Take My Breath Away (15 page)

‘Why did you decide that he would drive you back to your flat? Wouldn’t it have been easier to call a cab?’

‘Of course it would have been fucking easier!’ She choked back a sob. ‘Oh Christ, I don’t know. It cropped up in the conversation. Both of us were fuddled with the booze, especially me. I suppose I had a vague idea that I’d invite him in and we’d complete a perfect day with a session of wild love-making. Utter crap, naturally. Bradley was quite a man, but I doubt if even he would have been able to keep me satisfied after all he’d put away that night.’

‘You were happy to go with him?’

‘At one point I even offered to drive. I was pretty far gone and someone dissuaded me. It didn’t cross my mind to protest that Bradley was too drunk to take me home safely. We said our goodbyes, there was a lot of kissing – and that was that. I must have fallen asleep in the passenger seat. First thing I knew, there was this almighty noise, as if a bomb had gone off. The most terrifying sound I’ve ever heard. The car jack-knifed and we hit a fence, a barrier or something, Christ knows what, I never wanted to know the grisly details. I was in so much pain all of a sudden and Bradley – well, I told you what happened. Then the pain became too much and I passed out. When I woke up, I was in a hospital bed and a doctor was telling me I’d never walk again.’

Ahead of them, the ground dipped and there was a gap in the row of shrubs and trees that marked the boundary of the garden. Nic halted to gaze at the Spa, the Esplanade and the harbour and castle in the far distance. Landmarks from his childhood. The familiar salt smell was in the air.

‘See where the land falls away?’ Alice said. ‘A hotel
used to stand there. One night, the land started to slip away and soon the cliff collapsed. The hotel fell into the sea. A place which had stood for many years – vanished in a trice.’

Nic nodded, remembering shots from the television news. Scarborough’s moment of national fame. A bizarre incident, like something from one of his father’s tales about Camelot.

‘Like Bradley, I suppose. He achieved so much and yet with a few drinks too many he threw it all away.’

The sun was beating down on the garden. Nic undid a couple of shirt buttons and shifted his position on the bench. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again.

‘You’re not really,’ she said. ‘You’re simply doing your job. Or so I suppose. Which makes me ask one question, if it’s my turn.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘Just what is this all about?’ She rested her elbows on the arms of the wheelchair and gazed steadily at him. He was conscious of her burning intelligence, the flame undimmed by the breaking of her body. She could never have been conventionally pretty, but in that moment he understood perfectly what had attracted Bradley Hurst to her. ‘I mean, someone else rang up to ask me about the accident, not long ago.’

‘Dylan Rees.’

She stared. ‘Right first time. You know him?’

‘We were friends. He died recently.’

‘I read about it. Some woman stabbed him. Is that why you’re here? I mean, I don’t buy the line that you’re simply researching background for an in-depth profile of Creed. This doesn’t have the smell of Fergus about it. As far as he’s concerned, Bradley’s death was a PR disaster and I’m just an embarrassing reminder of
it. So why would an outsider like you be interested in old news?

‘I owe you an explanation, I suppose.’

‘You do, really.’

Jazz had sworn Dylan to secrecy. As soon as he had decided to spill the beans, he’d died. Coincidence, no doubt, but perhaps his tall story was one that people weren’t meant to know. Alice might not find ignorance bliss, but at least it was safe.

‘Sorry. I’ll have to disappoint you.’

She clicked her tongue, but he could see she wasn’t too angry with him. She had more to lose sleep over than conundrums about the life she’d left so far behind.

His next destination was a few miles up the coast. He told himself it would not be much of a detour. There was time for him to take a look at the place where his life had changed forever.

Soon he was following the winding road signposted to Ravenscar. How long since he had last travelled this way? As a boy, sitting in the back of his father’s Rover, this had sometimes seemed like their own private drive. Summer tourists didn’t count and houses were few. This afternoon, there were more cars on the road than he remembered, but that was true everywhere.

Ravenscar should have been a popular destination. A bustling resort perched on the cliffs overlooking the sea. Instead, there were rolling fields and scattered buildings. As he drove into the village, he saw that the National Trust had put up an information centre. The hotel and golf course were still there, but the markings of the old roads were scarcely visible.

A hundred years ago, entrepreneurs had conjured
up the idea of building a town at the midpoint on the new railway line linking Scarborough and Whitby. Boulevards were laid out, sewers constructed, plots of land sold to townies seduced by the idea of living at the seaside. But the developers had failed to do their homework. The shore was inhospitable and in winter the weather was wild. The company folded as war broke out, leaving a network of broad streets and a handful of houses that seemed oddly out of place, stuck in the middle of the countryside. The station was abandoned and the track became a bridleway.

The Gabriels had lived in the house nearest to the cliffs, optimistically named Sunny View. During a gale, Wuthering Heights would have been nearer the mark, but although the site was exposed to the elements, Nic did not care. He had relished the isolation, the sense that he was set apart from other children. For him, the only cloud had been his father’s absences. At least when Bryn Gabriel came home again, there were always fresh stories about Arthur and his knights of old and the long wait for his return had suddenly seemed worthwhile.

The house was still there, a solid and ugly stone building, aggressively asymmetrical. It even boasted a small turret with a single window. Once it had been the playroom. Nic had kept his boxes of Lego there, and his train set. Now the house doubled as a sort of shop. A brightly painted signboard at the gate promised
Pine Furniture at Knockdown Prices, Fine Art Bargains, Household Knick-Knacks.

He pulled up by the gate and a middle-aged woman in t-shirt and jeans who was pottering about outside the front porch turned and waved at him. She gestured for him to wind his window down.

‘Come and look round.’ She didn’t sound like a native. Mancunian, at a guess. ‘We’ve just had a stock of bedside cabinets delivered. Going cheap.’

The sight of the house made him dizzy. He’d pictured it so many times in his mind. It was smaller than he’d remembered, not in the least bit Gothic in design. He could feel his heart thudding. One thing he knew for certain. Even after all this time, he could not bear to go back inside. It would be too much.

‘Thanks, but I’m just getting my bearings.’

‘Suit yourself.’

The garden was neatly kept. Someone had built a rockery and populated it with heathers tough enough to survive the blast of winter. When he had lived here, the grounds had been wild and overgrown. He remembered the sweet fragrance of the untamed honeysuckle that had clambered along the broken-down fence at the back. His father always used to say that one fine day he would landscape the garden, perhaps put in a little pool, but preferred telling stories to his son to DIY and the place had remained ramshackle. For all that, Nic had loved living here and had never imagined leaving. Not, that is, until the day when he came home from school and found his mother dead. His father was missing and Nic never saw him again.

As a boy, Nic worshipped the father he seldom saw. Bryn Gabriel travelled the world. He was some kind of journalist, but Nic knew little about what he actually wrote. His father never discussed it in his presence. It didn’t matter, because his father brought back presents from all four corners of the globe. A model of the Empire State Building, wonderful in its detail. Sweatshirts from Moscow and Johannesburg, a set of toy cars and an armful of comics from Sydney. Nic
lived for the short spells when his father returned from overseas and made up for lost time by spoiling his son rotten, buying him things, playing soccer and cricket on the unkempt lawn which ran down to the cliffs, taking him on trips across the snow-covered Goathland moors in the depths of winter.

Bryn Gabriel was nothing like other fathers. Doing the unexpected was what turned him on. It was exciting simply to belong to him. One summer day, the year before the murder, he turned up without warning after a month abroad and took them out for a drive. Only when they arrived at the airport did he show them the flight tickets for Florida. He’d grabbed a late booking and the three of them were together for a dizzy Disney fortnight that Nic would never forget.

Above all, Bryn Gabriel was a story-teller. He claimed it was all down to his Welsh roots. As a student, he’d spent a long hazy summer at Harlech Castle, entertaining tourists with tales from the
Mabinogion
. He knew a hundred legends by heart and those he didn’t know, he made up. Romances of Arthur and the Otherworld, populated by shape-shifting necromancers, beautiful women who turned into snakes if kissed and knights whose armour changed colour in the blink of an eye. He painted word pictures of a miraculous kingdom, where brave men claimed swords from stones floating on water, chess pieces were moved by invisible hands and ships sailed by themselves. The boy drank it all in, the tales of true love and chivalry and the promise that the secrets of immortality were waiting to be found, if only one knew just where to look.

His mother was slim and blonde; physically, Nic took after her. She was quiet, content to remain in her
husband’s shadow. When she wasn’t occupied in looking after Nic and the rambling old house, she liked to go on long walks along the cliffs. She did a bit of freelance copy-editing for the publishers she’d worked for before her marriage; her favourite hobby was reading and every nook of Sunny View was crammed with her paperbacks. When Bryn was away, she would read aloud in her soft cool voice, stories by C.S. Lewis and Tolkien. She was calm and well-organised and never seemed to worry about a thing. Except, perhaps, her husband’s absences. One night Nic had heard his parents talk about them.

‘We need you here,’ his mother said, her low voice drifting up the stairs and in through the open bedroom door.

‘And I want to be here, too. Give it time. It will happen. Promise.’

A sigh. ‘How many times have I heard you say that? I just feel sometimes – that things aren’t ever going to change.’

Of course, she was proved right. Nothing did change in the town that never was, until the day Nic came home and found his world destroyed.

A warm afternoon; he’d stuffed his blazer and tie in the saddle bag. As he wheeled his bike into the courtyard at the end of the drive, he caught sight of his father’s Rover parked by the kitchen wall. Bryn had been abroad for the last six weeks and he wasn’t expected home for another fortnight. Joyfully, he abandoned the bicycle and ran to the open front door.

‘Dad! You’re back! Somehow I
knew
you would be. I dreamed about it last night, believe it or not. How’s that for ESP?’

The silence of the house was strange and unexpected.
Usually when he came home, his mother was pottering about, singing old Beatles songs to herself. This afternoon, there was nothing. He felt butterflies in his stomach, wondering if something might be amiss.

He shouted again, ‘Dad! Mum! Are either of you around?’

Nothing. They must be outside. He wandered into the garden, but he felt suddenly cold and his legs had begun to shake. The gate which led on to the cliff path was swinging open. The thought sprang to his mind.
It’s better not to know, things are never going to be the same again
. Yet he had to keep going, force himself to see whatever there was to be seen.

He peered over the edge of the cliff and saw, far below, a crumpled figure. His mother, spread out on the rocks like a broken puppet.

The days and weeks that followed were a blur in his memory. All that Nic knew was that his father had come home and then disappeared. At first the police said they were seeking him in their enquiries in connection with the death of his wife. They never found him. Nic did not understand what had happened. Part of him did not want to understand. Nothing could bring his mother back to life. All he could hold on to was the belief that his father was innocent. Inconceivable that the devoted husband could have killed the woman who meant so much to him. He might have embroidered Arthur’s battles and the search for the Grail, but when he told his wife he loved her, as he often did, it was no less than the truth. Nic had faith in that, a diamond-hard certainty that the family’s life together had not been a lie.

From the day of the murder, he had suffered from insomnia. He was cared for by his aunt and uncle, who
were childless. They and the doctors suggested a hundred so-called cures, but none of them worked for long. When he did sleep, one dream kept visiting time and again, like an old movie repeated endlessly on late night television. He played the detective and discovered who had killed his mother. Having proved his father’s innocence, he tracked the old man down and brought him out of hiding to reunite the family. When he woke up, the programme changed. Everyone thought – he knew this to be true, although
no one
, not one single person, ever said it to his face – that his father had committed suicide after killing his wife. Probably he’d hurled himself into the sea after weighting his body down so that it could not be washed up again. The police said the case was not closed, but Nic knew they were sure about the identity of the culprit. He’d tried to talk to them himself, but they had been kind and sympathetic and not taken a blind bit of notice. How could he know more than they did?

Of course, once he was grown, he could always investigate for himself. Time without number he picked up the telephone, to make the first call that would set him on the path to unravelling the knots. In his late teens, at university, as a trainee solicitor and after qualifying, he had said to himself that nothing was worse than not knowing. Self-deception: he needed to cling to the faith that he had. If he discovered the worst, he would lose more than sleep. The mystery of his mother’s death and his father’s disappearance were like the legend of the Questing Beast – they were meant to tantalise, never to be solved.