She’d spent much of the day considering treachery. She could blame it on Will; she could pin it on Charlotte. If the police came, asking questions, she could deflect all the blame. Nobody saw what she saw. They all killed Bruce Craven; all three of them played their part. Charlotte struck him with a stone, Will strangled him with his bare hands, and she just finished off the job that they’d bungled. He was a formidable man; he took some killing. Surely he was dead?
There was another knock at the door, it was impatient now, more aggressive. Was this the police? Was her time up? Had they found Bruce’s body in the foundations of the paddling pool, hauling it out of the newly poured concrete before it had time to set? Was he really alive, had he reported them all to the police? Maybe somebody saw what she did; perhaps they weren’t the only ones wandering through Sandy Beaches Holiday Camp in the dead of night.
She had to think it through quickly now. Jenna had run through the scenarios several times. It was easiest to blame it on Will. He would not let Charlotte take the blame for her part in Bruce’s assault. It was self-defence, after all. Bruce was trying to rape her on the beach at the time. Any woman would have done the same thing if the opportunity had presented itself.
As for Will, reluctantly, she had to admit that was also self-defence. He’d gone to see if Bruce needed help and, like the feral animal he was, he attacked the man who had come to his aid. She’d been terrified as she witnessed Bruce’s pursuit of Will from her hiding place behind the gorse bush. The power and sheer velocity of the man was enough to paralyse anybody with fear. There was no doubt about it; it had been self-defence for Will. So, if she removed herself from the equation, her two friends would be charged with manslaughter at the very worst. They’d likely get off without a sentence, particularly if they told the court the truth about what had happened. And if Bruce was still alive? Who knew how he’d take his revenge.
As Jenna had searched her soul that day, she found that when push came to shove, she was lacking in the moral fibre that her parents had tried to instil in her from an early age. After all, in the eyes of the law, she was what Charlotte and Will were not. Jenna Phillips was a murderer. At least, she’d intended to murder Bruce. She hadn’t finished off Bruce Craven in self-defence. She’d taken that last, agonised breath from him because she hated the man. She could no longer face the way he forced himself on her roughly in bed, the constant, eroding comments about her appearance and her behaviour, or the sense that she simply did not have the courage to walk away. Bruce Craven had to be stopped. At that time, in that place, caught as she was, Jenna could see no other way out.
Yet, she would happily throw her friends under the bus to avoid prison, if it came to that. The thought of the police coming to question her, taking her down to the station, getting fingerprints and those terrible prisoner photos that she’d seen on the TV and in the papers; the fear and shame of it all consumed her with terror. In the twenty-four hours or so since she thought Bruce Craven had drawn his last breath, Jenna had learned some harsh truths about herself. She was a coward, she was treacherous, and she would rather see her friends suffer than have to go through the process of seeking justice for Bruce Craven’s attack. She was abdicating all responsibility. If this was the police at the door, she’d deny any culpability and point the finger at her friends.
There was a third knock. She heard the sound of somebody leaning against the door and giving it a push, trying to force it open. She’d have to answer it now; if she didn’t, it sounded like they were coming in anyway. Would the police behave like that?
She looked at the LED alarm clock at the side of the bed. That was Bruce’s. It was ten minutes past midnight. Bruce had supposedly left a letter with the admin department saying he was quitting his job at the holiday camp without notice. Jenna hadn’t a clue how that had happened or who’d written that note. All she knew is that there was no way Bruce Craven was alive when she left him in the foundations of that pool and, even if he was, by some twist of fate, he had not come back to his room to collect his things.
Jenna walked up to the door, twisting the small handle on the Yale lock. Before she’d even completed the motion, the door was forced. Two men burst into the room, silently dangerous. One of them pushed his hand against her neck and propelled her over to the bed, lifting her up from the floor momentarily and throwing her down onto the mattress.
The other checked that they hadn’t been seen, quietly closed the door, then locked it. He stood in front of the door, blocking it with his massive frame.
Jenna began to panic and drew breath to scream. The first man sat on the bed, his substantial weight compressing the mattress so that she rolled towards him. He put his finger to his mouth and indicated that she should be quiet.
From a sheath that was attached to his belt, he removed a large knife with serrations at the tip; the type a hunter might be seen with in an American movie. Slow and deliberate in his movements, he gently pressed the knifepoint into her groin, then ran it up to her stomach, pressing it in a little, moving to her neck, then levelling it up with her eyes.
‘Such pretty eyes,’ he said.
Jenna was motionless on the bed. They’d said three words between them, yet she already knew they were more dangerous than Bruce. He seemed like a lightweight in comparison. She just wanted to be rid of men like this; Jenna craved the end of this horrible violence.
‘Where is Bruce Craven?’ the man asked. His voice was steady and regulated; there wasn’t a sign that he found this even mildly stressful. He was approaching the intimidation of Jenna much in the way that she’d place a cup of tea in front of one of her customers in the dining hall. It was an everyday occurrence to him, all in a day’s work.
He placed his free hand on her thigh and moved it towards her groin, working underneath her nightshirt so that he was in direct contact with her flesh. His skin was smooth, but his hands were fat and threatening. She flinched.
‘Where’s Bruce Craven?’ he asked again.
Jenna tried to speak. She couldn’t find her voice. Her throat was dry and taut; the words would not come.
The man moved his hand a little further up. Jenna tensed again, fearful for what was coming.
‘I don’t know,’ she managed to say.
‘Where’s Bruce Craven?’ the man said again like this was the extent of his vocabulary.
She had her voice now. His hand was now gently massaging just below her groin, the knife perilously close to her right eye.
‘No, please,’ Jenna pleaded. ‘I don’t know. We argued last night. He never came back to the room. I’ve been waiting for him all day. Everybody says he left the holiday camp and went back home. Ask the people in the admin block. He left a letter. I promise he never came back.’
‘Who saw what happened?’ the second man asked. His voice was deep and gravelly; she’d never heard one like it before. It was as if he’d had some kind of throat problem in the past; it didn’t sound right to her.
‘Nobody, I swear. We argued in the pub last night. He stormed out. I thought I’d find him here. He wasn’t in the room when I got back. I assumed he’d stayed in a friend’s room, maybe even gone with another woman. I waited all night. When I went to work this morning, everybody was talking about it. Bruce Craven just quit. He went back home. It’s a pretty shitty place to work; we just assumed he’d thrown the towel in. That’s it, that’s all I know.’
Jenna was sweating, in the few minutes that this exchange had taken, her nightshirt had become sodden with sweat.
The man with the abrasive voice moved closer to Jenna, who was still on the bed, not daring to move for fear of the knife.
‘If you see Bruce Craven, tell him we’re looking for him. He’s not finished with us yet. And if I find out you’re lying … have you ever been with two men before? That look on your face tells me no. Well, we’ll be back if we find you’re lying to us. And next time we might even bring a friend. It’d be a shame not to make the most of a nice girl like you. Espe
cially before we take your skin off and throw it in the waste paper basket.
Jenna closed her eyes tight shut as she used to when she was five years old, to repel the bogey man in the dark. She kept them closed for ten minutes after they’d left her room. She had never known fear like it in her life. But it was a fear that would find her once again, many years later.
Morecambe - Six Months After
The phone started to ring in the hall. Charlotte left the lounge to answer it.
‘Hello, Lakes View Guest House, Charlotte Grayson speaking.’
‘Hello, is that Charlotte Grayson as in Will and Charlotte Grayson?’
It was a woman’s voice with a strong hint of a north-east accent.
‘Yes, that’s me. How can I help you?’’
‘I’m sorry it’s short notice, but do you have a room available tonight and Saturday? I may extend beyond that, but I’ll decide when I’m there is that’s okay?’
Charlotte consulted the bookings. She could accommodate the booking and, with the exception of Barry McMillan’s room, that gave them a full house for the weekend. She was relieved that they didn’t have any events in the lounge that weekend, it was always all hands to the pumps whenever that happened.
‘Yes, I can book you in on those dates. If you decide to stay, we’ve also got a couple of rooms free throughout the week. Whose name shall I book it in?’
‘Mrs Bowker. Daisy Bowker.’
Charlotte took down her details, went through the credit card procedures and secured the booking in the online management system.
‘Just one last question,’ Charlotte said. ‘What’s your reason for visiting Morecambe, leisure or business?’
‘A bit of both really,’ Daisy replied. ‘I’m researching my family history. I’ve got a relative whose last known whereabouts were Morecambe. I want to see if I can track him down.’
Charlotte’s interest was piqued.
‘Now that sounds interesting,’ she said. ‘We have a lovely local library and I can even recommend the local historian to you, he’s really quite excellent. Jon Rogers is his name. He seems to know everything there is to know about Morecambe. I’m not sure if he works Saturdays, mind you.’
‘Well actually, I wanted to book in at your guest house for a reason. I read about you and your husband online in a recent article about the guest house. I don’t think you’ve had it very long, have you?’
Charlotte was tense now. This woman had sought them out rather than selecting them at random from a list of search results, as most guests did. She hesitated as she answered, nervous to find out more.
‘Yes, we’ve been here for some time now. What was it that caught your eye? That story has been read by a lot of people, it’s amazing how far the local newspaper travels.’
‘Well, I saw that you and your husband met at the Sandy Beaches Holiday Camp in the eighties.’
Charlotte’s stomach tightened, she felt sick.
‘Yes … that’s right. It’s been demolished now, they’re building houses on it.’
‘So, I’ve read,’ Daisy continued. ‘It looks like it’s quite a project from what I’ve been able to find out about it. I’m trying to find somebody connected with the holiday camp, it’s proving to be quite some task.’
Charlotte tried to silence the alarm bells that were sounding inside her head. Thousands of people passed through the Sandy Beaches Holiday Camp over the years. Some were staff but most were holiday-makers. She scolded herself for being too jumpy. This woman would come and go, there was nothing to worry about.
‘Have you managed to track down the electoral roll or the phone books from the time? They can be quite useful,’ Charlotte suggested.
‘Oh yes, I’ve been through all the usual channels,’ Daisy replied. ‘I’m quite used to doing research like this, most people are much easier to find. But my half-brother is proving to be the proverbial needle in the haystack. He moved from Jesmond in 1984 and then I lose track of him completely. It’s unusual for somebody to slip below the radar like that, particularly in these days of digital records. He even seemed to evade the Poll Tax and that took some doing.’
Charlotte knew the answer to her question already, but she had to ask it; she had to know. They hadn’t even considered the possibility of a marriage breakdown, a broken family and a half-brother or half-sister. That prospect had passed them by completely.
‘It sounds like you’ve got quite a task ahead of you,’ Charlotte said, trying as best she could to keep a voice steady. ‘Sandy Beaches was such a huge place, it’s unlikely that I’d have met him. What was his name, just to be certain?’
‘It was Bruce. My half-brother is called Bruce Craven.’
Author Notes
Left for Dead is probably my most personal thriller to date in that it very closely maps the summer of 1984 when my then-girlfriend - now wife - and I spent our first summer together as students at Pontins Middleton Tower site near Morecambe. As with Will and Charlotte, we were working off the overdrafts that we’d run up during term time and working at the camp gave us food, accommodation and income, sparing us from having to go our separate ways and spend the summer at our respective parental homes which were at opposite ends of the country.
The entire story is a complete figment of my imagination, I hasten to add, but the locations of the book have been born out of my own experiences working at the resort and visiting Morecambe over successive years.
The story is based upon my memories and experiences working on that holiday camp. The descriptions of the chalets, the moaning of the holiday-makers, the presence of the prune eaters and the brick and stone covered beach are for real. However, the camp on which the story is based is fictional, as are the characters in the story. I never met a Bruce Craven character while I was working there, neither was there a pool being built or a night watchman called George. The guest house is made up too - that should be enough assurances to keep the lawyers at bay!
Before I began writing the story, I dug out all of our old photographs from our time on the camp. There are pictures of us in the uniforms we had to wear when waiting on tables, as well as images from around the holiday camp. I’ve added these to a picture gallery at https://paulteague.co.uk/ - just click on the Thriller Galleries tab to check them out. You’ll also find an excellent Flickr collection on that web page; it shows photos of the Pontins Middleton Tower site through the ages. It’s hard to imagine now, in these days of cheap air travel and foreign holidays, but this is the type of home-grown holiday that the British used to enjoy.
I also returned to the holiday campsite before starting work on the book. It’s now a retirement village - nothing is left of the previous site. You’re still greeted by the Middleton Tower sign, and the tower itself is still there on the beachside, but the pub, the big ship structure and the arcades are all gone. Thousands of holiday-makers and hundreds of staff must have passed through there over the years. If that place could speak, it would have so many stories to tell.
It was strange writing about a time before computers; a lot of the time I had to really cast my mind back to recall how we did things back then. Even catching a bus to Morecambe was a logistics effort - you had to secure printed bus timetables first, and there was no cheating by doing an online Google search. There were no mobile phones either; the first proper mobile phone I ever saw was in 1991, so it was all payphones and keeping some loose change in your pocket back then.
It’s the same with the comings and goings of staff. It would have been very possible to just disappear in 1984, like Bruce does. There was no social media - we all communicated on the phone or via Royal Mail and I didn’t even have access to a home phone in those days. I couldn’t afford it. I used to write letters to my mum to keep her updated. Our payslips were generated electronically I believe, but we were paid in cash and we’d go and pick up our wages every week. When my wife and I left, we’d earned the money we needed and we did a deal with the holiday camp to let us go early. It was
all managed verbally back then. If nobody was looking for you - as is the case with Bruce Craven - and no body was found, you could disappear and never be seen again. It was the very early days of DNA back then, and by no means as routine as it is now.
Compare that with Charlotte’s modern-day life and everything has changed. She can now get anonymous messages through Facebook, and she and her family message each other all the time. Her kids won’t even use the phone, preferring instant messaging instead. Anonymous guest house bookings come in via online sites and the local newspaper can now be seen all over the world because the stories are placed online. It’s all very different to the world of 1984 when Bruce Craven could bully and intimidate and there was no HR behavioural code to refer to.
If you’ve read any of my other thrillers, you’ll know I have a soft spot for UK coastal resorts. As a former student at Lancaster, Morecambe was one of our summer destinations during our long student holidays. We used to go to Frontierland - which was an excellent pleasure park in the resort - and frequent the arcades, most of which are still there. I still love a game of bingo too, by the way.
On a recent research visit to Morecambe, I was sad to see that Frontierland has now been completely levelled, ready for somebody to build the next supermarket, I suspect. Adventure Kingdom is my fictional version of Frontierland and will feature more heavily in Circle of Lies.
Left for Dead Page 24
