by Ruth Ware
Thea opens her mouth, and I think she is about to reply, but instead she turns to one side and vomits again into the ditch.
‘Oh for goodness’ sake,’ Fatima says resignedly, but the shaking anger has gone from her voice, and when Thea straightens, wiping water from her eyes, she reaches into her bag and pulls out a packet of wet wipes. ‘Look, take these. Clean yourself up.’
‘Thanks,’ Thea mutters. She stands up, shakily, and almost stumbles, and Fatima takes her arm to steady her.
As they make their slow way over the turf, I hear Thea say something to Fatima, too quietly for me and Kate to hear, but I catch Fatima’s reply.
‘It’s OK, Thee, I know you didn’t. I just – I care about you, you know that?’
‘Sounds like they’ve made up,’ I whisper to Kate and she nods, but her face in the moonlight is troubled.
‘This is only the beginning though,’ she says, her voice very low. ‘Isn’t it?’
And I realise she’s right.
‘NEARLY THERE,’ KATE says, as we clamber painfully over yet another stile. The marsh is so strange in the darkness, the route I thought I remembered in daylight retreating into the shadows. I can see lights in the distance that must, I think, be Salten village, but the winding sheep paths and rickety bridges make it hard to plot your course, and I realise, with a shudder, that if it wasn’t for Kate, we’d be screwed. You could be lost out here for hours, in the darkness, wandering in circles.
Fatima is still holding Thea’s arm, guiding her steps as she stumbles with a drunkard’s concentration from tussock to ridge, and she’s about to say something when I stiffen, put my finger to my lips, shushing her, and we all stop.
‘What?’ Thea says, her voice slurred and too loud.
‘Did you hear that?’
‘Hear what?’ Kate asks.
It comes again, a cry, from very far away, so like Freya’s sobbing wail when she’s at almost the peak of her distress that I feel a tightness in my breasts and a spreading warmth inside my bra.
A small part of my mind registers the irritation, and the fact that I forgot to put breast pads in before I left – but below that the much, much larger part of me is frantically trying to make out the sound in the darkness. It cannot be Freya, surely?
‘That?’ Kate says as it comes again. ‘It’s a gull.’
‘Are you sure?’ I say. ‘It sounds like –’
I stop. I can’t say what it sounded like. They will think I’m crazy.
‘They sound like children, don’t they?’ Kate says. ‘It’s quite eerie.’
But then the wail comes again, longer, louder, rising to a hysterical bubbling pitch, and I know that is not a gull, it can’t be.
I let go of Thea’s arm and I set off at a run into the darkness, ignoring Kate’s cry of ‘Isa, wait!’
But I can’t – I can’t wait. Freya’s cry is like a hook in my flesh, pulling me inexorably across the darkened marsh. And now I’m not thinking, my feet remember the paths almost automatically. I vault the muddy slough before I’ve even remembered it was there. I sprint along the raised bank with the mud-filled ditches either side. And all the time I hear Freya’s high, bubbling cry coming from somewhere up ahead – like something out of a fairy tale, the light that lures the children into the marsh, the sound of bells that tricks the unwary traveller.
She is close now – I can hear everything, the siren pitch as she reaches the furious peak of her scream, and then the choking snotty gasps in between as she revs up again for the next wail.
‘Freya!’ I shout. ‘Freya, I’m coming!’
‘Isa wait!’ I hear from behind me, and I hear Kate’s footsteps pounding after me.
But I’m almost there. I scramble over the final stile between the marsh and the Reach, hearing the rip of the borrowed dress without caring – and then everything seems to slow down to the pace of a nightmare – my breath roaring in my ears, my pulse pounding in my throat. For there, in front of me, is not Liz, the girl from the village, but a man. He is standing near the water’s edge, his silhouette a dark hulk against the moon-silvered waters – and he is holding a baby.
‘Hey!’ I shout, my voice a roar of primal fury. ‘Hey, you!’
The man turns, and the moonlight falls upon his face, and my heart seems to stutter in my chest. It’s him. It’s Luc Rochefort, holding a child – my child – like a human shield across him, the deep waters of the Reach shimmering behind him.
‘Give her to me,’ I manage, and the voice that comes out of my mouth is almost alien – a snarling roar that makes Luc take an involuntary step back, his fingers tightening on Freya. She has seen me, though, and she reaches out her little chubby arms, her scarlet face sparkling in the moonlight with tears, so furious that she can’t even muster a wail now, just a long, continuous series of gasps as she attempts to draw breath for a final, annihilating shriek.
‘Give her to me!’ I scream, and I bound forward and snatch her out of Luc’s grasp, feeling her cling to me like a little marsupial, her fingers digging into my neck, clutching at my hair. She smells of cigarette smoke and alcohol – bourbon maybe, I’m not sure. It’s him. It’s his smell, all over her skin. ‘How dare you touch my child!’
‘Isa,’ he says. He holds out his hands pleadingly, and I can smell the spirits on his breath. ‘It wasn’t like that –’
‘It wasn’t like what?’ I snarl. Freya’s small, hot body flails and arches against mine. ‘What’s going on?’ I hear from behind me, and Kate comes running up, panting and flushed. Then, incredulously, ‘Luc?’
‘He had Freya,’ I say. ‘He took her.’
‘I didn’t take her!’ Luc says. He takes a step forward, and I fight the urge to turn and run. I will not show this man I’m afraid of him.
‘Luc, what the hell were you thinking?’ Kate says.
‘It wasn’t like that!’ he says, louder, his voice almost a shout. And then again, more levelly, trying to calm himself, and us, ‘It wasn’t like that. I turned up at the Mill to talk to you, to apologise to Isa for being …’ He stops, takes a breath, turns to me, and his expression is almost pleading. ‘In the post office. I didn’t want you think – but I turned up and Freya, she was beside herself – she was screaming like this –’ He gestures to Freya, still red-faced and sobbing but calmer now she can smell me. She is very tired, I can feel her flopping against me between bursts of screeching. ‘What’s-her-name, Liz, she was panicking, she said she’d tried to call you but her phone was out of credit, and I said I’d take Freya outside for a walk, try to calm her down a bit.’
‘You took her!’ I manage. I am almost incoherent with rage. ‘How do I know you weren’t about to drag her off across the marsh?’
‘Why would I do that?’ His face is full of angry bewilderment. ‘I didn’t take her anywhere – the Mill’s right there, I was just trying to calm her down. I thought the stars and the night –’
‘Jesus Christ, Luc,’ Kate snaps. ‘That’s not the point. Isa entrusted her baby to Liz – you can’t just take matters into your own hands like that.’
‘Or what?’ he says sarcastically. ‘You’ll call the police? I don’t think so.’
‘Luc …’ Kate’s voice is wary.
‘God,’ he spits. ‘I came to apologise. I was trying to help. Just once – just once – you’d think I’d learn from my mistakes. But no – you haven’t changed, none of you. She whistles, and you come running, all of you, like dogs.’
‘What’s going on?’ It’s Fatima from behind us, with a staggering Thea on her shoulder. ‘Is that … Luc?’
‘Yes, it’s me,’ Luc says. He tries for a smile, but his mouth twists, and it comes out halfway between a sneer and the expression someone makes when they’re trying not to cry. ‘Remember me, Fatima?’
‘Of course I do,’ Fatima says in a low voice.
‘Thea?’
‘Luc, you’re drunk,’ Thea says bluntly. She steadies herself on the stile.
‘Takes one
to know one,’ Luc says, taking in her muddied dress and smeared make-up.
But Thea simply nods, without rancour.
‘Yes. Maybe it does. I’ve been on the edge enough times to know you’re pretty fucking close right now.’
‘Go home, Luc,’ Kate says, ‘sober up, and if you’ve got something to say, say it in the morning.’
‘If I’ve got something to say?’ Luc gives a short hysterical laugh. His hands, as he runs them through his tangled dark hair, are shaking. ‘If? What a fucking joke! What would you like to talk about, Kate – maybe we could have a nice chat about Dad?’
‘Luc, shut up,’ Kate says urgently. She looks over her shoulder, and I realise, unsettlingly, that it’s not impossible that anyone will be out at this time of night. Dog walkers, people from the dinner, night fishermen … ‘Will you please be quiet? Look – come back to the Mill, we can talk about this properly.’
‘What, don’t you want the world to know?’ Luc says mockingly. He puts his hands to his mouth, making a trumpet, and shouts the words out to the night. ‘You want to know who’s responsible for the body in the Reach? Try right here!’
‘He knows?’ Fatima gasps. Her face has gone pale as clay. I feel my stomach dropping, and suddenly I feel as sick as Thea looks. Luc knows. He has always known. Now suddenly all his anger makes sense.
‘Luc!’ Kate’s voice is a sort of screaming whisper. She looks beside herself. ‘Will you please shut up for God’s sake? Think about what you’re doing! What if someone hears?’
‘I don’t give a fuck who hears,’ Luc snarls back.
Kate’s fists are clenched, and for a minute I think that she is going to hit him. Then she spits out the words as though they are poison.
‘I’ve had it with your threats. Get away from me and my friends, and don’t you dare come back. I never want to see you here again.’
I can’t see Luc’s face in the darkness, only Kate’s, hard as stone and full of fear and anger.
He doesn’t say anything. For a long time he only stands, facing Kate, and I feel the wordless tension between them – strong as blood, but now turned to hate.
At last though, Luc turns, and begins to walk away into the darkness of the marsh, a tall black figure melting into the night.
‘You’re welcome, Isa,’ he calls back over his shoulder as he disappears. ‘In case I didn’t say. Looking after your baby – it was nothing. I’d be happy to take her again.’
And then the sound of his footsteps fades away into the night. And we are alone.
AS WE WALK the last short stretch back to the Mill, I try not to let Luc’s words get inside my head, but I can’t help it. Every step is like an echo of that night, seventeen years ago. Sometimes what happened then seems like something done in another place, another time, which has nothing to do with me. But now, stumbling across the marsh, I know that is not true. My feet remember that night, even if I have tried to forget, and my skin crawls with the memory of the hot summer stickiness.
The weather was just the same, the insects still buzzing in the peat, the warm air a strange contrast to the chilly moonlight as we stumbled over stiles and ditches, our phones casting a ghostly glow over our faces as we checked and checked again for another message from Kate, one that would tell us what was going on. But there was nothing – just that first, anguished text: I need you.
I had been ready for bed when it came through, brushing my hair in the light of Fatima’s reading lamp as she ploughed through her trigonometry homework.
The beep beep! shattered the quiet of the our little room, and Fatima’s head came up.
‘Was that yours or mine?’
‘I’m not sure,’ I said. I picked up my phone. ‘Mine, it’s from Kate.’
‘She’s texted me too,’ Fatima said, perplexed, and then, as she opened the text, I heard her indrawn breath at the same time as mine.
‘What does it mean?’ I asked. But we both knew. They were the same words I had texted the day my father phoned and told me that my mother’s cancer had metastasised, and that it was now a matter of when, not if.
The same words Thea had texted when she had cut herself too deeply by accident, and the blood wouldn’t stop flowing.
When Fatima’s mother’s jeep crashed on a remote country road in a dangerous rural area, when Kate had trodden on a rusty nail, coming back one night from breaking out of bounds … each time those three little words, and the others had come, to comfort, to help, to pick up the pieces as best we could. And each time it had been OK, or as OK as it could be – Fatima’s mother had turned up safe and well the next day. Thea had gone to A&E, armed with some story or other to cover up what she had done. Kate had limped back, held up between us, and we had bathed the scratch with TCP and hoped for the best.
We could solve anything, between us. We felt invincible. Only my mother, dying by slow degrees in a London hospital, remained like a distant reminder that sometimes not everything would be OK.
Where are you? I texted back, and as I was waiting for an answer, we both heard the sound of running footsteps on the spiral stairs above, and Thea burst into the room.
‘Did you get it?’ she panted. I nodded.
‘Where is she?’ Fatima asked.
‘She’s at the Mill. Something’s happened – I asked what, but she hasn’t replied.’
I hurried back into my clothes and we climbed out of the window and set out across the marsh.
Kate was waiting for us when we arrived at the Mill, standing on the little gangway that led across the water, her arms wrapped around herself, and I knew from her face, before she even spoke, that there was something very, very wrong.
She was bone white, her eyes red with crying, and her face was streaked with the drying salt of tears.
Thea began to run as we caught sight of her, Fatima and I jogging after her, and Kate stumbled across the narrow gap of water, her breath hitching in her throat as she tried to say, ‘It – it – it’s Dad.’
Kate was alone when she found him. She hadn’t invited the rest of us that weekend, making an excuse when Thea suggested coming over, and Luc was out with his friends from Hampton’s Lee. When Kate arrived at the Mill, bag in hand, she thought at first Ambrose was out too, but he was not. He was sitting on the jetty, slumped in his chair, a wine bottle on his lap, and a note in his hand, and at first she couldn’t believe that he was really gone. She dragged him back into the Mill, tried mouth-to-mouth, and only after God knows how long begging and pleading, and trying to get his heart to start again did she break down, and begin to realise the hugeness of what had just happened.
‘I’m at peace with my decision,’ the note read, and he did look at peace – his expression tranquil, his head flung back for all the world like a man taking an afternoon nap. ‘I love you …’
The letters trailed almost into incoherence at the end.
‘But – but, why, and how?’ Fatima kept asking. Kate didn’t answer. She was crouched on the floor, staring at her father’s body as though, if she looked at it for long enough, she would begin to understand what had happened, while Fatima paced the room behind her, and I sat on the sofa, my hand on Kate’s back, trying without words to convey everything that I didn’t know how to express.
She didn’t move – she and Ambrose the still, hunched centre of our restless panic, but I had the sense that it was only because she had cried herself into numbness and despair before we arrived.
It was Thea who picked up the object lying on the kitchen table.
‘What’s this doing here?’
Kate didn’t answer, but I looked up, to see Thea holding something that looked like an old biscuit tin, covered with a delicate floral pattern. It was oddly familiar, and after a moment I realised where I’d seen it before – it was usually on the top shelf of the kitchen dresser, tucked away, almost out of sight.
There was a padlock on the lid, but the thin metal clasp had been wrenched open, as if by someone too distraught to bother with
a key, and there was no resistance when Thea opened it. Inside was what looked like a jumble of medical equipment wrapped in an old leather strap, and lying on top was a crumpled up piece of cling film, with traces of powder still clinging to the folds; powder that stuck to Thea’s fingers as she touched the plastic wrap.
‘Careful!’ Fatima yelped. ‘You don’t know what that is – it could be poison. Wash your hands, quick.’
But then Kate spoke, from her position on the floor. She didn’t look up, but spoke into her hunched knees, almost as if she were talking to her father, stretched out on the rug in front of her.
‘It’s not poison,’ she said. ‘It’s heroin.’
‘Ambrose?’ Fatima said incredulously. ‘He – he was a heroin addict?’
I understood her disbelief. Addicts were people lying in alleyways, characters in Trainspotting. Not Ambrose, with his laughter and his red wine, and his wild creativity.
But something in her words had struck a chord – a phrase written above his painting desk, in his studio on the top floor, words that I’d seen so often but never tried to understand. You’re never an ex-addict, you’re just an addict who hasn’t had a fix in a while.
And they suddenly made sense.
Why hadn’t I asked him what they meant? Because I was young? Because I was selfish and self-absorbed, still at an age where only my own problems mattered?
‘He was clean,’ I said huskily. ‘Right, Kate?’
Kate nodded. She didn’t look away from her father, her eyes stayed fixed on his gentle, sleeping face, but when I came and sat beside her, she reached for my hand, and her voice was so low that it was hard to hear her.
‘He took it at university but I think it only got out of control after my mother died. But he got clean when I was still a baby – he’s been clean for as long as I can remember.’
‘Then why …’ Fatima began uncertainly. She trailed off, but her gaze went to the box on the table, and Kate knew what she meant.
‘I think …’ she spoke slowly, like someone trying hard to make themselves understand. ‘I think it was some kind of test … He tried to explain it to me once. It wasn’t enough just to keep it out of the house. He had to wake up every day and make a choice to stay – to stay c-clean for m-me.’
