The Reckoning

FIFTY-SEVEN

Whale Island

ONE

It was like two worlds. Overhead, the sun beat down from a clear blue sky. A hundred yards ahead, the dunes had already disappeared.

Fin stopped and waited, feeling his bare arms turn to gooseflesh. Even at the height of summer the sea mist brought with it a chill. A deadening of sound and vision. A sense of reality suspended.

He could feel ribs of sand pressing into the arches of his feet. The warm water lapping round his ankles. The air was still, but the mist needed no wind for movement. Dragon’s breath, boiling up out of the sea. That was how Fin had always thought of it. The sigh of ancient, leathery lungs in some vast dark cavern, fifty fathoms below.

Now the mist brushed up against him, rolled around him, as if deciding whether to smother him or sweep him away.

There was a strident call, somewhere between a long honk and a grunt. The ferry, making her way out to the islands, the sound of the siren distorted by the fog.

The islands. We were one of them till they built the bridge, he thought. He had liked to think of himself as an islander when he was a kid. A Whale Islander. Different. That’s how he’d felt as he’d watched the occasional visitors step down on to the jetty. Proud and independent, piratical even. But now all he could think of was starting university and getting away on to the mainland. And just ahead of him, invisible in the mist, the bridge hung like a thread of hope across the narrows. He could hear a muted rumble as a vehicle crossed it.

The morning’s inactivity on the beach had left him feeling sluggish. He wished he had brought a fleece. Still, the twenty-minute walk back to the village would warm him up. He stepped from the water on to firm wet sand and set off homewards. Not even the thickest sea mist – and this one seemed to be thickening by the minute – could disorientate him on this stretch of shore. He had walked it hundreds – no, more like thousands – of times in his eighteen years. He knew every sweep and promontory, every dune, almost every rock pool, between here and home.

Any minute now he would come to the first pier of the bridge, rising up through the fog like a great steel-and-concrete giant’s leg. He could hear another vehicle approaching now. Closer. Slowing and stopping. Directly ahead of him. The sound of a door opening. Someone getting out. A voice.

Fin walked forward. The pier materialised beside him, towering into the murk. He looked up but could see nothing.

He paused as a second door opened. There were footsteps, no more than thirty feet above his head, on the far side of the bridge. The vehicle had been heading towards the mainland. Now there was a scuffling sound, raised voices, then a cry. Scarcely human, more like the shriek of a seabird. Followed by a fleeting glimpse of movement in the mist. And then a dull, wet thud.

Fin stood where he was, rooted to the sand. There was a long moment of silence. Then a short burst of frenzied splashing. Then silence again.

He began to run.

He was almost on her before he saw her. The splashing started again as one leg drummed the shallows where she lay half in, half out of the water. Fin could see the sleek black curve of rock on which she had landed, a porpoise arcing out of the sand. A couple of feet in either direction and she would have missed it, for what difference that might have made. The way she lay, sprawled across the rock on her back, she looked like something discarded. But her eyes were open and they widened as she focused on Fin. She was in her early twenties, he guessed. She had high cheekbones, dark hair falling across a chalk-pale face. She was slim in jeans and sweatshirt, now soaked. But for the colour of her skin she could have been Maia, he thought, his heart thundering in his chest as he knelt down beside her in the water.

The fog swirled around them now, so thick he could see no more than a couple of yards beyond her.

She opened her mouth but no sound came out.

He leaned forward, put his head close to her face.

Her whisper was almost inaudible. ‘Help . . . me . . .’

‘I’ll help you,’ he said.

She groaned and her eyes clouded in pain.

‘I’m . . . frigh . . . tened . . .’

She looked up at him.

He didn’t have his phone on him. What the hell should he do? Leave her to get help? Stay with her and hope someone came along? Shout out at the top of his lungs?

‘Please . . . hold . . . m—’

Her body shuddered and little flecks of foam appeared at her lips.

‘Your hand?’

Her eyes flickered.

Fin reached down and took it. Despite the chill damp air, her hand was warm and the skin felt very smooth. The fingernails were bitten low.

‘It’s OK,’ he said, feeling hopeless. ‘You’ll be all right. There’ll be help along soon.’

She had begun to pant. More foam bubbled at her mouth, pinkish now.

He longed to run away. But he also wanted to comfort her, take her in his arms if need be. He was terrified of hurting her. Her head lolled back over the rock, though she had moved it to look at him, so her neck couldn’t be broken.

‘I’m going to get you more comfortable,’ he said.

He let go of her hand and it fell at her side. He shuffled round in the water to kneel behind her on the edge of the rock. Then lifted her head and took it on his lap. He laid one palm against the side of her face and felt the tiniest pressure from her cheek. With the other hand he stroked her head. Through the seawater tang came the scent of shampoo.

‘Is that all right?’ he asked.

She gave a little grunt.

‘You’re OK,’ he said again. ‘I’m here. With you. There’ll be help soon.’

She was panting again, faster now and shallower.

‘It’s all right.’ He could feel his voice rising in his throat.

Her eyes were starting to lose focus. She was slipping away from him.

‘Stay with me,’ he whispered. ‘Please. Please. Don’t go.’

He was rubbing her cheek now with one hand and stroking her hair with the other.

‘It’s OK, it’s OK . . .’ He was repeating it like a mantra, over and over again. ‘Stay with me, stay with me . . .’

And then suddenly she was gone.

For a moment the mist eddied above his head and thinned. A wafer of sunlight fell on her face, and Fin caught a swift movement aloft, the flash of a gull’s wing against the blue.

Then the mist closed around them once more. The shocked young man kneeling in the water with the stranger’s head cradled in his lap.

TWO

Separated from the mainland by a narrow channel, Whale Island was five miles long and a little over a mile and a half wide. In former days it had been known for the whaling station from which it took its name, two small fishing communities, a herd of wild goats and a shrine to St Brigid, who was reputed miraculously to have saved the crew of a stricken ship run aground in the island’s Goat Bay during a storm. Now, since the building of the bridge, some visitors still made a kind of pilgrimage to the shrine, but most simply came for the sheltered beaches and the picturesque fishing village of Easthaven.

Today the mist had spared Easthaven, a sunlit mosaic of glinting water and upturned boats, white cottages, stacks of orange lobster pots and lengths of blue synthetic rope.

In the back seat of the police car, Fin registered none of it.

The car was drawing to a halt at the harbour. One of the policemen was saying something to him.

‘Sorry . . . ?’

‘I said, you all right, son?’

He nodded.

‘Don’t want us to come in with you?’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Did all you could, you know.’

‘I guess so.’

‘Get your mum to put the kettle on. Make you a cuppa. We’ll be back later to take a statement.’

Fin climbed out of the car and stood in the sunshine, every moment of the last hour vivid in his mind. The short minutes leading up to the girl’s death. Then, almost immediately afterwards, the footsteps approaching. The appearance out of the mist of a short, balding, bespectacled man in a suit splashing through the shallow water in his shiny shoes. The moment of surprise as he took in the sight of Fin and the girl. Then shaking his head, saying in clipped tones, ‘I tried to stop her.’ And shocked and dazed though Fin was, his feeling that something was not right . . .

He stepped out of the sunlight and into the alley that ran between the cottages. He was glad the police hadn’t insisted on seeing him to his door. If his father was in, he’d assume the worst before Fin had even opened his mouth. He always did. That was Danny Carpenter’s way. Or had been since the accident which had crippled him, half Fin’s lifetime ago. And right now a bawling match with his father was the last thing he needed. Thank God it was his mother’s Saturday off.

He paused at the front door, frozen at the thought of the normality that lay the other side. He had just held someone’s head on his lap as they died. And through there his mother would be tidying or emptying the washing machine or making a cup of coffee . . .

He took a deep breath, then opened the door. And realised at once that today nothing was normal.

Sounds came from the sitting room. Kath Carpenter and someone else, another woman. Their voices low, intense. Although he couldn’t hear what they were saying, the sense of drama was palpable, even through the closed door.

Fin stood in the crowded kitchen wondering what to do.

He didn’t want to intrude, but he wasn’t sure how much longer he could contain what had happened.

The living-room door opened and his mother came out.

‘Hey, sweetheart! Heard you coming in. Back already?’

Fin tried a smile and failed.

She frowned. Over her shoulder he could see the television through the living-room door. She was not a daytime television-watcher, not even at weekends. But now it was on, though the sound was off. It was showing scenes of devastation in some crowded city street. Rubble. Wrecked cars. Shattered market stalls. Dark stains on the ground.

‘You all right?’

He shrugged. ‘I guess.’

She lowered her voice and smiled. ‘Can it keep, whatever it is? See . . . I’ve got Sally here. Just back from the city.’ She gestured at the television. ‘She got caught up in . . . that. She’s in a bit of a state, poor love. She was passing the West Indian market when it went off. The market was packed. And, trust Sally, she went in to help . . .’ His mother’s voice faltered. ‘She saw some dreadful things.’

Fin tried another smile. ‘Yeah. It’ll keep. I’m going upstairs.’

Kath put her hand on his arm. ‘Have a good natter later, eh?’

‘Sure.’

He climbed the narrow stairs and stopped on the little landing at the top. On the shelf below the skylight was an old brass barometer. The weather had been good for the last week, the needle holding resolutely to the extreme right. Now it was swinging back towards the centre.

Number Thirteen, Easthaven, like most of its neighbours, had six rooms. Three bedrooms upstairs, two small, one slightly larger. Kitchen, living room and bathroom downstairs. Despite the historic character of the village, and the building restrictions that went with it, one or two incomers had found ingenious ways to create more space in the low, cramped cottages. But most of the islanders simply made do with things as they’d been arranged two hundred years ago, when the cottages had first been built. There were only thirty of them, clustered in a vague semicircle around the harbour. There were no street names, just Easthaven. Fin had always liked that. Number Thirteen, Easthaven. It felt as if his cottage was something important to the village, a solid part of what made it into a place. And solid they were, these cottages, with their gable ends to the sea so that the winds and rain and spray battered the windowless end walls, not the vulnerable front doors and windows. Fin liked that too. That someone had thought about it. Worked out how to minimise the ill effects of being so close to the water. Though it meant that there was little space or light between the cottages, as they hunkered down in short rows under the lea of the hill that rose to landward.

Now Fin opened the door to his left and went in. Maia’s room. It was a few months since he’d last been in here. It looked as if she’d just tidied it. Books, music and movies neatly arranged on the shelf, bedcover drawn up and her old threadbare teddy sitting watchfully on the hump of the pillows. Knick-knacks crowding the little dressing table. Bead necklaces hanging round the frame of the mirror. Blue Planet poster behind the bed. But it smelt empty, musty, as if it was too long since the window had been opened. Fin felt the ache of longing start, the lump rise in his throat. Could Maia have died? Frightened, alone like the girl on the beach? It was nearly a year now since they’d last heard anything from her. Eighteen months since that awful Christmas Day when she’d left home – forever, she’d said. Though over the following months there had been texts, the occasional phone call, and one weekend when Kath and Fin had taken the overnight bus to visit her at university. But finally, at the end of last summer, a jubilant postcard: Got a job! Then silence.

Anger, confusion and a deep ache of loss. These were what Fin felt whenever he thought of Maia, his adored older sister. Her twenty-second birthday just last month and nowhere to send her a card. For so long his guardian and protector. The one who cleaved her way through life’s choppy waters, leaving Fin to paddle along comfortably behind. He could understand why she’d left home. Danny had worn her down, their clashes becoming more and more intense as she started at university and all her passion found its focus in her studies, her concern for the environment. Not that Danny, a former fisherman, could argue much with that. But her education, her way with words, made him feel clumsy and inadequate. Fin could see that. And, no matter how often Kath intervened, he took every opportunity to undermine her. To snipe at her student way of life, her friends, her clothes, her taste in music, her airy-fairy politics, as he called them. Until finally, that day, seated round the table for Christmas dinner, Danny had gone too far. And Maia, beyond tears, her face tight with rage, had gone upstairs, packed a suitcase and walked out of the house, leaving a half-finished plate of turkey on the table. The worst thing of all was that it was Fin who had started it. Rising to some snide remark from Danny about the dreadlocks he had started to grow, when he should have known to keep his mouth shut. Especially on Christmas Day. Then Maia had stepped in to say that actually they had been her idea, that he’d look like her idol, Bob Marley. And so the argument had escalated until the two of them were screaming at one another and eventually even Kath had given up trying to get them to see sense and had sat there in her paper hat, head in hands, staring at her best tablecloth.

Still, despite his feelings of guilt, Fin could see that since Danny’s accident, the chemistry between his father and sister had soured beyond repair, and anyway neither of them was able or willing to compromise. Maia had been only six months away from the end of her studies, so perhaps the gesture of leaving had been more symbolic than anything. But why had she then cut them all out of her life? What had happened? Was it the job? A relationship? An opportunity overseas? Did she have any idea how hurtful the unanswered texts had been? The unreturned phone messages . . . ? Now, of course, Fin had given up, assumed she’d got rid of the old phone. But until today, a few minutes ago, he had never allowed himself to think the very worst.

He threw himself down on the bed and buried his face in the pillow, hoping that maybe some scent of her, some reassuring trace remained. He was relieved when the tears came, though he wasn’t sure whether they were for the dead girl, or his sister, or both.

Later he got up again. This was no good. It wouldn’t bring Maia back. He plumped the pillows and smoothed the cover down. He knew his mother paid occasional visits to the room when the house was empty. A couple of times he’d caught a whiff of her perfume around the door. He also knew that his father wanted to reclaim the room so they could tidy away some of the junk that cluttered the small house.

‘She’s not coming back, woman. You know that as well as I do. And even if she did, I wouldn’t have her . . .’

Sometimes Fin wondered why his mother hadn’t left long ago. Got herself a flat in Cliffton, on the mainland, where she’d been brought up. But she had a stubborn streak, Kath Carpenter. Like mother, like daughter. And he knew there was a part of her that still, despite herself, believed Danny’s disability, his self-pity and bitterness, were challenges she would eventually overcome. So for the time being, Maia’s room waited ready for her return.

Well, his mother could visit it as much as she liked, thought Fin, closing the door. But that was the last time he would go in there till Maia came back. He crossed the landing and went into his own room. Lay down on his own bed and breathed deeply. This was his haven. No matter what went on, he could usually put himself back together in here. This was the place where he thought about things, imagined them, created them. Where, sometimes, things happened that made him feel he was marching to the beat of the universe.

He closed his eyes. At once the young woman’s face filled his mind. Her imploring look as she asked him to hold her hand. He opened his eyes again quickly. Focused on the narrow workbench which spanned the whole wall beneath the window.

There was his laptop, speakers perched on the window-sill behind it. And there, taking up most of the rest of the bench space, was the Carpenter Patent Beer Dispenser. His own invention. It had been there for over a year now and he hadn’t yet had the heart to dismantle it. From the centre of the bench rose a metal arm, slightly shorter than his own, with an elbow joint halfway up and a claw for a hand. Pulleys ran like sinews from the shoulder to the claw. In front of it sat a pad on which were set a can and a glass, held in place by an adjustable frame. When the laptop was on, all he had to do, from anywhere in the room, was say, ‘Beer, please!’ and the arm would bend, the claw would lift the ring pull and the frame would release the can as the arm lifted it free, tilted it and poured the contents into the glass. In theory. In practice it had succeeded once out of a dozen attempts, an expensive way of ruining his bedroom carpet. Still, it had been a near-triumph at the time. He’d scrounged some bits and pieces from Mr Newton, the design teacher, made the arm and claw and holding frame in the school metal workshop and got hold of a copy of some voice-activation software from a kid whose father worked for an engineering firm. Once he’d fine-tuned the prototype, his plan had been to try something much more ambitious, the Carpenter Patent Ice Cold and In Your Hand Beer Dispenser, although that would have involved buying a mini-fridge and taking up the carpet to fix a set of rails to the floor between the bench and the bedside, and he wasn’t sure what his mother would have thought about that. Though he knew what his father would think, and not hesitate to say: ‘Contraptions. Don’t see the point of ’em. You should be outside getting your sleeves rolled up, rather than sitting in your room all day. Christ, boy, I was at sea when I was your age, doing man’s work. I was a man at seventeen, but your generation . . . you’re bloody soft.’ Maybe you’re right, Fin would have been tempted to say, but look where being a man got you. Though in fact he would have bitten his tongue yet again and watched as his father limped out of the room, with that twisted, dragging movement of his left leg that sometimes made Fin want to scream.

As a small boy, Fin had always had the idea that one day he would build the best toy in the world. It would be the most fun, exciting, fast, scary, fantastic, lovely thing anyone had ever made. It would be better than the best computer game, the best movie, the best story, the best construction kit, the best wildlife film and the best fairground ride. It would be all the things he looked forward to or longed for, rolled into one. And as time went on, when his parents were arguing, if he got into bed and put his pillow over his head and thought about the best toy in the world, it seemed to blot out all the badness. But his attempts to build it had always ended in dismal failure, because he had no idea what it was. The closest he’d got was a model of an autogyro, a kind of simple two-man helicopter. Making something that actually flew would have been a major breakthrough. But although the rotors spun furiously as it sped along the bench, they lacked the power to lift it off. And little by little it had dawned on him that perhaps this fabulous toy could only ever exist in his imagination.

Then, during his last year at school, an even more intriguing thought had struck him. Maybe the toy was his imagination, pure and simple. The place where he was entirely free to think, do, or be anything he chose. And if that was the case, perhaps the virtual world might be more interesting than the physical, tangible, three-dimensional world of Useful Things, whose design was where he’d so far imagined his future might lie. So he’d abandoned the Carpenter Patent Beer Dispensing devices and begun drawing and sketching. Then he’d downloaded some free software on to his laptop and started experimenting with simple animations of everyday objects. Halfway through the autumn term the head of design and technology had passed him on to the Art department. And now, on the strength of a short animation he’d made over the Christmas holidays, he had an unconditional place on the animation course at Northwestern University and a project to complete for the beginning of term. Storyboards for a thirty-second animation on the theme Life Is a Bowl of Cherries. Although at this moment it seemed like a distant planet . . .

Downstairs he heard his mother and Sally saying goodbye. The front door opening and closing. Then his mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

THREE

The policemen returned late in the afternoon. Kath made them a cup of tea and they sat, all four, round the small table in the kitchen.

They were polite and friendly, Kath thought, and considerate of what Fin had been through. One asked questions, the other scribbled in a notebook. A well-rehearsed routine.

She could tell that Fin was shaken. When she first went into his room she thought he might have been crying. His eyes looked puffy and some of the brightness seemed to have gone out of his face. As she listened to him, sitting on the end of his bed, she found it hard to believe that this was her son, telling her how he’d looked after a dying girl, alone in the fog on the seashore. And when he finished, and shrugged, and said, ‘Well, that’s it, there’s nothing more to say,’ she couldn’t help feeling that something else had happened out there in the mist. That he had crossed a line. And her heart gave a tug as she realised that this was the beginning of losing him.

But now, as he talked with the policemen, answering their questions in a level voice, sure of what he had seen and heard, repeating his answers when they asked him to, Kath felt nothing but pride. He seemed to have filled out over the summer. The shoulders were broader, the planes and angles of the face more pronounced, the skin a rich glowing brown. And, once she’d got used to them, the dreadlocks, deep chestnut and shot with streaks of honey from the salt and sun, did lend a certain rakishness to his look, she had to admit. There was no doubt he was handsome. How would Maia look now . . . ? Kath dug her nails into her palms and forced herself to concentrate on what was happening here in the kitchen.

‘And you’re certain you heard two voices?’

‘Certain.’

‘Could you tell who they were?’

‘No. But I guess it was the man in the suit and the girl.’

‘Talking to one another?’

‘Not really. At first just one saying something. I think it was the girl. Then nothing for a while.’

‘And then?’

‘Then the other person getting out of the car. Then a bit of an argument, a scuffle maybe. But very short.’

‘What next?’

‘The cry.’

‘Straightaway?’

‘Yes.’

The writer nodded and closed his notebook as his colleague downed the last of his tea, then said, ‘Thank you, young man. You’ve been very helpful. And thanks for the tea, love.’

Kath smiled. ‘So, what now?’

‘Well, it looks like suicide. In which case there’ll be an inquest. We might need to call your son as a witness. We’ll let you know.’

‘Do we . . . Do you know her name?’ Fin asked.

‘Yes. It’s Charlotte Svensson. She worked on Seal Island, at the Institute, as a researcher. The gentleman you met, who was driving her, was Mr Hunter. He’s the head of security there. We’ve also spoken with the director, Dr Whitelands. It seems she’d been suffering from depression for some time. They were sending her off