They had stayed in small B & Bs before, but on this trip Dougie had booked into a hotel, Sandybank, overlooking the bay. In the foyer was an advertisement for Turkey and Tinsel Weekends, from October. He nodded at it as they went in. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You are joking, Dougie Meelup! Christmas is all very nice, I quite enjoy it when it comes, but it doesn’t come until the last week in December. Some people want to get a life.”
He laughed. Dougie laughed a lot. It was one of the things she had liked about him from the start, his laughter and the way years of it had set his face in a laugh, so that even when he was asleep, he sometimes seemed to be smiling. They had a room at the front with a sea view, but the sun had gone in now and the sea was churning about inside itself under a threatening sky.
“What would you like to do? Drink in the bar here or wander along and find somewhere else you fancy for a glass of wine?”
“I think here looks very nice.”
The hotel was bright and clean and not too large, they had been welcomed as if they were wanted, not just customers, and she would be happy sitting looking out at the bay and the life on the seafront. Happy.
She was happy.
There was a handful of other people in the bar and in a small room next to it the television was on.
“I like that,” Eileen said, taking her glass of wine. “I don’t like places where the telly blares out at you whether you want it or not.” She looked behind her through the window. Most people had left the beach and the benches along the promenade now that the sun had gone. It was quiet. The tide was on the way out.
“I could live here,” she said.
Dougie raised his beer glass to her. But then he set it down again. “Do you mean that?”
“Live here? Yes. By the sea. I would. It’d suit me very well.”
“Well, there’s nothing to stop us. Eighteen months’ time, I’ll be a free man and I could always get a bit of a part-time job somewhere here. So could you, come to that.”
She took a sip of wine and tried to picture it.
“Oh, I don’t know really. It’d be such an upheaval.”
“What’s wrong with an upheaval? Keep you young.”
But she knew she would have to roll the idea about slowly in her mind, turn it over and over like a penny in her pocket, look at every bit of it, see the problems and drawbacks. She couldn’t begin to take it all in now. It would be weeks. Pleasant weeks though. Whatever side she came down on, the thinking would be pleasant.
“I’ll just go and have a look at the news,” she said. It was too exciting, that was the thing; she realised that the moment Dougie had suggested it, she had wanted to leap in then and there, say yes, yes, and move, be in a place like this, a house with the sea view beyond the windows, and it was a dream and you had to be careful with dreams. Very careful. She had had too many of them broken to be anything but wary by now.
She needed to calm down and have her mind taken off it. For now. Just for now.
The small TV lounge looked over the garden, with blue hydrangea bushes and a bird feeder swinging from the branch of a rowan tree. That was the sort of garden they could have, with bushes and trees and not too much weeding to do. So long as they had a view of the sea from it.
Dougie stayed in the bar. He took up the evening paper and ordered a second glass of beer. She glanced affectionately at him through the open door. He looked like anyone else. He was neither very tall nor too short, neither fat nor thin, bald nor with his youthful head of hair. No one would look at him twice, nor remember him, no one would stare at him, no one would envy her or feel sorry for her when they saw them together. No one could have known the goodness of him, the kindness and the way he had given her a new life.
The news was announced by the music Eileen always thought of as angry, but Katie Derham had an extremely nice navy blue suit on with white pipings.
“Good evening.”
Dougie Meelup went through the local evening paper quite thoroughly, always having believed that you learned more about life that way than from any national media. He had meant what he said about moving to somewhere like this, right on the sea, and after reading the news and sport he moved on to the property pages to get the measure of the house prices. They shocked him. Anything facing the sea or even with a fairly distant view of it looked out of their price range by miles, though there were some nice small new houses a short walk behind the promenade. But would Eileen like the view? He had seen the way she had looked out across the bay, from the bench and then from the bedroom window. He wondered how much money he might be able to raise and whether one of the boys might even be interested in coming in with them.
He took the pen he had won in a spot-the-ball competition years ago and which had been his only pen ever since and started to jot down figures in the margin of the Gazette. He was immersed in them, trying to juggle and massage them to make them look more promising, when he sensed Eileen standing near.
Dougie glanced up. She was in the doorway between the bar and the television lounge. Her face was so odd, so contorted somehow, in an expression he had never seen and could not interpret, that for a second he wondered if she had had a stroke. She was very pale but with two high spots of colour on her cheekbones and her mouth was twisted.
He put the pen down. “All right, love?” But it was so clear that she was not that now the girl behind the bar looked at him and started to ask if there was anything she could do.
Eileen did not move. Her mouth opened and shut again but she did not move. Dougie went to her. Her eyes were huge and bewildered. He felt her shaking. But then, in a dreadful, surrealistic moment, she started to laugh, a weird, giggly laugh, not loud.
Another couple had come into the bar, they were standing staring, looking uncertain as to whether they wanted to sit down after all.
Between them, Dougie and the girl got her to the table and sitting down.
“Shall I fetch her a brandy?” the girl whispered.
“Maybe a glass of water.” He took her hand between his and chafed it. “Eileen …” Her expression was still odd. It panicked him.
She fumbled for her bag and handkerchief and wiped her eyes and then her mouth in an aimless, unfocused way, looking at him, then away from him, and once or twice glancing round at the door to the television room, as if checking something.
“Do you feel ill? Shall I get them to ring a doctor? Can you just tell me what happened?” He kept her hand between his.
She smiled a wonky smile. She tried to lift the water but her hand shook, so Dougie held it up to her mouth as she took a few sips, before pushing it away.
“The thing is, it’s all so stupid, it’s not true, I mean, it isn’t the right one, it’s stupid, but it gave me a terrible shock. Well, of course it did.”
“What gave you a shock?”
“When they said her name.’
“Whose name?”
She glanced at the doorway again. Then she gave a deep, juddering sigh. “It isn’t as if it’s such a common name, is it? Weeny’s name. Edwina.”
“Not so common, no. No, I can’t say I’ve known any other.”
“Only there it was. Edwina Sleightholme. Of course it isn’t her, my Edwina that is, my Weeny, of course it couldn’t be, but you can see how it gave me a shock, coming out of the television like that. The room went round.”
It took several more minutes for him to get the story fairly clear.
A young woman, the same name as Eileen’s younger daughter, the same age, had been charged with the abduction and murder of two children, and the abduction, with intent to murder, of a third.
“It just seems unbelievable, that,” Dougie said. “Just unbelievable. No wonder it gave you such a shock. Was it that little lad disappeared last year, that one?”
“Yes. And another boy and a little girl. It’s terrible.”
“Of course it is. I suppose if they’ve got someone … it’s … no, it’s terrible.”
But there was something not right. There had to be.
“Where was this?”
“On the news. Katie Derham.”
“No, where was the … the one with the same name as your Weeny? Where was she?”
“That was the funny bit.”
“What was funny, Eileen?”
“The funny bit was not only her name and her age but where she lived. She lived there. Same as our Weeny. They even live in the same town!”
She started to laugh the terrible giggling laugh again, but her eyes were on his face and would not focus anywhere else, her eyes begged him to laugh with her, to see how funny it really was, that there should be two women of the same name and age, two Edwina Sleightholmes living in the same town, two …
Dougie Meelup’s heart began pounding so hard he felt a pressure inside his chest, inside his ears, inside his head, an awful, pulsating pressure.