The Dark Shore

by Susan Howatch

  He shouted something and then was after her and the rocks were the towering tombstones of a nightmare and the roar of the sea merged with the roaring of the blood in her ears. The granite grazed her hands, tore at her stockings, bruised her feet through the soles of her shoes. She twisted and turned, scrambling amongst the rocks, terrified of coming up against a blank wall of rock or falling into a deep gulley. And still he came after her, gaining slowly every minute, and her mind was a blank void of terror depriving her of speech and voice.

  When she was at the base of the cliff again she caught her foot in a crevice and the jolt wrenched her ankle and tore off her shoe. She gave a cry of pain, the sound wrenched involuntarily from her body, and as the sound was carried away from her on the still night air she saw the pin-prick of light above her on the cliff-path.

  “Jon!” she screamed, thrusting all her energy into that one monosyllable. “Jon! Jon!”

  And then Rivers was upon her and she was fighting for her life, scratching, clawing, biting in a frenzy of self-preservation. The scene began to blur before her eyes, the world tilted crazily. She tried to scream again but no sound came, and as the energy ebbed from her body she felt his fingers close on her throat.

  There was pain. It was a hot red light suffocating her entire brain. She tried to breathe and could not. Her hands were just slackening their grip on his body when there was a sound far above her, and the pebbles started to rattle down the cliff face, flicking across her face like hail stones.

  She heard Rivers gasp something, and then he was gone and she fell back against the rock.

  The blackness when it came a second later was a welcome release from the swimming nightmare of terror and fear.

  3

  When she awoke, there was a man bending over her, and although it seemed that an eternity had passed since Rivers had left her, she learned afterwards that she had been unconscious for less than a minute. The man was frantic. There was sweat on his forehead and fear in his eyes and he kept saying, “Sarah, Sarah, Sarah” as if his mind would not allow him to say anything else.

  She put up her hand and touched his lips with her fingers.

  “Is she all right?” said another vaguely familiar voice from close at hand. “Where the hell is Rivers?”

  The man whose lips she had touched stood up. “Stay here with Sarah, Max. Have you got that? Don’t leave her alone for a moment. Stay with her.”

  “Jon,” her voice said. “Jon.”

  He bent over her again. “I’m going to find him,” he said to her gently. “Justin’s gone after him already. Max’ll look after you.”

  “He—he killed Sophia, Jon... He told me—”

  “I know.”

  He was gone. One moment he was there and the next moment he had moved out of her sight and she was alone with Alexander. He was breathing very heavily, as if the sudden violent exercise had been too much for him.

  “Max—”

  “Yes, I’m here.” He sat down beside her, still panting with exertion, and as he took her hand comfortingly in his she had the odd instinctive feeling that he cared for her. The feeling was so strange and so illogical that she dismissed it instantly without a second thought, and instead concentrated all her mind on the relief of being alive.

  And as they waited together at the base of the cliffs, Jon was sprinting over the Flat Rocks to the water’s edge, the beam of the torch in his hand warning him of the gulleys and the crevices, the reefs and lagoons.

  By the water’s edge he paused.

  “Justin!”

  There was an answering flicker of a torch further away, a muffled shout.

  Jon moved forward again, leaping from rock to rock, slithering past seaweed and splashing in diminutive rock pools. It took him two minutes to reach his son.

  “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know.” Justin’s face was white in the torchlight, his eyes dark and huge and ringed with tiredness.

  “You lost sight of him?”

  “He was here.” He gestured with his torch. They were standing on a squat rock, and six feet below them the sea was sucking and gurgling with the motions of the tide. “I saw him reach this rock and then scramble over it until he was lost from sight.”

  Jon was silent. Presently he shone his torch up and down the channel below, but there was nothing there except the dark water and the white of the surf.

  “Could he—do you think he would have tried to swim round to the cove?”

  “Don’t be a bloody fool.”

  The boy hung his head a little, as if regretting the stupidity of his suggestion, and waited wordlessly for the other man to make the next move.

  “He couldn’t have fallen in the darkness,” said Jon after a moment. “When you reach the top of a rock you always stop to look to see what’s on the other side. And if he had slipped into this channel he could have clambered out on to the other side—unless he struck his head on the rocky floor, and then we’d be able to see his body.”

  “Then—”

  “Perhaps you’re right and he went swimming after all... We’d better search these rocks here just to make sure, I suppose. You take that side and I’ll take this side.”

  But although they searched for a long while in the darkness they found no trace of Michael Rivers, and it was many weeks before his body was finally recovered from the sea.

  4

  “What’ll happen?” said Justin to his father. “What shall we do?”

  They were in the drawing-room at Clougy again. It was after midnight, and the tiredness was aching through Justin’s body in great throbbing waves of exhaustion. Even when he sat down the room seemed to waver and recede dizzily before his eyes.

  “We’ll have to call the police.”

  “You’re mad, of course,” said Alexander from the sofa. “You must be. What on Earth are you going to say to the police? That Michael’s dead? We don’t know for sure that he is. That Michael tried to kill Sarah? The first question the police are going to ask is why the hell should Michael, a perfectly respectable solicitor, a pillar of society, suddenly attempt to murder your wife. My dear Jon, you’ll end up by getting so involved that the police will probably think we’re all in one enormous conspiracy to pull wool over their eyes. They’ll ask you why, if you knew your first wife had been murdered, you didn’t say so at the time. They’ll ask you all sorts of questions about Marijohn and your reasons for wanting to protect her. They’ll probe incessantly for motives—”

  “For Christ’s sake, Max!”

  “Well, stop talking such God almighty rubbish.”

  “Are you scared for your own skin or something?”

  “Oh God,” said Alexander wearily, and turned to the boy hunched in the armchair. “Justin, explain to your father that if he goes to the police now Sophia—and probably Michael too—have both died in vain. Ask him if he really wants Sarah’s name smeared all across the Sunday papers. ‘Canadian millionaire in murder mystery. Horror on the Honeymoon.’ God, can’t you imagine the headlines even now? ‘Sensation! Millionaire’s first wife murdered! Millionaire helping the police in their inquiries.’ II would be intolerable for you all, Jon—for Sarah, for Justin, for Marijohn—”

  The door opened. He stopped as Marijohn came into the room.

  “How is she?” said Jon instantly. “Is she asking for me? Is she all right?”

  “She’s asleep. I gave her two of my sleeping tablets.” She turned away from him and moved over towards the boy in the corner. “Justin darling, you look quite exhausted. Why don’t you go to bed? There’s nothing more you can do now.”

  “I—” He faltered, looking at his father. “I was wondering what’s going to happen. If you call the police—”

  “Police?” said Marijohn blankly. She swung round to face Jon. “Police?”

  “Tell him he’s crazy, Marijohn.”

  “Look, Max—”

  There they go again, thought Justin numbly. More arguments, more talk. Police or no pol
ice, what to tell and what not to tell, Michael’s death or disappearance and what to do about it. And I’m so very very tired...

  He closed his eyes for a second. The voices became fainter and then suddenly someone was stooping over him and there was an arm round his shoulders and the cold rim of the glass against his lips. He drank, choked and opened his eyes as the liquid burnt his throat.

  “Poor Justin,” said the voice he had loved so much ten years ago. “Come on, you’re going to bed. Drink the rest of the brandy and we’ll go upstairs.” There was fire in his throat again. The great heaviness in his limbs seemed to lessen fractionally and with his father’s help he managed to stand up and moved over to the door.

  “I’m all right now,” he heard himself say in the hall. “Sorry to be a nuisance.”

  “I’ll come upstairs with you.”

  There seemed more stairs than usual, an endless climb to the distant plateau of the landing, but at last they were in the bedroom and the bed was soft and yielding as he sank down on it thankfully.

  “I’m all right,” he repeated automatically, and then his shirt was eased gently from his body and the next moment the cool pajama jacket brushed his skin.

  “I’m afraid I’ve been very selfish,” said his father’s voice. “I haven’t said a word of thanks to you since you arrived back and all I could do down on the Flat Rocks was to be abrupt and short-tempered.”

  “It—it doesn’t matter. I understand.”

  “I’ll never forget that it was you who saved Sarah. I want you to know that. If Sarah had died tonight—”

  “She’ll be all right, won’t she? She’s going to be all right?”

  “Yes,” said Jon. “She’s going to be all right.”

  The sheets were deliciously white, the pillow sensuously soft and yielding. Justin sank back, pulling the coverlet across his chest and allowing his limbs to relax in a haze of comfort and peace.

  He never even heard his father leave the room.

  When he awoke it was still dark but someone had opened the door of his room and the light from the landing was shining across the foot of his bed.

  “Who’s that?” he murmured sleepily, and then Marijohn was stooping over him and he twisted round in bed so that he could see her better. “What’s happened?” he said, suddenly very wide awake, his brain miraculously clear and alert. “Have you called the police?”

  “No.” She sat down on the edge of the bed and for a moment he thought she was going to kiss him but she merely touched his cheek lightly with her fingertips. “I’m sorry I woke you up. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Jon’s just gone to bed and Max is still downstairs drinking the last of the whisky. We’ve been talking for nearly three hours.”

  He sat up a little in bed. “Haven’t you decided anything?”

  She looked at him and he thought he saw her smile faintly, but the light was behind her and it was difficult for him to see her face.

  “You’re leaving tomorrow—you and Sarah and Jon,” she said and there was a curious dull edge to her voice which he didn’t fully understand. “You’ll go straight to London and catch the first plane to Canada. Max and I are going to handle the police.”

  He stared at her blankly. “How?” he said. “What are you going to tell them?”

  “Very little. Max is going to drive Michael’s car up past the farm and abandon it on the heath near the airport. Then tomorrow or the day after I’m going to phone the police and tell them that I’m worried about Michael and think he may have committed suicide—I’m going to say that Max and I have found Michael’s car abandoned on the heath after you all departed for London. Our story is going to be that Michael came down here in the hope of persuading me to go back to him, and when I refused—finally and forever—there was a scene which ended in him leaving the house and driving away. We shall say he threatened suicide before he left. Then the police can search for him as thoroughly as they wish, and when his body is eventually recovered—-as I suppose it must be, even on this rocky coast— it’ll lend support to our story.”

  “Supposing Michael isn’t dead?”

  “He must be. Jon is convinced of it. Michael had nothing left to live for, nothing at all.”

  “But...” He hesitated, trying to phrase what he wanted to say. Then; “Why is it so vital that the police don’t know the truth from start to finish?” he blurted out at last. “I mean, I know the scandal would be terrible, but—”

  “There are reasons,” she said. “Your father will tell you.”

  “But why did Michael try to kill Sarah? And why did he kill my mother? I don’t—”

  “He wanted to protect me,” she said, her voice suddenly flat and without life. “It was all for me. Your father will explain everything to you later when you’re all far away in Canada.”

  He still stared at her. “I couldn’t see why he was the murderer,” he repeated at last. “I knew he must have been the murderer but I couldn’t see why.”

  “What did Eve tell you? What did she say that suddenly made you realize Michael was guilty?”

  “I—I persuaded her to talk to me about her own memories of that weekend at Clougy, and her memories, when I pieced them together with my own, spelled the real sequence of events.” He paused to collect his thoughts, thinking of Eve and the little room in St. Ives above the blue of the bay. “I thought my father had killed my mother because I followed a man with a red sweater up the cliff-path and saw him push my mother to her death in the darkness ... As soon as I’d seen her fall I ran away up the hillside and over the hill-top to Clougy. I didn’t take the cliff-path back to the house because I was afraid my father would see me, so I never discovered that the man in the red sweater wasn’t my father at all. But I think Michael must have returned to the house by a similar route to the one I took, because neither of you, coming from Sennen, nor my father, coming from Clougy along the cliff-path, saw either Michael or myself. My father told me tonight that you and he had met by the steps soon after my mother fell.

  “When I left the house to follow the man in the red sweater I met Eve— she was coming up the path from the beach just as I was about to take the fork which led up on the cliffs. I hid from her, and she didn’t see me.

  “This afternoon she told me what had happened to her that evening. She said that when she reached the house again after I’d seen her she met my father. That proved to me that the man in the red sweater couldn’t have been my father, and she also remembered he wasn’t wearing a sweater when she saw him and that the red sweater he’d worn earlier in the evening had been removed from the chest in the hall.

  “That meant the man had to be either Michael or Max. And according to Eve, it couldn’t possibly have been Max because she’d seen him go off along the cliff-path to the Flat Rocks some while before she passed me on her way back to the house. She said they had quarreled at the spot where the path from Clougy forks, one track leading up on to the cliffs and one leading down to the cove, and afterwards he had gone off up the cliff-path to wait for my mother—Eve saw him go. Then she sat down by the fork in the path to try to pull herself together and decide what she should do. She would have seen Max if he had come back from the cliffs, but he didn’t come back. And the man in the red sweater, whom I followed had started out from the house a few minutes before I saw Eve coming back up the path to Clougy where she was to meet my father. So the man had to be Michael. My father was still at the house and Max had already gone out to the Flat Rocks. There was no one else it could possibly be.”

  “I see.” She was silent for a moment, and he wondered what she was thinking. And then she was standing up, smoothing the skirt of her dress over her hips automatically, and moving towards the door again. “You’d better get some more sleep,” she said at last. “I mustn’t keep you awake any longer.”

  She stepped across the threshold, and as she turned to close the door and the light slanted across her face, something in her expression made him call out after her.

 
But she did not hear him.

  5

  Max had just finished the whisky when Marijohn went downstairs to lock up and switch off the lights. A half-smoked cigarette was between his fingers and as she came into the room the ash dropped from the glowing tip to the carpet.

  “Hullo,” he said, and he didn’t sound very drunk. “How’s my fellow conspirator?”

  She drew the curtains back, not answering, and reached up to fasten the bolt on the French windows.

  “You know why I’m doing it, don’t you?” he said sardonically. “I'm not doing it for you or for Jon. Between you you’ve destroyed a good man and were indirectly responsible for Sophia’s death. You deserve all you get. So I’m not doing this for you. I’m doing this for the girl because I don’t see why she should suffer any more than she’s suffered already. Quixotic, isn’t it? Rather amusing. But then I’ve always been a fool over women Lord, what a fool I was over Sophia! I wanted her dead just as much as everyone else did, did you ever realize that? I told Sarah this afternoon that I felt sorry for Sophia, and so I did—to begin with. But I left several detail, out of my story to Sarah; I never told her that Sophia was trying to force me me into taking her away to London with me, never mentioned that Sophia was threatening me, never hinted that it was I, not Sophia, who suggested the rendezvous on the Flat Rocks so that I could try and make her see reason ... And once she was dead, of course, I said nothing, never breathing a word of my suspicions to anyone, because I had a strong motive for wanting her dead and in any police murder inquiry I would naturally be one of the chief suspects ... And even now you won’t have to worry in case I decide to change my mind and say too much to the police some time in the future, because I know for a fact that I haven’t long to live and when I die you’ll all be quite safe, you and Jon, Sarah and the boy ... The boy will have to know the full story, of course. I can’t say I envy Jon having to explain ... You’re fond of the boy, aren’t you? I suppose it’s because he reminds you of Jon.”

  Yes, said a voice in her brain instantly in a sudden flare of grief, and no doubt I shall always have to share him just as I’ve had to share Jon. Aloud she said, “I’ve no mental affinity with Justin at all. He doesn’t remind me of Jon as much as all that.”