Brodmaw Bay (38 page)

‘An accelerant must have been used. It’s murder, gang crime.’

‘Olivia thinks that she is responsible. She was given a wish to make at her Club meet on Monday evening. Something she calls the spookmeister granted her wish, she says. She is quite insistent. There was a carving of this spookmeister on the door of the hut on the island. She says she saw one in the garden of the London house. She says that your brother saw it too and it spooked him.

‘After she had gone to bed I asked Jack about the carving. Megan Penmarrick told him that they should not be named. It is bad luck to name them. But they do have a name, she said. They are called Harbingers.’

‘How is Olivia now?’

‘She is sleeping. Things are happening here I don’t like, James. I think we have made a mistake in coming here.’

‘You don’t believe it, do you, about Olivia’s wish?’

‘I know my daughter and she is not telling lies. Last night I went to the church, James. I saw an act of desecration there. Then I saw Angela Heart. She took me back to her lovely home and in her pretty garden gave me an explanation for why there is no organised religion practised in the bay and not a word of it rang true.’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow, darling.’

‘You remember what we saw on the beach, James?’

‘Of course I do, vividly.’

‘It was magic, wasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know what it was.’

‘It was magic,’ Lillian said. ‘And magic exacts a price.’

‘Lock the doors and windows tonight.’

‘I’m sorry it didn’t go well, darling, in Colorado.’

‘Remember to lock the doors and windows, Lily, before you turn in.’ He ended the call and stored the number in his phone’s memory.

He did not feel like staying in the Bermondsey house. He was disappointed by his reception in America. He was slightly jet-lagged from two transatlantic flights in as many days. He had been more affected by what he had read in Adam Gleason’s testimony than he had been prepared to admit to himself. He was shaken by what his wife had just told him over the phone.

In some significant ways, James Greer was quite a stubborn man. This stubbornness did not just manifest itself in concerns about the integrity of the computer game he had devised. He was not the man be intimidated by folkloric myth or ghoulish coincidence into booking into a fucking Novotel when he had a perfectly good house in central London where the power was still switched on and where he remembered there still reposed a perfectly comfortable bed.

The trouble was, he thought as he put his key in the lock, that he had seen the thing lurking in the garden with his own eyes. He had rationalised it, of course. But he had seen it. And then his daughter Olivia had seen it. And his brother had seen it and felt disturbed enough by the experience of doing so to warn him about it. Gleason had called it a Harbinger. Megan Penmarrick had called it that too. It was somewhere in function between an emissary and a footsoldier loyal in the service of the Singers under the Sea.

It was ridiculous, he thought, switching on the sitting room light and dumping his bag on the sofa, aware of the weight of the laptop inside with his game prototype stored there, redundant now, just a broken dream expressed in lines of code encrypted on the hard drive.

They signalled the need for sacrifice. They demanded fresh blood. They could hurt you physically. They could not be killed by the bullet from a Lee Enfield rifle coolly aimed by a vigilant teenage veteran of the conflict on the Western Front. They could grant a child’s vindictive, murderous wish.

He poured himself a consolatory whisky and walked through to the study and stared out of the window at foliage stirring on fleshy-leaved shrubs against its rear wall in darkness. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? He took a sip of Scotch. He remembered that Alec McCabe had told Lillian that Robert O’Brien had probably been frightened to death.

He resolved then to do something the following morning. He knew that it might be a total waste of his time and he was anxious to get back to the bay and his family as soon as possible. Even a few weeks earlier, his failure in America might have shaken his marriage. His bond with his wife then had been weak. He had not known how weak. It was much stronger now, though. It was honest and crucial to both of them. He wanted to return to the bay and the wife and children he loved and found he missed even after only a couple of nights away.

First, though, it was necessary to try to find something out. Either attempting to do so would be an exercise in futility, or it would provide the reassurance he hoped it would, or it would confirm suspicions he could not help his mind engendering since his reading of the Gleason testament and his bleak lay-by conversation on his mobile with Lillian of an hour earlier.

He stood there in the darkness and silence of his study and watched carefully through the windows for any sign of furtive movement in the bushes and undergrowth outside.

There were things James was afraid of. He was afraid of professional failure. Less so now than before, he was still afraid that his wife might one day stop loving him. He was afraid of harm coming to one or both of his beloved children. At that moment, he was afraid also of a spade-shaped face with a gaze of empty fury and grey skin as rough as burlap resolving itself over a squatting body in the gloom of the garden he stared into.

He watched and waited for it. He sipped occasionally from his drink of Scotch. Then when his glass was empty and it had not come, he went back and turned off the sitting room light and climbed the stairs wearily to bed.

The rest home to which Lillian’s mother had been taken occupied a handsome, sandstone building in Surbiton. Lillian had chosen it because it was near to the area in which her mother had lived for most of her life. She hoped that the familiarity of the streets, on those occasions when her mother was taken out, might stimulate her mind.

It had not worked. Her dementia did not respond to stimulation. What was strange only intimidated and confused her as her mind retreated further and further into what was familiar and comfortable because she recognised it and regarded it with fondness.

Lillian had taken in her mother when the first symptoms had made it impractical and then dangerous for her to live alone any longer. She had been their house guest for a year. Then, when her condition worsened, when she failed to recognise her grandchildren any longer and the incontinence became a daily aspect of her life, the decision was taken to have her cared for somewhere the job could be accomplished by compassionate professionals. They were thankful they could afford it. Lillian thought it the least her mother deserved.

In truth, she did not visit much. It distressed her too greatly. The blank stranger who greeted her with polite bewilderment was not the woman she knew and remembered and loved as her mum. It was weak of her and selfish, she knew, but the visits declined until they were no more frequent than once or twice a month. That was why Cornwall had posed no practical difficulties. The visits could be fitted in when she came up to town to talk to clients or authors or her agent. Living in the bay, despite the distance, she would see her mother no less.

James arrived at the reception desk of the home at
8
a.m. The elderly had a habit of rising early. It was true of those even with dementia, as though they were impatient for the opportunity to experience another confused and fragmented day. He knew most of the staff there by sight and three or four well enough to enjoy a conversation with. The girl behind the desk was called Magdalena and she was originally from Gdansk. She spoke flawless English and she possessed alert blue eyes and she seemed able to remember the name of everyone she had ever met.

She smiled. ‘Mr Greer.’

‘James, please, Magdalena.’

‘James, then, charmed, I’m sure.’

It was their little ritual of spoken greeting. Magdalena told him that his mother-in-law was taking tea in the music room. He would find her alone there. Most of the other residents were still at breakfast. She did not need to show him where to go. He knew the location of the music room. She did not ask him what the bag he carried with him contained.

April Matlock sat by the window, looking out of it, seeing, James supposed, whatever tableau from the past was unfurling through the remnants of her mind. Her hands were clasped in her lap. There was a slight tremor to them, or to one of them, which the other could not successfully still. Her long grey hair had been brushed and pinned and the trouser suit she wore was clean and recently pressed. The only wrinkles were the ones on her neck and cheeks, under the bright and vacant gaze her eyes wore, reflecting the sunshine through the glass.

He pulled over a straight-backed chair and sat in it next to her, leaning forward with his hands on his knees to bring their heads to the same height. He was not so tactless as literally to look down on her. He did not think that she would remember or recognise him. She had not done so for more than eighteen months. He wanted her to think of them as equals, though, if she was capable of coherent thought at all.

Without a glance at him she said, ‘I expect you have come about the drains. They have needed attention for weeks, you know. The lavatory has backed up most unpleasantly and the kitchen sink smells of sewage. It is neither hygienic nor acceptable.’

‘I have not come about the drains, April,’ he said.

Now she did look at him. She said, ‘My Lily is very gifted at drawing, you know. She has a quite astonishing gift for a six-year-old. Mr Davenport at the school says that she is most precocious. He does not mean cheeky, when he calls her that. He means that she possesses a talent mature beyond her years.’

‘I’m sure she does. I am quite certain of it.’

‘Who are you?’

‘My name is James.’

‘A good English name, James. What is your surname?’

‘Greer.’

She frowned. ‘Are you doing a survey, Mr Greer? Will there be a questionnaire to complete?’

James bent down to where he had put his bag, between his feet. He took from it the book about Brodmaw Bay published by Chubbly & Cruff and illustrated by his wife, whose memory of having done so was as blank as the woman’s in front of him seemed on everything that had happened since her life as a young mother. He placed the book gently in her lap. She looked down at its cover and then began to turn the pages. Her eyes were no longer on the view through the window. But the expression on her face had not changed at all.

April Matlock turned the pages. When she came to the spread on which her daughter had depicted the church, she stopped. She placed the flat of a hand on the image with her fingers splayed and expelled a sound that James thought might have been a sigh.

‘We had never thought about adoption,’ she said. ‘But by then we knew that I could not carry a child of my own to full term. I think my husband craved fatherhood. In fact, I know he did. He was friendly with Father Reid, who ran the refuge. The girl was only fourteen. She could not have looked after the child. She had fled Brodmaw to escape the scandal and had no means of supporting herself. She was too young for work, never mind motherhood.’

‘Do you remember the girl’s name, April?’

‘Of course I do. She was a beautiful child. I was quite jealous of two attributes she possessed. She had the loveliest eyes. I was jealous of her fecundity, of course. And I quite envied Angela Heart those striking green eyes.’

‘And the father?’

‘Penmarrick. She said he was important. He was sort of the squire, but more important than that. More like the lord of the manor, my husband said.’

‘Why did you not tell Lillian she was adopted?’

‘She never was, legally. Angela gave us her baby. It had to be a secret.’

‘Did Lillian ever visit the bay?’

‘Once, when she was five, we took her. We thought that she should see where she came from. It was a pretty place, very picturesque. She drank it all in, as a child will. There was an excursion to an island. The local Scouts had organised a jamboree. The bay possessed its own old-fashioned charm. I expect it is all quite spoiled now.’

‘Yes,’ James said, ‘yes, April. You are quite right. It is completely spoiled.’ He eased the book off her lap and put it back into his bag and rose to go.

She raised her head to him and blinked once and said, ‘If you could fix the drains, we’d be ever so grateful.’

Chapter Twelve

Richard Penmarrick was charm itself when he called Topper’s Reach about ten minutes after Lillian had concluded her conversation with her husband on his instruction to lock their windows and doors. He explained that the following day was an inset day at the Mount. He apologised for the short notice, but asked if Lillian would consider helping escort the members of the Club to their island for a day’s activity and adventure.