Little Black Lies (15 page)

Run now, Peter. Turn and run.

He’s in the middle of the road, staring at me as I hurtle towards him. He is frozen in place. Unafraid. Staring.

How much easier it will be, to take the child, instead of the adult. How much more devastating for Rachel, to lose her baby rather than her own life. Perfect revenge.

I jump down hard on the brakes and the car slides to a stop. Peter is feet away from me. He cannot be alone.

He is. I can see Rachel’s car in the driveway but there is no sign of her, or the two older boys who should be home from school by now. I wind down my window and listen.

Nothing other than the cries of the skuas and the grumble of the ocean. And the uncontrollable hammering of two hearts.

Run, Peter. Forget everything you’ve been told. Monsters are real and this one’s coming to get you.

Leaving the engine running, I get out of the car, fully expecting him to turn and flee, to disappear back within the safe confines of the family garden. He doesn’t. He continues to stare. I wonder, for a second, whether it is the sight of the vanishing sun that has scared him, the sudden darkening of his bright world, but no. It is me that he’s looking at. He has never seen me before in his life but there is recognition in those harebell-blue eyes. Or maybe I have acquired the ability to hypnotize. The way a snake can.

Last chance, Peter. Break the spell. I’m a step away. An arm’s reach away. A single blow away.

The spell holds. Peter doesn’t move. So I do.

PART TWO

Callum

‘Shoot him! Fucking shoot him.’

‘You shoot him!’

Hope fading in the lad’s eyes. None of the men with the stomach to kill a frightened kid. A single bullet. A sharp upward stab of the bayonet. The kid falls to the mud. My bullet. My bayonet. Sometimes, the buck just stops.

DAY FOUR

Thursday, 3 November, 10.30 hours

14

I arrive in Stanley mid morning and grab a late breakfast at Bob-Cat’s Diner. It’s a long, thin, single-storey building with a bright orange tin roof and matching tabletops. Pictures on the walls are faded, cheap-framed photographs of the harbour. Which is pointless, really, seeing as how the diner has one of the best views of the harbour in Stanley.

Back home environmental health would slam a demolition order on the place. There are grease stains on the walls and dead flies in the lampshades. And you’re a braver man than me if you venture into the lavatory out back. But, as Bob-Cat points out regularly, nobody ever died within twenty-four hours of eating here.

I open the door and step into the familiar smell of burned fat. There are a couple of visitors at a table by the window and some blokes from the fishing boats at one end of the serving counter. A bunch of local workmen are stretching ‘smoko’ out for as long as they can. The traditional morning break, ‘smoko’ means tea, a fag and cake. It’s the bane of most employers’ lives.

‘What you smiling at?’ Roberta Catton, also known as Bob-Cat, scrapes bacon from the grill and slaps it on a bun. She adds an egg, over easy, and swirls brown sauce to form the letter C for Callum. As she says, it’s the little touches that make the difference. She’s been serving me breakfast for a long time now. She doesn’t need to ask what I want any more. She also knows I won’t always answer her daft questions.

‘Coffee’s a bit stale.’ She leans against the counter. ‘I’ll make some fresh.’

In over ten years of coming in here, I’ve never known Bob-Cat offer fresh coffee. You drink what’s in the pot till she has to shake out the grains, and if you’ve the balls to complain you’re reminded that you probably have a kettle and a jar of instant at home.

I say nothing. I’m not about to push my luck. Bob-Cat’s coffee isn’t bad when it’s fresh.

‘You’ll have a lot to talk about this morning,’ she grunts.

The plate she’s given me isn’t chipped, and she’s wiped it free of grease. And she’s added a napkin, a small, ripped square of kitchen roll, but it’s more effort than she’d normally make. She wants something. Not too difficult to guess what.

‘What happened to doctor/patient confidentiality?’ I say this to make a point rather than because I’ve a snowball in hell’s chance of keeping anything quiet in this place. Once a fortnight for the past three years I’ve had hour-long appointments with a counsellor and, within a week of the first, everyone on the islands knew I was seeing the local shrink. (Except Catrin, as I learned Tuesday night.) They’ve all been pretty good about it. While ex-patriots here are known as the three Ms – Mercenaries, Missionaries and Misfits – former servicemen are cut a lot of slack.

I’ve never asked which of the three Ms I am. I’ve never needed to.

‘Nothing confidential about those lads being found. One alive, one dead, God help us.’ Bob-Cat looks offended. For such a tough-talking old broad, her feelings are more easily ruffled than her hair. It’s vertical right now. Three inches of wiry, black and grey hair, standing up on top of her head and doing some pretty weird things to either side. She’s one of those local women with neither the time nor the patience for the niceties of being female. Running the diner is a second job for Bob-Cat. I called it her hobby once and she nearly bit my ear off.

I watch her turn away to do something to the coffee machine. It starts to hiss and I half expect her to slap it.

Her other job is farming. She and her husband run a smallholding outside Stanley with a few sheep, a couple of pigs, and a small army of poultry. Her hands are stained pale brown by the peat she digs for fuel and she invariably has grime under her fingernails. Her skin is tanned and wrinkled, but the flesh beneath it is holding up well. She could be any age between forty and sixty. She’s not short of a bit of meat on her, but no one – no bloke anyway – would call her fat. I’ve seen her hold her own in arm-wrestling contests with some pretty hefty guys. She’s in the Globe most nights of the week.

‘It was all over the radio last night.’ She’s still talking about the boys, Archie and Jimmy, shouting back over her shoulder as she wrestles with the coffee machine. Around us, conversation has stopped. Of course, they all know everything already, but they want to hear it again, first hand.

I got used to it years ago, the relentless nosiness.

When you’re hundreds of miles away from the rest of the world, when news from outside is always too little, too late, then the world you inhabit, however small and sparsely populated, assumes a terrific importance. In the Falkland Islands, everybody knows everybody else’s business.

Bob-Cat pours the coffee and puts it in front of me. ‘Watch the mug,’ she says. ‘We’ve had a lot of breakages this week.’

Two days ago I dropped one of her mugs and paid well over the odds for it. I’m not about to apologize again. On the other hand, the coffee she’s put down smells like the answer to all my problems right now and I have five minutes to take a thirty-second walk. I can afford to be generous.

‘Bloody radio can be a pain in the arse.’ I bite deep, thinking once again that there is a God and he enjoys a good fried breakfast. Folk would go to war for Bob-Cat’s bacon. It’s thick as a flash-fry steak, moist like young chicken and exactly the right blend of sweet and salty. Bob-Cat imports honey from South America and cures the meat herself. The salt comes from the ocean. The result, every time I eat it, feels like the best thing I ever put in my mouth. Maybe the Argies got a whiff of it twelve years ago.

She’s waiting for me to go on. Everyone is.

‘Profits at the Globe must have taken a dive,’ I say, after swallowing faster than I would have liked. ‘I think everyone came out to meet us. Complete gridlock for about a mile.’

I’m only going to talk about Archie, I decide. That story had a happy ending. Jimmy’s family don’t deserve to be gossiped about.

‘I told ’em.’ Bob-Cat is shaking her head in a nobody-listens-to-me kind of way. ‘I said they should stay where they were, leave the road clear for the police and the ambulance, but would they listen?’

I’m pretty certain I drove past Bob-Cat’s old Land Rover in the line last night, but I’m not about to argue. I have less than three minutes to go and there is no way I’m leaving any of this food.

Once we were back in the truck last night, with Archie wrapped in my blanket on Catrin’s lap (pissing off Piglet no end), we discussed whether to radio it in. Well, I discussed it – out loud – with myself. Catrin listened, wide-eyed and tight-lipped. When I decided that putting his parents out of their misery at the earliest opportunity outweighed the likelihood of getting half the population of Stanley out to meet us, she nodded her agreement. So I called Bob Stopford on what is supposed to be a secure channel but, of course, is anything but. We heard the news being broadcast less than fifteen minutes later.

‘I think perhaps I made the wrong decision,’ I said, when the headlights of our reception committee appeared on the horizon. Meeting one car on the Darwin Road and getting round it is no big deal. Getting round a couple of dozen or more was another matter entirely, given the depth of the roadside ditches. And yet somehow, this shaking, silent little lad had to be handed over to his parents and secured in an ambulance, which would then have to manoeuvre itself past all the other cars to get to hospital.

‘You didn’t.’ Finally, a word out of her. ‘His parents know he’s safe. They’ve known for an hour. You have no idea what that means to them.’

‘Even if the sun’s coming up before they get their hands on him?’

She was staring at the line of lights, curling its way towards us like a giant serpent from science fiction. ‘They won’t let a traffic jam get in their way.’ Her hands were white with tension and I realized this was probably the first time Catrin had touched a child since her own had died.

‘Well, at least it’s over now,’ says Bob-Cat. ‘And no harm come to the lad.’

Her news brings me back to the present. I’d been planning to drive up to the hospital later in the day to check on young Archie. ‘Do we know how he is?’

She nods over at one of the workmen. ‘Ron’s sister-in-law’s niece works at the hospital. Lad’s stable.’ She waits for Ron to confirm. He nods his head slowly and pinches his fag out between his thumb and index finger.

‘Very dehydrated.’ Bob-Cat runs on before Ron has a chance to open his mouth. ‘Possible pneumonia, but they’ve had antibiotics in him overnight and they’re hopeful. No major injuries. A few cuts and bruises.’

She leans across the counter. I can smell smoke, coffee and stale alcohol on her breath. ‘No sign the lad’s been interfered with, but you can’t always tell, can you?’

‘Actually, I think you can. Especially if the interference was penetrative.’

Her eyes narrow. Bob-Cat can go from friendly to mean as hell in the blink of an eye.

‘Who’s treating him?’

A nasty smile. ‘Ben Quinn. Catrin’s husband.’

I know she wants me to correct her, say ex-husband, so I don’t. I make a mental note, though, not to bother going to the hospital after all. If what she’s told me is right, it’s about as good an outcome as anyone could have hoped for.

I thank her for breakfast, finish the coffee, remember to pay her – like she’d let me leave otherwise – and walk out into the wind.

*   *   *

I have a few streets to navigate, but I always quite like walking around Stanley. Most of the houses here are built of what the locals call ‘wriggly tin’. It looks like horizontal wooden boarding and when the wind gets up it creaks and whistles like a bunch of wheezy old ladies in a bingo hall. Most of the houses are painted bright colours, which I always think is about defiance more than décor, as though a good strong storm couldn’t send half of them hurtling across the ocean.

As I near the junior school PC Skye is coming out of the gate. She gives a little start when she sees me and her eyes drop to the footpath.

‘Morning.’ I stop in front of her. Calling by the police station is something else I agreed to do this morning.

‘Callum. Hello.’ She takes her hat off and starts tapping it against her thigh like a tambourine. ‘How are you this morning? I mean, recovered from your adventure?’

‘Aye. As is Archie, from what I understand. No ill effects at all, is what folks are saying.’

Her face stays troubled, telling me all I need to know.

‘The rumour going round is that he wasn’t hurt, Skye. If that isn’t true, you’re doing nobody any favours with a cover-up.’

She looks over her shoulder. And past mine to further down the hill. ‘Nobody’s covering anything up. As far as we can tell, Archie wasn’t hurt. Apart from being very cold and hungry, he seems fine.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

Another glance around. ‘He says he was taken by a man. Which doesn’t really make any sense. Who’d take him and not do anything?’ She shrugs. ‘Chief Superintendent Stopford thinks he’s probably confused.’

I bite back the obscenity. ‘He may be confused, but he didn’t walk thirty miles on his own.’

She steps to one side. ‘I really need to get back. You can ask Mr Stopford directly later.’

Even I’m not daft enough to forcibly restrain a police officer. I let her go and carry on up.

A few paces past the school I see a toddler in a buggy on the opposite side of the road. He’s red in the face, straining against the reins, trying to be free and crying at the same time. I’m about to cross the road to check him out when I recognize both child and buggy. This is Rachel Grimwood’s youngest, the kid who got me in trouble for breaking Bob-Cat’s crockery earlier in the week.

Then I see a woman’s bottom sticking out of the back seat of a Land Rover a couple of metres away and I know it’s Rachel’s because of the jodhpurs and riding boots. And I have a knack of being able to recognize women by their arses. The car isn’t hers, though, it’s Bob-Cat’s. I’d know that skanky old pile of tin anywhere.

For some reason, Rachel is rooting around in the back of Bob-Cat’s car.

I shrug. It isn’t any of my business. And the kid seems fine. Pissed off, but fine. I carry on up the hill.