After twenty minutes more sailing they were on their own. Ellie couldn’t see another craft anywhere. They were a long way past the workmen on the bridge, an equally long way from Rosyth on the opposite coast. The bridges looked like models from this distance. Ellie imagined Sam and Libby sitting in her living room right now, looking out the window. She had a flash of Logan jumping, the footage of him stepping into nothingness, 5.6 seconds of gravity.
Ben took in the main sail and tied the boom as Ellie locked the tiller. She scanned the horizon with the binoculars. A couple of sailing boats miles away, over near North Queensferry, but nothing else.
She felt a hand on her shoulder.
‘Let’s do it,’ Ben said.
They went into the cabin and stood over Jack’s body.
Ellie picked up his hands, held them tight, as Ben lifted the legs and tucked the feet under his armpits.
‘After three,’ Ellie said. ‘One, two, three.’
He was heavier than she expected. Not a big man, but solid enough. Their first heave barely lifted him off the ground. Ellie staggered backwards towards the steps, Ben shuffling after her, the body sagging between them. Ellie felt her palms sweat, the pain in her hand where she’d been cut, the rope burns. She bumped into the first step then lowered her backside on to a higher one and slid herself up, gripping tight. Ben stepped closer into Jack, getting a better grip on his thighs as Ellie bumped herself up the stairs one at a time. As she went up, Jack’s head reached the bottom step, so that Ellie had to heave his weight up and over, his skull bumping on the steps with a solid clunk.
Seven heaves and she was at the top of the steps, sitting on deck, pulling at Jack’s arms. Ben had changed his grip and was pushing at Jack’s arse, lifting it over the top step. Ellie imagined the corpse farting in Ben’s face. Didn’t bodies piss and shit themselves when they died? She was sure she’d read that somewhere.
Jack was on deck. Ellie and Ben slumped at either end getting their breath back. Ellie stood up and did a three-sixty. No sign of any boats. She grabbed the binoculars and scanned again. She wondered about people on shore, if anyone was paying them any notice, just a normal sailing boat on the firth. A high-powered telescope or binoculars would be able to identify them, but no one could see Jack’s body from anywhere except up close, as he was nestled in the footwell of the deck.
She looked at him. His hair was dark and slick, the water around him pink with blood. The wound in his neck was raw and open, a ragged mess of skin and flesh.
She heard a sound. Something alien, electronic. It was so out of place it took her a moment to realise it was a ringtone, a descending scale of notes, coming from Jack’s body. She exchanged a glance with Ben, then crouched down, tilted her head. She went into his trouser pocket and pulled out a mobile. ‘Alison’ flashing on the screen. Calling to find her husband. Ellie thought about GPS, could it be tracked? She switched the phone off and slipped it into her pocket.
Ben headed back into the cabin and she followed. He took one handle of the kit bag and looked at her. She lifted the other handle and took the strain. The two of them waddled with the weight between them to the step, then Ben went up backwards, pulling as hard as he could, Ellie placing her hands under the back end of the bag, pushing as it slid up the steps in short yanks and spurts until it landed on deck with a thunk.
Then she and Ben lifted a rucksack each. Hers was too heavy to get on her back so she heaved it up and cradled it in her arms, using her elbows on the stairs to lever herself on to the deck. She dropped the rucksack with a clack of bricks from inside.
Ben went into one of the small lockers on the side of the deck and pulled out spare ropes and ties. He looked up, checking the water around them, then down at the body.
‘We need to get him on the side here, before we tie the weights on.’
He nudged past the body to Jack’s legs as Ellie took the hands again. The skin of Jack’s hands felt rubbery. They hauled him out of the footwell and up to the port side of the deck. The effort of it made the boat rock, and Ellie and Ben fell on to their knees next to the body, sliding close to the edge.
Jack was in view now if anyone came by. From here, they could just give him a little push and he’d be in the water.
Ellie was down at the kit bag, waiting. Ben took the other handle and they heaved it up and on to Jack’s body. Ellie winced as the weight squashed Jack’s chest and stomach. She picked up a rope and tied the handle of the kit bag to Jack’s arm, then forced the rope beneath him, slid it under his neck and round the other side, connecting with his right arm then the other handle of the bag.
Ben had the rucksacks up and was tying them to Jack’s thighs and torso.
She tested her handiwork, pulled on the rope and it seemed secure. She looked around. A small dinghy was heading down the firth, but way over on the north side, too far away to be any bother. Ben saw it too and shook his head. He yanked on the ropes tied around Jack’s corpse, checking them, and everything held well.
He ran his hands through his hair and stood up. Ellie looked at her hands. She had pulled on the ropes so tight she’d given herself more burns. All these little reminders.
‘Let’s do it,’ she said.
Ben nodded.
The two of them pushed at Jack’s body with the bags on it. For a moment nothing happened, the mass of it creating inertia, but slowly he began to inch towards the edge of the deck, and as they shoved harder he gained momentum against the slippery surface, then slid over the edge legs first, hitting the water with a thick splash and disappearing straight down.
Ellie stared at the waves where he’d gone in. No sign of anything untoward amongst the brown chop and swell of it. She imagined Jack sinking to the bottom and wondered how long it would take. More than 5.6 seconds anyway. She turned. Ben was rubbing at his stubble. A thin trail of pink water led from the edge of the deck into the footwell, then along to the cabin door.
Evidence everywhere.
36
They ran the engine for ten minutes, puttering closer to the coast, heading further west until Ellie couldn’t see the road on the shore through the binoculars. She took Jack’s phone out of her pocket, slid the back off and removed the battery and sim card. Snapped the sim in half, weighed all the pieces in her hand then hurled them as far as she could into the water. She scanned further west, past the small copse of oaks and beech that made up Bog Wood, then the open shoreline of North Deer Park. Sure enough, she spotted half a dozen deer, male and female, grazing on a patch of grassland by the beach, stopping to chew and look around.
The Porpoise was about half a mile from land when she cut the engine. The boat bobbed and swayed. She thought about that phrase ‘sea legs’. It was a real thing, some people naturally more able to cope with the constant shifting of weight, the continual balancing act. And it worked the other way round, after a long day’s sailing the first quarter of an hour on dry land was disorientating, the flatness of the world under your feet, the banality of a solid planet. Her body missed the shifting of the sea when she was away from it.
Ben went into the cabin and came back out with wetsuits. He threw one to her. She took her lifejacket off and stripped, pulling the rubber against the skin of her legs, feeling the tension of it.
She watched Ben do the same, admiring his body. He’d thickened over the years but not unpleasantly. There was no potbelly or love handles, just a stocky torso, a welcome solidity. She pictured Sam semi-naked in Logan’s room, so lithe and skinny. Entirely different creatures.
She looked down at her own body. Gazed at the tattoos covering the real her. She scratched at the new one of the bridge on her arm, it was starting to heal. She looked at Logan’s name and dates of birth and death on her left wrist, touched the ink under the surface. Not that she needed a permanent reminder, of course, the tattoos were more than that, a penance.