I woke up slowly to a half-remembered nightmare in my dark little bedroom in the middle of a storm. The rain battered on my windows and the shadows around my bed moved slowly, turned menacing, as if being egged on by the wild wind. But in one moment they were all swept away by the lighthouse, its light tearing through the room, leaving everything familiar and subdued in its wake. Strangely relieved, I lay there for a while, listening to the storm and watching the lighthouse sweep. I didn’t really feel like going back to sleep; partly because I didn’t want to return to the nightmare, but mostly because the lighthouse reminded me of something. That morning, I’d seen the lighthouse keeper buy a dozen eggs. It had bothered me all day, but lying here now I was pretty sure that it meant trouble.
And trouble on the island was trouble for me, because of the nearly seven hundred inhabitants, I was the only policeman. I was in fact the British Government’s only representative on this distant relic of its empire. If something was wrong, I was the only person in about a thousand miles who would do anything about it. Well, aside from my part-time constable Charlie, who was a nice kid but couldn’t be around as often as he liked thanks to his father’s insistence on his son manning the fishing fleet’s radio for what seemed to me like twenty-four hours a day. I sighed loudly, and then heard my bedroom door creak. I looked over to see a dog’s nose appear in the gap.
“Rozzer!” I said, not as sternly as I could have.
He made his way sheepishly to the end of the bed and sat there, head down, but looking up at me with those eyes. So now my dog, as well as my duty, was not going to let me get any sleep. So with another, much more painful, sigh I hauled my old bones out of bed and got dressed. As soon as I made a move for the door, Rozzer skittered through it and barreled down the stairs. I often took him for late night walks, and though I wasn’t sure exactly what to do about my eggs and lighthouse problem, perhaps we’d head down to the sea and take a look.
Outside the storm had calmed to an occasional drop, and though it felt like it would be back, for now everything was quiet. The houses were sleeping and the windows were dark around the road that wound down to the water. The only noise was the clop of my footsteps and the panting of Rozzer straining at his leash. In the distance the lighthouse still turned, keeping ships away from a rock the world had forgotten about a long time ago. This had once been a vital rest and refueling stop for ships crossing the Atlantic, situated as it was almost exactly halfway between England and America. But with the coming of aeroplanes, the island had been abandoned like a petrol station on a road no-one uses any more. Those left behind did what they could to continue as a place that lived and worked and other normal things people did everywhere else, but it was infected with the sort of melancholy that can only come from staring at a sea with no-one on it. How I’d ended up here was a long, long story; but suffice to say, it wasn’t a promotion.
The rain started up again as we reached the water’s edge, around the time on a walk that we’d normally think about heading back. But instead I looked out at the pale tower and wondered what might be happening beneath the light. The keeper, Liam, was a curmudgeonly old swine but I liked him all the same. He would throw a salute my way when I saw him come ashore. I suppose we were kindred spirits, two old men charged with protecting the island from one sort of harm or another.
“He’s on his own though, eh Rozzer? He doesn’t have someone like you to keep him sane.”
Rozzer looked up at me with the particular expression he wore when we had stood in the rain for too long.
“There is a possibility” I said to the damp dog, “that I might be overreacting to the eggs.”
But we stood on the quay for a minute or two watching a beaten up old boat that was moored there, my boat, being juggled by a wild sea.
* * *
It’s difficult not to feel a sense of foreboding when you’re sailing towards a lighthouse on a dark and stormy night. Rozzer barked, and I jumped a little.
“It’s all right,” I said. “Not too far now.”
The rain tore itself to pieces on the cabin window, and Rozzer tried to keep a scrabbly footing on the deck. As we drew closer to the rocks, the lighthouse tottered over our heads. The sea was getting much, much worse.
“Almost there, Rozzer, almost there.”
The wheel jerked and shook in my hands as the waves swept control out from under us. We were tumbling slowly past the rocks now and heading for the jetty. I couldn’t stop us, we just had to hope it would hold our weight. It was a pretty small boat. But it looked like a pretty old jetty.
“Here we go!”
With a thudding slam the boat stopped dead, throwing me against the wheel and Rozzer into me, causing me to tumble over him and land with a whoomp on my back. I was winded, but happy to be still for a moment, before I remembered I had to tie the boat up before the sea dragged us away from the shore. I ran drunkenly towards the stern, gathered up the rope, and took several deep breaths before I jumped.
As I lay on the blissfully still ground, silently cursing my inability to stay in bed and sleep, I looked behind me at the lighthouse. I saw a bright yellow light in a window near the top and was pondering what this meant for me when something passed in front it. But instead of being relieved, I felt… uneasy.
“Rozzer?” I called quietly to the boat.
I heard a scuffle and a thump and then a snuffling in my ear. I reached up a hand and patted his familiar head.
“Glad you’re here.”
I got very slowly to my feet, powered by grunting noises I never thought I’d be old enough to make.
“Rozzer,” I whispered. “You stick with me, O.K?”
Together we walked down the glistening path towards the now quite menacing lighthouse. When we were only a few hundred yards away I saw the shadow pass again across another window.
“Wait,” I said to Rozzer, and put my hand on his collar. He stopped and we watched, but there were no more shadows. I wasn’t immediately sure what we should do.
“Hello!” I called to the tower, taking myself by surprise.
A shattering of glass exploded quietly behind the wind and we looked up to see Liam at a broken window. A gust caught one word of his yelling and flung it at us through the air.
“Sorry!”
Whatever else he was shouting turned to screaming as we ran. I looked up just before we burst into the lighthouse, and saw his face come unhinged with terror. But when the crash of the door breaking open disappeared, I could only hear silence. It was the sort of silence only left behind by something bad.
“Liam?” I said peering up the empty stone steps.
“Up here.” The quiet old voice of Liam floated down.
Rozzer and I looked at each other nervously, then started to climb. The further up the tower we went, the more the sound of the waves grew distant; where we were headed remained silent. We passed a store room, empty, a kitchen, empty, and a living room, empty too. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of our imprisoned clattering, we came to the very top. The door there was open like all the others, so that the room revealed itself with every step I took. The first thing I saw inside was a jiggling foot, as if someone impatient was waiting.
“Sit, Rozzer,” I whispered, and he obeyed.
Slowly, slowly the foot’s person appeared as I reached the top of the steps. It was Liam; sitting in the middle of his tiny bedroom on a rickety wooden chair. His wide, white, terrified eyes were looking right at me.
“Liam?” I asked softly.
Something else’s tongue slithered from his mouth, blackly red and slick; it took me a moment to realise it was blood. It hung from his chin in thick, slick strands before tumbling onto his dirty shirt. By the time I looked up, the terror had gone from his eyes, and so had everything else. There was a noise behind me and I spun around.
“Bloody hell, Rozzer,” I said with relief.
He barked and wagged his tail, not an expert at judging the mood. I looked back at poor Liam. I got my bad feeling because I knew he was in trouble; and it looked like the trouble decided to do for him when it had seen me coming. So now the big question was, where the hell had trouble gone? I walked over to the window and rattled it. It was locked tight. The stairs were the only way in or out, but Liam was alive when we started climbing them. There was a whimper from the corner. Rozzer was huddling, his eyes fixed on the corpse, whining quietly between his teeth.
“It’s all right Rozzer, I don’t think there’s anyone in there now. He’s gone away to God knows where.” I said gently while scratching behind his ear.
Rozzer had never seen a dead body before. He was given to me as a puppy by a kitchen porter on the boat that Her Majesty made me take here. It had been my first voyage too, and we arrived on the island as strangers together. But Rozzer hadn’t seen the things that I had, the things that sleep beneath a city in the desperate dark of night. I had always tried to treat the bodies that were left behind as bric-a-brac; abandoned remnants of something that would not be whole again. Of course, that was then and this was now, and I was a long way from London.
“So,” I said to Rozzer, “where should we begin?”
He came over and put his nose in my hand. I was grateful for the warmth, and to have someone to talk to. I realized I had never been on my own at a murder scene before. In my old life as a detective I was one of the last to arrive, into a sort of rush hour of routines, lights and chatter. But now here I was, alone with a dead body.
“Except we’re not alone are we?” I muttered. “Liam didn’t do this to himself.”
The cut in his throat was deep and ragged, it was made too slowly to be self-inflicted. Besides, there was no knife anywhere. I looked around the empty room, and at the empty stairs behind us. I took a deep breath, and exhaled for a very long time. Someone slit Liam’s throat while we were climbing to the top of the lighthouse, and then vanished into thin air before we got there.
“Spooky.” I said inadequately. Rozzer warily sniffed Liam.
I had once been very frightened of dead bodies, that they would reach out and grab me in a death-proof thirst for vengeance; it may have had something to do with the horror films I snuck downstairs to watch when I was young. This fear raised its ugly head when I first became a policeman, and found myself having to deal with corpses on a regular basis. But it wasn’t until I had been a year on the force that I found out that the reason I saw so many dead bodies was that they used to send for me special whenever one showed up. It turned out I wasn’t as good as hiding my fear as I thought, and I’d spend the whole time on scene with a wide-eyed expression of pure terror on my face. I had no idea until I saw the video; a compilation for the Christmas party of all the corpses I’d had to search for their identity. For the first time I saw what my fear looked like, accompanied by howls of laughter in a smoke filled room.
From then on I worked hard to keep the fear far away from my face, and slowly sort of got used to it. Eventually they stopped sending for me every time there was a body. After quite a few years I got promoted, which was when my real problems began. Now I had to examine the corpses’ lives, talk to their families, and shoulder the responsibility of giving them peace. I couldn’t run away from the dead bodies any more, because now they really did want revenge. The difference was I had to find it for them. They want to know why, and they want the world to know who. That’s their revenge; for you to feel the collar of the truth in the dark, and yank it into the light. But the only way for a copper to do that is to ask questions. When you’re standing over a dead body, there are a lot of questions. And every single one of them is so important, you dare not get them wrong. It’s not just the corpse’s revenge that depends on them, it’s also the life of the one you haven’t yet accused, but must before too long. That’s when I came undone. They started to unbalance me, these unanswered questions, forming a whirlwind in my mind that dug up the old fear and turned it into something else. Something fiercer, something wilder, something beyond my control.
So, feeling like I might be pretty close to going mad, and throwing away a career I’d worked very hard to succeed in, I knew I had to find a way to battle through. And then on my fourth or fifth case, I came across a corpse without a name. I became obsessed with finding out what it was, and forgot about everything else. After a few days of research and interviews I realised I was feeling pretty good, very focused, and quite a long way from going mad. I discovered that if I picked just one question I didn’t know the answer to, and focused all my energy on that, I could lull myself into a sort of monotonous calm. It didn’t even matter what question; I would just stick at it until I knew the answer. It also meant that I began to work a little differently from other policemen; they would look at a dead body and all the circumstances around it and develop a theory based on their experience, solving the puzzle with all the pieces in a jumble in front of them. But I just picked one corner and worked my way out, one piece at a time.
“What question should we pick tonight, Rozzer?”
There were definitely a few to choose from. Did they come here to murder Liam, or was that necessary only once I turned up? What could an old lighthouse or its keeper possibly hold that was worth enough to kill for? Given how small the island was, was it someone that I knew? But there was only one question, even though I didn’t fancy hanging about with poor Liam to have to answer it.
“How did they get out of this room?”
I couldn’t see any way out but the window. I unlocked and opened it. It sounded like I was removing a barrier between two worlds; the eerie silence inside the lighthouse was crushed by the anger of the storm. I put my head out into the night and looked down the murky white wall of the tower right down to the churning sea. There was nothing there. I looked to the sides, and even right above me, but I couldn’t see anything that looked like someone had gotten out this way. My foot slipped suddenly and I briefly lost my balance while quite a lot of me was hanging out of the window. I grabbed the sides and pulled myself back inside. My heart thumped in my ears in a persistent echo of that split second’s terror. I breathed in and out, but the thumping would not stop. My breathing got faster, and the thumping got louder, and suddenly I was back in London again on one of my first cases. I had forgotten that it felt like this. I knew the fear had always been there. Conquered fear doesn’t shrivel up and die, it crawls into the deep and waits for you to be afraid enough for it to return. I tried to feel the steady floor under my feet but I knew it wasn’t the slip that was causing this. I was alone on a very small island with a corpse and its murderer, and no-one was coming to help me. That was the problem; the fear I had in London was irrational, but this was most certainly not.
I could definitely make a run for it. But I wasn’t so keen on going back out into the night where anything could be waiting for me. It was important to remember that other than Liam being dead, I had no idea what was going on at the lighthouse. Even though my heart was still in my ears, I tried to remember the question.
“How did they get out of the room?” I said under my breath.
I cast my eyes over the room in an ‘is there anything out of place’ sort of a way. But it was just a room, with its owner sitting dead in the middle of it. I didn’t look at him. I looked behind the pictures and paintings, and even went as far as looking behind the bookcase. But there were no secret switches or passages, just dust and the blankness of the walls Liam tried to cover up.
“If not the window or the walls or the floor, then there is only one way out.”
I went through the doorway and stood at the top of the stairs that wound their way down to black and disappeared. I started walking down them, slowly. I didn’t know what else to do. With each step my fear got fiercer, and my head started to pound with the noise of my heart and the total shutdown of coherent thought. During my foot’s interminable journey to the third step, I started to feel light-headed. The darkness at the bottom of the tower reached out to grab me. Rozzer barked.
My foot hit the step and I turned around. He was sniffing at the open door to Liam’s room, trying to force his nose in between the door and the wall. With a creak the door swung away from the wall and closed with a click, shutting Liam in. I felt very, very stupid. There, cut into the now revealed wall was a tiny wooden door. We weren’t at the top of the lighthouse, the light was at the top of the lighthouse. Of course there was a way to get to it.
“That’s the first question answered then.” I said quietly.
But now I knew that whoever killed Liam was waiting somewhere above me, and almost certainly listening. I had to keep calm; I had to decide what the next question would be. Once again, there were a lot to choose from. Did they go up into the tower because that was the plan all along and Liam had to die so they could do it? Or were they only hiding from me? Had they even seen me? Or would they get bored soon and take their chances against an old man and his dog? But I was a policeman, so I knew there was one question I had to answer before all others. Am I going to go up there after them?
I looked up at the discolored ceiling and thought about my old bones, and their murder weapon. I heard Rozzer walk over to me, something he always did when I stood staring into space for too long. But I wasn’t scared this time, I was thinking. The fear crawled back to its hiding place once I knew the killers of Liam were real. I wasn’t sure exactly why I felt so much better right then. Perhaps it was as simple as knowing what happened. Perhaps it was just knowing they could be nicked.
“Wait here, Rozzer, I’ll be right back.”
I went down silently to the storeroom where I had seen Liam’s toolbox. I grabbed it, went back up and, putting the tools down by the door as quietly as I could, made a ‘ssh’ sign to Rozzer. He’d only mastered this sign after a week and a half of driving me crazy in my cabin at sea, but it had come in handy more than once since then. So he just watched me as I went back into the room and took all the books from Liam’s bookshelf and laid them down on the floor. Every time I heard a sound from anywhere in the tower I stopped, waited and listened; my eye on the toolbox and the possible weapons inside. But the noises passed, and soon every book was down and arranged in tottering stacks. I called Rozzer over with a pat on my thigh and led him deliberately through the maze of books and pushed him to sit on the floor. I did not want him underfoot for the next part. Once he was safe, and watching me in that quizzical way he had when he’d been forbidden from being too interested in what I was doing, I walked over to the bookcase and tried to lift it. It would not budge. I was thinking about straining what was left of my muscles just a little more, but decided that being alone in a lighthouse with a murderer was bad enough without doing my back in as well. I looked at the floor and realised I could probably push it with a lot less effort. The downside was that would make a lot of noise. And I wasn’t sure that whoever was waiting up there was going to suffer too much in the way of strange noises before deciding to come down and take a look for themselves. I briefly toyed with the idea of running down and pouring some oil or something on the floor to make it easier to shift, but I wasn’t sure where I would find any and I honestly didn’t know how long I had to get this done. I tried to push from one end, and though it moved a little, it bumped up against some knot or something in the floor pretty quickly and wouldn’t go any further.
“Bugger.” I said quietly, pricking up Rozzer’s ears in a ‘time for me to help?’ sort of a way.
I gave him the ‘ssh’ again and walked around to the other side of the bookcase. Well, I was going to have to pull it. And it made an almighty racket as I tried to heave it over the knot, my body was pushed to its worn down limits, but finally it came free. It made the most awful screeching sound as I dragged it very slowly slowly across the floor, so loud I thought the walls might come down. I kept having to check over my shoulder to make sure the tiny door hadn’t spat out a murderer behind me. The last few feet were agony, my arms were killing me and I swear I could hear something moving above me over the din of the bookcase but finally, finally I had it where I wanted it. I stumbled over to the toolbox, startling Rozzer’s puzzlement into full-blown curiosity, and he followed me back to the bookcase that now covered the tiny door. I took the hammer and started pounding nails through the back of bookcase and into the door and the jamb. I was sure the whole thing would start rattling and shaking in my hands when whoever was up there realised what was happening. Something was moving around up there for sure now, but the bookcase stayed steady until I’d used every single nail I had managed to scrounge from the box. Completely exhausted and out of breath, I stood back to look at what I’d done. It was a pretty big bookcase and even a strong man would have trouble freeing it from its new moorings; it was also a very small door and we were already so close to the outside walls of the lighthouse that the door could only lead to a ladder. I was pretty sure they wouldn’t have the space to get anywhere near the leverage they would need to force open the door. Pretty sure would have to do for now. At least I had some time.
“There, Rozzer. What do you think about that?”
He wasn’t paying attention to me, he was sniffing around the pile of old books. He liked the way they moved when he nudged them with his nose.
“That is not a bad idea.”
I started picking up the books and placing them back on the bookcase. They were mostly cheap paperback horror novels, why a lighthouse keeper would want to scare himself was beyond me, but there were a few hefty hardbacks and dictionaries in there. Enough to feel good going down with a thunk on the shelves. I could still hear something trying to think above me, but with each pile of books I put back in place I began to breathe a little easier. When I was done, the floor was bare and the books were back where they belonged. And I was now sure that whoever killed Liam was trapped at the top of the lighthouse. They could try to break the glass up there, but even if they could (and it would have to be pretty strong stuff to withstand the wind and rain and sea) there was no way to get down the sheer, tall tower. And, just as I was beginning to feel a little better, I saw the light of a boat that was making for the island.
“Bugger.”
So, they had a friend, our murderer. They were coming from the wrong direction to be someone from the island. This had to be the murderer’s ticket out, and whatever they were expecting, it wasn’t their colleague nailed behind a bookcase by an elderly policeman and his dog.
“Whatever we’re going to do now, old friend, we had better do it sharpish.”
The light from the boat grew closer. I wasn’t armed and I hadn’t been able to take anyone in a fight for twenty years, so walking up to them and placing them under arrest seemed a little over-confident. Come to think of it, I didn’t know how many people were on the boat. I suspected only one as this whole thing, whatever it was, reeked of secrecy and to be able to kill Liam meant they didn’t need him any more. Clearly this was not an operation that required a lot of manpower, or they would at least have thought about keeping the old keeper around, him being just as partial to not being arrested as anyone. So all right, one, probably; but the light was getting closer and I still didn’t have a plan. The fear from earlier started beating in my heart and slowly crawling out into my chest. This was not a great place to be in fear for your life and running out of time. I looked at the books on Liam’s shelf. I had an idea.
# # #
From beneath the damp shelter of a cluster of old trees, Rozzer and I watched one man come ashore. He walked without a face along the path towards the lighthouse, always in the darkness as if the shadows were his friends. He was spooking us all right; but I knew his insides were squishy, just like mine, and it wouldn’t take too much on a night like this, in a place like this, to panic them into jumping up, strangling his brain and starving it of reason.
I rubbed my hand the wrong way up Rozzer’s throat, it was one of his party tricks and it was going to be useful. Sure enough he let out a quiet growl that grew into a melancholy howl. The wind was still high enough that it carried the howl away from us and swirled it all around the lighthouse. The man looked around trying to find where it had come from, but it had already disappeared. Slowly, he moved towards the tower. There was a light humming above the front door, but the man stopped just before we saw his face. He had seen the message we had left for him on the door in jagged red paint.
YOU
KILLED
ME
The man held out his hand towards the words and stepped into the light. He had an average face, a bit rougher than most perhaps. Probably not more than forty, and almost certainly a long way from home because I had never seen him before. I could see our message had worked. He looked frightened. I coaxed another howl out of Rozzer for good measure, but before the wind finished with it, the man disappeared inside.
“Good job, Rozzer.” I whispered and we got up to follow him.
Before we made half the distance the front door opened up again. We stopped dead, completely exposed under the moonlight, and waited. But the man didn’t appear in the doorway; instead we heard the sound of the two-way radio crackling and talking inside. It looked as if the third part of our plan was working so well, the man left the front door open just so he’d have an escape route. I grinned down at Rozzer. We tiptoed towards the open door and the radio got louder.
“You killed me…” it whispered before sliding back into static. A few moments later the voice repeated itself, though this time with a little more relish on the “me” part. Good old Charlie; I’d just had time to call him on the radio to explain what I wanted, then I left it on and hidden it. Now I could hear the sounds of the room being torn apart, but still the disembodied voice continued. After a minute of silence I was worried that the man was having second thoughts about walking up that dark and empty staircase. I held Rozzer’s collar and we lingered outside while the radio voice repeated “you killed me, you killed me”. A long, long time passed. Whipped by the wind, I tried to keep my eyes and the rest of me ready for any movement out of the door. Eventually I heard very careful footsteps disappearing up the tower.
“All right,” I whispered to Rozzer. “Let’s go. Quietly.”
I slid as best I could up to the door that was still ajar. I couldn’t hear anything, which was good. But I didn’t want to go inside, and that was bad. I knew I didn’t have very long until he got to the top even if the plan was working and he was as scared as I had been.
“Damn and blast.”
I put my head very, very slowly around the side of the door and looked inside. There was nobody in sight, but I could hear slow footsteps not far above me over the sound of the radio. Seeing another chance to put the willies up the accomplice, I hustled Rozzer into the radio room. I was worried my idea might bring the man back down the stairs though so I picked up a huge, heavy spanner from the desk. Then, after a deep breath, I kicked the front door shut with all my might. Rozzer started back, but I put a soothing hand on his head as the clap of the front door echoed through the lighthouse. The footsteps stopped. It was as if the slam of the door flung a wave of silence all the way to the top of the tower. I held my breath, and Rozzer fidgeted.
“Hello?”
A small voice fell down the stairs and floated through the door.
“Hello?”
The voice was a little louder this time, and now I could hear how frightened it was. I hushed Rozzer again and we waited until the footsteps started moving again.
We had to be quick now if we were going to catch up before he reached the top. I knew Rozzer would do fine, I just wasn’t sure about me. Reluctantly, I put the spanner back down on the desk, and we started to climb once more. I figured I could run the last ten or so steps as having him hear running footsteps behind him would have the added benefit of frightening and distracting him from what was going to be in front. But there was a long way to go to get to the thin rope I’d tied, a rope I hoped he hadn’t seen, wound as it was behind the handrail and looking for all the world, I prayed, like it belonged there. Still the man’s footsteps moved above us as we raced as loudly as I dared to catch them. My heart jumped every time one of our feet scraped the stone, but still we moved up the tower. By the time we reached what I remembered as roughly halfway up, the sound of his feet was too far way and he must have been getting close to the top. It was far more of a distance to run than I wanted, I wasn’t sure my old bones could even handle running up the stone for that long, let alone fast enough to get to the rope before he reached the top of the lighthouse. But what else could I do? I ran. Rozzer stayed at my heels and started panting loudly, and now there were six feet hitting the steps as well as the sound of an animal; a sound that was magnified by the stone into something terrible even here, God knows what it was like further up the tower. I was starting to feel confident that we might even make it until I realised that all this cacophony might make him run away from us and get to the top before I had time to pull the rope. I tried to throw my ears above us and away from our cacophony to try to hear whether the man was running away, staying put or turning to face his fate. He looked like a tough guy, he might even believe he was a tough guy, and maybe we had pushed him to the point where he decided he’d rather go down fighting. But I couldn’t tell. I was going to have to get to the rope, pull it, and hope that I made it in time.
“Ut! Ut! Ut!” I whispered through wheezes.
I could hear his footsteps clearer now, and for the first time they were coming down. Only a few more steps to go. I didn’t understand the acoustics well enough to know whether the man would get to me before I reached the rope. If he did, I was finished, as one quick push from him would put pay to this old man for good.
“Ut! Ut! Ut!” I wheezed again, no longer caring if he heard me.
Even Rozzer beside me was getting tired. Step after agonising step, my tiring bones feeling like they were about to disintegrate, and still his footsteps coming closer and closer until…
There it was! The end of the rope nestled around the bannister. I lunged forward and pulled it with all the strength that I had left. Nothing budged at first, and I panicked that it might have gotten caught on something. His footsteps clacked and clumped towards me. I heaved with everything, and then I felt it move; just a little, but enough. I heaved again and this time it came slowly but surely. I heard a thump above me and then a clatter. The clattering got faster and faster and louder and louder until I heard the man scream in terror; a scream that was silenced almost immediately by an almighty crash. Rozzer and I stayed still for a long time until the silence in the lighthouse was complete. I could tell he wanted to go up and investigate, but I wanted to wait a little longer to be sure because I had no more new tricks up my old sleeves. Enough quiet went by that Rozzer started nudging me in the leg.
“All right, all right,” I whispered.
We ascended carefully. The man wasn’t very far away, and had gotten pretty close to us before I sprang my final surprise. I couldn’t really see our man that clearly as he was almost completely obscured by the dead lighthouse keeper lying on top of him. The swivel chair that I tied Liam’s body to was still firmly attached, and all three of them were lying in a painful looking heap upon the steps.
“Well,” I said with relief, “that went well.”
Rozzer had a sniff around the wreckage but nobody stirred. I wanted to lift Liam back up because I did feel pretty bad about what I’d put him through. But I had come to know him pretty well over the years, and I think that the fan of cheap horror novels would have been tickled at the way I had used him to scare the living daylights out of his murderer’s accomplice. The man was still alive anyway, his pulse strong inside his neck, so I untied the rope I’d used to pull the chair down the stairs and tied the unconscious man’s hands behind his back. I tried to pull Liam off him too, but he was just too heavy. I didn’t have any strength left.
“Sorry, Liam.” I said quietly, and meant it.
# # #
I sat outside the only cell in my police station and waited for the Englishman to come around. The American who had been hiding at the top of the lighthouse, who up until an hour ago had been sharing this cell, had already been airlifted out by the U.S. military. It had been quite a scene in the afternoon life of the island. A lot of the locals had never seen a helicopter. They’d come pouring out of shops and houses to stare up at this great floating metal machine with a growl that tore the air apart. Then I tied the man into its harness and it whipped him away, less than twelve hours after Charlie and I brought him and his partner back from the lighthouse.
“Where am I?” The Englishman said, gingerly opening his eyes.
“You’re lying in a two hundred year old prison cell on an island in the Atlantic called Leofstan; it’s almost exactly halfway between England and America.”
“You what?”
“Remember?”
And then, he did.
“Look, I just went into that lighthouse because I thought something was up. I was just passing, honest.”
“No, I went into that lighthouse because I thought something was up. You see, the lighthouse keeper bought a dozen eggs.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Liam comes ashore once a week, every week and buys provisions for himself. And one of the things he buys is half a dozen eggs so that he can have a hard boiled egg every morning, Doctor’s orders. You know why he only buys half a dozen when he’s not going to be back for exactly a week?”
“Er…”
“Because on the seventh day he makes himself pancakes, an enormous pile of pancakes. He reasons – oh well there aren’t any eggs in the house, I’ve been good all week, the only thing in the cupboard is just-add-water pancake mix, I deserve pancakes, I’ll have pancakes.”
“I swear I was just passing through and…”
“Every week; every single week for the last the last ten years. So when I saw him yesterday buying a dozen eggs I knew something was wrong. Because to buy more eggs than he needs means he wouldn’t be able to have guilt-free pancakes. He’d either have to eat an egg, and therefore no pancakes, or he’d have to eat the pancakes knowing there were eggs in his fridge that he could be having. And pancakes that taste of guilt are no kind of pancake at all.”
“Could you please stop saying ‘pancake’ and listen…”
“Do you know why he needed the extra eggs? Because you were late for your rendezvous.”
The Englishman stopped trying to talk then, and for the first time looked around his cell.
“Your partner arrived on time, but the bad weather you had to come through to get here delayed you by a couple of days. But your partner had to wait if he wanted to make the exchange. And if he had to wait, then he needed feeding. And so Liam came ashore, the same day as always so as not to arouse suspicion; but this time he bought too many eggs.”
“ I don’t know who you think I am…”
“I know you are a man with half a million pounds in cash, and a boat with an empty hold large enough to carry the half a million pounds’ worth of guns the American had in his boat.”
“Um… that’s just, I mean…”
“I only went out there because of the eggs. But Liam and your other partner, it saddens me to say it but Liam must have been involved, saw me coming. Liam panicked or… you know I like to think that your partner wanted to get rid of me, it would have been the cleanest way, and Liam wouldn’t allow it and that’s what got him killed. I think I’m going to leave it at that because he was a good man, he just couldn’t resist the unique opportunity to make a lot of money out of simply being in charge of a piece of land almost exactly halfway between England and America by sea.”
“I think I should talk to a lawyer.”
“We don’t have a criminal lawyer on the island I’m afraid. That’s the downside of committing crime in the middle of nowhere.”
“All right, the British ambassador then.”
“This is a British Overseas Territory, and the closest thing the British government has to an official representative on the island is me. Don’t worry though, they’ll be along shortly.”
“When?”
“About two weeks. That’s when the next boat from Britain arrives, I’m sure they’ll put someone on there to bring you back.”
“What?! Now, wait a minute…”
“Were you scared up there?”
“Scared?”
“When you were walking up to the top of the lighthouse… were you scared?”
“Yes. Yes, I was bloody terrified.”
“Me too. Everyone was except Rozzer. I suppose we’re all only human on a night like that…
I’m afraid I have to go, duty calls, but I’ll send someone in with some food for you. How do you feel about eggs?”
J.E.A. Wallace has been a hotel night porter, an abattoir security guard, and a barman in The House of Lords. Born and raised in England, he now lives and writes in New York City.
His first book “Are You Hurtling Towards God Knows What?” is available now from Unsolicited Press.
