The Light Between Oceans(74)

That distress, that despair at the loss of a mother – he never imagined he would see it again after Ellen’s death, until confronted by his granddaughter in the garden. Just when he thought he’d seen all the tricks life could play, out it came with a new one, like an evil card sharp. He knew what the little girl was going through. A doubt seeped into a corner of his mind. Perhaps – perhaps it was cruel to keep her from the Sherbourne girl …

He looked again at the portrait of Ellen. Grace had the same jawline. Maybe she would grow up to be as beautiful as her grandmother. He wandered off into imaginings of Christmases and birthdays along the way. A happy family, that’s all he wanted. He thought of Hannah’s tortured face; remembered with guilt that same look when he’d tried to stop her marrying Frank.

No. This was the place for the child, with her true family. She’d have the top brick off the chimney. Eventually she’d get used to her real home and her real mother. If Hannah could just bear up that long.

He felt tears in his eyes, and anger fought its way to the surface. Someone should pay. Someone should be made to suffer the way his daughter had been made to suffer. Who could possibly come across a tiny baby and keep her, like a driftwood souvenir?

He drove out the intrusive doubt. He couldn’t change the past, and the years he had refused to acknowledge Frank’s existence, but he could make it up to Hannah now. Sherbourne would be punished. He would see to it.

He switched off the lamp, watching the moonlight glimmer on the silver framing Ellen’s photograph. And he pushed away thoughts of what the Graysmarks must be feeling that night.





CHAPTER 27



SINCE HER RETURN, Isabel found herself constantly on the lookout for Lucy – where had she got to? Was it time for bed? What would she give her for lunch? Then her brain would correct her, remind her how things were now, and she would go through the agony of loss all over again. What was happening to her daughter? Who was feeding her? Undressing her? Lucy would be beside herself.

The image of the little girl’s face as she was forced to swallow the bitter sleeping draught made Isabel’s throat tighten. She tried to blot it out with other memories: Lucy playing in the sand; Lucy holding her nose as she jumped into the water; her face as she slept at night – at ease, safe, perfect. There was no more wonderful sight in the world than your child sleeping. Isabel’s whole body bore the imprint of the little girl: her fingers knew the smoothness of her hair as she brushed it; her hips remembered the weight of her, and the tight locking of her legs around her waist; the warm softness of her cheek.

While she wandered through these scenes, sucking comfort from them like nectar from a dying flower, she was aware of something dark behind her, something she could not bear to look at. It would come to her in dreams, blurred and dreadful. It would call to her, ‘Izzy! Izzy, love …’ but she could not turn around, and her shoulders would shoot up to her ears as if to escape a grasp. She would awaken, breathless and sick to the stomach.

All the while, Isabel’s parents took her silence for misplaced loyalty. ‘There’s nothing I can say,’ were her only words that day she first came home, and she repeated them whenever Bill and Violet tried to broach the subject of Tom and what had happened.



The cells at the back of the police station usually had to do no more than keep a drunk long enough to sleep it off, or give an angry husband time to see sense and promise not to take his temper out with his fists. Half the time, whoever was on duty didn’t bother to lock the cell door, and if it was someone they knew, on a shift that was dragging, more often than not they’d have them out in the office playing cards, on the strict understanding that they wouldn’t try to shoot through.

Today, Harry Garstone was particularly excited, at last in charge of a serious criminal. He was still spitting chips that he’d been off duty the night a year ago when they brought in Bob Hitching from Karridale. The fellow had never been right in the head since Gallipoli. Got carried away with a meat cleaver and did in his brother from the next-door farm because they didn’t see eye to eye over their mother’s will. Ended up swinging for it. So now, Garstone was delighting in the niceties of procedure. He got the rulebook out to check that he was following it to the letter.

When Ralph had asked to see Tom, the constable had made a great show of consulting the book, sucking his teeth, and sliding a pout from one side of his letterbox mouth to the other. ‘Sorry, Captain Addicott. I wish I could let you, but it says here—’

‘Don’t give me any of your nonsense, Harry Garstone, or I’ll be on to your mother.’

‘It’s quite specific, and—’

The walls in the station were thin, and the constable was interrupted by the voice of Vernon Knuckey, who rarely bothered to rise from his seat for such communications. ‘Don’t be so bloody wet, Garstone. It’s the lighthouse keeper in the cell, not Ned bloody Kelly. Let the man through.’

The deflated constable gave the keys a vigorous jangle in protest as he led Ralph through a locked door, down some stairs and along a dark corridor until he arrived at a few cells with bars.

In one of them, Tom sat on a canvas bunk that folded out from the wall. He took in Ralph’s face – drawn and grey.

‘Tom,’ said the skipper.

‘Ralph.’ Tom gave a nod.

‘Came as soon as I could. Hilda says hello,’ he said, ‘and Blue,’ emptying his pockets of greetings like small change.