Deep Water, Thin Ice (41 page)

*

It was Saturday when Alex came to in hospital. It should have been her wedding day but she emerged from a nightmarish dream to find herself in bed with something strapped to her arm and Erica sitting nearby. Opening her eyes to see her sister there, she thought she was imagining her. Erica looked like an angel, hazy as if clothed in mist, and tentatively smiling. Poorly edited memories loomed into her mind, vague at first but slowly coming into focus and she closed her eyes again, willing them away. She waited a couple of minutes before cautiously reopening them.

‘Hello sleepy head,’ she heard Erica say.

Alex moved her lips but nothing came out.

‘Hold on, I’ll get a nurse.’

The nurse helped to get Alex sitting up, propped her up with pillows, allowed her a few sips of water and withdrew. In the harsh fluorescent light, the bruises on Alex’s face and where her shoulder showed above the sheet, looked livid and painful. Erica, sitting close now, seemed to be trying not to stare at them, or at the crusty blood on the cuts round her mouth and eye.

‘So…’ began Erica. Alex cautiously moved her eyes sideways to look at her sister and then fixed them back on the wall opposite. Erica tried a smile; it lacked conviction. ‘…I hope the other guy looks worse,’ she finished.

Alex found her sister’s hand on the bedspread by her side and covered it with her own.

‘Thank you,’ she muttered with a mouth that felt like she was using it for someone else.

‘Thank me?’ Erica gave a short embarrassed laugh. ‘What for?

‘For being here.’

‘Oh.’

There was a silence before Alex spoke again. ‘How did I get here?’

‘You were wandering round the village apparently, looking wild and scary, talking nonsense. Then you passed out and you were airlifted out here.’ Erica hesitated and then added, off-handedly: ‘The things some people’ll do to get noticed.’

‘So you’ve been to Kellaford Bridge?’

‘How do you think I found you? I heard about the flood on the news just before we set off. I managed to leave Ben with a friend and came hot wheel down to find you. The village is in a terrible state.’ She paused. ‘Do you remember about the flood?’

‘Yes,’ Alex murmured. ‘Some. I remember Theo said…Never mind. Go on…about the village. What happened?’

‘Well,’ said Erica,’ studying Alex’s face anxiously, ‘everyone’s in shock but there’s no shortage of people keen to talk about it.’ Alex cautiously rolled her head a little to look at her sister again. ‘You look shocking too. So what happened to you?’

‘I don’t remember exactly. I fell.’

‘Which is it: you fell or you don’t remember? The staff told me it looked like you’d been hit.’ She winced as she looked at Alex’s swollen, purple skin. ‘I think it looks like that too.’

‘Tell me about the village,’ Alex persisted. ‘Is everyone all right?’

‘It can wait Alex…’

‘Tell me.’

Erica recounted what had happened as it had been told to her. Alex, it seemed, had already missed most of the drama by the time she had staggered down the hill. Apparently Mick Fenby, noticing the sea water seeping in from the direction of the bar, had gone to investigate, to find that the bar was rapidly collapsing and the rising tide was going to make short work of finishing the job. Aware of the vulnerability of the lower village, he’d carried on into the centre to warn people. By then the first of the river water had already made it into the square and was rapidly rising. With most people collecting near the village hall, ‘the woman from the shop’ had been hysterical about her son because she didn’t know where he was. Mick waded back and found the boy clinging to the top of the climbing frame in the playground. He got him down and just managed to get him back to drier ground before the deluge really hit.

‘I heard his mother was sobbing all over the guy, saying he was a hero. That’s that odd, secretive chap from the reserve isn’t it?’

Alex said nothing, her head resting against the pillows, her eyes fixed on the wall ahead of her again.

‘Well,’ Erica continued. ‘Seems like his credit rating has shot up now anyway.’ There followed an awkward pause.

‘Where is he now?’

‘Mick?’

Alex nodded her eyelids for answer. Her head ached too much to move it much voluntarily.

‘I don’t know. Like everyone else, I imagine, looking to see what can be salvaged from the mess. It’s awful down there Alex. I mean, the water left as quickly as it came they say but the sludge and the debris, not to mention the damage and the smell…It’s gruesome. Anyway, fortunately Hillen Hall is fine of course – that’s the advantage of being on a hill.’ Erica was probably trying to be flippant but it came out sounding fatuous.

‘And what about Theo,’ Alex said. She’d closed her eyes again and had spoken so quietly that Erica had to lean forward to hear her. ‘Where is he?’

Erica swallowed and squeezed Alex’s hand.

‘He’s missing,’ she said gently.

‘Missing?’

Erica passed on the most coherent version she’d been told, how Theo had been beside himself when he’d got down to the village, searching for his mother, desperate for any news of her. In a crazy attempt to swim across the seething waters to find her, he had gone under and not been seen since.

Erica squeezed her sister’s hand again. Alex said nothing. She had such a confusion of thoughts and emotions going on in her head, she felt like she was spinning herself. She could have been in the water too, going round and round with that roar in her ears…

‘Are you all right Alex?’ Erica stroked her thumb across her sister’s hand. ‘I’m so sorry. I wasn’t going to tell you yet. I mean…he still might be found but…well, it was like a whirlpool out there they said. I spoke to the police. They said that the helicopters would keep going over for a while, looking. Theo wasn’t the only one unaccounted for.’

Alex felt tears start to roll down her cheeks. She lifted a heavy arm and brushed them away.

‘Who else?’ she murmured.

Erica automatically straightened the sheet again as she answered.

‘I don’t know, some old guy…confused, they said.’

‘Not Harry Downes?’

‘Yes, that was it. And some young girl who’d been out playing; from one of the holiday cottages. Are you sure you’re all right Alex?’

‘I don’t know. How awful it all is.’ Alex opened her eyes and rolled them towards Erica. ‘And Sarah Hellyon?’

‘Ironically, she’s all right. She was sheltering with a few others at the hotel. The water never quite reached it. Theo didn’t need to risk his life like that. I mean…it was a wonderful thing to do…very brave but…’

Alex stared at Erica and started to laugh. The laugh grew and swelled until she was half-laughing, half-sobbing, her body rocking, shoulders heaving, her hands to her head to support it, pulling at the drip attached to the back of her right hand.

Alarmed, Erica went for a nurse who immediately called a doctor.

‘She’ll give her something to help her settle,’ the nurse said firmly to Erica. ‘I think you should go now.’

Alex remembered reading that Julian’s body had washed up on Longcombe Beach a couple of days after he’d been swept away by the river. ‘Everything ends up there,’ the locals said, ‘It’s the way the currents pull. Sooner or later, anything that goes into the sea round here will come up on Longcombe Beach.’

And so it was that on the day Alex was allowed home from hospital, forty-eight hours after going in, Harry Downes body was washed up on Longcombe Beach. The next day, the little girl’s body returned too. When Sarah had been told that Theo had gone missing and to expect the worst, she had become so agitated that the doctor arranged for her to be taken somewhere where she could be supervised; she was apparently making little sense. So when, another two days later, Theo’s body came ashore, Alex was asked to identify him. When she saw him, Theo, having been in the water for several days, battered, eaten and decomposing, was almost unrecognisable; he was most readily identified by his remaining clothes and the seal on the chain around his neck.

Erica had stayed over and accompanied her. She’d made a lot of phone calls, extended the arrangements for Ben and taken a week off work. Alex was still badly bruised and shaken and rested a great deal. She said little. The deluge of conflicting emotions washing through her in the aftermath of the flood had drained away to leave her feeling numb. She preferred to leave it that way, reluctant to revisit the events or conversations of that day, and rebutted all Erica’s attempts to get her to talk.

When Erica had to leave to go back home, she suggested that Alex should come back to London with her. ‘The doctors don’t think you should be alone,’ she urged her. ‘You’ve had a bad concussion. You might get a reaction yet.’

To Erica’s obvious surprise, Alex agreed. She felt lethargic and dazed and irrationally scared; she didn’t think she could cope alone. Nor did she feel strong enough to put up any resistance.

Before leaving for London, she insisted on having the locks changed. But when Erica asked why, she didn’t answer.

*

During Alex’s first week in London she did little. Her bruises slowly turned yellow and her cuts healed. Her joints and muscles were stiff and weak; she felt like an old woman. She began to go out, did a little shopping and cooking, went off walking by herself, took Ben out after school or sat playing games with him. Her nephew’s company was therapeutic. He teased her when she played badly, persuaded her to help him with his new tropical fish tank and even went to the cinema with her to see a romantic comedy. He made her laugh and, with a sensitivity he clearly hadn’t inherited from Erica, he asked nothing. Alex began to rally.

As she recovered, Alex found that the emotion which surfaced most forcefully was anger. That Theo had wilfully killed both Julian and Simon in pursuit of his sick obsessions left her feeling impotent and bitter. The only emotion which mitigated it was the relief of knowing that Simon had not taken his own life and that there had been nothing she could have done which would have saved him. It was little compensation. She couldn’t shake off the regret of knowing that their relationship had ultimately been so distant that he had never mentioned Hillen Hall and the tragic event which had happened there; nor had he spoken of Theo’s prospective visit. Perhaps, like Harry, he blamed himself for Julian’s death. Sadly, she would never know.

It occurred to her that she felt no sense of loss for Theo. She wondered fleetingly how a man possessed of so many gifts and advantages had turned into someone so evil but personally, despite the anger, she felt nothing. She was surprised; she’d expected to hate him. She concluded that she’d never loved him, that there had been no emotion there strong enough to transmute into either grief or loathing. And it wasn’t simply a reaction to his crimes. Looking back she recognised that she had never really loved him; she had simply wanted
to. She was mortified that she had fallen so readily under his spell, blind to his weaknesses, duped because – and she couldn’t avoid this painful conclusion – she had wanted to be duped. His apparent love and support had been a heady mix and she had arrogantly ignored all hints, warnings and advice. How deeply, deeply foolish she had been. It had been a lucky escape and the realisation of how close she had come to losing her own life helped to galvanise her mind and make her focus again.

Her thoughts began to turn to home. She’d left Hillen Hall willingly but, as the days went on, she desperately wanted to go back. ‘All those people in Kellaford – their homes ruined. I feel guilty at having left them all to it,’ she said to Erica one day, only to have her sister snort and ask what she thought she’d have been able to do for anyone, ‘the state you were in.’ But Alex insisted she was now ready to return and she wanted to go back to help. She’d been in London nearly two weeks.

Erica didn’t try to hide her disappointment.

‘But I thought you’d be looking for a house back in London.’ Erica adopted the hurt expression Alex knew all too well. ‘Near us maybe,’ Erica added. ‘I thought you were going to start your career up again.’

‘I am. But I
can
do that from Devon too. It’s not the end of the world. Living there’ll help me keep things in perspective, make me keep a sense of balance.’

The night before leaving, she finally steeled herself to tell Erica about Theo and what he had done.

‘You don’t believe me?’ she said at the end, watching Erica’s sceptical expression. ‘I can hardly believe it myself now but it was you who told me to doubt him, remember. You were right and I was stupid.’

‘Of course I believe you,’ said Erica, though her voice lacked conviction. ‘I
thought
you’d been hit.’ She paused. ‘But all the rest…Did he actually admit to it?’

‘Yes, I told you. Just before he hit me.’

Erica winced and automatically glanced at Alex’s scars again.

‘I’ve been thinking that I should go to the police and tell them,’ Alex said. ‘They should know.’

Erica frowned, half smiling and shaking her head.

‘Alex, you can’t be serious. You’ve got no proof, have you? They’ll just think you’re crazy. Or still concussed. Believe me, I’ve seen the way they think. And what’s to be gained?’ She gave her sister’s arm a sympathetic squeeze. ‘Just let it lie Ali. He’s gone. It’s over.’