The Fire Child (19 page)

Anne Williamson has nothing to say. The nurse is hiding her face.

‘Then, yes, months later, I had a breakdown. I didn’t tell anyone. Not at first. I felt a kind of shame, I suppose. But I stopped believing in God, and then when I lost that I felt there was nothing to stop me falling through the floor. I started cutting myself.’

The doctors say nothing.

‘It was my mum who called the doctors. She found me slicing my arm, hacking at myself with scissors. I fought the doctors, but she was right. I would have killed myself. In effect I would have let
him,
my father, kill me.’

I do believe the nurse is nearly crying. I look at her, then go on, calmly enough. It all works so much better if I am calm.

‘I was sectioned. For a few weeks. For my own protection. I had a brief psychosis. But only for a few weeks. What is the term? Brief schizophreniform disorder. A brief psychosis. But, I ask you, who wouldn’t have gone a bit mad, after all that?’

The silence holds. Then I notice Doctor Conner is standing. He steps around the table, and takes my hand and he holds it in his, and he looks me firmly in the eye.

‘I’m so sorry to have put you through all this, Rachel. All this absurdity. I’m so very sorry. I think we’ve asked more than enough questions. I don’t think you’ll be hearing from us again.’

Anne Williamson says nothing. She looks guilty. The nurse comes across and shakes my hand as well and then dashes another tear from her eye and the three of them walk to the door. As they step outside, Doctor Conner turns and says:

‘I hope you will be all right? I understand David is not here at the moment.’ He gives me a look that seems to say:
I understand why
. His smile is earnest and sincere. ‘If you want anything, please call me.’

And then he is gone. And I am victorious.

And then I turn and look at my completed Christmas tree.

The little fairy at the top of the Christmas tree is staring right at me. I sense that she knows. She knows that I have told the bitter truth, yet also an enormous lie. She is smiling. Everyone is smiling. It is Christmas, after all.

Afternoon

The two of them gazed out to sea. Where that boat still drifted, pointlessly; and where the Lizard mine houses stood inert and black, blocking part of the view.

If only they could be demolished. Swept away. Pushed into the sea and forgotten. Part of David yearned to knock down every single mine in all of fucking Cornwall. Fucking blow them up.

But he couldn’t. Like the mines of Morvellan, Levant, Consols, and everywhere along the coast, these mines were Grade One listed. A UNESCO World Heritage Site. Untouchable. Protected. Every resident of West Cornwall, in particular the Kerthens, was cursed to look at them, every day.

The only consolation was that it gave him and Jamie something to talk about, and think about, other than the horror unfolding at Carnhallow, when he got his cherished hours with his son. His one free day a week, when he got to be a father. David was taking all his holidays, to be as close as possible to his son.

They’d had lunch in Pizza Express in Truro and ice creams on the wave-swept pier at Mullion Cove, and now, as the day ebbed, they were striding the coast of the Lizard, smuggling country, staring out towards Penzance and Mousehole. Across the chaos and turmoil of the Atlantic. Twenty years ago it was the kind of view he liked to draw, and paint. Not now.

Jamie was talking.

‘Tell me more about the mines, Dad. Did we really own them all? How did they make us rich, the mines?’

These questions – about the mines – had become more frequent of late. It made sense, as Jamie began to realize who he was: the son and heir of the mineral lordship of Penwith.

David pondered an answer: something involving but not too emotional. They didn’t need emotional. As the pair of them walked the cliffside path, the winter gusts carried tufts of surf, clipped off the manes of the waves below. The grey-white spindrift nestled in the shivering grass, and melted to nothing. As if it had never existed.

Jamie looked up, as David answered, ‘We got rich because the earth is rich. You know, I remember a list my grandfather used to recite, of all the minerals that lie under Cornwall. It was like a poem.’ David closed his eyes, searching back, a time of happiness. ‘How did it go … Yes. Yes, this was it: sulphide of bismuth, arborescent native copper, arseniate of iron crystallized in great cubes. Then foot-wide garnet crystals, prisms of iron, haematite iron, hydrous oxide of iron, magnetic iron pyrites, hornblende mixed with slate, axinite in veins, thallite, chlorite, tremolite, plus jasper, schorl, and traces of gold. All of it here, all of it right here, under these rocks.’

He paused. Jamie was looking at him, eyes wide. Sceptical or impressed, David couldn’t say. So David went on, ‘Fifteen per cent of the world’s minerals can be found in Cornwall. It’s more diverse, minerally speaking, than any comparable area on earth, with the possible exception of Mount Olympus, in Greece—’

Jamie interrupted, ‘But how did we
get
them, Daddy? How did we get all our mines, like uh, Morvellan and Levant, and how did we get the mines up on the moors?’

‘Your clever ancestors. They did some clever deals. We always owned Morvellan. But we bought Pendeen from the Bassetts in 1721. Levant we bought soon after. Often we bought mines when the previous owners went bankrupt.’

‘What does that mean? Bank …?’

‘Means the owners, or the shareholders, the tributers, ran out of money. Mining is expensive and many investors didn’t find the ores they were expecting.’

Jamie tilted his head, ‘But we did?’

‘Oh yes. We certainly did.’

‘And how many men died in our mines, Daddy? Teacher said in school that it was really, really bad, and they died too soon.’

Now David hesitated. He was toiling away, doing his best. But the boulders above him were beginning to roll, booming and muffled. ‘Well yes, yes, Jamie, it was pretty bloody grim. They used to get diseases. Horrible. Your grandmother can remember seeing miners holding on to lamp-posts in St Just – young men dying of lung disease, unable to walk home—’

‘Why didn’t they try fishing, or or …’

‘Fishing wasn’t much easier. I sometimes think the Cornish should have stuck to smuggling. And wrecking.’

Jamie stood there. Nodding. Absorbing. Wondering. The brightest of children, but surely given too much to think about. ‘Is it true there used to be blind men, Dad?’

‘What?’

‘In the mine tunnels, the tunnels under the sea? Miss Everett said in class that they had blind men down there ’cause they could see better in the dark so if there was an accident the blind miner would um lead the other miners to a safer place.’

‘Yes. That’s true.’

David remembered when he had first learned this startling fact: the Gothic quality of it had been shocking, even in the context of those great, Satanic undersea mines. Blind men were, once, employed for their blindness, because they were deemed better able to negotiate the utter blackness when explosions snuffed the candles.

‘It sounds horrible, Daddy, what they did. So why did we get to send them down the holes and under the sea?’

‘Because—’

‘Is it because we were bad? ’Cause the Kerthens were bad people?’

‘No, that’s wrong, it’s nothing like that. Really. You mustn’t think that.’

He was trying to disguise his fatherly concern. Jamie’s mental disturbance was unquestionably worsening, thanks to the proximity of Rachel. David desperately needed to rescue his son from the madness of his stepmother. But he had no idea how to do this. The law conspired against the lawyer.

The breeze was picking up. They were stationary on the clifftop. David leaned to zip his son’s raincoat. Jamie pushed his arm away. ‘Dad. I’m OK. I can do up my own coat!’

‘All right. All right. Sorry.’

David also knew he was being overprotective, trying to compensate for his intensified absence. But the way he missed Jamie was like an illness, he missed him far too much. Missed the daily things. Simply hanging out with his son, eating together, giggling at a shared joke, all of it. Now that David was entirely excluded from family life, he realized that it was the mundane and spontaneous stuff that mattered most of all. A sudden, rhapsodic game of Pooh sticks with Jamie over a stream in Ladies Wood. Cooking up a random barbecue with Jamie and Rollo on the front lawns in the summer.

With the objectivity of an exile, David could see that these stray times with Jamie had been the best moments of his entire life, the moments when he surprised himself with his capacity for happiness, the times when simple parenting was more intensely joyful than anything else he had done, ever.

And now those spontaneous moments were no more. Their meetings were structured. Life was contrived.

Everything was lost. Or close to being lost.

‘All right, Jamie?’

‘Yes, Dad.’

Jamie smiled. That puzzled yet wistful smile. A barely hidden sadness in the eyes. ‘Daddy, are you going to come home soon? It’s not the same without you, it’s lonely at home.’

‘I hope so, Jamie.’

‘Why do I have to meet you so far away from the house? I mean I, um, I had a nice time today, but why is it like this?’

‘Because I did a very stupid thing. A very, very bad thing. I’m really sorry about it now, but I had to go live somewhere else for a while.’

‘I saw Rachel’s face. When I came back from staying with Rollo. Something happened with her, Daddy? What happened?’

This question.
This question.
Rollo’s parents had very kindly and temporarily taken Jamie in, for a couple of nights, after his assault, but the boy could not be protected entirely from the truth. And besides, Jamie had then said he wanted to stay in Carnhallow, with Rachel. And would not give a reason.

‘Well, Jamie, we had a particular kind of an argument, but it was also very different. It was a foolish thing. I was extremely foolish.’

‘OK.’ Jamie seemed satisfied, though David wasn’t sure why.

The boy looked once more out to sea. So did David. It was what you did. Everyone in West Cornwall looked out to sea when conversation lagged: wherever you went you caught the same gesture, people tailing off into silence, then glancing to the west with a kind of longing. It was as if the landscape had shaped the mind. Living on the trembling edge of Europe, close to the western Celtic afterworld. This place where the rocks and grasses reached towards eternity: it taught the people to do the same.

A slight shiver overtook David. The winter twilight was deepening, and the last scars of surf were turning a silvery pink. Jamie was gazing at that unmoving boat. David thought he’d try one more time.

‘Jamie, you do know you don’t have to stay in Carnhallow?’

The boy didn’t even glance at his father; his gaze stayed firmly directed at the waves.

‘You don’t have to stay with Rachel. You could come and stay with me, at least at weekends. It’s your choice.’

Silence.

At last the boy turned, his blue eyes burning. ‘Daddy, you know why I won’t do that.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes!’ There was fury in his voice. ‘Yes you do! You do. Mummy is there. Mummy is in Carnhallow. So I’m not leaving her. Not. Not ever not ever. You can’t make me.’

‘But – Jamie – your mummy—’

‘Yes she’s dead, yes she’s in Zennor, yes she’s in the shaft, so you say – but, Daddy, I see her! In the house. It’s like she’s really there, so nearly real, she’s there. And Rachel saw her too. She is there!!’

This was close to breakdown, to something awful.

Man and boy stared at each other. Then the father shook his head: deciding to ignore this outburst; he had no idea of what he might do otherwise. The first and most important thing was to get rid of Rachel. Get her out of Carnhallow. Expunge the source of the madness.

Yet David’s plan to get Rachel sectioned had failed. If anything, it had made things worse. His own GP was now suspicious, when before he’d been conspicuously loyal. And his GP knew lots of police officers in Truro. They were probably all chatting. About that singular case of Nina Kerthen.
What really happened that day two years ago? We never found the body. Why did the son behave so strangely? Let’s look at it all again
. David’s life was about to disintegrate entirely.

Jamie seemed to have calmed. The wind was cold. The boy was blowing warm breath between his fingers.

‘Come on,’ David said, ‘Cassie is going to pick you up from my hotel. We’d better get going.’

As they headed for the car, parked by the King of Prussia pub, David turned. That peculiar, unmoving boat had gone. And yet the sea toiled on, uncaring. Maybe the oceans had swallowed the little vessel, when no one was watching. Things could disappear so quickly in these freezing waters.

Morning

David slowed in the December mud and stopped his Mercedes on a muddied track, well away from the snaking B road that meandered the coast from St Ives. He didn’t want to be seen by anyone, not here. He was probably within five miles of Carnhallow already, breaking the terms of his exclusion order.

Again he seethed with anger at the very idea. Excluded? From his own house, his own son. The impotence boiled inside him, like the sea at Zawn Hanna. He was powerless. Castrated by the courts.

Picking up his binoculars, David gazed along the shore. Between the gaunt rocks and wizened trees of the moors, and the tumbling grey waves, he could make out the black, dumb shapes of the Morvellan mine houses. Carnhallow was invisible, tucked in its cosy valley. Its roof slates no doubt glistening after the latest shower.

The day was now bright, but very sharp. Snow was expected later, and more snow was forecast for Christmas. This was a rarity. Usually they got vivid winter storms, not frost and snow. David hadn’t seen Carnhallow asleep in snow for half a decade: he could remember how deliciously handsome the great house looked in snow, how antique and pretty. He remembered snowflakes sprinkled like large crystals of sugar on the red berries of the holly wreath, adorning the front door.

They’d had snowball fights in the garden, that winter: even his mother had joined in. David recalled the scent of snowflakes on his wife’s blonde hair when he kissed her; he saw it all. He was staring, now, at a mental postcard of his own past happiness, the husband hugging the wife, the parents hugging the laughing son. Everyone happy in the snow.

David resisted the prickles of emotion; he used the binoculars again. He had to plan. But what in actuality was he going to do?

If it came to it, he would have to be clever – and careful. He already knew that his second wife was troubled by the idea of Christmas, so that would be a good time to take advantage of her unbalanced state. Christmas was also the perfect time to isolate her, in Carnhallow – David’s mother sometimes went to stay with ancient friends over Christmas, the Penmarricks at Lanihorne, the Smithwicks in Falmouth, for a week of goose-fat roast potatoes and sloe gin.

He could encourage her to take up another invitation. He might even be able to entice Cassie away: she was unhappy at Carnhallow, now David had been excluded. David was paterfamilias, the milord, and his absence offended her patriarchal Thai sensibilities. And David paid her wages.

Extract Cassie and Juliet, and Rachel would then be almost perfectly vulnerable. Pregnant and vulnerable. Spinning out of control.

But, if it came to it, what would he actually
do
? How far would he go? To save Jamie?

He scanned the brooding green fields, with their knuckly outcrops of granite, and the very obvious roads that gouged their way through the green-grey fields, heading west. No. He couldn’t drive to Carnhallow. That would be too conspicuous. On these lonely moorland roads a car could be seen for many miles.

But if he walked along the cliffs, using the long-distance coastal footpath, no one would see him. It would be easy to keep out of vision. Once he reached Morvellan, he could break into Carnhallow with ease. There were so many ways to gain access. So many basements and tunnels, coalholes and forgotten drains. He’d maybe do it at night, when the rowans and oaks looked like black coral in a midnight blue sea.

He also knew he had to test the route, see how long it would take, the best way of getting close without being seen. And Christmas was fast approaching. So whatever preparations were required, they had to be made now.

Locking his car, slipping arms into his stiff Barbour rain jacket, David buttoned himself against the cold sea-wind, and followed the cracked wooden sign saying
Coastal Footpath
. Crows and ravens bickered in the furze on either side.

He was quickly up to his ankles in mud, a slough that was tainted with reeking cow slurry. Taking his phone from his buttoned pocket, he made a note.

Good boots.

Head-torch.

He would definitely need a head-torch, because he would definitely need to do this in the depth of darkness. Christmas Eve perhaps, or the following night. That’s when Rachel would be most scared, most maddened, easily tipped into mistakes.

The walk from here to Carnhallow was very rugged: right along the teetering clifftops. He could see the brown houses of Zennor half a mile to his left, and the handsome, weathered church. And its graves. Onwards he trudged, down one cliff, then up on to another headland, then repeating the process, carefully past the Gurnard’s Head, past holiday cottages shuttered and padlocked for the winter, then old miners’ cottages – tumbledown ruins, wreathed in brambles, like rusty barbed wire.

Newer, glassier houses stood on the higher clifftops. Lights from Christmas trees behind windows showed they were occupied. Though he couldn’t actually see anyone on this raw, unpleasant day; the weather was close to tears, cold and damp, and sad.

David was getting near. The trees grew taller, the landscape perceptibly softened, and then he saw the black shapes of Morvellan Mine. This was the spot. As soon as David passed the next copse of oaks he would see the path that led up to Carnhallow, and then the house itself: dreaming in its scoop of valley, protected by its hoop of woods.

This was the most dangerous point from David’s perspective. Rachel liked to linger in the kitchen, to gaze down at the mines. If she did that today – or on Christmas Eve, when he returned – she would see him.

David shoved his hands in his pockets, away from the cold. Thinking it all through. If he walked ten more yards he’d be in full view.

How was he going to do it, come Christmas? Breaking into the house was easy enough. But then? Whatever he did, he needed her gone, for ever. And there was no easy solution. David wondered, idly, what Jago Kerthen would have done. Acted without pity, no doubt. Preserved the family at all costs.

Lost in speculation, David looked along the cliffs. And now the panic needled him. He had foolishly wandered close to the mine houses, where he was visible from all sides. And a hundred yards away he could see Cassie, walking the clifftop path, returning towards the house.

She was staring pensively down at the ground, as she approached. It was the only reason she hadn’t seen David already. This was potentially a disaster. She was going to stumble upon him breaking the injunction. His plans would be scuppered before he’d even started. And there was nowhere for him to go. If he ran, he’d surely be seen. He couldn’t rely on Cassie to stay quiet, and break the law. The injunction would be extended. He’d end up back in court. He had seconds to hide.

The mine. Morvellan Shaft House. He kept that second key for the Shaft House with him all the time. A sign of his ownership. As the mineral lord of West Penwith.

Desperate and clumsy, David juggled for the key. He had seconds to do it, before Cassie found him. Ten seconds, five. Four. He could sense her nearness, as he stuck the key in the rusty padlock, and turned.

Cassie was thirty yards away. Three seconds, two. She must see him now. Two seconds, one. But the chains fell open, and David pushed the door, slipped inside, and shut the door behind him.

Saved.

The mine greeted him like an old friend. It was all as he remembered. Strangely quiet, sheltered from the ceaseless wind, but utterly cold. Roofless, like a ruined church tower: a grim and primitive temple of oddly fine proportions, solidly built. And there was that great big void: the pit that descended a mile.

David’s heart was beating fast: he felt like a frightened kid. This place, where she died. This place of hurt and suffering, shouts and horror, of men going down into the pits of Hell to work, a mile under the sea, with only the tiny fires of their candles.

Cautiously moving closer to the shaft, David took a brief look down into the blackness. It was too dark to see anything, too deep. A place out of which you could not climb. The perfect place to dump a murder victim.

Picking up a random stone, a quartzite chunk of the deads, David tossed it down the shaft. He used to do this as a boy, to see how long it fell, before the splash. It was somehow irresistible. Everyone did it.

He counted the seconds of silence. The splash, when it came, was strangely muffled. More like a thump, than a splash. As if the stone had bounced on something, then skipped into the water.

Fumbling in the cold, David reached in his pocket; he didn’t have a proper torch, but he had the torch in his phone. Switching it on, he went as close as he dared to the very edge of the pit. The sensation was deeply unnerving. These stone slabs were so dangerously slippery. It would be so easy to skid, and topple in. And if he fell he would die too. But he had to see what had muffled the splash.

Crouching, then squatting, David peered over the edge, and held out his phone. Giving him enough light to see the black surface of the water, thirty feet down.

At once, he was sliced to the core with cold horror. Because, quite visible, floating face-down in the ink-black water, was a body.

It was a little bloated, distended by some process of decomposition. Resisting the urge to reel away, David stared. The red dress had been bleached, shredded. It was pinkish-grey, and half dissolved. But the blonde hair, that haloed the head like silvery seaweed, was very distinctive.

It was his first wife.

Nina Kerthen, née Valéry, had returned. Suspended this way, she looked exactly as if she were swimming in the sea off Collioure, snorkelling, hunting for sea urchins with Jamie.

He gazed, rapt, yet aghast, mesmerized by this gruesome spectacle. He couldn’t, at first, compute the coincidence: for the first time in a year he had visited Morvellan and this very same moment he had seen the body?

But it made entire sense. Nina might have been floating here for months, unseen. The detectives and pathologists always said there was a chance she would return, one day, it was all a question of those mysterious undersea tides and currents. No one ever came to desolate Shaft House, scene of that Christmas tragedy.

No one would have noticed Nina’s corpse, until now. She could have been suspended down there since the summer. Floating on the waters in that dissolving dress, unheralded and unmourned. An astronaut in the black, spinning in darkness.

Now the sadness surged. Grief, and anger, and steely regret. This thing, this pitiful spectacle, was his first wife. The woman he had loved so much, the woman for whom he had taken the most dangerous risks.

And the gruesome sight of her gave him resolve: he had sacrificed almost everything for Nina, Jamie, Carnhallow, the Kerthens. He had taken the greatest of chances to keep it all together, to keep it going. If Rachel threatened to destroy all that, he would do whatever was required.

David placed a hand on the wet slabs, preparing to leave. But as he did a gurgle from the waters below made him pause.

The body was moving. Some shift in the current, or some underground gas, was flipping the corpse. With a saddening gush the body turned over. Now he was staring at the remains of a face, dead yet partly preserved, expressive yet seriously defleshed. He could see the grin of half a skull, teeth exposed, as she smiled at him.

Was this horror truly Nina? It was impossible to tell, the decomposition was severe. It had to be Nina, yet the effects of two years in the freezing water were so distressing that she was unrecognizable.

The urge to escape was too much. Cassie must surely have gone by now. Creaking the door open, David stole out into the cold, and ran for the woods. Running away from what he had seen. The seabirds laughing at him as he fled.