The Trawlerman, стр. 44
That afternoon she left work two hours early. ‘I have to see my counsellor,’ she said.
The men nodded. They knew why she was on light duties. Nobody seemed to mind. She drove south towards the coast. At Folkestone, instead of going south to The Leas, where her counsellor’s office was, she turned east. This part of the coast made her glad to live at Dungeness. So much of the Kent coast was occupied by lines of dull bungalows facing the sea.
The road rose up above the town. The Battle of Britain war memorial had been built on a stretch of green that lay between the row of houses and the escarpment that looked out over the Channel. She had moved to Kent two years ago but had never once visited here. She wasn’t sure why; she approved of remembering the dead, after all.
On a weekday, the car park was almost empty. She left her car at the far side of it, tucked close to the hedge in the hope that it would shade the Yaris, and walked down the slope towards the main memorial. The summer grass was parched brown. Gulls swooped over the slopes towards a sea that was bluer here than she ever saw it on the spit where she lived.
Carved out of Portland Stone, a lone airman sat facing the Channel, as if waiting for the signal to scramble. He wore a thick flying jacket; he would feel hot on a day like this, thought Alex. Far behind him, carved into black marble, were lists of names. She looked around, checked her watch. She was early.
Thirty-two
London was a place with open arms; this was a place that was used to defending itself. The monument was surrounded by ramparts; a green circular bank of earth that reminded her of the circle around her house. A small notice confirmed that this site, too, had been a wartime gun battery.
Her father had been an Irishman with little interest or respect for English martial pride, but she found it moving, thinking of the names of hundreds of men, little older than Zoë, behind her who had died fighting for this place. She thought of the plane wrecks below the sea; the metal that Danny’s nets dodged.
She checked her watch, looked around. An elderly man was walking down the path towards her. She stepped away from the memorial to let him have his time alone.
Just as she was about to give up and go home, she saw a familiar, tall woman striding towards her, smiling. Stella was wearing red shorts and a big white T-shirt with the word Arizona on it. When she was close enough, she stopped and called her over. ‘I usually sit over here. I brought coffee.’ Two benches had been erected facing the black wall of marble. Stella sat on one of them and waited for Alex to join her.
‘Come here often?’
‘That’s my great-grandad,’ she said, pointing to the wall. ‘Flying Officer James Godden. He was twenty-two. Since they built it, my mum comes up here all the time. Ironic, really, because I used to come up here all the time when I was, like, nineteen, twenty, before they built it. It was a good place to get wasted.’
Alex looked at the memorial; the lists of names picked out in gold. ‘Did you tell Tina you were coming here?’
‘No. But I don’t like keeping secrets from Tina. What is it you want to say?’
‘You told me you knew her when she was still with Frank.’
She nodded. ‘Course I did. Yeah.’
‘And you talked about how Frank disappeared.’
‘Yeah?’ she said blithely, as if it were nothing to her. ‘Coffee?’ Stella took a metal thermos from her backpack and laid two stainless steel mugs beside her.
Alex waited until she was pouring the first cup before asking, ‘Now tell me about how Frank treated Tina.’
A dribble spilled down the side of the cup onto the ground, just a small, tell-tale shake of her hands. Coolly, Stella completed filling the cup and passed it to her. ‘Who said?’
Alex shrugged. ‘Does that matter? It’s true, isn’t it?’
She had thought about the look on Tina’s face the day the taxi driver shouted at her and she realised she had recognised something in it; she had remembered what Terry Neill had said about the amygdala being like an alarm bell and about how some traumatised people just freeze up when that bell starts sounding.
‘No,’ said Stella flatly. ‘Course it’s not.’
Alex had seen the blue circle on the map; the pulse of reports of domestic abuse incidents. ‘She was living with an abusive man, wasn’t she? Someone who probably didn’t like the idea that his wife was having an affair with another woman.’
Stella poured a cup for herself and said, ‘I don’t know what you’re digging at here, but Frank never knew nothing about Tina and me. We were absolutely one hundred per cent sure on that. She didn’t want to hurt him. She didn’t want to hurt anybody; she never has. She was discreet. And so, believe it or not, was I, though the effort almost bloody killed me.’
‘It would give someone a motive for killing Frank, though, wouldn’t it?’
Stella looked up at the wall of men’s names and said, ‘Oh Jesus. You’re nuts.’
‘People tell me that all the time.’
‘Is that why you wanted to talk?’
‘I wanted to find out what you thought.’
‘No. I’ll tell you what I really think. Listen to this, right?’
‘OK.’
She looked Alex right in the eye. ‘I came out when I was just fifteen. My family was all straight, you know? They were Seventh Day Adventists and all that shit. I thought I was a complete freak. I was some total weirdo, you know? They didn’t like me. I didn’t like me either. So I hung out with everyone else who was different . . .