The Lamplighters

14

A mile further on, past two padlocked gates, she saw them at last: four single-storey keepers’ cottages nestled on the peninsula, painted green and white, with factory-black chimneys and slate roofs. The Maiden Rock cottages were as close to the lighthouse as it was possible to be, but still so far away, and this had always struck Helen as sad, unrequited, a hopeful heart reaching out to indifference.

It could be yesterday; Admiral could still be theirs. The biggest of them, purpose-built and utilitarian, a cross between a school boarding house and a P&O ferry. Inside it had corridors like a hospital and small box rooms, whose hard, antiseptic edges no quantity of personal belongings could soften. In winter a chill crept through the cracks in the windows, which were fastened with iron latches that made her palms smell of coins. Above the oven and shower Trident House issued laminated reminders that the property was not theirs: USE EXTRACTOR FAN and CAUTION: HOT WATER. A notice in the hall read IN CASE OF EMERGENCY DIAL 999. At the front, beyond the barren windswept veranda with its concrete picnic table, garage doors advised DANGER – DO NOT USE IN HIGH WINDS. And always, always, the monotony of it – that was what had done her in. Day in, day out, the weeks, the months, the years, with only the sea for company.

Jenny and Bill had lived in Masters. Today there was a red hatchback parked on the tarmac with a ‘Baby on Board’ sticker in the rear. Helen supposed it was a unique getaway for people, a glimpse into a lost world, and the Maiden Rock’s infamy ensured a one-off attraction. That was why the cottages had been converted so quickly after automation, a money-spinner for Trident House. She could see the advert now:

Experience what life was like for the Maiden Rock Missing!

The third cottage, Pursers, had been Betty and Frank’s. Frank had been First Assistant on the tower, having been in the job longer – when Arthur was ashore, he’d be made Keeper-in-Charge. Frank had been off duty at the time of the vanishing. Helen always thought it must have felt to him as if he’d turned up five minutes late for a flight that wound up crashing into a mountain.

Gunners, the last, would have gone to Vince. He had wanted that promotion so badly. The reason why he’d never got it was a secret only the lighthouse knew.

As the Maiden glimmered coolly on the horizon, Helen could not shake her suspicion that the tower knew yet more. It knew about her.

Now it returned her gaze in quiet accusation, as if to say: You can’t deny the truth, Helen. You are not the innocent.

She gave him the address and he put out his fag and jerked his head to the boot.

‘Any bags, love?’

‘No. I’m just here for the day. I need you to take me to the station after.’

‘Right you are.’

The sun was dropping, molten peach as it dipped into the horizon. Helen was glad he could not see her properly, in the back of the taxi, drowsy in summer shadow. Mortehaven drivers were Mortehaven born and bred; the story was forever at the forefront of their minds, as they were called upon by tourists to recap the disappearance or identify their part in it: where they had been when they’d heard, the Trident House official they’d carried once from A to B, the friend of their daughter who knew one of the Walker children. She shouldn’t think he would recognize her anyway, not all these years on, but equally expected strangers to greet her as they had in the past, when she was Mrs PK, asking how Arthur was, when he was due ashore, how she was getting on in his absence. In return they would tell her their personal business, their problems, her position as the Principal Keeper’s wife issuing a public service akin to that of a reverend or pub landlord, interested by default in the lives of people she didn’t know.

‘Are you picking up a friend?’ he asked from the front.

‘We’re not stopping,’ she said. ‘Well, we are, but only for a moment. I’m not getting out.’

He turned the radio on. They passed the church with its slender evening spire, and the smugglers’ inn where she and Arthur and Jenny and Bill had gone for supper on a rare occasion both men were ashore. After a bottle of wine Jenny had cried and told her she was lucky she didn’t have children because it was no good looking after them when you were stranded back here on your own; Bill had got it in the neck, then Jenny had been sick in the ladies’ and they’d left. Winding up past the hotel and park and through the climbing terraces. The same address Helen had visited for the last nineteen years, whenever she came back, a rite of passage even if she never went inside. One of these days she would pluck up the courage to get out and walk up to the door.

‘Here,’ she said. ‘Anywhere’s fine.’

A gift at this late hour to be able to glimpse into windows: squares lit gold, life glowing within. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked. ‘Shall I turn the engine off?’

‘It’s OK. Keep it running.’

The house was the only one in darkness. Perhaps Jenny had gone away or didn’t live here any more. The thought panicked Helen – of being unable to contact her; of never again putting to paper those things she could only ever say to this woman, about their loved ones, their lost ones, the breach between them that twenty years later had calcified to stone.

Jenny had thought she could put her trust in the PK’s wife. Why shouldn’t she? Trust had been the foundation of Helen’s job. It had been her role to give support, to pour drinks and hold hands, to wipe tears when life became too much, because she understood, she did, and she cared. She knew when to stroke an arm, saying, ‘There, my love, it’s not forever, he’ll be back before you know it,’ and think of ways she could make it better, because lonesomeness was a friend of hers and she knew its tricks and wiles.

Instead, Helen had deceived her.

‘All right,’ she told the driver. ‘We can go now.’

‘That’s it?’

‘Yes. I’m ready to go home.’

The train was late; the soporific chug of its wheels closed her eyes before Truro. She dreamed, again, that she was following him in a crowd – the back of his head, only when the head turned it wasn’t the right person after all. His eyes came to her in drifts of sleep, looking up from underwater or otherwise in broad daylight, sitting opposite her at the kitchen table, or at the end of her bed, keeping watch over all that she did.

15

You’d like to know why I don’t speak to Jenny Walker. Rather, why she doesn’t speak to me. Are you interested in the truth? You say you are, but you’re also very good at making things up. I’ll admit your novels aren’t my sort of thing. I haven’t read any, in fact – although I know the one about the brothers on the barrack ship, Ghost Fleet, that’s right: a friend of mine got quite into that one when it came out.

That’s what I’m saying, without wishing to be rude. Alpha men, fighting, all that testosterone flying about. If you’re looking to tell one of your adventure stories, I doubt you’ll see what happened between Jenny and me as relevant, if I’m honest.

Who knows if it was relevant? Over the years I’ve gone half mad asking myself if it was. If Arthur and the others disappeared because of how things were with us.

First, I’ll tell you that I never expected to marry a lighthouse keeper. I was aware there must be people doing it, but it always sounded marginal to me, a job someone might take if he didn’t fit in with any other part of society and it turns out I was right. It takes a special temperament. All the keepers I’ve known have had that shared thing in common, and that’s to be all right with their own company. Arthur was content with himself. I thought that was very attractive in someone and I still do. You can only get so close to that person because he has something inside him that only he knows about. My grandmother had a saying about that. It was to never show your full hand – you know, to whoever you’re with. Never show your cards, always keep something back. I don’t think Arthur showed his full hand to anyone, not even me. That was just who he was.

I’m not sure I’d describe him as lonely. As I said, he had a contained way about him, but that isn’t the same as loneliness. Being on your own doesn’t mean you’re lonely and the other way around: you can be with lots of people, all chattering and nattering and demanding of your presence, and you can be the loneliest person there is. Certainly, on the lighthouses, Arthur was never lonely. I’m confident about that. That was one of the questions people asked; they’d say, doesn’t he find it lonely out there? But he never did. If anything, I’d say it was here, on land, that he felt lonely.

When you think of it like that, it isn’t any wonder I made a mistake. I’m not justifying it, and Jenny wouldn’t either. But nothing’s ever black and white.

I’m not sure Arthur ever wanted to come home to me. When he came ashore on his relief, I could see as soon as he stepped off the boat that he was already missing the light. Not missing being there – missing her. Land life wasn’t for him.

What we went through, Arthur and me, of course that was part of it. I had a lot of feelings about that, a lot of complicated feelings to come to terms with. I blamed Arthur. He blamed me. We blamed each other, but there just isn’t any point in blame when something like that happens, is there? There just isn’t any point.

I felt so angry after he disappeared. That he’d found this way out for himself. He had no right to do that, just upping and leaving one day without a word. He always said I was strong, and I am strong, but sometimes I think I should never have let him know it.

When Arthur first got his post to the Maiden, I thought we’d be happy. The tower made him happy, so I thought we’d be happy too. Arthur was pleased because for him she was the best of the lights. He’d done spells on the Wolf, the Bishop, the Eddystone, the Longships, all the major sea stations, but the Maiden was the one he coveted: big, old-fashioned, the sort of lighthouse he’d dreamed about when he was a boy. Arthur said a sea tower was ‘a proper lighthouse’ – the proper experience of one. Boys don’t dream about the ones stuck on land, do they? They want boats chucked about on the waves, brigands and buccaneering, camaraderie and starlight.

For a while after Arthur died, I consoled myself by thinking that at least it was the way he’d have wanted to go. He wouldn’t have wanted to die in any other way than on the sea. In a sense it’s fitting, and that actually makes me feel a bit better about it.

The Maiden always had her eye on him. Does that sound silly? Don’t put that in your book, will you. Lighthouses don’t have personalities; they don’t have thoughts and feelings and dangerous ideas, and they don’t bear ill will towards people. Anything like that’s fantasy – and that’s your department, not mine. I’m just giving you the facts.

But I never liked the look of her. Some lights look friendly enough, but she never put me at ease. I never set foot on her and I didn’t like that either, that Arthur stayed somewhere I’d never been. But you can’t land on a tower any day you feel like it; you can’t drop in to say hello. Seeing as Arthur was a private man, this suited him. I think he liked having something away from me. Perhaps all husbands do. They need something that their wives know nothing about.

Oh, be quiet! The dog needs letting out. Will you excuse me for a moment?

Right, here we are. Sorry about that. I spend my life waiting for her to get on with things. I got my first dog right after I lost Arthur because I needed another heartbeat about the place, and I suppose I was used to having a quiet companion, or at least one who wasn’t here for much of the time. Unfortunately, this one’s been on a digging spree, but that’s the way of it, and she’s as entitled to the garden as I am. I never used to bother with planting, but that’s helped me too. It’s about watching what you’ve put in the ground grow and flourish. If you’ve been through an ordeal like ours, you need to see the way life has of coming back again and again, against the odds, against the frost and the dog paws. There’s a certain stubbornness in it that I admire.

Arthur was always fascinated by nature. Right from childhood, he was sensitive, with a full imagination. Like you, in that way – the imagination part. I’m not saying you’re insensitive. I haven’t spent enough time with you to tell one way or the other, and anyway, what business is it of mine? I’d assume you have to be sensitive to be an author, getting inside your characters’ minds and coming up with what makes them tick.

His father kept birds, that’s what started it. The poor man wasn’t well, it was shellshock after the War, an extremely bad case, and the birds soothed him.

Arthur didn’t like to talk about his father. Wouldn’t or couldn’t. Whenever I asked, he’d change the subject, or tell me he didn’t wish to discuss it. There was much my husband didn’t wish to discuss, and I came to learn that’s all well and good until the person you’re with wants to talk. When your wife wants to, she deserves to have a conversation, doesn’t she? Because how else does anything ever get solved?

I do think, sometimes, how we might have avoided everything that happened: those twists and turns of life that evolve from a single decision. If Arthur hadn’t seen the Trident advertisement in the paper, if we hadn’t bought that particular paper on that particular day… If I’d never met him, because that was a chance encounter as well, in the queue at Paddington station when I was short of change to buy my ticket. A single to Bath Spa, to visit my parents. Even then, when it was the done thing, I didn’t assume a man would pay for me. I thought about Arthur the whole way there.

We met a week later so I could pay him back. The attraction was a slow burn. It wasn’t one of those lovestruck, thunderbolt situations. Part of me was pleased at imagining my father would disapprove. He was headmaster at an all-boys’ boarding school and he wanted me to marry a doctor or a lawyer, someone with a ‘reputable’ job. He never told me so, but I’d put money on him thinking lighthouse-keeping was for men with a feminine way about them. I don’t think my father ever read a single line of poetry. Does that explain it better?

Trident offered us a good salary and starting package, housing was thrown in and bills were paid – it all sounded highly agreeable. Arthur thought he’d fit in well and I thought it was the kind of lifestyle that would be a good conversation-starter at parties – that my husband worked on a lighthouse. I didn’t realize then that parties didn’t come too far out of London and they certainly didn’t swim down the Severn Estuary and emerge in the Bristol Channel, around which we spent the best part of those first years.

The routine wasn’t easy on either of us to begin with. As an SAK they send you all over the country and you never know where you’ll be sent to next. Every few weeks you’re at a new light. It’s because Trident want to give you as much experience as they can, so you learn the job fast. But they’re also testing you. They want to know if you’re able to get along with the different personalities, if you’re flexible, if you’re willing and reliable. We used to joke that Arthur was parcelled from here to Kingdom Come – only Kingdom never came, until the Maiden, that was. But yes, it was tiring. I never stayed anywhere long enough to settle, and Arthur was off for long stretches at a time. It was harder than I’d been prepared for. I felt him slipping away from me even then.

Not everyone found the training as hard as we did. Vince, for instance, he was used to being moved around and never staying put; he grew up in foster care and I don’t think he ever had a permanent home. Vince appreciated the spontaneity of it, getting a posting through, then you pack your bags and go where you’re needed. You could be called up north or down south or out on an island somewhere. The Maiden was Vince’s first tower. It’s an extreme post for a novice anyway, but then when you think how it ended… Just terrible. A young man with his whole life ahead of him.

I’m not surprised Michelle Davies won’t talk to you. As his girlfriend she had a bad time of it after the disappearance, with everyone saying Vince had been responsible for it, he’d killed Arthur and Bill, some plan he’d been formulating weeks in advance then he made a clever escape for himself. Trident implied it, too. They weren’t allowed to say so, but they definitely encouraged people to believe that.

Michelle’s married now. Two daughters. I shouldn’t think she wants to revisit that period in her life. She and Vince were very in love. He used to come down from London before his duty was about to start. I’d see him in the harbour with his cassette player, all arms and legs and one of those big moustaches you see in American TV shows. He would’ve got keepers’ accommodation once he’d made Assistant.

Arthur spoke highly of Vince, said what a nice boy he was, decent and down to earth. It’s a shame for a person, when they’ve had a difficult start in life, and they can never get out from under because people always think the worst of them.

Trident got blamed for hiring a man with a criminal record, but they were always taking people who needed a way back into society and it was never frowned upon or worried about. Lighthouse-keeping is the best job for someone who’s used to being closed off and living in confined spaces. They’re normally a very disciplined sort too, in being accustomed to a strict way of life. It wasn’t unusual to be on a light with a borstal boy, or someone who’d been in jail. The trouble was when something went wrong, which it did, it was easy to point the finger. Michelle couldn’t argue back. She couldn’t speak up for Vince, because that wasn’t what the Institution wanted to hear. It went against their party line. That’ll be why she doesn’t want to see you. She doesn’t want all that scraped up and all those horrible things being said about Vince again. People went ballistic at the time, when they found out he’d been in jail. There was every rumour circling you could think of – that he’d been a murderer, he’d murdered ten people; he was a serial killer, a rapist or a paedophile. I can tell you he wasn’t any of those.

You don’t have to go to prison to know you’ve done wrong. Aren’t we all accountable, to a certain extent? What I did. What Arthur did. What Bill did. Just because someone didn’t put bars around us, it doesn’t mean those bars weren’t deserved.

Michelle told me once that Vince did many things in his life that he wanted to forget. Now you know about Arthur and me, I can admit to you that I did, too.

16

17

She hadn’t been his girlfriend for a long time, she thought, as she bent to tie the fifty-sixth shoelace of the day. ‘Stay still,’ she told her daughter, whose hand grabbed a clump of hair in response. A lot of the time Michelle couldn’t tell whose hair it was, just that hair got grabbed in angry fistfuls and when it hurt it was probably hers.

‘Now keep them on,’ she said. ‘Please.’

The sisters went off to play Snakes and Ladders, or empty the game across the carpet and feed the dice to the dog. Michelle stayed in the hall, watching the phone.

He had called once already this morning, and again yesterday, and again last week. ‘I’m not Vinny’s girlfriend any more,’ she’d told him, which was stating the bleeding obvious, since Vinny would never again have a girlfriend as long as he lived – and he wasn’t living, was he? Or was he? To cope with uncertainty long-term, to let it get inside her and make its nest there, was the worst kind of limbo.

Dan Sharp might think he could get to the bottom of it, but Michelle couldn’t say if there was one. It just went down and down, like the sea. Why Vinny disappeared and how – these were things she would never discover. And if he wanted her to say that Vinny had been all the things he hadn’t, all the things the public hated him for, well, she couldn’t. She had her own family now. Her husband wouldn’t be glad to come home to find her talking to a stranger, breathing life back into the man she’d loved when she was nineteen, the only man, truly, she’d ever loved.

The author should go sniffing round somebody else’s door. He had no idea what he was getting himself into, dredging up memories from people who’d rather stay out of it. He should stick with his thrillers. Michelle had borrowed one last year from the library while they were in there looking for Esio Trot. Roger had called it rubbish, but he didn’t like her reading. Said it put fancy ideas in her head.

‘Mummy!’

Two minutes, the average time it took before one of the girls shouted a complaint. What would it be this time? Accusations of snatching, cheating, Fiona taking her knickers off and sitting bare-bottomed on the board game. She went in, comforted her youngest’s crying and tried to take her mind off Vincent Bourne. That was another world, one she no longer lived in. Even if she wanted to, she couldn’t find a way back.

People hardly talked to her about it now. Marriage had helped, since she didn’t have the same name so they couldn’t recognize her; they couldn’t say, ‘Oh, that’s who you are, you’ll know all about that then,’ to which her reply was always the same. No, she knew nothing, no more than they did. But still they’d get that look in their eye, nudge-nudge, wink-wink, as if she did indeed know why those men had vanished, but of course she couldn’t tell. It had been her man, after all. His secret.

‘Mummy, want a biscuit.’

‘What do you say?’

‘Please.’

The children put up a wall, but that was as good as it got. Walls stopped her feeling. Hurting. Except when she managed to scale them, usually first thing in the morning when she opened her eyes and the day was a blank white page, and she had an image of Vinny in her mind that was so real it could have been a photograph. She couldn’t believe it had been twenty years since they’d touched. How had her mind held on to these details? She never talked to Roger about it. He was the jealous type anyway, wasn’t interested in past relationships, especially not that one.

On the way back from the kitchen, the telephone rang. Michelle stopped, Malted Milks in hand, paint stains down her top. It would be him again.

There were things she could tell him. Sometimes she almost wanted to, just to be free of them. But that was in the dead of night, and by the time the alarm clock shrilled, and the girls needed getting up and there was breakfast to be made and Roger’s sandwiches to go in a bag and the school runs to be done, she saw sense.

Michelle picked up the phone.

The writer started talking, but she cut him off.

‘I told you to leave me alone,’ she said, gripping the receiver. ‘I’ve got nothing to tell you about Vinny. If you contact me again, I’ll call the police.’

18

The sand got everywhere. Jenny disliked how it felt between her toes, how it made the skin there squeak, how it got into the picnic basket and the cheese and pickle rolls she’d prepared that morning, careful to cut them into quarters as her grandson preferred. Later she’d go home with grit in her teeth and it would be there in her food for a week.

The beach reminded her of that scene in Jaws. Little ones in sun hats patting out buckets, squealing in the shallows and shivering in towels. Jenny had seen Jaws at the Orpheus three summers after Bill went and God only knew why she’d put herself through it. Bad things coming up out of the sea, things with teeth that smelled of blood.

Jenny didn’t like to be scared. It was like being a child again, afraid of the dark and the creak on the stairs; the shadows in her mum’s garden on Conferry Road that came closer day by day. When they were little, Carol used to tell her stories about vampires and werewolves, and others she made up too, about the shrivelled thing that lived under the bed. Jenny thought there’d been enough to be afraid of in that house.

No wonder Carol had left as soon as she could. She had cut her ties. Jenny, the younger, had stuck around longer.

Hannah came back with the ice creams. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘They melted.’

The cones were soggy and green. The grandchildren got the best of them then dropped them in the sand. Jenny felt her shoulders burning.

‘Not still thinking about it, are you?’ said Hannah.

‘No.’

‘You’re paranoid.’

‘So what if I am?’

Jenny looked out at the lighthouse, cloaked in mist, the sort there is on the sea after the weather’s blown over. The more she peered into the steam, the more the tower materialized. It would always concern her how these two scenes could be part of the same world. Children on a beach, carefree and licking ice creams. And that place.

‘You think that man’s spying on you.’

‘No, I don’t.’

Jenny moved under the parasol. A couple strolled past, his hand on the small of her back. Bill had used to walk next to her with his hand on the small of her back. At the beginning anyway, when he’d still wanted to be near her.

‘You’ve got to stop curtain-twitching, Mum. It’s unhealthy. And turn some bloody lights on at home; I’m sick of coming round and finding it like a mausoleum.’

‘Then don’t.’

Hannah sulked for a minute. She said, ‘What are you worried about anyway? He’s only going to write up what you tell him.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘I don’t know. I’m asking you.’

Jenny pushed a hole in the sand with her finger. It felt cooler under the surface.

‘Stop talking to him,’ said Hannah.

‘I can’t.’

‘Why?’

‘If she is,’ said Jenny, ‘I am.’ She would avoid saying Helen’s name at any cost. She hated that she even had to think it, that the woman existed at all.

‘For God’s sake.’ Hannah jumped up and ran down the beach, where Nicholas had fallen in another child’s sandpit. Sometimes Jenny wished she had never told Hannah about Bill’s affair, back when Hannah was barely a teen. The right thing would have been to keep it to herself – for her daughter to have had nice, unspoiled memories of her dad as loving and caring. After a while, though, Jenny hadn’t been able to stop herself. She couldn’t share it with anyone else because she was embarrassed.

On the outside, she and Bill had been the perfect couple, the envy of their friends. After he went, it seemed a shame to ruin it. Tragedy on top of tragedy.

Hannah came back with a bawling child. A sour taste filled Jenny’s mouth. She thought about what Bill must have tasted when he’d eaten those chocolates.

‘Who cares what that cow’s doing?’ said Hannah, sitting down next to her. She shielded her eyes from the sun. ‘You were the one who knew him, Mum.’

Hannah put a hand on hers and Jenny worried she might cry. She’d have no one left, if Hannah found out. She had only meant to teach Bill a lesson. Remind him where his loyalties lay. Just the tiniest amount of household bleach – ‘limited vomiting when swallowed in small quantities’ – disguised by the soapy flavour of violet.

It was her own fault. She hadn’t made an effort with anyone in years, just hidden herself away eating microwave dinners in front of re-runs of Blockbusters. Julia and Mark were good enough to her, but Hannah was the special one: the older she’d grown, the more like friends they’d become. Hannah believed her mother was the innocent victim. Jenny couldn’t risk her discovering that both her parents had failed.

Now this Sharp person would push and prod until she gave in. Or maybe he already knew. Maybe Helen knew; maybe Arthur had written it in a note sent back from the tower. The worst part would be explaining it to Hannah. She couldn’t.

‘You were married fourteen years,’ said Hannah. ‘Three children, Mum. Helen knew him for what? Five bloody minutes. She can say what she likes. If raking up what happened is making you miserable, don’t do it. I mean, shadowy figures waiting outside your house in cars? Come on.’

Hannah was right. Only Jenny had felt it the night before last, really felt it, someone loitering on the road. And sure enough, when she’d peered through the nets, she’d seen a car there with its engine purring. It had sat for a long time, watching her. No one had come to meet it; no one climbed out. Moments later it drove away.

Jenny stood and shook the sand off her towel. It blew back on her, stinging. She wanted to go home but the children were coming back too, and she’d have to put the oven on for chops and get to peeling potatoes, and she’d miss Neighbours now at the least. She helped to pack the bags, call the children, dust off their feet – and all the while the Maiden stood obscenely at her back, her ghastly companion.

The intruder was opening doors she needed to stay closed. Doors she’d spent years blocking, because the place beyond was one she could never set foot in again.

She had already lost her husband. She wasn’t losing her daughter too.

19

I don’t see it as a downside, not knowing. It’s good not to know. Mum used to say, ‘Jennifer, you don’t know anything.’ She meant it meanly because she was a mean woman, but actually, it’s helped me a lot in the course of my life. They’ve never found Bill’s body and until that happens, there’s a chance he’s alive. As long as there’s a chance, there’s hope. It gets less as the years go by, but it’s never completely gone.

Until Trident House can show me what’s left of my husband, I won’t accept he’s dead. Why should I? His vanishing was a magic trick. He could come back the same way. Surprise! Like that Paul Daniels off the telly. It’d be no harder accounting for Bill popping back up than it is accounting for how he got lost.

Authors are meant to be open-minded, aren’t they? Well. Let’s see.

You’ll remember I told you about Bill’s bad feeling. He had these extra senses; he was that sort of soul. Tuned in, like me. It’s no surprise, in my opinion, what with his mother dying like that. It meant Bill got to believing – at least, he wanted to believe – that there was more to life than the skin and bone we’re given in this one.

When we first started going together, he used to leave notes for me. He’d put them in my desk at school, saying what time to meet. We had to do it in secret because of Mum. Carol had gone by then, so it was just Mum and me at home. She’d lock the door as soon as I got in and wouldn’t let me out again. There was a tree in the park, with a hole in the trunk he put presents in. A bag of sherbet lemons or a plastic ring he’d got off the market. I still think I could find one of those notes, one day, from Bill. Under my pillow or propped up by the kettle. The cottage where we used to live, Monday, four thirty, he’ll meet me there.

I’m not saying Bill’s off sunning himself on a beach somewhere. Just that if it was something supernatural that took him – better to say, borrowed him – then something supernatural might just as easily return him to me. It’s possible, and that’s enough for me.

I don’t trust people who say they’ve never experienced something they can’t explain. They must be very closed off as people and it’s a waste to live a life where you only think about what’s in front of you and you never consider what else there is.

You have to look beyond all that. Stretch your mind out a little, if that’s what it takes.

Did you ever hear about the Silver Man? He’s a bit of a Mortehaven local legend. I never clapped eyes on him myself, but plenty I know did. Trustworthy people who you’d swear were telling you the truth. They said they saw him just wandering about as plain as day, easy as you like, just as if he belonged.

God, your publishers really picked a bright one with you, didn’t they? Because he was silver, obviously, his hair and clothes. Even his skin, sort of silvery, like a fish. And the weird thing about him, as well as what he looked like, was that he showed up in places he couldn’t have got to. Like he’d got there more quickly than he could; like there must have been more than one copy of him drifting about. There were folk who said he seemed like he was on his way to work because he was carrying a briefcase and that was silver in colour too. Some would see him at the bottom of the high street, then they got in their cars and minutes later he came out in front of them at the top of the climb or up on the cliff, three or more miles away. Pat in the Seven Sisters said she saw him one time waving at her from down on the beach, and if you ever meet Pat, you’ll know she doesn’t know how to tell a lie. He was far off and carrying his little silver bag, and she said it was just like he was inviting her over because as she got closer, he walked into the sea and carried on walking till he went under and that was the end of that.

You’re right that I’m Christian, but I think the more you understand religion, the more you see it’s part and parcel of the same thing. Heaven and hell – that’s supernatural, isn’t it? Angels and devils. Bushes on fire. Seas split in two. If you trust God, you should be broadminded about the possibilities in His universe.

There’s more than what the textbooks tell you. It’s not like science for all its cleverness gets the answers. Take that about Creation. Science goes back with its theories about the Big Bang, but then it can’t get any further because there’s no reason why any of the stuff that was needed for the Big Bang to happen was there in the first place. All these particles and atoms or whatever was meant to go bang, they don’t come out of nowhere, do they? Bill said that’s why a lot of scientists believe. They know better than anyone that you can’t get something out of nothing.

My mum believed in both. Growing up, we had crosses and psalms all over the house; everywhere you looked there was the Baby Jesus, you couldn’t get away from Him. Mum lit candles and kept the curtains closed so it was like a chapel inside, but we also had wind chimes and dream catchers, and she saw shamans sometimes. One of them was called Kestrel. He came round and put his hand on Mum’s head and spoke gobbledygook then they went upstairs. I remember he had a big ink of two crossed feathers at the top of his back. I saw it one morning when I came into the kitchen in my nightie and there he was, making toast like he lived with us.

When I was nine, the Virgin Mary turned up in our garden. She arrived one day lying face-down by the shed, in between the fridge and the pile of bin bags. Mum said she’d fallen out the back of a van at church, so she’d brought her home to watch over us – because we needed watching over, Carol and me. The fact she’d fallen out the back of a van, now I think of it that’s just a turn of phrase, not actually what happened, but in those days I had an image in my head of the van doors coming open and a life-sized Madonna smacking her face on the pavement. You could see where she’d smacked it; her cheek was chipped on one side. Mum had this plan to bring her in and clean her up, but she never did, so I went out there and put her upright. From then on, every night I made myself open my bedroom curtains and see her standing there like a real person. I’d scare myself into thinking she moved, from one side of the garden to the other, then towards me, nearer each day.

Even though Mum said she was religious, she must have sworn by a different God to mine. Let’s just say the plaster Mary wasn’t the only one who got a smacking.

Living with her made me understand the difference between good and bad. How you can’t always see the difference with your eyes – you have to feel it, you know, here. The way I look at it is there’s light and dark in the world and that’s what the whole world revolves around. There has to be light in order for there to be dark and the same the other way. It’s like a set of weighing scales, up at one end, down at the other. It depends which there’s more of – the more light you have, the harder it is for the dark to get in. The thing about God’s light is it’s easy; it’s not hard to find. There might be moments in your life where you get a little bit of light, say if you have good news or a nice thing happens to you, and I think that’s like flicking a torch on. It’s bright while it lasts but it doesn’t last forever. God’s light lasts.

Bill was the only person I confided in, about that and lots of things. When we got engaged, Mum told him she was glad he was taking me off her hands because she’d had about as much as she could stand. Apart from that I don’t think she ever spoke a word to him. At my wedding reception, she locked herself upstairs at the pub with a bottle of Jameson’s, crying about how I was leaving her.

I did leave her, in the end. She fell asleep in the WC and I left her there, with her head on the toilet-roll dispenser. I haven’t spoken to her since. I don’t know if she’s dead or alive. I don’t waste time thinking about it. After Bill went, she didn’t try to contact me, even though it was all over the papers so it wouldn’t have been hard. I didn’t want her to find me anyway. I’m better off without her. It takes a lot to say you’re better off without your mother, but that’s the fact of it for me.

I’ll never have my girls hate me like I hate my mother. I’ll never be a mother like that. Not really a mother – that’s a holy word and she wasn’t a holy woman, just a person who put me in this world then washed her hands of me.

It was fate I found Bill. I’d be in a shelter, or homeless, if it weren’t for Bill and the lighthouse service. Now do you see why he would never have left that tower of his own accord? We’d come so far for what we had. That’s how I know it was something else that went on.

I could tell when his bad feeling got one over on him. He’d stop eating or sleeping. He’d wake at five o’clock in the morning; I could hear him swallowing in the dark. He’d lie there so still. If I said anything, if I said, ‘Bill, love, are you awake?’ he wouldn’t answer, and that’s when I knew he was under one of his clouds.

When he did talk to me, which wasn’t often, I always listened. He’d never had that. His dad and brothers were always making fun of him and if there’s anything Bill hates, it’s being made fun of. He’d be another man, if he’d had his mum. Then again, I wouldn’t have wanted another man, so that’s a problem it’s best if I don’t think too long on.

Do you believe in coincidences? You must. You’ve got a big fat one at the end of Neptune’s Bow with those two characters of yours walking into the same hotel. What are the chances of that? You could’ve found another way round it, but you didn’t. Maybe you and me aren’t so different after all.

Well, here’s another one for you. You’ll know the light was burning the night before Bill disappeared – the night of the twenty-ninth. The papers made a lot of that at the time, because it means that whatever happened must have happened the next morning, before Jory Martin’s boat went out. It means there was someone there, at least one of them, at least someone, putting the light in and tending it through the night – and it just so happens they vanish right before the relief gets there?

I don’t think coincidences like that happen without there being more to it. It makes us think if only that relief had got out there sooner, if only the boatman had gone against the weather, and it just seems extra cruel that way. But that’s what it boils down to: whether you think coincidences exist. Is it just the way the world has of working, or is it something else? For me, it’s clear which one it is.

Anyone who knows the first thing about tower reliefs knows that when relief day comes, everyone’s on the radio transmission, anxious the landing should happen and talking about whether or not it’s going ahead. But that day, they couldn’t get through. Ashore they were ringing in, but no one was picking up. The engineer wrote up storm damage, but I don’t accept it for a second. A transmitter going just as three men vanish off the face of the earth? You’d have to be a fool.

At the end of the day, people wouldn’t keep talking about the Maiden Rock if there was nothing strange about it. Nothing supernatural. They wouldn’t if it was the sea, like Helen says, or the Supernumerary losing the plot.

There’ve been people who said they saw lights in the sky the night before Bill disappeared. Red ones that hovered over the tower then darted away. Or the captains on ships who say they’ve seen a keeper waving at them from the balcony rail, when there hasn’t been anyone living there for years. Or the birds – you’ll have heard about them. Fishermen who swear they’ve seen three white birds, perched on the rocks at low tide or flying round the lamp when it’s rough. The maintenance mechanics who go out there now say so too. They’ve put a helipad on top of the lantern, to stop them having to try and land the traditional way. The birds are sat right there waiting for them; they’re not fussed by the rotors or the noise, they’re just staring straight at them.

That’s why the thing about the mechanic bothered me. Everyone says it didn’t happen – that there was no one out there but them. Trident threw it out with the rest of the hearsay. They said it was as unbelievable as those captains saying they’d seen a ghost. But it depends what you believe. I said to you before, I believe in what if.

It was Bill’s bad feeling. It was the lights in the sky, the birds, the transmitter, the coincidence. Maybe it was something I haven’t thought about yet because like my mum said, I don’t know anything. All I know is I don’t know anything at all.

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