Little Black Lies

by Sharon Bolton

  ‘What are you doing on Thursday? Do you have someone with you?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’ I keep my eyes fixed ahead. I cannot let Ben suspect that I have anything in particular planned for Thursday. Especially not that I am planning to kill my former best friend. ‘It’s been three years. People move on.’

  ‘I moved on.’ I can’t see Ben’s face, but I know he’s close. His voice has dropped so that only I can hear it. ‘I found a way to deal with it. You didn’t, love.’

  I keep walking, but I hear the long, sad sigh.

  ‘I still care about you, Catrin.’

  ‘I’ve heard elephant seals can be aggressive.’ Mel has caught us up, thank God. ‘If the lad came across one of those, he wouldn’t stand much of a chance, would he? Sea lions too.’

  ‘Possibly not.’ I look back to make sure none of the others are in earshot. ‘But not something we have to worry about if he came this way. It would be very unusual to see either this far inland.’

  ‘What about birds? Would they attack a three-year-old?’

  This, I admit, is a possibility. Skuas are known for attacking humans. During nesting season, locals and visitors alike venture near their sites armed with large sticks. ‘It would depend on how hungry they were, to be honest, and at this time of year there’s a lot of food around.’ I try to give Mel a reassuring smile. He’s a sweet man and there’s no point in him being upset. ‘We probably don’t have to worry about him being pecked to death by birds.’

  ‘Everything OK, Catrin?’ Callum’s voice comes over the radio. I can see him in the distance, on slightly higher ground, and I realize my group has almost stopped moving. I raise my hand to tell him we’re fine. He turns away without responding and his group press on. I do the same.

  ‘Tell me something, darling, do you think I’m wasting my time?’ Mel has slung a rope, rancher-style, over one shoulder.

  ‘Trying to keep your boots clean? Almost certainly.’

  ‘With Lieutenant Murray.’ Mel gives an exaggerated sigh directly into my ear. ‘That great, big, gorgeous hunk of ginger. I only came back to this God-forsaken lump of rock for him.’

  Unlikely as it sounds, Mel and Callum met during the conflict, on board the MV Norland, when Mel was head steward. According to Callum, the typically homophobic soldiers were pretty hostile to Mel at first, but such was his good nature, efficiency and sheer brilliance at the piano, he won them all round. By the time they got here, he’d practically become the regimental mascot.

  ‘I really don’t think you’re his type, mate.’ Ben’s voice has an edge that makes even Mel stop and think before he says anything else.

  ‘We’ve reached the bog,’ I tell my group. ‘It’s about thirty metres wide, so we go in single file from here.’

  One of the women looks nervously at the thick covering of fern and pale wild grasses, the dark earth beneath. ‘What if he fell in here?’ she asks. ‘He could be at the bottom right now. We could walk right past him.’

  ‘We’re still some way from where the child went missing,’ I say. ‘It’s very unlikely he made it this far.’

  ‘But the third child to vanish. You must be asking yourselves why?’

  I don’t try to hide the sigh but Ben beats me to it. ‘Imagine a child goes missing on Barry Island, with nothing to suggest anything more sinister than he fell in the sea.’

  She listens, flattered by his attention.

  ‘Over a year later, a child vanishes in Rhyl,’ Ben continues. ‘You don’t necessarily connect the two. We’re talking similar distances, similar timescales. Then another year goes by and a third child, a bit younger than the others, is lost, but you still have every hope of finding him. You wouldn’t be screaming about serial killers and paedophiles – and neither are we.’

  She seems satisfied with this. At any rate, it shuts her up for a bit. Of course, what Ben’s just related is the best-case scenario, a child found soon with nothing more to show for his adventure than a ravenous appetite and a few bruises. It doesn’t explain why all the attempts to find him yesterday failed.

  The radio bursts into life again. I call for quiet and the others gather round. Some way in the distance I see Callum’s group doing the same thing. My heart beats a little more insistently. In my group someone starts to speak, someone else shushes her immediately. Callum is looking my way again. I stare back, thinking how much easier it is to do this when he’s at a distance, when there’s no danger of eye contact. Then I see Ben watching me.

  On the radio I hear a reference to flies, to maggot activity.

  ‘Oh my God,’ says the Welsh lady in my group. ‘They’ve found him.’

  5

  As the Welsh lady jumps very quickly to the obvious but wrong conclusion I’m shaking my head, sending my own private message to the man on the hillside.

  ‘It can’t be Archie.’ I raise my voice and give the radio to Mel while I address the group. ‘Maggots can hatch in twenty-four hours but to do so they need much warmer conditions than they’ll find on a Falkland night, even one in late spring. Archie would have to have died almost before he was missed. Even then…’

  Mel taps me on the shoulder and gives me the thumbs up. ‘Dead sheep,’ he says. ‘I’ve asked them to deliver it to the Globe for tonight’s dinner.’

  * * *

  We don’t find him. By two o’clock in the afternoon, we’ve walked the area twice. He isn’t here.

  Back at the police station, food has appeared and the search parties fall on it. Mel practically falls on Callum. I hang behind, wanting to leave. After a few minutes, the search leaders are called into a separate room.

  ‘There’s talk of a vigil tonight,’ Stopford announces. ‘The radio’s been full of it all morning. Calling for people to camp out. Build fires. Give the lad something to aim for, apparently. Bloody daft, of course. They’re more likely to set half of camp on fire and I can’t see how that’s going to help him much.’

  ‘The ground’s probably too wet to catch fire, Bob,’ says Ben. ‘And it’s understandable. No one wants to think about the kid being out at night by himself. If half the island is camping out too, then he isn’t by himself, is he?’

  ‘I think we have to consider the possibility that he may have left the island.’

  Everyone turns to the speaker, Major Wooton. A hush settles over the room.

  ‘Going where?’ I say, which is sort of pointing out the obvious. Tierra del Fuego on Argentina is three hundred miles away. South Georgia is nearly a thousand miles in the other direction. Other than that? Well, Antarctica, if you have weeks to spare.’

  ‘One of the other islands, obviously,’ Wooton says to me.

  ‘Well, that narrows it down.’

  Wooton glares.

  ‘I don’t mean to be difficult, but there are over seven hundred of them.’

  Callum clears his throat. ‘I think what Major Wooton is driving at is that it’s starting to look as though he didn’t leave the area by himself. And, let’s be honest now, these islands have form when it comes to missing kids.’

  Silence. A stubborn one at that, and it’s clear what everyone is thinking. We’re a small community. We all know each other. Go back a hundred years and half of us are related. There is no crime here other than parking tickets, the odd bit of teenage pilfering from the shops and fairly regular but largely harmless merrymaking at the weekend. Our prison houses drunks. The idea that someone could have abducted Archie West is monstrous.

  ‘We need to close the ports,’ says Wooton, as though there are dozens of them. ‘No one leaves the islands.’

  He’s panicking. No one can leave the islands, even without his macho posturing. There isn’t a flight out till tomorrow, even if it were possible to smuggle a three-year-old child on an RAF plane.

  ‘What about the cruise ship?’ Ben says. ‘That’s due to leave on Thursday.’

  I mutter excuses and wander outside, helping myself to a couple of small sausages as I go. In the car park, I let
Queenie out of the car and feed them to her. She licks my hand until it can contain no trace of anything but dog slaver.

  There is a noise behind and I know who has followed me out. ‘Someone has to think the unthinkable,’ Callum says.

  ‘No one on the islands would hurt a child. It must have been one of the visitors.’

  He shakes his head. ‘Visitors might have the will but not the means. Someone who doesn’t know the islands would have nowhere to take him. Wouldn’t know where to hide him.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘The same group of visitors weren’t here seventeen months ago when Jimmy Brown disappeared from Surf Bay. They weren’t here twenty-seven months ago when Fred Harper vanished from Port Howard.’

  Trust Callum to be quoting facts at me. ‘No one’s taken him.’ I turn to face camp. ‘He’s out there somewhere. He fell in the river and got washed out to sea, or into a bog and for some reason he hasn’t floated yet. The best way to find him is to systematically clear the area of livestock and then have the army do another heat search. We’re looking for a body now and that’s terribly sad, but we might as well face facts.’

  We glare at each other.

  ‘The cruise ship will be searched this afternoon,’ he says, after several seconds. ‘Stopford was reluctant to agree but we talked him into it. Wooton is going to release all personnel not needed for basic guard duty. They’ll do the fishing boats as well. With our own private army, we’ll be able to rule out the visitors by the end of the day.’

  If the boats are being searched today, we should all be in the clear by tomorrow. Able to move around freely again. In the meantime, this conversation is going nowhere. I should simply climb in my car and drive away.

  ‘Isn’t it always the parents?’ I say. ‘Maybe Stopford needs to have a long, hard chat with the West family.’

  He half smiles, and there’s a pitying look in his eyes as he turns away and walks back towards the station. He thinks I, and the rest of the natives, are simply refusing to accept that someone we know could be bad. That there could be a monster among us.

  * * *

  Mid afternoon, I decide I need something from the store, so take Queenie for a quick walk around town. I’m conscious of it being almost time for school to finish and the knowledge makes me walk faster than usual, keeping my eyes down. I find it too hard to see the kids racing out of the gates, and I don’t want mothers trying to be kind to me. It’s impossible to miss Callum’s Land Cruiser, though. It’s probably the only car on the islands that particular shade of forget-me-not blue.

  Just as I realize he’s most likely in Bob-Cat’s Diner, even as I’m thinking that I might actually – no, I’m not going to do that – I see him. Sitting at the counter, directly in front of the window. He hasn’t gone home yet, he’s in the same clothes he was wearing this morning. He isn’t alone.

  There’s a small child, a child I don’t know, but one about two years old, leaning towards him, his little feet balanced precariously on the lap of the woman sitting beside Callum at the counter. A woman wearing pale-coloured jeans tucked into riding boots and a sweater that’s exactly the blue of her eyes. Callum is with Rachel.

  Someone walks past me on the pavement. I have a feeling it’s Roadkill Ralph, but I can’t take my eyes off the diner window.

  I haven’t been this close to Rachel in three years. In such a small community it would be impossible to avoid her completely, but on the few occasions I’ve seen her, I’ve always made myself scarce. If she turns now, she’ll see me. They both will.

  I can’t move. Something is rooting me to the spot.

  She looks great. Her hair is longer than I remember. She’s a bit plumper, maybe, but it suits her. And she’s laughing. She’s looking up at Callum and both of them are laughing, while the child hangs between them. They look like a family.

  I’m going to be sick. As saliva floods my mouth, I turn and drag Queenie back down the street.

  * * *

  Later that evening, I can barely summon the energy to eat and clear away afterwards. I never sleep well, and it doesn’t take much exertion above normal to send me into a state of complete exhaustion. The search for Archie resumed in the afternoon, but in a less focused way. The police and military all left to search the various boats around the islands, leaving the population and the visitors to their own devices. I went to work, where the radio and a constant stream of visitors kept us up to speed with the day’s lack of any sort of progress.

  Fewer than two days to go. Around forty hours. Tomorrow I’ll write the letter that will ensure Queenie is taken care of.

  ‘I moved on.’ All afternoon, I’ve had Ben’s voice in my head. ‘I found a way to deal with it.’ Ben dealt with the loss of our sons, who were as important to him as they were to me, by finding another woman to love, by replacing the family he’d lost with a new one. Could I have done that too? Should I have tried?

  Too late now.

  As the daylight fades, the wind picks up and the skeletons in the garden start to creak and groan. For a short while, Queenie rushes from the front to the back door, barking at phantoms in the dark. She’s quickly unsettled by my moods. It isn’t really cold enough to merit a fire, but I feel the need for its comfort, and Queenie loves nothing more than curling up on a scorching hearthrug. I pour a glass of red wine and tuck myself into the big armchair. Most evenings, if I’m not working, I either read or watch movies. We don’t have live television on the islands. Our programmes are courtesy of the British Forces Broadcasting Service, chosen for their likely popularity with serving soldiers. We have a thriving movie video library, though, and most of us make good use of it.

  Not tonight. Were I to choose a romantic comedy, the faces of the leading actors would morph into those of Callum and Rachel. A murder mystery? Guess whom I’d be picturing as the corpse? The ticking of the clock seems unnaturally loud. The child has been missing for nearly thirty hours now and it feels as though the islands are waiting for something.

  * * *

  Queenie jumps to her feet as the banging resounds through the house. This is not the polite tap of a close neighbour. This is someone demanding entrance. My heart starts to thud in my chest. Queenie’s frantic barking doesn’t help.

  There he is, Callum Murray, right there on my doorstep, claiming my attention in person just as he does, so much of the time, in my head. He has the grace to look embarrassed.

  ‘Sorry, I know it’s late, but I think someone should search the wrecks. We should start with the Endeavour, that’s the most likely, then the Sanningham.’

  Remembering this afternoon, seeing him in the café, I want to hit him, but that would require too much in the way of an explanation. ‘What are you talking about?’ I say, instead.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about places he could have been taken.’ Callum steps back, as though not to crowd me. ‘Everyone’s checked their outhouses and their barns and their peat sheds. He isn’t anywhere obvious. He’s where no one would think to look.’

  ‘He’s at the bottom of a bog. He’ll float in a few days when his body fills up with gases.’ I know I sound heartless, but the last time I saw this man, he was grinning at the woman who killed my children.

  ‘The Endeavour,’ he repeats. ‘Catrin, are you listening to me?’

  The Endeavour was an Antarctic supply ship that sits now on the seabed off the coast of Fitzroy. It will be the small hours before we’re back.

  ‘He can’t be on a wreck.’

  ‘Ask yourself where you’d hide a three-year-old,’ Callum says. ‘Somewhere he’ll be safe until you need him again, but with no possible way of escape and where no one else would think to look.’

  There’s a time lag in our conversation. He speaks, but it takes me a second or two to process the content.

  He doesn’t wait for me to answer. ‘The Endeavour isn’t much more than an hour’s drive from where he went missing. It’s largely out of the water, but too far out for wading or even swimming to s
hore to be a possibility.’

  ‘You’re saying someone grabbed him, drove him to the coast, put him in a dinghy, motored or rowed out to the Endeavour and stowed him in the wheelhouse?’

  ‘Or the Sanningham, but the Endeavour is more likely because you wouldn’t have to drive close to Stanley to get him there. Are you saying it’s impossible?’

  I want to. Except … ‘Have you shared this with Stopford?’

  ‘He’s still tied up at the harbour with the cruise ship.’

  I know about the police activity at the harbour. My own boat was searched earlier. The constable who stopped by the office to collect the keys told me that no boat, skippered by resident or visitor, will be allowed to leave harbour without police permission while Archie West is still missing. It is very much in my interests that the child is found quickly.

  I give in to the inevitable and find my jacket and keys.

  ‘You can drive,’ I tell Callum as Queenie follows us to his Toyota. ‘I’m wrecked.’

  He jumps in and starts the engine. ‘Yeah, I imagine Archie West’s feeling pretty jaded right now. Not to mention his mum and dad.’

  There’s no real answer to that, so we head for the harbour in silence.

  The town is busier than it should be, people on the streets, beer bottles in hand. We have a mild problem with alcohol abuse on the islands. Noise, skirmishes, minor vandalism. In all fairness, there isn’t a lot else for the younger people to do in the evenings, but it’s usually, if not reasonably good-natured, then basically harmless. Not tonight, though. I don’t like the purpose I can see in these groups. I don’t like the way people stop talking and watch us drive past.