Little Black Lies (32 page)

I leave the track, heading out across open countryside, knowing from the sweetness around me that I am travelling through gorse. When we reach the peat, the smell will become one of dank, rotting vegetation. The wind has gained in strength, irritating Bee, but we soon arrive at the point where I can turn him, and now the wind is behind us, urging us on.

DON’T LEAVE HIM ALONE

Halfway, I almost turn and go home. I have left all three of my boys alone. If someone has been watching me, maybe they saw me leave the house.

‘Maybe they’re there now, sneaking around, looking for a way in.’

Trust my horse to make a helpful contribution to any internal debate. And it’s a ridiculous idea. No harm can come to sleeping children here. I tell him so.

‘Archie West’s parents left him alone.’

‘Archie is lost. He wandered away. That’s as sinister as it gets.’

‘You keep telling yourself that, love.’

‘We go home when I say so. Now shut it.’

There is light in Catrin’s bedroom. I see it when I’m still over half a mile away. It’s not so unusual, though, for Catrin to be awake late. She takes her boat out at night, anchoring in some isolated bay. Maybe she, too, has trouble sleeping.

The last stretch takes me along the road, although I keep to the verge to muffle the sound of Bee’s hooves. I can see the upper storey of the house, the tips of the skeletons, but the gorse hedge that grows around the garden screens most of it from view. I get down and in a sheltered spot behind a rocky outcrop I tie up Bee.

There is a weak point in the hedge. It’s uncomfortable, pushing through thorns, but I’ve done it before. Head down, I squeeze myself in tight and I’m soon through. The light I saw from a distance is still shining. As I step closer to the house, I think I’m half willing her to look out and see me, or for Queenie to sense my presence and start barking.

A short distance away, Bee snickers and a second later, I hear a soft, low, human sound. A grunt of effort, a fraction more than a sigh. Someone is coming. I slip back into the hedge and wait.

A tall man strides to the gate and steps over it. He stands on the edge of the garden looking around.

‘Hello?’

I recognize the accent immediately, if not the voice it belongs to. This is a Scotsman. Coupled with the man’s height and breadth, it can only be Callum Murray.

Who seems to see me, to be looking directly at me as he crosses the garden to the point where I’m hiding. I shrink back further, but know I can’t get away without making a sound. I’m saved by the fact that he doesn’t know this garden as well as I do and doesn’t see the stack of harpoons. His foot catches one. Thrown off balance, it falls and dislodges the others; they clatter to the grass.

I take advantage of his distraction to get further into the hedge, but as I’m about to turn and go, the back door of the house opens.

‘Bit late for trick-or-treat.’ Catrin is in the doorway, barely visible against the darkened room. Callum mutters something about thinking he’d seen her in the garden. As he steps closer their voices are masked by the wind, and I can no longer hear what they are saying. The voice in my head, though, is loud and clear. Catrin and Callum are together again.

Three years ago, I’d known there was something Catrin wasn’t telling me. I’d known for months. She’d changed. Her time was suddenly much more limited, for one thing. And she’d lost that openness, that willingness to share everything that was going on in her life. I knew she was holding something back. I toyed with the idea that she and Ben might be having problems, but deep down I knew it wasn’t that. There was no sense of unhappiness coming from her. Then, one day, I rode Bee up here without telling her I was coming. I tied him up, in the exact spot he’s tied now, approached the door and heard her voice from round the back of the house. I made my way round and stopped at the corner.

At the rear of Catrin’s house, the side that faces the sea, is a suntrap. When the wind is light, and the sky clear, it forms a small patch of bright warmth. It was late spring, and this was a hot day by Falkland standards.

Catrin was lying naked on a cluster of scatter cushions with a man, also naked, whom I knew instantly wasn’t Ben. The broad shoulders reaching over her were fair and overly muscled, his legs so much longer than those of her husband. The tension in her body, the way her toes curled and pointed, her fingers clutching his shoulders, told me they were about to make love. Then he raised his head and I recognized the sandy hair.

I fled the scene, wondering how I’d keep a secret so immense, so important. It was beyond belief – for me anyway – that a woman whom Ben came home to every night could even think of looking elsewhere. At the same time it made perfect sense, and Catrin’s barely concealed interest in the Scotsman who’d fought in the conflict became entirely understandable.

What I felt that day, when I got over the shock, was nothing less than joy. Catrin had met someone else. I knew her well enough to be sure she wouldn’t be having an affair with a man she didn’t care for. Catrin had fallen in love with another man. Ben could be free again. Free to be with me. It would be complicated, of course, and I would feel bad about taking the boys from their father, but we could work something out. Suddenly, my life was full of possibilities. For the first time in years, there was hope of happiness, not just consolation. Something more than solace.

I’m feeling something of that now, as I lead Bee away. Catrin is seeing Callum again. If he’s back in her life, is it a sign that she’s recovering? If she can find happiness again, maybe she can find a way to let me back in too.

DAY TWO

Tuesday, 1 November

29

The search for Archie continues the next day. All morning, the horsemen of the apocalypse, as my father insists on calling us, patrol the beaches, looking for the sand-smeared remains, the tiny shoe poking out from behind rocks. Others, including Catrin and Callum, fine-tooth-comb the hills. As noon approaches, optimism is becoming an effort. If the child did nothing more than wander off, he would have been found by now. If he died on the moor, he would have been found.

There remain two possibilities. The first, that he fell into the river and was swept downstream and out to sea. In which case, if the tide hasn’t brought him up already, it is unlikely to do so. We may never find him.

The other possibility, over which opinion is sharply divided, is that someone may have taken him. No islander, other than my father, will admit openly that this is a possibility but the visitors are thinking it. The military are thinking it. Everywhere I look I see an undercurrent of concern building in strength. People are openly dissatisfied. They are starting to take sides.

I have to leave the search at midday. Mum, who had Peter all morning, has a hospital appointment, and it’s one of my days for picking the boys up from school. I collect my youngest and, not being able to face even an hour at home alone with him, I head into Stanley.

There are more people in town than we would ever normally see. A lot of them are service personnel, in town to help with the search. Others are coming off the
Princess Royal.
Nothing new in that, of course, but visitors typically come ashore for a few hours at a time, to watch wildlife, travel to the less accessible beaches. They don’t hang around in Stanley. This lot, though, seem drawn to trouble the way flies are to rotting meat.

It’s not as though any of them can know Archie’s family, because the Wests came here independently, not on the cruise ship. These people with their big hair, their bright man-made fabrics and their gleaming white trainers are here for the drama. They are here to inhale the stench of our trouble.

I collect a bundle of post, tucking it into my bag without looking properly. In the store, I see Roadkill Ralph buying roll-up paper and tobacco. He nods to me and seems about to say something, but the woman at the counter speaks to him and he turns away.

When I’ve got everything I need, I still have an hour before school finishes, so I head to Bob-Cat’s Diner for coffee. The swing door is heavy, difficult to manoeuvre with a buggy, so I’m not really concentrating on who’s inside.

‘Bang, bang, bang!’ A child’s voice. My child.

Something shatters on the stone-tiled floor as the door slams shut. Behind the counter, Bob-Cat curses. Everyone else in the room has fallen silent.

Callum, standing between the counter and the door, is staring down in horror at my son, at the gun in his hand. The remains of a coffee mug are scattered across the floor. My child bursts into ugly loud sobs.

‘For God’s sake, mate, it’s a kid’s pop-gun, what’s with you?’ Bob-Cat is seriously pissed off about the broken mug and spilled coffee.

Callum is still staring and there is a light in his eyes that I don’t like, certainly don’t recognize. I pull the buggy back as Bob-Cat leans across the counter and tugs at Callum’s shoulder. It does the trick. He shakes his head, as though to clear it, then looks down at the mess on the floor.

‘Shit, I’m sorry.’ He bends down, starts to gather up the broken pieces, then stops. ‘Rachel, I think the coffee caught him. I think he’s burned.’

Suddenly, everyone in the diner is an expert on first aid, determined to make a massive fuss of the child, who stops wailing once he realizes he’s the centre of attention. There is a pink mark on his left shin and coffee stains on his sock, but we strip it off, wrap cold, wet cloth around his leg, and in a minute or two there isn’t a mark to be seen.

While the rest of us are seeing to Peter, Callum clears up the mess and offers to pay for the mug. Bob-Cat takes him at his word and charges him enough to buy a set of bone china.

‘It was my fault,’ I say, when some semblance of peace is restored. ‘I didn’t realize he had that with him. It’s his brother’s. It must have been tucked away at the bottom of the buggy.’

‘No harm done.’ Callum has also insisted on paying for my coffee and my son’s milkshake. I’d intended to head for an empty table at the back of the room but that seems rude now. Besides, Callum and Catrin? I take a stool beside him at the counter. The child complains, predictably enough, so I unfasten his reins and lift him on to my lap. He tries to climb off, on to the counter, but is distracted by a biscuit.

‘No luck this afternoon?’ I ask.

Callum lowers his voice. ‘Stopford’s a fool. He won’t accept any possibility other than the kid wandering off. So he’s keeping the search in one area only. No one’s looking anywhere else.’

I think about this for a second. About the sheer size of the islands. ‘Yeah, but fair play, where would he start?’

‘There’s been no real attempt to find this other Land Rover the kid’s brother saw.’

Behind us, the door opens and a smell of frying food, seaweed and diesel fumes blows in, as though we are at the end of a wind tunnel leading directly to the harbour. When I turn, I see Roadkill Ralph, his nicotine-stained fingers clutching a half-smoked roll-up.

‘Them boys o’ yourn been playing on the wreck?’

It takes me a second to get over my surprise that Ralph has actually spoken. ‘I don’t think so. They know they’re not allowed to go out there by themselves.’

He nods and sucks on the thin, straggling cigarette, before turning and leaving the diner.

‘Must get him and the girls round for dinner some time.’ Callum’s face is completely deadpan and in that moment I see exactly what Catrin saw in him. Sees in him? I am amazed to find myself laughing. A second later, he joins in.

I stay too long in the diner, too long chatting to Callum about nothing, when all I really want to say is, how is Catrin? Will she talk to me, do you think? And by the way, I know I never thanked you for what you did that day. I know you went into the water looking for me, for my sons, that you risked your life to save ours, but that was the day when her sons died, when I became the monster that nobody can quite bring themselves to look in the eye, and we can’t talk about that, can we? Not ever?

He leaves first. I follow more slowly and push the buggy up the hill to my car. I must be more distracted than usual because I actually get in the wrong one. It’s easy enough, no one locks their vehicles here and we have a lot of light-coloured Land Rovers. I open the rear door and think that someone has stolen the child’s seat. Then I see the cardboard box of bacon labels, register that my car has never been this filthy, this covered in sand, and realize I’ve opened Bob-Cat’s by mistake. Embarrassed, I climb out and look around, but no one seems to have spotted me, so I take hold of the buggy and slink a few yards further up the hill to my own car.

When I get home with the boys, I look at the post for the first time. There is another white, hand-addressed envelope. Local postmark.

Even though I can hear them playing, I nevertheless have to go into the room and do a head count. Big boy, middle boy, little boy, all present and correct, engrossed in building a Death Star from Lego. I want to throw the envelope away but can’t bring myself to.

I open it. Same as before. Almost.

DON’T LEAVE HIM ALONE. LAST WARNING.

*   *   *

I don’t sleep much. Every hour, it seems, I get up, check the locks, pull the curtains a little closer and peer in at the boys. Each time I do, I work out the time where Sander is. I surprise myself by how much I want him home. I surprise myself by how afraid I am.

On my third bedroom round I see the fires. A dozen or more, stretching up the hillside, dancing in the wind. Beacons for little Archie West. All over the island, people are camping out, keeping vigil, so the child won’t be entirely alone. It is well meant, I know, but I wish they hadn’t, because the picture up on the hillside seems the living embodiment of verses I can’t get out of my head.

About, about, in reel and rout

The death-fires danced at night

Each small flame looks to me like a funeral pyre.

DAY THREE

Wednesday, 2 November

30