8
After getting the car window repaired early the next morning, I followed up Mary’s library lead and immediately hit a dead end. Even if Alex had gone there on the day Mary had followed him, it wasn’t for books. She’d told me it was about six o’clock when he’d got to the library, but their computers had no record of anyone borrowing anything during the fifteen minutes he was inside. Once I was back at the office, I called the company he’d worked for in Bristol. It was just as fruitless: like talking to a room full of people who didn’t speak the same language as you. His boss remembered him, but not well. A couple of colleagues could only give me a vague description of what sort of person he was.
Next, I called the friends he’d lived with. Mary had told me she’d kept in contact with one of the them, John, for a while after Alex’s disappearance and that, as far as she knew, they still lived in the same place. She was right. There were three of them. John was working when I called. The second, Simon, was long gone. The third, Jeff, was home, but seemed as perplexed by what had happened to Alex as everyone else.
‘So, how can I reach the other two guys?’ I asked him.
‘Well, I can give you John’s work address,’ he said. ‘But, I doubt you’ll be finding Simon anywhere.’
‘How come?’
‘He kind of… disappeared.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘He had some problems.’
‘What kind of problems?’
A pause. ‘Drugs mostly.’
‘Did he leave around the same time as Alex?’
‘No. A while after.’
‘Do you think he might have followed him?’
‘I doubt it,’ he said. ‘Alex didn’t get on with Simon at the end. None of us did. Simon was a different guy in those last few months. He… well, he kind of hit out at Kath when he was high one night. And Alex never forgave him for that.’
I put the phone down, and turned in my chair. On the corkboard behind me, in among the pictures of the missing, was a hand-drawn map of a beach.
My options were narrowing already.
Winter suddenly came to life as I crossed into Cornwall five hours later, the colours of late autumn replaced by a pale patchwork quilt of fields and towns. About forty miles from Carcondrock, I stopped at a café and had a late lunch. Through the windows, turning gently in the early afternoon breeze, I could see the wind turbines at Delabole.
Carcondrock itself was a quaint stretch of road with shops on both sides, and houses in the hills beyond. It was framed by the Atlantic and the smudged outline of the Scilly Isles. The beach ran parallel to the high street, while the main road wormed out of the village and upwards along the edges of a rising cliff. The higher the road, the bigger the houses — and the better the views. Below, against the cliff walls, the beach eventually faded out, replaced by sandy coves, dotted like pearls on a necklace along the line of the sea.
I found a car park between the beach and the village, and then headed to the biggest shop — a grocery store — armed with a picture of Alex. No one knew him. At the end of the high street, where the road followed the rising cliff face, there was an old wooden shack. Beyond that, a pub and a pretty church, its walls teeming with vines. Everything had an old-world feel to it: walls greying and aged; windows uneven beneath slate roofs. It was obvious why Kathy and Alex had loved it. Miles of lonely beach. The roar of the sea. The houses like flecks of chalk among the scrub of the hillside.
I got out the map Kathy had drawn for me of the hidden cove, and walked a little way on the road as it gently rose upwards along the cliff. Halfway up, leaning over the edge, I found it. Two hundred feet below me was a perfect semi-circle of sandy beach, surrounded on three sides by high walls of rock and on the fourth by the ocean. Waves foamed at the shore.
The only way I was going to get to it was by boat.
The wooden shack turned out to be the place to hire boats. It was starting to get dark by the time I reached it, and the old man who ran it was closing up. Behind him, attached to a jetty, four boats bobbed on the water.
‘Am I too late?’
He turned and looked at me. ‘Eh?’
‘I need to hire a boat for an hour.’
‘It’s dark,’ he said.
‘Almost dark.’
He shook his head. ‘It’s dark.’
I looked him up and down. Red and green checked shirt; mauve suspenders holding a pair of giant blue trousers up; yellow mud-caked boots; unruly white beard. He looked like the bastard love child of Captain Birdseye and Ronald McDonald.
‘How much?’ I asked him.
‘How much what?’
‘How much for an hour?’
‘Are you deaf?’
‘Sorry, I didn’t catch that.’
He paused, his eyes narrowing. ‘Are you takin’ the piss out of me, sonny?’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’ll double whatever the going rate is. I just need one of those boats for an hour. And a torch if you’ve got one. I’ll have everything back here by seven.’
He pursed his lips, thinking about it, then turned around and opened up the shack.
It took about twenty minutes to row around to the cove. I moored on the sand and dragged the boat up, away from the tide. The cove was small, probably twenty feet across, and the cliff walls towered above me. I flicked on the torch and swept it from left to right. At the back of the cove, in the torchlight beam, I could see a pile of loosened rocks and boulders. Some had fallen. Others had been washed up. As I stepped closer, I could see the arrow-shaped stone Kathy had talked about. It had tilted, but still faced upwards. At the bottom was a tiny mark — a cross — in black paint. I knelt down, clamped the torch between my teeth and started digging.
The box was buried about a foot under the surface. Its bottom sitting in water, its sides speckled with rust. Kathy had wrapped its contents in thick opaque plastic. I picked at it with my fingers but couldn’t break the seal, so removed my pocket knife and sliced it open. The contents were dry. I reached in and pulled out a stack of photographs and, around them, a letter. The birthday card was inside. A rubber band kept everything together.
I placed the torch in my lap and flicked through the photographs using the cone of light. Some of the photos were of the two of them, some just of Kathy, others only Alex. In one of the photographs, I noticed Kathy had her hair short. I guessed it had been taken by someone other than Alex, some time after he’d disappeared. I flipped it over and on the back she’d written: After you left, I cut my hair… On closer inspection, I could see all the photographs had comments on the back.
I picked up the torch and turned my attention back to the letter. It was dated 8 January, no year, and still smelt faintly of perfume.
I’ve no idea why you left, Kathy had written. Nothing you ever said to me led me to believe that one day you’d drop everything and walk away. So, if you came back now, I’d cherish you as I always did. I’d love you like I always did. But, somewhere, there would be a doubt that wasn’t there before, a nagging feeling that, if I got too close to you, if I showed you too much affection, you’d get up one morning and walk away.