The Revenge of the Tide eased off the mud and rocked into the flow of the river. Malcolm steered the boat around, back toward the opposite bank. Nicks stepped back as Fitz came up the steps and into the wheelhouse. I moved out of the way. He had blood on his hands, blood down the front of his jeans. The gun was still in his hand. The boat was roaring out into midstream now, away from the bank and the police officers who were gathering on the dock, their powerful flashlights shining over us, beaming into the wheelhouse.
“Where do you want to go?” Malcolm shouted at them.
Fitz was slapping Nicks on the shoulder as though they’d done something smart, outwitted the cops, escaping from under their very noses. “I don’t know, mate. Just keep driving for now, okay?”
Malcolm was turning the wheel slowly, bringing his hands back to the two-o’clock position each time. And Fitz and Nicks had to move to the stern to keep watching the dock. I wondered what Malcolm was up to. The Revenge was heading straight for the other bank now.
Fitz was laughing, cupping his hand to his ear as the officers on the dock shouted things that none of us could hear. Nicks was next to him, almost leaning over the edge.
“What did you think you were doing, Malcolm?” I asked him, trying to get him to look me in the eye.
He shook his head.
“Malc! Did you call him?”
“I was trying to help, okay? I was trying to get rid of it for you.”
“By selling it to Fitz?”
“I know, I know,” he said. “It wasn’t my finest moment, all right?”
I looked over his shoulder at Fitz, who seemed to have given up on taunting the police. He looked joyous, as though he’d just done the best deal of his life. “What are you two gossiping about?” he shouted. “Get on with it, you fuck!”
I turned back to Malcolm and he looked determined, focused, a gleam in his eye that I hadn’t seen before. “Get ready,” he said, and I didn’t understand what he meant until there was a great bang, like an explosion. The boat stopped dead and I was catapulted sideways, down the steps and into the cabin, landing on my back with a crash. I skidded backward along the floorboards and hit my head on something, one of the cabinets in the galley.
My ears were full of the grinding of the engine, louder than ever, vibrations coming through the floor and rattling the cups and plates. A book, papers, a bowl fell off the top of the galley worktop and landed on my head. Above it all, shouting, yelling, noises from the deck.
I struggled to my feet and hauled myself upright. The boat was listing to port and the floor was at a crazy angle. Dylan had rolled over and was lying in a jumble of limbs and broken bits of furniture, cushions from the dinette, against the bottom of the sofa. I scrambled over to him.
“Dylan? Can you hear me?”
His face, his poor face. Even in the darkness I could see so much blood on him. I touched his cheek, crying.
“I’m so sorry,” I sobbed. “I should have listened to you, I should have listened.”
He made a noise then, not quite a groan. A cough, above the noise of the engine churning. And he said something—I couldn’t hear him.
“What?” I put my ear next to his mouth. “What did you say? Say it again.”
“I said okay.”
I kissed his cheek and tasted blood. He coughed again, raised an arm and pushed me away. I was going to have to leave him here.
A weapon—I needed a weapon. I scrambled back to the galley. All the knives had fallen out of the knife block except for one: a small vegetable knife. It wasn’t going to be much good against Fitz’s gun, but it was the best I could do.
I pulled myself back up the steps. Malcolm was there, leaning back against the wooden wall of the wheelhouse, holding his head. Blood was pouring from a cut above his eye. Fitz was lying on the ground in a heap, not moving.
“What happened?” I yelled. “Where’s Nicks?”
He waved a hand to the deck and I went to look.
Nicks had fallen from the deck into the water below. But we had run aground. In the dim light I could see him, half-swimming, half-wading toward the boat. The water was coming in almost visibly, the tide tugging at his legs and pulling him backward. The more he struggled in the mud, the more it pulled him back. And then he fell forward into the water. Pushing himself upward with his hands in the mud now, his legs stuck up to his knees, he was never going to make it.
I slipped the knife into my pocket and went to the storage locker on the deck, found a lifejacket, pulling it clear. They’d come with the boat. I had no idea if they’d ever been used, or worn.
“Hey!” I shouted.
Nicks was flailing in the water, struggling to remain upright. He tried to turn, but that made him lose balance and he fell again.
I threw the lifejacket at him. It flew through the air and landed in the water a few yards away from him, but it might as well have been a mile. He stretched and tried to reach it, and one of his legs, miraculously, came free of the mud and he fell backward into the water. At that moment the stern of the boat caught a surge of tide and, with nobody at the wheel to guide it, turned in a slow, graceful arc. The momentum of it was powerful and fast, and before I realized what was happening I saw Nicks’s face illuminated in flashlight from the dock, saw the fear in his eyes as the hull swung toward him.
There was a thud, a bang, and the boat passed over him. I raced to the port side, hoping to see him come up, but there was nothing. Nothing.
And then there was another sound, a shout from behind me, a crash. Fitz was wrestling with Malcolm on the deck, the two of them rolling over and over on the slope until they ended up in a heap against the port gunwale. Fitz was punching Malcolm’s face, his fist coming away bloody, blood spraying in droplets.
“Stop it, stop it!” I yelled, my voice drowned by the churning engine and carried away by the wind.
I pulled at Fitz’s back but he was slippery with mud, and cold. I felt for the knife. It was small, just a little kitchen knife, but before I could think about it too hard I jabbed it into his upper shoulder. Not hard, or deep, just enough to make him stop.
Blood started seeping into the fabric, blooming into a wide crimson flower, and he turned, struggling to his feet. Malcolm lay still, his face away from me against the storage locker on the port side.
“What the fuck did you do that for?” Fitz yelled at me, trying to reach behind his shoulder to feel the wound. “Are you fucking crazy?”
I still had the knife in my hand but he swiped at it, grabbed for it. I kept hold of it and as Fitz turned his body toward me there was a bang, a shot, loud above the noise of the engine, echoing across the empty space. I didn’t feel any pain. I looked down at my body in shock, expecting to see blood, expecting to see a hole somewhere. Then Fitz let out a scream and crumpled into a ball.
Malcolm was still. Fitz was on his side in the fetal position, making high wailing noises.
Above that, and above the painful grinding noise of the engine, I could hear more sirens. They seemed louder, the vibrations passing through my feet and into my chest with a discordant rhythm. And another sound, distant, a helicopter . . . but too far away?
Dylan. I wanted Dylan.
I ran down the steps. It was dark, the cabin was a mess and the floor was wet, slick with blood. I looked across to the bottom of the sofa. He wasn’t there.
The engine finally spluttered and cut out. Then I could hear it, the definite thud-thud of a helicopter, and a spotlight shone down on the deck of the boat and in through the open wheelhouse door. I could see blood on the walls, on the floor. A bloody handprint on the wooden siding near the door to my bedroom. And noise—I could hear movement. And a sudden bang, the noise of wood cracking and splintering.
The door was open. The bedroom was a mess, a tangled, angled mess with bedding and dark blood on the walls. On the floor, against the bed, Leon Arnold lay still, his leg twisted beneath him. He wasn’t moving.
The noise again. I looked to my lef
t, to the open doorway of the second bedroom. The two figures inside it fighting, a snarl of bodies, fists; and it took me a moment to realize that it must be Dylan, must be Markus—but which one—and what could I do?
In the corner of the room, tipped on its side, was my crate of tools. I lifted the nearest—a plane, heavy and solid. And at that moment the light shone through the porthole and Dylan was on the floor, and Markus with his knee on Dylan’s chest, a piece of wood he’d broken away from the edge of the berth, a two-by-four raised back at shoulder height ready to swing it into Dylan’s skull.
I must have hit him with the plane. I had it in my hand and then he was lying on the floor, slipping a little on the smooth floor and sliding to a stop against what was left of the berth.
I dropped the plane. I was on my knees next to Dylan, not knowing where to touch, not knowing how to help him.
Noises from the cabin, shouts and steps, lights shining down the hall. I thought it was Fitz. I lay my body across Dylan’s and held him, protecting him.
Chapter Forty
The hospital in the middle of the night: a soul-destroying place to be.
Josie and I had been sitting in the same hard plastic chairs bolted to the floor for the past two hours. Before that, we’d been allowed in to see Malcolm, or at least Josie had. I’d watched through the doorway, a police officer standing next to me in case I did something, or said something, or tried to run—I didn’t even know. But they were here in any case. I stopped paying attention after a while and the next time I looked the male officer had gone and a female officer was there in his place. She spoke to me, random words that made sense at the time, and I nodded to her and said, “Yes, okay,” and that seemed to satisfy her because she was quiet after that.
The police officer had brought me a cup of brown liquid that might have been coffee. It burned my throat but I scarcely noticed. My head was trying to work through what had happened, but none of it made sense. It churned in my brain and every version that came out was somehow wrong, faulty, failed.
Josie had given up asking me questions. Every time she mentioned Malcolm’s name, I cried. She told me that she’d gone into the Scarisbrick Jean and found flour, several bags of it, piles of it tipped up on the floor. Flour everywhere. She had no idea what that was all about.
That was the one part that made sense to me. Malcolm had taken the package out of the hatch, expecting it to contain drugs. Then he’d phoned them, had made contact with Fitz, believing the package to be a shipment of drugs belonging to the criminal gang. And Fitz had come down himself to take care of the mess, thinking maybe that he’d finally discovered that someone was skimming a cut from the drugs he was importing, and that the stash was in Malcolm and Josie’s boat. And, of course, when they opened the package in front of Malcolm, poor Malcolm, who was as half-assed at being a criminal as he was at everything else and hadn’t thought to look inside the package himself first, the kilos of cocaine they’d all been expecting turned out to be six bags of self-rising flour.
“It’s that one from before,” Josie said, and I looked up.
Jim Carling was striding up the hall toward us.
He was dressed in jeans and a brown jacket, frowning and looking left to right as though he were lost somehow, and cross with himself for not knowing what was going on.
I rose to my feet, wanting to call to him or wave, but not sure what he would say, how he would react. But when he saw me he smiled. He touched my arm gently, as though he wanted to hold me, but I moved away. We stood awkwardly a few feet apart. This was, after all, a professional meeting rather than a social one. “Where were you?” was the first thing I said.
“I tried to get there. As soon as I got your message I sent patrols out to the marina . . .”
“They nearly killed him, Jim. They nearly killed Dylan. And Fitz shot Malcolm. It was so awful, it was . . .” I was crying again, the tears that didn’t seem to stop for more than a few moments at a time.
He took me in his arms and this time I didn’t pull back. I sobbed loudly, out of control, and he held me tighter, and stroked my hair, and made soothing noises that somehow made it all worse, not better.
In the end he said to me, “Come for a walk.”
The sobs had subsided to jerky breaths, my hands shaking. He put his arm around my shoulders and steered me down the hall, past the reception desk to the entrance.
Outside it was chilly, the air crisp. I breathed it in deeply. I thought that I would never take breathing fresh air for granted again. We found a wooden bench and sat there for a few moments in the darkness. I wondered if he’d come to tell me Dylan was dead. They’d taken him away in an ambulance. Every time I asked, nobody seemed to have any idea what had happened to him.
“You know they’re going to arrest you,” he said.
“I think I hit him with a plane.”
“Yeah, don’t tell me anything, I don’t want to know about that. I’m just letting you know.”
“You’d think they’d be grateful, wouldn’t you? He would have killed Dylan if I hadn’t stopped him.”
He shot me a look. “That’s just the way the criminal justice system works, Genevieve. You know that as well as I do.”
“How’s Dylan?” I asked. “Have you heard anything? They won’t tell me.”
Jim’s face was grave. “He’s going to be fine,” he said.
“Have you seen him? Is he really okay? I thought they’d killed him. I thought Fitz had killed him.”
“No, he’s all right. Fitz is in a room somewhere upstairs. You know, he shot himself in the balls.”
“What?”
“Accidentally, of course. Occupational hazard, keeping your pistol tucked in your waistband. He’s been arrested. They’ve got a guard on him.”
“And the others?”
“Leon Arnold’s just got a concussion, would you believe? The other one is upstairs with head injuries. Not as bad as it looks.”
I waited for him to say something about Nicks, but that was all he said.
“What about my boat?”
“The marine unit’s getting a tug and they’re going to bring it back to the marina at high tide. I think it’s all right.”
“You know they were after Dylan,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You need to keep him away from them, Jim.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I spend my whole working life doing, keeping Dylan out of trouble.”
“You told me you’d been at school with him. I knew you were lying; I just didn’t know why.”
He looked at me steadily. “I wouldn’t have lied to you without good reason.”
The sky was turning gray at the edges, the shapes of the trees standing out now against the clouds and the sky. I was tired, numb, cold. I wanted to go home and sleep forever.
“What’s going to happen now?” I asked.
“Fitz will be charged. You’ll be interviewed and, with a bit of luck, bailed. And then you and Dylan can do whatever it is you want to do, and I’ll quietly disappear and think about what might have been.”
I felt my cheeks flush. I’d behaved very badly, toward both of them. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He was quiet for a moment, then he gave a short laugh. “Yeah, well, I should have known I’d never be that lucky. Besides, you’re one of the most infuriating women I’ve ever met.”
I looked up at him then and saw the hurt behind the smile. “Me, infuriating? You were the one who wasn’t around when I really needed you.”
That was the wrong thing to say. I saw him almost flinch.
“Look, I didn’t mean that. You did your best, didn’t you? It wasn’t your fault I decided to go back to the boat, when you’d told me not to. I was an idiot.”
“No, you’re right. I let you down. Both of you.”
An ambulance pulled up outside the entrance around the corner, sirens screaming and then abruptly silent. We got up off the bench and walked back toward the doorway.
&n
bsp; “Can I see Dylan?” I asked.
That look again. The hurt behind his eyes. “I’ll see what I can find out,” he said.
Chapter Forty-One
The morning of Caddy’s funeral brought bright blue skies across London. I caught the train from Maidstone East and now I was waiting outside Bromley station, wondering if I should have worn lower heels, tugging my skirt down a little. Opaque tights made the outfit more sober.
The black BMW pulled up next to me without a sound and, while Dylan got out of the driver’s seat and went around to open the door at the back for me, I opened the passenger’s door and jumped in. Despite the occasion, I smiled to myself as I watched him through the side mirror. He stopped, rolled his eyes, shook his head slightly and came back to the driver’s side. He got in and shut the door.
“All right?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
That was it. The engine started up and we moved off into the traffic.
At first I stole sneaky glances at him out of the corner of my eye, and then I gave up and twisted in my seat so I could look at him properly. His gaze remained resolutely forward, and, while he seemed perfectly relaxed and calm, both hands were gripping the steering wheel. Dark glasses, partly hiding the mess they’d made of his face. He was wearing a suit, the way he always did, even though he wasn’t supposed to be going to the funeral. He’d offered to drive me there and wait for me, and, because it was the only time he’d agreed to see me since the night I’d nearly managed to get him killed, I’d readily accepted.
“You should come in with me,” I said at last. “They probably won’t even notice.”
“They’d notice,” he said. “I don’t exactly blend in.”
I wasn’t even sure why Caddy’s family had extended an invitation to me, since I was possibly the only one who could have saved her, could have gotten to her in time. But it seemed that Caddy had talked about me, and, since I wasn’t a dancer anymore, that was it: I got an invitation.