Brodmaw Bay (39 page)

Lillian assented for two reasons. The first was that Richard had done so much for them that she did not think she could in all conscience refuse. The second reason was the simple human impulse of curiosity. She wanted to see the carving of the spoookmeister on the hut door for herself. She wanted to see the Harbinger it was considered unlucky to name and that apparently granted vindictive wishes. Olivia’s wish had been a ghastly coincidence. But she still wanted to see the thing that her daughter claimed to have seen in life in their old garden.

She did not for a moment consider they would come to any harm. There were some pretty strange people living in the bay. She had had that fact demonstrated to her by the desecration in the church. The community was more insular than she had first supposed and the paganism of the shellfish ritual on the beach was stranger and more shocking, paradoxically, the more she thought about it. She did not think, however, that they would have been so warmly received if anyone thought ill about them. Their reception had been, in some ways, little short of rapturous.

There were mysteries in the village she wanted solving. She did not think Angela Heart had told her the whole truth about the Reverend Baxter. But Baxter’s ordeal had taken place in the aftermath of the Great War and uncovering what had really happened almost a century ago, whatever it was, was hardly an urgent priority.

The shock of her daughter’s confession wore off somewhat as she listened to Richard on the phone, outlining the Baden-Powell-ish nature of the following day’s programme. In his tone and language, he managed to be enthusiastic and ironic about it all at the same time. He was gently sending up both himself and the tent-peg and bugle, jamboree nature of what they had planned for the kids.

‘We’re expecting a swell, so we’ll probably go over in a small flotilla of sturdy boats. We need some cargo space, you see, for the instruments the band will play if the weather is fine at the picnic in the afternoon. And we will have to ship the raffle prizes too.’

You can butter crumpets from now until kingdom come. Rupert Brooke isn’t coming to tea.

She thought that the island trip, with its mundane and cheery timetable, would help Olivia put her wish concerning Jack’s attackers into a perspective where it could only be an unfortunate coincidence. The next time she confronted that carving on the hut door, it would be with the comfort of her mother’s arm around her shoulder and it would seem like exactly what it was: a good luck symbol, no more than a rather crudely executed image of a figure from local mythology.

Lillian had found the bay a bit claustrophobic since James’s departure. She was aware of it as she locked the doors and windows. Topper’s Reach was a spacious house, it had large rooms with high ceilings and in the daytime it was gloriously bright. But it was still hemming them in. The absence of the car was probably, she thought, the main cause of this feeling of being slightly trapped.

Angela’s arrival at the church had made the feeling worse because it had almost suggested she was under some kind of surveillance. The boundless expanse of the sea, the exposure of the island itself, would be an antidote to how she felt and pass the day pleasantly and when they returned here, her husband would have arrived back.

She did not really care that the trip to America had gone badly. She was confident that James, this new and tougher and more resilient James, would have given a good account of himself. He was no longer the type of man to go to pieces in front of an audience under the pressure of delivering a presentation.

She cared, for him, because she wanted him to succeed on his own terms and the game was something on which he had spent a lot of time and creative energy and in which he had invested a significant amount of hope. She thought that he would be disappointed. His tone and language in their brief phone conversation had suggested that. But she knew that career disappointment was no threat now to their relationship. They were locked on. They had never been closer. They had survived the ordeal of her adultery and emerged as though tempered by fire.

She suspected that the Americans had suggested some sort of compromise that James felt threatened the integrity of what he had created. Projects like that were collaborative and the finished article seldom very much resembled its original concept. James had been open to compromise once. It had been a feature of his character. Jack’s accident had changed him in that regard.

It could have been argued that he had compromised his principles on the matter of her betrayal, but he hadn’t, really. His defining imperative in that matter had been his love for her.

Lillian thought that in the long term, James would be better off if she was right and he had refused to capitulate to the demands of the Colorado software outfit. His strength, the new strength and confidence he possessed, enabled a measure of self-respect in him that had not been there before. He was a better man for it. He was not just better, he was much happier too.

James climbed into the Jaguar in the rest home car park, tossing the bag with the book inside it over onto the rear seat. He sat and glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was still only eight forty in the morning. He took out his mobile and called Topper’s Reach. There was no reply. He called Lillian’s mobile, but there was no signal.

He wondered where they could be. The children did not have to be up for school. Neither of them would be enrolled at their new schools before the start of the new academic year in September. Jack was not habitually an early riser if he wasn’t getting up for school or for a football training session. He was like every thirteen-year-old: pretty much comatose until he was physically roused. They must have gone out. But without the car, where would they go so early in the day?

There was a phrase in his head. He could not get it out of his mind. It was the words Richard Penmarrick had used in greeting Lillian on her arrival in the bay. They had come down from their room with the glow of their recent lovemaking still on them to the saloon bar of the Leeward where he had been standing, waiting for them. ‘Welcome home,’ he had said.

James called Alec McCabe. ‘Can we talk?’

‘Only if it’s life and death, I’m not on duty until noon.’

‘It’s life and death.’

‘I was joking, James. I recognised the number. If I wasn’t prepared to talk to you, I wouldn’t have accepted the call. I assume you’re joking too, by the way.’

‘No. I don’t think I am, Alec.’

‘I told your wife as much as we know last night. The circumstances are pretty gruesome and, so far, totally inexplicable. We’ve got some very experienced people. None of them has ever seen anything like it.’

‘I’m not calling you about that. I’m calling you about Robert O’Brien.’

‘Not my case.’

‘I remember you said a mate of yours was the investigating officer. Totally off the record. Just between us, as a favour, Alec. It really could be life and death.’

‘I like you, James. You are an honest man, no bullshit, and in a world mired in bullshit, I respect that. And that lad of yours is an absolute gem. If you are in some sort of trouble, tell me. Tell me truthfully and I promise I will do everything I can to help you.’

‘You said that Robert O’Brien was scared to death. I want to know what it was that scared him.’

‘Cocaine killed Robert O’Brien,’ McCabe said. ‘You’ll be reading as much over your breakfast cornflakes, if you’re one of those quaint people who still buys a newspaper. You probably do, since you now live in so quaint a place. He only took a gram, but it wasn’t street stuff. It was top Bolivian product,
98
per cent pure and it caused a valve in his heart to rupture.’

‘The scene of crime people thought he might have died of fright. Could anything have scared him?’

There was a pause. James could hear his own heart hammer in his chest. Then the detective sergeant said, ‘This is privileged information because there is some ethical concern over whether the source should ever have revealed it. I will therefore not name the source. But O’Brien saw a psychiatrist in the afternoon on the day of his death. He told her that he had been plagued by an apparition. He thought he was being haunted, James.’

‘Did he describe this apparition?’

There was another long silence. Then McCabe said, ‘The reason the shrink breached patient confidentiality by telling us about it is that after O’Brien’s departure, she thought she herself saw someone who strongly resembled the person he had described, looking up at her from the street.’

‘It was a little girl, wasn’t it?’

‘She was dressed in the grey pinafore and purple of what appears to have been a school uniform of the more traditional sort. She was blonde and pigtailed and wore a straw hat. Best guess as to age is around eight. Don’t tell me you’ve seen her too.’

‘I can do better than that. I can tell you her name, Alec,’ James said. His mouth felt dry. ‘She died more than ninety years ago and I do not think that she died willingly or well. In life, she was called Madeleine Gleason.’

He started the engine, put the car into gear. If he put his foot down, if the Wednesday traffic cooperated, he could be in the bay by one. It would not seem a sinister place on a sunny, early July afternoon, would it? It would look charming and picturesque and in the detective sergeant’s slightly contemptuous word, the bay would look quaint.

Lillian had been lured back exactly as Adam Gleason had been. Both had returned with the fresh blood of their respective families. Gleason had followed the lure of a job after diphtheria had killed his son and poisoned his mind against London, a city he subsequently saw as tainted and sought to escape.

London was not afflicted with diphtheria in the early twenty-first century. It did, though, have plenty of other potentially fatal hazards. The white-flight impulse James had first felt in the hospital had been triggered by the attack on his son. The mentally unstable ringleader of the gang that had carried it out had been responding, he said, to instructions he heard in his head. He had been ordered to carry out the attack on Jack. There had been nothing random or even really feral about it. The voice in his head had commanded and he and his acolytes had obeyed, too terrified to consider doing otherwise.

How far back did all of this go? How much careful magic had been employed to impel them west to the place his wife had been conceived in a tryst between Richard Penmarrick and an underage Angela Heart? The book he had found about Brodmaw Bay on a hospital shelf had been deliberately planted there. The seed had been deliberately sown. And after that it had all been made very easy for them, hadn’t it? They had been welcomed as incomers surely never were in the far reaches of a county notorious for its insularity. Except that Lillian had not been an incomer. Not really, she hadn’t. Lily had been coming home.

They embarked from the small harbour sheltered by the breakwater to the right of the Leeward Tavern. The water was quite calm there, the anchored boats rolling gently on a modest swell. Beyond the harbour the sea looked much rougher than Lillian had so far seen at the bay. There was a keen offshore breeze that felt chilly for July. The air was damp. The morning sky was grey and the sea dull and greenish and vast under flecks of white foam on its turbulent surface.

Richard approached and put an arm around her and gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. He was wearing jeans tucked into canvas boots and a blue wool sweater. A red and white bandana was knotted around his neck and he had on a seaman’s blue cap. He smelled of Eau Sauvage aftershave and looked strong and handsome and capable. ‘It’ll clear up,’ he said, blinking at the sky. ‘Don’t worry, Lillian.’ He grinned and winked. ‘This is just the storm before the calm.’

She thought his witty wordplay amusing enough but was not really comforted by his prediction concerning the weather. The quayside was busy with children and supervising adults going up and down the gangplank of a large, turbine-driven craft, loading the day’s provisions and the band’s instruments and various items of equipment to be used for outdoor games. They were not attired in wetsuits for the voyage aboard this larger vessel. They were wearing dun-coloured attire, like Scouts. Hers were the only children dressed as civilians.

When in Rome, she thought. But Rome was sited on seven hills on dry land under a southern Italian sun. So the saying did not really apply. She had a sort of presentiment, imprecise but uneasy, about the day to come. She thought it must have been provoked by the sea and the stiff wind scouring off it and the pervading greyness of the light. The conditions were raw and slightly gloomy. She was aware for the first time since moving there of the elemental force of the sea, of its capricious moods and potential for violence. They were intent on recreation but the sea was a place of peril, to those upon it, much of the time.

She thought of the fate of the boat built for Thomas Cable and blessed by the Reverend Baxter. She had been called the
Sally-Anne
. She had foundered in the fog and lost all hands in these waters. They had been expert mariners but had died helplessly, catching the sea in a vindictive mood.