Dark Tides (19 page)

Your entire body is shaking. You’re sweating profusely and short of breath. Your intestines are clenching and unclenching. This is excitement. It’s exhilaration.

At first, you were horrified when Callum and Rachel abseiled together. You’d been prepared to attack whoever was left on their own at the top – maybe even force them off the cliff altogether – and you were afraid that you’d missed your opportunity. But then you understood that things were going your way again. The universe really was on your side. And how elegant to cut a single rope and leave it to fate to decide what happened next.

You had to respond very swiftly when the opening presented itself and the truth is that this time you’ve excelled. You only had a handful of seconds to react and you still found the time to improvise. Like with the empty beer bottle that you scooped up and carried with you to smash until you had a suitably jagged edge.

The only thing that saddens you is that you couldn’t look down. You couldn’t crawl to the opening of the chasm and see the havoc you’d unleashed. But it helps that you were able to hear some of what followed. And there are other consolations and accomplishments to take pleasure in. Such as what you’re doing right now, for instance. Your final improvisation and, quite possibly, your best yet.

I checked the knot on the red rope that I’d attached to my climbing harness. Still secure. I made sure the rope was untangled and then I tied it off around a splintered rock cleft in the facing wall.

You don’t need to teach us. We won’t be doing this again.

I wish.

I leant back and tugged as hard as I could, kicking at the rock anchor with the sole of my boot. It was solid. I backed away and bent low beside Rachel.

She didn’t stir or move or grumble. I placed my fingers against her bloody forehead. Her skin felt clammy.

I faced the pool of seawater. It swelled up, stilled, then swirled back down. I clambered in.

The temperature was far lower than I’d imagined. I clenched my hands into tight fists and waded away from the edge. The pool wasn’t level. I’d moved off some kind of lip and the water rose up to my thighs. Then a wave came in. The water surged up beyond my navel.

The cold was intense. I couldn’t stand it for long. I had to move fast. Had to be decisive.

The water level began to drop. I spread my hands below the surface and felt for the current. No good. I watched the thread of seaweed and the dirty suds. It didn’t tell me anything for sure. I moved closer to the rock wall nearest to the coast. I gritted my teeth and bent my knees and fumbled around. My knuckles scraped stone. My fingers clawed at strange nooks and crannies. An opening? I wasn’t sure.

The water rose up again, pushing me back. I had to be close. I reached up and unclipped the chin strap of my helmet, then propped it on the ledge next to Rachel with the torch beam angled at the wall in front of me. I waded forwards and took a deep breath and ducked my head right under. It was dark down below. Not black but close enough. My eyes stung and my ears filled with a swirling hush. I waved my arms around, tracing submerged ridges. Still no good. I surfaced and snatched a fresh lungful of air. My lips were salty and numb, my hair was pasted over my eyes.

I waited for the water to drop and then I dunked myself once more. I tried not to move too much. I just floated down there, holding my breath, trusting the currents. They nudged me sideways. Sucked me down. I felt around with my feet, then my arms. My left hand disappeared into a hollow. I extended my arm and felt a drag. I stretched further, right up to my shoulder. The opening was roughly circular, about the size of a manhole cover. Big enough for me to get my head and shoulders in.

But not just yet.

I kicked back from the wall and broke the surface and croaked air. Water drained from my hair and clothes. There was a cold tingling sensation all over my upper body.

‘Callum?’ My bloated lips could barely shape his name.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m going to try to get out.’

‘You can’t climb without a rope.’

‘Not climbing.’ I was shivering hard now. ‘Swimming.’

He didn’t respond right away. The silence and the cold were getting to me. My gut flexed as if I might vomit.

‘Too risky. You could get stuck.’

‘I’ve tied the rope to myself and secured it to an anchor. I can pull myself back.’

I knew I was probably kidding myself. Knew that if the channel became too tight then I wouldn’t be able to drag myself out. I’d drown down there, wedged underwater.

‘We should wait.’

‘For what?’

He didn’t answer.

For nothing, I thought. For Rachel to die. For darkness to set in. For the last faint hope that somebody would find us early the following morning before Callum bled out or I drowned or we both succumbed to shock or exposure. There were no good options. No sure choices. I couldn’t live with myself if I stayed down here, clutching to a handhold and shivering while Rachel drifted away.

‘I’m going,’ I told him.

‘Claire, don’t.’

‘Keep shouting. Keep making noise.’

‘Claire . . .’

But I didn’t wait to hear any more. I turned my back on the sheep’s skull, filled my lungs with as much air as I could take and then plunged and kicked hard for the opening.

The water was going out and I moved with it. I shut my mind to the fear and the doubts and I scrambled for the channel, flattening my hands against the sides, pulling myself in. The opening was filled with water. There was no air at all. The rock bit into me, scraping the flesh from my forearms and back, slicing my fingertips, scoring my knees. It was tighter than I’d feared. There was no way I could swim down here. I had to crawl. Had to lever myself forwards with my elbows. Had to pull with my hands and scramble with my feet.

My eyes were open but there was nothing to see. It was pitch black.

The shaft was becoming tighter. I was finding it hard to move my arms. They were straight out ahead of me, clamping my ears, my palms pressed together as if I was holding my position after diving into a swimming pool. I was starting to believe it wasn’t a passageway so much as a funnel. The rope dragged back from my waist, tangling in my ankles. It was no use to me at all.

I thrashed and kicked forwards with my legs. The channel narrowed even further, pinning my shoulders, compressing my lungs. I was running low on oxygen, high on stress and fear. My chest was tight and getting tighter. Pressure built in my ears and nose.

The stone encased me. My chin grazed rock. I inched on, wriggling desperately. There was just a little give around my shoulders. I wasn’t sure about my hips. My lungs screamed for air and finally I let go, went limp. I opened my mouth and bubbles writhed before my eyes.

Bubbles. Light. Grey-green water up above.

I felt around with my hands and found something to push off. I heaved and pulled. I scraped my elbows through and dug them into the hardness that surrounded me, levering my body on. My hips jammed. Wouldn’t budge. The bubbles were streaming before me now. The water was alive with them. My ears roared. I twisted sideways and grappled hard.

My hips came free of the wormhole. My legs slipped out. I kicked for the surface.

But something pulled me back. It jerked on me hard. I looked down in panic and confusion and kicked once more. The rope. It was pulled taut.

Terror gripped me then.

I yanked on the rope. No good. I writhed and fought. My lungs were all out. My jaw parted and I gulped water. I choked and spat up and gulped some more. My fingers were straining for the surface. The last thing I wanted to do was lower them. I took another mouthful of water and finally reached down, fumbling with my harness. I fitted my hands around the carabiner and fought to unscrew it and jam open the spring-loaded gate. I grappled with the rope until it came free and then I wriggled away and kicked one last time for the light.

I came up into surf and froth. I heaved air. I gagged and spat. The waves carried me ashore, where I rolled on to my back, coughing and trembling, my body spent and wasted, my eyes roving in my head, trawling the bleak cliff face, scanning the towering slate for some kind of path back up to the top.

Much later, long after I’d stumbled through the Chasms and had found Callum’s mobile and fumbled with the keypad, long after the coastguard and air rescue teams had arrived, long after Callum had been winched out on a plastic stretcher and flown away to the hospital, after I’d been told in sombre tones that Rachel hadn’t made it, I found myself sitting cross-legged on the bed of slate at the top of the cliff, a foil blanket wrapped around me, a paramedic trying to coax me towards a waiting ambulance, watching the coastguard crew working to bring my dead friend to the surface, when I happened to glance back across to where our ropes had been anchored. The flat-topped boulder was lit brightly by the glow of the temporary arc lights that had been set up all around. The chalk drawings were lit, too. The flower, the stick man, the pentagram, the figure riding a horse. And among them, a sketch I hadn’t spotted before. The outline of a footprint in white chalk.

As far as stakeouts went, we were breaking all the rules. We were parked at the end of a side street on double yellow lines. Our vehicle was memorable – a gunmetal BMW with smoked glass windows, low-profile tyres and alloy wheels. Added to that, we couldn’t see the entrance of the place we were watching. Our line of sight was badly compromised by a high brick wall and overhanging trees.

Yet none of us could look away.

Like I said, rule breakers. But then, I was getting used to that. It was becoming second nature to me.

The BMW belonged to David. He’d purchased it after a recent promotion to a new management role at the airport and a generous inheritance from his uncle that had included the fishing boat he’d taken us to the Calf of Man on all those years ago. David was fastidious about cleaning and maintaining the BMW, outside and in. The interior was showroom fresh.

‘Sure you want to do this?’ he asked me.

‘What choice do we have?’

Callum leaned forwards from the back. ‘Maybe we should just forget this whole thing? Move on with our lives.’

‘Like Rachel, you mean? Or like Scott?’

‘We don’t know what really happened to them. You could be wrong.’

‘I could be. But I don’t think I am. And last time we talked, neither did either of you.’

I’d finally confronted them just under a fortnight ago. I’d given it a lot of thought and I’d come to the conclusion that I owed them a warning – one I’d failed to give Rachel.

I had them meet me up at the Ayres, late on a Sunday afternoon. Callum was already there when I arrived. He was straddling a mountain bike, wearing a pair of sports leggings, a red cycle top and a lightweight helmet over some wraparound sunglasses. His backside and the small of his back were sprayed with mud. There were splotches of grime on his cheeks and forehead.

I was getting used to seeing him out on his bike. His doctors had told him to exercise as part of his physical rehabilitation, but it didn’t escape my notice that cycling was one of the few activities his now defunct business had never offered.

The inquest into Rachel’s fall had tainted him. Her death had been ruled an accident but he’d been criticised in the report for not checking the long grasses surrounding his anchor point for sharp objects, like the broken bottle the rope had rubbed against before shearing, and for not using a safety backup.

Word got around the island very fast. Pretty soon, nobody wanted to book an activity with Callum’s firm, even supposing he was willing to take them. And he wasn’t, I knew. It didn’t take an inquest verdict for him to blame himself for Rachel’s death. Perhaps that was another reason why he went cycling so much. Maybe the exertion and the focus distracted him from the hurt and the guilt he was feeling. Maybe it was something I should try.

He leaned back from his handlebars as I stepped out from my car. His face was chiselled beneath the dense stubble that grazed his neck and cheeks. He’d lost almost a stone during the past year. I didn’t believe he’d shed all of the weight through training alone. I was pretty sure he wasn’t eating or sleeping as much as he should be.

‘Seen much of David recently?’

‘Every now and then.’

‘Are you guys . . . you know?’ He whistled two fast notes, like he was signalling a dog.

‘That was a long time ago.’

‘You know he’s still hung up on you, right? That’s why he acts like such a prick around you.’

He shrugged and gazed off towards the horizon, tinted lenses glinting in the weak afternoon sunshine. Callum rarely held my eyes any more. I guessed maybe he was afraid of what he’d see there, as if he expected to find his own sense of remorse projected back at him, magnified many times over.

‘Funny thing: he always seems to be working when I try to get in touch.’

‘He doesn’t blame you, Callum.’

‘Doesn’t he?’ Callum sniffed and wiped his nose with the fingerless gloves he had on. ‘Then he’d be the only one. Including me.’

I didn’t reply. There wasn’t anything to be said. Not yet, anyway. Not until David arrived.

He turned up five minutes later, the mirror-like exterior of his BMW reflecting the low grassland all around as he sped towards us over the bumps and hollows in the track. He swooped into the gravel turning circle and climbed out of his car. He was wearing a dark blue suit over a light blue shirt. His black shoes were as shiny as his BMW. He held his silk tie flat against his chest, the tails of his jacket flailing in the stiff coastal wind.

Callum whistled again, from high to low. ‘Didn’t you get the memo? We’re not meeting in the boardroom today.’

‘I’ve been at work. I haven’t had time to go home and change.’

Callum didn’t say anything to that but I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking the same thing myself. David had come here dressed in his tailored suit, driving his spotless BMW, because he wanted us to see what a success he’d made of his life. He wanted to beat us down with it.

The really irritating part was that he looked pretty great. Sure, the suit helped, but he’d been hitting the gym a lot just recently, and he’d also changed his hair. It was trimmed very close around the back and sides with a fringe that slanted across his forehead, partially concealing the half-moon scar above his eyebrow. Right now, he looked like he could have stepped out of a Sunday-newspaper fashion supplement.

I slammed the door on my dated Vauxhall. ‘Let’s walk.’

‘Walk?’ David gaped down at his suit, as if I’d suggested that we go for a swim in the sea. ‘Where?’

I looked behind him, towards the distant stand of pines. Then I faced the other way, tracking a beaten pathway that ran along behind the marram-grass dunes towards the lighthouse.

I set off towards it, the moss and lichen squelching beneath me. It had been raining until a few hours ago and the reeds and grasses that ran along the tops of the dunes were bent and flattened down.

‘What’s going on, Claire?’ David had caught up to me. He was taking exaggerated steps through the grass in an effort to keep his shoes clean. ‘Why did we have to meet you out here?’

I looked to my right and saw Callum standing on his pedals, his bike chain making a faint ticking noise as he glided alongside me, his chunky tyres throwing up fans of spray from the back.

‘Yeah, what gives, Detective?’

I reached inside a pocket of the padded body warmer I had on and removed my mobile phone. I used my thumb to select a photograph, tilting the display towards David.

‘What am I looking at?’

I showed Callum the same thing. He jammed on his brakes and snatched the phone from me.

‘What the hell, Claire?’ The muscles in his neck had pulled taut. ‘You really think I need to see this again?’

‘Look closer.’ I leaned over and manipulated the image with my finger and thumb until it zoomed in. ‘See?’

His jaw fell. He stared at me, then back at the phone. ‘When did you take this?’

‘First of November last year. I went back the day after the accident. But I saw it when the coastguard crew were retrieving Rachel’s body.’

‘Does someone want to tell me what’s going on?’

I grabbed the phone and held the image up to David. I told him the photograph showed the boulder where Callum had anchored his abseil equipment. Then I told him that most of the chalk drawings had been there before we started our descent.

‘All except for the footprint.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Pretty sure. And I saw another footprint when Scott died. It was a muddy outline left on the car mat behind his seat.’

Callum swung his leg off his bike, letting it fall to the ground.

‘Why didn’t you tell us before?’

‘I wasn’t sure what to make of it before.’

Which wasn’t strictly true. I’d had other reasons for keeping the information to myself. Suspicions that wouldn’t quite go away.

‘This wasn’t mentioned in the inquest into Rachel’s accident. What are your lot doing about it?’

‘Your lot’ being the police. As if we were a different species entirely.

‘They don’t know about it.’ I switched my phone off and pocketed it. ‘Nobody does.’

Callum and David looked at me. The wind tussled my hair, throwing it round my face. I waited for more.

‘I don’t understand this, Claire. What does it mean?’

‘You tell me.’

David lowered his voice, almost as if he was afraid to utter the words. ‘You think this is connected to Mark? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I think it’s connected to all of us.’

‘As part of what, some kind of vendetta?’

‘Maybe.’

Callum raised a hand in the air. ‘Wait. Are you suggesting Scott and Rachel were murdered?’

‘I don’t know. But is it any more unlikely than your anchor rope being cut by a broken bottle none of us saw?’

‘
You don’t know.
’ He clasped his hands to his helmet. ‘And you wait until now to tell us this.’

‘I thought you deserved a warning.’

David grabbed my arm and hauled me round. ‘A warning? How do you mean? Do you think we could be next?’

‘Hop-tu-naa isn’t far away. I guess we’ll find out.’

Callum shook his head slowly, his hands still gripping his helmet. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t report this.’

‘I didn’t have any evidence.’

‘Then what’s that on your phone? What does that picture
mean
, Claire?’

‘It means something to us, maybe. Because of what we were involved in. All of us. But it means nothing to anyone else. And I did mention the footprint in my report on Scott’s death. I flagged it a couple of times.’

‘And?’

‘And nobody was interested. They thought it was just a muddy footprint.’

‘But you knew otherwise.’

He was angry. I supposed he had every right to be.

I closed my eyes. They were getting damp now, the tears beginning to come. I couldn’t pretend it was because of the wind. It was seeing the horror and distrust on their faces. It was finally facing up to all of this being real.

I tore my arm free of David’s grip and started walking again. I moved fast, head down, feet pounding the sodden earth.

‘It could be nothing,’ David said, hurrying to keep up.

Callum was hobbling along next to him, wheeling his bike at his side. The fracture to his pelvis had been severe. Chances were he’d always have a slight limp. But the effect was pronounced because of the cycling clips fitted to the base of his shoes.

‘Two deaths,’ I told them. ‘Both on successive Hop-tu-naas.’

‘Stranger things have happened.’

I shook my head roughly. ‘And the footprints? Hell of a coincidence, wouldn’t you say?’

It was enough. They saw it now.

‘Then somebody sabotaged my gear.’ Callum sounded stung and wistful. ‘Do you know what the past year’s been like for me, Claire? Do you have any idea?’

Oh, I had an inkling. I had a reasonable understanding of how awful it might feel to believe you were culpable for the death of one of your closest friends. If Callum had tortured himself with the idea that Rachel would still be here if he hadn’t screwed up in some way, then I couldn’t avoid feeling the same way.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘
Sorry.
That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?’

‘What else do you want me to say?’

‘I want you to tell me why you didn’t do anything about this. I want you to explain why you didn’t say anything before now.’

I hurried on, moving ahead of them, pumping my arms and legs. We were getting near to the lighthouse. Up close, among all this flat land tapering away into the sea, it struck me as vastly out of proportion. Too wide. Too tall. Too absurd.

A collection of low whitewashed dwellings surrounded the base of the tower, hemmed in behind a high stone wall. The facility had been purchased by a private family some years ago now, and the former keeper’s quarters had been divided into separate homes. There were signs up warning people not to trespass. There were bed sheets drying on a sagging washing line outside.

I cut away to the left, tracking a path that bisected the last of the dunes and followed the shingle beach around the peninsula. The wind was picking up now. It was blowing against me, sea spray lashing my face.

‘Claire, you need to talk to us.’

It wasn’t just sea spray. It had also started to rain. Fat drops spluttered down. They gathered pace, drilling into the sand and surf, the wind whipping them into tumbling spirals.

David ran past me on a slant, lifting the tails of his jacket above his head, veering sideways as though the ground were shifting beneath him. He was making for the shelter of a ramshackle cottage just beyond the perimeter wall of the lighthouse complex. The place looked abandoned. So did the derelict garage out back. The grass had grown long around both buildings. There was a faded sign in a dusty window of the cottage:
FOR SALE
.

I huddled next to David with my back pressed against the stone wall, breathing hard.

Callum was standing out in the downpour holding his bike, his clothing drenched.

‘Why didn’t you tell anyone?’ he shouted. ‘Why didn’t you report the chalk drawing?’

‘I couldn’t. Don’t you see? If I explained it to any of my colleagues, it would be an admission. I’d implicate all of us in what Mark did. They’d be obligated to pursue it. We’d all face charges.’

‘That’s not an option.’ David was holding the collar of his jacket up around his chin, fingers white. ‘It was all on Mark, anyway. He’s the one who lost it.’

Not the only one, I thought, but I didn’t correct him.

‘You could have told
us
.’ Callum’s chin jutted forwards, the rain streaming down his face.

‘And I have. Now.’

It wasn’t enough. There was no way I could ever justify it. Not to them. Not even to myself.

‘I needed to wait. I needed to clear my head.’

‘Then why today?’

‘Because we have to have a plan. Think about it – you remember why we were planting a footprint in Edward Caine’s home that night?’

Callum shrugged. ‘To scare him.’

‘More than that, though.’ I stared out at him. ‘The footprint was supposed to be a taunt – it was a prediction that someone would die.’