FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018You do not accept lifts from strange men. Viola Kendrick knows the rules.
Say no to sweets. Refuse all invitations to see kittens. Tell a grown-up where you are at all times. Never walk home late and alone, but if you must, dress soberly, anonymously. Cross to the opposite pavement if you are followed and pretend to be on your phone. Take the sharp edge of your house key and brace it between your fingers as a makeshift weapon. Fill your lungs. Be ready to scream.
Viola was led to believe that these rules would not apply here, that they could be left behind on the mainland. But the rules cling like limpets to the bottom of the boat. Viola cannot unremember them. She cannot action them either. How can you cross to the opposite pavement in a place that has no pavements? What use is a phone at your ear with no signal to feed it? And who carries a house key when there isn’t cause to lock your door in the first place? Still, it feels like a transgression to be bouncing down the East Road in the passenger seat of a 1980s Land Rover. The man behind the wheel in the black police uniform and yellow reflective jacket is not a stranger. But he is a strange man, certainly.
Viola scans the blur of pines through the window, searching for outlines, people, anyone who might see them hammering past, hear the noisy engine and smell the rotten exhaust. Anyone who might be willing to stand as a witness.
Her driver doesn’t speak and hasn’t since he instructed her brusquely at the Sisters’ Stones to get in the cab. He rolls a hard mint from cheek to cheek, clicking it against his teeth, pausing every so often as if he might say something, but no words come. He offered Viola a mint before starting the engine, but she refused. Like a good girl.
As they leave the coverage of Cable’s Wood, the sea spills out on their left, the surface of water still blanketed by fog. It is spring though, so this fog will lift when the sun rises, allow the first ship of the year to find its way. If she turned in her seat, Viola would see that giant’s bite in the cliffside behind them, but she doesn’t look back. They hurtle past the turning for her home – ‘home’ being not exactly the right word – to her mother, the old Reunyon Farmstead. That they have passed this exit is cause for relief but also sends a bitter wash of adrenalin to her mouth. She should speak, demand to be taken there, if only to show she is in charge. Instead, she pulls Dot, who sits damply on her lap, closer to her body for protection. The dog pants at the window, adding an extra layer of fog to the view. With every bump in the road, her wet nose draws ticks and swirls in the film on the glass.
Dot was acquired as a guard dog – Deborah Kendrick’s first tentative step towards building a total defence against an unfair world, before the idea of Lark reached her consciousness. The error was clear as soon as the puppy arrived – tiny, incontinent, as fallible as a human baby. How would a miniature Schnauzer defeat all their unseen enemies – lick them into submission?
Dogs are not protectors on the island, they are not even considered companions – they have no soul. Viola disputes this absolutely. Dot has a soul, she can feel it now, emanating from the soft, warm creature on her lap, filling her with much-needed determination as they ride the rough track, seemingly harbour-bound, instilling her with the courage to speak.
Any resolve she has falls away as the road does, steeply, the East Bay revealing itself beneath them. The back end of the vehicle competes in the gravel to become the front, and Viola clamps Dot ever tighter, gripping the seat beneath her, fingers slipping into the foam insides where the leather has split. As her driver steadies the Land Rover in its skid, he is the one who finds the wherewithal to say something.
‘How come you knew where to find him?’
‘Huh?’ Viola is unprepared, still gulping away fear from their slide down the hillside. ‘Who?’
The driver snorts, abusing the gears. He wants to appear scornful, all-knowing, but Viola can see how his hands tremble on the wheel.
‘Oh, the body,’ she says. ‘I didn’t. I didn’t know.’
A new set of mainland rules bobs obligingly to the surface. The rules for how bad things happen, how they come to be known.
‘It’s always the dog walker who finds the body,’ she tells him, because this is a truth.
The dog walker is the first voice in the story. They stare, pale-eyed, down the journalist’s camera lens, describing how their usual morning became exceptional. Then, the revelations begin.
Her driver won’t know this. He won’t have spent weeks, months, away from school, ostensibly to mourn, had mainland television deliver the news with each mealtime, had Radio 4 fill a kitchen with tragedy every hour on the hour. Here on the island there is only static, a foreign voice if you’re lucky, calling through the storm as you gently turn the dial. You might hear a snatch of a song you thought you once knew.
He also won’t know that a third of accidents happen within a mile of your home, that relatives asked to make public pleas for the return of their missing loved ones are often the prime suspect and, for all the advice about strange men and cars, that most perpetrators are well known to their victims.
‘I think you went looking for him,’ says her driver. A challenge.
The sight of the blood spatters, the boots, the coat submerged in ferns… it rises up into Viola’s vision, bringing the heart-flutter of panic, a spike of guilt. She won’t have it. She pushes it back.
‘I was just walking my dog,’ she says, as breezily as she is able. ‘I didn’t expect to find anything.’ A lie. The dog walker is always primed for discovery. Sometimes, darkly, they wish for it, for their usual morning to become exceptional, for something to flip the day’s routine. An escape – from the silence of a dilapidated farmhouse perhaps, from two-step linear equations and exponential functions that must be learnt alone, without the help of a teacher and the camaraderie of fellow classmates. From the miserable sight of an expanse of abandoned soil, a flaking veranda, still waiting for love and repair.
‘I think you went looking for him,’ the driver persists.
Viola shakes her head.
The mist has lifted on a sea that has calmed at the arrival of the sun, a rebellious child who quietens when the adults show up. At the limit of the dogleg stone jetty, the large metal cross stands dull and grey, reflecting back none of the trifling light. Today, it suggests, God is out-of-office.
‘You knew they’d done this.’ He spits when he talks. ‘Maybe you even put them up to it.’
The Land Rover swings, too fast, past the harbour loading bay and the smokehouse. The herring gulls gather on the railings, barbing, jostling – half a dozen or so, not enough to signal the imminent return of the three-day trawler. The driver brakes to a halt outside the Customs House.
She must speak, take control, decide how this will play out. The revelations must dance to a tune of her picking. Otherwise what was the point of such an early start? Why be the only dog walker on the island?
He kills the engine. They sit quietly for a moment, listening to the gulls’ disputes.
‘Well, if you think that I’m in on it –’ these are the words she eventually chooses ‘– what does that say about you?’
She reaches for something inside her mother’s long, quilted coat, exciting interest from Dot who knows that treats live in that pocket too. Saul looks down at the object she places onto the scuffed and empty seat between them. She keeps her hand tight upon it.
‘You can give me that back,’ he says.
She shakes her head, tightens her grip. He is the one to peer out of the window now, checking for people, early workers on the harbourside, anyone who might witness this scene: Viola Kendrick, the red-haired coycrock girl, and Saul Cooper, Lark’s almost-forty-year-old Customs Officer and sometime policeman, sitting together in a stand-off in a steamed-up Land Rover just after 7 a.m.
There is no one there.
Saul’s eyes return worriedly to the object. It is one half of a set of walkie-talkies.