Life Ruins Read online

  For Martha, Eleanor, Bethany and Samantha

  Chapter 1

  Ravenscar, December 2015

  The setting moon hung low in the sky, turning the rocks at the water’s edge a ghostly grey.

  It was almost high tide. The sea flowed over the beach and lapped at the bottom of the rough path that formed a scramble to the clifftop. The waves washed in, then drew away, rattling the shingle in the winter silence.

  People rarely came here. It was a place where wading birds turned pebbles over in the water, and grey seals basked on the rocks, undisturbed by walkers on the path above.

  As the moon waned, the silhouette of Raven Hall high above merged with the darkness of the pre-dawn hour. The foreshore lay in deep blackness as the sea washed up its secrets: some rope, a baulk of timber long seasoned by the saltwater, a piece of fabric, torn beyond recognition by its time in the water.

  And there was something else, something that was carried onto the shore as the tide came in, lifted onto the rocks and stranded there as the sea retreated leaving its bounty for the birds and the beachcombers.

  The woman lay supine on the rocks, her hair fanned out in the cold morning air so the breeze lifted it gently, tousling it. The sea had not been kind to her. Her face was gone and the empty sockets of her eyes stared up at the sky.

  It was midday before a walker scrambled down the path to explore the beach. Later, as the tide was turning and the light was starting to fade, a coastguard boat out on patrol saw yellow and black tape flapping in the breeze and people moving in the growing shadows on the foreshore. The next day, they read about the body of the young girl taken off that foreshore, battered by the sea and nameless.

  A week later, all that was left was ragged sections of tape, and after that, nothing.

  Chapter 2

  Kettleness, January

  Something was coming. Something dark was carried on the wind.

  Kay McKinnon stopped on the headland of the Ness and looked out across the North Sea, grey and turbulent in the winter chill. A sea that is stranger than death . . . She could remember Matt standing there proclaiming Swinburne into the storm winds of autumn, facing the sea as defiantly as the cliffs themselves.

  But in the face of the sea, even the cliffs give way.

  She was well wrapped up in boots, waterproofs, scarf, hat and gloves, but the cold stung her face and crept into every gap in her defences. As she stood there, she sensed that same, elusive feeling again.

  Something was coming.

  Kay had no time for fey portents. ‘If you feel something’s wrong, it’s because you know something’s wrong,’ was how she countered the nervy premonitions of teenage girls in her care. ‘Even if you don’t know you know it.’

  So where was this feeling coming from? It wasn’t surprising really. Matt had died a year ago today, and here she was, doing some kind of morbid pilgrimage he would have laughed at if he’d known.

  ‘Well, you’re not here to stop me, are you?’ She said it out loud, as she said a lot of things to Matt. She still wasn’t reconciled to his death and saw no reason why she should be.

  Milo, Matt’s white Staffie cross, tugged impatiently at his lead. Like his late master, he had no time for contemplative gazing from headlands, not when there might be rabbits to chase.

  Turning south, Kay trudged along the path of the Cleveland Way that followed the cliff edge. In the distance, under the louring clouds, she could see the second headland. Beyond that was Sandsend. It was too far to walk before darkness fell. Only an idiot would get caught on these unstable cliffs at night.

  She left the official footpath and let Milo off his lead. He trotted ahead of her as she crossed a field to the track bed of the old railway. She whistled Milo to heel when she reached this path, hesitating as she tried to decide which way to go. They’d walked almost eight miles, and these days, a few days after her sixty-eighth birthday, they both felt it. If she turned towards the coast, it was only a matter of fifteen minutes’ brisk walking to take her back to her car on the headland and home for a much-needed cup of tea.

  Kay didn’t believe in mourning – when bad things happened, you got past it by . . . well, by getting past it. You worked, you went on with what you were doing, you got on with life, that’s what you did.

  But you didn’t forget. Today she was remembering Matt by retracing the first walk they had ever done together in a lifetime of walking. And here she was thinking about cutting the walk short. ‘I’m getting old, Milo,’ she said. He panted up into her face, grinning. Old age is not for wimps, Matt used to say, and he was right. The trouble was, neither was the only obvious way of avoiding it.

  She wasn’t seventy. She had a few good years in her yet.

  A gull swooped down and curved away on outspread wings, crying as it headed out to sea. Kay watched it go, then, making a sudden decision, turned inland onto the old railway track they’d followed all those years ago. Bother being tired. She was going to look at the tunnel. Matt had shown it to her as they were coming to the end of that first walk. Want to see something?

  In the heady awareness that something special was happening, she’d nodded her agreement, and they’d shared a conspiratorial grin. They’d walked down this track and there it was – the entrance to the tunnel, bricked up and abandoned years ago. They’d promised themselves they would come back but in over forty years of marriage – forty-three to be exact – they never had, so today, just a year after his death – here she was.

  Calling Milo, she picked her way across the rough grass and followed the track into the cutting. Stunted trees grew above her as the ground began to drop away. The path felt boggy under her feet. Despite the poor conditions, at least one other person had come this way recently. She could see the remains of their passage through the undergrowth.

  And then the tunnel was ahead of her, a deeper darkness in the shadows. Dead vines trailed across the entrance, and grasses brushed against her legs, soaking her boots and trousers.

  The entrance itself was partly sealed by a brick wall, but there was a gap at the top. It had been easy enough for her younger self to climb over. The wall was no more than a warning really, a reminder that old, unmaintained tunnels were dangerous.

  Someone had helpfully stacked a couple of rocks up against it to make access over the top easier. ‘You are joking,’ she said to the absent stacker and, just a bit, to herself. She could hear that voice at the back of her mind urging her on. You can do it! Go on! You aren’t too old! She pictured herself getting stretchered out by a group of husky young cave rescuers and decided she’d better not take the risk.

  On the old bricks, a graffiti artist had painted an image of a young woman against a background of flowers. In keeping with current tastes for the macabre, the face was a grinning death’s head. The image was in greyscale, blending in with the sepia notes of the winter scene – a beautiful but transient work of art that was already disappearing. A more recent – and less talented – tagger had spray painted a heart and the words ‘Bobby + Lisa’.

  Kids.

  The tunnels must act like a magnet for them – forbidden, so instantly attractive and, for the more desperate – and Kay had worked with the most desperate and knew what pressures drove them on – maybe they provided some kind of shelter.

  No. Not even those kids could look at that dark mouth and see shelter.

  Whatever might have happened forty years ago, she and Matt had taken their happy memories away with them. They weren’t waiting for her here.

  Milo had been standing still, watching the tunnel mouth, but then he pressed himself against her legs, whining quietly, deep in his throat. ‘It’s OK, boy,’ she said, clipping him back onto his lead. ‘I don’t like it here either.’

  The light was fadin
g. She had to use her torch to guide her return along the uneven path. Milo moved reluctantly, dragging against her arm, then he started barking, his hackles up. She looked back and saw a light bobbing in the shadows a way behind her – another walker. The path led up to the tunnel and nowhere else, so whoever it was must have come from there. She was half tempted to wait and ask about the conditions beyond the portal, but there was something about the darkening landscape . . . and Milo was still barking. He could be tricky with strangers.

  She pulled him smartly to heel. After a moment of resistance he came, and they continued on their way, moving briskly. Just before she emerged from the cutting, she heard the walker behind her whistling. It was something Matt used to do, whistle absent-mindedly as they walked together – something he always denied.

  She recognised the tune at once. It was an old Celtic melody about the transient nature of love. As the whistling faded behind her, the words ran through her head: And what can’t be cured love must be endured love, but my own true love I will ne’er more behold . . .

  OK, now she was really wallowing in it. She blinked her eyes to clear them – daft old biddy – and followed Milo’s urging as he pulled hard on his lead. She looked back and saw the figure emerge on the path behind her, just a silhouette in the dusk. She raised her hand in acknowledgement, and saw whoever it was do the same. Milo barked, and she turned back to the path.

  Time to go home.

  When she got to the car, she felt dissatisfied. Her walk hadn’t really been in memory of Matt. There had been too many changes and too many recent events intruded. She couldn’t shake the sense of foreboding. If anything, it was stronger now.

  It wasn’t that something was coming.

  Something was here.

  Chapter 3

  In the darkness, the cliff edge was barely perceptible. Jared Godwin shone his torch onto the broken shale ahead. There were roped paths down to the foreshore, and an undulating, dead landscape that spoke of old mine workings and tunnels.

  He’d spent the afternoon exploring the cliffs and the shore. It had been a long drive up from Bridlington but it looked as though it was going to be worth it. This coast had a history that suggested it would be ripe for exploration – old mines, old tunnels, military posts sealed off and abandoned. There would be an opening in the cliff somewhere, he was certain. He just had to be patient. He’d find it.

  He always did.

  Jared was an addict. Not for him the illegal street deals, the petty crime, the inevitable decay and death. His high came from danger and from fear, from the adrenaline surge of insane risk balanced against skill, experience and sheer dumb luck. Oh, his habit would kill him one day, he knew that, but until it did, it was the only thing that made life worth living.

  People said it was like a rat inside you, clawing your guts, demanding to be fed. Jared had been feeding the rat since he was twenty but it couldn’t be satisfied. Now it gnawed in his brain. Now it drove him on.

  His moments on the edge – moving across a rock face with nothing but a thousand metres of air beneath him, climbing along ledges a hundred metres off the ground, buildings where the stone was crumbling away, places not meant for human presence, high above cities in those gaps in the world that the maps ignored, these moments were the ones when he truly felt alive.

  Until the day he fell.

  They were in the old steel works. They’d come in down the rails, climbed along the abandoned conveyors to the blast furnace. They’d had to climb to reach the ladder, and the ladder was rusting away.

  He could still feel the rung snapping in his hand, the safety rail breaking as he swung back against it. Sixty metres below him, the rusting hulks waited. He had hung on, his other hand welded to the rung above, his feet scrabbling for purchase on a ladder that crumbled at each touch. Skua edged back – ‘Hang on mate! Keep hold!’ – but Skua couldn’t reach him and could do nothing but watch as the last rung broke.

  And then there was the drop.

  He had fallen almost fifty fucking metres. He should have been killed. Instead, his attempts to break his fall, grabbing at the ladder as it snapped again and again, slithering down the metal, snatching at any hold he could, had turned a plummet into a series of shorter falls. He broke both his legs, his shoulder, his pelvis, smashed his ribs, cracked a couple of vertebrae and twisted his back.

  Now, over a year later, he was walking again, walking on legs that were feeble compared with their previous strength, a body that had lost its suppleness and power, a body that doctors had told him, in no uncertain terms, would not survive the stresses of living the way he had. On the forums, they were calling him Phoenix, but he’d made his decision in that moment when he realised he had lost. If I survive this – never again.

  Never again.

  But the rat came back. The rat was hungry.

  Two weeks ago, Jared had made his way to the east coast and ended up in Flamborough, just outside the small seaside town of Bridlington, where he found accommodation in a run-down caravan park that was more or less deserted in the winter months. But not that deserted, as it turned out. Night after night he was woken by the sounds of people partying on the far side of the site – loud music, shouting, screaming. The noise sometimes went on until three, four in the morning.

  The guy who rented the van to him had just glared at Jared when he’d mentioned it. He was a big, slabby man with a massive beer-belly whose fat didn’t conceal the hefty muscles underlying it. Jared had taken one look and dubbed him Greaseball Harry – GBH for short. GBH seemed to resent Jared’s presence at the site altogether, but not enough to make him leave. Money was money, Jared guessed. And the van, run down and dilapidated, was cheap enough. But some nights he lay there unable to sleep, listening to the music, wondering who the partygoers were, what they were doing.

  Today, he had come north to recce the old mines dug into the Kettleness cliffs, and the abandoned railway tunnels cut through the crumbling coastline from Sandsend to Runswick Bay. It was better up here than further south around Bridlington. Tomorrow, he’d leave the caravan site – it was so cheap at this time of year he could forget about the money lost. He’d find an accommodating farmer who’d let him camp in one of these fields. He’d get a better night’s sleep in a tent on the ground than in that shithole of a caravan park.

  It was getting late – it was already dark and he should really head back, but he wanted to take a look at the entrance to the Kettleness tunnel before he left. He checked his map. He was on the south side of Lucky Dog Point. He turned off the footpath and headed across the fields, his torch making a wavering beam on the ground.

  He felt the air chill as he descended into the cutting. The portal was ahead of him now, a dark gap with wings of stone. As the light from his torch played across the wall, the figure of a woman jumped out at him, making his heart jolt with shock until he realised it was a painting, a piece of graffiti art, the kind of thing some urban explorers left to mark their passage. He’d check it out later.

  At the foot of the wall, someone had left a handy stack of rocks to make access easier. It would be simple enough to climb. He’d come back tomorrow, and . . .

  In fact . . .

  He glanced at his watch. It was after six. The idea that was creeping into his head was crazy. He wasn’t here to explore; he was here to check out some sites. He was tired, his back was starting to hurt, he didn’t have his equipment, he just had . . .

  It’s only a railway tunnel, for fuck’s sake. It didn’t matter that it was dark – it would be dark in there if he went in at high noon. He was wearing decent boots, he had a torch and a lighter. He was wearing his waterproofs. What more did he want?

  The rat stirred, and he knew what he was going to do.

  Carpe diem. It may never come again. He remembered the feel of the rung, solid under his foot one moment, gone the next. A prickle of tension touched his neck, apprehension clutched his stomach. He grinned.

  He was going in.

&nbs
p; He checked the batteries of his torch and made sure his camera was zipped securely in his pocket. Before his accident, a quick push of the arms would have seen him over the wall, but now it was a struggle to reach the top.

  Once he was astride the wall, he had to stop to catch his breath.

  A couple of months ago, he couldn’t walk without a stick. It was getting better and it would go on getting better.

  He dropped down into the tunnel.

  Chapter 4

  Kay lived in a small cottage near Lythe, north of Whitby. She and Matt had bought it two years ago, just after Matt’s last big project had ended, and just before his illness made itself known. It had been advertised as having ‘period charm’, which meant, as far as Kay could see, no mod cons and doors and windows that didn’t fit. But Matt had loved it and talked her into it as a project for their long-delayed retirement.

  The cottage was cold as she let herself in. She took off her waterproof but left on her big jumper and changed her boots for warm slippers. Milo shook himself dry and hopped up onto the armchair, curling up small, his eyes watching her from under his tail. Matt had always been indulgent with Milo – Matt who could lecture for hours on the necessity of training and obedience as Milo sneaked biscuits off plates and curled up to sleep in forbidden places – and Kay hadn’t the heart to change things now.

  She checked the phone for messages. There were just two. The first one was from Becca, one of her long-term foster-children who had just started a new job: Where are you? You aren’t answering your phone. Kay grimaced. Becca had called while Kay was out walking, and she had had ignored it. The other message was unexpected.

  ‘Er . . . Hello. Is this the right number for Kay McKinnon? Sorry to call out of the blue like this. It’s Shaun Turner. You probably don’t remember me. I used to work with Matt – with your husband – and I only just heard . . . Look, I’m messing this up. I hate these machines. I’ll call later.’