The Wave at Hanging Rock: A Psychological Mystery and Suspense Thriller (8 page)

With this the decision was made, and Darren wasn’t going to argue any further.
 

“You keep holding it down, and I’ll kind of crunch its legs off.” John stepped around and crouched down beside Darren, his knife back in his hand. He poked his tongue out in concentration as he lined up the blade against the side of the crab, and then pushed it slowly down. There was a delicate cracking sound as the steel bit through the outer shell and severed the four legs as one.
 

“Now let it go, see if it can walk.”

The crab had barely reacted, but finally released from the pressure on its back it made a move to scuttle sideways to the pier edge. Its good side still worked and it was able to make some progress, but the stumps of the legs in its broken side just waggled in their sockets while more green juice oozed out.

“If I was a flattie I’d eat that,” said John, satisfied. He reached for his own rod and easily caught up with the crab. He picked it up and after a moment’s consideration poked the hook into one of the sockets, and forced it through the body until the shiny silver tip reappeared through the creature’s belly. John let it go and it swung out from the end of the rod. He walked a few feet to the pier edge and began to swing the line as he manoeuvred the rod out behind his head. When the crab was at the far extent of the swing behind him he cast it forward, pointing the rod out to sea. The crab flew out into the air behind the lead weight, the whole assembly seemed to hover briefly as its momentum carried it away, and then it plopped into the water and John’s reel fell silent.

“There. Now we’ll see which works better.” John settled the rod against the handrail and sat down with his back against the stone wall.
 

No one talked much for a while. It sometimes took ages to catch anything, and sometimes we didn’t catch anything even if we fished for hours. We had a few more mussels, but I didn’t want to catch any more crabs for a while and I could see that Darren felt the same. Instead we watched the two rod tips, waiting to see which one would twitch first.
 

“Fishing is pretty boring,” John said after about fifteen minutes had passed.
 

“Yeah,” Darren agreed. You could see the distaste had gone away already. We were back to normal.
 

“When are we going to get any waves?”
 

“Dunno.”
 

Surfing was our fall back conversation. I read somewhere that part of what makes it so addictive is that you can’t do it every day. It can be flat for ages and there’s nothing you can do, just wait and make sure you’re ready for when the waves do come. And all you know is that one day they will come again. Maybe that’s true, I don’t know, but I do know that whatever it was we were doing pretty quickly became boring compared to the thrill of surfing.
 

“I bet your old beach in Australia has got perfect surf right now,” said John.

John did this sometimes, talked about Australia, or about other places he’d read about in the magazines. The way he talked about them was like they were somehow nearly within reach, the sort of place we might go to for a holiday or something. I guess it was because he did disappear every now and then on a holiday, mostly with his mum, he’d come back tanned and full of tales about it, what the pyramids were like inside, or how warm the Caribbean was in February. But it seemed impossible to me by then. I felt like I could barely even remember Australia. I sometimes tried to remember the way from our old house to the beach and I could never do it. I could never quite connect the two. And the beach, that white sand, the azure waters and the lush green of the jungle on the bluff, all that had got mixed up with the images from the surf magazines I binged on.
 

“We should go there,” John went on now. “When we’re older and we can go places I mean. Or Indonesia, we should go there and explore and find places that no one has surfed before. We should open a bar in Indo. That’d be cool.”

That silenced us all for a while. It would be forever before we were even old enough to drive. Until then we were trapped here. A one-beach town where the waves had to be big enough to push up the Irish Sea before they could get to us. It was a depressing thought. I looked around at the coastline that by then was so familiar. The tide was dropping now and the beach was a thin strip of dirty yellow sand and pebbles, a black line of damp seaweed marking the highest point the water had lapped at an hour or so earlier. There were a few people walking on the beach, and one or two huddled around picnics, mostly families from the campsite. My eyes followed the beach south to where it abruptly met black rocks and above them low orange cliffs. These features curved away out of sight as the coastline took a turn to the south, low green hills visible falling into the sea beyond.
 

“We could explore a bit more here,” I said suddenly. “For all we know there might be better waves somewhere. Better than Town Beach.”

Darren’s eyes followed my gaze southwards, and when he spoke he sounded alarmed. “No, we can’t go there. You’re not allowed to go there.”
 

“I know you can’t go there,” I said, irritated. I’d been looking at the estate which hugged the coast to the south of Town Beach. It was private land, some wealthy landowner had miles of it all fenced off. Even the coastal footpath took a detour inland to go around the estate.

“Everyone knows you can’t go there,” Darren said again. “It’s private.”

“Alright Darren,” I said. “I didn’t mean inside the estate alright? I meant, I dunno, like further away, beyond the estate.”

“But how would we get there, it’s miles…” Darren started to say until John cut him off.

“Shut it Darren, you’ve made your point.”
 

Darren closed his mouth and watched John nervously. I knew how he felt.

John had his eyes looking southwards as well now, where the cliffs at the end of Town Beach disappeared around the small headland.
 

“It can’t really be
that
private can it? Not to locals like us.” John said.

I almost protested again. I hadn’t meant exploring inside the estate, but then the truth was I hadn’t
not
meant it either. I’d lived there a couple of years by then, and the three of us had already explored pretty much everywhere else. We knew Town Beach backwards, we’d walked every step of the cliff path to the north, we knew all the coves and the caves, and where it was best to jump from the cliffs into the water at high tide. But up to then we’d always kept away from the estate to the south. But it was probably only ever a matter of time. If I hadn’t known that before, it was pretty clear from the look on John’s face now.

John’s rod tip suddenly jumped down, and without hesitation he scooped it up and gave it a sharp upward jerk, then held it in both his hands, feet widely planted. The tip went still and we watched in suspense as nothing happened for a few seconds, then it bent right over and John grabbed the handle of the reel and began to turn it and wind the line in. We never bothered with playing the fish or nothing like that, we’d just use all our strength to pull it in. Darren and I leaned over the handrail watching the water below as whatever was on John’s hook was drawn closer to the pier. He was panting with effort by the time we saw a grey shape underwater pulling the line first one way then the other, then it broke clear of the surface and hung there like wet washing on a line, just giving an occasional flap. It was a big flattie, a really good size to catch from the pier. He hoisted it over the handrail and jumped on it with his knife, severing its spinal cord before removing the hook so that it hardly flapped at all. There was no triumphalism in John’s voice when he spoke.

“I guess that proves it boys. Alive crabs are the best.”

It was probably just luck that made that fish choose the living crab that day, but maybe things would have worked out different if it had gone for the dead one. I don’t know, but I do know that over the next few years, a lot of crabs suffered because of that fish.

twelve

 
IT WAS ONLY a few hours after Natalie reported Jim missing that the police found the car.

Two officers from the Devon and Cornwall police drove into the car park overlooking Porthtowan beach on the north coast of Cornwall. The interior of the car smelt of the hot kebabs they had just purchased from a nearby takeaway. The officer in the passenger seat was midway through his, a dribble of sauce running down from the corner of his mouth. As he wiped it away he spotted the car. He prodded his colleague in the ribs.
 

“Hey, over there. Red Nissan.”

“Hmmm?”

“There.”

“Well, get the list. Have a look.”

The first officer re-wrapped his food and reached behind his seat to pick up a clipboard. He flicked through a couple of pages of notes from the morning’s briefing until he found what he was looking for. He scanned a finger across the page, then looked over at the car again.

“Yep, that’s the one.” He glanced sadly at his half-eaten lunch then pushed the door open and climbed out, settling his hat onto his head.
 

“You’re keen,” his colleague said, taking another bite of his kebab.

“Well one of us has to fight crime around here.”

 
As he approached the car his feet scrunched in a manner depressingly familiar and he swore out loud.
Bloody thieving toerags.
The passenger window on the Nissan was shattered, fragments of glass lay on the ground like thousands of tiny cubes. He glanced in. There was more diced glass, but here it was scattered across a pile of clothes on the front seat, as if someone had got changed to go for a swim or a surf, which was a common activity on this beach. Or to drown themselves, the officer thought to himself. Suicides weren’t unknown either.
 

There was a parking ticket on the windscreen, a penalty notice. The officer craned his neck to see when it was issued, just a couple of hours previously. He looked around the car but couldn’t see any evidence that a pay and display ticket had been purchased.
 

The passenger side door was unlocked so he opened it, then squatted down. He noticed the ignition hadn’t been broken - it was a break in, not a stolen car that had been dumped. The kids around here were getting picky about what they went joyriding in. He stared at the pile of clothes on the seat for a moment, just jeans, a t-shirt and a jumper. Then he stood back up, walked back to his car to finish his lunch and then called it in.

thirteen

A LITTLE WHILE later John turned up at the campsite early one Saturday. There wasn’t any swell, and nothing in the forecast. At least it wasn’t raining though.

“Is your mum around?” he asked.

“She’s gone into town,” I replied, still eating toast.

“Good.” John walked out of the kitchen and into what was built as the living room but served as the campsite shop. We were open on Saturdays for two hours in the morning. I got the rest of the day off. He browsed for a while, collecting a chocolate bar and a small packet of cereal.
 

“Got any milk?”
 

“Use the stuff from the kitchen,” I replied knowing John wasn’t going to pay. “Mum’ll be less likely to notice.”

“OK. Where’s Darren?”

I shrugged from the doorway. “Guess he’ll be around soon. There’s no waves again.” I meant it like there was no rush.

“Do you sell maps here?”

I thought for a moment. “Uh, yeah, they’re in the drawer under the till. Why?”

“Let’s have a look at one.” He opened the drawer and pulled out a map, checking on the back that it covered the area he wanted. “Come on.”

We went back to the kitchen and he stuck the chocolate bar in his mouth while unfolding the map. It wasn’t the biggest table and he had to stop and get me to put all the breakfast things onto the side before he could open it properly.
 

“So we’re here right?” He said, stabbing at it. I leaned in. I’d looked at the map before of course, but I’d never really studied it. We’d explored up to then just by wandering, seeing what was there. You didn’t need a map for that.
 

John had his finger pointing at the campsite, behind the yellow crescent of the beach. To the north there was the small fishing harbour, and behind that the blue ribbon of the river cut into the green of the land, the little village spread out along its twin banks. Our world.
 

“So what’s down here then?” John was now poring over the stretch of coastline to the south of the bay. Like I said, all the land down there was privately owned back then, from a few miles inland right the way down to the coast. There was no footpath like there is today either, just signs saying “Private, Keep Out” as you got to the end of the beach. Inland there was a brick wall built along the road that snaked the whole way round the estate, too tall to see over. But on the map the details of the land the other side were shown in just the same detail. You had the contour lines showing where the hills and valleys met the sea, and the actual coastline had different symbols showing how the rocks continued all the way until the next sandy beach, with various jagged inlets and headlands as it went.
 

I joined John and began to study the section where the fine detail of the land was replaced by the simple colour blue of the sea.
 

“We need to check out the bits where it faces south west, that’s most likely to get the bigger waves,” John said.

“Or where there’s rock slabs that go out underwater. That’ll set the waves up and make them break properly.” I agreed.

“If we look now, when there’s no waves, we’ll need to be able to spot where will work when a swell hits.”

“Do you think we’ll be able to see?” I asked.

“Yeah, course we will.”

“Look here, there’s a bit.” I pointed at a little kink in the coastline, a small inlet in the rocks where a tiny stream had carved out a notch. “I bet there’s a wave that breaks there. I bet it’s awesome.”