On the Edge

by Jane Jesmond

  I peered over his shoulder. It was the bank. He went indoors and I took the harness off and let it drop to the ground. Window cleaning was over for now. Thank God. I stuffed everything else into the bag round my waist and untied it.

  ‘Jen,’ Talan said. ‘I’m glad of the chance for a word. I wanted to tell you that the lighthouse file is closed. No further action will be taken. There was no real damage done.’

  ‘OK.’

  I stuffed my hands into my sleeves to coax some warmth back into them.

  ‘So we can let the matter drop.’ He paused. ‘But be careful, Jen. I’m speaking to you as a friend. An older brother, if you like.’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ I was pretty sure now this was true. ‘I didn’t break into the lighthouse.’

  He frowned.

  ‘Someone saw a young woman,’ he said.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Kelly’s voice was sharp.

  Had she told Talan something?

  Talan sighed. ‘Nothing.’

  I looked hard at Kelly but she brushed her bruise-coloured fringe out of her face, met my gaze and gave me a tiny shake of her head.

  ‘Not that bloody lighthouse again. It’s all you talk about.’ She came over. Her bad leg dragged, scraping along the gravel.

  ‘Someone saw a young woman heading towards the lighthouse that night,’ Talan continued. ‘On the road heading out of the village. They remembered because the rain was tipping down by then. They wondered what she was doing.’

  ‘The road out of the village?’ I repeated. ‘In the rain?’

  It made no sense. I’d been out of the village well before the rain started.

  ‘Really! Who?’ Kelly said to Talan.

  ‘One of the old boys coming out of the pub. Waiting in the doorway for a break in the rain.’

  ‘Christ, Talan. They’re all ninety-five and deaf and blind. Did they say it was Jen?’

  Talan hesitated. ‘No. They didn’t get a close look, but they were sure it was a woman. A young woman. Who else would it be? It sounded like Jen.’

  He had a point, I thought. Who else would be out and about?

  ‘Loads of people,’ Kelly said. ‘The one-way system’s a nightmare. People often get dropped off at the top of the high street and have to walk down. Besides, why the fuck would Jen walk out of the hotel in the rain? When she’d got a perfectly good car in the car park behind it? Huh?’

  Talan looked at my car, bright red against the greens and browns of the trees, and I gave Kelly a quick, grateful smile. Now was my moment, I thought. While Kit was away.

  ‘Talan,’ I said, my thoughts speeding ahead of my words. ‘I know I can trust you. I’ve found something. Something that really worries me.’

  With their eyes following me, I walked over to my car, leant in, unlocked the glove compartment and took out my little package of powder. My hand didn’t even shake. And my aim was true when I tossed it to Talan.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked, turning it over in his hands.

  ‘What do you think it is?’

  ‘You know what it looks like. Where did you get it?’

  I made a rapid decision. I wouldn’t tell Talan about Nick Crawford. Not yet. There’d be time once I knew for sure what the powder was.

  ‘I found it in one of the attics.’ I lied.

  His eyes looked up into the dark windows under the eaves, gleaming from my efforts.

  ‘Among a pile of old paint pots,’ I continued. ‘Thought it was some sort of plaster but it seemed strange because it was such a tiny amount. So I removed it. Put it in the car. You know, with Rosa getting into everything now, I didn’t want to leave it lying about.’ I was doing well, I thought. Talan’s face had creased in understanding when I’d mentioned Rosa and he’d stopped fiddling with the car keys. ‘So will you take it and get rid of it for me? I don’t want to put it in a bin. In case…’

  ‘But who would have left it there?’

  ‘Impossible to say. The place has been full of people for months.’ I paused. Deliberately. Then did a little flutter of the hands as though an idea had just come to me. ‘I don’t suppose you could get it tested, could you? Just, if it is what we think it is, I ought to tell Kit. But I don’t want to worry him if it’s nothing.’ I paused again, as if I was summoning up the courage to confide. ‘Things are bad. You know that, don’t you? Kit’s got a lot of problems. We’ll get out of it. We’ll find a way. I’m going to sell my flat. And my car. But Kit’s stressed to death. And Sofija, too. I can’t give them anything else to worry about.’

  He reached out a hand and patted my shoulder. Sort of brotherly-like. I resisted the urge to slap it away and smiled and thanked him.

  ‘I didn’t ask Kit for my money back,’ Talan said. ‘I guess you’re the one who’s paying?’

  ‘I don’t think Kit is comfortable owing you money,’ I said. ‘And it’s a lot, Talan. You should have it back. It’s our mess, not yours.’

  We shuffled around the subject a bit longer. I was touched, though, that he was prepared to forgo such a large sum. I didn’t think policemen earned a great deal. And he must be helping Kelly, too. If she had to look after Freda, she must be desperate for money.

  ‘You won’t forget to let me know about the test results,’ I said.

  ‘You staying at Tregonna then?’ Kelly asked.

  ‘Yup,’ I said. She raised her eyebrows. ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘Can’t be easy.’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘Talan said your mother and Sofija aren’t talking. That they’d had a terrible row.’

  Talan looked uncomfortable. ‘That was in confidence.’

  ‘I’m only telling Jen. Keep your hair on.’

  ‘I’d noticed anyway,’ I said. ‘You could hardly miss it. It’s just stress. They’ll be better now things are getting sorted.’ But, remembering both the look on Sofija’s face after she’d learnt the sale of my flat wouldn’t cover their debts and Ma’s vitriolic words about her, I knew it was unlikely.

  As their car went up the drive, Kelly looked back at me with a sharp expression. She guessed I’d lied about the cocaine, I thought. If I could get her on her own I’d explain.

  ‘Off to his mine,’ Kit said as he came out of the house.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Talan’s part of a band of oddballs who are restoring the old mine at Cambervale. Trying to make it into a tourist attraction. Although I think the others have rather lost interest.’

  Memories of a pleasant but narrow and steep-sided wooded valley with a large stream came back to me. Cambervale was a long walk from Tregonna but we’d gone there from time to time. Kit and I and a group of friends. It was a long way from anywhere, in fact, and quiet. The ruins of the old mine were hidden here and there in the valley, come upon by chance and covered with ivy or with trees growing out of their walls. I remembered the ivy more than anything else. It had a bitter smell that stayed on your hands for a long time.

  ‘I’m surprised there’s anything left to restore. It was falling apart when we used to play there.’

  ‘Did we?’ Kit’s face was blank, his thoughts elsewhere.

  ‘Don’t you remember? Part of it fell down one day.’

  ‘That’s the buildings. Pump houses and engine rooms. Talan’s working on the underground stuff.’

  I shuddered. He laughed at my face and, for a moment, he was the old Kit, before financial stress squashed the life out of him.

  ‘It’s not so bad because it’s not very deep,’ he went on. ‘Only a scratch in the hillside. Not like the shafts at Botallack or Levant that run out under the sea for miles. Awful for the miners, always wondering if the weight of the water above might split the rock. It would only take a tiny crack and the sea would…’

  His voice wavered and I looked hard at him. His hands gripped hi
s face, leaving a gap between his fingers through which his eyes glinted. Sharp and bright. I thought he might be crying and looked away.

  ‘I can’t get over Talan being a policeman. He wanted to be a pirate when we were young,’ I babbled. ‘We were going to sail the seas together and live on coconuts from handy desert islands. We even started building a boat.’ I gave up. ‘Kit, what’s happened?’

  ‘I’ve got to go to the bank,’ he said. ‘To beg,’ he added. ‘Not that it’ll do any good in the long run, but it might buy us a bit more time.’ He took his hands from his face and picked up the harness I’d dropped.

  ‘Did you explain –?’

  He cut me off. ‘I told them everything. The car. The flat. But they want all their money back and we haven’t got it.’ He ran the harness straps back and forward through his hands. ‘I think we might have reached the end of the line.’

  Despair stripped his face of colour and I couldn’t look. I wanted to tell him there were worse things than going bankrupt but obviously I didn’t.

  ‘The belay’s in the attic with the rest of my stuff if you want to carry on with the windows,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe later.’

  Fourteen

  As soon as Kit had gone I went into the house. Asking Talan to test the powder was the first step. Now for the next. It was time to find out more about the so charming Mr Crawford.

  A few doubts washed through my head. Maybe I should leave it. Maybe I should disappear. Lie low. It might be safer. But I couldn’t. I wanted to get the bastard who’d hung me over the lighthouse and left me to fall. Besides, when had I ever run away from danger?

  I went back to my room, typed ‘Nick Crawford’ into Google and scrolled through pages of hits. He shared his name with a member of a popular boy band and a very vocal scientist in New Zealand. Even when I eliminated the two of them from my search, it was a common enough name to yield thousands of matches. More surprisingly, ‘Nick Crawford carpenter’ brought up nothing that related to him, not even the website address on the card he’d given me. I typed that address in instead.

  It was a simple site. One of the off-the-peg ones you can adapt to your own products. There was some blurb about working closely with clients, high standards and wealth of experience, contact details and lots of pictures of furniture. Nothing about Nick Crawford. Not a hint of a biographical detail. Not even a picture. I checked again but there was definitely nothing.

  He could be shy. He might think his furniture would speak for itself. Which it did. Beautiful curves and abstract shapes. Distinctive, very distinctive. A suspicion came to me. I chose a piece. An extending dining table with a top made from walnut burr and the base a half circle of a loose grained wood I didn’t recognise. It was striking and simple.

  I googled ‘extending dining table walnut burr’ and hunted through the images. There were pages of them. But I found it in the end. And this time on the website of a bespoke furniture maker in Poole. Benjamin Edwards, he was called. I went onto his site and there it was. No doubt about it. Same table. Same picture even. One of them had stolen the picture from the other and when I looked further through Benjamin Edwards’s site it was clear who the thief was. In the section called ‘Workshop’ there was a picture of Benjamin working on the same table. And he looked nothing like Nick. Nick Crawford was a fake. His bare workshop was a lie. Wherever he got his money, it wasn’t from making furniture.

  I thought back to the night of the storm. How Nick had got out of his car and walked away. Lent it to me so I could get home safely. It had seemed an act of great kindness; now it looked like an entirely different scenario.

  Nick Crawford is on his way home after a night bringing the drugs to shore and transporting them to the workshop in his cottage. There have been snags. The weather, for one, although at least it meant the coastguard was unlikely to be out and about. And another was the girl who’d stumbled across the lads hauling the final package up the cliff. She saw their faces. Recognised some of them. Getting rid of her was the only solution.

  They drugged her and dragged her to the lighthouse. An accident. It would look like an accident. She was the sort of girl, they said, who would have thought it fun to go to the top and watch the storm. They hung her by an old length of sash cord. It wouldn’t hold for long and she’d fall and, with her history, everyone would think it had been a climbing accident.

  Part of me still wanted to think he hadn’t been there. That he hadn’t been part of whatever they’d done to me.

  He wasn’t there and if he had been, he thinks he’d have come up with a better solution than the lighthouse. Bash her over the head and dump her at sea, but he understands they didn’t want to go back out there with the storm scudding towards them. Besides, the disappearance of a girl as well connected as she is would make the police investigate the area and he doesn’t want that. At least this way there’ll be a body and an explanation.

  His headlights catch something at the side of the road. Someone walking. He stops.

  Had he recognised me then? Or later? It wouldn’t have taken long. There couldn’t have been many mad, drugged creatures wandering the cliffs in the storm.

  She’s not going to get in the car with him. That much is certain. And he’s not going to be able to catch her. But she’s off her head. Drugs and fear. If she goes to the police now, he doesn’t think she’ll make much sense. He doesn’t think they’ll believe her. Not in the state she’s in. And if she goes when she’s calmer, he still doesn’t think they’ll be convinced. They’ll want to know why she didn’t come straightaway. The story of being hung off the lighthouse will sound like a fantasy. He just needs to make sure the lads she recognised have a good story and an alibi. Besides, there’s every chance she won’t remember much.

  But he is a careful man. A clever man. And he wants to keep tabs on her. And most of all, he doesn’t want anyone else to come across her. Help her. Hear her story. Take her to the police. Or, if she won’t trust them, call the police. So he gives her his car. If she does go to the police, they’re hardly going to suspect the Good Samaritan who helped her out, are they?

  And the following day he picks up his car from the hotel. He finds out she is there. Not sleeping it off in a police cell or hospital. So far so good.

  He goes to the lighthouse to check nothing has been left that will give his lads away. Gregory is already there looking at the damage caused by the break-in but he hasn’t found anything incriminating. Nick finds some remnants of the cord and pockets it, then has no choice but to contact the police.

  I still wondered why he had gone to the station rather than calling them. Had he found something else at the lighthouse he wanted to get rid of before the police arrived?

  And when he comes back, she is there, chatting to Gregory.

  Me, that is. Chatting to Gregory. At ease. Perhaps a bit pale. With eyes still bearing traces of the previous night if you looked hard enough. It must have given him a shock. He must have sweated even more when Talan arrived and turned out to be an old friend of mine.

  And I’d thought he was being kind when he didn’t tell Talan he’d seen me the previous night. Covering for me. But the last thing he wanted was any discussion about what had happened the night before. Clever, clever Mr Crawford.

  Well, maybe not so clever. Because I was on to him now and I knew exactly where to go next to find out where he’d come from.

  Fifteen

  Looe hadn’t changed. The air smelled of fish and rang with the sound of yachts’ rigging twanging in the breeze. The inevitable seagulls called overhead. I remembered the town as bathed in the permanent sunshine of childhood summers. Today it was grey with a bitter edge to the wind.

  And the boats were in. My mood soared. Two pieces of luck. Getting Talan to test the powder and, now, the fishermen would be around. They were a close and closed bunch of families with boats passing from one generation to ano
ther. Chances were they’d know of illegal shipments arriving. Chances were one of them might be involved. I’d have to be careful who I spoke to.

  First, I went to the Tourist Information Centre. An elegant building, grey granite and high ceilings, built for one of the fishing fleet owners in the days when there was real money in fish. It was open and Rachel Mullins was there, sitting behind the counter sorting piles of brochures. She’d run the Tourist Office for as long as I could remember. The Mullins were one of the biggest local families with a finger in every pie. Freda, who Kelly looked after, used to run their affairs and, now that she was incapable, I was fairly sure the mantle would have passed to her daughter-in-law, Rachel. The men of the family preferred it that way. They might grumble about their mothers and wives among themselves but all of them ran scared at the thought of managing their own lives.

  As I came in she looked up and gave me a vague smile before returning to her brochures. She was a familiar figure with her square jaw and the hint of bulldog jowls dragging her cheeks down but clearly she hadn’t recognised me.

  I browsed among the postcards and fingered the key rings and purses with Welcome to Looe stamped on them and debated how to ask her about Nick Crawford. If only I were a police officer, or even a private detective, someone who could slam a card on the counter and get straight into the questions.

  Instead, I sidled up and flicked through the brochures nearest her and when she looked up again, feigned a start of surprise and exclaimed, ‘It’s Rachel, isn’t it? Rachel Mullins? Not sure if you remember me. Jen Shaw. My mother is Morwenna Hammett. At Tregonna. I was at school with your daughters.’

  Now she recognised me. We went over how much I looked like my mother and in answer to her litany of questions, I gave a brief and untrue résumé of what I’d been up to recently and lied some more about why I was back in Cornwall. She told me what her daughters were up to: one a mother, the other working for the National Trust. Both still living nearby. How nice! So Rachel saw a great deal of the grandchildren. How lovely! No, I wasn’t married. No, no one on the horizon. Yes, a brief visit home to see the renovations at Tregonna. Yes, they had been pricey. No, there was no problem. All going well. Oh with finance, you mean. Just a bit of a cash-flow thing. You know what the banks can be like.