Shadows

by Thorne Moore

  ‘Honest labourer. Ha! You’re letting Kim go alone this time then?’

  ‘Yep. I’m letting go. She’s been pretty shaken up by Michael, you know. She liked him. We all did. Anyway, she’s talking about applying to college again next year, so I’m going to stand back and let her work it out for herself.’

  ‘That’s wise. And brave. You’ll be a long way away from her, in Denmark.’

  ‘I know, but Jo will be on hand. She’s joining a firm in Newcastle, so she’ll keep an eye on her.’

  I glanced across at Jo who was laughing drunkenly into Padrig’s beard. ‘I see. She’s not going with you.’

  ‘I did tell you her trip to Peru was a trial separation.’ Al gave his wife a friendly wave. A brotherly wave. She waved back in a sisterly fashion.

  We stood silent for a moment, watching the moonlight blaze silver on the distant sea. All things were finishing. Ends needed tying.

  ‘Al.’ I half turned to him. ‘Could you have killed Christian?’

  I’d thought the question might surprise or shock or offend, but it did none of those things. ‘No need,’ he said easily, hands in his pockets. ‘You think he’s dead, don’t you? Wouldn’t surprise me. Someone was going to get him in the end.’

  He hadn’t answered my question. Better, perhaps, if I never knew.

  Chapter 26

  Sylvia and I sat alone in the kitchen, listening to the clock ticking. Tamsin had reluctantly returned to Bristol, Sarah and Phil had gone home, Taverner Restorations had moved on, the holiday season was over. No visitors any more, apart from occasional voyeurs, peering up our drive, eager for a glimpse of the Hammer House of Horrors.

  Sylvia was marking the pine table top with her knife. She was thinking of Christian, I could tell, but I wasn’t prepared for her words. She sighed deeply, but with no sign of incipient tears.

  ‘You know, I think Chris is dead. I knew he’d do it one day.’

  I swallowed. All this time, waiting for news that his body had been found, wondering how Sylvia would cope with one more terrible blow, and now she was accepting the notion as if it were something she’d been quietly living with for years. Just as Tamsin had predicted.

  ‘He’d have been in contact, wouldn’t he, if he were still alive? If only to ask for money. Ken hasn’t heard from him. No one has. I think he must be dead.’

  She had to explain, to a world that wasn’t listening. ‘I was so convinced I’d find a way of saving him. But I didn’t have a hope really, did I? He would never have let me. Poor Mike understood that.’

  I took her hand and squeezed it. Perhaps there’d been a part of Chris always calling out for some parental hand to rescue him, but always there had been his monsters, snapping at any proffered hand, withering any hope of salvation. Sylvia was convinced his death must be suicide, and perhaps, in a sense, she was right. Suicide by proxy.

  ‘And he was in such terrible debt,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it. All those big plans. He was going to be a millionaire by twenty one.’ She heaved another sigh. ‘Well, I just hope…’ Her voice began to crack. ‘If he had to choose that way out, I hope it was quick.’

  How much should I reveal? Now that Sylvia seemed reconciled to his death, would it be better if his body were found? Reinterpreting my feelings when I’d driven north in search of Hannah’s corpse, I was as certain as I could be where Christian would be.

  He’d driven off in hatred and pain, heading God knows where, probably not knowing himself, only knowing that he didn’t dare return to London and the ‘friends’ who would be waiting for him. His car had been facing south, the police had said, so somewhere, out there in the dark, his spite had dissolved in hopelessness, and the little boy had turned to come home. To the mother he’d spat at, because she was all he had. And the car had run dry, like everything in his life.

  He’d abandoned it, but only after ransacking it for any pill or resin or speck of powder that might have escaped Michael’s confiscation, and he’d found it, one little capsule to ease him from life.

  I’d walked the route he’d taken, and I’d felt the ghost of his hopeless weariness, his desperate longing to be out of it all, trapped in the stones of that ruined hut where he, like me, must have sought a moment’s shelter. Had he already taken the capsule? Was death already starting to thread its way through his veins? Go no further. Rest now and sleep. Somewhere down in that silent, serried plantation of firs, he’d come to a halt and curled up to wait for the escape a little pill promised.

  If I said nothing, his body might lie there forever, slowly buried in fir needles, absorbed into the acid soil and no one would ever know. If, one day, chainsaws and bulldozers cleared the plantation, his bones might not even be noticed. His disappearance would remain a mystery forever.

  Like all the others. Life was full of them; deaths unexplained, disappearances unresolved, murders undetected. Why was a man drowned in the bog centuries ago? Why was another left to suffocate and starve in a priest hole? What tragedy left the imprint of some servant’s death in an attic bedroom? What would account for human remains, unearthed in a fir plantation?

  I had the power to resolve that last riddle. I could have Christian’s body brought home to Sylvia. But then, if pathologists deduced murder, I would have to produce Michael’s letter.

  Sylvia accepted Christian was dead. That was enough. The truth would remain my guilty secret, the shadow of my own making that would follow me wherever I went, for the rest of my life. No escape from that, ever.

  My stomach heaved.

  It was Sylvia’s turn to clasp my hand. ‘Poor Kate.’ She looked at me with motherly sympathy. Perhaps that would be her salvation: my sickness. It was constantly with me now.

  I tried to smile, watching her sympathy turn to concern, then to doubt, then to wonder, then—could it be delight? For a moment, the old Sylvia was there, face lit with eager joy. ‘Kate!’ she declared, emphatically. ‘You’re pregnant!’

  Nonsense.

  Utter nonsense. Surely. Except…

  It was absurd. How could I detect the end of life with such precision, and yet have no sense of its beginning? When I lay, dawn after dawn, sick with the guilt that assailed me, it hadn’t occurred to me to question the reasons for my nausea, and as Peter had been fond of pointing out, I was irregular to the point of bloody-mindedness.

  ‘I can’t be,’ I said, but Sylvia would hear none of it. Of course someone so life-affirming could detect what I hadn’t even suspected. Through her dull grief came a flicker of her resurgent vitality. For a moment she was almost impish and I could see a question hovering on her lips.

  An unforgiveable question. Sylvia was about to ask me whose it was, and in all honesty…

  A jolt. A surge of fierce hunger. Suddenly, in a blinding revelation, I recognised that nameless sensation that had nagged at me, echoing from the rocks of the bog. That unidentified feeling that had clung on when all the anger had been washed away. The feeling that fought against the nihilism of Michael’s death and my despair, because that was exactly what it refused to accept. It wasn’t fear, or hatred, or desolation, not any of the crushing emotions that I soaked up so easily. It was the reverse: an indomitable will to live, a determination to overcome and be free, so strong that it seemed to grasp me under the armpits and toss me upwards. Life. My life and life in me. Triumphant survival. ‘Face the sun,’ it screamed, ‘and shadows fall behind you.’

  I burst into fierce laughter. ‘Before you ask, yes, I do know whose it is.’ I stood up, ready to take on the world. ‘She’s mine. And this time she’s going to live.’

  Sylvia hugged me and at last we dared to laugh.

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