The Sea Gate

by Jane Johnson

  ‘But no sign of your ex?’ the female officer asks.

  ‘None.’

  She looks at me. ‘Could he have got out before the earth movement?’

  ‘I don’t know. It seems unlikely – there would have been no way out of the cove when the tide was up.’

  The two officers look at one another, then the woman takes some details from me and starts to speak into her radio, moving away out of the kitchen and out of earshot.

  When she comes back her expression is grim. ‘It appears your ex has a record.’ She gives me a hard stare.

  ‘Eddie?’ It seems absurd. ‘Surely not?’

  She consults her notebook. ‘He’s been cautioned for possession of a Class B drug, found guilty of affray and of carrying a knife in a public place, and has a suspended sentence for handling stolen goods.’

  ‘But I lived with him for ten years and I didn’t know…’

  Her lips press together as if she’s trying to stop herself telling me how blind people can be. She must have seen it all, I think. I wonder how hard it must be for those working in the police force to form healthy relationships. It would surely undermine any trust you might have had in the goodness of human nature. ‘They’re sending over a sniffer dog, an excavation team and the local surveyor, to look for the missing man and make a risk assessment,’ she says, then pauses. ‘Can you tell me about the owner of this house, and whether they may have been involved in the importation or handling of drugs?’

  I almost laugh. I explain about Cousin Olivia’s age and how she has been in the hospital all these weeks, about the work we’ve been doing on the house to prepare for her return.

  ‘Don’t forget the rat poison,’ Reda prompts.

  ‘Rat poison?’ The policeman looked up from the notes he has been taking.

  Reda hands him the bagged items. ‘I know it all sounds mad,’ I say, ‘but I think there’s been something going on here for a very long time, a sort of campaign of intimidation, of bullying, against the old lady who lives here.’

  I tell them what I know, and even what I suspect. When I mention the name of the Sparrow family the two officers give each other a long, meaningful look.

  ‘We’ll need you to come into the station to make statements and give your fingerprints,’ the woman says.

  ‘All the way to Camborne?’

  She shakes her head. ‘We’ll make sure there’s someone qualified on duty in Penzance. Can you do it today? The sooner the better.’ She takes down our names and contact details, makes a couple of calls, then gives us both a card headed Devon and Cornwall Police on which she is identified as Sergeant Hephzibah Johns. ‘Please call me at once if there are any further developments.’ She turns to the young policeman and says, ‘Let’s call in the troops and make a little visit to Newlyn, shall we?’

  We watch them disappear through the rain-sodden vegetation and down the garden steps.

  *

  A couple of days later I go into the shop in Porth Enys for bread and milk. The woman behind the counter gives me a delighted smile, and serves the other customers – a pair of German tourists – with accelerated speed, before leaning across the counter conspiratorially and saying without preamble, ‘Someone said they found some remains.’

  ‘Sorry?

  ‘Up at Miss Kitto’s.’

  Her curiosity makes me cautious. ‘I don’t know anything much. They’re still sifting through the rest of the landslip.’

  ‘You be careful the whole place don’t fall down round your ears.’

  ‘They’ve got civil engineers in to make a report. But they think the house itself is safe.’

  ‘And there was someone in the tunnel, under the fall?’ She is delighted to have got me cornered, to be able to cut through all the local gossip to get the real information from the horse’s mouth and is holding on to my bread and milk as hard as Gabriel does to his treats.

  ‘Mmm,’ I say noncommittally.

  They had found Eddie, remarkably still alive beneath the rubble. He had managed to slot himself into a recess in the tunnel where most of the debris from the landslip had sheered past harmlessly, but had trapped him inside it. ‘I thought I was going to die,’ he had wailed. ‘It was like being inside a tomb! I shouted but no one heard me, and when I tried to dig my way out, more of the stuff fell on me and pinned me down.’ His complaints were piteous.

  The rescue team, encouraged by the reactions of the sniffer dog, had taken some hours to reach him and, after the engineers had propped the tunnel, to carefully remove the fall of earth and rock. When at last they did find him, he was curled in a ball, whimpering, able to breathe only the foul air where the corpse had been interred. The team had not only retrieved Eddie but also most of a skeleton, which had been removed for further forensic investigation.

  Eddie was taken by ambulance, in handcuffs, accompanied by the police, to be checked out at the West Cornwall Hospital. I have decided not to press charges for his assault on me, feeling that my own retaliation had somewhat cancelled that out, but we each separately gave a statement about the attempted theft and because that breaches the terms of his suspended sentence it seems more than likely that that original sentence will now have to be served. The police sergeant told me that when she explained this to Eddie he had cried and had to be given a tissue but all he had said was that he couldn’t believe he was still alive, and that prison would be a piece of piss after what he’d just been through.

  ‘Probably one of the gang,’ the shopkeeper says, looking knowing. ‘I gather the Sparrow brothers have disappeared.’

  ‘Disappeared?’

  ‘Lots of rumours flying around. They’ve taken the Roscoff ferry to the continent, gone into hiding. Or they’ve been dealt with…’ she slices a finger across her throat, ‘by their gangmasters. Drugs is a dangerous business.’

  ‘Surely not?’

  ‘Everyone round here knows what they’ve been up to for years. How else they got those big houses? You don’t get to live somewhere fancy like that on honest fisherman’s wages.’

  I say that I have no idea where they live and the woman grabs her iPad from beneath the counter and with a few key taps shows me first of all a handsome granite building set in fine gardens – ‘that’s where the parents live’ – and then a photograph of a vast glass-fronted architect-designed monstrosity which she says belongs to the brothers.

  ‘God knows how much they bunged the local planning department to get that through,’ she says darkly. ‘They never even gave me permission to change my bleddy window frames.’

  ‘Why didn’t anyone ever shop them if it was so well-known?’

  ‘Locals, ent they? We don’t rat on our own down here, no matter how bad they are.’

  Unfortunate choice of words.

  ‘’Sides, nasty pieces of work, the Sparrow family. You don’t want to wake up one mornin’ to your decapitated cat hanging off your front door, do you? ’Part from Jem – he’s okay. Spent his whole life being bullied by his missus.’

  ‘Rosie?’

  ‘You ask me, she’s the real brains in that family. Not from round here though. They say her mother abandoned her here during the war and Miss Olivia raised her, and then Miss Olivia’s mother, till she died. Tragic that: far too young.’

  How fascinating. I admit I know nothing at all about Cousin Olivia’s mother.

  ‘Died not long after coming home. Can’t remember what of – was it a fall or something? Anyway, rotten luck to die so soon after coming through the war.’

  My mouth is so dry I can barely reply. Was that what Gabriel’s cry was about, and not Olivia’s fall after all? I pay for my milk and bread and hurry back to the car, my head pounding.

  *

  I stop at the gate to the Sparrows’ house and stare up. Handsome, four-square, granite, the house is like a smaller, smarter version of Chynalls. The garden is stuffed with exotic plants – banana palms, tree ferns, yuccas, aloes, birds of paradise, aeoniums, and between them statues are pl
onked down incongruously – a terracotta Greek athlete, discreetly naked, crowned with laurel; a flamingo treading delicately in a concrete pond in which a huge laughing frog sits on a stone lily-pad; a pair of cherubs squat in the rosebed, their wings trailing strands of ivy; a cute fat dragon gazes up through the ferns as if begging for food. On either side of the front door sit two roaring stone lions that would be more at home guarding a manor house.

  Having picked my way through this strange menagerie, I reach the front door. There is no doorbell and no doorknocker, and as far as I can see, no letter box either, and the glass in the panels is fortified with crisscrossed ironwork inside the house.

  I am having misgivings about coming here, especially alone. Reda is finishing the job in St Buryan with his brother and I felt I had taken too much of his time to ask him to come with me. Now I wish he was here. But it’s time for me to stand up for myself, and he has already done so much for me. He keeps dropping by on one pretext or another – bringing me his mobile so that I have a better chance of a signal at the house and don’t feel cut off – he shows me the old Nokia he is using instead and programs its number into the Galaxy he has given to me. ‘Just text me and I can be there in ten minutes!’ He brought me cakes cooked by Amina, Mo’s wife, each one beautifully shaped and set with its own jewel-like glazed almond; treats for Gabriel; a good sweater of his, since I have brought no winter clothes with me and the weather is turning so chilly. He has chopped a mountain of firewood and kindling, rehung the paintings Eddie tried to make off with.

  ‘I can stay,’ he said when at last I pushed him out of the door. He hesitated, two steps down the path and looked at me under his thick lashes. ‘I’d like to.’

  My head is full of the possibilities of him and me together, naked, clothed, laughing, solemn. Exhilarating possibilities; scary possibilities. But it is too soon. Too much has been going on. I need to clear my head, and my heart.

  Even so, I have been sleeping in his sweater. There is a faint scent of him woven through the weft of the wool – slightly spicy, slightly musky. I have slept like a stone the past few nights.

  Now, I rap sharply on the door, then take a step back, feeling like a naughty child. There is no sense of movement in the house. I am about to leave, when the door cranks suddenly open.

  Jem stands there, framed in darkness. ‘What do you want?’

  He says this gruffly, but with more curiosity than hostility. I wouldn’t blame him if he were hostile, after all, I have turned out to be his family’s nemesis, come down here from London to meddle in their affairs, when everything has been rolling along so well for decades.

  ‘I was looking for Rosie,’ I say, forthright, sounding braver than I feel.

  ‘She ent here,’ he says shortly. ‘Gone shopping.’

  I suck in a breath.

  ‘To Waitrose,’ he adds. ‘For food and stuff.’

  ‘Oh, OK.’ I turn to leave. ‘I didn’t even know there was a Waitrose down here.’

  ‘Up Truro.’

  A chill inches down my spine.

  ‘Mebbe she’ll call in at Treliske on her way back.’

  ‘To visit your father?’

  He stares at me. ‘My da been dead thirty year.’ Then he shuts the door against me.

  All my fears crystallize in an icy rush and I turn and run down the steps as if all the stone beasts are in pursuit.

  *

  The Clio has a one-litre engine and has seen better days. Car after car overtakes me on the A30 even in its notional fifth gear and with the accelerator pressed to the floor. By the time I hit the backed-up traffic at the Chiverton roundabout the air inside the cabin is blue with every swear word I have ever known and several more compound nouns I have devised.

  From there, the cars snake along the Truro road, snarling up at every set of lights. When at last I pull off at the hospital junction I am in a sweat. Two voices have been jabbering in my ear the whole way: one cool and reasonable, my normal unstressed voice; the other as mad as Gabriel’s. The first one says, Don’t be ridiculous, what can an old woman do to another old woman in a public place under the eyes of staff and visitors? But the other voice will not be assuaged: She’s going to kill her this time, and you’re not going to be able to stop her! It’s already too late…

  My feet slap on the corridor floors, upstairs, along another corridor. I pass people moving slowly – on crutches, in wheelchairs, pushing walking frames. Porters stare curiously as I dash past, but no one says anything. Hospitals are theatres of human drama, of triumph and tragedy: the place where most of humankind enters and departs this world. People are always in a hurry to meet some crucial event – a death, a birth, the awful limbo in between.

  I push open the doors to Olivia’s ward and stare feverishly around. Everything looks just as a geriatric ward should look: old folk lying quietly in their clean hospital beds, sleeping or gazing into space, some chatting to visitors as nurses go solicitously from bed to bed with clipboards and blood-pressure machines. A burly blonde woman is wheeling a trolley bearing a tea urn, cups and saucers and biscuits. One old dear in the first bay is trying to unclothe herself, as determined as a small child, despite the attempts of two student nurses to stop her. ‘Shan’t, shan’t!’ she squawks. ‘Horrible dress! Horrible bra! Nasty pants!’ She catches my eye. ‘They’re trying to kill me,’ she informs me matter-of-factly. ‘They kill everyone in here, but if you take your clothes off they can’t touch you!’

  I smile apologetically at her, then at the nurses and duck past. Olivia is not in her usual bed. I try not to let this panic me: they do move the patients around from time to time according to the urgency of keeping an eye on them. I walk past each bay in turn, trying not to stare intrusively, but it soon becomes clear she is not in this ward, unless…

  I twitch back a privacy curtain that has been drawn around the last bed. Inside, Olivia lies on her back with her eyes closed and her hands folded on her chest. She looks peaceful. But unutterably dead. Terror grips me. I dash inside and grab her hand.

  Her eyes fly open. ‘Oh, it’s you.’ She does not look pleased to see me. She frees her hand, makes a shooing gesture. ‘Go away – you’ll spoil everything!’

  ‘Spoil what?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? I’m supposed to be dead.’

  ‘Cousin Olivia, whatever do you mean?’

  Her expression is crafty. ‘I pulled the curtains round myself at the end of the shift. The new ones will find me here like this and cart me off to the morgue – or whatever they have in hospitals these days. Then I can slip out and get the bus home. I’ve got a five-pound note hidden in my knickers.’

  ‘Olivia!’ I press my hands against my mouth to stop myself laughing. ‘I’m so glad you’re OK, I was worried about you. There’s been a lot going on.’ How am I going to tell her about Eddie and his attempt to steal the paintings, and the small matter of the Sparrow brothers being pursued by the police, the Border Force, and the Coast Guard; and the landslip? I will have to explain the structural work that’s going on at the house, the underpinning and the concreting up of the tunnel. There are going to be financial implications: there is some talk about the council making the entire hillside safer but there may have to be an insurance claim and I haven’t been able to find any insurance documents anywhere.

  But, most importantly, I have to ask her about the skeleton in the tunnel.

  I help as she huffs herself upright and add an extra pillow for support, and I’m about to launch into this difficult subject when there is a rattle and a clank and the curtains part. ‘Afternoon, Mrs Kitto!’

  ‘Miss,’ Olivia growls, as the tea lady sticks her head into the bay.

  ‘Nice cup of tea?’ she asks, oblivious to the correction.

  Olivia grudgingly admits that a cup of tea would be nice.

  ‘And how about your visitor – would you like one too?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I say, and the head disappears back into the ward. I am sure I’ve seen her somewhe
re before.

  ‘Chocolate digestive!’ Olivia bellows.

  ‘Oh, sorry, Mrs Kitto,’ comes the disembodied voice. ‘No choccy biscuits today. How about a custard cream or a nice garibaldi?’

  Olivia grumbles and at last accepts that a custard cream is not the end of the world. I reach over and position her tray table, then take the cup and saucer and perched biscuit from the tea lady for her. I am about to pass it to Olivia when my nose picks up the faint scent of garlic. I bring the cup closer for a better sniff.

  ‘Thought you didn’t want one, dear,’ the tea lady says, ‘but we all change our minds, don’t we?’

  I hurl the cup away from me, spilling tea everywhere including over the tea lady who dances up and down, shrieking and brushing at her clothes. There is a momentary lull in the surrounding din in the ward which makes the shattering cup sound cataclysmic.

  ‘What did you do that for?’ asks Olivia crossly. ‘I was looking forward to my tea.’

  But I am on the move, grabbing the ‘tea lady’ by the arm. There is a scuffle, and the trolley goes scooting across the ward and bashes into an intravenous drip stand. An alarm goes off and suddenly everyone is running at me.

  ‘What on earth is going on here?’ demands the ward sister, helping the tea lady – who in the midst of all this has been poleaxed by her own trolley – to her feet. She is not, by any stretch of my wild imagination, Rosie, but a woman a good thirty years younger, her hair clearly her own, if badly dyed. Everyone is staring at me as if I’m some sort of axe murderer.

  ‘I’m very sorry,’ I say. ‘I dropped the cup. I’m so clumsy. I do apologize. Are you all right?’ I ask the tea lady, who is glaring at me uncomprehendingly.