The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (18 page)

Not too much had changed in those eight years, she was still teaching at university, a lot more confident now with her lectures, settled into her career. The house had been re-decorated, Jim’s more valuable belongings long-since sold, the rest given away, or taken to the tip. After eight years the house felt hers. She had lived there alone for twice as long as they had lived there together, the only traces left of him were the photographs on the walls, a bike in the garage, a few folders of papers kept on a shelf, evidence of his life and death.

At first it had felt like her life was in limbo, waiting for Jim’s body to come ashore so he could be buried, and so she could finally get an answer to the cause of his death. But equally she didn’t want him to be found. She grew to accept that Jim couldn’t have known about her affair, but it didn’t help. She still felt a hot guilt when she thought about it, and doubts always crept in. And when the months turned into years she knew that the secret of Jim’s death would stay a secret. She grieved, and she felt the pain recede into the distance. And the guilt and the shame. But it never quite disappeared entirely.

That morning she had a midday lecture. She got up late. She had time for a coffee before going in. That’s when the phone rang. She almost didn’t answer it, you get so many nuisance calls these days.

Click. A little bit of wind noise, like the caller was outside.

“Can I speak with Jim Harrison please?”

“I’m afraid not, he passed away some time ago. What’s it regarding please?” She sighed inwardly. Another list to have Jim’s name removed from.

There was a very long pause on the phone and the man’s voice changed when he replied. He sounded confused.
 

“Oh. I was phoning to say I’d found his wallet.”

Her brain was already returning to how she would deliver her lecture that afternoon, but this stopped her dead. Jim’s wallet had never been found, the police had assumed it was taken when the car was broken into.

“I’m sorry, what do you mean?”

“Well like I said, I’ve found his wallet.”

“Where? How?”

There was no delay this time. The caller seemed on more expected ground. “Yesterday, out on the new cliff path. We’ve been putting a bridge in over the stream and there was this bag stashed in a bush. Bit tatty it was, but it didn’t look like it was exactly abandoned. Anyways we had a look in, there were a few clothes in there and stuff, and this wallet. It had his name and address in it. You know, if lost please contact this number…” The man left his voice hanging. It wasn’t until later that Natalie wondered if he’d been hoping for a reward. But at the time her mind was too busy trying to process the information.
 

“Are you sure it’s the right Jim Harrison?”

“Well I don’t rightly know that do I? I’m just ringing the number in the wallet.”

 
“Yes of course. I’m sorry.” She stopped.

“And I assume you’re working somewhere in Cornwall are you, near Porthtowan?”

Again the confusion sounded in the man’s voice.

“
Cornwall?
No love. No we’re up by Llanwindus, you know the new coastal path that’s going in?”

“Llan…? I’m sorry where is that? Is that in Cornwall somewhere?” Natalie insisted.
 

“What’s all this about Cornwall? Like I told you, we’re here in Wales. Near Llanwindus.”

“Wales? But that doesn’t make any sense. Jim was in Cornwall when he died, not Wales. That’s where they found his car.”

There was a pause and when the man spoke again she could hear in his voice he was looking for an excuse to end the call.

“Look I don’t know nothing about that. Maybe I’ll just send the bag onto you, would that be best?”
 

Natalie answered quickly, beginning to panic. “Yes. No, don’t go. Look I’ll give you my address.”

“I’ve got it already. Remember? It’s in the wallet.” The man hung up.
 

Natalie tried at once to trace where the call had come from, but it was an unlisted number. She replaced the receiver on the wall and stared at it until her coffee went cold.
 

She didn’t mention the call to anyone at work, and by the time she came home later that day she decided she wouldn’t tell anyone about it. Not because she wanted to keep it secret, but because, by then, she couldn’t be certain she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. Better to wait and see if anything actually came through the post, or the man called back. Then no one could accuse her of losing it.
 

Nearly a week passed. She nearly convinced herself it was some crazy hallucination, but then she saw the postman coming up the drive. He knocked on the door and handed her a parcel wrapped in brown paper. He said something about the weather but she didn’t hear what. She’d seen the postmark: Llanwindus Post Office.

She took the package into the kitchen and sat at the table, just looking at it for a while. Then she steeled herself and began to open it. Whoever had wrapped it had used too much tape, the paper tore easily enough but she had to get scissors to break through the taught web of plastic which gripped the contents of the parcel. When she’d pulled it away she recognised the bag inside with a jolt. She’d even noticed it missing, when she cleared out Jim’s possessions in those black months after he’d disappeared from her life. It was his flight bag, waterproof and designed to carry enough gear for an overnight stop. It wasn’t worn but was faded in places. She undid the twin buckles and looked inside.
 

She first pulled out a pair of jeans, light blue and battered, underwear bunched up within them. A tee shirt, a black woollen jumper. She raised it up to her face and breathed in, but there was nothing of him there, just dampness. And then out it fell, his brown leather wallet.
 

It had been a present from her. Special soft leather, hand stitched. Totally overpriced of course but she hadn’t minded that. She’d given it to him to replace a horrible cheap thing he carried around in luminous colours from some surfing brand or another.
 

She unfastened it and looked inside. His credit cards, personal and business sat in their sleeves. The section for notes held thirty pounds in cash, a handful of coins too. She emptied them out on the table top and watched as they rolled and spun noisily before settling with an unexpected suddenness, the silence returning to the kitchen. His driving licence was there, his face looking off to the left as if in disdain for the bureaucracy of such things, then the slip of card with his name and address on it. Their address, the house that had been hers for longer than it had ever been theirs.
 

She breathed a few deep breaths and looked again inside the bag, but there was nothing more. And she checked the remains of the packaging for anything, a note, anything that might show who had found it. But nothing again. She sat with her dead husband’s clothes spread out on the table in front of her and asked herself, what it meant. Questions she had hoped would slowly fade into the past once again hammered at the front of her mind. And a sadness too, at losing Jim, and the part she might have played in it. She stroked the soft leather of the wallet. She knew there was only one person she could speak to, but she sat there that morning for a very long time before she picked up the phone.
 

“Can I come and see you?” She said. “I need your help.”

twenty-four

WHEN WE WERE too tired to paddle another stroke we let ourselves be pushed ashore on the other side of the bay where the waves bent around so far the water was nearly calm. The small beach there was made up of fist-sized rocks, bleached driftwood and plastic bottles. No one spoke as we emerged from the water. Maybe it was the concentration needed to pick our way up the slippery rocks, but I like to think it was something more. What had just happened, it took time to process it. Our minds had just been opened.
 

We kept up the silence as we walked back around the bay, across the stream, then back out the other side until we stood beneath the Hanging Rock. Then and only then did any of us speak. And of course it was John.
 

“This place,” he said, quietly, reverently, “We have to keep it secret. We can’t tell anyone about it.”

Darren was peeling off his wetsuit now and I did the same, pulling a towel from my bag. It was like both of us had lost the power to talk.
 

“If we tell anyone about this place,” John went on. “It’ll be ruined. People will come every day, from miles around. This place will be ruined. This is our wave. Our place. We tell no one.”

This time Darren nodded and managed to get a word out. “OK,” he said solemnly, like he was swearing an oath.

“Jesse?”

John’s blue eyes were locked on mine, trying to read me, willing me to accept what he was saying. For a moment I felt trapped as the elation of the last few hours came up against the misery of the previous month and the two cancelled each other out. But I couldn’t keep it up, the immovable object was crushed before the irresistible force and the flicker of a smile on my lips burst out into this massive grin.

“
Oh-my-fucking-God!
Do you realise what we’ve got here?” I was laughing now. “Of course I’m not going to tell anyone, this is the best wave in the whole world. This is winning the lottery. This is the dream, the surfer’s fucking dream!”

Then we were all laughing, and I don’t know why, but I opened my arms and grabbed John and pulled him towards me and then we were holding each other, laughing and jumping up and down with Darren trying to join in from the side. And the noise we made echoed up above us as it bounced off the Hanging Rock and out over the reef, and the line after line of perfect waves.

When the buzz wore off there was one immediate problem. There was no way we could keep getting our surfboards to Hanging Rock without someone, sooner or later, seeing us and wondering where we were going. It felt pretty safe once we were there. There were no signs that the owner of the estate, or anyone else, ever bothered coming that way, and the valley walls were so steep you couldn’t be seen from anywhere else, but we were totally exposed getting the boards to the estate’s boundary wall. The obvious answer was to leave the boards there. Right underneath the Hanging Rock there was a little cave, just high enough to walk into if you stooped over, and it got bigger inside so that it was maybe five metres deep. But if we left the boards there, we wouldn’t be able to surf the Town Beach. Since we could only get to Hanging Rock at the weekends, that meant no weekday surfing, and if we stopped surfing Town Beach altogether, then people might get suspicious and wonder where we were going.
 

For a couple of weeks we wrestled with the problem, but then it was John that came up with the solution. His dad was away so we were at his house for once, sprawled out on the white leather sofas with our feet up on the coffee table. Darren had taken a decanter of brandy from the bookshelf and was poking his finger down its neck, tasting it a drip at a time.

 
“I know what we’re gonna do about the board problem,” said John, watching Darren but doing nothing to stop him.

“What?” I asked. I expected him to come up with yet another route to get there, the best idea we’d come up with so far.
 

“We’re going to get the boards stolen.” He said it, then laughed to himself, probably at how brilliant it was. He stretched himself out on the wide armrests. But we didn’t get it.
 

“How does that help?” asked Darren.

“Because, if the boards get stolen, no one at Town Beach will expect to see them any more.”

“But we won’t have
any
boards,” said Darren. He set the decanter back down on its felt base and came and sat next to me.
 

“No.” John went on. “Then we’ll have two boards, because we buy new ones, just like everyone expects us to. And then, because the old ones aren’t really stolen, we just make it look like they are, we surf the old boards at Hanging Rock, and use the new ones at Town Beach. Problem solved.”

Darren looked doubtful.
 

“But I can’t afford a new board,” he began, but I started speaking at the same time.

“My board’s insured,” I said.

John ignored Darren and answered me.

“That’s even better. You get a new board for nothing.”

I thought about this for a while then I sort of chuckled as well.

“Actually, that’s quite good. Mum would definitely claim if my board got stolen, so it won’t even cost anything.”

John gave me a golden smile and leaned forwards on the wooden surface of the table, he began to tap his forefinger like he was sending a message in Morse code.
 

“We need to make it look real. We’ll do it from your house. That way it’ll look like someone from the campsite has taken them.”
 

“Yeah, there’s always dodgy looking guys there, who’d definitely steal boards. Mum’s always telling me to be careful.”
 

“But my board isn’t insured,” said Darren. “And I haven’t got any money either.” But we ignored him, John just looked at me with a grin that told me he was going to enjoy this. And he did, even more than I’d thought. He loved it.
 

John insisted it had to happen at night. He said it was when most burglaries took place. So one week later, as the sky grew dark, we left the boards on the lawn in front of the house where Mum couldn’t help but see them. Then we retreated to our caravan and kept an eye on them so that no one actually did nick them. We knew Mum had gone to bed when her bedroom light switched off. John gave it five minutes for her to fall asleep and then we moved. But that was when Darren announced he didn’t want to do it. He said it was because he hadn’t figured out a way to replace his board but I think he was just scared. John just shrugged. Told him it didn’t matter, then told me I was carrying Darren’s board as well as my own. For a while it looked like Darren might argue but then he just went home so it was just me and John left.