The tape was in a kitchen cupboard that Brenda reserved for over three dozen prettily wrapped packages of ginger biscuits waiting to be apportioned half to Bletchley Hall and half to a home for abused wives and children in Truro.
How fucking thoughtful, Macalvie thought.
The two packages were the same size as all the others and wrapped in identical colorful paper, the only difference being that these two did not wear one of the WOODBINE TEAROOM silver stickers. That was to tell Brenda which packages held the tapes. Damned funny if someone was expecting biscuits and found that film instead.
Damned funny, thought Macalvie.
Brenda had sat three hours longer in that scarred and straight-backed wooden chair. She was not going to give up the tapes. She looked at him and exhaled smoke from the last cigarette in her pack into the already smoke-filled room.
“What’s the difference?” she said. “Why would you want to know anything more than the fact Simon Bolt did film it. It’s what I already told you. I shouldn’t think the details of their deaths would be very pleasant to watch.”
“I’m sure.” Macalvie had risen and was pacing in the room’s semi-darkness. The only available light was that coming from the shaded bulb hanging above the table, casting a pool of bleached light over her hands. Shadows played tricks with her face.
Macalvie stopped pacing. “The thing is, Brenda, it’s not past. It’ll never be past for the Bletchleys. It will never be past for Morris Bletchley.”
“May I have a cup of tea?”
Macalvie ignored this as he had every request she’d made, except going to the loo. A WPC had escorted her. She had also been given water. The police code no doubt dictated a certain amount of consideration should be given the witness, but Macalvie didn’t give a damn.
He continued. “Morris Bletchley has been living in a sort of limbo-you yourself predicted that-not knowing exactly what happened: how they got down there, what made them stay. Not knowing is a kind of hell. You must have experienced something like though hardly to the extent Bletchley did.” He stopped and waited.
“You’re not going to show that tape to Morris Bletchley, for God’s sake!”
It was the only time in this interrogation she had actually shown some emotion. And what she apparently felt was shock and gratification. And hunger, a hunger to enlarge upon the old man’s suffering. It showed in her face, which appeared to lose some of its pliant smoothness and take on a bony, chiseled gauntness, as if a death’s head were showing through. The tricks of shadows.
Macalvie said, “Don’t you think Bletchley deserves to know what happened? Now, you’ve got nothing to lose if he knows.”
She actually tilted that skeletal face back and laughed, the laughter like some residue of a saner time, even a carefree time, when her daughter was alive. But it was just that: a residue, quickly used up. Nothing to laugh about now, except-
“Morris Bletchley.” She sighed. “How I wanted to send it to him! But that wasn’t the purpose of the film; that would have been icing on the cake.”
Icing on the cake. Macalvie turned away.
“I knew I wasn’t clever enough to outwit the army of investigators he’d hire.”
Macalvie interrupted. “You told me all that.” He splayed his arms on the table and leaned close to her. “So you can make this your dying wish, can’t you? Poor old Bletchley watching that tape.”
Brenda smiled that thin death’s-head smile.
She told him.
Macalvie sat in Brenda Friel’s little sitting room watching a hand-held camera panning the dark cliff and the shiny-wet stair down to the water behind Seabourne. That little oblong that fit the top of the plastic casing was missing, but it still fit in the VCR.
Some sort of light arrangement had been set up near the stone steps, which would have revealed this little drama had anyone else been there to see it. But there was only Mrs. Hayter, whose room was on the other side of the house.
Moonlight augmented the artificial, making the latter almost superfluous. The camera followed a pretty girl-how old? teens, most likely-wearing a dress made diaphanous by the moon, and Macalvie wondered what uses beauty could be put to. The whole scheme needed a woman, any woman, to go down the steps with them, to make them feel at all safe. Macalvie could only speculate on the little kids’ feelings; he imagined daring was outweighed by the adventure of it all.
The stone steps, after all, were utterly familiar. It certainly wasn’t the first time they’d gone down them. Of course, they’d been told never to go down them without an adult. Well, here was an adult to make it safe.
They stood either side of the older girl. She was holding their hands as they stood, posing for the camera, at the top of the stairs. The little girl Esmé’s sharp giggle startled Macalvie. He had expected the sound of the sea, but not of the children.
The three of them started down the steps in a sort of awkward single file, the girl in between, holding both of the children’s hands. Esmé, the older, was in front; Noah was behind.
The camera followed close behind. There was only a bit of wind and Mounts Bay was almost calm, water insinuating itself under the boat and gently washing over the steps at the bottom. The Bletchleys’ boat rocked peacefully in the slurred waves, tethered by a long rope anchored by a ring in the cliffside.
Even as Macalvie watched, he could swear another step, farther up, was now sluiced by water. It was as if the tide were obliging Bolt’s camera work, a fake sea against fake rocks. But there was no denying the power of this terrible film as Macalvie watched the children get farther and farther down the steps and the camera move farther and farther back, as if it did not want to chance going down to those bottom steps.
But the camera could make out what was happening at the bottom. The children were now into water that covered their feet but still delighting in this game, one part of which seemed to be something the young girl had taken from her sling bag, but whatever it was, was hidden by her back.
Macalvie leaned closer, squinting as she turned and the viewer could see what she was doing. A bracelet winked in the light. No. A choke chain, something a dog owner would put on an unruly pet. His mouth went completely dry. How could he have missed it, for God’s sake? Looking at what she was doing: two chains, one for Noah, one for Esmé, gone around their wrists and then hooked to the ring that kept the boat moored. Esme’s right wrist, Noah’s left, their other two hands free.
The water was up their legs now. They had stopped laughing. Bolt now dared the slippery steps (fucking coward, afraid he’d get wet?) and the camera honed in on their faces. The faces were beginning to crumple. Both of them wanted to stop the game, to go back up the cliff.
But it was the young woman who went back up, and then of course they knew. They were trapped at the bottom in water now waist high and they couldn’t move more than a few feet. They wept; they began to howl with fear. The girl kept walking upward.
And then Esmé became aware of the boat, shoved a little closer to the cliff by the waves. She grabbed Noah’s hand and lunged for it. If they could reach the boat, it would buoy them up.
Macalvie was standing now. He was watching the kids maneuvering toward the boat (and the boat, as if in silent assent, rocking toward them); he was watching as if this were a story whose ending was as yet unknown. As if the little kids really were actors and the scene was counterfeit.
She made it. Esmé was close enough to haul herself into the boat and then to drag Noah in after her, once she-