Kittiwake Keep was a decommissioned lighthouse at the end of a sweeping red-brick promenade. Along the seafront were clinking amusement arcades, candy-striped ice-cream kiosks, pastel-coloured beach huts and a bustling fish and chip shop that smelled of salt, vinegar and joy. The air had been bitten by a winter crispness that felt delicious in the lungs.
Alice, Hafsah and I had parked up nearby and were approaching the lighthouse with trepidation. The white and red paint was flaking away, and rust crept up from the bottom of the structure. The whole place had a general air of neglect I found desperately sad.
Suddenly it seemed incredibly naive of me to assume Renner would still be living in the same place he had been over ten years ago. And yet people who lived in lighthouses didn’t seem the type to hop from one home to the next, so I had to hope we were in luck. It was beginning to look like Alice’s last chance, and I was willing to do anything to never have to watch her in that kind of hell again.
‘I assume you’ll be doing the talking,’ Alice said, as though reading my mind. She wore a calf-length houndstooth coat and burgundy-and-gold-framed sunglasses that made her hair look even wilder. ‘On account of being sunshiney as fuck.’
I snorted. ‘Yeah. I don’t think threatening to stab him is the way to go.’
‘Coward,’ muttered Hafsah sardonically, still rubbing at her wrists.
I knocked on the door politely at first, then when there was no response I rapped more insistently. After we’d waited a minute or two, Alice’s shoulders visibly sank.
‘Let’s just go,’ she muttered, pushing her sunglasses further up her nose as if trying to better mask her disappointment.
But then there was the faint shuffle of footsteps, and a grumble as a key was turned in the lock.
T.A. Renner was both exactly as I expected and not at all as I expected. He wore a long velvet night-robe with a fur-trimmed collar, suede slippers with sheepskin lining, and there was an unlit tobacco pipe in his mouth. So far, so eccentric.
But his manner was far more jovial than I’d imagined. He had two perfectly round spots of red flush on his cheeks, as though he’d been drinking a lot of wine, and an utterly euphoric expression; eyes wide and glistening.
‘Frances! How utterly incandescent you look!’ He shoved straight past me and kissed Alice twice on each cheek. ‘Do come in, do come in! I’ll have Crispin rustle up some tea. Crispin!’ He picked up a little silver bell from a sideboard in the hallway, tinkled it insistently, and then shuffled through the house in his slippers, gesturing for us to follow.
Alice lowered her sunglasses and peered over the top of them, utterly aghast. I raised the Kodak hanging on a leather strap around my neck and took a picture of her astonishment. It was simply too perfect not to capture. With the clear cerulean sky behind her and the edge of the rusting lighthouse to the side, it looked like aVogueeditorial.
She was so beautiful it was a little painful to look at. Just like I’d explained in Hafsah’s dorm, I’d never experienced real attraction before. Asexuality had been a coat that fitted almost perfectly until I met Alice.
‘Come on, Frances,’ I said with a low smile, trying to tamp down the unwelcome embers. She was still violent, after all. She may or may not have murdered an immortal cat – and she may or may not have been losing her mind. Thoughts about running a finger down her pixie-tilted jaw were not particularly useful at the moment.
Renner led the three of us through to the kitchen; a semicircular hodgepodge of tables, chairs and sideboards. Mugs and saucers covered every available surface, and there was an aubergine-coloured Aga in the centre of the room that was smoking lightly. Renner did not appear at all concerned by this.
No butler by the name of Crispin seemed to have appeared.
‘Now, Vanessa, how can I be of service?’ he said to me, rustling in a cupboard for some teabags. ‘I trust you’re here to execute the estate.’ He plopped a teabag into each mug and filled them with cold water straight from the tap.
Each of us took a seat at the rickety kitchen table as the cups of non-tea were handed to us. ‘Actually, my name is Lottie,’ I said. ‘Lottie Fitzwilliam. We haven’t met before. I just wanted to ask you a few questions about the book you wrote, if that’s all right?’
‘I wrote a book?’ he asked, eyes widening with awe. ‘How marvellous. Did anyone read it?’
I’d envisaged this conversation playing out in many different ways, but this was not one of them. ‘Well, yes. We did. That’s why we’re here.’
‘Wonderful.’ He beamed. ‘Now here’s a good one. What did the cuckoo say to the ox?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said politely.
‘You’re running late!’ he cried before utterly exploding into laughter. Fat tears rolled down his cheeks, great gulping roars that echoed around the curved walls. He slapped his thigh with so much vigour I was vaguely worried he might shatter a femur.
I offered a courteous smile, and once he’d finally calmed down, I gently nudged, ‘Would you mind talking to us about your book, Mr Renner?’
‘Gosh, it’s funny, isn’t it?’ He got to his slippered feet, sloshing cold tea water over the stained wooden table, and crossed to the sink where he began some miscellaneous clattering. ‘That all books are just different combinations of the same twenty-six letters, and the hallucinations in your brain vary wildly depending on what those combinations are.’
‘That’s true,’ I conceded. ‘We would love to know more about the combination you used in your book, specifically.’
At this Renner gasped and clapped his hand to his mouth, staring out to sea from the kitchen window.
‘Is everything all right, Mr Renner?’
‘Could you even imagine what it would be like if a dolphin could ride a bicycle?’