Little Black Lies (6 page)

‘Lot of British taxes go into making you people feel safe,’ says one of the men.

‘You ever woken up to the sight of an invading army marching down your high street, darling?’ Mel may not be a native kelper but he isn’t going to let that one go. ‘Ever been under house arrest? Had to obey a curfew? Been locked in a community centre with nearly fifty other people and only one working toilet?’

‘What’s your point?’

‘My point, sweet-cheeks, is that the good people of Argentina, who believe these islands belong to them, are three hundred miles away. Britain, on the other hand, is eight thousand miles away and the current prime minister does not have the mighty cojones with which Mrs Thatcher was blessed.’ Mel holds his stare.

‘So, if you have a soldier for every civilian member of the population, how come this is the third kid to go missing?’

‘Hold on tight.’ I swing the car into a ditch. There are grunts from the back, some muffled cursing from Mel, but we make it up the other side and drive on. Callum, driving the vehicle ahead of us, disappears into a steep dip, sending up a pair of alarmed geese in his wake.

‘Kelp geese,’ I say, because the group with me might as well get some of their money’s worth. ‘The male is pure white, which makes him easy to spot. The female has very distinctive black-and-white striped breast feathers. You normally find them on the coastline but there’s a freshwater pond in this dip. Almost there – hold on, everyone.’

Once up the other side of the dip, I slow to a halt. When I jump down, the spot we’re standing on is bare rock but the ground will get boggy as we head west. Callum and his team have continued on.

I’ve walked over camp many times, through tussock grass, following the stone runs, through the bogs. Every time I do it, I’m hunting for something, usually creatures much smaller, better camouflaged and a lot more accomplished at evading predators than a human child. If he’s here, he should be easy prey. I watch for incongruous colours, for movement that isn’t caused by wind, for the furtive scuffling sound that tells me something is panicking.

I lead my group further across my wild, windswept homeland, and as I do so, I’m thinking about the mother we passed on the road. When Ned was fifteen months old, I lost sight of him for a few minutes. We were on the beach. I’d gone to the water to check on a possible oil slick and left him higher up among the dunes. When I looked back, he’d vanished.

Impossible to describe the horror of that moment, until then the worst thing that had ever happened to me. The ability to think, to reason, left me completely. I got to the spot where I’d left him, called his name, ran on into the grass and there he was. He’d crawled after a cormorant chick, was watching it hop around the grass.

‘Catrin, are you OK?’ Ben has drawn close, is looking at me with undisguised concern. I’m sweating in spite of the wind, breathing far too quickly. I nod, but I’m still more than half lost in bad memories. Because that time on the dunes wasn’t the worst thing to happen to me, not by a long chalk. The worst time came later, when I was far out to sea, and my husband called me on the boat radio.

There’s been an accident. Rachel’s car went over the cliff outside the house. She left Ned and Kit alone in it. God knows why. The handbrake must have been dodgy. Maybe one of the boys pulled it off. Nobody knows. They’re both on their way to hospital. Get here as soon as you can.

When I recovered enough to think it through, I realized Ben had known when he called me that they were both dead. How could he not? He was there, at the house, when it happened. He saw them being pulled from the water. They were both killed instantly and he is a doctor, for heaven’s sake, he understands the condition of being dead. He simply hadn’t dared tell me. He hadn’t dared risk what I might do, two hours out at sea, with such dreadful knowledge in my head. He thought I might do something terrible in my grief, that I’d destroy my own life too, and he couldn’t risk that. Not with my being six weeks pregnant.

‘What are you doing on Thursday? Do you have someone with you?’

‘I’ll be fine.’ I keep my eyes fixed ahead. I cannot let Ben suspect that I have anything in particular planned for Thursday. Especially not that I am planning to kill my former best friend. ‘It’s been three years. People move on.’

‘I moved on.’ I can’t see Ben’s face, but I know he’s close. His voice has dropped so that only I can hear it. ‘I found a way to deal with it. You didn’t, love.’

I keep walking, but I hear the long, sad sigh.

‘I still care about you, Catrin.’

‘I’ve heard elephant seals can be aggressive.’ Mel has caught us up, thank God. ‘If the lad came across one of those, he wouldn’t stand much of a chance, would he? Sea lions too.’

‘Possibly not.’ I look back to make sure none of the others are in earshot. ‘But not something we have to worry about if he came this way. It would be very unusual to see either this far inland.’

‘What about birds? Would they attack a three-year-old?’

This, I admit, is a possibility. Skuas are known for attacking humans. During nesting season, locals and visitors alike venture near their sites armed with large sticks. ‘It would depend on how hungry they were, to be honest, and at this time of year there’s a lot of food around.’ I try to give Mel a reassuring smile. He’s a sweet man and there’s no point in him being upset. ‘We probably don’t have to worry about him being pecked to death by birds.’

‘Everything OK, Catrin?’ Callum’s voice comes over the radio. I can see him in the distance, on slightly higher ground, and I realize my group has almost stopped moving. I raise my hand to tell him we’re fine. He turns away without responding and his group press on. I do the same.

‘Tell me something, darling, do you think I’m wasting my time?’ Mel has slung a rope, rancher-style, over one shoulder.

‘Trying to keep your boots clean? Almost certainly.’

‘With Lieutenant Murray.’ Mel gives an exaggerated sigh directly into my ear. ‘That great, big, gorgeous hunk of ginger. I only came back to this God-forsaken lump of rock for him.’

Unlikely as it sounds, Mel and Callum met during the conflict, on board the MV
Norland,
when Mel was head steward. According to Callum, the typically homophobic soldiers were pretty hostile to Mel at first, but such was his good nature, efficiency and sheer brilliance at the piano, he won them all round. By the time they got here, he’d practically become the regimental mascot.

‘I really don’t think you’re his type, mate.’ Ben’s voice has an edge that makes even Mel stop and think before he says anything else.

‘We’ve reached the bog,’ I tell my group. ‘It’s about thirty metres wide, so we go in single file from here.’

One of the women looks nervously at the thick covering of fern and pale wild grasses, the dark earth beneath. ‘What if he fell in here?’ she asks. ‘He could be at the bottom right now. We could walk right past him.’

‘We’re still some way from where the child went missing,’ I say. ‘It’s very unlikely he made it this far.’

‘But the third child to vanish. You must be asking yourselves why?’

I don’t try to hide the sigh but Ben beats me to it. ‘Imagine a child goes missing on Barry Island, with nothing to suggest anything more sinister than he fell in the sea.’

She listens, flattered by his attention.

‘Over a year later, a child vanishes in Rhyl,’ Ben continues. ‘You don’t necessarily connect the two. We’re talking similar distances, similar timescales. Then another year goes by and a third child, a bit younger than the others, is lost, but you still have every hope of finding him. You wouldn’t be screaming about serial killers and paedophiles – and neither are we.’

She seems satisfied with this. At any rate, it shuts her up for a bit. Of course, what Ben’s just related is the best-case scenario, a child found soon with nothing more to show for his adventure than a ravenous appetite and a few bruises. It doesn’t explain why all the attempts to find him yesterday failed.

The radio bursts into life again. I call for quiet and the others gather round. Some way in the distance I see Callum’s group doing the same thing. My heart beats a little more insistently. In my group someone starts to speak, someone else shushes her immediately. Callum is looking my way again. I stare back, thinking how much easier it is to do this when he’s at a distance, when there’s no danger of eye contact. Then I see Ben watching me.

On the radio I hear a reference to flies, to maggot activity.

‘Oh my God,’ says the Welsh lady in my group. ‘They’ve found him.’

5

As the Welsh lady jumps very quickly to the obvious but wrong conclusion I’m shaking my head, sending my own private message to the man on the hillside.

‘It can’t be Archie.’ I raise my voice and give the radio to Mel while I address the group. ‘Maggots can hatch in twenty-four hours but to do so they need much warmer conditions than they’ll find on a Falkland night, even one in late spring. Archie would have to have died almost before he was missed. Even then…’

Mel taps me on the shoulder and gives me the thumbs up. ‘Dead sheep,’ he says. ‘I’ve asked them to deliver it to the Globe for tonight’s dinner.’

*   *   *

We don’t find him. By two o’clock in the afternoon, we’ve walked the area twice. He isn’t here.

Back at the police station, food has appeared and the search parties fall on it. Mel practically falls on Callum. I hang behind, wanting to leave. After a few minutes, the search leaders are called into a separate room.

‘There’s talk of a vigil tonight,’ Stopford announces. ‘The radio’s been full of it all morning. Calling for people to camp out. Build fires. Give the lad something to aim for, apparently. Bloody daft, of course. They’re more likely to set half of camp on fire and I can’t see how that’s going to help him much.’

‘The ground’s probably too wet to catch fire, Bob,’ says Ben. ‘And it’s understandable. No one wants to think about the kid being out at night by himself. If half the island is camping out too, then he isn’t by himself, is he?’

‘I think we have to consider the possibility that he may have left the island.’

Everyone turns to the speaker, Major Wooton. A hush settles over the room.

‘Going where?’ I say, which is sort of pointing out the obvious. Tierra del Fuego on Argentina is three hundred miles away. South Georgia is nearly a thousand miles in the other direction. Other than that? Well, Antarctica, if you have weeks to spare.’

‘One of the other islands, obviously,’ Wooton says to me.

‘Well, that narrows it down.’

Wooton glares.

‘I don’t mean to be difficult, but there are over seven hundred of them.’

Callum clears his throat. ‘I think what Major Wooton is driving at is that it’s starting to look as though he didn’t leave the area by himself. And, let’s be honest now, these islands have form when it comes to missing kids.’

Silence. A stubborn one at that, and it’s clear what everyone is thinking. We’re a small community. We all know each other. Go back a hundred years and half of us are related. There is no crime here other than parking tickets, the odd bit of teenage pilfering from the shops and fairly regular but largely harmless merrymaking at the weekend. Our prison houses drunks. The idea that someone could have abducted Archie West is monstrous.

‘We need to close the ports,’ says Wooton, as though there are dozens of them. ‘No one leaves the islands.’

He’s panicking. No one can leave the islands, even without his macho posturing. There isn’t a flight out till tomorrow, even if it were possible to smuggle a three-year-old child on an RAF plane.

‘What about the cruise ship?’ Ben says. ‘That’s due to leave on Thursday.’

I mutter excuses and wander outside, helping myself to a couple of small sausages as I go. In the car park, I let Queenie out of the car and feed them to her. She licks my hand until it can contain no trace of anything but dog slaver.

There is a noise behind and I know who has followed me out. ‘Someone has to think the unthinkable,’ Callum says.

‘No one on the islands would hurt a child. It must have been one of the visitors.’

He shakes his head. ‘Visitors might have the will but not the means. Someone who doesn’t know the islands would have nowhere to take him. Wouldn’t know where to hide him.’

I say nothing.

‘The same group of visitors weren’t here seventeen months ago when Jimmy Brown disappeared from Surf Bay. They weren’t here twenty-seven months ago when Fred Harper vanished from Port Howard.’

Trust Callum to be quoting facts at me. ‘No one’s taken him.’ I turn to face camp. ‘He’s out there somewhere. He fell in the river and got washed out to sea, or into a bog and for some reason he hasn’t floated yet. The best way to find him is to systematically clear the area of livestock and then have the army do another heat search. We’re looking for a body now and that’s terribly sad, but we might as well face facts.’

We glare at each other.

‘The cruise ship will be searched this afternoon,’ he says, after several seconds. ‘Stopford was reluctant to agree but we talked him into it. Wooton is going to release all personnel not needed for basic guard duty. They’ll do the fishing boats as well. With our own private army, we’ll be able to rule out the visitors by the end of the day.’

If the boats are being searched today, we should all be in the clear by tomorrow. Able to move around freely again. In the meantime, this conversation is going nowhere. I should simply climb in my car and drive away.

‘Isn’t it always the parents?’ I say. ‘Maybe Stopford needs to have a long, hard chat with the West family.’

He half smiles, and there’s a pitying look in his eyes as he turns away and walks back towards the station. He thinks I, and the rest of the natives, are simply refusing to accept that someone we know could be bad. That there could be a monster among us.

*   *   *

Mid afternoon, I decide I need something from the store, so take Queenie for a quick walk around town. I’m conscious of it being almost time for school to finish and the knowledge makes me walk faster than usual, keeping my eyes down. I find it too hard to see the kids racing out of the gates, and I don’t want mothers trying to be kind to me. It’s impossible to miss Callum’s Land Cruiser, though. It’s probably the only car on the islands that particular shade of forget-me-not blue.