I Do Not Sleep

by Judy Finnigan

Genres: Ghost; Occult & Supernatural; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

From bestselling author, broadcaster, journalist and Book Club champion Judy Finnigan comes an unputdownable and wonderfully moving story of the enduring power of a mother's love.

Do not stand at my grave and weep

I am not there; I do not sleep.

Five years ago, Molly Gabriel lost her 20-year-old son, Joey, to a terrible sailing accident. His empty boat was found washed ashore on the rocks -- but his body was never found. Now, Molly has returned to the sands of Cornwall haunted by his death, unable to accept he is gone. Joey was an experienced sailor and died on a calm sea -- things just don't add up and Molly cannot let it go. Desperate for answers she turns to Joey's best friend, Ben, to go back to what really happened that day . . .

Release date: May 26, 2015

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 384

Sample

Five Years Later

Adam glanced over at me as he overtook a battered old Transit van on the A38. We’d passed Exeter, which meant there was less than an hour to go to get to Treworgey. He smiled hopefully at me, willing me to feel happy, or at least positive. I saw his look, did my best to smile back. At least we weren’t going to Polperro. At least we were staying slightly inland, at a farmhouse in the Looe Valley, with beautiful views; we knew the place well, having stayed at the old homestead many times when the children were small. I remembered Joey and Daniel, careering down the slope beside the house on their skateboards; how Danny had broken his arm riding his bike round a treacherous bend in the lane, which the family ever after called Broken Arm Corner; how Adam took him to Derriford Hospital in Plymouth; and how ridiculously proud Danny had been when they arrived back at Treworgey with his arm in plaster and a sling. I really did allow myself to smile as I thought of Danny’s self-important face and his little brother’s woebegone look as he realised his sibling had trumped him in the stakes of parental concern.

That was then.

Way back then, when Danny’s silly little accident had seemed so dramatic. Before the clouds collapsed and obscured the ocean, shrouding it in fog; before the seas swelled into the monstrous wall that engulfed my youngest child, swallowed him down into the oh-so-familiar story of Cornish tragedy, the accident from which there was no way back. Ever. No plaster, no sling could cure this. There was no body, even. Nothing left to mourn except an absence, a space; a gap that would never be filled.

Adam looked in his mirror. ‘They’re right behind us,’ he told me with a reassuring grin. This time, I gave my husband a look of genuine relief, because in the black Peugeot which followed our Volvo Estate was all that remained of our little family: Danny, Lola, and, most precious of all, Edie, my shining light, the only purely good and wonderful thing that had happened to me since Joey’s disappearance. I still used that word because I found it almost impossible to think of him as dead. Adam and I had had a blazing row about it two months ago when he told me he’d booked our old cottage for the summer.

‘How could you?’ I’d asked. ‘How could you try to make me go to Cornwall on HOLIDAY, for Christ’s sake? I can’t believe you’ve done this. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me down there, ever again.’

Adam had put his hands on my shoulders and looked me steadily in the eyes. ‘I’ve done it for us, Molly–and for Danny. He wants to come with us; he says it’s unhealthy for us all to pretend that Cornwall doesn’t exist. Before Joey died…’ I flinched. Adam felt the tremor, but his voice stayed firm. ‘Before Joey died, we went to Cornwall as a family every single summer. Danny misses it, and he wants to take Edie there, let her play on the beach.’

‘There’s nothing to stop Danny going back. Without us.’

‘Yes there is. You.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Danny won’t go back to Cornwall without you. Don’t you see? He needs your permission. He told me he was terrified of hurting you by taking Lola and the baby down by themselves. And so I thought about it. Believe me, Molly, I thought about it for a long time. I was frightened of telling you, I knew you’d be upset, but in the end I made a decision. And that was to risk your anger and book it anyway. It’s not as if it’s in Polperro, where Joey… died. You don’t have to get up and look at the harbour every day. We’ll be at Coombe, which is sheltered and which we always loved so much. Where the boys were happy.’ His voice softened. ‘Do you remember how they used to try and round up the sheep? The farmer got furious, and we had to buy him a beer to placate him. And remember how Joey used to ride the family pig? And how they both adored the horses?’

Of course I remembered. Didn’t Adam understand how agonising those memories were? I started crying, the happy memories blending with my ache for Joey. Adam folded me into his arms. ‘Don’t, darling. Don’t. Look, I think Danny’s right. We have to do this for him. Danny misses him desperately too. But now he’s married, he has a baby. He needs to move on, live his life. And, Molly, so do we. We have a grandchild now, hopefully the first of several.’ I smiled at this. ‘We have a future; we have a long life to look forward to. And this is the first step. If it doesn’t work, if you really are terribly unhappy there, we’ll come back home and I promise you I won’t ever ask you to go back to Cornwall again. But never going back there won’t bring Joey back. And we’ll be sacrificing so many happy memories if we don’t ever go there again; it’s special, you know that. Cornwall is part of our family history, a precious place for us. It will always be in our hearts. We have to reclaim that happiness, because it’s real, it’s what happened. Molly, you simply have to accept what’s happened to Joey. For all our sakes, you can’t be in denial any longer.’

In denial. He was right. I was. And I still wasn’t ready to let Joey go. But Adam was persuasive; he’d convinced me, and against my better judgement I found myself speeding down the A38.



As Adam drove, I remembered the night a year ago, when my granddaughter Edie was born. How Danny wept in my arms. ‘God knows I’m happy, Mum, I’m so happy, but I just wish Joe were here to see the baby. My little brother… he would have loved her so much.’ I had comforted him, had tried to tell him not to feel guilty and accept that this new life was a miracle, her birth an occasion of great joy, that she was sent to heal us. And I truly meant it; I did feel deeply delighted, as if life had given us, our family, another chance.

Adam swung left into the driveway at Coombe at the last minute. The lovely old greystone house is hidden from the lane, and after so many years–thirteen now–since we were last there he had forgotten its exact location. But when he saw the open gate with the handwritten sign reading Mr and Mrs Gabriel and Family, he swung the car, followed by Danny and Lola, into the picturesque courtyard in front of the house–where we were immediately astonished, as always, by the perennial lushness of the white climbing roses encircling the porch.

I took a deep breath. This is going to be hard, I thought, my mind immediately enslaved by pictures of Danny and Joey as toddlers, feeding the ducks in the pond behind the house, squabbling outside in the embers of evening about who should have the first bath before bed.

But then Danny opened the Peugeot’s door and lifted Edie out of her car seat. Lola followed with a huge smile. ‘Molly, this is so perfect,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen such a pretty house.’

And I looked again at Coombe, and saw it as I had that first year we all came down on impulse, when Joey was only two and Danny five. I remembered my motherly misgivings, my fear that the longed-for perfect seaside holiday with our little sons would be spoiled by domestic glitches. No view, perhaps, or a shabby house and garden.

There was no need to worry. The place was impeccably kept back then, and it looked exactly the same now. And despite my reluctance about returning, my anxiety about my missing son, the fear that Joey’s memory would haunt my days here in our old family paradise, I sighed with pleasure. Coombe was after all unsullied, a peaceful, lovely house, awaiting our return with quiet welcoming warmth. There was nothing strange about it–nothing dark, threatening or spooky.

I breathed again, and went to take Edie from my son. ‘Look, Edie,’ I whispered. ‘It’s fine. We’re home. You’ll come to love this place so much.’

Adam took the keys from the plant pot in which they were always left, opened the porch door, stepped across the grey slate floor leading to the hall, and, hesitantly, we all followed him.

We quickly settled in. There was a cosy wood fire in the sitting room, all set and ready to light, which we immediately did. Best of all, the owners had left a home-cooked three-course meal in the fridge. Chicken-liver pâté, freshly baked brown bread rolls, a delicious fish pie and apple crumble with cream. All we had to do was heat it up. It was so welcome, so unexpected, and so appreciated after our seven-hour drive down from Manchester, although now I remembered it had always been one of the great selling points of these lovely cottages at Treworgey: a daily delivery service of wholesome good food. All you had to do was call the farm kitchen in the morning. The owners of this little village of picturesquely restored holiday cottages were that thoughtful.

We ate the delicious supper, Edie barely awake but still cheerful in her high chair. She loved mealtimes; loved the sociability of eating with adults, playing with her food, offering it to us with grave infant generosity, teasing us by snatching it away again, chuckling with pleasure when she eventually gave in and let us chomp on her mashed potato and toast fingers.

She was in her tiny element, surrounded by grown-ups who obviously adored her; and so, suddenly, was I, briefly transported to a place where I actually forgot my grief. It was extraordinary, the hold Edie’s presence had on me. I was entranced by her gummy smile, now punctuated with two tiny white teeth at the bottom. During that first evening at Coombe, I was completely focused on this miraculous baby, so much so that when I occasionally drifted back up to the surface to face who I actually was, a bereaved mother who had never even seen her missing son’s body, I felt quite shocked. What was happening to me? Had I stopped being a mother, and become so besotted with my granddaughter that my pleasure in her had almost wiped out the grief of my terrible loss?

No. That was ridiculous. I was still locked in a fight to find Joey. His body was missing. The little boat he had been piloting had washed up ashore, with no clues about my boy’s fate, how he could have vanished off the face of this earth, even given the treacherous seas of Cornwall. So five years on I was still bleeding. God knows I’d tried to carry on living. I was still working at a girls’ school in Manchester, still trying to take pride in the pupils’ achievements. I suppose some of our friends thought I had recovered. But I hadn’t. I’d just been putting it off. Surviving, trying to keep my marriage intact.

But I always knew there would be a reckoning. I always knew I would have to come back and find him. And now Adam had forced my hand by bringing us all down here. He had meant it to heal me. But as I sat surrounded by my family, I knew this was my chance. I needed to know. I would find Joey; I would discover what had happened to my son. And I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that somehow Edie would help me.



I had taken a punt on this pretty little hamlet many years ago after seeing an enticing ad in The Sunday Times. We and our boys had loved it, cocooned as it was in the gentle Looe Valley, close to beautiful beaches and also to Polperro and the Land of Legend, a small but enchanting attraction depicting ancient Cornish myths, which had fascinated and terrified our sons in equal measure.

Although we were always happy at Coombe, as the boys grew older we began to rent cottages in Polperro instead. They were mad about boats and wanted to stay closer to the harbour. Adam had taken them on a sailing proficiency course, and in their teenage years we hardly saw them as they spent whole days at sea with friends who, like them, came back to Cornwall summer after summer. Their reunions were joyful, and while they often spent their evenings illicitly drinking ‘smuggled’ beer and cider on the little beach, we whiled away our time with the other parents, thoroughly enjoying wine and barbecues at each other’s holiday cottages. We were a group of like-minded people from all over the country, mostly professionals, teachers like Adam and me, lawyers and doctors, all liberal enough to ignore the fact that our kids, who although well into their teens were still technically underage, were getting slightly tipsy with beer we had bought for them and left casually in the kitchen for them to ‘sneak’ out to their harbourside camp fires. The children never let us down, though. None of them ever got thoroughly sloshed. Our kids knew we were watching beady-eyed from our warren-like houses, clustered closely together round the harbour.

We were all devoted to Polperro. Other couples, our contemporaries, may have preferred to get together in the Algarve, Spain or Brittany, but we and our little summer circle stayed loyal to Cornwall.

Then, I had loved the place so much. I had felt our family history, small as it was, belonged here. I’d believed our lives would gain meaning here, and–ridiculous as it sounds, since none of us was Cornish-born–that somehow, our destiny would unfold in this mystical place. And of course that had proved all too true for my Joey. His destiny was here, all right. Vanished in our little paradise. And here I was again, so many years on, without the slightest clue about what had happened to my darling boy.



I tried with all my being, all my soul, not to dream that first night at the cottage. I prayed that hideous thoughts would stay away; and for once someone listened. I had refused to believe in any kind of God since my son disappeared. There were no answers from Him in the desperate weeks and months before we gave up hope, not of finding him alive but at least of retrieving his body, something of Joey to wrap warmly in cashmere and lay gently inside a casket; a casket in which to place his favourite old cuddly toys, a casket to lie before the altar in Talland church, a tangible body to pray for and weep over. ‘Hand it over to God,’ said a well-meaning vicar friend when my grief became too much to bear. And I’d tried, but nothing came of it. Just silence. No news. Only the sympathetic words of the Coroner who told us that bodies often disappeared at sea and they were not always, as I had supposed, washed up ashore, even as close to land as Joey’s empty boat had been found.

He didn’t elaborate, but the dark voice inside my head found its own narrative. Yes, it intoned bitterly. Nothing left, of course. He’ll have been eaten; he’ll have been devoured by marine life. The monsters of the deep.

Adam and I didn’t discuss it. Our thoughts about what was left of Joey remained for each of us our secret. Horrible images. Private nightmares, not to be discussed in daylight, for fear we should go mad.

So I had no faith in prayer, and yet that first night at Coombe the entity that guides our dreams thankfully spared me.

The first few days of our summer holiday passed pleasantly enough. I still couldn’t face Polperro, but there were lots of other pretty coves to take Edie to. My favourite was Talland beach, small and unthreatening, with its cosy little café, softly lapping waves and hordes of tiny children digging in the sand, building lopsided towers out of pebbles and bits of shale. Yes, I had to look at the sea, and it was the same sea that had claimed Joey, but here during these soft summer days the water looked so gentle that I couldn’t equate it with the tempestuous tides that capsized Joey in a sudden April squall more than five years before. Apparently it had blown in out of nowhere, Joey’s friend Ben had told me. It wasn’t that my son, skilled sailor that he was, had taken a foolish risk and set sail in bad weather. The sea was calm as a millpond when Joey left the harbour. Half an hour later the wind whipped up and the waves grew fierce and choppy.

And yet… it wasn’t a violent storm, Ben said, just a bit of a blow. He hadn’t been worried about Joey at all until he didn’t return in time for the pub lunch they were supposed to meet up for at the Blue Peter. He confided his concern to a fisherman he met in the pub. The fisherman took Ben at once to find the harbourmaster, who immediately ordered a search. Late in the afternoon Joey’s boat was spotted, wrecked on rocks down the coast near Looe. Joey, of course, was not on board. Joey was nowhere to be found.

As I played on Talland beach with Edie, who was valiantly trying to fill her little seaside bucket with pebbles, I tried not to think of that dreadful day at the start of the Easter holidays, when Ben had called me as I sipped wine in the garden at home in Manchester. Oh, foolish, stupid woman. Just to think of myself sitting there without a care in the world, waiting for Adam to get home, planning a barbecue, made me feel sick.

Ben had stayed on in Polperro while we rushed down in a panic that night. We moved into the same cottage he and Joey were renting. As day after day passed with no news, I took to sleeping in Joey’s bed, his sweater on my pillow, his red scarf wrapped around my shoulders. The local doctor gave me pills, but it was Joey’s scent that enveloped and calmed me on the rare occasions when I managed to drift off. On those nights, inhaling his robust young man’s smell, I felt he was joining me in my dreams. I could hear his voice calling to me, urgent, pitiful, above the sound of crashing surf and howling wind. Oh, how desolate it made me feel.

Now, years later, sitting on the rocks with Edie and Adam, as Danny and Lola, child-free for a few blessed minutes, strolled arm in arm along the beach, I made a decision. I needed to see Ben. Yes, we’d talked about that day many times but I wanted him here with me in Cornwall. I felt a desperate need to go through it all again.

I knew Adam would be unhappy. He saw this break as an opportunity to move on, not to get stuck again in the past. But there was no help for it. He had brought me here, and now I needed to ask more questions. Ben seemed the only person who could possibly answer them. If we went over that Easter day again, now, with the immediate panic of Joey’s disappearance long past, with the questionable benefit of five years’ mourning behind me, maybe Ben would tell me something he might have mentioned before, when I was too distraught to listen properly. The more I thought about what I knew about that day, the more I realised what a blur it had all been.

I began to feel excited, as Edie chortled over some sandy shells I stopped her trying to eat. There must have been something, I thought. Something Ben might have noticed; maybe Joey had told Ben exactly why he wanted to take the boat out alone that morning. Usually they sailed together. Why had Joey decided he wanted to make this trip on his own? I decided to call Ben at once and ask him to come and stay with us at Coombe.

Except I couldn’t get a signal at Talland, and even back at the cottage I would have to use the landline. No keeping it secret then. I would have to tell Adam. I braced myself.



Edie began a swift crawl along the beach, evidently heading towards a small boy who was building a sandcastle with his dad. I lunged forward and grabbed her just before she ploughed into his lovingly crafted handiwork. The boy looked at her with annoyance and disdain. Edie, bless her, gave him an enormous grin and held out a grimy shell. He took it and placed it on the turret of his castle. Edie promptly swiped it back, demolishing a large section of the tower into the moat his dad had just finished digging. I smiled apologetically, and shrugged: what can you do? But the dad scowled. Not a nice man, I thought, as I scooped Edie up and took her back to our beach towel. Adam was watching with amusement. ‘What a plonker,’ he said. ‘Honestly, I’ll never understand territorial wankers like that.’ He looked so chilled that I decided now was the moment to broach my idea about Ben.

‘Adam,’ I began hesitantly. ‘How would you feel if I asked Ben Thomas down to stay with us for a bit?’

He looked puzzled. ‘Ben?’ he asked. ‘Why on earth…?’

I looked at him, and at once he understood. ‘No,’ he said immediately. ‘No, no, no, no, no. Not under any circumstances. That would be all wrong, completely wrong for us right now.’

‘It wouldn’t be wrong for me,’ I said quietly. ‘In fact, I really need to see him.’

Adam looked at me carefully. ‘When did this come on?’ he asked.

‘Just now,’ I said honestly. ‘But I think it’s been in my subconscious ever since we got here.’

Adam sighed. ‘I suppose I should have thought of this. I guess it was inevitable.’

‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘Once I came here I was bound to start thinking about it all again. Bound to start asking questions.’

‘But, Molly, Ben’s already answered all our questions. He’s told us everything he knows about Joey and… that day.’

‘I know. But I was in such a mess I didn’t listen to him properly.’

Adam looked grim. ‘Well, I did,’ he said. ‘And I can assure you he knows absolutely nothing more about Joey’s last day than we do. Molly, love, it’s all over. I brought you here because I wanted you finally to accept that.’

‘Well, what if I can’t?’ I asked sadly. ‘What if getting me here just stirred it all up again? You must have known it was a risk.’

‘I thought that Edie… I thought your focus would be on her.’

‘Adam, I love Edie with all my heart, but she’s not going to make me forget about Joey.’

‘No, of course not. I just hoped we could have a new start.’

I looked at my husband, my heart swelling with sadness and despair. ‘You don’t under. . .