Coffin Road

Chapter thirty-one

No words have passed between us during the last hour as Jon’s boat ploughs through mounting seas and the dying embers of the day. He has deferred to my superior seamanship and I am at the helm. But even I am afraid of the coming storm, for this is just the beginning of it. Only my fear for Karen is greater, and that is my single focus.

For some time now we have seen the beam of light fired out at regular intervals from the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr, piercing the gloom, reflecting on the underside of the dark, dangerous clouds that gather all around us. The Seven Hunters are shadows huddled along the horizon, intermittently obscured by the ocean swell.

Our silence is full of tension. I have given them the barest outline of the circumstance which has led me, and them, to make this journey that no sane person would undertake on such a night. They listened in grave silence, neither asking questions nor making comment. All colour and animation left Sally’s face, and I caught them once exchanging glances, a dark, troubled exchange conveying an unspoken understanding that I could not interpret.

But I have held my peace. I cannot afford to confront them with what I know before we reach the island. And they must realise that their success depends on my getting them and me there safely. They also know by now that I have my memory back, for I have told them. And so our silence preserves the pretence. But in my head a voice is screaming, and had I the means I would strike them both down, and hit them. And keep hitting. And hitting. Until I had extinguished all sound and movement and life.

We are upon the Flannans almost before I realise it, the sea breaking luminous and white all around the ragged contours of the rocks. The sound of the sea breaking over them from the south-west and the cry of the wind is very nearly deafening.

I have no choice but to turn on the spotlights mounted on our crossbar to light the way ahead. I know it means that Billy will see us coming, but without them we would founder on the rocks.

From the merest shadows fifteen minutes ago, the Seven Hunters have risen above us now, as if they have somehow pushed up out of the sea, crowding around us, overlapping, dangerously obscure as I try to navigate between them. There is the merest lull in the force of the storm as we slip into the lee of Eilean Tighe, and I keep a wary eye on Gealtaire Beag, away to our starboard side. But then the sea gathers momentum and anger again as it rushes through the gap between the two Làmhs, and I try to hold a course for the south-east side of Eilean Mòr and the more sheltered of the two landing sites.

Finally, our lights pick out the shell-crusted steps cut so steeply into the side of the cliff, and the sea breaking ferociously around them as they vanish into the depths below. We see Billy’s boat, anchored in the bay, rising and falling dangerously on the swell. And his inflatable, dragged up the steps and on to the broken concrete quay, where he has secured it to the great rusted ring that is sunk into the rock. I get as close as I dare to his boat, then drop anchor. A glance at my companions reveals fear in their faces. They know as well as I do that this is the most dangerous moment. The transfer from boat to tender, and the attempt to reach and jump out on to the steps.

I cut the motor and clamber into the back of our boat to swing the inflatable out on its jib and lower it carefully into black waters that seem alive with rage and a determination to suck us under. As the tender comes up on the rise, I jump in and feel it fall away beneath me again as the sea drops, and I fall backwards into the bottom of it, grateful for the ropes around its smoothly inflated sides to grip and steady me as the boat rises again and water breaks over me, icy cold in the darkness.

Sally is next and, as she swings herself into the tender, I grab her arm to steady her. In that moment, I remember all the times we have made love. The feel of her skin beneath my hands and against mine. Her lips. Her breath in my face. Our eyes meet, but neither of us can hold the look, each for different reasons. And then Jon is there beside us, and the two of them sit, clinging to the ropes, as I pull the starter cord and the outboard comes to life, a roar we can barely hear above the sea and the wind. I cast off and, accelerating away from our boat, turn into the swell and steer us towards the cliffs.

As we approach the steps, I swing the inflatable around at the last moment to bring us alongside, nursing the engine and the throttle to try to keep us there and prevent the sea from throwing us against them. It is not an easy thing to do, for the sea is trying its hardest to smash us all to pieces as our tender lifts ten feet or more, riding the incoming waves. I accelerate hard against its drag until we drop again, suddenly. I hear Sally scream, but we are still in one piece. Jon turns his eyes towards mine and they are black with fear. I throw him the rope and shout at the top of my voice, ‘Next time we go up, jump, then hold us steady.’

But he misses the moment. I see him brace for the leap, but he doesn’t make it, fear breeding inertia.

‘Now!’ I scream at him as the sea tosses us high again. And this time he jumps. For a moment I lose sight of him and think he has gone into the water. But as the sea recedes and we drop once more, I see him standing on the steps, ashen, the rope in his hands. Sally looks at me, panicked at the thought that she is next. I nod, and she knows she has no choice.

In the event, she makes the jump easily, grabbing Jon’s outstretched arm to set herself, and they both pull hard on the rope. This is the worst moment for me. I know I must cut the motor before jumping, and trust that the Harrisons will keep tension on the rope. If not, I will be gone, and there will be no one to protect my little girl from these people.

I see the next wave driving in and brace myself, feeling the tender lift on the crest of it. I stall the engine before leaping into space. I seem to fall through darkness for an eternity before my feet strike solid concrete and I feel Sally’s steadying hand. It takes me only a moment to get my bearings, and then all three of us are dragging the inflatable on to the steps, and pulling it up above the reach of the water, to the old concrete landing stage. I can feel salt spray stinging my eyes and the cold of this September sea seeping into my bones.

We secure it to the same ring that Billy has used to secure his, and I stand for a moment, looking out at the incoming ocean caught in the sweep of light from above. The wind is almost strong enough to knock me off my feet, and I know that with the rising tide this will all soon be under water, and the chances are that neither inflatable will survive.

Without a word, I turn and start to run up the steps. The old rusted iron handrail is deformed beyond use, ravaged by countless storms, and for the briefest of moments I find myself in the company of the lighthouse men who lost their lives here. They had trodden these same steps many times, and perhaps their ghosts still do. But Jon and Sally are not ghosts. They are flesh and blood and a threat to me and mine, and they are right behind me.

At the elbow of the dog-leg, I stop to catch my breath. The wind is even stronger up here, the beam from the lighthouse sweeping through the night above us, twice every thirty seconds, reaching twenty miles and more out to sea. I see Sally’s face and Jon’s, caught ghostly white in its reflection. None of us knows what the next few minutes will hold, and all of us, I suspect, are afraid of them.

I push on up the steps, two at a time, feeling how every muscle in my legs aches and how the breath rips itself from my lungs with every step. From the landing platform, we follow the concrete path and the rusted lines left by the old tram tracks, until we reach what they once jokingly called Clapham Junction, where the tracks from the east and west landings converge to ascend that final stretch to the lighthouse itself.

There I stop again and look up at the shadow of the lighthouse standing stark against a stormy sky almost entirely devoid now of light. It flickers and fades like some phantom in the reflected light of its revolving beam. The wind hits us here like a physical blow, and it is not possible even to speak. The outside light at the entrance to the building is switched on, drawing us like moths to our fate.

The rain drives in horizontally as we run the last few yards to the comparative shelter of the outer wall of the complex, and I feel relief in escaping the relentless wrath of the storm. I crouch down in the lee of the wall, among the wet grass and the rubble, and the Harrisons do the same, three faces turned towards each other in the colourless light of the lamp above our heads. The time for pretending is over.

I say, ‘All I want is my daughter. Safe.’

‘So do we,’ Sally says, and the look I turn on her forces her to avert her eyes.

Jon is still gasping for breath. He says, ‘All we want is the data. That’s all we ever wanted.’

‘What makes you think it’s here?’

‘Because it’s not at the cottage. Do you think we haven’t been through that bloody house a hundred times? Every time you went up the coffin road to your bees. All those nights that Sally kept you safe in your bed, asleep after sex.’ I glance at her but still she won’t meet my gaze. ‘And Billy says you were manic about it, refusing to share with him or Sam. That you were the only one with all the data. Paranoid. And just crazy enough not to keep copies in case they fell into the wrong hands.’ He looks at me with cold, hard eyes. ‘We had your computer hacked.’ He shook his head. ‘Both of them. Nothing. No data on the hard drive. And you weren’t uploading to the cloud. So you had to have some kind of hard copy. It’s here somewhere, isn’t it? All those trips backwards and forwards to the islands. That was all about keeping your data safe.’

I nod.

‘And you knew all about us, didn’t you? You knew we were watching you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Until you lost your bloody memory.’ He glares at me. ‘At first I didn’t believe it, but Sally was convinced it was real. And then we were afraid that we wouldn’t get our hands on it, because you didn’t know where it was. And who knew when you might remember? If ever.’ He turns and looks towards the door of the lighthouse. ‘You’ve hidden it in there?’

I nod again. ‘It’s all on a hard drive.’ And in the look I give him, I try to convey all the contempt that I feel. ‘You know what you’re doing, don’t you? All the time and money and effort that’s gone into this. Proof positive that the poison these agrochem companies are pouring on our crops is destroying the bees. And all that that means for the future of our own species. This planet. And you don’t care, because someone’s paying you a lot of money.’

‘A helluva lot of money.’

‘You fucking idiot! Maybe one day, if you ever have children, you’ll understand how you’re selling their future down the river.’

He is unmoved. He says, with a strangely quiet authority, ‘We’ll go in there, get your data, and take Billy away with us.’

But I shake my head. ‘Billy’s not going to just walk away, Jon. I saw him kill Sam that night. And he’d have killed me, too, if I hadn’t got away from him.’ I shake my head with the recollection of it. ‘I knew I was going to have to blow the whole project. Go to the police as soon as I got ashore. And I would have, if I hadn’t struck rocks trying to clear the islands in the dark. Holed the bloody boat, and knew I was never going to make it back. Don’t know how many hours I bailed her out after the engine got submerged. I don’t even remember her going down in the end. Just the thought that I was going to die out there.’

Sally’s voice cut in for the first time. Frail and uncertain. ‘But you didn’t.’

I turn withering eyes on her. ‘No. Which is why Billy came looking for me at the cottage two nights later to try and finish the job.’

Jon’s voice forces me to tear my eyes away from Sally. ‘Billy was way off script, Tom. Freelancing. The stupid little idiot must have thought he could hijack the research data himself and hold Ergo to ransom. All he was supposed to do was keep me and Sally informed, and we’d have snatched the results from you ourselves when the time came. No need for anyone to get hurt.’

‘Except me.’ I turn my head towards Sally again. ‘And I don’t mean physically. It must take quite an act of will to fake sex with someone so convincingly.’

This time she forces herself to hold my eye. ‘It wasn’t all an act, Neal.’ And speaking the name she has always used for me strikes us both, as if we have been slapped in the face. She quickly corrects herself. ‘Tom.’

‘Enough.’ Jon stands up, rising beyond the protection of the wall, and takes a step back as the full force of the wind hits him. He reaches behind him and draws a pistol from some hidden holster. His smile is dry and goes no further than his lips. ‘Don’t worry, Tom. I have a licence for it. And no intention of using it. But who knows how unstable our friend Billy Carr might be? He might require a little persuasion. And we might need a little protection.’

The grilles protecting the outer door have been prised open, and the lock on the door itself smashed. Jon opens out one half of it and slips into the yellow light that illuminates the kitchen and the corridor that leads off to the sitting room. Sally and I follow, and I pull the door shut behind us.

The sound of the storm raging outside recedes immediately, and we are enveloped by a strange hush. Like stepping through some portal that takes us to another time in another world. I become aware that all three of us are soaked to the skin and trembling with the cold.

There is no sign of life. No sound. Yet I know that Billy must have seen us coming, and that he is waiting for us somewhere in here. I only hope to God that he has Karen with him, and that she is still alive.

‘Billy!’ Jon’s voice thunders in the silence of the building.

‘We’re in the tower.’ Billy’s shout echoes down the spiral stairs from the light room above.

‘Don’t be an idiot, son. Leave the girl up there and come on down. Tom’s going to give us the hard drive and we’ll be out of here.’

But I know that they won’t. No one is leaving the island tonight. Not in this storm. And I wonder if Jon has any intention of letting Karen and me leave at all. Because hasn’t it all just gone too far by now? Ergo may never have intended causing anyone physical harm, but Sam is dead. Murdered. Billy is a loose cannon, and I am a witness. As, now, is Karen.

In focusing on the short term, in trying to save my daughter, I have not thought any further ahead than that. I have not projected possibilities into the future, played out the game in my head to visualise where it will end. And now I do. And see it clearly. Jon cannot afford for any of us to leave here alive. Not Billy, not me, not Karen. Not now. And I wonder if Sally realises it.

I glance at her pale, frightened face and find it hard to believe she is really capable of this.

Billy’s voice reverberates in the stairwell again. ‘He saw me kill Sam.’

‘That’s just your word against his. There’s no physical evidence to link you to this place. No other witnesses. And anyway, the police already think Tom did it. No point in making things worse.’

But Billy is not listening to Jon’s reason. ‘If he doesn’t want me to hurt Karen, he’d better come up. Right now.’ I can hear the hysteria creeping into his voice. His intelligence must surely be telling him that this cannot end any way but badly. But something else possesses him, something beyond intelligence, and he seems driven on a course to self-destruction. Which makes him unpredictable and dangerous.

I glance at Jon. In a low voice I tell him, ‘He’s going to kill me.’

Jon shakes his head in disagreement. ‘Not until he has his hands on the data.’

I close my eyes in desperation. No one, it seems, is thinking clearly or rationally. Except me. But I don’t know what else I can do. Billy has Karen and I have no choice but to do what he demands. With a final glance back at Sally, I start up the stairs, steadying myself with outstretched fingers on the curve of the walls.

From the stairwell, I enter through a yellow door into the circular wood-panelled room beneath the light room itself. The light is dazzling up here, as the slowly revolving beam thrown out by the lamp passes just above my head. I duck to avoid the underside of the lamp mechanism and climb the rungs of the ladder through the hatch in the grilled floor, pulling myself up and into the circle of glass whose prisms magnify the light and launch it out to sea. Briefly, irrationally, I wonder if it is reaching any ships out there in the dark, guiding them safely away from us.

Almost immediately, a revolution of the lamp blinds me, and I stagger back against the glass. It passes quickly, but leaves me nearly blind, and I blink to bring Billy and Karen into focus out of the flare of negative colour that fills my eyes. He is wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes to protect them. Karen’s hands are bound behind her, and she has a pillow case over her head that concertinas on her shoulders. He has a hand spread across her forehead, pulling her head back, and a knife against the cloth where her throat must be. I feel a terrible empty ache inside me. I cannot imagine what I will do or how I will feel if any harm comes to her. ‘Where have you hidden the data?’

I see the lamp coming and close my eyes this time until it has passed. ‘What makes you think there’s not a copy?’

He just laughs. ‘Because you’re too fucking paranoid, Professor Fleming.’ A mocking parody of how he addressed me at the Geddes. ‘If there’s one copy, and you have it, there’s not the slightest danger of anyone else getting their hands on it. Unless, of course, you give it to them.’

I shut my eyes again, but even so, the light burns through my lids.

And still Billy wants to talk. ‘All the data that Sam and I collected so faithfully every week. Sent to you. Never shared. All the samples we sent to the lab, results returned only to you. So nobody else, nobody, could put it all together. Except you. And the statistician. Whoever he might be.’ A sneering little laugh. ‘Just one more thing you kept from us. Playing God. Forgetting that it was me — me — who discovered it all in the first place. Not you. Me. And who was going to get all the credit?’ He waves a finger of admonition at me. ‘Not right, Professor Fleming. Not right at all.’

I shut my eyes against the glare one more time, and feel someone at my side. I open my eyes, still in the blaze of light from the lamp, and even before I can shout, ‘No!’ I hear the shot. Deafening in the confines of the light room. I see Billy step back, the glass behind him red with his blood, the light fired from the lamp off into the night turning momentarily pink.

I am knocked roughly aside as Jon steps over Billy’s body, which has slumped into a sitting position against the wall, head tilted forwards, eyes closed. He whips away the cover from Karen’s head and I see her blinking frantically in the sudden, blinding blaze of light. Her mouth is taped over and, as her pupils contract, I see her terror.

I want to throw myself at Jon, but he holds her upper arm and pushes his gun against her temple.

‘This was never going to work.’ He has, it seems, lost all patience. ‘I want the data. Now!’ His voice reverberates around the light room almost as loudly as his gunshot of moments earlier.

I nod. ‘It’s downstairs.’

I am strangely calm as I kneel on the floor with the screwdriver that I have recovered from its hiding place in the kitchen. Above me, set into the wall, are the coat hooks where the men who tended this lighthouse once hung their waterproofs. Their boots would have stood where I now kneel. One of them, in contravention of all the rules, had left his coat hanging here on the night that Ducat, Marshall and McArthur disappeared in a storm just like this one.

One by one, I remove the screws that hold the wood panelling in place below the hooks, and start lifting away the panels. Jon stands over me with his gun, Sally just a few paces behind us in the corridor, holding Karen firmly by the shoulders.

Jon says, ‘How the hell did you ever get keys for this place?’ I chuckle, though there is really nothing to laugh about. It is the irony, I suppose. ‘The first summer I was here, I landed one day to find that the Lighthouse Board had sent in decorators to paint the place. Everything was opened up. The guys were okay with me taking a look around and we got chatting. The forecast was good, and they expected to be here for a few days. So I spun them the story about writing a book and said I would probably be back tomorrow. And I was. Only this time with a pack of Blu-tack. When they were having their lunch, I took the keys from the inner and outer doors and made impressions. Dead simple. Had keys cut, and access to the place whenever I wanted thereafter.’

The final panel falls away in my hands, and I reach in to retrieve a black plastic bag. I hand it up to Jon, and he peels back the plastic to look inside. As I stand up, I lift one of the wooden panels. I know that this is the one chance I will get, while he is distracted, and I swing the panel at his head as hard as I can.

The force with which it hits him sends a judder back up my arms to my shoulders, and I actually hear it snap. He falls to his knees, dropping the hard drive, and his gun skids away across the floor.

Sally is so startled, she barely has time to move before I punch her hard in the face. I feel teeth breaking beneath the force of my knuckles, behind lips I once kissed with tenderness and lust. Blood bubbles at her mouth.

I grab Karen by the arm and hustle her fast down the corridor, kicking open the door and dragging her out into the night. The storm hits us with a force that assails all the senses. The wind is deafening, driving stinging rain horizontally into our faces. The cold wraps icy fingers around us, instantly numbing.

Beyond the protection of the walls, it is worse, and I find it nearly impossible to keep my feet as I pull my daughter off into the dark. Only the relentless turning of the lamp in the light room above us provides any illumination.

We turn right, and I know that almost immediately the island drops away into a chasm that must be two or three hundred feet deep. I can hear the ocean rushing into it. Snarling, snapping at the rocks below and sending an amplified roar almost straight up into the air.

I guide Karen away from it, half-dragging her, until we reach a small cluster of rocks and I push her flat into the ground behind them. I tear away the tape that binds her wrists, then roll her on to her back to peel away the strip of it over her mouth. She gasps, almost choking, and I feel her body next to mine, racked by sobs, as she throws her arms around me and holds me as if she might never let go. Her lips press to my cheeks, and I feel the explosion of her breath on my face as she cries, ‘Daddy!’ One simple word that very nearly breaks my heart.

‘Baby. Baby, it’s okay. We’re going to be okay.’ I squeeze her so hard, I’m afraid I might break her.

We are, both of us, soaked through, the sodden ground beneath us stealing away the last of our body warmth. The rain is as relentless as the wind, and it feels as if it is flaying the skin from our faces.

I untangle myself from Karen and lift my head up over the rocks to look back towards the lighthouse. It is almost spectral in the strange reflected light of the beam that sweeps across the island and off out into the night. And I am just in time to see Jon and Sally run out from the protection of the outer wall. He has a torch, but its light is all but snuffed out by the blackness of the night and the ferocity of the storm. He turns it in an arc around them, searching, I imagine, for some sign of us. But he must know it is pointless. He grabs Sally’s hand and they run down the concrete path, in the tracks of trams long gone, and are swallowed by the dark. I am aware, then, of Karen’s face close to mine, watching, too.

‘You can’t just let them go,’ she says.

‘Why not?’

‘Because they’ve got the data.’

I turn, and for the first time in a long time find myself able to smile. ‘And I’ve got you. And that’s all that matters.’ I gaze off into the dark. ‘Anyway, there’s no way they will get off the island in this.’

Karen looks at me very directly, and I see myself so clearly in her blue eyes. ‘You can bet they’ll try, though.’

I struggle to my feet. ‘You wait here.’

But she grabs my hand and pulls herself up. ‘I’m not letting go of you again. Ever.’

I nod. And I don’t want to let go of her either. ‘Come on, then.’

We run, crouching into the wind, across the grass, and join the concrete path again just above Clapham Junction. We turn to our left, water flowing in spate across the concrete beneath our feet, and make our way down to the concrete platform, where the crane would have dropped its loads in days gone by. From there, a short flight of steps leads down to the concrete block where the crane itself was mounted, and we find ourselves looking on to the steps far below. I pull Karen to her knees, and we lie on the concrete, offering less resistance to the wind, easing ourselves closer to the edge of the platform, so that we are looking over it into the maelstrom beneath us.

The sea is like some wild animal, possessed, and thrashing itself in a fury against the rocks. Out in the bay it is just possible to see the two anchored boats being tossed around in waves that break across them in bursts of almost luminescent spume, threatening to engulf them completely. And I know that those anchors will not hold for long.

Two hundred feet below us, Jon and Sally try to reach the inflatables. But the sea has beaten them to it. Both tenders, still tethered to the ring, are being thrown about and smashed against the rocks. The Harrisons retreat ten or fifteen feet back up the steps, and I hear a roar so human that it sends a chill through my very soul.

‘Jesus!’ I hear Karen say. ‘Look!’

I lift my head and see a huge wall of black water thundering between the islands to our right, gaining in strength and momentum. I have heard stories from old sailors of freak waves that carry all before them, but I have never seen one like this. It must be a hundred feet high or more.

The Harrisons hear and see it too, and I watch them turn and run in panic back up the steps. But they are too late. The luminous white that has been brimming on the brink of the wave finally spills over as it crashes into the island, completely engulfing the figures below us. I feel the force of the spray lash my face.

I blink to expel the water from my eyes, and when I can see again, the wave is receding with an enormous sigh, retreating into the bay in a whirlpool of green and black and white. And Jon and Sally, and both of the inflatables, are gone. Like the three lighthouse keepers on the west landing more than a hundred years before them.

Almost immediately I hear the sound of a motor rising above the storm and see a searching beam of light that sweeps across the island. Karen and I roll on to our backs and look up to see the coastguard helicopter as it swings dangerously in the wind, dropping on to the helipad just below the lighthouse and touching down with a bump on the concrete.