Page 12 of The Man Made of Smoke

And yet, a couple of days ago, he had left this house, locked the door behind him, and then driven out to the Reach and done the unthinkable.

What had been going through his mind? It was a question that occupied me in my work, and I was usually good at explaining and predicting behavior. Makingsenseof things. But there was no case file to work with here, and no longer any patient to talk to.

I tried to picture my father alone in the car on that final journey. Hadhe been scared? Was he crying? Did he doubt himself in those last few moments or did he act swiftly—decision made—and step easily off the edge?

I would never know.

Why didn’t you talk to me, Dad?

The question tightened my throat.

Regardless of the difficulties we’d had in the past, I had imagined our relationship had settled into one in which he would have felt able to share whatever pain he was facing. It broke my heart to realize that had not been true. For some reason, the weight he always prided himself on bearing had become too heavy for him, and he had kept that from me.

In his final moments, my father must have felt utterly alone.

Ever since the phone call yesterday, I’d been keeping my emotions shut away. I had beendetached;I had beencalm. They had become watchwords for me over the years, because I knew that emotions could be dangerous, and that it was safer to keep the world at arm’s length. But now—alone in the dark and silent garden—I finally allowed a door inside me to open. Just a crack. But still enough for the feelings I kept so carefully under control to come flooding out.

And with nobody around to see, I knelt down on the decking and sobbed.

There was food in the fridge, but it felt too soon to use the kitchen, as though the house itself should be allowed a period of mourning. After I’d pulled myself together and washed my face, I walked back down to the seafront.

I sat down on a bench by the water with a carton of fish and chips. The night was cool and the food steamed in the air as I ate. The lights of a few boats were scattered out in the dark water, but none of them would be coastguard vessels. Assuming they were even still out at this hour, they would be combing the coastline to the north. If my father’s body was going to wash up anywhere, it would be there. But the island’s tides were capricious; the sea here kept hold of things. The reality was that my father’s body might never be found, and I knew that I had to prepare myself for that.

I wiped my hands with a napkin and put the rubbish in a nearby bin.

The silence that I knew would be waiting back at the house for me felt forbidding, and so I walked along the seafront for a time. There were pubs here, but the laughter from behind the clouded glass windows pushed me away. These weren’t places to drink alone; if you went in by yourself, you wouldn’t stay that way for long. I had no desire to encounter someone I half remembered from my childhood here. What I wanted, I realized, was more of aliminalspace. Somewhere I could exist out of time and space for a while, and in which everyone else there had made a silent pact to do the same.

I headed round into an even more run-down stretch of the village. Most of the buildings were long boarded up, but eventually I heard the sound of music, and then saw soft light falling out of the open doorway of a bar ahead. The front was painted a dull blue color, with two dirty windows occluded behind metal grilles. Old cigarette ends lay scattered beneath a broken bin hanging half off the wall. The music coming from inside was karaoke: a woman singing a surprisingly respectable rendition of “Raspberry Beret.”

I walked in.

The bar looked rough from the street, but while it had clearly seen better days, there was no underlying sense of threat. It was a long, narrow room, with a bar running the length of one wall and small tables with weathered stools crammed in against the other. There were maybe ten people inside, all elderly and sitting alone. I glanced to my right. The woman with the microphone was facing away from me, but the wording on the back of her shirt suggested she was one of the barmaids, keeping herself amused while the place was quiet.

Another woman was serving behind the bar. I bought a beer and sat down at one of the rickety stools there, swallowing the first mouthful of cheap lager quickly. And then the second. Because suddenly, the thought of getting a little bit drunk tonight was very far from the worst idea in the world.

The song finished, and there was a smattering of applause from the bar’s patrons. I joined in, for what it was worth. The woman might nothave been the best singer in the world, but at least she’d given it her all, and that always counted for something.

She punched the air happily.

“Thank you, Cleveland!”

Then she turned around.

And I felt my heart drop.

She was older than the image I had of her in my head. Of course she was. But even after all these years, I recognized her.

And she recognized me right back.

Sarah stared at me for a long moment. Then she blinked quickly and looked away. She lifted the gate on the bar and approached the woman serving there.

“Fiona,” she said. “Can you cover for me for a bit?”

Four

We sat at a table all the way at the back of the bar.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Sarah said. “So sorry.”

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