The First Cut Read online

  The First Cut

  PETER ROBINSON

  For Sheila

  Map by Brian Lehen

  Whitby

  Map by Brian Lehen

  Yorkshire’s Coast

  Contents

  MAP OF WHITBY

  MAP OF YORKSHIRE

  1 MARTHA

  2 KIRSTEN

  3 MARTHA

  4 KIRSTEN

  5 MARTHA

  6 KIRSTEN

  7 MARTHA

  8 KIRSTEN

  9 MARTHA

  10 KIRSTEN

  11 MARTHA

  12 KIRSTEN

  13 MARTHA

  14 KIRSTEN

  15 MARTHA

  16 KIRSTEN

  17 MARTHA

  18 KIRSTEN

  19 MARTHA

  20 KIRSTEN

  21 MARTHA

  22 KIRSTEN

  23 MARTHA

  24 KIRSTEN

  25 MARTHA

  26 KIRSTEN

  27 MARTHA

  28 KIRSTEN

  29 SUSAN

  30 KIRSTEN

  31 SUSAN

  32 KIRSTEN

  33 SUSAN

  34 KIRSTEN

  35 SUSAN

  36 KIRSTEN

  37 SUSAN

  38 KIRSTEN

  39 SUSAN

  40 KIRSTEN

  41 SUSAN

  42 KIRSTEN

  43 SUSAN

  44 KIRSTEN

  45 SUSAN

  46 KIRSTEN

  47 SUSAN

  AFTERWORD

  NEW FROM PETER ROBINSON

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY PETER ROBINSON

  CREDITS

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  1

  Martha

  Martha Browne arrived in Whitby one clear afternoon in early September, convinced of her destiny.

  All the way, she had gazed out of the bus window and watched the landscape become more and more unreal. On Fylingdales Moor, the sensors of the early-warning missile-attack system rested like giant golf balls balanced at the rims of holes, and all around them the heather was in full bloom. It wasn’t purple, like the songs all said, but more delicate, maroon laced with pink. When the moors gave way to rolling farmland, like the frozen green waves of the sea it led to, she understood what Dylan Thomas meant by “fire green as grass.”

  Sea and sky were a piercing blue, and the town nestled in its bay, a pattern of red pantile roofs flanked on either side by high cliffs. Everything was too vibrant and vivid to be real; the scene resembled a landscape painting, as distorted in its way as Van Gogh’s wheat fields and starry nights.

  The bus lumbered down toward the harbor and pulled up in a small station off Victoria Square. Martha took another quick glance at her map and guidebook as the driver backed into the numbered bay. When the doors hissed open, she picked up her small holdall and followed the other passengers onto the platform.

  Arriving in a new place always made Martha feel strangely excited, but this time the sensation was even more intense. At first, she could only stand rooted to the spot among the revving buses, breathing in the diesel fumes and salt sea air. She felt as if she was trying the place on for size, and it was a good fit. She took stock of the subtle tremors her arrival caused in the essence of the town. Others might not notice such things, but Martha did. Everyone and everything—from the sand on the beach to a guilty secret in a tourist’s heart—was somehow connected and in a state of constant flux. It was like quantum physics, she thought, at least insofar as she understood it. Her presence would send out ripples and reverberations that people wouldn’t forget for a long time.

  She still felt queasy from the journey, but that would soon pass. The first thing was to find somewhere to stay. According to her guidebook, the best accommodation was to be had in the West Cliff area. The term sounded odd when she knew she was on the east coast, but Whitby was built on a kink in the shoreline facing north, and the town is divided neatly into east and west by the mouth of the River Esk.

  Martha walked along the New Quay Road by Endeavour Wharf. In the estuary, silt glistened like entrails in the sun. A rusted hulk stood by the wharf—not a fishing trawler, but a small cargo boat of some kind—and rough, unshaven men wearing dirty T-shirts and jeans ambled around on deck, coiling ropes and greasing thick chains. By the old swing bridge that linked the east and west sides of the town stood a blackboard with the times of high tides chalked in: 0527 and 1803. It was a few minutes before four; the tide should be on its way in.

  She walked along St. Ann’s Staith, sliding her hand on the white metal railing that topped the stone walls of the quay. Small craft lay beached on the mud, some of them not much more than rowing boats with sails. Ropes thrummed and flimsy metal masts rattled in the light breeze and flashed in the sun. Across the narrow estuary, the white houses seemed to be piled haphazardly beside and on top of one another. At the summit of the cliff stood St. Mary’s Church, just as it had, in one form or another, since the Abbot William de Percy built it between 1100 and 1125. The abbey beside it had been there even longer, but it had been crumbling away for over four hundred years, since Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries, and now there was nothing left but a somber ruin.

  Martha felt a thrill at actually seeing these places she had only read about. And she also had a strange sense of coming home, a kind of déjà vu. Everything seemed so damn familiar and right. This was the place; Martha knew it. But she’d have plenty of time to explore East Cliff later, she decided, turning her attention back toward where she was going.

  The pubs, seafood stalls and souvenir shops on her left gave way to amusement arcades and a Dracula Museum; for it was here, in Whitby, where the celebrated Count was said to have landed. The road veered away from the harbor wall around a series of open sheds by the quayside, where the fish were auctioned before being shipped to processing plants. Obviously, the catch hadn’t come in yet, as nothing was going on there at the moment. Martha knew she would have to come down here again and again and watch the men as they unloaded their fish into iced boxes and sold them. But, like everything else, it could wait. Now she had made up her mind, she felt she had plenty of time. Attention to detail was important, and it would help overcome whatever fear and uncertainty remained within her.

  She stopped at a stall and bought a packet of shrimp, which she ate as she carried on walking. They sold whelks, winkles and cockles, too, but Martha never touched them. It was because of her mother, she realized. Every time the family had visited the seaside—usually Weston-super-Mare or Burnham-on-Sea—and Martha had wanted to try them, her mother had told her it was vulgar to eat such things. It was, too, she had always believed. What could be more vulgar than sticking a pin in the moist opening of a tiny, conchlike shell and pulling out a creature as soft and slimy as snot? It wouldn’t bother her now, though. She had changed. Her mother didn’t know it, but she had. Now she could probably even rip apart a lobster and suck out the meat. But her mother’s words still stuck in her mind. The more she thought about it, the more she realized that it was not so much the act itself that her mother thought vulgar, but its class associations. Only the lower classes went around at seaside resorts sticking pins in whelks and winkles.

  A bingo caller from one of the arcades interrupted her stream of thought: “All the fives, fifty-five…Legs eleven, number eleven.” The amplified voice echoed through the empty auction sheds.

  Martha passed the bandstand and took Khyber Pass up to West Cliff. At the top, she walked under the enormous whale’s jawbone, set up like an archway into another world. It was a hot day, and by the time she had climbed the steep hill she was sweating. She ran her hand along the smooth, warm, weather-darkened bone and shuddered. If
this was just the jaw, how gigantic the creature must have been: a true leviathan. And as she passed under its shadow, she fancied she was like Jonah being vomited forth from its mouth. Or was she going the other way, entering the whale’s belly?

  She could picture the old Sunday school illustrations of the Bible story: inside the whale had looked as vast and gloomy as a cathedral, with the ribs mimicking its vaulting. And there sat poor Jonah, all alone. She imagined how his cries must have echoed in all that space. But could there really be so much emptiness inside a whale? Wasn’t it all a twisted congestion of tubing and swollen, throbbing organs like it was inside people?

  She tried to remember the story. Hadn’t Jonah attempted to escape his destiny by running off to Tarshish when he was supposed to go and cry against the wickedness in Nineveh? Then a great tempest had raged and the sailors threw him overboard. He spent three days and three nights in the belly of the whale, until he prayed for deliverance and the beast spewed him forth onto dry land. After that, he accepted his destiny and went to Nineveh. She couldn’t remember what happened next. There was something about the people there repenting and being spared, which didn’t please Jonah much after all he’d been through, but Martha couldn’t recall the ending. Still, it seemed remarkably apt. She had struggled against her fate, too, at first, but now she had accepted her destiny, the holiness of her task. She was headed for Nineveh, where evil thrived, and no matter what, there would be no mercy this time.

  Captain Cook’s statue looked confidently out to sea just beyond the jawbone, rolled-up charts under his arm. Cook had learned his seamanship on the Whitby coal ships, Martha had read, and the vessels he had commanded on epic voyages to the South Seas had been built here, where that rusted hulk lay at anchor in the lower harbor. The Endeavour and the Resolution. Good names, she thought.

  Royal Crescent, curved in an elegant semicircle facing the sea, offered a number of private hotels with vacancies, but the prices were too high. She might have to stay a week or two, and over ten pounds a night would be too much. It was a shame, because these hotels were probably a lot more comfortable than what she was likely to get. Still, a room with a bath and a color television was too much to ask for. And you always had to pay more if you wanted to see the sea. How often did people on holiday actually sit in their rooms and admire the view? Martha wondered. Hardly at all. But it was the reassurance that counted, the knowledge that it was there if you wanted to look. And that privilege cost money.

  The promenade along West Cliff was lined with huge Victorian hotels of the kind that were built in most seaside towns when holidays at the coast came into vogue. Martha knew none of these were for her, either, so she turned down Crescent Avenue to find a cheap bed and breakfast place on a nondescript street.

  As it happened, Abbey Terrace wasn’t entirely without charm. It sloped steeply down to the estuary, though it stopped at East Terrace before it actually reached the front, and boasted a row of tall guesthouses, all bearing recommendations from the RAC or AA. Many of them even had their rates posted in the window, and Martha chose one that cost nine pounds fifty per night.

  Wiping the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand, she opened the wrought-iron gate and walked up the path.

  2

  Kirsten

  Come on now, let’s be ’aving yer! Ain’t yer got no ’omes to go to?” The landlord of the Ring O’Bells voiced his nightly complaint as he came over to Kirsten’s table to collect the glasses. “It’s half past eleven. They’ll have my license, they will.”

  “Pray cease and desist,” said Damon, holding up his hand like a stop sign. “Dost thou not ken ’tis the end of term? Know’st thou not ’tis the end of our final year in this fair city?”

  “I don’t bloody care,” the landlord growled. “It’s time you all pissed off home to bed.” He snatched a half-empty glass from the table.

  “Hey, that was my drink!” Sarah said. “I haven’t finished it.”

  “Yes you have, love.” He stood his ground, not a big man, but quick and strong enough to outmaneuver a bunch of drunken students. “Out, the lot of you. Now! Come on!”

  Hugo stood up. “Wait a minute. She paid for that drink and she’s got every bloody right to finish it.” With his curly blond hair and broad shoulders, he looked more like a rugby player than a student of English.

  Kirsten sighed. There was going to be trouble, she could sense it. Damon was drunk and Hugo was proud and foolish enough, even sober, to start a fight. Just what she needed on her last night at university.

  The landlord tapped his watch. “Not at this time, she hasn’t. Not according to the licensing laws.”

  “Are you going to give her it back?”

  “No.”

  Behind him, the cellarman, Les, an ex-fighter with a misshapen nose and cauliflower ears, stood poised for trouble.

  “Well, fuck you, then,” Hugo said. “You can have this one too.” And he threw the rest of his pint of Guinness in the landlord’s face.

  Les moved forward but the landlord put out an arm to stop him. “We don’t want any trouble, lads and lasses,” he said in an icily calm voice. “You’ve had your fun. Now why don’t you go and have your party somewhere else?”

  “Might as well, Hugo,” said Kirsten, tugging at his sleeve. “The man’s right. We’ll get nothing more to drink here and there’s no sense starting a fight, not tonight. Let’s go to Russell’s party.”

  Hugo sat down sulkily and frowned at his pint glass as if he regretted wasting the stout. “All right,” he said, then glared at the landlord again. “But it’s not fair. You pay for your drinks and that bastard just snatches them off you. We ought to get our money back, at least. How long have we been coming here? Two years. And this is how we get treated.”

  “Come on, Hugo.” Damon clapped him on the shoulder and they all got up to leave. “ ’Twould indeed be a great pleasure to drown yon varlet in a tun of malmsey, but…” He pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose and shrugged. “Tempus fugit, old mate.” With his short haircut and raddled, boyish complexion, he looked like an old-fashioned grammar-school kid. He whipped his scarf dramatically around his neck and the end tipped over a glass on the table. It rolled toward the edge, wobbled back and forth there, undecided, then stopped for a moment before dropping to the floor. The landlord stood by patiently, arms folded, and Les looked ready for a fight.

  “Fascist bastards,” Sarah said, picking up her handbag.

  They beat a hasty and noisy retreat out of the pub, singing “Johnny B. Goode,” the song that had been playing on the jukebox when the landlord unplugged it.

  “Russell’s is it, then?” Hugo asked.

  Everyone agreed. No one had any booze to take along, but good old Russell always put on a good spread. He had plenty of money, what with his father being such a whiz on the stock market. Probably a bit of insider trading, Kirsten suspected, but who was she to complain?

  And so the four of them walked out into a balmy June evening—only Damon wearing a scarf because he affected eccentricity—and made their way through the deserted campus to the residence buildings. There were Hugo, Sarah, Kirsten and Damon, all of them final-year English students. The only person missing from the close-knit group was Galen, Kirsten’s boyfriend. Just after exams, his grandmother had died and he’d had to rush down to Kent to console his mother and help out with arrangements.

  Kirsten was feeling a little tipsy as they hurried to Oastler Hall and up the worn stone steps to Russell’s rooms. She missed Galen and wished he could be here to celebrate, too—especially as she had got a First. Still, she’d had enough congratulations to make her thoroughly bored with the whole business already. Now it was time to get maudlin and say her farewells, for tomorrow she was heading home. If only she could keep Hugo’s wandering hands away…

  The party seemed to have spilled over into the corridor and adjoining rooms. Even if they wanted to, which was unlikely, Russell’s neighbors would hardly have been abl
e to get to sleep. The newcomers pushed their way through the crowd into the smoky flat, calling greetings as they went. Most of the lights were off in the living room, where the Velvet Underground were singing “Sweet Jane” and couples danced with drinks in their hands. Russell himself leaned by the window talking to Guy Naburn, a trendy tutor who hung around with students rather than with his colleagues, and welcomed them all when they tumbled in.

  “Hope you’ve got some booze,” Hugo shouted over the music. “We just got chucked out of the Ring O’Bells.”

  Russell laughed. “For that, you deserve the best. Try the kitchen.”

  Sure enough, half-finished bottles of red wine and a couple of large casks of ale rested on the kitchen table. The fridge was full of Newcastle Brown and Carlsberg Special Brew, except for the space taken up by liter bottles of screw-top Riesling. The four latecomers busied themselves pouring drinks, then wandered off to mingle. It was hot, dim and smoky. Kirsten went to stand by an open window to get some air. She drank cold lager from the can and watched the shadows prance and flail on the dance floor. Smoke curled up and drifted past her out of the window into the night.

  She thought about the three years they had spent together and felt sad now they were all going their separate ways in the big, bad world beyond university—the real world, as everyone called it. What an odd bunch they’d made at the start. That first term, they had circled one another warily and shyly, away from home for the first time, all lost and alone, and none of them willing to admit it: Damon, the witty eighteenth-century scholar; Sarah, feminist criticism and women’s fiction; Hugo, drama and poetry; herself, linguistics, specializing in phonology and dialects; and Galen, modernism with a touch of Marxism thrown in for good measure. Through tutorials, department social evenings and informal parties, they had made their tentative approaches and discovered kindred spirits. By the end of the first year, they had become inseparable.

  Together, they had suffered the vicissitudes, the joys and the disappointments of youth: Kirsten consoled Sarah after her nasty affair with Felix Stapeley, her second-year tutor; Sarah fell out with Damon briefly over a disagreement on the validity of a feminist approach to literature; Galen stood up for Hugo, who failed his Anglo-Saxon exam and almost got sent down; and Hugo pretended to be miffed for a while when Kirsten took up with Galen instead of him.