Doctor Who_ Rip Tide - Louise Cooper [23]
So, then, he was here, but Ruth wasn't. This change of habit forced
Nina to revise her view that he was only pretending to explore the rock pools. He was looking for something. What, though?
For several minutes she dithered between courage and cowardice, wondering whether to make a direct approach and ask him straight out what was going on. In the end, cowardice won and she merely continued to watch, ignoring two more brief but ferocious squalls that swept in from the sea. The jelly-baby man was working his way thoroughly and methodically from pool to pool. Every so often he dipped the pink fishing net down into the water, brought it up again and carefully examined the contents, but he obviously did not find whatever he was looking for. Then, just when Nina had almost decided that nothing was going to happen and she might as well go home, he gave up. The tide had turned, and the incoming sea was starting to surge into the pools, slapping and swirling over the lowest of the rocks. Another squall came in, and by the time it passed, the jelly-baby man was back on the sand and coming in her direction.
Not wanting to be seen, Nina went quickly back into the beach shop as he approached. She bought a chocolate bar and a packet of crisps, then hung around near the counter until she judged that he must have gone by. As she cautiously emerged she saw his back view heading away up the road, using the pink fishing net like a hiker's pole.
She pulled up the hood of her anorak, and started after him.
Ruth felt the shivering beginning again, and ferociously she set her mind to combat it. But it was becoming hard; the bouts were happening more and more frequently, and each one took a further toll on her energy. She knew she was seriously weakened. And she knew that she must do something about it soon, or she would pass the point of no return.
If only she could get warm. It was, she knew, purely a result of the sickness; she had all the heating and clothing she could possibly need. But despite them, there was a relentless, aching ice in her; a cold that seemed to penetrate to her innermost self and that nothing could alleviate.
From here she couldn't see the outside world, but she knew that the squalls were still coming in from seaward, one on the heels of another. She did not know, could not begin to guess, how long it would be before the weather changed. Before it became dry again and she could venture out. She had seen people in clothing that protected them from the rain, and had wondered ... then acknowledged that it was too great a risk. She could only wait. There was no other choice.
Ruth did not have the ability to cry. Tears, anyway, would have been worse, far worse, than the sickness that was slowly but inexorably sapping her life force. But she could feel the pain of grief, and it was in her now, like a cancer devouring her from within. And fuelling the grief and making it immeasurably worse was the heartbreaking misery of facing up to the fact that she was responsible for a tragedy that should not have happened, and she didn't want to believe it had happened, and she couldn't bear to believe it had happened.
Outside, another squall swept the coast, and the voice of the blustering wind seemed to echo in her skull. She sat, shivering. She waited. There was nothing else she could do.
INVESTIGATIONS
It seemed that the jelly-baby man really was just an ordinary holiday-maker. Nina trailed him up the beach road for a quarter of a mile before he turned in to the first of several letting cottages that were separated from the road by a tangle of trees and bushes. From behind a dripping hawthorn Nina watched him unlock the cottage door and go in. A light came on, and a minute or so after that the sound of Radio 4 wafted from one of the windows.
Nina withdrew to the road, feeling disappointed and baffled. She had been so sure that the stranger had some kind of hidden agenda, and to find him behaving like a perfectly