The Low Water Hours

Eleven People

By half past four the wind had found its way into Gull House through every gap the paint had left. Maren stood in the kitchen in her mother's nightdress with a coat over it and dialled 999. While she waited she watched her own reflection in the black window, a woman holding a phone too tightly.

"Coastguard," she said, when they asked which service. Then, because it sounded thin, she said "Police" as well, and had to explain twice what a tidal island was.

The woman on the line was calm and patient. Was she certain he hadn't simply gone for a walk? Had she checked the grounds? Was there any chance he'd left before the tide came in?

"He was at dinner at nine," Maren said. "The causeway was shut by half past. He was here."

"And there's no one else on the island who could—"

"There are eleven people on this island," Maren said, and heard how it sounded. It sounded like a list of suspects. "I'll go and wake them."

She didn't need to. When she came down the path with a torch, the Ship's windows were already lit. Jory Treloar stood at the harbour wall in his smock with his hands in the front pocket, as if he'd been standing there for hours, or had never gone to bed.

"Your guest," he said. It wasn't a question.

"How do you know?"

He tipped his head towards Gull House. Every window she'd passed was lit, all four storeys, and the house stood blazing on the headland like a ship about to go down. She hadn't noticed herself switching the lights on.

"Lights went on in a row," Jory said. "Then the door."

There was a man coming along the harbour arm behind him, tall and stooped, in a yellow oilskin buttoned to the throat. He had a hurricane lamp, which was an affectation in an age of torches. His face was long and lined, and his white hair had been combed wet.

"Declan Roskilly," he said, and shook her hand formally, as if they were meeting at a funeral, which in a way they had been. "Harbourmaster. I was sorry about your mother."

He was the first person who had said it. Maren found she had no idea what to say back.

"Has anyone taken a boat out?" she asked instead.

"No."

"You're sure?"

"There are three boats in this harbour, Miss Hale." He lifted the lamp, and the light slid over them: Jory's blue one with the nets heaped in the stern, a white crabber, and a small clinker dinghy with its oars shipped. All three sat on their moorings, nodding together in the swell that came round the end of the wall. "Nothing has gone in or out since the Morwenna came in at six last evening. I'd have heard. I sleep above the store, and the slip's under my window."

"In this wind?"

He looked at her steadily. "I'd have heard."

They searched while it was dark, then in the grey hour that wasn't quite light. There were nine of them in the end, strung across the island's back with torches. Wind came off the sea with rain in it, and the gorse rattled like dry paper.

Maren hadn't walked the island in twenty-two years, and her feet knew it before she did. They took her down the sheep track on the south side without hesitating, over the stile with the loose top bar and round the granite outcrop the children used to call the Anvil. She caught herself reaching for a handhold that had been there when she was twelve. It was still there.

The cliffs on the west were not high, perhaps forty feet, but they dropped straight into water that boiled white over the ledges. Jory went down the gully on a rope with a torch in his teeth. He came back up shaking his head, with weed on his knees.

"If he went in there," he said, "we won't see him till he comes up somewhere else."

"Where?"

He looked out at the bay. "Depends on the tide," he said, and she understood he meant days.

The tin-mine shaft was the place she had been dreading. Wheal Brannoc had been worked out before anyone's grandfather was born. All that remained was a ruined engine house with no roof and, thirty yards above it, the shaft, a round black mouth in the turf with a cage of rusted iron bars over the top. When Maren was small her mother had told her a boy had fallen down it in 1890 and was still falling. She had believed this for years. She had believed, specifically, that if you lay with your ear to the grille you could hear him.

A woman she didn't know got to the grille first. She was in her forties, sharp-featured, in an expensive waterproof that had never met a fishing boat. She shone her torch through the bars and down.

"It's padlocked," she said, and rattled it. "Look. Padlocked. Nobody's getting through that."

The padlock was new. Maren noticed that. It was a bright brass thing on a hasp that was furred orange with rust, and there was a clean scrape in the rust where the hasp had swung recently.

"Who has the key?" she asked.

"Declan," said the woman, and then corrected herself: "The parish council. It's a safety thing. Clare Ashdown, by the way. We're in the one with the glass." She waved vaguely back towards the harbour, where the cedar extension stood out pale among the old cottages. "Simon's searching the north side. We only came over in 2019. We didn't know your mother well. She was—" She hunted for the word. "Private."

Maren knelt and put her torch to the bars. The light went down slick granite walls, caught a ledge of fern and a ladder of iron staples furred with rust, and then gave out. There was a smell coming up, cold and mineral, like the inside of a stone.

"Mr. Venn?" she called.

Her voice went down and didn't come back.

At first light Declan let her into the harbour store to use the VHF, because the mobile signal was coming and going with the weather. The store was a stone room under his flat, smelling of diesel, rope and paraffin. Lobster pots were stacked to the beams. A desk stood by the window looking out over the slip, and on it, squared to the edge just as the offer letter had been squared on her mother's table, lay the harbour log.

While Declan spoke into the handset in a flat, practised voice, giving positions, numbers and conditions, Maren read the log upside down.

It was a big ruled book bound in black cloth. Each day had its own line: date, time, vessel, in or out, conditions, initials. The handwriting was small, careful and slightly backward-leaning. Morwenna — IN — 18:04 — SW 5 rising — D.R. After it came a line drawn neatly with a ruler, then NIL MOVEMENTS in capitals, then the date for today.

She turned the page back while he wasn't looking. Then she turned back another.

Every entry was in the same blue pen. Every ruled line was the same length. There were no crossings-out, no smudges, no salt spots or rain stains, and no place where the writing went loose and hurried because it was half past five on a February morning and the boat was coming in and the man's hands were cold. It looked less like a working logbook than a fair copy of one.

"Falmouth says no," Declan said, hanging up the handset. He hadn't looked round, but she had the sense he knew exactly which page she'd been on. "The helicopter's tasked to a yacht off the Lizard, and they won't put the inshore boat into this harbour in a south-westerly with the swell running. Police will walk over at the next low water if it's safe to cross."

"And will it be?"

He looked out of the window. The wind had dragged the bay into long grey ridges with white tearing off the tops. Over on the causeway the marker posts stood up to their white bands in water, and the water was still climbing over them when it should have been falling.

"Not if this keeps up," he said. "Surge'll hold it. Tomorrow, maybe, when it backs westerly and drops." He took the log from under her hand, closed it and laid it square again. "Tea at the Ship. Wenna's doing breakfast for everyone. You'll want to eat."

Wenna Tregear met her at the door of the Ship with both arms open. Maren, who did not get hugged, found herself held against a cardigan that smelled of fried bread and Yardley's lavender.

"You poor love," Wenna said into her hair. "You poor, poor love. Your first night. Your first night, after everything." She was a big, soft woman, about Ruth's age, with a pretty face gone pouchy and lipstick put on very carefully. Somebody had put it on for this in the last hour. "Come in. Sit by the fire. Ruth, get her a tea, sugar in it, she's had a shock."

Ruth was already behind the bar with the pot. "Look at you," she said. "Look at the—" She stopped herself, poured, and pushed the mug across.

The Ship was low and dim, all black beams and horse brasses, and the fire had been lit. Maren couldn't remember ever seeing it lit before October. People were sitting at the tables in damp coats. They looked up when she came in and then looked away, almost all at the same moment, like birds on a wire.

Tregear, she thought, sitting down. Tregear & Lowe, Property Consultants, Truro.

"Any relation?" she said, when Wenna brought her a plate of eggs she hadn't asked for. "To the estate agent?"

Wenna laughed easily and warmly. "Oh, there's Tregears from here to Bodmin, my love. You can't throw a stone in Cornwall." She patted Maren's hand. "Eat. You'll feel better. Shock goes to the stomach."

It was what anyone would say. It was kind. But Maren had spent eleven years on reception desks in Bristol hotels, saying I'm so sorry for the inconvenience to men who'd found a hair in the bath. She knew what a sentence sounded like when you'd said it before, in the mirror or in your head, to get the weight right. Wenna's sentences sounded like that, every one of them, as if she had known since half past four that Maren would come through that door and had been deciding what to say.

"He was in here last night," Maren said. "Mr. Venn. After dinner."

"He was." Wenna sat down opposite her, heavily. "Sat over there in the corner, by the barometer. Half of bitter, made it last, the way they do. Didn't talk to anyone. Drank alone."

"Did anyone talk to him?"

"He wasn't a talker, love."

That was not true, Maren thought. He had talked to her. He'd asked about the second week of August, a storm and the old ledgers, in that soft sickroom voice, while he cut his lamb into tidy squares.

"What time did he leave?"

"Twenty to eleven," Wenna said. "I was wiping down. He said goodnight, nice as you like, and went up the path."

Over the next hour Maren met all of them. She asked each one where they'd been, as gently as she could manage, and she slipped without meaning to into the landlady's voice: I'm so sorry to ask. Just so I've got it straight. They didn't seem to mind. They seemed, if anything, ready for the question.

Simon Ashdown had come in from the north side with his trousers soaked to the knee. He was a quiet man with an architect's glasses who kept looking at his wife before he answered. They'd had a drink at the Ship until about half ten and seen Mr. Venn in the corner. He'd left at twenty to eleven, and they'd gone home just after. Clare took a sleeping tablet. Simon sleeps like the dead.

Hedley Pascoe, Ruth's husband, was eighty if he was a day and deaf in the ear nearest Maren. He was in bed by ten, he said. Ruth came in at eleven. Twenty to eleven, the fella left. Ruth said.

Kit Roskilly was Declan's son, a big fair lad of twenty-five or so with a gold ring in one ear. He wouldn't sit down. He'd been in the Ship, played darts with Jory and seen the birdwatcher go at twenty to eleven. Then he went up to his dad's and was asleep by half past. Declan was already in bed. Declan always was.

Elowen Treloar was Jory's mother. Maren remembered her as a fierce woman with red arms gutting pilchards on the slip, and now she was a fierce old woman in a wheelchair by the fire. She took Maren's chin in her hand as if she were checking a fish for freshness and said, "You've got her jaw. God help you." She had been in bed since nine and had heard nothing, and her son had come in at eleven.

Sam Nance was the youngest, early twenties, a mainland boy who lodged with the Pascoes and worked on the white crabber. He blushed when she spoke to him and said "twenty to eleven" before she'd finished asking.

Jory was leaning on the bar. "Darts with Kit," he said. "Home at eleven. Mum'll tell you."

"She did."

"Well, then."

Maren wrote it all down on the back of the Tregear & Lowe envelope, because it was the only paper she had. When she'd finished she looked at the list and felt the hairs rise on her arms. It had nothing to do with the wind getting in under the door.

Every time agreed. Every story leaned against the next one, like books on a shelf. Nobody had been anywhere alone. No one had needed a moment to think, and no one had said eleven-ish or I don't know, I wasn't looking at the clock. On a dark wet night in a pub where the clock behind the bar was ten minutes fast, and had been fast since Maren was a child, they had all looked up together at twenty to eleven and watched a man they didn't talk to go out of the door.

She had been a teenager on this island. She knew what it looked like when people got their story straight. It was what she and Jenna Nance had done the summer they took the dinghy round the point and nearly didn't come back. They'd agreed on everything, down to the last detail, and her mother had seen through it in about four seconds.

"Who's missing?" she said aloud.

The room went quiet. Wenna looked up from the coffee machine.

"I've counted ten," Maren said. "Jory said eleven."

"Agnes," said Ruth, too quickly, and then regretted it all over her face. "Agnes Ivey. She doesn't come down. She's ninety-one. She keeps the chapel." She waved a hand. "She'll have been asleep. She's always asleep."

"Has anyone asked her?"

Nobody answered. Then Jory pushed himself off the bar.

"I'll go up," he said.

"I'll go," said Maren.

"She doesn't know you."

"She knew my mother."

Jory looked at her for a long moment. It was the look he had given the water, years ago, when he was teaching her to read it, as if he were watching for something under the surface that hadn't shown yet.

"Go home first," he said. "Get dry. You're shaking."

She hadn't noticed that either.

Gull House was cold and every light was still on. She went through switching them off, room by room, and stopped at the door of number three.

The bed was as she'd left it. The notebook was still on the desk, still open to the first page. 14 August 2004. Her mother's name was underlined twice, so hard the pencil had dented the paper.

She didn't touch it. She told herself that was for the police. The truth was that she didn't want to know what was on the second page.

In the end it was the wind that took her upstairs. It boomed across the roof and something banged up there over and over, a loose shutter or a trapdoor, a hollow knock like a fist on a coffin lid. She climbed past the attic bedroom with its boxes to the narrow ladder at the very top and pushed up the hatch to the widow's walk.

The wind nearly took her off her feet. She caught the rail and stood bent into it, in the little railed platform her great-great-grandfather had built so his wife could watch for a boat that never came home. The whole island lay below her: the harbour, the Ship, the cottages and the chapel squatting on the slope with its bell swinging in its open frame. Beyond it was the drowned causeway, with the posts standing up out of the grey like the fingers of something buried.

Tobias Venn's binoculars were on the rail.

They hadn't fallen there or been dropped. They had been wedged into the angle where the rail met its corner post, with the strap wound twice round the iron to hold them, and set level, like a sighting instrument. Whoever had set them there had taken time over it.

They weren't pointed at the sea or the north stacks, where the terns had nested, and they weren't pointed at the harbour where the boats were. They were pointed down the slope and a little to the left, at the chapel.

Maren bent and put her eyes to them without touching them. The focus had already been set, and the chapel jumped up at her, sharp enough to count the lichen on the slates: grey granite, the bell frame, the low arched door with the iron ring.

The door was open an inch.

A light was moving inside, low and yellow, the kind a candle or a hurricane lamp gives. She watched it pass behind the plain glass of the window, then stop.

She straightened, her heart going hard, and looked down at the harbour. They were all coming out of the Ship now in their coats, Wenna in her cardigan with her arms folded, and gathering on the wall to watch the water. She counted them, then counted again because the wind was making her eyes stream.

Ten. Ruth, Hedley, Wenna, Declan, Kit, Sam, Elowen in her chair, Clare and Simon Ashdown, and Jory a little apart from the rest, standing with his hands in his smock, looking up at Gull House. Looking at her.

That made ten on the harbour wall, and one ninety-one-year-old woman who was always asleep.

In the chapel window the light went out.