The Survivors(44)

He became aware of a shrieking that, for once, had nothing to do with Audrey. Around the cliffs, the seabirds were protesting his presence, swooping and circling overhead. The terns were nesting, he could see now as they hovered around their babies, anxious and agitated. The birds had rarely nested here before, back in the days when Kieran had traipsed up and down all summer. They’d become less used to visitors since the safety barrier had gone up.

Kieran moved away from them, crossing the beach to the South Cave, where he and Olivia had once lingered while the day slipped away and the tide slid in. He stepped inside now, not far, just a few paces. He could see the outline of the ledge from where he stood.

He was struck, as always, by how close it was to the entrance. He walked over. It was definitely the right ledge, though; he could make out where Ash had carved his name nearby.

Kieran reached up and ran his finger over the letters. He had almost forgotten how they had all used to do that. Pull out their keys and slice their names permanently into the sea-softened rock face whenever they reckoned they’d discovered something new of interest in the caves. Only Sean had tried to talk them out of it, with predictable results. Even he had buckled in the end, and under pressure from Kieran had given in and scratched his name at the start of a route they’d mapped together in the North Cave. Sean had felt bad about it for the rest of the summer, which Kieran had thought was overkill at the time. But looking at the letters now, still legible more than a decade after they’d been made into the rock face, Kieran couldn’t believe he had ever been such a dickhead. He couldn’t remember how he’d convinced himself this was a good idea, or even an acceptable one.

He leaned his back against the ledge and turned to the glow seeping in from the entrance. The sea and the sky were both a brilliant blue and he could see Sean’s catamaran anchored above the site of the Mary Minerva.

Kieran watched it for a while, the dive flag flapping. He hadn’t been able to face going out there himself at all in those early years, not even to join his parents for an on-board memorial ceremony to mark the first anniversary of Finn’s and Toby’s deaths. But Sean had never stopped sailing out. Two years after the storm, Kieran had cracked and asked him how he coped with being on the same body of water where his brother had died.

Sean had thought about it for so long, Kieran had started to feel bad for asking.

‘It’s like a bubble,’ Sean said, just as Kieran thought he wasn’t going to answer. ‘I sort of draw a circle around it. Keep it all in there and try to carry on like I would have if it had never happened.’ Sean gave a small shrug. ‘It feels a bit easier that way.’

It was the last time they had ever talked about it, but when Sean next asked if Kieran wanted to go out on the boat, Kieran said he would. It had been about as bad as he’d feared, and he had barely said a word the whole time. But at least he’d done it, and after that it had been easier to do it again.

Kieran pushed himself away from the rock now and took a last look at the ledge. In his mind, it was always further back in the cave, buried deep. In reality, the entrance was far closer than he remembered. There was no reason he shouldn’t have noticed the storm drawing in so fast. No excuse there.

He walked with his daughter back out to the beach, shielding Audrey’s eyes as she squinted in the sun. Kieran dug in his bag for her cotton hat, the one Bronte had given them what felt like a long time ago now, but came up empty-handed. He must have left it at home, and Kieran suddenly thought of Mia, still back at his parents’ place with Verity, and Brian.

Don’t leave me alone with him again.

Kieran checked his phone. No messages and no missed calls. Still, he looked down at Audrey.

‘What do you think, little one? Time to go back? See Mum?’

Audrey’s baby face appeared untroubled either way, so Kieran set off across the sand. He slowed as he passed the entrance to the North Cave.

He’d never liked it as much as the southern one, there were too many twists and turns for his taste. But Finn and Toby had thought it was the better of the pair, and had spent hours mapping out routes. They’d made their mark all over the North Cave, quite literally, and even from the sand Kieran could see a couple of places where the two men had scratched their own names. As he moved forward for a closer look, Audrey decided she’d had enough. Kieran started to sing a little song she sometimes liked but that only made things worse. His daughter scrunched up her face until it was hard and red and began to scream, the sound bouncing off the cave walls and ricocheting down into the warren of hidden tunnels.

‘Okay, all right, we’re going.’ Kieran turned, and then suddenly stopped.

For a second, in the thin slice of silence as his daughter drew breath to scream, Kieran thought he heard a strange whisper of movement.

No. He looked into the dark. Not something moving. Something going still. The frozen watchfulness of an animal. Kieran tried to listen, his palm firm on Audrey’s back. He stared into the black hole. He could hear nothing but her cries and see nothing but blackness, but he had the overwhelming sense of something waiting quietly in the dark.

‘Hello?’

Kieran’s call echoed back to him with a hollow flatness. Sound behaved in an unusual way in the caves, he knew, sometimes drawn deep through the tunnels and sometimes muffled by dead ends and water pools. Now, though, Kieran could see and hear nothing but the two of them. No movement. No answer. Just the gaping black hole.