Out of the Night (2 page)

S
he couldn’t stand unaided. She was hanging on to me desperately to stop herself falling. I struggled to hold her upright. Somehow I managed to manoeuvre her far enough inside that I could slam the door shut with my foot. Got the wind and the rain out of my face.

‘Please!’ she stammered again, teeth chattering wildly, and her whole body shaking.

I lifted her off her feet and took her through to the living room. As gently as I could, I laid her on the sofa. It wasn’t easy, and I was glad to be rid of her weight.

It was only when I straightened up that I could see her properly. She was young. Probably in her twenties. And she was completely naked and blue with cold. She pulled her arms across her breasts and held on, shivering uncontrollably, her legs jumping, her eyes shut tight.

‘Stay there,’ I said, virtually on autopilot. ‘I’m just going to get some towels and a blanket.’

She didn’t reply. She just lay there and shook hard enough to make the sofa rock.

I brought a big bath towel and covered her with it. She made no move to dry herself. She was too weak. So I did the best I could, as quickly as I could. Then I covered her with a quilt and turned my attention to the stove.

It was still quite hot. Briskly, I stirred the embers and placed some kindling on top of them. When they got going, I started piling in some bigger lumps of wood, all of it driftwood collected from the beach, none of it a sensible shape or length. But it took hold and began to crackle. I shut the door.

All the time I was processing what I knew of my visitor. It didn’t take long. She was young, painfully thin and desperate, incredibly desperate. Inevitably, my thoughts jumped to the bodies that had been found on the beach. Should this have been another one? Had she somehow averted what had happened to the others? It seemed a strong possibility. Someone must have been after her. She hadn’t got into this state all by herself.

Before I did anything else, I went to the cupboard under the stairs and took my shotgun out of its locked case. I placed it where I could easily reach it.

That done, I returned to the sofa. She stared up at me, still shaking but eyes wide open now.

‘What happened?’ I asked gently. ‘Where have you come from?’

She said nothing. Just stared. In shock, probably. Either that or too cold for her brain or tongue to function.

‘Can you tell me anything?’

‘Thank you,’ she said.

That seemed to be it. I decided not to press her for the moment. I was worried about her condition, as well as curious about how she had ended up here. She was probably suffering from hypothermia.

‘I’ll make you a hot drink,’ I said, turning away. ‘That’ll help.’

‘Thank you,’ she said again, wheezing this time.

‘Then I’ll call an ambulance,’ I added over my shoulder. ‘Get some paramedics here to take you to hospital.’

‘No!’

The cry startled me. I spun round and stared at her. She stared back, wide-eyed.

‘We need help,’ I said gently.

‘No,’ she said again. ‘Please! They will kill us.’

‘Who will?’

She just shook her head.

I considered for a moment. Then I said OK and went to make some coffee.

While the water was heating, I took a quick look outside. Nothing. Nobody. Not in the immediate vicinity, at least.

She sat up to take the coffee mug from me. I was surprised by her powers of recovery. Minutes ago she hadn’t been capable of that. She was still shivering, though. And still terribly cold.

‘So what happened?’ I asked her again.

She sipped her coffee and then put the mug down on the small table I had placed within her reach.

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘I can tell you nothing.’

I nodded. ‘OK.’

Foreign, I had decided by then. From her accent, European – probably.

‘Lucky I heard you,’ I said with a smile. ‘Lucky I’m a light sleeper.’

She nodded. ‘Thank you,’ she said again. ‘I thank you.’

‘Where are your clothes?’ I asked. ‘Who was chasing you?’

She put down the coffee mug and her expression became blank. I was getting nowhere.

‘All right, all right!’ I raised my hands, palms out, to placate her. ‘How do you feel? Can I ask you that?’

‘Better, thank you.’

I was getting tired of her words of gratitude. I wanted more from her. But I knew I wasn’t going to get it yet.

‘I’ll find you some clothes,’ I told her. ‘You stay there and finish your coffee. And don’t,’ I warned, ‘say “thank you” again!’

An expression of alarm flashed across her face. She gazed at me warily. I smiled. She relaxed. ‘You make joke,’ she said.

‘Small one,’ I agreed.

I went upstairs and dug out a pair of jogging pants, a thick flannel shirt and a heavy-duty sweater. She was going to have to make do without underwear. Mine wouldn’t fit and none of my visitors had left any behind.

I switched off the bedroom light and moved the curtain aside. Still a black, stormy night. I could see nothing. Here at Risky Point we have no light pollution whatsoever. An astronomer’s paradise, apart from the rain, fog and cloud.

For a moment I stayed where I was. Who on earth was she? And what the hell was I going to do with her? One thing I knew: I looked forward to meeting whoever had got her into this state.

Then I smiled ruefully as one of Jimmy Mack’s many criticisms of me came to mind. I didn’t need to go looking for trouble, he had once said. All I had to do was stay where I was, and it came to my door. This looked like more of the same.

She was lying down again when I went back downstairs, her coffee mug empty.

‘Feel any better?’

She nodded, and managed to avoid using her stock phrase again.

‘I’ve found you some clothes of mine. They won’t fit but at least they’ll keep you warm.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Would you like a hot bath first? That would help.’

She hesitated and then said she would. I helped her up and steered her to the stairs, still wrapped in the quilt. Somehow we got up them. Then I ran the bath while she watched.

‘Can you manage now?’

She nodded. I hesitated a moment but decided she probably could. ‘I’ll bring those clothes up for you,’ I said. ‘You carry on. If anything is too difficult, give me a shout. My name is Frank, by the way.’

She nodded and actually smiled. Things were looking up.

After that I checked the bed in the spare room and threw an extra quilt on top. Then I returned downstairs and waited. A long soak would do her good.

A loud thump on the ceiling twenty minutes later suggested things were not going so well upstairs. I raced back up and found she had extricated herself from the bath but was now sitting in a heap on the floor, the towel wrapped around her.

At least the shivering had stopped. I picked her up with difficulty and carried her to the spare room, where I laid her down and covered her with the quilt again. I could see plenty of nasty scrapes and bruises on her legs, and her feet were a mess, but any serious bleeding had stopped.

She was almost asleep now. So I decided any further attention,
let alone questions, could wait till morning. At least she was a bit better now, if battered and exhausted. She was out of danger. The resilience of youth.

But I wasn’t sure I was OK. In manoeuvring my visitor around, something had gone pop in my back. So the best place for me, too, was bed.

Downstairs, I checked the locks, collected the shotgun and switched off the lights. Then I, too, sought refuge in sleep. I was tired and sleep didn’t take long in coming.

I woke up about 7.30 a.m., my usual time in the winter months. It was just starting to get light by then. I lay still for a minute or two, recalling the events of the night, sorting my head out. Then I got up, pulled on a few clothes and went to check on my visitor.

She was gone. The bed was empty and cold.

I
was shocked. Pulse racing, I started checking. The bathroom – empty. There was nowhere else upstairs. I ran downstairs. No sign of her. By then I was really worried.

I went through the cottage again, more carefully this time. There were no signs of a struggle, no signs of an abduction. I knew there couldn’t have been anyway – I would have heard it. The bedroom, and the rest of the house, were simply empty.

All the windows were intact, closed and locked still. Both external doors were shut, undamaged and locked with the Yale locks. The back door was also fastened with a double cylinder, deadbolt lock. The serious lock on the front door was open. It had been opened with the key, which was still in place.

That was it. My inescapable conclusion was that she had let herself out and departed voluntarily. There was no other explanation. I opened the front door and took a quick look outside. No one there, and nothing unusual in sight.

Back indoors, I checked through the house once more and discovered that she had taken a few things with her. Not much, though. Just enough. Understandably, she had kept the clothes I had given her. She had also taken an old jacket
that I kept hanging behind the front door and a pair of lightweight walking boots. The boots would be too big for her, like everything else, but she had to have something on her feet in this weather.

What the hell was going on? I swore savagely and slammed a door or two. It wasn’t because of the stuff she had taken. That didn’t matter. It was partly because this mystery that I didn’t need had been dumped on me. It was even more because I feared for her. It’s not often a girl has arrived on my doorstep in the middle of the night. Not uninvited anyway. And never in such condition.

Whoever she was, she was obviously in serious trouble of some sort. And now I was involved. I had seen her naked, touched her, carried her, helped her – and done my best for her. I was involved. I didn’t want her to end up as another headless, handless body on the beach. There might not have been any connection at all between my visitor and what had happened at Port Holland, but I didn’t believe that for a moment. She was in trouble.

I made some scrambled eggs and coffee for breakfast, and took my time over it. There was no hurry, and I needed to work out what I was going to do next.

Briefly, I thought about Bill Peart. Briefly. Bill was officialdom, and one thing the girl had impressed on me was that she didn’t want the official world alerted. Given that she had sounded foreign, I suspected that was because she was here unofficially. Perhaps illegally.

So no Bill Peart.

I decided to look for her myself. It was possible that she
had left Risky Point far behind, perhaps by hitching a lift, but it was also possible that she had not gone very far at all. I tried not to consider the possibility that I might find her at the foot of the cliffs, without her head, but I couldn’t rule it out.

Risky Point is a strange, abandoned place, a ruined village on top of high cliffs that are constantly retreating. To the north is Boulby, with higher cliffs than anywhere else in England. To the south, more cliffs – all the way down to Whitby and beyond. Once a railway ran along the top of these cliffs. And at the base of them are countless industrial sites and relics, places where men have for centuries quarried and dug out a living from ironstone, alum shale and jet, as well as from fishing.

On top, too, there have been plenty of shafts and quarries dug by men mining the seams of iron ore that run through Cleveland. Often in these places, as at Risky Point, villages were built for the men who worked there and their families. Many survive still, communities where people now commute or eke out a living in ways that once would have been unimaginable. It’s a strange, hard and yet still attractive landscape that is as impressive as any I know. It’s also one with great opportunities for concealment, if you want to hide and stay hidden.

I started my search outside my own front door. To my relief, I didn’t find a body in the first hundred yards. That strengthened my optimism. I pressed on.

It was a raw morning. The cloud was low and dark, and there was a biting wind coming off the sea, bringing with it
flurries of needle-tipped sleet. I walked northwards first. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular. I was looking for things out of the ordinary. Most of all, I was hoping I wouldn’t find a woman’s body.

I walked north for a couple of miles and then turned round to come back and let the wind freeze the other side of my face. I kept on going until I reached our cottages, still with the same vague objective in mind. But I had seen nothing. In a way, I was reassured. Unless she had fallen over the cliff edge, which I was inclined to rule out, I was starting to believe she had managed to get well away. Somehow she had. Good luck to her. My mind was slightly easier, despite the enduring mystery. I hoped she had a good life, and a long one, ahead of her.

I called in on Jimmy Mack, just to say good morning. He was in a funny mood. Grumpy and bad tempered. He didn’t say much. He was in his shed, re-arranging his tools and generally being uncommunicative.

‘You didn’t see or hear anything last night, did you?’ I asked him.

‘Just the usual.’ He turned to look at me. ‘Why?’

I shrugged.

‘Any more bodies yet?’

‘I hope not. Bill Peart came over yesterday afternoon. I think it’s wearing him out already.’

‘That’s easy done, when you start finding folk without their heads.’

He shook his own head, as if he didn’t know what the world was coming to.

‘What do you think, Jimmy?’

‘Me? I haven’t made my mind up yet. But there’s plenty going on around here. I can tell you that. We haven’t heard the last of it, not by a long chalk.’

He wasn’t feeling sociable and he didn’t offer me coffee. He seemed determined to be enigmatic. So I moved on and walked a mile or two to the south. Still nothing. By then, I was pretty relaxed about the whole thing. I suspected it might be a long time, if ever, before the night’s events were explained. I could live with that.

As I trudged northwards again the cottages came into view, about half a mile ahead. I saw a car travelling along the access track towards them. It stopped outside my place. Two men got out. One of them knocked on the front door while the other went round the back.

I broke into a run. By the time I reached my gate, one of them was inside my shed and the other was working on the lock on the front door. I yelled at the one on my front doorstep. He looked over his shoulder at me and then carried right on.