What We Did In the Storm, page 26
The shock of the hammer blow made Hannah scream and step back. If only she’d have fallen over the cliff edge then. But she managed to lunge for Beatrice and hit her a couple of times, flailing, calling her all the names under the sun, terrible language, and she grabbed Beatrice’s hair and managed to kick her. Beatrice felt no pain at the time but she was very annoyed.
She felt better when she stabbed her. The barmaid didn’t see the screwdriver coming. She stopped hitting back after that. Three more swift jabs to the side of her ribs.
It was easy really. If the woman had been wearing an oilskin it might have been more difficult, but she only had a cheap windbreaker jacket, poor-quality material, which says it all really.
Beatrice considered one more blow to her repulsive gut, but call her sentimental, she couldn’t, because if there was a baby it would have been partly Kit’s.
The barmaid didn’t scream again. Or if she did it was snatched away by the wind.
The push was easy because she didn’t seem entirely aware of what was happening by then. She was staggering. One small push for Beatrice, one giant push for mankind. Ha! How many other men had she saved by disposing of the awful woman?
She was a bloody wrecker, luring men to their deaths on the rocks. She was a bloody siren, and Beatrice could not, would not, let her destroy her boy!
Hannah didn’t fall, rather crumpled in stages – to her knees, her hip, her hand, her elbow. Her head went down last.
The heavens opened. The wind was insane. It spat nails of rain into her face.
But Beatrice had her Pilates to thank for her excellent core control. She was far stronger than she looked. She was far better at standing up on a surfboard than Kit or Henry ever were.
She braced and pushed with her foot, and off the woman went, sprawling over the lip of the cliff. And it might have been all done and dusted then. But it wasn’t. No such luck.
She had hoped to fling her into the sea, but when she looked, the body had somehow become lodged on a ridge below. Beatrice had to scramble down after her. So irritating!
She managed to reach her, careful not to lose her balance, and by pushing and shoving her along with her foot, clinging to the grasses in the crevices of the rocks at the side to keep her balance, she managed to roll the body off the ledge, rolling her around and down, like the Gloucester cheese at the Cooper’s Hill Cheese Roll. Kit did it one year; sprained his wrist the silly boy. Over and over she went. Beatrice laughed. Nerves. Hannah caught her once more, another kick as her leg shot out, but that might not have been voluntary.
And by then they were almost at the blowhole.
Beatrice knelt over her. She was curled into herself like a giant foetus, the side of her face ruined, bits missing, splattered with blood and mud. She seemed to focus on the face above her for a second and she cried out. It was such a horrible animal noise that Beatrice smashed the hammer into her teeth, a reflex action to shut her up. Then she hauled her up under her armpits, heavy as a sack of potatoes – not that Beatrice had ever lifted a sack of potatoes – dragged her across the wet rocks the last few inches, and flung her into the mouth of the blowhole.
Of course, just her luck, right at that moment, the sea spumed up so hard she feared the body would be hoisted aloft, the waterspout like that of a giant whale. But she’d gone in. Beatrice peered over the edge just to make sure, but there was no sign of her.
She sat there a good while to get her breath back. The waterspout caught her a couple of times before she galvanised herself to stand. She threw the screwdriver and the hammer and Kit’s phone into the blowhole after her. Then she started to make her way back down.
Then she saw him – the man in the balaclava! God! Her heart lurched and she started running. She couldn’t tell if he’d seen her and she had no way of knowing if he’d seen what had happened.
The rain hurtled against her as she ran, and she slipped a few times, but ploughed on and … she thought GOOD – it will wash all traces of that vile woman off her: her hands, her hair, her cheeks, her coat. A deluge! Almost biblical.
She was barely aware of how she managed to stagger all the way back to Falcon.
She was soaking, freezing by the time she got indoors. She leant against the wall, trembling spasmodically, and attempted to arrange her face in case Charlotte was home, but she wasn’t, thank God.
She had a very large double vodka to steady her nerves. She assumes she had quite a few more.
In the morning Kit came.
She had no real idea how bad she looked.
He told her about the attack. Charlotte battered and whisked away to hospital. The man in the balaclava. Awful!
Useful.
The police interviewed Beatrice. Why wouldn’t they believe the same man had attacked her too? Shock is convenient – details slip away. What other explanation could there be?
When her coat had dried, before Kit came in the morning, she has a vague recollection of ramming the pink waterproof into the very bottom of her supply box. And she forgot about it. She only thought of it once she’d arrived on the mainland. She should have thrown it into the sea. Too late then. No one would seek it out, surely. Her DNA would still be on it. But …
No one looks in those supply boxes. Always busy and a little chaotic, the changeover days, even more so in May. No one checks the personal belongings of the guests. There’s only an issue if something goes missing. Like a barmaid.
She does recall her heart battering as she got on the helicopter to leave the island. She feared someone might shout, ‘STOP! MURDERER!’ But, of course, the barmaid hadn’t been missing very long then.
Charlotte had left earlier than Beatrice, keen to be away. She went to recuperate with her mother in Bath, so Beatrice was on the helicopter by herself. She had waited until the actual day of her return ticket, so no one could suspect she’d rushed away.
Kit stayed behind to search. Foolish boy.
There followed one, two weeks back in London when Beatrice tried to blot it all out. Poor Primrose was left to her own devices.
Then she stopped. She gave herself a good talking-to. That woman wasn’t worth risking her health for.
She now tells herself she had only done what any good mother would do – protect her child. Kit might hate her now, but he will come to understand it was done out of love …
And how dare some barmaid tell her to keep your fucking nose out of my business. He’s her son! It is her business!
She would do anything for her boy. A parent’s job is to protect their child. She would do it again.
82
Christie
It is a lovely peaceful night; Finn, a big boy now, into everything, a dead weight, fast asleep next to her on the sofa as she watches TV with the volume low, her feet up on the little beanbag Tommy likes to sit on. She helps herself to another Malteser and nuzzles into him. It’s rare that she has a chance to put her feet up. The twins and Tommy are with their dad. Finn’s full of a cold so she kept him home.
When Sam was living here she could never settle at night, waiting for him to come home, always on edge, listening out for him whether she was sitting down here on the sofa or up in bed. Now she knows he’s not coming back, she can relax. She falls asleep easily.
Yeah, some nights she has to get up and come down for a few drinks until she feels able to go to sleep again. But not often.
Those are the nights she’s back at the North End. Those nights she jerks awake.
If she’d got to the bloody barmaid that afternoon she would have gone for her, she knows that. But, in the end, she didn’t have to. She stood in the gale and the driving rain, pressed herself into the lee of the rocks, her hip pushed hard against the unforgiving granite crag, and she watched Beatrice Wallace do the job for her.
Christie might have stopped her or tried to. Didn’t.
If the police had come after her, if they’d found her pink coat, she would have told them what she saw. But they didn’t push it, so she didn’t need to.
Because if she told the police she’d seen Beatrice Wallace attack the barmaid, Beatrice could just as easily lie and say Christie had done it. And who would they believe – someone like her, or someone like Beatrice?
Best leave it be.
She has enough on her plate with the boys as it is.
83
Thor
He is thrumming with excitement, almost squirming in his seat. His first time on the helicopter. His first time meeting one of his online playmates in real life.
He’s arranged to meet her at the Travelodge, book in, then go to a café overlooking the sand at Towans beach. She said she wanted to see the sea. Rhianna she calls herself, RhiRhiSweetSixteen.
That’s not her real name.
It’s not her real age either. She told him she was fifteen. Almost. Didn’t matter much either way to him.
Fourteen-year-old Rhi-Rhi. What fun he’ll have with her.
It is an effort not to bounce up and down in the seat of the taxi, but the driver is taciturn and doesn’t seem to notice his eagerness. Hayle in November, hardly a riveting proposition.
He will put on his Marilyn Manson T-shirt and his eyeliner as soon as he gets there. The bitch had better turn up, otherwise all the screenshots he has of her will be off the Cloud and up online. He thinks of those images again. He can hardly wait. His online pal BDE666 has given him plenty of ideas and Van Damme is always grateful for the images.
Standing at reception someone is waiting for Thor. The one who sent the last few messages, RhiRhiSweetSixteen. Not her name. Not her age. A much older woman, with short blonde hair. She spritzes it up into a quiff on a night out, but today it’s combed flat for work. There is tension in her jaw, tiredness around eyes that have seen too many things she’d rather not see. All part of the job; a job that has left her loving her two rescue Staffies more than most people.
Rhi-Rhi – otherwise known as DCI Maggie (Margaret) Banks, part of a special team investigating internet grooming as part of the National Crime Agency’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection unit. Not a mother herself – doesn’t need to be to feel absolutely fucking furious at what goes on. And while in no way excited like Thor, she is antsy. She picks a rough bit of nail, gnaws at it.
A gift, the girl, the real Rhi-Rhi, breaking down and telling her parents and the parents immediately getting in touch. Rarely happens. Shame, the great inhibitor.
Maggie very much wants to meet Thor, aka twenty-five-year-old Alec O’Donnell. Some pathetic, socially inept incel. Bullying bastard. She can hardly wait.
Then they will trawl through his computer and find who else he’s been chatting to. They’ve already got a location for another person of interest who calls himself Van Damme – from the island of Bryher. He’s a consumer rather than producing the disgusting content. Still scum.
84
Kit
It is a blustery day. A bouncy castle boat ride over to St Mary’s to catch the flight, which means they won’t fly over Tresco on the way back to Penzance. When the helicopter takes off, Kit doesn’t look back. He has the feeling that he’ll not return to the island.
The wind makes the helicopter lurch as it lands at Penzance, making him feel queasy.
He nods to a couple who’d been staying at the Old Ship as they disembark, but he can’t face the small talk.
He fusses over Primrose when she’s released from her cage. She gazes up at him with trusting eyes the colour of chocolate drops. She seems to be in a trance. The dog remains quiet in the taxi to the station. She sits on his lap and doesn’t seem entirely present. The new vet gave her some calming tablets before the flight and she didn’t make a sound on the way over. Kit wouldn’t mind some of those tablets himself.
He needs a coffee before he can brace himself to get on the train back to London. He needs a moment.
He walks slowly at the dog’s pace, hauling his one wheelie case behind him. He’ll have the rest of his things sent over later. They make their way inland, away from the harbour where a wind with the taste of winter is cutting across the water with malice. Primmy squats for a wee, then sits in the puddle, perplexed. He has to tie her up outside Boots and buy some baby wipes to clean her up. When he comes back out she is staring up at the sky, watching the gulls making lazy loops above despite the force of the wind.
He sits in a café which welcomes dogs. Messages a few friends. Charlotte’s Insta is now labelled Charlotte’s Journey and she’s gained several thousand more followers, rebranding herself as a Mental Health Advocate/Survivor. Good for her.
Earlier this morning, Sergeant Jack Moore came over from St Mary’s with a detective from the mainland to take his mother into custody. She went quietly, as they say.
The last thing she said to him was, ‘It was an accident, darling,’ her face a pantomime of grief.
She never told him what really happened. He guesses she never will.
He has no idea what will happen to her next, or where he’ll go, what he’ll do. At some point he’ll need to try and unravel his emotions, but he is unable to do that right now – it is too raw. He has the responsibility of the dog, that’s as far as he can think. He’ll try and do what Hannah did, live in the moment, wring every last drop out of life while he can.
By the time they head to the train, Primrose is trotting once more, her head held high.
The Blowhole
She told them where. She didn’t tell them why.
So well spoken. You could hardly believe what she’d done.
She admitted her injuries weren’t from the man in the balaclava but from the barmaid. Swore it was self-defence, an accident.
She said they might find her in the blowhole – although it would be more accurate, what was left after so many months being battered by seawater.
A few tatters of material, bones, hair. Fragments. Hardly a person.
The team gather the equipment ready to descend at low tide. It is a beautiful day.
85
Hannah
Above, the birds cry their if onlys.
Below – she is nothing but pain.
The rain splinters her thoughts into fragments.
Memories like lightning.
He lay in her arms and sobbed. She stroked his hair, kissed his temple, soothed him. They spent the night together.
Christie didn’t believe they’d never fucked. No one believed that. The gossips made up a story of an affair.
Sam loved her in a way. Trusted her. Hated her, ashamed that he’d allowed her to see the part he kept so well hidden – the tenderness he attempted to anaesthetise with alcohol when his wife lost her temper and pummelled him.
A kick. She curls away from the pain. A fleeting image of a baby.
The gossips made up a story of a pregnancy.
A flash of Kit sobbing against her breast. She kisses his eyelids and soothes him. He is grieving for his father.
Above her, a face, a gash of rage.
Below her, boiling water.
She fights. She fights until the breath is kicked out of her.
Then she falls.
Her light explodes into rocks and spume and the roar of the waves and the shrieks of dead gulls and she is all sound and sensation.
She flickers a moment … then goes under.
And she flies apart into a billion atoms. And she is the sea.
If you loved What We Did in the Storm, why not try these other dark and gripping thrillers from Tina Baker:
Call Me Mummy
‘Dark, heartbreaking and totally absorbing’ LORRAINE KELLY
Nasty Little Cuts
‘Gripped my throat and didn't let go until the final, searing sentence’ CAROLINE ENGLAND
Make Me Clean
‘A dark delight. Funny, violent, real and with characters you love to love – and hate’ JANICE HALLETT
Acknowledgements
I love the Isles of Scilly and hope to go back one day if the people there forgive me for this book and don’t Wicker Man me or Midsommar my Geoff. The real Tresco isn’t anything like the one depicted here, nor are any characters based on any of my real friends I met there: Sue, Hobbsie, Robin, Anna, Joan, Jo, Jeremy, and everyone else. The Tresco in these pages is more like the Upside Down in Stranger Things, or perhaps a David Lynch version of Doc Martin.
There is no barmaid-encrusted blowhole, the Old Ship in these pages is not Tresco’s New Inn, there is no Book of Sea Stories and Songs. I have taken liberties. I also took their barman.
Me and my Geoff have been married twenty years. Of all the bars in all the world, I walked into his while holidaying on Tresco. Ours was a long-distance relationship for a couple of years, me hurtling from London to Penzance on the sleeper train before getting the helicopter or the Scillonian across to the islands.
We had our wedding blessing on Tresco a couple of days after we’d run the Tresco marathon, with celebrities including Bill Bryson, Blake Morrison, Charlie Dimmock and Jenny Agutter, some doing a lap each, others the whole shebang. It is seven and a half times around the island to do 26.2 miles. Geoff had a pint of Betty Stoggs on his last lap. I only realised at twenty miles that the final half-lap would include the worst bloody hill. I recall falling across the finish line sobbing, ‘I love you, Jenny Agutter.’ It was one of the highlights of my life.
Such was the state of our legs due to this event, after we knelt to pray at our wedding blessing, we had to be hoisted to our feet by the husband-and-wife couple officiating. They styled themselves the BOGOF vicars, Buy One Get One Free. The BBC’s An Island Parish chronicled the unusual way clergy operate on the islands.
