The First Cut

31Susan

Monday morning found Sue riding up the coast toward Staithes on the 10:53 bus. Her plan was to have lunch there, look around, then walk the three miles or so along the Cleveland Way to Runswick Bay for tea. From there she could get a bus back to Whitby at 6:25 in the evening.

Robin Hood’s Bay, though quaint enough with its hotchpotch of pastel cottages almost sitting on top of one another, had proved disappointing. Not only had Sue seen no evidence of fishing there, she had felt very strongly that this was not the place she should be wasting her time in.

That evening, she had ventured into the lounge alone to watch TV and make a cup of instant coffee, and Mr. Cummings had joined her for a while. He was a pleasant, ruddy-faced young man, more than willing to talk about fishing in the Whitby area. It turned out that there were more jobs connected with the industry than Sue had imagined-canning, freezing, processing, shipping-and some of them might be worth looking into. But Staithes was a strong fishing community, so she couldn’t afford to overlook it.

The coast road to Staithes cut across a landscape of rolling farmland that ended abruptly in sheer cliffs at the North Sea. To the west lay a patchwork quilt of hedged fields. Some were brown after harvest, some still pale gold with uncut wheat and barley, while others were plain green pastures where black and white cows grazed. The bus passed a far-off village, a cluster of light stone houses with red pantile roofs, almost hidden by a clump of trees in a hollow. The weather had turned sunny again, and the colors of the landscape were saturated with light, like a color transparency. On the seaward side, in a field next to a local rubbish dump, hundreds of white gulls squatted fat and replete after feeding. The sight disgusted Sue and made the bile rise in her throat. She looked beyond them to the clear blue sea, where the sun glinted silver on distant ships.

The bus stopped in the modern part of the village up on the main road, and Sue had to walk about a mile down to the village itself. The street, by Roxby Beck, was so steep that cars weren’t allowed down it. Below her, the houses, a mixture of different stones, colors and styles, seemed to tumble over one another down to the sea. On the way, she stopped at a newsagent’s and bought a local paper and a Daily Mirror.

The village at the foot of the hill was penned in on both sides by high headlands, huge skulls of grass-topped rock, where the horizontal strata of light sandstones and reddish brown clays had been bared by the wind and rain over the centuries. The only view from the promenade was of the cliffs looming on each side, or out to the sea itself. There was nobody about; the place was deathly quiet. Even the gulls seemed to be swooping in silence, and the air was thick with the smell of rotten fish.

First, Sue wandered into the Cod and Lobster, a whitewashed pub right on the seafront above the thick stone wall. She ordered a lager and lime and, surprised to find they didn’t do meals, sat down for a cigarette and a read. There weren’t many people in: a man in a Yorkshire Dales T-shirt scratched the neck of his red setter, two lads in navy jerseys, baggy jeans and Wellingtons chatted up the young barmaid, and that was it. In fact, she hadn’t seen many tourists at all, even on her way down the hill. Staithes seemed to be much more of an isolated, working village than Robin Hood’s Bay. It seemed to be the kind of place where she might have more luck in finding the man she wanted.

As she smoked, Sue examined the photographs on the walls. Some of them showed a terrible storm that had hit Staithes in 1953 and damaged the pub badly. Others showed groups of local fishermen, and Sue studied them keenly. She knew she could rely on her visual memory least of all in her quest, but she had glimpsed him briefly in the moonlight and remembered the thick black eyebrows meeting in the middle, the Ancient Mariner eyes and the thatch of dark hair. No one in the photographs resembled him, so she turned to her newspapers.

There was nothing more on the Sandsend body in the local paper. Obviously, the police were stuck and the reporters couldn’t justify repeating the same story day after day. It didn’t mean that the investigation had come to a dead end, though, she realized. The police would still be working on it, questioning people, digging around for evidence. The very idea that they might be drawing closer gave her butterflies in her stomach.

She had bought the Mirror because she thought it might have more news about the Student Slasher. She found a whole page recapping his exploits, with the familiar blurred photos of the victims’ faces taken from old students’ union cards or passports (not Sue’s, of course, for she had never been officially identified as his first victim). There they were: Kathleen Shannon with her long, wavy hair; Jane Pitcombe with her large, far-apart eyes; Margaret Snell with her lopsided smile…and the three others. Apart from veiled hints about what he did to the nubile young bodies (suggesting, between the lines, that some of them asked for it), and a number of editorial calls for the police to get a move on and catch him (“This could happen to your daughter, too!”), there was no real information at all. Sue stared at the six faces. She had never met any of the women, but she felt closer to them than she did to anyone else. Sometimes late at night, she had even fancied she heard them whispering in her ear. They helped her, guided her when she felt weak and lost, and for them, if not for herself, she had to carry on to the end.

Feeling hungry, she stubbed out her cigarette and finished her drink. Outside, a little further around the harbor from the Cod and Lobster, was a café attached to a private hotel. She walked in and found the small room crowded with full tables and only one waitress trying to deal with all the orders. Though she was obviously rushed off her feet by a recent influx of six or seven customers, the woman managed everything as quickly as she could, and with a smile. From the glimpses Sue got when the kitchen door swung open, there was only one cook, too. The menu offered little choice. The special of the day was cod and chips. Sue ordered it.

Smoking was not allowed in the café, so she passed the twenty minutes or so she had to wait for lunch doing the crosswords and reading about the sexual exploits of famous TV personalities and pop stars in the Mirror. When the meal finally came, it was good. Sue realized that she had spent too much energy avoiding fish and chips in Whitby -because it seemed that that was the only food available-as she actually enjoyed it, at least in moderation.

As she ate, she remembered the local chippie near the university, where she and her friends had often stopped on their way home from the pub and eaten out of newspaper as they walked. If only her mother could have seen her; she’d have had a fit. But the north seemed so full of fish and chip shops, what could you do? Though she had never thought about it at the time, she guessed now that much of the fish came from places like Whitby and Scarborough, and even the smaller villages like Staithes. It came? Well, obviously it was delivered. It didn’t fly there by itself. A whole fleet of vans must be constantly rushing back and forth from the coast to service inland towns and cities. Sue paused with her fork in the air as the simplicity of it all came to her: the final piece of the puzzle. Of course! How could she have been so stupid? Now she knew exactly what to do next.

When she had finished eating, she pushed the empty plate aside and lit a cigarette. One or two fellow diners gave her nasty looks, but no one actually walked over and asked her to stop. The waitress also ignored her. She had much more on her mind than telling a patron to stop smoking. Eventually Sue got the bill, paid it and walked out into the sea air. Its rotten-fish smell now seemed mingled with the odors of seaweed and ozone, and just a trace of diesel fuel from the boats.

There was no point remaining in Staithes any longer, she thought as she walked along the harbor wall. She had always been certain, in her heart of hearts, that Whitby was the place where she would find him. Now even logic backed up her instinct.

Still, it was pleasant enough walking in the sun and watching the placid blue sea. The place seemed less oppressive now that she had decided to leave it soon. She could at least wait until she had digested her lunch. The only discomfort she felt was a hot and itchy scalp under her wig.

She sat down on the sea wall and let her legs dangle over the edge. Stretching her arms out behind her and resting her palms on the warm tarmac, she leaned back and let the sun warm her closed eyelids. One more cigarette, she decided, then back up the long hill to the bus stop. Shifting position, she checked her timetable and found out that there was a bus at 2:18. It was twenty past one now, so she had just missed the one before. Plenty of time.

As she sat watching a distant tanker move across the horizon, she became aware of someone staring at her. The hackles at the back of her neck, under the wig, stood on end. At first, she brushed off the feeling as ridiculous. Hadn’t she just decided that she would find her man in Whitby? He couldn’t be here. Then, for a moment, she panicked. What if it was the police? What if they had somehow got on to her? Or were they just following her, watching? She could bear it no longer. Turning her head slowly and casually toward the rail in front of the Cod and Lobster, where she thought the watcher was standing, she picked out the tall, tanned figure.

It was Keith McLaren, the Australian she’d met at the Abbey Terrace guesthouse. And he recognized her. Even as she looked, he waved, smiled and started to walk toward her.