‘I’ve moved the boat near to the boat-house.’
It felt like driving in a tunnel and it was a relief when we came out into the open. I saw some boats. When the car stopped I heard them rattling in the wind. There were a few wooden shacks, with peeling paint. One of them was abandoned and open to the sky. There was nobody around at all.
‘You can change in the car,’ Michael said briskly.
‘I want a changing room,’ I said in a sulky tone and got out of the car. ‘Which one’s yours?’
‘I don’t really want to go to the trouble of opening it up. The car would be better if it’s all right with you.’
‘It isn’t.’
Michael extracted himself awkwardly from the car. He was already in his rubbers, big and slick and black.
‘All right,’ he said with an ill grace. ‘Over here.’
He led me to a seasoned wooden building with double doors facing the sea and handed me his bunch of keys.
‘The door might be a bit stiff,’ he said. ‘It hasn’t been used since last spring. There’s a life-jacket hanging on a hook.’ He padded off the coarse yellow grass and along the pebbly beach to the boat. ‘Stay near the front or you’ll probably tread on something sharp or pull something down on you.’
I looked along the shoreline. Nobody, and no wonder: the sky was all shades of slate and the water was whipped up by vicious squalls. White spray flew off the waves. I could hardly see the point from where I stood and the wind on my face felt icy. I scraped the key into the lock and with difficulty turned it, pushing one of the doors narrowly open. Inside, there was a jumble of objects: yellow and orange life-jackets hanging from a large hook on the wall to my left, two fishing rods standing propped against the opposite wall, several large nylon bags which, when prodded by my curious foot, turned out to contain sails. At the back of the shed lay a windsurfer. There were buckets, bailers, boxes with nails and hooks and small implements I didn’t recognize, a few empty beer bottles, an old green tarpaulin, some pots of paints, sandpaper, a tool box, a crowbar, a broom. A thick smell of oil, salt, sweetness, rot, decay. There was probably a dead rat in here.
I laid the wet suit on a rough wooden bench and started to pull off my clothes, shivering in the icy, stagnant air. Then I tugged on the unwelcoming rubber. It closed relentlessly around my limbs. God, what was I doing here?
I’d dropped the little rubber shoes on my way to the bench so I gingerly hobbled across the shed to pick them up, trying to avoid stepping on wood chips and grit with my bare feet, and then tottered back. Sitting on the bench once more I rubbed the soles of my feet to remove the debris that had stuck to them. Something – it felt like a straw stalk – had caught between two toes. I prised them apart and removed it. A pink bit of paper twisted into the shape of something with four legs and a sort of head and a funny little tail. I rotated it in my fingers, a little cousin to the six creatures standing on my kitchen table.
Could Michael have brought it along? Could it have stuck to his clothes? ‘It hasn’t been used since last spring.’ Last spring Danny and I had been squabbling in London. Danny had been here. I was in a fever. I knew that I needed to think clearly but the objects in the room were shifting in shape, making me dizzy. My stomach shifted. I felt each hair on my skin prickling against the inside of my outer, rubber, skin. There was a light of clarity on the edge of my mind and I had to calculate my way towards it, but everything I had been sure of was now twisted out of shape. Danny had been here.
‘Remember your life jacket, Sam.’
I turned to the door where Michael was standing, silhouetted against the grey. I closed my fist around the little paper creature. He came towards me.
‘Let me help you with that,’ he said. He pulled the zip up behind me, so hard that it made me gasp. I was aware of his large physical presence. ‘And now the boots.’ He knelt in front of me. I sat down and he took both my feet in turn and gently eased them into the boots. He looked up with a smile. ‘The slipper fits, Cinderella,’ he said. Danny had been here. He took a yellow life-jacket from the hook and slipped it over my shoulders. ‘And, finally, your gloves.’ I looked down at my closed fist. I took the gloves in my left hand.
‘I’ll put them on in a minute.’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘We’re ready.’
With an arm gently on my back, he escorted me down to the boat and we climbed on board. He looked at me, and with the wind blowing in our faces I couldn’t make out his expression.
‘Now, let’s have a bit of fun.’
I’d been here before, the wet rope callusing my palm as I pulled it taut, the boat rising steeply in the wind, sails cracking in the gusts, iron-grey water slopping over the sides, the weird cries of seabirds as we scudded our lonely way out to open sea, the curt commands of ‘lee-oh’ as I cast myself desperately from side to side, the silent minutes of leaning back against the boat’s violent heeling. Danny had been in the boat-house. I tried to think of an innocent explanation. Could Danny have gone there on a walk with Michael? The door hadn’t been opened since last spring. Michael had said so. The little paper creature was still clasped in my frozen fist.
We tacked swiftly away from the shore and the spray stung my face so that if I was crying he wouldn’t know. And I didn’t know. Images passed through my mind: Finn when she arrived at my house, so white and mute; Danny staring at her across the table – and the expression that I could vividly recall wasn’t one of desire, then, but of discontent; Danny with Elsie, lifting her on to his lap, leaning down to her so that his black hair tangled with her blonde wisps. I tried to cling to wisps of thought. Danny had been there. Danny hadn’t run away with Finn. Danny hadn’t committed suicide.
‘You’re silent, Sam. Are you getting the hang of it?’
‘Maybe.’
At that moment a gust caught us, and the boat lifted up so it was almost vertical. I leaned my whole weight out.
‘There we are, we’re almost round the point.’ Michael sounded completely calm. ‘Then we needn’t go so close to the wind. Ready about…’
And we swung, with a neat whip of the boom and a smack of the sails, into open sea, with the wind steady from the side. I looked back, and I couldn’t see the shore we’d started from. It was lost in mist and grey glare.
‘That was pretty good.’
‘Thanks.’
‘Are you beginning to feel better, Sam?’
I attempted a shrug and a neutral mumble.
‘What was that?’
‘I don’t feel sick,’ I said. He looked at me closely. He turned away. He was holding the tiller and mainsheet with one hand now and fiddling with something in his other. I looked around. Then he was close beside.
‘What did you find, Sam?’
There was a metallic cold sensation in the pit of my stomach.
‘Nothing,’ I said.
Very quickly, before I could move, he seized my right wrist and opened the fingers. He was strong. He took the small paper animal from me.
‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘It might have stuck to your clothes.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Or it might have got stuck on
‘Yes,’ I said.
He gave a spooky little giggle and shook his head.
‘Sadly not,’ he said. ‘Pull your jib in tighter, Sam, we’re going to beat a bit.’
The wind was getting stronger again; it bit into my left cheek. Michael pulled on the tiller so that the boat swung away from the wind and let the mainsail billow. We had safely rounded the point and were now heading back to the coastline, towards the sharp needles of rocks that he’d pointed out last time. I turned and looked at him from close up. His strange face looked its best in the wind and the spray. The fog in my mind was slowly dispersing. Finn had been murdered. Danny had been murdered, and I was going to be murdered. I had to speak.
‘You killed Finn.’
Michael looked at me with a half-smile playing across his features but said nothing. His pupils were dilated:
