Exit

by Belinda Bauer

  Fast.

  Too fast.

  King and Calvin hung up on the last relative and looked at each other.

  ‘It’s all about the houses,’ she said.

  ‘Skipper left the house to Albert in his will,’ said Calvin, with a buzz of excitement in his belly. ‘Maybe Albert arranged the Exit­eers for him . . .’

  Kirsty King nodded grimly. ‘And then they killed the wrong man . . .’

  The Boat

  Felix walked Mabel along Bideford Quay. He started at the Old Bridge and passed the big steel vessels with Russian names on their bows that were berthed behind the bus stop – as if you only had to show your pass to get a free return to Vladivostok.

  After the Russian ships came the Oldenburg, which took supplies to Lundy, and tourists to see the puffins and ponies. After that the boats grew much smaller – a few pleasure boats, but mostly little trawlers with white decks and brightly coloured hulls, and with rust running down from their rivets into the dark green seawater that found refuge here twice a day.

  As the rising sun warmed his face, Felix led Mabel all the way along the quay, stepping over ropes as thick as his arm, and alongside the park dotted with municipal marigolds, noting how small the boats became here, and how shabby. Increasingly so, until – just when he thought Skipper must be senile – he finally saw the Susanna.

  She was the last boat made fast to what might be deemed the quay, although this far downstream it was no longer an obvious thing with a long drop to the water and shiny black capstans, but a grassy bank with a thick wooden post driven into the mud to hold the boat in place. But it was the Susanna, all right. Her faded name had been painted in black across her sky-blue stern.

  She was a bit of a mess.

  Felix knew nothing about boats, but even he could tell she was no longer seaworthy. Her once-white deck was covered with algae and streaked with rust, and the windows of her little wheelhouse were opaque with dirt and cracked in places. There was a puddle of dirty water in the middle of the deck. There were several coils of greenish rope, and a bundle of filthy fishing net, but – like everything else on board – they were covered with bird droppings. As if to drive home the point, a seagull shouted at him from the top of the mast and spread its wings to warn him off.

  Instead Felix climbed on to the boat.

  He hadn’t planned to, but the tide was low, which meant the transom was only thigh-high, and he’d only recently climbed a tree, so he thought he would certainly be able to climb on to a boat, although even as he did, he had no clear idea of why he would want to in his brogues. The operation was not completed without a wobble or two, and a yap from Mabel, who clearly thought the whole exercise was beyond him. But it wasn’t, because before long Felix was standing on the deck of the Susanna.

  The shore looked different from here, even though he was roped to it and had barely moved a yard. He thought he could have had very much the same view from the bank if he’d just turned around.

  But it felt very different.

  For a start, he now thought of the grassy bank as the shore, when before he’d only thought of it as the grassy bank. The other thing that was different was that the surface under his feet felt so hollow. It was like standing on a big wooden bubble. He could feel the slightest vibration of things against the hull or passing by in the water, as if his ears now started in his feet.

  Felix walked cautiously across the slippery deck, which creaked and bowed a little, and made him think of pirates.

  Arrrr, me hearties!

  He laughed quietly to himself.

  There were big drums with nets and floats still attached to them – frayed and green with algae. He tried the door of the wheelhouse and was surprised to find it open. Anyone could just come in here and steal anything! He stepped inside. It smelled good in here – and bad too. Salty and fishy and wooden. The dashboard was peeling veneer, with a few basic dials set into it. Along the top, old red and black wires showed where electronic equipment had been removed. Felix touched the wheel, which creaked when he turned it. He touched it again, and imagined life on the high seas. Waves crashing over the bow, and turning the Susanna into the wind – or whatever one did in high seas. His entire understanding of seamanship came from Charles Laughton in Mutiny on the Bounty and was therefore a little sketchy.

  The wheelhouse was so small that he only had to turn around to step back on to the deck, and this he did – feeling more like an old hand now as he observed the now-familiar nets and the puddle. Another boat passed slowly up the river and he watched the wake head towards the shore, and put out a hand to steady himself as it made the Susanna bob. The unsteadiness made him feel just a tiny bit drunk. Happy drunk. It was rather fun.

  Mabel yapped again, fussing like his mother. Come OUT of there, Felix! Come DOWN from there, Felix! Get OFF that, Felix!

  When had he stopped doing anything daring? Or had he never done anything daring in the first place? He couldn’t remember, so quite possibly not.

  ‘All right, Mabel,’ he told her, ‘I’m coming,’ and he lifted a leg over the side of the boat.

  But getting off the Susanna was not as easy as getting on it had been. Then he’d stepped down from the bank on to the vessel. Now he was trying to step up from the boat and on to the slope and, whereas the bank had stayed still as he’d left it, the Susanna did not. Another boat passed slowly upstream, and suddenly she was riding little waves up and down and swung a bit away from the land, and the whole affair became fraught with potential disaster.

  Felix straddled the transom and thought how silly he must look in his M&S jacket and his brogues, and with his own dog barking at him.

  He looked around, but there was nobody watching.

  Good.

  He waited for the Susanna to swing herself back against the bank, and although that took a minute, she finally did start to close the distance between herself and dry land.

  Felix licked his lips and waited until he was sure, and then half stepped, half leaned across the divide, but he had no real confidence in the manoeuvre, or commitment to it, and left one leg in the boat while he leaned and leaned and leaned – until he leaned right into the river.

  The Torridge closed over his head and the sky turned yellowy-brown . . .

  Lost at sea!

  Skipper Cann’s words rushed back at him like the ocean . . .

  Then his feet touched mud and he gathered enough purchase to push himself back up to the light. He surfaced, spluttering, with his face in the grass and the Susanna nudging the back of his head. For a horrible second he panicked that she might crush him, but when he put up a hand and pushed her away, she slowed and stopped and then politely withdrew to give him the space to crawl up the bank.

  Except he couldn’t crawl up the bank. It was too steep, and the mud was too soft under his feet, and his hands and arms were those of an old man.

  So Felix just stood there, up to his chest in water and holding on to clumps of grass with both hands, while Mabel barked and barked and barked.

  ‘You all right down there?’

  Felix lifted his head to see a grizzled old chap wearing overalls and wellington boots at the top of the bank.

  ‘Fell in the water,’ he said.

  ‘I see that,’ said the man, and spat casually into the grass. ‘You happy there? Or you want a hand?’

  ‘A hand would be lovely,’ said Felix. ‘Thank you.’

  The old fellow put down the shopping bags he was carrying and edged down the bank on his bottom. He stopped halfway down to pet Mabel, then reached out for Felix, who took his hand. He managed to scale the bank in a series of slippery pulls and humiliating scrambles until they were both sitting on the slope of grass.

  The shore.

  ‘Thank you,’ panted Felix at last.

  ‘No trouble,’ said the man. ‘Trip, did you?’

 
‘No, I was on the boat and then fell in.’

  The old chap squinted at the Susanna. ‘You buying her then?’

  ‘No, no. Just checking on her for a friend.’

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘Skipper Cann.’

  ‘Thought he were dead,’ said the man.

  ‘No, no,’ said Felix. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Cancer, in’t it?’

  ‘I believe so,’ said Felix, and the man squinted at the glittering river.

  ‘No way to go,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ agreed Felix.

  ‘Shoulda died at sea.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Felix, who now felt better qualified for an opinion on the matter. ‘Are you a friend of his?’

  The man got a sparkle in his eye. ‘Well now, at my age I reckon it’s best to be friends with whoever’s left alive, don’t you?’

  ‘I do,’ smiled Felix, and leaned down and tried to wring out his trouser leg, but there was very little point. He just needed to get home and put the whole lot in the wash and himself in a hot bath. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I should go home and get dry. Thanks for your help, Mr . . . ?’

  ‘Chanter,’ said the man. ‘Tovey Chanter.’

  ‘Felix Pink,’ said Felix, and held the man’s hand for the second time in five minutes as they helped each other to their feet.

  ‘All shipshape?’

  Felix nodded down at himself. ‘Miraculously,’ he said. ‘I was very lucky you were so close by.’

  ‘Just passing,’ said Tovey. He picked up his shopping bags and Felix saw that they didn’t contain shopping at all, but were full of odds and sods – old rope, cleats, and pieces of electronics that Felix didn’t recognize, although one of them had a picture of a fish on it.

  ‘You have a boat too?’

  ‘No, no,’ said Tovey, and nodded vaguely down the quay. ‘Working on one for a mate. Doing it up, see? Want to buy a fish-finder?’ He held out a chunky apparatus with dangling wires.

  Felix smiled but shook his head. Then he nodded ruefully at the Susanna. ‘This old girl looks past saving.’

  But Tovey Chanter winked at him and showed off his gappy brown teeth. ‘Nothing’s past saving if you got enough money.’

  The Pill

  Felix got home from Bideford to find that Buttons had claimed the front step as his own and wouldn’t budge – even when he waved his arms and hissed.

  Felix had seen the cat with a large mouse dangling from its mouth a few days ago. It might have been a rat. Frankly, Buttons gave him the creeps, and the fact that he was obviously well able to take care of himself meant that trying to catch him and put him in a box was becoming an increasingly unattractive proposition.

  He decided not to escalate things with Buttons and went around to the back door. That turned out to be a good idea as, rather than traipse muddy river water through the house, Felix emptied his pockets on to the kitchen table and then peeled off his clothes in the kitchen – right down to his underpants – and put them straight in the washing machine. Then he took the beige jacket out again, and looked at the big black mark on it. He had forgotten to get mustard powder, but he had vinegar, so he rubbed some into the mascara stain before feeding it back into the machine and setting it all for a hot wash. He’d be sorry to see the jacket go now, after all they’d been through together. He wondered what Miss Knott would recommend for his brogues, which looked awful. He stuffed them with the Telegraph sports section and left them to dry, then went upstairs and had a hot bath.

  As he dressed in his bedroom, he could see Miss Knott in her garden, lifting daffodil bulbs in the front border.

  On impulse he opened the bedroom window and called, ‘Miss Knott?’

  ‘Yes?’ She got to her feet and looked up and down the street.

  ‘Up here,’ said Felix, and she looked up at the windows of the houses across the street.

  ‘Hello?’ she said, with the wariness of a woman who suspects she’s being taunted.

  Felix was already regretting his boldness. Having flung open the window like Juliet, he was reluctant to give her a clue so familiar as his own name to guide her gaze.

  ‘Next door,’ he said, which sounded awkward and impolite, but at least Miss Knott turned his way and shaded her eyes against the sunlight.

  ‘Oh, hello, Felix!’

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and then stalled. He’d planned to ask her around to see the pill, but it would be the first time he’d had anyone actually in the house since the undertaker, and he wasn’t sure how to ask – or even if he wanted to ask – or how to behave if she did come round . . .

  ‘Did you want something?’ she said.

  ‘No,’ he said, and shut the window.

  Then he opened it again and she was still standing there, looking at him, so he said, ‘Actually I wonder if you would mind popping round? I have something to show you.’

  ‘I’ll just wash my hands,’ she said, and five minutes later, she was in the kitchen, sitting at the kitchen table with Mabel on her lap, as if she’d been doing it for years.

  ‘Margaret never let her do that,’ Felix observed a little nervously. ‘She said it would encourage her to jump up while we were eating.’

  ‘Of course it will.’ Miss Knott said. ‘But how else is she supposed to reach the table?’

  Felix smiled. ‘Would you like tea?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Miss Knott, and peered at the table. ‘I do like a good jigsaw.’

  ‘I’ve rather stalled on that one,’ said Felix. ‘This piece here is the bane of my life.’

  ‘Is it grass?’ said Miss Knott, frowning at it.

  ‘I’m not sure any more,’ said Felix. ‘I’m not even sure it’s from this puzzle.’

  They’d had a teapot once and nice cups, but he couldn’t remember where they were, so he just dropped bags into two mugs.

  ‘I only have custard creams, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Miss Knott.

  By the time he set the mugs down on the table, Miss Knott had put the rogue jigsaw piece into place.

  ‘Oh, bravo!,’ he said.

  ‘It looked like grass,’ said Miss Knott. ‘But it was a reindeer’s bottom.’

  Felix leaned down to examine it. She was right. ‘Marvellous,’ he murmured.

  ‘Every little helps,’ she said modestly. ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’

  ‘Ah yes,’ said Felix. ‘I found this next to Skipper Cann’s bed.’ He picked up the pill from the corner of the table. ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘Looks like Oxycodone,’ she said immediately.

  ‘Is that a kind of morphine?’

  ‘Well, it’s a painkiller, but it’s stronger than morphine in tablet form.’

  Felix decided not to tell Miss Knott that Skipper had washed down two with rum and his blessing.

  ‘It can make you very sleepy and muddled,’ Miss Knott went on.

  ‘Skipper did say he’d fallen asleep the day I . . . when we . . . went into the house . . .’

  ‘If he was taking these, then I’m not surprised,’ she said. ‘Have they been prescribed?’

  ‘I don’t think so. They were in a bottle marked morphine.’

  ‘That’s very worrying,’ she frowned.

  He nodded. ‘I think you were right to be concerned about him.’

  ‘And I think you were brave to go back,’ she said, and Felix felt as pleased with himself as a small boy with a finger-painting on the fridge.

  ‘We’ll have to go to the police now,’ she said. ‘They’ll protect him.’

  Felix fiddled nervously with the puzzle. ‘I’m afraid that’s no longer an option, Miss Knott.’

  Miss Knott pursed her lips. ‘Because you promised this girl?’

  Felix shook his head. ‘Because I promised Skipper.’
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  She nodded slowly. They sat in silence. Their tea cooled, unsipped.

  Finally Miss Knott reached out and covered his hand with hers. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing, Felix,’ she said. Then she placed Mabel gently on the floor, and left.

  Felix sat at the kitchen table and stared at the jigsaw.

  He felt lost.

  Alone.

  Miss Knott hadn’t argued with him – and for that he was grateful, because going back on his promise to Skipper Cann was not an option. But it was plain she felt it was a bad idea – and one she could not support. And, even though she was only a neighbour, he was troubled by that.

  Inexplicably.

  A knock on the door made him jump, and he got up so fast he banged his knee. He didn’t care. ‘Out of the way, Mabel!’

  Miss Knott had come back with a solution. A compromise. A daring plan.

  She’d come back to help him.

  Felix threw open the front door to find a pretty young woman there. Her hair was in a neat ponytail and she was dressed in hi-vis. He glanced down to see which charity she was collecting for. He gave regularly to two charities – Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and the Alzheimer’s Society – but wasn’t averse to giving occasional sums to other worthy causes. However, she didn’t have a bucket.

  ‘Mr Pink?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I’m Police Constable Braddick—’

  Felix almost fainted.

  He swayed precariously, and she quickly stepped over the threshold and caught his arm. ‘Are you all right, sir?’

  He absolutely wasn’t. He’d been expecting this moment for what felt like for ever, but now it had arrived he couldn’t catch his breath and his legs were like jelly. Things seemed to slow right down and there was a rushing, roaring noise, as if all the blood in his head was falling past his ears and into his feet.

  The officer walked him gently backwards into the hallway with the yellow woodchip on the walls and lowered him on to the telephone seat. He bumped it and the memo pad fell to the floor, and she trod on the pencil with the little gold tassel and broke it in two.