First chapter - Sea of the Edge

Decker fell.

One stumble and he was gone; an avalanche of old skin and bones all the way down to the hallway. He came to rest in an undignified sprawl, face down, his feet still on the bottom stairs, one slipper half hanging off and the other lost on the descent, along with his glasses.

Immediately, the pain shot through him. Gut-wrenching hurt, that made him scream and almost faint.

He knew straight away what had happened — he'd broken both his legs.

 

He was walking a tightrope of brick. Arms outstretched, one foot right in front of the other, slowly at first but then with increasing speed and confidence. He could achieve anything he wanted, now that he was free.

"Bollocks to you, Sergeant Major Jones. Bollocks to square bashing and boot polishing and all the bloody lot of it. Bollocks to the British Army!"

"Come down, you bloody idiot," laughed Dave, but with an edge of seriousness. Even full of beer, he was still Mr Common Sense. "You'll break your bloody neck."

Decker ignored him and carried on along the steelworks wall. The night belonged to him; he was invincible.

"Jesus, it's so good to be alive!"

"You won't be alive much longer if you're not careful. Come on, don't be a prat. I can't afford any trouble with my application going through."

"Why the hell do you want to join the police? Really? Why does anyone want to spend their life in a uniform?"

"You'd never understand."

"You're right, I wouldn't."

He wobbled for a second but then regained his balance, with a childish giggle.

"I might apply to join the circus, you know. It's a doddle. An absolute doddle."

"What?" sneered Dave. "Become a clown? You already are one."

"Very funny. But just look at this."

He was near the corner now. Instead of attempting a 90 degree turn, he jumped to the next bit of wall. He landed fine at first, celebrating with a cheer. But then he toppled forward, his grin turning to an almost comical look of horror. He smashed into the pavement with a sickening crack and his scream pierced through the night.

 

He'd broken his left leg years ago, and now it was both. A matching pair as testament to his clumsiness.

He felt stupid, foolish, a useless old man. His bladder leaked, his memory failed him, and now he couldn't even walk down a flight of stairs without a feat of acrobatics. Though only a minute before he had descended the precarious ladder from the loft. If he could manage that, why couldn't he cope with stairs?

The first time he'd at least had the excuse of youthful high spirits. When had that been? The throbbing agony fogged his mind. Must have been around 1965 or 1966. Then there had been Dave to help him, knocking on the door of the nearest house and asking to use their telephone. The ambulance had come and then his friend had scarpered, worried about being arrested for being drunk and disorderly.

Now there was no-one to help. He would have to call an ambulance himself. Annoyingly, there was no landline anymore as he'd thought it a waste of money, even though he was wealthy beyond worry. His only means of contact with the outside world was the rarely used mobile, which was probably still in his coat pocket. And his coat was in the kitchen if he remembered rightly.

He attempted to crawl, but just the slight movement of his leg sent another lightning bolt of pain through him. If he'd eaten anything, he would have been sick.

How many feet to the kitchen Ten? Twelve? And he would have to turn, even though the hallway was fairly narrow. It was impossible. The pain was so intense that he wouldn't be able to move more than a few inches without blacking out.

He would have to wait here until someone came. But who was going to come? The postman only came as far as the outer gates and left the post there. That just left Magda, the cleaner, but she had gone back to Poland for two weeks.

Who else might come and ring the intercom buzzer at the gates? No-one.

Nobody was going to come anywhere near the place. Not at Christmas.

 

Decker would have driven straight past the entrance if he hadn't been behind the estate agent's car. What at first looked like nothing more than a passing place, curved sharply round to a dirt track and then suddenly straightened, heading a hundred yards through the impenetrable gloom of the trees before arriving at a pair of tall metal gates. The estate agent got out of his Vauxhall Cavalier to unlock them. He was all shiny suit and blond highlights, like a reject from some fashionable New Romantic band. He smiled smarmily back at Decker before returning to his car and leading the way to a large, square clearing where the track became a surfaced driveway, widening into a parking area to the front of a house.

So, here we are," beamed the estate agent, as Decker got out of his car. "Quite a hidden gem, isn't it?"

Decker took a good look. The house was only two storeys, but looked sizeable for him to rattle around in. Though not that old, just Edwardian at the earliest, the building had been given the trappings of a more ancient farmhouse: a huge wooden door beneath a weathered gable, and ivy creeping up the Purbeck stone. Thankfully, there was no thatched roof, which was just a fire hazard as far as he was concerned.

"As you can see," continued the estate agent, "as well as this fantastic house you get these gorgeous grounds, which stretch right round the back too."

Grounds was the right word, Decker thought. You couldn't really call them gardens, given that they consisted of nothing but lawns and a few bushes. As he had little time for gardening, that suited him just fine.

"And over here we have this very spacious outbuilding, which you could use as a garage, or maybe even convert into a flat for guests."

It was a barn, basically; a ramshackle wooden construction, looking in urgent need of repair, but Decker did suppose he would use it as a garage.

"Shall we take a look inside the house first?"

"Sure," said Decker and waited while the young man looked for the right key and wrestled with the huge wooden door.

Inside, the house was a shell, stripped of furniture and all clues to its formers inhabitants, apart from the fact that when it came to painting walls their imagination didn't stretch beyond eggshell white. Decker followed the estate agent from one room to the next, only half-listening to the well-rehearsed sales pitch. He was imagining his own possibilities for the place; where the bookcases would go, and where each picture would hang. It was time to have a proper home again, rather than just a perfunctory roof over his head.

His mind was inevitably thrown back to that first look around the cottage on Sketby Moor — that had been similarly empty but in a far more rundown state. He quickly shook away the memory as it wasn't a place he wanted to go right now.

The estate agent wittered on. Decker made some appreciative noises and followed him upstairs. On the landing, they stopped to look at the hatch above.

"The attic's pretty big so you could have a conversion. Or just use it for storage."

"That'd be useful, yes," said Decker, with a definite plan in mind. His long-desired moonscape model.

"Marvellous. Now, through here's the main bedroom."

The estate agent led the way in a squarish room with a high ceiling. Decker paced around it for a moment, getting a feel for its size, then went over to the window. It looked out on to the back of the house, where there was another stretch of lawn, though this time ornamented with a few flower beds and a small pond. Beyond the rear fence were more trees. This was one of the parts of the New Forest that was actual forest rather than heathland.

"Your nearest neighbour's quite a way away," said the estate agent. "It's the perfect place if you like your privacy."

"Yes," agreed Decker. "I like my privacy." Or to be more exact, he liked seclusion, being away from people and all their dreadful noise.

This was perfect. After a hard day's work, dealing with idiot customers and unreliable workers, he could come back here and for a few hours forget they existed. There would just be him, in his little castle, hidden away in the heart of the forest. It was a place where he would have room to think.

"I'll take it," he said, without a second thought.

 

The old carriage clock, a gift to Decker's father on his retirement from the steelworks, ticked away remorselessly. Everything in the hallway was as it had been for decades: the splintery old chest used as a toolbox, the hat-stand with shoes heaped at the bottom, the bookcase crammed with vintage science fiction novels.

A still life picture with Decker at its centre, unable to move. The pain was overwhelming now, making him bite his lip so hard that he drew droplets of blood. Tears welled up his eyes and his bony fingers dug deep into the carpet.

He'd chosen this place all those years ago because he wanted to be alone, giving little thought what it would be like to one day be a frail old man out here in the middle of nowhere. Where the nearest neighbour was a quarter of a mile away and would never hear a scream for help. Where there were no passers-by to alert.

No-one would come to visit either. No friends or family would pop round this Christmas Eve to offer their best wishes. Anyone who had ever cared about him was either dead or had given up on him long ago.

Through living here, and from years of being anti-social, he had created the perfect prison for himself, and he was sure it would be the end of him, unless he got to the kitchen and that phone.

Did he care? Not so much about dying. Even ignoring all that had happened to him, and the dark underbelly of life to which he had been exposed, it was not a world he viewed with relish. All the preaching and the lying. All the poisonous ideologies pretending to make things better but only making them worse. All the vacuous hype about things that had no worth. He wouldn't be sorry to leave all that behind.

The only sting from death came from this: that he would die without knowing the answer to the question that had plagued his life. What had happened to his wife and daughter? Who had taken them?

 

She walked through the ward like a ballerina dancing across a battlefield, entirely incongruous to the ugliness and misery around her. Even the act of pushing a silly little trolley couldn't mar her elegance. To Decker she seemed like someone from another universe altogether. A realm without such sordid things as broken limbs and bedpans.

Lying there for days, with his plastered leg in traction, he had already reached the crude conclusion that even the plainest of women were leant a touch of bewitchment by a nurse's uniform. But this was the kind of woman who would have looked good in an old coal sack.

"You're new," he said when she reached him and began straightening the pillows and the bed clothes.

"Only to this ward. I'm just helping out."

"Oh. I see. What's your name?"

"Nurse Baxter."

"No, what's your first name?"

"Don't worry about that. I'm just Nurse Baxter to you."

As she leant over him, he caught her wonderfully clean, soapy smell. Up close she was even more entrancing.

"Is it Abigail? Clara? No, I've got it — Grace. Princess Grace!"

"Yes, that's right. Like I said, I'm just helping out here. I'm flying back to Monaco tonight."

"Can I come with you?"

"You're not flying anywhere any time soon, are you? Here, take this." She handed him a painkiller and a glass of water.

"I fell off a wall."

"That was a silly thing to do, wasn't it?"

"Yep, but I was celebrating leaving the army."

"I take it you didn't like the army."

"Not much. I'd rather have been in the Air Force. I like planes, though not as much as rockets."

"Rockets?"

"Oh aye, it'll be all rockets soon, you know, up to the Moon and back. They'll be bases on the moon - whole cities. And then it'll be Mars."

She smiled — with an air of condescension, but it still delighted him.

"I think you're letting your imagination run wild," she said.

"What's the point of having an imagination if you're not going to let it run wild?"

"I suppose."

"Everything in the world was just someone's imagination's once. Perhaps I've just imagined you."

"Perhaps you have. And now I'm going to vanish in a puff of smoke."

And with that she was gone, off to the next sorry case, leaving Decker staring wistfully after her.

 

If he died here he would never know. Never understand what had become of Laura and Zoe. He would slip into the darkness with the mystery unsolved.

But now it seemed any chance was gone, lost in a moment of geriatric clumsiness. Unless he could somehow get to that phone. Could he overcome the pain and make it to the kitchen? He had to try.

He pulled at the top of his jumper and stuck it in his mouth, to give him something to bite. Then he dragged himself towards the front door — just a few inches but the sensation was sickening. As his feet hit the floor there was another jolt of pain. The wool muffled his agonised scream.

It took him a couple of minutes to recover and work out what he was going to do next. The kitchen was behind him, but there was no room to easily turn 180 degrees. He could try crawling there backwards, but that would put even more pressure on his legs. The only solution that he could see was to get face up and then sit up. Then he could get more leverage from his arms and push himself there.

Turning himself face up was not going to be easy. Wincing with pain, still biting the jumper, he twisted the top half of his body over. His legs, a dead weight, remained where they were. Bracing himself, he slid his hand under the left one and quickly pulled it over. The pain was so unbearable that he almost blacked out, and it was another five minutes before he thought about moving again. He sat up and shuffled towards the kitchen, inch by inch, pushing himself forward with his arms. Every foot or so he stopped for a while, to catch his breath and to try to quell the awful feeling of nausea that was overcoming him.

He passed by the doorway to the living room, and then finally arrived at the threshold to kitchen. Gasping for breath, he peered around, expecting to see his coat on the back of the chair by the table.

It wasn't there.

Then he remembered. When he'd come home that morning, after doing a bit of shopping, he'd put the food away and then gone straight up to the loft, still wearing his coat. While eagerly working away up there he'd got too warm and taken if off. It was still up there, on the chair. There was no way he could get it back. Even if he could get up the stairs, getting into the loft involved standing on tiptoe with the hook to pull open the hatch and drag down the ladder. And then getting up that ladder. With two broken legs that was impossible.

There was no way in the world that he could get to his phone. He was trapped.