there, but only the answering-machine spoke to him, or rather Harry, Tommy’s son, whose voice announced, ‘You have reached the number for the Holroyd family.’ He had tried Tommy’s mobile too, but that just rang out, didn’t even go to voicemail. He had no one he could talk to. Not even the dog.
He walked past the Seashell, found a bench near the car park by the sea wall. The bench had a view of the sea and Vince stared at it until his mind was as blank as the sea wall itself.
After a while he roused himself and looked around. From the car park there were steps that led up to the cliff. You could walk for miles up there, it was part of the Cleveland Way. They had come here with Ashley when she was small. Eaten a picnic in a freezing wind, sitting on a bench in the middle of Kettlewell. There had been nothing there, not even a café, and they had all been miserable, but the passage of time had transformed it into an almost pleasant memory. There were going to be no more pleasant memories, were there? Wouldn’t it be easier all round if he followed Lesley Holroyd over the cliff?
Vince shivered. The sun had begun to dip into the sea. He needed to keep moving. He sighed and stood up stiffly from the bench and began to climb the steps up to the cliff. A man going nowhere. Trudge, trudge, trudge.
Curtain Call
Jackson was running. He had returned to the cottage, sans unicorn backpack, feeling rather defeated. Time to regroup the little grey cells. He tipped an invisible hat in Poirot’s direction. Jackson preferred the Belgian to Miss Marple. He was more straightforward, whereas Miss Marple was endlessly devious.
He had Miranda Lambert on his headphones. She was his absolute favourite. She was blonde and curvy and sang about drink and sex and heartbreak and nostalgia and he suspected he would be slightly nervous of her in real life. But she was still his absolute favourite. He was running in the wood near his cottage. It was shady in the wood, damp and mushroomy, the scent of autumn. A foretaste of the change in the season that was lurking threateningly around the corner. Winter was coming. Always. With neither cease, nor desist.
The wood had two entrances. A main one, off the road, with a car park and a café, and a much smaller one close to his cottage – a path so well hidden that it seemed almost like a secret and Jackson had begun to think of it as his own private entrance. Both routes into the wood had official estate signs about respecting the wood, days of opening, warning against dogs off the lead, and so on. You weren’t allowed in every day, the estate had shooting parties, and when they didn’t have shooting parties they were raising things that could be shot. The pheasants wandered around tamely in Jackson’s front garden, completely unaware of their final destination. The males were gorgeous in their finery, but Jackson preferred the more modest speckled females.
He was running a lot these days, despite the protests from his knees.
‘Your knees are too old to run,’ his GP had bluntly informed him. She was young. Nice knees on show. Nice, young knees. She would learn.
He ran in the wood, he ran on the beach. He ran on the clifftop. If he went north he could run to Kettlewell, Runswick Bay, Hinderwell, Staithes. He could probably have run all the way to Saltburn, but he hadn’t tried that. He could have veered away from the cliff path and run to Middlesbrough, but he definitely wasn’t going there. It wouldn’t just be his knees that would protest if he did that.
In the other direction he could run along the cliff from Whitby Abbey to Robin Hood’s Bay. He liked Robin Hood’s Bay. There used to be a lot of smuggling going on there. Smuggling in the past seemed romantic – barrels of rum, chests of tea, bales of silk, transported from the shore through secret tunnels by the locals. Brandy galore. He seemed to remember reading a book about it when he was young (or more likely, knowing the young Jackson, it had been a comic). Contraband had lost its fanciful charm these days. Counterfeit goods, heroin, endangered animals, endangered people.
The arrival of a teenage boy and an elderly dog tended to get in the way of his running. Nathan couldn’t