Stick or Twist

by Diane Janes

  Who was he trying to kid? He would end up clinging there until the hours turned into days and delirious with hunger and thirst, he would lose consciousness and plummet to his death on the rocks below. He might as well get the thing over with now. He’d gambled and he’d lost everything. Even if he managed to get safely back to terra firma, Chaz and his gang of thugs were out to wreak revenge for his unpaid debts. That was assuming he wasn’t in custody for murder, because on consideration, the situation didn’t look good: two people shot, another one pulped at the bottom of some cliffs, and him the sole survivor.

  His right side ached where it had been bruised and jarred in the fall, while his head still throbbed from the blows inflicted by Rob. Every part of his body was protesting. Wouldn’t it just be easier to give up now? Another series of hideous noises drifted up to him. Rob was pleading with someone – anyone – to come and help him. Mark clenched his jaws together. The guy had shot Jude in cold blood. He deserved to suffer. His continued survival however gave pause for thought. If he threw himself down and the fall didn’t kill him, he was going to be in far worse discomfort than he was now. From where he was positioned just now, a suicide attempt didn’t look like a smart option.

  FORTY-EIGHT

  Peter had eventually crawled back into bed at around six thirty, his ability to sleep miraculously restored. By the time he woke again Hannah was already up, showered and dressed. He found her sitting at the kitchen table, with the telephone and a handwritten list in front of her. He recognized it as the list she had already agreed in advance with her brother-in-law, of people she should ring to convey the news of Clare’s death. Typical of conscientious, efficient Hannah, he thought, to have fulfilled her difficult commission within twelve hours of the event. When he got nearer, he could see that there was a neat tick alongside each of the names. Impulsively he kissed her on the top of the head. She responded by reaching for his hand and squeezing it.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

  ‘Not as awful as I thought. I expected to be in floods at this point, but I think it’s like I said last night – or was it this morning? There’s been such a long lead up, so much grief already. We’ll never get over losing her, but somehow the actual moment … it isn’t as bad as I thought it would be.’

  He bent down and kissed her hair again. Close up, she always smelled gorgeous. You could get high, just sniffing her, he thought.

  ‘It’s the funeral I’m dreading now.’

  ‘I’ll be with you.’

  She raised her face, then frowned when he failed to kiss it. ‘Don’t panic. You can forget what I said last night. I’m not going to trick you into fatherhood.’

  ‘I never even thought about it. I didn’t want to kiss you, because I haven’t cleaned my teeth in I don’t know how many hours and my mouth tastes like the scrapings from a guinea pig’s cage.’

  ‘I didn’t realize you were familiar with the taste of guinea pig droppings.’

  ‘I’m a man of wide experience.’

  ‘Seriously – I want you to forget what I said last night. Forget the whole conversation. I know it kept you awake last night.’

  ‘Au contraire – there you are, you didn’t know I could speak French either, did you?’

  ‘I’d expect nothing less from a man of wide experience.’

  ‘Well, OK then. As it happens, it was an entirely different conversation with you which kept me awake last night.’

  ‘What conversation was that?’

  ‘It was the conversation we’ve been having – on and off – for weeks. The Thackeray case. You’ve made point after point and basically no one – least of all me – was listening. And the trouble is that no one – maybe not even you – completely got what all of it means.’

  ‘Points mean prizes?’

  ‘Your points – all those on-the-ball, nit-picking, typical spikey McMahon observations—’

  ‘You do know that I find it extremely sexy when you call me McMahon – I wish you’d do it more when we’re in bed together.’

  ‘Please can we stay on track here?’

  ‘Just another observation.’

  ‘Right. What it all adds up to is that Jude Thackeray – and her supposed brother, Robin – may have set the whole thing up.’

  ‘Supposed brother?’

  ‘Granny Mina’s friend said she didn’t think there was a brother. We need to check that out, because it seems like something else that wasn’t looked into properly at the time.’

  ‘We were short-handed.’

  ‘I don’t care if we were short-footed.’

  ‘I realize what it all adds up to. If Jude and Robin Thackeray are not what they seem, then they could have set the whole thing up between them. I’ve gone over and over it all and got to that time and again,’ Hannah said. ‘But what I don’t get is why. What’s the motive? They didn’t make any money out of it. They didn’t want the publicity. It was as much as we could do to persuade them to do a press conference to appeal for information.’

  ‘They said they didn’t want publicity, but they got it anyway. Appearing reticent gave them a veneer of authenticity. The seriously rich don’t need to sell their story. But suppose you weren’t rich at all, but you wanted to attract a man who was. An extremely wealthy man will be wary of even the most attractive gold-digger, looking to snare a rich husband …’

  ‘Whereas you would accept someone who had already been publicly identified as a wealthy heiress, as being just the opposite of your traditional gold-digger,’ Hannah finished for him. ‘It would take some doing, but I suppose the idea would be to keep up the façade just long enough to get a ring on your finger.’ She thought for a moment, then added, ‘But surely having got your millionaire, you’d need to keep him sweet, unless you wanted to lose him again. And you’d lose him pretty damn quickly, once he realized that he’d been tricked.’

  ‘Are you familiar with the saying, where there’s a will, there’s a beneficiary?’

  Hannah emitted a slow whistle from between puckered lips. ‘If Mr Millionaire made a will in your favour, then died, you could end up getting all the spoils.’

  ‘Precisely. In fact you wouldn’t need to make a new will. Marriage negates any pre-existing testaments, so if anything happens to hubby, brand-new wifey stands to gain. Having taken the trouble to plan an elaborate sham kidnap, in which the victim manages to escape at the last minute, it presumably isn’t going to be beyond newly-wed wife, assisted by her fake brother, to organize a robbery or an accident, in order to dispose of poor old hubby.’

  ‘Surely they’re not dumb enough to think that they could get away with pulling the same stunt twice?’

  ‘Why not?’ Peter ran his hand across his unshaven chin. ‘If we’re on the right lines, then they’ve already got away with it once, and I don’t suppose it’s their intention to re-run a carbon copy of the original stunt. They would think of something else.’

  Hannah looked thoughtful. ‘It’s so extreme.’

  ‘It’s also bloody risky. All kinds of things could go wrong.’

  ‘Then again, you don’t have to be in this job forever to realize that some people will go to the most ridiculous lengths to get money, and come up with schemes so crazy that no sane person would attempt them.’

  ‘If we’re right, then the boss isn’t going to like the fact that so many things were missed first time around. And if we’re wrong, we could end up looking like a right pair of idiots.’

  ‘If we’re right, some poor bloke could be in danger right now … Did that last remark sound as melodramatic to you as it did to me?’

  ‘Definitely. Except that it may be true. Are you off today?’

  ‘Yeah. I phoned in earlier. Compassionate leave – and as it happens to be your day off anyway …’

  ‘Anything in particular that you have to do?’

  ‘Not really. We all said what we had to say to one another at the hospital last night. I’ve worked my way through the list of people I’d
agreed to telephone. Basically, I’d much rather be at work than taking condolence calls at home.’

  ‘Then I suggest we do a little bit of unofficial ferreting. We’re going to need more than a few hunches to persuade Lingo that we’re really onto something.’

  FORTY-NINE

  ‘Stay awake, stay awake,’ Mark muttered to himself. The effort of maintaining the same position for what seemed like hours was sending his body into involuntary spasms, making his upper body rock backwards and forwards, like the head of a nodding dog on the backseat of a car. Though he doubted whether it was possible for anyone in such an uncomfortable situation to accidentally fall asleep, he was afraid that it might be possible to drift into some form of unconsciousness from sheer mental and physical exhaustion.

  From somewhere far below came another series of howls and moans – a mere dribble of incoherent sounds now, with no definite words discernible. Mark longed to scream down at Rob to shut up. The noise had been going on and on. It was serving no useful purpose and was driving him crazy. He remained silent however, because at the back of his mind there lingered a faint doubt as to how badly injured Rob actually was, and whether or not he had lost his grip on the gun. It would be just my luck, Mark thought, to hang on until dawn breaks, only to find myself still in the firing line of a man who’s lost the use of everything except his trigger finger.

  When the fear of losing mental concentration – and with it, his precarious balance – crept up on him, he tried to focus on something concrete. He attempted to remember every Derby winner for the last twenty-five years, but he got stuck on the one which came between Benny the Dip and Lammtarra. After that he went through every person who had taught him since nursery school, followed by a recitation of the kings and queens of England, from William the Conqueror onwards. He was nothing if not an asset to a pub quiz team, he thought. At one stage he wondered about praying, but he hadn’t really given the Deity much consideration since leaving prep school, and thought that promises of turning over a new leaf in exchange for divine intervention would sound particularly hollow under present circumstances.

  He tried to decide which direction the cove faced. North west probably. He had watched as the moon climbed briefly above the headland, before disappearing behind it again, and with the resumption of a darker sky, he had become more aware of the stars, but as he knew nothing at all about astronomy, they gave him no help with his orientation. As for telling the time, though he did recall the phrase, ‘the darkest hour is just before dawn’, he had a distinct suspicion that it came from a pop song, rather than being an actual real-life indicator of the passage of time.

  He couldn’t ever remember watching the sun come up, but he was expecting something dramatic, so he was surprised when the reality of the dawn crept upon him unexpectedly, with a gradually lightening sky and the realization that he could make out the shadowy barrier of earth and rock which had arrested his fall, and then the faint shape of his own lower body. He stretched out an exploratory arm and counted the grey shadows of his fingers and thumb – confirmation that it was definitely getting light. Soon he could see well enough to distinguish the water from the sand, and make out the crests of the small waves as they tumbled forward, then receded in a mass of white lacy froth, a dizzying distance below him.

  He could see now that the section of cliff which had broken his fall was part of a narrow ridge which ran down from the top of the cliff face, ending a matter of inches from where it had brought him to a halt. If he had gone over the edge just a couple of feet further to his left, he would have missed it altogether, which he was forced to assume was what had happened to Rob. It was some while since he had last heard anything from him and though there was now ample light in the sky, he still could not see him. An uneasy suspicion grew in his mind that Rob might have recovered sufficiently to be back on the prowl, and was maybe working his way to a vantage point, from which he could take a pot shot at a helpless target. At the same time, a competing voice of common sense said that those sounds the night before had emanated from a badly damaged individual, who was probably lying somewhere in the area of beach directly below his eyrie, hidden by the jumble of outcrops which criss-crossed the reddish brown cliff face.

  If that was the case, then it was unlikely that anyone walking along the cliff top would be able to see Rob either, still less spot himself, clinging part way up. He supposed that he could try shouting for help, but there was no point doing that unless someone was coming. Would he be able to hear anyone walking along the top of the cliffs? How often did anyone walk along? No one ever came to the beach itself – Jude had said so and he had no reason to disbelieve her on that point, even if she had lied about so much else. How often did anyone come along the coast in a boat travelling close enough in to notice people stranded on the beach? Maybe not for days. Rescue from an external source appeared to be a forlorn hope.

  Though it was not a sheer drop to the beach, the slope immediately below him was far too steep to tackle, and Mark knew that once you began to slide it would be game over. The only other option was to attempt an ascent. He twisted his neck at an awkward angle, and began to contemplate what would be entailed in going up. The surface above his head was pitted and uneven, theoretically providing plenty of foot and hand holds, but how to tell which ones would support his weight and which would give way beneath him? Every move would represent a gamble, and gambling – as things had turned out – clearly wasn’t his forte. Still, since attempting to go down was out of the question …

  Obviously it would be foolhardy to rush into anything. He considered the options again – a process which did not take anything like as long as he would have liked it to. It was getting lighter every minute and apart from the fact that he felt as weak as a kitten, he knew that there was no particular excuse not to get started.

  Holding his breath, he began by drawing his left leg up from its position on the exposed slope, marvelling that the limb responded at all, after the deadening cramps which he had endured the night before while trying to retain the same position for so long. Once he had his left foot level with his right, he dug in gently with his heels and inched his backside further up into the small gully between two ridges of earth. It was the same manoeuvre which had brought down the unstable overhang from the cliff top the night before, but this time he achieved it without mishap. He lifted a dirty palm and saw that his hand was trembling.

  Another few inches and he felt a good deal safer. He had pulled himself into what amounted to a cup-shaped hollow, where his body was protected from any immediate drop on three sides and his feet were at least a yard back from that treacherous-looking slope. It was as far as he would be able to progress by shuffling backwards. Now the real test would begin, because he needed to stand up, steady those trembling knees, turn to face the cliff and start to climb up the narrow chasm.

  ‘Don’t look down.’

  He had spoken aloud without realizing it. No harm in a bit of self-encouragement. It wasn’t as if he had anyone else on his side. He clambered awkwardly to his feet, then edged around, an inch at a time, until he had completed the half circle and was facing away from the drop. There was a sticky out bit to his left and another foothold a little bit higher, to his right, and yes … by some kind of superhuman effort, he managed to make it onto another outcrop, which in turn led to another, smaller, three-sided, cup-shaped place where he paused, his heart hammering, his ears singing, clinging to a lump of turf which presented itself at face level.

  He was already sobbing with effort and had probably managed to ascend no more than six feet. Above the turf, he could see nothing further to help him and nor could he be certain of returning to what now seemed the relative safety of his former position. His eyes welled with self-pity. It had been the wrong choice again.

  Wait though … if he could step around the side of his current perch, there was a reasonably wide series of lumps and bumps, which led downwards. Getting onto the first one involved almost stepping into t
hin air, but he made it, then began to follow what seemed like an initially easy route, taking care to secure some kind of hand hold and testing each step with only half his weight before committing.

  The sunlight was flooding into the little bay now. From his new vantage point, he could see that a couple of boats – presumably brought there by the mysterious Stefan, were pulled well up the beach, ready and waiting for him. If everything had run according to their plan, one of those boats would have been taken out to sea and abandoned by now, bobbing along, awaiting discovery, a few items no doubt carefully planted to suggest a tragic accident; his own and Rob’s bodies dumped in deep water, maybe never found. His imagination instantly conjured images of their corpses, bloated and battered by long immersion and the beach suddenly seemed to come up to meet him, just as his leading foot slipped. No … oh no … he dug his very fingernails into the cliff face and managed to cling on.

  It took several minutes to steady himself before he could manage to move again. The two-tone loafers on his feet were hardly what he would have chosen for a climbing expedition and since the latest near-disaster whatever limited confidence he might have achieved had ebbed away again. However, he made it around a couple more vertical buttresses of earth and rock, before the series of downward hand and footholds petered out.

  It now appeared possible to attempt an upward climb again. He knew that there was nothing to be gained from going back, but equally he could see that he was making no real progress in any direction but sideways. At this rate, he would end up alternately scaling and descending in a sideways course along the face of the cliff until he finally ran out of handholds, or alternatively fell exhausted onto the beach.

  The latest ascent took him on another zig-zag, with his progress becoming slower and slower. Had there been any opportunity to sit or crouch, he would have taken it, but the cliff here was pitted with a series of narrow shelves and small depressions, which afforded no suitable location for respite. Small plants and tufts of grass, none of them rooted reliably enough to bear the weight of a man, obstructed his progress, some of them seeming to deliberately entangle themselves in his hair. The ache in his tired limbs was a constant source of agony now. Then he saw it – not twenty feet to his left, just beyond the next pinnacle of earth – the path which connected the cliff top to the beach. He struggled towards it, negotiating a large fallen boulder, a treacherously sloping grassy margin, and then he was clambering onto a wooden platform built into the side of the cliff, where he sank to his knees and sobbed in sheer relief.