Little Black Lies (2 page)

I pull up the anchor, start the engine and head south towards Stanley, thinking about my grandfather again. Tonight, it seems, my thoughts are determined to stray along the shadowy path, where furtive plans creep like snaring roots across the forest floor, where the darker reaches of our minds run free.

Grandpa Coffin, my father’s father, was one of the great whalers in the South Atlantic. He was the last scion of a dynasty of marine hunters, who left Nantucket in 1804 and arrived on New Island in the Falklands several months later. For the next two hundred years, they plundered the islands and their surrounding ocean. Marine and island wildlife around here is still trying to recover from the impact of Grandpa Coffin and his forebears.

He died when I was a child. A pity.

I turn into the more sheltered waters of Port William and adjust my course so that I’ll steer well clear of the visiting cruise ship, the
Princess Royal.
From now to the end of the summer, we’ll see a steady stream of such ships, stopping by for a few days on their way to South Georgia and the Antarctic. They’re a mixed blessing, the hundreds of tourists who land on our shores on a daily basis when a ship is in harbour, and like most mixed blessings we love and curse them in equal measure. Tonight, it seems unusually awake and noisy, given the hour, but these ships can party hard, the sounds of the revelry reaching many miles inland.

Unnoticed by anyone on deck, I slip past and head for the inner harbour. It’s almost one in the morning. Soon I’ll be counting down in hours, not days. There are things I have to do still, promises I’ve made to others, but keeping busy has to be a good thing. I glance around the boat. I’ve been making sure the fuel and the water tanks are topped up. In a locked cabinet is the CO
2
tranquillizer dart gun for the rare occasions when I might need to sedate a large mammal, and also an old handgun of my grandfather’s for when euthanasia is the only option. Both are in full working order. I’m ready.

Ready to find out just how much of the blood of the old family runs in my veins. I steer through The Narrows into the inner harbour and see immediately that my carefully laid plans may come to nothing.

The police are waiting for me.

2

In the short time I’ve been at sea, something has happened here. Most people on the Falkland Islands live in Stanley, but it’s still a small community. Only around two thousand people in some seven hundred houses. Three hours ago, when I motored out, the tiny lights of a hundred or more jack-o’-lanterns littered the hillside like stars, but they’ll all have burned down by now. At this time of the morning Stanley should be in almost complete darkness. It isn’t. I watch a police car drive along the coast road and there are more blue lights on the harbour front.

It’s three years, almost to the day, since I last drove into harbour to find police waiting for me.

‘There’s been a car accident.’ Three years later, I can still hear Ben’s voice, crackling and shaky on the boat’s radio. ‘Ned and Kit are both on their way to hospital, but I don’t know any more. Get here as soon as you can.’

He signed off quickly, leaving me to imagine the worst. Except I didn’t. I couldn’t let myself. I imagined them in pain. I imagined their small, perfect bodies bruised and broken, cut apart by razor-sharp metal. All the way back to Stanley, I heard their voices in my head, crying for Mummy, unable to understand why, when they needed me the most, I wasn’t there. I imagined limbs torn from torsos, scars cut across their pretty faces. I never imagined them as lifeless corpses, lying side by side, in the mortuary.

In the grip of bad memories, I’m pushing the throttle too hard. I shouldn’t be heading into harbour at this speed. There are rocks, more than one wreck, hidden obstacles that can tear a boat apart. I force myself to slow the boat and wait for my breathing, my heartbeat, to do the same. Both prove less easy to control than the throttle. And yet I have to keep up the appearance of being normal, of coping. For a little while longer the human shell around me has to hold.

Someone is waiting for me at my usual mooring, one of the retired fishermen. He lives in a cottage by the harbour with two women whom most people agree are his mother and sister, but nobody is placing any bets. His name is Ralph Larken, Roadkill Ralph behind his back. As I throw him the stern line I see that he’s wearing faded striped pyjamas beneath his oilskin. They’re tucked into enormous black fisherman’s wellingtons and in this strange half-light they give him the look of a pirate. I jump down myself with the bowline. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Kid missing.’

I stare at him, wondering which of us will say it out loud. He does.

‘Another one.’ He nods towards a group on the harbour wall. I can make out police uniforms, someone in military fatigues. ‘Expecting you,’ he says. ‘Saw your boat lights.’

Another child missing. I was still floundering in my own grief when the first vanished, a little over two years ago, but I remember people telling each other it was a terrible accident, albeit of an undisclosed nature. When the second disappeared, those same people said we’d been terribly unlucky. And now a third?

Someone has left the group by the wall and is coming towards me. It’s the young policewoman, the one whom nobody can take seriously because she is so very young, and so very tall, and because she can’t seem to move without knocking something over. Constable Skye McNair is one of those people whom others claim they like because they feel sorry for her and want to be considered compassionate. I’ve nothing to prove so, I’ll admit, I find her clumsiness annoying.

Watching her now, I think for the first time that she looks so very alive. Her hair, long, wiry, the exact shade of freshly made marmalade, is flying out around her head, and her face, pale as paper in the moonlight, tells me that she’s anxious and more than a little excited. For an inch or two around her, the night doesn’t seem so dark.

‘Catrin, sorry.’ She is way taller than I am. She stoops towards me and then sways backwards as though afraid of crowding me. ‘I need to know if you saw anyone else out there tonight? Any vessels you didn’t recognize?’

I tell her no. Several big, commercial fishing boats left harbour around the same time I did, but I knew all of them. A lot of the islanders night-fish, but typically in smaller boats, hugging the shore.

‘Sorry, this must be so difficult.’ Skye never seems to know what to do with her hands. She’s flapping them right now. ‘I know it’s almost exactly the—’

Skye wasn’t here three years ago. She was away in England at police college. And yet she knows that in two days it will be the anniversary of the day I lost my life.

‘What’s happened, Skye?’ I glance at Ralph, who is petting Queenie. ‘Something about a missing child?’ I don’t say
another one.
It’s hardly necessary.

‘One of the visiting families.’ She looks back to the crowd behind us. ‘Not from the cruise ship. They arrived independently, have been staying at one of the guest houses in town. They were picnicking out near Estancia at lunchtime. The kids were playing in the grass. They lost sight of the youngest.’

Estancia is a farm settlement, about twenty miles away, on the south-easterly tip of a great sea inlet.

‘He’s only three.’ Skye looks on the verge of tears.

Three years old. The two kids who went missing previously were older, but not by much. Both were boys. A child of three, separated from his family for hours, alone at night. He’ll be cold, hungry, terrified. Isn’t abandonment the worst fear of the young? On these islands, at night, he will feel abandoned by the world.

‘Has there been a search?’

Skye’s face gives a little quiver as she pulls herself together. ‘We’ve had people there all day. And some men have gone back again. Callum Murray for one. He went with a few men from the barracks. We’re waiting to hear.’

‘Is that his family?’ I find the mother without really trying, a plump, dark-haired woman in her late thirties. Her whole body is clenched inwards, as though she’s afraid that if she lets go she might fall apart. I know that, when I get closer, whatever flesh she once had on her face will appear to have gone, leaving it skin over bones. Her eyes will look dead. She will look like me.

Except that where it matters she’s a world apart from me. She still has hope.

‘That’s the family.’ Skye seems to be standing on one leg now. ‘The Wests. It’s all getting really difficult. There are people off the cruise ship too and, well, I don’t want to be unkind, but they’re not exactly helping. They seem to think we should be forcibly searching properties. They want a block on all boats leaving harbour from now on. Can you imagine what the fishing vessels are going to say if we tell them they can’t go out in the morning?’

‘I doubt many will listen.’ Authority is tolerated here, but only to a point.

‘And the family are anxious enough already. The last thing they need is people putting all sorts of wild ideas in their heads.’

I’m tempted to say that, given our recent history with missing children, the wild ideas will be there already.

‘It’s all very unsettling.’ As Skye continues talking and I pretend to listen, we walk towards my car. ‘We’ve been called out to five incidents since nine o’clock. Chief Superintendent Stopford is trying to get all the visitors back to the cruise ship, but they don’t want to go until the little boy is found. It’s going to be a bad night.’

Muttering what I know to be expected, that she should let me know if there’s anything I can do, I slip away. Queenie leaps into the car and I head towards my house on the western side of Cape Pembroke peninsula, a tiny spit of land between the inner and outer harbours of Stanley and the ocean itself.

I’m not thinking about the missing child. Or rather, I am, but only insofar as how it will affect me. If boats are to be stopped leaving their moorings, if they are to be searched before they leave harbour, my plans fall apart. Two and a half days from now. Around sixty hours. The kid has to be found by then.

I don’t take the shortest route home. Some nights, usually when the black fog in my head is getting the upper hand, something seems to take me out towards the Grimwood house. Always at night, when the chances of seeing the family are next to nonexistent, something pulls me to it. Tonight, I drive around the easternmost tip of Stanley’s natural harbour towards the big house with the peacock-blue roof that looks east over Surf Bay. I slow down as I round the last bend and can see the whitewashed walls, the black windows, the low gorse hedge, now bursting with yellow flowers. To either side of the low wooden gate is a pumpkin lantern, and in their intricate, accurate carving I see the handiwork of the children’s grandfather. He carved pumpkins for my family, too, once.

Someone is up. I can see light in an upper window. Peter’s room. I have never seen Peter, the youngest Grimwood child. He has lived the last two and a half years in my head. I see him as a fair-haired boy, skinny and oval-faced like his two brothers were at that age. He will also, like them, have his mother’s bright blue eyes.

I haven’t been in this house for years, not since before Peter was born, but I know Rachel’s house as well as I know my own. Peter is awake in the night and Rachel will be with him, wrapping her body around his, rocking him to sleep. She’ll be breathing in the scent of his hair, feeling him trembling against her and loving her power to soothe away his fears. I hate her so much at this moment it is all I can do to press down on the accelerator and carry on driving.

Yes, I think. Killing Rachel will be easy.

3

I push open the door to my house and sense, immediately, the departure from the norm. There is something – a scent, the echo of a giggle, the fractional change in the atmosphere. Tiny signs, but unmistakable. They are here again.

I close the door softly behind me and look around. No bright eyes in the darkness. No scuffling movements as tiny forms press deeper into the shadows. I make a slow circuit of the large, old-fashioned room and step out into the hallway. I’m both wary and eager. It’s an odd sort of hunger, this need to see the dead.

In the three years since the boys’ deaths they have haunted me. Do I mean that literally? I’m not sure. I am a scientist, more likely to believe in aliens than ghosts, but within days of the accident their presence in the house became more real, more compelling than that of my husband or any of the gaggle of well-wishers who appeared periodically.

The real people left but the boys remained, drifting in and out of my life with the reliability, if not the regularity, of the tide. Always when I least expect it, I see their shadows behind curtains, the curve of their bodies under quilts on beds I still can’t bear to strip. Their voices, sometimes giggling and plotting secrets, quite often squabbling, will mingle with the sounds from the television or the radio. I’ll catch a whiff of their scent. The particular musky apple smell of Kit’s hair a day or so after washing. The acrid smell of Ned’s trainers when the shoe cupboard had been left open.

They’re not sitting at the bottom of the stairs, or curled up on the sofa staring at the blank television screen. Good, I hate it when they do that. I make my way upstairs. The stair-gate that we never got round to removing is closed. Did I do that? Why would I? And yet it’s rare for me to suspect the boys of having an impact on the physical environment. The odd toy, perhaps, may have been moved. A dent on one of the beds. My dog, of course, could be responsible for either.

Queenie, as usual when the boys are here, is downstairs by the kitchen door, whining. I have no idea whether she, too, senses their presence, or whether she just hates seeing me in this mood, but their visits freak her out. It’s a shame, because she loved them too, but pets aren’t mothers I suppose.

I’m sure I’ll find them in Ned’s room, curled up together like a couple of puppies, but the shape I see as I press open the door is only a large bear lying prone on Ned’s bed. Not in Kit’s room either. I’m moving faster now, telling myself to slow down, but feeling the normal panic of a mother who can’t find her children. Even her dead ones. My bedroom is empty too. Or appears to be.