There was something wrong. The wind was fierce and steady, blowing hard. Nat was fighting the tiller to hold her course—and now she didn’t even know if she’d been heading in the right direction to start with.
Jim. She should have gone, even if she had no idea what he’d taken, or when. Could she trust a taxi driver to explain? Of course she couldn’t. Couldn’t trust anyone.
And behind her on the beach, what bothered her was the suitcase, sitting there, Sophie and her husband. Had he chucked her out? Did he have a plan? Her head ached under the low sky, with trying to make it make sense.
And there wasn’t any escape, either. The Chickadee was sluggish, low in the water, she wasn’t handling properly. The wind and tide were dragging her, and the tiller just wasn’t responding and Nat didn’t understand why. Her head felt as sluggish as the boat, overloaded. More of the boat below the water, so the wind had to work harder. And the wind was offshore, the tide beginning to run.
Nat looked back at the land, searching it, the trees dark from a summer of sun, the bleached fields. He was there somewhere: the man who had taken Beth, who had hung her white dress in a tree. Who had dug her empty grave under Nat’s kitchen window. Nat hadn’t gotten him, she was only running away from him. And with that thought she had the weirdest, most horrible sickening feeling that he had come after her, he was in the listing boat, he was under the boards, in the tiller that resisted her. She sat up straighter on the stern thwart, trying to get a better view, and as she saw the clump of trees that concealed Dowd’s camp and a pale spot appeared, standing there—in the same moment an answer unfolded itself. Stupid: so obvious.
Had he done it while she was behind the shed, talking to Paddy, kneeling to talk to Rufus?
You’d have to know me, that was the thought that chilled her, that curdled her. You’d have to know what I would do when things get shitty, that I would climb in the Chickadee, just fuck the lot of you, I’m going.
“Shit,” she said savagely, to no one.
And he did, didn’t he? She’d let him get to know her.
You’d have to have watched me.
She wasn’t going to make Sunny Slopes.
Across under the trees she saw the pale spot emerge, become Dowd, and he was walking out toward the sea wall and the jetty. The wind was blowing steadily offshore now and the sky was lowered, bruised cloud down to the horizon. Then to the right, inland, a flash flooded the sky, lighting up inside the cloud and down to the land. Sheet lightning. On reflex Nat began to count.
One thousand, two thousand. You needed to count to know how far off the storm was: every second two hundred yards, something like that. She got to ten before the thunder came, a long rolling crack, deafeningly loud, unfurling across the trees that were tossing now in the wind, black and silver.
And the suitcase. The suitcase.
Dowd had gotten to the jetty, his arm raised above his eyes. He was watching. Nat half stood on instinct, showing herself, even if it was the wrong thing to do, even if he wanted to see it was her, even if she would be making herself a target for the storm. Standing told her something, though, the way the Chickadee slid under her—clumsy, heavy—would have told her if the sickening tepid slosh of bilge water over her feet hadn’t, even if she hadn’t already guessed. This wasn’t a matter of boards opening a bit in the heat.
The suitcase.
It had been stained at the bottom. Nat felt a thump in her chest as she understood. It wasn’t mud, or tide. It wasn’t Sophie’s suitcase. It wasn’t stained with mud, mud wasn’t that color.
And then with a lurch and a gasp Nat was on her knees, soaking, groping for the baler, trying to find the source of the leak. Did she even check that the plug was in? No, of course she didn’t, too much of a hurry to run away, from Jim, from the taxi driver with judgment in his eyes and his hand out for her cash. She felt under the slimy water: yes. The plug was out but that wasn’t all. She was leaking somewhere else. Not just in one place, either, and there had been no leak the last time she sailed, tight as a drum. The size of her mistake ballooned in Nat’s head.
Something popped up from under a thwart, jaunty orange plastic, with a handle. The baler.
Right. Right.
Nat grabbed it, sat back on her heels in the bottom of the boat, hauled the mainsheet up over the hand that held the tiller, set the bow toward the shore, and with the other hand she began to bail, frantically.
When she looked up, Dowd hadn’t moved on the jetty except his arm was down now. He had his hands in his pockets.
She waved the orange baler, frantic. Nothing.
The suitcase must have been under the tarpaulin in the back of the pickup. All that time. Beth.
In her pocket her phone rang and in the same moment she felt the lightning as much as saw it, a fork this time, a mile high. Falling back on her arse in the water with the mainsheet tangled around her hand and the tiller swinging free, the baler between her knees, she began to count again, stupidly, pointlessly. The phone was in her hand.
It was Jim. The crash of the thunder—five seconds this time, getting closer—meant she didn’t hear what he said straightaway, but she had already seen his name on the screen. She realized as she spoke into it that she had thought it would be Jonathan Dowd, phoning to goad her, to tell her what, why. To tell her what was in that suitcase he’d kept under a tarpaulin in his pickup.
“Jim,” she said in despair, and sitting there below the gunwale of the boat she’d always trusted and feeling its fragility, feeling the surge of the water pressing against it, trying to pull her down, all she could think of was, if this was it, she’d better talk to Jim. She let the mainsheet run. Sod it. Listen.
“You called me,” he said. His voice was slurred with need and she could feel herself losing it, losing patience with him, desperation climbing as she struggled to be kind. “Jim,” she said again, pleading. “Have you got to the hospital? Did he get you there?”
Don’t give up. Don’t give up.
He sounded weak, his voice strained, wandering. He was saying something about the taxi driver. “Help me,” she said. “Get the lifeboats out, someone’s scuppered the dinghy. It’s too far to swim.” Her hands were cold, the phone slippery and Jim didn’t seem to hear her, he didn’t seem to be listening because he was talking about a car.
“Please, Jim,” she said, and then his voice was suddenly clear, certain.
“The car I saw, outside your house that night,” he said.
Noise behind him, an alarm beeping, hospital noise. “Get the lifeboat out,” she said, but her voice was too weak.
“There’s something I remembered,” Jim said and she could hear how hard he was trying. “Only not until I climbed out of the taxi at the hospital. That was it, you see, I saw it and I remembered.”
“Saw what?” The water was lapping up her back, under her shirt. Nat didn’t dare raise her head to see how little freeboard there was left, but the water told her anyway: a wave sloshed in over the gunwale at her cheek. Too low at the stern. Nat tipped herself onto her knees and began to crawl forward. “Saw what, Jim?”
She let the mainsheet fly: all she could hope was that the tide wasn’t in full flood yet, that she wasn’t already at sea.
“Silver car, just like the one brought me here. With that thing screwed on below the number plate at the back. Licensed taxi.”
* * *
“Do you mind?” said the man, leaning down to turn the music up.
Bach, thought Victor, and looked in the rearview mirror for the taxi driver’s face—but his head was down as he reached for the CD controls and all Victor could see was a shock of dull brown hair, a full head of hair, carefully maintained. Dyed, even?
That told you something. Victor felt his thoughts roll on as they had all his life, meandering, remembering, deciding. A man who takes too much care of his hair is vain, narcissistic they call it these days. That is all we are. Thought and memory, that is all we are. Victor knew the end would come. Was it now?
Between the seats in front of him he saw the man’s rolled shirtsleeve, his forearm. Victor saw it coming. He saw it even before he raised his eyes to the rearview mirror again and met the man’s eye.
Thought and memory—and love. There’s a quote, biblical. And the greatest of these is love.
“It was you,” said Victor on an outward breath. He felt as though he’d come full circle. Even as the worst emerged he knew he shouldn’t have said it, shouldn’t say anything at all, but it was too late for that.
The man smiled, looking at him in the rearview mirror. His name tag sat beside it above the windscreen, where Victor’s long sight, the old man’s gift, could read it, if it meant anything, by now. If it wasn’t too late. Don Jason, licensed taxi driver. Remember that, anyway.
He had to keep staring, into the man’s eyes. Don Jason. Lisa Jason’s husband, who worked nights, the husband, he had finally understood, of whom she was afraid. And then Victor looked away, through the window, seeking the real world, the outside world—it was important to know where he was. Where the man was taking him. He didn’t recognize the empty road, the trees, the dark cloud. There was a crack and rumble somewhere close.
“What was that, Mr. Powell?” said the taxi driver pleasantly, but in that voice, the voice that sounded in Victor’s ears down most of a century, the voice of the teacher who wants you to know how clever he is, how much cleverer than you, the voice of the lieutenant on the beach at Anzio, with his heavy gun in his hand. Don Jason. Remember that.
“We’re old friends, Mr. Powell, aren’t we? Old enemies.”
The sound of the music rose, flooding the space, unbearable. Had it taken this, wondered Victor, to know he hated Bach?
“There’s something I’d like you to see,” said Don Jason.
And then the driver looked away, and the taxi swung off the road, the ground turning rough beneath it, jolting Victor against the window.