Authors: Peter Robinson
They still sounded like seagulls. Even though they could no longer fly, they waddled on the dark sands and keened like the ghosts of a million tortured souls.
Martha woke sweating in the early dawn. Outside, the gulls were screeching, circling. They must have been at it for a while, she thought as her heartbeat slowed. She must have heard them in her
sleep, and her mind had translated the sound into the pictograph of a dream. It was like dreaming of searching for a toilet when you’ve had a bit too much to drink and your body is trying to
wake you up before your bladder bursts.
Just the thought of moisture made Martha thirsty. She got up and drank a glass of water, then crawled into bed again, the sour taste of vomit still in her mouth. Unable to get back to sleep
immediately, she found herself thinking of the gulls as her allies. She could imagine them with their sharp hooked beaks picking and pulling at the body in the cave, snatching an eyeball loose or
making an ear bleed. Did they never stop? For them, life seemed nothing more than a long-drawn-out feast: one for which you had to go out and catch your own food and tear it to pieces while it was
still alive. Had she become like them?
Martha glanced at her watch: 6.29. That day, she remembered, high tide was chalked in as 0658, so the gulls couldn’t have found the body unless it was floating on the water’s
surface. Already the cold North Sea would have stuck its tongue into the cave and slurped Jack Grimley’s corpse into its surging maw.
Shivering with horror at what she had done, Martha turned on her side, pulled the covers up to her chin, and drifted back into an uneasy sleep with the paperweight in her hand and the harsh
music of squabbling gulls echoing in her ears.
KIRSTEN
They came back again that night, the dreams of slashing and slicing, to invade Kirsten’s childhood room. The white knight and the black knight, as she had come to call
them, both without faces. This time, they seemed to be trying to teach her something. The black knight handed her a long ivory-handled knife, and she plunged it herself into the soft flesh of her
thigh. It sank as if into wax. A little blood bubbled up around the edges of the cut, but nothing much. Slowly, she eased out the blade and watched the edges of torn skin draw together again like
lips closing. A pinkish bubble swelled and burst. And all the time she didn’t feel a thing. Not a thing. Somehow, she knew the faceless white knight was smiling down at her.
MARTHA
The dead fish stared up at Martha with glazed, oily eyes. Pinkish-red blood stained their gills and mouths, and sunlight glinted on their silvery scales and pale bellies. The
fishy smell was strong in the air, overpowering even the sea’s fresh ozone. Holidaymakers paused as they walked along St Ann’s Staith and took photographs of the fish sales. The people
involved, no doubt used to being camera-fodder for tourists, didn’t even spare them a glance.
The auction sheds that Friday morning were hives of activity. Earlier, while Martha had still been sleeping, the boats had come in, and the fishermen had unpacked their catches into iced boxes
ready for the sales. Crab pots were stacked and nets lay spread by the sheds. As Martha watched, a man hosed fish scales from the stone quay. Gulls gathered in a raucous cloud, and occasionally one
swooped down after a dropped fish.
Of course, Martha realized, they only
sold
the fish here; they didn’t clean them and gut them. That must be done elsewhere – in canning factories, perhaps, where the loaded
lorries were headed. How little she really knew about the business.
It didn’t matter now, though, did it? Odd that he had turned out not to be a fisherman, after all. But you can’t be right about everything. Even so, as she walked by and watched the
sales, she scanned the groups of fishermen by the railings and the auctioneers and buyers in the open sheds. It was what she had planned to do, and she was doing it anyway, even though there was no
longer any point.
Martha felt strangely dazed and light-headed as she walked down the staith towards the bridge. She hadn’t slept well after the gulls had woken her, and the thought of what she had done
haunted her. At breakfast time she’d been very hungry and had even eaten the fried bread she usually left.
The old couple at the window table were still there, he grinning and even, now, winking, while his wife glared with her beady eyes. But all the others were gone, or had changed into someone
else. Martha was finding it hard to keep track. The guests were all starting to look the same: serious young honeymooners; tired but optimistic couples with mischievous toddlers; old people with
grey hair and morning coughs. She felt the same way she had on the only occasion she had tried marijuana. She could see more, sense more, each line on the face, the flecks of colour in the eyes,
but ultimately it all added up to the same. The more individual the people became to her, the more they became alike.
She crossed the bridge, bought a newspaper, and turned up Church Street. It was becoming a routine. Still, this morning she needed waking up even more than usual: there were important decisions
to be made. In the Monk’s Haven, she sipped strong black coffee and smoked a cigarette while she flexed her brain on the crossword. Then she flipped through the headlines to see if there was
anything interesting going on in the world. There wasn’t.
Only for a short while, when she had finished with the paper and still had some coffee and cigarette left, did she allow herself to think of the previous evening. It had been awful, a million
times worse than anything she had imagined. She could still feel the loose fragments of bone shifting under her fingers, and that soft, pulpy mass, like a wet sponge, at the top of his head. She
didn’t feel sorry – he had deserved everything he got – but she was appalled and amazed at herself for really going through with it. After leaving the body in the cave, she had
run down to the sea and rinsed her hands and her paperweight again before going back to the guesthouse. She hadn’t seen a soul on the way. The door opened smoothly on its oiled hinges and the
carpet muffled her ascent to her room. Once safe, she had brushed her teeth three times, but still hadn’t been able to get rid of the bitter taste of vomit. Even now, after the breakfast,
coffee and cigarettes, she felt herself gagging as she recalled Grimley’s body jerking on the sand and those long minutes in the dank, stinking cave: the blood, the staring eye.
The tide would have carried the body out to sea by now. She wanted it to be found soon, wanted to be there to enjoy all the fuss. It wasn’t because she was conceited or proud or anything,
but because the discovery was all part of the same event. To go now would be like leaving a book unfinished. And Martha
always
finished the books she started, even if she didn’t like
them. Surely, when they found out the dead man’s identity, they would go to his home and find something to connect him with the atrocities he had committed? A man like that can’t avoid
leaving some kind of evidence behind. And Martha wanted to be around when the full story hit the newspapers. Even if there was a little risk involved, she wanted to stay to hear the gossip and
whispers in the pubs and along the staith – to
know
that she was the one who had rid the world of such a monster.
She knew nothing of the tides and currents, but hoped the body would wash up soon somewhere nearby. It would be too much to expect it to land back on Whitby Sands, but it might drift only a
short way up the coast to Redcar, Saltburn, Runswick Bay or Staithes, or even further down to Robin Hood’s Bay, Scarborough, Flamborough Head or Bridlington. Wherever it turned up, she hoped
it wouldn’t take long.
She finished her coffee and stubbed out her cigarette. It was eleven o’clock already. Now that she had fulfilled the main part of her purpose here, time was beginning to hang heavy; all
she could do was wait, a much more passive activity than searching and planning.
To kill time until lunch, she found herself again mounting the 199 steps to St Mary’s and the abbey ruins. There were even more people about this time: children racing one another to the
top, counting out loud as they did so – ‘Eighty-four, eighty-five, eighty-six . . .’ – old folk in elastic stockings, wheezing as they went, dogs with their tongues hanging
out running back and forth as if they didn’t know up from down.
Martha climbed steadily, counting under her breath. Again, it came to 199, though legend said it was hard to get the same figure twice. At the top stood Caedmon’s Cross, a thin twenty-foot
upright length of stone, tapering towards the top, where a small cross was mounted. The length of it was carved with medieval figures – David, Hilda and Caedmon himself – like some sort
of stone totem pole, and at the bottom was the inscription, ‘To the glory of God and in memory of Caedmon the father of English sacred song fell asleep hard by 680.’ Martha knew it
wasn’t that old, though; it had been carved and erected in 1898, not in the real Caedmon’s time. But it still had power. She particularly loved the understated simplicity of ‘fell
asleep hard by’. When she had to die, that was the way she would like to go. Again, she thought of Jack Grimley and shivered as if someone had just walked across her grave.
Getting her breath back after the long climb – it came less easily since she had started smoking – she paused in the graveyard and looked at the town spread out beyond and below the
cross. She could easily pick out the dark, monolithic tower of St Hilda’s at the top of her street, and the stately row of white four-storey hotels at the cliff-side end of East Terrace. She
could see the whale’s jawbone, too, that entry to another world. The rough, sandy gravestones, with their burnt-looking knobbly tops, stood in the foreground; the trick of perspective made
them look even bigger than the houses over the harbour.
Martha turned and wandered into the church again. A recorded lecture was in progress in the vestry. It sounded tinny from constant playing. She found herself drifting almost unconsciously
towards the front of the church, where, below the tall, ornate pulpit she slipped into a box marked FOR STRANGERS ONLY. It was the same one she’d been in before, and again she felt that sense
of luxurious isolation and well-being. Even the sounds of the tourists in the church, with their whispered comments and clicking cameras, were barely audible now. In the hush, she ran her
fingertips over the green baize and knelt on a red patterned cushion. There, cut off from the rest of the world, she offered up a prayer of a kind.
KIRSTEN
Kirsten lay in bed late the next morning. Outside her window the birds sang and twittered in the trees and the village went about its business. Not that there was much of that.
Occasionally, she could hear the whirr of bicycle wheels passing by, and once in a while the thrum of a delivery van’s engine.
She put the empty coffee cup back on the tray – breakfast in bed, her mother’s idea – and went to open the curtains. Sunlight burst through, catching the cloud of dust motes
that swirled in the air. It’s all dead skin, Kirsten thought, wondering where on earth she’d heard that. Probably one of those educational television programmes, science for the masses.
She opened the window and warm air rushed to greet her, carrying the heavy scent of honeysuckle. A fat bee droned around the opening, then seemed to decide there was nothing for him in there and
meandered down to the garden instead.
Kirsten’s room reflected just about every stage of her transition from child to worldly student of language and literature. Even her teddy bear sat on the dressing table, propped against
the wall. Stretching, she wandered around touching things, her feet sinking deep into the wall-to-wall carpet. The walls and ceiling were painted a kind of sea-green, or was it blue? It really
depended on the light, Kirsten decided. Those greeny-blue colours often looked much the same to her: turquoise, cerulean, azure, ultramarine. But today, with the light shimmering on it as on
ripples in the ocean, it was definitely the colour of the Mediterranean she remembered from family visits to the Riviera. The walls seemed to swirl and eddy like the water in a Hockney
swimming-pool painting. When Kirsten stood in the middle of the room, she felt as if she were floating in a cave of water, or frozen at its centre like a flower in a glass paperweight.
It was two rooms, really. The bed itself, with a three-quarter-size mattress far too soft for Kirsten’s taste, was set in a little recess up a stair from the large main room, just below
the small window. Also tucked away in there were the dresser and wall cupboards for her clothes. Down the step was the spacious study-cum-sitting room. Her desk stood at a right angle to the
picture window, so that she could simply turn her head and look out at the round, green Mendips as she worked. There, she had written essays during her summer vacations and made notes as she read
ahead for the following term.
Above the desk, her father had fixed a few bookshelves to the wall on brackets. Apart from some old childhood favourites, like
Black Beauty, The Secret Garden, Grimm’s Fairy Tales
and a few Enid Blytons –
Famous Five, Secret Seven
– most of the books were to do with her university courses. They were either for subjects she had studied over the past three
years, brought home to save space in her bedsit, or books she had bought second-hand, usually in Bath, for courses she had intended to take in the future. Like the ones on medieval history and
literature – including Bede’s
An Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation,
Julian of Norwich’s
Revelations of Divine Love,
and the anonymous
The Cloud of
Unknowing.
But Kirsten had never taken that course. Instead, she had chosen at the last moment special tutorials on Coleridge with a visiting world expert in the field, an American academic who
had turned out to be a crashing bore far more interested in trying to look up the front-row women’s skirts than in the wisdom of
Biographia Literaria.