BLIND SPOT - AND TWO OTHERS

BLIND SPOT PART 5

16

  There are streets in Oxmarket that could be in the suburbs of any English town. Built just before the war, covered with pebble dash, bright new conservatories, and paved driveways, sheltered from the wind by rows of Leyland. You would never have known you were on the most easterly part of the Suffolk coast, except for the occasional boat parked on a trailer in a front garden.

  The road stretched out interminably and my feet slapped heavily along the surface. A car drove by with undipped headlights, dazzling me and splashing water from puddles over my jeans.

  Kimberley had gone back to the flat. She had an early start in the morning, so I went searching for Old Danny on my own. I had considered walking Charlie, but he looked disinterested at my suggestion, so I started to jog along the unlit street, where the road ran along the shoreline. On my left there were houses with lights glowing through drawn curtains, smoke rising out of chimneys, on my right the dark, lapping water. The tide was nearly up now. I could hear little waves rattling against the shingle.

  I pushed open the door of the Malt and Hops, squinting in the brightness. People lifted their heads to stare at me, but I ignored them and gazed around, trying to see Old Danny.

  “Looking for someone special, mate?” called a voice from a corner. There was a splutter of laughter around him.

  “Old Danny,” I said.

  “Try the Bull and Butcher.”

  I backed out and faced the North Sea. I could see the lights of the harbour to my right and opposite me was the army range, empty silent and bare.

  I walked briskly down the road to Osborne’s Yard, where old boats were turned belly-up beneath rotting tarpaulins, and rusting trailers stood in a skeletal line along the fence. Past Julie’s Place, with its sign flapping in the wind, and into the Bull and Butcher. It was smaller and dingier than the Malt and Hops, cracked orange lights draped round the bar and an ancient dog lying in front of the fire place. Old Danny wasn’t in the front room. I went to the back, where four youths with shaved heads and tattoos on their bare arms were playing pool and asked if they’d seen him.

  “Who?”

  “Old Danny.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “He’s like the old man of the sea.”

  “I know him,” one of them said, “but he hasn’t been in tonight.”

  “Thanks,” I said miserably.

  I stood outside in the icy darkness and decided to visit Old Danny at his home in the morning. I turned and walked along the seafront, past the old restaurant once more, past Osborne’s yard and the boatyard, where the massed shapes of boats drawn up for the winter stood.

  Everything that was familiar now looked strange. The moon was low in the dark sky and I could see the first scattering of diluted stars above the inky, shifting water. I loved Oxmarket at night: the silence, the slap and murmur of water, the smell of salt and mud, the chime of halliards and the forlorn cry of birds.

  I rounded the corner and eventually came to the front door of my flat. In the gloom, I fumbled the key into the lock, and as I pulled the door open Charlie shot forward and banged into my legs, nearly bringing me to my knees. His pink tongue slavered at my hands, and he jumped, putting his paws on my chest, all smelly fur and hot mouth and shining eyes. I knew he would have been fed but judging by Charlie’s behaviour you never would have guessed. He always behaved as if he was hungry. If food were put in front of him, he would always eat it. If any food of any description that was accessible to him, and there was no one in the room to restrain him, he would eat that too. We had lost entire meals to him. On my last birthday he had eaten half of the cake that Kimberley had made especially for the occasion. I might as well give him something.

  I picked up his feeding bowl, and he started quivering and pirouetting, giving a strangled excited yowl. I flung a handful of dried dog food into the bowl and put it down for him. He ate the contents in a few seconds. I filled the bowl with cold water, and he drank that with a huge lapse of his pink tongue.

  I plugged my phone into the charger and a little digital plug on the screen winked at me. I poured myself a glass of milk and sat on one of the kitchen stools and shut my eyes, pressing my fingers to my temples, trying to think. Ideas, fragments of thoughts, bounced around in my head, splintered against my skull.

 Something then crept into my brain, a tiny wisp, like fog. What?

  Think. Think.

  A bell rings. A rope breaks. A man dies.

  My frustration was almost unbearable.

  I looked at my watch.

  It was half past ten. A strange time to go for a walk I had to admit, but that was exactly what I did. I took the torch but was not intending to use it unless absolutely necessary. I wanted to experience what Simon Nunn experienced with his limited vision. To walk in a world almost reduced to darkness.

  Fortunately, it was, as my father would have said, as black as Newgate’s Knocker. The icy heavy driving rain reduced what little visibility there was too just nothing at all. The only way to locate anything was either to walk into it or to fall over it. Normally, as long as you kept to the coastal path (the route I was taking) it would have been only an easy Sunday afternoon stroll for a fairly active octogenarian. I was no octogenarian though I felt like one, but then this wasn’t a Sunday afternoon.

  My only guides were the wind-lashed rain and the lie of the land. Simon Nunn always headed east, the near-gale force wind was almost due west, so as long as I kept the cold stinging rain on the back of the neck I’d be approximately heading in the same direction.

  Initially, I would have felt as if I were floating in outer space, had it not been for the soggy grass through my shoes and the wind and rain off the sea that I could feel against my skin. The sound of the bell, when it came, was so brief and faint that I thought I might have imagined it. But no, there it was, again, sometimes nearer, sometimes further, obscured by the sound of the sea and the wind, sometimes barely audible but always returning. It was real.

  Rather than use the torch that I had brought, I picked up a broken branch I’d tripped over and held it in front of me. Around me was rough grass but that was all I could feel of my surroundings, one wrong step to the right and I could be falling down the cliff and to my death.

  I heard the bell again, faint, and intermittent at first then gradually swelling in strength. For a moment, I contemplated using a torch, so I could see exactly where I was, but that would have defeated the object of me being out on this godforsaken night and shoved the torch back into my pocket.

  Almost immediately I regretted that decision, as the ground gave way beneath my feet and I fell. I braced myself, arms outstretched, for the impact, but my reaching hands found nothing. No impact. I kept on falling, rolling, and twisting down a slope, with nothing to stop my progress. I rolled and bumped over a sudden horizontal grassy bank and landed on my back in soft wet sand. Even while I was whopping and gasping and trying to get my fortunate fact that kind of providence and a few million years had changed the jagged rocks that must have fringed that part of the shore into a nice soft yielding sandy beach.

  I got to my feet. I estimated that I was about a hundred metres away from where Simon Nunn’s body had been found. I couldn’t be certain, I could hardly make anything out. Black on black. Depth on depth. Here, I used my torch and its frail beam skewed on the small inky waves and then illuminated a dim puddle of light on the white sand in front of me. All I could hear was the steady, rumbling wash of the sea beside me and the fretful moan of the wind and the rain.

  I stood there, rummaging through my memory as further up the beach, under the crumbling cliffs where stunted trees leaned out with exposed roots waving helplessly in the air, the sea was starting to recede at last, sucking at the thick, bubbling mud, lapping at driftwood, rubbish, and sharp stones. Tomorrow, the winter light would return all of this to a landscape I knew: the placid blue-green sea, the shingle and sand where wading birds would lift their long legs in the shallows.

  I stared at the sea, making myself look back to those awful days after Zoë had died, wandering the remote coastal paths of Oxmarket, those walks in the stinging northerly gales when I hadn’t known whether the tears were of grief and anger or just the wind. The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. I had felt the living man behind his work at Cobra Mist, and my conversations with Kimberley and Jodi West, but now looking and standing on the last thing he had had ever seen, I felt strangely close to him. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What I lacked was proof.

  I thought and remembered and suddenly, I knew and with that, I realized everything and saw with utter clarity what I must do.

17

  Next morning, I drove along the narrow coast road, through the gloom of gathering storm clouds. Snow poles lined the road and the hills folded around them, swooping, and soaring on all sides, peaks lost in clouds that tumbled down the scree slopes like lava.

  The huge single wiper of my Peugeot 107 could barely handle the rain that blew across the windscreen obscuring the road ahead. Sheep huddled in silent groups at the roadside, picking desultorily at the thin patches of grass and heather that somehow survived among the rocks.

  The road skirted past a tiny clutch of houses that was sheltered from the prevailing westerlies, where the water was an almost unbroken mass of foaming white, big white capped rollers marching westwards across the darkened North Sea, long creamy lines of spume torn from the wave-tops veining the troughs between. There wasn’t a single craft in sight, even the local fishermen had stayed at home, and it was as bad as that.

  As I reached the brow of the hill, the landscape changed again. Granite rock broke up green-covered hills that swooped down in folds and gullies through a wash of pale spring sunlight to the golden sand and turquoise sea. The storm-gripped, glowering cliffs of the north had receded unattainable and mind, and their spirits lifted.

  The road circumnavigated the beach, curving around a length of causeway, towards the collection of houses and crofts that made up the tiny community of Ox upland Parva. I turned right on to a narrow road and followed the pothole-pitted tarmac until I came across a house with smoke coming from its chimney and beside it a boat shed. The smoke meant an inhabitant, at least one inhabitant and however he earned his living he certainly didn’t do it from tilling the good earth. So, he would have a boat, a boat for fishing for his livelihood. I parked my car twenty yards from the shed.

  I rounded the corner of the boat-house and stopped abruptly. I always stop abruptly when I’m struck in the stomach by a battering-ram. After a few minutes, I managed to whoop enough air into my lungs to let me straighten up again.

  It wasn’t a battering-ram that Old Danny had used on me, it was a gun. None of your fancy pistols, just a good old-fashioned double-barrelled twelve-bore shotgun. The kind of weapon that at close range – six inches in this case – would blow your head off. He had it aimed at my right eye. It was like staring down the Dartford Tunnel. When he spoke, I could see he’d missed out on all those books that laud the unfailing courtesy of the locals.

  “And who the f**k are you?” He snarled.

  “My name’s John Handful. Put that gun away. I -”

  “And what the f**k do you want here?”

  “How about the friendlier approach?” I said. “You normally see it everywhere round here.”

  “I won’t ask again, mister.”

  “I’ve come to ask you a favour.”

  “A favour?” He lowered the gun till it pointed at my stomach, maybe because he thought it would be more effective there or make for a less messy job when it came to bury me.

I nodded to the gun. “Are you expecting me to tell you while you’re pointing that at me?”

“You can expect what you like, but I don’t like strangers and old Danny Mountfitchet protects his own.”

“And an excellent job you make of it as well,” I said approvingly. The gun moved and I said quickly. “Can we go and talk inside?”

“Why?” He said. “I could still blow your head off, you know?”

“I doubt that,” I told him. “Guns used to be my business, and you’ve left the safety catch in the ‘On’ position.”

Old Danny’s face showed how out of his depth he was in this situation, and he wasn’t as good at concealing his expression as I was.

“This way.” He said eventually.

I followed him round to the front of the house and I had to admit some people built their homes in the damnedest places. If I’d been compelled to build a home I’d have been hard put to it to make a choice. Old Danny’s house was built out near the tip of a foreland, several wicked reefs that made a natural breakwater, an even more wicked-looking entrance through the reefs and two small boats rolling wildly at anchor inside the reefs.

  He eased open the well-oiled door and turned on the light. I had to admit that my dear old mum wouldn’t have been too chuffed at the wallpaper used on three out of four of the walls. One entire wall was given up to food supplies, a miserable couple of dozen crates of whisky and score upon scores of crates of beers. Another two walls were devoted to a form of art, in uninhibited detail of a type not usually to be found in the better-class museums and art galleries. Not my mother’s cup of tea at all. But the third wall was lime-washed and the embers of a driftwood fire were smouldering in an ingle-nook.

  Old Danny hung the twelve-bore on a couple of nails on the wall and then sank in one of the cane bottomed chairs and gestured to me to do the same. He sat in silence, his head bent, staring into the dull red heart of the fire. For a few moments he had had the look of a man who was staring into a dying fire because that was all that was left in the world for him to do.

  “Do you like my little hot bed of culture collection?” He said suddenly. “Don’t you think the one with the ear-rings looks indecently overdressed?”

  “You must have scoured the great galleries of the world,” I said reverently.

  “I’m no connoisseur. Renoir and Matisse are my cup of tea.” It was so unlikely that it had to be true.

  “By the way, I noticed you didn’t have the safety catch on,” I admitted.

  “You don’t miss much,” he acknowledged. “But there were no cartridges in the gun.”

  “Thank god, for that,” I exclaimed.

  “So, how can I help you?” The old bloodshot eyes had a gleam to them.

  In for a penny, in for a pound. This man would grant his co-operation for nothing less than the truth. And I knew he was a man whose co-operation I desperately needed. So, I took a deep breath and told him exactly what I was and wanted from him. I left out the in essentials, but not one of the essentials and Old Danny got not only the truth but the whole truth.

  When I had finished he stared sightlessly into the fire, his voice the sunken whisper of a man who is just thinking aloud and hardly aware that he is speaking. “Well, if that isn’t the damnedest story I’ve ever heard.” His forehead wrinkled as if he suddenly realized that I brought a new dimension in his life. “You’re a private detective, you say?”

  I nodded. There were stirrings of life in him now, life in his face and in his eyes. He stared at me for a full minute, and I was beginning to feel uncomfortable under the gaze of those faded eyes.

  “When you want to go?”

  I thought of the maelstrom of white breakers outside the mouth of the alleged harbour. I said. “Will it be too dangerous to go out now?”

  “Of course not,” he laughed. “I’ve been out in a lot worse than this. It’s a fine fresh morning. You couldn’t ask for better. I’ve taken out the Lovelace, six o’clock on a black January evening, into a full gale. For trips like this Old Danny Mountfitchet, is definitely your man.”

  I said no more. It was obviously going to be a great comfort to have Old Danny accompany me out into the North Sea.

18

  And Old Danny was undoubtedly my man. On a night like this, dark as doomsday, rain sluicing down and a thickening mist making it impossible – for me, at least – to tell the difference between a naturally breaking sea and a wave foaming over a reef, Old Danny was my man.

  He was one of those rare breeds, that very rare breed, of naturals to whom the sea is truly home. Twenty years’ daily polishing and refining in every conceivable condition a rarely bestowed gift with which you must be born in the first place and anyone can be like this.

  His huge hands on throttle and wheel had the delicacy of a moth. He obviously had the night-sight of a barn owl and an ear which could infallibly distinguish between waves breaking in the open sea, on reefs or on shores: he could invariably tell the size and direction of the seas coming at him out of the darkness and mist and touch wheel or throttle as need to be: he had an inbuilt computer which provided instant correlation of wind, tide and current and our speed and always let him know exactly where he was. And I’ll swear he could smell land, even on a lee shore and although I was suffering olfactory paralysis from the fumes of the strong cigars which seemed to be an inseparable part of the man, it required only ten minutes beside him to realize that one’s ignorance of the sea and ships was almost total. A chastening discovery.

  He took his boat the Lovelace past the interlocking concrete fingers that made up the breakwater and out of Oxmarket’s harbour entrance under full throttle. Foaming white-fanged reefs reached out at us, barely feet away, on either side. He didn’t seem to notice them. He certainly didn’t look at them.

  He just yawned prodigiously as we headed out to sea, facing into a huge swell, waves breaking over the bow to pour in foaming rivers across the deck. It seemed no time at all until the comforting sight of Oxmarket was swallowed by the mid-morning light as we yawed and pitched into the open seas. The last thing to vanish was the comforting sight of the red and white striped lighthouse on the Headland and when that was gone there was only the North Sea.

  My jacket was already soaked through, as I climbed slippery rusted steps to the upper deck and made my way along the narrow walkway to the bow of the boat. I was gazing out across the vast expanse that lay ahead, oblivious to the sky above, which was torn and shredded by the wind and periodically obscured by the squally showers of fine rain that blew in my face.

  “Onehouse Island!” Old Danny, shouted from the wheelhouse, puffing thoughtfully on the stump of his noxious smelling cigar.

  I didn’t need telling. I had spent a weekend at the luxury hotel on the island with Kimberley, solving the mysterious death of my former brother-in-law, Ian Hammond. Three hundred feet of sheer black cliff streaked with white, rose out of the sea. Almost in that same moment, as the mist cleared, splinters of sunlight fell through the fissures in the cloud and the glistening rock was thrown into an instant projection contrasting light and shade. I saw what looked like snow blowing in a steady stream from the peak before I realized that the snowflakes were birds. Fabulous white birds with blue-black wing tips and yellow heads, a wingspan of nearly two metres. Gannets. Thousands of them, filling the sky, turning in the light, riding turbulent currents of air.

  Onehouse Island lay along a line that ran approximately south-east to north-west. The towering spine of rock dropped from its highest point in the south to a bleached curve of two-hundred-foot cliffs at the north end, prevailing weather of lashing gales and monstrous seas that rose out of the south-west to smash upon its stubborn coarse-grained metamorphic rock. Three promontories on its west side jutted into the sea, water breaking white and foaming furiously in rings all around as they dipped down into undersea ravines.

  Old Danny steered the Lovelace gently away from the island and out into open water. The further we got away from the up-surging maelstrom I became aware of the noise of the birds, a deafening cacophony of screeching, calling, chattering creatures that filled the air.

  As I looked back at the island on every ledge and stack and crack in the rock birds sat in nests or huddled in groups: gannets and guillemots and kittiwakes and fulmar petrels.  All around us was alive with young shags, their long snake like necks dipping in and out of the water searching for fish.

  I held on to the white-painted rail and watched as Onehouse Island receded behind us. Incongruously, the sun had slipped beneath the line of cloud in the west, sending out its light to illuminate the contours of the island against the blue-black sky behind it. Before suddenly it was gone, and the island was swallowed by the rain and mist.

  I remained on the foredeck, watching how the boat carved a green channel that fanned out in our wake, rising, and falling among the waves. My feet were planted wide, managing somehow to move my body to the rhythm of the boat and stay balanced.

  Old Danny sounded the horn as the Lovelace slipped into the swirling grey. I could feel the wetness on my face until finally the faintest shadow emerged from its gloom. The merest smudge on a lost horizon, eerie and eternal, like the ghost of Simon Nunn’s past coming back to haunt me.

  As the rogue buoy took gradual shape in the mist, I remain amazed still until now, how Old Danny had located it in the rain and the fog. It was something that would have been for ever beyond me. It was as if he had used the most modern radar or search and rescue equipment. He went into reverse, brought the bows, plunging heavily in the deep troughs, to within two feet of the buoy, waited till I picked my moment before grabbing it with a long pole with a hook on the end.

  The buoy bumped unceremoniously against the side of the boat and then Old Danny was beside me and as he helped me haul the dead weight out of the sea and onto the deck of the Lovelace, I felt all the hairs stand up on the back of my neck and was almost overwhelmed by a sense of remorseful satisfaction.