The Last Resort(79)

Amelia still doesn’t understand. But there’s something more pressing that she wants answered. ‘What did your father do to you?’

Merryn laughs, a sad, broken laugh. ‘He punished me, of course. Kept me locked up. Said he wanted to help me atone for my sin. For the only true sin that Father believed in was the taking of another’s life, and that, of course, is what I did. He’d decided that it was true, and there was no point in me denying it.’

‘But . . . no,’ Amelia says. ‘I pushed him. I left him.’

Merryn smiles. ‘Maybe it’d be easier if you just watch.’ She taps the side of her head and a screen appears behind her. She doesn’t turn round, but moves a little to the left, making sure that Amelia has a clear view.

The memory picks up where it left off in the other room. The last part that Amelia watched with James. Amelia as a girl, running down the hill back to the village, stumbling, half blinded by tears. Arriving at the shop, and hesitating . . . before she turns away, shoulders shaking with all the crying, and heads back to the beach.

‘I don’t understand,’ Amelia says. ‘How can you have my memory in here? I don’t have the tracker—’

Merryn shakes her head. ‘It’s not your perspective though, is it? You were being watched. I’ve already told you . . . Jago saw the whole thing, didn’t he?’

James. She still can’t take it in.

Then the view cuts back to the cliff. Strands of short, straggly hair flip against her face as the view pans around quickly. A hand pushes a couple of overgrown branches out of the way, before the view tilts down the cliff, right over the edge – showing now the thing that Amelia couldn’t have seen from her own vantage point back at the top. A steep, snaking path, overrun with grasses, all the way down to the rocks. A gull circles ahead, swoops down and opens its beak wide with that whooping warning cry.

This is George’s memory.

Amelia feels as if she’s experiencing this through a virtual reality simulator. She’s in George’s head, seeing through her eyes as she walks down the path, slowly, carefully, holding herself low, keeping close to the inside of the cliff face to keep out of the whirling wind.

She rounds the bend in the path and finds herself on the rocks, where she scrambles hand over foot, to reach the boat man, who is still half on, half off the flat rock. His hair moves gently with the waves, his hand draped over the rock, flipping upwards as the water clutches it, slapping back down as the waves diminish and retreat into the sea.

She makes it across the rocks to the man’s body. She bends over, the wind grabbing her hair again, whipping it across her face. She takes his hand and pulls, with some difficulty, flipping the man onto his back. She bends closer, puts an ear close to his face. And then the man’s hand moves. It reaches for her and she pulls away as his mouth opens in a cry. She falls back onto the flat rock, arms smacking down, breaking her fall as the man grabs at air, tries to turn himself over. Tries to grip onto the rock. The back of his head is dark and wet, with water and blood and matted hair. She crawls away, running her hands across the smaller rocks wedged into the shale at the foot of the cliff.

‘Oh God . . .’ Amelia says, tears springing into her eyes. ‘He was still alive.’

She blinks, before fixing her gaze back to the projection of George’s memory. The man is almost on his knees when she finds the rock, grips it tight.

She gets to her feet as the man tries to get to his, but he’s injured from his fall. His leg buckles under him, probably broken . . . and he lets out a cry of frustration, which turns into a scream as she lurches forward and brings the rock down on the back of his head.

Again.

Again.

Amelia flinches, almost feeling the force of the blows juddering up her arm as they rain down – the tightness in her fists as she grips the rock.

Then the man slumps into the water again and she scrambles away, tossing the rock into the roaring sea. She turns, stumbles. The bottom of her T-shirt gets trapped and she yanks it hard, ripping it as she manages to pull it away. Then she looks up, finding the cliff path once more, takes a deep breath, and runs as best she can against the steep incline without a backwards glance.

The scrap of T-shirt. So that’s how the fisherman knew that George had been there?

Amelia hadn’t even realised she was crying, but now she wipes away tears with the backs of her hands. The screen is frozen in place, showing the broken man lying on the rock.

‘You’re a monster.’ She says it under her breath, her eyes still fixed on the screen.

Merryn taps the side of her head again and the screen vanishes. ‘Maybe.’ She shrugs. ‘I guess I was born that way. You can’t have generations of inbreeding and fail to display some undesirable traits. At least I was physically normal – that’s how I’ve always consoled myself.’

‘You could’ve left . . . run away . . .’

‘I did, eventually. Although I had to wait until I was sixteen, and they had to send me to school on the mainland. I taught myself all I could from books, while I was locked away – and I got myself into college and then university using a fake name.’

‘But I assume Merryn Hicks is your name? Why did you change it back?’

‘I had to. So I could apply for ownership of the island. They took all the other descendants away, and Jago was already gone – so when Father died, it was only me who could lay claim. Only me who wanted to. You’d been fascinated by the island and the lighthouse, and I wanted to turn it into something nice for you.’