The Dark Shore (19 page)

He didn’t move at all at first, and then he came towards her and she started to scream.

Six

1

Justin was
ru
nning, the breath choking his lungs. He was running past the farm down the track to Clougy, not knowing why he was afraid, knowing only that his mother’s murderer was at the house and that no one knew the truth except Justin himself and the killer. He didn’t even know why his mother had been killed. The apparent motivelessness of the crime nagged his mind as he ran, but he had no doubts about the murderer’s correct identity. According to Eve it would only be one person
...

He could hear the stream now, could see the hulk of the disused water-wheel on one side of the track, and suddenly he was at Clougy at last and stumbling through the open front door into the lighted hall.

“Daddy!” he shouted, and the word which had lain silent in the back of his vocabulary for ten years was then the first word which sprang to the tip of his tongue. “Where are you? Marijohn!”

He burst into the drawing-room but they weren’t there. They weren’t in the music room either.

“Sarah!” he shouted. “Sarah!”

But Sarah didn’t answer.

He had a sudden premonition of disaster, a white warning flash across his brain which was gone in less than a second. Tearing up the stairs, he raced down the corridor and flung open the door to his father’s bedroom.

They were there. They were sitting on the window seat together, and he was vaguely conscious that his father looked drawn and unhappy while Marijohn’s calm, still face was streaked with tears.

“Justin! What in God’s name—”

“Where’s Sarah?” was all he could say, each syllable coming unevenly as he gasped for breath. “Where is she?”

There were footsteps in the corridor unexpectedly, a shadow in the doorway.

“She’s gone for a walk with Michael,” said Max Alexander.

2

“It’s all right,” Michael Rivers’ voice was saying soothingly from far away. “It’s all right, Sarah. It’s only me
...
Look, let’s find a better place to sit down. It’s too dark here.”

She was still shuddering, her head swimming with the shock, but she let him lead her further down towards the sea until they were standing on the Flat Rocks by the water’s edge.

“Why did you follow me?” she managed to say as they sat down on a long low rock.

“I saw you leave and couldn’t think where on Earth you were going or what you wanted to do. I believe I thought you might even be thinking of committing suicide.”

“Suicide?” She stared at him. “Why?” And in the midst of her confusion she was conscious of thinking that in spite of all that had happened, the thought of suicide to escape from her unhappiness and shock had never crossed her mind.

“You’ve been married—how long? Two weeks? Three? And you discover suddenly that your husband has a rather ‘unique’ relationship with another woman—
”

“We’re leaving tomorrow,” she interrupted. “Marijohn told me. Jon’s decided to leave and never see her again.”

“He decided that ten years ago. I’m afraid I wouldn’t rely too much on statements like that, if I were you. And what do you suppose your marriage is going to be like after this? He’ll never fully belong to you now, do you realize that? Part of him will always be with Marijohn. Good God, I of all people should know what I’m talking about! I tried to live with Marijohn after Jon had first disrupted our marriage, but it was utterly impossible. Everything was over and done with, and there was no going back.”

“Stop it!” said Sarah with sudden violence. “Stop it!”

“So in the light of the fact that you know your three-week old marriage is finished, I don’t see why you shouldn’t think of committing suicide. You’re young and unbalanced by grief and shock. You come out here to the Flat Rocks to the sea, and the tide is going out and the currents are particularly dangerous—”

She tried to move but he wouldn’t let her go.

“I thought of suicide that weekend at Clougy,” he said. “Did you guess that? I went fishing that afternoon by the sea and thought and thought about what I could do. I was out of my mind
...
And then the child came and talked to me and afterwards I went back to the house. Marijohn was in our bedroom. I knew then how much I loved her, and I knew that I could never share her with any man, even if the relationship she had with him was irreproachable
and
completely above suspicion. I foresaw that I would be forced to have a scene with Jon in an attempt to tell him that I could stand it no longer and that I was taking Marijohn away
...
So after dinner we had the final scene. And I was winning
...
It was going to be all right. Jon was shaken—I can see his expression now
...
And then, oh Christ, Sophia had to come in, threatening divorce proceedings, threatening exposure to anyone who would listen—God, she would have destroyed everything! And Marijohn’s name smeared all across the Sunday papers and all my friends and colleagues in town saying, ‘Poor old Michael—ghastly business. Who would have thought
...
’ and so on and so on
...
All the gossip and publicity, the destruction of Marijohn, of everything I wanted
...
Sophia was going to destroy my entire world.”

“So you killed her.”

He looked at her then, his face oddly distant. “Yes,” he said. “I killed her. And Jon went away, saying he would never have any further communication with Marijohn, and I thought that at last I was going to have Marijohn back again and that at last I was going to be happy.”

His expression changed. He grimaced for a moment, his expression contorted, and when he next spoke she heard the grief in his voice.

“But she wouldn’t come back to me,” he said. “I went through all that and committed murder to safeguard her and preserve her from destruction, and all she could do was say how sorry she was but she could never live with me again.”

The surf broke over the rocks at their feet; white foam flew for a moment in the darkness and disintegrated.

“Sophia knew they were brother and sister,” he said. “Not that it mattered. She would have made trouble anyway. But if she had never known they were brother and sister, the scope of her threats would have been narrower and less frightening in its implications
...
But she knew. Very few people did. The relationship had always been kept secret from the beginning in order to spare Jon’s mother embarrassment. Old Towers made out that Marijohn was the child of a deceased younger brother of his. And when they were older they kept it secret to avoid underlining Marijohn’s illegitimacy. I always did think it would have been best if Sophia had never known the secret, but Jon told her soon after they were married, so she knew about it from the beginning.”

There was another pause. Sarah tried to imagine what would happen if she attempted to break away. Could she reach the cover of the nearby rocks in time? Probably not. Perhaps if she doubled back
...
She turned her head slightly to look behind her, and as she moved, Rivers said,

“And now there’s you. You’ll divorce Jon eventually. Even if your marriage survives this crisis there’ll be others, and then it’ll all come out, the relationship with Marijohn, your very natural jealousy
—
ev
e
rything. Marijohn’s name will be dragged across the petition because like Sophia, you know the truth, and when the time comes for you to want a divorce you’ll be embittered enough to use any weapon at your disposal in an attempt to hit back at both of them. And that’ll mean danger to Marijohn. Whatever happens I want to avoid that, because of course I still love her and sometimes I can still hope that one day she’ll come back
...
Perhaps she will. I don’t know. But whether she comes back or not I still love her just the same. I know that better than anything else in the world.”

There was no hope of escape by running behind them across the rock. The way was too jagged and Sarah guessed it would be too easy in the dark to stumble into one of the pools and lago
o
ns beyond the reefs.

“It would be so convenient if you committed suicide,” he said. “Perhaps I could even shift the blame on to Jon if murder were suspected. I tried to last time. I planned the death to look like an accident, but I wore a red sweater of Jon’s just in case anyone happened to see me go up the cliff path and murder was suspected afterwards. I knew Sophia was meeting Max on the Flat Rocks. I heard Sophia remind him of their rendezvous after supper, and saw Max leave the house later. Then after the scene in the drawingroom when we all went our separate ways, I didn’t go up to my bedroom as I told you earlier this evening. Jon went into the garden, Marijohn went to the drawing-room, Sophia went upstairs to change her high-heeled shoes for a pair of canvas beach shoes, and I took Jon’s sweater off the chest in the hall and went out ahead of her to the cliffs. I didn’t have to wait long before she came out from the house to follow me
...

“But they never suspected murder, the slow Cornish police. They talked of accident and suicide, but murder was never mentioned. Nobody knew, you see, of any possible motives. They were all hidden, secret, protected from the outside world
...
”

“
Michael.”

He turned to look at her and she was close enough to him to see in the darkness that his eyes were clouded as if he were seeing only scenes of long ago.

“If I said that I wasn’t going to divorce Jon and that the secret was safe with me—”

“You’d be wasting your breath, I’m afraid, my dear. I’ve confessed to you now that I’m a murderer and that’s one secret I could never trust you to keep.”

She swung round suddenly to face the cliffs. “What’s that?”

He swung round too, swiveling his body instinctively, and even as he moved she was on her feet and running away from him in among the rocks to escape.

H
e shouted something and then was a
ft
er her and the rocks were the towering tombstones of a nightmare and the roar of the sea merged with the roaring of the blood in her ears. The granite grazed her hands, tore at her stockings, bruised her feet through the soles of her shoes. She twisted and turned, scrambling amongst the rocks, terrified of coming up against a blank wall of rock or falling into a deep gulley. And still he came after her, gaining slowly every minute, and her mind was a blank void of terror depriving her of speech and voice.

When she was at the base of the cliff again she caught her foot in a crevice and the jolt wrenched her ankle and tore off her shoe. She gave a cry of pain, the sound wrenched involuntarily from her body, and as the sound was carried away from her on the still night air she saw the pin-prick of light above her on the cliff-path.

“Jon!” she screamed, thrusting all her energy into that one monosyllable. “Jon! Jon!”

And then Rivers was upon her and she was fighting for her life, scratching, clawing, biting in a frenzy of self-preservation. The scene began to blur before her eyes, the world tilted crazily. She tried to scream again but no sound came, and as the energy ebbed from her body she felt his fingers close on her throat.

There was pain. It was a hot red light suffocating her entire brain. She tried to breathe and could not. Her hands were just slackening their grip on his body when there was a sound far above her, and the pebbles started to rattle down the cliff face, flicking across her face like hail stones.

She heard Rivers gasp something, and then he was gone and she fell back against the rock.

The blackness when it came a second later was a welcome release from the swimming nightmare of terror and fear.

3

When she awoke, there was a man bending over her, and although it seemed that an eternity had passed since Rivers had left her, she learned afterwards that she had been unconscious for less than a minute. The man was frantic. There was sweat on his forehead and fear in his eyes and he kept saying, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah” as if his mind would not allow him to say anything else.

She put up her hand and touched his lips with her fingers.

“Is she all right?” said another vaguely familiar voice from close at hand. “Where the hell is Rivers?”

The man whose lips she had touched stood up. “Stay here with Sarah, Max. Have you got that? Don’t leave her alone for a moment. Stay with her.”

“Jon,” her voice said. “Jon.”

He bent over her again. “I’m going to find him,” he said to her gently. “Justin’s gone after him already. Max’ll look after you.”

“He—he killed Sophia, Jon
...
He told me—”

“I know.”

He was gone. One moment he was there and the next moment he had moved out of her sight and she was alone with Alexander. He was breathing very heavily, as if the sudden violent exercise had been too much for him.

“Max—”

“Yes, I’m here.” He sat down beside her, still panting with exertion, and as he took her hand comfortingly in his she had the odd instinctive feeling that he cared for her. The feeling was so strange and so illogical that she dismissed it instantly without a second thought, and instead concentrated all her mind on the relief of being alive.

And as they waited together at the base of the cliffs, Jon was sprinting over the Flat Rocks to the water’s edge, the beam of the torch in his hand warning him of the gulleys and the crevices, the reefs and lagoons.

By the water’s edge he paused.

“Justin!”

There was an answering flicker of a torch further away, a muffled shout.

Jon moved forward again, leaping from rock to rock, slithering past seaweed and splashing in diminutive rock pools. It took him two minutes to reach his son.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.” Justin’s face was white in the torchlight, his eyes dark and huge and ringed with tiredness.

“You lost sight of him?”

“He was here.” He gestured with his torch. They were standing on a squat rock, and six feet below them the sea was sucking and gurgling with the motions of the tide. “I saw him reach this rock and then scramble over it until he was lost from sight.”

Jon was silent. Presently he shone his torch up and down the channel below, but there was nothing there except the dark water and the white of the surf.

“Could he—do you think he would have tried to swim round to the cove?”

“Don’t be a bloody fool.”

The boy hung his head a little, as if regretting the stupidity of his suggestion, and waited wordlessly for the other man to make the next move.

“
H
e couldn’t have fallen in the darkness,” said Jon after a moment. “When you reach the top of a rock you always stop to look to see what’s on the other side. And if he had slipped into this channel he could have clambered out on to the other side—unless he struck his head on the rocky floor, and then we’d be able to see his body.”

“Then—”

“Perhaps you’re right and he went swimming after all
...
We’d better search these rocks here just to make sure, I suppose. You take that side and I’ll take this side.”

But although they searched for a long while in the darkness they found no trace of Michael Rivers, and it was many weeks before his body was finally recovered from the sea.