The Boat House (2 page)

It was a path that Alina had walked before him, many times.

Diane was wrong. The three of them weren't alone. Others knew what had happened, and how.

But they'd never speak out again.

PART ONE

Beginnings

We are familiar merely with the everyday,
apparent and current, and this only
insofar as it appears to us, whereas the
ends and the beginnings still constitute
to man a realm of the fantastic.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer

Everything must have a beginning…
and that beginning must be linked to something that went before.

Mary Shelley, Introduction to Frankenstein

ONE

But there's no clear point at which one could say,
here it began
.

Instead, there are many. Like the day that Pete McCarthy turned up at Ted Hammond's auto-marine with nothing more than a cardboard suitcase and the hope of a season's maintenance work (a season that ran on into a year, and then into the next, and seemed set to run on indefinitely should nothing ever happen to break up their growing friendship), or perhaps the one some years before when a seven-year-old Russian girl named Alina Petrovna led a teenaged boy out into the marshlands near her village and came back alone. Or the day that Alina, now grown, gathered whatever possessions she could carry and made her first, unsuccessful attempt to cross the border out of her Karelian homeland.

Or perhaps, getting closer to it, the night that Pete McCarthy set out from the valley to attend his mother's funeral, while Alina Petrovna, hardened if not chastened by her punishment, got most of those same possessions together and tried it again. As beginnings go, this one's probably better than most.

McCarthy first.

As the woman who was to change his life was boarding the train that would, indirectly, bring her to him, Pete McCarthy was doing his best to kick some life into his shabby old heap of a car.

But the shabby old heap simply didn't want to know; it sat under the workshop lights, mean and dark and uncooperative, its chromed grin shining dully and a spirit of mischief showing deep in its sixty-watt eyes. It was a black Zodiac, close to twenty years old and easily the ugliest car to be seen on the roads around Three Oaks Bay, and even if its colour was appropriate for a funeral it was going to be of no damn use at all to Pete if it didn't get him there.

This was all that he needed. This, after three hours of tweaking and tuning and a once-over with the Turtle Wax to make it look halfway presentable. He'd given it loving care, he'd given it attention. What more did it expect of him?

There was nothing else for it.

He took off his suit jacket, rolled up the sleeves of the shirt that he'd changed into in the back washroom less than ten minutes before, and reached for the bonnet release.

He was still working at it when Ted Hammond called by after a late session in the auto-marine's office. "Having problems, Pete?" he said, and Pete made two fists, growled, and kicked the nearest wheel. The Zodiac's hubcap fell off and rolled into the grease pit. The two of them had the carburettor in pieces by the time that Wayne, Ted's sixteen-year-old boy, put in an appearance; Wayne spent no more than a few seconds contemplating the engine before saying that he knew exactly what was needed.

"I've got to have some money," he said, and then he went off in the breakdown wagon (which, in only seven months, he'd be able to drive legally), and returned fifteen minutes later with a party sized can of beer.

It was almost midnight when Ted found the fault.

The fault was in the new set of contact breakers that Pete had fitted as part of the routine service. If he'd left everything alone, he'd have had no trouble. Nobody, fortunately, was unkind enough to say so out loud, or they'd have received a look that a laser would have been hard pressed to match.

They put everything back together, and Pete tidied himself up again. Because there were no chairs around the workshop, they opened up the Zodiac and all three of them sat inside as they finished what remained of the party can. Or rather, Ted and Wayne took care of it, seated in the back of the car; Pete turned around the rearview mirror in the front and tried, without much success, to make a decent job of knotting his borrowed black tie.

Ted said, "Wayne can take the van up to the cottage every now and again, check on it for you while you're away." And Wayne raised his styrene cup, and burped loudly in assent.

"Don't worry about it," Pete said. "If anybody's desperate enough to steal my stuff, they're welcome to it." He gave the knot a final check in the mirror before half turning himself to face the two in the back. They were sitting there patiently like a bleary eyed jury, Ted looking like a Toby Jug in a frayed old sweater and Wayne slumped into the corner with the skull on his
Judge Death
T shirt grinning out of the shadows.

Pete said, "How do I look?"

"You want the truth?" Ted asked.

"Not necessarily."

"You look fine."

"You look like they just let you out of prison," Wayne added helpfully.

"Oh, thanks," Pete said. "Just what I need." And then, to signal that the brief and sober goodbye party was over, he got out of the car and went around the back to close the open boot lid on his suitcase. The drive ahead would take most of what was left of the night. His brother had promised to fix him up with a borrowed flat for the stopover, but now he'd have to skip it and catch up on his sleep sometime later. Big brother Michael - the respectable one in the family, who'd taken it upon himself to make all the funeral arrangements - probably wouldn't be pleased at the change in schedule, but that would cause Pete no extra grief at all. Mike was so uptight, he probably couldn't even fart without the aid of a shoehorn.

Ted Hammond and Wayne climbed out and then Pete walked all around the Zodiac, slamming and checking the doors. Wayne followed him, looking doubtful. No denying it, the car was a rustbucket; in the past Pete had welded so many pieces onto the underside that he could have driven over a landmine without personally suffering a scratch.

"Think you'll make it?" Wayne said.

"Are you kidding? She's running like a dream."

Wayne stepped back, so that he could take the whole car in at once; the pitted grille, the yellowing headlamps, the small chip crack in the windshield that had never quite become bad enough to star, the wrapping of black tape that held the radio aerial into the bodywork.

"Yeah," he said, finally and with distaste. "I had a dream like that, once." And then he moved to open the workshop's big double doors as Pete got in behind the wheel.

Ted bent to speak to Pete through the car's half open window. "Anyway," he said quietly and seriously, "I'm sorry about your mother."

"Yeah," Pete said. "We could see it coming, but…" And he shrugged; it was a thought that he'd been unable to complete in any satisfactory way since the news had first come through, in a phonecall from Michael three days before.

Ted took a step back; Wayne now had the doors open to the darkness, standing just inside the workshop and trying not to shiver in the March night's chill. Pete nodded to Ted and smiled briefly, and then he reached for the key to start the engine.

The Zodiac eased out into the lake-misted night, smoothly and in silence.

It moved in silence because Ted and Wayne were pushing it; Pete's earlier attempts had run the battery down, and the jump-starter was way over on the marina side of the yard. Grunting and wheezing, they got him across the dusty forecourt and onto the stony track that went on to the main road, and after a few yards the engine kicked and turned over and coughed into a ragged kind of life. On came the lights, making sudden and bizarre shapes out of the boat hulls, trailers, and half-dismantled cruisers that were crowded in along the trackside verge, and then the car was out from under their hands and pulling away as the two of them stopped to catch their breath.

They watched his tail lights all the way down the track, until they started to flicker as he made the turn around behind the trees. A few moments after he'd gone from sight, there came a faint singsong vibration of tyres on metal as the Zodiac crossed the iron bridge that was their link to Three Oaks Bay, the lakeside resort which brought the yard most of its business. The sound lasted less than a second, and left silence behind.

Ted put his hand on Wayne's shoulder as they turned to go back inside.

And then he winced as, somewhere far off, there was a loud backfire. The high valley sides caught and echoed it, like a gunshot deep in some vast, empty building.

"Don't worry," Wayne said. "Think of it as advertising."

"In what way?"

"If he can keep that old heap on the road, he can probably fix anything on wheels."

Wayne closed the big workshop doors, and turned the handle to lock them from the inside. Ted stood by the smaller back exit, his hand ready on the light switch. He was thinking that things were going to seem strange around here for a while, with Pete away. He had another mechanic, a quiet, intensely private man named Frank Lowry, but their relationship wasn't the same; in the four years since he'd joined them Pete had become more like another son to him, and almost like an older brother to Wayne. Maybe it wasn't your standard family unit, but in a world where it seemed that just about everyone was damaged goods in one way or another, they'd made themselves a fairly happy corner of the junkheap.

It wouldn't last forever, of course, because nothing did. Wayne was starting to spread his wings a little, swapping
Custom Bike
for
Playboy
and getting into a relationship with a girl named Sandy which seemed to consist mostly of baiting each other and trading insults and playing music somewhere around the pain threshold. And Pete; Pete, eventually, was going to hook up with someone who really appreciated him, and then it would be goodbye to those evenings of beer and popcorn and frozen pizza and rented videos, and all those other little touches that made up a uniquely masculine view of the Good Life. Both of them would leave him, and then he'd be alone.

But maybe not this year,
was his consoling thought as they moved out into the main part of the yard and he closed and locked the door behind them. It wasn't much of a lock, but then it didn't need to be; Chuck and Bob, Ted's two German shepherd dogs, were let to run free in the yard on all but the coldest of nights.
Survivors will be prosecuted
, Wayne had once chalked on the main gate, but then Ted had made him clean it off.

Wayne Hammond was a likeable boy, much as his father had been at the same age. He wasn't academically bright, but he was sharp in all the ways that counted. He was taller than his father, with a lithe swimmer's body and an averagely pleasant face that wouldn't break any hearts - but then it wouldn't stop any clocks, either. Ted would look at him sometimes and, just for a moment, he'd see the boy's mother again.

As the two of them crossed the yard to their unlit house - Wayne going along to raid the fridge before returning to his two-roomed teenager's den above the workshop - the woman who would bring disaster to their lives and to the valley was making a crossing of a different kind, more than two thousand miles away.

Nikolai had done little more than to sit watching her for the first couple of hours, until he'd realised that he was making her nervous. That was when he'd moved from the fold-down seat to lie full length on the compartment's upper berth, leaving Alina below to gaze out of the window at the passing landscape. This was continuous and unvarying, birch and pine forests standing dark in the moonlight; occasionally the trees thinned out for settlements of low wooden houses with small-paned windows and snow laden roofs, but for the most part it was just a rolling backdrop for their dreams and fears.

He adored her. One dream, at least, seemed to be coming true for him.

He was nervous about their situation, but nothing more. This wasn't like the dark old days, where people were let out grudgingly if at all and then only with the certainty of family ties to draw them back; Nikolai knew that, had he chosen to travel alone, he'd almost certainly have faced no difficulty in getting permission. Border controls were easing, the Berlin wall had fallen, there was a different kind of outlook all around. The problem lay with Alina; she'd some kind of a criminal record and she'd told him that there were charges still outstanding that she'd have to answer if ever they caught up with her. He'd never asked her what the charges were. He trusted her.

But he knew that she'd spent time in a prison psychiatric hospital, and that she'd slipped out on a technicality and they wanted her back, and that before he'd met her she'd already lived without a permanent address or identity for at least two years. He couldn't imagine himself surviving in that way, but he could see what it had been doing to her. There was no question about it, she had to get away; and after he'd known her for only a short time, there had been no question but that he'd have to go with her.

A sharp rap on the wall by the door brought him slithering down from the berth. Alina was already standing as the guard came in, a boy soldier in an iron grey uniform and with a deep cheek scar like a cattlebrand. He was carrying a short stepladder in one hand, their passports in the other; after setting the ladder down he read out the names on their papers, mispronouncing them, and then turned to the photographs. They were French passports, guaranteed stolen but not yet reported, and the flimsy visa forms inside were simple forgeries.

There wasn't much room. Alina was standing close beside Nikolai, her head only just level with his shoulder, and she was looking at the floor. Nikolai felt a small flame of apprehension coming to life inside him at this, and the flame became a steady heat as the guard - barely out of school but already as tough and as ugly as a board - looked up from her picture to find her avoiding his eyes.