Alice glances at Lily through the window of the café. Then she passes Derry her door keys and says, ‘Can you pop back to mine – just quickly? Open the back door, let the dogs out. Ignore anything you find on the floor.’
Derry shrugs and leaves. Lesley goes to the counter to buy another round of coffees. Outside the coffee shop, Lily paces and gesticulates while talking to whoever she is on the phone to.
Alice turns to look at Frank. ‘How are you?’ she says, her hand resting on his shoulder.
He shrugs.
‘Any more memories?’
He stares through the window for a moment, then sighs and shakes his head.
On the pavement outside, Lily has finished her phone call.
‘What did they say?’ says Alice when she walks back into the cafe.
‘I did not call the police,’ she says tersely. ‘I called my friend. He will go to the building site. Soon we will know.’ She looks at them, one by one. ‘What do we do now?’
Lesley answers: ‘It’s obvious really, isn’t it? There’s only thing we can do. We need to find Kitty Tate.’
‘We should go back to the house,’ says Alice. ‘See if we can find an address for her there.’
‘I have looked in the house already,’ says Lily. ‘I found nothing.’
‘It’s a big house,’ says Alice gently. ‘Might be worth another search?’ This girl is just five years older than Jasmine. She imagines her daughter in a strange country frantically searching for the man who brought her there. She imagines how she and Frank and Lesley must appear to her: old and other, discomfitingly unfamiliar. She smiles at her for the first time.
Lily wavers for a split second but then pulls back her shoulders and her resolve. ‘You can do that,’ she says. ‘I will keep asking the people in this town. I will come later.’
Alice watches her turn and leave the café, hesitating momentarily in the doorway before turning left. What twist of fate brought this girl to this quiet, gently bohemian town hidden away in a dip of the Yorkshire coast? And what would she be doing now, right now, if Mark Tate had never walked into her life?
She pictures him now, tied to a radiator in an empty flat. And she thinks of what the man she knows as Frank says he had to do to put him there: the knife to the throat, the bag over the head, the tying of hands and the issuing of threats, the kidnapping and the taking hostage. She cannot conflate these actions with the soft man who has been living in her house for the past five days, the man she has slept with, who has sat with her daughter in the early hours of the morning, who has been befriended by her least trusting dog and given the seal of approval by her teenage son. She is reminded once again that the man she found on the beach last week was not a man at all, just an empty box in which to put whatever she wanted. She’d imbued him with qualities and character traits that suited her. She’d ignored the possibility that underneath the gentle, golden façade, Frank might well be a sociopath or even a killer. She’d put her children in danger. She’d put herself in danger.
And yet still, as she walks with him, side by side, towards Kitty Tate’s house, her heart aches for him, her arms yearn to embrace him. Whatever he is. Whoever he is. Whatever he has done.
Frank turns to Alice and smiles uncertainly. What is she thinking? he wonders. Is she regretting every minute she has spent in his company? Is she recoiling at the memories of their night together? Is she already repainting him in her mind’s eye as the twisted monster that he might well turn out to be?
From the very beginning of his slow emergence from the fugue he has felt echoes of violence, of hands around a throat, the slow burn of murderousness. What will Lily’s friend find when he opens the door to apartment number one? An empty room? A dead body?
He finds that he has begun walking away from the others as they head up the hill towards the main road out of town.
‘Frank? Where are you going?’ calls Alice.
He looks up at them and then down towards the coastal road. ‘Can we . . .? Just quickly?’
Something’s tugging him down the hill, down that alleyway, towards the sea. He’s walked this way before. Many, many times. The others nod and follow him and as he emerges from the other end of the narrow alleyway he instinctively turns right and there it is, Rabbit Cottage. Except it’s not called Rabbit Cottage any more. The engraved slate plaque outside says ‘Ivy Cottage’. It’s been painted a soft sky blue and the windows have been replaced with double glazing.
He stares at the tiny house and feels his soul opening up like a sinkhole. This was the last place they’d all been together. If he’d come home from the pub that night with his family, if he’d stayed with his family instead of chasing girls, if he hadn’t drunk three shots of tequila and brought those people here, they’d all have gone to bed that night, woken up together, spent another day together, and another, and another; they’d have driven back south together, spent the rest of their lives together. Kirsty would have met a man who wasn’t mentally ill; Gray would have had a niece or a nephew, a brother-in-law. He may even have had a wife of his own, a child or two. His mother would have dealt with her empty nest like a normal human being instead of an anxiety-ridden lunatic. His father would have grown older and greyer and they would have been normal and boring and perfect forever and ever.
It was all his fault. All of it. All of it.
Derry appears then from the mouth of a cobbled alleyway, holding Alice’s door keys. She looks at them in surprise. ‘Nice of you all to say where you were going,’ she says. ‘Just went back to the Sugar Bowl; woman outside said she saw you all heading this way.’
Alice apologises and Derry shrugs and puts her hands in her pockets. They all start walking towards town. Frank finds himself side by side with Derry. For a while they walk in silence, then Derry says, ‘So, Frank, did you kill him?’
He starts. ‘What?’
‘Mark Tate. Did you kill him? You keep looking at your fingers’ – she glances down at his hands – ‘like you don’t recognise them. Like they don’t belong to you.’ She narrows her eyes. ‘I mean . . . it would be the logical explanation. It would explain your memory loss, your midnight flit to the middle of nowhere. Wouldn’t it?’
He looks at her, trying to gauge her stance. Is she challenging him? Attacking him? Or merely trying to introduce him to some interesting concepts?
‘I genuinely don’t know,’ he says. ‘I might have killed him, yes. I might well have. And with my hands.’
‘And if you have?’
‘Then he deserved to die. And I deserve to go to prison for what I did.’ He shrugs, feeling a sense of balance and release at this idea.
They walk the rest of the way in silence.