by Tim Weaver
Kilburn smiled. ‘Bit late to run for it now.’
The smile broadened and he let out a long breath of air. Most of it was drawn from relief, from knowing he was back in control, that his daughter was safe, that he would be seeing her again soon. Whatever he’d done in his life, whatever the whole truth about that night at the cabin, Kilburn wasn’t a sadist. He didn’t lie, injure and kill because any of it appealed to him. He did it because he was protecting himself, purely and simply.
‘Get on the phone to Barry Sargent at the airport,’ he said to his sister, still watching me, still holding the pistol at his side, ‘and tell him I need a pilot to take me to the ship. Tell him I’ll be there’ – he checked his watch – ‘in thirty minutes.’
After he’s taken care of me.
His sister looked at me. She seemed uncomfortable with the idea of what was coming, of the subtext hidden behind her brother’s demand. I tried to stare her down, to appeal to her somehow, to get her to talk him back, but she ripped her gaze from me and headed for the turnstile.
‘Jack,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to do this.’
‘So is this what you were going to tell me?’ he said, shoving the gun at me. ‘Or were you just stringing me along?’
I shook my head. ‘No.’
The turnstile squeaked again as Kilburn’s sister moved back through. He didn’t look at her once, just kept his eyes focused on me, but I did: I followed her as she emerged on to the other side, fleeing the lido; watching as she glanced over her shoulder at me, once, twice, before finally vanishing from view.
‘Were you going to tell me?’
I turned to him.
‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Beth wouldn’t want this.’
‘How would you know what she wants?’
‘I spoke to her on the ship.’
‘So?’
‘So this violence is what drove her away in the first pl–’
He smashed the gun across my face.
I was on the floor, dazed, before I’d even realized what was going on. I could feel snow against one side of my face, blood leaking from a cut above my eye on the other, and Kilburn was standing over me, leaning forward, screaming at me, ‘Don’t talk to me about my daughter! You’ll never know what it’s been like for me!’
I’d brought my arms up to my face to protect myself, expecting the gun to go off, steeling myself for a punch, a kick, praying his finger didn’t slip against the trigger. I could hear my heart in my ears, feel a thump behind my eyes. I took my arms away again and watched him level the weapon at me.
‘Jack, please.’
My voice wavered.
‘Jack, you don’t have to –’
‘Shut up.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’
‘Shut up.’
He leaned down and pressed the gun against my head, rolling me on to my back. I listened to Kilburn’s sister driving away, the engine disappearing against the moan of the wind, and then it was just the wind, and the snow, and us.
‘If you’re going to do it, Jack,’ I said to Kilburn, ‘then do it.’
I closed my eyes.
In the darkness, I thought of Richard Presley, a man who’d survived, knowing nothing about himself, on the other side of the world; and now here I was, about to die for knowing too much, seven thousand miles from home.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
I opened my eyes again.
Kilburn was looking beyond me. I shifted, propping myself up on to an elbow, and again felt the warmth of blood at my face.
‘We’ve betrayed our kids.’ Another voice, the words slurred.
I twisted and looked over to the changing rooms.
The voice belonged to Bill Presley.
70
Presley stood about three feet away, still in his police uniform. Across the front of his black windbreaker were the letters REIP, in white, the badge of the Royal Empress Islands Police on his breast. He was holding a shotgun, the stock against his shoulder, and aiming it at Kilburn, but he seemed to sway as he stood. The smell of booze carried across to us on the wind.
Kilburn shook his head, his own gun still at his side. ‘How long have you been hiding?’ Kilburn took a step forward, looking past Presley to the changing rooms. He made a show of sniffing the air. ‘Do they serve whisky in there now?’
Presley didn’t respond.
Kilburn shook his head again, looking down at me and back up to Presley. ‘Bill, you’re drunk at two in the afternoon, so why don’t you let me handle this?’
‘You know when it changed?’
Kilburn sighed. ‘What?’
‘You know when all of this changed?’
‘What the fuck are you talking about?’
‘What we did up there,’ Presley said, nodding sideways at the hills, at the folds and clefts of Mount Strathyde, ‘it was survival to start with. You and me, we weren’t as clever as Roland, so it took me a while to catch on.’ He wasn’t fully drunk, but his words were soft, the edges of them doughy and flat. ‘The fence and the lies and the bullshit; the money we took – waiting thirteen years for Roland to hand out our share to us like the good little boys we were; at his beck and call when the Argie police came here asking questions. It was all survival.’
‘You’re rambling,’ Kilburn said.
‘No,’ Presley shot back, shaking his head. He glanced at me. ‘No. We were trying to survive for a long time, trying not to get sent to prison for what we did, and I swallowed it and I accepted it, we both did, because that’s what Roland said was for the best.’ He adjusted both hands at the shotgun. ‘But you know when it all changed, Jack? You know when it suddenly hit me? The full weight of what we’d done, all the things we’d covered up, the misery we’d brought to other people, the families they had – you know when I saw it clearly for the first time?’
Kilburn looked at me again, but something was different. He’d worked out where this was going. He knew where Presley was headed.
‘Penny,’ Presley said.
Her name made Kilburn jolt.
‘When Roland told us she was dead, why she was dead, when he told us that Kraut, or Pole, or whatever the fuck Marek is, dumped her body on that railway line, shoving her into those sleepers like she wasn’t worth a damn thing, you just accepted it. This girl you’d brought up as your own, you just accepted –’
‘I didn’t accept it.’
‘So what did you do about it? Huh?’ Presley waited for an answer. When he didn’t get one, he said, ‘It’s been two years, Jack. She’s been gone two years.’
‘I mourn her every day.’
‘Do you? You never signed off on her murder, I’ll give you that much. But you went along with it after. You’re as culpable as that prick who put her there on that line. And that was the moment when I saw everything clearly.’ He glanced at me again, and this time he addressed me: ‘When Roland told us about you, I thought, “Good. Let him come.” ’ He stopped for a second. ‘ “Let him come.” ’
‘Put the gun down, Bill,’ Kilburn said.
‘I’m glad my boy’s got no memory,’ he said in reply, his voice starting to break. ‘He doesn’t remember me. He doesn’t remember the things he found out about us. He doesn’t know who we are and what we did, the lives we ruined.’
‘Bill,’ Kilburn said again.
I watched Presley’s eyes shift to Kilburn’s gun.
‘Why would Beth ever want to see you again, Jack?’
Kilburn’s eyes flashed. ‘She’s my daughter.’
‘No.’
‘I’m her father.’
‘No,’ Presley said again.
He took a step closer to Kilburn.
‘You stopped being her father two years ago. You stopped being her father when you allowed Roland to get away with what he did. Beth’s better off without you, Jack. Richard’s better off without me. You and I, we betrayed our children.’
They watched each other for a second.
&
nbsp; The wind blew; the snow surged and swelled.
And then the silence was shattered by a gunshot.
71
Birds scattered from the roof of the lido, taking off into the sky.
I got up on to my feet, still woozy, my trousers damp from the grass, my face burning along the ridges of my cheekbone. I used the sleeve of my coat to wipe away the blood, and looked at Presley. He was standing between the bench Kilburn and I had been sitting on and the changing rooms, his shotgun at his side.
He was sobbing.
I turned to Kilburn. He lay on the slant of the grass as it dropped away to the swimming pool, eyes staring up into the granite of the sky. As the snow fell around us, it began forming in patches on his body, on the toes of his upturned boots, in the folds of his coat, in the cleft at his throat. Blood spread out either side of him, like a pair of red wings, the embers of his life finding a path through the grass, artery-like, filling microscopic chasms and voids.
I looked back at Presley.
He was crying harder, waves of it coming up from his chest, bending him almost double. The shotgun became a walking stick, the barrel of the weapon in the ground supporting his weight as he leaned into it. When he lifted his other hand to his face, swabbing tears away, his fingers wiping at his nose, I noticed that something was poking out of his pocket: the corner of a colour photograph.
I took a step closer, conscious that he was armed and loaded on whisky, but he didn’t move, didn’t even react, and as I took a second step towards him, I saw more of the photo. It had been on the mantelpiece in his house that morning. It was him and Richard, arms around each other’s shoulders, in a different time.
A different life.
I noticed something else too.
Matted to his hands was earth and what looked like rose petals. I thought of Jacob Howson then, of how he’d brought flowers to the railway line, to a grave site on the opposite side of the world.
And now here I was in another.
For a while, I’d thought it was going to be mine as Kilburn had pressed the gun to my head, but it was his. I looked at him, his body splayed across the ground, and again I felt a moment of remorse for him, despite what he’d done.
‘Here.’
I turned back to Presley.
He was looking at me, tears running into his beard. In front of him, he was holding something out, pinched between his fingers.
It was a key.
‘Is that for the cabin?’ I said.
He nodded, sniffed.
‘What will I find up there?’
He didn’t seem to have heard me.
‘Bill?’ I said, using his first name as a way to try and get his attention. He looked up at me. ‘Bill, what will I find up there?’
I saw more earth on his hands, forming little brown crescents beneath his fingernails. It was on his jacket, along the bottom fringes of it, at his knees.
‘If it isn’t you,’ he said, looking past the key he was still holding out to me, ‘it’ll be someone else.’ He paused, his lips parting slightly. At his gum, I could see the slightly skewed front tooth he shared with his son. Beneath his beanie, a hint of thin red hair poked out. ‘You, the Argies, there’ll be others too. You’ll just come and come because the thing is, no secret can stay hidden. You think you’ve buried yours somewhere far up into the hills, you think you’ve put them behind a fence, behind a thing that scares the shit out of everyone, but they don’t stay up there.’ He threw the key to me. ‘As long as human beings have a conscience, secrets will never stay hidden.’
I glanced at the key.
‘He had the most beautiful soul.’
I looked at Presley again.
‘Richard,’ he said. ‘He was a beautiful kid. He used to read all these books, one after the other. He’d know so much about everything. I’d listen to him over dinner, or when we went out fishing or kicking a ball around, and every time was like the new, best moment of my life. When you look at your kid, and you realize they’re so much better than you’ll ever be, even in your best moment, it’s like …’ Presley ground to a halt, unable to form the words, tears running down his face. He wiped them away and smiled, but it was a smile that was hard to watch. It was like sunshine after a bomb – it lit him up, but the devastation was done.
‘Tell Richard I love him.’
‘Bill, wait a second –’
‘Just tell him I love him.’
He raised the shotgun at me.
‘And tell him that beach he can remember – just to forget about it.’
I frowned. ‘What?’
‘I read online that he can remember looking out at a beach as a kid. I read that they think it might have been where he grew up.’ He shook his head. ‘It isn’t. He didn’t grow up by the beach. Just tell him I’m sorry, okay? Just tell him to forget it.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I want you to leave now.’
I stared at him.
‘You have the key,’ he said. ‘Now leave.’
‘You don’t have to do this.’
But he was already shaking his head.
‘This is exactly what I have to do.’
I walked into a wall of wind, following the half-mile road back towards Sophia. In the distance, smudged by snow and sea mist, I could see the lights at Blake Point. The Olympia was gone. The islands were cut off from the world again.
I was marooned here.
After a few minutes, I looked back over my shoulder at the lido, sitting like a blister on the edge of the plateau. I heard birds somewhere close by – and then they stopped, and the wind dropped away.
A single gunshot rang out.
72
The hiking trails were all scree, grey veins worming their way up the side of the mountain. As I climbed in the direction of the Brink, the snow eased off, thinning out, but the wind got stronger, drawn to the mounds and drops of Strathyde.
It was freezing cold and hard on the body: at points, I was leaning forward almost at forty-five degrees, the wind hammering against me, blowing the hood off my head, its noise like a dog whistle against my eardrums. Everything hurt: the bruise on my face, the ones on my hands, on my arms, on my ribs. I paused at one stage and, through the gauze of the snowfall, thought I could see an actual road somewhere in the distance, its shape gouged out of the hills. I remembered how Beth had talked about Kilburn coming up in a vehicle and leaving her and Penny at the fence. But the road looked difficult to negotiate, full of hairpin turns, and even if I’d had a car I wasn’t convinced it would have been safer. The snow wasn’t thick but it was thick enough, and up here the roads wouldn’t be gritted.
Twenty minutes after that, the landscape changed.
It seemed to come out of nowhere, the mountain cleaving in two. I glanced back, estimating that I was about eight hundred feet up, and looked ahead of me again. The trail petered out about thirty feet in front of me, and was replaced by two distinct halves. On the right, Strathyde continued its ascent, just without a defined path, rising another two thousand feet to its peak. On the left, there was a kind of plain, a flat shelf of land that, as I got closer, I could see gradually sloped away. It was wide, too wide to properly get a sense of in the weather – but I knew immediately where I was.
Somewhere near the Brink.
I kept going, leaving the last of the scree and crossing into grass. Initially it was shorter, less dense, but it soon thickened, condensing into chunks, the ground becoming softer, the snow struggling to settle because of how moist it was. In front of me, though, flakes still whirled and dipped, massaged by the wind, and a faint mist began to land, gripping the outline of the mountain. I could see far enough ahead to know where I was going, but at eight hundred feet above the town, hardly any of Sophia was visible any more.
I walked on a little further, then stopped.
For the first time, I could see the fence.
It was six feet tall and ran all the way across the marshland, right
to left. It was hard to gauge for how far, or how many wire-mesh fence panels must have been put up, but it was more than enough. I tried following it for a while to see if there was any break in it, tracing the downward cant of the hill, but I couldn’t see any gaps, no breaches at all, and then I spotted something else.
The pillbox.
Feeling a flutter of unease, I walked to the fence and looked through the wire at the size and scale of the Brink; into the ring of mist that had bedded in, to snow that moved and whirled and constantly changed shape.
I’d been to places like this before, to buildings that carried the weight of their past, to patches of land whose history was burned into their soil. I’d never believed in ghosts – not the sort that rattled chains and made noises in the attic – but I believed a place could retain a sense of the things that had happened in it, like a residue that never dried out. And this was one of them.
I could see it, feel it.
I laced my fingers through the mesh, found a hole with the toe of my boot and started to haul myself up. At the top, a leg on either side of the line, I looked out into the long grass again, everything moving in the wind – swaying, altering – and I felt a hesitation. Somewhere deeper down, a part of me argued against the idea of going beyond the fence at all. The feeling became stronger the longer I chewed on it, a magnetic pull wanting to drag me back to safety.
I pushed the doubt away, swung my leg over and climbed down the other side. When my feet hit the ground, I felt them sink into the wetness of the peat bog, the long grass whipping against my legs in the wind.
I turned and looked left down the slant of the mountainside, and then right, higher up, in the direction of the place that Richard had described to Beth: the tarn, the cabin, what I hoped would be the truth. I couldn’t see anything, no landmarks at all except for the looming shadow of Strathyde, its crags lean and emaciated.
