Slapton Sands (24 page)

‘There's one more thing,' Mrs Cartwright said brightly. And Alice knew that everything so far had been the mere preamble to this.

‘You had further dealings with them?'

‘Not intentionally.'

‘Go on,' Alice said. ‘Please.'

‘It was one morning in the cottage hospital at Kingsbridge. I was doing all that dig for victory stuff and had got a septic finger for my pains. While I was waiting to be treated, two Americans came into the vestibule of the building, demanding to see a doctor. There was no doctor present, and they got the duty nurse. They screamed at her for blood plasma. And I do mean screamed. There wasn't any, I think. It was only a cottage hospital. Their stocks pretty much ran to milk powder for new mothers who found they couldn't breast-feed. Emergency blankets for the parish poor in very cold spells. They cleaned cuts and applied dressings to abrasions and burns.'

‘Did the soldiers say anything about burns?'

Mrs Cartwright paused, as if trying to remember. Alice thought she remembered perfectly well. ‘No. They didn't say anything about anything. They were rushing greatly and they were deeply distressed. They left with boxes of lint and
bandages. Ampoules of morphine. A big bottle of ether. And a case filled with bottles of TCP. No blood plasma, I remember that.'

‘When was this?'

‘I'm pretty sure it was April of 1944.'

Pretty sure.

‘Date?'

‘I think around the twenty-ninth.'

Alice nodded. Birds were singing in the vicarage garden. It was a gorgeous afternoon. Weren't they all, in England just now?

‘There was some catastrophe, wasn't there?' Mrs Cartwright said.

‘I think so,' Alice said. ‘Yes, I think there was.'

Mrs Cartwright nodded. In sunlight, you could see her scalp through her hair, see where the dye had congealed and gathered at the withering roots. This summer, Alice thought. It's relentless and entirely without remorse.

Alice took photographs of the beach at Slapton from various elevations. She was using a black and white film originated by Agfa for medical photography. Ordinarily it wouldn't have been any good for landscape work in England. There wouldn't have been sufficient ambient light. But it would work perfectly in this weather, she was told. The specific qualities of the film were subtle graduations of contour and astonishing detail over a considerable depth of field. She had borrowed the Leica camera and the lenses
from the university photography club, and its secretary had advised her to buy the Agfa stock, after asking what she wanted the camera for. She made sketches and she wrote notes. She was gathering impressions, really. Her visit to Slapton Sands had never been about uncovering conclusive evidence. That lay, if anywhere, in a confidential report gathering dust in a file probably in Washington. She was here because the something covered up had happened here. She was neither a psychic nor a cop. She was a historian. She was here for the simple reason that however barren it proved in providing her with finished material, this place, this location, was her primary source.

On her third day she called Professor Champion, using the telephone to do so in the cottage. Her landlady had still not returned, and in Alice's mind she was by now assuming the status of rumour or myth. Champion had requested she call him once a week in his capacity as her course supervisor. He'd said to reverse the charges, which she did. He was still on campus, guest lecturing at the lucrative summer school they ran. Alice made the call at five-fifteen, still within campus office hours. The college switchboard must have closed for the long vacation, though. It didn't respond. Alice eventually reached the professor directly on his office number.

‘The police are looking for you.'

Well, she thought. That's the niceties dispensed with. ‘They found me. I spoke to your former protégé.'

‘You did what?'

‘Sally Emerson. The maths teacher in waiting. I spoke to her two days ago.'

She heard his desk lighter click and hiss. There was a pause while he breathed in smoke and breathed it out again. ‘I'm not talking about the Kent Constabulary. This chap was based in Lambeth. In Kennington.'

Alice was pretty sure that David had parked the Apache's car legally. Of course, the Apache, spiritual heir to the Lizard King, was not the type to worry about things like those tax discs they displayed on windscreens in England. But there was nothing to connect the car to her. They'd had a later brush with the law. But nothing of consequence. And not in Kennington.

‘You used your student card to validate access to some microfiche files in the Imperial War Museum.'

‘I did. They were a waste of time.'

‘After your departure it was noticed that a photograph had been removed from the wall of one of the galleries.'

‘I don't have it,' Alice said. But she knew which one it was.

‘Give them a call,' Champion said. ‘As a courtesy. Put suspicious minds at rest.' He gave her the number and the name of a policeman who worked the day shift on the front desk. She didn't even bother to copy the number down. ‘How are things otherwise?'

‘Curiouser and curiouser, professor,' she said.

But her words did not reflect her feelings. The pun was
anything but funny. Alice had the sense that she was being driven towards a discovery she was being deliberately and systematically scared away from making. She didn't know which was more alarming. The malign spirit of Johnny Compton had almost disabled her with fear, on those occasions in which it had manifested itself. But she had the strong intimation that each lead she uncovered led her along a predetermined path. And that was just as unnerving. It called into question whether she acted out of free will. It made her feel like a child following planted clues in the pages of a story hurtling towards its dreadful conclusion.

Alice figured that two catastrophes, not one, had claimed the lives of the soldiers killed in such appalling numbers at Slapton Sands. Both, she concluded, had taken place in April 1944, just a few weeks before the date set for D-day. She strongly believed that the second tragedy had taken place not so much despite the first but in some perverse way because of it. And the second event was the one the US army were determined to keep a secret.

Something had happened at sea. American bodies had washed up, for weeks, all along a large stretch of coastline. But whatever her Colorado vet had almost been a party to had happened not at sea but on the beach. It was smooth, he had said, free of shell holes, of corpses, of the chaotic litter of battle. But talking to him had left Alice convinced that something had happened. Craters and corpses could be bulldozed into sand. Some industrious subterfuge had taken place that April night, something her vet had been
prevented at gunpoint from witnessing. What price a mass grave full of young Americans under the sand at Slapton? Listen to your hunches, her dad had told Alice. She was increasingly sure that some awful event had taken place on the beach.

There was always the possibility that the first incident could be independently corroborated, proven, even, with evidence the American military establishment would be unable to refute. So they would continue to deny that anything went wrong. And then, if given no alternative by incontrovertible proof, they would admit to the first of these covered-up, costly events. But they would never admit to the second. They would insist that a single, regrettable incident had claimed all the casualties.

If what she suspected about the first incident were true, there would have been no need of blood plasma and morphine supplies. But then, if what she believed about the first incident were true, how in God's name had the second tragedy been allowed to occur? And what part had Johnny Compton played in it that so shamed his ghost now? Jesus, the man had mutilated a prostitute. He'd been a scumbag in life, so what could he conceivably want to scare her away from finding out about that sordid life in death?

Compton's role had to concern the second incident, Alice believed. He was an infantry officer. His only possible part in the first Slapton tragedy would be as victim. Or witness. That was her supposition, anyway. Tomorrow, she hoped to establish at least that much as fact.

Now, though, she was unnerved by the disappearance of the picture from the Imperial War Museum. She wished there was someone she could sit down and talk to. She needed the simple assurance of good and trusted company. It would be so comforting to walk down to the pub at the far end of Slapton Sands from the cottage and meet Rachel Vine there, puffing on a Players Navy Cut, scowling at the volume of the jukebox, sipping a gin and tonic at a corner table. Or Mrs Cartwright. Mrs Cartwright would do, blue-rinsed Jane Cartwright, composure unruffled by the scrutiny of the Special Branch, happy to talk about church fêtes and gardening prizes and the purgative power of black molasses. Except that Jane Cartwright's pub excursions had very probably ended in 1945, with the return from the war of her husband.

Who else was there? Who else would she be happy to share a drink with in the pub? Clifford Lee was an interesting guy. Metric Larry had called Clifford a Hardy man. She enjoyed Thomas Hardy herself. They could discuss English literature over a pint, the way students were traditionally supposed to do. According to Metric Larry, he liked her. She'd like to buy him a drink, get to know him better, thank him for saving David's life. As if he'd have done anything different than go into the water. As though she had any right to the presumption.

Who else? Who was she kidding? There was nobody else. She had liked Sally Emerson. The woman was a compelling mix of physical allure and blade-keen intelligence. But she
would always associate Emerson with the disturbed, disturbing circumstances that had led her to meet the woman in the first place. Professor Champion? Champion was clever, but he considered a failure any social encounter with a woman that didn't end with you lying underneath him nailed naked to a bed.

Which, of course, left David Lucas.

From the age of eight, Alice had never shared a classroom with the children of parents who weren't rich. Her isolation had made her independent, given her an objectivity beyond her years. Insular, disdainful, arrogant, remote: those had been the words used to describe her by her school contemporaries, and Alice had been happy to consider each a sort of accolade. Her attitude got her through. She was self-contained. She valued self-possession. When what her father drove or where her family vacationed provoked cruel adolescent mirth among her schoolmates, Alice genuinely didn't care. You had to respect someone's opinion before it had the power to hurt your feelings. If you didn't depend on other people, they couldn't let you down. It was her and her dad and her brother, not against the world exactly, but sort of, in a way that had suited her very well.

Except that now it was only her. And unnerved by Johnny Compton's thieving ghost, she craved company as she never had in her life. And the company she particularly craved was that of David Lucas. He'd be under the fort at Bembridge now, groping through kelp and gloom in a wetsuit, dragging breaths from a cylinder strapped to his
back, a belt full of lead countering his body's buoyancy, keeping him close to the bottom.

‘Be wary, David,' Alice said. ‘Be wary of the sharks.' She could not believe how much she missed and feared for him then. ‘Be safe, David,' she said, comforted for a moment just by the small intimacy of saying his name out loud.

She took a long breath and looked at her watch. It was seven o'clock. It was evening, though you'd barely guess it from the quality of light. They hadn't yet got to the English longest day. Alice intended to go to a town for that particular event. She'd drink scrumpy in a beer garden and try to avoid wisecracking about John Barleycorn and the green man and the inevitable troupe of fucking morris men. Assuming, of course, that she could find the companions to avoid wisecracking about these things with.

She had retreated to her room after the phone conversation with Champion. One of the necessary disciplines of her isolation was the rationing of fear. She had known the thing that now had a name, the Johnny Compton thing, would follow her here. So she had imposed certain disciplines on her thinking to deal with that contingency. Except that contingency was the wrong word. Because Johnny Compton's pursuit of her was a creeping inevitability. She was being haunted, properly haunted, by an unquiet, angry ghost. She could sense it now, in her cottage room under the eaves, as the cosy room grew thick with the forbidding odour of the sea. As the air grew heavy and portentous, dread settled on her and made her shiver and
clutch at herself, bizarrely, watching heat ripple on the oozing, glossy asphalt melting in brilliant puddles on the coast road outside her window. She felt the thick breath of him, the tar from his tobacco-heavy lungs. He lived in her, revolting, dead.

‘Bitch,' he said.

She felt the coarse texture of his tongue, licking her ear. Light had bled and perished from the room. She was enfeebled by darkness, trapped and reeling under the salt ooze of decay, corruption.

‘Go home, bitch.'

And it was gone.

When she was able to, she walked out of the cottage and across the coast road and sat on a hillock of razor grass and cried. She cried with terror and eventually with relief. She stopped crying only because shock had exhausted her beyond the point where she could continue. When you were unpractised at crying, it seemed to require a sapping energy. Alice sat on her hillock of razor grass and rubbed rawness and salt from her eyes. No one had passed her. Nobody had come along the road. She ran finger and thumb down a ragged edge of grass. Blood bloomed from her thumb. The blood pulsed out of her in droplets and dripped with the accelerated thump of her heart. She looked back to the cottage. It seemed out of shape, contorted and leering like a carnival funhouse. But it was just a cottage, she knew. It was just a cottage on a quiet and
picturesque part of the English coast. There were pretty seashells picked from the shore on its window ledges. There were sentimental Victorian prints to do with boats and harbours on its walls. A guest book by the door was filled with happy testimonials. It was only a bed-and-breakfast cottage. And a ghost lurked there, corrupted and rancorous.