第27章 Saltgate

The drive took most of the day. Lin drove the way she did everything — flat, careful, unhurried — and the road out of Devon threaded through the moors and dropped into Cornwall through a gap in the hills that smelled of salt long before you could see the sea. They stopped once, at a service station on the A30, and Lin bought pasties and cups of tea and looked at the drawing Clary had spread on the bonnet of the car without asking what it was, because she had learned, over the months, that some questions had answers that did not fit inside a file. Saltgate was smaller than the map had promised. A single street of whitewashed cottages ran down to a harbour wall, and the harbour held a handful of fishing boats and a skiff with its engine in pieces on the quay, and the breakwater curved out into the grey Atlantic, carrying the lighthouse on its shoulder like a man carrying a lantern to meet someone. The lighthouse was white and black-banded and real, and its window was dark in the afternoon light, and Clary stood on the quay with her hands in her pockets and looked at it and felt the drawing on her page settle into place, the way a key settles into a lock it was made for. The woman who ran the boats was named Bess Pentreath. She was sixty, with forearms like mooring ropes and eyes the colour of the sea on a bad day, and she looked at Detective Lin's warrant card with the resigned patience of a woman who had been looked at by a great many warrant cards and had never once been impressed by any of them. "Missing girl," she said. "That's what they always say. You'll be the third lot this year. The coastguards were here in June. They wanted to know about the fog." "What about the fog?" Clary asked. Bess Pentreath looked at her for a long moment, and something shifted in her face — not suspicion, but assessment, the look of a woman who had learned to measure strangers by the weight of what they asked. "The fog's been coming in strange," she said. "Sets in offshore, around the islet, on clear days when there's no weather to make fog with. Comes and goes. And there's the bell." "Bell?" "There's a church under the water," Bess said. "Or there was. Old charts show a village out beyond Callow, drowned before my grandfather's time — some say it was a storm, some say the land gave way. When the tide's right out and the sea's quiet, you can hear the bell ring. Not a storm bell. A church bell, one toll, slow, like it's waiting for something. My father heard it all his life. He used to say it was the bell ringing the drowned in to services." She turned and looked out at the sea. "Last three weeks it's been ringing every tide. And the islet's in the wrong place." "The wrong place?" "It's moved," Bess said. "Two hundred yards north of where the charts say. My lad plots our pots by the lighthouse and the islet, and he had to move half the strings. Fishermen don't move their pots for a trick of the light." She looked back at Clary. "And last Tuesday, at dawn, there was a house on it." The words hung in the air. Tamsin had gone very still. Lin was watching Clary with the flat, attentive look she wore when a file was about to stop making sense. "A house," Clary said. "Slate roof," Bess said. "Whitewashed walls. Smoke from the chimney, thin and straight, the way it goes on a windless morning. It was there for half an hour, clear as you like, and then the fog closed over it, and when the fog lifted the islet was bare rock again." She took out a battered box of cigarettes and did not light one, just turned it over in her hands. "I've been fishing these waters for forty years. I know what lives out there. I know what doesn't. That house doesn't live out there. But it was there." Clary asked to see the charts. Bess brought out a tin of them, dog-eared and salt-stained, and Clary spread them on the harbour wall and knelt over them the way she had knelt over the great map in the blank space at the centre of Lumen. The oldest chart was dated seventeen twenty-one. Callow was there, a small lump of rock with a crosshatched halo of shallows, and beside it, in faded brown ink, a name: the Drowned Parish. A mile offshore, marked in a hand that had been careful and afraid, was the outline of a church with the word steeple written beneath it, and a note in the margin: bells sometimes heard at low water. The people of Saltgate have no explanation. Clary ran her finger along the chart, from the drowned church to Callow to the harbour. The curve of the coast on the seventeen twenty-one chart was the same curve as the coastline on the page that had drawn itself in her room. The same bite of headland. The same breakwater, though the chart showed it as a natural ridge of rock, and the lighthouse was not there yet, had not been built yet, would not be built for another hundred years. She stood up. She looked at the islet, a low grey shape on the horizon, and she looked at the sky above it, where a thread of fog was gathering against the grain of the wind, and she felt the map in her pocket grow warm, the way her first map had grown warm in the weeks after Tamsin disappeared. "I need to go out there," she said. "At low tide. Tomorrow, if the weather holds." Bess Pentreath studied her for a long moment. Then she put the cigarette box away and said, "Low tide's at six in the morning. I'll have the boat fuelled. You'll pay for the diesel and you'll take the life jackets, and you'll tell me the truth when you come back, because I'll know if you don't." She looked at Lin. "And the detective can stay on the shore and look official, which she's clearly very good at." Lin, to Clary's surprise, almost smiled. That night they took rooms above the Ship's Bell, the one pub in Saltgate that still kept a light burning past nine, and Clary sat at the window of her room with the sketchbook open on the sill and watched the islet stand black against the last of the sky. Tamsin fell asleep on the bed with the phone still in her hand — Ivy had called from Exmoor, wanting to know everything, and Tamsin had told her the shape of it without the words, the way they had learned to tell each other the things that did not fit inside files. Clary drew the approach to Callow until her hand knew the channel by heart: the reef to the north, the deep water to the south, the landing beneath the bridge that her map said was there and Bess's charts said was not. At some point the fog came in off the sea, and the lighthouse light began to turn above it, and Clary watched the beam sweep the dark water and thought about the first door, drawn by a boy who had only wanted to keep his valley, and about the bell under the water, waiting three hundred years for a tide that would ring it home.