Brodmaw Bay Read online

  Brodmaw Bay

  F.G. Cottam

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by F.G. Cottam

  The House of Lost Souls

  Dark Echo

  The Magdalena Curse

  The Waiting Room

  About the author

  A former magazine editor, F.G. Cottam has two children.

  First published in Great Britain in 2011 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © F.G. Cottam 2011

  The right of F.G. Cottam to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 978 1 848 94521 0

  Paperback ISBN 978 0 340 98100 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For my sister, Sharon, with love and pride

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  After five novels and five years, acknowledgement for their unfailing encouragement and support is well overdue to some of the splendid people who work for Hodder and Stoughton. I would like to express my lasting gratitude in particular to Carolyn Caughey, Francine Toon and Eleni Fostiropoulos. To the three of you, sincere thanks.

  Chapter One

  James Greer sat on a modular plastic chair in the crowded A&E department of the hospital and tried the technique of visualisation to escape the panic threatening to submerge him. He pressed the pads of the thumb and forefinger of his right hand gently together. He closed his eyes. He drew in a deep breath. He pictured a shoreline in early, gentle English light. Emerald waves tumbled on to sand at the edge of the sea, smoothing out with rhythmic, dissipating force.

  The sand was exposed, yellow and compacted, hissing in odd fissures and pockets on the retreat of the water, leaving behind translucent bits of shell and trailing wisps of kelp. He exhaled, at a blessed and deliberate remove, suddenly, from the chaos around him. It had worked. He was alert to the tug of his sleeve or the mention of his name over the public address system. But he was away from it, in the mental refuge of a place that meant calm and release. He even sensed he could smell the salt scent of a coastal morning.

  He had learned this coping exercise two years earlier. He had been obliged to give a series of presentations. James had always suffered a secret terror of public speaking. As the moment approached, he would succumb to an attack of nerves. He would stammer and shake. So he had sought the help of a hypnotherapist.

  Two sessions had been enough. He had not actually been hypnotised at either. Instead, he had been advised to deal with the onset of panic by picturing in his mind a place that symbolised calm and happiness to him. He supposed the business with his hand was meant to help with focus. He didn’t over-analyse the whole procedure. It had succeeded. He had paid his fee and left the hypnotherapist’s consulting room relieved and grateful for the ploy that put an end to the sweaty helplessness that the pressure of public performance had always inflicted upon him.

  It was not fear of facing an audience that forced him to visualise now. It was an ordeal much more grave and testing. It was panic over the plight of his son. The call from the police station in Peckham had come an hour earlier. Jack had been mugged aboard a bus on the way home from school for his mobile phone. The level of violence used had been out of all proportion to the prize involved, his father had been told. The ambulance had delivered Jack to the hospital unconscious. Three assailants had beaten him senseless.

  They had taken his wallet, too, which had delayed the process of identification. An alert constable had found a name tag on his shirt when they had stripped him at the hospital. He was concussed and the socket of his right eye was fractured. He was in theatre now, having the damage to his brain assessed. It was why his father was sitting in A&E, dreaming of a beach and breathing sonorously with his eyes clenched tightly shut. There were tears trapped under the lids of his eyes. But James knew that if he gave in to the loss of composure they signalled, he would not be of any practical use at all to his injured son.

  Their Bermondsey townhouse was at the centre of London’s latest fashionable district. James could lunch each day at Borough Market. His wife’s steel and granite studio was on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge, with a panoramic view of the river through its tinted glass windows. They were handy for the Tate Modern and the Globe Theatre and Hay’s Wharf and he was only a scenic fifteen-minute stroll north to where most of his clients were based in Clerkenwell. But schools were difficult in inner London and Jack’s was in Peckham and he had been assaulted and robbed on the bus journey home by what the police were saying were members of a Somali street gang housed in one of the area’s sink estates.

  Jack tried not to think about the price his son had just paid for maintaining the family’s metropolitan cool. He thought instead of his imaginary beach, with its emerald waves and wan English sunlight and the sand glimmering wetly under the light’s gentle spread. He thought of that, amid the sprained and cut and drunk and overdosed, among the toxic casualties of a typical early evening in an inner-London hospital.

  He was there for two hours before a staff nurse summoned him to see the consultant. James shook his hand, thinking him young for a neurosurgeon, observing that there was none of his son’s blood on the spotless white coat the doctor wore. Maybe that was a good sign. Or maybe he had just changed out of one drenched to the elbows in gore and dropped it into a laundry bin. He smiled but the smile was tight, unreadable. The specialist might be miffed at having missed a dinner party. He might be on the brink of the delivery of tragic news.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Greer.’

  ‘I’ll stand for what you have to tell me.’

  ‘Very well, then. Your son will make a full physical recovery. He is severely concussed, but there is no cranial or arterial damage; no fractures to the skull, no blood clots causing any pressure to have to attempt the tricky procedure of relieving. He is young and healthy and the physical trauma will repair itself fairly rapidly. The damage to his eye socket will cause him a few weeks of pain and discomfort. But there is no evidence of nerve damage. His sight will be unimpaired. He retains his full capacity for facial expression. There will be no paralysis or permanent scarring.’

  ‘You mean there will be no physical scarring.’

  ‘Your son was very lucky.’

  ‘Was he?’

  The doctor was studying something on a clipboard. ‘Jack was hit repeatedly about the head with a blunt instrument. Probably a tyre iron, the police think. Knives are the preferred choice of weapon among London’s feral youths. In the circumstances, I�
��d say he’s extremely lucky.’

  It was all relative, James was thinking, who was thinking no longer about a beach. His thoughts were landlocked now and consigned to a sunless interior. ‘How long will he have to remain here?’

  ‘He’ll be here at least a few days, under observation, as a precautionary measure. The police will wish to take a statement. As the victim of a violent crime he also qualifies for counselling, which over the coming weeks, after a trauma such as this, he will almost certainly need.’

  ‘The hospital provides that?’

  The doctor smiled his thin smile again. He tapped his clipboard with a pen. ‘Of course we do, Mr Greer,’ he said. ‘We’re a front-line resource.’

  James nodded. ‘May I see my son, now?’

  ‘You may. I can’t predict this with absolute certainty, but it will be at least a few hours before he comes round, probably about breakfast time tomorrow. He will be sore and thirsty and I should think very happy and relieved to see you.’

  James looked at his watch. It was just after eight o’clock in the evening. He needed to call Lily. His wife was at home, fighting a mother’s natural instinct to be at the bedside of her injured son, because right now their eight-year-old daughter Olivia, frantic at her brother’s plight, needed a parent’s care and consolation. He would make the call. The news was positive. It was all relative, as he had just conceded to himself. Relatively speaking, the duty of phoning home would be a happy one. Then he would endure the night vigil of waiting for Jack to regain consciousness.

  After delivering the glad tidings to his wife, James sat at his son’s bedside in the private room for which his credit card had paid. The monitoring equipment to which Jack was attached by various tubes and wires beeped discreetly every now and then. Time passed until outside, beyond the hospital buildings and its grounds, he began to hear the idling lorries and the raucous cries of the porters unloading them at the neighbouring market. Air brakes hissed, carts and trolleys clattered, laughter erupted at swapped banter. As Jack slept his oblivious, healing sleep, his father was reminded that the city in which they lived never slept at all.

  There was no practical point to his being there until Jack awoke. But he was a father who very much loved his son and the situation here was way beyond the practicalities. He would not have chosen to be anywhere else. Pads of cotton wool were blood-soaked under wound lint covering Jack’s head, entirely concealing his features. His chest rose and fell with his breathing and his father put a hand there gently just to feel the proof of the life in him. It was an hour before he sought any diversion beyond sitting and gazing at his son’s bandaged head and face. When he did, he saw that there was a shelf of books and heaped magazines mounted to the left of the door.

  The light was low in the room, but he had become accustomed to it and could see perfectly well. He got up and walked across and looked at the spines of the books. None of their titles or authors really took his fancy. He needed diversion but did not have the concentration for a plot and the books were mostly thrillers and espionage stories and romances. Only one volume intrigued him, took his eye, so he levered out the book and took it back to his chair to look at it.

  It was a children’s story and as soon as he glanced at the cover of the book, James was aware that Lily had been responsible for its artwork. His wife’s style of illustration was vivid, atmospheric and, to him, instantly recognisable.

  The front cover showed a village rising above a curved inlet as it would be viewed, or imagined, looking landward from the sea. The cottages of the village were clustered cosily under the ascent of a grassy hill contoured with deep green tussocks. The dwellings, picturesque and mostly whitewashed, rose above a sea wall. The beach was covered in orange shingle and the intense tones of the picture and its long shadows suggested sunset. To the left of the panorama, a small flotilla of fishing smacks sat at anchor. The picture was detailed and authentic-looking but James thought it much too unspoiled and charming to have been taken from life. The title of the book, lettered in gold over the deep blue sky above the summit of the sheltering hill, was Brodmaw Bay.

  The calendar provided what slight plot the story possessed. It followed the seasons from autumn through to summer and the bay was pictured by his wife in all its varied and entrancing moods. It was a tribute, he thought, to the fertility of Lily’s imagination, as well as her decorative skill. Brodmaw Bay had not just charm but character. He was distracted, looking up every now and then from the images on the pages to watch and listen to Jack’s breathing, making sure for himself, despite the battery of hi-tech monitors, that his son was not slipping elusively away from the short life he had enjoyed.

  The author of the book was credited, but he could find his wife’s name nowhere between the covers or on the fly-leaf either. It had been published by Chubbly & Cruff, a house he had never heard of, and the year of publication was given as 1993. Lily had still been at college. She must have done it for rent money in the period when she’d been struggling along on a tiny grant and the tips from Covent Garden waitressing shifts.

  How things had changed, he thought. Now, she was one of the most sought-after illustrators of children’s books working anywhere in the world. Characters she had copyrighted were animated on children’s DVDs. They appeared in comics and on the backs of cereal packets and it all ticked along very lucratively.

  Brodmaw Bay was an atmospheric place, with its slate roofs and lobster pots and steep cobbled lanes. There was a chandlery and a boatbuilder’s yard and a butcher’s shop with partridges and hares hanging from hooks above the display of sausages and choice cuts of lamb and beef in the window. There was a pub with a wooden sign and welcoming yellow light in the darkness behind its mullioned glass. The place was all of a piece, James thought, an idealised bit of Little England, quaint and folkloric, from a time easy to feel nostalgic for that had never really occurred.

  Only one image jarred in this portrait of an idyllic coastal village. A church was pictured on one page towards the back of the book. It was seen from the perspective of a gate leading to its porch and in the foreground there were graves to either side of the short path to the church door. The season was winter. Snow sat in white slabs topping the headstones of the graves and sagged in ripples on the roof of the porch. The headstones had mostly surrendered to some instability of the earth and were canted at angles that seemed sinister. Moss and lichen had crawled across their inscriptions. They did not look as still as James thought gravestones should. The church spire was crooked too, a casualty of the subsidence that had shifted the graves, but the effect on it was slyer, more subtle. The church had about it the sunken character of faith undermined.

  He saw that the windows of the church were smashed, the small panes between their lead lattices, each and every one of them, broken. The damage looked deliberate and vindictive. Then he noticed that the door in the porch hung slightly open, an iron hasp twisted where he supposed a padlock had been forced, a hint of darkness where it opened inward, to the right of the doorframe.

  Studying this scene, James shook his head. The whole image was out of sympathy with the rest of the illustrations, weirdly out of kilter with the mood of starry-skied, lantern-lit cosiness conjured by the other pictures in the book. He thought its inclusion a misjudgement, on the part of his wife and on the part also of whoever had overseen the editing. But its inclusion suggested something intriguing. It hinted that Brodmaw Bay, far from being a townscape of his wife’s imagination, was somewhere real she had simply documented with her palette and brush.

  Jack groaned then in his sleep. He coughed and the cough was wet-sounding and his father rose and waited with dread for blood to bubble and well from his mouth. He continued to wait. He thought about saying a prayer. Instead, he just watched, tense, with his own breath poised. But no blood came. He realised that the book about Brodmaw Bay was still in the grip of one hand. He thought the location sounded Cornish. It had resided in the Cornwall of his clever wife’s dreams in her stude
nt days. Either that or she had actually been there. He must ask her about it. He walked over to the shelf and put back the book.

  Towards dawn his bedside vigil was interrupted. A nurse came into the room and measured Jack’s pulse and took his temperature and made sure that the drip providing him with fluid was functioning properly and the bag supplying the saline solution still adequately full. She told James that it would be at least another few hours before his son stirred. It would be about lunchtime before the sedative wore off sufficiently. She smiled, he supposed to relieve the look of worry his face wore. She said that Jack’s heart rate was slow and steady and his pulse strong. James nodded. The nurse patted his shoulder and left. He thought the contact probably a breach of protocol. It was comforting and he was grateful for it.

  Light was entering the room, through its single tall window, from a courtyard space beyond the glass. It was June and dawn broke early in London in June. The room was in an old part of the hospital. The floor was black and white tiles of marble scored and faded with feet and polishing. There were still pipes on the wall, painted over, that must have fed the gas lamps that once provided the room’s illumination. James decided he would go and get something to eat. Somewhere would be open. There would be a café, one of those old places with Formica-topped tables and steam from a tea urn and buoyant London banter. He needed a break, a change of scene. He needed to get some perspective on what had happened to his son and its implications.

  He walked out in the early summer air to cobbles and bronze street bollards and iron railings topping old walls and the peal of a summoning bell from a church probably the work of Wren or Hawksmoor in the aftermath of the Great Fire in the time of Charles II and his Restoration. He could smell the cool drift on the wind of the Thames. This was an old part of London and the city wore its history in this vicinity in every lane and almost every building. Once it had charmed him. Once it had beguiled him.