Slapton Sands Page 19

  ‘The police are looking for you.’

  Well, she thought. That’s the niceties dispensed with. ‘They found me. I spoke to your former protégé.’

  ‘You did what?’

  ‘Sally Emerson. The maths teacher in waiting. I spoke to her two days ago.’

  She heard his desk lighter click and hiss. There was a pause while he breathed in smoke and breathed it out again. ‘I’m not talking about the Kent Constabulary. This chap was based in Lambeth. In Kennington.’

  Alice was pretty sure that David had parked the Apache’s car legally. Of course, the Apache, spiritual heir to the Lizard King, was not the type to worry about things like those tax discs they displayed on windscreens in England. But there was nothing to connect the car to her. They’d had a later brush with the law. But nothing of consequence. And not in Kennington.

  ‘You used your student card to validate access to some microfiche files in the Imperial War Museum.’

  ‘I did. They were a waste of time.’

  ‘After your departure it was noticed that a photograph had been removed from the wall of one of the galleries.’

  ‘I don’t have it,’ Alice said. But she knew which one it was.

  ‘Give them a call,’ Champion said. ‘As a courtesy. Put suspicious minds at rest.’ He gave her the number and the name of a policeman who worked the day shift on the front desk. She didn’t even bother to copy the number down. ‘How are things otherwise?’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser, professor,’ she said.

  But her words did not reflect her feelings. The pun was anything but funny. Alice had the sense that she was being driven towards a discovery she was being deliberately and systematically scared away from making. She didn’t know which was more alarming. The malign spirit of Johnny Compton had almost disabled her with fear, on those occasions in which it had manifested itself. But she had the strong intimation that each lead she uncovered led her along a predetermined path. And that was just as unnerving. It called into question whether she acted out of free will. It made her feel like a child following planted clues in the pages of a story hurtling towards its dreadful conclusion.

  Alice figured that two catastrophes, not one, had claimed the lives of the soldiers killed in such appalling numbers at Slapton Sands. Both, she concluded, had taken place in April 1944, just a few weeks before the date set for D-day. She strongly believed that the second tragedy had taken place not so much despite the first but in some perverse way because of it. And the second event was the one the US army were determined to keep a secret.

  Something had happened at sea. American bodies had washed up, for weeks, all along a large stretch of coastline. But whatever her Colorado vet had almost been a party to had happened not at sea but on the beach. It was smooth, he had said, free of shell holes, of corpses, of the chaotic litter of battle. But talking to him had left Alice convinced that something had happened. Craters and corpses could be bulldozed into sand. Some industrious subterfuge had taken place that April night, something her vet had been prevented at gunpoint from witnessing. What price a mass grave full of young Americans under the sand at Slapton? Listen to your hunches, her dad had told Alice. She was increasingly sure that some awful event had taken place on the beach.

  There was always the possibility that the first incident could be independently corroborated, proven, even, with evidence the American military establishment would be unable to refute. So they would continue to deny that anything went wrong. And then, if given no alternative by incontrovertible proof, they would admit to the first of these covered-up, costly events. But they would never admit to the second. They would insist that a single, regrettable incident had claimed all the casualties.

  If what she suspected about the first incident were true, there would have been no need of blood plasma and morphine supplies. But then, if what she believed about the first incident were true, how in God’s name had the second tragedy been allowed to occur? And what part had Johnny Compton played in it that so shamed his ghost now? Jesus, the man had mutilated a prostitute. He’d been a scumbag in life, so what could he conceivably want to scare her away from finding out about that sordid life in death?

  Compton’s role had to concern the second incident, Alice believed. He was an infantry officer. His only possible part in the first Slapton tragedy would be as victim. Or witness. That was her supposition, anyway. Tomorrow, she hoped to establish at least that much as fact.

  Now, though, she was unnerved by the disappearance of the picture from the Imperial War Museum. She wished there was someone she could sit down and talk to. She needed the simple assurance of good and trusted company. It would be so comforting to walk down to the pub at the far end of Slapton Sands from the cottage and meet Rachel Vine there, puffing on a Players Navy Cut, scowling at the volume of the jukebox, sipping a gin and tonic at a corner table. Or Mrs Cartwright. Mrs Cartwright would do, blue-rinsed Jane Cartwright, composure unruffled by the scrutiny of the Special Branch, happy to talk about church fêtes and gardening prizes and the purgative power of black molasses. Except that Jane Cartwright’s pub excursions had very probably ended in 1945, with the return from the war of her husband.

  Who else was there? Who else would she be happy to share a drink with in the pub? Clifford Lee was an interesting guy. Metric Larry had called Clifford a Hardy man. She enjoyed Thomas Hardy herself. They could discuss English literature over a pint, the way students were traditionally supposed to do. According to Metric Larry, he liked her. She’d like to buy him a drink, get to know him better, thank him for saving David’s life. As if he’d have done anything different than go into the water. As though she had any right to the presumption.

  Who else? Who was she kidding? There was nobody else. She had liked Sally Emerson. The woman was a compelling mix of physical allure and blade-keen intelligence. But she would always associate Emerson with the disturbed, disturbing circumstances that had led her to meet the woman in the first place. Professor Champion? Champion was clever, but he considered a failure any social encounter with a woman that didn’t end with you lying underneath him nailed naked to a bed.

  Which, of course, left David Lucas.

  From the age of eight, Alice had never shared a classroom with the children of parents who weren’t rich. Her isolation had made her independent, given her an objectivity beyond her years. Insular, disdainful, arrogant, remote: those had been the words used to describe her by her school contemporaries, and Alice had been happy to consider each a sort of accolade. Her attitude got her through. She was self-contained. She valued self-possession. When what her father drove or where her family vacationed provoked cruel adolescent mirth among her schoolmates, Alice genuinely didn’t care. You had to respect someone’s opinion before it had the power to hurt your feelings. If you didn’t depend on other people, they couldn’t let you down. It was her and her dad and her brother, not against the world exactly, but sort of, in a way that had suited her very well.

  Except that now it was only her. And unnerved by Johnny Compton’s thieving ghost, she craved company as she never had in her life. And the company she particularly craved was that of David Lucas. He’d be under the fort at Bembridge now, groping through kelp and gloom in a wetsuit, dragging breaths from a cylinder strapped to his back, a belt full of lead countering his body’s buoyancy, keeping him close to the bottom.

  ‘Be wary, David,’ Alice said. ‘Be wary of the sharks.’ She could not believe how much she missed and feared for him then. ‘Be safe, David,’ she said, comforted for a moment just by the small intimacy of saying his name out loud.

  She took a long breath and looked at her watch. It was seven o’clock. It was evening, though you’d barely guess it from the quality of light. They hadn’t yet got to the English longest day. Alice intended to go to a town for that particular event. She’d drink scrumpy in a beer garden and try to avoid wisecracking about John Barleycorn and the green man and the inevitable troupe of fucking morris men. Assuming,
of course, that she could find the companions to avoid wisecracking about these things with.

  She had retreated to her room after the phone conversation with Champion. One of the necessary disciplines of her isolation was the rationing of fear. She had known the thing that now had a name, the Johnny Compton thing, would follow her here. So she had imposed certain disciplines on her thinking to deal with that contingency. Except that contingency was the wrong word. Because Johnny Compton’s pursuit of her was a creeping inevitability. She was being haunted, properly haunted, by an unquiet, angry ghost. She could sense it now, in her cottage room under the eaves, as the cosy room grew thick with the forbidding odour of the sea. As the air grew heavy and portentous, dread settled on her and made her shiver and clutch at herself, bizarrely, watching heat ripple on the oozing, glossy asphalt melting in brilliant puddles on the coast road outside her window. She felt the thick breath of him, the tar from his tobacco-heavy lungs. He lived in her, revolting, dead.

  ‘Bitch,’ he said.

  She felt the coarse texture of his tongue, licking her ear. Light had bled and perished from the room. She was enfeebled by darkness, trapped and reeling under the salt ooze of decay, corruption.

  ‘Go home, bitch.’

  And it was gone.

  When she was able to, she walked out of the cottage and across the coast road and sat on a hillock of razor grass and cried. She cried with terror and eventually with relief. She stopped crying only because shock had exhausted her beyond the point where she could continue. When you were unpractised at crying, it seemed to require a sapping energy. Alice sat on her hillock of razor grass and rubbed rawness and salt from her eyes. No one had passed her. Nobody had come along the road. She ran finger and thumb down a ragged edge of grass. Blood bloomed from her thumb. The blood pulsed out of her in droplets and dripped with the accelerated thump of her heart. She looked back to the cottage. It seemed out of shape, contorted and leering like a carnival funhouse. But it was just a cottage, she knew. It was just a cottage on a quiet and picturesque part of the English coast. There were pretty seashells picked from the shore on its window ledges. There were sentimental Victorian prints to do with boats and harbours on its walls. A guest book by the door was filled with happy testimonials. It was only a bed-and-breakfast cottage. And a ghost lurked there, corrupted and rancorous.

  ‘I’m going nowhere until I’ve nailed you,’ Alice said. But she said it to herself. Because it was not an announcement. Nor did she mean it as defiant rhetoric. She felt the threat would be heard and understood without it needing to be voiced. Grief had taught Alice Bourne a forlorn economy when it came to the shedding of tears. She didn’t easily let them go. She was angry now, at having been frightened into crying. In life, Johnny Compton had evidently hated women. In death, Alice now determined she would be one he would be made to fear. He would hear words, would Johnny Compton. He would sense the determination in her threat.

  He had already. It was why he was here.

  That night, for what was to be the last time, Alice dreamed the cormorant dream. She was aboard the same uneasy, flimsy-bottomed shudder of a boat. Its course was the same bewildering slough through peaks and troughs of emerald sea. She felt the familiar lurch of panic as it lost sight of shore. And the great bird seemed more prehistoric than ever, fish scales oozing through reptile talons as it settled on the gunwale and it fixed her with its glare. The bird shifted, but did not take flight when she began to climb up the side of the hull. She gripped the gunwale next to where the cormorant perched and gained purchase with the toes of her boots on the tails of the unfinished bolt screws that held the hull plates together. She slipped feet first into the water, aware of the height of the swell and the cold shock of it as the Higgins boat swayed from her reach and the instant weight of water in her clothing and boots and ammunition belt and pack dragged her under. Salt burned her nose in the water, filling her throat and lungs. She opened her eyes and saw a trail of small bubbles rise towards the opaque light receding above her. She didn’t know if they were from her body or her clothing. She sank, steadily, and the receding light diminished into dark. She remembered no last thoughts when she awoke. Just an absence, growing colder and colder in her, with diminishing light.

  Her father had told her that most men were creatures of habit. The worst of them became criminals. Most of the criminals were caught and convicted eventually for their crimes. They were given long, harsh sentences in maximum-security prisons. On occasions, some of them managed to escape. And it didn’t matter how brutal or desperate the means of escape, or how long and desperately they ran to evade recapture. Men were creatures of habit, and eventually they went home. Wait long enough, her dad told her, and you’ll find them there. You’ll discover them sleeping in their own bed or reclining on their own porch. The staying away hurts them more than the thought of recapture. They return to their loved ones and the routine they knew. To the smells and sanctity of home. It’s what they escaped to find again. It’s the thing they missed. It’s the great and enduring paradox of the absconded criminal. They spend years plotting escapes of breathtaking ingenuity, only to go back in the rare event they succeed to the one place they know we’re guaranteed to go looking for them.

  Dartmouth was a welcome contrast to the emptiness of Start Bay. The harbour itself was an open rectangle of old stone, a drop of twenty feet to the crowds and clusters of boats berthed in mud and silt below, with the tide out. The stones from which the harbour walls were constructed were big, dank things plugged by the rings of mooring chains and pitted where others had broken free in violent weather. Sea moss hung from the stone in dripping green beards. Under the strengthening sun, the harbour smelled of mussels and seaweed and oozes in the mud of escaping outboard and engine fuel. To the rear of the harbour, shops and hotels formed a handsome, higgledy-piggledy terrace Alice thought was probably mostly Georgian. There were tourists in Dartmouth, absent in their droves from Slapton Sands. They were English tourists. Or more accurately they were British. Leaning against the painted iron rail around the harbour, Alice heard voices from Scotland and Wales and the harsh accent of Ulster. It was an odd accent to hear in play, hearing it as she had, always venting hatred and indignation on the English television and radio news.

  They were not affluent tourists, these. Their shoes and their clothes were cheap, and there were lots of elderly people and family groups. A number of the older tourists limped, the legacy of childhood rickets or polio epidemics. The visitors here reminded her a bit of her summer vacations with Bobby and her dad to Atlantic City. The same cheap sandals and sunglasses. The same awkward sunburns from the beach. The same air of privileged anticipation. Christ, he’d been a good father, her dad. He’d been the best. The best. How the missing of him burned in her still.

  She heard passing cricket commentaries on little transistor radios clutched to the ears of liver-spotted men. Some of the youths carried huge cassette players on shoulder straps. In the Georgian huddle of Dartmouth, her ears were assaulted by Queen and Rod Stewart and the Quo. They were the aural equivalent of tribal banners, these cassette players, she thought. It was a conclusion reached when a boy in a wedge cut limped by under his colossal burden of tape player and the batteries needed to power the thing into life, playing the new Bowie single, ‘Golden Years’.

  Rory Carnegie was easy to find. He was one of her father’s creatures of habit. But he was not an escaped felon. He had no requirement here of a disguise. And he looked much the way Rachel Vine had described him. He wore a tam-o’shanter, as he always did, to protect his bald head from the sun. A thick, full moustache covered his top lip. He’d been something in rugby called a prop forward in his youth, and his nose had been flattened, compressed. It looked like a boxer’s nose to Alice, and gave Rory Carnegie’s face a pugnacious cast. He sat on a bench at the side of the harbour with a sea rod extending over the top rail from between his feet. He showed the interest in the rod a spear-carrying extra might in his weapon on a movie
set in a lull between scenes. The clincher was the tattoos visible on his crossed arms. The ink had faded over time, but they were high-class work and deeply and confidently etched. Alice could see the coil of a mermaid’s tail, make out the scales and tailfin shape on the left arm, the one nearest her. He turned his head and looked at her. His eyes were very blue, very pale in the ruddy tan of his face.

  ‘I’d guess you’re not looking for the time, lass,’ Rory Carnegie said. His voice sounded as though its owner had never departed Aberdeen. Men are creatures of habit, Alice reminded herself. He never would have left Aberdeen if he hadn’t been exiled by the other trawlermen. He’d fetched up here before the outbreak of war, after a false start in Penzance. And here he’d stayed.

  ‘Have you caught anything?’

  ‘What do you think.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re trying.’

  ‘They’re not biting. You’re nibbling, though. Why?’

  ‘I want to know what happened at Slapton Sands.’

  Carnegie didn’t blink. The nerve that had allowed him to net fish in forbidden waters in wartime had neither diminished nor deserted him. There was a large watch on a metal bracelet on his wrist. It was a Rolex, like the watch David had been sent by his father. Only this one had seen a lot less wear. Time had been kind to Rory Carnegie.

  ‘You should play poker,’ Alice said. ‘You’d have a lot more success than you do with that rod.’

  He looked around. He had the bench to himself. Nobody was particularly near them. No one was paying them undue attention. He’s acting like a spy in a movie, Alice thought.