The Cold Cold Sea (6 page)

Maggie nodded, grateful when he left her alone again. It wasn’t Livvy, she could feel that.

Howard returned a few minutes later.

‘Maggie, Colin’s here. He wasn’t happy when I told him we hadn’t been able to identify the kid from the film so he’s having a look for himself now.’

‘You mean he was mad at me because I couldn’t identify her,’ she said, startled to hear the bitterness in her own voice.

‘He’s hurting too,’ said Howard. ‘I’ll bring him through when he’s seen it.’

Maggie could hear Colin before she saw him, ranting about the miserable quality of CCTV films. She shrank back in her chair. His anger was even more apparent now than it had been earlier.

He strode into the room, his face pale.

‘Maggie,’ was all he said, barely making eye contact. She nodded, a lump rising in her throat. Before she could say anything, Howard appeared in the doorway.

‘It’s a girl called Meredith O’Brian. The family were on their way home from a day out when Meredith had to go to the loo. Exeter station was nearest. I’m sorry.’

Maggie’s tenuous hope vanished abruptly, and hopelessness returned full force. Olivia was still missing. Believed drowned.

Colin stood up.

‘We’ll leave you to do your work. Come on, Maggie.’

Back at the cottage, the helicopter had gone. Howard had told them it would only be searching at low tide today, and the thought that it would be looking for a dead child felt unreal to Maggie. Yesterday’s agony was gone, along with today’s brief hope, and in their place the new heaviness was making every movement so difficult she didn’t know how she was managing to stay upright. She was moving into uncharted waters now. Whatever happened, her life would never be the same again. And with every second that passed, the already miniscule likelihood of getting Livvy back alive was growing smaller, and the dread of what was almost certainly coming was quite unbearable.

Colin strode into the bedroom and yanked the case out from under the bed. He pulled clothes from the wardrobe, squashing t-shirts, jeans, everything in any old way. There was no expression on his face now but Maggie could tell by the set of his jaw that he was at the limit of his endurance.

‘Col, we can’t leave now,’ she said, standing in the doorway. ‘We have to be here in case... when... ’

He stared at her, his lips pressed together. He was furious, she could tell, but when he spoke his voice was quiet. Not a gentle kind of quiet, though, but guarded, as if he was afraid of saying too much.

‘Maggie, I just can’t look at you and think of what happened. I have to get away. I’m going to Looe, I promised Joe I’d be back before bedtime. You stay on here if you want, or go back to Carlton Bridge. You know they won’t find her alive now.’

‘No,’ she said, reaching out to him, but he pushed past her to get his things from the bathroom. ‘Colin. Please. We have to get through this together. Joe needs us to be his... ’

‘Livvy needed us too,’ he said, and his use of the past tense hurt her even more than the news that it had been a girl called Meredith she’d spent so long staring at today, not Livvy. She watched as he finished packing and then followed him out to the car. He was going to leave again, and this time he wasn’t going to come back.

‘Please, Colin, please don’t go.’

‘No, Maggie. I just - I can’t.’

He flung himself into the driving seat and stabbed the key into the ignition.

This time she didn’t wave as the car bumped away from the cottage.

Maggie stood at the kitchen window. She couldn’t see the ocean from here, but she could hear the waves crashing up the beach at the front of the cottage. The tide was going out and it was raining softly, more like mist really. September rain. Or it would be, tomorrow. Shivering, she turned and put the kettle on. The fifteenth of August seemed like a lifetime ago now.

Maggie dropped a tea bag into the clown mug that Olivia had won at the hoopla last summer. Livvy’s mug, for hot chocolate and bedtime stories. She poured the water in and cradled the mug in both hands. The warmth was comforting, if anything could be comforting now. Drearily, Maggie went through to the living room, and the whole scene at the beach began in her mind yet again, like a never-ending film going round and round, not letting her switch it off. She could smell the seaweed, hear the still distant breakers and the gulls circling and crying above them. She stood at the front room window and stared out over the ocean. The cold, grey sea.

Waiting for Livvy was all she could do now. Hot tears streaked down her face as she held the mug against her heart, because of course it wasn’t the only thing here to remind her that she’d once had a daughter. Olivia’s blue hair slides were still on the window ledge, and the picture book she’d been leafing through that last morning was lying on a chair that no-one had sat on for two weeks. Maggie turned from the greyness outside and wandered round the cottage.

Livvy’s beach ball was lying deflated in the corner beside the bookcase. They’d forgotten it on the fifteenth. And her trainers were under the sofa where she’d kicked them off the night before. The fifteenth, of course, had been sandals-for-the-beach weather.

The bathroom was the worst place of all.

Livvy’s stripy peppermint toothpaste. The lotion Maggie had smoothed into her daughter’s skin every evening; the strawberry shower gel. The smells of lost Olivia.

Maggie lay awake for hours each night, struggling with the less than five minutes on the beach when Olivia must have disappeared. She hadn’t seen where her daughter had gone and neither had Colin or Joe. Howard and his colleagues had reconstructed the entire beach scene and were satisfied that they had drawn the right conclusions, but Maggie knew that one day she would have to go down there and establish for herself just what she and Colin could and couldn’t see. If she checked for herself, then she might believe that Livvy had drowned. Col was so adamant he’d have noticed if Livvy had gone into the water, but Maggie wasn’t so sure and neither was Howard. Colin and Joe hadn’t seen her, but then they hadn’t been watching out for her either.

Trembling, Maggie went for her jacket. The rain had almost stopped; there was no excuse not to go. In the two weeks since Olivia had vanished, this would be the first time she’d been back on the beach.

Of course now there were only two possibilities. Either Livvy had drowned, or someone had taken her away. If she’d simply wandered off by herself she would have been found by now.

Hands deep in her jacket pockets, Maggie walked across to the rock pools. How much of the beach
could
Col and Joe have seen? They’d been moving about all the time, standing up and crouching down, digging round jellyfish and talking.

Maggie stood for a moment watching a swarm of tiny fish flit around amongst some seaweed and stones, the odd raindrop shivering the surface of the water. Joe would have had them in jars as quick as anything. Tears stung her eyes at the thought of her son, but she blinked them away and looked back across the beach to the rocky ring.

She knew that from inside the ring, she’d been able to see about a third of the shoreline. What could Colin see? She would check now and then call him tonight.

The frostiness between them was thawing, albeit slowly. He had phoned twice now, and they’d talked like strangers, but it was something. A start, maybe.

Maggie crouched in the middle of the rock pools area, facing the rocky ring but still staring into the nearest pool. From here she
would
have noticed a little girl running towards her. And if she faced the sea, she
would
have seen Livvy going into the water. Even if she wasn’t actually looking, the movement would have attracted her attention. But the other direction, facing away from the ring...

Maggie squatted for a moment, then stood up slowly, massaging her thighs. None of the waves that were rushing up the sand had been within her line of vision just now. If both Colin and Joe had been facing this way, engrossed in the pool-life in front of them, they might well not have seen Olivia go down to the sea. From the very beginning, Colin had refused point-blank to even consider that Livvy could have gone into the water without him noticing her, but he was wrong and she’d just proved it.

Maggie trudged back across the sand. She’d known all along really that the sea was the most likely option. That was probably why she’d avoided the beach so determinedly. It hadn’t been as painful as she’d expected, though she knew that the pills she had from the doctor were taking the edge off a lot of the pain.

Halfway up the cliff path she turned and looked back at the beach. This end was deserted. On the other side of the rock pools area two dog walkers were sitting on the steps of one of the beach huts, throwing sticks for their dogs.

Her mobile buzzed in her pocket, and she jumped. It was Howard.

‘Maggie, I’m at the cottage.’

She hurried on up the steep path. Howard or Amanda came by most days to report the lack of progress in the search for Olivia. She didn’t know if this was what would routinely have happened or if they were doing it because they felt sorry for her. Poor Maggie, her daughter drowned and her husband and son gone.

Occasionally they did have something to report. There had been several ‘sightings’ of Olivia, all of them negative. The police had been round all the hotels, petrol stations, shops, hospitals and restaurants in the area, but Livvy hadn’t been seen in any of them. She had vanished off the face of the earth. The news reports all said ‘missing, believed drowned’. But there was still no proof, and dear God, as Livvy’s mother, she just needed proof.

He was waiting by the door, a green plastic bag in one hand, and she hurried across the lane. There had been a lot of green plastic bags; the coastguards had found nearly everything Maggie had left on the beach that day. Except, of course, the one thing that was irreplaceable.

‘Nothing,’ said Howard, following her inside. It was a kind of code they’d developed. ‘Nothing’ meant ‘we haven’t found a body’. Wilting, Maggie waved him to the sofa and sank into the single armchair opposite, staring at him. He looked different today, his face was set in resignation.

‘Maggie. We found this. It’s a size ten.’

He opened the green bag and produced a blue plastic sandal. It was exactly like the ones Livvy had, except this one was faded and scarred. Maggie bit her lip, surprised that she wasn’t falling to pieces here. But then maybe there was a limit to the number of times you could do that.

‘Can I hold it?’

He handed it over. ‘It was found yesterday at Warders Bay.’

Maggie held it in both hands. This one was harder, stiffer than she remembered Livvy’s being, but then maybe that was the salt water. And of course there was nothing, just absolutely nothing to say if this particular sandal had ever belonged to Olivia.

‘It’s the same as hers, but...’

Howard returned the sandal to the bag. ‘I know. Okay.’

He looked at the floor, and suddenly she knew what was coming. The helicopter had stopped searching days ago, of course, but the coastguards still went out. As did the searchers along the clifftops and in the towns. But apart from the contents of the beach bag and now this anonymous blue sandal, nothing had ever been found. She looked at him, feeling the apprehension grow.

‘Maggie, I am so, so sorry. You know we’ve gone over the whole area thoroughly, so many times. There’s no sign that Olivia came back up here. We’re going to call off the active search. We’ll keep the file open, we’ll investigate anything that comes in that might even possibly be a lead, but you know yourself that the most likely thing by far is that Livvy went into the sea. And was lost. But if that did happen, she’s at peace now, Maggie.’

She stared at him. In a way she’d been expecting this, it was the logical next step, but it was still brutal. He was telling her that they were so sure Livvy was dead that nobody would be out there looking for her.

‘We’ve drawn a blank everywhere,’ he said, his voice heavy. ‘The team has shown her photo for miles around, but no-one has seen her. There are hundreds of posters up all over the place and we’ve had dozens of calls, but, just nothing. And every single person on the sex offenders register that could have been anywhere near here has been checked. I’m sorry, Maggie. I really am.’

For a moment Maggie stopped breathing. She couldn’t say anything, she couldn’t even cry. There was nothing more that anyone could possibly have done to find Olivia.

She nodded at Howard, and he stood up.

‘Amanda or I will come by again tonight. Maggie - you shouldn’t be alone now.’

‘My mother’s coming again tomorrow.’

The relief on his face was obvious.

‘Good. That’s great. Maybe you should go home with her for a while.’

Maggie shook her head. Her mother had been here three days last week too, but it had been difficult for them both. Mum loved her, but she had loved Livvy too, and every word the older woman spoke was tinged with reproach.

‘I want my little girl back,’ she told Howard. ‘I’ll stay here and wait.’

‘It could take weeks. It might not happen at all,’ he said helplessly. ‘When people are lost at sea... we don’t always get them back.’

Maggie knew there was no way she could leave Cove Cottage without Olivia. She would stay here until she was an old woman if necessary. Because if Howard was right, then Livvy was just a few yards away outside. In the sea.

‘I’m waiting for her,’ she said, and he nodded.

‘I’ll see myself out.’

Maggie remained slumped in the armchair. There was nothing more to do now.

Phillip pushed the wheelchair through the hospital park, where tall palm trees were providing welcome shade to those patients well enough to be outdoors. Even halfway through September it was still hot. It was great that Gran was well enough now to come down here again; he loved to see her with more colour in her face. The radiotherapy had made her tired and sick, but the course was over now and she had been for a scan that morning.