The Trawlerman, стр. 40
Alex checked her watch and tried to picture herself living on her own in the house by the nuclear reactor.
‘You know Bill South, right?’ she asked.
‘Sure. Everyone knows Bill.’
‘You haven’t seen anything of him, have you?’
She watched Kenny frown. ‘Actually, no. Not for a few days, now you mention it.’
‘I think he’s disappeared. He hasn’t been in his house for days.’
‘He’s almost like Zoë’s dad, isn’t he, Bill? She hangs out with him a lot.’
She nodded.
‘Maybe he’s off visiting friends or relations?’
He doesn’t have any relations, she thought to herself. ‘Almost five past. Keep looking.’
Kenny lifted his pint to his lips and drank; then drew on his cigarette. ‘I don’t know what precisely you’re expecting me to see,’ he said.
‘Was this what it was like two Wednesdays ago?’
‘Warmer tonight maybe. Few more people out here.’
‘What about the sunset?’
He looked around the sky. To the north, where they were gazing, the azure deepened to dark blue. Stars were appearing low on the horizon. Above the Younises’ house, a dim cluster of stars were brightening, shaped in a flat W. ‘Pretty much the same.’
She checked her watch again, then tilted her head up again. ‘Keep looking,’ she said.
The minutes ticked by.
Beside her, Kenny gasped. Raised his arm and pointed. ‘There,’ he said.
A streak of light floating upwards at speed, only visible for seconds, and then it was lost in the growing darkness. An unearthly silver streak, rising rapidly against dark sky.
‘That’s what you saw?’
He had spilled what was left of his pint on the grass at his feet. He looked at her, bug-eyed.
Twenty-nine
‘Finish your pint,’ said Alex. ‘I need to show you something.’
Glass in one hand, cigarette in the other, Kenny was still having trouble understanding what he had just seen. He gulped the last of the brown liquid down and put the glass onto a crowded picnic table, then stared once more out towards the north horizon where the streak of light had been. Nobody else in the pub garden seemed to have noticed anything.
‘Was that just the same as before?’
He nodded.
Kenny was a little like her daughter. Like Zoë, Kenny had trained himself to notice the world around him; naturalists were like that. Like good police officers, they trained themselves to spot unseen patterns, to be always alert to anomalies.
‘Come with me,’ Alex said again.
He snapped out of it and followed her. ‘Where are we going?’
‘To the Younises’ house.’
‘Why?’ He sounded afraid.
‘I want to show you something.’
Headlights on in the darkening evening, they drove the short distance down the lane.
She tucked her car by the gate and untied the piece of cord that had been there. Zoë was sitting on the steps in the gloom. ‘Did I do it right?’ she asked.
‘Perfectly.’ She leaned forward and kissed her daughter’s forehead.
‘I wasn’t sure I should do it at all,’ said Zoë, looking at Kenny as if she expected him to be angry with her.
Kenny said, ‘No. Whatever it is . . . it’s cool.’
‘There may have been souls rising up from here last week, but that’s not what you saw.’ Alex pointed at the open garage door and the cylinder of helium that she had seen in Georgia Coaker’s photograph. ‘I found a pack of four silver weather balloons in there. Two had already been used. Ayman Younis probably used one as a test and a second on the night. That’s what you saw.’
‘A weather balloon?’
She had inflated the third balloon, tied it to the Younises’ front gate, and asked Zoë to cut the cord at exactly seven minutes past ten. ‘They’re large and silver. At this time of night I figured you’d probably just get a glimpse of the shine of it as it was shooting up.’
Poor Kenny seemed lost. ‘Someone was getting killed here and Ayman Younis was letting off balloons? That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. Are you going to explain it to me?’
‘No. Sorry. Not really.’
‘It was Ayman Younis who released the balloon? Before he was killed?’
‘Kind of,’ said Alex. ‘Look, Kenny. I’d really appreciate it if you didn’t talk about what you’d seen, about coming here, to anybody at all.’
‘Not even your daughter?’ He looked at Zoë.
‘Jesus, no. Especially not my daughter.’
Zoë said, ‘I didn’t do it to make you feel like an idiot, Kenny. She asked me to, just at the last minute.’
‘Course you didn’t.’
‘I didn’t want to do it at all.’
‘It’s OK. It was like an experiment, wasn’t it?’
‘Do you still believe in souls?’ she asked. ‘’Cause I do.’
Kenny smiled. ‘Course I do. I was wrong this time though, that’s all.’
Zoë looked relieved.
After she’d dropped Kenny at his house, they drove back to Dungeness in the dark.
Zoë remained a dark bundle of silent anger in the passenger seat next to her.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Alex. ‘We had to do it, though. I would have asked Bill, but he’s not here. I asked Jill but she’s . . . busy.’
‘Why? Because you wanted to prove a point?’
‘No. Because there’s a man being held on a charge of murder who shouldn’t be. He’s ill, a bit like me, I think. Only, what he has is much worse. I think he must be very confused and scared. I am pretty sure that it can’t have been him. So thank you for helping,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I had to, but there was no one else I could ask.’
The headlights swept up the