The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea

DEADWATER ^{SIMON BESTWICK}

Above the sea, the railway ran; a hundred yards inland a 4x4 stood empty on a dirt track, keys still in the ignition. There was no one inside, no sign of a struggle, and no witnesses. That whole part of the coast is hills and empty fields, with the odd farmhouse hidden in bristling crops of pine.

A rainy sky, and the tide was in, the dull grey sea gnashing at the edge of the shingle beach.

The 4x4 belonged to one Robin Gaunt. Police Constable Lewis popped into the Harbour Café that morning to ask if I knew him. The Harbour’s the most popular café here—both locals and tourists love it. I’ve part-timed at half the other places in town, too—work here tends to be seasonal, so you take whatever’s going—which means there isn’t much I don’t hear about. Clive makes me his first port of call whenever he wants to know something. Fringe benefit of being his girlfriend, I suppose.

Around here people are like the tide: some flow in, some flow out. Ten, fifteen years ago there’d been an influx of New Age types, all coming to commune with Nature; Robin had been one of them. Now they were being displaced in their turn, by urban professionals buying second homes. Frankly, I was missing the hippies already.

I told Clive most of what I knew. Robin popped into the Harbour once or twice a week for a Full English or a sandwich, but didn’t have much motivation beyond getting high and saying “wow, man” at the scenery a lot. The scenery around here is pretty “wow”—we’re on a nice stretch of coast, with mountains all around—but after a while, you hardly notice it. Unless you’re like Robin.

We’d meet some evenings, when Clive was on nights. Look, I’m young and I get lonely. Around here, you find some company or you climb the walls. We smoked some weed—usually out in his car—and slept together twice. The first time we were stoned, and I was going through a bad patch with Clive. The second time was a mistake, and I told Robin it wouldn’t happen again. He accepted that, and my statement that I still wanted to be friends. Go with the flow was his philosophy: that was how he’d ended up here. And why I liked his company. He was easy-going, didn’t make demands. I told Clive none of this, of course. As a small-town copper, he tends to see things in black and white.

Clive had been to Robin’s rented cottage, but no one had answered the door. No, he hadn’t broken it down—this wasn’t the big city and all he had so far was an empty car. Robin had probably smoked too much draw and walked back into town instead of driving along the narrow, winding, ill-lit coastal roads. He was either at a friend’s house or so comatose he hadn’t heard Clive knock.

That didn’t sound right to me, even then. No matter how caned he was, some weird homing instinct always got Robin home at the end of a night. I didn’t know what it was—some sort of OCD, something that had happened to him—but he never felt safe under someone else’s roof, or in a strange bed. Similarly, anything like a knock on the door would snap him instantly awake, no matter what. But explaining how I knew that to Clive would have been awkward.

In the end, it made no difference. A few hours later, the tide went out, exposing the shingle beach. There’s an outfall pipe there, emptying fifty feet from the shore. Robin lay next to it, face-down, seaweed in his hair, arms outstretched towards one of the rusted iron struts holding the pipe in place. A pair of handcuffs were looped around it, fastened on his wrists. The pathologist said he’d still been alive when the tide came in.

“Must have been bloody horrible,” said Clive.

I stroked his hands. We were sitting at a table in a corner of the café. Technically I was at work, but it was a quiet day and Jeanette—the owner—likes being on good terms with the police.

“There’d be no one around to hear,” he said, “not that time of night—if he’d changed his mind, I mean. Even a train going by wouldn’t have seen him.”

This time of year, the tide takes about an hour to come in. An hour can seem very short or very long; I could guess which it would have been for Robin. Then I registered what Clive had said.

“Changed his mind?” I said. “You’re not saying he did that to himself?”

“Looks that way. Doesn’t seem to have had any enemies round here.”

“But he was handcuffed…”

Clive glanced round to ensure we weren’t overhead. “Just between us, Emily, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Gaunt was a known druggy. History of mental health problems. He’d tried topping himself two, three times before he came here. And you should have seen his forearms—Christ alive. Looked as if someone had been playing tic-tac-toe with a razorblade.”

I had seen them, but didn’t tell him. Robin had worn long-sleeved shirts, even in summer. He’d only taken them off in bed.

“Looks like he wanted to do himself in but kept bottling out. So he found a way to make sure. Cuff himself to the outfall, let the sea do the work. Like I said”—Clive took another sip of tea—“I hope he didn’t change his mind.”

Clive was working the night shift. Once I’d finished wiping down tables and serving customers, I went for a walk along the seafront.

The beach here is beautiful, but I prefer the far end of the promenade, where the yellow sand gives way to shingle and rock broken up by tall wooden groynes. It isn’t as pretty to look at or as nice to walk on, so there aren’t as many people. Not that there were many today in any case; it was raining—lightly, but enough to keep away the day trippers. That was why the Harbour Café had been so quiet that afternoon.

Normally, an evening like this, with no Clive to snuggle up with in front of the TV, I would have gone over to Robin’s for a coffee, maybe gone out with him for a spliff. But of course I couldn’t do that now.

It’s the absences that get you, with any death. The gaps, the depths, the holes people leave behind: they’re what we mean by ghosts.

I got to the end of the sea wall and looked up the rocky beach that stretched away beyond it. The small, shallow cove where Robin had died was about two miles to the north.

A druggy, a self-harmer, a mental case. That was the pigeon-hole Clive had put Robin in. He really had no idea, but that was my fault. There was a lot he didn’t know about me. I’d cut more carefully than Robin had, back in the day. My cuts had either healed without scarring, or the scars were where Clive hadn’t yet found them. And he wondered why he’d never made CID.

Not that they were any better. They’d put Robin in the same box. A suicide, because that’s the way the damaged and the broken are meant to go, if they’ve any decency. Take their mess and awkwardness out of everyone else’s life. And of course, we often do. Maybe I would one day, if the dark ever welled up in me again and I found no way to drain it off. Maybe Robin had.

But I didn’t think so. I might be wrong, of course; there were any number of reasons why I wouldn’t want to think it. All I had, really, was a feeling, and I couldn’t share the little I had to back it up with the one copper who might listen. More absences. More holes, more ghosts, more deeps.

There’s a little café at the end of the sea wall. It’s nowhere near as pretty or popular as the Harbour, but they get by. A quiet, friendly Kurdish guy called Hish runs it. He makes good coffee, so I went in.

“Emily. You’re well?” He took a closer look at me. “Ah. I see. No.”

“Did you know Robin?”

“Robin?”

I described him. Hish nodded, sighed. “Yes. Was he the one who drowned?” I nodded. “A friend of yours?”

“Yeah.”

I didn’t say anything else. Hish looked down. “You want some hummus?” he said. He’s not the most expressive guy. His first response to any situation is to do something practical, usually food related. That’s okay, though. He’s a good cook.

“Thanks,” I said.

The hummus came with a plate of toasted pita strips. I ate slowly, sipping coffee and watching as it got dark. It wouldn’t be hard to ask around, maybe see if I could dig something up, enough that Clive might take a closer look at Robin’s death. The worry was, as always, what else might get stirred up in the process.

I’m good at compartmentalising; I like to keep things well ordered. Things, and information: about me, in particular. There was plenty Clive didn’t know, and his uncovering one thing might quickly bring others to light. And what then?

I wasn’t that different from Robin, really. People break in different ways and places, and have different ways of coping. Robin’s and mine had been much the same: find a place to hide, and hide there.

My time here had been a good one: I’d hidden enough of me away to pass for normal. If the hidden stuff came out, I couldn’t live here anymore. I’d have to go. Find another hiding place, try and root myself there. I supposed I could do it, but I didn’t want to. I was tired of running.

Robin and I had been enough alike that he’d have understood that. But still, the idea he’d be dismissed as a suicide when he wasn’t bothered me more and more. I told myself we fucked-up ones had to stick together, but most likely I was thinking of myself. People usually do. My own death—my own murder—might as easily be passed off the same way.

I shivered, and drank more coffee to chase the chill and the black dog’s shadow away.

When you pass over them, the deeps are cold.

“Inquest’s next week,” said Clive in the morning, when he got in, “but by the look it’ll be open and shut. Like I said, with his history…” He shrugged and carried on undressing.

He slept, but I couldn’t. I got out of bed, drank some coffee and watched the sun come up over the estuary. I’d already more or less made up my mind, but that clinched it. If I could find anything that might make Clive look again—without revealing anything about myself I didn’t want him to know—I’d do it.

Frankly, it wasn’t as hard as it might sound. Most information came my way as gossip sooner or later. The trick here was to get hold of something specific, ideally without making it too obvious I was digging.

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?”

“Oh, it’d just been me and Dad for years, ever since Mum died. It’s the family business, you see. That I work for. That I run, now.”

“That’s why you don’t have to delegate anymore,” I said.

“Right.”

“So it’s just you now? No brothers or sisters?”

Again his smile went funny. Again that look, as though something had turned sour in his belly. “No,” he said. “I had a brother, but… he’s gone.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

And that was when I realised what had seemed familiar before. I took another swig of beer to make sure he didn’t see anything in my face. I didn’t think he would have, anyway. I’m good at that.

“So.” Ed got up and moved towards me, crouching beside my deckchair. “What next?”

I could have played hard to get, I suppose. But I wasn’t sure of him, and I might need to keep on his good side. More to the point, he was used to getting what he wanted.

So I put my beer down and I let him kiss me. Not long after that he took me belowdecks again, and I let him fuck me. I sucked him off, too. I’m good at that. No, I didn’t feel dirty. It was—necessary. To be safe. To maintain control. I’d had a lot of practice with that. You go away, step back from it. It’s just your body; it isn’t all of you. It’s a good way of coping with things you don’t want to be there for. Things you don’t want to remember afterward. The kinds of things that live in the deeps, that you have to keep at bay with pills, or by cutting yourself, or whatever other ways you can find. Dad taught me a lot, without meaning to. In the end, he wished he hadn’t.

In a distant way I registered that Ed wasn’t a bad lover. Quite sensitive, in fact. I had a good time, or would have if Robin hadn’t been hanging over me. Clive? Well, Clive was never going to know what I’d had to do. Compartmentalising again.

Afterward, while Ed was in the toilet, I slipped his wallet out of his shorts and checked inside. There was a business card for a company called Yorkguard: E. York, Managing Director and Chairman. I put the card back in the wallet and the wallet back in his shorts before he came back.

“Tide’s turning,” he said. “Best get back now.”

“Okay,” I said.

I dressed and went up on deck. Ed was in the wheelhouse, guiding us back up the estuary. He didn’t turn around, but I saw a red flush creeping up his neck.

“Will I see you again?” he said at last.

“Sure,” I said. “Tomorrow?” Clive was working nights the rest of the week.

“Okay.”

I slipped off the Emily, hoping I’d gone unnoticed, and made my way home, where I showered to get every trace of Ed York off and out of me. After that I made a strong cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and sat by the window of my flat in a thick bathrobe, a towel around my hair, watching my laptop power up.

I checked out Yorkguard’s website first. They were a security firm, based in Kent, and the Managing Director and Chairman, Edmund York, was indeed the man I’d just slept with. A quick shufti at the Company History section of the site gave me the details of his father—Sir Richard York, no less, who’d died six months ago. No mention of another York brother, though, past or present.

I googled Sir Richard next: he’d been a big enough name to have garnered three obituaries on major newspaper sites. I scrolled through them, skipping the details of York’s career and achievements, looking for information about his family.

And then I had what I needed.

Clive woke me up in the early hours by crawling into bed with me. By the time I was awake, though, he was asleep, so I just lay there for a while, watching him. He looks about twelve when he’s sleeping.

I couldn’t sleep, so I got up and went for another walk. To clear my head, and be ready for what was coming.

I went to the Harbour for another day’s work, taking orders and wiping down tables as fast as they were vacated. Even from inside the café I could see the Emily, moored at the quay. While I was cleaning the tables out front, Ed came out on deck. He waved at me and smiled. I smiled back, but didn’t wave.

“So,” said Daniela at lunchtime, “I hear someone went on a little boat trip yesterday.”

“They don’t miss much around here,” I said. “Do they?”

“Does Clive know?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Does he?”

“Well, he won’t from me, you know that.”

I smiled. “True.”

Daniela tapped ash from her cigarette. “Emily, I know it’s not my business, but…”

“Nothing happened,” I said. “Nothing like that, anyway.” And in a funny way, it was true. Yesterday’s fuck had been no realer than any other act I put on to keep things separate.

“As long as you know what you’re doing,” said Daniela.

“I think I do,” I told her. “But in case I don’t…” I gave her an envelope. “Can you hold onto that for me? And promise not to open it?”

Daniela studied me, then nodded. “Okay,” she said. She didn’t understand everything, but she didn’t have to. She understood enough.

“Thanks,” I said. “Can I steal one of your Marlboros? I’ve run out.”

As the end of my shift approached my stomach became a knot, and it only tightened as I walked home to get changed.

Clive had left a note for me. Nothing much, just that we had to have dinner once he was off nights. He’d booked a table at the Nook. I had to smile; the Nook’s the best fish restaurant in town, and he knows I love seafood. Even though he hates it, and they only have about two meat dishes. That’s Clive. He’s not the sharpest, but he’s sweet.

Love? I don’t really know what that is, but he’s mine. So I look after him.

I went into the wardrobe and took out a small box hidden at the back. There were things in it I hadn’t used in a long time. Pieces of old lives. I took what I needed, and went down to the quay.

“Hi there.” Ed smiled up from the deck of his boat.

“Yo,” I said. “Permission to come aboard, Cap’n?”

He laughed. “Board away.”

I climbed down the ladder to the deck, knowing he’d be watching my arse. Good. Let him. He looked at my body and thought it was me, while the real me was in a control room, working levers and gears and watching everything unfold.

“So,” I said, “where to now?”

“Another trip along the estuary?” he suggested.

“Maybe,” I said, “or…”

“Or what?”

I nodded out towards the bay.

“Yeah?” he said. “We could do a trip along the coast. There and back. Weather’s supposed to be good, so we could just drop anchor and…” He ran a finger down my arm.

I kept the smile on my face and managed not to draw back. “Sure. Why not?”

“Okay, then. Let’s get underway.”

The sky was grey and dull, but the sea was flat enough. The town and the harbour shrank away from us, merging into the low dark ridge of the coast. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact spot where Robin had been found, but it wouldn’t have been far from here.

“Okay!” said Ed. “Left at the first star and straight on till morning.” He put his hands around my waist and pulled me against him. He was already getting hard. “Shall we go below? Or do you fancy doing it on deck?”

“In our life jackets?” I said. At his insistence, we’d both donned them.

“It’d be different, anyway,” he mused.

“Maybe,” I said, slipping out of his grasp and sashaying back towards the rail with a come-hither look. He grinned and followed me. “Actually,” I said, “I just wanted to ask you something first.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He spread his hands. “Well, then. Ask away.”

“Okay,” I said. “Why did you kill your brother?”

There was a moment that he blinked, still grinning, thinking it was a joke. Then his smile changed, became the crooked, soured thing it had been yesterday, and he went very still. The way a conger or a moray eel will, lying in its hole and waiting to strike. “What?” he said.

“Robin,” I said. “Robin York. Or Robin Gaunt, as he called himself around here.”

Ed licked his lips and his gaze strayed off to the side. I didn’t look, but I guessed there was something he thought he could use as a weapon. His eyes were uneasy, but there was a predator’s coldness in them. “How did you know?”

“His mum was called Emily, too,” I said. “He told me once.” It had been after the first time I’d slept with Robin; I’d forgotten about it until yesterday. “Twenty minutes on Google took care of the rest. Your brother vanished, didn’t he?”

“More than ten years ago,” Ed agreed, very still now, except for the slow tensing of his arms and legs. He was readying himself to leap; a moment’s inattention and he’d go for me.

“I found an old picture,” I said. “I had to look hard to see the resemblance—he didn’t have the long hair or beard in it. But that’d have been the point, right? He didn’t want to be recognised.”

Ed shook his head. “He always was difficult. Wrong.”

“Wrong? He’s not the one who killed someone.”

“He was a misfit,” said Ed. “He had so many advantages in life—advantages other men would have killed for. Dad never had them—he had to fight for everything he had. And what did Robin do? He threw it all back in Dad’s face. And then he ran away and vanished.”

“So why come and find him?” I said. “Why murder him?”

“I hadn’t heard from him in years,” said Ed. “Christ, we all thought he was dead. Dad had him declared dead, a couple of years ago. But then he wrote to me. Out of the blue.”

“What did he want?” I said. “Money?” Robin had never seemed particularly bothered about that, beyond the odds and ends he could pick up with odd jobs around town.

“Money? Oh, no. He had no interest in that, he said. Why would he? But he wanted to talk, Emily. He wanted to talk about the abuse.”

“What abuse?” But it was all falling into place. Robin had never said much about what had happened to him. There’d been stories of exploits and escapades with friends—equally wasted, of course—but nothing about his family, about wherever he and his wounds had come from.

“There was no abuse,” Ed shouted. “That’s the whole point. Dad was a good father. Stern, yes. He believed in discipline. That was all. Christ, you clip some little shit around the ear these days and it’s child abuse. He was just trying to bring us up right. To be men.”

But his eyes were full of pain, and I saw too much there. What had their childhoods held? What had Sir Richard York thought fit means to discipline his sons? Whatever it had been, it had left Robin afraid of anywhere that wasn’t his own four walls, left him starting awake at every sound in the middle of the night. And his brother? Everyone breaks in different ways, and finds different ways to deal with it. Robin’s had been to run and hide in another life. Ed had become the damage and called it normality.

That’s one of the things that lies in the deeps, never far enough from the surface; the only real difference between the broken ones and everyone else is that the broken ones know there isn’t one.

“But here was Robin—weak, he’d always been weak, and decadent, with his drugs and his sponging—here he was, putting our father—my father—in the same category as some bloody child molester. I wouldn’t have it. I wouldn’t let that degenerate blacken his name.”

“But he didn’t want money?” I said. The wind had started rising.

“No!” snapped Ed. “I told you. No, he just wanted to talk about it.”

“To who? The press?”

“To me, that’s what he said. But it wouldn’t have ended there. He’d have kept going, till it all came out. And I couldn’t have that. I wouldn’t allow it.”

“So you came here,” I said. “And you found him—on the coast road, right?”

“Crashed out on a bench,” said Ed. “Barely knew where he was, or who he was.”

“And you got him back into town, and then on here.” I nodded at the Emily’s deck. “How did you get him to the beach? A dinghy?”

“He was out of it.” Ed had sidled towards me, a little. “Vegged out as soon as I got him on the boat. He only came round at the end.”

He’d gone pale, with a greasy sheen of sweat. His eyes didn’t quite seem to see me. He didn’t look warm anymore, or kind. There are places in your head that have no room for those things. “I was going to hit him with something. Stab him, then put him over the side. But I couldn’t. Too… final. But I couldn’t let him go on. He’d…” Ed focused on me, and his eyes were almost pleading. “Dad dying, you see, it had brought everything back to him. That’s why he’d started talking about it, and if he wasn’t made to shut up he’d have told someone else, and it would have got out, and…” He gestured helplessly. “I couldn’t have that.”

And I did understand. You do whatever it takes to cope with the damage. And if anything threatens your coping mechanism, your safety, your sanctuary, you do whatever it takes to protect it.

“So you got him on the beach and cuffed him to the pipe.” Clive had been half right, then. Robin’s death had been the work of someone without the resolve to commit the act themselves, so they’d snapped on the cuffs and let the tide do the work. He’d only been wrong about who.

“He was unconscious,” said Ed. He was shaking. A single tear ran down his cheek. “He didn’t wake up. I didn’t hear anything. I didn’t hear anything.”

He said it again, and then again. I wondered how many times he thought he’d have to before he believed it.

I thought at first that that was it: something else had finally broken, and he had nothing left to say or do. I’d wondered at first why he’d stuck around—why not leave once the job was done?—but it wasn’t hard to understand. If anyone had ever worked out who Robin really was, his long-lost brother spending a few days on this beautiful bit of the coast would probably rouse less suspicion than if he’d popped in and out of the harbour on the day of Robin’s death.

I unzipped the pocket on my denim skirt, but as I did Ed moved, lunging for me. I kicked him under the knee and he fell with a scream that echoed across the whitecaps on the bay. I make a point of always ordering boots with steel toecaps. They’re more weight to drag around, but if you ever need to defend yourself they’re a big help.

Before he could get up, I took the cuffs out of my pocket. They’d belonged to an old—and slightly kinky—boyfriend, but they were police issue. I snapped one around Ed’s left wrist, looped the chain around one of the iron railings on the deck and snapped the other bracelet shut around his right.

“What the fuck?” he shouted. He leapt up, or tried to, and I stepped back as he jerked and yanked at the chain. When I was sure the rail wasn’t going to give, I walked back along the deck, to a small box at the base of the railings. I guessed that was where he’d been looking towards before. Inside were a flare pistol and a couple of distress flares. I loaded the pistol, pocketed the spare, then went into the Emily’s wheelhouse and pointed her prow out to sea, before pushing the engines to full power.

“What the hell are you doing?” screamed Ed.

I ignored him and his frantic yanking at the chain, then went belowdecks and opened the seacocks. As water started flooding into the yacht, I went back up top, the flare gun cocked and ready just in case he’d got loose.

He hadn’t. He was slumped on his knees, red-faced and exhausted. “What are you doing?” he said. “What?”

The boat was already wallowing. Water splashed over the decks. “Justice,” I said, then pointed the flare gun skyward and fired. The distress flare streaked up. I reloaded and fired the other one, too, then climbed over the rail. “Oh, and by the way,” I said, “your brother was a better shag.”

He started screaming when I went over the side. I struck away from the Emily, watching as she surged forward and went under, her own screws driving her down. Into the deeps. Ed seemed to scream for quite some time before he choked and gargled into silence.

Reluctantly, because I hated to lose them and replacements would be hard to come by around here, I kicked off my boots, feeling lighter as they sank. Out towards the coast, a flare burst in the sky. The lifeboat was on its way.

I’d need to find Daniela as soon as I could, get the letter back and burn it. Meanwhile, as my teeth started chattering from the cold, I rehearsed what I’d tell Clive. Most of it would be true, but I’d leave out certain things—and, of course, Edmund York would be the one who’d opened the seacocks and chained himself to the railings, in a fit of remorse. But only after firing the flares from the gun he’d been aiming at me to stop me interfering.

As some old comedian used to say, all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. Robin’s death was paid for, Clive wouldn’t know anything he didn’t need to, everything would stay in its proper compartment, and life would go on.

I told you: you do whatever it takes to protect the safety you’ve found.

The grey sea heaved, capped with foam. I looked a little longer towards the place where the Emily had been, then turned and struck out towards the shore.