Safe House (21 page)

I backed away, my shoulder blade nudging the rough edge of the picnic table, making me flinch. I was having difficulty with the idea. ‘Why would she do that?’

‘Money? Erik has plenty of it. Or something else. Something we don’t know just yet. But there’s a logic to it. Think about the men in the white van. The way they tapped into the surveillance equipment up at the cottage. The way they staged your accident to get at Lena. That’s not the type of thing a campaign group could comfortably pull off.’

‘But a couple of spies could?’

Rebecca nodded. ‘That couple of spies would be part of a larger network. They’d have resources. Support. They’d have the ability to keep Lena hidden. Maybe even transport her away from here. And they’d have the power to shut down a police investigation. Remember what Teare said? About why Shimmin swept everything away into one straightforward road-accident report?’

‘Because he didn’t want to find answers he couldn’t do anything with.’

Rebecca smiled crookedly and slipped her hands inside the pockets of her leather jacket. She clinched her arms against her sides for warmth and tucked her chin down against her chest. She was watching me closely. Monitoring my thoughts.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘Laura.’

‘What about her?’

‘Don’t you see? If we assume she was working against her employer, rebelling in some way, then all those resources, that entire network, could be turned against her.’

My heart thudded in my chest. I waited for it to thud again. The waiting took a long time.

‘What are you saying?’ I asked. ‘You think they staged her suicide? That she was murdered?’

She held up a hand. ‘I’m not saying that. Not yet, anyway. But I’m starting to think it would be useful if I could see where she died.’

‘You mean right now?’

She smiled. ‘I don’t imagine I’d be able to sleep just yet. Do you?’

*

Marine Drive is a coastal road carved into a gorse-covered headland at the southern end of Douglas Bay. It stretches between Douglas and Port Soderick, a small village roughly four miles away, but for as long as I can remember, the road has been closed at the mid-way point. It’s blocked because of the deterioration of the road surface and the dangers associated with a winding ribbon of tarmac that hovers precariously at the top of two-hundred-foot sea cliffs. Even so, the road can still be accessed from either end. It’s popular with dog walkers, cyclists and joggers. Parents take their kids there to teach them to drive. A lot of kids return when they’ve passed their test because Marine Drive is a choice make-out point. There are plenty of sweeping curves and secluded pull-ins with outstanding sea views, and it’s quiet enough to hear an approaching vehicle.

The white hulls of the yachts in Douglas marina were gleaming beneath the electric street lamps that surround the quay by the time Rebecca drove us past the ferry terminal and swung left on to the narrow road climbing the side of the headland. We passed terraced houses and a small industrial yard. Then the view opened up and we could see the sweeping horseshoe curve of Douglas Bay below. The fairy lights strung across the prom glowed a soft, vibrant yellow, and hundreds of lights were on in the windows of the hotels and apartments that lined the seafront. The ferry dock was aglow beneath powerful floodlights. Up ahead, a squat block of luxury flats enjoyed the best of the view from just above the Victorian Camera Obscura.

I had Rebecca drive around to the right, where we approached a crumbling brick structure that had the appearance of a castle turret with two archways cut through it. Above the archways the words MARINE DRIVE had been painted in faded white lettering. The road was completely dark, with no white lines or street lamps, and Rebecca had to switch to full beam as we passed beneath.

We didn’t have far to go. After following a bend for a few hundred metres, Rebecca’s headlamps picked out a swathe of clear plastic by the side of the road. The plastic was wrapped around the dying remains of a bunch of white roses. Mum had placed the flowers there to mark the spot where Laura had pitched herself over the cliff.

I hadn’t been up here since the accident, but it was pretty much how I’d expected it to be. There was an obvious gap where some of the concrete posts and wire fencing that ran along the edge of the road were missing. Of the posts that remained, one was bent at a sharp angle, half ripped out of the ground by the force of Laura’s car bursting through the wires. Glassy fragments glittered in the light of our headlamps on the low gravel pavement. They looked like broken pieces of headlamp reflectors.

Rebecca stopped a short distance away. The engine idled. I powered down my window and felt the coastal wind on my face. I could hear the surf far below. The swirl and crunch of the waves striking the base of the cliffs. The cry of nesting gulls.

Rebecca cut the engine and dimmed the headlamps and stepped outside, walking through the slanted beams towards the flowers. She bent down and read the card, then straightened to peer over the cliff.

I hadn’t planned on joining her and I was still inside the car when she turned and walked back to talk to me through the gap in my window.

‘Can you pass me my torch?’ she asked. ‘It’s in my bag.’

The torch was a weighty Maglite. It had a dimpled metal shaft, cold to the touch. I powered the window right down and handed it to her. She compressed the switch with her thumb and headed back to the gap in the fence, the beam swinging from side to side. I watched her shine the flash into the darkness below. She took a series of sideways steps, like she was conducting a careful survey of the drop. I caught a blink of white in the glare. A seagull taking flight.

A few moments later, Rebecca beckoned to me with the hand holding the torch. The dazzling flare lanced into the night sky.

I thought about staying where I was. I thought about shaking my head and signalling that this wasn’t something I could do. But she was insistent, as if she’d found something I really needed to see.

I shoved my door open. Stepped out of the car. My legs felt stiff, unbending, like my knees were locked in place. My shoes scuffed in the gravel at the side of the road. The air felt raw and wild up here. I could hear the caw of the gulls. The crash and shuffle of the surf. The darkness seemed to have swallowed the yellow light of the headlamps completely.

‘Something to show you,’ Rebecca called.

My throat was dry. I worked my cheeks. Swallowed some saliva.

‘It’s not so bad,’ she told me.

Easy for her to say. For weeks now, I’d fought to keep the reality of this place shut off from my mind. I hadn’t wanted to think about the long drop to the jagged rocks below, or to count the awful seconds Laura would have endured as her car tumbled through the air. I hadn’t wanted to know how unforgiving the impact would have been. How sudden and absolute the outcome.

The grass verge was torn up where Rebecca was standing. The result of a combination of factors, I guessed. The jolt of Laura’s car digging into the soft turf. The bite of her wheels in the mud. The snag of the wires holding her back for the merest fraction of a second before momentum and gravity took over and the concrete fence posts were yanked free in a spray of compacted earth. Then the stamp of the heavy machinery used by the rescue services to haul the remains of Laura’s car back to the road.

‘See this?’ Rebecca asked.

She was aiming her flashlight over the side. I don’t suffer from vertigo. Not in a big way, at least. But I was feeling unsteady. My legs had a treacherous urge. I kept picturing myself slipping. Or falling. Like invisible hands were pushing me forwards.

I whipped my head down and snatched the briefest of looks, but the drop wasn’t what I’d expected. I looked again. It was steep, no question, but it wasn’t a sheer cliff. The ground sloped at an acute angle for fifty or so metres, then evened out, then plunged sharply, before ending in a shallow grassy bowl at the top of a spit of land sticking out into the sea. The powerful light of Rebecca’s torch picked out whitish debris and bits of metal at the bottom of the second drop. Two rough trenches had been scored into the earth. I had no doubt that I was looking at the site where Laura’s car had ended up.

‘Now look at this,’ Rebecca said.

She guided me away to the right, through the beams of the headlamps, and played her torch over the edge once again. The fence was still intact at the point she’d chosen and I rested my hand on a concrete post and teetered forwards. The drop rushed up at me out of the dark. A straight plunge to the foaming depths way below. The cliff face was rough and craggy, jammed with shards and fissures of broken rock.

Rebecca said, ‘It’s the same on the other side.’

‘So?’

‘So your sister’s car went over at an interesting point. It’s the only section along this stretch of road where there isn’t a sheer drop.’

I backed away from the edge and looked to where Laura had driven over. ‘There’s still a hell of a fall.’

I waited for Rebecca to respond. She was distracted. Absorbed in thought. She walked past me, towards the flowers.

‘It’s not like she would have known what was on the other side,’ I called after her. ‘Look at the speed she must have been going to break through the fence.’

Rebecca pivoted at the waist and played her torch over the spit of land again. The halogen bleached the scraggly grass. The area of debris looked like someone had been fly-tipping.

‘What’s the rest of the coastline like along here?’ she asked.

‘The same, pretty much. We’d have to come back in the daytime. Why?’

She ignored the question. Chewed on her bottom lip.

‘What?’ I asked.

‘You think you could get down there?’ She swung the flashlight over the loose shingle at the beginning of the drop.

‘Not with my arm like this,’ I said, lifting my sling. ‘And I wouldn’t want to do it now anyway. Too dark. Too windy.’

She made a humming noise. ‘Laura’s crash was when? Five in the morning?’

‘Just after. Mum heard her go out. She just assumed Laura was having trouble sleeping again.’

More humming. More lip chewing.

‘What is it? Rebecca?’

She blinked. Like she was coming round from a daze. ‘Let’s get back in the car.’

She switched off her torch and turned from me, pacing around the reverse of the Fiesta, the cherry red of the brake lights colouring her jeans. I looked back through the broken fencing at the clotted blackness beyond. The concealed spit of land. The pounding of the waves. Then I followed her to the car and folded myself into the passenger seat and powered up my window as Rebecca pulled away.

She flipped her lights to high beam and crouched forwards over the steering wheel, peering hard towards the grassy fringe at the side of the road. Our route coiled around to the right and the headlamps coiled with us, illuminating a parked car. Two figures were huddled together in the front. They broke apart and I could see their faces. A young lad and a flustered girl. There was an R plate on the front of the car. You can learn to drive at the age of sixteen on the Isle of Man, but your car has to be fitted with an R plate for your first year on the road.

Rebecca dipped her lights.

‘Doesn’t go on much farther,’ I said.

‘I’ll turn at the top.’

There was a gentle gradient ahead of us, climbing towards the locked gates at the crest of the rise. Farmland was on our right. A lone sheep grazed behind a barbed-wire fence.

‘There’s something I think you should consider,’ Rebecca said. ‘Something you might not have thought about just yet.’

‘OK.’

‘I want you to think about your own role in all this. How you came to be involved in the first place.’

‘You know how. It was my bike crash. Lena’s disappearance.’

Rebecca shook her head. ‘Before that.’

The car’s headlamps picked out the pale timber of the gate. It was closed and bolted. Alongside it was the cliff edge. In the far distance, I could see the milky ray of a southerly lighthouse sweeping the open sea.

Rebecca heaved the steering wheel to the right and turned the car around, setting off down the hill again. The glow of the instrument panel bathed her hands and her jaw in a green luminescence.

She said, ‘You went out to fix the heating, correct?’

‘You know I did.’

‘And you were called to do that, yes? You picked up a message from one of the guys. The one called Lukas.’

‘I’m pretty sure it was him.’

‘And how many plumbers are there in the phone book over here?’

Her question threw me. ‘I don’t know. Close to a hundred, maybe.’

‘Anything special about your ad?’

‘I paid extra for a coloured box.’

‘Other people do that too?’

‘Sure.’

‘How many?’

‘Around half of them, I suppose.’

‘Well, coincidence is one thing. And we shouldn’t dismiss it completely. But seriously, what are the chances of them picking your name out of the phone book?’

She looked across at me. Reading my reaction. The sickly green light bathing her face from below.

‘Don’t you see?’ Rebecca lifted a hand from the steering wheel. ‘We’re assuming Laura was connected to Lena in some way. Assisting her. And then, out of all the plumbers they could possibly have called, they called you.’

I let go of a breath. It sounded more like a sigh. ‘So maybe Laura gave them my card.’

‘Tell me about the fault with the boiler. What was the problem?’

‘It needed a good service.’ I shrugged. ‘But other than that, it was nothing serious. Some wires had come loose. One connected directly to the circuit board. I didn’t have the right connector plug to fix it. That’s why I needed a spare.’

‘And how often do you see a problem like that?’

‘Couple of times a year, maybe. When the burner kicks in, if the boiler isn’t grounded properly – say it’s on sloping ground – it can shake. Over the course of a few years, that shaking can work a wire free.’

We eased by the parked car with the young couple in it. This time, they didn’t break apart as we passed. Maybe they figured we’d come up here for the same reason.