The Wheel of Fortune (160 page)

I decided to walk out to the tip of the headland. Any activity seemed better than none, and so although I could have remained where I was I didn’t.

I could have stopped—but I went on.

IV

By the church a farmer drove past me in his tractor and the normality of his cheerful wave was soothing to me. Moving on down the street I passed the hotel at the road’s end and headed down the track past the car park and the Coastguard’s cottages. Automatically, responding to a lifetime’s experience of Gower, I checked the board where the Coastguard set out information about the state of the tides and saw that the Shipway was safe for another hour and fifty minutes. I was hardly planning an expedition to the Worm, but I thought it possible that Kester might be pottering around down on the rocks if the tide was favorable. I could remember him gazing into a pool there when we were children and declaring how ravishing the seaweed was. I’d been collecting dead starfish at the time.

With my mind still deep in the ragbag of the past, I drifted on past the Coastguard’s cottages before veering to the edge of the cliff to check the beach below. But there was no one down there who looked like Kester. I did wonder if he might be hiding in a cave but I could think of no plausible reason why he should be.

I went on.

The most likely solution to the mystery of his disappearance was that he had strolled to the end of the headland and then veered south along the top of the cliffs. It was a reasonably level walk and not too arduous. I couldn’t quite see Kester trekking down to sea level and back after a busy day, but when I approached the end of the headland and glanced along the cliffs to Porteynon there was no sign of him and when I finally reached the point where I could look down upon the Shipway I saw him immediately.

He was loafing around a rock pool not far from the bottom of the cliffs.

Surprising but not, as far as I could see, either extraordinary or bizarre. I stood watching him and for a moment I thought he’d looked up but he hadn’t, he was just pushing the hair out of his eyes as he straightened his back. It would have been useless to call out. The clear evening light was creating the optical illusion that he was close to me but the cliffs were high, the sea was droning away and we were probably at least ten minutes apart in time. I hesitated, not sure what to do. I glanced at my watch. Half-past six. The Shipway would remain exposed for well over an hour and even though Kester was bound to come back eventually up the cliff path to the summit where I was now lying in wait for him, it was possible that he could be mooning around gazing soulfully into rock pools for some time. Could my nerves stand the wait? No. Better to go down and confront him.

I set off down the path.

The path zigzagged and I wasn’t watching him all the time, but before I was halfway to the bottom of the cliff I noticed that he was on the move. I stopped to stare at him. He was heading out across the Shipway. At first I thought I might be mistaken because the Shipway is such a jumble of rocks that no one who traverses it can travel in a straight line, but as I watched I knew I was right. He wasn’t hurrying; he was moving casually, but he was keeping up a steady pace and he was no longer pausing to look at the rock pools.

Now, this
was
bizarre. I glanced at my watch again. I even listened to it to make sure it hadn’t stopped but it was ticking away normally enough, and as I’d set it right by the one-o’clock news I knew it couldn’t possibly be more than a minute slow. Could Kester be making some sort of balls-up? No, he was Gower-bred, just as I was, and he too would have looked at the Coastguard’s notice on his way out. So that meant he knew what he was doing, but what the hell was it?

If he was going out to the Worm he was mad—not suicidal; he had plenty of time to get there and back before the tide turned nasty; but just plain mad. Crossing the Shipway was a hard slog. It took half an hour to get from the foot of the cliffs to the Inner Head, the first of the Worm’s three humps, and the terrain was terrible nearly all the way. No one in his right mind would battle across the Shipway at the end of the day in order to twiddle his thumbs for a few minutes before being obliged to start the journey back.

I went on, driven by curiosity, and by the time I reached the grassy bank at the bottom of the cliffs he was a long way ahead. In fact he was halfway across. He was standing on that little shingle beach in the middle of the great tilting C formed by the Shipway, and gazing out across Rhossili Bay. It was hard to judge distances in that seascape of optical illusion, but if he was on that beach I calculated we had to be at least a quarter of an hour apart; I had dithered on the cliff while he had been striding out so he had gained a few minutes on me. Was he aware of my presence behind him? He gave no indication of it. I had half-wondered if he had seen me and was running away, but he showed no sign that he was unnerved—rather the reverse. He looked like a disciple of Wordsworth absorbed in the wonders of nature.

Most odd.

So what did I do? I decided to stay where I was because at any minute now he was sure to turn back; I just couldn’t believe he’d slog on across the Shipway. But he did. He stopped gazing across the bay and went on.

Extraordinary. What did it mean? I glanced at my watch again. Plenty of time. No danger. He could get to the Worm and he could certainly get back, no problem about that, but what the hell was he up to? I had no idea, but if he was mad enough to trek across the Shipway for no reason on a fine spring evening I supposed I could be mad enough too. At least a trek over rough terrain was better than sitting on the bank beneath the cliff and going crazy wondering what the hell he was doing.

I went on.

As I scrambled down the bank onto the rocks I met two holidaymakers, a man and a woman, who were just completing the ordeal of the return journey, and we all said good evening to each other. The man added some jovial warning to me about the rising tide, and to reassure myself I glanced at my watch. Nearly a quarter to seven. An hour and fifteen minutes of perfect safety—and probably longer. The Coastguard, all too aware of how often people underestimated the time it took to cross the Shipway, was sure to make allowances in its calculations for the misguided and the foolhardy.

I began to slog across the Shipway. I couldn’t see Kester all the time because the taller rocks often hid him from view, but as time went on it gradually occurred to me how odd it was that he never once looked back. One often had to pause on the Shipway to calculate the best route and it would have been natural to glance back during these routine surveys, but whenever I did catch sight of Kester he was either gazing out to sea or else resolutely confronting the Inner Head.

Why didn’t he look back?

But on the other hand, why should he? It wouldn’t do to start being neurotic, although it was hard not to be neurotic in the face of his peculiar behavior. I decided that for my own peace of mind I needed to know what he was doing and why. Could he be luring me on in order to kill me? If I was going to give way to paranoia I might as well give way entirely, but no, the whole point of our situation was that Kester didn’t have to kill me to get what he wanted. I was the one who had to kill him except that I wasn’t going to. That took care of that particular theory but I was still no closer to guessing what the devil he was up to.

I reached the middle of the Shipway and stood on the little shingle beach where Kester himself had stood a quarter of an hour before. The water of the bay nearby was tranquil but I could hear the surf booming on the other side of the isthmus as the tide swept up from the south. As I paused for breath I glanced ahead at Kester again and at that moment he reached the Inner Head and scrambled up from the rocks onto the grassy bank. Now, I thought, now he’ll look back. One always did when one had finally conquered the Shipway. One looked back not only to see the dazzling view but to pat oneself mentally on the back for crawling the full distance over that nightmarish terrain of jumbled rocks and pools.

I stood stock-still and waited to be discovered. But discovery never came. He didn’t look back. He drifted on down the path that led away from the Shipway, and soon he had disappeared from sight along the southern flank of the Inner Head.

Incredible behavior. Could he be quite mad, so mad that he wanted to kill me just for the hell of it even though my murder was unnecessary? I decided that I could believe that—just—but what I couldn’t believe was that Kester would try to kill me by luring me out to the Worm’s Head and tossing me (how?) into the sea. After all,
I
was the expert in unarmed combat. That would be a great way for me to kill Kester but hardly a great way for Kester to kill me—strychnine in the scotch would be more in his line and a nice grave waiting in the woods, although if the police searched the grounds they’d be bound to discover any newly made grave … No, on second thoughts Kester would favor a murder that could look like an accidental drowning, but hell, it was all quite irrelevant because I hadn’t a shred of evidence that Kester had murder on his mind.

I just had it on mine. But no, it would be crazy to kill him, those holidaymakers would testify that I’d been chasing Kester out to the Worm and even a policeman with the brains of a louse could see that I had a gargantuan motive for wanting Kester dead. And I wasn’t going to kill him anyway. So that was that.

Maybe my wisest course was simply to turn back and wait for him on the mainland, but no, I really had to stop being so paranoid and pull myself together—I had to stop picturing either Kester or myself as a drowned corpse, because if there was one certainty about our present situation it was that no one was going to wind up killed on an expedition to the Worm’s Head like—

My God, yes, like Owain Bryn-Davies back in the Eighteen Eighties.

I’d never really understood that story. Apparently Bryn-Davies had gone to look at the Penrice flock which was kept on the Worm in those days, but he was a North Gower man from The Welshery and he hadn’t understood about the tides. Why not? He obviously wasn’t a fool. He must have consulted the tide tables—or asked someone to consult them for him. So what had happened? God only knew, but anyway the net result had been that the usurper at Oxmoon had been neatly eliminated and my grandfather Bobby Godwin, the rightful heir, had wound up the undisputed master of his stolen inheritance.

The usurper had been neatly …

I swallowed some air in a moment of complete panic, floundered in among the rocks again and clawed my way up onto the spine of the Shipway so that I could see what was happening on the other side, but no, I was still thoroughly safe; the tide, though looking snappish, was still thundering at a distance but as I watched it I knew as absolutely as if I’d seen the family history printed in black-and-white that my grandfather had trapped Bryn-Davies, trapped him and drowned him on the Shipway, because he had seen no other way of removing the usurper from his home.

Kester wasn’t Bobby Godwin and I wasn’t Owain Bryn-Davies. History never exactly repeats itself. But it reverberates, and as I stood there listening on the Shipway I was nearly overwhelmed by those echoes in time.

I checked my watch. Could Kester have altered the Coast guard’s notice? Of course not. Impossible. However I came to the conclusion that I really wasn’t very happy right in the middle of the Shipway with the tide coming in, so the big question once again was Did I go back or did I stagger on to the Inner Head to find out exactly what Kester was doing with himself?

I dithered away and the minutes ticked on. At this rate I’d be drowned through sheer indecision and it wouldn’t even be Kester’s fault. I had to act, and in an effort to marshal my thoughts I found myself again looking at my watch.

It was five minutes past seven. In less than an hour’s time, at eight o’clock, the Shipway would begin to go under and both Kester and I, unless we were certifiable lunatics, would be back on the mainland because if we weren’t we’d be marooned together on the Worm until the early hours of the morning. That was a hideous thought so the sensible thing for me to do now was go back and wait for him beneath the cliff.

But on the other hand …

I considered the other hand. I could go on, confront him and still be back on the mainland before the Shipway went under. The advantage of that was that it would put me in a strong psychological position when it came to striking a bargain with him. Obviously he didn’t know he was being followed; that crap about him luring me on was just me being paranoid. If he now found himself alone in an isolated spot with a trained killer who had a huge motive for wanting him dead, he’d be so unnerved that he’d agree to whatever I suggested and the odds were I’d get a much more favorable compromise. He might even let me keep Hal.

That settled it.

I went on.

V

I felt as if I were crossing lines, line after line after line, but that was all right because I knew there was always the final line that I’d never cross. Kester had talked of lines when he had told me how he’d killed Thomas; I could remember him gabbling how he’d crossed the last line without being aware of it and then found there was no way back. “Once that die was cast, I’d
crossed that line,
and then I could only move forward to destruction …” Typical Kester, melodramatic and emotional as always, very stupid. He’d been hysterical, that was the trouble, too hysterical even to see a line, let alone draw one. No one in his right mind, as I was, could cross a crucial line without being aware of it. Impossible. The very idea was ridiculous.

I reached the Inner Head. The Worm’s three humps all rose high above the sea. The Inner Head was connected to the Middle Head by a rough stretch of rocks not unlike the Shipway but set above the high-water mark, and the Middle Head was connected to the Outer Head by a natural arch known romantically as the Devil’s Bridge. The entire Worm was a mile long and provided endless dazzling panoramas of sea, cliffs and sky, but I was hardly in the mood for sight-seeing that evening so when I reached the Inner Head I didn’t linger to dwell upon the view. I did glance back across the Shipway as usual, but I made the glance a brief one; I was too nervous that Kester might sneak up and tap me playfully on the shoulder when my back was turned, but of course he didn’t and when I swung around to examine the steep treeless flank of the Head I could see no sign of him.