Little Black Lies (26 page)

‘The Argies thought we were fucking supermen.’

I’m smiling at the memory. In the midst of the hell that was the Falkland liberation, you had to find your light relief where you could.

‘I’ve missed your soldier stories.’

I keep walking. I can’t answer that. Once I do, the conversation will move on. It won’t be the last thing she said to me.

‘Callum, what do you think happened to him? Rachel’s little boy, I mean.’

Bloody good question. And one we really need to answer. ‘We know he wasn’t taken by road, because we were on it, so only two possibilities that I can think of. The first is that someone approached the property from the beach and then got him away by boat.’

‘Which means he could be anywhere on the islands.’

‘The other is they came from camp.’

‘And carried him off on foot?’

‘Actually, I was thinking quad bike. Or horse.’

She accepts the suggestion immediately. Lots of people on the islands still keep horses for getting around camp. Rachel has a couple herself.

‘If any of those is true, there would have been tracks. On the ground around the house if it was a bike or horse, at the top of the beach if it was a boat.’

‘There could well have been. But the police didn’t look for them because they were focused on you.’

‘And the rain’s washed them all away.’

‘When I was there yesterday the crime-scene team had found a footprint. Or so they thought. A large one. A bloke’s. I think they got a print of it before the rain.’

She’s silent for a moment, thinking about it. ‘I still can’t believe it’s someone on the islands,’ she says. ‘Everyone’s lived here for years. People don’t suddenly turn into paedophiles overnight.’

Over the years, people have often asked me why I came back here after the conflict was over, why I’ve stayed so long. The truth is, I came for Catrin, even though I didn’t know her at the time, and for people like her.

One of the things I love about this woman at my side, about everyone here, is their innocence. This tiny archipelago is like a bubble, isolated from the rest of the world, in which people have the chance to be their very best. Here, the cult of the individual, so common in the Western world, is largely unknown. There is no in-bred sense of entitlement here. No one here talks about ‘me time’. Here, life is about graft and sweat, about making the very best life out of a harsh environment and, big difference now, about helping others along the way. This is a community. It’s a team.

Margaret Thatcher, who’s practically become the patron saint of the islands after her handling of the invasion, talks about society being redundant, of the individual being king. If she truly knew and understood this place, she’d never spout such a load of old bollocks.

Other than the conflict – and even then, the invading Argentinian army behaved pretty well towards the islanders – kelpers have no experience of the worst the human race is capable of. They don’t know that it can take years to make a monster.

After half an hour, we reach the end of the minefield and duck under the fence. Catrin is visibly relieved. I’m freezing. We’ve cut nearly a mile off our journey though and we soon pick up the stream that takes us directly to my house.

‘Is this bringing back memories?’ She’s still struggling to keep up, but that wind is piercing and I can’t slow down. At my feet, Queenie seems to be limping along too and I wonder if I’ll be carrying them both before the night’s out. ‘Of, what did you call it, yomping?’

‘Lady, wash your mouth out. The Crap Hats yomped. We tabbed.’

‘Two words for exactly the same thing.’

‘Bollocks,’ I say, although technically she’s right. Yomping is a Marine term. There was always a healthy ‘cap badge’ rivalry between the Marines and the Paras. We had a lot of respect for them, but it only went so far. When Stanley was retaken, the bosses wanted the Marines to raise the Union Flag over the islands once more. For symbolic reasons, whatever that meant. As far as we were concerned, the Cabbage Heads had lost it in the first place and there was no way we were giving up ground. We’d been the first battalion ashore, the first to give the Argies a good pasting, and we were bloody determined to be the first into Port Stanley. We were too.

‘Tabbing involves heavier packs and an extra couple of miles an hour in speed,’ I tell her, and I’m not going to be argued with. ‘Boys yomp, real men tab.’

One last fence, a short distance downhill and I can see my house. At my side, Catrin gives a massive sigh. ‘Would I be pushing my luck if I said I was hoping for hot water?’

I have a sudden mental picture of Catrin in the tub, her skin glowing pink in the steam, and tell myself to slow down. There’s been progress tonight, but still a hell of a long way to go. ‘I can probably manage a hot dinner too, although it might be microwaved.’

When she speaks again her voice is quieter, more serious. ‘Cal, do you think Rachel thinks I did it?’

I honestly have no idea. I never got to know Rachel particularly well; when we do meet, we stick to social niceties. ‘She’s known you longer than I have. If I know you didn’t do it, she must too.’

‘You don’t though. And neither does she. You might hope, or even believe, but you don’t know.’ She’s slowed down, is hardly walking forward at all. All very well, but she still has my coat and the night isn’t getting any warmer.

‘I know you,’ I tell her.

‘You knew me three years ago. You knew me before. I’m very different now.’

‘People don’t change that much.’ I’m telling her what I need to believe: that in her heart, Catrin is still the same woman. ‘No matter what they’ve been through, deep down they stay the same.’

‘I think we both know that’s not true.’

Almost home. I know what I’m hoping for and it isn’t, particularly, hot water and hot food. I tell myself I must not push her. And then I do the exact opposite. I push her. I stop and face her. We stand together on the narrow path.

‘I spoke to Ben last night. He knows about us. Did you tell him?’

Her face clouds over when I mention Ben. I really want her to say that she told him. God knows I begged her to often enough. When you have nothing, small victories mean a lot.

She knows exactly what I want her to say, but she’s the woman who never lies. ‘It wasn’t me. It was Rachel.’

‘You told Rachel?’ She’d always insisted that Rachel could not know.

She can’t meet my eyes. I sense she’s reluctant to say this, even now. ‘No, I didn’t tell her. She found out. She saw us together one time. We were, well, I don’t imagine there could have been much doubt about what we were doing.’

I wait for more details. I can’t think when Rachel could have seen us. We were pretty careful.

‘That’s why she was at the house that day, when she left the boys in the car.’ Catrin is talking to the ground at our feet now. ‘She was nearly an hour earlier than we’d arranged. She went to meet Ben, and she told him about us. My best friend was in my house, breaking up my marriage, trying to destroy my family, when my sons fell to their death. An accident, a moment’s carelessness, I might have forgiven. But not that.’

Shit. I don’t know what to ask first. Did Ben tell her this? Why should Rachel want to hurt Catrin so much? Why did none of this come out at the inquest into the boys’ deaths? What I ask is the least relevant and most selfish thing I could come up with.

‘Were you ever going to tell him?’

I don’t get the slap I probably deserve. For a long time I get nothing. Then, ‘I was afraid,’ she says. ‘Ben was just so – dependable. I loved you so much, but you were a total wild card. I had no idea whether I could rely on you, and I had two children to think about.’

Oh, I’m glad she brought that up. ‘Three children. You had three children to think about.’

She backs away, tries to step around me. I reach out, but she’s already moved out of reach.

‘Was it mine?’ I call after her as she strides ahead. I know she isn’t going to tell me. Not now anyway. Still, the ball has been played. It’s in her court.

We walk on, we’re almost home.

‘Cal, I need to ask you something about computers.’

‘Should be within my grasp.’ I’m sulking a bit.

‘I need to delete some files. If I go into File Management and delete them, are they gone for good or are they still on the hard drive somewhere?’

Ask me something hard. ‘Still there. I can delete them properly for you, if it’s that important.’

‘Can you tell me how to do it?’

As I start to wonder where this is going, we reach the last ridge and are a stone’s throw from the house. ‘If it’s your home computer, though, you might have to wait. It wasn’t in your bedroom earlier. It must have been taken in as part of the investigation.’

She stops walking. Just as I see that there are two police cars waiting outside my house. I stop too. When she turns around I don’t like what I see on her face. She slips off my coat and hands it to me. ‘Thank you,’ she tells me. ‘Not just for the coat.’

We’ve been seen. Stopford is getting out of one car with Josh Savidge. Skye is in the other, with two more constables. They start walking towards us.

‘Better late than never, I suppose.’ I feel the need to act as though this is no big deal. That, of course, given what we left behind at Catrin’s house, the police are going to be waiting for us.

‘I was wrong,’ she says. ‘About Ben being the reliable one. You’re the one who’s been there for me, who never gave up. I’m sorry.’

And there’s the smile. It’s only there for a second, but it’s real. Then it’s gone. ‘Callum, don’t do anything stupid. You can’t protect me any more. Don’t get yourself in trouble.’

‘Cat, this is bullshit. They’ve probably just come to make sure you’re OK.’

‘Look after Queenie, please. I think Ben will take her, but until he can get something sorted out. Promise me you’ll look after her.’

‘There’s nothing they can do. They don’t have any evidence.’

‘Oh, they have enough. More than enough.’

She starts walking forward. I put out a hand to hold her back and she gently brushes it away.

‘I’m really sorry, Callum,’ she tells me. Then she walks ahead. As the night grows colder, I stay where I am. I watch her meet the police head on. I watch her hold out her hands for the cuffs, I see her listen without arguing as they arrest her again. Then I watch them take her away.

*   *   *

Queenie is seriously upset. Scratching at doors, whining, racing from one side of the house to another. Not sure whether I want to yell at her or join in, I start wandering the rooms myself.

Catrin wanted me to delete something on her computer. No, she wanted me to tell her how to do it. The police have her computer. Whatever it is she didn’t want me to see, they’ve seen. Knowing they’d seen it, she went with them without arguing.

Catrin’s computer is a stand-alone model. There’d been no lead that would have connected it to a modem. No modem either. She had no way of sending emails or accessing websites. She’d have used it for admin, for storing information. That means there’s no way I can access it directly. To transfer information she’d have needed to save it on to a disk and download to another computer. If that’s been done already I can pick it up at the police station.

Within minutes I’m back in the police system but I find nothing. I get up, light a fire, force food down my throat, feed Queenie and try again. Nothing. I keep trying. Finally, an hour before dawn, I find it. Her files have all been downloaded and saved, but one in particular has been opened and read several times in the past few hours. I open it too and find a diary. I had no idea she kept a diary. Maybe when she and I were together she didn’t. The first entry is dated a little under three years ago.

In different circumstances, I would not dream of violating Catrin’s privacy. But everyone connected with the islands’ police force will know the contents of the document in front of me by now. I start reading. I finish as the sun is starting to appear on the eastern horizon.

DAY SIX

Saturday, 5 November

23

There must be some mechanism in our heads that acts as a kind of filter when really bad things happen. Protecting us from the full force of the blow, it lets the bad news trickle through, drip-feeding, giving us just enough to deal with, before calling a halt and making us take a break. Certainly, in this first hour after reading Catrin’s diary I’m struggling to take it all in, to make sense of any of it. For this first hour, I’m numb.

Catrin kept a diary, that much I know. It started out as a record of grief, an expression of wonder that someone could go on living with so much pain. I deal with that, as I wander from room to room, step outside to let the cold air hurt me. Catrin kept a diary, and in it recorded the clear progression from grief to burning rage, then a cold, pitiless determination to get revenge.

In reading Catrin’s diary, I have discovered a woman I had no idea existed. A woman whose pain was so great, that she was prepared to become a monster rather than go on living as she was.

I thought nothing, ever again, could shock me to the core. I’ve seen mates blown apart by grenades on nights when I’ve been so cold I’ve been tempted to put my hands on the guts spilling out of their stomachs just to stay warm. I’ve seen dark-skinned boys running around battlefields looking for their missing arms. I’ve seen men bigger than me sobbing for their mothers, as they die lonely, freezing deaths on the opposite side of the planet. I thought it was impossible to shock me. How wrong I’ve been.

The knocking on the door takes me completely by surprise.

She’s back. It was all a mistake. The diary was nonsense, a fake, some twisted work of fiction. I race to the door and pull it open. Not Catrin on my doorstep.

Rachel.

24

She smells like a beer mat in the Globe a few hours after the final whistle in the annual soccer match. Mascara smudges under her eyes suggest she hasn’t washed or looked at herself in the mirror for days.

‘I need to talk to you.’ Her eyes don’t quite focus on mine.

I step back to let her in, but I’m wary. I can’t imagine why Rachel would be here. She and I barely know each other. Catrin talked about her a lot but never wanted the two of us to spend any time together.