Jim Kelly - Death

‘Tug brought him ashore — they were in his fishing boat, not the ferry. Aidan looked dreadful — dirty, like he hadn’t slept. And pale — almost bloodless. We went into the woods and he took his shirt off and there was this knife wound — a few inches, clean but deep, and there’d been lots of blood. I said I wouldn’t do anything unless he told me what had happened. He said he couldn’t tell me.’

Valentine lit a match and the sound made her jump. Shaw noticed that the flame burnt upright, unmoved by the slightest wind. If he examined the silence he could just hear the whisper of the sea falling on unseen sands.

‘I put in the butterfly stitches, cleaned him up. Then I asked again. Told him I had a right to know. That did it — he just snapped. I didn’t expect it to happen — I thought I knew him so well. Looking back it was the pressure, the fear. But at the time it was so frightening. He had a knife in his belt — a knife I didn’t recognize — and he drew it and cut the air between us, back and forth, twice. His eyes. .’ She had a look of horror on her face, as if she could see him there.

‘It was supposed to be a warning. But when I looked down my hand was half red below a razor-sharp wound, the blood dripping into the pine needles.’ She looked at her hands. ‘And when he looked down there was a spray of blood on his legs and feet.’ She peered into the mist: ‘I couldn’t stitch the wound with one hand. So he drove me to A amp;E.’ She dipped her hand in the sea, then lifted it out, letting droplets fall into the perfectly calm, oily, water. ‘Years later, he’d often take my hand and say sorry again. He said he was sorry that day too. When I came out of A amp;E he was there in the car. That was when he told me why he’d gone out to East Hills. The lifeguard, White, had taken pictures of Marianne with men and he was after money. Marianne had come to Aidan for a loan —?50.’ She laughed at the amount. ‘Of course, that would have just been the start of it. He’d have been back. Aidan gave her the money. He said he didn’t want to worry me about it, which I understood.’ She nodded to herself. ‘But I was hurt Marianne hadn’t come to me first. She was going to give White the cash that Saturday out on East Hills. Aidan’s always been very protective of Marianne, like a big brother. He wasn’t worried about the money but he thought White would want something else in payment — sex. So Aidan went out on the boat that day to have it out with him, to try and end it.

‘When Marianne walked off into the dunes he followed. White was waiting for her, but when Aidan arrived he was angry that she wasn’t alone. Aidan told White it was over — that he wanted the negatives and then he didn’t want to hear from him again. White just laughed in his face, pulled the knife.

‘Aidan didn’t plan to hurt him, let alone kill him. That’s what he always said and I believe him. There’s a cold streak in Aidan — I know that. Something died inside him when he had that accident. He lost a life then — a life he’d imagined was his to live. But he’s not a calculating man. Never that.

‘He said there was a lot of blood — that they’d both been wounded. The only thing he really remembered was the slipperiness of that boy’s skin, covered in blood. It had never bothered him until then, the sight of blood. But after that it was like a phobia. That’s why he always wrung the chickens by the neck.’ She looked over the grey water where a seal had broken the surface and was poised, scanning them.

They heard the dull percussion of a diesel turbine and the silhouette of a trawler slid by, fifty yards off the port side. The base note of vibration made a small bone buzz in Valentine’s ear. Another fishing boat went past, this time unseen, but the wake reached them and rocked them, the noise of oily water slapping unnaturally loud.

‘It wasn’t the truth, was it? Not all the truth?’ she asked. ‘Since Marianne died he hasn’t talked to me. Nothing. He won’t touch me.’ She looked from Valentine to Shaw, her face suddenly wet with tears. ‘I can feel the lies. I can imagine what it is — that he was in those pictures with Marianne. I’m not stupid. I heard the rumours when I came back from Durham: that she’d gone after what was mine. But I could live with it; I’ve always lived with it. What really frightened me, what’s frightening me now, is that there’s another lie worse than that lie. That there’s something else he didn’t tell me.’

She cupped her face, an almost theatrical gesture, as if she’d run out of ways to react to what was happening to her life. ‘I think he was there when Marianne died. .’ She covered her mouth as if retrieving the words. ‘So I can see that might be the truth, but somehow even that doesn’t seem enough. ’ She used the back of her hand to wipe her face, first left then right, then left again. ‘What I don’t understand is that he said he did it all for me.’

Shaw had the sequence of the buoys leading out of Wells Harbour by rote. He’d been the pilot of the inshore RNLI hovercraft for nearly four years and he’d memorized most of the navigation along this stretch of the coast, from Lynn to Cromer. He knew that after the third green buoy on the port side he needed to look to starboard for the first red buoy, beyond which he should turn south-east to pick up the deep rip-tide channel which slipped past East Hills. So something had to be wrong because he was staring into the white mist, scanning a featureless seascape, when he saw two red buoys. Then three. Then none.

The blood drained to his heart so he blinked, trying to encourage the eye to water, his hands tightening on the paddle, which was poised in mid-air. He closed his eyes, the darkness full of strange cluster-bombs of blue light, then opened them to discover he had complete double-vision — everything in twos, one image slightly to the side of the other, slightly elevated. Nausea swept through him like a poison. The sharpness, the clarity, had gone, so that he was seeing a world with blurred edges, two worlds shadowing each other.

Valentine was looking at him. ‘Peter?’ he said. Ruth Robinson just looked into the mist, her head awkwardly forward, tensed to hear, to catch the first whisper of waves falling on the island beach.

‘You navigate, I’ll paddle,’ said Shaw, his voice strained, his eyes closed. Reason told him that if he robbed his brain of the evidence his eye was failing then it would stop flooding his bloodstream with adrenaline. Sweat, beaded on his forehead, fell into his blind eye. He put the paddle down then held his hands together, the fingers braided. Valentine was shocked by the thought that he might have done that to stop them shaking.

‘Peter?’

‘I’m OK,’ he said. ‘Just do what I say.’ He picked up the paddle and dipped the blade expertly into the water, the sound as delicate as a trout taking the bait. He could do it blindfold, so he kept his eyes closed, feeling the boat slip forward in response to each stroke. ‘Over your right shoulder there should be a red buoy,’ he said.

‘Not a thing,’ said Valentine.

‘Right. We’ve drifted a bit. It’s OK. Look around.’ Shaw’s voice was light now, controlled, and it made him feel better to hear it.

Valentine turned and the shift of weight rocked the boat.

Shaw kept his voice matter-of-fact. ‘Just move your head.’

Valentine tried that but the vertebra in his neck cracked as he swung his bony, axe-like, skull from left and right. ‘There, I see it,’ he said. ‘It’s to our right — three o’clock.’

‘Take us past it — leave it on our right. Then look out for another, ahead, and do the same with that.’