by J. L. Butler
Rain started to hammer on the tin roof.
‘We might have no choice,’ he smiled.
‘Is the island going to get cut off?’ I asked, thrilled by the idea.
‘Perhaps.’
We took off our coats and there was a few moments’ silence.
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t lie to me again,’ I whispered, trying not to think of my own deception. That I knew he had met Donna in Chelsea on Monday night, because I had seen them together.
The shed was still icy cold and I could feel my nipples stand to attention under my T-shirt. I watched Martin pull the mattress off the bed and thump it on the floor in front of the fire. He stepped towards me, and then we were kissing. As he pulled my T-shirt over my head, I groaned with longing.
I closed my eyes and listened to the howl of the wind, and the harsh cry of the cormorants overhead. His fingers traced the undulations of my spine. I unzipped my jeans and shook them off, kneeling on the mattress to watch him undress.
He stepped towards me and I took him in my mouth. He held my head, his coarse hair scratching my face, and I breathed him in deeply, the scent of sweat and musk and sex, the taste of him, moist, sour and warm.
‘Lie back,’ said Martin, as he pulled out of me.
I smiled and lowered myself back as he straddled me.
‘Do you want the island to get cut off?’
His voice was low and husky with the anticipation of what was to come.
I nodded my approval, spreading my legs to receive him.
A length of rope lay coiled by the stove. He picked it up, stretched my arms over my head and gripped my wrists tightly. After tying them together, he fastened them to the frame of the bed, and lowered his face closer to mine until I could feel his breath on my lips. I felt bound and captured, as if he possessed me. At that moment, it was the only thing I wanted.
‘There’s a new moon tonight, so you might be in luck. You might not be able to escape,’ he said into my ear as I shivered through cold or sense of danger; I neither knew nor cared.
I was out at sea, out of my depth, the only thing I could think about or cared about was him.
I gave a soft, submissive sigh of pleasure as he traced his mouth over my breasts and abdomen, down and down, until his tongue was inside me, stroking that slick nub until I started to come, my back arching, my trussed fists trying to lift off the floor. I was oblivious to the sharp burning sensation of the rope chafing my skin, oblivious as he kissed me and teased me to a climax of sweet, abandoned desire.
I cried out and the sound merged with the rain and the wind. As he came up from between my thighs, he smiled and began to untie me.
I took small, controlled breaths to calm myself and he lay down in the space beside me.
‘I would rather sell the loft than this place,’ he said, so quietly that I could barely hear him.
‘It won’t come to that,’ I whispered, feeling cold air seep into the shed through the cracks in the clapboard.
An image of his wife pushed into my thoughts, and as I looked up, watching the shadows of the flames dance on the cracked paintwork of the ceiling, I tried to forget that the last person to see the missing Donna Joy was the man lying next to me.
Chapter 17
I must have dozed off, lulled by the muffled sound of the wind and rain, but the shrill ring of a mobile phone shook me from my slumber.
I glanced over at Martin, sat upright on the blanket-strewn mattress and immediately I could tell that the call concerned Donna. I watched his brow crease, the muscles in his face tighten; yet again she had the power to fire-blanket my pleasure.
Martin’s end of the conversation was short, crisp and professional, which made it hard to work out what the call was about. When it ended, he fell silent and looked thoughtful.
‘Everything OK?’ I asked, not wanting to intrude but desperate to know what was going on.
‘I’ve got to go,’ he said, not meeting my eye.
‘What. Now?’
‘The police are concerned about Donna,’ he said, getting to his feet.
‘More worried than they were this morning?’ I asked, reaching for my T-shirt. I feared that this was not a conversation we wanted to have naked.
‘Apparently. They want to speak to me, so we’ve got to get back to London.’
‘But they’ve already spoken to you today,’ I replied, feeling panic in my belly.
‘And now they want to meet me again. Tonight. Someone is coming to Spitalfields at ten.’ He picked up his shirt and threaded his arms through the sleeves.
Looking at his bare chest and flaccid cock, I wondered what the police would think if they could see him now. As if he was reading my mind, he grabbed the rest of his clothes and dressed quickly. He rubbed a layer of dust off the window and peered outside.
‘Nice night for a drive back to the city,’ he muttered. And as he opened the door, an angry swoosh of wind roared into the shack, shaking it to its core. I sensed an ending; with a bleak certainty, I knew that things were going to be unwelcomely different once we stepped out of the cabin.
It was dark outside. Driving rain lashed my face as we ran across the beach and back to the house. I slipped several times, the soles of my shoes skidding on the wet shingle, but each time I scrambled up again, desperate to get to the car.
The house groaned as we ran inside. My hair stuck to my cheeks, and my damp jeans felt claggy against my skin, but there was no time to dry off. Martin locked up Dorsea House and we got into the Aston Martin, my damp coat squelching against the pale leather seats. He switched on the headlights, casting ghostly halos on the front of the building. The corner of my mouth curled upwards, a grim goodbye of regret and wonder. Something told me I would not come back here and I wanted to remember its faded grandeur.
Firing the engine, Martin turned on the wipers. Despite the power and precision engineering of the vehicle, they struggled to make two clear arches on the windscreen.
‘Perhaps we should wait a bit,’ I offered as the wheels crunched over the gravel.
‘It’s been raining this hard for an hour. It could go on all night,’ he replied.
Darkness enveloped us as we pulled out of the gates. Pinpricks of light pierced the black hole of night and foul weather, but otherwise it was completely dark.
I strained my eyes and looked for the fishing boats I had seen earlier, hoping that they were all safely moored. Driving conditions were terrible, but things would be far worse at sea.
Martin focused at the wheel, but his speed was steady and I wasn’t sure whether this was because of the poor visibility or a recluctance to get back to the city.
In the distance, I could make out the shadowy outline of the mainland. Though less than a mile away, for the past few hours it had seemed blissfully distant, part of another universe. We were nearing the causeway now and already, in the pale beam of the headlights, I could make out a band of brackish, dirty water that ran across the road.
‘I don’t believe it,’ cursed Martin, slowing the car until it had almost stopped. The sound of the seawater sloshing against the tyres was unmistakable.
I knew better than to speak. Martin revved the engine but it growled dangerously, reminding us this was a sports car, not an off-road vehicle.
‘There’s no way through,’ he muttered. I wondered if I would chance it in a £100,000 Aston Martin.
‘How long does it last?’ I asked as he started to reverse.
‘Not sure. An hour, maybe two in the spring tides, but who knows in a flood.’
‘Should we go back to Dorsea?’
He shook his head. ‘No. There’s a pub down the road. We should sit and wait it out. They’ll have more of an idea when the road might clear.’
The Anchor was a half-timbered building I had noticed on the way there. Parking right outside, we ran in to find it unsurprisingly empty.
We ordered two coffees from the barman, who suggested making them Irish. From his
banter, I wasn’t sure if he knew Martin or whether he was just grateful for the custom.
Martin led the way to a banquette table with red flocked seating tucked away in a corner. I glanced across at the only other customers: two old men nursing pints of Guinness. My knee bounced up and down under the table as I waited for Martin to say something.
‘So how did you leave it on Monday night?’ I asked, pretending to be calm.
‘Leave it?’ he said, taking his cup of coffee from the waitress.
‘How long were you there? At Donna’s.’
‘Come on, we don’t need to talk about that,’ he said, taking a sip and avoiding my gaze.
‘This isn’t about me, Martin,’ I whispered pointedly.
I didn’t want to interrogate him but I felt myself slipping into professional mode. I wanted him to be prepared for the police, and besides, I wanted to know.
‘I left around midnight,’ he offered finally.
‘Was she awake?’
‘She was in bed. She got up as I was leaving.’
‘And she didn’t give you any idea about what she was doing the next day,’ I said, morphing into the person I was in court.
‘She didn’t mention anything out of the ordinary,’ he said with a touch of petulance.
I glanced at the other customers, paranoid that they could hear our conversation.
‘I assume you told the police you went round on Monday night.’
He looked uncomfortable but my own panic was building as my thoughts raced ahead of me, looking for angles, clues, solutions. I could see where this was going and it frightened me. The only way I knew how to deal with it was professionally, like a methodical puzzle, although unlike my other cases, I was unable to leave this conundrum in the office.
‘I said we met for dinner. To discuss the divorce.’
‘And did you tell them you slept with her?’
My bluntness made him frown.
‘No,’ he said finally.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it doesn’t look good.’
‘Too right it doesn’t. And it’s going to look worse when it looks like you withheld information from them. What about when you left? Where did you go?’
‘Back home.’
‘How?’
‘I walked.’
‘You walked? It must be five miles back to the loft.’
‘I had a lot of thinking to do.’
Resentment, fear, panic; I could see it all there in his expression.
‘Do you think I should speak to a lawyer?’
I saw his Adam’s apple bob up and down and I felt a spike of pity for him.
‘Not my area of expertise,’ I said quietly, randomly reminded of all those friends over the years who’d wanted help with house purchases, speeding tickets and consumer complaints. I was the one-size-fits-all lawyer that everyone thought had the answers to everything.
‘A criminal lawyer. You must know someone.’
‘But you haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said carefully, gauging his reaction.
He nodded, the alpha male reminding himself that everything could be resolved if you threw enough resources at it.
‘She’ll be somewhere,’ he said more passionately. ‘A friend in the country, overseas.’
‘Why don’t you call her sister?’
‘Right. She’s probably been telling the police I’m the big, bad husband who wants to screw Donna over in a divorce. That I’d be better off if Donna just disappeared.’
‘She wants to find Donna. Just as we all do.’
He glanced at his watch. He didn’t need to tell me the time. The clock behind his head told me it was gone nine o’clock.
‘This is going to look great,’ he said sarcastically. ‘Not turning up for a police interview.’
‘You probably shouldn’t tell them you were locked in a shed with your divorce lawyer,’ I said trying to lighten the tension.
‘I thought you said I should tell them the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.’
I felt a flutter of fear. A cold realization that I was now involved. I had joined the cast of a drama I had not auditioned for, and I did not like my part.
Glancing around, I was suddenly nervous of eyes upon me.
‘What should I tell them?’
‘The truth,’ I said firmly. ‘You were at your house in Essex and the flood cut off the road to the mainland.’
‘I should go and phone Jemma.’
‘And maybe I should sit in the car.’
‘We’ve been seen now,’ he said, as if reading my thoughts.
He was gone five minutes, although to me, the time seemed to drag on much longer. I prayed he’d come back smiling, but he looked even more unsettled than when he had left the room to make the call.
‘They searched the house today. They found her handbag and phone,’ he said when he’d sat back down.
‘I’m sure Donna has more than one bag. One phone even.’
I said it to reassure him, but I was aware that everything I said could sound like a dig at Donna.
‘They found her passport too. But not her purse. Landline messages haven’t been checked since Monday. She’s not been admitted into any of the local hospitals, none of her friends know where she is . . .’
He paused to stir his teaspoon around his cold coffee, splashing dark streaks around the rim of the cup.
‘A detective inspector is in charge of it now and the Missing Persons Bureau are involved. There’s talk of an appeal being broadcast tomorrow night.’
I’d been to enough family law conferences, attended enough child abduction seminars, to know how this worked. To know that while we had been fucking in the oyster shed, Donna Joy had been passing through cyberspace, her details, her image, the circumstances of her disappearance. To know that someone in authority was taking the fact that she was missing sufficiently seriously. I knew that an appeal meant the media would be involved, stories leaked, information managed. I knew this was not looking good for Martin Joy, and by implication, for me.
‘Do they have a theory about what might have happened to her?’ I asked after a moment.
‘It’s always the husband, isn’t it,’ he said quietly. ‘A wife goes missing, and the finger gets pointed at the husband first.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ I said, putting my hand over his. ‘You’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘I should talk to a lawyer. Just to get some advice on how to handle this.’
I noticed a tic pulsing under his left bottom eyelid and jumped when I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned quickly and saw the bar manager, who gave us a thin, brown-toothed smile.
‘Water on the causeway’s thinning out,’ he said, clearing up our coffee cups. ‘Looks like it’s your lucky night, after all.’
I glanced up at Martin, and I could tell from his faraway and troubled expression that neither of us believed him.
Chapter 18
I was surprised that he was in on a Saturday night and even more surprised that he was alone.
‘Coffee or a stiff drink?’ asked Tom Briscoe when he opened the door of his Highgate home. It was a terraced cottage overlooking Pond Square, small but with an appropriate air of Georgian grandness.
‘Coffee. Decaf,’ I said, already feeling anxious as I stepped inside, not venturing more than a few feet beyond the threshold. The door opened straight on to an open-plan living space. I looked and listened for another person in the property but it was almost as quiet and dark and still as the deserted Highgate square outside.
‘I’m so sorry about this,’ I said gripping the strap of my handbag tighter. ‘I know it’s late, but it shouldn’t take long.’
‘It’s fine. Come through,’ he said, keeping his distance but directing me towards the sofa with a sweep of his hand.
He disappeared into the kitchen and I looked around the dimly lit space. The dining table was covered in files and legal textbooks, and I could see the soft glow
of a laptop screen, a half-eaten sandwich on a plate. I’d always considered Tom to be a bit of a chancer, a privileged public schoolboy who had got where he was through the old boy network, but this scene said something else. A workaholic on a Saturday night, putting in the graft and extra hours.
‘Is Hannah not here this weekend?’ I asked, taking off my coat. I put it over the back of his club chair, and felt suddenly conscious that I wasn’t wearing a bra. I folded my arms in front of me, wondering if I still smelt of sex and the sea. All I wanted now was to get this meeting over with.
‘I’ve told you, it’s not that sort of relationship,’ he smiled, coming back through and handing me a mug of coffee. It would usually have been my cue to tease him, but the last thing I felt like doing was joking around.
As I curled my fingers around the blue-and-white striped mug, I could feel the steam rise up in front of my face. I sat down on the sofa as he sat in the armchair opposite me.
‘So are you going to tell me what’s going on?’ he said finally, sensing I was in no mood for chit-chat.
I muttered an apology for being so vague when I’d called him on the way back from Essex. As the foul weather had tailed off as we approached London, Martin had become more agitated with every passing mile. It was a side of him that I had never seen before, one I had to admit was not especially attractive.
‘You must know a lawyer,’ he’d pressed, until in the end I got on the phone and called the one person I knew who might be able to help, even though I felt very uncomfortable doing so.
I was not in the habit of calling Tom Briscoe late on a Saturday night. In fact our paths rarely crossed outside of chambers. But Tom and I went back a long way. We were not close, but we were bound together by history and geography. We had both arrived at Burgess Court to start our pupillage on the same day and had spent every day of our working lives together; if that didn’t give me licence to arrive at his house at this time, then I don’t know what did. Even so, I didn’t like being here. Not when I’d spent the afternoon fucking the client I was here to discuss. I had come here because Martin was desperate and I would do whatever I needed to do to help him.
I took a sip of coffee before I spoke.
