A Dark Inheritance

by Chris D'Lacey

  I took a drink of my shake. It was one of those with ice cream floating in the bottom, the kind you have to suck until your cheeks implode. “Why didn’t you come to our meeting on the headland?”

  “I did,” she said, looking out the window. “I arrived a few minutes after the carnage. By then, it was all flashing lights and twisted metal. It looked nasty. I’m glad you’re okay. I mean it.”

  I knew she did. I was watching her eyes. She didn’t care about me much, but she wasn’t lying.

  “Why were you late?”

  “I was held up in traffic.”

  “On the coast road?”

  “No, here. In town. They’re still doing work on the water mains. I was running behind with an editorial and misjudged the time — journalistic curse. Eddie suggested I cut along Hope Street because it would be quicker if the lights were kind. They weren’t. End of story.”

  “Eddie the photographer?” My carrot cake suddenly felt heavier than lead.

  “Okay, it was a cheap trick faking the photo, but —”

  “You told Eddie you were meeting me?”

  She shrugged. “He’s a colleague. We share information all the time. What of it?” She picked up her coffee, tutting as the table leg rocked a little.

  “What kind of car does he drive?”

  “A BMW — no, a Ford, I think. He changed it a couple of weeks ago. Why?”

  “What color is it?”

  The cup didn’t make it as far as her mouth. She lowered it back toward the table, seating the bottom in the indent of the saucer as precisely as a satellite docking on its mothership. “What are you getting at, Michael? I’ve known Eddie Swinton for over three years, ever since he joined the Holton Post. He’s a friend and a talented photographer. He’s not the kind of man who goes running down kids.”

  “Only you and Eddie knew I’d be on the headland that morning.” (As long as I discounted Chantelle and Klimt.) “What if he deliberately sent you through town so he could go via the coast road and reach me first?”

  She sat back in her chair, looking like her cheekbones were ready to crack. “Jeez. What the heck’s in that milk shake? Have you any idea what you’re implying? How serious an accusation that is? You’re talking about attempted murder. What reason could Eddie have to mangle your bike?”

  “Rafferty.”

  “What?” That took her by surprise. Her eye colors danced.

  “I was starting to ask too many questions about her.”

  She shook her head. “This is not funny.”

  “Neither is spending a week in the hospital.”

  “You seriously think,” she lowered her voice, “that Eddie killed Rafferty?”

  Not deliberately, perhaps. But I was certain now he was driving the car that had followed her that night.

  A phone buzzed somewhere in Candy’s bag. She dug it out, rejected the call, and banged the phone down on the table, making it wobble again. “No one’s denying you had a nasty experience, Michael, but chances are, you were hit by someone changing a CD or reaching across the seat for their phone. Take your eye off the road for a second and you can have an accident — just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I came here to talk about the dog, not Rafferty. But while we’re on the law enforcement theme, I’m going to ask you a question. Where was the knock on my door?”

  I stuck a fork in my carrot cake and left it speared. “I don’t understand?”

  “If you suspect Eddie, you must suspect me. Why didn’t you tell the police about our meeting? For the past two weeks, I’ve been waiting for a knock that never came.”

  “You didn’t do it,” I said. “You didn’t run me down.”

  “How do you know?” She threw out her hands.

  “Because you drive a small red Fiat.” And she had the flecks of truth in her eyes.

  She sat back, shaking her head in bemusement.

  “Did you stop?” I took another drink of my shake.

  “What?”

  “Did you stop at the scene?”

  “Of course I stopped.” She looped her hair crossly. “I watched them stretcher you into the ambulance.”

  “What did you tell them?”

  “Who?”

  “The police. If you’ve been waiting for the police to call, you couldn’t have told them you were there to meet me. So what did you tell them?”

  “Nothing,” she said, playing with her watch strap. “I said I was traveling to Poolhaven on a job and I’d stopped at the scene because … it was a story. If you must know, I was too afraid to mention our meeting in case they started asking awkward questions.”

  “Too afraid? Like Eddie might have been if he knew he’d caused Rafferty to fall off her bike?”

  “This is ridiculous.” She took a fast gulp of coffee and slammed the cup down. “I should never have brought you here. You’re just a kid with a big mouth, Michael. You’ve got no right to say these things when you haven’t got a single grain of proof.” She picked a napkin off her lap and threw it down. “Here’s a ten.” She threw a bill across the table. “If it comes to any more than that, find it yourself.”

  And she stood up too quickly, forgetting that the table legs didn’t quite add up to three. What was left of her coffee somehow found its way onto her lap. “Oh, God!” she cried, bringing the entire café to a hush. “These jeans are Dulcie and Gavanna!”

  She snatched up her bag and ran for the ladies’ room.

  Leaving her cell phone on the table.

  Maybe it was because she’d called me a bigmouth. Or maybe I was still too wired about Freya. Or maybe the unicorn on my ankle was telling me here was my chance to close this file. Whatever the reason, I was about to commit the most dangerous act of my entire life.

  Ignoring the stares and the whispers from the room, I picked up Candy’s phone. It was identical to mine, just one edition newer. I tapped the screen and brought up her contacts, finding Eddie in under three seconds. I tapped the screen again.

  New message.

  Been talkin 2 the Malone kid. He’s saying weird stuff bout Rafferty N. Think u shud hear it. Meet me on the head by the landslide. 1hr

  I hit SEND and watched it go. Then I took out the SIM card, dipped it in my milk shake, and put it back.

  Across the road was a taxi stand. I knocked on the window of the first available car. The driver folded up a newspaper and dropped his window. “Yes, son.”

  “I need to go to the cottages on Berry Head West.”

  I showed him the cash.

  “You do a bank job or something?” He looked along Hope Street for a trail of bills.

  “Please, I’m in a hurry. You can keep the change.”

  He stuffed the bill into the pocket of his shirt. “In that case, your wish is my command. Let’s ride.”

  Eddie turned up five minutes before the hour. He didn’t bother with the parking lot half a mile away but simply pulled off the road and got out without locking his car. Even from a distance, I could sense his confusion. It didn’t look like the willowy Candy Streetham standing in front of the landslide signs. No, it looked like Michael Malone.

  He took the embankment in confident strides, looking left and right for unwanted company. Some distance away, an elderly couple was fussing over a couple of dogs. Other than them, and the odd passing car, it was just me and Eddie.

  “What’s going on?” He jutted his chin. He had his hands stuffed into a sand-colored coat, fully unbuttoned despite the wind. There was a hole in one of his black Chelsea boots. He hadn’t shaved that morning.

  “New car?” I said. It was a gray off-roader. Different in every respect from the black sedan he’d driven into me.

  I caught a twitch at the corner of his eye. His gaze flickered beyond me briefly, as if I might be holding his colleague hostage. “Where’s Candy?”

  “Not coming. I used her phone to send you a message. I thought it would be better if we talked out here, in case you wanted to pay your respects.”

  �
�My what?”

  “To Rafferty,” I said.

  Again, he checked left and right. He took another stride forward. I braced myself. The sea and the rockfalls were only yards behind me. “Are you trying to be funny?” He was so close now I could smell on his breath what he’d eaten for breakfast. There were food stains on his sweatshirt, too. “Whatever you think you know, boy, think again.”

  I stared right into his pale gray eyes. He was a big man, several inches taller than me, but the slope of the ground was bringing us level. His flecks were dancing, popping like crazy. He was anxious, but he hadn’t spoken an untruth yet.

  “Well?” he snapped.

  “I know it was you. I worked it all out. You told Candy that the husky belonged to Freya, but you knew all along it was Rafferty’s dog. You just didn’t want her name in the papers again. You got lucky when someone mentioned Freya or the argument Dr. Nolan had had with her dad. But all the locals know Dr. Nolan. And they all know he walks his husky on these cliffs.”

  He laughed and stubbed the toe of one boot into the ground. For the first time, he took his hands from his pockets. Large hands, covered in wispy brown hairs. In a fight, there was no way I’d overpower him. But I wasn’t here to fight. I just wanted him to talk. He said, “Let me tell you an old photographer’s joke. It’s about a man who pretends to take a picture of his wife on a cliff top. When he asks her to step back so he can focus …” He made a falling motion with his fingers. “Do you want me to take your picture, Michael?”

  I swallowed hard. “Easier than running me down with your car.”

  He turned his head to one side and chewed on this a moment. “That wasn’t meant to happen.”

  “Tell that to my family.”

  “It was her fault,” he hissed.

  “Her?” I prompted.

  “Her,” he said again. “The Nolan girl. She was there, right by the rock where she died. It spooked me and I swerved. You … you got in the way, that’s all.”

  I remembered her voice and the warning in it. She had clearly been worried that he might drive into me, but by appearing when she did, she could have unintentionally made it happen. So there was some truth in what Eddie was saying. But his eyes still told a muddled story.

  “I was on my way out here to talk to you,” he said.

  Less gold, more green. But the flecks were interchanging too fast for me to make an accurate assessment. “To tell me the truth?”

  “What truth?” he spat, inserting a swear word between the others.

  “Why did you follow Rafferty that night?”

  He clenched a fist and came half a pace forward. “I didn’t kill her.”

  “But you were there,” I said, trying not to be distracted by the particles of food in his yellowing teeth. “She went to the police to tell them something, and you went after her. Why?”

  “I was at the station already,” he snapped, his face twisting into a knot of anger. “She came in saying she’d seen something — out there, on the water, breaking the waves. A craft far bigger than a submarine.”

  The second picture. “Craft?” I said.

  “The desk sergeant told her it was just a ship. Go and annoy the coast guard, he said. But I’ll give the girl her due; she was a feisty little thing. She sat down on a row of chairs, in among the drunks and other misfits, and drew what she’d seen.”

  “This?” I showed him the copy from Freya’s book.

  He backed away, startled. “Where did you get that?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said.

  But it did to him. He stepped forward and snatched it from my hand. “That’s not possible. That can’t be real. She only drew one —” And he stopped, suddenly, knowing he was about to incriminate himself.

  “You took her notebook, didn’t you?” I said. “The one with the original drawing in it.”

  “You need to shut your mouth,” he threatened.

  “Why?” I pressed. “Why was the notebook so important?”

  He held up the picture and let the wind take it. It was fifty yards away in a matter of seconds. “Evidence,” he said through gritted teeth.

  “Of what?” Interesting. His eyes weren’t lying.

  He pushed a hand through his ragged brown hair, pulling so hard at a shoulder-length clump that I thought he was going to tear it out. “I just wanted to talk to her,” he said. “Get the whole story. Find out what she’d seen. They like that at the Post. Anything weird connected to the sea. It wasn’t gonna happen there, in the station. So I got into the car and followed her up the coast. I pulled alongside her with my window down. Showed my ID. Told her I wanted to talk about the drawing. She glanced at me briefly, said she wasn’t interested, and pedaled away.”

  He paused and ran a hand across his mouth. Now it was coming, the truth about Rafferty Nolan’s death.

  Without prompting, he said, “I was closing in again when we saw the light. A beam. Like a spotlight. At a shallow angle. It panned across the headland from above the water. Blue, then red. Flaring in my headlights. It startled her. The bike wobbled badly, to the far side of the road. She put up a hand. Lost her balance. Fell. Then the light was gone. And she was on the ground.” He looked down for a moment. I half expected some words of remorse, some regret for his part in Rafferty’s fall. But when he started to speak again, his words were cold and matter-of-fact. “I pulled up, but she wasn’t breathing.”

  “She was,” I said. “She died in the hospital.”

  “I saw her,” he growled. “She was as good as dead. She wasn’t gonna survive. Not with half a boulder buried in her head.”

  “You could have called an ambulance.”

  He gave a scornful laugh. “And put myself in the middle of a police investigation? They interviewed everyone who’d seen her at the station. It was obvious they thought a car was involved because the girl had died on the wrong side of the road. I told them I’d driven straight back into Holton. They had nothing on me. They couldn’t prove a thing.”

  “You still haven’t said why you took the book.”

  He threw out a hand, as though inviting me to dance. “Haven’t you been listening to anything I’ve said? There was a light, like nothing I’d seen before. She was right, the girl. There was something out there. Something …” His voice drifted off into the wind. A moment ticked by, and then he said, “The book was on the road, spilling out of her bag. I just … It was evidence. A kind of proof. You hear about these things. Animals mutilated. People being taken. There’ve been sightings before along these cliffs.”

  I looked at him and almost felt a touch of pity. It would be easy to suppose that an alien craft had been cruising the coastline looking to beam up unsuspecting humans, but I could think of something far more believable. “You saw a helicopter,” I said.

  This he dismissed with a snort of laughter. “I’d have heard a chopper.”

  “Not if it was windy.”

  He grimaced and turned his head to one side.

  “You ran,” I continued, “because you didn’t want to face up to what you’d done. The UFO story is just a cover. You left Rafferty to die because you’re a coward. And you ran me down because I told Candy the truth about Trace and she was beginning to make a connection. It wouldn’t have taken her long to find out that the police talked to you about Rafferty’s death, would it?”

  “I told you, you need to shut your mouth.” He leveled a malevolent finger. The flecks in his eyes were red, red, red. “You can’t prove a thing. And if you breathe another word of this to anyone, I’ll make sure your family gets dragged through the mud.” He saw my hurt look and laughed in my face. “That’s right,” he said. “You know where this is going. There were some interesting theories about your father and the reason he disappeared when he did.” He nodded his mean, self-satisfied head. “At the time, there was no evidence to support it. But it’s amazing how effective a well-placed rumor can be.”

  “Shut up! My dad would never have hurt Rafferty.”
/>   He backed away, tapping the side of his head. “No, but it’s what people think that matters. Bye, Michael. Oh, one last thing. If you want to see another birthday, don’t ever come near me again.”

  He spat on the ground and turned to go. And that was it. I should have just let him walk. I had him, recorded, all over my smartphone. But I stupidly said, “I won’t need to.”

  He paused and looked over his shoulder.

  And wouldn’t you just know it, my phone rang.

  Right away, he knew he’d been taped. “Hand it over,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Nice and easy. Don’t make me hurt you.”

  I took out the phone. Mom’s face lit the screen. Mom, wondering why I hadn’t called, wanting to know if I was safe in Holton. I felt sick.

  “Give it to me. Now,” Eddie demanded.

  No way. I hadn’t come this far to let him win.

  I rejected the call and put the phone in my pocket. His face twisted into a look of disbelief. Before he could speak again, I dipped into my jacket and pulled out a chain.

  “You can’t be serious. You think you can take me with that?”

  I let the links drop, making sure they rattled. “Not me,” I said. “This is a choke chain.”

  He caught my subtle glance to the right, and turned in time to feel forty pounds of Siberian husky thudding into his chest.

  The setup had been simple. I’d asked the taxi driver to drop me off at the Nolans’ house. I was gambling that one of them would be home, and Aileen was. We had talked about Freya, and I had told her all the things that Freya had told me, about wanting to live near the sea and finding the sudden ability to draw, but without ever saying that Rafferty’s heart was inside her. That I left for Aileen herself to decide. When it got too emotional, and time was moving on, I asked if I could take Trace out — on my own. Aileen had agreed without a second thought. On the headland, I started talking. “I’m going to take her off the leash now, Rafferty. If you’re here, I need you to keep her occupied until I call her. You owe me this.” And then I had let Trace loose. Seconds later, she was jumping around an unseen hand and chasing invisible sticks across the green. When she saw the spaniel the couple was walking, she had gone to investigate. Rafferty had kept her there, waiting for my signal.