Page 3

Three

After leaving the police station, I followed the seafront around awhile, and then headed up the steep cobbled hill and along the country lanes that led farther inland. The smell of wild garlic hung in the air above the hedgerows, and the quiet was interrupted only occasionally by one of the few cars that traveled this back road.

Eventually I reached a cul-de-sac that ran a short distance into the woods. There were seven detached properties spread out along it. Three on one side; three on the other. The property at the far end was a wide, two-story log cabin, facing down the road with its back to the woods behind.

My father’s house.

I stopped at the end of the driveway and looked up at the peaked roof of the converted attic. That had been my bedroom as a child, and I still slept there on my occasional trips to the island. The last time had been a few months ago, in May, because however much I hated returning here, I always made an effort to see my father on his birthday.

As usual, I had bought him a book as a present. In his older age, my father had become an avid reader. Mysteries and crime thrillers; he loved those. Not because they reminded him of his career in the police, but because they deviated from it. The stories were exciting and full of incident, the bad guy got caught at the end and justice was served. Real life was rarely that eventful. When it was, almost never so simple and satisfying.

The first thing I did when I was inside was make my way up to the attic, turning a few lights on as I went. I put my bag down on the single bed and looked around. The room had clearly been made up since my last visit, presumably in expectation of my return at some point.

Which forced the question:

How long had you been planning to do it, Dad?

Not a useful question right now, I decided.

Back down one floor, I let myself into his room.

After my mother left, my father spent the next summer knocking through three rooms on one side here, converting them into a single space that stretched the entire length of the property. At one end were his bed, wardrobes, and drawers. At the opposite end, his desk and shelves. In between was a rudimentary exercise area, with weights racked by one wall and a heavy leather bag hanging down on a chain from the ceiling.

When I was a teenager, he would spend whole evenings locked away in here, and the sounds I heard from behind the closed door had seemed to define the parameters of his life back then. Typing awkwardly on the computer. A monotonous thudding. And silence.

I walked over to the bag now and gave it a gentle push.

The chain creaked softly.

Finally, I moved over to my father’s desk. The built-in shelves on the wall above housed his records: years of paperwork stored away in weathered ring binders and box files. Everyday police work on the island was dull, and at some point after I left for university, my father had channeled his energy into researching unsolved cases he found online.

Exciting, high-profile crimes.

I had no idea what he expected to achieve. A few years ago, on one of my visits back to the island, I’d asked him what he imagined he could find that all the more experienced investigators involved at the time had missed.

What did he bring to the table?

Brute force , he told me .

I’d rolled my eyes at that, and made some flippant comment about how he just wanted to be like the characters in the books he read. I didn’t mean it badly—just a casual joke—but I remembered him looking at me strangely for a moment, and that I had regretted saying it. Then he’d laughed gently, and everything had been fine. But he’d never brought it up again after that.

There was a desktop computer and printer on the desk.

There was also a single sheet of paper. I picked it up and turned it over: a printed photograph. The resolution was poor, but decent enough for me to see that it was an image of my father, standing on a footpath in the woods with something in the undergrowth at his feet. The quality made it impossible to see what that was, but my attention focused naturally on my father. He was looking toward the camera, the expression on his face lost to blur. As I stared at the image, it was hard not to imagine that he was dissolving before me. That the photograph was developing in reverse before my eyes, becoming ever more faded and indistinct, until soon nothing would remain.

I blinked.

Then I headed downstairs.

The living room appeared undisturbed. My father had always been fastidiously tidy. He used to tell me that everything had a place in which it lived and, as far as I could tell, everything was living there now. The rows of books; the paperwork stored neatly on the shelf beneath the glass coffee table; the remote control in its place beside the television.

I knelt down and rubbed the carpet. It was freshly vacuumed.

The coffee table had been wiped clean recently.

I walked through to the kitchen. Again, everything was spotless. One by one, I opened the cabinets and drawers, finding plates and cups and cutlery that had been stored away carefully. A full jar of coffee sat next to the kettle on the counter. Beside it, there was a rack of herbs and spices, the bottles all turned so that their labels faced out.

The fridge was humming gently. I opened it and found it half full. My father cooked all his meals from scratch and shopped weekly. There was enough food here for at least three or four meals. He wouldn’t have bought anything he wasn’t planning to use, which suggested that, even just a few days ago, he had been anticipating that he would be here, standing where I was right now.

And then something had changed.

But what?

The question made me feel helpless. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, beyond that there should have been something here to help make sense of what had happened. Some clue as to his state of mind. And yet I could see no obvious indication of disorder or distress. Quite the opposite, in fact. The house had the feeling of a home whose owner had simply stepped out for a time.

I unlocked the back door and stepped out onto the decking.

Night had fallen now, and the long garden ahead of me was black, the hedge at the far end lost in darkness. To my right, two lounge chairs and a table were set out on the patio. During my last visit, on his birthday, the two of us had sat there drinking. It was always nice out back on an evening, especially in spring. Everything was quiet, and the air smelled of the woods beyond the hedge.

I had got through more bottles of beer than he had that night, but I remembered him chuckling, and there being a little sparkle in his eyes. He had been at least a little bit drunk. What had we talked about? I wasn’t sure. Probably nothing much. Our relationship had become easier over the years, and the silences between us more comfortable. It was as though we’d both accepted that some of the doors between us were always going to stay closed, but that we could work well enough with the open spaces that we did share.

He’d seemed content .

I was sure of that much.

And yet, a couple of days ago, he had left this house, locked the door behind him, and then driven out to the Reach and done the unthinkable.

What had been going through his mind? It was a question that occupied me in my work, and I was usually good at explaining and predicting behavior. Making sense of things. But there was no case file to work with here, and no longer any patient to talk to.

I tried to picture my father alone in the car on that final journey. Had he been scared? Was he crying? Did he doubt himself in those last few moments or did he act swiftly—decision made—and step easily off the edge?

I would never know.

Why didn’t you talk to me, Dad?

The question tightened my throat.

Regardless of the difficulties we’d had in the past, I had imagined our relationship had settled into one in which he would have felt able to share whatever pain he was facing. It broke my heart to realize that had not been true. For some reason, the weight he always prided himself on bearing had become too heavy for him, and he had kept that from me.

In his final moments, my father must have felt utterly alone.

Ever since the phone call yesterday, I’d been keeping my emotions shut away. I had been detached; I had been calm . They had become watchwords for me over the years, because I knew that emotions could be dangerous, and that it was safer to keep the world at arm’s length. But now—alone in the dark and silent garden—I finally allowed a door inside me to open. Just a crack. But still enough for the feelings I kept so carefully under control to come flooding out.

And with nobody around to see, I knelt down on the decking and sobbed.

There was food in the fridge, but it felt too soon to use the kitchen, as though the house itself should be allowed a period of mourning. After I’d pulled myself together and washed my face, I walked back down to the seafront.

I sat down on a bench by the water with a carton of fish and chips. The night was cool and the food steamed in the air as I ate. The lights of a few boats were scattered out in the dark water, but none of them would be coastguard vessels. Assuming they were even still out at this hour, they would be combing the coastline to the north. If my father’s body was going to wash up anywhere, it would be there. But the island’s tides were capricious; the sea here kept hold of things. The reality was that my father’s body might never be found, and I knew that I had to prepare myself for that .

I wiped my hands with a napkin and put the rubbish in a nearby bin.

The silence that I knew would be waiting back at the house for me felt forbidding, and so I walked along the seafront for a time. There were pubs here, but the laughter from behind the clouded glass windows pushed me away. These weren’t places to drink alone; if you went in by yourself, you wouldn’t stay that way for long. I had no desire to encounter someone I half remembered from my childhood here. What I wanted, I realized, was more of a liminal space. Somewhere I could exist out of time and space for a while, and in which everyone else there had made a silent pact to do the same.

I headed round into an even more run-down stretch of the village. Most of the buildings were long boarded up, but eventually I heard the sound of music, and then saw soft light falling out of the open doorway of a bar ahead. The front was painted a dull blue color, with two dirty windows occluded behind metal grilles. Old cigarette ends lay scattered beneath a broken bin hanging half off the wall. The music coming from inside was karaoke: a woman singing a surprisingly respectable rendition of “Raspberry Beret.”

I walked in.

The bar looked rough from the street, but while it had clearly seen better days, there was no underlying sense of threat. It was a long, narrow room, with a bar running the length of one wall and small tables with weathered stools crammed in against the other. There were maybe ten people inside, all elderly and sitting alone. I glanced to my right. The woman with the microphone was facing away from me, but the wording on the back of her shirt suggested she was one of the barmaids, keeping herself amused while the place was quiet.

Another woman was serving behind the bar. I bought a beer and sat down at one of the rickety stools there, swallowing the first mouthful of cheap lager quickly. And then the second. Because suddenly, the thought of getting a little bit drunk tonight was very far from the worst idea in the world.

The song finished, and there was a smattering of applause from the bar’s patrons. I joined in, for what it was worth. The woman might not have been the best singer in the world, but at least she’d given it her all, and that always counted for something.

She punched the air happily.

“Thank you, Cleveland!”

Then she turned around.

And I felt my heart drop.

She was older than the image I had of her in my head. Of course she was. But even after all these years, I recognized her.

And she recognized me right back.

Sarah stared at me for a long moment. Then she blinked quickly and looked away. She lifted the gate on the bar and approached the woman serving there.

“Fiona,” she said. “Can you cover for me for a bit?”