Silver Bay (43 page)

‘That’s his sister,’ she said quietly. And I thought, That’s the journalist, and my peaceable mood dissolved.

I was making a cheese omelette, and whisked the eggs furiously, trying to lose the dark thread of my thoughts in domestic tasks. Since Liza had told me her plans, I had never cooked so hard, nor the hotel been so clean. Pity there were no other guests – they would have had a rare five-star service. I stuck my head down, and whisked until I had forgotten what I was thinking about and I had eggs so light they were ready to fly out of the bowl. It was several minutes before I noticed that since Mike’s shout there had been no noise at all from upstairs. Not even the usual padding of his feet as he moved from desk to leather chair, or the creak as he lay down on his bed.

Once again Hannah was engrossed in her exercise book, but there was a quality to the silence that made me curious.

I took the pan off the heat and walked to the doorway. ‘Mike?’ I called up the stairs. ‘Everything okay?’

Nothing.

‘Mike?’ I said, holding the banister and taking a step up.

‘Kathleen,’ he said, and his voice was tremulous. ‘I think you’d better come up here.’

As I entered the room he told me to sit down on the bed. In truth he was so pale, so unlike himself, that it was a couple of seconds before I agreed to do so. He moved towards me and squatted in front of me, like someone about to propose. Then he said those two little words, and as I heard them spoken aloud I felt the colour drain from my face. Afterwards he told me he was afraid I’d have a stroke like Nino Gaines.

He was a fool, I thought, with the part of my mind still capable of functioning. Or a madman. We’d been harbouring a madman all this time. ‘What the hell are you saying?’ I asked, when my voice returned to me. ‘What kind of joke is this?’ Suddenly I felt furious with him, and he waved a hand at me, telling me, uncharacteristically rudely, to shush, to wait while he opened his computer.

He stood up and, as I began to protest, scanned down a load of messages. Then, as I wondered whether I should try to leave the room, a little box opened on his screen and there she was. Unbelievably. In full colour. Staring at us with a wary incomprehension that matched my own. And my hands began to tremble.

‘This is the picture Monica took today. It looks like her, right?’

My mouth hung open and my hand was glued to my chest. I was unable to tear my eyes away from that face. And then, in halting sentences, he told me what his sister had told him.

‘Hannah,’ I croaked. ‘You’ve got to get Hannah.’

But Hannah must have become curious about what was going on upstairs because when I looked away from the screen she was already in the doorway, her pen still in her hand. Her eyes flickered from me to Mike and back again.

‘Hannah, sweetheart,’ I said, lifting a trembling hand towards the computer. ‘I need you to look at something. I need you to tell me whether this – this looks like . . .’

‘
Letty.
’ Hannah moved closer to the screen, lifted a finger and traced her sister’s nose. ‘
Letty.
’

‘She’s alive, sweetheart,’ I said, as the tears came. I couldn’t speak properly for several minutes, and I felt Mike’s hand on my shoulder. ‘God save us, she’s alive.’ And I was afraid for Hannah, afraid that she would be feeling even more than the shock and disbelief I felt. My thoughts were in turmoil, my heart numbed by the sight of that child, whom I’d never known but whose life and death had hung over this house as surely as if she’d been my own. How on earth could we expect Hannah to cope with this?

But she was the only one of us not crying.

‘I knew,’ she said, a great smile breaking across her face. ‘I knew she couldn’t be dead, not like the sea creatures. She never
felt
dead.’ She turned back to the screen and traced the image again. They were so alike, it was as if she was staring into a mirror. It’s hard to believe now that I could have doubted it.

Mike had gone to the window. He was rubbing the back of his head. ‘Those bastards,’ he was saying, forgetting Hannah’s presence. ‘How can they have kept the truth from her for all those years? How could they do that to her? How could they do that to the
child
?’

The size of their deception had hit me too, and the language that emerged from my mouth I haven’t heard since I was a wartime barmaid. ‘That bastard! That yellow-bellied, rat-eating son of a rabid dog! That . . . sh—’

‘Shark?’ suggested Mike, raising an eyebrow.

‘Shark,’ I affirmed, glancing at Hannah. ‘Yes. Shark. I’d sure love to gut him like one.’

‘I’d shoot him,’ said Mike.

‘Shooting’s too good.’ I had a sudden image of Old Harry, my harpoon gun, mounted on the wall of the Whalechasers Musem, and had a thought that would have shocked those who knew me. I knew Mike’s mind was headed the same way. Then Hannah spoke again. ‘I still have a sister,’ she announced, and the simple delight in her voice stopped us both. ‘Look! I have a sister.’ And as Hannah placed her own face beside that oversized image, so that we could both take in the reality of that statement, Mike and I turned to each other.

‘Liza,’ we said, in unison.

We didn’t know how to tell her. We didn’t know how to give her this news. She was out on the boat and it was too huge, too shocking, to tell her over the radio. Yet we couldn’t wait for her to come in. In the end we borrowed Sam Grady’s cutter. With Mike and Hannah at the prow, and me at the tiller, we sailed out past the bay to Break Nose Island. The breeze was light, the seas gentle, and within minutes we were accompanied by pods of dolphins, the joyful arcs of their bodies echoing the mood on our boat. As we bounced across the waves, Hannah leant over the edge and told them. ‘They know!’ she said, laughing. ‘They’ve come because they know!’ For once I didn’t put her straight. Who was I to say how life worked? Who was I to say those creatures didn’t know more about it than I did? I felt at that moment that nothing would surprise me.

And there she was, coming back in, standing at the helm with Milly beside her, looking forward already to coming ashore. She had a full boat, largely Taiwanese. The tourists leant over the front rails, curious as to why we had approached, some still clutching their cameras, then snapping madly as they saw the dolphins in our wake.

As she spotted us and steered towards us, the sun was behind her and her hair looked as if it was on fire. ‘What’s up?’ she yelled, as we pulled alongside. She forgot to be mad about Hannah not wearing a lifejacket: when she saw the three of us crammed into the little boat, she knew we couldn’t be there for any ordinary reason.

I looked at Mike, who nodded at me, and I began to shout, but before I had even said the words, the tears were streaming down my face. My voice broke. It took several attempts, and Mike’s proffered hanky, before I could make myself heard.

‘She’s alive, Liza. Letty’s alive.’

Liza looked from me to Mike and back again. Above us, two gulls wheeled and cried, mocking what I had said.

‘It’s true! Letty’s alive! Mike’s sister has seen her. She’s really, really alive.’ I waved the picture that Mike had printed off, but the breeze whipped it round my hand and she was too far off to see it.

‘Why are you saying this?’ she said, her voice cracking with pain. She glanced back at the passengers, who were all watching the scene intently. The colour had drained from her face. ‘What do you mean?’

Struggling to keep my balance, I unfurled the picture and held it above my head, in two hands, like a banner. ‘Look!’ I shouted. ‘Look! They lied to you! The bastards lied to you! She never died in the car crash. Letty’s alive, and she’s coming home.’

The tourists hushed, and a few of the Taiwanese, perhaps sensing the enormity of the occasion, began a spontaneous round of applause. We waited below, our faces alive with joy and expectation, and then, as the gulls flew off on some predetermined path, Liza turned her face briefly towards the sky and fainted clean away.

Mike said he’d never realised how much he loved his sister till that day. In a three-hour conversation, as Liza sat pressed up to him, still pale with shock, she told him how she had arranged to meet Steven Villiers at his office and, once there, cup of tea in hand, told him she was following up a story about a respected councillor who had deliberately told his girlfriend that her daughter was dead in order to separate them. A councillor who had systematically beaten his girlfriend until she left in fear of her life. A girlfriend who had kept photographs of her injuries and had them verified by a doctor. Okay, so Monica had lied about that bit, but she said her blood was up by then and she’d just wanted to be sure she would win. I liked the sound of Monica Dormer.

The shocking thing was how easily the Villiers man had caved in. He went very quiet, then said, ‘What do you want?’ He had married, you see, and had two young sons, and when Monica told him that Letty would know, one way or the other, what he had done, she had thought, from his voice, that this was a conversation he had probably expected for some time. They struck a deal: restore the child to her mother, and this would remain a family matter. He agreed a little too readily; she had the impression that it wasn’t the happiest of families.

This is the best part. He had known where Liza was for years – through his contacts in the police, probably, or some kind of private investigator. The irony was that he had wanted her to stay away from him as much as she had wanted to stay away. He said his mother had told Liza the child was dead, partly because at that point they thought it might be true, and partly out of spite. Then when they discovered that Liza had disappeared, they’d decided it might be useful to let her believe it, that it would be an easy way to have her out of their lives. She was a loose cannon, a threat to his career and his future, an obstacle to his happiness with the elegant, dark-haired Deborah. And they had what they wanted. He had the grace, she said, to look a little ashamed. He wanted proper access, he said, the kind of man who at least wants to behave as if he still has control of a situation, and Monica told him he could have his access – as much as his daughter wanted.

Then, accompanied by a lawyer and with a child psychologist at the ready (Mike’s sister was a little afraid by then, never having dealt with children herself), they went to the house to tell Letty she was going on holiday. It was quick. We worried later that it was too quick, given the shock that the girl experienced on being told that her mother had not abandoned her, after all. But, sounding as unsure as Mike had ever heard her, Monica admitted that until they left the drive, she had been afraid Villiers would change his mind.

There were so many lies that Letty would have to learn to disbelieve, so many secrets. Mike’s sister said she was a bright kid, that she wanted to know everything. It was night-time there now, and they were letting her sleep, but in the morning, our evening, Monica would ring us and, after five years, Liza would be able to speak to her. Her younger daughter, her baby, risen from the dead.

I saw the light on in the Whalechasers Museum as I let Milly out for her last walk of the night, and I guessed pretty quickly who it might be. I don’t bother locking it half the time – there’s nothing of monetary value in it to steal, and Milly would let us know if strangers headed up here when they shouldn’t.

Liza and Hannah were upstairs making their telephone call and they needed to be alone, so I grabbed a couple of beers and went out there. He was probably feeling like I was, a bit of a spare part. This was Hannah and Liza’s time. We could be happy for them, overjoyed even, but in truth, not yet knowing Letty, we could only ever feel a fraction of what they did. Being in that house while that conversation was going on upstairs felt intrusive, like listening in on someone’s love affair.

Besides, I was curious about what Liza had told me the previous day, before her whole world had changed again – about the possibility that the development might not go ahead. It was nothing certain, she said, and she was not meant to tell anyone until it was confirmed. But she said it was down to Mike and then, her face darkening, she said that he would be leaving for good tomorrow and after that she wouldn’t say much at all.

He didn’t hear me at first. He was sitting on one of
Maui II
’s rotten timbers, one hand resting on it, and his shoulders were stooped, as if he were carrying a great weight. Given what he had achieved, it seemed an odd stance.

Milly shot in past me, wagging her way to him, and he glanced up. ‘Oh. Hi,’ he said. He was almost directly under the strip-lights, and they cast long shadows on his face.

‘Thought you might like this.’ I held out a beer to him. As he took it I sat down on the chair a few feet away and cracked one open myself.

‘Not like you,’ he said.

‘Nothing normal about today,’ I said.

We sat and drank in companionable silence. The barn doors were open, and through them, in the near dark, we could see the shoreline, the distant lights of people’s cars, of fishermen’s boats preparing for their night’s work. The gentle, humdrum life of Silver Bay pottering on, as it had done for half a century. I still couldn’t believe what I’d been told – that it was possible Mike could pull us back from the brink. I couldn’t believe that we might be allowed to stand, undisturbed, for a little longer.

‘Thank you,’ I said, quietly. ‘Thank you, Mike.’

He looked up from his beer.

‘For everything. I don’t understand how you’ve done it all, but thank you.’

His head dropped again then, and I knew something was wrong. The dark, contemplative expression on his face suggested that he was not out here to give Liza space: he was out here because he had needed to be alone.

I sat and waited. I’ve been around long enough to know you catch a hell of a lot more fish by keeping still and quiet.

‘I don’t want to leave,’ he said, ‘but it’s the only way I can stop the development.’

‘I’m not sure I understand . . .’

‘There was a choice . . . and I couldn’t make it hers. She’s had to make too many hard decisions already.’