Dark Tides (16 page)

You’ve had one question at the front of your mind for the past twelve months, one question that’s been with you every minute of every day. Who should be next?

And the answer is that you haven’t decided yet. Which is not to say that you haven’t made a decision, it’s just that the conclusion you’ve reached is that you shouldn’t plan in so much detail.

That’s where you went wrong last year. On reflection, that’s what detracted from your enjoyment. The real rush? You found that in the things you couldn’t control. It was in the ways you adapted and reacted on the night, in the moment. It was seeing fate reward you by placing Claire at the scene.

So the thrill now, the buzz you’re feeling, is because it could be any one of them today. And it could happen in any number of ways. You have a lot of equipment at your disposal. You have a host of opportunities. You have a completely open mind.

And really, with a mind like yours, isn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?

Rachel and I were sitting alongside Callum in the front of his minibus. The vinyl bench seat was scuffed with mud, the footwell gritty with sand. The interior stank of the damp wetsuits that were stashed in a plastic container on a seat behind us. Whenever we sped round a corner too fast, I could hear equipment sliding around in the back.

Callum had been running his own outdoor activities business for almost three years now. Six months before Scott’s death, a group of colleagues had talked me into going sea kayaking as part of a bonding exercise and the officer in charge of the trip had booked with Callum’s firm. I’d showed up at the rendezvous point in Peel, close to Fenella Beach, sick with nerves and fitful hope, only to find that Callum had arranged for another instructor to lead our session at the last minute. I guessed he must have seen my name on the booking form.

Amazing how things had changed. The four of us had talked about getting together and doing something in Scott’s memory, and while I’m pretty sure that three of us had been thinking of going to a pub and drinking the day away, Callum had other ideas. He’d said we’d only get mawkish and depress one another. I reckoned he was probably right and didn’t especially care, but Rachel and David had come around to Callum’s point of view.

Now that David had bailed, I’d started to wonder if our plans might alter. I had three days off, and the prospect of drinking myself into an emotional black hole, with a couple of days to recover, held an undeniable appeal. Besides, I felt uncomfortable about the adventure Callum had planned for us. It had echoes of the old days. Felt, in some ways, as if it were just another stupid dare.

I’d said as much to Rachel once we’d climbed into the minibus cab. We had a few minutes to ourselves because Callum had stayed outside to make a call on his mobile.

‘We can’t pull out now,’ Rachel told me, watching Callum through the windscreen. ‘He’ll be crushed.’

‘I’m just not sure I can do it.’

‘Neither am I. But it’ll be fun finding out.’

Fun was the last thing I felt like I needed, but I could already tell that Rachel didn’t get where I was coming from – or preferred not to. It wasn’t only the activity that daunted me. It was whether it was appropriate in the first place.

She hooked her arm through my elbow. ‘If Scott was here, you know he’d want to do it.’

She was right. He would. But that was no recommendation. The reason Scott wasn’t here was because of his recklessness. It was crazy to suggest we should follow his example.

But before I could argue any further, Callum ended his call and walked around the front of the minibus to open the driver’s door. He’d tugged a woollen hat over his head. It was black, the same colour as his fleece. He’d let the stubble grow dense around his lean face and it gave him the appearance of a backwoodsman, or maybe a hunter.

‘Anyway, I need a new hobby.’ Rachel nudged me as Callum hauled himself into the cab behind the wheel. ‘Maybe this could be it.’

There was no misinterpreting what she meant. She wasn’t talking about the activity Callum had planned for us. She was talking about Callum himself.

I gave her a look. The look said:
No
.
This is a terrible idea
.
We both know he still likes you and it’s cruel to string him along
.

She gave me a look in return. One that said:
Don’t care. I’m going to do it anyway.

She smiled super-sweetly and shuffled over to cosy up to Callum, resting her head on his arm as he twisted the key in the ignition and accelerated away, and I turned from them to watch the glassy waters of the reservoir slide backwards out of view.

Now I was staring out of my window again, chewing my thumbnail. We were speeding towards the south of the island and I should have been listening to Callum, paying attention to the safety tips and advice he was giving out. But I was thinking instead about what Edward Caine had said to me. I was thinking about Dad.

I didn’t buy into what Edward had implied. I didn’t believe for one second that Dad could have killed Mum. He’d been wrecked by what had happened to her. He’d been broken even worse than me. I’d made a pretence of recovery. I’d gone on with my life, even if it often felt as if I was just playing a role, acting out an existence that didn’t truly reflect the life I would have led if Mum hadn’t disappeared. Dad was different. He’d never bothered with the charade. He hadn’t been in a serious relationship since Mum had vanished. He lived in the same house. Slept in the same bed. And today, like every Hop-tu-naa for the past seventeen years, he’d follow the same routine.

Except, as I’d discovered when I’d called round to see him after leaving the Caine mansion, his routine had been disrupted.

I found him sitting in the kitchen, the radio playing in the background with news of the clean-up operation in the United States following Hurricane Sandy. He was wearing the luminous orange jacket from his most recent job as a docker for the Steam Packet ferry company. His hair was bedraggled, his face pale and unshaven. The laces of his steel-cap work boots were untied. He was smoking a cigarette, and when I entered the room, he crooked his arm and shielded the packet as if he was trying to hide it from me.

‘Dad?’

I was holding a bouquet of fresh lilies and the plastic wrapping crinkled in my grip. Dad’s eyes were wet and pink behind the thread of smoke rising up from the cigarette.

‘Since when do you smoke?’

‘Since about an hour ago.’ His voice sounded hollow. ‘One of the other dockers gave them to me.’

‘Why?’

‘Said I looked like I needed them.’

‘And do you?’

‘Damn eyes are stinging.’ He bowed his head and shook it ruefully, pinching the bridge of his nose. ‘Thought I’d just sit here and smoke the whole pack. Make myself ill.’

I could see two cigarettes stubbed out in a saucer just in front of him.

‘You’ve got a while to go yet. Feeling nauseous?’

‘Just angry.’

He looked it, too. I clicked off the radio.

‘What happened?’

He took a long draw on the cigarette.

‘Got fired.’

‘What for?’

‘Punching one of the supervisors.’ He coughed and thumped his chest, gesturing at me with the lit cigarette. ‘You’ll hear about it soon enough. Guess one of your lot will be coming to talk to me. Pretty sure I broke his nose.’

I looked down then and saw that Dad hadn’t been trying to hide the cigarette packet from me at all. He’d been concealing his right hand. It was swollen, the knuckles blown, the skin grazed and weeping.

‘Oh, Dad.’

I dumped the flowers on the kitchen counter and moved over to the sink. I wetted a tea towel with cold water, then pressed it against his knuckles.

‘Can you move your fingers?’

He winced. ‘Not all of them.’

‘You’ll have to go to A&E.’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Dad, this is serious.’

‘Tomorrow.’ But this time he couldn’t quite finish the word before his shoulders started to quake. He dropped the cigarette, pressing his face into his upper arm.

I waited for him to calm, holding the cold compress against his hand and rubbing his back. It took him several minutes to compose himself, and when he finally did, he wiped his eyes with his forearm and tried to stand from the table.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Clean myself up.’

I pushed him back down. ‘Not until you tell me what’s happened, Dad.’

And so he finally did, in fits and starts, in broken sentences and bitter curses. He said he’d been put on a shift pattern that had meant he’d have to work today. He’d tried explaining why he couldn’t, but his supervisor – a guy he’d never got along with and who’d been promoted only a few months back – had ignored him and put him down for the shift anyway. He’d even called first thing to make sure Dad showed up at work. So Dad had got out of bed and pulled on his work clothes and walked down to the Sea Terminal. He’d marched right into the supervisor’s office and punched him hard in the face.

This wasn’t the first time Dad had got into a fight around Mum’s anniversary. He’d always had a fierce temper but come October he sometimes erupted with a terrible rage he seemed unable to control. His anger was never directed at me – where I was concerned, he’d long been calm and indulgent to the point of my own frustration – but he was quick to react if he felt that Mum was being disrespected in some way.

‘It’s your mum’s day,’ he told me, but he couldn’t quite look at me as he said it. ‘I shouldn’t be working.’

‘Life has to go on, Dad.’

‘Not today, it doesn’t. Not today.’

I let him go then. Let him walk upstairs and close the bathroom door. Listened to the noise of the water running through the pipes.

I reached for my mobile and called the station to get some sense of what might be going on. It didn’t take me long to find out that the man Dad had punched had already reported the incident. A unit was on its way to pick Dad up. I managed to speak to the section sergeant on duty and arrange to take Dad in myself tomorrow. I had to tell him why, of course. Had to give away another little piece of myself.

When I ended the call, I glanced down at the pack of cigarettes and thought about lighting one of my own. I was worried about Dad, but more than that, I was troubled by the way Edward’s words kept thrashing around in my head.

Then I think you should speak with your father, Claire. I think you should ask him the same question you came here to ask me.

I didn’t think I could bring myself to do it – and certainly not now – but that didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about it, and one thought bothered me above all others. I was remembering the alibi Dad had given me in the days after Mark’s attack on Edward.

I told Jennifer that I was here with you all night. I told her we were flicking through some old family photos of your mother until you fell asleep some time after midnight and I pulled a blanket over you on the sofa.

And thinking about that gift from Dad, that willingness to protect me at all costs, made me think of something else: I was Dad’s alibi on the night Mum had vanished. I remembered talking to DC Knox and a uniformed female officer in my bedroom a few days after Mum had gone. I remembered telling them how Dad had stayed home with me. I remembered that I was careful not to mention how Dad had rowed with Mum before she’d left, how I’d heard him pacing and slamming cupboard doors downstairs. I remembered telling them how Dad had come up and stuck his head into my bedroom that night and watched me for a brief moment, thinking I was asleep. I’d whispered goodnight to him and he’d smiled ruefully and told me to close my eyes. But what had happened after that, I honestly couldn’t say, because I’d drifted off into a world of dreams and nightmares that it still sometimes felt as if I hadn’t fully woken from. Could he have left the house? Could he have gone out after Mum? Had his temper got the better of him that night?

I gazed over at the bouquet of lilies Dad would be taking down to Port St Mary later today. I wouldn’t go with him. I knew it would break me. And truth be told, I wasn’t sure it helped Dad much, either. But he’d do it all the same. He’d do it because he was a good man, a good husband, and because he was a good son who knew that it made Nan feel a little better if he make-believed that the ritual was soothing to him. Later, though, he’d come home by himself and he’d sit in front of the unlit television screen in the lounge, pretending nobody was in to answer the calls of any kids singing for sweets, his lost wife stubbornly refusing, yet again, to reappear. And who did that but someone torn by true grief?

So why had Edward said what he had? Why had he planted this sick thought in my mind? Because he was mean, I told myself. Because he spent long hours confined to his bed, in a child’s room that was too cold and too bright for him, engaged in some senseless battle of wills with his son, and how else could he get his kicks besides tormenting me? I’d always known that he was cruel. I’d sensed it as a child. And I knew for a fact that he was a liar because he’d condemned Mark to a longer prison sentence by claiming that he’d broken into his home with the shotgun.

I knew all that. I felt it to be true. I despised and feared him more than anyone else on this earth. I didn’t know if he’d killed Mum. I didn’t know how or why he would have done it, but as far as I was concerned, he’d always be responsible for her death. He’d caused it. Not me. Not Dad. The only reason Mum had left the safety of our home that night was because he’d made her.

And yet, despite how much I hated myself for it, the same question kept repeating itself in my head: could Dad be this messed up, this broken, not because of whatever dark fate had befallen Mum, but because he’d had some hand in it, some terrible complicity that couldn’t be undone?

It was drizzling by the time we bumped along the single-lane track running through the hamlet of Cregneash. Part of the hamlet was a living museum dedicated to preserving traditional Manx culture, and the knot of thatched and whitewashed cottages were blurred in the fine rain, puffs of blackened smoke rising up from wonky chimneys. Scrawny chickens pecked at a muddy yard while a group of schoolchildren walked by in raincoats and wellington boots. A woman in historical clothing was directing the children towards a blacksmith’s barn where a team of museum workers were waiting to show them how to carve their own turnip lanterns for Hop-tu-naa.

Hearing the rumble of the minibus engine, the woman raised her head and looked at us. In her thick woollen skirt, woven waistcoat and white cotton bonnet, she looked like the inhabitant of some remote settlement that had been cut off from the modern world for centuries past, and her hostile expression suggested that she didn’t welcome our intrusion.

Callum parked at the top of the headland and we stepped out into the fine rain and a buffeting wind. He fitted rucksacks to our backs, taking a little longer than was necessary to make sure Rachel’s straps were correctly aligned. The packs were loaded up with all the gear we’d need. There was a lot more equipment than I’d anticipated and the straps bit into my shoulders as we climbed over a stile and then hiked down a sloping field that was carpeted in western gorse and heather. I could see the swollen mound of Spanish Head and the Chicken Rock lighthouse to our right, the low buildings of Castletown and the lights of the airport runway far off on our left.

Ahead of us, in a shallow compression at the base of the field, lay a derelict grey building with bricked-up windows. The word
CHASMS
was just legible in faded white paint across the bare concrete exterior. At one time, the place had been a cafe, but for as long as I’d been alive it had been little more than a shelter, abandoned to the wind and rain and whatever else nature cared to throw at it.

Callum paced ahead of us, a coiled red rope slung diagonally around his neck and waist. He was moving with confidence and purpose. He was excited about what we were going to do.

I turned to Rachel, my pack lurching round and almost pulling me from my feet. The gradient of the field was very steep and the muddy pathway was slippery.

Rachel was wearing a bright green outdoor jacket over light denim jeans and colourful hiking boots. The jacket was spotless and looked expensive. Her blonde hair was held back from her face by a green head warmer. Her entire outfit looked as if it had been planned and co-ordinated in considerable detail. Everything Rachel wore always did.

As usual, I felt like a tramp in comparison. I hadn’t had time to shower before leaving my flat. My hair was a mess that I’d opted to hide beneath a red bobble hat, my jeans were black and faded, my leather hiking boots were caked in dried mud, and the coat I had on over my fleece was little more than a thin nylon rain mac.

‘Great bum,’ Rachel commented.

‘Thanks.’

‘I was talking about Callum.’

I sighed and shook my head. ‘So are you going to tell me the real reason why David’s not here?’

‘I told you. He phoned me and said he had to work.’

‘I know that’s what he said, but what’s really going on? It’s me, isn’t it?’

‘Self-absorbed, much?’

I threw up my hands. Not easy with all the weight that was bearing down on me.

‘He’s been acting really strangely around me, Rach. He’s fine with you. Fine with Callum. But when I’m there, he clams up.’

‘I haven’t noticed.’

‘Oh, come on, what is it? I know he was pissed off about how I broke up with him. But we were just kids, Rach.’

I’d ended things between us in a brief letter from uni. And yes, it had been a coward’s way out, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. We’d barely talked in the weeks following the attack on Edward, and when we did speak, it was only by phone. David had tried to meet up with me a couple of times before I left the island but by then I couldn’t handle seeing him. The rest of us had severed links so abruptly and so completely that I’d just assumed David would want the same thing.

Turned out I was wrong. He’d finally confronted me a month or so after Scott’s funeral. He said I’d broken his heart, which is about as clichéd as it gets, but unfortunately didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. He also told me Mark had lost it with Edward so badly because it was obvious he had feelings for me. Worse than that, though, was the expression he claimed to have seen on my face.

‘You looked so grateful to him. So
understood
. I should have seen it for myself. It took me years to fully understand.’ He’d stared at me then, the hurt and disbelief distorting his features. ‘You loved him for it,’ he said, and in a moment of dawning clarity, I saw that perhaps he was right.

Next to me, Rachel groaned dramatically, but I wouldn’t be deflected.

‘You’re his cousin. He must have said something more to you.’

‘OK, fine.’ She grabbed hold of her rucksack’s shoulder straps as if it was a parachute and she was about to jump out of a plane. ‘He did say something to me. But don’t get all hung up on it because he was in a bad mood when I talked to him. He was being a total drama queen.’

‘Just tell me.’

‘He said something about how he doesn’t like the person he becomes when he’s around us. He doesn’t like how we make him feel. See? I told you it was crazy. It’s not like he mutates or something.’

But it wasn’t crazy to me. Sometimes, being with the others reminded me of those things I was most ashamed of, and it wasn’t hard to believe David might experience something similar. Maybe hanging out with us made him think back to how Edward had grabbed his leg and how he’d kicked him to get free. And sure, the real damage had been done by Mark before then, but perhaps it shocked him to know what he was capable of. Perhaps he was scared by the darkness inside himself.

‘Besides,’ Rachel went on, ‘I know he doesn’t hate you, if that’s what you’re worried about.’

‘If you say so.’

‘You’re serious? You really need me to spell it out?’

The path was getting increasingly treacherous. We turned sideways to face one another and crabbed downwards, the rain spattering into us.

‘You’re clueless, Claire, you know that? You’ve been single how many years now?’

I didn’t answer because there was really no need. She already knew there hadn’t been anyone serious since David, and I’d never confided in her about the fling I’d had with Mark and the confusion of emotions I felt towards him. Truth was, none of us ever mentioned Mark. If we didn’t talk about him, then he didn’t exist. And if he didn’t exist, then we couldn’t have let him down so badly. As far as I knew, I was still the only one to have visited or written to him. My letters had become less frequent since I’d spoken to him a year ago. I’d sent the last one a month back, telling him of our plans to commemorate Scott. He hadn’t replied.

‘One day, Cooper, it’s finally going to dawn on you how gorgeous you are.’ The wind whirled in my ears but I could still hear the slurp of our boots in the mud. ‘One day you’ll see what’s been staring you in the face all these years.’

‘And what’s that exactly?’

‘You’re the detective, Claire. You figure it out.’

Rachel turned from me and hurried on, her rucksack swinging wildly from her hips, her arms spread wide to prevent her from falling. I watched her go. Watched her slip and slide towards Callum, then barge into him and grab him round the waist and lower her hand to squeeze his backside. I could have caught up to her. Could have hauled her round and made her tell me what she meant. But I had a reasonable enough idea already.

Question was, was it true? Did David have feelings for me? Did he want us to get back together? He hadn’t said anything to me about that. He hadn’t given me any indication that he was still interested. So perhaps it was all in Rachel’s head. Or perhaps she was simply trying to make me feel better about David’s no-show.

Either way, I wasn’t going to waste my afternoon dwelling on it. I had more immediate things to worry about, starting with the sign Callum was pointing towards.

The sign was fitted to a low wooden gate just in front of the derelict former cafe. The gate was in the middle of a stretch of dry stone wall that bisected a portion of headland. Tufts of sheep wool had become trapped on a length of barbed wire running along the top of the wall.

‘Read this,’ Callum said. ‘Consider it your safety briefing.’