by T. M. Logan
The blade was sharp, but not sharp enough. I googled it and found the key thing was the angle, the precise angle – European knife blades have a twenty degree angle, Asian are fifteen degrees – but if you took your time, you could get anything to razor sharpness. It was just a matter of how long it would hold the edge.
I found the knife sharpener in a kitchen cupboard and started to run the blade through, the rasping scrape of steel on stone travelling through the house. Testing the steel on a piece of paper afterwards, the blade went straight through top to bottom without any resistance. The lightest of pressure was enough to breach my skin, a perfect orb of blood rising on the ball of my thumb. The taste of dark blood in my mouth, copper and iron and salt, as I sucked the wound.
The idea of using it was thoroughly abstract, ridiculous, the thought of taking a blade to another human being to deliberately cause them harm. Consciously choosing to injure another person would never normally have entered my mind. It was crazy.
I cleaned the knife of blood and slid it back into its sheath.
But what if it was a choice between Abbie and someone else? Between safety or peril for my only child? What if it came down to that? Would I have given up my life for my son? Traded one for the other?
Of course. Without hesitation.
George Fitzgerald had vanished. I shuddered as I thought about what Ryan might be capable of. He was a liar, adulterer. A murderer too? What if Abbie was next? The question now was whether I was willing to surrender my freedom, my liberty, in order to protect my daughter – even if I had to draw blood.
All I knew was that I was her father, and I would never forgive myself if I stood by and did nothing. I would willingly throw myself in front of a bullet for her.
Years ago, I had failed. I wouldn’t fail again. I would do anything to keep her safe.
Anything.
48
You could see almost the whole city from up here, spread out like a map below.
The castle jutting into the skyline atop its outcrop of rock, the creamy-white dome of the Council House just visible between the buildings surrounding it on Market Square. The cricket ground at Trent Bridge, six floodlights looming over it like giant fly swats. Bunched together with the city’s two football stadiums, Forest and County, all crowded close within a half mile.
Summer was in full cry. Blue skies barely troubled by a hint of cloud, Sunday morning air clean and crisp, the smell of yesterday’s freshly cut grass still lying across Wilford Hill. I liked to come here early in the morning when it was quiet, before anyone else arrived, even the groundskeepers. I often had the whole place to myself. Sometimes I talked quietly, sometimes I just sat on the grass and listened to the birds sing, watching through the forest of marble and stone as the hearses wound their way slowly up the hill, leading columns of cars up from Loughborough Road to the chapel and crematorium.
I loved it up here.
I hated it too.
I used to come with Claire for the first few years, on Sundays and birthdays. We’d bought Abbie a few times. But gradually through the years, the visits had tapered off, until I didn’t want to suggest it anymore. Since then I’d come alone. I didn’t call myself a Christian, and no longer believed in God or any higher power that could act with such senseless cruelty. As a boy, I had been in my local church choir, singing at weddings and funerals and twice on Sundays, and sometimes I had imagined I could hear the voice of God whispering in the echoes of the empty nave and high in the wooden rafters.
I hadn’t known God for a long time now, but I knew everyone around here by heart.
There was the gravestone nearby covered in a red Forest shirt. Changed at the start of every season when the new home strip came out, always the number 4 on the back. There was the Polish couple who had died forty years apart, a faded black-and-white picture behind glass of them on their wedding day. There was the row of plain stones, set apart from the rest a little further down the hill, for the victims of an air raid on the city in 1941. A mother, father and their three children among them, laid side by side. The stones green with age and neglect, another forgotten tragedy.
I never wanted to forget, never wanted the wound to close. Forgetting meant losing, forever. I didn’t want to forget how fragile everything was – life, happiness, family – all of it paper-thin. So thin that anything could tear it into ragged shreds. I needed to remember, needed to be sure I would never be complacent again. I couldn’t talk to Claire about it anymore.
That was why I needed to talk about it with Rebecca.
To tell her how I’d pushed for Joshua to go to nursery when he turned three years old. Claire had been in two minds about it, but I had found the nursery, vetted them, put my trust in them. I had reassured her, told her it would be fine. I was the one who looked up the studies on child development, seen all the research that said nursery would be good for socialisation, language skills, motor skills, all that stuff. I told her it was the best thing for Joshua and for us, for our family, for her career. And mine. It took months, but I changed her mind in the end. I wore her down, persuaded her to do it.
Rebecca has heard the story many times before of course, but she always lets me talk.
‘The first time I dropped him off there,’ I say, ‘the very first day, I got a vibe from the place that I hadn’t got before. It was a chaotic Monday morning and I got a sense, a gut feeling that the staff were not quite on it, they weren’t quite alert enough to what was going on with the kids. A couple of them on their phones, a couple chatting, an open side gate, I got an uneasy feeling – and I came so close to turning around and walking away, taking Joshua back home with me. But I told myself I was being stupid, paranoid, over-protective. So I dropped him off that first day, and every day afterwards . . .’
I had ignored my instincts. And only a few weeks later, they had taken the children on a visit to the park on a bright summer day, for games and ice creams on the field. The staff became distracted by a wedding party arriving at nearby Bridgford Hall; just a few crucial moments of inattention while Joshua wandered off towards the library at the edge of the park. An inquest finding of death by misadventure, the coroner concluding that it was less than two minutes from him slipping away to the moment he ran out into traffic on Central Avenue.
Two minutes.
A crow, sleek feathers shining oil-black in the morning sunshine, landed on a nearby headstone and considered me with sharp black eyes. I stared at the bird for a moment before putting my rucksack down on the grass and sitting on it, brushing leaves away from the headstone beside me, picking out a few clumps of moss that had started to push their way through the grass.
I never used to know what to bring, but I’d settled for flowers years ago to bring colour to this spot: always the brightest yellow and the loudest red I could find. Yellow and red. Always yellow and red. The colours of a comfort blanket, a favourite car, a favourite storybook. Placing the flowers at the foot of the pitted marble headstone, I read the inscription again even though the words would be engraved on my heart until the day I died.
Joshua Luke Collier
12th July 1999 – 4th September 2002
Beloved son of Claire and Ed, cherished baby brother of Abbie
Sleep, beautiful boy
I laid a hand on the marble, the stone cold and hard beneath my fingers.
‘Happy birthday, son.’
49
I drove west through the suburbs, past the university and out onto the dual carriageway. Waiting at junction 25 roundabout on the M1, I checked the tracking app and saw that Ryan’s car was still stationary in Beeston. He’d not left yet. Good. I joined the motorway going north, driving for half an hour before I peeled off west, into the hills. An A-road at first, becoming a minor road, sheep grazing on gently sloping fields, deep green valleys crisscrossed by dry stone walls.
Edale was tiny, a scattered village centred on two pubs and a café by the little station. The Sheffield to Manchester railway line chug
ged through it, along the bottom of the valley, but only one train an hour actually stopped at the village station. It catered mostly to hikers. I took the phone out of my bag and checked the GPS tracker. Ryan was on the move now, avoiding the M1 and using smaller roads that came up through the middle of Derbyshire, about half an hour behind me.
Joel Farmer may have let me down on the background check – of which there was still absolutely no evidence, despite the hefty expense – but at least the tracking equipment he’d supplied was working.
I parked my Peugeot at the main walkers’ car park by the village hall, tucked into a corner next to a big Range Rover where it would be relatively inconspicuous. Behind me was the railway line, to my left a border of trees. The public toilets and village hall were on the far right, away from my vantage point. It was overcast but dry, with no rain forecast. That was good. It meant more walkers would be out, more people with whom I could blend in.
Taking up position in the passenger seat, I slid down low and watched a single woman get out of her car. She opened the boot, changing shoes and gathering equipment. I took out my binoculars, training them on the woman. She was dark-haired, late twenties, fully kitted out for fell running: Lycra and a headband, sturdy trainers and a small pack on her back with two water bottles in pouches each side. It struck me as slightly unusual, a woman on her own up here. It was more common to see people in twos and threes, rather than walking solo.
Is it you? I thought. Are you the one he’s meeting?
I took out my phone, zoomed in with the camera and snapped a couple of pictures of her. An athlete’s physique, high cheekbones and kind of Scandinavian-looking, there was no doubt that she was attractive. But not a match for the pictures of Danielle White on Facebook. I watched her as she stretched, took a drink from one of her bottles, and set off at a jog.
A train rattled past behind me, on its way to Manchester.
I checked the GPS tracker app again, watching the dot as it drew nearer. Feeling like the spider at the centre of the web, watching the fly crawl closer, heedless of the danger.
Ryan was coming right to me.
50
Ryan arrived just after noon, parking up and stretching as he got out of the car. He opened the boot of his Audi and sat on the tailgate to change his trainers for heavy hiking boots, then pulled on a bright orange jacket and hoisted a good-sized rucksack onto his back. Lifting the binoculars to my eyes, I watched as Ryan took out his phone, checked the screen, smiled and tapped away for a few seconds, before putting the phone back in the pocket of his jeans.
Checking she’s still coming, Ryan? Is your girlfriend on schedule?
I would follow them first, get pictures of them together, and then confront them. In my head, I practiced what I would say.
Hey Ryan, who’s your girlfriend? No, too direct.
Hi Ryan, who’s this? Yes. Don’t give him a chance to think.
The orange jacket was good, I thought. It was highly visible against the green and brown of the countryside above. No chance of losing Ryan while he was wearing that.
My own coat was generic navy blue, a fairly nondescript jacket that Ryan had never seen me wear. Blue jeans, walking boots, green rucksack, nothing really to distinguish me from any other walker in the Peaks. I stayed well back out of sight, a few other visitors between us, watching him thread his way up the path and begin the ascent towards the open moorland high above the valley floor.
I checked my phone for any messages, but there was no mobile reception up here. Tapped my pockets to ensure I had the rest of my kit easily to hand. Map: check. Fully charged powerbank: check. Energy bars: check. Water: check.
Knife: check.
I felt exhilarated, almost giddy, to be in control for once. To be on the front foot rather than just reacting all the time, as I had been for the last couple of months. I cinched the straps of my rucksack tighter and set off in pursuit, making sure to keep Ryan about two hundred yards ahead the whole time. It was just like following him in the car – the trick of it was to be far enough back so that it was not obvious you were following, but to stay close enough so that you didn’t lose track of him if he moved out of sight.
We walked up the lane from the little railway station at Edale, past an old white cottage, then a tiny overgrown cemetery, slanting gravestones mottled dark with age. Past a parish church and onward, the ground starting to rise a little as we moved up from the valley floor.
I kept my eyes on him, as the houses fell away and the path led through fields of buttercups. Rising, all the time rising, towards the low clouds skimming the dark gritstone ridge ahead. Ryan only turned and looked back once, but he seemed to be looking out across the valley rather than back down the trail, stopping to take a picture of the view.
I moved back behind a hawthorn tree, dipping my head so the bill of the baseball cap hid my face then taking a water bottle from the side pocket of my rucksack as if I too had stopped for a breather. I counted off two minutes in my head before looking back. Tapped my trouser pockets – phone left side, knife right side – and set off again.
There was movement ahead, a figure, running.
A figure, alone, coming towards Ryan now. Moving downhill towards us.
A woman.
She slowed when she reached Ryan.
Got you.
I snatched the phone from my pocket, selected the camera with maximum zoom. There was still no phone signal, not even a single bar. I got ready to take a picture, but instead of stopping and greeting Ryan, the woman picked up speed again and ran straight past him, towards me. She was in her forties, I could see now, at least ten years too old to be Dani White. Just another fell runner out on the moors.
I nodded to her as she passed.
‘Afternoon,’ I said.
She nodded and smiled back.
I kept walking, cresting the top of the hill ten minutes later. Looked across the high moor laid out in front of me. The valley below had a few sparse reminders of man’s influence on the landscape, populated here and there with dry stone walls, a scattering of sheep and a few houses. But up here on the moor it was absolutely desolate. Wild, unmanaged land, dark green peaks rolling on for mile after mile, as far as the eye could see. Like waves on the sea. Nothing to suggest any kind of change in the last hundred, or thousand, or even ten thousand years – probably not since the last Ice Age.
The view was spectacular.
I turned back to the path, eyes slitted against the wind whipping over the gorse, searching the path ahead for a figure in a bright orange jacket. But the landscape was empty.
Ryan was gone.
51
I had followed Ryan for almost an hour, scrambling up the rock-strewn path that led out onto the top of the untamed moors. It was still overcast but the clouds were thinning now, the sun trying to find its way through.
Of Ryan and his secret girlfriend, however, there was no sign.
How could he have just disappeared? There’s nowhere to go, no trees, no hiding places. I checked my map, realising then what I had forgotten amid all of my planning and preparation: I had no compass. Maybe there was an app I could download? My hand was halfway into my pocket before I remembered there was no signal.
I unfolded my map instead, tracing my location with a finger. The valley was behind me to the south, the path wound north-west, toward a couple of peaks in the distance. Way off to the left, I could make out figures moving on the slope of Kinder Scout, the highest peak in the area. Ryan was wearing an orange jacket – I should be able to spot him easily enough. I sat on a rock, expecting to see him appear from a fold in the ground at any moment.
It was certainly beautiful up here. Rugged and bleak and breath taking. There was nothing like it in Nottinghamshire. Nothing to match the raw size and scale of the Dark Peak.
I heard footsteps behind me.
‘Hey Ed, I thought it was you,’ a familiar voice said. ‘What are you doing up here?’
I whirled around.
/> ‘Ryan!’ I said, my heart thudding in my chest. ‘Christ, where did you come from?’
He stood back, a look of alarm on his face. He’d taken the bright orange jacket off and looped it through the straps of his rucksack.
He was alone. No sign of Danielle White.
Damn.
And now my cover was blown, the stealthy pursuit compromised. My hand went instinctively to my pocket, feeling for the knife, its handle curving into my palm.
‘Sorry, Ed,’ Ryan held up his hands in a placatory gesture. ‘God, I’m so sorry, didn’t mean to startle you. Thought I saw you across the moor but convinced myself my eyes were playing tricks on me.’
I felt my pulse start to settle.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘You just took me by surprise.’
‘That makes two of us, I guess. Claire didn’t come with you?’
‘Claire’s still away, in Ireland,’ I said. ‘I have to say, Ryan, I’m a bit surprised to see you up here, to be honest.’
‘How’s that?’
‘The thing is . . .’ I frowned, trying to disguise a flush of awkwardness that came from knowing his routine, his movements. ‘Abbie said you went to Manchester on the second Sunday of the month, to take flowers to your mum’s grave. I thought you’d be there.’
Ryan nodded and gave a sad little smile. ‘Sometimes I just can’t face it, going to the cemetery where Mum . . .’ He cleared his throat, his cheeks reddening. ‘Sometimes I get halfway there and it feels too overwhelming, everything coming down on top of me, all those memories. So I come here instead, to be on my own for a bit. It’s so beautiful up here it helps me clear my head.’