The Dark Shore (18 page)

“I can’t re
m
ember when I first discovered this thing. I suppose it was after Jon’s parents were divorced and I was taken away from Jon to live in a convent. I knew then how strange the world seemed without him
...
Then when I was fourteen his father took me away from the convent and I was able to live at his house in London and Jon came back into my life. We both discovered the thing together then. It was rather exciting, like discovering a new dimension
...
But then his father misunderstood the situation and, thinking the worst, decided to separate us again for a while. That was when I began to have affairs with as many men as I could— anything to bring color back to my gray, black-and-white world
...
Jon married Sophia. I was glad he was happy, although it was terrible to lose him. I wouldn’t have minded so much if I’d liked her, but she was such a stupid little bitch—I couldn’t think what he saw in her
...
I went on, having affair after affair until one day things went wrong and I had a great revulsion—a hatred of men, of life, and of the whole world. It was Jon who cured me. I went down to Clougy to see him and he brought me back to life and promised he’d keep in touch. I married Michael after that. Poor Michael. He’s been very good to me always, and I’ve never been able to give him anything in return.”

She stopped. It was still in the room. There was no sound at all.

“Even Michael never understood properly,” she said at last. “Even he tended to think I had some kind of illicit relationship with Jon, but it wasn’t true. Jon and I have never even exchanged an embrace which could remotely be described as adulterous. The thing we share is quite apart from all that, and I can’t see why it should be considered wrong. But Michael thought it was. And Sophia
...
Sophia simply had no understanding of the situation at all. My God, she was a stupid little fool! If ever a woman drove her husband away from her, that woman was Sophia.”

A door banged somewhere in the distance. There were footsteps on the stairs, a voice calling Sarah’s name.

Marijohn unlocked the door just as Jon turned the handle and burst into the room. “Sarah—” he began and then stopped short as he found himself face to face with Marijohn.

“I was trying to explain to her,” she said quietly. “I was trying to tell her about us.”

“She already knows. You’re too late.”

Marijohn went white. “But how—”

“I told her myself,” said Jon, and as he spoke Sarah saw them both turn towards her. “I thought Michael had already told her. I’m sure she must have guessed by now that we both had a first-class motive for murdering Sophia.
”

6

It was dark on the road but fortunately the mechanic had a torch and could see what he was doing. Justin, glancing around in an agony of impatience, caught sight of a lighted window of a farm-house a few hundred yards from the road and began to move over towards it.

“I won’t be long,” he called to the mechanic. “I have to make a phone call.”

The track was rough beneath his feet and the farmyard when he reached it smelled of manure. The woman who answered the door looked faintly offended when he asked her politely if he could use her telephone, but showed him into the hall and left him alone to make the call.

He dialed the St. Just exchange with an unsteady hand. It seemed an eternity before the operator answered.

“St. Just 584, please.”

Another endless space of time elapsed, and then he could hear the bell ringing and his fingers gripped the receiver even tighter
than
before.

It rang and rang and rang.

“Sorry, sir,” said the operator at last, cutting in across the ringing bell, “but there seems to be no reply
...
”

7

T
hey were still looking at her, their eyes withdrawn and tense, and it seemed to her as she watched them that their mental affinity was never more clearly visible and less intangible than at that moment when they shared identical expressions.

“What did Sophia threaten to do?” she heard herself say at last, and her voice was astonishingly cool and self-possessed in her ears.

“Surely you can guess,” said Jon. “She was going to drag Marijohn’s name right across her divorce petition. Can’t you picture the revenge she planned in her jealousy, the damage she wanted to cause us both? Can’t you imagine the longing she had to hurt and smear and destroy?
”

“I see.” And she did see. She was beginning to feel sick and dizzy again.

“Marijohn is illegitimate,” he said, as if in attempt to explain the situation flatly. “We have the same father. Her mother died soon after she was
born
and my father—in spite of my mother’s protests and disgust—brought her to live with us. After the divorce, he naturally took her away—he had to. My mother only had her there on sufferance anyway.”

The silence fell again, deepening as the seconds passed.

“Jon,
”
sai
d
Sa
rah
a
t
last. “Jon, did you—”

He
knew w
hat
she wanted to ask, and she sensed that he had wanted her to ask the question which was foremost on her mind.

“No," he said. “I didn’t kill Sophia. You must believe that, because I swear it’s the truth. And if you ask why I lied to you, why I always told you Sophia’s death was an accident, I’ll tell you. I thought Marijohn had killed her. Everything I did which may have seemed like an admission of guilt on my part was in order to protect Marijohn—but although I didn’t know it at the time, Marijohn thought
I’d
killed her. In spite of all our mutual understanding, we’ve both been suffering under a delusion about each other for ten years. Ironic, isn’t it?”

She stared at him, not answering. After a moment he moved towards her, leaving Marijohn by the door.

“The scene with Sophia came after supper on the night she died,” he said. “Michael was there too. After it was over, I went out into the garden to escape and sat on the swing-seat in the darkness for a long while trying to think what I should do. Finally I went back into the house to discuss the situation with Marijohn but she wasn’t there. I went upstairs, but she wasn’t there either and when I came downstairs again I met Eve in the hall. She told me Sophia had gone out to the Flat Rocks to meet Max, and suddenly I wondered if Marijohn had gone after Sophia to try and reason with her. I dashed out of the house and tore up the cliff path. I heard Sophia shout ‘Let me go!’ and then she screamed when I was about a hundred yards from the steps leading down to the Flat Rocks, and on running forward I found Marijohn at the cliff’s edge staring down the steps. She was panting as if she’d been running—or struggling. She said that she’d been for a walk along the cliffs towards Sennen and was on her way back home when she’d heard the scream. We went down the steps and found Max bending over Sophia’s body. He’d been waiting for her on the Flat Rocks below.” He paused. “Or so he said.”

There was a pause. Sarah turned to Marijohn. “What a coincidence,” she said, “that you should be so near the steps at the time. What made you turn back at that particular moment during your walk along the cliffs and arrive at the steps just after Sophia was killed?”

“Sarah—” Jon was white with anger, but Marijohn interrupted him.

“I could feel Jon wanted me,” she said simply. “I knew he was looking for me so I turned back.”

Sarah scarcely recognized her voice when she next spoke. It was the voice of a stranger, brittle, hard and cold. “How very interesting,” she said. “I’ve never really believed in telepathy.”

“What are you suggesting?” said Jon harshly. “That I’m lying? That Marijohn’s lying? That we’re both lying?”

Sarah moved past him, opening the door clumsily in her desire to escape from their presence.

“One of you must be lying,” she said. “That’s obvious. Sophia before she fell called out ‘Let me go’ which means she was struggling with someone who pushed her to her death. Somebody killed her, and either of you—as you tell me yourself—had an ideal motive.”

“Sarah—”

“Let her go, Jon. Let her be.”

Sarah was in the corridor now, taking great gulps of air as if she had been imprisoned for a long time in a stifling cell. She went downstairs and out into the drive. The night air was deliciously cool, and as she wandered further from the house the freedom was all around her, a vast relief after the confined tension in that upstairs room.

He was waiting for her by the gate. She was so absorbed in her own emotions and her desire to escape that she never even noticed, as she took the cliff path, that she was being followed.

8

“It’s a funny thing,” said the mechanic when Justin reached the car again. “But I can’t make her go. T’aint the carburetor. Can’t understand it.”

Justin thought quickly. He could get a lift to St. Just and a lift out to the airport, but he would have to walk the mile and a half from the airport down into the valley to Clougy. But anything was better than waiting fruitlessly by the roadside at Zennor. He could try another phone call from the square at St. Just.

“All right,” he said to the mechanic. “I’ll have to try and get a lift home. Can you fix up for someone from your garage to tow away my car tomorrow and find out what’s wrong?”

“Do it right now, if you like. It only means—”

“No, I can’t wait now. I’ll have to go on ahead.” He found a suitable tip and gave it to the man who looked a little astonished by this impatience. “Thank you very much for all your trouble. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight to you,” said the mechanic agreeably enough, pocketing the tip, and climbed into his shooting brake to drive back along the road towards St. Ives.

9

Sarah first saw the dark figure behind her when she was half a mile from the house. The cliff path had turned round the hillside so that the lighted windows were hidden from her, and she was just pausing in the darkness to listen to the sea far below and regain her breath after the uphill climb when she glanced over her shoulder and saw the man.

Every bone in her body suddenly locked itself into a tight white fear.

You’ve been assigned Sophia’s role
...

The terror was suffocating, wave after wave of hot dizziness that went on and on even after she began to stumble forward along the cliff path. She never paused to ask herself why anyone should want her dead. She only knew in that blind, sickening flash that she was in danger and she had to escape.

But there was no cover on the stark hillside, nowhere to shelter.

It was then that she thought of the rocks below. In the jumbled confusion of boulders at the foot of the cliffs there were a thousand hiding places, and perhaps also another route by the sea’s edge back to the cove and the house. If she could somehow find the way down the cliff to the Flat Rocks
...

The path forked slightly and remembering her exploring earlier that day, she took the downward path and found the steps cut in the cliff which led to the rocks below.

Her limbs were suddenly awkward; the sea was a roar that receded and pounded in her ears, drowning even the noise of her gasps for breath.

She looked back.

The man was running.

In a panic, not even trying to find the alternative route down the cliff, she scrambled down the steps, clinging to the jutting rocks in the sandy face and sliding the last few feet to the rock below. She started to run forward, slipped, fell. The breath was knocked out of her body and as she pulled herself to her feet she looked up and saw him at the head of the steps above her.

She flattened herself against the large rock nearby, not moving, not breathing, praying he hadn’t seen her.

“Sarah?” he called.

He sounded anxious, concerned.

She didn’t answer.

He cautiously began to descend the steps.

Let him fall, said the single voice in her mind drowning even the noise of the sea. Let him slip and fall. She couldn’t move. If she moved he would see her and she would have less chance of escape.

He didn’t like the steps at all. She heard him curse under his brea
th
, and a shower of sand and pebbles scattered from the cliff face as he fumbled his way down uncertainly.

He reached the rock below at last and stood still six feet away from her. She could hear his quick breathing as he straightened his frame and stared around, his eyes straining to pierce the darkness.

“Sarah?” he called again, and added as an afterthought: “It’s all right, it’s only me.”

She was pressing back so hard against the rock that her shoulder-blades hurt. Her whole body ached with the strain of complete immobility.

He took a step forward and another and stood listening again.

Close at hand the surf broke on the reefs and ledges of the Flat Rocks and was sucked back into the sea again with the undertow.

He saw her.