by Lara Dearman
But they had failed. And they were all gone now.
Now there was only him.
15
Jenny
Friday, 14 November
‘Sorry I’m late. It’s the weather. Traffic’s a nightmare so I had to leave the car at Salarie Corner and walk and I’m soaked.’ Amanda’s friend, Chloe Bishop, took off her coat and sat down. She was a large, plain-faced girl with wide-set eyes and a downward turning mouth. She was wearing the uniform of the Blue Line ferry company: a navy suit and crisp white shirt. She worked on the check-in she explained, and her boss was a right bitch, she couldn’t be late.
‘Don’t worry, this shouldn’t take long. Do you want anything? Tea or coffee?’ Jenny motioned to the miserable red-haired waitress who walked over and pulled a notepad from her apron pocket.
‘I start work at eight, I haven’t got time.’ Chloe looked at her watch and Jenny ordered one coffee.
‘Are you not eating?’ The waitress stood, pen poised on notepad. ‘Only there’s a queue for tables.’ She gestured around the room. The place was full. The men at the table next to them wore suits and were talking loudly, looking at a laptop, but everyone else was wearing overalls or heavy-duty work gear with sturdy, battered boots. It was hot, the heating turned up high to combat the draft from the permanently open door and the smell of grease and coffee was tinged with the paint fumes and engine oil which evaporated from the wet clothes of the builders and fisherman who filled the place. Jenny scanned the menu and ordered a bacon butty. She was rewarded with a brief but brilliant smile, a stack of paper napkins, and a ketchup bottle shaped like a tomato.
She turned to Chloe. ‘I was just wondering if you could tell me a little bit about Amanda. What sort of person she was, what she liked to do, and why she might have been near the water last Saturday evening?’
Chloe rolled her eyes and told her she’d already talked to the police and she didn’t know anything about it.
‘Did she have a boyfriend? Someone she might have been with?’
‘No. A lot of boys asked her out and that, but she was shy. Didn’t think she was pretty, see? Even though everyone was always tellin’ her.’ Jenny detected a hint of bitterness in this last remark and looked up from her notes.
‘I weren’t jealous or nothin’, if that’s what you’re thinking. Yeah, it was annoying, her getting all the attention. But I wouldn’t have swapped places with her. She was sad all the time. An’ I don’t want you printing none of this. I’m not a gossip.’
‘Of course not. I’m just trying to find out what Amanda was like. I don’t have to mention your name at all if you don’t want me to.’ She paused. ‘Did Amanda have any hobbies?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘Not really.’
‘How did she spend her free time?’
‘Honestly,’ Chloe, said, ‘she’d got really boring recently. We went out most Saturday nights but Amanda didn’t stay out late ’cause she sang in the church choir on Sundays. S’pose that’s a hobby.’
‘Which church?’
‘St Andrews. She liked singing. She weren’t good enough to be a professional or nothin’ but she had lessons as well.’
‘At the church?’
‘At her house, I think. I’m going to have to go.’ She made no move to leave.
‘Just a couple more things. Last Saturday. You were all at the fireworks – Amanda didn’t meet you?’
‘No. We all met at a friend’s first, to have a few drinks. Amanda was off the booze.’
‘Why?’ Jenny interjected.
Chloe sighed again, as if the whole conversation was painful. ‘She’d been depressed. Like I said, she was sad all the time. She thought maybe the booze was making it worse. Read it in one of them leaflets from the youth club. Anyway, she was s’posed to meet us at Vale Castle later. We were planning on going into town afterwards but I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t turn up. That’s why I didn’t call her mum or nothin’. Like I said, she didn’t like to stay out late on Saturdays and sometimes she’d get down and just didn’t come out at all. She wouldn’t have told her mum her plans neither, they didn’t get on.’ She looked up at Jenny. ‘You know her mum called the police on her? Found cannabis in her bag. I know for a fact she was only looking after it for a mate.’ She went red, perhaps worried she had said too much. ‘Amanda had barely spoke to her since then anyway, so she wouldn’t have worried when she didn’t come home.
‘We were on our way to town when I saw all of the police cars, heard people saying there was a body. I had no idea it was Amanda until her dad phoned me the next day to ask if she’d stayed with me. Said she hadn’t come home. It was only then that I thought about the body. That it might be her, you know.’ She bit her lower lip. There was clearly something she wanted to say. Or something she didn’t want to say but felt that she should. In Jenny’s experience, you just had to get them to keep talking.
‘Just one more question: there were cuts on Amanda’s arm. They look almost like some kind of symbol.’ She pulled a sketch out of her bag and showed Chloe.
Chloe looked at it, shook her head. ‘Amanda never cut herself.’
‘Looks like some kind of marking. It doesn’t mean anything to you?’
‘Nope. No idea.’
‘This must be hard for you. Have you spoken to anyone else? Thought about getting some counselling? It can really help. I could put you in touch with someone, if you’re struggling.’
‘I wasn’t a good friend to her, was I?’ The tears started flowing. ‘If I’d called to ask her where she was, or checked with her mum, we might have found her before she done this. I could have stopped her.’
Jenny handed her the napkins. ‘I’m sure you were the best friend you could be. It doesn’t sound like she made things easy for you. And you’re helping even now. Perhaps you can think of something, anything, which might help us to figure out how she came to be in the water last Saturday?’
‘I told you, she had issues. She never thought she was good enough at school, or pretty enough, or thin enough. Her mum was always hard on her. Always pushing her to study and that. She was dead disappointed when Amanda didn’t stay on to do A levels. Said the course we was doing was a drop-out course. And then I went and dropped out, didn’t I? That probably didn’t help. They had a row about her friends. ’Bout me, I s’pose. Then, after her mum called the police, Amanda got even worse. She was really messed-up. The last few weeks she’d been quiet. More than usual, I mean. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure she was still singing. She mentioned something about it making her feel uncomfortable. She got like that sometimes. Funny around people. I knew somethin’ was up. But I did nothin’ to help her. I have to go now. I need a ciggie before work.’ She stood, pulling her hood up over her head and wiping her nose on her sleeve. She left without a goodbye.
The waitress placed a plate unceremoniously in front of Jenny.
‘Enjoy,’ she said, and then dropped the bill next to it before hurrying off to clear tables for the ever-growing queue of waiting customers at the door.
Jenny looked around. She was the only person eating alone. She wondered who the police would talk to if her body were found washed-up on the beach. There was her mum, obviously, and Sarah, her oldest friend. But she had made no real effort to get back in touch with the rest of them. After what happened, they’d hardly been friends by the time they’d all left for university anyway. At best they’d tolerated her and some had stopped speaking to her altogether. Jenny had become introverted, protected herself by pulling away from people. Perhaps that’s what Amanda had done. Only Jenny had always had Sarah, who had stuck by her, believed her side of the story without question, forced her to come out, to hold her head up high, to face people. Would Amanda be alive, Jenny wondered, if she’d had a friend like Sarah?
She watched the rain through the window. She hadn’t planned on staying in Guernsey this long. She had a life in London. Good friends. Only the longer she was away, the slighter those con
nections became. How long before she was just another Guern whose time in the big city was no more than a rite of passage, just a small step taken on a well-worn pathway that seemed to lead them all back here. Water spilled from the gutters above, falling down on to the panes in thousands of tiny rivers. People hurried by with bright umbrellas, cars drove past, engines humming, tyres spraying water in their wake, the shapes and colours rippling through the wet glass, edges blurred.
She might have sat there all day, but her phone buzzed, reminding her she had a meeting with Elliot to go over the Save the Islander demonstration taking place the next day, which Brian was now insisting she cover as he’d decided the Amanda story ‘had no legs’. Which was odd, she thought. Teen suicide would normally be right up his street.
16
June 1966
The light. He lay in bed looking at the beams of spring sunshine penetrating the gaps in the thin curtains and coming to rest on his bedroom ceiling and thought: the light is different today. Brighter. Whiter. Purer. As he washed, the smell of the coal tar caused his eyes to water, his nostrils to flare and his airways to open so that the next breath he took was deep and primordial, filling his lungs as if for the very first time. As he slipped his shirt over his taut, muscular body, the sweep of the starched cotton against his nakedness sent a thousand tiny bolts of electricity through him, each one like the touch of the finest needle on his skin.
Small things. They would have been imperceptible to most. But they were signs.
He should have been prepared, then, for when he got there. The concrete-edged bathing pools, with their elaborate diving boards, were all too familiar to him. As a child he had come here for swimming lessons with the school, earning red and white ribbons for conquering widths and lengths. As young teenagers, groups of boys gathered at the diving boards and performed for the girls who sat sunning themselves below. He would sit and watch, fascinated at these displays, but never partaking in them himself. As time passed, as those children who had taunted him moved on, lost track – too busy, knee-deep in cow shit or fucking their girlfriends to keep tabs on their favourite Jerry-baby – he realised it served no good purpose to be thought of as a loner.
He worked on his social skills. Made friends. It was so easy. All people wanted was a smile, a few questions, a compliment every now and then. Even a couple of jokes, which were more difficult to get right, he found, so he left the humour to others, making sure that he laughed at the right time and for just long enough. They came here, to the bathing pools. They played water polo. He was good at it. Everyone wanted him on their team. They had races, just for fun, but he always won. On occasion he would climb the sturdy metal diving frame, to the highest board. He would take only moments to gather himself, to raise his arms skywards, before plummeting, sagittal, into the water, emerging to the sounds of applause. They should be good memories. To him, though, they were banal. Pedestrian. Mundane. And so were the pools.
Until today.
And it all started with the light. Exquisite, pure and pale, for the sun had not yet fully risen. It shone over the castle and on to a silver sea, each wave and ripple illuminated, crushed glass scattered on a mantle of blue.
The pools were in shadow, the water calm and blue-black. And there she was, at the edge of the ladies’ pool, a soft, pale interruption on the hard black rock. He faltered at first, as if afraid that his approach might wake her, though he knew, of course, that the dead could not be disturbed. Still, he trod carefully, alert to his surroundings, listening to the sea and the gulls and the protesting whine of an overburdened engine as, out of sight, a lone car struggled up the Val de Terres. He looked around. Satisfied that it was too early for passers-by and willing to take the risk that it was not, he knelt at her side.
Her eyes were blackened with kohl and mascara; black tears spilled across pale cheeks. Her lips, blue beneath the red of her lipstick, were smeared and bruise-like. Her nails were neat and crimson. And everything else was white. Death had drained her of colour. Her hair and skin and underwear were white, white, white against the dark wet stone. It almost hurt to look at her. He wanted nothing more than to envelop her, to place his body over hers, to absorb her strength and beauty. Instead, he calmed himself. He gripped his knees with his hands and pressed his lips together, so as not to spoil her, not even with his own breath.
Outside calm, inside turmoil. What does it mean? His eyes moved rapidly. Her hair. Her face. Her breasts. Her hips. Her thighs. Her knees. Her ankles. Her toes. What does it mean? He looked over and over her silent, motionless form for what felt like hours until his eyes were aching and dry and then, all at once, he realised. It was what he had been waiting for.
She was a sign.
She was his purpose.
He closed his eyes, breathing deeply as he did so, opening his mind and his heart and his soul to her. When he opened them again, he saw her as if for the first time. He took in every part of her again, this time appreciating what was before them. Her hair. Her face. Her breasts. Her hips. Her thighs. Her knees. Her ankles. Her toes. When he’d had his fill of looking, he placed his face next to hers and breathed in her scent: sea salt and cheap perfume, and behind that, the yeasty sweetness of a fallen fruit. Already it was getting warm. The flies, which had scattered in his presence, returned, lulled by his prolonged stillness. They landed on her face, attracted by the moisture present in her eyes and nose and lips. A few of them tried their luck on him, lured by his warmth, confused by his proximity to their intended destination. He batted them away. Time to move. One last, deep, breath as he got to his feet. One last chance to remember.
It seemed as if the sun rose as he did, pouring over him and drenching her damp white body in warmth and light, splashing her hair and eyes and skin with colour, an artist with a palette of yellow and gold. The warmth added to the feeling of well-being and strength he had imbibed from her and he stretched, flexing his arms and his legs. He rubbed his knees, sore from resting on the hard ground and brushed off his jacket and trousers. They were coming. He had business to attend to. He tried to disguise the spring in his step as he walked away from her.
* * *
At the end of a predictably busy day, he drove to Moulin Huet. He hoped to be alone but the lengthening hours of daylight ensured this was not the case. An elderly couple gave a friendly ‘good evening’ as they walked past. Their bright-eyed border collie sniffed at his ankles and gave a low growl. Dogs usually liked him. He wondered if it could smell death on his shoes.
He sat on his rock. Sat and watched the setting sun. The very same sun that had risen that morning, that had brushed the earth with the lightest golden touch now lay red and bloated, too heavy for the darkening sky. He watched it bleed into the ocean, until the last of it had been consumed and he felt the warmth of the day, settling into his bones, strengthening his body and mind. He had spent years wondering, searching inside himself, trying to find a way to fulfil this aching desire to do something, anything, to make a difference. He closed his eyes. Smiled. Finally, he had a plan.
17
Jenny
Friday, 14 November
The rain eased off around lunchtime but there was a cold wind. The perfect opportunity to test out her theory that the bathing pools would be more sheltered than the open sea. She walked through town and on to the seafront. A few boats swayed and creaked in the Albert marina. Small yachts and catamarans, fishing boats, mostly local, the odd French flag. Not many tourists made the trip across the Channel at this time of year. Further out there were a few floating gin palaces, Sunseekers, Fairlines and the like, which tended to be the tax exiles’ vessels of choice. Boats with big engines, whose owners preferred to lounge around on the deck while sipping cocktails and wouldn’t know what a jib or a mainsail looked like, let alone what to do with them. It seemed strange, to move over here, to this backwater, to go to all that effort to save money and then to blow it on an overpriced boat which only got taken out a couple of times a year. Probably small c
hange to them. And it meant they could join the Yacht Club, which was the only place for a snob worth their salt to be seen over here.
She carried on out of town, past the bus terminus and Castle Cornet, to the bottom of the Val de Terres, a steep, winding road leading up to Fort George. Here, she turned left, following the seafront to the bathing pools.
There were three pools, one each for ladies, gentlemen and children, plus a small, shallow, horseshoe-shaped pool used for paddling or as a warm-up spot before committing to the deeper, colder water further out. The pools were man-made, huge concrete troughs edged with the ever-present granite the island provided, but at the same time they were part of the sea; it was both within and without them, filling them and draining them as the tide ebbed and flowed. Jenny had never swum here. She knew they were once popular. She had seen black-and-white photographs of school children in their old-fashioned bathing costumes, lined up at the edge, eagerly awaiting swimming galas, but nowadays, when it was no longer frowned upon to be seen in a swimsuit on a public beach, there seemed little use for the place. It was archaic, a relic of a bygone age, a quieter, more genteel time. It was beautiful.
Several cars were parked on the road alongside the pools, facing out to sea, pensioners inside, sipping tea from Styrofoam cups, taking in the view. Across the inky water, under low-lying cloud, Castle Cornet was grey and foreboding, looking more like the fortification it once was than the quaint museum it had become. Behind them, the cliffs rose sharply, ochre rocks, slick with rain, jutting out from beneath dense foliage, providing a natural shield from the wind.
Three women in bright green swimming caps were doing lengths in the ladies’ pool. Jenny changed quickly and stood at the side of the pool, but only for a moment. You couldn’t give yourself time to consider the cold, had to train yourself to think only of what needed to be done to get into the water. Keep moving forward, never hesitate. Waves broke against the pool walls, but, within, the water was calm. She dived in. Ice-cold, painful at first, then numbing. Her limbs shocked and frozen, it took every effort to move them. Slowly, she found a rhythm. It was easier to swim here than in the open sea, the calm water less demanding. It was easier to think too. About dead girls. Elizabeth, lying on the pool’s concrete edge. Amanda, on a bed of stones. And Madalina. Where was she? Epping Forest, most likely. In a shallow grave.
