On the Edge

by Jane Jesmond

  ‘He made those doors for Kit. Kit was pleased with them.’

  ‘Have you ever seen him actually making anything?’

  Talan shook his head.

  ‘He didn’t even fit the doors himself. Got someone local to do it for him. And when I visited his workshop, there was no sign of anything being made. It was tidy, very tidy. Too tidy. You know how people who make things are. They always have half-finished stuff lying about, or bits they’re going to use to make something else. Nick Crawford’s workshop was spartan.’

  He looked as if I’d sparked off a complicated set of ideas in his head. I had to get him to do this. ‘He’s a charmer on the surface and I guess that helps if you’re a criminal. But I’m sure he’s a villain. Through and through. Like a stick of rock, if you snapped him in two, you’d see it in him.’

  ‘You’ve been playing private detective?’

  ‘A bit.’

  ‘Well, don’t. Crawford could be dangerous.’

  He put his helmet and jacket down on the rock between us. For once, I couldn’t read him.

  ‘OK. I’ll look into him. You don’t need to come in and make a statement but you’ve got to promise me you’ll back off, Jenifry. No more haring around asking questions.’ He ground his cigarette out on the rock. ‘I’m heading back now.’

  ‘I thought you were here for the day?’

  ‘No. I need to talk to some people about what you’ve told me. Are you in the car park at the bridge?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘If you hang on a sec while I lock up, I’ll give you a lift back to your car.’

  ‘It’s OK. I’ll walk.’

  He jerked his head upwards. A crowd of dark clouds had slipped in from the south with the wind. ‘You’ve got half an hour, tops, before it pours down.’

  I thought of rain lashing down on my face and I remembered my earlier fears of being stalked in the valley.

  ‘Maybe a lift is a good idea,’ I said.

  He picked up his safety gear and headed towards the mine entrance.

  ‘I need to shut the mine. Easiest way is if I go in here and walk up to the top shaft, locking the gates behind me.’

  I peered in to the dark hole and felt the hair stretch away from my scalp. Go into the pitch black, I thought. The choking, dust-ridden dark.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to take you down there,’ he said.

  ‘Too fucking right you’re not.’

  He grinned and then his face lit up.

  ‘It’s fascinating, though, Jen. There are miles of passages we haven’t explored yet. We think there’s an older mine deep beneath this one. There’s mention of one called Wheal Greet in old documents in the library at St Blazey. It’s down there somewhere.’ He stepped into the mine and put on his hard hat, switching on its light so the beam illuminated the sides of the tunnel. ‘If we could only find it, then we’d get serious funding. At the moment, everyone thinks we’re a poxy little scratch on the surface.’

  The beam of his hard hat jerked around the cave as he spoke, sending jagged shadows chasing each other across the rock.

  ‘You’re mad, Talan Rashleigh.’

  He laughed but it was tinged with uneasiness.

  ‘You go ahead up to the top entrance,’ he said. ‘You can’t miss it. I’ll meet you there.’

  And he disappeared into the dark, slamming the red metal door behind him. Its clang startled the sparrows in the hedges and they flew up with a whir like fluttering flags. Then silence. I was alone. My fears crowded back and I hurried along the path past boulders of granite softened by centuries of rain and wind, with clumps of moss growing in the cracks and spilling out to create strange lines and shapes.

  It was growing darker by the minute when I reached the upper entrance, although the threatened rain still hadn’t arrived. I wished Talan would hurry up. I was at the top of the slope, close to the moor, and the bushes and trees had petered out. Nowhere to hide except inside the mine. I looked into it. The rock was rough. But the tunnel wasn’t dark. Not like the black hole I’d left Talan going down.

  I heard voices from above. Coming down the valley from the road where Talan was parked. I flattened my body against the rock face on one side of the mine entrance and peered up through the heather. There were two of them and they looked out of place in the valley. With their white T-shirts, black jeans and leather jackets, they should have been hanging round outside a club, checking for trouble. One of them, the older and balder one, stumbled on a stone beneath the undergrowth and swore.

  It was stupid to think they were after me. Paranoid and pathetic. But I couldn’t help it.

  I took a step into the mine.

  It wasn’t that bad in there. Further along the passage it was brighter still. I clenched my hands, fixed my eyes on the light beyond and pushed the door closed behind me.

  Talan found me, staring up at a tunnel in the roof down which the light came. A shower of soft, grey light falling in a puddle on the floor, catching on the rough edges of the rock as it dropped, dissolving the black into grey. Here and there, a glitter showed where a smear of tin ore had been left behind.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like being underground,’ I said. ‘What is this?’ I pointed to the shaft above.

  He put the two rubbish sacks he was carrying down and switched off the light on his helmet.

  ‘A raise. A cut down from the surface. This is the original mine. They started off taking tin from the streams above and when it ran out they followed the lodes of ore underground, chipping it out as they went. It’s why the raises aren’t straight.’

  I reached my hands up but the opening was too high. I could feel a faint draught and smell the sweetness of grass through the gritty smell of the rock.

  ‘We’re very close to the surface here,’ he said. ‘Further back, the raises twist and turn a long way through the rock. What are you doing here anyway?’

  ‘Two guys came down from the road and I… All your talk of dangerous men. I didn’t like the look of them.’

  ‘Wait here.’ He was gone for a while but when he came back he was smiling. ‘Their dog’s run off. They’re trying to find him. Nothing to worry about.’

  I tried to smile as well. ‘Sorry. Imagination working overtime.’

  ‘But you’ve got to promise me you’ll stop playing private detective, Jenifry.’ He picked up the rubbish sacks. ‘And don’t go telling anyone what you’ve told me. It might take a while to sort this and if you’re right about Crawford, it would be dangerous for you if he and his friends found out you’d shopped them.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘There’s no way I’m going to tell anyone.’ The decision I’d made earlier when I met Talan came back to me. ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘I’m going back to London.’

  He looked relieved. ‘Good; that way I won’t have to worry about what you’re up to down here.’

  He shut and locked a barred gate, like a cage door, behind us and we walked out. At the entrance he dragged the wooden door closed, securing it with a chain and padlock. I looked around. No sign of the two men.

  The threat of rain had receded by the time I got back to my car. My Golf. Talan raised his eyebrows when he saw it but said nothing. I was seriously tempted to tell him then and there about the two attempts on my life.

  But I couldn’t. Not until I was sure it was Nick and his colleagues. Not while there was still a possibility someone close to me might be involved. This thought ran through my brain constantly, a background hum to everything, occasionally chiming a sharp staccato note when I fell upon some new realisation. Like how it would be easy for Vince and Ricky to fake the ‘when’ of their blog. Or how Mark and Grid, the two people with cause to hate me most, had given each other an alibi. And I was still haunted by the moment when Nick Crawford had lent me his car, the moment when, fancy umbrella in hand, he’d bowed a
nd gestured towards the open door. I now knew he’d only done it to keep tabs on me but I couldn’t forget the grace of the act.

  Twenty-One

  On the way back from the mine, I stopped at Gregory’s cottage. Light shone out of the tiny window buried in the thick stone walls so I was sure he was home. I knocked and shouted his name through the letterbox. Just as I was about to give up, he walked round the outside of the cottage clutching an armful of logs. I took them from him and followed him into a low-ceilinged room that doubled as living room and kitchen. I’d seen bathrooms that were bigger. The hair on my scalp tightened again.

  ‘You all right, Jenifry?’ Gregory settled himself into a high-backed wooden chair covered with old rugs and stretched his feet towards a tiny wood burning stove. Everything was as old as he was, and as battered. ‘You never did like coming in here.’

  ‘I can cope. Anyway, I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Ay, well put the wood in the basket first.’

  I did as I was told and cleared a pile of knitting off a stool, pulled it up to the fire and sat down.

  ‘Careful with that.’

  ‘What are you knitting?’

  ‘Mittens to fit over my gloves.’ He spread his bony hands over his knees and looked at them. ‘My hands feel the cold. Never used to.’

  He seemed much more in the present than he had a few days ago at the lighthouse and I wondered if it was the warmth relaxing him. The stove was small but so was the room.

  ‘You come to bring me my tarp back, then?’

  I jerked round to look at him and he cackled at the look on my face.

  ‘I might have,’ I said.

  ‘Thought so.’

  ‘I might not have, though. Why do you think I’ve got it?’

  ‘I can put two and two together.’

  ‘And make how many?’

  ‘You always loved going up the lighthouse. Your Pa used to bring you here and he’d sit and chat and Kit would annoy Pip but you’d be away as soon as you could and up them stairs. Then after your Pa upped and went and never came back, I’d find you up there some nights when I went to lock up. Staring out into the dark.’

  ‘Did I? I don’t remember.’

  ‘Said it made you feel calm. Thought you might have needed a bit of calm the other night, the way things are at Tregonna.’

  ‘You don’t want to believe everything Ma tells you,’ I said.

  He raised an eyebrow at me.

  ‘Maybe things aren’t great. And maybe I like to get away from them all from time to time. But it’s a bit much to go from that to thinking I broke down the door, Gregory.’

  ‘Nick Crawford told me he picked you up on the coast road that night wrapped in my tarp and you left bits of blue paint all over his car. So what else was I supposed to think?’

  ‘Nick told you that?’

  A faint film of smoke leaked out of the side of the stove door. Gregory kicked it and the smoke disappeared.

  ‘He was worried about you,’ he said as he settled back into his chair. ‘I told him to leave you be. You’d sort yourself out. Always had. Always would.’

  I didn’t know what surprised me the most: Gregory’s belief that I could sort myself out or Nick telling Gregory that he’d picked me up. It seemed totally wrong.

  ‘I thought Nick might be the one who broke in,’ I said.

  ‘Why would he do that? He’s got a key.’

  ‘How come he’s got a key?’

  ‘I gave him one.’

  ‘What?’

  Nick Crawford had a key to the lighthouse.

  ‘Why? Why did you give Nick a key?’

  Gregory stared into the fireplace and I watched the flicker of the flames play on his skin. I wondered if he’d got lost in the past and if I’d have to nudge him back to the here and now, but he surprised me again.

  ‘Pip disappeared, you know that?’ he said.

  ‘Yes. Sofija told me.’

  ‘He went out one night and never come back. Nick Crawford helped me look for him. Drove me all over the place. The weather was strange that night. The sort that might catch you unawares. Wind from the north and a big, slow swell. Looked calm but it wasn’t.’ He stopped again. I waited. ‘And a couple of nights later, those bodies were washed up. I told Crawford I figured the bodies had gone overboard near the lighthouse. Would have been tricky out at sea that night.’

  ‘You think Pip…’

  ‘The two who drowned weren’t sailing the boat. So some of them landed, that’s for sure.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Women, they were.’ I started to protest but he overrode me. ‘Foreigners. Nick thought Pip might have disturbed the ones who made it to shore. He said he’d keep a look out.’

  I watched in horror as his face crumpled in on itself. He sniffed and blew his nose on an old hankie. I’d never disliked Nick Crawford more than I did at that point. Taking advantage of an elderly man, grieving for his dog, to gain access to the best surveillance point for miles, was unforgiveable. He’d have been able to see cars on the roads a long way away and coastguard vessels out at sea and warn the boats unloading.

  But if he had a key why break the door down? Unless they’d set it up so it looked as though I had? Crap, it was all getting so complicated.

  I spoke gently. ‘Cup of tea? Shall I make you a cup of tea?’

  ‘Pass me the bottle inside the cupboard behind you. And a glass by the sink. Two, if you like.’

  ‘No thanks.’

  He poured himself a half glass. It smelt like rum. Then stretched out to unlace his boots.

  ‘Very smart,’ I said. ‘They look new. Do you want a hand?’

  ‘I can manage me own boots, Jenifry.’

  He was back in control of his emotions now. I tried another question.

  ‘You said “some of them landed”. What do you mean?’

  ‘We’d have had a lot more bodies washed up if they’d all drowned.’

  So he wasn’t talking about drug smugglers.

  ‘Immigrants, illegals, you mean?’

  ‘Ay.’

  ‘Ma said you knew who brought them in.’

  ‘I know some who will bring one or two in. But proper, like. This weren’t that. There’s talk of others that bring them in close-ish and then dump them into old inflatables. Too many of them. God knows how many of them drown.’

  I thought of the pictures on the news. Desperate people fleeing desperate places. Who could blame them? All they wanted was a chance to live without fear of death from violence or starvation. And, of course, there were people out there ready to take advantage of that. Was that what this was all about? Not drugs after all? But what about the cocaine I’d found at Nick’s?

  A faint snore came from Gregory’s chair. I took the glass out of his hands, put it on the grate and went outside to get his tarpaulin. I breathed in the air, its tang of seaweed mixed with the smell of frost rising from the earth, and walked through the gathering dark to the lighthouse door. Someone, presumably Gregory, had nailed a cross piece over the broken planks. Definitely Gregory. No one else would have used a piece of driftwood, soft and crumbling from soaking in the sea.

  I leant my head against it and willed myself back to last Friday. If only I could remember, but all that came were flutters of playing with Kit round the lighthouse while Pa and Gregory drank tea.

  I tried the handle and the door opened. No one had mended the lock yet.

  It was dark and quiet inside as I felt my way up the stairs, gripping the damp, smooth handrail. A flicker of memory. Too fleeting to pin down but enough to catch my breath. Out onto the viewing platform. A line of dark cloud on the horizon. Was this the threatened rain? Another storm brewing? They rolled across the Atlantic regularly at this time of year.

  The raucous shouts of seagulls rac
ing inland pierced the clouds and a shockwave of memory broke over me, punching the air out of my body. Friday night collided with the present and I wasn’t sure which I was in. In both, seagulls fled the rolling clouds of a storm rushing in over the sea, tension bruised the air and the rough, chisel-edged stone pushed into my hands.

  Here and now, only the air surrounded me; in the past, a blow struck my head. I staggered in both the present and the past and heard a great cry of pain swoop up to join the swirling calls of the birds.

  So they’d hit me on the head here, on the lighthouse, not at the ledge. Blue flakes in my hair. Blue flakes washing down the plughole along with the blood when I showered. Had they used a stray piece of wood from the lighthouse door to knock me out? That would make sense. There’d been blue specks everywhere on the viewing balcony.

  I must have come here on my own then. Broken the door down myself? Thinking the lighthouse was a sanctuary, like I had as a teenager escaping the cold emptiness that was Tregonna without Pa and Kit. Gregory was right. Being high on the lighthouse had always grounded me. Seeing the world below me had made things all right. Maybe I’d managed to run away last Friday night and, drugged-up and off my head, the lighthouse would have seemed the perfect refuge from whatever I was fleeing. Until whoever had tried to kill me had crept up after me.

  Another flicker of memory.

  I’m on the road. I’m rushing up the steep slope where the road leaves the village towards the lighthouse, the tarmac hard beneath my feet. I’m feeling spacey and empty. As though my mind and body are slowly peeling apart from each other. I know I’ve got to get to the lighthouse. I’m desperate to get to the lighthouse because everything will be all right once I’m there. I know I’ll be able to stick myself back together again.

  ‘Humpty Dumpty’ ran through my brain.

  Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. A very high wall. And Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t stick Humpty together again. But Humpty knew if he could only get back up the hill and climb to the top of the wall, it would be all right again.