The Reckoning on Cane Hill: A Novel (2 page)

‘Yes.’

Nobody in the clearing replied. His voice didn’t sound as strong as it had back at the car. In the silence that followed, he could hear the rain on the canvas above, slow and steady as drumming fingers, and then, finally, Detective David Groves tried again.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘This is my son.’

Part One

And when their Mother was said to have passed over, They were brought before Her in Heaven. And She bid Them sit with Her, and They listened with wonder as She told Them secrets of life and death, and of the true nature of good and evil, and of how the dead are never truly gone, and of ways the dead may remain with us still
.

Extract from the Cane Hill bible

Mark

A horrible truth

I’m happy now. My life is a good one. But if you were to excavate it, you would find something terrible in the foundations.

It feels strange to look back on what happened from the present day. It all felt so intense at the time – each sight and sound vivid and indelible; every emotion sharp and heightened – and I’d never have believed there’d come a day when I would forget. When I would have a new life in a different place. A job with a respected team in the police. A relationship with a woman I love more than I can say. Back then, it would have been impossible to imagine it could ever feel as distant from me as it does now.

I was on a backpacking holiday when it happened, with a different woman. My girlfriend at the time. One evening Lise and I pitched our tent at a small campsite on the coast, and then we went down to the beach and swam together in the sea. The setting sun was a beautiful sight, lowering itself towards the water and filling the horizon in front of us with a spread of orange flame. I can imagine our shadows, cast back over the beach as we ran down to the edge of the surf, and the soft sand pushing against our feet.

There was nobody else around; we had the beach entirely to ourselves. Which seemed like a blessing at the time. We were
young and in love, after all, and couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We went into the sea and floated out a little way, buoyed by the slight waves. When we were pushed together by the current, we embraced and kissed. When it pulled us apart again, we linked hands and allowed our lower bodies to swing slowly up to the surface, then lay on our backs and kicked our toes out, watching the sunlight turn the water into burning pearls. It was beautiful.

I wasn’t a strong swimmer and wanted to stay within my depth, so I kept reaching down with my feet to find the seabed, feeling the silt between my toes. It gave me a sense of security. But then at one point I tried to touch down and the bottom wasn’t there any more. The water went over my nose, unexpectedly, and I came back up again coughing. I craned my neck to look back towards the shore; it suddenly looked a lot further away than it should have done.

Just relax
, Lise told me. I can’t remember the exact words, but it was something like that. She could tell I was nervous, but at that point she was still calm.
Let’s head back in
.

I nodded, and we both struck out for shore. I probably swam a little harder than I needed to. Even though there was no immediate danger, I felt out of control and I wanted that reassuring feeling of ground beneath my feet once more. A minute later, half exhausted, I looked up at the beach again, and it was further away than before.

Treading water for a moment, I could feel the sea pulling gently at me. Lise was a little way off to the side by then, and I could see that she wasn’t calm any more. That frightened me more than anything, because she was a much better swimmer than me. She never panicked about anything.

Scream
, she told me.

I did – we both did – but the noise was small and didn’t go anywhere, and there would have been nobody around to hear it if it had. I struck off again, clawing at the water now. In a single moment, it felt like the sea around me had changed from settled and serene to choppy and dangerous. It happened as quickly as
the sun can sometimes pass behind a cloud. I heard Lise scream, some distance away from me now, and then a wave knocked me under. I came up coughing and choking. The beach ahead was smeared by the water in my eyes, and appeared to be above me somehow, as unreachable as the top of a cliff face. Then I was pushed under again.

Somehow I kept swimming. I understood very clearly that I was going to die, and it felt ridiculous and unfair. I’d never been a strong swimmer, but now something animalistic and primal took over, and every time my body flagged, I found strength from somewhere. I kept swimming. There was nothing more to it than that. Some time later – surely no more than a minute – I realised my feet could touch the bottom again, and then I found myself stumbling out of the sea, my body waterlogged with exhaustion. For a moment, I couldn’t understand that I was alive. But I was. I made it out of the sea that evening, and Lise did not.

The last image I have of her is from the beach, standing at the edge of the water and shouting out to her.
Swim! Breathe! It’s going to be okay!
I remember her face screaming back at me for help, just before she disappeared amongst the black waves, and then I never saw her again.

For a long time afterwards, it felt like I’d died that evening too. I remember that the days that followed were as dark as the nights, and that the grief and sadness were physical sensations – literally
there
in my chest, like a muscular pain that couldn’t be relieved by stretching into a new position. I ached from the absence of her in a way that seemed impossible to bear. My life had received an injury that didn’t feel survivable. And yet I kept living. Because that’s what happens.

Over time, it got easier. Knowing what Lise would have wanted for me, I eventually took my life by the scruff of the neck and applied for a new job – a new start – on the other side of the country. I mourned, but I also tidied away. After a time, I met somebody new and fell in love with them. I gradually put distance between the
now
and the
then
, until what had hurt
so badly had finally scarred over, and pressing on it produced little aside from the dullest throb. I built a new life, and it’s a happy one. Somehow I had kept swimming.

But there is a horrible truth underlying that, and a question I avoid asking myself. The truth is this: Lise died, and my life changed irrevocably and awfully. But in the end, not all of those changes were for the worse. My happy life now is a structure built on the foundations of that tragedy, and to remove it would remove me. As much as I loved her back then, if I were given an impossible opportunity to wind the clock back – to have Lise survive that evening and my life now to become something else entirely – would I take it?

Impossible, of course, which makes the question easy to set aside. In the end, whatever the junctions open to it, your life can only ever follow one track. You can’t turn back time, and the people who are taken from you are gone for ever.

That was what I thought, anyway. But that was before a woman called Charlie Matheson came back from the dead.

Charlie

What had been done to her face

Constable Tom Wilson was driving at a leisurely pace down Town Street when he found her.

He was heading back to the department from a routine domestic call-out: a couple rowing. Today, like the days before it, had been far too hot, and he found the temperature always seemed to bring out the worst in some people. They burned, and they got hot and angry and difficult. The pavements outside every pub he passed were teeming with groups of men, many of them already red-chested and drunk. He didn’t envy their partners. He certainly didn’t envy the evening shifts.

Wilson checked his watch as he idled along. An hour left of his own shift, barring further incidents, and although he knew that anything could happen, in his head he was already counting down the minutes. A cold beer in the garden. That would do it, he thought – a few drops of peace to dilute the day. He drove along steadily, the window down and his arm resting on the sill, already tasting it.

And then he saw the crowd.

It was more a gathering, really – several people clustered together outside a grocer’s up ahead on the right – but he could tell immediately from their body language that something was wrong. They were all focused on the same spot, some of them
leaning forward, and one man was crouched right down as though talking to someone on the ground.

Wilson imagined an old lady, fallen down. If so, it was likely that someone had already called an ambulance, but still. He indicated, then pulled in and parked up directly opposite.

As he waited for a break in the traffic, a couple of people in the small crowd turned and saw him, and looked grateful as he finally trotted across the road. A uniform always gave reassurance. In Wilson’s experience, and despite the events of this hot afternoon, most people were generally good, and when someone was in distress in public, they rallied round to help. But it was always a little tentative, a little
I don’t know quite what to do
, as though the person they wanted to help was a bird that had fallen out of a nest, and they weren’t sure whether they were allowed to touch it or not.

‘Right then,’ he said. ‘What’s going on?’

It was an elderly woman nearest him who answered. ‘I don’t know. She was coming along, and then she just sat down. The way she was walking, I could tell that something wasn’t right.’ A man behind them said, ‘I’ve just phoned for an ambulance.’

‘Good. Can everyone move back, please? Thank you.’

They did as they were told, revealing a woman sitting on the ground outside the shop. She was half leaning against a rack of fruit, head bowed so that a tumble of curly brown hair obscured her face. Her knees were raised in front of her, with both arms wrapped around her shins, hugging them. Even without being able to see her face, it was obvious that she was much younger than he’d been expecting.

Wilson crouched down in front of her.

‘Miss?’

The woman didn’t react to him in any way. She was dressed strangely, he noticed then: her trousers and short-sleeved blouse were both a brilliant, uniform white. Her bare forearms were thin and pale, a barely distinguishable shade from her clothes. His gaze moved over the criss-crossing scars there. There were so many, and while some looked old, others appeared to have
been inflicted much more recently. With that and the outfit ... he wondered, was she a patient somewhere? There was nowhere nearby that he could think of.

‘Miss?’ he said again. ‘Are you okay?’

Again there was no response. She was gripping her legs so hard that her knuckles seemed to be coming through the skin. And breathing very rapidly, he realised, as though trying to control a panic attack.

Give her room
.

Wilson stood back up and turned to the woman who’d answered him first.

‘Where did she come from?’

‘Down that way.’ She gestured further along Town Street, in the direction of the field at the far end. ‘I knew something was wrong with her. I could just
tell
. She seemed a bit out of it. I think she might be drunk.’

‘And what happened? She collapsed?’

‘She reached here and stopped, and then she just ... sat down.’

‘Okay.’

Wilson didn’t think the woman on the ground was drunk. You could almost always smell it on anyone bad enough to be found in a state like this. Whatever they’d been drinking, the alcohol itself seeped out of their pores. And this woman didn’t smell of booze. Breathing in now, he caught the mixed smell of the fruit stall beside them, and the slightest hint of antiseptic, but nothing more.

‘Nobody knows her?’ he asked the gathered crowd. ‘None of you have seen her round here before?’

Blank faces, a few shakes of the head.

‘All right.’ He crouched back down again. ‘Miss? Can you hear me? My name’s Tom. I’m a policeman. It’s going to be okay, I promise. Can you tell me your name?’

That got him the faintest of replies.

‘Sorry, could you say that again?’

‘Charlie.’

‘Okay. Hello, Charlie.’

‘Matheson. That’s my name. Charlie Matheson.’

‘That’s really good,’ he said. ‘Now—’

‘There was an accident,’ she said suddenly. ‘There was a terrible accident. And I don’t know where I am! I don’t understand. Where is this?’

He started to answer, but the woman suddenly tilted her head back and looked at him. The people around him receded into the distance, and the noise of the traffic behind disappeared underwater.

For a moment, Wilson couldn’t say anything. All he could do was look at the woman. Just crouch there in front of her, staring in horror at what had been done to her face.

Mark

Back from the dead

Of course, I didn’t know any of that as I woke up the next day. In fact I didn’t know very much at all. As I lay in that vague state between sleep and consciousness, my eyes still shut scrupulously tight, my thoughts were grey and heavy and distinctly unusual: disjointed jigsaw pieces that, when assembled, I thought would not make for a pleasant picture. I was dimly aware that moving too much would be a bad idea, but at that point I hadn’t quite remembered why.

You’re massively hung-over, Mark
.

Oh yes. That was it.

‘Coffee for you.’

I felt pressure against the side of my leg as Sasha perched on the bed beside me. She clicked her fingers above my face.

‘Come on, Mark. Wakey wakey.’

‘Ugh.’.

‘Is that really all you can manage?’

‘It seems so.’

I heard the tap as she put the cup down on the bedside table. A moment later, I risked opening my eyes. The room seemed oddly angled. As I stared up at the lightshade for a few seconds, it began moving gradually away to one side. My hangover appeared to be slowly stirring the bedroom.