Frank regarded me coolly. ‘I don’t reckon Mr Robin would be too ‘appy about that,’ he said in a level voice.
‘Well, maybe he needn’t know about it,’ I said.
‘What,’ countered Frank. ‘On this island?’ He gave a wry chuckle.
It was my turn to shrug. ‘If there are any problems I’ll carry the can,’ I said.
‘Hmph,’ he responded. For a moment or too he stared at the flat water. If anything the sea was even calmer than it had been on the November day when Jason had abandoned me on the rock. Certainly Frank couldn’t use weather conditions as an excuse, even though we were at the height of winter.
‘Don’t suppose it makes much bleddy odds anyway,’ he said eventually. ‘’E’s not the boss for much longer, is ’e?’
Abruptly he turned away from me again, covered the short distance to the boat in a couple of easy strides, dumped the driftwood into the bow, and began to push the little vessel out into the water.
‘C’mon then,’ he called over his shoulder.
The nearer we got to the Pencil the more I regretted my impetuous behaviour. And once again it was mostly my determination not to be seen to back down which made me force myself to go through with it.
I could clearly hear the thump of my heart in my chest as Frank held the little boat steady before the Pencil’s precarious channel, waiting for that seventh wave to take us in over the rocky outcrop. My mouth felt dry. I swallowed moisturelessly.
Frank had tipped up the outboard and had the oar ready to guide the boat into just the right position, just as his son had done on my previous fateful visit to the phallic rock.
He was studying the water carefully, but at the last moment he turned to look at me, and he would have had to be blind not to see how tense I was.
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘You know I’ll ’ave to take ’er out again and come back for ’ee, don’t ’ee? Just like always. There’s no choice ’bout that.’
I nodded, not quite trusting myself to speak.
‘Right then.’
Deftly he positioned the little craft on the crest of a wave, steered her bow just right into the channel and then used his oar to fend off to the right as we surfed alongside the Pencil’s only landing place by the ledge where I had spent all those terrified hours. Frank was very assured, but then, I remembered, so had been his son.
He lopped the mooring line around the same rock outcrop which I recalled so well and prepared to help me clamber up onto the ledge. I swallowed hard and forced myself forwards and upwards.
‘I’ll be just a few yards out, and I’ll be looking out for ’ee,’ he called as he turned the boat to catch the outward roll of a wave.
I waved as confidently as I could, and stood for a moment watching him depart and wondering what on earth I thought I was playing at. The water lapped against the rock a yard or so below my feet, and I forced myself not to think about the last time. Not to panic.
I busied myself with what I suppose had always been the subconscious purpose of my return to the Pencil. I began to methodically check out the rock, looking for anything which might in any way help to solve the mystery of Natasha’s death. If it was a mystery. Stupid of me really, I suppose, to think that I would find anything when the entire might of the Devon and Cornwall’s Scenes of Crime team had already been at work — although they had missed the carving of Robin’s name on their first visit, I reminded myself. It was predictable that to begin with all I gained was a nasty bruise on the head when I jerked upright at just the wrong moment as I crawled through the tunnel to the far side of the Pencil.
The view was as spectacular as ever, even without either dolphins or seals. Why is it that great beauty and great tragedy seem so often to be intrinsically linked?
When I re-emerged on the ledge which doubled as the rough and ready landing stage I was relieved, in spite of knowing really that there could be no doubt this time, to see that Frank Tucker was still hovering just twenty yards or so away. And as he turned his boat around and began to manoeuvre the little craft in to me, I looked up at the rock face to where I knew the carving must be.
It should not have been a shock to see it but it was. Robin’s name looked so stark and accusing there. And the carving, in an outcrop of softer slate running in a generous fault through the hard granite of the Pencil, was higher up the rock than I had expected, a good three or four feet above the top of the tunnel entrance. I could imagine all too clearly how absolutely desperate for survival Natasha must have been to have managed to climb so far up a sheer rock face, and I shivered at the vivid picture which suddenly presented itself to me.
The letters were roughly scratched but unmistakably formed the name Robin — although the N at the end was not completed. Had Natasha fallen into the sea, numb with cold and fear, unable to hang on any more, before she could finish it, I wondered. The thought made me shiver all the more.
I remembered all too clearly what Todd Mallett had asked. Would the last act of a young woman in fear of her life really be to scratch her lover’s name on a cliff face? Would she really waste her precious last energy on doing that unless she were trying to say something?
The very bleakness of it was shocking. If I had been looking for some kind of solace I had found anything but. I fervently wished I had not asked Frank to bring me out here. And I wished it all the more when we returned to Abri.
Robin was waiting on Pencil Beach when we returned. Frank had been going to take me straight back to Home Bay, but as we motored into the lee of the island the figure of Robin, waving furiously, dominated our view, demanded our swift presence, and could not be ignored.
He waded out towards the dinghy. His face was like thunder. At first he did not even look at me.
‘Frank, I thought I told you never, never, to take visitors out to the Pencil again,’ he shouted.
‘Robin, it was my fault,’ I interrupted, perhaps unwisely. ‘I asked Frank to take me...’
Robin ignored me. In any case Frank seemed quite unconcerned. He no longer looked at Robin in the warm respectful way that I had observed when I first saw them together.
‘Didn’t think ’er was a visitor, exactly,’ he said.
Robin glowered at him but said no more. Instead he turned his attentions to me.
‘C’mon,’ he snapped, and he reached forward, grabbed my arm and half-lifted me out of the little boat. I landed with a plop in about a foot of icy sea water and would have fallen forward were his grip on my arm not so tight. But as we waded ashore I was uncertain really whether he was dragging me or helping me.
‘You go on back to the landing beach, Frank,’ he called over his shoulder.
Frank made no reply. I suspected by now that he had nothing more to say to the man I was to marry.
Robin waited until the little boat had disappeared around the headline before he vented his fury on me. The Daveys, even in moments of high dudgeon, were not the kind of people who rowed in front of the servants, which to me was the way Robin had always seemed to have regarded the tenants of Abri, even though his great affection for them was without question. I had little time, however, to reflect on the curiosities of life in a feudal community. I had never seen Robin so angry. He was almost hysterical.