On the Edge

by Jane Jesmond

‘But they’ll never see a penny from any of it,’ he continued, ‘because they belong to the gangs who’ve brought them in. Who’ve cherry-picked them because they’re strong or good-looking. They’ll be sold on to other gangs. They’re slaves.’

  ‘Slaves.’ Of course. I’d seen stuff on the news about modern slavery. ‘But they come in here? In Cornwall?’

  ‘They come in everywhere. Refugees come in everywhere. It’s hard to tell the difference because it’s only when they arrive they become slaves. They’re forced into sex work, or domestic work. Some end up in the fields. Some end up in cannabis factories. They’re stuck. Too frightened to tell anyone because they’re here illegally. And, after a while, too abused to try to escape. I know who brings them in but I’m not after them. I’m after the men who distribute them round the country. There’s a network of traffickers and gang-masters in the UK and if I’d got in with them, we could identify many of the slavery operations in this country. That was my job. That was why I was sent here.

  ‘We know when deliveries are due but we haven’t caught them landing even when we kept a lookout on the lighthouse after Gregory gave me a key. There are too many places and they always come in where we’re not watching and disappear as soon as they land. Twenty or thirty people at a time. We think they’re hidden somewhere and then shipped out later in small groups. All across the country. And it’s the network organising this we want to penetrate.’

  He picked at the moss on the rock beneath his hand.

  ‘And I was so close,’ he said. ‘So close. I’ve spent months trying to get in with them and I’d finally been asked if I’d run some people up to Manchester in a few days. No questions. Well paid. Finally, after all these months.’ He stood up. ‘Nothing anyone can do. Sometimes it works out like that. Come on. They said they’d pick me up on the road.’

  The last few hundred yards of the gully were narrow and dark but the ground was flat and grassy. We walked side by side. Nick was a solid black figure against the streaky shadows of the bushes, changing shape as his body moved. His confession seemed to have unlocked him and he talked about the months he’d spent in Cornwall.

  They’d chosen carpentry as a profession because a bespoke furniture business delivering all over the UK would be useful to the men they’d been after. Plus, he’d had some wood-working experience, although anything really difficult was made elsewhere and sent on to him. He’d spent months doing nothing but working with wood, while putting his story out. Nick Crawford’s story.

  Nick Crawford was a self-contained man with some lurking bitterness and a sense that he didn’t think the world had treated him fairly. There was a history there but he wasn’t going to shout about it. He was a lure and the kind of people he was designed to attract didn’t like mouthy types.

  After a few minutes, I stopped looking at him and just listened. As the sides of the narrow gully slowly lowered and opened out I felt, for the first time, as though there was no barrier between his thoughts and words. He talked about how he got himself in with the men he was after. A slow process but one he’d been through many times before. A gradual descent through layers of criminality. A bit of handling stolen stuff. A bit of drug dealing. And so on, until he became known and trusted as a useful contact.

  And then he stopped his tale. Nick Crawford had made contact with the men he was luring and that, the tone of his voice said, was all I needed to know.

  ‘I shouldn’t be talking to you about any of it really,’ he said. ‘But it’s been a weird night. Like a time out of normal life.’

  ‘Normal life. Do you have one?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘What is it? Where is it?’

  ‘That really is something I can’t talk about.’

  I thought he was going to say something more but he turned and walked on. He’d got his second wind and I was the one stumbling now. My energy had drained away and been replaced by a heavy pool of depression. Nick was right. This had felt like a time out of normal life. A time away from the problems I was going to have to resolve.

  I stopped when we reached the place where the ravine opened out and became a wide valley descending to the coast and the road. The sea stretched out before us, calm, the waves mere ripples running over its smooth surface and reflecting back the moon. The sky was still veiled with a thin layer of cloud so there were no stars. Only the moon was strong enough to penetrate and even its edges were blurred.

  I sat down, suddenly realising how tired I was.

  Nick sat, too.

  ‘Where are we? I think I recognise this but…’

  ‘The coast road’s at the bottom of this field. Round the corner there’s a place called Poltallack: bunch of cottages and a little teashop. It has a big sign advertising cream teas so, depending which way your friends are coming from, we’ll be a hundred yards before or after it.’

  He sighed.

  ‘We’ll wait here,’ he said. ‘We can see the cars coming before they see us. Can you call someone to come and get you?’

  Kit. In the past I’d have called Kit. But I couldn’t call him. Not while…

  ‘I know some people who live behind the teashop.’ I said. ‘I can go there.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘You could come with me but it’d be easier for you not to. You’ll end up stuck at the station for hours and there’ll be a lot of questions about your involvement.’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  He asked for my phone, called and told them where to pick him up and afterwards we sat on separate boulders in uneasy silence. He turned to look at me a few times and cleared his throat like he was going to say something. It had been a long night, I thought, and although the news he was on the side of the angels was good, so good, it meant all my worst suspicions might be true.

  ‘Why did you let me have your car?’ I asked. ‘The night we met?’

  ‘I thought you’d come in from the sea. You were wet through and carrying nothing but a tarp.’

  ‘You thought I was one of your refugees?’

  ‘You behaved like one. Speechless with terror. And when I realised you weren’t, I couldn’t just drive off and leave you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘What had happened to you? You said something about the lighthouse. Was that it?’

  ‘Yup, but it doesn’t matter now.’

  A cold trickle of water dripped from my hair and ran down my neck. I kicked a few stones.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said suddenly and I laughed. ‘I mean it. I’d be dead if you hadn’t stopped to pick me up. And dead if you hadn’t got us off the moor.’

  I didn’t reply.

  ‘You’re quite something,’ he went on. ‘And I wish you’d tell me what happened to you on the lighthouse.’ I pulled a few blades of grass up and looked at them. ‘Because whatever it was, I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘So what were you doing on the coast road? On a night like that?’

  ‘Going to check Gregory was all right. Last time we had a bad storm he had water in the cottage. It’s slowly falling apart around him. I went the next morning instead when I met you again.’

  It made sense.

  So I told him the whole saga from arriving in the hotel to the moment he stopped his car in the storm. He was quiet while I spoke, only interrupting once at the beginning, when I told him about the moment I came to from the drugs.

  ‘Hanging from the…’

  ‘Yes.’

  The dark made it easier to talk calmly. It was a blanket around me protecting me from the awfulness of it all, making it seem as though it had happened to someone else or was only a strange and unreal story. Sitting still made me cold so I got up and strode around and slapped my arms around me as I finished the tale while Nick’s eyes tracked the horizon. I had the sense of his brain pulling my story apart and reassembling it behind his unfocuss
ed gaze.

  ‘There you go,’ I said in the end.

  ‘It wasn’t the traffickers. I’m sure of it,’ he said slowly. I tried to speak but he cut me off. ‘Listen. Listen to me for a while. You think you came across them bringing cargo in?’ I nodded. ‘But there wasn’t anything going on that night. Definitely not. The weather was shocking. Everyone knew the storm was coming. Besides, they’d never get rid of you in such an idiotic way. If they’d wanted to kill you, you’d be dead. They’d shoot you. Cut your throat. Run you over several times. Or simply smash your head in. And then dispose of your body so no one would know. It’s not hard.’

  ‘You would know, wouldn’t you?’ My voice soared above his list of killing methods like the shriek of the seagulls wheeling round the fishing boats. ‘What if they wanted to make it look like an accident? A climbing accident? With drugs?’

  ‘They’d have thrown you off, maybe frayed a bit of rope and dropped it after you,’ he said. ‘Not left you hanging. It smacks of the amateur, Jen. Someone with no experience. Someone acting on the spur of the moment.’

  I’d seen Nick play a lot of roles. From the saviour in the storm to the player jousting words with me. But this Nick, serious, professional, was a new one.

  ‘It was personal, too,’ he continued. ‘I’m sure of it and I’m sorry, Jen, because it means it was probably someone who knows you.’ He paused as though he thought I might say something.

  But I couldn’t speak. Someone who knew me. Nick’s words were one confirmation too many of what I was now sure was the truth.

  The silence between us became a buzzing in my ears, like the flapping of thousands of distant wings and the sense the air was turning inside out. A cloud of birds. A murmuration of starlings, I think they call it.

  Nick waited a while longer then carried on speaking.

  ‘But, for what it’s worth, I think whoever it was couldn’t quite bring themselves to do it. They planned to throw you off the top but when it came to it, they couldn’t and they left you a way out.’

  The birds inside my head wheeled and banked violently because I didn’t think this was true. Nick, with his fear of heights, hadn’t spent time gazing over the top of the lighthouse at the ground far below like I had.

  ‘And one other thing,’ he continued. ‘You said you were slipped something like Rohypnol.’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘I think you’re right. I guess you know Rohypnol blurs your memory of the time before you take it.’

  I nodded.

  ‘But not to the extent you think it does. Your memory loss starts at the hotel. You should be thinking who could have spiked something you ate or drank there. That’s where you need to look – the hotel, and who knew you were there.’

  ‘But I went straight out. The woman who runs the hotel told me. I was OK then.’

  ‘Rohypnol takes a while to work completely. Half an hour. Maybe less.’

  Was he right? I thought he was.

  And then I remembered something. Maybe because I was with Nick. I remembered hunting for his keys in my hotel room while Vivian waited at the door. I’d found them behind an empty cup and saucer. On the table by the door. Had Vivian regretted her dour welcome and brought me a cup of tea? It wouldn’t have taken a moment to slip something in it. Not for someone chatting to Vivian in the room behind reception while she made the tea. Someone like Sofija. Who’d popped in to see Vivian. To apologise for the cheque bouncing, maybe. But really, to check I was there.

  Nick’s voice went on but it felt as though he was talking to someone else. Another Jen, standing next to me and taking his words in while my thoughts reeled.

  ‘Someone who knew you well, I’d say.’ Nick’s voice was a relentless drum beating against my ears. ‘Who knew your history of climbing dangerous things. Who thought, if you were found at the base of the lighthouse, the police would think it was a mad scheme gone wrong. And that you’d taken the drugs found in your body for pleasure.’

  ‘Enough! That’s enough!’ I shouted into the night, disturbing a few sheep who got to their feet and thundered about aimlessly until the momentum of their fright ran down and they settled back to sleep.

  I wondered if there was a tinge of light towards the east but when I looked at my watch it was still too early for a winter’s dawn.

  Headlights appeared round the bend on the road below.

  ‘Is it them? I mean, the police?’ I asked and my phone bleeped at the same time.

  ‘Yes.’

  Neither of us moved.

  ‘I won’t see you again, will I?’ I said.

  The question came out before I thought about it.

  ‘No. Are you sure you’ll be OK?’

  ‘Yes.’ It came out sharper than I intended. ‘I’m only going round the corner. I’ll be fine.’

  ‘Like I said, it would be easier if I went down alone.’

  ‘I get it. No worries.’

  He stood up and came close to me. He smelled of damp wool and mud mixed with something sharp and green. I wanted to cry.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I should say much more but there isn’t time. So thank you will have to do.’

  His face was close to mine and I breathed in the scent of him. He wasn’t tall, Nick Crawford, but he was the right height for me. The car stopped on the road and he spoke rapidly.

  ‘Next week,’ he said. ‘I’ll be back in the place where I grew up. I call it home, although I only get back there from time to time. A little village where everybody knows me. It’s where my grandparents lived and where my mother was brought up. I’ll stay in their old house. And most evenings, around nine o’clock, I’ll go down to the little bar off the central square. A funny little place, with a ceiling carved out of cork. Quite intricate and fabulous. Anyway, when I’m there next week, I’ll think of you. You’ll be hard to forget. I’ll have a drink and toast you. Jenifry the valiant.’

  His lips touched my forehead.

  ‘Goodbye, Jen.’

  ‘Goodbye, Nick.’

  A silent black Mercedes picked him up. He hauled himself into the back and, as it moved off, I thought I saw the flash of a white face through the rear window, as if he’d turned to look back at me.

  I walked down the slope and sat on the dry-stone wall that kept the sheep from the road. I needed a bit of space before I walked into Poltallack. If I hadn’t been so cold, I’d have curled up by the side of the road and slept.

  Instead, I thought about Kit and Sofija and the desperate straits they’d got themselves into. I thought about the fraying rope at the lighthouse. I thought about how my body would have fallen outside Gregory’s window. Nick was wrong. No one had had second thoughts about killing me. I hadn’t been left a way out. It had all been a timing device. A way of letting the perpetrators disappear before I fell and disturbed Gregory. I thought about Kit and the precision of his planning and Sofija wanting me to clean the windows at Tregonna…

  The stones of the wall were hard and I was damp, cold, tired and sad. If what I suspected was true, the danger was over. Pa had come to the rescue not only of Kit and Sofija, but of me, too. I couldn’t think about it any more now. I stood up and stamped my feet up and down to get some warmth back into them.

  Now, I was going to sit in front of a wood stove until my clothes steamed and drink five cups of tea with sugar in a kitchen I’d always found homely. While Nick and his colleagues rounded up the criminals, I was going to eat toast with lots of butter with Kelly and Talan who lived round the corner. And maybe even laugh with them when I told Talan that he’d been investigating an undercover police officer.

  Twenty-Five

  It was only a couple of hundred yards to Talan and Kelly’s cottage, one of a cluster of small stone houses huddled along a tiny inlet. They’d been built for fishermen around two hundred years ago and crammed into the limited space so bits of one
rested on top of another and it was hard to see where each house began and ended. Even if they were out, I knew where Talan kept the spare key. Or where he used to. He might have moved it but I didn’t think so. People like Talan didn’t change, that was what was so comfortable about them. He wouldn’t mind, either, if I let myself in and made myself at home. I walked faster, the longing to feel heat on my skin overpowering every other thought.

  Talan opened the door. He was dressed and not long in. Muddy boots lay on their side in the tiny porch and the legs of his tracksuit were spattered with wet earth. His eyes widened when he saw me. I looked down. I was covered in half-dried mud but he ushered me in straightaway, down the narrow corridor and into the back kitchen.

  I hadn’t been here in years but it hadn’t changed much since his mother used to sit me on the table to bathe my scratches and grazes after a fall. The fridge and dishwasher were new but the cupboards and surfaces were the same scratched blue painted wood. I crossed to the old range and stretched my hands over its top. The heat, rising through my fingers, felt solid and graspable. I felt my body give a huge sigh. Even the acrid smell of burning coke biting my nostrils was familiar and comforting.

  Talan’s hand reached past me and took the kettle.

  ‘Tea?’

  ‘Please.’

  The clink of a spoon against china and the slosh of water. It was great to do nothing. My mind was empty of everything except the glorious touch of warmth on my skin. I leaned my head over the range and shut my eyes.

  ‘Are you falling asleep?’

  ‘I might be.’

  He dragged a wooden armchair over to the range and I fell into it. A mug of tea arrived. It wasn’t very hot but I gulped it down.

  ‘Another cup, Talan, please.’

  He busied himself with the teabags and the kettle. My eyes started to shut again. I felt relaxed for the first time for days. No, weeks. Maybe months.

  ‘Toast,’ I said. ‘Is there any chance of toast?’

  ‘What have you been doing, Jen?’

  I was too tired to lie.

  ‘Racing round the countryside, chased by a gang of criminals. With butter. And marmalade. If you’ve got any.’