THE WHALEBOAT HOUSE

Mark Mills

For Caroline, Gus and Rosie; and to the memory of John N. Cole (1923–2003)

I stand as on some mighty eagle’s beak,

Eastward the sea absorbing, viewing, (nothing but sea and sky,)

The tossing waves, the foam, the ships in the distance,

The wild unrest, the snowy, curling caps – that inbound urge and urge of waves,

Seeking the shores forever.

From Montauk Point WALT WHITMAN

July 1947

Conrad knew it was a body the moment he started hauling on the net. The weight was there, rising and falling in the swell between the beach and the outer bar, but where was the familiar twitch of the line in his hands, the urgent pulse of fish thumping against the mesh? He said nothing to Rollo, but a stolen glance confirmed that his friend had sensed it too.

Some forty yards down the beach Rollo’s gaze was fixed on the bobbing cork line that arced through the ocean between the two men. He was searching the crescent of enclosed water for signs that he was mistaken – fleeting shadows in a cresting wave, the silver flicker of a surface break.

Conrad dug the heels of his waders deep into the sand and hauled hand over hand in unison with Rollo. He felt the chill wind of fatalism blow through him, calming. Further speculation was useless. In a few minutes the net and its cargo would be drawn into the pounding surf, raised high on a breaker – a momentary offering – then unceremoniously dumped on the beach.

One

‘Conrad. Conrad …’

The first light of dawn was creeping over the horizon when Conrad was roused from his slumber by Rollo’s hollering. Conrad only ever slumbered, he never slept, not the sleep of a child, dead to the world, its oversized surroundings. One small part of his brain kept constant vigil, snatching at the slightest noise or shift in smell. It no longer bothered him. He accepted it for what it was: a part of him now, like the scar in his side and the remorseless throb of his damaged knee.

The boards groaned under his feet as he shuffled from his shack on to the narrow deck that ringed it. The sharp salt air stabbed his lungs, raw from too many cigarettes the previous evening. As if in reprimand, an overflowing ashtray still sat on the arm of the slatted wooden chair out front. A book lay face down on an upturned fish crate beside the molten remains of a candle and an all-but-empty bottle of cheap Imperial whiskey.

He had read deep into the night, the bugs dancing dangerously close to the candle flame until it had finally sputtered and died. The waxing moon, so high and prominent at dusk, had long departed, having run her early course; and for a further hour he had sat in the deep darkness, breathing in time to the beat of the waves beyond the high beachbank, sleep rising up around him like the unseen tide, his mind numbed by the liquor, his body by the blanket of night-dew settling over him. Conrad stared at the chair, unable to recall the short stroll he must surely have made from the abandoned perch to his bed.

‘Conrad. Conrad …’

The cries were closer now, carried on the breeze, but Rollo was nowhere to be seen among the tumbling dunes. Conrad guessed that when he finally appeared he’d be flailing his arms like a windmill. He always did when he was excited or running. Right now, it sounded like he was doing both.

A few moments later Rollo hove in sight. Sure enough, his arms were slicing the air. He bounded down the face of the dune, hurdling a large clump of beach grass, stumbling momentarily but recovering his footing. He was panting, sucking in air, when he finally drew to a halt by the shack. Conrad waited for him to catch his breath.

Rollo’s lank dark hair was streaked by the sun and the salt air as it always was at this time of year. When he finally looked up and smiled, his teeth stood out like bleached bone against the deep amber of his skin.

‘You’re not wearin’ no clothes.’

‘Well, what do you know?’ Conrad allowed a note of mild irritation to creep into his voice.

‘Go get togged up.’

‘This better be good.’

‘Oh, it’s good, it’s good.’

They paused as they reached the top of the high dune that separated Conrad’s isolated home from the ocean. Overhead, a handful of stars winked their final farewells in the brightening sky. Beneath them, the broad beach stretched off to the western horizon, one hundred miles of almost unbroken sand, straight as a yard-arm, reaching into the heart of New York City.

A few miles to the east, beyond the sandy lowlands of Napeague where they now stood, rose the high ground of Montauk – a noble upthrust of ridged and pitted glacial moraine at the very tip of the South Fork: Long Island’s last defiant cry before it tumbled into the oblivion of the Atlantic. Beyond lay nothing but water … and the lost dreams of the Old World.

The ocean was suspiciously calm and limpid, the towering breakers the only indication of the powerful forces that lurked beneath its pewter skin. Even from here, Conrad could see that the longshore set was still running west to east – a sporadic event that occurred when a tendril of warm water broke free of the Gulf Stream, snaking northwards, assisted on its lazy passage by a sustained southwesterly blow.

The marked rise in sea temperature was welcomed by the everincreasing number of city people who populated the ocean beach from Memorial Day to Labor Day. It lured them beyond the relative safety of the crashing surf into the deeper water with its counterintuitive jostle of currents. Fortunately, the warmer waters were awash with bait, and with the bait came the predators, bluefish and striped bass, which in turn attracted an even larger predator – man.

Many owed their lives to the happy conjunction of treacherous swimming conditions and increased fishing activity off the ocean beach. Many were those who’d been plucked limp and spluttering from the water into one of the cumbersome little dories used by the local surfmen. Once deposited safely on the beach, embarrassment – more often than not – would get the better of gratitude, and they’d hurry off, eager to banish the memory, casting a few mumbled words of thanks over their shoulders as they went. This wasn’t always the case.

Everyone knew the story of Gus Bowyer, how he had returned to his shingled home on Atlantic Avenue one afternoon to find a gleaming new motor car standing beside the old barn out back. The handwritten note attached to the windshield meant little to Gus, who was unable to read or write, and he’d been obliged to wait two puzzling hours for his wife’s return from Montauk, where she worked as a dispatch clerk for the Long Island Rail Road. Within a few minutes of crossing the threshold, Edna Bowyer informed her husband that they were now the proud owners of a Dodge Special Type-B Sedan – a gift from a gangling New York architect whom Gus had saved from near-certain drowning off the ocean beach the previous month.

News of the couple’s windfall soon spread, and for the remainder of the summer, bathers who were even so much as tumbled by a wave would find themselves descended upon by a pack of alert and overly obliging local fishermen. Edna, a pillar of Puritan common sense, had urged Gus to return the overstated vehicle to the Halsey Auto Company in East Hampton and recoup the purchase price in cash. God knows, they needed the money. Twenty-two years on, they still needed the money and Gus was still driving the hulking Dodge around the back roads of Amagansett.

‘She’s on the turn,’ said Rollo, meaning the set, not the tide. The wind had come around overnight. By noon the vast body of water in motion would grind to a halt then slowly turn back on itself. The natural order would prevail once more with the current scouring the coast from east to west. Interesting, but hardly worthy of a pre-dawn rousing.

‘Remind me to be angry with you when I wake,’ muttered Conrad, turning to leave.

‘Whale off!’

Everyone knew the call to arms, though it was no longer heard on the South Fork of Long Island, the days of shore whaling some forty years past. Conrad turned back slowly.

‘Bound east’rd inside the bar.’

‘You sure?’

‘’Less you saw a fifty-foot bass before,’ grinned Rollo, pleased with his riposte.

They scanned the ocean in silence, with just the hoarse cries of a few black-backed gulls wheeling overhead on dawn patrol. Suddenly, Rollo’s arm shot out. A patch of whorls and eddies ruffled the still surface of the ocean a hundred yards directly offshore. A few moments later, the whale broke water and blew – two distinct jets, fanned by the wind, caught in the sun’s earliest rays.

‘Right whale,’ observed Rollo, identifying the species from its forked spout. But Conrad was already gone, padding down the side of the dune on to the beach. The whale blew four more times before sounding.

For over an hour they tracked the leviathan on its journey eastwards, their faces warmed by the rising sun. They walked in silence, not needing to share their thoughts.

Right whales hadn’t been sighted off Amagansett for decades. Hunted to near extinction, they had once been a cornerstone of life on the South Fork. Three hundred years previously, when a straggle of English families first appeared in the woods a few miles to the west, they found the local Montaukett Indians already preying on the migrating schools that roamed the ocean beach, going off through the treacherous winter surf in their dugout canoes. With the crude geometry of a child, those first white settlers pegged out a community around a slender marsh, fashioning cellar-shelters from the trees they had felled, naming their new home Maidstone after the English town in the county of Kent where most had sprung from.

Fourteen years later, when the hamlet rechristened itself East Hampton, the dwellings had crept above ground, the early ‘soddies’ replaced by New England saltbox houses clad in cypress shingles and insulated against the sharp winters with seaweed and corncobs; the marsh had been excavated to create the Town Pond; and the townsmen were in effective control of a small, burgeoning and highly profitable shore-whaling industry.

‘Away with you. Hoooo. Woooo.’

Conrad was dimly aware that they’d passed the Napeague Coast Guard station. Now Rollo was striding towards the water’s edge waving his arms in front of him. The whale had altered its course and was heading inshore at an angle to the beach. With a lazy flick of its giant flukes it sounded.

‘She’s goin’ to beach,’ cried Rollo. He started running, set on heading the whale off.

When Conrad caught up with him he was standing in the wash, oblivious to the waves breaking around him, scouring the ocean. Without warning, the whale surfaced beyond the white water to their left. At this short distance, the sheer bulk of the creature was overwhelming. It filled their field of vision, deadening all other senses.

‘Hooo. Woooo. Yaaaaa. YAAAA –’

A rogue wave caught Rollo broadside, slapping the wind from his lungs, sending him sprawling. Conrad hauled him to his feet, dragging him up the beach, but Rollo pulled free, stumbling back into the wash. The waves became clouded with rile, churned sand where the whale had grounded.

Conrad was struck by the bitter irony of the sight – Rollo Kemp, grandson of the legendary whaleman Cap’n Josh Kemp, the last man to take a whale off the ocean beach; Rollo Kemp pathetically hurling handfuls of wet sand in a vain bid to save a creature his grandfather had devoted a lifetime to slaughtering. Laughter filled his head. It was a few moments before he realized the sound was coming from behind him.

Gabe Cowan, Chief Boatswain’s Mate of the Napeague Coast Guard station, stood chortling uncontrollably, his creased face like weathered oilskin. A good-natured man, and a first-rate fiddler till arthritis turned his hands to gnarled claws, Conrad’s reproachful look seemed only to amuse him further.

‘It’s them krill,’ said Gabe.

‘What?’

‘Come up on the Gulf Stream then pushed inshore. She’s feedin’, off of the krill.’ He laughed some more.

Beyond the prancing figure of Rollo, the whale had turned parallel to the beach, sieving its breakfast from the ocean.

Conrad hurried over to Rollo. ‘Rollo, she’s feeding …’

Deaf to his words, Rollo’s face was wet with spray and tears. Conrad seized him, binding his arms to his sides, holding him tight.

‘It’s okay, she’s just feeding on krill,’ he said gently. Rollo’s struggles subsided, his eyes searching Conrad’s face.

‘Never seen it before,’ muttered Gabe, appearing beside them. ‘Sight to behold, boys, sight to behold.’

Conrad only released Rollo when he started to laugh. ‘Go get ’em,’ he yelled. ‘Go get ’em krill!’

Maybe his cries startled the whale, more than likely she had had her fill, but with some difficulty she swung herself around and headed offshore, presenting first her small end and then the giant fan of her tail as she kicked below the surface. They waited, watching. She showed briefly just beyond the outer bar, blowing only once before disappearing for good.

A summer flounder flapped weakly at the edge of the wash, stunned by its encounter with the whale.

‘Well, what do you know …’ said Gabe, taking two nimble strides and stamping down with the heel of his boot. ‘Lunch.’

They accompanied Gabe back to the Coast Guard station, reflecting on what they’d just witnessed. As far as any of them knew, the coastal wanderings of right whales had always been confined to the colder months, June at the very latest. What was it doing here at this time of year? Had it been alone? Where was it headed? Conrad contributed his share of idle banter, but his thoughts were elsewhere. The episode was somehow emblematic of the times. It was as if the turbulence of the past years had infected the ocean as well, disturbing the natural rhythms, disorienting its occupants.

‘You boys figure on haulin’ down?’ asked Gabe.

Rollo looked to Conrad to reply. They had planned to take the morning off, treat themselves to a well-earned rest, maybe set a gill net off Shagwong later in the day.

‘Seeing as we’re up,’ said Conrad, and Rollo beamed.

‘Set’s on the turn. Be one hell of a chop out there come noon.’

‘How else we going to make you earn that wage?’

‘That ain’t no wage, it’s a goddamn insult.’

‘Man your age, scavenging for his lunch?’ said Conrad. ‘The shame of it.’

Gabe glanced at the dead flounder and laughed. ‘That’s the truth.’

Everyone knew that Gabe had squirreled away a small fortune over the years, largely thanks to a case of temporary blindness contracted during Prohibition.

‘Wouldn’t bank on much of a haul,’ said Gabe. ‘When the wind’s from the east, the fish is least.’

He wandered up the beach to the Coast Guard station, a grandiose weatherboard affair perched high on the frontal dune.

Conrad turned to Rollo. ‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘Huh?’

‘For waking me.’

Rollo smiled. ‘Told you it was good.’

They ate a full breakfast on the front deck of Conrad’s house as they did every morning, weather permitting. The menu never changed – pork belly and eggs fried side-by-side in a skillet, sourdough bread smeared with butter, and strong coffee, black as caulking tar, thick enough to float a nail. Afterwards, over a smoke, they would discuss the fishing prospects for the day ahead, trading the little hearsays that were the lifeblood of the fishing community. ‘Old Emmett took a full charge of cow bass on the Two Mile Hollow set, none of them under thirty pound,’ Rollo would say, or ‘Lindy says the bluefish is running off of Cedar Point.’

To Conrad there was something deeply pleasing about the mundanity of his morning routine with Rollo, its repetitive, unchanging nature. He would have been disappointed if, having hauled on his stiff black waders, Rollo hadn’t promptly struggled out of them again, announcing that he needed to relieve himself – the click of the chest straps acting as some kind of Pavlovian trigger that also spared him the chore of loading the gear.

The equipment was stored in a barn behind the house. Windblown sand had banked up against its sides giving the impression it had risen up out of the ground, pushing its way through the soft mantel. The barn’s clean hard lines belied the muddle inside. Sails hung from its rafters like giant bats. Gill nets, drift nets and haul-seines were bundled up all around. There were cod lines, drag lines, Greenport sloop dredges for scallops, basket rakes and bull rakes for clamming, oyster tongs, lobster traps and eel traps; as well as all manner of other paraphernalia for ensuring the smooth operation of the above – tubs of cork floats and lead weights, clusters of small anchors and marker buoys, spools of twine and coils of rope, buckets of nails, tins of grease and barrels of tar.

Stacked in one corner of the barn was a jumble of obsolete whaling gear – lances, double-fluke and toggle harpoons, longhandled blades for cutting into blubber, block and tackle for prizing the blankets free from the carcass, more blades for mincing the blubber, two cast-iron cauldrons for trying-out the whale oil, and large sieves for skimming off the bones and skin.

This clutter had come with the old whaleboat house – Rollo’s contribution to their enterprise – that now stood beside the barn. A twenty-six-foot whaleboat had also formed part of the package. They had hoisted the craft up into the barn’s rafters where the beauty of its slender lines was revealed to maximum effect. It was the first thing Conrad’s gaze would settle on each time he heaved open the double-doors. This morning was different in that he found himself smiling as he stared up at the craft.

He singled out a short haul-seine net, grappled it outside, and shouldered it into the dory. He was hitching the boat’s trailer to the back of his battered old Model A Ford when Rollo appeared from the outhouse.

‘Let’s go get us a bunch,’ said Rollo, predictably, in words that never changed.

The stretch of ocean beach they planned to fish was no more than a few hundred yards from where they stood, but there was no breach in the tall dune that fronted the sea, no passage for a vehicle, and they were obliged to take the long route round – up the rutted sand track that connected Conrad’s secluded world to Montauk Highway, a mile westwards into Amagansett, then down Atlantic Avenue to the beach landing and back along the shore.

At any other time, they would have been met at the landing by Sam and Ned Raven, the foul-mouthed sons of the equally foul-mouthed Joe Raven. A family of scallopers from Accabonac Creek, the quiet tidal backwater a few miles northeast of Amagansett, the Ravens were true ‘Bonackers’, and proud of it. They did little to hide their resentment at having to sell their services to other fishermen from the wind-scoured days of March, when the adult scallops began to die, to the limpid days of late summer, when they could take to their sloop again in pursuit of the inshore pectens.

The boys had grunted half-hearted interest when Conrad offered to take them on for the short haul-seine season. ‘I don’t know, a quarter share for haulin’ another cunt’s nets?’ was how Ned had phrased his hesitancy.

Conrad figured they’d come round to the idea. The eelgrass was still dying back and the scallops had been down that winter. Most baymen had struggled to hit their daily limit of five bushels, and money was tight for the Ravens and their kind.

After a couple of weeks in Sam and Ned’s company, Conrad had begun to wish the brothers had rejected his offer. The flood of blue speech that tumbled from their lips displayed an impressive and, at times, amusing grasp of the English language; but it unsettled Rollo, a devout Presbyterian and church-goer.

Fortunately, the reduction gear on the Briggs & Stratton winch bolted to the bed of the Model A had given out a few days back, and Conrad had taken the opportunity to lay the boys off until it was repaired, buying a respite from the obscenities. This meant that he and Rollo were hauling by hand right now using a shortened eighty-fathom net, about a third the length of their usual seine. A two-man crew also demanded that they go off through the surf with only one oarsman, difficult and dangerous at the best of times.

The semi-inflated tires carved blunt furrows in the soft sand as the Model A slowly ranged the beach, Conrad teasing the stiff clutch to keep apace of Rollo, who wandered the water’s edge, scanning the ocean. He was looking for signs of fish: driven bait stippling the surface, like handfuls of sand cast upon the water, or a feeding slick that marked the spot where the larger fish were wreaking their havoc beneath the waves. Gulls and terns, everalert scavengers, would sometimes help guide the eye. If you were lucky. Most sets were made blind, based on some inexplicable feeling that the fish were there. Some called it smell, and Rollo came from a distinguished line of ‘long-nosed’ Kemps. In the brief time they’d been in business together Conrad had come to respect his uncanny instincts.

Rollo drew to a halt, squinting out to sea. Conrad eased the gear stick into neutral, letting the motor idle. He knew better than to say anything, and had time to roll a smoke before Rollo finally turned.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I don’t know.’ He appeared puzzled that his sixth sense had deserted him. ‘Good a place as any, I reckon.’

Conrad backed the trailer down to the water and they dragged the dory into the wash. As surfboats went she was a little shorter than most – fourteen feet along the bottom – but in all other respects she was typical, her high, flaring sides climbing to sharp ends fore and aft that sliced through the surf when going off and parted the following sea around her stern on the equally perilous run to shore. Along with her oars and two nets, she was the only piece of his father’s gear that Conrad still owned.

Hitching the inshore end of the net to the back of the Model A, Conrad pulled the vehicle up the beach until the line ran taut. He hurried back to join Rollo and they wrestled the dory through the thumping chaos of white water, fighting to keep its bow headed into the seas.

Conrad scrambled aboard. Moving fast, he slipped the oars into their locks and began to row gently, still standing, setting his stroke. His eyes were fixed on Rollo, chest-high in the water, doing his best to steady the dory. There was no need for Conrad to glance over his shoulder at the rearing seas. Everything could be read in Rollo’s face as he waited for a slatch between two series of waves.

The next few seconds were critical. Rollo’s judgment would determine whether they went off cleanly, or whether they filled up, broached to, or – God forbid – pitchpoled.

‘Pull!’ yelled Rollo, pushing off and struggling aboard in one graceless movement.

Conrad arched his back into the stroke. The dory slid up the face of the first capping sea. It broke over the bow, dowsing them, but Conrad was already well into his second stroke, shifting his weight, the oars biting deep, driving them down into the trough. His third stroke, long and measured, propelled them up and over the face of the next wave before it broke. They knew they were safe now unless Conrad popped an oar or the gods tossed a rogue wave their way. But the gods were in a good mood and Conrad hadn’t popped an oar in almost a decade.

Clear of the surf, Rollo could now concentrate on paying out the net, pitching the coils of lead line over the gunwale, the cork line dragged right along with it. Conrad settled down on to the thwart and eased into his long distinctive stroke. Carrying so little twine, he soon began to turn the dory in a short clean arc. The thicker mesh of the bunt began passing through Rollo’s hands. This reinforced middle section housed the bag at the very center of the net, marked by a cork flag buoy. As soon as the bag was set Conrad swung the dory parallel to the beach.

Rollo paid out the rest of the net until the offshore wing narrowed to a manila line coiled at his feet. This was Conrad’s signal to turn again and begin their run to shore.

Speed and timing were everything when approaching the surf line. If Conrad lost momentum the dory would slip back into the trough, floundering at the mercy of the chasing waves. If he came in too fast the dory would hurtle down the face of a breaking sea, plant her bow in the sand and pitchpole forward, jackknifing over in one brief, heart-stopping moment, crushing her occupants.

Rollo was aft, his face a mask of concentration, applying just enough resistance to the net line whipping through his hands to keep the dory’s stern headed seaward. If Conrad misjudged, coming in too fast, Rollo could yank on the line, stalling the boat’s headway, buying them another shot at a clean approach. The line would skin his palms in an instant, but it was a small price to pay to avoid pitchpoling.

As it was, Conrad committed them to the surf on the back of a large, lazy sea that lowered them kindly into the maelstrom of white water. He boated the oars and seized the thwart to brace himself. As soon as he felt the jolt of the dory stranding he was over the port side, Rollo over the starboard. They seized the gunwales and hauled the boat up the beach, assisted by the next breaking wave.

Exhausted, clinging to the dory for support, they laughed. It always felt good when they judged the seas correctly, going off and coming back without mishap.

They left the net to fish for a while, buying themselves time to recover from their exertions and share a smoke. Conrad had relished the last couple of days, the timeless, almost biblical simplicity of the fishing – two friends, the beat of the sea, a net cast from a boat then hauled up on to the sand – no machinery, nothing to fall back on besides their experience and brute physicality.

After ten minutes or so they drew the offshore wing up on to the beach, closing the net. The semicircle of cork floats danced merrily on the building chop, the flag buoy at the apex not even a hundred feet beyond the breakers. They had yet to see any signs of fish. In all likelihood, the building heat combined with the shift in the longshore set had driven them into the deeper water beyond the bar.

‘You okay?’ asked Conrad.

Out of superstition, they never spoke when they sensed they were about to make a dry haul. But there was something else in Rollo’s silence, the manner in which he mistrustfully regarded the ocean. He made to speak. It wasn’t that he checked himself so much as gave up, unable to find the words.

‘Meet you halfway,’ said Conrad. He headed off down the beach to the Model A and unlashed the onshore line from the back of the truck. They started to haul on their respective ends of the net, hand over hand, in unison.

Conrad felt the weight almost immediately, a particular kind of weight – dead weight – not the twitching load of fish breaking for deep water and coming up against the twine. A dead porpoise, perhaps. Another thought flashed through his mind. He shut it out, cursing himself for even considering it, for lending it any kind of credence or life.

He glanced along the beach and knew immediately that Rollo had also sensed something amiss. His rhythm had slowed and he was staring intently at the shrinking half-circle of water, their small bite of ocean enclosed by the net. Still no visible signs of fish. Just the inert load being drawn towards the crashing surf. Short of abandoning the haul, there was nothing either of them could do to alter the outcome.

They had been drawing ever closer together, measured steps to keep the bag centered, coils of sodden net snaking behind them on the sand. Only ten or so yards of beach divided them when a big sea caught hold of the bag, raising it from the bed. They hauled speedily, taking up the slack.

Conrad glimpsed a streak of white – the belly of a large fish? – buried behind the glassy face of the capping wave. It was lost to view as the wave broke, collapsing in a thunderous tumble of water.

The wash receded to reveal a body snarled in the bag – a woman, long blonde hair braided with seaweed, sand crabs scurrying, sea robins flapping, drowning in air. Then she was engulfed by the next breaking wave. Instinctively, Conrad and Rollo used the momentum to drag the bag up the beach, beyond the wash.

Conrad stared, deaf to Rollo’s religious mutterings and the crash of the surf.

The woman was lithe and long-limbed, wearing a navy blue swimsuit. She was lying face down, her right foot cocked behind her left ankle, her right arm tight against her body, the left extended above her head, the fingers of her hand slightly splayed as if reaching for something.

She moved. Conrad hurried forward. She was definitely moving. Seizing her cold, pale shoulder, he turned her over. An enormous monkfish bucked and flailed beneath her. The bloated lips of its grotesquely broad mouth seemed to be reaching for the woman’s, lunging for an embrace. As for the woman, her lips were blue, starved of oxygen, of life.

Conrad delved into the bag, seized the mollykite by the tail, and in one violent movement swung the creature high out over the breakers. He remained staring out to sea.

‘Conrad,’ said Rollo helplessly, looking for guidance.

Conrad finally turned. ‘Help me take her out.’

They peeled the net off the woman as best they could, swept the sand crabs from her face and body, and drew her out by the feet. She was completely rigid, unbending, as if frozen or hewn from a block of white marble.

Her hair snagged in the mesh. Rollo proffered his jackknife, but Conrad ignored him, finally freeing the woman from the clutches of the seine.

Rollo seemed reluctant to touch the woman again, so Conrad took her in his arms and carried her up the beach.

Two

Tom Hollis lit another cigarette and turned to the sports pages. The Amagansett Bonackers had defeated the Hampton Bays by a score of 9–7 in Sunday’s game. Some fellow called Lambert had gone four for five, knocking in two runs, and his batting was described as ‘spectacular’.

‘About what?’ asked a gruff voice.

Hollis looked up to see the considerable bulk of Chief Milligan filling the door of his office.

‘About what?’ said Milligan, repeating himself.

Hollis frowned, still unsure.

‘You said, “Who gives a damn?”’ explained Milligan.

‘I did?’

Christ, not only was he talking to himself now, he didn’t even know it.

‘Oh, you know, the baseball.’ He flapped the East Hampton Star vaguely in Milligan’s direction.

‘My boy scored the winning run in the twelfth.’

He should have remembered. He did remember. Young Tim played for the Bonackers. Southpaw. Swing like a caveman killing his lunch. It was coming back now. All too late.

‘Think you could give a damn about this?’ said Milligan, advancing. He slid a sheet of paper across the desk. Hollis scanned it.

His first thought was ‘There goes my lunch.’

* * *

Hollis turned left on to Newtown Lane from the East Hampton Town Police Department. From here it was pretty much a straight run east of two miles into Amagansett, but as he cleared the town limits he swung the patrol car south on to Skimhampton Road, opting for the back roads.

He reached for the bottle of Gordon’s in the glove compartment, steering with his knees while he unscrewed the cap. A bracing shot, he persuaded himself, because of what lay ahead. He didn’t allow himself to recall the numerous other corpses he had confronted in his career without the aid of liquor.

The beach landing at the end of Atlantic Avenue was deserted except for a black sedan with New York City plates. Hollis pulled on his cap, squinting against the sun and the dust whipped up by the dry, stiff breeze. Even the beach appeared empty. Strolling down on to the sand he saw a gathering of vehicles and men about half a mile to the east through the thin haze of mist thrown up by the breakers. Half a mile. He’d only walked thirty yards and already his shirt was clinging to his chest. He removed his jacket and set off along the shore.

The body lay beneath a faded green canvas tarpaulin in the shade of a large truck, some kind of military transport converted for beach use. A dozen or so fishermen stood about talking in huddles. A few curious vacationers hovered on the fringes, morbid onlookers.

‘Deputy Chief Hollis,’ he announced, approaching the group of fishermen nearest the body. Amagansett fell within the jurisdiction of East Hampton town, but he rarely ventured over here and didn’t recognize any of the characters gathered around regarding him coldly. He didn’t blame them. He couldn’t abide small-town cops himself.

He removed his cap and wiped his brow with the back of his sleeve. ‘Who found her?’

One of the men nodded over his shoulder. Thirty yards down the beach, a fisherman, tall and big-boned, was loading a net into a surfboat hitched to the back of an old Model A flatbed. Another fellow – slighter, wirier, with lank, bleached hair – was helping him.

Hollis glanced back at the tarpaulin. ‘Don’t worry,’ said one of the younger men, thin lips buried in a scraggy beard worn to conceal a weak chin. ‘She’s fresh. A day, not even.’

His reluctance to take a look was that transparent? Crouching, Hollis folded back the tarp.

Death had not completely obscured her beauty. Blonde tresses matted with weed framed an oval face that descended to the delicate point of her chin. Her lips, though blue, were arched and full. Faint smile lines flanked her mouth. Her nose was sharp, her eyes wide-set and closed.

He resisted the temptation to force open the lids. Green, he guessed. He’d find out soon enough. There was a small scar etched into her left eyebrow, and pierce-marks in her ears. A beautiful young woman, her life cut short after no more than, what, twentyfive years? Thirty, maximum.

He examined both sides of her neck, instinctively, a vestige of his time in homicide. There was no bruising, but he did find something else, in the sand beside her head.

‘Anyone recognize her?’

The fishermen shrugged, not bothering to reply. Hollis folded back the tarp and got to his feet. ‘Who took her earrings?’

They stared at him, their faces set in stone. He held up the gold back-stud he had found in the sand.

‘I said, who took her earrings?’

He intended his words to have an edge of easy menace, but he knew they sounded petulant.

‘What you take us for?’ From the one with the beard again.

Hollis let it go.

The two men who had netted the body exchanged a few words as he approached them. ‘Deputy Chief Hollis,’ he announced. The tall fisherman nodded an acknowledgment. His dark hair was cropped short, his mouth was wide, intelligent. Steel gray eyes looked down on Hollis from beneath a broad, heavy brow.

‘You were the ones found her?’

‘Uh-huh.’

There was something unnerving about the steady, unyielding gaze. The stillness of the fellow was in stark contrast to his companion, who shuffled his feet nervously as he glanced around him.

Hollis removed a small memo pad from the breast pocket of his jacket. ‘Your name?’ he asked the taller one.

‘Conrad Labarde.’

Hollis looked up. ‘What is that, French?’

‘Basque.’

Basque. It rang a bell, some distant memory of a geography lesson.

‘And you?’ asked Hollis. The nervous fellow froze, then looked to his tall friend as if for assistance.

‘Rollo Kemp,’ replied the Basque. Even Hollis had heard of the Kemps, an old dynasty of farmer-fishermen, one of those families that went back all the way.

‘Cat got his tongue?’

‘You make him a little jumpy is all.’

There was no hint of aggression in his tone, no allocation of blame despite the phrasing. Hollis looked the Kemp boy over – something not quite right about him, he could see it now. Not ‘overburdened’, as his mother would have said. The product of inbreeding, perhaps.

‘You want to tell me what happened?’

Hollis took notes while the Basque, in an even monotone, described the events leading up to the discovery of the body. When he was finished, Hollis closed the pad and placed it in his hip pocket.

‘Any idea who she is?’

‘No.’

‘And what did you do with her earrings?’ It was an old cop trick – a question charged with assumptions, asked ever so casually.

The Basque held Hollis’ gaze, no trace of a flicker. Hollis showed him the earring back-stud.

‘Wait here,’ said the Basque, making for the group of fishermen. Hollis followed, damned if he was going to be ordered around.

The Basque stopped and turned.

‘It’s best,’ he said.

Hollis was too far away to hear the specifics of the exchange. At a certain moment, the Basque must have mentioned Hollis, because everyone glanced over at him. Not long after, the young fisherman with the beard became agitated, raising his voice. With a dismissive sweep of his arm, he turned on his heel.

He had taken all of two steps when the Basque placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. The younger man spun back, swinging a roundhouse as he did so. More shocking, though, was the speed of the big man’s reaction. He stepped inside the arc of the punch so that it fell harmlessly against his shoulder and in the same movement he pushed his assailant in the face with the open palm of his hand, so that he fell back on to the sand.

The Basque clamped a foot on the other’s chest and held out a hand. The younger man rummaged in his pocket and handed something over. Only then did the Basque remove his foot and step away.

He wandered back over and placed a pair of pearl stud earrings in Hollis’ hand. ‘What happens now?’ he asked.

‘The Medical Examiner’s on his way from Hauppauge. They’ll take her away.’

‘They’ll bog down on the beach. We should move her to the landing.’

Hollis nodded.

An hour later the Suffolk County Chief Medical Examiner and his two assistants arrived at the beach landing in an unmarked van. Dr Cornelius Hobbs was a stout, brisk man with gold-rimmed spectacles and a hairpiece that made little attempt to disguise itself as such. Jet black, its curling fringes flapped wildly in the breeze like a young bird struggling to take wing.

‘Deputy Hollis?’ he asked, not waiting for a reply. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got, shall we?’

His voice was pinched, nasal. Sinuses, thought Hollis, a welcome affliction for someone in his line of work.

The woman’s body had been placed on the bed of the Basque’s Model A. Without any consideration for the handful of onlookers, Hobbs seized the end of the tarpaulin and yanked it off.

‘Mmmmmmm,’ he mused, lowering his voice as he turned to Hollis. ‘A fine figure of a woman. I believe a little mouth-to-mouth is called for. You never know, Hollis, you just never know.’ Like many of the medical examiners Hollis had known in the past, Dr Cornelius Hobbs clearly enjoyed proclaiming his own ease when confronted with a corpse. He was still chuckling to himself as he used the trailer hitch to clamber up on to the back of the truck.

The Basque appeared at the side of the vehicle. ‘A little more respect, I think.’

There was nothing censorious in his tone. Had there been, maybe Hobbs would have reacted differently; as it was, he simply frowned. ‘Don’t I know you?’

‘Not sure I’ve ever had the pleasure.’

The reply brought a thin smile to Hollis’ lips.

The woman’s body was loaded into the van on a gurney by the two assistants. Hobbs closed the doors and turned to Hollis.

‘They never learn.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Hollis.

‘The sea’s no friend of ours. Third drowning this week.’

Here we go, thought Hollis.

‘Had a lad down Mecox way, city people, father a banker. The boy gets accepted by West Point, has his friends up for the weekend to celebrate, big party on the beach. Swam for his college. Wasn’t drunk, his blood tested clean. Sharks had themselves a nibble before he washed up.’ He nodded towards the van. ‘No, don’t get much cleaner than that.’

‘How long do you reckon?’

‘From the rigor … less than twenty-four hours. You’ll have the autopsy report tomorrow, afternoon at the latest.’

‘I need a photo. For identification.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘Today would be good.’

‘Today, today, all I ever hear.’ Nevertheless, he clicked his fingers at one of his assistants. ‘Snap her.’

Clutching two four-by-five film holders, Hollis watched as the van pulled away. Almost immediately the spectators started to dissipate. The Basque was rolling a cigarette by the Model A; the Kemp boy appeared to have left already. Hollis strolled over.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘For the earrings.’

‘I figured it was important.’

‘Yeah?’

‘How many women you know go swimming in their jewelry?’

Damn right, thought Hollis.

‘What do you mean?’ he said.

The Basque eyed him flatly, then slipped the rolled cigarette between his lips and lit it with a steel Zippo.

‘Army issue?’ asked Hollis, nodding at the lighter.

‘See you around, Deputy.’

The Basque climbed behind the wheel of the Model A, fired the engine and pulled away. Hollis stood watching the vehicle, the trailer dancing over the ruts, until it turned east on to Bluff Road and was lost to view.

Three

Unable to justify a full-time photographer, the East Hampton Town Police Department subcontracted the work to a local man, Abel Cole. The sign in the window of his narrow shop next to Edwards Theater on Main Street read: Portraits, Christenings, Weddings. ‘And Bar Mitzvahs’ had been added beneath in a different shade of ink.

Many wealthy Jews from New York had built houses in the more exclusive beachside areas of town in the years preceding the war. They experienced little or no prejudice from the locals, who looked on all ‘people from away’ as aliens, but if they expected their peers to leave their bigotry behind them in the city they were sorely mistaken.

The Maidstone Club, the sine qua non of social acceptability for the wealthy summer colonists, showed no signs of removing its ban on Jewish members. As a Jew, you could own a lavish mansion overlooking the manicured fairways of the Maidstone’s links course, but if you wished to actually play golf you had to travel west to Wainscott.

Hollis had witnessed at first hand anti-Jewish sentiments, or at any rate their aftermath – a Star of David daubed in white paint on the front door of a Colonial-style residence belonging to a family called the Rosens.

It had been a sorry introduction to East Hampton for Hollis, occurring just two weeks after he’d taken up his position as Deputy Chief. A stark and malicious act, it was also quite unnecessary, since a large brass Star of David was already attached to the lintel above the door, nailed there by the Rosens when they had moved into their new home.

A search of the front garden had uncovered a size-10 patent leather dress-shoe speckled with white paint in a clump of hydrangeas – a discovery that Hollis had kept to himself, along with the name of the shoe’s owner, clearly embossed on the inside.

The gentleman was a member of the Maidstone Club, the son of the club Treasurer no less. Hollis didn’t need to summon the full force of his detective’s training to piece together the events of the evening in question: a drunken dinner following the Maidstone’s annual tennis tournament; the member’s dress-shoe; further sets of footprints in the flowerbeds; a property defaced with white paint that washed off easily – as easily, in fact, as the thin whitewash used to mark the lines on a lawn tennis court. Hardly the stuff of departmental legend.

Hollis had stalked the shoe’s owner for a few days until the opportunity presented itself for a word in private. When confronted with the evidence, the culprit pleaded high jinks. When Hollis informed him that a court of law would only accept a plea of ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’, he broke down in tears, right there in the changing rooms of a gentlemen’s outfitters on Newtown Lane.

Two hours later, Jacob Rosen answered his door to a blond, redeyed young man in a brand-new blazer who handed him an envelope. Inside was a banker’s draft to the order of five hundred dollars made payable to the Temple Adas Israel in Sag Harbor. The young man then asked for, and received, Jacob Rosen’s forgiveness. He politely declined the invitation to take tea and cake with the family.

To Hollis’ mind the debt was only part-paid. Almost a year on, he still kept the shoe in a box beneath his bed along with a photo of the incriminating article, taken in situ by Abel Cole in his official capacity as the Police Department’s photographer.

It was the first time the two men had met, but the signs of a fast friendship were there from the start. Hollis’ plan for an unofficial settlement of the matter had required Abel’s discretion and collusion. Indeed, it was Abel who suggested the outrageous sum of five hundred dollars by way of a penalty. He knew the family by reputation, knew the boy was good for the money but that it would pinch him hard enough to hurt. That very same week Abel Cole had added ‘And Bar Mitzvahs’ to the sign in his window.

Hollis entered the shop to find Abel photographing a sternfaced, middle-aged woman seated in a chair set against a mottled backdrop. A Persian cat lay curled on her lap, looking quite as unhappy and mistrustful as its owner. As ever, the sickly smell of darkroom chemicals hung heavy in the air.

Abel was stooped behind a tripod, peering through the viewfinder of his camera – a Graflex Speed Graphic. Hollis had seen hundreds, if not thousands, of the machines over the years – in front of precincts and courthouses, at crime scenes, bulbs popping on their side-mounted flashing units – but Abel’s was different, trimmed in olive drab, witness to his time as a wartime photographer in Europe.

‘She’s got beautiful eyes,’ said Abel.

There was no reaction from the woman.

‘And a fine, pert little nose.’

‘Yes, she has, hasn’t she?’ conceded the woman matter-of-factly.

Abel looked up. ‘I was talking to the cat.’

Despite herself, the woman broke into a smile. Abel tripped the front shutter.

‘Gotcha,’ he said.

‘Edith Harper,’ explained Abel as soon as the door had swung shut behind the woman. ‘Lost her only boy in the Pacific, but she was a sour-faced old trout long before.’

He took a pack of cigarettes from beneath the counter and offered one to Hollis. Six months back, Hollis would have glanced outside through the window to check no one was watching before accepting. He was way beyond that now.

Abel lit the cigarettes and pushed his long fringe out of his eyes. ‘Any luck?’ he asked.

‘No.’ After dropping off the film holders with Abel for developing, Hollis had returned to police headquarters to run a missing persons check through the neighboring force at Southampton, but had turned up nothing. ‘I was hoping you might know her.’

‘Seen her around,’ said Abel, reaching for a buff envelope on the counter. ‘Who could forget, face like that? But I don’t know her name. City girl. Drives a swanky roadster. Ten bucks says someone’ll know over at the coven.’

‘The coven?’

‘You know … the Ladies’ Vaginal Insertion Society.’

The Ladies’ Village Improvement Society was an organization of local women devoted to preserving and beautifying ‘the village’, as they insisted on calling it. They had first come together to campaign and raise funds for the regular watering down of Main Street when it was little more than a dusty track at the mercy of the brisk summer winds. But they soon expanded their activities to include a program for the sweeping of the sidewalks and crosswalks, the installation of oil lamps, and the pruning of the huge elms that flanked the thoroughfare.

And so it had continued, their self-proclaimed remit extending beyond the main artery of the town like a river bursting its banks, swamping all in its path. Fifty years on, there was almost no aspect of life within East Hampton that lay beyond the scrutiny of the LVIS.

Abel was right, it was as good a place as any to start. Their numbers swelled in the summer months with the influx of wealthy New York worthies. More than likely, one of them would recognize the dead girl.

‘Crying shame,’ said Abel, handing over the envelope. ‘Face like a Botticelli angel.’

‘Yeah,’ said Hollis, unsure what his friend was talking about.

He decided to leave the patrol car and walk down Main Street. Up ahead, two young girls pattered along behind a squat woman, their hair done in tight, stiff braids, faces scrubbed clean enough to shine.

Hollis wondered why he hadn’t shared the news of the girl’s earrings with Abel. It wasn’t professional discretion on his part; there was little the two men kept from each other. Maybe he was getting ahead of himself, maybe she had simply forgotten to remove the items before going swimming. He had done a similar thing himself a month back, ruining a perfectly good wristwatch in the process, a gift from his wife.

Yes, that was why he had hesitated, for fear of looking foolish when it proved to be a blind alley. And yet the tightening in his stomach told him otherwise.

The Ladies’ Village Improvement Society was based in the old Clinton Academy, beside the library on the north side of Main Street. The former school was now home to the East Hampton Historical Society, which, for a nominal sum, subleased the annex to the women.

Hollis paused before entering the old brick-and-wood building. From the apex of its gambrel roof rose a tall, pointed cupola, the bell it once housed for summoning the students long gone. The odor from an unruly clump of honeysuckle was almost unbearably sweet in the searing afternoon heat. Hollis wiped his brow before stepping into the shaded sanctuary of the covered porch.

The LVIS occupied two small, low offices at the rear of the building. They were a hive of activity, with women hurrying to and fro as if being blown by the black electric fans which adorned almost all the desks.

Hollis felt like a student entering the teachers’ common room, summoned there for some misdemeanor then deliberately ignored to stew in his guilt and the anticipation of his punishment. Maybe it was the early history of the building somehow exerting its presence; whatever, no one paid him a blind bit of notice.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to a woman in a floral cotton dress as she hurried by purposefully, a stack of papers under her arm. Without breaking her stride she nodded towards a desk in the corner of the room.

So that was it, a strict pecking order, everything had to pass through Mary Calder, President of the LVIS. She was leaning forward in her chair, one elbow on the desk, the fingers of her right hand tugging at her sandy locks. In her other hand she held a phone receiver pressed to her ear.

‘Yes, yes, I understand,’ she said irritably. ‘But the fair is only three weeks off and you still haven’t committed.’

The LVIS annual summer fair, hence all the activity, thought Hollis, relieved that they didn’t always function at such a shaming pace.

Mary glanced up at him (on reading his thoughts? He wouldn’t put it past her). Her pale blue eyes registered his presence and she smiled. This threw Hollis. She had never smiled at him. In fact, she had only ever scowled at him in the past, usually when she was berating him for the mortal danger posed to village residents by speeding motorists, as if somehow he were personally to blame.

In fairness to Mary, accidents were an increasingly common occurrence, and it was little more than a year since one young resident had indeed lost her life, her coltish body shattered by a motor car, the impact so violent that she’d been thrown twenty feet through the air into the hedge beyond the verge.

The incident had occurred a few weeks before his arrival in East Hampton, but he could still see the photo in the file – Lizzie Jencks hanging there in the hawthorn like some grisly scarecrow. The driver had stopped, scarring the surface of the dirt-grade road, only to drive on, his identity destined to remain a mystery, as would the reason a fifteen-year-old girl was out walking a country road in the dead of night.

Mary rounded off the telephone conversation, the tone of her voice making it patently clear to the person on the other end of the line that their life wouldn’t be worth living should they let her down. She hung up and made her way across the room towards Hollis.

He knew her to be in her mid-thirties, almost five years older than he, but she displayed fewer visible signs of encroaching middle age. She was tall, slender, healthy-looking to a fault, her tanned and freckled face, devoid of make-up, witness to an active life spent outdoors. He had often seen her striding out along the wooded lanes north of town, sinewy calves protruding from clumpy hiking boots, a small canvas knapsack on her back.

‘You must think me a dreadful harpy.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘Always complaining, always after something. You only ever see me at my worst.’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ he said with a wry smile.

Christ, thought Hollis, I’m flirting with her, stop flirting with her.

Mary cocked her head slightly, eyes narrowing, taking his measure. Hollis squirmed under her gaze; he had been way too familiar.

‘Oh, you don’t need to do that,’ she said. ‘Ask around, you’ll see I’m not such a terrible old hag.’ Hollis’ brain was racing too fast to fathom the implications of the last comment, so he searched for a way to move the conversation on.

‘Can I have a word alone?’

‘Yes, you may,’ replied Mary, stressing the ‘may’ to correct his grammar. She paused before continuing. ‘Damn,’ she said, ‘you’ll never believe me now.’

Hollis watched her closely as she flipped through the photographs of the dead girl and knew immediately that he had just gotten a positive identification. They were standing in the shaded garden at the back of the building. A small fountain played nearby, humidifying the air around them. A climbing rose, loosely wired to a trellis, strained under the weight of its flowers. Birds chirped merrily and the wind lapped at the leaves of a tall birch tree. It was a tranquil spot, quite at odds with the expression on Mary’s face.

Hollis was intrigued. From her very first glance she had clearly recognized the girl, but she insisted on viewing all four photographs, taking her time as she did so. When she was finished, she handed them back.

‘Lillian Wallace. Her family has a house on Further Lane.’ Only now did she look Hollis in the eye.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

Mary accompanied him around the side of the building to the street. She folded her arms across her midriff as if chilled by the eighty-five-degree heat. ‘She loved the ocean. I sometimes saw her there, down at the beach, in the evening when I was walking the dog. She liked to swim there.’

Strange, somehow she didn’t seem like a woman who owned a dog. What would it be? Something devoted and fiercely loyal – a retriever, maybe, or a labrador.

‘She was a good swimmer?’ he asked.

‘Not good enough, it seems.’

‘I appreciate it,’ he said, holding up the envelope. Mary watched him leave.

‘I was sorry to hear about your wife,’ she called after him. Turning back, he groped for something to say. In the end he simply nodded then carried on his way.

Returning to the patrol car, he found a note from Abel on the driver’s seat: Dinner tonight, 7:30. Don’t worry – I’m cooking!

Hollis smiled, fired the engine and pulled away.

The length of the yew hedge that flanked the entrance gates of the Wallace property on Further Lane gave some indication of the scale of the plot, close on a hundred yards wide, while the height of the hedge concealed all else from prying eyes. The white wooden gates, discreet but imposing, were open and Hollis guided the patrol car through them, slowing only to read the name painted in neat black capitals on a board – Oceanview – proof that wealth and imagination didn’t always make for natural bedfellows. All the properties on Further Lane gave directly on to the ocean at the rear.

He always found it strange when he entered the colony, this narrow belt of oceanfront the wealthy had claimed as their own. A mile to the south of Main Street, it was in East Hampton, but not of it. There were no stores, no filling stations, no bars or boarding houses. In fact, there was almost no trade whatsoever, nothing that might remind the residents of how they had amassed their fortunes. There were simply stretches of half-glimpsed residential grandeur, hedged and fenced, pegged out and parceled off.

Hollis had heard that some purchasers would happily pay too much for a house, inflating the value of surrounding real estate, thereby ensuring that the diminishing number of vacant plots would only ever be occupied by those of their kind. Maybe it was just rumor, but he somehow doubted it. There was a chilling simplicity to both the logic and the formula.

All you needed was the money, and for those with less than others there were alternatives – the roads once, twice, three times removed from the waterfront avenues that fronted the ocean and skirted the shores of Georgica Pond.

On the map, Georgica Pond always reminded him of a startled marsupial settled on its haunches, its upturned snout, pointed ears, forelegs and tail formed by the larger creeks and coves which ran into the main body of water. At over a mile and a half in length from top to toe, ‘pond’ was something of a misnomer. It extended from the highway to the ocean, effectively demarcating East Hampton from Wainscott and the other communities further west.

Once open to the sea, a vicious hurricane had ripped through the area in 1938, and in a few brief hours scooped up thousands of tons of sand from the ocean bed, plugging the broad tidal gut as nonchalantly as a man might stop a bottle with a cork.

The summer colony had borne the full brunt of that freakish storm, exposed as the houses were on the high dunes and sandy bluffs that fronted the ocean. Nowhere suffered more than the Maidstone Club. Dozens of its colorful beachside cabanas were reduced to matchwood within minutes and littered across the slope leading up to the clubhouse. Paradoxically, the devastating force of the hurricane ensured the colony’s survival. After all, was this not the very reason the wealthy had come here, to stare Nature in the face, to stand mute with wonder before Her? Besides, many of them had wisely over-insured their properties and duly snatched a tidy profit from the jaws of misfortune. The pioneering spirit rekindled and reinforced, an alarming number of industrialists, financiers, publishers, actors and artists had blown in on the back of that hurricane, despite the advent of war.

Maybe the tide would turn again, as it had during the Depression. It was unlikely. Even in these uncertain times, Hollis had counted no fewer than four houses under construction on Pondview Lane while driving to the Wallace residence, the bearer of bad news.

Assuming the Medical Examiner’s initial prognosis was correct, Lillian Wallace had drowned the previous day, and as he guided the patrol car down the serpentine driveway Hollis wondered why no one had reported her missing. He hated this moment, the nervous shuffle of his feet on a foreign doorstep, the downturned gaze, the mumbled words of comfort for a total stranger – ‘I’m sorry’ – the unavoidable postscript, hopelessly inadequate.

He pulled to a halt a respectable distance from the main entrance, instinctively, as if the area immediately in front of the door were somehow reserved for the exclusive use of the family and their own motor cars. What had Abel said? Lillian Wallace at the wheel of a swanky roadster. There was certainly no sign of the vehicle out front.

Even with his untrained eye Hollis could tell that the house, however imposing, was an ugly affair, uncertain of its identity, overblown, with all the discreet grandeur of a rooster puffing out its chest. It was as if the architect had thrown everything in his repertoire at the building in the hope that something pleasing to his client would stick. Over one hundred feet long, the walls were stuccoed in the English style and swathed in Virginia creeper. The vine-covered pergolas suggested an Italo-American villa, but the hipped and shingled roof was too steeply pitched for the effect to be convincing. The roof was interrupted at the sides by eyelid dormers from another stylistic epoch, and in the middle by twin gables that descended to a wide porticoed entrance. This central section looked as if it had been bolted on later, almost as an afterthought. Apart from its near symmetry, about the only thing the hybrid building had going for it were the exquisite formal gardens that rolled off in all directions.

As Hollis tugged on the bell-pull he spotted an elderly gardener observing him from beside a rose arbor, squinting beneath the brim of his straw hat, water arcing from the hose in his hand. There must be someone at home or he would have approached by now. Sure enough, there was the clatter of shoes on a wooden floor from inside the house, and the front door swung open to reveal a small, trim woman dressed in a maid’s uniform. Her long dark hair, laced with strands of gray, was pulled back tightly off her face. When she spoke, her voice betrayed a faint accent.

‘Good afternoon.’ Almost immediately, her hand went to her mouth. ‘O Dio, no …’ She had read it in his eyes.

‘Is there … I mean, are the Wallaces at home?’

‘Lillian. Where is she? Is she all right?’ Her eyes pleaded with him.

Procedure dictated that he speak to the family first, if they were present. ‘Are they here, the Wallaces?’

‘No,’ she choked.

It was Thursday. Still in the city, probably. Wouldn’t be up till the weekend.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Rosa.’

‘May I come in, Rosa?’

Four

For the third time that day Manfred Wallace inhaled the heady scent of victory. He leaned forward over the backgammon board and stared at the dice. Six and five. The gamble had paid off.

‘God damn it, Manfred.’

‘Language, Peter, I believe the Chairman’s within earshot.’

Peter Carlson arched his long neck. Sure enough, Wheaton Blake, Chairman of the club’s Card and Backgammon Committee, was seated near the bar, observing them from behind a glass of chilled white port. Peter gave a coy smile and received a guarded nod of the head in return from the Chairman: Apology accepted. This time.

‘You lucky bastard,’ muttered Peter under his breath.

Manfred didn’t believe in luck, or if he did, that it was the just reward of the skillful. Behind in the race almost from the first, he had played a faultless bar point holding game, gradually eroding White’s advantage. Still ahead, Peter had been obliged to break his midpoint first, exposing himself to a double hit.

This was the one moment Manfred’s bold stratagem had been geared towards – a pyrrhic victory or certain defeat to be determined by one roll of the dice. Ideally, he required six and five. He not only required them, he deserved them, he had earned them, they were his by right. The dice, it seemed, had agreed with him. Coming off the bar, Peter had tried valiantly to bring his two rear men home; but the game had slipped away from him along with the five hundred dollars riding on it.

‘Whiskey?’ asked Manfred.

‘Why not?’

Manfred caught the eye of a waiter polishing glasses behind the bar and the young man hurried over.

‘Two whiskeys and soda please, George.’

‘Just a needle for me,’ said Peter.

‘Of whiskey, sir?’

Peter shot him a look – soda, fool.

‘Ignore him, George, he’s sulking,’ said Manfred.

‘Ignore me, George, I’m sulking.’

George shed a helpless look and shuffled off. Peter pulled a checkbook from his pocket and began to write.

Manfred understood. It wasn’t the money, it was the losing. Not once, but twice; first at squash racquets, now at backgammon. The squash had also been a close-run thing. Evenly matched ever since their days on the varsity team at Yale, Peter’s fitness had dipped a little of late and Manfred had duly developed a hateful little dropshot. Their Thursday game was a regular fixture, and had been since the end of the war. Sometimes they played at the Yale Club down on Vanderbilt Avenue. More often than not the New York Racquet and Tennis Club was the chosen venue, as it was today. Built on a prime patch of Park Avenue, the vast building resembled a Florentine Renaissance palazzo, with rusticated arches and stone walls as thick as a prison, a prison designed to keep unsavory types out rather than in. The interiors were grand yet austere, the physical embodiment of the ideals of the gentleman sportsman, and members still stepped on to its hallowed courts clad in Brooks Brothers flannels, Oxford-cloth shirts and Indian cotton jumpers.

Peter handed over the check. ‘You’re going to have to make it up to me,’ he said.

Manfred smiled, reaching for one of Peter’s cigarettes and lighting it. ‘Jarvis Steel Company.’

‘Never heard of them.’

‘They’re based in Union, New Jersey. They make a range of tool steels, nickel bearing alloys, that kind of thing. They’ve paid dividends every year since 1903. Very sound.’

‘Very boring.’

‘A little. Till now.’

Peter leaned forward, intrigued.

‘Their metallurgical laboratory in Reading has just patented a corrosion-resistant alloy,’ Manfred went on. ‘They’re calling it Jarvis Number 10. I won’t bother you with the technical details. Let’s just say the results of the tests are, well, very impressive according to my man.’

‘You and your men,’ smiled Peter. ‘Where on earth do you find them?’

Manfred shrugged.

‘How much should I put in?’ asked Peter.

At that moment, George returned with the drinks. Manfred waited for him to leave before replying.

‘Forty thousand.’

‘It’s a lot.’

‘Not as much as the hundred you’ll make in a year, maybe two, not including dividends.’ Peter looked suitably impressed; one hundred thousand dollars was a lot of money even by his standards. It didn’t come close to the sum that Manfred’s family brokerage house had made that very morning.

It was Manfred, fresh from Yale, who had convinced the partners of Wallace, Greenwood & Company that they move into sugar when war ripped through Europe in 1939. Sugar was then selling at a paltry penny a pound. Prices had gone through the roof in the First War and there was every reason to suppose the same would happen again.

In all, Manfred and his father had spent a month in Cuba before settling on a producer just emerging from bankruptcy and controlled by the Federal National City Bank of New York. It was another six weeks before the firm formally took control of the operation. They spent heavily on processing and refining equipment, an investment which had more than paid its way by the time America entered the war in 1941. Sugar prices continued to rise, the business prospered, buoyed up by wartime demand for ethyl alcohol, readily produced from sugarcane molasses.

The foresight, the risk, the hard work had all been theirs. Eight years on, it was time to reap the rewards, a staggering seventy-six-fold return on their investment. The deal had been finalized that very morning – Manfred’s first victory of the day, indeed, his greatest to date. A few months shy of his thirtieth birthday, he was wealthier than he could ever have imagined. More importantly, though, for the grand design of his life, he had also made a lot of very influential people rich, and this was something they would never forget.

‘Excuse me, Mr Wallace.’ It was George again. ‘There’s a phone call for you.’

Manfred and Peter exchanged a look. No one ever phoned them at the club. It was a matter of principle.

‘It’s your father.’

‘My father?’

‘He says it’s important, sir.’

Manfred tamped out his cigarette and followed George to the bar. He paused for a moment before raising the phone receiver to his ear. Something had gone wrong with the deal. No. Impossible. It was signed and sealed, he’d witnessed it with his own eyes just hours before.

‘Father?’

His father’s voice, when it came, was not its usual stentorian self; no bark, no bite. ‘Manfred, I’m afraid I have some terrible news.’

Peter Carlson drained the last of his whiskey and turned in time to see Manfred replace the receiver on its cradle, groping for the surface of the counter to steady himself. His face was ashen, even the high color of his recent exertions on the squash court drained from it.

Peter hurried over. Manfred’s blank eyes seemed focused on some distant, imaginary horizon. ‘Manfred, are you all right?’ he asked. Only when he rested a hand on his friend’s arm did Manfred appear to register his presence.

‘My sister … she’s dead.’

‘What? How? I saw her at El Morocco’s only last night.’

‘Not Gayle. Lilly.’

‘Lilly?’

‘She drowned.’

Peter remained silent, not because he couldn’t think of anything to say, but because in the twenty-two years he had known Manfred Wallace he had never once seen him cry.

Five

As Hollis turned off Woods Lane, a dog darted into the road. He braked suddenly, stalling the car, and the small basket of chocolates spilled off the passenger seat on to the floor. He let them lie where they fell – already softened by the heat, the dirt clinging to them – then he restarted the engine and carried on along Highway Behind the Lots.

Abel lived in a modest cottage near the junction with Wireless Road. It was the house he had grown up in, the only house he had ever known. His father, an engineer with a New York firm, had moved with his wife and newborn son to East Hampton soon after the Great War to oversee the construction of a wireless telegraphy station on a plot just south of Cove Hollow Road.

By 1921 Henry Cole’s work was done, but East Hampton had weaved its spell on him. A keen amateur photographer, he secured a loan for a down payment on a narrow store on Main Street, and for the remainder of his life devoted himself to photographic portraiture. Abel was nineteen years old at the time of his father’s death, and it was natural that he take over the business. However, with money tight he was in no position to move out of the family home, and he had to content himself with entertaining a string of local girls on the plum-velvet Victorian couch in the shop, the one reserved for family portraits. With his dark, broken looks, his languid manner and quick wit, there was never any shortage of young women willing to test the springs with him.

His mother died quite unexpectedly of a stroke the day after the German army entered Paris. The two events were not necessarily unconnected. Sylvie Cole had spent the first eighteen years of her life in a small apartment off the Square des Batignolles in the 17th arrondissement of that city, before boarding a ship in Le Havre bound for New York.

The only son of an only son, destined never to meet his mother’s family from whom she was estranged, Abel found himself alone in the world at the age of twenty-three with an ailing business and a small shingled cottage on Highway Behind the Lots.

Set some distance back from the road, the front lawn of the house was an untended meadow of tall grasses and wild flowers, Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed susans. A narrow swathe of clipped lawn provided the only access to the house, obliging visitors to run a gauntlet of butterflies and bees in order to reach the front porch, which was fringed with self-seeded hollyhocks, well over six feet tall at this time of year.

If Hollis knew the names of the flowers it was only because Abel’s girlfriend, Lucy, had talked him through them on many occasions. Although they didn’t live together, Lucy had staked her claim to the front and back gardens – wild, unruly kingdoms which belied the thought, expertise and hard work behind them.

Lucy made a comfortable living maintaining the gardens of city people. Out of season she pruned their shrubs, cut back their perennials, planting bulbs and annuals so that their borders, pots and window boxes were ablaze with color come the summer when they took up residence once more. The summer months were her quietest time of the year. She had a team of local boys, headed by her feckless nephew, to weed and water, and mow the lawns.

Lucy must have seen Hollis park up because she appeared on the porch as he made his way towards the house. Slight, slender and effortlessly beautiful, her long dark hair tied back with a ribbon, she was wearing an apron and clutching a wooden spoon. Hollis kissed her on the cheek.

‘You look very …’ He searched for the word.

‘Yes?’

‘Norman friggin’ Rockwell!’ shouted Abel from inside the house.

Hollis laughed. It was true, she was the very picture of benign domesticity, the smiling wife in the gingham apron, pure Saturday Evening Post front cover.

Abel appeared from the house and Lucy struck him with the wooden spoon, a playful but firm blow on the arm.

‘Jesus, Lucy!’

‘Any more of that and you won’t be eating tonight.’

‘Chance would be a fine thing,’ mumbled Abel, wisely backing out of range. Lucy headed inside.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Abel. ‘She insisted.’ He was referring to the fact that Lucy was wearing an apron. She was a woman of many talents; sadly, cooking wasn’t one of them. It was an inescapable truth that Lucy sought unsuccessfully to refute with recipes of ever-increasing ambition and complexity.

In her defense, the dish she’d prepared for them that evening was far better than it sounded. Tomato aspic with cloves and beef tongue was certainly a first for Hollis, and it wasn’t half bad, though there was no question it would have been far more appetizing had Lucy chosen to slice the tongue first. As it was, the pale, muscular appendage, spiked with cloves, lay suspended in its bed of rosy gelatin like some scientific curiosity preserved for posterity.

Abel was uncharacteristically restrained in his comments, even when Lucy cleared the plates and entered the house. They were eating at the table on the back terrace, the garden awash with warm evening light. Abel filled Hollis’ glass with wine.

‘You make any headway on the dead girl?’ he asked.

‘Name’s Lillian Wallace.’ From Abel’s expression, it rang no bells with him. ‘Her father’s some Wall Street whiz. I spoke to him earlier, broke the news. The family’s driving up tonight. There’s a formal identification of the body set for noon tomorrow.’

He didn’t tell Abel that he planned to be at the morgue a good hour earlier to scrutinize the results of Dr Hobbs’ autopsy before the body was released to the custody of the family.

‘Speaking of corpses,’ said Abel, reaching for his pack of cigarettes. ‘Any news from Lydia?’

‘She called a couple of nights back.’

‘Collect?’

Abel had never liked Hollis’ wife, a fact he had half-heartedly attempted to disguise while she’d been around. Now that she was gone, he felt no such compunction.

‘Still with that stoop-shouldered fucker, is she?’

‘Seems so.’

‘What did she want?’

‘A divorce.’

Abel looked at Hollis long and hard, weighing the news. ‘What did you say?’

‘What could I say?’

‘Knowing you – “Come back, dear, all is forgiven.”’

‘I said yes.’

‘You didn’t?’

Hollis nodded.

‘I’m trying not to smile.’

‘I can see that.’

‘Good on you, Tom,’ beamed Abel, raising his glass in a salute. ‘To the stoop-shouldered fucker. May he soon come to know that your loss is not his gain.’

The gentleman in question was a New Jersey artist of Scottish extraction, a competent watercolorist who had summered in East Hampton the previous year at a boarding house on Accabonac Road. Hollis had no idea how Lydia had come to meet Joe McBride. He didn’t wish to know. It pained him to think of the numerous liaisons the pair had doubtless contrived behind his back; and it still puzzled him that he hadn’t read the signs, the clues, he of all people. Hindsight offered no illumination. Even casting his mind back to that time, he could recall nothing out of the ordinary. Had she taken special care over her appearance? Had she been more remote or badtempered with him than usual? Had she shown any undue aversion to sex? Probably, but nothing he could remember. It had simply happened, without his awareness, almost in his very presence.

This was the saddest indictment of their relationship, the unspoken pact of mutual indifference they had allowed themselves to sign up to. He had been immune to her, even as her heart soared. Could he really blame her for leaving?

One small part of himself clung to the notion that ultimate responsibility lay with Lydia, that things would have been different if she had only supported him in his hour of need, rather than chiding him for destroying his career, and their lives with it, on a matter of principle.

In his heart, however, he knew it was he who had betrayed their childhood dream, hatched in the gloomy passageways of the four-flight walk-up tenement where their families lived, vowing to each other that life would be better for them – no bedbugs, no roaches, no shared hall toilet stinking of CN disinfectant, no El trains hammering past outside, drowning out their whispers, the flat, dead eyes of the passengers staring in on their wretched lives. And so it had proved, their first halting steps on the ladder of selfbetterment against the downdraft of the Depression years, ever upwards, until he had lost his footing, dragging her with him into the void.

At the age of twenty-nine, way before his time, Hollis had already faced the grinning demon all men must confront in their lives, the one who mocks you with the certain knowledge that you’ve climbed as high as you’re ever going to, that you’ve scaled the peak, that from here the only way is down.

They were doomed even before they moved out to Long Island, he knew that now. Life in East Hampton – the village, its people, the cloying parochialism – became just another rod to beat him with. Lydia waxed sentimental about the city they had been forced to leave behind them, the same city she had spent the past twenty years of her life lambasting. She dreamed of Manhattan stores she had never shown any inclination to visit when they lived there: Macy’s, Saks Fifth Avenue, Bonwit Teller. She subscribed to the New York Sunday Times, scouring its innumerable sections. Plaintively, she read aloud the reviews of Broadway plays as if theater were her greatest passion, and yet she showed no desire to attend the capable productions of the local Guild Hall Players.

Hollis had always tried to keep a wall between his work and his home life, to spare Lydia the daily round of depravity he witnessed as a detective. Since moving to East Hampton, he had maintained this wall, though for different reasons – to shield her from the banality of his work, to deny her the tools of further castigation.

As for himself, he had simply become inured to the desperate drudgery. He no longer bothered to return the smiles and waves while out on patrol. When called on to deal with some minor misdemeanor – the theft of a few hay bales or a family feud come to blows – he struggled to muster any concern, professional or otherwise, for the victims. The daily crowings and criticisms from Chief Milligan washed over him where once they had made his blood boil with impotent anger. He became an observer of a world he no longer inhabited although he moved through it: a muted world, clouded, like squinting at a painting.

That had all changed as of today when he saw the earring backstud lying in the sand beside the head of Lillian Wallace. A moment of clarity, a detail, the world unexpectedly thrown into sharp relief. The Devil is in the Details – the note pinned to the wall above his desk in the detective division task room.

‘Have you heard of a fellow called Labarde?’ he asked. ‘Conrad Labarde. He’s a fisherman, in Amagansett.’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘He was the one pulled the girl from the sea.’

‘Sure, I know him, to nod at. We crossed in high school. He got yanked out like most of the fishing kids. We didn’t mix much, the East Hampton boys and the ’Gansetters, you know – a rivalry thing. I remember him, though.’

‘Carries a limp.’

‘A limp?’

‘Left leg.’

Abel shrugged. ‘Not back then. Hell of a ball player, if I remember right. Could be he picked it up in the war.’

‘He’s a veteran?’

‘Not all of us managed to dodge the draft,’ said Abel with a wry smile. He knew this was unfair, that Hollis’ job as a detective had excluded him from military call-up.

‘We all passed through Camp Upton about the same time. I don’t know where he ended up. Come to think of it, maybe he never saw action. He didn’t show at the Memorial Day parade, this year or last.’ Abel stubbed out his cigarette. ‘Why all the questions?’

‘No reason,’ said Hollis.

In truth, the tall Basque with the unsettling gaze had been preying on his mind all day. In the first place, he had also picked up on the woman’s earrings – that was impressive – and then when Hollis feigned uncertainty of their significance he had simply smiled enigmatically, seeing through the front.

How had the fellow got his measure so quickly? And his parting words, the studied weight of the delivery – ‘See you around, Deputy.’ They had never met before, why should they ever see each other again? If it was a message, it was one that Hollis had yet to fathom.

‘When you’re ready,’ said Abel.

‘What’s that?’

‘Come on, Tom, something’s up. I can see you thinking; shit, I can almost hear it.’

Hollis didn’t reply.

‘All I’m saying is … in your own time, if you want to talk about it.’

At that moment Lucy appeared from the house, hurrying towards the table, the oven gloves barely a match for the heat from the glass dish she was carrying. Dropping the dish on the table, she shook out her scalded fingers.

Hollis and Abel stared: patches of ocher-brown paste showing through a husk of dirty white, like snow on a muddy paddock during the spring thaw.

‘Lou, what in God’s name …?’ muttered Abel.

‘Sweet potato and marshmallow surprise,’ she replied proudly.

Six

Conrad found himself counting his steps as he walked – ten paces to every breaking wave, the spume washing around his bare feet. He resisted the urge to hurry ahead, the darkness not descended yet, measured strides over the tide-packed sand at the water’s edge. One-to-ten, one-to-ten. The mental metronome of a route march, memories of the ragged hills east of Cassino invading his thoughts, the sound of the collapsing waves not unlike the hollow report of distant artillery fire, unseen shells reshaping the Italian landscape.

Looking up, he saw a couple coming towards him, arms linked, bodies pressed close, stepping out at twilight. He thought of turning away, veering off towards the dunes to allow them a clear passage along the shore, not wanting to intrude on their moment. But they had seen him now, and a sense of propriety drove them apart.

They approached through the blue-black light, eyes downcast like guilty children.

‘Good evening,’ said the man stiffly as they passed.

A thought occurred to Conrad, and he stopped in his tracks. ‘Excuse me.’

The couple hesitated, turning.

‘Do you walk here every evening?’ asked Conrad.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I was just wondering if you walked here most evenings.’

‘Why?’ said the man.

‘We’re from Albany,’ said the woman. She uttered the words as if they were some kind of protective incantation.

Conrad took a couple of steps towards them. ‘Last night, were you here around this time?’

‘Look,’ said the man, ‘we’re very late.’

‘It’s important,’ said Conrad.

‘We weren’t even here last night, okay? We got here today. And now we have to go.’ They turned and left, stepping briskly away.

Puzzled by their reaction, Conrad glanced down, taking in his appearance, aware for the first time that he was still in his fishing gear – the shabby twill trousers, patched and stitched and crusted with fish scales, plaid shirt protruding from the tattered hem of his jersey, once white, now stained with fish blood and streaked with tar. No wonder they’d been so anxious, confronted by a ragged, barefoot scrap of humanity.

He tugged the jersey up over his head and set off along the shore. After a few hundred yards, he cut inland, up the steep frontal dune. Beyond lay a tumble of sandhills, a tangled maze of crests and troughs, like an angry cross-sea. Narrowing to a point a few hundred yards beyond the Maidstone Club, this mysterious tract of vacant land extended four miles eastwards into Amagansett, widening considerably as it went, demarcated to the north by the steep inland bluff on which the wealthy had built their summer homes.

It was a world Conrad was well acquainted with, one that hadn’t changed in all the years he’d known it. As kids, this had been their preserve, a private nether world where innumerable battles were fought, where Custer died a thousand deaths, yet, strangely, Jim Bowie and Davy Crockett always seemed to survive the storming of the Alamo.

Back then the old-timers still referred to the place as ‘the Glades’, dim memories handed down of the time when the pockets of freshwater marsh, fringed with phragmites, were deep enough for skiffs, and cranberry bogs abounded. The cranberries were still there, a welcome source of pocket money for Conrad and his friends when they were growing up, though Arthur Bowles, the manager of Roulston’s Store, always screwed them down hard on the price, his plastered smile masking a ruthless business head.

It was ‘down the Glades’ that Conrad first met Rollo, wheeling around, lunging wildly, delightedly groping the air – a game of blind-man’s buff – surrounded by a pack of shrieking kids, too young to know they were laughing at his expense, no sense yet that others saw him as different. That came later. Long summers spent roaming the sandhills in packs, squelching knee-high through the swales, forming tribes, alliances sealed in blood but soon reneged on, building camps thatched with dried reeds and cat-tails, whittling spears with gutting knives filched from unsuspecting fathers.

Sometimes they ventured beyond the southern frontier on to the beach, little Edmund Tyler – always Edmund, with his cherub face and see-no-evil eyes – coyly approaching a group of bathers, ‘Watch out for the sand snakes, it’s their feeding hour’, the others flat on their bellies in the beach grass at the top of the dune, howling with laughter as the city people snatched up their belongings and scampered to safety.

One time, venturing further still, into the west, to the Maidstone Club – the playground of the rich – the club itself too closely patrolled to risk an incursion despite the imagined lure of naked female flesh around the swimming pool, striking out across the golf course instead, sticking to cover, the eighth hole – par three, partially blind approach – Conrad racing from the scrub, staying low, scooping up a ball from the edge of the green and dropping it in the hole, not staying to witness the celebration of the hole-in-one, knowing their laughter would give them away and ruin the prank, the unwitting victim still dining out on that magnificent drive from the tee, no doubt.

Conrad smiled, remembering. Then it occurred to him that four of the six boys present that day were now dead.

He banished the memories, pinched the burning end from his cigarette and drove the stub into the sand with his finger.

It was night now, time to go.

Only fifty yards or so separated the wind-trimmed holly tree where he’d been sitting from the sandy bluff, and he could see the lights of the houses glinting through the oaks standing sentinel along the crest.

The moon lit his path as he picked his way across the sandhills and up the slope. He slipped the latch of the gate in the iron fence and stepped into the garden.

The air was cool and moist, rich with earthy scents where the borders had been watered. Somewhere out there in the night a dog barked and another returned its call. A low hum emanated from the small hut that housed the swimming pool’s filtration system.

There were patches of water on the pool’s flagstone surround, and a part-smoked cigarette in an ashtray beside a lounge chair. The cushions bore the moist impression of a person not-so-long gone.

He was right to have waited a while.

He strayed as close to the house as he dared, positioning himself beneath the boughs of a tree at the edge of the lawn. From here he waited and watched, the figures moving behind the windows like marionettes on a nursery stage, until the lights were extinguished. A lone bedroom light was still burning bright behind the curtains when Conrad finally slipped away through the shadows.

He stopped as he passed by the swimming pool.

Crouching down, he dipped his fingers into the water and raised them to his lips.

Seven

‘You’re early,’ said Dr Hobbs, dropping the liver on to the tray of the hanging scales with a loud slap.

‘I just wanted to make sure the paperwork’s in order before the family get here,’ lied Hollis.

‘Five pounds, four ounces,’ said Hobbs, reading off the weight of the organ to his assistant who was taking notes at a table. A sign on the wall read: This is the Place Where Death Rejoices to Teach Those Who Live. The maxim was accompanied by an image of the Grim Reaper standing beside a blackboard, scythe in one hand, stick of chalk in the other.

The cadaver on the autopsy table was that of an elderly woman. Her large breasts, laced with veins, were splayed across her torso, hanging down over her arms so that they gathered on the enameled surface like wax at the base of a candle. There was a gaping Y-shaped hole in her abdomen where Dr Hobbs had been at work.

Hollis’ natural curiosity drove him towards the body, Dr Hobbs evidently intrigued by his lack of squeamishness. ‘Want to hazard a guess at the cause of death?’ he asked.

Hollis glanced at the weighing scales. ‘The shape of the liver, its color, weight …’

‘Its weight?’

‘Almost twice as heavy as it should be.’

Dr Hobbs raised an eyebrow.

‘I don’t know,’ continued Hollis. ‘Liver failure brought on by chronic alcoholism? The contusions on her knees and forehead suggest she collapsed forward on to the ground; the lividity in her face and neck that she lay there for some time.’

Hollis regretted the words as soon as they had left his mouth. As a rule, he played his cards close to his chest, finding it far more advantageous to be underestimated by his colleagues and associates. It was a sign of how low he’d sunk that he felt the need to impress the likes of Dr Cornelius Hobbs.

‘Local woman, Anne Hamel, notorious lush,’ confirmed Hobbs, ‘bottle and a half of gin a day. Neighbor found her on the bathroom floor.’ He removed the liver from the scales. ‘I can see you’re something of a dark horse, Hollis. I’m going to have to keep my eye on you.’

Yes, he should have kept his mouth shut.

‘As for the paperwork on your girl,’ continued Hobbs, ‘I can’t complete the Death Certificate or body-release form before identification by next-of-kin. But then I figure you already know that, so you must be here to cast an eye over the autopsy report.’

Hollis shrugged. ‘Just out of curiosity.’

‘Go ahead, it’s on my desk, last office on the right down the hall.’ Hobbs couldn’t resist a parting shot as Hollis left through the swing doors. ‘You’ll let me know if I missed anything.’

The office was small, immaculately tidy, with windows on to the parking lot at the side of the building. There were graduation photos of two youngsters on the desk – gowns and caps, black tassels dangling – instantly recognizable as Hobbs’ son and daughter, something that must have been a source of considerable consternation to the girl.

The autopsy report sat beside the phone, a sheet of ruled paper pinned to the front on which someone, Hobbs presumably, had written in a neat, cursive hand: Lillian Wallace (to be confirmed). Death by Misadventure: death from drowning.

Hollis settled into the chair at the desk and picked up the report. He paused a moment before starting to read. What was he looking for? He wasn’t sure. Maybe he was still grasping at straws. He admonished himself for thinking that way, cleared his head and started again. Discrepancies. Yes, discrepancies between the report and what little he knew of Lillian Wallace and the last hours of her life.

The few scraps he had to work with had been provided by the maid, Rosa, the previous day. After breaking the news, Hollis had sat with her for ten minutes while she tried to choke back the shock and grief, tears pouring down her face.

When her sobbing had subsided, he gently prized his hand free of hers and went and made a cup of tea for her. She joined him in the kitchen, a room larger than the footprint of his whole house, with a cathedral-cold stone floor. They sat at a table and she answered his questions while he took notes in his memo pad.

Lillian Wallace had been twenty-six years old, the youngest child of George and Martha Wallace, sister to Gayle and Manfred. Her mother had died four years previously from a cancer of the throat. Her father had not remarried. Ordinarily, Lillian lived at her apartment in New York, but she had been staying at the house in East Hampton since January, following a separation from her fiancé, the engagement broken off.

When asked if Lillian was depressed, Rosa replied that she’d been very low at first, but within a month or so she was her old self again – spirited, full of life and humor. She said this in such a way as to warn him off the notion that Lillian might have taken her own life.

For much of the time Lillian had been alone in the house. Rosa lived with her husband and three children on the other side of town and only stayed in the house on Friday and Saturday nights during the season, when the whole family came out for the weekend. Since Lillian had taken up residence though, Rosa would come in for a few hours every morning to air the rooms, clean a little, make Lillian’s bed, and prepare an evening meal for her.

Lillian kept herself pretty much to herself during the week, although Rosa said she played tennis with friends at the Maidstone Club every now and then. She read a lot, walked a lot, and swam whenever she could, in the swimming pool out back and in the sea.

Her evening dip in the ocean had been an established ritual. Even weekends, when her family was around, while the others indulged in pre-prandial cocktails on the terrace Lillian would head off to the beach, out of the back gate in the garden and across the dunes. Rosa’s eyes misted over again as she described this daily pilgrimage, the one that Lillian had never returned from.

Hollis had asked if he could take a look at Lillian’s bedroom, and Rosa accompanied him upstairs. He would have preferred to inspect the room on his own, taking his time, but Rosa loitered protectively at the door.

There was nothing overtly feminine about the room, very little besides the clothes in the closet to suggest the gender of its occupant. The walls were painted cream and were hung with prints and etchings – a cart passing down a country lane, Montauk Lighthouse, an abstract female nude by some well-known European artist whose name Hollis couldn’t recall.

On the wall beside the bed was a framed photo showing a group of young women gathered on a stage. The caption on the matt read: The Experimental Theatre, Vassar College 1942. Lillian Wallace stood out like a beacon, her beauty and the breadth of her smile animating the photo, lending life to those around her. The image was in stark contrast to Hollis’ first sight of her, face frozen with rigor mortis, pinkish foam oozing from her blue lips.

He was left in little doubt as to what she had studied at Vassar. The shelves of a mahogany bookcase bowed under the weight of volumes of English and French literature, and there were more books stacked on the desk in front of the window. Hollis’ eyes grazed over the clutter on the desk, looking for a suicide note. Despite Rosa’s assertions, he didn’t dismiss the possibility that Lillian Wallace had taken her own life.

There was no note, not on the desk, not on the nightstand, not in any of the drawers in the room. This didn’t rule out suicide. Relatives or friends sometimes destroyed the suicide note of their loved ones. Sometimes this was done for simple, if misguided, reasons of decency. On other occasions it was no doubt done to protect themselves.

There was no denying the genuineness of Rosa’s grief, but it didn’t preclude her discovery of a note that morning when she had come to work. And as Hollis picked his way around the room, he was able to construct an alternative sequence of events – Rosa’s horror on finding the note, the anxious hours spent waiting, praying that Lillian wouldn’t see it through, that she would turn up, then the dashed hopes when he had appeared on the doorstep, the subsequent surge of emotion in Rosa indistinguishable from genuine surprise, and no less authentic.

This could also explain what Rosa was doing at the house at three o’clock in the afternoon when by her own account she only ever came in for a few hours in the morning.

‘Have you touched anything in here?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘So the bed was already made?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did that strike you as strange?’

‘Strange?’

‘You say you make her bed every morning. You come in one day and it’s already made. Has it ever happened before?’

Rosa hesitated before replying. ‘No.’

‘So you must have been a little … surprised.’

‘Yes,’ she said, regarding him mistrustfully. Her mind was working hard, too hard.

There was a door in the corner of the room. Behind it lay a bathroom, painted pale blue. There were some cosmetics on the glass shelf above the basin, nothing elaborate. Across the room, a linen skirt and a white blouse lay neatly folded on a wicker chair, a pair of leather sandals on the floor nearby.

Sensing Rosa behind him in the doorway, he spoke without turning.

‘This is where she would have changed?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are these the clothes she was wearing yesterday?’

‘Yes.’

Hollis lifted the lid of a laundry hamper. It was empty. ‘Did she wear a brassiere?’ Rosa, understandably, was a little put out by the question. ‘I’m just wondering where her undergarments are. They’re not on the chair, not in the laundry hamper.’

‘They were in the hamper. I emptied it this morning.’

Hollis ran the scene in his head. It’s early evening, Lillian comes into the bathroom, she removes her clothes – first her blouse, then her skirt – folding them before placing them on the chair. She then takes off her brassiere and panties and puts them in the laundry hamper. Now she pulls on her dark blue swimsuit.

‘The times you saw her leaving for her swim, what was she wearing?’

‘A bathrobe.’

‘Shoes?’

Rosa thought before replying. ‘No.’

‘Did she take a towel?’

‘I think so. Yes.’

‘And jewelry?’

‘Jewelry?’

‘Earrings, for example, did she keep them in or take them out?’

‘Why are you asking me all these questions?’ Her eyes were filling with tears again.

‘I’m sorry, it’s routine procedure.’

‘She didn’t wear jewelry.’

‘Never?’

‘Special occasions.’

Well, death was certainly a special occasion.

‘One more question, Rosa. What are you doing here midafternoon? You said before you only come in for a few hours in the morning.’ He felt bad springing this on her, given her state, but he had to know the answer.

‘I wasn’t worried at first,’ she said defensively. ‘I thought … I thought maybe she went out last night.’

‘And didn’t come back? Stayed out? With someone?’

‘You know how the young people are these days.’

It bugged him that she chose to include him with her in the ranks of the elderly.

‘I went home,’ she continued, ‘I made lunch for my family. Then I couldn’t stop thinking …’ She broke off, gathering herself. ‘Maybe she never came back from her swim.’

‘So you headed back here.’

‘She always leaves her swimsuit there, with the bathrobe.’ She pointed to a hook on the back of the bathroom door. ‘I should have looked earlier, I wasn’t thinking, I should have looked …’ She started to cry again.

‘It wouldn’t have made any difference,’ said Hollis gently. He made to rest a hand on her shoulder, but she hurried away, across the bedroom and out of the door, deep sobs resounding in the corridor. He didn’t blame her for evading his touch; he had brought her to tears again with his persistent questioning, the mildly accusatory tone designed to unsettle, to dislodge the truth.

Well, at least he was able to throw out the theory of a missing suicide note. The deep affection Rosa clearly felt for her young mistress wouldn’t have allowed her to return home to make lunch for her family if she’d discovered such a note that morning. He couldn’t see it, it just didn’t fit.

He turned back and surveyed the bathroom. Everything in order, as it should be, nothing that might lend weight to his gut feeling that Lillian Wallace’s death wasn’t an accident.

Feeling foolish, his heart already going out of the matter, he crossed to the sink, filled his cupped hands with cold water from the faucet and drank, splashing his face as he did so. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, and disliked what he saw staring back at him – a nondescript man, brown hair, brown eyes, average height – no distinguishing features besides a strong inclination to see the very worst in situations and in people. To question what most were happy to take in good faith. To doubt where others trusted.

And to what end? Not in the name of Justice; that was a lofty notion he had abandoned within a year of leaving the Academy. He knew that the true injustices in life lay far beyond the scope and remit of the police. They were merely flies buzzing around the dung heap, giving some semblance of order and activity.

No, he was as he was because he was good at it, because that’s what he did best. And for the first time in his career he’d seen with blinding clarity that it was no longer enough of a reason to carry on doing it.

Casting his mind back to Lillian Wallace’s bathroom, it occurred to Hollis that he wouldn’t even be there, seated at Hobbs’ desk in the morgue, if he hadn’t wet his face with water at her sink. It was in the nature of destiny that you could trace your own back to the very smallest events.

Searching for a towel, he had spotted one hanging from a rail in the recess that housed the bath. Wandering over, he saw that there was also a toilet in the recess.

Only after he had dried his face and replaced the towel did it leap out at him: the wooden seat of the toilet was raised, suggesting that the last person to use it had been a man.

Hollis finally opened the autopsy report and started to read. He made notes; to ask for a copy would only alert others to his interest in the affair.

The first section dealt with the external examination. In describing the general appearance of the corpse, Hobbs began by stating that rigor mortis was well established, suggesting a time of death somewhere between six and twenty-four hours previously. Starting at the head and working his way down the body, he noted small conjunc tival hemorrhages in the eyes (green, as Hollis had guessed). These were evidence of asphyxiation, though not necessarily by water. The pinkish foam exuding from the mouth and nostrils, however, was strongly indicative of drowning, and led Hobbs to opine that the victim had been alive at the time of submersion.

The report then turned to the abrasions over the prominent parts of the face and the anterior trunk. Apparently this was concomitant with drownings off the ocean beach. Hollis read on, intrigued. He knew that when a person drowned they soon sank to the bottom where they remained until putrefaction filled their belly with gases that refloated them. He wasn’t aware that the submerged corpse always lay suspended in the same position – face down with the head lower than the rest of the body. The abrasions were the result of Lillian Wallace’s face and upper torso scraping along the sandy sea-bed as the currents carried her to and fro. The downward angle of the body also accounted for the faint and blotchy lividity in the head, neck and anterior trunk.

The hands were next. The skin of the fingerpads and palms was blanched and wrinkled, what Hobbs called ‘washer-woman hands’, a direct consequence of prolonged immersion. The fact that this maceration had not progressed to the backs of the fingers and the backs of the hands led him to narrow his estimate of time of death to between twelve and seventeen hours prior to the body’s recovery from the ocean.

The passage of the report that dealt with the internal examination was far more technical, and Hollis was obliged to read it several times over.

Core body temperature lent weight to Hobbs’ revised time of death estimate. The blue-purple discoloration of the bone of the mastoid air cells was typical of drowning, though not proof of it. However, a close examination of the stomach and the lungs placed the matter beyond question. There was seawater in the stomach, with associated blanching of the gastric mucosa. The lungs were described as bulky and ballooned, and as having a marbled appearance to the pleural surface, with blue-gray areas interspersed with pink and yellowish zones of more aerated tissue – typical of ‘emphysema aquosum’. When sectioned, sea water flowed from the lungs.

These appearances pointed to active inspiration of air and water and could not be produced by the passive flooding of the lungs post mortem. This was further confirmed by the existence of hemorrhagic subpleural bullae, resulting from tears in the alveolar walls, which also accounted for the blood-tingeing of the foam in the airways, nose and mouth.

There were further tests on the blood, bile and vitreous humor. These revealed low levels of alcohol, certainly not enough to have played a contributory part in her death.

In conclusion, wrote Hobbs, the pathological evidence established beyond any doubt that the decedent was alive when she entered the sea, and that she drowned in it some time between 5 p.m. and 10 p.m. the day before her body was found.

Hollis laid the document on the desk. He had misjudged Hobbs. The report was as impressive as any he had read – authoritative and thorough, circumspect in its judgments until the forensic evidence proved indisputable. What had he expected, some slapdash affair by a second-rate provincial medical examiner? Dr Hobbs’ jurisdiction covered miles of coastline noted for its treacherous waters. Drownings were commonplace, and he surely had more experience of them than the vast majority of pathologists. A little dejected, Hollis abandoned the idea of running the information by Paul Kenilworth, a former colleague back in New York.

A movement outside caught Hollis’ eye. A brougham was pulling into the parking lot. Not seen as often since the war, it was the sort of vehicle that made a discreet yet unequivocal statement about the owner’s wealth and standing. The uniformed chauffeur in the open driver’s compartment guided the car to a halt. Getting out, he opened the rear door, offering his hand as he did so.

For a brief instant, it occurred to Hollis that the whole thing had been a terrible mistake, that Lillian Wallace hadn’t drowned off the ocean beach. For there she stood, tall and slender, squinting against the sunlight.

It was a few moments before Hollis realized he was looking at Lillian’s older sister, Gayle. Physically, there was little to distinguish between the two women. Gayle’s hair was maybe a little longer and neatly coiffed so that it curled like two breaking waves around her neck and beneath the ears, but the oval face, the wide-set eyes and the mouth were the same. What differences there were lay not so much in the physiognomy as the presentation – in particular the clothes.

Hollis had seen nothing in Lillian’s wardrobe that came close to the elegance of the outfit Gayle was wearing. Her skirt was cut long and full in the new French style, her blouse was fashionably free of padded shoulders and tailored to accentuate her narrow waist.

A gentleman who could only have been George Wallace was next out of the car. Of medium build, he was dressed in a dark gray summer suit, white shirt and blue necktie. For a man who must have been into his sixties he was remarkably well preserved, displaying very little extra weight around the midriff, and a full head of silver hair, parted at the side. He stood tall and straight, exuding the easy patrician air of a long-standing member of the privileged class.

The same could not be said of his son, who was the last to exit the vehicle. The poor fellow was clearly upset and doing his best to conceal the fact, but the set of his brow and the stoop of his shoulders betrayed him. What was his name again? Hollis turned to his memo pad. Manfred.

Looking back through the window, he saw George Wallace direct a few words to his son, who then visibly pulled himself together, smoothing his sandy hair. Manfred smiled weakly at something his sister said, then she took his arm and they started making their way towards the building.

Hollis arrived in the lobby as they were entering through the main door. ‘Mr Wallace? Deputy Chief Hollis. We spoke on the phone yesterday.’

George Wallace accepted the hand with a cold, firm grip. ‘My daughter, Gayle. My son, Manfred.’ There was something soothing about the depth and resonance of his voice.

‘I’m sorry we had to meet under these circumstances,’ said Hollis. He felt insincere uttering the line he had used on many such occasions in the past. ‘The Medical Examiner will be with us shortly. Please, take a seat.’

They glanced disapprovingly at the diminutive waiting area, where a lean, shabby young man was sucking dejectedly on a cigarette. It struck Hollis that this must be one of the few instances in their lives where they had little choice but to do as others did, sit where others sat. Ordinarily, they lived sheltered from the world, moving between their houses, clubs and offices cocooned in chauffeured limousines, supported wherever they went by a loyal staff who shopped, cooked, cleaned, laundered and generally shielded them from the less appealing realities that most accepted as an elemental part of life. Maybe he was doing them a disservice, but somehow he couldn’t see any of them waiting in line at a grocery store for a pack of cigarettes or haggling with a taxi driver over the fare.

Here at the County Morgue, however, there were no private boxes, no members-only enclosures, no first-class Pullman compartments. It was a low, ugly, antiseptic building where all and sundry were obliged to mingle. Death, the Great Leveler.

Gayle picked nervously at the out-of-date magazines on the low table. Manfred removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offering one to his sister, who declined. Unexpectedly, he then held the pack towards the young man who had just put out his own cigarette.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said the man. From his eyes it was clear he had been crying. Manfred lit the fellow’s cigarette, and then his own, with a gold lighter.

‘Who’d you lose?’ asked the young man.

‘My sister.’

‘Mother,’ said the young man. And that was the end of the conversation, to the evident relief of George Wallace, who observed with a cool, dispassionate eye. Hollis looked at the young man, considering the likelihood that the woman with the swollen liver had been his mother.

‘How does this & work?’ asked Manfred.

Hollis turned. ‘One of you will need to identify her.’

‘We would all like to see her,’ said George Wallace, though Gayle’s expression suggested otherwise.

‘You’ll then need to sign the body-release form, and that’s it.’

‘That’s it?’ Manfred said.

‘The funeral directors can then take her away. I imagine they’ll be coming up from the city …’

‘She wanted to be buried here,’ said Gayle.

‘We don’t know that,’ interjected George Wallace.

‘Father, we’ve already had this conversation.’

‘She loved East Hampton.’ Manfred’s words were directed at Hollis, but intended for his father’s ears. George Wallace had evidently conceded defeat on the matter, but had wished to flag his disapproval one final time.

‘Can you recommend a local funeral home?’ Wallace elder asked.

‘I’m afraid I’m not allowed to do that. There are several in town.’

‘Livingstone’s is best,’ interrupted the young man. ‘Buried my Nan, Grandpa, and my old man, good and deep, no frills, don’t need ’em, not where they gone.’

‘Thank you,’ said Manfred.

‘Ain’t no skin off my nose.’

Hollis suspected that, thanks to the young man, Livingstone & Sons now stood little chance of attracting George Wallace’s custom.

At that moment, the receptionist manning the front desk approached. ‘Mr Hamel, like I said, it’s going to be several hours before we’re ready for you. There’s really no point in you waiting around.’ The young man looked at her long and hard. If he suspected he was being moved on for the benefit of the others, he gave no indication of the fact.

‘So long,’ he said, getting to his feet and leaving. The receptionist waited for the door to swing shut behind him.

‘I’m sorry about that,’ she said. ‘Can I get you something to drink?’

Hollis had been wrong. Even here in the morgue, the Wallaces and their kind received preferential treatment.

‘No thank you,’ said George Wallace.

‘A glass of water, please,’ said Manfred.

‘Yes, water, thank you,’ said Gayle quietly.

The receptionist left without even glancing at Hollis.

He placed a brown-paper parcel on the table. ‘These are Lillian’s, her bathrobe and towel, from the beach. I went down there when I was at the house yesterday.’

Following in her final footsteps, he had wandered past the swimming pool, out of the back gate in the garden, down the bluff and across the sandhills. He hadn’t expected to find anything, but a short search revealed the bathrobe and towel folded beside a clump of beach grass on the frontal dune. They were clearly visible from the beach, and it was evidence of the class of bather frequenting that stretch of shoreline that in almost twenty-four hours no one had taken them.

He had approached the spot carefully, but the soft, windblown sand had absorbed any tracks there might have been. Back at headquarters, a closer examination of the articles had revealed nothing out of the ordinary, just a hair band and a brush in the pocket of the terry-cloth bathrobe.

Hollis removed two documents from his pocket and laid them in front of George Wallace. ‘A personal-effects form, to say you’ve received them.’ George Wallace took the pen offered him and signed both copies. Hollis replaced one in his pocket.

‘There’ll be another form to sign for the effects found with her.’ He threw in a brief pause. ‘Her swimsuit … and her earrings.’ Mention of the earrings triggered no reaction.

‘Do you know what happened exactly?’ asked Manfred.

‘It’s hard to say. There were no witnesses that we know of. I’m sure you’re aware, the currents can be pretty dangerous. The autopsy confirms that she drowned.’

Manfred straightened in his seat. ‘The autopsy?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean you cut her up!?’

Hollis took a moment to formulate his response. ‘An internal examination was conducted by the Medical Examiner. The law calls for it in all cases of unattended deaths.’

‘Unattended deaths’: what was he thinking, reducing the tragic loss of their loved one to a piece of police-manual jargon?

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Manfred, ‘they cut her up!’

‘Manfred …’

‘Don’t you at least have to ask for our consent or something!?’

‘Manfred.’ This time, George Wallace raised his voice.

‘They should have asked for our consent.’

‘It’s not required,’ said Hollis.

George Wallace turned to him. ‘All the same, it would have been good to know.’

Hollis had to concede the point. It was an oversight on his part, and one he wouldn’t have committed if he hadn’t been so caught up in his own private speculations. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I apologize.’

‘What exactly did you do to her?’ Manfred’s tone remained accusatory.

‘Manfred, the gentleman has apologized,’ said George Wallace firmly. ‘He has explained the situation and he has apologized.’

Thankfully, at that moment the receptionist reappeared with the glasses of water. ‘The Medical Examiner will see you now, if you’d like to come with me.’

Manfred stared forlornly at the glass in front of him. Without touching it, he got to his feet and followed his father.

Gayle lingered a moment longer, sipping from her glass. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘They were very close.’

As she left, Hollis called after her. ‘Miss Wallace.’ She turned back. ‘Try Yardley’s Funeral Home. They’re on Newtown Lane.’

‘Yardley’s. Thank you.’

And she was gone.

Eight

Oyster shells crunched beneath the tires as Conrad turned into the parking lot. The lone headlight swept over the other vehicles already gathered there before settling on a space in the shadows, beyond the pool of light thrown by the lamp above the door of the ramshackle oyster house.

Conrad stepped from the vehicle. It was a still, warm evening, humid and close, the breeze too light to cool the skin. He could hear the hum of raised voices from inside the hall, then a barked reprimand calling everyone to order.

He shouldn’t have come, but what else was he going to do, sit at home with his swirling thoughts? He needed distraction and this was as good as anything on offer. He pulled the tobacco pouch from his pocket, laid it on the hood of the Model A and started to roll a cigarette.

The moon cast an inviting trail across the grand sweep of Gardiner’s Bay, connecting the steep bluffs south of Accabonac Creek to Promised Land where Conrad now stood. This was the northern limit of Napeague, the narrow thread of land that connected the high ground of Amagansett to that of Montauk.

Not even half a mile to the south lay Conrad’s house and the battered Atlantic coast. Here on the lee shore it was an altogether different world, a place of calm and shelter where the south westerly winds came in fits and starts, broken up by their passage across the upland, and the waters lapped lazily at the arcing sand beach.

The fishermen weren’t fooled by this. They knew from hard experience that the bayside sea could still turn on you in the beat of a heart. One winter just before the war Conrad had been helping Milt Collard run building stock out to Gardiner’s Island when the wind suddenly backed around to the northeast. With a crew of twelve workmen and a bellyful of bricks, Milt’s old cut-down schooner, the Osprey, was already slung low in the water when they set off from Three Mile Harbor, the big 671 diesel straining under the load.

Ten minutes out, the wind turned suddenly and breezed up. An angry chop soon gave way to battle-lines of whitecaps, four feet high, which advanced on the Osprey, slapping into her with remorseless regularity. In no time at all these had grown to six feet. Ice cakes left over from the big freeze began surfing down the face of the waves and shattering against the schooner’s bow.

By now they were pumping and bailing by hand, a bucket brigade of men fighting to keep the vessel afloat. Milt stood in the small pilothouse in the stern, fighting the wheel, water flooding knee-high around him each time the Osprey slumped into a trough.

‘Ditch the cargo!’ he screamed. ‘Goddamnit, ditch the goddamn cargo!’

You never saw a bunch of men move so fast. Instead of water, they now started heaving bricks over the side, no formal chain this time, half of the crew scrabbling in the hold, the others ducking the hail of bricks; the blind panic of men looking death squarely in the eye. There were no life jackets on board, not that they’d have done you any good in water that cold. No, if the Osprey went down, you’d have been better off grabbing an anchor and getting it over with.

It was a close call, but they had made the shelter of Gardiner’s Island, riding out the vicious squall. The wind dropped abruptly and Milt swung the Osprey around, heading back to Three Mile Harbor. Not one word had been shared by the ashen-faced crew since Milt first barked his order at them.

‘You lazy sonsabitches,’ he now said. ‘Two hours to load, two minutes to offload. Now I know you been leadin’ me a dance.’

A handful of men, Conrad among them, erupted in fear-tinged laughter. They quickly figured from the look in the eyes of those who knew Milt a whole lot better that any humor in the remark was entirely of their own imagining.

Milt later admitted that he’d never seen anything quite like it out on Gardiner’s Bay, and this from a man who’d skippered bunker boats out of Promised Land for more than twenty years. Fair weather or foul, the long steamers would put out from the dock in search of the spiny little menhaden fish – bunkers, as they were known locally – that clogged the waters off the South Fork during the warmer months. The Smith Meal Company had a dock and a clutter of hangars where endless tons of the fish were processed. Hauled from the depths in giant purse-seine nets, they were boiled to extract their oil, the remaining pulp scooped from the vats, dried and ground down into fish meal. It was a gut-wrenchingly malodorous process, one that had given Promised Land its name, for the place stank to high heaven – a smell so pungent it tarnished the silver coins in the pockets of the workers.

When the plant was in production, the tall smokestacks belching clouds of fetid steam, the residents of Amagansett lived in dread of an easterly breeze. The stench would descend on the village like a curse, clawing at your nose and throat, clogging your pores. Even during the winter months, when the vats lay cold and still, there was no escaping the smell out at Promised Land. Over the years it had permeated the wooden cladding of the factory buildings and the shanties thrown up for the hordes of itinerant laborers, it had seeped into the pale sand, and it seemed to drip from the branches of the pitch pines.

The fish-meal plant sprawled on the edge of Gardiner’s Bay like a rancid dishrag beside a sink, and yet its presence there had safe-guarded the area. For who in their right mind would want to build in the shadow of such a foul-smelling beast? The low dunes behind the curving beach were unencumbered by houses. More importantly, the fragile hinterland of Napeague had been spared the usual depredations of development. Its deerfeed flats, pine copses and dune hills were still laced with freshwater bogs that rang with the sound of peeper frogs in early summer. Cranberry, blueberry and sundews were in abundance, along with curly-grass ferns, staghorn lichens, Hudsonia, tiny orchids and strange edible fungi highly prized by those of Italian and French descent, who’d been known to come to blows during the short picking season.

Napeague meant ‘Water Land’ in the language of the Montauketts, and the area was a living testament to the happy co existence of both elements. The relationship, tentatively forged over the centuries, recalled an era when Napeague had been open water separating the hills of Montauk from the main body of Long Island.

Some disputed this notion, but Conrad was convinced of it. How else to account for the skeletal remains of the whale he had discovered while out roaming one spring morning? The bleached vertebrae, each as big as a water pail, lay part-buried beneath a tangle of bearberry bushes a quarter of a mile inland at a spot where Napeague was half a mile wide. The only explanation was that the creature had been cast up on a shallow bar linking the two land masses, and that over the many years this slender umbilicus had grown inexorably through a process of accretion, sand layered upon sand, scoured from the ocean bluffs of Montauk and deposited by the ocean.

Conrad was an eleven-year-old boy when he first stumbled across the bones, and to his wildly imaginative mind the find was proof that the great Flood as described in the Book of Genesis had indeed occurred. The whale must surely have found itself stranded high and dry when the waters that God sent to punish the wicked finally receded. As far as Conrad was concerned, discovering those bones was the next best thing to finding the Ark itself atop Mount Ararat.

The possessiveness of the young led him to guard his secret closely. He persuaded himself there was no need to share the discovery, not even with his closest friend – Billy Ockham – who would have been with him that day had he not been forced to trim hickory spiles for his father’s pound traps. Instead, Conrad carefully covered the exposed bones with sand, returning home with just the one vertebra, informing his father and stepmother that he’d found it on the ocean beach.

He had rejected the idea of hiding the precious object, partly because he needed his father’s expert confirmation that it had indeed come from a whale, but mainly because his older brother, Antton, would most likely have discovered the bone then destroyed it – ceremoniously, before his tear-filled eyes – for no other reason than that concealment was proof of Conrad’s affection for it.

For years the vertebra lay casually discarded in a corner of the attic bedroom the brothers shared, Conrad feigning indifference to it. However, when he was alone he’d pick it up, turning it in his hands, tracing its soft, porous contours with his fingertips.

Even when his faith abandoned him some years later, the bone lost none of its iconic power. Twenty years on, he still kept it in his bedroom. It was the last thing he registered before fitful sleep descended upon him, and the first thing his eyes searched out when he woke each morning. It had become the touchstone by which he tested his life. Somehow, it seemed to enshrine everything that had happened to him since he first prized it from the packed sand.

When he looked at it he saw himself romping with Billy on Napeague, grubbing for cherrystone clams that they cooked up on a steel plate over a fire-pit on the beach, digging holes and hauling up fresh water in a nail keg to see themselves through the long hot days of summer, or sneaking out at night to watch the Coast Guard cutters chasing the rum runners all over Gardiner’s Bay, tracer bullets and the muzzle flashes from the big three-inch guns lighting up the night sky, better than the Fourth of July. Other times, he saw Billy torn apart by machine-gun fire, clods of flesh flying, on some nameless rock in the Pacific, thousands of miles from home, fighting for a people who had sought, with considerable success, to annihilate him and his kind.

Good times and bad times, the lump of whale bone had absorbed them all like a thirsty sponge. Given the events of recent years, he now wondered if the bone hadn’t begun to favor the bad over the good, somehow attracting ill-luck to itself, and he questioned whether he was to blame for this. Maybe it was a cursed object, blighted from the moment he first removed it from its natural resting place.

He didn’t dismiss such ideas. Like most fishermen he was given to superstitions – no talk of pigs or knives around the boat, no women or preachers aboard, no whistling in a breeze. He even knew a Swedish lobsterman in Sag Harbor who refused to put to sea in the company of a Finn, but that had as much to do with ancient rivalries between the two nations as it did arcane beliefs. Men for whom death was a daily and very real possibility were inclined to respect the precautionary wisdoms, however curious, of those who’d gone before them. It was the reason Conrad still cherished the caul that had masked his blunt, newborn face.

The patch of diaphanous skin, moist and clear when he was first dragged into the world, now lay dry and crinkled like a piece of old parchment in the shallow wooden pine box made specially by his father to house it. Prized as a potent charm against drowning, deep-sea whalemen used to pay big money for a baby’s caul to carry with them on their perilous voyages, though most found themselves rounding the Horn with little more than a scrap of cow’s after-birth in their pockets, sold them by some unscrupulous type wise to the lucrative trade.

That Conrad should have been born with a caul was as good a portent as any fisherman could wish for his son. It meant that the child was somehow touched, that the gods looked favorably upon him, that this was one boy who would never get to share the company of Davy Jones. Whether there was any truth in this, who could say? All Conrad knew was that he was still alive while others had been taken by the sea.

A sharp pain in his hand brought Conrad to his senses. He flicked the cigarette butt away and turned towards the oyster house, aware again of the noisy debate taking place inside.

It was some years since the beds off the north shore had yielded oysters of sufficient number or size worthy of the New York market, and little remained in the cavernous hall to indicate the building’s original function. The long benches for cleaning and packing the oysters had been stripped out – bought by old Mabbett for a song when he had expanded his fish-packing business – and the community of Amagansett men who followed the sea now referred to the rickety building as Oyster Hall. It was where they collected to while away the slow, fragmented winter months in idle chat. When the weather was too severe for even the most reckless among them to put to sea, the place would be packed with bodies. Right now there were fifty or so men gathered inside, but not one of them turned as Conrad entered.

Some were on their feet, gesticulating wildly, disturbing the pall of pipe and cigarette smoke hanging below the rafters. Others hurled insults at each other. The meeting had degenerated into a free-for-all.

‘Shut it off!’ bellowed Rollo’s father, Ned Kemp. He was seated behind a table on the far side of the hall, flanked by Jake Van Duyn and Frank Paine. Beside them, on a worn square of zinc nailed to the floor, stood the big airtight stove, its long and rickety pipe snaking above their heads, suspended by wires from the ceiling. Grabbing a poker, Ned beat on the pipe.

‘Shut it off, goddamnit!’ The deafening sound restored some kind of order to the assembly.

Ned advanced through the rows of men ranged on chairs before him, brandishing the poker. ‘You, Osborne, bring your ass to anchor.’ Art Osborne duly did as he was told.

‘God in heaven,’ snapped Ned. ‘What do you think the sports’d say if they saw us now? I tell you what they’d say, they’d say they got the battle won, and they’d be right, you sorry sonsabitches.’

Conrad caught sight of Rollo standing with his brothers against the wall in the corner, looking completely puzzled. His father wasn’t naturally given to profanities.

‘We got to get us organized,’ Ned went on. ‘Else we don’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of beating the bill, that’s sure enough.’

The bill in question was a proposed amendment to the state fisheries law sponsored by the growing lobby of sportsfishermen. Like the bill narrowly defeated before the war, it called for a total ban on all fishing by means of nets, traps and trawl lines within the tidal waters of New York State, ascribing natural fluctuations in all fish populations to wholesale pillaging by the commercial fishermen. When it came to it, though, everyone knew the real reason the rod-and-line men were calling for action. They wanted to board the train at Penn Station in New York at 3 a.m. on a Saturday morning in the knowledge that no one else had tampered with their precious waters off Montauk since the previous weekend.

Conrad had witnessed the ‘Fisherman’s Special’ pull into Montauk Station only once, but it wasn’t a sight you were ever likely to forget – hundreds of grown men, many of whom had been on their feet for the past four hours, grappling with their gear and with each other to get off that train, leaping from the carriages, scrabbling through windows, anything to beat their friends-turned-rivals to the favored spots on the boats lined up along the Union News Dock on Fort Pond Bay, a short but sapping sprint away.

To the fishermen of the South Fork, the building crusade against them was an affront of such profound impertinence it made the blood beat in their ears. These were men whose families had fished the waters off the East End for as long as anyone could remember, for twelve generations in the case of the older Amagansett clans. They were the representatives of a tradition reaching back hundreds of years, and many still spoke with the same Kentish and West Country inflections of their seventeenth-century English ancestors who had first settled the village.

Ned Kemp understood that these romantic notions counted for nothing in Albany. The sportsfishermen were wealthy, they could afford the best lawyers, and they were accustomed to getting their own way. It was the reason Ned had called the meeting at Oyster Hall, to urge the fishermen to meet like with like, to act with level-headed pragmatism. But the discussion had clearly become mired in a collective venting of the spleen.

‘I know I ain’t a tub of wisdom,’ said Noah Poole, too old now to do anything but grub for piss clams in summer. ‘The way I sees it though, God Almighty put the fish in the water and the birds and animals in the woods for the people, and when you make any fool laws that stops the people from using ’em, then God Almighty makes ’em scarce.’

‘You’re right …’ said Jack Holden. Noah accepted the compliment by smoothing the few lonely wisps of hair on his head. ‘ … You ain’t no tub of wisdom,’ continued Jack.

This triggered a chorus of sniggers from the other young men he was seated with.

‘You boys got nothin’ better to contribute,’ said Ned, ‘you might as well clear off.’

‘What’s to say? This crap them sports is trying to put over on us, it burns me up,’ said Jack. ‘Sometimes the fish don’t run so good. There’s good and bad seasons for fish just like crops to a farm.’

‘Yeah.’

‘The bass and blues is down right now. Come next year they’ll be running like a damn army. That’s just the way things is.’

‘Always has been.’

Ned looked down at the younger men, deep furrows in his lean dark face, his white hair clipped so short it sat like a dusting of frost on his square skull. ‘We know that,’ he said. ‘Now we got to show it. Prove it.’

‘How’n the hell we gonna do that?’ came a voice from across the hall.

‘First off, I say we co-operate with that young fellow who’s around right now.’

‘You mean that screwball who keeps wantin’ to scrape scales off of my fish?’

There was a smattering of laughter from around the hall. The source of their amusement was a young fisheries biologist with the New York State Conservation Department. Sheepish, bespectacled and with a nose like a cobbler’s awl, the poor fellow had become something of a whipping boy for the local fishermen who openly referred to his biological survey as the ‘diabolical survey’ whenever he dared show his face.

‘I been talking to him,’ said Ned. ‘He’s a log of stuff to learn about fishing, but what he don’t know about bass ain’t worth knowing.’ He ignored the incredulous puffs from his audience. ‘It’s all in the spawning, he says, the Hudson and Chesapeake. The conditions ain’t right for the cows in the estuaries, ain’t no point in us and the sports even arguing, not one of us is going to see a fish off the East End.’

‘Fact is, the sports is takin’ more bass than us anyhows.’

‘Goddamn pinhookers.’

‘Yeah, what we take don’t amount to nothin’.’

‘He knows that, he’s with us on it. Like I say, the problem don’t lie here, it’s in the estuaries, the pollution from the factories.’

‘Factories owned by them politicians and their friends.’

‘Yeah, what good’s a sorry scamp like that going to do against them lot?’

‘If anything can drive you crazy or into evil, it’s politics.’

‘That’s the truth.’

‘I say him being here don’t spell nothin’ good.’

‘No, not by a damned sight.’

And so the discussion continued, despite Ned’s best efforts, whirling, reeling, spinning in circles, until Conrad’s head was swimming with words he no longer heard. The hall suddenly felt very small and congested, the atmosphere heavy, stifling. He steadied himself against the rear wall with a hand. He needed air.

The door swung shut behind him as he stepped outside into the night. A cloud of bugs buzzed around the tin lamp above the door, and for a moment it seemed to Conrad that they too were embroiled in some feverish, futile debate.

He drew a few long, deep breaths, but they did nothing to clear his head. He picked his way cautiously down the steps and towards the truck, each stride an act of concentration. Halfway across the lot he heard the door of the hall swing open then bang shut again. He didn’t turn till he heard the footsteps crunching behind him on the carpet of crushed shells, a pace and purpose to the tread.

Three men were advancing towards him, shoulder to shoulder, backlit by the lamp above the door. The jug-eared silhouette of the fellow on the right marked him out as Ellis Hulse. As they drew closer he recognized the other two as Charlie Walsh and his squat, none-too-intelligent brother-in-law, Dan Geary. And he knew then what was coming.

If there was any doubt, Ellis and Dan moved away from Charlie, drifting lazily off to the sides. Charlie drew to a halt, scraping at the shells underfoot with the toe of his boot. ‘So what do you think?’ he asked, nodding over his shoulder. ‘You think we’ll beat the bill?’

Conrad could feel the lightness shifting from his head to his stomach. ‘Go home, Charlie.’

Charlie looked at him as if seriously weighing the suggestion. ‘Shit on that,’ he said.

Dan Geary grunted with amusement, moving, still moving, around to the left. Ellis was circling to the right, obliging Conrad to retreat a little to keep them both in view.

Charlie advanced a few paces. ‘Just wanted to say I’m sorry, for before.’ His mouth was twisted between self-pity and bitter contempt. Conrad toyed with the idea of further conciliation but rejected it, not because he doubted it would work – that much was certain – but because he no longer wanted it to.

‘So you should be,’ he said, ‘stealing off the dead.’

‘A pair of damn earrings. What the hell does she care?’

‘What if it was your sister?’ fired back Conrad.

It took a moment for Dan Geary to register that Charlie’s sister also happened to be his own wife, but once the thought had lodged itself in his brain it appeared to bother him. He looked at his brother-in-law uncertainly.

‘What?’ snapped Charlie.

‘Nothing, Charlie.’

‘Good,’ cos it’s time we taught this foreigner some goddamn manners.’

Charlie Walsh wasn’t flame-headed like his father, but he still had the fire in him. Conrad could see it sparking in his eyes as he turned back, balling his fists. Conrad could remember his father telling him once in his labored English: ‘You just got to get an Irish down ’n’ beat shit out of him, then he’s the best friend you got.’

Even if they ganged him, as they clearly planned on doing, Conrad stood a fair chance of putting Charlie Walsh down, but he seriously doubted they’d ever become friends because of it. No, he set more store by the other piece of advice his father had offered up at the same time, much to the consternation of his step mother. If you’re ever outnumbered in a fight, he had said, keep your eyes on one man, but be sure to land your first punch on another.

And this is what Conrad did.

His eyes never left Charlie’s, but the punch, when it came, was a scything right across the body that caught Dan Geary square in the face, crumpling his nose and stopping him dead in his tracks. Conrad didn’t wait to see him hit the ground, he was already spinning back, shifting the weight to his left foot, swinging his right arm as he did so.

Caught off-guard, Charlie wasn’t set when the forearm struck him in the head, knocking him sideways. He probably would have kept his footing if Conrad hadn’t piledrived a knee into his hip a split-second later. Charlie snatched at Conrad as he fell, seizing hold of his shirt. Conrad pulled free, but he was off balance, his back now turned to Ellis. In two strides, Ellis was in range.

The boot caught Conrad in the side of the chest just below the ribcage and he heard something crack. He raised his arms protectively in front of his face as he doubled up and the second kick glanced off his elbow. He tried to back away, but Charlie was hauling at his trouser legs now, doing his best to bring him down. From here, things quickly degenerated into a close-quarters dog-fight – fists flailing, fingers clawing at faces and snatching at hair. There were a few small satisfactions – at one moment his elbow met Charlie’s mouth, splitting the lip clean open and dislodging some teeth – but Conrad started to wilt under the hail of blows. A few moments later he found himself brought to the ground, the side of his face impacting with the crushed oyster shells.

Charlie took a step back, setting himself for a swing of his boot. It was clearly intended for Conrad’s head and there was nothing he could do to avoid it; Ellis was all over him, pinning his arms. He closed his eyes in anticipation of the searing white pain and the black void of unconsciousness.

But they never came.

He heard a sound like a sack of grain being dropped from a trailer, and opened his eyes in time to see Charlie collide with a truck, another man wrapped around him.

It was Rollo. Conrad had never seen him so mad. In fact, he’d never once seen Rollo mad. Mute with frustration on a couple of occasions, maybe, but never like this, possessed by rage. He was screaming, pummeling Charlie with his fists.

If it had been a less shocking sight, Conrad might have been the first to react. As it was, Ellis had the edge. Conrad lunged at his leg but missed, looking on helplessly as Ellis snatched a length of two-by-four from the back of a truck.

‘Rollo!’ cried Conrad.

Rollo turned, saw the piece of lumber raised high above Ellis’ shoulder, and he froze.

‘No!’ It was Charlie Walsh who screamed, blood spraying from his mangled mouth. ‘Don’t!’ He extended his arm to ward off the blow, and Ellis truncated his swing at the last moment. Despite the heat of the fight, Charlie knew better than to strike a Kemp, especially Rollo. There would be the devil to pay.

Conrad was on his feet now, moving to be with Rollo. Charlie and Ellis backed off warily, helping Dan to his feet as they left. For the duration of the scuffle he’d been sitting on his ass, staring perplexedly at the blood sluicing from his nose into his open hands.

Charlie Walsh gunned the engine of his truck, the tires spitting shards of shell before biting on the packed sand beneath. He didn’t even glance over as he roared out of the lot.

Rollo watched the taillights disappear into the night. ‘He’s a hard-shell sinner, that one.’

Conrad laughed, then winced from the pain.

Despite Rollo’s protestations, Conrad insisted on returning home. He knew he had fractured a rib, possibly two, but it wasn’t as if it was the first time. Doc Meadows – in his inimitable, cranky way – would only strap him up, tell him to take it easy and maybe give him some aspirin to dull the pain. The first of these Conrad was quite capable of doing himself, the second was out of the question, the third he had no desire for.

He wanted to feel the stab of pain in his side, he wanted it to endure, to aggravate him as he went about his day, to wake him at night each time he rolled over in bed. It would act both as a nagging reminder of what had occurred and as a call to arms.

Already he could feel a clarity of thought descending on him, a determination as clean and hard as the steel of a new blade.

Leaving the parking lot, he found himself swinging the wheel of the truck to the left, heading east on Cranberry Hole Road. Home was to the west.

The handful of rundown shanties clustered on the western shore of Napeague Harbor where it opened to the bay was dubbed Lazy Point by the locals. There was indeed an air of languor about the residents who scratched a living from the surrounding beaches, bars and flats. But when they sold their services to others – shucking scallops, skinning eels or baiting cod trawls with skimmer clams in winter for the ocean crews – they worked with impressive speed and dexterity.

When it came to it, Lazy Point was so called because of its appearance. Aside from a few straggly hedgerow weeds there was hardly a flower to be seen in the place. Instead, the front gardens of the houses were cluttered with fishing paraphernalia, most of it well beyond use, or even repair. Ancient lobster pots lay abandoned in heaps, woven through with tall grasses. Small rowboats were propped up on logs, their rotten timbers destined never to be replaced. Out front of one house there was even a rusting horse-drawn hay rake, a relic from the last century when the nearby salt meadows were cropped for winter grazing.

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