The Facts of Life and Death

50

THE STORM AND the highest tide of the year had joined forces with the rain-sodden forest to finally wipe Limeburn off the map.

The rats had come first. Washed out of their nests in the kilns, and dashed against the cottages and cars by the storm. The waves that crossed the cobbles were fringed with the black, seething beasts, some squealing and terrified, some sodden and limp and already dead.

Then the sea came up the slipway too. Further than it had ever been before.

It met the broken stream coming the other way and together they filled the square with three feet of water – preparing the way for the real onslaught.

That final assault came in the shape of the great oak. In this magnificent tree, the sea had found a true weapon of war. It heaved the oak against the bigger of the limekilns like a battering ram. Again and again and again, until – at last – the thick stone walls fell and the kiln burst apart like a bomb, spilling its dark secrets into the ocean.

Ten thousand years from now, the grey stones that once made up the limekiln walls would be smoothed and rolled for miles up the coast to fortify the pebble ridge, in protection of another place entirely.

But their work here was done; there was no barrier remaining between Limeburn and the sea.

And the sea knew it.

It had crossed the square in a single sweep of breaker, leaving only the top windows of the cottages peeping out of the waves. It had set Maggie’s mother’s twenty-year-old Nissan adrift, and – because John Trick’s old piece of junk still wasn’t between them – crashed it into Mr Braund’s new Range Rover.

Then the sea had surged up the shallow hill to The Retreat, funnelled white water through the garden gate and smashed the front door clean off its hinges.

The sea!

The sea was in their house!

It was nearly up to Ruby’s knees and she staggered sideways with shock and almost fell, and got wet all the way up one thigh too.

It didn’t seem real. Everything else was the same: the lamps were on double – in the room and in the water. The front door was part open – hanging drunkenly on its top hinge alone. The spider rug floated gently off the floor and followed the water back outside as it retreated.

Then the sea exhaled and came again. When it came back this time, it came like a gunfighter into a saloon. The door flapped on its hinge and a wave crashed through the house and broke in a roil of foam, then spread itself around the room and slapped gently against the TV, which banged in a shower of sparks, along with the lamps, and everything went black.

‘Mummy!’ screamed Ruby. ‘Mummy!’

The bitter water gripped Ruby’s hips and she staggered sideways and grabbed the handle of the little white door to stay upright as the wave withdrew once more.

As her eyes adjusted to the new darkness, Ruby could see through the doorway and out into Limeburn.

The water was cold, but the chill that ran down Ruby Trick’s spine was even colder.

She’d been wrong.

The sea was not in their house.

Their house was in the sea.

Through the broken front door, Ruby could see the silhouette of an enormous tree rolling backwards and forwards in the square, bashing and banging between the cars and the cottages.

Everything between here and there was water.

‘Mummy!’ she screamed. ‘Mummy!’

All these years she’d been so scared of the woods, of the trees, of the creeping undergrowth and of the mud.

But the real danger all along had been the dark-grey ocean on their doorstep.

Ruby saw the next wave coming. She turned to run back upstairs, but it knocked her clean off her feet and washed her into the coffee table. She banged her head and her shin, and swallowed salt water, before getting to her hands and knees, choking and spluttering and unable to shout for help.

The sea sucked the wave back out of the house and Ruby knelt there and panted for a moment, too shocked to think straight, only aware of the salt in her mouth and the spongy carpet under her fingers.

‘Ruby!’

‘Mummy!’

She scrambled to her feet just as the next surge hit her, but it wasn’t as great this time, and she stayed upright by grabbing the edge of the table, then splashed her way over to the stairs.

‘Mummy!’

‘Ruby! Where are you?’

‘Here!’

Something bumped against Ruby’s thigh. She looked down and frowned. She recognized the thing that was floating in the black water, but she couldn’t understand it. It was beyond her. It was too much.

It was a body.

A woman’s naked body. Face-down and tight with bloat, the shoulders and the buttocks keeping it high in the water.

Without a face it could be anyone. Mrs Braund? Maggie’s mother? Old Mrs Vanstone? Ruby didn’t know; couldn’t think; didn’t want to.

As the black ocean lapped at the walls of the living room, the body drifted slowly away from Ruby. Then it rebounded gently off the sofa and came back for another pass.

And that’s when Ruby saw the bracelet. The silver chain bit into the bloated wrist, but the charms tinkled the way they always had – the elephant and the crow… and the little horseshoe.

Her heart beat hard in her head, and she felt sick.

She’d tried to tell Miss Sharpe her secrets, and now Miss Sharpe was dead.

Just like Frannie Hatton was dead, although her nose ring was in the car, and Steffi Cole was dead in the dunes behind the toilets.

And suddenly Ruby just knew that her Daddy had killed them all.

The wave turned and Ruby braced herself against the little white door as the water started to tug at her legs. The body floated away from her, the arm with the bracelet trailing behind it in goodbye. It bumped and turned slowly in the doorway, and when the tide sucked the sea out of the house, it took Miss Sharpe with it.

‘Ruby!’

She turned and saw Mummy standing halfway down the stairs – her face panicky and her phone in her hand.

‘Mummy! The sea’s in the house!’

‘Come upstairs! Quick!’

Ruby ran up to join her and they hugged on the landing. Ruby started to cry.

‘Shh, baby. We’re going to be fine.’

They weren’t, Ruby knew. She shook her head, but she was crying too hard to explain why.

‘Where’s Daddy?’ she said in sudden panic.

‘Don’t worry, sweetheart,’ said Mummy soothingly. ‘I already called him and he’s coming straight home to take care of us.’

The storm that had come out of nowhere was so violent that water spurted up and out of drains and gushed across roads.

In Bideford it created long, axle-deep stretches that halted pedestrians and slowed sane drivers to a crawl.

John Trick was not one of those.

The dirty white car sent up great bow-waves as he defied the heavens and headed for hell.

He’d lost Alison.

She was dead to him. The filthy whore.

The worm of suspicion had turned into a python of hatred and self-pity – squeezing his guts and starting to swallow him whole. He saw it all now. He’d been blind, but he saw it all now.

He’d kill her. He’d kill them all! Her and her bitch mother and her red-headed pervert of a father.

Trick sobbed through gritted teeth and pressed his palm to his belly to feel the coils of the mighty snake. It was loose inside him and he had no control over it.

If he didn’t feed it, then it would kill him.

But killing Alison was too good for her. Too quick, too painless, too kind. He needed to see her suffer for what she’d done to him. For taking away his strength and his power and his self-worth and his fucking life with her whoring and her betrayal and her lies.

He could punch her and kick her and slap her – but it wouldn’t be enough. It would never be enough.

But there were other ways to hurt a mother…

John Trick turned his head.

A woman was pushing a buggy in the rain. Running with it – head down, splashing through floodwater, regardless of the wet, which had already soaked her jeans, making them look almost black.

The baby was enclosed in a plastic bubble, a PVC chrysalis designed to keep it warm and dry.

Designed to keep it safe.

But the spray from the wheels and from passing cars had spattered mud all over the front of it, and condensation inside the bubble made the child invisible.

John Trick slammed on the brakes and slithered to a halt just ahead of the young woman.

He got out of the car and walked briskly around the back of it towards her.

She stopped. Lifted the drenched hood of her anorak from her eyes to stare hopefully at him. He knew how it would go. How it could go.

You want a ride?

Yes, please! I wouldn’t normally, but have you ever seen weather like it?

He didn’t give a shit what she’d normally do.

Five feet from her, he pointed the gun at her face.

‘Whore,’ he said.

‘What?’ The young woman frowned as if she just hadn’t heard him.

‘Fucking whore.’

She heard that! Her face dropped slowly into the more familiar confusion and fear.

Then she looked at the gun for the first time and gasped.

Trick kept the gun on her face as he bent to lift the plastic bubble.

‘NO!’ she screamed. ‘NO! Leave him alone! Help! Help me!’

The woman tried to pull him away, but he ignored her. Nobody was going to help her. There was nobody out in this weather. Nobody but her. The selfish bitch. Taking her baby out in this weather. Putting him in danger. Not caring about him.

He’d show her. He’d teach her a lesson she’d never forget.

Never.

The fastenings on the bubble were weird. He couldn’t see how to undo them.

The woman clawed at the side of his head and he belted her with the gun. She fell backwards into a puddle. A deep puddle, a shallow pool. She lay there, dazed, with her eyes blinking, blood coming out of her nose, and water up to her ears, while cars went past them like speedboats.

He turned back to the buggy.

Ah, that was how you opened this fucking bubble. That was how you got inside…

His phone rang.

He straightened up and answered it.

He stood there in the rain, listening, nodding, responding, as the young woman raised herself groggily from the water. She fell twice getting up, water pouring from her hair and her clothes.

‘My baby,’ she kept saying. ‘My baby.’

John Trick hung up the phone.

The woman ignored him. She staggered to the buggy and draped herself over it like a giant spider.

‘My baby.’

‘That was my wife,’ Trick told her. ‘I have to go.’