For Death Comes Softly

Sixteen

Shocked and bewildered as I was, I quickly became aware of the buzz of activity in Accident and Emergency. The area was being cleared to cope with a sudden influx of casualties. All of us on the helicopter were given a medical check-up — except Eddie Brown. He had taken off again straight away back to Abri to join in the rescue operation. If I had realised what he had been planning to do I would have attempted to go with him. As it was I found myself ushered into the hospital’s relatives’ room.

There was plenty of hot sweet tea and sympathy but there could be no comfort. News seemed a long time coming through and I even wondered if it was being deliberately withheld.

I knew from my police training that both a Survivor Reception Area and a Relatives’ Centre would already have been set up, probably in hotels somewhere, and a police-run Casualties Bureau to assimilate information. There were 338 people on Abri that day — the 67 long-time island residents, all invited to the wedding, 228 other guests, the outside caterers brought in from Ilfracombe for the big occasion, the vicar from Bideford, and the members of a well known Devon jazz band, The Dave Morgan Five, over from Plymouth.

The bureau’s job would be to log, as it became available, the details of everyone involved in the disaster — those who had escaped unhurt, the injured and the degree of their injuries, and, of course, the dead.

I shuddered. It was my natural instinct to be doing something, but I knew that my best chance of learning exactly what had happened and, more importantly, who had survived and who hadn’t, would be to stay-put for as long as the hospital let me. In addition I was still wearing my wedding dress which gave a kind of eerie unreality to all that was happening.

Somebody handed me yet another cup of tea. My hand was shaking and I spilt some of it on my dress. It was strange to think that earlier in the day that would have seemed like a disaster.

Eventually a young woman constable came to tell us that two Navy rescue helicopters from RAF Chivenor were already ferrying the most seriously injured to hospitals in the area, not just the North Devon District, which could not possibly have coped alone with the magnitude of the disaster, but also the Royal Devon and Exeter at Wonford, Derriford Hospital in Plymouth, Torbay General, and the Musgrove at Taunton. The Clovelly and Appledore lifeboats were on their way to Abri, several fishing boats had offered their help, and about forty survivors, including many of the less seriously injured, had been picked up aboard a dredger which had fortuitously been at work in the Bristol Channel not far from Abri and had immediately headed for the island. The tides were right for the dredger to come into Ilfracombe and she was due to arrive there within the hour. Paramedics had been winched from a helicopter onto the dredger and were already at work. More were waiting on the quayside at Ilfracombe.

‘The survivors will be triaged on the spot there,’ said the constable.

I understood the term, which dates back to the Napoleonic Wars. I knew it meant that as well as giving what on-site emergency medical care they could the paramedics would process all the dredger’s passengers including the apparently unhurt — this involved a quick medical examination and an even quicker decision on where the survivor should be taken depending on the level of his or her injuries or shock.

The entire island was being evacuated as quickly as possible, I was not surprised to learn. Those who were fit enough were being loaded onto the Puffin which was being used as an emergency base off Abri and would not sail for the mainland until much later.

I had to find out about Robin. Good news or bad, the waiting was the worst of all.

‘Do you have any names yet?’ I asked hesitantly. Robin dominated my thinking, over-shadowed all the many deaths and injuries I knew there must have been.

Maude was sitting quietly nursing Ruth on her lap. Ruth still seemed incapable of reacting to anything. Roger was there too, a comforting arm around Maude’s shoulders, and I sensed her stiffen as I asked the question. She stood to lose two sons that day.

‘There’s this list, ma’am, but only the helicopter cases are on it so far,’ said the constable. I snatched the piece of paper from her hand and quickly scanned the names — just twenty or so of them, and all very seriously injured. Neither Robin, James, nor my mother, my nephew or his father were on the list. I did not know whether to be relieved or not.

I could feel Maude and Roger’s eyes fixed on me. I met Maude’s gaze first and shook my head. She was still holding her incongruous oversized wedding hat in her free hand. She clutched it tightly and her knuckles were white.

I turned my attention back to the constable. I knew from her form of address that she must have been told I was a DCI. I didn’t feel much like a DCI, but I was in control again, just about. My wedding dress was suddenly a liability. I didn’t reckon I could think straight until I got rid of it.

‘What’s your name, constable?’ I asked.

Mary Riley, I was told.

‘OK, Mary,’ I said. ‘What do you think are the chances of getting me some sensible clothes?’

‘I’ll do my best, ma’am,’ she said.

Her best was pretty damn good. Less than half an hour later she returned with a pair of jeans, a sweater, and even some elderly trainers which were almost the right size.

‘There’s always a store of clothes somewhere in a hospital if you know where to look,’ she responded when I congratulated her. I tried not to think about who they would have belonged to and why they were available.

I could sit and wait no longer. It wasn’t in my nature. I tried to forget that I was a bride on my wedding day, to step outside myself, to force myself to function. Immediately after having changed my clothes I promised Maude and Roger that I would return as soon as possible, and left them to their tea and sympathy. Clem’s shock was so severe that she had been admitted and heavily sedated. I went to the ward where I knew she had been taken and slipped behind the curtain surrounding her bed. She was fast asleep. Her wedding attire had been swapped for a hospital nightgown and she looked quite peaceful. I remember thinking how short-lived that peace was going to be. When she woke up the horror would envelop her again. That was how it was going to be for all of us, I feared, probably for the rest of our lives.

I kissed her forehead lightly before I left. Then I sought out the lobby area in Accident and Emergency where the ambulance had delivered us, and sat down to wait for more arrivals, trying to make myself as inconspicuous as possible. Apart from our little party, only one other helicopter had come in to the North Devon District Hospital so far, and the hospital emergency procedure was already in full swing in preparation for a much greater influx of injured people. A row of trolleys as lined up by the double doors and a group of nurses and porters — many of whom I guessed would have been off duty and had been called in to boost the hospital staff to its maximum — were hovering around making the most of the calm before the storm.

Peter Mellor and his wife were in the first ambulance I saw arrive. Karen Mellor seemed superficially uninjured but was obviously in deep shock. Peter had one arm around her, ever protective. His face was bruised and cut and his other arm looked as if it were broken, but he was on his feet and walking.

I went straight to him. I was delighted to see him relatively unharmed, nonetheless, and no doubt to my discredit, my first enquiry was not about his welfare.

‘Robin,’ I breathed. ‘Robin, have you seen him? Is he all right?’

Mellor’s eyes were wild, his voice cracked and strange. He spoke to me, but it was as if he had not heard what I had asked.

‘The earth opened up, Rose,’ he said, using my Christian name probably for the first time ever. ‘It opened up and swallowed us.’

‘Robin,’ I said again. ‘Where is Robin?’

Peter Mellor just looked at me. I wasn’t even sure that he was focusing properly.

‘There was a child, Rose,’ he said. ‘Right in front of me. A little boy. He disappeared into the ground. I tried to hold his hand, but he slipped away from me. I... I nearly went too...’

Mellor’s voice broke. He was trembling. A nurse appeared and wrapped a blanket around his shoulders.

My eyes filled with tears, although still I could not weep. I backed away, suddenly all too aware of the scale of this disaster. What if that child were Luke, I wondered, thinking at last of someone other than Robin. Clem would never get over it.

The emergency reception area began to fill. Maybe the dredger had already arrived at lifracombe. The scenes around me were heartbreaking. Even professionally I had never been at the site of a major disaster before. There had not been one in Devon, Cornwall or Somerset in my lifetime. The nearest we had ever got to it had been a crippled airliner heading for the North Devon coast which had dropped into the sea off Ireland — five minutes away from Bideford, they said.

I had been trained in emergency procedure, of course, but nothing prepares you for the reality of it. As well as the walking wounded there were the stretcher cases, and more than once a doctor shook his head and pulled a sheet over the head of a victim. I felt as if I was in a daze as I wandered among all these poor injured people, hoping to find Robin, dreading the condition I may find him in. As a policewoman I had only been used to anonymous victims before. It was hard to think that these were my wedding guests.

I lifted the sheet from a comatose figure and revealed the face of a dead woman so disfigured that even if I had known her I would not have been able to recognise her. One side of her face had been more or less sliced off and congealed blood surrounded a gaping head wound. As I stood and looked at her my whole body started to shake.

‘I don’t know who you are but you will please get out of my casualty unit,’ ordered an authoritative female voice. I turned around and faced a tall commanding-looking woman in a uniform I just about had the nuance left to realise was that of a senior nursing officer.

By this time I was only too glad to obey. I couldn’t take any more. I found myself a chair in a quiet corner of the main reception area and sat down to wait. I couldn’t face Maude and Roger again, nor Clem. Not yet. Not after what I had seen. I shut my eyes and quickly opened them again. All I could see inside my head were the terrible faces of the dead and injured, jumbled up with images of people being literally swallowed up by the earth. Many of them must have been buried alive, I knew. My shakes were almost uncontrollable now. The scale of the disaster was almost beyond my comprehension. And this had been my wedding day. It was supposed to have been the best day of my life.

Somehow or other I fell asleep, just sitting there in reception. My head was still full of terrible images, but I suppose I must have been exhausted.

I was woken sometime after dark by a voice so welcome.

‘Rose, Rose, wake up, darling...’

It seemed to take me a long time to open my eyes. For a brief wonderful moment I couldn’t quite remember where I was. Then the horror overwhelmed me again. Automatically I glanced at my watch. It was just after ten. I had been at the hospital for almost nine hours. I couldn’t quite work out where the time had gone. I couldn’t work out anything much. I felt dazed.

Julia crouched by my chair and stroked my cheek with one hand. Her eyes were very bright and there was a gauntness about her. She looked as shocked as everyone else but appeared to have escaped unscathed.

‘People have been looking for you,’ she went on, managing a half smile. ‘They wanted to take me to some bloody survivors’ centre or something, but I found out that you were here and just bloody well insisted that I was brought here too.’

I threw my arms around her neck. Julia was so wonderful. With all that she had gone through she had come to find me, she had time to think of me.

‘Thank God you’re all right,’ I said.

‘I always was a lucky reporter,’ she responded, and the tentative smile stretched into a crooked grin. Her navy blue and white wedding suit was torn and muddy. I thanked God again that that seemed to have been the only damage she had suffered. Physically at least.

‘I came into lifracombe on a trawler,’ she told me. Her voice had a tremble to it and sounded almost as if it belonged to someone else. ‘A dozen or so of us aboard, none of us with more than a scratch, it’s all inside your head though, isn’t it, Rose? You wonder if you’ll ever be able to think of anything else...’

I buried my face in her neck and felt the tears welling up again.

‘My poor Rose,’ she whispered. And yet I had not even been on the island. I had not had to run for my life as the earth opened up beneath my feet. I had not faced death nor seen it approach close enough to touch as Julia had.

I looked up at her, wondering exactly what she had seen. My relief at discovering that she was alive and well, had, for the first time even put the thought of Robin out of my head — but not for long.

My eyes formed the question. As usual Julia half-read my mind. I didn’t need to say the words.

‘He’s all right,’ she told me. ‘I’ve seen him.’

The relief washed over me, then I was overcome with shame again at my selfishness.

‘All those poor people,’ I said haltingly. ‘My nephew, my mother... are they still missing? And how many others?’

She shrugged. ‘Nobody knows how many yet,’ she said. ‘It’s still too soon.’

I could hold the tears back no longer. I wept in her arms, great heaving sobs wracked my body but brought me no relief.

‘There’s time, Rose,’ Julia soothed. ‘They are still digging. People have been...’ She paused as if searching for the right words. It became obvious with what she said next that there were no right words. I knew what she was about to say, I had been thinking about it myself, but hearing the words was still shocking. ‘People have been buried alive. But they come out alive too — sometimes...’ Her voice trailed off. We held each other very tightly.

The Puffin, carrying the last of the survivors and many of the emergency workers was on her way into Ilfracombe, we learned. Mary Riley was still on duty and able to tell me that Robin was definitely aboard. Apparently he had refused to leave the island until everybody who could be helped had first been transported to safety, or at least installed aboard the Puffin.

I could not wait at the hospital. I did not even know if he would be taken to the North Devon District. I wanted to get to the quayside at Ilfracombe, fast. Mary Riley fixed me a ride with a couple of young constables in a squad car. Strictly against procedure, but I can be very persuasive. And I was a Detective Chief Inspector.

It was almost midnight when we arrived at Ilfracombe. Several ambulances were waiting there for the Puffin to berth, and a Mobile Incident Room — a West Country Ambulances’ control van — was parked by the waterside. In spite of the hour there was quite a large crowd gathered including more press and TV.

The night was as cold as the day had been glorious. I had no coat and I was shivering as I stood on the quayside, but after waiting only for twenty minutes or so I could see the Puffin’s navigation lights approaching.

It seemed like a lifetime before they brought her alongside, and then another lifetime before I spotted Robin clearly illuminated in the bright lights which had been erected around the harbour by the emergency services. I could tell that he was holding back, waiting on the deck until all the rest of the survivors had been helped ashore. Eventually he stepped onto the quayside briskly enough. His clothes were muddy and torn and he had a nasty gash on his cheek and was supporting his right hand with his left as if it was giving him pain. Other than that he seemed unharmed — except for his mental condition.

I rushed forward, pushing to one side a police constable who misguidedly tried to stop me, and half threw myself at Robin. He did not even greet me, just stared into the middle distance, his eyes vacant. I wrapped my arms around him to try to comfort him, but it was as if he was incapable of focusing on me. He looked grey and gaunt. He did not speak.

A paramedic checked him out, carefully studied his injured hand, consulted a clipboard and decreed that Robin should be taken to the Musgrove Park Hospital at Taunton — apparently the North Devon District was already dealing with well over its quota of injured. I begged to be allowed to travel with him.

In the ambulance he remained silent. I suppose it was crazy, but I found myself wondering if he would ever speak again. I asked him about his brother, and Luke, and my mother — of whom I still had no news — and he just looked at me blankly. I told him I had left his mother safely at Barnstaple, and that she was coping well. He did not react at all to anything I said or did. I accompanied him into the emergency room and nobody tried to stop me sitting with him while they stitched up his face-wound and then set splints on two fingers which had turned out to be broken. I was not even sure if he was aware of my presence.

They said he would be kept in for twenty-four hours and gave him two pills which he meekly swallowed. Ten minutes later he was soundly into what seemed to me to be an unnaturally deep sleep.

I was alarmed and called a nurse. ‘Classic reaction to shock,’ she said. ‘Best thing for him.’

I sat by his bed all night. The hospital told me they could get me transport home, if I wished. There was no question of my going home. I wasn’t even quite sure where home was any more. Contracts were about to be exchanged on my apartment and Robin and I had been due to move directly into the new Clifton house on our return from honeymoon.

The next morning it became apparent that Robin was being hailed as a hero. I learned that it was those inside Abri Parish Church, which could seat only 100, places allocated mostly to relatives and island residents, who had been worst hit, trapped within a tomb of collapsing stone. The others, to whom the ceremony was to have been broadcast on a closed-circuit TV screen, could at least run. Robin had been standing just outside the church, apparently waiting until the last moment before going in so that he could see me arrive. Instead of running from the crumbling building he had managed to help some people out before the entire church collapsed.

I would have expected no less of him. Mrs Cotley, who had also been taken to the Musgrove Hospital at Taunton, told the story of how he had defied flying timbers and masonry to throw himself into a huge crack in the earth to grab hold of her three-year-old grandson who had been fast disappearing into it. Somehow he managed to get the boy and himself to safety.

‘I don’t know ‘ow he did it,’ she told me wonderingly. ‘All I could do was watch.’

She had sustained a broken leg and a couple of cracked ribs, but she was sitting up in her hospital bed when I took a break from my vigil at Robin’s bedside and visited her on the morning after the disaster. I knew how fond Robin was of Mrs Cotley, and reported back to him that she appeared to be recovering surprisingly well. Robin showed little interest. He seemed to be in a kind of trance. The papers may have dubbed him Abri’s Hero. But it meant nothing to him. He was discharged from hospital later that day, although I did not really think he was fit to leave. It seemed to me that he was still in deep shock.

Somehow, I don’t really know why or even recall exactly how, we all ended up going to Northgate Farm. I knew by then that my mother and my brother-in-law Brian were both safe, but my nephew Luke was still missing, and so was Robin’s brother, James.

Robin and I travelled in complete silence in a hospital car. He would by then answer questions in a monosyllabic way, but there was still no possibility of conversation. I wanted desperately to talk about all that had happened. Robin would have none of it.

Maude and Roger were already at Northgate when we arrived. She was deathly white behind her perpetual tan, but maintained her dignity as ever.

The news we had all been dreading came within minutes of Robin and I arriving at the farm. Roger answered the phone. Maude and I were sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea. Robin had gone upstairs alone. He returned as soon as he heard the phone ring. All three of us stared silently at Roger as he held the receiver in his hand and listened. He said little, just an occasional desultory yes or no, but his manner told the story.

‘They’ve found James,’ he said simply, when he turned to face us.

We did not need to ask if he was dead. We knew, and indeed had known all along, I suppose. Nonetheless this was the final blow.

Robin seemed to sway on his feet. I thought for a moment that he was going to pass out, but before I could get to him Maude was by his side, her hand under his elbow steadying him. She had been a tower of strength all her life, I had no doubt, and it seemed to come automatically to her to support others. Even at this terrible time, learning that she had lost her much-loved younger son, her first thought was to prop up Robin — in every sense.

Again he did not speak, just looked at her with panic in his eyes.

She led him to a chair which he half-fell into. Maude stepped back from him and stood, ramrod straight, looking down at him.

‘Just remember you are a Davey,’ she told him. A truly weird thing to say at such a time, anyone who did not know the family might think, but from her it seemed perfectly natural, and her voice was gentler than her words.

Robin reached up and grasped her hand tightly. In common with Julia in the hospital the day it happened, he didn’t sound a bit like himself when he eventually began to talk.

‘If only James had lived instead of me,’ he whispered, forcing the words out.

His mother stroked his hair as if he were a child. ‘You mustn’t say that, darling boy,’ she said. ‘You really mustn’t.’

‘It’s true, it’s my fault, all those deaths, mother, they’re all my fault,’ he said. ‘I’m to blame.’

‘No, no, Robin,’ she admonished him, everything about her still wonderfully calm and controlled, her voice almost hypnotic. ‘No-one’s to blame. There hadn’t been that number of people on the island since your first wedding, and that was over twenty years ago. Perhaps it was just too many. We just don’t know, do we? But nobody could ever have predicted such a thing, Robin, luv. It’s nobody’s fault.’

I didn’t know how she could be so logical and so articulate right then. Robin remained crumpled. Certainly he didn’t look convinced. I could understand that well enough. If you throw a wedding party for 300-odd people and around half of them end up dead or injured you are bound to feel responsible, aren’t you? I jolly well knew that, I did.

My nephew Luke, my godson, was also not found alive. It took almost a week to recover all the bodies, and poor little Luke was one of the last to be discovered. I had loved him dearly and I was devastated. Although once again we had all known, I suppose, that he really must be dead, that there could be no hope, the dreadful limbo period had added to the nightmare. And when we finally got the bad news, I found myself wishing that my mother — who had been one of the few to survive from inside the church, escaping only with a broken wrist — had died instead of Luke. Then, of course, I was overwhelmed with guilt for allowing myself to think such a thing.

In all forty-four people died that terrible day and ninety-four were injured. Also among the dead were two of the band, The Dave Morgan Five, and thirteen residents of Abri. None of my police colleagues were killed although two were among the injured.

Luke’s death was the worst of all for me — the horror of it heightened by the long wait before his body was recovered. Naturally Clem took it very badly. Nothing else could have been expected. I wanted to visit her, in fact I had wanted to be with her all week, but my brother-in-law had counselled against it. Clem would not even come to the phone to speak to me.

‘Look Rose, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but she seems to blame you for what has happened to Luke,’ Brian told me haltingly over the telephone.

‘It makes sense to me...’ I said. ‘You see, I blame myself too.’

My mother had gone to stay with Clem and Brian, which I thought was all they probably needed, but even she wouldn’t speak to me. Normally I couldn’t have cared less about my mother’s whims and moods, but I needed all the comfort I could get right then. And there wasn’t a lot of it about.

I called Peter Mellor to ask him if he thought it had been Luke whom he had tried to save. He had never even met my nephew, and didn’t have a clue one way or the other. I don’t know why I even bothered to ask, but I think maybe it was a question of trying to keep Luke alive inside my head. And somehow I would always believe that it was Luke whom Peter Mellor reached out for.

I only went to two of the funerals. Luke’s and James’ — that was all I could cope with — and even that in spite of receiving a curt note from my sister telling me she did not want me there when she buried Luke. But I could not stay away. I arrived as late as I could and sat at the back of the church. Julia — who had gone straight back to work after the disaster, maybe trying to deny that it had all really happened — drove down from London to be with me, but Robin was not there. He only went to one funeral, his brother’s.

Little Luke was laid to rest on a wet and windy April day amid scenes which will haunt me for the rest of my life. It seemed like thousands of people lined the streets of Weston-super-Mare as the funeral cortege drove by. My brother-in-law carried Luke’s tiny white coffin in his arms and that image will remain with me always.

Julia kept her left hand permanently under my right elbow and somehow we got through it. When we came out of the church I wanted to go to the graveside, but saw Clem looking at me with undisguised hatred through tears which seemed to be born as much of rage as of grief.

I didn’t know what to do but Julia steered me firmly away. We walked slowly through the churchyard, I think I was still reluctant to leave, and suddenly I was surprised to find my brother-in-law Brian by our side, having broken away briefly from the main funeral party.

‘If it’s any consolation, Rose, she blames me too,’ he said.

I could only stare at him. I didn’t understand.

‘I was there, you see. I was with our son. I survived, and he didn’t. I doubt she will ever forgive me.’

His pain was written in the lines of anguish on his face that had not been there three weeks earlier. I touched his hand. He half-smiled. My legs felt shaky. I do not think I would have been able to carry on walking without Julia’s firm grip under my elbow. So often I was staggered by her strength, and couldn’t quite comprehend where she got it from. She too had been through a terrible ordeal, and the way she coped not only with her own nightmares but also with mine, was little short of magnificent.

She also managed to keep the bulk of press attention away from me yet I knew she must be walking a tightrope in her own office — showbusiness editor or not. After all, she had been at the wedding, she was the bride’s best mate, she would be expected to get the big story. Whatever the big story was. I felt for her. I knew exactly what it was like to be in that kind of situation. She must have been under terrific strain but she did not show it. She was such a good friend and support.

Robin was far too shocked to be supportive of me. I had to support him. That I could understand, but I was a little surprised — maybe because I had grown to regard him as some kind of superman.

Maude continued to be the most magnificent of all. She never spoke of her own grief, never seemed to consider her own pain. Her concern was entirely for Robin and for me and the families of all the other victims. She seemed to regard everyone else as being worse off than her.

I was coming to love Maude more with every passing day, and it was no surprise that she struck up an instant bond with Julia, who stayed with us all at Northgate for several days while the funerals were going on. Often it seemed that only Maude and Julia were holding the rest of us together.

Even before the Abri Island dead were buried, speculation about what had caused the disaster was rife. It seemed quite extraordinary that the entire structure of the island had caved in the way it did. It had been, as Eddie Brown had at once described it, like an earthquake. But earthquakes of that magnitude were not known in the British Isles, not in modern times, anyway — although I couldn’t help remembering those giant chasms which the locals all believed to have been caused by a quake some time around the seventeenth century.

Abri was unique, people said. And early speculation was that there must have been some extraordinary geological fault running through the island. Certainly, whatever the true cause might turn out to be, it seemed likely that Robin’s mother’s instinctive presumption that the disaster had been triggered by the volume of people on the island could be proven absolutely right.