The meet with Houghton had ended soon afterwards. Given the relationship with Pendrick, she wanted Lizzie interviewed under caution. If it turned out she’d been shielding Pendrick, she’d be in deep shit. As far as Pendrick was concerned, Constantine had no option but to wait. If his body was found, the file would go to the Coroner. If he’d simply disappeared, the file would remain open. As for Suttle himself, she had no choice but to remove him from the enquiry. Any further input to Constantine, she said, would be prejudiced by what she called his ‘personal circumstances’.
‘You’re happy with that? We understand each other?’
‘Perfectly, boss. I’ll sort out the interview and look after the baby. Happy days, eh?’
Now he was watching the last of the national news. The local headlines followed. Pendrick’s disappearance was the top story. Suttle found himself looking at footage from last year. A gaunt figure, barely recognisable, was climbing a set of stone steps at Penzance Harbour. A battered-looking rowing boat was secured to an iron ring beneath him. His hair was long, hanging in tangles around his bare shoulders, and in close-up his eyes seemed to have lost focus. The news coverage cut to a grainy shot of a helicopter sweeping seawards in the dying light, but what stayed with Suttle were the eyes. What had really happened out there in the Western Approaches? Had this man been nursing a serial grudge against the world at large? Had his poor bloody wife gone the way of Jake Kinsey?
Minutes later Suttle’s mobile began to ring. It was Gina Hamilton. He got to his feet and went out onto the patio. Even here the signal wasn’t great, but he got the gist of what she was saying. She too had been watching the news. So what was the real story?
‘We got him,’ Suttle said. ‘He did Kinsey.’
‘And you can prove it?’
‘No problem.’
‘How?’
‘Full confession.’ He stared into the windy darkness, his vision beginning to blur. ‘Piece of piss.’
It took Lizzie nearly an hour to get Grace to sleep. Pendrick’s bedroom was at the back of the flat. There were clean sheets on the bed and even a couple of neatly folded towels on the low table beneath the curtained window. Elsewhere, Pendrick had made a similar effort to tidy up. There were more towels in the tiny bathroom and a new tablet of soap in the shower tray. The kitchen was spotless, the draining board empty of washing-up. A note beside the electric kettle told her where to find tea bags and coffee, and there was fresh milk in the fridge. She might have stepped into a well-run holiday rental. All it lacked was a cheerful note about local must-see attractions.
With Grace asleep in the clean white spaces of Pendrick’s bed, Lizzie went back into the living room. She’d half-expected another note — longer, more intimate — but there was nothing to explain the decision he’d taken. She’d absolutely no doubt about what he’d done.
He’d pushed his body to the limits on the rowing machine. He’d wheeled the tiny single down to the water’s edge. He’d set off on an ebbing tide with the knowledge that the weather was about to get a whole lot worse. And somewhere out there, maybe at a time of his choosing, maybe not, he’d capsized the single and slipped away. An end like that, she realised, was totally in keeping with the journey he’d made. His wife had blazed the trail. And, after ridding the planet of Jake Kinsey, Pendrick had followed.
Might this be evidence of madness? She didn’t think so. In awkward, uncomfortable ways Pendrick was a man who hung together, a jigsaw puzzle that made a kind of hallucinatory sense. His wasn’t everyone’s view of the world. In many ways it was savage, unforgiving. In others, she thought, it had an almost childlike naivety. He seemed to believe in the simple things — in getting by on very little, in taking people at face value — and when he realised that real life didn’t work that way, that people rarely played by the rules, he’d decided to fold his hand and chuck it in. That’s what had taken him to sea in the single. And this flat of his was pretty much all that was left.
She prowled around, trying to ignore her emotional investment in his story, trying to play the investigative journalist, not knowing quite what she was looking for. Leaving her the key this way was, she imagined, a kind of apology. Pendrick had brought sunshine and chaos to her private life. He hadn’t understood that this thing of theirs was over and he’d made it infinitely worse by turning up pissed the other night. Any man could imagine the consequences of a scene like that, and access to his flat was his way of saying sorry. Thus the clean sheets and the readied towels. You might be hurting. You may need a place of refuge for a while. Make yourself at home.
His PC was on a table in the corner. There were file boxes beneath the table, each file neatly labelled. She knelt on the rug and started to go through the first box. This was stuff that went back years, letters to friends, photos from a thousand beaches, shots of Pendrick and the woman who’d shared all those adventures. Lizzie spread a handful of the photos on the rug. She was struck at once by how similar the woman was to herself — her own slightness, even her own smile. This must be Kate, she thought. No wonder he’d been so eager, so earnest, so committed. Déjà vu was too weak a word. In the sand dunes at Trezillion he must have been talking to a ghost.
She pulled out another box, extracted another file. This one was more recent. Inside she found an appointment slip for an SD clinic in Bristol. Mr T. Pendrick was due to attend on three dates in January this year. Beside each date was a pencilled tick. SD? Lizzie returned to the file, extracting a printout from the Internet: The web address was www.nhs.uk/conditions/erectile-dysfunction. She stared at it a moment, beginning dimly to understand. SD meant sexual dysfunction. Pendrick, poor man, couldn’t get it up.
She sat back on her haunches, her gaze returning to the photos of Kate. Was this something that had happened to Pendrick recently? Or had it been casting a shadow for years? If the latter was true, she could only imagine the consequences. SD had never played a role in her life. Far from it. None of her boyfriends had ever let her down in that respect, and even a night on the Stella didn’t seem to affect her husband’s prowess. Pendrick on the other hand clearly had a problem.
She began to read. Physical causes of SD apparently included diabetes and nerve damage after prostate surgery. Psychologically, you could blame guilt, depression or some kind of unresolved conflict. She gazed at the list of triggers. As far as she could gather, it pretty much summed up the person that Pendrick had become. Guilt about Kate. Depression about the fate awaiting Trezillion and all the other Cornish coves. And the conflict with Kinsey, which, until a wet Saturday night a couple of weeks ago, had defied resolution.
She picked up a photo. It could have been one of a million beaches — the blueness of the ocean, the curl of faraway surf, hints of a palm tree in the corner of the frame — but what took her eye was the grin on Pendrick’s face. It was natural, unforced, wholly genuine. This was a man who was happy in his skin. In the last hours of his life had he met that person again? Before he’d slipped under the waves had he found a kind of peace?
She thought about that last question, knowing she’d never be able to satisfy herself with an answer. Then she heard Grace beginning to stir. The tiny cry took her back to Chantry Cottage, and she shut her eyes, trying not to think about the wreckage of her private life.
After a while she got to her feet. Her mobile was in the bedroom. Grace, thankfully, was still asleep. She took the phone back to the living room and scrolled through the directory until she found the number she wanted. After a while she thought she might have got the time difference wrong but then came the familiar voice.
‘Lizzie? How the fuck are you?’
‘Crap, if you want the truth. We need help. Badly. And so do you.’