Ship Ahoy! (A Cliffhanger Novel Book 3) Read online

  ‘What do you mean, “It’s all right”?’ I walked her back to the shark. The newspaper was still stuck to its face.

  ‘See that picture there?’ I said. ‘That’s my first wife, Audrey.’

  Em looked at me. It was the only thing we’d disagreed on the three and half years, the marriage thing.

  ‘How many wives have you had Al?’ she said,

  ‘OK. OK. My only wife. See the headline underneath? Go on read it.’

  She read it, out loud.

  LOVE CHILD KILLER ESCAPES FROM PRISON

  ‘Crikey,’ she said.

  ‘Crikey indeed, my own. Give us the rest then. I’m having difficulty seeing straight.’ She smoothed the paper down.

  Audrey Cutlass, formerly Audrey Greenwood, sentenced to twenty years four years ago for murdering her husband’s love child has escaped from an open prison in Hertfordshire, it was confirmed today. Police warn the public not to have a go.

  ‘Crikey’ she said again.

  ‘With bells on,’ I said. ‘You better tell Johnny I concede the match. I need to lie down.’

  TWO

  As I said, I’d first met Emily when I was in prison for something I didn’t do. I didn’t say what I hadn’t done. Killed my own daughter, Miranda, that’s what they said, the one born the wrong side of the sheets. I never done that. What I had done was to try and kill my wife Audrey, tried to push her off a cliff, only I pushed someone else off instead. Didn’t know who at the time, but it set me all wobbly, unable to think or see straight. If I had, I might have clocked it earlier, that it was Audrey who had done Miranda in, but by then it was too late, everyone thought it was me, particularly Detective Inspector Adam Rump, who, being a fish fancier himself, was more interested in the state of my pond than who had done for my girl. So off I went to prison, while Audrey ran off with Rump’s wife, Michaela. Australia, South Africa, they had a high old time.

  Then guess what, Audrey had what they call a Damascus conversion—bit like a loft conversion only not as warm. Fessed up to the crime she did. Got me out of jail. It should have ended there, but it didn’t. Firstly I needed to know who I had pushed off. Silly that, but there you go. Secondly my other daughter, the one borne in holy wedlock, Carol, comes over, wanting to bang me back up inside for killing her fiancé Robin ten years previous, claimed I’d pushed him off a mountain and stolen his pocket Scrabble set to boot. I’d done both as a matter of fact, but I wasn’t going to give her the satisfaction. Daughters eh? One little mistake and they hang it round your neck for the rest of your natural. Anyway, with Audrey inside, Michaela decides it would be fun to steal her ex’s prize fish, blackmails me to do it, on account of she knew who I’d pushed off, or at least could help me find out. So like a mug I agree. And that’s when I met Miss Prosser again, lying on the beach, squinting up at me, that look on her face like she’d been waiting all her life for this to happen and I’m standing there with Rump’s stolen carp under my arm thinking the same thing. Everything else fell away. All I wanted to do was clean up my act and fuck off out of it with Miss Prosser in my arms. All the bad things I’d done, all the bad things I could do in the future, didn’t exist anymore. I was set free.

  And that was when I knew, how it was going to be. I’d give the fish back, tell Michaela to sling her hook, and start anew, New Zealand, Canada, somewhere far away. And we’d have done it, if, the next day, I hadn’t found out who I’d pushed off the cliff that Sunday afternoon. Robin’s mum, that’s who. Robin’s mum who’d been carrying her son’s ashes up to the Pimple, where Carol and he had gone courting. Knowing that just knocked the stuffing out of me, like I’d pushed my own mum off, trashed her memory and everything she done for me. Your mum’s your mum. No one should mess with her.

  I couldn’t live with that, not with Miss Prosser coming along for the ride, though being with her was what I wanted more than anything in the world. So I wrote her a letter telling her everything, knowing it would mean the end before it had even started, sent it first class and went up to the Pimple, waited for the plods to show. I stayed there all night, stayed there half the morning, a chill on me like I never felt before, but they came eventually, the boys in blue, just like I expected, piling out the car, like they couldn’t wait to get their hands on me.

  I stood up. ‘Here I am! Come and get me copper!’ I shouted, but if they saw me, they didn’t take no notice. Weren’t interested. They hadn’t come for me, but for Michaela, took her away kicking and screaming like a banshee. Emily hadn’t passed my letter on after all. She’d kept schtum.

  I couldn’t believe it. I sat there, the sun billowing up in the sky, the sea behind me all warm and blue, my little bungalow down below looking like I could just squash it with the ball of my thumb. Then another car pulls up, and Miss Prosser steps out like she’d stepped out once before, knocks on my door like she’d knocked on it once before, goes round into the back garden like she’d done once before, stands by the pond, touches the nymph, and then, by Christ looks up, looks up to where I’m crouched down, praying that she can’t see me. And then she jumps the fence and starts walking up through the long grass towards me, hitches up her pale blue dress all stuck about with pink and yellow flowers, and charges up, pushing the grass and brambles aside, like she can’t wait, like she thinks I might not be there anymore, like I might need saving, moving faster and faster, nearer and nearer, till she’s standing there on the top, facing me, her face all flushed, her chest heaving in and out, those pink and yellow flowers banging up and down all over her.

  ‘How did you know I’d be here?’ I said.

  She reached into a little pocket woven into the dress front, took the letter out, waved it about.

  ‘How do you think?’

  I stared at it. I could hardly recognise it.

  ‘I bet that curdled your cornflakes.’

  She held the pages between her hands, started tearing at them, never taking her eyes off me. She ripped them into little pieces, then chucked them into the air. Up they flew, out to sea.

  ‘I don’t care Al. I don’t care. I never did. Don’t you know that?’

  She stood there, her breath still coming hard and fast. A couple of letter-shreds landed in her hair; the most beautiful confetti you ever saw. She picked them out, set them free again, like she didn’t want them there.

  ‘You know what you’re getting into?’ I said.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘No. Yes. No. Christ Emily.’

  I grabbed her shoulders, held her so her heart was banging against me, like mine was banging against hers. There was so much there.

  ‘I don’t know what to say,’ I said.

  ‘Say nothing,’ she said, and started to pull me down.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Not here. I’ve had enough of these cliffs.’

  ‘Where then? There?’

  She grabbed my hand and hauled me up to the top, lifted those pink and yellow flowers clean away, laid herself out over the curve of it, head and legs hanging down, like she was half of the earth, the arc of her reaching up to the sky, her body white and lumpy like a mound of china clay, soft like china clay too, all smooth and slippery and I lay on top of her and started kneading her, kneading her like she was Eve, fresh out the ground and I was Adam and she put her hand between us and started kneading me too and we did it there and then, for all the world to see if they wanted, did it until we could do it no more.

  That’s how we started, the two of us, floating back down the hill like we were in a dream. And that’s how we’ve stayed too, like we were in a dream, from the moment we came down across the field, with old Poke Nose leaning out her upstairs window, giving us a wave with her binoculars, to that last but one cruise on the Lady Di. Everything seemed to go roses for us, right from the very start, the way we decided right there and then, that we’d go for broke come what may, no holds barred, that she’d give up her poxy prison job and move down from London, I’d give up my former ways and we’d set up together, a so
rt of mini artists’ colony, just her and me, painting and sculpting and screwing all the hours God gave us, knowing that we wouldn’t earn enough to keep a dieting budgerigar alive, but not caring, it felt so bloody marvellous, lying there next to each other, smoking fags, touching each other up, thinking about how connected the two us were, without really knowing how or why. Course we had to do something apart from painting and screwing, I knew that, she knew that, but we didn’t care. We knew it would come right, and it did, me bumping into Johnny Caracas one rainy Sunday afternoon in the Spread Eagle, him just appointed the new entertainments officer on the Lady Di and looking for talent. Christ, he hired the two of us after his third double gin, and he hadn’t even met Emily, she was busy bringing her clobber down. Even that went better than it should have, how everything she brought seemed to belong, brought the bungalow back to life, like it had all been made for it, like she was made for it, like she was made for me. That was it. Everything fitted. I fitted into her, she fitted into me. I could hold her foot in the palm of my hand, and when we laughed it was like there was a tune to it, a harmony, the way it tinkled around the room, like it had been written by Rogers and Hammerstein. Everything got lighter with Em, the way I ate, the way I drove, even the way I offered her up a slice of the old fellow. I don’t think I’d ever done that before really, made what she called love. Done something else lots of times, but not that, like it was rainbows we were sliding down, that there was no end to it, no beginning either, just light and freedom and something we could never touch. That’s not just me being a proud man speaking. It’s the truth. Apart, our lives had been like lost jigsaw pieces, all lumpy and out of kilter, the picture all misshapen and distorted, but once together everything locked together in perfect sense, just like a picture. I should have known it was too good to last.

  It was a bastard, them days after the chainsaw accident, waiting to tie up in Southampton. The only thing that kept me going was watching the CCTV re-runs of Mrs Durand-Deacon being rounded up like some longhorn from the O.K. Corral. As Johnny C. said when he lifted the Inter-Deck Scrabble cup above his head the day before we docked, it was the best bit of al fresco choreography the Lady Di had seen for years, and if I hadn’t dropped the chainsaw, not only would she not have jumped that five bar fence better than that little Olga Corbett at the Olympic Games, but he wouldn’t have won the tournament either. And then he gave me a couple of his prize marzipans, one pineapple, one Mexican espresso. Quite sporting of him considering he didn’t have a sporting bone in his body. I gave them both to Em. I wasn’t in the mood for marzipan. I wasn’t in the mood for anything. I just wanted to get back to Blighty and find out what the fuck had happened.

  ‘What was she doing in an open prison in the first place? That’s what I’d like to know,’ I said, a couple of hours later. Em and me were back in our cabin, putting on our togs for the Gala Last Night. Always a complete horror show, the GLNs, the fun they’re all so desperate to have, the fun they should have had but hadn’t, never would. It’s all one big lie, a cruise. Doesn’t stop them paying through the nose for them though. And us down-trodden workers sweating below? We just take their money and interfere with their clothing as best we can. ‘And why has no one got in touch with me? I mean who’s the injured party here?’

  Em was sticking her top half into her green chiffon party frock. She liked dressing up, more than I thought she would.

  ‘Stop whining Al. Perhaps they’re waiting until we land. They might not think you know.’

  ‘Well I do know, don’t I? The whole bloody world knows. Audrey Greenwood is on the loose.’

  ‘Cutlass,’ Em corrected. ‘Audrey Cutlass.’

  ‘Yes and hacking great lumps out of my brain with it,’ I said. ‘What did she want to go and escape for?’

  ‘It’s what prisoners do isn’t it? Don’t tell me you never thought of it. Here, hook me up.’ She turned her back on me. I blew on my fingers. I never had to do that when fixing Audrey’s evening attire, but then her skin didn’t have warm blood pumping through it.

  ‘Of course I thought of it. Everyone in prison does. We think about a lot of things. We’ve got bugger all else to do but think about things—women, food, the perfect break-out, women, you just go from one to the other. But we know what it is—something that will never happen. I used to play with myself every day thinking about you, and look where that got me.’ I reached round, made my hands like a pair of scales. She pushed me off.

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘The point is, Audrey wouldn’t just walk out. There’d be a plan, a reason.’

  ‘Perhaps there is.’

  ‘That’s what I’m worried about. I mean what’s she escaping for?’

  ‘To be free?’

  ‘Free to make more mischief, more like. You don’t know her. A more devious mind than Audrey’s you couldn’t hope to meet. I should know. I woke up to it every morning for twenty years, never knowing what little nightmare it had dreamt up during the night. I treated the world all right until I met Audrey.’

  Em leant down, picked something up from the dresser, came up close. Four and a half years we’d been together, cheek by jowl, and still she came up tight, like it was day one.

  ‘And now she’s out of your life, you’ve reformed, and whenever you play with yourself, your wish comes true. Here.’ She popped a marzipan in my mouth. Pineapple. I’d have preferred the Mexican espresso myself. ‘Now put your best face on and remember, be extra nice to Mrs Durand-Deacon, otherwise she might sue. Dance with her, ask to see her pictures of her poodles, remind her that as soon as you get your chainsaw mended, you’re going to drive over to Frinton and carve her her very own shark for her bathroom.’

  ‘That stuck-up dump. Am I fuck!’

  She smoothed my hair back. I could smell the heat on her arms.

  ‘I know you’re not. She knows you’re not. It’s a way of letting her keep her dignity intact. You can do that for her, can’t you?’

  We left for the party. I was extra nice to Mrs Durand-Deacon. I didn’t dance with her much, on account of the salt water in her ears affecting her balance. We sat at the table instead. I asked to see her pictures of her poodles. Romulus and Remus they were called, which was funny because there’d been this waitress in Dorchester with breasts with exactly the same names. Mrs Durand-Deacon told me how they’d wake her up in the morning, rubbing their noses in her face, how she’d squeeze and tickle them until they got quite beside themselves. I could relate to that. Later on I took down directions on how to get to Snobbery-by-the Sea, told her I’d drive over to carve her shark, three weeks maximum. Come midnight I hit her on the head with a festive balloon before walking her back to her cabin and kissing her crabby cheeks goodnight. I didn’t mind. I had quite a lot of time for her by then, the spirit she’d showed. Gerald probably deserved all the shark bites he got. Normally I hang about a bit, waiting for some farewell recompense, normally get it too, but I just gave her a quick squeeze and hot-footed it back to the cabin. Miss Prosser was waiting for me when I got back, chiffon party number back in the box, her and a bottle of bubbly waiting ready to froth in the bottom bunk. We usually tried to make a night of it ourselves, Gala night, after the punters had crashed out, but not that night. I just climbed up top, thinking about Audrey, where she was, what she was doing, what she was planning. Funny, all the time she’d been inside, I’d hardly given her a moment’s thought, but now she was out, I could think of nothing else. She was out there somewhere, out there in the same piece of dark we was steaming towards. The morning would come up all grey and wet and wintry, just like the home country likes it, and I’d walk down that gangplank like I was stepping off into an unknown sea, knowing that somewhere Audrey was looking at that same morning too. It hardly bore thinking about.

  Still it was nice to get back home. It always was, coming back from a cruise. I’ve never been much of a traveller. I was happy enough to go from port to port with Miss Prosser in tow, but I didn’t see the point of it much
myself, all this organised globe-trotting. They say that travel broadens the mind but I haven’t seen any evidence any of it. I mean show me the punter who leaves the Lady Di any wiser from when they first stepped aboard. They might have clocked a couple of pyramids or gone all gooey-eyed over the Taj Mahal, but so what? What’s the use of a pointy grave when you get back home? No bloody use at all. Everyone oohs and aahs and takes their digital pictures, but given the chance, which would you rather live in—a draughty marble palace miles from the shops or a centrally heated bungalow with a recently-opened Lidl’s just round the corner and double-glazing in all the windows? No, if you have to go on a cruise, and you want to broaden your horizons while you’re at it, my advice would be to find yourself a comfy sun-lounger on the promenade deck and park your bum down for the duration—apart from eating and the therapeutic leg-over obviously. Just sit and stare out to sea, let the old grey matter wander about a bit. If there’s one thing Em has taught me, it’s the benefits of letting the mind go walkabout every now and again. Gazing at some crumbling ruin in the Mediterranean, wondering how the Roman took a proper dump won’t help, cause all you are is dwelling on the past. The sea doesn’t have a past. It doesn’t have a future either, and it’s not in the present neither. It’s the whole caboodle all rolled into one, no beginning and no end. It’s been there long before we got up on our hind legs and it’ll be there when we’re flat on our backs trying to grow a new set of gills. It kind of sets you free from everything, the sea.

  Mrs B. had made it all cosy for us by the time we got back. We’d given her a key so she could look after the fish while we were away. In Audrey’s day we only had imitation gas-fire logs, as Audrey didn’t hold with having to clean the grate, but it was the first thing Em made me do, rip the bastard out, unblock the chimney, so we could sit there of an evening, find entertaining ways of warming ourselves by the flames. The bungalow had never seemed more like a home, what with the open fire and the rugs she brought and the pictures she stuck round the place, pictures she done, old ones of the countryside, cows mooing over fences, newer ones of the cove, boats bobbing about on the water, paintings of me too, feeding the fish, messing about on the Miss Prosser, having a kip in the conservatory. She had others too, a bit more personal, but they weren’t for show. She just stacked them up in the garage, save the one in the master bedroom, me lying back starkers on the Easy-slumber Sofabed, Tonto, head out the wigwam and ready for action. Truth was I was a bit embarrassed by that one, always took it down and slid it under the king-size before we went away. It wouldn’t be right for Mrs B to have to look at that, however many she’d had circling her own wagon in the past.