Chapter 87
‘Your friends and I shared a boat trip.’ Quick seemed to be speaking only to Holly now. The others had moved away from her and Charlie, and she couldn’t help the fear – stupid, probably, but she couldn’t help it – that they’d joined forces with Quick.
‘Thirty years ago,’ Quick went on. ‘We took a RIB from Newton Ferrers, bound for Plymouth. There were nine of us on board.’ He let his eyes leave Holly to travel around the rest of the group.
‘These five, the lad who stole the RIB, although he told us it was his, a man called Craig Lewis, and me and my pregnant girlfriend.’
‘Shelley,’ Holly heard Tara whisper.
Quick heard her too. ‘Oh, you remember her now? Tell me something. How often have you thought of her these past thirty years? Once a year, maybe? Or did you push her to the back of your minds the minute you got off that RIB?’
Holly glanced around. Every pair of eyes was fixed on the floor.
Except Quick’s. ‘Because there hasn’t been a day when I haven’t thought about her. Not a day.’ With an effort, it seemed, Quick got to his feet. ‘Do you love your son, Holly?’
Holly took a step back, dragging Charlie with her. Whether through pain, medication or just years of bitterness, this man wasn’t in his right mind.
‘My mum loves me more than anything,’ Charlie replied for her, and she loved that there was no doubt in his voice.
‘I loved my son,’ Quick said to Charlie. ‘My baby son. He’d have been a man now. We could have worked together these last ten years.’
‘What happened to him?’ Charlie asked.
Quick’s eyes seemed to fill. ‘His mother’s labour came on early. She was in so much pain. She couldn’t sit still in the boat. Craig threw her overboard.’ Finally, he took his eyes from Charlie to look around the room. ‘Then you all left her to drown.’
I didn’t, Holly thought. Why am I here? She looked at Tara, then Tug, Sabri, Robin and Cheryl. She’d liked these people, had trusted them. She said, but to no one in particular, ‘Is this true?’
‘Of course it’s true,’ Quick snapped. ‘I went in the water to save her, but she’d gone. The waves were huge. I almost died myself. But I tried. This lot, this sorry bunch of cowards. They didn’t do a thing.’
Robin said, ‘We had no choice. And Craig, if that was the guy’s name, he didn’t throw her overboard. It was an accident.’
‘There was nothing we could have done,’ Tara added.
‘You don’t know that.’ Quick seemed to sway on his feet. ‘I went overboard, and I survived. Craig clung on to the side of the hull and he survived. You could have turned the boat round. We could have found her. You didn’t even call out the bloody coastguard. You left both of us for dead.’
His voice cracked with the effort of speaking.
Holly took another step backwards, pulling Charlie with her. This fight wasn’t hers. How she and her son were mixed up in it she had no idea, but if there was to be crossfire, they weren’t getting caught in it.
‘How?’ Tug asked. ‘How did you survive that sea?’
For a moment, Holly wasn’t sure Quick was going to reply.
Then he said, ‘I got thrown onto that big rock. I clung on till it was light. A fishing boat picked me up. I’d held on to some sort of hope, until then, that the lifeboats had gone out, that Shelley had been found.
But you hadn’t even raised the alarm. You’d all just vanished into the night.
Was it really too much trouble to call out the coastguard? ’
‘We should have done,’ Tara said, at last. ‘But you must remember how bad it was. We didn’t think either of you could have survived. I’m glad you did, but you can’t blame us for what happened to Shelley.’
‘Yes, I can. I do.’ Quick took an unsteady step towards Tug. ‘You were in the navy.’ He raised a trembling finger. ‘Special bloody Boat Service. You knew how dangerous it was setting out that night. But you were so concerned with not getting a reprimand you were prepared to risk all of us.’
‘And you!’ he turned to the sofa where Sabri was perched. ‘A third-year medical student who’d just finished a course in obstetrics. You should have stayed with us in Newton Ferrers, called out a helicopter. You could have helped us.’
‘So could you.’ Another spin on unsteady feet, another accusation. Tara’s turn. ‘A nurse. A bloody nurse. And you did nothing.’
Tara dropped her eyes.
‘The police tried to find you all,’ Quick went on.
‘I told them what happened, that we’d been on a boat with seven other people.
I gave them descriptions. I didn’t know your names, but I told them everything I could remember.
There was an appeal. It was on television, in the papers for days. Don’t tell me none of you saw it!’
He broke off again as a fit of coughing took hold of him. He turned, perhaps to return to his chair, and stumbled. Tara got up, crossed to the table by his side and poured a glass of water. After glaring at her for a second, he took it.
‘Sit down,’ she told him. The two of them held eye contact as he did what she said.
‘It was that you couldn’t forgive, wasn’t it?’ Tara said, when his coughing had subsided. ‘Not what happened in the boat. What we did afterwards.’
Quick let his head fall and rise again. ‘It was as though she was nothing. A girl and her unborn baby died, and it meant nothing to you.’
‘It meant everything,’ Sabri snapped. ‘I failed my exams because of what happened that night. I had PTSD, although I didn’t know it at the time. I couldn’t concentrate on a thing. I became a bloody ambulance driver.’
‘I was a high-functioning alcoholic for years,’ Tug said. ‘Now, I’m a low-functioning one. So, don’t tell me it meant nothing.’
‘I’m afraid of water,’ Tara said. ‘I swim most days, but the sea terrifies me. I force myself to do it and I don’t know why.’
‘I told my mum what happened,’ Cheryl said. ‘She’s been blackmailing me ever since.’
‘Boo fucking hoo!’ Quick snapped. ‘I lost the woman who would have been my wife and my first-born son. You think anything compares to that?’
‘That’ll do, mate.’ Robin looked as though he’d had enough. ‘We did nothing illegal that night. Stupid, yeah, selfish almost certainly, but nothing more. And maybe we could have picked up you and Shelley but it’s just as likely we’d all have drowned.’
With one last squeeze of Cheryl’s shoulder, Robin came out from behind the sofa.
‘What you’ve done, though, is very illegal.
’ Now Robin was the one pointing fingers and making accusations.
‘Kidnapping a child, for starters. Then endangering all of us, including a woman who wasn’t even involved.
’ He gave a quick glance at Holly. ‘The whole business with the tokens is probably fraud. And that’s before we get onto the contents of the fucking port locker. Sorry to swear, Charlie.’
‘That’s OK.’ Charlie gave Robin a reassuring smile. ‘What’s in the fucking port locker?’
‘What am I missing here?’ Sabri asked. She glanced at Cheryl and then back at Robin. ‘What’s in the locker?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’ Tara was looking questioningly at Tug.
‘Me neither,’ added Cheryl, in a voice barely meant to carry.
‘What’s in the locker, Quick?’ repeated Sabri. ‘Anyone?’
‘Nothing by now,’ Quick replied. ‘Thomas is currently taking Gemini away to assess for damage. I doubt he’ll find anything unusual in any of the lockers.’
Tug got to his feet. He and Robin both moved closer to Quick.
‘Three of us saw what you put in the life-raft bag,’ said Tug. ‘I’m guessing it was the real Craig Lewis. Who’ll be reported missing, if he hasn’t already been.’
Quick gave a dismissive laugh. ‘Craig Lewis was a loser who barely scratched out a living. Sometime in the next few weeks, maybe longer, the housing association in Newquay will enter his property and find him gone. He has no family, no one to care. He’ll become a missing persons statistic.’
‘No, he won’t.’ Holly felt a tiny surge of satisfaction at contradicting Quick. ‘He’s a token recipient. You’ve made him one of the most famous people in the country. People will look for him.’
Quick gave a heavy sigh. ‘Maybe. I admit I’ve had to rethink my plans. I thought you’d all be at the bottom of the Celtic Sea by now. But as Sabri pointed out, I’m dying. There really isn’t much the authorities can do to me.’
‘You can spend your last months in prison,’ Holly snapped. ‘It’ll be a lot less comfortable than this place. And you still haven’t said why Charlie and I are here. Neither of us were born when you went on that boat trip.’
Quick sneered. ‘You’re a barrister, Holly, so stop talking through your arse.
The CPS will never be able to incarcerate a dying man for months before his trial.
Especially one with the lawyers I have at my disposal.
The worst they can do is pester me with interviews and depositions.
But I don’t plan to be around even for those. I’m leaving St Helen’s today.’
The helicopter. Holly remembered the gleaming white aircraft a stone’s throw from the house.
‘Why are Charlie and I here?’ Holly insisted. ‘We had nothing to do with what happened to your girlfriend.’
‘Her name was Shelley.’
‘Mum …’ Charlie said.
‘I don’t give a toss what her name was,’ Holly shot back at Quick. ‘You’re the one who put her in danger, not these guys. It was your baby she was carrying. What the hell was she doing miles from a hospital anyway? What happened to her is on you, not them.’
A hardening behind Quick’s eyes told her she was hitting home.
‘And this stupid revenge plan, which clearly isn’t going to work, is nothing more than you trying to deflect your own blame.’
‘Mum …’ Charlie repeated.
‘Tell me, Holly, how is your father?’ Quick said.
‘What’s my dad got to do with this?’
‘I think he was on the boat, Mum.’
Holly looked down at her son.
‘Grandad’s always talking about when he lived near the sea,’ Charlie told her. ‘Not that he talks anymore, but when he did, it was always about how he used to go fishing, and how he helped out with the boats in the summer.’