Dark Tides, page 17
‘Self-absorbed, much?’
I threw up my hands. Not easy with all the weight that was bearing down on me.
‘He’s been acting really strangely around me, Rach. He’s fine with you. Fine with Callum. But when I’m there, he clams up.’
‘I haven’t noticed.’
‘Oh, come on, what is it? I know he was pissed off about how I broke up with him. But we were just kids, Rach.’
I’d ended things between us in a brief letter from uni. And yes, it had been a coward’s way out, but it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. We’d barely talked in the weeks following the attack on Edward, and when we did speak, it was only by phone. David had tried to meet up with me a couple of times before I left the island but by then I couldn’t handle seeing him. The rest of us had severed links so abruptly and so completely that I’d just assumed David would want the same thing.
Turned out I was wrong. He’d finally confronted me a month or so after Scott’s funeral. He said I’d broken his heart, which is about as clichéd as it gets, but unfortunately didn’t mean that it wasn’t true. He also told me Mark had lost it with Edward so badly because it was obvious he had feelings for me. Worse than that, though, was the expression he claimed to have seen on my face.
‘You looked so grateful to him. So understood. I should have seen it for myself. It took me years to fully understand.’ He’d stared at me then, the hurt and disbelief distorting his features. ‘You loved him for it,’ he said, and in a moment of dawning clarity, I saw that perhaps he was right.
Next to me, Rachel groaned dramatically, but I wouldn’t be deflected.
‘You’re his cousin. He must have said something more to you.’
‘OK, fine.’ She grabbed hold of her rucksack’s shoulder straps as if it was a parachute and she was about to jump out of a plane. ‘He did say something to me. But don’t get all hung up on it because he was in a bad mood when I talked to him. He was being a total drama queen.’
‘Just tell me.’
‘He said something about how he doesn’t like the person he becomes when he’s around us. He doesn’t like how we make him feel. See? I told you it was crazy. It’s not like he mutates or something.’
But it wasn’t crazy to me. Sometimes, being with the others reminded me of those things I was most ashamed of, and it wasn’t hard to believe David might experience something similar. Maybe hanging out with us made him think back to how Edward had grabbed his leg and how he’d kicked him to get free. And sure, the real damage had been done by Mark before then, but perhaps it shocked him to know what he was capable of. Perhaps he was scared by the darkness inside himself.
‘Besides,’ Rachel went on, ‘I know he doesn’t hate you, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘If you say so.’
‘You’re serious? You really need me to spell it out?’
The path was getting increasingly treacherous. We turned sideways to face one another and crabbed downwards, the rain spattering into us.
‘You’re clueless, Claire, you know that? You’ve been single how many years now?’
I didn’t answer because there was really no need. She already knew there hadn’t been anyone serious since David, and I’d never confided in her about the fling I’d had with Mark and the confusion of emotions I felt towards him. Truth was, none of us ever mentioned Mark. If we didn’t talk about him, then he didn’t exist. And if he didn’t exist, then we couldn’t have let him down so badly. As far as I knew, I was still the only one to have visited or written to him. My letters had become less frequent since I’d spoken to him a year ago. I’d sent the last one a month back, telling him of our plans to commemorate Scott. He hadn’t replied.
‘One day, Cooper, it’s finally going to dawn on you how gorgeous you are.’ The wind whirled in my ears but I could still hear the slurp of our boots in the mud. ‘One day you’ll see what’s been staring you in the face all these years.’
‘And what’s that exactly?’
‘You’re the detective, Claire. You figure it out.’
Rachel turned from me and hurried on, her rucksack swinging wildly from her hips, her arms spread wide to prevent her from falling. I watched her go. Watched her slip and slide towards Callum, then barge into him and grab him round the waist and lower her hand to squeeze his backside. I could have caught up to her. Could have hauled her round and made her tell me what she meant. But I had a reasonable enough idea already.
Question was, was it true? Did David have feelings for me? Did he want us to get back together? He hadn’t said anything to me about that. He hadn’t given me any indication that he was still interested. So perhaps it was all in Rachel’s head. Or perhaps she was simply trying to make me feel better about David’s no-show.
Either way, I wasn’t going to waste my afternoon dwelling on it. I had more immediate things to worry about, starting with the sign Callum was pointing towards.
The sign was fitted to a low wooden gate just in front of the derelict former cafe. The gate was in the middle of a stretch of dry stone wall that bisected a portion of headland. Tufts of sheep wool had become trapped on a length of barbed wire running along the top of the wall.
‘Read this,’ Callum said. ‘Consider it your safety briefing.’
VISITORS SHOULD BE AWARE THAT THIS SITE COULD BE DANGEROUS WITHOUT PROPER CARE AND ATTENTION.
IF YOU ENTER THIS SITE, PLEASE TAKE EVERY CARE TO PROTECT YOUR PERSONAL SAFETY AND THAT OF OTHERS AROUND YOU.
You might not have planned in exhaustive detail this year, but that doesn’t mean you’re not prepared. Chance is a seductive force, and it’s true that you appreciate its power and appeal more than most people, but you’d have been an idiot not to plant a GPS on the minibus.
You can see the signal now, registering as a small red beacon on the map you’ve called up on your smartphone. There’s also a pleasing sound effect that bings like sonar. They’ve parked a short distance away – less than half a mile by foot – and you’re delighted to see that Callum has chosen such an isolated location.
True, the museum village is popular today, and the school bus that’s parked close by worries you a little, but you can hike around the back of the absurdly twee cottages and cut across some fields, avoiding the kids and their teachers and the narrow, winding track that leads up the hill.
Even the weather is co-operating with you. There won’t be many walkers around and the rain means you can put on your black cagoule with the hood that conceals your face. Your equipment is stashed in a small backpack, and to the average onlooker, you could be an ordinary rambler out to walk the coast path with a bag containing a map and a drinking flask and a neatly packed lunch.
But you’re not ordinary. You never have been. And there’s no space for a map or a flask or any lunch in your rucksack – not with all the gear you have stuffed inside.
Chapter Twenty-seven
This wasn’t my first trip to the Chasms, though I hadn’t been here in years. It wasn’t the type of place to visit on a whim. The sign was right. It was treacherous.
Imagine a chunk of headland shaped like a wedge of Swiss cheese. Imagine that one side of the wedge ends in a sheer cliff almost two hundred feet high. Imagine the holes in the cheese are actually concealed fissures that extend way down into the headland. Now imagine that the pathways between these hidden crevices are crooked and uneven, tangled with long grasses and gorse. Add in a stiff coastal breeze that’s numbing your hands and face. Allow for a cloying drizzle that might turn to full rain at any moment. And lastly, factor in the idea that you and the friends who’ve accompanied you to this nightmare terrain are planning to go rock climbing.
Crazy, right?
I thought so. But it was about to get a lot worse.
‘Most people who climb here trek down a gulley to come around the side of the cliff and climb up from there.’
Callum was pointing a short distance away from where we were standing. He’d led us between the chasms right to the very edge of the cliff. There was a shelf of ruptured, uneven slate beneath us. The slate was wet and sloped down at an acute angle. There was no fence and no safety railing. I caught a glimpse of what lay beneath. There was nothing except sea birds, at least for the first hundred or so feet. The drop was immediate, terminating in a steep grassy slope loaded with boulders and scree that descended towards a sliver of beach and crashing surf. Just off shore, frenzied tides smashed against the teetering, isolated stack of the Sugarloaf Rock. The flaking outcrop was alive with a mass of screeching birds.
‘OK.’
‘But we’re not going to do that.’
Callum stepped over to Rachel and turned her to face the sea. He hoisted the rucksack off her back and tossed it on to the ground alongside his own.
‘Why not?’ I asked.
He twirled his hand in the air, motioning for me to swivel.
‘Couple of reasons.’ He heaved my rucksack upwards and I felt my shoulders go light. ‘First of all, the cliff is exposed to the wind down there, and the rock’ll be so wet that it’ll be tricky to climb. Especially for beginners.’
He opened my rucksack and tossed me a white plastic helmet with a lamp fitted to the front and a battery pack on the rear.
‘And second of all?’
‘Second of all, I think walking down is kind of dull.’
‘Then what exactly are you suggesting?’ The wind was tugging rogue strands of Rachel’s hair from her head warmer, whipping them round her temples.
Callum removed another helmet for Rachel. A blue one this time, also with a lamp and a battery pack. I had a bad feeling about the lamps.
‘I thought we’d abseil down.’
‘Down where?’
Callum inclined his head towards a slash in the rock just behind where I was standing. It was narrow. It was black. It looked bottomless.
‘You have got to be kidding.’
‘Put this on.’ He handed me a harness. ‘You can go first, if you like.’
I didn’t like. Not one bit. The damp and the wind and the height were beginning to get to me. Five swift paces and I’d fall. There’d be no stopping me and no coming back from it. And the weird part was, as I pictured myself striding towards the drop, I could almost imagine it really happening. There was a twitchy energy in my legs. A renegade urge in my mind.
I dropped to my knees, flesh striking stone, my back to the drop and the taunting birds. I looked towards the former cafe, hunkered down at the base of the soggy field, beyond the crooked, overlapping clefts in the rock. I fitted the helmet on my head and straightened out the harness. I fed one leg through, then the other. I hauled the harness up and tightened it off.
Callum glanced over his shoulder as he dragged ropes and a collection of metal carabiners from his rucksack.
‘Is that comfortable?’
I nodded. Swallowed hard.
‘Feels secure?’
I nodded again.
‘That’s terrific. Just one small word of advice.’
‘OK.’
‘You might want to put it on the right way round.’
You find the minibus on a patch of stony ground just in front of an old farm shed. There’s nobody inside. No sign of anybody close. You pocket your phone and hurry across the mud and aggregate, dropping to your knees and reaching under the chassis to retrieve the GPS transmitter you attached in front of the rear axle.
You slip the transmitter into one of the zipped pockets on your cargo trousers, then rest your gloved fist against the exterior of the van – just below the colourful sign that reads MANX OUTDOOR EXPERIENCES: GO WILD! – and you consider the rear left tyre for a long moment, asking yourself if you should take the hunting knife from your backpack and slice through the rubber. You like the knife. It sits very snugly in your hand, the blade is viciously serrated, and you’re intrigued to see what it would do to the tyre. But on balance you decide it’s an unnecessary indulgence. If you need to keep them here for any reason, it would be much less destructive and far more sensible to release all the air from the tyre valve. Not that you need to do that yet, anyway. Not with the way things are shaping up.
You back off, pulling the thick Gore-tex glove from your right hand, and you walk around the front of the minibus and place your palm against the engine cover. It’s still warm, which doesn’t surprise you, but you’re gratified by how professional the move makes you feel.
There’s a wooden stile just in front of you and a sloping path beyond that. You know exactly where the path leads. You’ve been here before. You climb up on the stile with the wind in your face and the rain splattering your cagoule and as you look down towards the old cafe you feel your heartbeat spike and you can’t help but smile.
Chapter Twenty-eight
Twenty minutes later, Rachel and I were sitting next to one another on the hard slate, our backs to the sea, knees hugged to our chests. My coat was too thin and it had ridden up when I’d put on my harness, exposing the skin at the base of my spine to the drenching gusts. I leaned into Rachel and rested my cheek on her shoulder, snorting at the filthy commentary she was providing as we watched Callum secure his own equipment.
Once he was kitted up with a selection of colourful metal gadgets hanging from various loops attached to his harness, we watched him feed a long red rope through his hands, checking for any weaknesses or tears. He did the same thing with a green rope. Then he looped a third, much shorter, white rope around the base of the large boulder where he’d dumped our rucksacks.
‘This is our anchor point.’ He kicked at the boulder. It was a huge, dark thing, half sunken into the ground and surrounded by ferns and long grass. He took both ends of the rope and pulled them taut against the boulder, tying them in a figure eight. ‘And this is our anchor rope.’
‘You don’t need to teach us.’ Rachel’s lips were blue, her body trembling. ‘We won’t be doing this again.’
‘You’ll be addicted before you know it.’
‘Trust us,’ I told him. ‘That’s not going to happen.’
Callum smiled to himself, meanwhile attaching the red and green ropes to the figure-eight knot before tossing them into the chasm. He turned to face us, one foot planted in front of the other, his jacket and trousers fluttering in the breeze.
‘So who wants to go first?’
‘How about you do it? Then you can climb back up and tell us what we’re missing.’
‘Oh, come on. You’ll love it. It’s a rush.’
Rachel nudged me with her hip. ‘You go.’
‘Why me?’
She batted her eyelids. ‘Because you’re the brave one.’
‘Since when?’
‘Since always.’ She pouted and gave me her best doe-eyed look. We both knew exactly why she wanted me to leave her alone with Callum. ‘Please? For me?’
I sighed and pushed myself to my feet, shaking my arms to flush some of the nervous energy from my system. Callum had given us fingerless gloves to put on and when I spread my hands, it felt like the neoprene was compressing my knuckles.
‘All OK?’
‘Not even close.’
He attached an abseil device on the red rope to a carabiner on the front of my harness and explained how the gear worked.
‘This is called a prusik,’ he added, coiling a thin piece of rope around the red rope and securing the other end to a leg loop on my harness. ‘If you let go of your brake rope for any reason, it stops your descent. Downside is it can make your progress a bit slower. You happy with that?’
‘Safety first.’
‘Great.’ He slapped me on the arm. ‘And don’t worry about falling. These ropes could hold the weight of an elephant.’
‘Charming.’
‘Good to go.’ He rapped a knuckle on the top of my helmet, then guided me backwards to the vertical opening in the cliff. ‘OK. Lean back a little.’
I felt the red rope pull taut, tugging on my harness, bunching my jeans around my backside.
‘See? Nice and secure. Now try the brake rope. Get used to how it feels when it slips through the abseil device.’
I let the rope skim through in tiny increments, then locked it off and jerked my chin towards a spot just behind him.
‘What’s with the drawings?’
There were a bunch of faded chalk doodles on the face of the anchor boulder. I could see a yellow flower, a blue stick man, a white pentagram, and a crude drawing of a figure riding a horse that looked like the sort of cave painting an archaeologist might uncover.
‘Climbers get bored. They’ll do anything to kill time while they wait for a nervous beginner.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Afraid so.’
‘What if I told you I’d been climbing before? When I was in police training.’
‘Then I’d tell you to stop stalling and get on with it. Shuffle your heels out over the ledge.’
I took a series of tiny steps back towards the opening to the chasm. A smell like wet clay wafted up. Moisture trickled from the grasses, ferns and moss that were clinging to the top. The blackened rock had an oily sheen. Some thirty feet down, a bulge extended inwards from one side of the crevice.
I snatched my head around. The wind was scouring my face. The sleeves of my coat flapped wildly.
‘Looking good, babe,’ Rachel called.
‘Ease your weight back,’ Callum instructed. ‘Keep your feet planted shoulder-width apart and pivot from your ankles.’
I gripped the brake rope and eased my weight back over the abyss. The world tilted before me. Pretty soon, I’d gone beyond my natural balancing point. Without the rope, I’d plummet.
‘Quick question. Once I get down into this thing, I am going to be able to climb back out, right?’
‘Absolutely. Rachel will follow you and I’ll come after her. Then I’ll show you both how to do a rope ascent. Maybe teach you some bridging moves.’
‘Don’t forget me, will you?’
‘We never could,’ Rachel yelled. ‘Love you too much.’
