were the same. The guard-rail had been repaired, for example, but the outline of the rocks against the sea—were I to walk over to a spot fifteen feet from Donny's front head-lamp, drop to the ground, and turn my head due west, the jagged shapes would match precisely those seared onto my brain. I had been thrown from the motor's backseat onto that place on the rough-graded roadway; the brother with whom I had been arguing, the father who had turned from the wheel in irritation, the mother who had sat sharply forward, her hand on the dash-board and her mouth open to cry a warning—all three of the motorcar's other passengers had remained where they were. I alone had shot out over the side and hit the road, hard and broken, and only chance had determined that I came to rest with my face pointing towards the sea. My stunned eyes had been open to receive the impression of the motorcar dropping out of existence, had stayed open to witness the rotund flare of exploding petrol, had remained open and passively staring as the other, on-coming motor swerved and slithered to a halt before disgorging one pair of legs, then another. One set of feet had hurried to where I lay, accompanied by unintelligible squawks of sound; the other went to the shattered guard-rail for a moment, only to retreat rapidly from the cloud of oily smoke roaring up the rocks.
As the second pair of shoes came towards me, my eyes had drifted shut.
I had been fighting noisily with my brother, as my father's brand-new Maxwell motorcar had climbed the hill; I had distracted my father at a crucial moment, a fatal moment. I had killed my family, and survived, and in ten years, I had told only two people of my role in the disaster: Dr Ginzberg and, five years later, Holmes. She had soothed me, a temporary solution; Holmes had given me an emotional safe-box in which I could lock the knowledge, knowing its shape but no longer consumed by it.
Had I been told that I must return to this place, my first act setting foot in San Francisco would have been to hire a lorry-load of dynamite to blow the entire cliffside into the sea. I still was not certain how I had ended up here, staring at the great grey Pacific. Something Holmes had said, or rather the way he had said it, had made it seem not only necessary, but essential.
“Mary?” Flo's voice made me think she'd said my name more than a couple of times, for it sounded worried, and was accompanied by a hand on my arm. She'd been hovering near me, I realised, ever since we'd left the motor. “Mary, do you want to go now? I don't think we need—”
“No, I'm fine,” I told her. I blinked, and the past retreated a fraction. I was on the piece of ground I hated most in all the universe, ground I should gladly have consigned to the waves below, but it was also merely a piece of precipitous roadway built far too close to the edge of the world.
There was another motor there, as well, I noticed. Some sort of baker's van, although the bow-legged man standing across the roadway from it looked nothing like a baker. As I walked up to him, my first impression was confirmed: Grease, not flour, lay in his finger-nails, boots, and pores. And although he wore a cap, he also held in his hands a grey soft hat, turning it round and round in his blunt, blackened fingers. I stopped at the edge of the cliff near the baker's mechanic (Sunday, my mind processed automatically: no bread deliveries, good day to borrow the van) and looked out across the sea, the expanse of green merging into grey-blue with specks of white here and there, and a trace of mist lingering over the horizon. Then I looked down.
A man was working his way along the rocks, a dozen feet above the waves. His head was bare, a shock of greying red hair blowing about in the wind, the brightest object in sight against the dark grey of his overcoat and darker grey of the wet boulders below. His sideways progress was purposeful, undelayed by any consideration but the safest place for his hands and feet. Whatever he'd climbed down after, he'd either already found it, or decided it was lost. I did not even entertain the possibility that he was there for sport, a dare, or drunken whim: A man his age did not launch himself into danger for no good reason. And his companion, the mechanic with the grey hat in his hand, showed even less sign of intoxication than the man picking his deliberate way along the hazardous surface.
I raised my voice against the stiff wind. “What has he lost?”
The man looked up, startled, although I could not tell if his surprise was at my words or at my unexpected presence breaking into his intent concentration. “What?” he asked, half shouting.
“Your friend, what has he lost down there?”
The mechanic shook his head and returned his gaze to the cliff-side. “I don't know. And he ain't a friend, just some guy paid me to drive him out here. Insurance, he said. Didn't think he'd be pulling a stunt like this.” He shook his head again and began muttering; I moved closer to hear his words. “Hands me his hat and down he goes. Didn't even have a rope in case he falls, and seeing the kind of shape he's in, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if he did fall, damned fool, and what'll I tell the wife if I let the guy kill himself down there? Shoulda said no, call yourself a taxi, shoulda.” His voice drifted off and his eyes remained locked on the man who'd hired him, as if the strength of his gaze might be all that held the climber to the cliff face.
In a few minutes, the man below had crept around the worst of the boulders, and appeared to have a straight, if laborious, scramble to the sandy beach. The mechanic stirred and slapped the felt hat against his leg, his back straightening with the beginnings of relief. “Well, I'll go down and pick him up. Oughta charge him extra for the years he's taken off me.”
I stood at the cliff's edge for a moment longer, then turned away and said to Flo, “Shall we go down there, too, and see what on earth that man was doing?”
I climbed inside the car expectantly, giving them little chance to argue. Donny held Flo's elbow across the uneven ground, as her ankle-strap sandals were more suited to urban pavements; her right hand remained firmly clamped to her hat.
At the bottom of the hill Donny pulled into the lay-by near the bread van, and we got out to wait beside its driver. The climber emerged from the rocks, stumbling in exhaustion as he came up the beach. I revised my estimate of his age, and his condition, downward. His hair was thick and its grey premature—he wasn't much older than Donny. But as the mechanic had said, this was not a well man, in no condition, I'd have said, to go clambering around dangerous rocks for a lost article. When he'd dropped heavily onto the floor of the van and put together a cigarette with shaking fingers, Donny reached around me to light it for him—less a gesture of good manners perhaps than for fear the man would set his coat alight if he tried to manipulate a match. The man accepted it, and after a moment's silent appreciation, raised his eyes to give me a look that was oddly appraising, as if we'd met sometime before. I was sure we hadn't, however—I'd have remembered that face.
“That looked a rather dangerous climb,” I said mildly, by way of breaking the ice.
“Not something I'd do for fun,” he said dismissively.
So the gentleman did not care for amusing repartee; very well, I too would be blunt. “So why were you doing it? If you don't mind my asking.”
He was not interested in giving out any information, but I had often found that by handing over a revelation of my own it served to, as it were, prime the pump.
So I told him that someone I knew had died there, and with that his words began to flow.
It seemed that he was an insurance investigator looking into a death claim that might have been faked. It also seemed that this corner was infamous as a killer of motorcars.
Indeed.
He finished his cigarette, and by the looks of it the driver's flask, then with a tip of the grey fedora he climbed into the back of the van. The other man slammed the door behind him and hurried around to the driver's side; in moments he had the van turned around and headed back north.
Flo held out a packet of something in my direction. “You want a piece of chewing gum, Mary?”
“Thanks, no,” I said, and she helped herself, folding the stick into her pretty mouth. “Well, can we go now? It's too windy to smoke and I'm freezing to death standing here.”
“I was thinking we might go back to Serra Beach and have a drink or something.”
“Back? Mary, we're running late as it is. And it's a pig to drive a strange road in the dark. Wouldn't you say, Donny?”
“Oh, it's not so bad,” he said, but we could both hear the doubt in his voice. “If it's a jolt you want, I've got my flask.”
Body-temperature gin was not what I needed at the moment. “As I said, I'm happy to take over the driving,” I told him, but was not much surprised when I received the same response I'd got when I'd made the offer out in front of the St Francis: a polite and disbelieving smile. Clearly to Donny's mind, “girls” didn't drive unless there wasn't a man around to do that job.
