Read Online Permissible Limits by Graham Hurley - Free Book Online Page B

slowly along the terrace, counting the benches until I got to the end. Here was where we usually stopped. Here was where we could look down on the neat rows of moored yachts in the marina, fantasising about the moment when Old Glory would have bought us a big, sturdy ocean-going forty-footer, and we could take a year or so off and circle the globe, threading landfalls together like beads on a necklace. In my heart, I’d always known it would never happen - Adam was far too impatient to depend on anything as fickle as wind and tide - but it had become an important promise we’d made to each other and I liked the feeling it gave me, just thinking about it.
    Far away, out at sea, I could hear the bellow of a foghorn. Then came another, and another, much closer. The balustrade was cold and damp beneath my hands and I shivered, imagining yet again the half-submerged shape of my poor drowned Adam, somewhere out there, wave-tossed and abandoned.
    Growing up in the Falklands, you get used to death. Out on the horse, it would be a rare day when I didn’t come across the carcass of a sheep, the bones picked clean by the circling buzzards, or a sick elephant seal, beached and helpless, waiting for the rising tide to claim him. Back in the settlement, when someone died, we’d dig the grave ourselves, spading down through the soggy black peat and then gathering in the late afternoon to lower the rough, newly nailed coffin and listen to my father intoning a verse or two from the Book of Common Prayer before the light failed and we went back to the cookhouse for a glum round of scones and whisky.
    That had been the small print of our daily lives, something we were used to. For me, dead bodies held no mystery, no fear. But what had happened to Adam was altogether different. There was no body. There were no goodbyes. Just a heap of memories, confused, entangled, shot through with his laughter and his sheer appetite for life. On occasions, when he chose to, Adam could be as gentle as any man I’ve known. The day when I got the news from the fertility clinic confirming that I’d never be able to give him a child, he was kindness itself. But the Adam I treasured, the man I wanted, and won, and loved, was the Adam who’d stepped out of the helicopter all those years ago and shot me the hack old line about giving his winchman a decent party. That, of course, had been a pretext but I hadn’t minded in the slightest because it spoke of boldness, and mischief, and a determination to seize the initiative that I had, in my own young life, never quite managed to master. Living with Adam, getting to know him, a little of that magic had rubbed off, and I knew now - with an absolute certainty - that his death would make me stronger yet.
    Quite why he’d guaranteed Steve Liddell’s loan was beyond me, and it certainly hurt that he’d kept the arrangement so secret. But already, in my mind’s eye, I could see him volunteering to share the load in this new adventure, scribbling a couple of signatures for the bank manager, ignoring the small print. The thought that Steve might fail - that he might come to grief - would never have occurred to him. Once Adam believed in someone, his faith and his commitment were total and there simply wasn’t room for anything as boring and mundane as failure. That’s why he’d been such a delight to live with. And that’s why, even now - facing an interview that might rob me of everything - I could forgive him.
    For some reason, I’d always been the one who woke up first in the mornings, and the thought of Adam’s face on the pillow made me smile. If I listened very hard, I told myself, I could hear him now, rubbing the sleep from his eyes, telling me to get back to the B&B, and treat myself to a large brandy, and join him in bed. Nothing sounded sweeter, and I blew him a kiss, turning away from what had once been our view, glad I’d succumbed to the wine.
    I was back at the B&B by nine o’clock. The woman