Deep Water, Thin Ice (40 page)

‘It’s not about money Theo. You met Simon in London.’ She pointed at the statement on the desk with a finger that shook. ‘You paid for lunch at Leone’s.’ She fumbled in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out the folded letter. She waved it at him as if it were some sort of protective weapon. ‘Francine told me she met Simon the day he died and that he was going to Leone’s to meet someone he hadn’t seen in a long time. It was you wasn’t it?’ Adrenaline kicked in and her voice was rising now, unsteady and bright. ‘No secrets?’ She laughed. ‘You didn’t tell me that Theo, did you? Didn’t tell me you’d seen Simon? What a coincidence that you should meet him the day he ‘accidentally’ falls under a tube train.’

Theo’s brow furrowed in a heavy frown.

‘What’s that supposed to mean? Good God, What are you suggesting?’ He sounded indignant but his eyes shifted restlessly from Alex to the letter in her hand.

‘Why didn’t you tell me you’d met him?’

‘I didn’t. It all went wrong. I’d
intended
to meet him. I knew I was going to be in London and I gave him a ring to see if we could meet up. It had been so long that I felt guilty, thought it was about time we caught up. I offered to buy him lunch and he said he’d love to see me. But he never made it.’ Theo gave her a soft, sympathetic smile. ‘I thought it might bring back too many memories for you if I talked about it…’ He shrugged. ‘So I didn’t.’

Alex looked at him stonily.

‘I want to know what happened.’

‘Nothing happened,’ he said impatiently.

‘But you paid for lunch at Leone’s. Why do you keep lying to me?’

‘I’m not. For God’s sake, Alex. What’s got into you? I went there and waited for a while, tried his mobile, but got no reply. So I had a quick lunch and left.’ He looked down at the statement for a moment. ‘I know the amount seems a lot for one but the prices there are crazy. I was going to try to speak to him later but then – well, you know what happened. I couldn’t very well mention it after that, could I?’

Alex stared at him, eyes narrowed, and then shook her head slowly.

‘But you did meet him Theo. You talked about Simon’s reading glasses the other day. He’d only just got them before he died and I never told you.’

Theo hesitated for just the blink of an eye.

‘You did Alex. Don’t you remember?’ He smiled indulgently. ‘You’ve had a lot on your mind lately. It’s not surprising you’ve forgotten.’

She shook her head again.

‘I never told you Theo. Stop pretending that I’m losing it. You saw him in London and you kept it secret. What did you do to him Theo?’

‘Do to him? Nothing. What the hell are you accusing me of?’

‘So it was just lucky for you then?’

‘What do you mean?’ He’d lost the cool, measured tone now and his voice was hard and menacing.

‘That Julian died in an accident on the river soon after you’d been seen loosening the stones of the walkway? That the man who owned Hillen Hall should die a few months after inheriting it, and that you should be hellbent on courting his widow soon after? What plans did you have for me after the wedding: another push down the stairs like Helen Geaton? Another slip into the river off the stones? Is that why you wanted me to scatter Simon’s ashes on the other side? Surely Hillen Hall isn’t that important to you?’

Theo stared at her as if trying to come to a decision, then his mouth stretched into a mirthless smile.

‘So you’ve worked it out have you? Even Helen? Very good. Well done. I’d like to know what made you realise. Did I make a mistake?’ He nodded. ‘Of course, the thing with the glasses – that was careless. But something else must have started it off. Where did the information about the stepping stones come from?’

Alex hesitated, determined not to involve Harry. She didn’t answer.

‘Why didn’t you just ask Simon for Hillen Hall Theo?’ she said instead. ‘You could have come to some arrangement. He didn’t want it.’

‘I did ask him. That’s what the lunch was all about. I tried to persuade him to give me the Hall since it should rightly have been mine anyway. Tried to appeal to his better nature. But he refused. Did it just to stop me having it I imagine, the bugger. We’d never got on you see. He was big friends with Julian. He told me he’d guessed what I’d done. Admitted that he’d been too cowardly to say anything at the time. Not that anyone would have believed him of course. I’d made certain of that.’

‘So what happened?’

Theo ran a finger along the desk in a careless, disinterested way.

‘I followed him. When I saw him go down to the underground I knew it would be easy. It was so crowded down there. I just had to time it right to push him as the train was pulling in.’

His frank admission pulled her up short for a moment and the image he’d created took her breath away.

‘You’re mad,’ she said without thinking. ‘Completely mad. You
and
your mother.’ She saw his expression harden and realised her mistake. She shuffled a little towards the door, talking as calmly as she could to try to mask her movement. ‘You can’t keep killing people who are an inconvenience to you Theo,’ she said desperately. ‘It’ll start to become noticeable. There are a lot of people who’ll start asking awkward questions if anything happens to me. You’d never…’

‘Have you seen my mother?’ Theo demanded. ‘She wasn’t at home when I got back. I thought she might have come up here.’

Alex felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rise in her which she failed to quell. This was all so unreal.

‘It’s really all about Sarah isn’t it Theo? I’ve been so stupid. You were never in love with me. There’s no room for anyone else, you’re too obsessed with your mother.’ Alex backed away another step. The door still looked a long way away. She felt the laughter rising again and thought she was going to be swamped by it. She knew she needed to get out of that room as soon as she could but she felt light-headed, giddy…crazy even. It was all so sick and yet so horribly
funny.
‘And the saddest thing of all,’ she went on in a voice choked by something between a laugh and a sob, ‘is that she has no idea really, does she? She’s more interested in the house than she is in you. Don’t you…?’

‘Shut up,’ Theo bellowed as he crossed the space between them in a couple of long strides, drew back his hand and hit her hard across the face. Alex fell heavily sideways, catching a glancing blow from the desk to her temple as she went, and landing with a thump as her head banged the floor. He stood over her, bent down to grab a handful of hair just below her crown, and pulled it hard till her head and shoulders were lifted forward off the ground. He pushed his face close to hers and she blinked at him, dazed, a trickle of blood running from her mouth and from a deep cut near her eye.

‘I’ll ask you once more,’ he growled. ‘Have you seen my mother?’ She blinked again and he shook her. ‘Hm? Well?’

‘Yesh.’ Alex thought her voice seemed to be coming from the other side of the room. She tried to lick her lips and tasted blood. ‘She was here.’ She swallowed painfully.

‘Where is she now?’ He shook her again and she could feel the hair ripping at her scalp.

‘Shops. She’s gone down to the shops…’

‘Oh my God. The river.’ Theo stared at her in horror and then dropped her with another thump.

Alex heard him run across the room and out onto the landing but the world was getting rapidly blacker and soon she heard nothing at all.

*

Alex slowly emerged from oblivion, almost reluctantly, as if someone had been shaking her. She felt bitterly cold and her ears were ringing. When she cautiously opened her eyes she was alone. The room was moving around her; she felt sick and closed her eyes again. After a few minutes lying still, she tried once more. The world was still moving, but more slowly; it had a disturbing undulating quality. She took a deep breath and tried to move, easing herself up onto one elbow. She felt a wave of nausea, closed her eyes again and stopped moving. It passed and she managed to sit up. She leaned against the back of the desk and waited, eyes half closed, while the room steadied around her. There was a pain in her right shoulder and elbow and a gnawing ache in the side of her head. The events preceding her blackout slowly washed back into her brain. She put a hand tentatively to her face and felt the swelling around her cheek bone and the dried blood on her lips. Theo would come back, that much was certain; she needed to get out of there. She tried to move again but the world immediately shifted and she was forced to wait while Theo’s words kept running through her head:
The River Kella’s broken its banks…I wouldn’t want to be one of the poor buggers down the bottom at the moment.
She thought of all the people she knew in the village, being washed away in the flood. She thought of Mick. Would he be safe on the reserve?

By the time she felt strong enough to get to her feet, she thought it must have been hours since Theo had left her but a glance at her watch suggested, as far as she could work out, that it was nearer forty minutes; she hadn’t actually been out that long. She used the desk to steady herself and stood up, taking more deep breaths to stem the faintness. It passed off and, feeling a little better but with legs that felt like jelly, she edged her way to the door and looked out warily into the corridor. There was no-one there. She tried to move purposefully down the landing; she needed to get down to the village.

*

It was obvious to Theo what had happened as soon as he’d seen the foaming brown water blocking the road: all the recent rain had forced the Kella to break its banks up river, uprooting bankside trees and shrubs and carrying them downstream to lodge against the arched Roman bridge. With the bridge blocked, the water had shunted sideways and then been channelled, in a seething, bubbling frenzy, down the sunken narrow lane to the village. He remembered being told about something similar happening once in the nineteen twenties. Then it had been considered a freak ‘act of god’, a one-off. Five people had died.

Now, scrambling his way as fast as he could down the muddy hillside, he could hear the river’s deafening roar as it thundered down the road to his left, the sound magnified as it echoed back and forth across the valley. He was only dimly aware of it, his mind too full of Sarah. Where would she be now? How long had she been gone? He should have asked Alex but he’d been panic-stricken and not thinking straight. But he would find her; he had to. The village wasn’t that big. He tried to recall which way he’d been told the water had run the last time but of course there’d been a lot of building in the village since then. Much had changed. He tried to calm himself; Sarah would probably be safe in the Stores and the river would just spill down harmlessly and out to the sea. She’d tell him how scared she’d been and he’d hug her and make her feel better.

But when he reached the Village Hall he was momentarily frozen. Looking down on the square he could see nothing but a swirling cauldron of water. Sea water was pumping in over the lowest ground of the village to his right, flooding the new housing estate and suffusing the village centre. There it met and fought with the incoming river and the battle churned the water, spinning it round and round. The bar protecting the Grenloe must have finally given way and he felt a searing and unfamiliar twist of fear. The water would rise higher yet: high tide wasn’t due for another twenty minutes or so.

He looked around, trying to take it all in, dread numbing his brain. The water had already risen to first floor level and there were people stranded at upstairs windows and on rooftops; a couple of men had clambered up trees. The people who had managed to get out of homes and shops in time had collected nearby on the higher ground in and around the village hall where temporary shelter and aid were being given. Across the bubbling water, the higher ground round the Armada and the hotel stood proud, as unreachable as an island. There were boats, torn from their moorings, being tossed about and thumped against house walls; cars lifted from the ground and carried away into the harbour; bits of garden furniture and fences floated and circled before being dragged out into the bay. And over and above it all was the noise of the water.

Theo began to search frantically through the crowd of helpless onlookers but Sarah wasn’t among them. He grabbed people at random, shouting at them, demanding to know if they’d seen her. They all shook their heads, looking at him, white-faced and wide-eyed, before their gaze returned to the frantic muddy water destroying the village below them.

‘I think I saw her on the other side of the square,’ Tess Webber finally told him.

‘What? When? Which way did she go?’ He took hold of her and she grimaced as the ends of his fingers dug into the flesh of her upper arms.

‘I’m not sure. Twenty minutes ago maybe. She was heading for The Armada. She was already thigh deep in the water so it was the nearest dry ground.’

‘Did you see her get there?’ He began shaking her. ‘Did you see her get there?’ he bellowed.

‘No. I don’t know. I started watching someone else. Let me go.’

Theo dropped her and stared across to the pub and hotel. There was no-one left outside there now. He could see faces at the upper windows, bleakly staring out. It was difficult to make out who they were but they all looked male. He ran down to the waters’ edge and gazed into it, trying to gauge its depth but it was frothing and filthy with rubbish; it was impossible to tell. Uncaring, he kicked off his shoes and lunged forward into it. He had to get across to find Sarah; he had to be sure she was all right. He took a few steps till the water level rose to his hips, then he was lifted off his feet and he started to swim. A plank of wood careered towards him and he swerved, managed to avoid it, and pushed on. He’d always prided himself on being a strong swimmer – he didn’t doubt himself for a minute – but the currents kept taking him by surprise; they were strong and unpredictable and he found he couldn’t fight them. Suddenly he was being spun round and then dragged under. He surfaced again, gasping for air but he couldn’t keep any control and he was buffeted and tossed and then he was rolling and going down again, way down into a black, suffocating darkness.