Ken Follett - Eye Of The Needle

Lucy helped him into the jacket. It was a bit tight across the shoulders.

"We haven't got another oilskin," she said.

"Then I'll get wet." He pulled her to him and kissed her roughly. She put her arms around him and held tightly for a moment.

"Drive more carefully today," she said.

He smiled and nodded, kissed her again-briefly this time-and went out. She watched him limp across to the barn, and stood at the window while he started the jeep and drove away up the slight rise and out of sight. When he had gone she felt relieved, but also empty.

She began to put the house straight, making beds and washing dishes, cleaning and tidying; but she could summon up no enthusiasm for it. She was restless.

She worried at the problem of what to do with her life, following old arguments around in familiar circles, unable to put her mind to anything else. She again found the cottage claustrophobic. There was a big world out there somewhere, a world of war and heroism, full of colour and people, millions of people; she wanted to be out there in the midst of it, to meet new minds and see cities and hear music. She turned on the radio; a futile gesture. The news broadcast made her feel more isolated, not less. There was a battle report from Italy, the rationing regulations had been eased a little, the London stiletto murderer was still at large, Roosevelt had made a speech. Sandy Macpherson began to play a theatre organ, and Lucy switched off. None of it touched her, she did not live in that world.

She wanted to scream.

She had to get out of the house, in spite of the weather. It would be only a symbolic escape… the stone walls of the cottage were not, after all, what imprisoned her; but the symbol was better than nothing. She collected Jo from upstairs, separating him with some difficulty from a regiment of toy soldiers and wrapped him up in waterproof clothing.

"Why are we going out?" he asked.

"To see if the boat comes."

"You said it won't come today."

"Just in case."

They put bright yellow sou'westers on their heads, lacing them under their chins, and stepped outside the door.

The wind was like a physical blow, unbalancing Lucy so that she staggered.

In seconds her face was as wet as if she had dipped it in a bowl, and the ends of hair protruding from under her hat lay limp and clinging on her cheeks and the shoulders of her oilskin. Jo screamed with delight and jumped in a puddle.

They walked along the cliff top to the head of the bay, and looked down at the huge North Sea rollers hurling themselves to destruction against the cliffs and on the beach. The storm had uprooted underwater vegetation from God only knew what depths and flung it in heaps on the sand and rocks. Mother and son became absorbed in the ceaselessly shifting patterns of the waves.

They had done this before; the sea had a hypnotic effect on both of them, and Lucy was never quite sure afterward how long they had spent watching silently.

Its spell this time was broken by something she saw. At first there was only a flash of colour in the trough of a wave, so fleeting that she was not certain what colour it had been, so small and far away that she immediately doubted whether she had seen it at all. She looked for it but did not see it again, and her gaze drifted back to the bay and the little jetty on which flotsam gathered in drifts only to be swept away by the next big wave. After the storm, on the first fine day, she and Jo would go beachcombing to see what treasures the sea had disgorged and come back with oddly coloured rocks, bits of wood of mystifying origin, huge seashells, and twisted fragments of rusted metal.

She saw the flash of colour again, much nearer, and this time it stayed within sight for a few seconds. It was bright yellow, the colour of all their oilskins. She peered at it through the sheets of rain but could not identify its shape before it disappeared again. Now the current was bringing it closer, as it brought everything to the bay, depositing its rubbish on the sand like a man emptying his trouser pocked onto a table.

It was an oilskin: she could see that when the sea lifted it on the crest of a wave and showed it to her for the third and final time. Henry had come back without his, yesterday, but how had it got into the sea? The wave broke over the jetty and flung the object on the wet wooden boards of the ramp, and Lucy realised it was not Henry's oilskin, because the owner was still inside it. Her gasp of horror was whipped away by the wind so that not even she could hear it. Who was he? Where had he come from? Another wrecked ship?

It occurred to her that he might still be alive. She must go and see. She bent and shouted in Jo's ear: "Stay here. Keep still. Don't move." Then she ran down the ramp.

Halfway down she heard footsteps behind her. Jo was following her. The ramp was narrow and slippery, quite dangerous. She stopped, turned and scooped the child up in her arms. "You naughty boy, I told you to wait!" She looked from the body below to the safety of the clifftop, dithered for a moment in painful indecision, discerned that the sea would wash the body away at any moment, and proceeded downward, carrying Jo.

A smaller wave covered the body, and when the water receded Lucy was close enough to see that it was a man, and that it had been in the sea long enough for the water to swell and distort the features. Which meant he was dead. She could do nothing for him, and she was not going to risk her life and her son's to preserve a corpse. She was about to turn back when something about the bloated face struck her as familiar. She stared at it, uncomprehending, trying to fit the features to something in her memory; and then, quite abruptly, she saw the face for what it was, and sheer, paralysing terror took hold of her, and it seemed that her heart stopped, and she whispered, "No, David, no!"

Oblivious now to the danger she walked forward.

Another lesser wave broke around her knees, filling her Wellington boots with foamy saltwater but she didn't notice. Jo twisted in her arms to face forward. She screamed, "Don't look!" in his ear and pushed his face into her shoulder. He began to cry.

She knelt beside the body and touched the horrible face with her hand. David. There was no doubt. He was dead, and had been for some time. Moved by some terrible need to make absolutely certain, she lifted the skirt of the oilskin and looked at the stumps of his legs.

It was impossible to take in the fact of the death. She had, in a way, been wishing him dead, but her feelings about him were confused by guilt and the fear of being found out in her infidelity. Grief, horror, relief: they fluttered in her mind like birds, none of them willing to settle. She would have stayed there, motionless, but the next wave was a big one.

Its force knocked her flying, and she took a great gulp of sea water. Somehow she managed to keep Jo in her grasp and stay on the ramp; and when the surf settled she got to her feet and ran up out of the greedy reach of the ocean. She walked all the way to the clifftop without looking back. When she came within sight of the cottage, she saw the jeep standing outside. Henry was back.

Still carrying Jo, she broke into a stumbling run, desperate to share her hurt with Henry, to feel his arms around her and have him comfort her. Her breath came in ragged sobs and tears mixed invisibly with the rain on her face. She went to the back of the cottage, burst into the kitchen and dumped Jo ungently on the floor.

Henry casually said, "David decided to stay over at Tom's another day."

She stared at him, her mind a disbelieving blank; and then, still disbelieving, she understood. Henry had killed David.

The conclusion came first, like a punch in the stomach, winding her; the reasons followed a split-second later. The shipwreck, the odd-shaped knife he was so attached to, the crashed jeep, the news bulletin about the London stiletto murderer: suddenly everything fitted together, a box of jigsaw pieces thrown in the air and landing, improbably, fully assembled. "Don't look so surprised," Henry said with a smile. "They've got a lot of work to do over there, although I admit I didn't encourage him to come back."