Undercurrent (11 page)

Looking over the locked gate which led to the platform on the left of the caff, he could see that the tide was far higher than when he had been here last. The slurry sea looked as if it was oiled beyond the breaking of a wave, smooth on the surface but churning and boiling beneath like some giant, artificially quiet, industrial-strength washing machine doing serious business and resenting interference.. The whole edifice was closer to the water than he remembered: the legs seemed shorter, the sea so close it splashed up through the broken boards.

He was close enough to see the dimensions and the mist was beginning to break up and swirl like spun sugar. The missing boards, visible by the gaps they made, like missing teeth in a mouth, were obvious in their absence, but none of the boards were uniform in size, any more than a canine to an incisor. As the mist cleared in a teasing way, and then rolled back in gorgeous wisps, wreathed around the iron rail he clutched for support, he could see that the floor of the platform was a patchwork of wooden boards, metal boards of different age and size and colour, replaced and repaired only as time and weather dictated. There was a sign:
KEEP OUT
.

How would an
average
five-year-old boy manage to slip through one of these gaps? The five-year-old boy he had once been himself could not have slipped through these gaps with any degree of ease; his skinny shoulders would get in the way even if his hips and fat tummy could make it. He would have to breathe and wriggle to go willingly, which was possible in the course of a game. You would do anything in the course of a game or a dare when you did not want to look a fool. Even so, it looked a struggle to wriggle like that, with the sea almost tickling the ankles and wood splinters but yes, a boy could do it. A boy was like an eel, with a skin immune to the feeling of a graze.

Especially a boy who came out here to play on a morning like this, only when it was warm, not cold like now. Prancing out from a nearby house, running down the length of the
Titanic
, saying,
I
dare you
!, on a summer's day.
Yeah
! You go first, you older boy, then I
must.
The presence of an iron railing would be no barrier at all. Henry had done that, grabbed the swinging rope off the forbidden oak tree in someone else's back yard, swung into terrifying space without a single scream. Got his bruises, all right. Would have been an awful father himself, because he would have mollycoddled his own son from doing any such damn thing, just like his dad didn't, and for all that, he was still timid.

He could see it. Clutched the iron rail, forced himself to look down. The distance was small, but the sea was immense. The abiding fears of his life ranged from awe when faced with open spaces and the far more acute, claustrophic fear of being enclosed. Claustrophobia was the bane of his life, the devil which sat on his shoulder, trained into submission only most of the time. He could tolerate lifts and aeroplanes through the application of logic and keeping his eyes on a page; he could sit in small rooms jammed with people and keep his eyes on their faces, telling himself it was temporary; he could enter a long tunnel provided he could see the other end; could kid himself the devil had died, and then there would be a panic so blind he could not even scream.

He breathed deeply; the air no longer tore at his throat. He felt calm. There was an explanation.

He breathed deep. It did not hurt. Nothing could hurt here. A child had fallen, tragically. The mist would bandage wounds.

It muffled noise. He thought he had seen that same black dog trotting ahead and disappearing, but apart from that illusion, had not seen a single living soul in the fifteen minutes which had got him so far, and he did not hear her, either. He was in the frame of mind where he could tell himself he was the only soul on a small planet, looking at a place where a child had slipped, until the last second when he sensed her approach. Turned and saw her coming towards him out of the mist. A long-limbed, swift walking person with a pale shawl round her head, striding towards him with a determined step. He looked around, wildly, like a cornered rat in search of a shelter. The footsteps, and the shape, came on.

Her to the life, with the baggy khaki trousers and the slouching coat and the air of authority.

Francesca.
You've got to go home, Henry. How can you get satisfaction from being a novelty? If you
want to know what you are, Henry, you have to go home
.

The very soul of aristocratic womanhood was striding towards him, almost breaking into a gallop, the sort of woman who had always intimidated him until he met Francesca. Taller than he remembered. He wanted to run, but on this little road out to the sea there was nowhere to go. He also wanted to laugh at the reversal of tactic: the day before he had been chasing her and now she was advancing on him like a ghostly witch.

He had a sudden impression that she was going to walk straight through him and hover above the platform. And then the spectre was beside him, standing too close for comfort, staring at him.

She had Francesca's colouring, at close quarters, a lopsided version of her features, nose, eyes, mouth, younger than he would have imagined, older than he dreamed, and a voice which bore slight resemblance. She had highlighted, curly hair with nothing sleek about it; she was statuesque and groomed, her coat matched her shoes, she was completely different.

Francesca resisted the camera; it made the last image of her all the more memorable. He was frightened of this appalling facsimile, but when she spoke, she only sounded anxious, flustered and shy.

'ah God, Mr Evans. You had me worried there. What the hell are you doing out here?'

'Who are you?'

'I'm Maggie. You sounded so upset last night, all that sobbing. . . 1 thought. . . well I thought you might be going to jump. You're not, are you?'

'Of course not.'

The resemblance to Francesca was passing and fading into nonsense. This face was pale, hers had been as brown as a nut. The voice was so harshly different. His recall of the face might be flawed, but this woman was bigger and surely taller. He could never forget standing next to Francesca and the top of her head being level with his cheek. It was only the stride and drifting shawl. The hair, brownish gold, tinted, grew from a different and bigger head.

'What are you doing, then?' she demanded, stridently.

He felt faintly hysterical, reminded of his own long suppressed sense of the ridiculous. This long-limbed woman was seeming to suggest that anyone on the pier without company must be contemplating suicide. As if there was nothing else to do, such as fish, take pictures of the mist, wait for the caff to open, contemplate. He was about to bark back a wisecracking response about this being a free country, until he remembered that his motives for being here were dubious by anyone's standards, including his own.

'I came to see where that child slipped through the boards and drowned.'

She gazed at him hard, hesitated, and then nodded, resolved on something. Her shoulders seemed to slump in relief and a brief look of annoyance crossed her face. Then she shrugged. The slightest movement made her hair move. She had plenty of hair.

'This side. They mend each platform, every other year.'

She led the few steps across the concrete width of the pier until they leaned over the black painted railings on the other side. The boards twenty feet below were smooth and wet, solid, pale and complete. The sleeve of her coat touched his.

'There were holes in the boards last year. The boy got out of the house by himself, must have annoyed her. And he didn't slip. Postmortem results showed he was pushed. ah, he may have slipped initially, but then he was shoved the rest of the way. Really shoved, no messing about. His shoulders were dislocated and his ribs cracked. Someone pushed him through the hole. He was alive and bleeding by the time he hit the water.

Then he drowned, but not right away. He bled a lot. The fishing boat picked him up, even though no one had raised the alarm. It was this time of the morning. She lived in the flats near the castle.

Quite a change from the castle where she used to live. Francesca must have gone straight home, after she'd done it.'

'No,' he said. 'That is crap. Complete and utter crap.' He was looking at the churning water, listening to the sound of it, imagining the ice cold of its embrace. Hitting the water, hurt and terrified. The woman was leaning closer, speaking loudly into his ear, enunciating clearly and slowly.

'Yes. Francesca was quite adamant about what had happened. She confessed, Mr Evans. She insisted. The boy had cerebral palsy, spastic hemiplegia to be exact. He was hell to take care of, she couldn't stand it any more. She told them how she did it. She pleaded guilty to his murder. She insisted.'

She paused. Henry could see white fists, protruding from her coat sleeves, gripping.. the black rail.

'Francesca pushes the kid through a gap too narrow for his body,' he said, surprisingly calm as if he were voicing a question of merely scientific interest. 'She shoves him. The kid's five years old.

They're strong. Damn strong.'

He could sense, rather than see, how she shook her head, the curls almost touching his face.

'Not this one. Not very. He had paralysis down the right side, malfunctioning right arm and leg.

She said she stamped on the weak side and down he went. Gentle encouragement.'

Henry moved away from her abruptly and vomited. His stomach was empty; the involuntary effort produced nothing but bile.

'I did what I could for her at trial.' Maggie's unfamiliar voice continued crisply. 'At least 1 got them to leave out some of the more gruesome facts. Not that it makes any difference in a guilty plea to murder. Life imprisonment, regardless of the age of the deceased. At least we don't hang people any more.'

He wanted to disbelieve her and he wanted to get away from her. Henry began to walk back towards the seafront. He folded his arms and clutched at the comforting leather of his jacket. He watched his own polished shoes putting one step in front of another and made himself concentrate on keeping his feet marching at a regular pace and in a straight line, realizing as he concentrated that he was moving faster and faster and any moment now he might break into a run and hit something, unless he slowed down and looked up.

Heard the sound of a car on the road, and found she had kept level with him all along. He felt furiously inclined to take a swing at her, simply bat her away and listen to her fall, but then there was a dim memory of violence, so recently described, which made him ashamed of that impulse, too. Not that he believed a word of it.

Henry had come in search of a good woman, or at least an interesting sinner, not a bitch who killed children.

He let her take hold of his coat. She was smiling at him and all he wanted to do was spit.

'You don't have to believe me, Henry,' she was saying. 'You can check it all out in the library. You never have to believe what you see. And then you can go home, if you want.'

He was leaning against a lamppost, the pier behind him. There was a stone in his shoe.

'You will go home, won't you?'

It sounded like a plea, but he could not guess what it was she was hoping he might do.

Henry could see his suitcase in the hall, today or tomorrow, but soon. He hesitated.

'I can't believe a woman like Francesca was could ever be so barbaric.'

'We've all had difficulties with that, Mr Evans. Which has nothing to do with anything, does it? She believes it.'

'But 1 knew her,' Henry said. 'I loved her.'

'Loving someone,' Maggie said bitterly, 'has never been a guarantee of their virtue.

CHAPTER FIVE.

There was no one walking, other than those accompanied by dogs. Henry formed the impression of a series of dogs leading their subservient owners on well worn routes. The dogs seemed alert, the owners on autopilot. Henry concentrated on the dogs to suppress the bile which kept gathering at the back of his throat.

It was the dogs that got the owners out of the houses. Henry was realizing that he knew very little of how other people lived. He would have to maintain a twenty-four-hour surveillance, repeated at intervals during all four seasons of the year, to get a single idea of how they behaved, and even then all he would have observed was public habit, peculiar enough in its own right but not particularly revealing. You learned so little by simply watching. You could learn how to rob a place, but not what was in it. All he could see at the moment was the fact that the few stalwart elderly and early-rising occupants of Warbling, en route to the newspaper shop, were roughly the same shades of grey as their dogs, and all of them needed grooming.

He felt angry and sick.

'Coffee?' Maggie was saying briskly, clutching his arm again, as if she belonged, or as if he himself wasa wilful pet. 'Awful coffee, but warm?'

'Who did you say you were?'

'I told you. I'm Maggie.' She was standing with her hands on her hips, impatient, but not unsympathetic. That look of annoyance again, as if she was disappointed in him. 'By definition, a very part time lawyer of this parish, colleague of Edward Burns.

Status: recently divorced and deliberately homeless. A fellow lodger of yours, in case you hadn't noticed.

But I'm much more famous for being Francesca Chisholm's cousin. Do you want this filthy coffee or not? Or are you just going to stand there looking pale and interesting?'

He nodded.

There was one establishment open, although 'functioning' was how Henry might have described it in a more lucid moment, but only just. A burger bar with steaming windows, facing the road, and next to the newspaper shop which was attracting the dogs.