WEDNESDAY
That evening and all the next day Katie was hard at it in the lab, following her hunch. Claudia had called in sick, which made it all easier. Katie didn’t even have to pretend to be doing the work of a technician. At last she reached the point where there was nothing left to do but wait for the results to come in the following morning.
When she got back to her apartment, there was a text from Justin: “Are we on for tonight?” It took her a moment or two to remember about the meteor shower.
She rang Justin and they agreed to rendezvous at around ten o’clock. At nine thirty Katie set off for the headland. She would get a decent signal there and she would be well away from the lights of the house.
The night was cold and clear, and the stars tingled above her, a good night for watching the meteor shower. But at the same time there was a bitter wind coming off the sea and she could taste the salt in the air. She wished Justin was there to wrap his arms around her, but still, it was a romantic idea, gazing at the same stars together though they were so many miles apart.
Even as she walked through the woods, the wind grew stronger and she heard it moaning in the trees. When she reached the headland, strong gusts buffeted her. Far down below she could see white caps on the waves, luminous in the starlight.
When she rang Justin it sounded as if he were standing next to her. She was bracing herself against the wind and gazing up at the sky, when someone or something hit her in the small of the back, knocking the air out of her and shunting her forward onto the fence around the edge of the cliff. For a few moments she hung there, arms flailing, desperately trying to get her footing. The fence gave way and she shot head first over the cliff. As she bounced off the side, she grabbed at the sparse vegetation, tearing out handfuls and breaking her nails. She hit the side of the cliff again and again and then she was in free fall. But she had managed to slow her descent and she had time to anticipate the shock of the icy water. At the last moment she managed to clap her hands to her mouth and nose before she hit the water. She couldn’t help gasping and tasted salt water, but she clamped her mouth shut, and the water didn’t reach her lungs.
The water closed over her head. She bobbed up, broke the surface and saw the cliff rising dark above her. Her heavy down jacket was buoying her up, almost like a life-jacket.
Her training kicked in. She heard her instructor say, “The first rule is: Don’t panic, get control of your breathing.” Floundering would only increase the strain on her heart and ensure that she lost energy all the faster. She lay back into the water and floated, still breathing in gasps and jerks. Gradually her breathing settled. Gazing up at the glittering stars, rocked by the swell of the sea, it was like being cradled in the vastness of the universe. Her clothes were growing heavier as they filled with water, but she knew not to try and get out of them. The layer of water trapped inside would help to insulate her. She fumbled with her hood and tightened the drawstring with fingers that were already going numb.
She counted sixty seconds. One minute – ten minutes – one hour, said a voice in her head, telling her that she should spend a minute getting control of her breathing. After that she had ten minutes – maybe – before she lost manual dexterity and reasonable mobility. If she didn’t get out of the water she’d have about an hour before hypothermia set in. She would drift into disorientation and unconsciousness, and she would drown.
I am not going to die. I am not going to give up, she told herself. She thought of her mother, she thought of her brother and his little boys, she thought of Justin, of Chloe and Rachel.
The cliff rose straight up from the water. There was no way of climbing out. She pictured the coastline. Her best hope of coming ashore was to swim to the tidal bathing pool. It couldn’t surely be more than a few hundred metres. Time to move.
Her clothes were cumbersome and she had to fight the instinct to get free of them. And yet she seemed to be moving fast. The tide was coming in, she realized. But she was tiring. The weight of the water was dragging her down. Her thought processes were slowing, becoming hazy. I’m not going to make it, she thought. It’s too far. She thought of Justin, of what might have been, the time they might have had together, of the children they might have had, a golden future that lay so close and yet just out of reach...
She heard a voice and wondered if she were hallucinating. There it was again. Someone was hollering: “Hey, you, hey!”
She craned her neck. She seemed to see – yes, as she was lifted up by a wave for an instant she glimpsed someone on the sea-wall. And then she was in the trough of the wave. She heard a splash as something landed in the water nearby. She saw a flashing light and she understood. It was a lifebuoy. With what felt like the last of her strength she lunged towards it. She tried to grasp it, but her fingers were too numb. With supreme effort she managed to raise herself up and hook first one elbow and then the other over the rim.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you, hang on!” someone was shouting.
The lifebuoy was moving and she was going with it. She hung on for grim death. She was pulled through the entrance to the tidal pool into quieter water and washed up against the steps that led down into it. She felt the rough stone scraping her legs, but she couldn’t move. Her head was above the water. Nothing else in the world mattered. She was spent.
Someone seized her under the arms and began to pull her up out of the water, bumping her hip on the step.
The light on the buoy was still flashing, but now something else was going on. There was the sound of an outboard motor and a brilliant light washed across the wall. And now she recognized the face looking down at her. It was Bill’s.
* * *
“I was out at the moth trap,” Bill explained. “The wind dropped for a moment and I thought I heard someone shout. Good job it was a clear night, otherwise I wouldn’t have seen you in the water.”
They were at the hospital, where Katie was being treated for mild hypothermia.
He went on, “I rang the emergency services and asked for a lifeboat, and then I climbed down to the swimming pool. It seemed forever until I spotted you.”
Justin had heard enough to guess that Katie was in the water and he too had rung 999. He had had a desperate hour or so until she had managed to speak to him on Bill’s phone.
“I thought you were a goner,” Bill said.
And so she should have been. It was a combination of two factors that had saved her. First, she was an experienced swimmer and a trained lifeguard. And second, her medical training for Antarctica had covered the protocol for surviving a cold-water plunge. If she hadn’t understood the danger of cold-water shock and known what to do, that would have been the end of her.
Now she wondered what exactly had happened on the headland. Her initial conviction that she had been pushed was fading a little. The police asked her if it might not have been a freak gust of wind – apparently those weren’t uncommon on this coast – and though they had been sympathetic, she had picked up the implication that she had been unwise to venture onto the headland on such a night. And she had to admit that she hadn’t actually seen anyone; she had simply felt herself propelled forward. And then there was the question – again unspoken – of why someone would want to push her off a cliff.