by Glass, Lisa
‘You shouldn’t go surfing alone, you know. Sharks hunt at night.’
I was quite taken aback at this.
‘We don’t have killer sharks in Cornwall.’
‘Don’t be so sure. On the internet it says that we have Great White Sharks that come up in the North Atlantic Drift. Judging by the number of seals that have washed up all bloody this summer, I reckon I believe it.’
‘If them white sharks was here, people would have seen ‘em,’ I pointed out.
‘People have. A scientist from Plymouth’s National Marine Aquarium – a young woman – was in this very bay doing a survey on turtles caught in the Gulf Stream. There’s more turtles washed up here than anywhere else in the country. Starve to death they do because there ain’t enough jellyfish for them to gobble and the poor creatures are desperate enough to eat what we do have a load of, and that’s plastic bags, which is just everywhere in the sea, thanks to them evil supermarkets what hands them out like confetti.’
‘Uggh, that’s grim,’ I said. ‘How do you know they eat bags?’
‘When they cut open the dead bodies, that’s all they see in their guts. Coiled up plastic bags and nothing else. Breaks your heart.’
‘You was talking about white sharks.’
‘Weeks of searching, that scientist did, and then that young woman finally saw one of them turtles swimming alongside her boat. She filmed it with a video camera, as you would if you was a marine biologist, and wrote down as much as she could about its size and looks and all that. But then when she’d done everything and only had to go home and report the sighting, she couldn’t resist trying to get just a bit more footage of it. People are greedy, see, even scientists. The sun was out and the sea was calm as glass, so maybe she wanted to make the most of the day before the ride back to the harbour. So she got out her underwater camera and began recording again. But the thing is, as you should know yourself, when people’s concentrating on one thing, they can get tunnel vision and miss other things. I know this because I was once concentrating so much on hitting a plastic bottle with my airgun that I accidentally shot a pellet into your friend Nathan’s arm. I paid him fifty pounds not to tell anyone about that but whenever he runs into me, he taps me up for more money. Never do I hear the end of that.’
I couldn’t help laughing. I always wondered where that scar on Nathan’s arm had come from.
‘So this young woman was busying herself with recording her damn turtle and she didn’t notice the dark thing that was doing a wide circle of her boat. Eventually when she felt her boat skip to one side, like the Kraken himself had bashed into it, she took her eyes from that viewfinder and looked towards the prow. It wasn’t that big – only about eight foot long, which is quite small for one of them, but it was watching her. It had its ugly head chocka with teeth at the surface and it was looking right at her. Those sharks often do that before they attack. They prowl about, come to the surface, have a good stare at the surfer, then go back down and attack like a bullet from below. When she realised what she was looking at, that young woman knew she’d found the holy grail because people been seeing them critters for years in France, but never England, and so having the best day of her life, she filmed it too. She’d be able to publish books and get on the radio and maybe even have a documentary made about her. But what she did next was foolish, even by scientist standards. She didn’t stop to think everything through. No. What she did was dip that waterproof underwater camera into the sea with her own hand. She checked the pictures on the viewfinder and when the shark did another pass she stuck her hand under the water again. In for a penny in for a pound. The problem wasn’t the shark. It wasn’t the turtle either, which was long gone. No, the problem was the other shark. Because what she didn’t see was a second shark swimming towards the boat behind her. People used to think that these Great Whites only hunted on their lonesomes but sometimes, just sometimes, they hunt in pairs. Like in Melbourne, Australia, three years ago when a poor young man was eaten by two of them sharks right in front of his schoolmates. So you see, these things could have accomplices, and being a marine biologist you’d have thought she would have known that. But finding one of these things in our waters was miracle enough, so what was the odds of finding two in one place? Well, lightning does strike twice sometimes. Of them two sharks, the second one was much bigger than the first. Double the size. Maybe it was its mother. Females always more aggressive, all through nature. Anyway, this giant monster of a shark almost took her arm off. One second more and it would have. But she dropped the camera and lost the film of it all and now no one believes her on account of a nasty credit card debt and some problems with a bookie. But her father told me all about it down at The Bucket o’ Blood, when I was in there restocking their leaflet display.’
This monologue was by far the most I had ever heard Luke say in the whole time I had known him. Could’ve knocked me down with a feather.
‘Mouth must be dry after all that talking,’ I said, and added: ‘I can’t believe you actually swallowed that lot.’
‘The man knew that the name for Great White Sharks was Carcharodon Carcharias. That’s the sort of thing that the father of a marine biologist would know.’
I couldn’t help smiling a bit.
‘Sorry. It’s like alien abductions,’ I said, ‘and horoscopes. There’s just never any proper evidence.’
‘No evidence doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to fear.’
‘Really?’ I said, giving him a look. ‘Because you said there’s no evidence against you.’
‘I don’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘There’s no evidence against me because I’m innocent.’
‘Was your dad innocent?’ I said, fishing for lies.
His face went even stranger than normal and he went to say something but nothing came out.
‘You don’t have to answer that,’ I said.
When he had found his tongue again, he managed to say, ‘I have never killed anything intentionally, not even a spider, not in my whole life. I wouldn’t hurt one of those girls, even if they deserved it.’
I thought about him rescuing that dried-out worm.
‘Once you said to me that you weren’t the only one watching the models. Who else was?’
‘I think you know.’
‘Han.’
‘Yes, he seemed to be very taken with the little dark-haired one.’
I know,’ I said.
Han wouldn’t hurt those girls, I told myself; he didn’t have it in him. I knew him. At least I thought I did. But then . . . he had been the last one to see Vega before she vanished and he did get me to cover for him that time his gran phoned, and I still didn’t know what that was about.
Over Luke’s head in the west there was a shooting star, followed by another and another.
‘Wow,’ I said, pointing to the flashes.
‘It’s the Aquarids meteor shower. They’ve been going all night. Only the size of a grain of rice but they put on a good show.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what we can find over at the camp.’
I still felt a little woozy and Luke took my arm to steady me.
‘Do you know, when I was young I had the most almighty crush on your mother.’
‘I reckon everyone did,’ I said. ‘I seen the pictures and she was beautiful. Pity I didn’t get any of those genes.’
He looked at me in surprise.
‘But you did,’ he said. ‘You got her eyes. Except yours are nicer.’
‘Thanks, man.’
He clicked on his torch and sent its beams shooting up the beach and into the dunes, and we followed them.
Chapter 28At the camp we found a lot of rabbits, a swarm of footprints in the sand and some police tape, which we ducked under. I stashed my surfboard in some bushes and we walked the length of the assault course. Luke climbed the net wall, like
some big lanky spider.
‘Be careful,’ I said. ‘If you break your neck, I ain’t carrying you home.’
I noticed how thin he was then. He seemed to have wasted away over the past few months and now he was almost as skinny as the models. As he climbed higher I saw something hanging off the back of his shoe.
‘What’s that?’ I said, pointing at his foot.
He reached down to his shoe and threw something off; it landed at my feet.
‘Disgusting chewing gum,’ he said, looking his sole. I was more worried about the thing that the chewing gum had made stick to his shoe. It was hair.
I picked it up and looked more closely and saw I was wrong because the red strands were joined together at one end; it must’ve been a hair extension. I thought of the gobby red-haired model who had gone missing along with Vega, and I swallowed a lump in my throat.
‘Luke,’ I called, but he was already climbing again, not the least bit bothered by the fact that a hair extension had been sticking to his shoe.
It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t have trodden on it in the camp, because the police would have definitely found something like that, so his shoe either picked it up somewhere between the beach we had just left and the camp, or it must have happened before he got to me. Could one of the models have been pulling out her own hair extensions to leave a trail like in Hansel and Gretel? And how would Luke have crossed that trail if he wasn’t involved?
I shook my head. It must have just been a coincidence, a lost strand from one of the photo shoots in the dunes. I threw it on the ground again and then walked on towards the old airstrip and the building that stood to one side of it. The police must have looked in there because there were several sets of footprints. The room was dusty, the old equipment cracked and broken.
I went up to an old map on a wall and touched a fracture in the glass. Someone had sprayed a tag over the whole lot of it, which seemed like a mean thing to do. It was a scary place, drowned in sadness and the passing of time, I thought. I was just turning to leave when I heard a noise. Violin music. Around here somewhere, was Han. I put my ear to the wall but it seemed fainter. I put my ear to the ground and heard it again.
What was Han doing underground in that place unless he was somehow connected to the disappearance of all of those girls? It didn’t look good for him, or me, come to that.
I stamped my feet. The music stopped. One, two, three bangs answered me. Someone was down there. ‘I’m coming,’ I shouted. ‘Hang on.’
I searched about for a door but couldn’t find one anywhere. I left the room and looked for Luke on the assault course, but he was nowhere to be seen.
The banging started up again. There was a steel desk that might have been covering a trapdoor, I thought. In a moment of adrenaline I used every inch of my strength to push that desk. I pushed so hard I thought my back would break but I couldn’t move it an inch.
‘It’s too heavy,’ I shouted.
I sank down on the floor and brushed away an angry tear. The banging started again. ‘I can’t do it,’ I said. ‘It’s stuck good and proper. I’m sorry.’
Then I heard a shuffle of quiet feet behind me. Before I could turn around, I felt a strong hand over my mouth.
Chapter 29My dad, when people ask him, says he has his own theory about how things started to go wrong. My dad is basically a good person, no matter how often he drives me mad, and no matter how much he screws up. Before it was all done and dusted and written about in newspapers all over the globe, he had said to me, in a very grandiose voice: ‘The world is full of Stop and Detour signs – you’ve just got to notice them. Things are afoot here, maid. You mark my words…’ I waited for him to continue, but he sipped from his flask of Oxo and dipped and ate three pieces of cold toast. Exasperated, I broke my silence and said, ‘Well, tell me what then,’ and he cleared his throat and said:
‘We’ve had many such a sign here, maid, but who’s paying attention? Once you’re unemployed, you might as well be mute, because no feller will listen to you.’
I felt a bit guilty when he said that, because sometimes I did what my mum called ‘taking things with a pinch of salt’. There were afternoons with my dad when I’d taken a sea full.
There were things about my dad that not many people knew; things he didn’t like to broadcast. In some moods, he would tell me and my mum that he had his own ‘ideology’. Would say he believed ‘the natural world had ways, powerful ways, of showing people what was to come, good or bad’. He was, he said, ‘a believer in omens.’ He had to have got that from my nanna, because she believed in all sorts too. ‘Omens,’ he said, ‘never deceive. Unlike people.’
Not everybody liked my dad. He had a habit of rubbing people up the wrong way, even when he didn’t mean to. It was because he was so honest. He made a point of always saying what he thought, and sometimes what he thought was strange notions that startled people who was used to samey small-talk. People I knew liked to talk about rubbish as a form of politeness. The weather was a constant topic of conversation, especially as it related to the shipping forecast or farming schedules. My dad said he’d never been able to abide talking about the weather, because actually, unlike volcano eruptions and serial killings, the weather was almost entirely unpredictable.
I didn’t think my dad was a prophet or anything, far from it, and I didn’t always agree with him (there were a lot of things he said that were just plain ridiculous, especially when he was off his head on booze – like the idea that the Moon might not be round, or even really exist at all) but when it came to the Signs being everywhere, I had to admit that he might have been on to something.
That day with the Oxo, he tried to make me believe that dodgy stuff was going down in Hayle, but it all seemed so unlikely. When he mentioned that he’d had a very red and bloody dream that night, and that he knew that things would go badly for us, I just thought he was trying to creep me out, like he normally did with ghost stories. Old people find it funny to scare kids; it brightens up their day.
Another thing I should say about my dad is that I knew for a fact that he was a reformed criminal and that he had once spent ten months in prison. He told me, but he didn’t tell everyone. What he never said was why he was there. Apart from my mum, no one knew what crime he had committed, though my guess was theft. All that time in the clink turned him into even more of a thinker than he was before he went in. He used to watch cloud formations through the tiny window in his cell, and that’s how he began to read the sky. So if my dad said there were signs in the sky, then I should have believed that there were signs in the sky. Likewise for tealeaf patterns and the swishes of the sand. Another thing my dad liked to do in private, apart from drink and prophesise, was douse.
I wriggled around in that abandoned building and saw my dad behind me, his dousing rods in one hand.
‘Jesus, Dad, what they hell are you doing? You almost gave me a heart attack.’
‘Sorry, petal, I didn’t want you to scream. Don’t know who else is lurking about round here. You’d think there’d be a police presence but not one copper have I seen.’
‘What are you DOING here?’ I asked, worrying thoughts crossing my brain. It couldn’t be my dad that had hurt the models. Even drunk and irate he wouldn’t do something like that . . . would he?
‘Out here looking for them missing girls, course.’
I sighed with relief. ‘Christ in my handbag. Does Mum know you’re here?’
‘No, love, she wouldn’t approve. But imagine if I find them, Jen. I’ll be a hero. Everyone will want to employ me then. People will pay me just for the story of how I found them. I been dousing for them.’
‘I see that. And your dousing brought you here?’
‘It did, maid, it did. But what brought you here?’ He touched my wetsuit. ‘Bit of night-swimming, eh?’
‘Something like that. But then I came here and
heard violin music coming from down below.’
‘Violin music you say? Don’t that chap of yours play the fiddle? Used to as a kid. Was pretty good from what I remember.’
‘Millions of people do. Not just Han.’
‘Alright, alright. You know your mum will hit the roof if she finds out you been out here on your lonesome.’
‘I wasn’t alone. I was with Luke.’
‘Loopy Luke? The prime suspect?’
‘He’s alright, Dad. He’s innocent.’
‘Be that as it may, he’s much older than you, even though he don’t look it. He’s got strange ideas. Be careful with that one.’
‘The police didn’t hold him. They don’t think he’s involved with the girls going missing.’
‘I didn’t say he was. If any harm has come to them lasses then it’ll most likely be an outsider that’ll have done it. I know near on every person in Hayle and there’s not one of them capable of that kind of crime.’
‘Preaching to the converted,’ I said. ‘Now show me again how to use them rods.’
‘I ain’t even sure they work on missing people, to be perfectly honest, but we’ll give it a go now, shall we?’
We worked our way around the room looking for a hidden door, but we didn’t get any joy. The banging noises had all stopped too and I didn’t like to think what that might mean.
‘Not getting anything. Not a twitch.’
A figure appeared in the doorway.
‘I found a trapdoor,’ Luke said. ‘Well, Mr Hitchcock did. He’s here too.’
‘Looks like we all had the same idea,’ my dad said, raising an eyebrow at me.
‘Is there anyone asleep in Hayle tonight?’ I said, wobbling a bit on my heels.
My dad passed me a packet of Soft Mints. ‘Eat these. You look white as a ghost. And then we’ll go make ourselves heroes.’
Chapter 30We walked past the gates and into the old accommodation block. Apart from the show, it hadn’t been used since some time after the Second World War. The Council had been meaning to tear it down for years, on account of all the vandals and drunks, but there had never been the money. Then the show came in with their DIY crew and refurbished it as a set for the models. They hadn’t quite got all the spiders by the looks of things. And some of those caterpillars we had noticed had made their way into the corridors. No matter how nicely painted though, it was still an old building and in their rush to set up their operation, the show couldn’t have properly checked out the old blueprints. Likewise, the police must have been so convinced that the girls had been abducted under the cover of fog that they didn’t properly search the camp itself. Below the accommodation block was a storeroom and beneath that was a very old military bunker.
