by Danuta Kot
She looked towards the closed entrance and shivered. Just for a moment, her armour slipped, and she looked scared.
‘They’ve gone. They wouldn’t hang around if the police were on their way. I think we’re OK.’
She pointed at the waterproof. ‘OK, give me that.’
Jared unlaced the tent flaps and she squeezed out, coming back ten minutes later making faces and shaking the wet off her like a discontented cat.
While she was gone, Jared had been thinking. ‘That car – did it follow you from Brid?’
‘I don’t know. No. There wasn’t anyone really. I stopped at a friend’s house in some kind of, you know, village kind of thing. Lythe. Then –’ her eyes closed as she thought back – ‘it wasn’t until I got off that hill – they call it a main road if you want to believe that. One minute the road was empty, next minute . . .’
‘I was just wondering how they knew it was you if they hadn’t followed you.’
‘But why? I mean, yeah, if you’re that kind of moron, a girl drives past, you tailgate her and all that, but – why would they be looking for me?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to work out. You said someone had vandalised your car. And someone sent me those pictures, right?’
‘And then they try to drive me off the road. That’s . . .’ She frowned as the implications sank in.
‘They probably didn’t mean for you to crash. They were trying to get you to stop. Then . . .’ He remembered the feel of the girl’s hand in his, how she’d gripped it, and the faint moans as she lay there in the darkness.
Becca was watching him. ‘What?’ she said.
‘Look, it might be a coincidence. I don’t know why anyone would be going after you – well, you’d know better than me, but I do know there’s something pretty bad going on down near Brid. It was me who found that girl – there was something I didn’t tell you. They really trashed her.’
Becca looked stricken. ‘Paige . . .’
‘You know who it is now? You know it’s your friend?’ When he met her at Ashville Street, after the police interview, she hadn’t been sure.
‘It must be. Who else?’
So she still wasn’t certain.
‘Listen. There’s something I need to show you. It’s important.’
‘OK.’ He suspected she’d deliberately changed the subject.
She rummaged in her bag and pulled out a small tablet. ‘You know you said you went in a small side tunnel . . .’
‘Near here.
Yes.’
‘Look at this.’
The screen displayed a video. He clicked play and watched as the wobbly camera moved across a moon-scape of serpentine mounds, listening to the breathy, fragmented tune. He did that himself in tough places, whistled to keep his mind focused, to stop it from going places he didn’t want it to. The camera took him inexorably into darkness and then looked out across a strange, luminescent pool. He watched the hand dip into the water, then form the stained, dripping fragment of fabric into a flower.
‘Shit.’ He was staring at the dark screen. And again. ‘Shit.’
‘It gets worse.’ Becca sounded almost buoyant at his response. She’d been alone with this and she must have expected him to dismiss it as some kind of joke. She told him about the woman in Lythe – her foster-mother, an elderly woman, who, for reasons Becca didn’t explain, had been messing about near the tunnels around the time he’d gone in.
‘The same tune? Are you sure?’
‘And I’ve heard it – a couple of times. Someone at the drop-in . . .’
He leaned back on the cushions and closed his eyes. The significance of what she had just shown him, and what she was telling him, was just beginning to sink in. He could remember the debris falling around him, remember thinking it was a roof fall and he was going to die. But there hadn’t been a body. The police had said.
But . . . if the flower was real, then what about the rest of it? Maybe there had been a body. And between his fall, and the police arriving a few hours later, someone – somehow – had hidden it.
He could still see the face that had leaped out at him in the flickering blue light. What had seemed like a snarl could have been the exposed teeth of a skull. And the mask across the eyes, the shadows of empty sockets, a face skeletonised before its time. ‘Jesus.’
‘What?’
‘I thought it was all in my head. I saw some things in the tunnel. The air was bad. I thought I was seeing things. If it was real . . .’
‘If what was real? What are you talking about?’
‘I thought I saw a body. A dead woman. And . . .’ He really didn’t want to admit this because it just sounded crazy, but . . . ‘And a flower, you know, sort of silk . . . like that one. It looked like that in the . . .’ In the same blue, flickering light.
They both sat in silence, then Becca said, ‘The video?’
‘I don’t know, but I think it must be one of the old mines or tunnels round here. We need to go and find it.’
Chapter 35
The cry of a gull woke Jared. It was still too dark to see much. He stretched and was about to greet the day with a prolonged fart when he remembered he had a guest. No living like a slob now. Becca was just a mound in the tent’s shadows. He tested his back, his shoulders, his leg – a few twinges, nothing to worry about. Moving carefully so as not to disturb her, he slid out of his sleeping bag and edged his way carefully out of the tent.
The temperature had dropped during the night and the air felt crisp and sharp. The frozen grass glimmered white in the light of the setting moon. He could hear the sea, a restless surging as it washed against the cliffs. The field edge was marked by low scrubland that he knew fell away down the crumbling coast to end in a sheer drop. Beyond the edge, there was just darkness.
He walked back across the field to where they’d left Becca’s car the night before, the ground crunching under his feet, loud in the silence. Using his torch, he carried out a quick external check. There was no obvious damage. He got down to look at the undercarriage, wincing as his back delivered a stab of pain. He needed a pill. No, he didn’t. What he needed was a clear head.
He could manage.
The car looked sound as far as he could tell – everything looked intact.
He remained crouched down, thinking. Last night, the people who had driven Becca off the road had come back to look for her. It might have been altruism – some idiot boy racer wanting to make sure she wasn’t hurt – but Jared didn’t find that explanation very convincing. For some reason, someone had it in for Becca, and until they could work out why, it made sense not to stick around and find out the hard way.
He stood up, releasing the strain on his back. Why ‘they’? From Becca’s dramatic arrival late last night, her car skidding across the field and lurching to a halt, he’d thought about this as ‘their’ problem. But it wasn’t. It was Becca someone was after, Becca who was being trolled, Becca who had been run off the road.
A dull ache began low down in his back and the first stirrings of nausea started in his gut. Shit! He dug in his pocket, feeling a surge of relief as his fingers encountered the pill box. He didn’t have his flask – a slug of whisky helped the pills to work – but a couple of pills on their own would do the trick. He swallowed two dry, hesitated, then took two more.
As he did it, he made his decision. He hadn’t asked for this, but neither had Becca. Nor had the girl at the caravan site. All she’d asked for was help. And so had Becca, in her own spiky way. He could walk away, tell himself it was OK if anything bad happened because he was sorry. Or he could do something before it was too late.
Becca might be tough and resourceful, but the people in the car had been able to take her off the road without any difficulty. If he hadn’t been here, she would have been left to face them on her own, hurt, with no way to hide.
They’d be back, but he knew how to keep them both out of the way and he knew how to survive. Wasn’t that what his father ha
d taught him?
Until he fucked up.
That didn’t matter now. What mattered was keeping Becca safe until they could work out what was happening.
When he got back to the tent, Becca was sitting up, rubbing her eyes. ‘It’s freezing,’ she complained when he crawled back in through the tent flap.
‘It’s January,’ he said. ‘And there’s a frost. Go and stand out there for ten minutes, then it’ll feel warm in here.’
She didn’t bother replying, but burrowed down inside the sleeping bag again.
Jared lit the lamp, opened the front of the tent a bit and lit the stove. As he sat there, waiting for the water to boil, he could feel the pills start to soothe the ache in his back. The knot of anxiety in his stomach began to loosen, and he leaned back and let the sounds of the early dawn wash over him. If only it could always be like this.
He poured the water into the mugs and prodded the hump that was Becca. ‘Tea?’
She crawled out again and took the proffered drink. ‘Thanks.’ She spooned some sugar in and sat up, wrapping her hands round it for warmth, her face unreadable. ‘What time is it?’
‘Six thirty. We need to get moving. I had a look at your car. I think it’s OK, but you’ll need to try it.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You want some breakfast? Weetabix? Toast?’
She made a face but didn’t respond. Clearly not a morning person. ‘Up to you. Look, we need to get out of here. Those guys could be back. Most of my stuff’s packed up anyway. Yours . . .’ He felt the jeans and top she’d been wearing the night before. ‘These are still wet. We need to get moving.’
Her chin lifted. ‘You don’t have to worry. I’m not going to hang around and make trouble. If I can get the car started, I’ll go back to Brid.’
‘Jesus Christ, Becca. You come flying in here last night with the Black Riders on your heels and stories of videos and bodies in tunnels and now you’re all “I’m going back to Brid.” What’s that about?’ He was angry with himself as much as with her. It would be so easy just to let her go, let her take all the trouble away with her.
‘Yeah. And you’re all like, “Got to get a move on, got to go, your bag’s packed, your car’s ready when you are.” I don’t need you to tell me what to do.’
He threw himself back onto the sleeping mat. He didn’t know whether to laugh or to yell at her. He was trying to be one of the good guys, for fuck’s sake. ‘I just went across the field and looked at your fucking car. I thought it was going to be a tow job and I didn’t know how we were going to manage that. You’ll need to try it, but it looks fine. That’s a good news story, right? How you get from there to Get lost I have no idea and I don’t care, but don’t start giving me a hard time about it, right?’
She glared at her mug of tea. After a few moments, she said, ‘Have you got cornflakes?’
‘Where does it say five-star hotel?’
‘Just asking. Can I have some toast then?’
OK, she might jump down your throat for a dodgy intonation on a ‘Good morning’, but at least she didn’t sulk.
As she ate her toast, he tried to focus through his pill-induced brain-fuzz. ‘What I said before was right. We need to move on from here. I think they’ll be back, but not until it gets light. We need to lose your car – for the moment,’ he added as she opened her mouth to object. ‘They know it. We might be able to leave it here – there’s a place up beyond the car park where it’ll be OK for a while.’ There was something wrong here, something he was missing, but the more he tried to pin it down, the more elusive it became.
She chewed her lip, thinking it over, then gave a reluctant nod. ‘OK. What about the rest?’
‘We could go to the police. Show them what we’ve got.’
‘No! I don’t trust them.’ Her face was closed. ‘Paige left the video for me, not for the police.’
Maybe she was right. What would the police do? The video didn’t show much – an entrance in the cliff side and the flower. Becca was certain the video was connected to the attack on her friend, but where was the link? It was just weird events happening together. And the thing he’d seen in the tunnel. Don’t forget that. But he had no proof, and the police had found nothing.
Becca’s friend had gone off in a car with a couple of dodgy-sounding men who’d talked about a ‘party’. One of the caravan site parties that had been going on night after night? Was that the ‘party’ they’d been talking about, and did that mean there was a link between the drop-in where Becca worked and the caravan site? Even if there was, why the attack? Why trash a young girl so comprehensively?
‘Your foster-mum. When was she at the tunnel?’
Becca frowned, thinking back. ‘She said . . . it was like Matt’s tune. Like she thought it might be him, you know?’
‘Matt?’
‘Her husband. He died. It was the anniversary of his death.’
‘Can you remember the date?’ Jared kept his opinions about whistling ghosts to himself, but something must have showed on his face because her eyes narrowed.
‘Course I can. He was my foster-dad.’
‘Oh, for . . . yeah, OK, I’m sorry. So what date was it?’
‘The tenth. And it would have been— She said it was after three. It was getting dark.’
The tenth. That had been the day he’d almost killed himself in that same tunnel. But where did that get them? It was light enough now to manage without the lamp so he reached out and turned it off. Then he realised.
Daylight. Shit! He’d let her story distract him. Get a grip! ‘We need to get moving. We can talk about this later.’
To his relief, she didn’t argue. She stood up and reached for the clothes he’d lent her the night before. He turned his back to give her some privacy, and started clearing up his own stuff. He used to be organisation guy when he camped – the way his father had taught him. It had made sense then, and it made sense now. He wasn’t a natural slob. It was just since . . .
Since . . .
What happened, mate? How did you get it so wrong? Once she was ready, he pulled the stuff out of the tent and collapsed it. ‘Come on. Let’s get your car moved first.’ He headed across the rough ground as fast as he could, Becca stumbling behind him in unsuitable shoes. The car was a silhouette against the pre-dawn light. The sky was glowing over the sea, the clouds a fanfare of colour to welcome the day. How early would they come? And they would come, he was more and more certain.
He waited for Becca to catch up. ‘Give me your keys. I’ll go over. If there’s anyone there, then I’m just some dozy walker going for a stroll. If it’s safe, you can come and we can get the car out of sight.’
Again, he had that feeling he was missing something. Too bad. He couldn’t wait.
He walked across to the car and circled it, looking round. The road was empty in both directions, and there was no sign of movement in the still dawn. But he could feel it: a prickle of apprehension running down his spine, the hairs starting to rise on his neck. If they weren’t here, they weren’t far away.
He waved Becca across. ‘Come on. We need to get moving. Let me drive – I know this road.’ He unlocked the door and slid into the driver’s seat. It was cramped for him and he lost a minute working out how to adjust the seat. She hadn’t been able to get it started the night before, but with luck, all she’d done was flood the engine. The car was old enough. To his relief, it started on first try. Becca was opening the passenger door, and he was off before she’d fully closed it.
He bumped the car across the field, checking the road as they came out of the gate. It was empty, but there was something . . . On impulse, he turned towards the coast.
‘It’s a dead end,’ Becca protested.
‘We can’t go that way. They’re on the road behind us.’
‘How do you know?’
He shrugged. He could be wrong, but the sixth sense that had always kept him safe – well, reasonably safe – was on full alert. That, at leas
t, was still working.
Past the farm there was the derelict coastguard cottage, the old railway station, a turning place and a small car park. Jared took the car beyond this point, bumping across rough ground and round more farm buildings, hoping he’d remembered right. They were on a grassy track where a dilapidated cottage stood, empty so far as Jared knew. He drove past it, then pulled the car round onto rough ground so that it was concealed behind the building.
If they came looking, they’d find it, but with luck, they wouldn’t look this far.
Now they had to get back. ‘Let’s just keep this side of the wall,’ he said as he started to lead the way back to the farm. Becca followed, but her shoes were slipping in the mud. He was being over-cautious. They’d be fine on the path for a couple of minutes. He was just about to suggest it when he heard the sound his ears had been alert for: a car. He pushed Becca down and listened, but he couldn’t locate the direction it was coming from.
Close by – he couldn’t tell exactly where, but past the field, near the farm. He touched her arm and could feel the tension. ‘Stay down. I’ll go and check,’ he whispered. He wanted them to see the car had gone, wanted them to think Becca had left last night and was far away by now.
She nodded reluctantly. Jared took the path towards the cliff and followed it round to the field where his tent had been pitched. He picked up his stuff and went to find his car, which was parked behind the farm buildings. He was just packing everything into the boot when he heard the sound of an engine, and a car bumping along the rough track towards him.
Jared stiffened. Natural. Act natural. He looked up and as the car rolled to a halt next to him, he breathed again. It was the farmer’s mud-spattered Land Rover. Two border collies panted eagerly from a trailer.
‘Morning,’ Jared said.
The farmer wound down the window. ‘Morning. You off, then?’
‘Yeah. I was coming up to the house to tell you. Just for a couple of days. OK if I come back?’ The tunnels and the old mines in the cliffs were still there.