Dark Tides (25 page)

Hollis studied me in his rearview mirror as if I was some kind of alien who’d beamed down into the back of his squad car from a passing spaceship. I could understand his predicament. He was in an awkward position. I was different from him now. Different from his new colleague. I’d set myself apart.

The female officer was called Swift. The name suited her. She did everything with the cold and brutal efficiency of a Terminator – from the immaculate way she was dressed and groomed to the dismissive manner in which she was treating me. So far, she’d refused to engage with me at all. She was making a virtue out of ignoring me and I’d just about had my fill of it.

‘You missed your turn,’ I told Hollis. ‘There’s construction work on Peel Road. You’ll get snarled up taking me that way.’

‘We’re not taking you to Lord Street.’

‘Headquarters, then.’

‘We’re not taking you there, either.’

‘Huh. So where are you taking me?’

‘You’ll see.’

‘Really? Am I being renditioned, here?’

Swift sighed and cracked her window, as if I was a dog who’d rolled in something foul-smelling. ‘You mind if we don’t talk?’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Talk. With you. Do you mind if we don’t do that?’

‘Is she for real?’

Hollis’s eyes slid away from me in the glass. He tightened his knuckles on the steering wheel and moved his jaw around.

‘What am I, contaminated?’

Swift reached out and clicked on the stereo. Local news.

‘Wow.’ I shook my head. ‘So that’s how it’s going to be.’

Hollis drove out of Douglas and joined the Mountain Road. We gained speed and altitude, powering round the bend at Kate’s Cottage and coming over a rise into a world of open fields and barren hills. The sky was low and bleak, bruised with clouds the colour of crushed berries. There was talk on the radio of a storm coming.

It hadn’t escaped my notice that we were speeding along the same route Scott had raced through all those years ago, right before he hit the sheep. Hollis’s driving was much more assured but I had a bad feeling about where I was being taken and it was getting worse with every passing mile. My one consolation was that it sounded as if David was safe. I’d sent him a text message just before Swift had bundled me into the back of the patrol car and I was still waiting for a reply. The wait bothered me a little, but not as much as Swift did.

‘So I’m guessing you’ve heard some talk about me around the station.’ I tapped Swift on the shoulder. ‘I’m assuming that explains your attitude.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’

‘How many weeks do you have on the job? You started in September, right?’

She leaned forwards against her seatbelt and turned the stereo up a notch.

‘I used to partner Hollis. Did he tell you that? Bet he makes you stand outside with the speed gun when it’s raining.’

‘I’m not interested in bonding with you. We’re not the same, you and I.’

She was right, of course. Not just in what she said but in how she was behaving towards me. I wasn’t someone it was sensible to associate with. I was toxic.

For a long time after the fire, I’d been certain I was going to face criminal charges. Lawyer or not, I came clean with Shimmin about almost everything pretty much straight away. He was right about David – if I didn’t talk, David surely would. And this was my mess. I was responsible for it. Everything that had happened stemmed from me.

So I didn’t hold anything back. Not a single part of it, right from the very beginning. It wasn’t exactly a shocking revelation to Shimmin when I confessed to being one of the group of friends who’d broken into the Caine mansion all those years ago. He knew something of how I felt about Edward. He knew why. And my repeat prison visits to Mark and the accusations I’d levelled at Morgan had made the rest pretty obvious, even before the Adidas trainer was left outside the burnt-out cottage.

What did surprise him was the significance of the shoe once I mentioned the footprints I’d found following Rachel’s climbing accident and Scott’s car crash. Suddenly, I was either a paranoid criminal nut or the survivor of a ruthless revenge killer.

Paranoid criminal nut was the theory with the most traction to begin with. I couldn’t blame Shimmin for that. After all, he could see a pattern of troubling behaviour. First, I’d participated in the break-in at the Caine mansion as a teenager, I’d stood by as Edward was attacked, and I’d failed to come forward following Mark’s arrest. Then, as a police officer, I’d withheld relevant information from the inquests into the deaths of Scott and Rachel. I’d harassed the Caine family. I’d smuggled a firearm out of police headquarters. And, for the kicker, I’d survived the inferno that had killed Callum; a fire started with a mixture of lighter fuel and petrol, and for which no clear suspect had been identified.

Well, no suspect other than the survivors. Because for a while, at least, Shimmin’s questioning suggested that he thought I might have been the mystery arsonist, possibly working in tandem with David. He must have asked himself if the two of us had somehow colluded to sabotage the climbing rope when Rachel died. But that line of thinking came unstuck with Scott’s death. I was working with Hollis on the night Scott was killed. And sure, maybe David had handled the murder for me, but that didn’t explain why I’d flagged the muddy footprint in my report into the accident (even if I
had
omitted to mention why it had spooked me so much). Most crucial of all, Shimmin had no compelling motive for why David and I would want to kill our friends. His only workable suggestion was that we wanted to stop them from telling anyone about our involvement in the attack on Edward Caine. But why wait six years to begin? And why kill one friend every year?

Once the question of motive was factored in, the pressure didn’t simply ease off on me and David – it was redirected towards Edward Caine and Mark. Shimmin made the same logical deduction as me. If the deaths of Scott, Rachel and Callum were all murders, then the most likely explanation was that Mark or Edward was behind the killings. So he interviewed both of them several times. He quizzed Morgan Caine, too. But ultimately, there was no evidence linking Edward, Morgan or Mark to the deaths of my friends. It was all just speculation. Nothing more.

So what to do with me?

Well, that’s where I got lucky, if you want to call it that. Like I said, I should have faced multiple criminal charges, but there were complications with all of them.

Take my involvement in the attack on Edward. I should have come forward at the time and confessed to my role in the assault, but the case against Mark had been based, at least in part, on Edward’s assertion under oath that Mark had come to his house armed with an unlicensed shotgun. I knew that wasn’t the case. I could embarrass Edward. And I could make life awkward for the police and the prosecution services, since they’d opted to ignore Edward’s claims that there were other people involved in the break-in. Besides, Mark himself had always denied that anyone else was involved. And he
was
the one who’d beaten Edward so badly.

The Beretta was a potentially serious offence. I’d broken multiple laws by smuggling a gun out of police headquarters and there could be no debate about it. But I hadn’t shot anyone. In fact, I’d used the gun to save David’s life, as well as my own. And it really wouldn’t do for word to get out that internal procedures had failed so badly that a police officer was able to remove a confiscated weapon from the firearms store without anybody noticing.

And finally – and this was the clincher – if what I claimed was true, if Scott and Rachel really had both been murdered, then the Manx Constabulary had missed it. Twice.

Maybe you can see where all this was going. I can’t pretend I did at the time. I was convinced I was going to be prosecuted. But in the end, I was offered a compromise. Not directly. Nothing as crass as that. The news reached me via my lawyer, a no-nonsense female advocate with a reputation among my colleagues for tearing apart careers as well as cases.

‘Claire, it’s Marianne Crellin.’ I’d just been thinking of getting out of bed when her call reached me. It was two in the afternoon in the middle of January and my curtains were closed. I sank back down on to the twisted, funky sheets and clutched my pillow to my chest. ‘They’re dropping all talk of prosecution.’

I exhaled a stale breath I’d seemed to be holding on to for months.

‘Say that again.’

I’d heard she was good, but nothing like this.

‘Save the theatrics. There are conditions attached.’

‘Conditions?’

‘You’ll face disciplinary charges. I could run through them all with you now but frankly I don’t have the time and you don’t need to hear it. Short story: the charges will be severe. There’s no getting away from it.’

‘Will my suspension continue?’

‘Claire, listen to me. Hear what I’m saying. Suspension is the least of your worries. You’ll be disgraced. Word will spread around the island. It’ll find its way into the press. Scandal like this, especially with your personal background, it never goes away over here.’

My head pitched sideways and I eyed the medication on my bedside table. I could feel the twist of anxiety in my chest, muscles tightening and cramping.

‘Which is why I accepted a compromise on your behalf.’

‘You did what?’

‘This is a one-time-only offer. You resign and the disciplinary charges go on your record. But nobody sees them. They sit in a file in a cabinet somewhere. Maybe in a few years they get shredded.’

I felt like
I
was being shredded.

‘But I don’t want to resign.’

‘You do. You just don’t know it yet. I act in your best interests, Claire, and your best interests are to resign.’ I opened my mouth to argue but she spoke again before I had a chance. ‘You need to focus on you, Claire. On your wellbeing.’ I eyed the blister packs of pills down by my elbow. The fluoxetine. The lithium. ‘It’s difficult for you to see the bigger picture right now. I understand that, Claire. I’m sympathetic to your situation. Allow me to help you. Allow me to end this.’

So I did, and she had. My resignation was processed and approved and finalised. I was dismissed without pay or benefits. I didn’t even have to go into the station to collect my things. They were couriered to me in a plain cardboard box.

The coward’s way out.

I’d never thought it was my style. But then, what did I know? As time moved on, it began to seem as if Marianne had been right. I’d gone from being a depressive recluse to having some semblance of a life again. But there’s only so much that ducking a fight can do for you. I’d never have the respect of my former colleagues again. One look from Hollis had told me that.

He was studying me in the rearview mirror, his lips parting and closing as if there was something he wanted to say. I threw up my hands and hitched my eyebrows, framing an expression that asked:
what have you got to lose?

‘I heard Edward Caine died.’

I nodded. Kept my expression neutral.

‘Heard it was his heart.’

I nodded again. Edward had suffered a massive cardiac arrest in his sleep three weeks ago. The funeral had been just last week. In many ways, it was a huge relief. The monstrous bogeyman of my childhood, the man who still haunted my worst nightmares, was finally gone from my life. And if he really had been behind the killings of Scott, Rachel and Callum, if he’d somehow ordered their deaths, then the terror was over for David and me. Potentially, we were safe, and our trip away – provided I still made it to the airport later – was an unnecessary precaution.

‘I’m sorry for you, Cooper.’

This time, Hollis’s eyes lingered, and I saw that he really did understand. We might have only worked together for a couple of years but we’d bonded quickly. Nature of the job. Hollis wasn’t sorry for Caine or because of any misguided belief that I was somehow fond of the old bastard. He was sorry for the answers his death might have cost me. He knew I believed that Edward was involved in Mum’s disappearance and he also knew that the truth of what had happened to her might just have died along with him.

‘Mind telling me how much longer we’re driving for?’

Hollis glanced over at Swift, then pushed his mouth from side to side, as if weighing up whether it would be one concession too many.

‘Another twenty minutes.’

Which told me all that I needed to know. There was only one logical destination they could possibly be taking me to, and I didn’t like it at all.

You’ve never been afraid to repeat yourself. Why should you be? If something has worked once before then it stands to reason that it can work equally well a second time around. And besides, it’s good to play to your strengths. It’s wise to rely on proven methods when the stakes are so high.

Especially this year, because this is the first time that you’ve had to call on someone else for help, and you can’t be certain that your requirements will be satisfied. Your instructions were very specific. They couldn’t have been any clearer. But it’s a concern to you all the same. It bothers you that you’ve had to involve a third party because there’s no guarantee the task will be performed to the exacting standards you demand of yourself.

And yet, there was no other way. Given the parameters of the problem you faced, you came up with the best solution imaginable, and you can take a degree of comfort in that.

Which is a good thing, because you’ve reached the endplay now. This is when everything needs to come together seamlessly. Right timing. Right sequence. Right outcome.

It’s a lot of pressure, but pressure is one thing you appreciate. It tells you that the task you’ve set yourself truly matters.

An angry mass of rolling puce clouds had gathered around Jurby prison. Red Manx flags twisted in the wind. Coils of razor wire rattled and hummed. The entire complex looked dismal and forgotten.

Hollis opened my door and hauled me out by my elbow. The air felt thick with static and I didn’t think it would be long before lightning would rip through the sky. I was wearing a green V-neck sweater over faded jeans and light training shoes. Right now I wished I had on a jacket and gloves. More than that, I wished I was somewhere else entirely.

Hollis didn’t say a word. Neither did Swift. They lined up on either side of me as if I was a flight risk, and hustled me towards the high walls and recessed windows and hidden cameras.

My phone buzzed against my thigh. I freed it from my pocket and shielded the screen. The message was from David.

I was relieved but also a bit surprised by his text. David always planned anything he did in considerable detail. He liked to evaluate the pros and cons of a given scenario and settle on the best possible approach. He wasn’t one to rush into meeting me sooner than we’d agreed. And he knew about the trip to Port St Mary I was supposed to be making. Had something spooked him?

I tapped out a quick reply, the soggy wind blasting against my face and hands.

Which was a lie, because I had a reasonable enough idea. There was the location, for one thing. Then there was the uncompromising summons from Shimmin and the terrible significance of today’s date. And finally, there were the multiple police vehicles and the lone ambulance crammed into a lay-by outside the main prison entrance.

I thought about David’s message a moment more, then added a follow-up text.

Swift hurried ahead of me and stiff-armed the revolving glass doors and I followed her inside with Hollis close behind. The heat in the foyer reminded me of a public swimming baths. The stillness and the silence were absolute.

A stringy middle-aged guy in a white short-sleeved shirt and thin dark tie was waiting for us. He looked like he’d been waiting a lot longer than his nerves could stand.

His face was pinkish and greasy, his shirt damp beneath his armpits. He was wearing a bulky leather equipment belt around his waist, low on one side, that made him look a bit like a cowboy in a western movie – the badly-out-of-his-depth sheriff, maybe. He raised a two-way radio to his mouth and mumbled a few fast words as we approached.

‘I’m Deputy Governor Kent.’ He lowered the radio and pinched moisture from his upper lip. ‘You’re Cooper?’

I didn’t respond.

‘She’s Cooper,’ Swift confirmed.

‘You’ll need to check your personal belongings.’

Kent pointed with the radio antenna towards a glassed-in cubicle on my left where a team of prison officers were watching me from among banks of flickering security monitors and computer terminals. Someone had draped fake cobwebs over the office hardware for Hop-tu-naa. A plastic bat was stuck to the glass screen, looking as if it had suffered a nasty accident mid-flight.

I walked over and slid my house keys through a slot cut into the bottom of the screen. I checked my phone. There was nothing further from David so I slid it through, too.

The officers looked between themselves for several long seconds, carrying out a fast assessment of their respective ranks and seniority before all eyes fell on a young, busty female officer with red hair and freckles. She cursed and shook her head, then stepped closer and faced me on the other side of the glass, thrusting back her shoulders and pointing her breasts at me. I felt like holding up my hands in surrender but settled for watching in silence as she traded my belongings for a visitors’ ledger and pen.

I filled in the appropriate gaps in the ledger for the date and time and my name. There was an additional space where I was supposed to enter the name of the individual I was visiting. I tapped the nib of the pen against the page, then finally opted to leave the space blank and passed the ledger back.

I swivelled to face Kent with my hands down by my sides. There was a fidgety, febrile energy in my fingers and I had to fight a sudden intense urge to squeeze something hard. Swift’s throat, for example.

Kent said, ‘Now through the scanner.’

I tipped my head on to my shoulder. I didn’t move.

Kent coughed nervously and sweated some more.

‘It’s standard procedure. Do you mind?’

Oh, I minded. I minded being dragged out here without consultation or explanation. I minded being treated as if I was a suspect in a crime that I feared – but didn’t know for sure – had been committed. I minded Swift’s snort of contempt when I finally passed through the X-ray machine only for it to beep and flash red. And I minded most of all when she hauled me to one side and patted me down as if she genuinely expected to find some contraband concealed about my body.

‘Must have been a random alarm,’ Kent said, when her search yielded no results. ‘It’s set to go off every so often.’

‘And there was me thinking it was the blade I’d hidden in my shoe.’

Kent blanched. Hollis sucked in a sharp breath from behind me.

‘It was a joke, Mr Kent.’

Apparently not.

‘Come with me,’ he said.

He turned and hurried off but I didn’t follow him. He caught on after a few steps and swivelled round.

‘Would you mind telling me where we’re going, Mr Kent? Last time I checked, I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to be arrested and tried before I’m imprisoned.’

His cheek twitched. ‘You do know why you’re here?’

‘Nobody’s told me anything.’

‘But I assumed you’d been briefed.’

‘Then you assumed wrong.’

Kent tugged his collar away from his scrawny neck, then showed me his back and did some fast work with his radio, muttering an urgent scramble of words and receiving a brash squawk in response. His shoulders fell and he turned to face me once again.

‘Look, I’m not responsible for what you have or haven’t been told. You’re to come with me. It’s as simple as that.’

‘And if I refuse?’

Hollis stepped up behind me, his polished shoes squeaking on the waxed floor. Swift moved round on my other side and spread her hands next to the CS spray and baton fitted to her own equipment belt. A real Wild West moment.

‘Take it easy, Cooper.’ Hollis spoke with exaggerated calm, as if I was a possible jumper up on a very high ledge. ‘Shimmin’s waiting to talk to you in there.’

I felt my jaw quiver. Tears stung my eyes.

I fixed on Kent.

‘Is he dead?’

Sweat popped out across Kent’s face.

‘Simple question, Mr Kent. A straightforward yes or no will do.’

‘Why don’t you just come with me? Please. Make it easy on both of us.’

Which was as good as a yes, I thought. But then, I was 90 per cent sure already. It was Hop-tu-naa, after all. And if Mark wasn’t responsible for the deaths of my friends, then I should have known that he was a potential victim, too. I’d thought he was safe inside prison. I’d thought he’d been punished enough already.

But I’d been wrong.

‘Will you come?’

I bit my lip and walked forwards on stiff, unyielding legs to line up with Kent in front of a sliding glass door. The officer with the territorial boobs flicked a hidden switch and the door slid open, then closed behind us with a soft pneumatic hiss. There was another glass door immediately ahead of us that didn’t open until the first door had sealed. A standard security device, but right now it felt like I was passing through a decompression chamber.

‘You’re quite safe,’ Kent said, as the second door shuffled open and we drifted on through. ‘I can assure you of that.’

Kent could assure me all he liked, but right now I didn’t feel the least bit safe. I felt threatened and under attack.

He led me round a corner towards a reinforced steel door, the extendable baton fitted to his equipment belt tapping arrhythmically against his thigh. He reached for the set of keys tethered to his belt, then looked up towards the corner of the ceiling and waved a hand at a domed surveillance camera. Something deep inside the door mechanism clunked and a green light bloomed on a panel above it, then Kent fitted a key in the locking plate, turned the handle and whisked me through. I followed him up a flight of metal stairs and into a long corridor with waxed floors and two-tone beige walls that could have been a hospital wing or a passageway in a convention centre were it not for the powder-coated steel gate ahead of us.

There was another domed surveillance camera fitted above the gate and Kent repeated his routine with the waving and the keys. As soon as we were on the other side, he began to talk.

‘This is Main Street.’

I hadn’t asked for a tour but I sensed that Kent was uncomfortable with the silence that had grown up between us.

‘Arts-and-crafts room.’ He jerked his thumb towards a door on our right. I peered through a rectangle of safety glass at rows of worktables and assorted art equipment and displays. ‘IT room,’ Kent said at the next door. ‘Library.’

Another gate barred the end of the corridor. Kent waved for the camera, fitted a key in the lock and hurried on through.

‘All the men are in their cells right now. Standard procedure when something like this happens.’

Kent still hadn’t told me what
this
was, of course, but I had very few doubts left. Mark was dead. I felt sure of it.

Kent directed me on to a large, hexagonal gallery that looked down over safety railings at an empty floor space below. A glass dome was fitted in the ceiling above. The dark clouds scudding by overhead made it feel as if we were deep underwater in some airless, pressurised submersible.

‘The entire prison is designed around this central hub.’ Kent had moved alongside me and was gesturing with his radio. ‘The prisoner wings spear off from here like spokes from a wheel. We have separate wings for women and young offenders. Adult males are housed in wings A and B. It’s this way to B wing.’

Two sets of gates barred our entrance. A prison officer was stationed between them, standing with his hands behind his back like a soldier at ease. He waited until Kent had signalled to a camera and unlocked the outer door, then used his own keys to grant us access to the inner sanctum.

A long, rectangular galleried wing lay ahead of us. There were rows of cell doors on either side. Beneath the gallery was a recreation area filled with tables and chairs as well as a pool table with frayed green baize.

The hushed silence felt artificial and forced.

‘How many men are in here?’

‘Exactly forty. Twenty upstairs, twenty down. Same in A wing.’

‘It’s so quiet.’

‘Sign of respect.’

Which erased any last shred of hope I’d been holding on to. All that remained now was to confront what had happened.

I followed Kent down a flight of galvanised steel steps to the rec area, which was flanked by yet more sealed cell doors. I could smell the stench of cooked food coming from behind a kitchen hatch on my left. Just along from it, two prison officers monitored our approach from behind another set of steel gates.

‘It’s through here.’

I turned to find Kent lifting a length of blue-and-white police tape that had been strung across two double doors with rubber surrounds.

‘DI Shimmin is waiting for you.’

‘Aren’t you coming?’

‘I need to speak with my staff. We have a lot of paperwork to take care of.’

He lifted the tape a fraction higher and I ducked under it and pushed open one of the doors. I paced forwards, the stamp of my shoes defying the silence that awaited me. I passed a line of wall-mounted urinals and toilet cubicles without doors, followed by a row of washbasins. The far end of the room opened up into a large communal shower area where the tiled floor sloped down towards a central drainage grille.

Shimmin was sitting on a slatted wooden bench pushed up against the wall that faced the showers. His elbows were on his knees, his cushioned hands clasped together around a two-way radio. He was wearing a cheap dark suit, the material bobbled and crumpled, the collar of his shirt damp against his skin. He turned his head to look at me, and for just a moment, seeing the moisture that glistened in the deep folds of his skin, I could have believed he was sitting fully dressed in a sauna.

But the heat wasn’t coming from a pile of lit coals. It was being generated by the fluorescent lights burning in the ceiling. By the absence of moving air. By all the energy Shimmin had expended ordering teams of people around and arranging for the entire prison to be placed in lockdown.

By the body on the ground.

I could just glimpse the naked corpse out of the corner of my eye. It was sprawled beneath one of the shower heads, pressed up against the wall. Blood was running down from it, winding its way through the tiles towards the drainage grille.

‘Is this what you wanted me to see?’

Shimmin moved his jaw in a slow circle. It was the first time I’d seen him in more than ten months. The last time, it had also been just the two of us, but back then the room we’d been in had been considerably smaller and he’d been glaring at me from the other side of an interview table. Same suit, though.

‘Go ahead. Take a good look.’ His voice seemed to be trapped somewhere far down in his gullet. ‘Coroner’s been. SOCOs have been. We’re all just about done.’

I gazed down at my hands. A real Lady Macbeth moment.

‘What happened here was intended for you, Cooper. One way or another. And you’ll look or so help me I’ll come over there and make you.’

I wanted to tell him to go to hell. Wanted to turn on my heels and flee through the swing doors and bang my fists on the gates at the end of B wing until somebody came to let me out.

But I didn’t.

I raised my eyes to the ceiling, rotated my head very slowly, dug my fingernails into my palms and looked down.