Lorna spotted her before the path crested, a dark sliver moving against the bracken where the cliff bent westward. Nell Stride walked the way her sister might have walked ten days ago, with a camera slung low on one hip and her shoulders set at the careful angle of a woman measuring distance. Below, the sea dragged itself along the rocks in slow, grey tongues. Above, the sky thinned to the colour of old paper.
Lorna kept to the inland edge of the trail, where the turf was still springy and the gorse had not been trampled. She had brought no camera.
Lorna let Nell Stride draw ahead along the headland path before she moved out from the bracken. The wind off the sea carried a cold mineral smell, salt and something older beneath it, the kind of scent that lived in the cracks of cliff rock and never quite washed out. Her boots found the worn groove of the trail without her having to look. She had walked this path a thousand times as a girl, and her body remembered the soft give of the turf, the places where the stones jutted up through it like broken teeth, the slight inward tilt the land made where the cliff curved west toward the lighthouse that had not shone in forty years.
Nell's dark coat climbed the rise and disappeared over the lip of the hill. Lorna did not follow. She had not come to the headland to speak to her sister, not yet. She had come to find the man who rented the old saltbox at the bend of the cliff road, the painter who kept to himself and whose windows glowed at odd hours, the man Tom Belmore had mentioned that morning with the careful reluctance of someone passing on a thing he was not sure he should pass on.
The saltbox stood where the road bent inland around a stand of hawthorn. It was low and long, its roof sloping steeply down to the north in the way of all saltboxes, and it had been white once but the salt wind had turned it the colour of weathered bone. Lichen had climbed the north wall in pale green tongues. A chimney of red brick rose from the ridge, and a thin line of smoke leaned out of it toward the sea. Lorna had passed the place many times without stopping. Now she stopped.
The front door was set into the side of the slope, half-hidden by a lean-to of weathered boards that might once have been a woodstore. A clay pot of dead herbs stood on the step, the stalks still tied with a piece of garden twine. Lorna knocked, and the sound went through the wood like a knuckle on a drum.
Silence, then the scrape of a chair, then footsteps, careful and unhurried, the footsteps of a man who did not expect visitors and was not going to pretend he did.
The man who opened the door was taller than she remembered from the one glimpse of him in the village shop. Or perhaps it was the doorway that made him seem so, the way the lintel pressed down on the brow of the house. He wore a paint-spattered shirt, the cuffs rolled to the elbow, and his trousers had a pale smudge across one knee. His hair was pushed back from his forehead in a way that suggested he had been running his hand through it for some time. His eyes were pale, the kind of pale that caught the last of the daylight and held it, and his face had the stillness of a man who had spent a long time alone.
"Miss Peck," he said. He did not seem surprised. He stepped back from the door without waiting for her to introduce herself, and the air that came out of the house was warm and thick with the smell of linseed oil. "Come in. The kettle is on."
Lorna went in. The studio smelled of linseed oil and turpentine and the faint sweetness of old paper, and beneath all of it the salt of the sea, which never quite left any room in this village. Canvases leaned against the walls, their faces turned away as though they did not wish to be looked at, and a long table in the centre of the room was buried under brushes and jars of pigment and a clutter of small pots whose lids had been left off. The window facing the sea was half-obscured by a stretched canvas on which a single gull had been painted in meticulous detail, every feather suggested rather than drawn.
"Sit where you can," Jonas Quill said. He moved toward the stove in the corner, where a kettle did indeed sit on a low flame, and his movements had a careful economy that made Lorna think of a man who did everything twice in his head before he did it once in the world. "I have one chair. I have several crates. The crates are more comfortable than they look."
Lorna took a crate. The wood was smooth under her hands, worn by years of being sat upon, and she could feel the grain of it against her palms. She watched him pour water into two mugs, watched the careful way he measured the tea leaves into the pot, the slow precision of his hands. He had the look of a man who had not been touched by another person in some time, and who had made his peace with it.
"You came about the cliff road," he said, without turning around.
Lorna did not deny it. "Tom Belmore said you saw something the night Margot died."
Jonas Quill set the mugs on the table and sat down in his chair. The springs complained under him. He looked at her across the cluttered surface, and his eyes were steady and a little sad, the way the eyes of a man can be sad who has lived a long time with his own thoughts and not found them sufficient company.
"I saw headlights," he said. "Two o'clock in the morning. I was awake. I am often awake at two o'clock in the morning. The cliff road is right there, you see." He gestured with one long hand toward the window, toward the bend in the road that ran past his door. "I had been working on a study of the gorse. The light had gone wrong on me. I had given up and come to the window for a bit of air. The road was empty for an hour before that. I watched it. I had nothing else to watch. Then a vehicle came from the inland side, moving slow, and the headlights swept across the gorse and the rocks and then went out."
"Stopped?" Lorna said.
"Stopped. Or was stopped. I could not see the vehicle itself. The gorse is high along that stretch, higher than a man, higher than a small van. I only saw the lights when they came around the bend, and then they were gone, as though someone had reached for the switch." He picked up his mug, held it between both palms, did not drink. "I thought it might be a patrol. I waited for the sound of an engine, the crunch of tyres on the gravel when it started up again. I heard nothing. I stayed at the window for twenty minutes. The road stayed empty. At half past two, a vehicle did pass, moving fast, and the headlights came around the bend and were past my house before I could count to three. That was the one I saw in the patrol log the next morning. Sergeant Pells told me about it when he came to ask if I had heard anything. I said I had. I said I had seen a vehicle at two and another at half past two. He wrote down the second one. He did not write down the first."
Lorna sat very still. The studio was quiet except for the small sounds of the sea below and the creak of the chair as Jonas Quill shifted his weight, and somewhere in the walls a timber ticked as it cooled. The light in the room had gone the colour of bruised plums.
"Why did he not write down the first one?"
"I don't know," Jonas said. "Perhaps he thought I was mistaken. Perhaps he thought I had been drinking. I had not been drinking. I had been painting." He glanced toward the half-finished gull on its easel, and the look on his face was the look of a man defending himself against a charge he had grown tired of hearing. "I have been painting for nine years and I have never once mistaken a pair of headlights for something else. I know what I saw. I know the difference between a lamp and a headlamp. I know the difference between a moon on the water and a torch in a hand."
"And the patrol log has no record."
"The patrol log has no record. Sergeant Pells was very polite about it. He said he would look into it. He did not look into it. Or if he did, he found nothing, because there was nothing to find. The vehicle was gone before I could see what kind it was. I could not even tell you if it was a car or a van. Only that it had two headlights, and it stopped, and it did not start up again while I watched."
Lorna thought of Margot, who had been on the cliff path somewhere at that hour, who had been seen by no one and heard by no one, whose body had been found below the headland at first light with the tide still going out. She thought of the letter that had brought her back, the letter she had not yet shown to anyone, the letter that had sat in her coat all day like a small cold stone pressed against her ribs.
"You did not speak of this at the time," she said.
"I spoke of it to Sergeant Pells," Jonas said. "He did not ask me to make a statement. He asked me if I had seen anything, and I told him what I had seen. He thanked me for my time. That was the end of it." He paused, and the pause had the quality of a man choosing his next word with care, the way a man chooses where to put his brush. "I have lived here five years. I keep to myself. I am not a man the village consults when something has happened. I am a man the village walks past on the road. When I go into the shop, Mrs. Pells smiles at me the way she smiles at the weather. When I pass the school, the children do not know my name. I am the man in the saltbox. That is what I am."
Lorna looked at him. His hands were still wrapped around the mug, and the paint under his fingernails was the green of sea-pools, and his face in the fading light had the stillness of someone who had learned to expect very little from other people and had not been disappointed often enough to soften the lesson.
"What do you think happened?" she said.
Jonas Quill looked at her for a long moment. Then he set his mug down on the table, very carefully, as though the sound of it might break something in the room, or in himself.
"I think someone stopped on that road at two o'clock in the morning," he said. "I think they stopped for a reason. I think the reason was Margot Peck. And I think whoever it was did not want to be seen, and so they switched off their lights and waited until the road was clear, and then they went on, and they did not go past this house again for half an hour, and by then Sergeant Pells was not awake to log it." He lifted one shoulder and let it fall, a small motion that gave away more than his words did. "But that is only what the headlights suggest to me. I may be wrong. I am a man who paints gorse and the colour of the sea at four in the morning. I am not a detective."
"Neither am I," Lorna said.
"No," he said. "But you are her sister."
The word sat in the air between them. The sea below went on dragging its grey tongues along the rocks. Somewhere out on the path, Lorna thought she heard footsteps still moving away, though she could not be sure, and she did not rise to look.
The silence held. Below the cliff, the sea turned over a stone, then another, the sound arriving slow and wet, like someone testing the temperature of an argument they had not yet committed to. Lorna's hands stayed around her mug, though the tea had gone cold in her grip and she could feel the chill of the ceramic pressing into the soft of her palm. A gull went somewhere above them, calling out the name of the dark.
Jonas Quill turned away from her then, and she watched him do it with the careful slowness of a man who knew that he was about to do something he could not take back. He crossed to the small table under the window where he kept his work, and what he kept on his work were the usual things one might expect of a man who had spent five years on this coast and another twenty before that chasing other shores, other silences. Brushes in a jam jar. A tin of water the colour of weak coffee. A notebook closed with a rubber band. Tucked into the back of the notebook, a folded piece of cartridge paper that he lifted out and turned over once in his hand before he turned back toward her.
"I did not want to show this to anyone," he said. "I do not know why. But there it is."
He crossed to where she sat, and he did not sit down. He stood over her with the paper held out at arm's length, the way one holds out a photograph of the dead to a stranger who has asked to see it and is not sure they had the right to ask.
"I made it on the eleventh," he said. "The eleventh of last month. A week before she died. I had gone up to the lookout at noon, because the light on the gorse was doing something I could not get out of any photograph, and I wanted to draw it. When I got to the top, there was a woman already there. I spoke to her. She told me she was watching for a friend. I think she was telling the truth."
He set the paper down on the table in front of her, and Lorna did not lift it at once. She stared at the back of it for a moment, at the place where the paper had been folded most often, which was darker than the rest.
"I do not draw people," Jonas Quill said, as if she had accused him of something. "I am not good at it. I draw light falling on things. But this woman, she was so still, and she did not seem to see me, and I thought that if I drew her, I would at least have something to remember her by, in case she turned out to be no one I had ever seen. I drew her in charcoal. I have not touched it since."
Lorna lifted the paper.
The woman on the page was small in the field of charcoal grey, set against an empty sky. She was standing on the lip of the cliff, looking out across the water with her hair caught back and her hands by her sides. The proportions were slightly wrong. Her head was a little too large, perhaps, or her shoulders a little too square. But Lorna understood what he meant when he said he did not draw people, because the woman on the page was not a portrait, she was a presence. She had been drawn by someone who was trying to record the quality of her attention, and so her face was barely defined at all. It was only a faint smudge of charcoal, and her features were a series of suggestions. The ghost of a nose. The upward flick of an eyebrow. The small firm line of a mouth that the artist had decided could not be approached directly.
But she was not Margot. Lorna saw it at once, the way one sees the wrong key in a familiar ring. The woman was too tall in the shoulders, and too squared across the jaw. The hair, where the artist had drawn it, was not the kind of fine dark hair that Margot had inherited from their mother. This hair was thicker, and lighter, and pulled back with more intention, and Lorna had the strange sensation, looking at it, that she was looking at a coat she had once seen hanging on someone else's hook.
"She was wearing a navy coat," Jonas said from behind her. "With a collar turned up. I could see the shape of her against the sea and I knew she was not from the village, because no one in the village owns a coat that dark. And she had this way of standing, as though she had practised it in front of a mirror and only got it right at the last minute."
Lorna turned the paper over. The back of it was empty except for a small mark in the corner, a single line of charcoal like the first stroke of a letter, which was all the artist had been able to commit to before something else drew him away.
"The eleventh at noon," she said.
"The eleventh at noon."
"And you spoke to her."
"Only to ask if she was all right. She said she was watching for a friend. She said that the friend was later than she had said she would be. She used the word late twice. She said it the way one says a word one has been trying not to say."
"Was she alone the whole time you were there?"
Jonas Quill looked at her for a long moment. His eyes, in the failing light, were the colour of the water in the tin under his brushes, and not more readable than that.
"She was alone when I left," he said. "But before I left, I saw her raise a hand. I could not see to whom. The path down to the beach is cut into the cliff face, and there is a bend in it where a person can stand without being seen by someone above. I did not go and look. It was not my business."
Lorna looked again at the sketch. The woman on the cliff had her hand at her side, not raised, because Jonas Quill had chosen to draw her as she had been when he first saw her, alone against the grey. But he had remembered the hand. He had remembered the way she had stood. He had, Lorna thought, remembered too much of her, and that was what had kept the paper folded in his notebook for a month.
"Could you recognise her if you saw her again?" she said.
"I don't know," he said. "I could recognise the coat. The coat, I could recognise. And the way she stood. The way she put her weight on her right hip, and not her left. And the way her mouth was set, as though she were listening to a piece of music she had heard before but did not yet love."
"I am asking if you could recognise her."
He looked at her steadily. "I drew her in case I could not find her again," he said. "That is the answer to your question. I do not have a better one."
Lorna set the paper down on the table, face up, and did not look at it again. Outside, the dark had come in fully now, and the sea had become only a sound. The only light in the room came from the small lamp on the sill, and under it, the sketch of the woman on the cliff looked like a small grey
in a window. The ink was not quite dry at one corner, and she noticed it without meaning to, the way a person notices a sound they have no name for in a house they used to know.
Jonas Quill had not moved. He sat in the chair across from her with his hands on his knees, his face turned half away from the lamp so that only one side of it was lit. The lit side was the side she remembered from the pub, from the small hall above the post office, from the two or three times she had passed him on the lane and he had raised a hand and then forgotten to put it down. The unlit side was the side she had not known was there until tonight, and it was older, and more tired, and she did not know what to do with it, so she looked back at the sketch.
"Jonas," she said, and her voice came out quieter than she had meant it to. "Why did you keep it?"
"Because I do not know how to throw things away," he said. "That is the honest answer. The other answer is that I thought it might mean something to someone, and I did not want to be the person who had thrown it away when they came looking."
"Who did you think would come looking?"
He was silent for a moment. The lamp made a small sound, a thin ticking, the way a cheap bulb does when the current is not quite steady. Outside, the sea sounded like a person turning over in bed.
"Nell," he said at last. "I thought it might mean something to Nell Stride. I thought she might have come back because of it, even if she did not yet know it herself."
Lorna did not ask him how he knew Nell, because she already knew. The village was small, and Jonas Quill had been here five years, and people talk to people who will listen, and a woman who had come back after ten years would talk to anyone who would let her sit in a kitchen without having to explain why she was there. She had done it herself, years ago, when she first came back to walk the cliff path after her father's funeral. She had sat in kitchens she had never sat in before, and she had drunk tea she did not want, and she had let strangers tell her what her father had been like in the years she had been away, and she had been grateful for it, and she had hated it, and she had not been able to tell the two things apart.
"You should give it to her," Lorna said. "Not to me. To her."
"I will," he said. "But not tonight. Tonight I wanted someone else to see it first. Someone who is not her. Someone who does not already know the story she has told herself about why she came back."
"And what story is that?"
He looked at her then, fully, and the lamp caught the other side of his face as he turned it. "The story that she came back because of the letter," he said. "The story that the letter is the thing that brought her. The story that if the letter had not come, she would have stayed in Leeds until she was old, and never have set foot on this cliff again."
Lorna said nothing.
"She came back because she had to," he said. "She came back because there is a thing she has not finished here, and the letter is only the shape of it, the way a key is the shape of a lock but not the lock. She will not see that yet. She will not see it until she is standing where I stood when I drew that woman, and she sees what I saw."
"What did you see?"
"A woman who was not waiting," he said. "That is what I saw. A woman who was not waiting for anyone to come, and who was not waiting for anyone to leave. A woman who was on the cliff because the cliff was the place where she had to stand, and that was all. That is a different thing, Lorna. That is a very different thing."
He said her name the way he always said it, as though it were a piece of paper he was unfolding. She did not know why she noticed that, or why it mattered, but it did, and she let it matter, and she did not try to correct it.
She picked up the sketch and held it out to him. He took it from her, and she watched his fingers close around it, careful of the corner where the ink was not yet dry. He put it back into his notebook, and closed the notebook, and set it on the table beside his cup.
"I will walk back with you," he said. "It is dark, and the path is not kind at night."
"I know the path," she said.
"I know you do," he said. "I only meant that I would like to walk it."
They went out into the dark together, and the wind came up the lane to meet them, smelling of salt and of something else, something green and broken, the way the cliff smells in October when the bracken has begun to come away from the earth. The lamp in the window of the cottage went on behind them, and then it did not, because someone had come in from the back and turned it off, and Lorna did not turn to see who.
At the corner of the lane, where the path forks toward the cliff and toward the village, they stopped. The sea was louder here, and she could feel it in the soles of her boots, a low vibration that was not quite sound.
"Jonas," she said. "The woman on the cliff. Was she Hattie Pells?"
He did not answer at once. He stood with his head slightly tilted, the way he stood when he was listening to something he could not quite hear, or when he was deciding how much of the truth to give away at one time.
"I do not know," he said. "I have asked myself that every day for a month. The coat was the wrong colour for Hattie. The way she stood was not the way Hattie stands. But the way she held her mouth, the listening, that was something I had seen before, and I had seen it on Hattie's face in the photograph Tom Belmore keeps on the bar, the one of her at sixteen, before she went away to teach."
"And if it was her?"
"Then she came back," he said, "and no one has seen her, and that is a thing that will have to be lived with, the way all the small disappearances of this place are lived with. I do not think she came back to be found. I think she came back to stand on the cliff, and to put her hand up to someone she loved, and then to go away again, and that is all."
"And if it was not her?"
He turned to look at her, and in the dark his face was only the shape of a face, and his eyes were only the suggestion of eyes. "Then it was someone else," he said, "and we will never know who, and that is the more ordinary kind of sad, and it is the kind I have learned to write down."
They stood for a moment longer, and then Lorna said goodnight, and he said goodnight, and she went down toward the village, and he went up toward the cliff. She did not look back. She listened until his footsteps were no longer distinguishable from the sound of the sea, and then she stopped listening, and walked on, and the wind followed her all the way to the door of the house where Tom Belmore was waiting up for her with the lamp on, and Vivienne Stride's coat hung on the peg by the door, and inside, in the kitchen, the kettle had just begun to sing.