There! Another high-pitched bark. Desperate. Scared. This one from somewhere near my feet. I stopped, searching the ground. There must be another creek nearby. Picking my way slowly forward, I spotted him. Yes – he’d somehow got jammed into a narrow creek. Unable to go forward or back, he was stuck fast.
A quick glance at the water. The white crest was clearly visible. The land was so flat here that the tide didn’t come in as a series of waves, but as one continuous motion, pushing forward, relentless and speedy. It was gaining on us.
I fell to my knees and started digging at the soft ground with my bare hands, all the time making soothing noises to Wiggins. Nails tore, my fingers hurt, but I kept digging.
I can’t even keep your dog safe, let alone my daughter. I’m a Jonah. Better I keep away from you, Beth.
More mud flung to one side. Wiggins wriggled but stayed stuck fast. The creek started to fill, the water level rising rapidly. Now Wiggins was up to his chest. I risked a glance up. The sea was almost covering the mudflats, and only the top of the whale’s vast skeleton could be seen.
Glenn crashed beside me, sinking to his knees and hauling great handfuls of muck away.
‘Come on! Come on!’ he urged, grunting with effort.
Wiggins gave another wriggle. Leapt forward and up in one movement, scrabbling into my arms. I fell back, laughing with relief. But we weren’t out of danger yet.
‘Come on, boy, stay with me.’
Then I was up, all three of us loping along, picking our way back to safety. Eyes always down, just briefly looking up to check we were going in the right direction. We could hear the sea clearly now. A low, rushing noise. Jumping across the first creek, now almost full. The land getting wetter, not drier. My feet slipping and splashing.
Then firmer ground. Smoother. Springy vegetation that came up to mid-calf. Now low, coarse grasses. Then soft, long grass. Finally we reached the sea bank.
I almost crawled up its steep side, my jeans clinging round my ankles where they had got wet. Gasping with exhaustion and relief, I lay on my back, a starfish. A shorelark wheeled above, then turned and headed into the field behind me. The sobs hit as the adrenaline drained away. Wiggins licked my face feverishly until I pushed him off and sat up. Glenn sat beside me, knees up, arms resting on them, panting.
‘That was crazy. We almost died for a dog.’
I was too knackered to reply.
Thank goodness he had got stuck in a smaller creek, rather than one of the larger ones. The deeper creeks sometimes still had barbed wire, or rusting drums, in the bottom of them. I had once seen what looked like an ejected plane seat poking up from some gelatinous mud. If Wiggins had been caught on one of those, then I might never have got him free.
I cursed myself for getting so deep in conversation with Glenn that I hadn’t kept a closer eye on Wiggins. He’d gone further and further away from me, exploring the marsh. This was all my fault.
Still, I’d saved him in the end. And as I lay there, catching my breath, I felt full of renewed determination. I would find your attacker, and you would get better. I would save you, Beth.
‘I’m going to talk to the Jachowski boy,’ I decided.
Thirty-Five
BETH
FRIDAY 22 JANUARY
Beth was careful never to refer to him by his actual name. Instead, he was always SSG, because he Smells So Good.
He wasn’t like the other lads she knew, the still-childish boys she had grown up with. He was older. More mature. He would protect her. Even though they had only been talking to each other for a couple of months, it felt, to Beth, as though she had been dreaming of kissing him all her life.
And now the moment was finally here.
As she wrapped her arms around his neck, she breathed in his cologne. Hmm, lush. Then they kissed. It felt incredible.
Until she saw the look on his face. Her stomach flipped as if she had smelled something sickeningly sour. She had made a terrible mistake.
Thirty-Six
Glenn had been instructed to wait for me in The Poacher, while I talked to Aleksy alone. I didn’t actually suspect the handsome seventeen-year-old. Not truly. But perhaps he could shed some light on what you had been up to.
The only time I ever saw Aleksy was when he waited in the morning for the school bus to Wapentake Secondary, and hopped off it in the late afternoon. He used the same stop as you, almost opposite our house. I’d never taken much notice of him. He was one of those beautiful boys who seemed painfully shy about his looks and spent most of his time hiding behind a long lick of hair over his eyes, although the rest of his dark locks were quite short. Hands permanently in pockets, his head always down and bobbing to the beat of whatever music he was listening to through his headphones.
I lurked in the lounge waiting for the bus to pull up. Your bedroom would, of course, have given me a better view in the failing light, but going in there was too much for me. Besides, it had become your dad’s place to go and cry ? mine was out on the marsh.
The bus was late. Light was fading.
I thought about when I was your age. I’d been a seething mass of insecurities about my looks, my personality, my future. Then I thought about what I was like at seventeen, Aleksy’s age. What a world of difference! I’d been confident, happy, felt loved – and I’d been just a year or so away from falling pregnant with you. Would someone such as Aleksy, on the brink of manhood, be interested in a girl your age?
The bus pulled up, brakes squeaking gently. Ten minutes late. Typical.
I hurried from my lookout, trying to appear casual. ‘Aleksy.’
He didn’t hear, but caught sight of me as he crossed the road.
‘Hi, Aleksy, isn’t it?’
His dark brown eyes widened in confusion. A quick movement and he’d pulled off his headphones so the wires dangled down and swung against his chest. A tinny tsk tsk tsk escaped from them.
I’d never noticed before how tall he was, but he towered over me, the smell of his citrus body spray drifting over me. I cleared my throat. ‘I’m Beth’s mum. You know Beth? The girl who has been hurt on the marsh?’
With the universal wariness of teenagers faced with a questioning adult, he nodded, avoiding my eye.
‘I’m chatting to anyone who had anything to do with her. Trying to find out a bit more about her life, you know?’
What was I doing? This was ridiculous, and worse, we were drawing attention – Martin Young had just come out of the shop and done a double take before heading into the pub.
‘So I wondered, did you know her well? Did you ever speak with her?’
‘Er, yeah. Sometimes.’ His voice was surprisingly deep for such a skinny whippet of a lad; his legs looked like a couple of strings in his tight black jeans. There was no trace of a foreign accent in his speech.
‘What sort of things did you talk about?’
Aleksy was built for the loose shrug he gave. His jacket looked like a wire coat hanger had been shoved inside it, rather than a body.
‘School. Music. Dancing.’
‘Dancing?’