Brodmaw Bay
Authors: F.G. Cottam
Brodmaw Bay
F.G. Cottam
Also by F.G. Cottam
The House of Lost Souls
Dark Echo
The Magdalena Curse
The Waiting Room
About the author
A former magazine editor, F.G. Cottam has two children
.
First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © F.G. Cottam 2011
The right of F.G. Cottam to be identified as the Author of the Work
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be
otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that
in which it is published and without a similar condition being
imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
Ebook ISBN 978 1 848 94521 0
Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 98100 9
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
For my sister, Sharon, with love and pride
Contents
After five novels and five years, acknowledgement for their unfailing encouragement and support is well overdue to some of the splendid people who work for Hodder and Stoughton. I would like to express my lasting gratitude in particular to Carolyn Caughey, Francine Toon and Eleni Fostiropoulos. To the three of you, sincere thanks.
Chapter One
James Greer sat on a modular plastic chair in the crowded A&E department of the hospital and tried the technique of visualisation to escape the panic threatening to submerge him. He pressed the pads of the thumb and forefinger of his right hand gently together. He closed his eyes. He drew in a deep breath. He pictured a shoreline in early, gentle English light. Emerald waves tumbled on to sand at the edge of the sea, smoothing out with rhythmic, dissipating force.
The sand was exposed, yellow and compacted, hissing in odd fissures and pockets on the retreat of the water, leaving behind translucent bits of shell and trailing wisps of kelp. He exhaled, at a blessed and deliberate remove, suddenly, from the chaos around him. It had worked. He was alert to the tug of his sleeve or the mention of his name over the public address system. But he was away from it, in the mental refuge of a place that meant calm and release. He even sensed he could smell the salt scent of a coastal morning.
He had learned this coping exercise two years earlier. He had been obliged to give a series of presentations. James had always suffered a secret terror of public speaking. As the moment approached, he would succumb to an attack of nerves. He would stammer and shake. So he had sought the help of a hypnotherapist.
Two sessions had been enough. He had not actually been hypnotised at either. Instead, he had been advised to deal with the onset of panic by picturing in his mind a place that symbolised calm and happiness to him. He supposed the business with his hand was meant to help with focus. He didn’t over-analyse the whole procedure. It had succeeded. He had paid his fee and left the hypnotherapist’s consulting room relieved and grateful for the ploy that put an end to the sweaty helplessness that the pressure of public performance had always inflicted upon him.
It was not fear of facing an audience that forced him to visualise now. It was an ordeal much more grave and testing. It was panic over the plight of his son. The call from the police station in Peckham had come an hour earlier. Jack had been mugged aboard a bus on the way home from school for his mobile phone. The level of violence used had been out of all proportion to the prize involved, his father had been told. The ambulance had delivered Jack to the hospital unconscious. Three assailants had beaten him senseless.
They had taken his wallet, too, which had delayed the process of identification. An alert constable had found a name tag on his shirt when they had stripped him at the hospital. He was concussed and the socket of his right eye was fractured. He was in theatre now, having the damage to his brain assessed. It was why his father was sitting in A&E, dreaming of a beach and breathing sonorously with his eyes clenched tightly shut. There were tears trapped under the lids of his eyes. But James knew that if he gave in to the loss of composure they signalled, he would not be of any practical use at all to his injured son.
Their Bermondsey townhouse was at the centre of London’s latest fashionable district. James could lunch each day at Borough Market. His wife’s steel and granite studio was on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge, with a panoramic view of the river through its tinted glass windows. They were handy for the Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre and Hay’s Wharf and he was only a scenic fifteen-minute stroll north to where most of his clients were based in Clerkenwell. But schools were difficult in inner London and Jack’s was in Peckham and he had been assaulted and robbed on the bus journey home by what the police were saying were members of a Somali street gang housed in one of the area’s sink estates.
Jack tried not to think about the price his son had just paid for maintaining the family’s metropolitan cool. He thought instead of his imaginary beach, with its emerald waves and wan English sunlight and the sand glimmering wetly under the light’s gentle spread. He thought of that, amid the sprained and cut and drunk and overdosed, among the toxic casualties of a typical early evening in an inner-London hospital.
He was there for two hours before a staff nurse summoned him to see the consultant. James shook his hand, thinking him young for a neurosurgeon, observing that there was none of his son’s blood on the spotless white coat the doctor wore. Maybe that was a good sign. Or maybe he had just changed out of one drenched to the elbows in gore and dropped it into a laundry bin. He smiled but the smile was tight, unreadable. The specialist might be miffed at having missed a dinner party. He might be on the brink of the delivery of tragic news.
‘Sit down, Mr Greer.’
‘I’ll stand for what you have to tell me.’
‘Very well, then. Your son will make a full physical recovery. He is severely concussed, but there is no cranial or arterial damage; no fractures to the skull, no blood clots causing any pressure to have to attempt the tricky procedure of relieving. He is young and healthy and the physical trauma will repair itself fairly rapidly. The damage to his eye socket will cause him a few weeks of pain and discomfort. But there is no evidence of nerve damage. His sight will be unimpaired. He retains his full capacity for facial expression. There will be no paralysis or permanent scarring.’
‘You mean there will be no physical scarring.’
‘Your son was very lucky.’
‘Was he?’
The doctor was studying something on a clipboard. ‘Jack was hit repeatedly about the head with a blunt instrument. Probably a tyre iron, the police think. Knives are the preferred choice of weapon among London’s feral youths. In the circumstances, I’d say he’s extremely lucky.’
It was all relative, James was thinking, who was thinking no longer about a beach. His thoughts were landlocked now and consigned to a sunless interior. ‘How long will he have to remain here?’
‘He’ll be here at least a few days, under observation, as a precautionary measure. The police will wish to take a statement. As the victim of a violent crime he also qualifies for counselling, which over the coming weeks, after a trauma such as this, he will almost certainly need.’
‘The hospital provides that?’
The doctor smiled his thin smile again. He tapped his clipboard with a pen. ‘Of course we do, Mr Greer,’ he said. ‘We’re a front-line resource.’
James nodded. ‘May I see my son, now?’
‘You may. I can’t predict this with absolute certainty, but it will be at least a few hours before he comes round, probably about breakfast time tomorrow. He will be sore and thirsty and I should think very happy and relieved to see you.’
James looked at his watch. It was just after eight o’clock in the evening. He needed to call Lily. His wife was at home, fighting a mother’s natural instinct to be at the bedside of her injured son, because right now their eight-year-old daughter Olivia, frantic at her brother’s plight, needed a parent’s care and consolation. He would make the call. The news was positive. It was all relative, as he had just conceded to himself. Relatively speaking, the duty of phoning home would be a happy one. Then he would endure the night vigil of waiting for Jack to regain consciousness.