On the Edge: Sunday Times Best Crime Novel of the Month - 'A Promising Debut'

Prologue

Along the road from my family home in Cornwall, the lighthouse at St Matthew’s Point dominates the landscape. As a child I used to lie in bed and watch its great beam sweep the night in unending, unhurried circles and feel safe. During the day, it seems asleep. In winter, it is a solitary brooding tower; even in summer, its peace appears untouched by the tourists who cluster round its windswept base or pay a pound to climb the 163 steps to the viewing platform and stare out over the sea. Most of the time, I remember it as the visitors see it, stately and still, gleaming white against blue skies and the grey-green of the wind-whipped grass.

Yet sometimes, even now, dreams of the lighthouse as it was on that Friday night, my first night back in Cornwall for months, disturb my sleep. The dream is always the same. A storm of wind and rain batters the coast. The tapering white form of the lighthouse appears in the distance, stark and motionless against the turbulent backdrop of dark clouds and darker seas tearing shreds out of each other. Its shaft of light shoots out into the night and circles, steady and constant, despite the blasts of the gale.

In my dream the lighthouse comes closer and closer as though a wave of rushing wind carries me towards it. A blotch appears, dark against the white walls. At first it’s a shadow that dances from side to side as the beam passes overhead; then it becomes a figure. A person, dangling off the viewing platform that encircles the top of the lighthouse beneath the lantern. Clad in dark clothes that gleam with wetness, a thin rope looped in a figure of eight under its arms and over one of the stone blocks that give the lighthouse the look of a medieval castle. The wind dashes the figure against the wall and shakes the stream of water that falls like a cord from its bare feet.

Closer still and a face with tight-shut eyes appears. A young woman. The skin of her eyelids and around her mouth twitches and trembles. She is lost in some fantasy sparked to life by the drugs crackling through her veins while all the time the rope thins and frays. And even in my dream, I know I must wake her before it’s too late, before the rope breaks and she falls to the ground.

Except I can’t. Because this is a dream and the young woman is Jenifry Shaw. She’s me. The figure hanging from the lighthouse is me.

One

Another night in rehab. A Thursday night and my eight week anniversary. It was much like all the other nights – sleepless and long. I’d done fifty-six days of rehab. Fifty-six days of talking, talking, talking. Of sitting in meetings: group therapy, yoga classes, ‘Preparing to Change’ sessions, counselling. Meetings meant people, and I’d never liked being around too many of them. At least not without drugs making everything blur. Eight weeks of breathing stale air passed through the lungs of too many people. It was long enough. Surely it was. I wanted to get out.

I was free to leave at any moment. All voluntary patients were. And I’d gone into this willingly, scared witless by what I’d become and trying to recompense by shelling out vast sums of money for help.

I paced around my room, my hands tying knots in a length of string I’d found in the bottom of one of the drawers: bowline, double figure 8, clove hitch and so on, over and over again. I couldn’t sleep. The room was too small. Too hot. It smelt of disinfectant overlaying vomit and the window lock prevented it from opening more than a couple of inches. Someone cried out. Not for the first time. The night was often punctuated by people howling for the things they desired. Hidden longings set free by the dark. I made a snap decision. It was time to go. I packed my bag and went downstairs, told the duty staff I was leaving. Told them I was fine. Told them I’d recovered.

They wanted a chance to discuss it with me first and wore me down with smooth torrents of words asking me to wait for the morning until I gave in and trailed back to my room, painted yellow to look cheerful and with random framed prints of birds pinned to the walls. It still felt like a cell.

Which was what I deserved, after all.

I rested my head on the windowsill and stared up at the night sky, feeling the narrow shaft of air cool my skin. And I thought. I thought about the drugs. I thought I was over them. I was sure I was over them. Somewhere in among the endless talk about addictive behaviour and triggers, I’d grasped enough to understand they were only a substitute for something I couldn’t have.

And that was climbing.

Free climbing. The clue’s in the name. Free climbers rope up to save ourselves if we fall. We don’t use the rope to climb. We use nothing but our bodies to get up the face. Nothing but us and the rock. Sometimes working in harmony. Sometimes fighting each other.

That was all over, though. I’d never climb again. I’d promised my brother Kit and I kept the promise. But I hadn’t promised to stop thinking about it.

I shut my eyes and remembered the smell of the rock in the Verdon Gorge. It changed during the day. In the morning it was sour and damp but by midday the sun had warmed it to a harsh grittiness overlaid with sharp spikes of lavender and thyme. The climb was called Luna Bong. We got there early, before the sun dried the rock. Fingers slip on damp edges so we waited for the heat and while we waited I stared up, scouring the rock for holds and feeling the movements in my body. Grid, my ex-boyfriend, loved that climb and we must have done it twenty times, so it’s imprinted on me. Muscle memory.

In the cell-like room, I shut out everything else and turned my attention to the cliff. Let myself feel the heat bouncing off the rock and hear the cicadas rattling in the scrub. It soothed me. And as my body remembered itself moving up the rock face, I finally fell asleep.

In the morning, still desperate to escape, I thought of grabbing my bags and running. I knew I was fine. But the staff would never believe me. The words to bridge the gulf between us didn’t exist. Feeling restless and tense, I waited to see my counsellor, watching a line of other patients shuffle into a morning meditation class, and checked my phone. And saw the mail from Kit. It wasn’t recent. They take your phone away in rehab. It’s voluntary, of course, but everybody hands it over. And, actually they’re right. It is a distraction. They give it back to you from time to time to check for anything urgent, though. I went to delete the mail like I’d deleted all Kit’s texts recently, but a stray memory from our childhood caught my thoughts and stopped me. It had been a meditation class, too. Something Ma thought would be good for us to do, like collecting herbs by moonlight or dying T-shirts with crushed flowers.

We’d spent the first session sitting cross-legged in the crowded front room of a friend’s cottage. Thin carpets covered the stone flags but their chill rose through and numbed my bottom as we concentrated on the breath slipping in and out through our nostrils. It wasn’t difficult, if a little dull. We then moved on to observing the sensations in different parts of our body. Observing only.

I observed my toes, cramped at the end of trainers that were too small. The whisper of cold air passing over a graze on my wrist. And the muscles in my legs, twitching up and down the length of them, unable to be still for so long.

I couldn’t help it, I had to obey my legs. So I leapt up and ran out of the room, out of the back door, past a woman stirring something that smelled fragrant and strange, into the garden and over the stone wall at the end, barking my knee on the top. Not that I cared. It was a small price to pay for the bouncy grass of the moor and the prickle of heather against my shins and the feeling of air in my face.

Kit ran after me and we lay on the ground and laughed together. And I knew he understood.

Ma didn’t take us again.

I opened Kit’s mail.

Dear Jen, it started. Nothing peculiar in that, except I didn’t think Kit had ever been so formal. When we worked together, the mails had been cursory. Plan attached, please review. That kind of thing. Otherwise it was always, Hi. So the Dear Jen worried me. The rest of the message showed how right my feeling was.

Dear Jen

I’ve tried to call but I never get you. You don’t answer your mobile and the office say you’re not there. I hope you’re not avoiding me.

Sofija says you haven’t been in touch with her either.

Will you come down and see us? Please, Jen. Something’s come up. We need your help. We really need your help. We’d like to see you anyway. It’ll be easier to explain face to face, so don’t ring up and demand to know what’s going on. Text me when you’re coming.

Kit

No mention of the row we’d had seven months ago. No mention of the promise he bludgeoned out of me. Although ‘promise’ is a weak word for what Kit forced me to give, out of my mind with guilt after Grid’s accident and battered by all Kit’s fury and accusations that had the nasty sting of truth. I’d sworn I’d never climb again, then screamed at him to fuck right out of my life. And I hadn’t seen or spoken to him since. Or Sofija. Or Ma.

No contact until now. But he was my brother and he needed me. He had a problem and he thought I could solve it. It was the perfect excuse to leave. And anyway, after weeks of gritting my teeth and gratefully nodding at the carefully chosen words of the counsellors helping me, it felt wonderful to be the rescuer. Plus, Kit was in Cornwall and Cornwall was full of air, great gusts of it blown in from the sea, scouring the land and imbuing it with a salty tang.

I left rehab, feeling like an escaped prisoner. Family crisis, I told them. Got to go, I said firmly. And, with less conviction in my voice, I’ll come back and finish. They weren’t keen for me to leave. They didn’t think I was ready. They thought I was still ‘in denial’. I was sure they were wrong.

It felt good to be out. It felt good to be driving. To be on the move. To be doing something again. And to be alone. My car, my lovely red Aston, ate up the miles even though I stuck to the speed limit. Most of the time anyway – there were moments when the motorway was clear and a song I loved came on the radio and then I sped up and sang along.

My mood wasn’t quite so upbeat after Exeter as the signs for Cornwall started flashing by. I wondered what Kit’s problem might be and the thought of what could be waiting for me was as depressing as the deepening grey of the clouds brooding overhead. As I crossed the Tamar, the heavy sky lowered and squeezed the colour out of the rolling hills and farmland that lined the road and instead of lifting my heart, Cornwall, moody creature that she was, showed me her sullen and bitter face. My doubts grew. My driving slowed. Was this yet another of the impulsive escapades that littered my past? The closer I got to Craighston village and Tregonna, my old family home, the twitchier I became.

I pulled off at a service station in the end and called Kit. No answer. No answer from Sofija, his wife, either. I thought of calling the Tregonna landline but Ma might answer. I was sure Kit’s problem was to do with her so probably best to avoid speaking to her for the moment. She had an uncanny way of getting me to commit to things I didn’t want to.

Staying at the hotel was a spur of the moment idea. I got to Craighston and hesitated. Tregonna was only a mile or two away, up the steep road that led out of the other side of the village and past the lighthouse at the top, but I couldn’t face my family yet. Couldn’t face the explanations of why I’d been away so long. Couldn’t deal with the aftermath of Kit’s fury in the carpark. Besides, none of them knew I was on my way so they weren’t expecting me. I made a quick decision and pulled into the car park round the back of The Seagull, as it was now called. In my day it had been The Smuggler’s Arms, then The Craighston Inn and, for a few short seasons, The Piskie’s Revenge. It was Craighston’s only hotel, slap bang in the middle of the village, owned by a series of incomers who arrived full of dreams and left worn out a few seasons later.

Reception, drab in the damp weather and needing the chatter of families on holiday to bring it to life, was empty. Voices came from a room behind the desk and when I pinged the bell, a sour-faced woman with iron-grey curls stuck her head round the door and looked at me accusingly.

‘Are you open?’ I asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Could I have a room? Just for the night.’

She sighed but she came out. ‘Of course.’ She was about as welcoming as the weather.

‘Your name?’

‘Jen Shaw.’

She didn’t react. My name meant nothing to her. She tapped it into the computer, asked me for my card and gave me a key – the old-fashioned kind attached to a brass rectangle with the number punched into it. Heavy enough to stop guests taking it with them by mistake. She pointed down a corridor whose uncarpeted floor showed a few splotches of fresh paint then thought better of it.

‘I’ll take you to your room. They’ve finished decorating but I’m not sure if they’ve put the room numbers back on the doors.’

I trailed after her, wondering why anyone would have chosen to use that particular shade of yellowish beige paint and hoping its smell hadn’t penetrated my room. When she pushed the door open and I walked in, I realised it hadn’t. Or maybe it was smothered by the overwhelmingly musty odour. I pulled back the curtains, flung the window open and found myself staring out into the car park. Fab. The rooms on the second floor had a view over the rooftops of the squat buildings around the hotel, all huddled together against the winds that regularly tore in from the sea despite Craighston nestling in a little creek. From up there you could see the sea and the cliff path rising through the village and, if you stuck your head out, the tall white figure of the lighthouse on the point, an exclamation mark against the wild skies. I thought of asking if I could change rooms but this one looked clean, if a little too full of Cornish knick-knacks for my taste – china piskies and fishing boats and the obligatory framed picture of smugglers hauling barrels off a boat in a small cove. Besides, it was only for one night.

‘No kettle?’ I asked.

‘The electrics can’t cope if everyone turns them on at once,’ she said shortly.

I thought about asking how many people were currently staying here but decided it wasn’t worth it. She must have seen the irritation pass across my face.

‘I’ve got a spare one in the flat. I’ll bring it down later,’ she said. ‘Sorry, we’re a bit at sixes and sevens with the redecoration. I’m Vivian Waring. Reception isn’t manned off-season but you can call me on my mobile if you need anything.’

‘I might go out for a bit of fresh air,’ I said. Anything to escape the damp smell and unlock the knots of tension in my neck.

‘Well, be careful. There’s a storm on the way and it will be dark in an hour or so.’ She handed me a card. ‘Key code,’ she said. ‘For the front door.’ And with that she turned and left me. I glanced at it. 2468. Very original.

Craighston out of season. About as cheerful as my mood. I chucked my bag on the bed and sat down. For the first time in a long while I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no one to see, no meetings to sit through. It should have been a moment of peace. Instead all the old longings crawled into the emptiness and scratched their way into my blood.

And then… my memory dissolved into shreds and tatters: the tufts of the bedcover under my fingers… my hand closing a drawer… the raucous screams of seagulls wheeling overhead… then rain… nothing but rain.

Then… nothing. The stream of my consciousness stopped. Dead. As if a surgeon had sliced the memories out of my mind leaving nothing but a few flickering images and echoes behind.

Two

And then… something.

I woke.

Through the spiralling confusion in my brain, I knew I was awake. Everything was sharp and clear and real.

Not a dream.

But unbelievable. An undecipherable maelstrom of sound and motion and sensation. Brightness above me jerked my head back and turned the water falling over my eyes into glittering beads.

Rain.

I was outside.

And noise.

A confusion of wind, crashing waves and rain drumming a hard surface.

A storm.

Then pain, as a blast of wind hurled me against a white wall. The shock knocked the breath out of me and blew the mists of unconsciousness away.

Where am I?

A wall in front of me; white and smooth. But not in a climbing gym. There were no grips and no route markers.

The wind battered me again. Spun me round. Giddying my brain.

I need to get out of here.

I forced my thoughts to grip onto the here and now, and looked up. The wall ended against the dark sky. Then the blinding beam of light stabbed through the dark again and passed over my head. And disappeared.

I know what this is.

And I knew where I was. On the lighthouse along the coast from Tregonna. St Matthew’s lighthouse. Hanging from the viewing platform that jutted out below the lantern room, my knees against its bottom edge and my feet threshing the wild but empty air.

How…?

My brain screamed.

No time to panic.

I looked down. Through my feet, the concrete circle at the base of the lighthouse lay on the wind-lashed grass of the headland. I’d seen it so many times before from the safety of the viewing platform, leaning over its wall and staring down at the same grey circle, resting like a raft on waves of grass. A tiny raft far below, waiting to smash my body when I fell.

Not falling. You’re not falling.

Something held me up. Something under my arms dug pain into my flesh. I lifted my hand to touch it. A rope.

The beam circled overhead again and a glimmer echoed off the clouds onto the white wall. The rope was sash cord. Very old sash cord, hairy with loose strands that had broken or worn through.

The rope gave. A matter of millimetres. Even less. But I felt the drop in my bones.

My eyes scanned the wall above. The top of the parapet gleamed briefly as the beam passed overhead again. Not far to climb. But the surface was smooth. Super-smooth. No holds. No edges. No cracks. Nothing. I’ve climbed cliffs you’d think were impossible. Flat sheets of granite, smooth to the eye as butter sliced by a hot knife. Nature loves imperfection, though and there’s always a ridge or an edge in the rock your fingers and feet can use to swarm up the face. Even if you can’t see it, you can feel it. But the lighthouse was man-made, its surface grainy, gravelly, slippery in the wet.

The rope dropped again. A micro millimetre. A whisper of a movement but enough to tingle the sweat pores in my palms and sharpen my breathing, as if a hundred blades cut through my body and sliced through the confusion. Sliced through it and let it fall away. I felt alive, like I only ever do when I’m climbing. Even coke can’t compare to it. I laughed. Fuck the rain. Fuck the cold. It was just me and the wall.

I ran my hands over the surface: up, down, side to side, seeking a fault or a crack I could widen.

Slow. Too slow.

As if my hands and brain were disconnected. I forced them to keep moving. All I needed was a hole big enough to jam a fingertip in. Inch by inch, my fingers searched, over and over again, but there was nothing.

Except the rope.

Use the rope.

It slipped again.

The moment when the rope would snap hurtled towards me and fear fired my sluggish neurones. I grabbed the rope and pulled myself up the lighthouse. Hand over hand, inch by inch, until my feet hit the bottom of the viewing platform and I flattened them against its side and pushed. Thrust out and up, forcing the grit into the flesh of my soles and toes. Dragged my body up the parapet, hauling on the rope’s fraying strands. Suddenly the rope came alive, twitching as its strands snapped and unravelled.

Shit.

I hurled an arm over the top of the parapet, gave a last kick, heaved myself up and over and tumbled onto the rough, wooden floor of the viewing balcony.

Adrenalin shook my limbs as I rolled onto my back. The sky was stormy black. There should be stars, I thought. There should be fireworks. There should be great, roaring bursts of rockets to celebrate this moment. Only the lighthouse beam travelled across the sky in its majestic orbit. I counted the length of its circuits as my breathing calmed. And then there was nothing but a slow fall into blackness as my consciousness drained away once more.

I woke again to cold and pain. My head and nose hurt along with the flesh under my arms and round my back where the cord had bitten. I made myself move to the doorway round the far side of the viewing platform, where the tower gave me some protection from the wind coming off the sea, wrapped myself in a tarpaulin that was lying there and tried to think as rivulets of rain gathered in its cracks and creases and ran in streams onto the wooden floor.

I huddled in the doorway for a while waiting for something to make sense. It could have been a few minutes. It could have been a lot longer. Time became elastic so some minutes stuck to me and held on for an age and when they let go the minutes waiting behind them shot past in a blur. And when I finally thought to try the door handle, it opened and I tumbled inside.

The quiet of the musty interior, out of reach of the storm, calmed my shaky brain. I brushed the worst of the water off my face, noticing my hand did what I wanted without hesitating. The strange disconnect between body and brain was passing.

Shit. Drugs. It must be. What have I taken? How the fuck did I get here?

The last thing I remembered clearly was the hotel room. How had I ended up two miles along the coast, hanging off the lighthouse? God knows I’d come to in some strange places before. Crept out of strangers’ houses as the first lightening of dawn dimmed the street lamps; been woken by cleaning ladies hammering on the door of the toilet cubicle in whichever bar we’d ended up in the night before. Come to, leaning against the closed grille of the tube station and, once, propped in someone’s doorway with a faint memory of an angry taxi driver. The memories were always vague. And lost in the glittering blur of bars and drinks and mirrors dusted with the last few grains no one had yet taken. Saving them for a last gum smear before heading out into the night. But I always had some memory of how I’d ended up where I was. Nothing like this utter blankness.

Pain in my hands dragged me back to the here and now, where I crouched in the dim and quiet of the lighthouse stairs. I’d dug my fingers into the crumbling wooden floor and driven splinters into the grazed and battered flesh. Cold seeped into my bones. I’d think about all this later. Now I needed to get back to the hotel.

I felt for my phone with some idea of calling a friend or a cab but I didn’t have it with me. Had I left it in the hotel, charging up on the bedside table? Not that it mattered. I was in Cornwall, not London. And in an area that was quieter than quiet. I looked at my watch. It was a few minutes before one o’clock. No chance. If you wanted a taxi here, you booked it the day before. As for friends, they’d all left Cornwall. At least the ones you could call at one in the morning when you needed help. Which left my family: Kit, Sofija and, I supposed, Ma – and even if I’d had a phone I wouldn’t call them. Two years ago, I’d have called Kit straightaway. A few months ago, I might still have called him. But not now. No way.

Tregonna was closer than the hotel but I couldn’t let Kit see me wrecked like this. He’d be furious and I couldn’t bear that. I just couldn’t bear any more of that. I’d get back to the hotel by myself. I stood up and started down the steps. The door at the bottom of the lighthouse was open, swinging and banging in the storm. I went out and onto the coast road.

Three

It’s a a mile or so from the lighthouse back to Craighston village. Fifteen or twenty minutes tops. Unless you have bare, sore feet and torrents of rain drumming on your head. I almost gave up on the tarpaulin, not sure if the barricade it gave me against the rain was worth the struggle to hold it tight against the wind. It might be easier to dump it and walk free. But then the rain would beat against my head again. Its noise was already starting to eat away at my brain and cut my thoughts into pieces.

Keep walking. Get to the hotel. Keep walking.

Ahead, the road ran past one of the great lumps of granite that litter this part of the coast. The lighthouse beam lit up the clouds behind it and, for a moment, the rock’s outline was sharp and harsh.

The beam circled away and the rock became less distinct. More of a dark hole looming over the road than a thing of any substance. Its shape shifted slowly. A trick of the night, I thought. But the closer I got, the