Sarah and Andrew stood outside, standing back from work in progress, and watched the large figure of Edwin Hurly walking downhill towards the bend in the road, disappearing out of sight. He was veering left, towards the next town. Dawn was beginning in the sky, not yet touching the land.
‘We should go after him,’ Andrew said. ‘Come on, let’s go. I don’t know what he’s going to do, and he’s a man of conscience, for all that.’
‘No,’ Sarah said. ‘No.’
Ten minutes later, the delivery man, who’d never had a name, got into his white van and drove away, fast.
An hour later the Pennyvale traffic jam began.
H
ow had she done this? What was it Edwin Hurly had said?
I didn’t see her; she was there. She had taken the phone off and put it down.
Sarah was on the cliff path alone, playing it back. The record of a Sunday night conversation.
(Calm voice, male.) What the hell are you doing here, girl? I told you, stay away. What are you on? What do you want to do, ruin me? Do you know what time it is? You should be in bed. Oh God. Dinner. I forgot. I got busy, I forgot.
(Female voice, hysterical.) Bastard, bastard, bastard, fucking bastard. You forgot. Like hell you forgot, you left me sitting alone. You were going to make it up to me for leaving me again and again. All you ever do is leave and get away with it. Every time, you leave and you lie. You say you love me, and you lie, you’ve lied to me all my life. You lied to my mother, you broke her into pieces. How could you let me think you were dead, how could you let me think it was ME who drove you away to die? How could you do that to me? You drive me mad.
You were mad before that, girl.
DON’T call me GIRL! MAD? What about you? You give out love like you’ve won some lottery, then it’s all gone, gone, gone. Couldn’t believe it when I found you again. You hugged me; you kissed me. You said I’d be the most important person in your life, for ever, just like it was. You were proud of me, just like you were once, wanted to take me everywhere, you said we’d do that again, only don’t let Mummy know. We’ll go to all the best places, you’d go with me, you’d get me work, get me started. You took me places, made me meet people, got me jobs, Daddy, you were proud of me. Why did you stop? What did I do?
You’re a stupid little tart, Jess. You wanted me to go home. I got scared of you and I won’t be scared of anyone. Grow up. You can’t, Jess, you never could. You should go home. You’re a home girl. You can’t even cook. How could you think I could ever go back to hell?
Go home and keep quiet? Go without you? Not tell her? I can’t go home ever again, because of you. I don’t want to go anywhere without you. I love you, Daddy. I love you so much it hurts and you shut me out. I can’t live without you. I want Mummy to be happy. I want to stop this pain and make us all happy.
(Him, wearily.) Get real, Jess. You’re a loser. I can’t make you a winner. You can’t hold down a job. You’re a fucking stalker. You’ll ruin me . . . You’ve made a fool of me three times over. Look, what do you want? Money?
I want you to love me like you said you would, like you did. I want you to love both of us.
(Sobbing.)
Get real, Jessica. Can’t love a stalker. Go away, please, I’m tired. If you show me up, if you come here again, I’ll fucking kill you.
(Pause. Footsteps, metal clashing, fist on surface?)
(Female.) Where’s that bloody chef? I’ll tell him.
Go home, girl. Tell you what, if you’re good, I’ll take you . . . somewhere nice. PUT THAT KNIFE DOWN.
Again? Like a pet on a lead? And then stand me up? I’ll kill you first, I’ll kill you. It was better when you were dead. I was happy when you were dead.
Put it down, girl. Stoppit. It’s sharp, put it down. STOPPIT.
(Shuffling, crashing, both voices screaming, indecipherable noise: duration thirty seconds. Silence one minute.)
(Male voice.) Shit. Where’s your phone? Oh, no, no, no. Oh, you silly little calf. What have you done?
C
onvenient that the recording had ended there, the last messages curtailed by Edwin Hurly finding the phone. It was all oddly undramatic, sounding more like a Saturday-night screaming row between two drunks in the middle of a longstanding shouting match with threats, where nobody died and they all stood up again like characters in a cartoon film. It coincided with the prescribed version, leaving terrible ambiguities. Unclear throughout: there were intervals with nothing but white noise, mumbling, yelling, crashing; Jessica’s phone could not record what went on in every corner of a room. The recording was unable simultaneously to show who had attacked whom while it worked to exonerate anyone else. Had Edwin Hurly really been sure that Jessica was dead when he’d used his own knife with such imperative speed? The cut would have had to be instant: otherwise she would not have bled.
Twenty-four hours for a bled body to cool; transfer to Smithfield on Smithfield’s busiest day of the week. For the record, Jessica would rest in the cold dark backyard of a fashionable restaurant in the meantime. DK was closed on
Mondays: he could live with her corpse there for longer than that. After that, according to the record which would become official, Edwin Hurly had brought her home the long way, by himself.
Sarah knew that he had not done so. Edwin Hurly was a man who gave orders, did not deliver himself. Jessica had rested in the delivery man’s cold van, waiting her chance to go home. Edwin Hurly was a man who forced others to do his will, just as he was doing now. He wanted them to know the truth of his ingenuity and his power and then act upon the untruths and Sarah, for one, was willing to comply. He wanted them to know all but the details and then wanted them not to know. Sarah wondered how long it had taken him to realise that this was the only way.
She was rationing compassion in the interests of compromise. Sarah had called the police and informed them that she would be arriving soon with new evidence and it was better that she came to them rather than them coming to her, because all it was was a phone. Mike and Andrew disappeared into the ether, following instructions. Let Sam Brady and herself be the only witnesses to Edwin Hurly’s reappearance and confession: keep it simple. It was not good to make a man of the cloth tell lies: better that he had never been there. Andrew had shaken her hand on leaving, gazing into her eyes, his own full of questions and disappointment and hope. A hooker. A Mary Magdalene, ripe for redemption. Maybe she was.
T
he best part of the day had gone. Sarah had been accused, lectured and criticised for obstruction of the course of justice. She’d opened her eyes wide, and held her innocent ground. The light was going again before she walked past the bend in
the road, turned left and followed the coastal path to the next town, deviating onto the shingle beach, following the pathways that Jeremy had shown her on the way back and because the beach was such a wilderness it was difficult to remember, until she gave way to instinct and let her own feet lead her. She had learned about instinct and finding her way in the dark and she was thinking as she walked that this hidden village was not as disjointed as she’d thought. There was a core to it: there was common opinion: there was secret knowledge of who was who and what was what, secretly shared. There had been a fine conspiracy to lead the police in the opposite direction from the obvious place where anyone who knew Jeremy would know where they might have gone. There was loyalty here; there was devotion to those who had not left; there was belief in innocent until proved guilty, whatever the evidence. Those two had not stayed free in the darkness alone. Someone had helped.
They had been in her house only once. They took a risk to bury a dog: they were savages with peculiar consciences. There was plenty of anarchic goodness in this place.
As Sarah approached the beach, she met a man returning from it, an old man who seemed to wink compulsively, accompanied by an even older (in canine time) dog that knew how to walk the paths on the beach without injuring its paws on the shingle.
Mike had come part of the way and then went back when he saw the emptiness of the landscape. He was afraid of nothing but nothingness like this. He hated wide empty spaces.
‘Got to go home, doll, can’t walk on this stuff. Can’t stand this place, can’t help anyone if I’m scared. When are you coming home?’
‘Don’t know. You’ve been brilliant. You are a star in my firmament.’
‘Like those in this bloody great big sky? No, thanks. I need other kinds of lights. This scares me. Just don’t tell me you’re going to stay here and marry the vicar and raise kids.’
‘At my age?’
‘You’re never too old. You can always hightail it to town. Don’t leave it too long. I’m not waiting for you. You told me, don’t.’
‘No, don’t wait. No one should ever wait for me.’
Sarah could hear his footsteps, going back, losing the path, afraid to go over the dip and be out of sight of the few lights on the side road and the twinkling lights beginning to emerge from the pub and the row behind. Mike could not bear this kind of darkness and whatever he did he always had to know the way back. He had to know his own territory to function, while she had never been afraid of the new. All she could hear was the sound of the sea and the distinctive sounds made by her own feet whenever they went left and right off the meandering path which led with such charming indirectness, somewhere and nowhere. The sound of boots on shingle was as loud as shouting, neutralising the sound of the water that seemed so distant and yet so close. They would hear her approaching long before they could see her. Better Mike had gone back: otherwise they might have run. A single set of footsteps was better than two.
The beach shelved as steeply as she remembered, levelled out and shelved again. She fell once or twice over the first slope, hazarded the next and followed her own feet. Beyond the amazing growth of fennel, garlic, thistles and soon-to-be vibrant flowers, there were only smooth hard-going stones. Sarah slithered and slipped, bore left, plodded on noisily, until
she could sense as much as see the colony of damaged boats looming ahead, identifiable by shape alone, backlit by the reflection from the sea itself, still hidden beyond the last shelf. There was a single light illuminating the little colony; a light that was extinguished as soon as her steps became audible.
How clever that the search parties had always gone right of the village, towards the cliffs and the old ice houses, never to the left in the other direction, guided then by crafty local expertise. Sarah was carrying six cans which rattled in a bag. Her imagination, that mortar between facts, told her that even the sound of that burden was audible and welcome. She walked beyond the boat colony, with her all too noisy steps, as if she had not seen it, stepped into the beyond. This was vanity, she told herself as she slithered down the last shelf and sat facing a quiet, murmuring, talkative sea, so peaceful that she felt able to have a conversation with it.
She sat on her bottom, twenty feet from the mumbling waves, lit a cigarette, shook the carrier bag she had carried with her so that it made a tinny sound, waited. The bag had grown heavier with each step, given her ballast. She took one can from it, sipped from the rim and slung the rest to one side. Wine was her preference; lager would do. She wanted to swim out here when it was warmer. Home was where you could find your own way, backwards and forwards, a place where you had no fear.
Finally two figures slithered into shape beside her. Sarah ignored them and turned her face to the sea, sat with her bum on cold shingle, arms crossed over her knees, looking ahead. Greedy hands went towards the bag three feet away. Then they sat in a single line, facing the sea. Today the waves chose a time to mumble rather than roar: she was grateful for that.
The weather had been kind and calm all week.
‘It’s over now,’ Sarah said. ‘You can go back, you know. You can go back any time you want. Everybody knows you didn’t kill her. Nobody here killed her. She died in London, where she lived, she was carried back here and everyone knows. Everyone knows it wasn’t you. Everyone always did. You can go home now.’
‘Who says so?’
‘I do.’
Jack grabbed her and pushed her over. They set upon her like hungry wolves, scenting prey, tickling instead of biting. She lay spreadeagled on the concrete and let Jack sniff her like a dog while Jeremy touched her breasts and patted her body. They were like scavengers around a carcass. Darkness finally fell as she let them paw at her clothes. She lay as stiff as a dead starfish, felt afraid and then not afraid, until, ashamed, they fell back, giggling. They were giddy children. Only teasing and tickling. Different, maybe, if she had screamed or resisted. Only testing for response, testing tolerance. In a brief moment she wondered if they were beyond hope: wondered what they were capable of becoming without kindness. If ever there were two young men in need of a fuck, it was these. She was too old for them and they were too young for her. She could find them friends, if she stayed.
‘Sorry,’Jeremy said, and reached for another can out of the bag. They both smelt of salt and fish and unwashed clothes. They drank, moving away from being harmful to harmless.
Sarah sat up. Jeremy pressed his unfinished still-cold can into her hand. Greater love hath no boy. Her hands were colder than her body.
‘I said everyone. I meant everyone who counts. Who’s been feeding you and believing you? Get a life. You might
not be exactly loved or loveable, either of you, but a lot of people know what you are.’
She got to her feet and walked uphill as noisily as ever, weaving slightly until Jeremy caught one arm and Jack the other. They linked their arms with hers, one each side and ran her up the steepest shelf of the beach, still giggling, paused for breath, walked on, stopped.
‘We already knew,’ Jeremy said. ‘No, that’s not right. We
thought
we knew.’