Into the Water(32)

She looked at me imploringly. ‘I can’t say that, of course, but you need to look into him, you need to find out where he was when she died.’

My scalp shrivelled, adrenaline cutting through the alcohol. ‘What’s this man’s name? Who are you talking about?’

‘Robbie Cannon.’

I drew a blank for a moment, but then it came to me. ‘Cannon? Local guy? The family had car dealerships, a lot of money. That one?’

‘Yes. That one. You know him?’

‘I don’t know him, but I remember him.’

‘You remember …?’

‘From school. He was in the year above. Good at sport. Did well with girls. Not very bright.’

Her head bent so that her chin almost touched her chest, Jules said, ‘I didn’t know you were at school here.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ve always lived here. You wouldn’t remember me, but I remember you. You and your sister, of course.’

‘Oh,’ she said, and her face closed, like a shutter slamming shut. She put her hand on the door handle, as though making to leave.

‘Hang on,’ I said. ‘What makes you think Cannon did something to your sister? Did he say something, do something? Was he violent towards her?’

Jules shook her head and looked away. ‘I just know that he’s dangerous. He’s not a good person. And I saw him … looking at Lena.’

‘Looking at her?’

‘Yes, looking.’ She turned her head and met my eye at last. ‘I didn’t like the way he looked at her.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘I’ll, uh … I’ll see what I can find out.’

‘Thank you.’

She made to open the car door again, but I put my hand on her arm. ‘I’ll drive you back,’ I said.

Again, a glance at the bottle, but no word. ‘OK.’

It took just a couple of minutes to get back to the Mill House and neither of us spoke until Jules had opened the car door. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I wanted to tell her.

‘You’re very like her, you know.’

She looked shocked and gave a startled, hiccupping laugh.

‘I’m nothing at all like her.’ She brushed a tear from her cheek. ‘I’m the anti-Nel.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said, but she was already gone.

I don’t remember driving home.





The Drowning Pool


Lauren, 1983


FOR LAUREN’S THIRTY-SECOND birthday, in a week’s time, they would go to Craster. Just her and Sean, because Patrick would be working. ‘It’s my favourite place in all the world,’ she told her son. ‘There’s a castle, and a beautiful beach, and sometimes you can see seals on the rocks. And after we’ve been to the beach and the castle, we’ll go to the smokehouse and eat kippers on brown bread. Heaven.’

Sean wrinkled his nose. ‘I think I’d rather go to London,’ he announced, ‘to see the Tower. And have ice creams.’

His mother laughed and said, ‘OK then, perhaps we could do that instead.’

In the end, they didn’t do either.

It was November, the days short and bitter, and Lauren was distracted. She was aware that she was acting differently, but couldn’t seem to stop. She found herself sitting at the breakfast table with her family and all of a sudden her skin would flush, her face would burn, and she would have to turn away to hide it. She turned away when her husband came to kiss her, too – the movement of her head was almost involuntary, beyond her control, so that his lips brushed her cheek, or the corner of her mouth.

Three days before her birthday, there was a storm. It built all day, a vicious wind ripping down the valley, white horses riding the breadth of the pool. At night, the storm broke, the river pushing at its banks, trees felled along its length. The rain came down in sheets, the whole world underwater.

Lauren’s husband and son slept like babies, but Lauren was awake. In the study downstairs, she sat at her husband’s desk, a bottle of his favoured Scotch at her elbow. She drank a glass and tore a sheet of paper from a notebook. She drank another glass, and another, and the page remained blank. She couldn’t even decide on a form of address – ‘dear’ seemed dismissive and ‘dearest’ a lie. With the bottle almost empty and the page still unmarked, she walked out into the storm.

Her blood thick with drink and grief and anger, she made her way to the pool. The village was empty, hatches battened down. Unseen and undisturbed, she clambered and slipped through mud to the cliff. She waited. She waited for someone to come, she prayed that the man she had fallen in love with might miraculously somehow know, might somehow sense her despair and come to save her from herself. But the voice she heard, calling her name in panicked desperation, was not the one she wanted to hear.

And so boldly she stepped up to the precipice and, eyes wide open, pitched herself forward.

There was no way she could have seen him, no way she could have known that her boy was down there, behind the treeline.

No way she could have known that he had been woken by his father’s shouts and the sound of the front door slamming, that he had got up and run downstairs and out into the storm, his feet bare and his skinny limbs covered only by the thinnest cotton.