used the back of her hand to wipe her face, first left then right, then left again. ‘What I don’t understand is that he said he did it all for me.’
FORTY-TWO
Shaw had the sequence of the buoys leading out of Wells Harbour by rote. He’d been the pilot of the inshore RNLI hovercraft for nearly four years and he’d memorized most of the navigation along this stretch of the coast, from Lynn to Cromer. He knew that after the third green buoy on the port side he needed to look to starboard for the first red buoy, beyond which he should turn south-east to pick up the deep rip-tide channel which slipped past East Hills. So something had to be wrong because he was staring into the white mist, scanning a featureless seascape, when he saw two red buoys. Then three. Then none.
The blood drained to his heart so he blinked, trying to encourage the eye to water, his hands tightening on the paddle, which was poised in mid-air. He closed his eyes, the darkness full of strange cluster-bombs of blue light, then opened them to discover he had complete double-vision — everything in twos, one image slightly to the side of the other, slightly elevated. Nausea swept through him like a poison. The sharpness, the clarity, had gone, so that he was seeing a world with blurred edges, two worlds shadowing each other.
Valentine was looking at him. ‘Peter?’ he said. Ruth Robinson just looked into the mist, her head awkwardly forward, tensed to hear, to catch the first whisper of waves falling on the island beach.
‘You navigate, I’ll paddle,’ said Shaw, his voice strained, his eyes closed. Reason told him that if he robbed his brain of the evidence his eye was failing then it would stop flooding his bloodstream with adrenaline. Sweat, beaded on his forehead, fell into his blind eye. He put the paddle down then held his hands together, the fingers braided. Valentine was shocked by the thought that he might have done that to stop them shaking.
‘Peter?’
‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘Just do what I say.’ He picked up the paddle and dipped the blade expertly into the water, the sound as delicate as a trout taking the bait. He could do it blindfold, so he kept his eyes closed, feeling the boat slip forward in response to each stroke. ‘Over your right shoulder there should be a red buoy,’ he said.
‘Not a thing,’ said Valentine.
‘Right. We’ve drifted a bit. It’s OK. Look around.’ Shaw’s voice was light now, controlled, and it made him feel better to hear it.
Valentine turned and the shift of weight rocked the boat.
Shaw kept his voice matter-of-fact. ‘Just move your head.’
Valentine tried that but the vertebra in his neck cracked as he swung his bony, axe-like, skull from left and right. ‘There, I see it,’ he said. ‘It’s to our right — three o’clock.’
‘Take us past it — leave it on our right. Then look out for another, ahead, and do the same with that.’
Shaw felt the change approaching before his skin felt the sun. The temperature rose, the damp, almost sulphurous smell of the mist dissolved, but most of all the acoustic world came back in sharp definition, as if the ‘treble’ had suddenly been switched up on a gigantic sound system. A gull shrieked, the branches on the stone pines whispered, and he opened his eyes to see East Hills bathed in sunshine, the image pin-sharp.
Then his mobile beeped. It was a text from Twine. He didn’t want to strain the eye by reading it so he handed the phone to Valentine. ‘It’s Joe Osbourne,’ he said. ‘He died an hour ago. Tilly was there.’
FORTY-THREE
Shaw stood on the sand looking along the deserted beach towards the far point of East Hills. The pain in his blind eye was still there but blunted, distant. His vision had stabilized but the images were oddly vivid, as if his good eye was suddenly connected to a high-voltage cable. And his other senses, hearing and smell, were jangling, picking up too much information: he seemed to be able to track each gliding gull, catch the scent of every scrap of seaweed, every gull-pecked crab. From the trees on the crest of East Hills he caught the sharp scent of pinesap and the creaking of a crow’s wings as it clattered out of the high branches.
The sunlight seemed to flatten the island, driving away any shadows, while the mist lay behind them, obscuring the distant shore. Shaw knew that with the turn of the tide the mist would roll slowly out to sea, foot by foot, and would envelop them within the hour. Ruth Robinson sat in the boat, her hands seemingly too heavy to lift, her body rocked by the gentle nudging of the gunwale against the rubber buffers of the little pier.
‘If he wants you, will you come?’ Shaw asked her.
‘You won’t find him,’ she said. ‘I want to go back. Tilly needs me.’
It had been her first thought, on hearing of the death of her father, that Tilly would be alone. But Shaw couldn’t go back. ‘When the launch gets here, go back with them. And George, follow me up.’ He kept his voice low, and as flat as the sea. ‘Head for the pillbox. Until then, let’s keep it quiet.’ From his pocket Shaw retrieved a copy of the plan they’d found in the dugout of the small underground shelter, set relative to a six-sided building. ‘I think there’s one of these dugouts up by the pillbox,’ said Shaw. ‘That’s where he’s gone.’
‘You could leave him,’ said Ruth Robinson. ‘Let him do it. He’s got a pill left. Would that be a crime?’
It was an odd use of the word and it made Shaw pause. ‘Then we’d never know,’ said Shaw, feeling a wave of sympathy for this woman, trapped between two futures, both desperately dark. To let her husband die and to die herself, one day, in ignorance of what he’d done, what he’d hidden from her. Or to let him live, give him the chance of life, and then live with the consequences of that — to know the truth, to know why all those people had to die. In a way it was she who was in hell, a hell of his making.
He walked up the beach towards the ridge, checking his path against the plan. The pillbox was north, near the point, the secret dugout just off the path, between twenty and twenty-five feet short of the concrete octagonal perimeter wall. Within a minute he was close, walking through the dappled shadows of the pines, until the brutal concrete structure came into view. He stopped, looked back and saw the mist was closer, on the island already, amongst the trees, the whiteness tinged purple like a garlic clove. The air was hot and dry. the wind the slightest of zephyrs, which he could only feel if he stood still, judging which side of his face was the coolest.
In the stillness Shaw walked the path by placing each heel down, then the toes. He checked his mobile — there were no signal bars but he killed it anyway, waiting for the screen to blank out. As he took each step he thought about what might be beneath — the single room, a storm lantern, perhaps, and Robinson. Alive still?
The pillbox was thirty feet away when he dropped to his knees, feeling the sand at the side of the path with his hands, spreading it in fan-like patterns to either side. Fifteen feet from the pillbox he stopped, about to stand, about to retreat to search again, when his left hand connected with gritty sand — gritty and
The mist arrived, seeping through the trees, the temperature dropping instantly, the sunlight gone. In these few seconds Aidan Robinson could end it all, biting down on the lethal capsule. Shaw felt a growing dread that he was, perhaps, already too late, a fear that he’d find Robinson’s corpse, rigor creeping over him like the sea fret over East Hills.
He stood, feet together, astride the trapdoor, took the iron handle in both hands, bent his knees and leant back, letting the trapdoor balance his weight; then he pulled, flipping the heavy iron cover up on well-oiled hinges. The hole gaped, mist falling into it like dry ice. He dropped down, landed in sand, then turned quickly to face into a single room lit by a candle-stub, the light of which caught the ribs of corrugated iron in the roof. It was as if Shaw had been swallowed and was in the stomach of some metallic whale. The candle guttered with the impact of his fall.
Aidan Robinson sat in the only chair on the far side of a table, the edge of which pressed into his body. His arms hung by his side so that Shaw couldn’t see his hands. His face was glistening with sweat, the whites of his eyes catching the light. Under stress time slows down, and so for a second, or less, Shaw thought Robinson was dead because there was something frozen about his shoulders and neck, as if he’d been nailed to the rigid back of the chair. Then the large, broad skull rocked left and right, the eyes moving in and out of the light, from silver to
