Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
JUDE
Four thirty-seven Saturday morning and the harbour’s mine. Just me and the gulls, who haven’t started their daily screaming match yet. The world smells like low tide and diesel, that particular combination that means home whether you want it to or not.
I check the moorings automatically. It’s what Peter used to do, what someone has to do now he’s gone. The boats bob in their usual formation – Persistence, Celtic Pride, Second Chance – all present and accounted for.
Except.
The Mary Jane’s berth is empty.
Cold floods my skin like a spring tide.
For a second, I just stare at the space where she should be, my brain refusing to process the absence. She was here last night. I checked her myself, tightened the stern line, ran my hand over the hull the way I seem to have picked up from the old man.
‘Bloody Brynn Trelawney,’ I groan. She knows boats, she’s angry, and she’s been in the harbour for three days with a grudge older than she is. It’s not rational – I know it’s not rational even as I’m thinking it – but the Harding reflex is strong, and Harding reflex says: Trelawney did it.
I head for the shed first. That’s where she sleeps – the camp bed, the holdall, Peter’s space heater humming through the night.
I can see from twenty paces that the light’s off.
The door’s shut. I try the handle – locked.
Cup my hands against the window. Empty. Sleeping bag neatly rolled on the camp bed, steel-toed boots gone.
Both the boat and Brynn are missing.
‘Fuck.’
I’m running before I finish the thought, but not towards the harbour master or the police or anywhere sensible.
I’m heading up the cliff path, towards the cottage that’s been empty for twenty years, because there’s nowhere else she’d be unless she’s on the water, and if she’s on the water in the Mary Jane at four in the morning then—
Don’t think about that. Just move.
The cottage looks worse in the grey pre-dawn light.
Whatever softness the dark gave it is gone, replaced by the honest inventory of neglect – roof sagging on the left side where the lead flashing’s given up, windows clouded with twenty years of salt film, the whole place wearing its abandonment like a coat it can’t take off.
But the walls are solid. The stone’s good.
There’s a lamp glowing behind the front window.
I hammer on the door harder than necessary.
‘Brynn! Open up!’
Shuffling inside, then the door cracks open.
She’s half-asleep, wearing someone’s old fisherman’s sweater that swallows her whole, feet bare on the cold flagstone floor.
Her hair’s a disaster and there’s a pillow crease on her cheek and I absolutely do not notice how young she looks like this, how much like the girl who left.
‘What the – Jude? It’s not even five—’
I push past her without asking, already scanning the cramped space like the Mary Jane might be hidden behind the sofa. ‘Where is she?’
‘Where’s what? Who?’ She’s more awake now, indignation replacing confusion. ‘You can’t just barge in here—’
‘The boat. The Mary Jane. Where—’
I stop. Actually see the place for the first time.
It’s not as bad as I expected. That’s the first thought, and I feel guilty for it – guilty for expecting ruins, guilty for the surprise that the walls are standing and the floor’s taking weight.
But it’s not good either. The wallpaper’s peeling in the hallway, curling away from the plaster in long slow strips.
There’s a bowl under a drip in the ceiling – the bad corner, where the flashing’s gone – tinged brown from whatever’s collected in the roof space.
The whole place smells of cold and damp and stale air.
No heating. No insulation. And a deep chill that gets into your bones and sets up camp.
On the wall by the kitchen doorway, she’s taped up a list. I can’t read it all from here, but I can see it’s long and methodical – numbered, categorised, the handwriting small and precise. A renovation plan. Nothing crossed off yet.
‘Brynn—’
‘Don’t.’ She crosses her arms, defensive. ‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s freezing in here. You’ve got no heating—’
‘I’ve got a sleeping bag rated to minus fifteen. Army surplus.’
‘The roof’s leaking—’
‘In one corner. I’ve got the bowl. The roofer in Pencross can do the flashing next week if I can scrape together two hundred quid.’
‘You can’t just—’
‘I can. I am. It’s mine, Jude. And I’m going to fix it,’ she says, like a dare, like she’s waiting for me to tell her she can’t. ‘Now where is your bloody boat, because it’s not something I’ve taken, and you barging in here at stupid o’clock won’t change that.’
‘You weren’t in the shed. I went there first.’
‘No. I was here. Working on the list until I fell asleep on the sofa like an idiot.’ She rubs briefly at the back of her neck before gesturing at the front room – sure enough, there’s a blanket bunched on the sofa, a torch on the floor with a notepad.
‘I go up in the evenings when there’s still light.
The shed’s for sleeping for now, until I can get a bed.
The cottage is for fixing. Two different things. ’
‘And you didn’t hear the boat leave?’
‘From up here? Are you crazy? No. I didn’t hear anything until you started trying to break my door down.’
She’s right. The cottage is too far up the cliff and too far inland to hear a single engine in the harbour. I’ve been stupid. Panicked and stupid and now I’m standing in her cold kitchen at five in the morning looking like a lunatic.
‘How the hell would I know where your boat is?’ She steps closer, and I can smell sleep on her – tea and salt and the lingering scent of dusty furniture. ‘If you’re this worked up, maybe it’s not the boat you’re worried about.’
‘How did you—’ I start, then stop, because she’s reading me again. That thing she does. Like I’m a gauge she knows how to interpret.
‘You were staring at the shed from the jetty last night. Don’t think I didn’t clock that.’ Her voice is quieter now. Less defensive. ‘And now you’re here in the dark, terrified, and it’s not about me. So. Who took the boat?’
The truth comes out like air from a puncture. ‘He’s gone out alone.’
Her whole posture changes. The fight drains out of her as understanding dawns. ‘Your father?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Isn’t Reuben Harding the best old sea dog in the south-west?’
‘He thinks he is.’
The words hang between us, heavy with everything I’m not saying. She moves to the kettle, starts filling it from the tap that coughs and splutters. Giving us both an excuse not to look at each other.
‘And you’re worried because…’
I shouldn’t tell her. This is family business, Harding business, none of hers. But the words come anyway, pulled out by exhaustion and fear and the strange safety of telling someone who already thinks the worst of us.
‘He’s not himself lately. Confused. Forgetful.
Yesterday he called me Kit about seven times and didn’t notice.
Last week I found him at Peter’s mooring at three in the morning, asking when Peter was coming back from Plymouth.
’ I pause. Let that land. Peter’s dead and everyone knows it.
Reuben was at the funeral. He carried the coffin.
‘And the week before that, he put the kettle on the hob – the electric kettle, on the gas hob. Stood there watching it melt.’
She’s quiet for a long moment, fiddling with tea bags and banging a spoon against a metal canister on the kitchen countertop. ‘And you think it might be—’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘Jude—’
‘I said don’t.’
She doesn’t. The word sits between us anyway, enormous and unsaid, taking up all the air in the room.
I haven’t let myself think it. Haven’t let it form into a shape with edges and a name.
If I don’t say it, it’s not real. If I don’t say it, he’s just tired.
Stressed. Getting older. Normal things. Things that happen to everyone.
‘Forget it.’ I back towards the door, retreat instinctive as breathing. ‘I should go look for him.’
‘Jude—’
‘This place needs a roofer, not a demolition crew, by the way.’ I gesture at the ceiling, deflecting so hard, my voice is straining with it.
‘Get the flashing done and half your problems go away. The damp’s coming from the roof, not the walls.
The walls are good Cornish stone, they’ll outlast all of us. ’
She blinks at the pivot. ‘Did you just give me building advice while having a panic attack?’
‘I’m not having a—’
‘You are. And you’re also right about the flashing. Which is annoying.’ She holds out a mug of tea, tannin and sugar sweetening the air between us. I didn’t even see her make it, but her doing so makes me meet her gaze and pause, just a moment, a blink or two.
I take the tea. My hands are shaking and she sees it and says nothing, I’m not sure if that’s better or worse.
‘Go find your dad, Jude,’ she says. ‘I’d offer to help, but I think he’d rather stay missing if he knew I was part of the search and rescue.’ Her gaze shifts. ‘Sorry, that was—’
But I’m already leaving, tea untouched on the counter, out the door before either of us can make this worse.
The walk back to the harbour feels longer than the run up. The sky’s lightening properly now, painting everything that particular grey-blue that only exists in Cornwall in March – not quite dawn, not quite night, the colour of held breath.
I end up at the end of the jetty, hood raised against the wind that’s picking up, boots dangling just above the tide that’s starting to turn. This is where Peter used to smoke his morning cigarette, back when he still smoked, before Nina made him quit. Before quitting mattered.
An oystercatcher picks its way along the tideline below me, long orange bill probing the mud.
Then a turnstone, flipping shells. Two sanderlings skittering at the water’s edge like they’re playing chicken with the waves.
I used to keep a notebook – species, behaviours, feeding times, tide patterns.
Before notebooks became spreadsheets and the spreadsheets became the business.