StillWaters:Book4oftheSophieGreenMysteries (6 page)

The cave was maybe fifteen feet high at the entrance, and from the harbour it looked like it went back about thirty or forty feet, the ground steeply raked, pebbly, punctuated with severed crab claws and bottle tops. The bright beam of the flashlight glinted off the metal of the bottle tops and the glistening wet walls. The place stunk of seaweed and something else, something that was possibly the odour of a drowned body. I’m glad to say it’s not one I’d come across before.

I ventured in further. The sensible part of me said that it was just a cave, it held nothing scarier than a couple of hermit crabs and some seaweed, but the rest of me, the largest part of me, said, it’s dark and dripping and someone died here. It’s got to be full of monsters and they’re all going to leap out from the shadows and eat your brains.

Well, in that case, they’d go hungry.

Norma Jean stayed outside, sniffing and pawing at dead, smelly sea things, while I crept forward, my feet crunching on the pebbles, my breath loud and white in the cold black air. I kept seeing my own shadow reflected back at me and jumped every time.

I wasn’t even sure what I was looking for. The spy part of me (that same little bit that said there were no monsters in the dark) said that tourists didn’t hang themselves a week before Christmas. That there had been something fouler afoot here.

I didn’t even know who she was. I made a mental note to get in touch with the Cornish authorities (if I ever got any signal on my phone) and find out what they knew. If they knew anything. If they hadn’t already written it off as suicide.

But I knew…something inside me knew it wasn’t suicide. Female intuition. My spy sense was tingling. I don’t know.

I was standing in the middle of the cave, looking up at the rows of metal hooks and eyes screwed in the rocky roof. I guess they were some sort of pulley system for when stuff was smuggled up here. I’d have to go to the pub and ask them about it. See if the tunnel was still open.

I was standing there, aiming the torch up, making a mental to-do list, when quite suddenly, everything went black.

Chapter Four

There were sounds, somewhere, far away, but all I could feel was peaceful, cold, calmness. Maybe there were lights, too. Voices. I wasn’t sure. It was all so distant.

And then the calmness receded. I was tumbled and grabbed and many fingers were touching me, probing me, voices were shouting. Cold lips fastened to mine and I tried to fight against it but I was too weak. Pain exploded inside me, my lungs were turning inside out, and I tried to pull myself back down into the blackness, where things were quiet and calm and nothing hurt.

Bright lights, and there were people talking closer this time. Still so many hands all over me, touching and feeling, people talking to me but I didn’t want to listen.

And then finally something pulled me up, out of the arms of unconsciousness, presented me to the world and left me, lying in a hospital bed, pale and sick and quite confused.

“Hi,” said a voice, and I tried to focus my scratchy eyes on someone sitting by my bed. Dark hair. Beautiful eyes. Maria.

“Hi,” I croaked, and the sound was barely audible.

“How do you feel?”

“Like crap. What happened?”

Her expression dimmed. I could see it more clearly now.

“We were sort of hoping you could tell us that.” She shook her head. “Sophie. I’m taking you home. I know you’ve only just woken up but there’s nothing they can do for you here we can’t do at home and you know what the NHS is like with beds…”

I scraped my eyelids closed, and then back open in what used to be called blinking, and I shall now re-christen Ow Ow Fucking Ow.

“Now?”

“If you think you can manage it.”

I tried to breathe in, but my mouth and nose felt polluted. “I don't want to stay here.”

I wasn’t sure who allowed it, because I could hardly move, let alone stand, but someone had discharged me. Or at least, that’s what Maria said. She helped me into some clothes and propped me in a wheelchair and took me out to Ted, where she lifted me into the passenger seat and drove away, leaving the wheelchair sitting there outside the hospital. No one seemed to care. I guess that’s the NHS for you.

Ted is not the most comfortable car in the world, but I still managed to drop off to sleep again, everything so tired, waiting and wanting to sleep. And when I opened my eyes again I was in Luke’s bed with the floral duvet, and he was sitting on the other bed, a bucket there to catch the drips from the ceiling, and he was scowling at me.

“Luke?” I was so tired, I felt hung over, but I knew I’d drunk nothing for months. What had happened? Why was I so ill? “Have I got flu?”

“No,” he said, and there was no warmth in his voice.

“What happened? I don’t remember…”

“Do you remember taking Norma Jean out in the middle of the night? Going for a walk around the harbour when the tide was in?”

I licked my lips. Boy, did I need some Vaseline. “I checked the paper,” I croaked. “The tide was out. I checked. I had hours.”

“Well, the tide was pretty damn high when we found you,” Luke snapped.

“Found me?” I tried to move my head but someone had been hammering at the back of it. Anything other than lying on one side produced extreme pain.

The door opened and I, unable to move my head, had to wait until Maria spoke before I realised it was her.

“Luke, I hope you’re not traumatising Sophie.”

“’Cos it’s not like she deserves it.”

I frowned tiredly. What did I deserve? I tried to remember. What had I done?

“Could you step outside with me please?” Maria said tersely, and Luke, glaring at me, got up and stomped over the thin, noisy floor and slammed the door behind him. I listened hard, my ears feeling thick and watery, and caught Luke snapping, “She’s still a stupid cow,” before he stormed down the stairs, and the front door slammed.

Maria came in, looking at me apologetically.

“He’s not in a very good mood,” she said unnecessarily.

“What did I do?”

“You really don’t remember?”

“I—no. Maria, what did he mean about high tide when you found me? Where was I?”

“In the sea,” Maria said, and sat down on the edge of the bed.

While I lay there, head swirling and bunching nauseously, trying not to chuck up seaweed flavoured bile, Maria explained what she knew about what had happened.

Luke had discovered I was missing in the early morning. My heart leapt at the possibility that maybe he wanted to talk to me, but of course I wasn’t there. He’d checked all over, and when I truly couldn’t be found he woke Maria who, when her amusement had faded, realised that Norma Jean was gone too. They found her outside, decorating the doormat like a fat, blonde rug.

She led them, rather grumpily, to the harbour, where Luke was morbidly convinced I’d thrown myself into the still water—God knows what goes on in his mind to have come up with that—so he persuaded Maria to help him steal a boat and come looking for me. Coming across the early morning fishermen setting out they had, however, hitched a lift with them. One of them had spotted something bobbing around near the cave and Maria, with her SBS training, had managed to steer the little boat over the causeway without doing a Titanic because Luke, in her words, was having screaming hab dabs because he thought the something was me.

As indeed it was.

White, bloody, salty and very still, they’d cast a net to pull me out and started me breathing. I guess that would be all the hands and lips, then. Good to know I wasn’t being felt up while I was unconscious. Maria had placated Luke who was, touchingly, going gonzo, and dragged me off to hospital for X-rays and stomach pumping.

I’ve had my stomach pumped. How manky-cool is that?

Eventually the front door slammed again, and Maria called down to Luke that he could come in if he was prepared to be civil.

He did, sighing, as Maria left.

“There’s a sight for sore eyes,” I said, my voice more or less back to normal now, although with a bit of a husk I decided I rather liked.

“Are they?” Luke asked, taking a seat at the foot of my bed, leaning back against the metal frame. “Sore?”

I nodded.

“Good.”

I was stung. “Is that what you call being civil?”

“Is that what you call being sensible? God, Sophie, how damn stupid are you?”

I blinked at him nervously. “Okay, so maybe I could have waited until it was

light—”

“Or low tide?” He glared at me.

“I
did
,” I said. “I checked the tide table. I went out before low tide. I gave myself loads of time. I
checked
,” I repeated, feeling almost faintly drunk. Still, better than hung over.

“You couldn’t have.”

“Don’t you call me a liar,” I said as hotly as I could manage.

“Well, you’re either a liar or an idiot,” Luke said baldly. “Which would you prefer to be?”

“I’m not an idiot,” I insisted, all evidence to the contrary. “I was careful, and I had a flashlight, and proper boots—”

“But you still managed to get knocked out and nearly drowned. Did you slip and hit your head?”

He was sneering, and I glared at him for it.

“No,” I said. “I didn’t slip. I—”

And then I realised I didn’t remember.

I brought an arm up to rest over my eyes. The light from the window hurt.

“Sophie?” Luke said cautiously.

“It’s too bright.”

He got up and let the blind drop, and I blinked at the welcome darkness.

“Better?”

I nodded feebly, and the mattress moved as he got onto the end of the bed again and settled back against the footboard. He stretched out his legs beside mine, on the other side of the quilt, and fixed his eyes on me.

“Okay. Now tell me what the
fuck
you thought you were doing.”

I didn’t move my arm from my face. “I went out to look at the cave.”

“What cave?”

“The pub cave. Where the dead girl was.”

“Why?” Luke asked incredulously.

“I was curious.” Admittedly, I still wasn’t sure what I’d expected to find there, but I didn’t need to tell Luke that.

“So you went out there in the middle of the night?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

Luke let his head roll back. “Jesus. Okay, Sophie?”

“Mmm?”

“Next time you can’t sleep, come wake me up and I’ll shag you into unconsciousness, okay? Don’t go investigating dark caves at high tide.”

I lifted my arm and glared at him. “This is all your fault anyway,” I said.

“How is it my fault?” Luke bridled, but he looked slightly guilty.

“You know why. You kissed me, and you shouldn’t have.”

“So because of that you went out and nearly got yourself killed? Sophie, you weren’t
breathing
. You could have
died
. And you’ve been ill—”

“I’m fine now!”

“Blatantly.”

We glared at each other for a while, then I asked sullenly, “What time is it?”

“A little after two.”

“P.M.?”

“No, the sun shines very brightly in the middle of the night in Cornwall. Perhaps you noticed this when you took your midnight stroll?”

I didn’t even bother to dignify that with an answer.

“So I haven’t been out long?”

“I’d call a day and a half pretty impressive. It’s Monday, Soph,” he added, more gently, when I looked confused. The last I remember was Saturday night…

“Did Maria have fun with her surfer buddies?”

He laughed. “Yeah. She came home at three and spent all yesterday moping that she had to leave the party early or she wouldn’t have got a cab home.”

“She’s getting on well with her Aussie bloke, then?”

“Sounds like it.”

Thus goes everyone to the world but I
, I thought, remembering the film.
I may sit in a corner and cry “Heigh-Ho for a husband.”

Not that a husband is precisely what I’m looking for, I suppose under the current circumstances it’s quite the opposite. But, you know. It started out right.

I spent the rest of that day, and the whole of the day after, in Luke’s bed. Reading and sleeping, sparring tiredly with him, grateful for the respite Maria brought. She told me she believed I’d been sensible—well, as sensible as I ever was—and that as soon as I got my memory back, everything would become clear.

She made up some soup for me, as my throat was still sore from the stomach pumping (did you know they put a tube down your throat, all the way to your stomach, then suck everything out? Gross! I’m so glad I was unconscious) and I felt so nauseous all the time, I could barely keep anything down.

Luke continued to snipe at me, which I thought was just adding insult to injury. I was pretty sure I hadn’t done anything wrong, but he told me about ten times a day how bloody stupid I was and how he wasn’t sure I deserved to have been rescued. For which I kicked him through the covers.

“Why is he being so horrible to me?” I asked Maria tearfully when she brought me in some leek and potato soup, my favourite.

“Haven’t you figured it out yet?”

“Apparently I’m too bloody stupid.”

She sighed and sat down on the edge of the bed as I pulled myself up. “Sophie, you should have seen him. He was terrified you were dead. He was crying. I’ve never seen him cry before.”

I blinked. “Neither have I.”

“He kept saying it was his fault. He’d made you go out there. And when I brought you back he insisted you come up here, because you hated the room downstairs.”

“Is that where he’s sleeping?”

She shook her head. “On the sofa. So he can hear you.”

Bless.

“But—if he’s being so—why is he being so—?”

She smiled. “Because he was worried about you, you daft cow. You told him about your little hospital stay, right?” I nodded. “Yeah. He kept saying you were fragile and you had to be looked after.”

I snorted at this, because I don’t think I’ve been fragile since—well, I don’t think I’ve ever been fragile.

Anyway. It looked as though my plan failed. Breaking up with Luke to make him a better spy. Trying to stop him caring for me. I know, I know, I’m an ungrateful sod, I should be falling at his feet. But try to understand, he’s an excellent spy. He’s what I can never be. I don’t want to be the cause of his ruin.