Shallow Ground (Detective Ford) by Andy Maslen (to read list txt) 📕

and retches. He looks back the way they came. The boulders they hopped along are awash. There’s no way Lou can make it.

He’s crying now. He can’t do it.

Then she presses the only button she has left. ‘If you stay here, we’ll both die. Then who’ll look after Sam?’

Sam is eight and a half. Born two years before they married. He’s being entertained by Louisa’s parents while they’re at Pen-y-holt. Ford knows she’s right. He can’t leave Sam an orphan. They were meant to be together for all time. But now, time has run out.

‘Go!’ she screams. ‘Before it’s too late.’

So he leaves her, checking the gear first so he’s sure she can’t be swept away. He falls into an eerie calm as he swims across to the cliff and solos out.

At the clifftop, rock gives way to scrubby grass. He pulls out his phone. Four bars. He calls the coastguard, giving them a concise description of the accident, the location and Lou’s injury. Then he slumps. The calmness that saved his life has vanished. He is hyperventilating, heaving in great breaths that won’t bring enough oxygen to his brain, and sighing them out again.

A wave of nausea rushes through him and sweat flashes out across his skin. The wind chills it, making him shudder with the sudden cold. He lurches to his right and spews out a thin stream of bile on to the grass.

Then his stomach convulses and his breakfast rushes up and out, spattering the sleeve of his jacket. He retches out another splash of stinking yellow liquid and then dry-heaves until, cramping, his guts settle. His view is blurred through a film of tears.

He falls back and lies there for ten more minutes, looking up into the cloudless sky. Odd how realistic this dream is. He could almost believe he just left his wife to drown.

He sobs, a cracked sound that the wind tears away from his lips and disperses into the air. And the dream blackens and reality is here, and it’s ugly and painful and true.

He hears a helicopter. Sees its red-and-white form hovering over Pen-y-holt.

Time ceases to have any meaning as he watches the rescue. How long has passed, he doesn’t know.

Now a man in a bright orange flying suit is standing in front of him explaining that his wife, Sam’s mother, has drowned.

Later, there are questions from the local police. They treat him with compassion, especially as he’s Job, like them.

The coroner rules death by misadventure.

But Ford knows the truth.

He killed her. He pushed her into trying the climb. He dislodged the block that smashed her leg. And he left her to drown while he saved his own skin.

SIX YEARS LATER | SUMMER | SALISBURY

DAY ONE, 5.00 P.M.

Angie Halpern trudged up the five gritty stone steps to the front door. The shift on the cancer ward had been a long one. Ten hours. It had ended with a patient vomiting on the back of her head. She’d washed it out at work, crying at the thought that it would make her lifeless brown hair flatter still.

Free from the hospital’s clutches, she’d collected Kai from Donna, the childminder, and then gone straight to the food bank – again. Bone-tired, her mood hadn’t been improved when an elderly woman on the bus told her she looked like she needed to eat more: ‘A pretty girl like you shouldn’t be that thin.’

And now, here she was, knackered, hungry and with a three-year-old whining and grizzling and dragging on her free hand. Again.

‘Kai!’ she snapped. ‘Let go, or Mummy can’t get her keys out.’

The little boy stopped crying just long enough to cast a shocked look up into his mother’s eyes before resuming, at double the volume.

Fearing what she might do if she didn’t get inside, Angie half-turned so he couldn’t cling back on to her hand, and dug out her keys. She fumbled one of the bags of groceries, but in a dexterous act of juggling righted it before it spilled the tins, packets and jars all over the steps.

She slotted the brass Yale key home and twisted it in the lock. Elbowing the door open, she nudged Kai with her right knee, encouraging him to precede her into the hallway. Their flat occupied the top floor of the converted Victorian townhouse. Ahead, the stairs, with their patched and stained carpet, beckoned.

‘Come on, Kai, in we go,’ she said, striving to inject into her voice the tone her own mother called ‘jollying along’.

‘No!’ the little boy said, stamping his booted foot and sticking his pudgy hands on his hips. ‘I hate Donna. I hate the foobang. And I. Hate. YOU!’

Feeling tears pricking at the back of her eyes, Angie put the bags down and picked her son up under his arms. She squeezed him, burying her nose in the sweet-smelling angle between his neck and shoulder. How was it possible to love somebody so much and also to wish for them just to shut the hell up? Just for one little minute.

She knew she wasn’t the only one with problems. Talking to the other nurses, or chatting late at night online, confirmed it. Everyone reckoned the happily married ones with enough money to last from one month to the next were the exception, not the rule.

‘Mummy, you’re hurting me!’

‘Oh, Jesus! Sorry, darling. Look, come on. Let’s just get the shopping upstairs and you can watch a Thomas video.’

‘I hate Thomas.’

‘Thunderbirds, then.’

‘I hate them even more.’

Angie closed her eyes, sighing out a breath like the online mindfulness gurus suggested. ‘Then you’ll just have to stare out of the bloody window, like I used to. Now, come on!’

He sucked in a huge breath. Angie flinched, but the scream never came. Instead, Kai’s scrunched-up eyes opened wide and swivelled sideways. She followed his gaze and found herself facing a good-looking man wearing a smart jacket and trousers. He had a kind smile.

‘I’m sorry,’ the man said in a quiet voice.