except for the lights. The lights gave him hope and there’s no sense thinking he’d chuck that away. If Pearl was here, she’d say, ‘Remember what he did the last time? Someone who does that’s got it in him to do anything.’ But she’d be wrong. Just like she was wrong saying he’d beaten Pamela up and spat on her when he was little. Vinny wasn’t even with his mum most of the time she was alive, and the way I see it he might’ve whacked her by accident like all babies do, like my babies did, when they’re learning to sit in a high chair or have their nappy changed, or have a bottle or go to sleep or whatever. It’s garbage to say he meant it. Pam’s bruises came from the needle.
Vinny did have a mean streak, yes. He must have, to do what he did. It wasn’t meanness in a petty way, as in saying something to hurt your feelings, but properly, like if he wanted to hurt you then you were probably going to get hurt. You didn’t want to get on his wrong side. But I have to tell you he was loyal too. Once he liked you, he’d never doubt you. That’s how I know he’d been loyal to Trident cos they were loyal to him. It was that job that made the difference to him.
Do you know about the White Rook? Real name Eddie Evans. Erica told me how it was back round where they lived. She said it was Eddie and Vinny that ruled the roost. They were always up against each other, out to pick the other one off – who was on whose turf, who had what girl, who’d nicked off with what, and the crap thing is no one remembers what any of it was about cos it was all so bloody pointless. But when Eddie went after Vinny’s best friend, that was when the situation changed. Erica said he smashed Reg up so badly that Vin had to go over there to sort it out. They only meant to warn Eddie off. They didn’t know he had a little girl. How were they to know that?
After Vinny got the job with Trident, he heard the news Eddie was working there. Vinny hadn’t seen him since that night, when the last thing Eddie’d said to him was that one day he’d get his revenge for what they’d done.
I told the investigators. And they talked to Eddie – at least they said they did – and Eddie said he couldn’t help. He hadn’t clapped eyes on Vinny in ages and that was for the best. He said that was a distant time in his life anyway and he was a new man by then. And how would he have got on there and done what they were suggesting, and made all three keepers disappear from inside a tower that’s hardly wider than this bench we’re sitting on? But it got me thinking then and it still does now. Just cos Eddie didn’t get his own hands dirty doesn’t mean someone else didn’t do it for him.
Trident kept to it that they’d never sent a mechanic to the tower. There was never anyone else on there but those three. They replayed the radio transmission, to prove it – Arthur asking them to send a mechanic then taking it back, saying it’s all right, call it off, it’s fixed after all. But Arthur didn’t say who fixed it or how. Trident just assumed, like they assumed everything else, that it was him or Bill or Vinny. I can tell you now Vinny wouldn’t have a bloody clue what he was doing with fixing anything, let alone a diesel generator. He could hardly change a light bulb.
It’s cos no one else saw this mechanic. Trident’s lot reckoned there had to have been someone who’d witnessed him, ’specially cos this man sounded so unusual looking. They couldn’t find any trace of the boatman either.
But that’s what Eddie’s men are. Ghosts. He could’ve had his pick out of any of the individuals that worked for him, but it was Sid he chose. Sid was told to kill all three and get rid of the bodies then make himself scarce. And that’s exactly what he did.
It got forgotten about with the other speculation. There was plenty of that at the time, so it was hard to know what to hold on to. Rumours flying everywhere, people saying crazy stuff and after a while you didn’t know what to believe. Take the length of rope missing from the storeroom. Trident denied that, of course they did, even though one of their investigators came out years down the line saying it was true. I know that could fit with a wave coming and washing them away, like Helen thinks, and the rope got thrown in to help . . . Maybe. I think this Sid bloke strangled them with it.
I’ve told you already how it was and how Vinny was in the thick of it. And when Eddie went for Reg that was it; Vinny got mad; he said they were going round to show him what for. The dog was never meant to come into it. It was wrong place, wrong time. They just decided on it last minute, a spur of the moment thing, and it was a bad thing to do; they only meant to break into Eddie’s flat and they didn’t know his six-year-old daughter was there. But then she came out in the hallway in her pyjamas and started crying and that woke Eddie up. Someone was like, ‘Shut her up, shut her up,’ and then Eddie found her and thought the worst, so he pulled a knife and it all went down.
Eddie put a knife in Reg and killed him. Reg died in Vinny’s arms. Vinny must’ve lost his head cos this had been his idea and now what; they hadn’t known about the girl and that was his fault too. He freaked out. They all did. Then they heard the dog outside, tied to its kennel. I bet Eddie wished he hadn’t tied it up that night of all nights – a German Shepherd; Vinny said it had a rotten nose and bits of its fur were missing. It wasn’t his idea to set fire to it, it was one of the others’, but no one’s thinking and there was blood all over and Reg was dead, so they did it. They strung Eddie up and made his girl watch her dog getting burned. Eddie watched her watching the dog.
It had been Vinny’s decision to go, even if it wasn’t his decision to do what they did, and he might’ve been a lot of things, but he wasn’t a coward. He took the hit with the police – he had nothing to lose, no family to look after, he already had a record, so it might as well have been him. Like I said, if he was loyal to you, he was loyal. At the end of the day it was a dog; he got a couple of years then out. But there’s something in the fire, right? And in making the girl watch. Yes, there’s something in that.
People can say what they want about Vinny and maybe he did have a bad side. Don’t we all? If we’re pushed hard enough, if something makes us lose our heads, all I’m saying is, don’t we all?
After Reg died, Vinny wanted out. That was the last time. He wanted to be better and he knew he could be. I knew it too.
Here. Vinny included this poem with the last letter he sent. You can make of it what you will. When Trident asked me if I’d had anything from him during that time, I said I hadn’t. I knew I’d never see it again otherwise. But the more years pass, the more I doubt that Vinny even wrote it. He was into his poetry; he loved words. He thought the poems made him look soft – but how good is it that a man with no education can put things down on paper like that?
The thing is, this isn’t the kind of thing he wrote. I can’t explain. It just isn’t, if you knew him. He sent me love poems from time to time but you’re not getting your hands on those. This one’s different. He said he talked to the PK a lot about poetry. I think Arthur was the one who wrote it, got Vinny to put it down, I don’t know. That’s just what I think.
Vinny always knew his past would trip him up. He thought that whatever he did and however fast he did it that past would always be there, waiting for him. And it did, that’s the saddest bit of it. It did wait for him. That he’d had that time on the lights at sea, thinking he could be free. It’s like a bird in a bloody cage, isn’t it, it’s fine while it’s in the cage but then as soon as you let it out it sees what it’s been missing. It sees it wa
sn’t ever meant for this, and its wings don’t work after all.
46
[Address withheld]
10 September 1992
Dear Mr Sharp,
Thank you for your letters dated 12 June and 30 July. It’s taken me some time to reply, for which I apologize. My work under Trident House at the time of the Maiden Rock Vanishing is a source of some difficulty to me; the matter has long weighed on my conscience and this has both deterred my response to you and finally encouraged it. The secrets kept in the Inner Circle cannot remain secrets forever.
Yes, the Institution does know what happened to the keepers. It’s only between a few of them and I shouldn’t imagine it will ever be widely noted. Whatever your book settles on will become a theory like any other, with neither corroboration nor confirmation from the people who can give it. I can offer you answers, but only in the strictest confidence.
In those days we didn’t talk about the disappearance. I was employed by one of the Elder Fellows and was encouraged, to put it mildly, to turn a blind eye and deaf ear to all I saw and heard. It could never be acknowledged. Even after I terminated my engagement with Trident House, I still don’t like to see a lighthouse any more.
Trident has a version of what happened based on the evidence they shared with the public. To all intents and purposes, they blamed it on the Supernumerary Assistant Keeper and that remains to this day the party line. They would never admit the truth. That it wasn’t anything on the outside that did it, but rather the nature of the work itself.