FRIDAY THE 13TH – APRIL 2018Viola Kendrick sits in the Customs House and waits, a musty blue blanket draped across her shoulders. In her grip is the walkie-talkie, at her feet lies Dot – curled up, chin on paws, making a damp print of herself on the sanded boards.
From the back office drifts Saul Cooper’s voice. Viola cannot make out the sentences he’s using, just the music of them. First, the staccato codes of communication – letters, digits, short forms – then, longer phrases, affirmations, contradictions. He will be using the satellite phone, she presumes – the Atlantic line can be unreliable. The Marine VHF is of no use here, unless there was to be the most fortuitous alignment of boats and masts. Saul has explained all of this to Viola, an age ago it feels, back when he was happy to humour her.
They had stepped free of the Land Rover and Viola dictated the next move: ‘Now we call the real police.’
As she spoke, she held the walkie-talkie in clear sight, as a reminder, as collateral. Do what I say, and no one gets hurt. The phrase was on the tip of her tongue; Saul wouldn’t have recognised the cliché. There were monthly cinema screenings in the Counting House, a carefully curated selection of the obscure and the inoffensive, with regular popular repeats. No one on Lark was fluent in film speak.
We can do this the easy way or the hard way.
I could tell you what I know, but then I’d have to kill you.
You just don’t get it, do you?
Viola has these phrases rehearsed and ready, should she be stuck for something to say.
They had gone inside – Saul first, Viola behind, resisting the urge to push the walkie-talkie into the small of his back like a weapon. The bald wooden floor of the Customs House had echoed their arrival, magnifying their footfalls and the rustling of their coats. Viola had started to follow Saul into the back office, like always, but he’d stopped her, put up the palm of his hand – ‘No, you wait here’ – before gesturing to the bench below a browning pastel map of the island. This had thrown her off-guard. She’d given him a look that asked, Really? He’d nodded, waiting for her to move away and sit. That was when he’d taken one of the blue blankets from the wire basket by the door, provisions for occasional overboard fishermen, and arranged it across her shoulders, paternally, almost. She was dealing with official Saul, Saul-at-work.
He’d raised the hinged front desk, the section bearing a taped-on laminated timetable for this year’s mainland ships, closing it behind him, and then disappeared into the office beyond.
On the opposite wall to the bench there is a series of framed black-and-white images of the estate – the Big House in some long-gone heyday, the seat of the reclusive Earl. Viola has heard so much about this invisible sovereign, this silent ruler of the island (or rather she has heard the same small slices of information on repeat), that the man has morphed, in her mind, into the fickle, fairy-tale giant who bit a chunk out of Lark and pushed it out to sea. At his whim, might the Earl push the island right back again – if he were ever to show his face?
Viola looks down. The toe of her boot skims the coastline of an old stain on the otherwise pristine blond-wood floor, a stain that wasn’t there last time she rested on this bench, limp and ocean-tired, the day she arrived on Lark. It would be easy for her to think that she is different now, that these ten months on the island have transformed her – once bewildered and full of sorrow, she is now upright, focused, and in possession of the ball – but it would be a lie.
The two-way radio is growing sweaty in her grip. Her back is slowly slumping. Dot has given up all hope of breakfast and fallen sleep.
Viola isn’t in charge. She called one shot and then landed herself on the wrong side of the counter, away from the action.
Get up, instructs a voice inside. Go into that back office!
But here comes another voice, slicker, more practised, telling her that she hasn’t been blindly obedient to Saul, rather she’s chosen to put her faith in his clear authority. She must not fall into the trap of assuming that every man is up to no good.
But he IS up to no good! screams the first voice. We know this!
Do we? asks the second voice in all reasonableness. Can we really trust your opinion on that?
Viola stays put, desperate to know how the morning’s discovery is being retold, desperate to hear snatches of the mainland coming down the line, even though those sounds of home might derail her, bring on a dreadful, gasping claustrophobia of the kind she experiences sometimes when the fog closes in and she allows herself to think how very far away everything is.
Before Lark, before the terrible incident back on the mainland, Viola used to cocoon herself in the darkness beneath her duvet, pretending that she was in a stricken submarine, miles below the water’s surface, or in a small pocket of air beneath a fallen building. A test. Could she breathe deep and not panic should the very worst thing happen to her? Her method for counting seconds was robust – one- elephant, two-elephant, three-elephant… But she could get no further than twenty before throwing off the duvet and gulping for oxygen. The very fact that Viola is able to draw breath every day on the island feels like a pure miracle.
She sits back against the damp-encrusted wall, fragments of the plaster attaching themselves to the roughness of the blanket, making her think of the peeling balusters of the farmstead veranda. She must plan, formulate her next move. She returns to the language of film. She could mimic the suspects she has seen on screen who grab power by demanding a phone call – to their family, to a lawyer. But she is not a suspect, Viola reminds herself, a little belatedly.
And there is no one she can call.
The farmstead is out. Her mother would likely collapse on the other end of the line, shifting the locus of the tragedy to herself.
The Eldest Girls cannot be contacted. To bring them into this now would result in a fait accompli, confirming suspicions too easily, too quickly. The girls must be kept at arm’s length for as long as possible.
There is only one person left, someone Viola half-expected to be pressing his nose against the window of the Customs House right now.
She could call Michael.