Саймон Бествик - The Devil and the Deep - Horror Stories of the Sea

With Clive still sleeping, I slipped out for a long walk—I do that, sometimes, when I can’t sleep. I walked up and down the prom, letting the sea calm me, till it was time to go to work.

After the lunchtime rush, when I finally got a half-hour break. I slipped to the ice-cream parlour further along the quayside. “Daniela around?” I asked Krisztof, the owner.

“Out back, having a smoke.”

“Thanks.”

I found Daniela in the yard behind the parlour. “Emily.” She hugged me. “I heard about Robin. Are you okay?”

I shrugged. “I’m still here.”

She led me to the bench in the corner of the yard, gave me one of her Marlboros. “What are you thinking?” she said.

The face of a Vogue centrefold, the eyes of an interrogator. Daniela’s my best friend in the town. I’d never told her about Robin and me—compartmentalising, again—but I think she guessed at least some of it. Just as she doesn’t know what my secrets are, but knows damn well I have them. She’s smart like that: make a better copper than Clive ever would. But she’s not a copper, and she’s smart enough not to ask about anything I haven’t volunteered. She has her secrets, too, I know—most likely about how she got here from Prague. She’s a little broken, same as Robin and me—not as much, but enough. That, or she hides the cracks better.

“They’re saying he killed himself,” I said.

“I heard. But you don’t think so?”

“I don’t want to.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“I know.” I dragged on the Marlboro. “Did you see him? I mean that night, before he—”

“Yeah,” she said. “It was quite late—gone midnight, I think. I was walking back from the Lion.”

Daniela does the odd night shift at the Lion on Church Street. I don’t know where she finds the energy, but she seems to manage.

“I was going up the coast road,” she said. Home for Daniela is the caravan park just out of town, along the coast road leading north. “He was on a bench there. Looked pretty wiped out. I was going to see if he was okay, but a guy came along, started talking to him. He woke up then, anyway.”

“Did you know the guy?”

She shook her head. “No, but I’ve seen him around.”

“Tourist? Local?”

“Tourist,” she said. “He brought his boat into the harbour a couple of days ago. It’s still there.” Daniela grinned. “It’s named after you.”

It was a nice boat, too—a white motor yacht with EMILY emblazoned across the stern. The man on its deck wasn’t quite as good-looking, but not bad. He was about ten years older than me, late thirties or so. Around Robin’s age, within a couple of years.

When the café closed, I slipped home and got changed. A quick shower, then some careful make-up and an outfit that ought to catch the eye: a red T-shirt with a white skull, black-and-white-striped tights, boots and a short black skirt. I put my black bobbed hair into bunches and skipped back down to the quay.

“Nice boat,” I called down to him. He looked up and smiled. He obviously liked what he saw, even though he was as conservatively dressed as you could be on a boat.

“Thanks,” he said. “You work in the café, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Want to come aboard?”

I hesitated. Too easy for word to get back to Clive; too many questions I wouldn’t want to answer that way. But how else was I going to talk to him? If I sat on the edge of the quay, I’d be even more visible to prying eyes. “Okay, then,” I said, and climbed down.

“Coffee?” he said, motioning belowdecks. “I was just making some.”

“Okay.”

He passed me a mug. “Ed York.”

“Eh?” I realised that was his name. “I’m Emily,” I said, and grinned. “Like your boat.”

“No way.” He smiled. “Named it after my Mum.”

“Ooh.” I pulled a face. “Oops.”

“Why ‘oops’?” He filled his own mug. “Same name, that’s all.”

There was something familiar about this, tickling the back of my brain, but I wasn’t sure what it was. “True. Like I said, anyway, it’s a nice boat.”

“Hm.” He wasn’t particularly tall, but there was something imposing about him. He was well groomed and tanned, in shorts and a T-shirt that were probably a lot more expensive than they looked. Wavy brown hair, greying at the temples, crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes. Good-looking, though, with or without the money. Not movie-star handsome, but the kind of face you’d want your dad to have: warm, kind. My dad hadn’t been either.

That thought took me by surprise, and not pleasantly. I don’t like remembering my dad, what he did to me or what I did to him in the end. Luckily Ed claimed my attention back by moving closer to me—no prizes for guessing what he thought I was here for. “I’m a good cook, too,” he said. “If you want to stick around.”

“Okay, then,” I said.

I was a little uncomfortable when he steered the Emily down the estuary inland, but on balance I decided eating on the deck in the middle of the river was better than doing so at the quay, where anyone might spot us.

Ed had caught a couple of bass earlier on, and grilled them on a barbecue on the deck, serving them with a squirt of lemon and not much else. We ate with the river lapping gently at the yacht’s hull, the hills rising either side.

“This your first visit here?” I said.

Ed nodded, sipping from a bottle of beer. “Always meant to come to this part of the world,” he said, “but I never did. Pressure of work, as much as anything else. Funny, really.”

“Funny?”

“Well—now I’m in charge I’ve got a lot more free time. You’d think it’d be the other way round, but now I get to delegate. Before, I was the one it got delegated to.”

“Rank hath its privileges,” I said. Clive had come out with that more than once.

“That’s the one. What about you? You lived here long?”

“Five years.”

“You happy here?”

“Yeah, course.” I gestured round. “Who wouldn’t be?”

“Yes, but—you must want more than this?”

“Why? I’m happy, I have a home. And I’m here. What else would I want?”

“Money? A career? A family?”

“I’m happy with what I have.”

“You seeing anyone?”

“Are you?”

He shook his head. “Divorced. Now what about you?”

“A boyfriend,” I said. I saw Clive’s face for a moment, but pushed it away. Back into its box. Its compartment.

“You’re so happy with what you’ve got,” Ed said, “that you’re out on a boat having dinner with a stranger?”

“I’m happy with what I have,” I said, “and I take what I can get.”

“That’s more like it.” He smiled. “So what about your family?”

“What about them?” I wasn’t able to keep an edge out of my voice.

“They don’t live around here?”

I shook my head. “I don’t have a family.” I looked at him long and level, willing him to get the hint that this wasn’t a topic for discussion. When I saw him open his mouth to speak again I knew he hadn’t, so I spoke first. “What about you?”

“Me?” His smile turned crooked and a little sour, as if he’d suddenly developed a gut pain. “I’m the same, actually.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes. No family. Not anymore. Another beer?”

“Okay.” I’d tipped judicious amounts of mine over the side when Ed hadn’t been looking, as I wanted a clear head. “So what about yours?”