The Canadian had been waiting for him just inside the treeline.
The Muleskinner seemed delighted by the revelation of one of his captives to the other. It was a sudden appearance. Taryn saw the fissure in the sand, and remembered it. It had always been there, visible as a dark scratch from the treeline of the windbreak, but hidden again from the level sands, until you were right on top of it.
One particularly hot summer, when Alan had gone to London and left Taryn idle in Norfolk, she got tired of the lap pool and waiting on the tide. She took to walking over the inlet when the sun, coming green across the Broads, shone right into the channel, turning crushed cockleshells in the sand into a cloud of stars. The water itself was braided with sunlight and shadow, and warm. It wasn’t as salty as the sea because, even at low tide, the river at the back of the inlet ran into this channel. Taryn would slip into the water, face the setting sun, and swim to keep her place. Still she would be swept slowly towards a little beach on the seaward bend, where she’d climb out and walk back to begin all over again.
The moment she saw Jacob—battered but alive—she let out a cry of relief. The Muleskinner thrust a fist into her shoulder and knocked her down the bank. She rolled, then sat up at the foot of the bank with dry sand plastered from her muddy overshoes to the crown of her head.
Jacob’s face and neck, hands and feet, were webbed purple with chilled blood. He was wearing jeans and a cashmere jersey, but the wind would be blowing right through them. He was chained, but his chain had plenty of play in it. He looked up when he saw her and came as far as he could towards her, as if to help her to her feet. He stretched out his hands. Taryn got up and went to him. His hands were icy. His cheeks clammy and mouth dry. He had bruises on his jaw and forehead, blood on his sweater, and crisscross slashes on the backs of his hands. She let go when she saw that the webbing of one of his thumbs had been cut all the way through.
Jacob put his mouth to her ear and said, ‘Run, Taryn. He’ll catch you, but try to get around the corner and take a good look at the banks.’ Then he let her go.
Taryn brushed past him and clambered over the tractor tyre. She ran as fast as she could seawards. She didn’t bother to listen for pursuit, or look over her shoulder, or brace for impact. She built up momentum and used her newly conditioned muscles to power away over the shells and the film of warm water. She closed on the corner, and jumped over the deep step in the small beach she’d used to climb out on all those years ago.
Then the Muleskinner slammed into her back and lifted her over his head, and instead of struggling she wrenched herself around to look as far as she could see. The view swam before her eyes, the scalloped sandbank of the channel, its height diminishing a little—or was that only distance? A dead tree, half buried, and slimed green. Another bend, maybe a hundred and fifty metres on, which hid the sea. She could hear the waves.
The Muleskinner carried her for a few paces, then threw her down and waited for her to get up. He said, ‘If you try that again I’ll cut off his nose.’
Jacobs’s nose, not hers.
The Muleskinner wouldn’t kick her or cut off her nose, because of course those things didn’t fit the story he was telling himself, a version of the old story he’d had about how he was her white knight. Her dark white knight.
But Taryn was pretty sure now that none of this fastidiousness meant that he wouldn’t kill her. She’d changed her mind about that. There was a way in which he’d planned for her to die, and he was going to stick to his plan.
Before she got up, she dandled her hands in water collected in one of the wave-shaped depressions in the sand. She rinsed them, taking her time. Then she stood and went obediently back to Jacob.
The Muleskinner had her sit on the side of the tyre opposite Jacob. He unlocked the flounced knot and wound the chain twice around her neck, threaded the lock through, snapped it shut, tested it with a sharp tug, then dropped it, cold and wet and heavy against her décolletage. It swung, tapping her, like a hand making that gesture: mea culpa, mea culpa: the fault is mine. Taryn tried to meet the Muleskinner’s eyes and was horrified when she did. How bright and dead they were. She wanted to ask him if he was hearing voices or losing time, but of course that wasn’t it. She said, ‘I would have talked to you once I realised that it was you, but you didn’t give me any way to contact you. You have to see that. Later everything was complicated by my getting mixed up with MI5 because some Saudis came to speak to me about my book. MI5 was bugging my phone. How could I speak to you freely without causing you trouble?’
‘It may sound far-fetched, but it’s true,’ Jacob said, his voice as reasonable as she’d tried to make hers.
‘Look at your feet,’ said the Muleskinner.
They both looked at their feet. There were halos of water around each of Jacob’s naked toes. When he lifted one foot the sand went matte again. The tide was turning. The first sign of it in the channel was this slight liquefying of the sand as more water came into it by capillary action.
‘Your boyfriend has worked everything out. He can fill you in—as the inlet fills in.’
Taryn caught the smirk, brief and ghastly on that hollow-cheeked face.
‘I’m not Taryn’s boyfriend,’ Jacob said. ‘I’m interested in someone else. Who won’t miss me. And you know how that is. So you might consider taking pity on me.’ He said all this as if explaining something quite routine, as if he supposed it might make more impact that way than if it were delivered with tears and pleas.
Taryn was crying. She did the pleading for Jacob. She begged for his release, his innocence of anything she was guilty of.
‘You don’t sound convinced, Taryn. Neither of you sounds at all convinced of anything you’ve said.’
‘Well, that’s a shame,’ said Jacob. ‘Because it’s all true.’
‘Please,’ sobbed Taryn.
‘Perhaps we don’t believe you capable of hearing us,’ Jacob said. ‘So haven’t the heart to muster true sincerity. So why don’t you just piss off and give us our privacy.’
The Muleskinner’s eyes narrowed as he gazed at Jacob with what looked like indignation.
‘Don’t you want to know,’ he said, ‘why you are going to drown?’ His eyes flickered back to Taryn, and he flinched, as if he were shocked by the sight of her. ‘Drown like Webber drowned, desperate, face mashed into three inches of water in a drain, spraying water everywhere, struggling, rubbing his chin raw?’
Good, thought Taryn, savagely. Her old hatred and satisfaction were roaring through her and she didn’t regret, and hadn’t repented.
But Jacob was saying something about there never being sufficient reason for murder. He didn’t sound sincere. He sounded as savagely sardonic as her demon had.
‘We will listen to whatever you want to tell us,’ Taryn said, still trying. ‘I’ll confess.’ She turned to Jacob. ‘I confess to getting this man to kill Webber for me.’
‘I’m not listening to him. He can just fuck off,’ Jacob said to Taryn. He turned himself completely away from the Muleskinner. ‘If he’s disabled one of the cameras, Palfreyman’s security people will be at the house already. So if he means to get away, he’d better move.’
‘I didn’t disable a camera. I didn’t have to. I got you both to walk into the trees,’ said the Muleskinner. ‘Also, I’ve already pulled Taryn’s phone apart. And I borked the SIM on yours before using it as a sound recorder.’
Taryn wondered which of her phones he’d found. He would only have known to look for one. She’d been carrying both her new one, and the phone MI5 had cloned. Had she said anything to the Muleskinner between when he delivered the blow to the back of her head, and when he threw her bag into his bivouac? Would the bugged phone have picked up anything more than her calling out to Jacob in order to locate him? She had planned to go to the bathroom as soon as she got in the house, and leave the phone there—then retrieve it before she went, and be heard saying, ‘It’s okay, I found it,’ like a person who has innocen
tly mislaid a phone. And, anyway, she had imagined talking to Jacob outside the house, taking him for a walk along the beach and telling him everything that had happened, all she knew, before they sat down and went through her grandfather’s papers.
And here she was now, still running through precautionary measures against surveillance, and wishing she was being watched, by cloned phones, or drones, or ravens, or even demons—though she supposed demons could just as easily depose her about the dissolution of her grandfather’s library once she was dead and in Hell.
And then Taryn had a moment. Wait. There’s something in that. What’s stopping the demons from just killing me and asking all the questions they want to ask once they have me in Hell?
The Muleskinner interrupted her thought. ‘I’ll leave you to get on with it,’ he said. ‘Drowning.’ He turned on his heel and trudged back up the bank, its sides collapsing behind his boots. He paused at the top, looked at them once more, and made a gun of his hand, cocked his thumb and mimed firing on them. Then he walked away, passing quickly below the horizon of the lip of the bank.
‘Let’s wait a few minutes,’ Jacob said. ‘He’s a sly shit and might nip back to check what we’re up to.’
Taryn wondered whether there was anything they could be up to. She went to Jacob and pressed her face into his chest. She began to cry, half real, half fake—as much weeping as growling and grinding her teeth. Her mind rushed along in a sluice of acid, conductive thoughts. Jacob must have a plan. It might be an outside chance, but Jacob had decided that they stood no chance of reasoning with the Muleskinner, or appealing to him. That’s why he was so rude; so keen to get the man out of his sight. Taryn wouldn’t have been able to decide as Jacob had. She wouldn’t have given up one option even to take hold of another.
She kept up her yelps and wails and was glad that she was at least warming Jacob as he held her.
He began to speak when her crying grew quieter. ‘I tried talking to him, as a cop to a misunderstood and misled perpetrator. But he wasn’t interested in telling me his story. He’s a man of few words who doesn’t like to open his mouth unless he’s put the person he’s talking to in a position where they won’t talk back. But I’ll tell you what: I don’t think he’s at all sure of his motivations for murder. Or even what murder means. Though he’s done it before and, by putting us here, he’s trying for a second and third. I think he’s someone who has driven himself over the edge by trying to have feelings.’ He paused, then added, ‘I can see how that might happen.’
A group of terns flew overhead, travelling seawards. Taryn matched their cries with a deeper sound, a real moaning. She was about to die at the hands of an infantile fantasist who set himself to do things, involved people in his acts, and then slipped his moorings.
‘However,’ Jacob said, ‘on the subject of the tides he positively shone.’
He sounded calmly disdainful but was shivering with, Taryn thought, as much anger as cold.
‘Ah,’ he breathed, and Taryn knew the Muleskinner had reappeared to take a peek at them—hopefully a final one. She bunched Jacob’s soft sweater in her fists and pushed it into her hot eyesockets. She burrowed into him, her face burning with fury. She felt she might at any moment levitate with rage, bound to the tractor tyre by the chain, like a helium balloon anchored by a ribbon to the railing of a hospital bed—a get-well-soon Taryn, making a gesture of caring in the absence of presence. The fashionable presence, prescribed for everyone now, like a spiritual superfood. The thing she could never get right, being Taryn Cornick, who was never in the right place at the right time.
A few minutes later Jacob set her gently away from him. He got onto his knees and began to scoop handfuls of black silt from the tyre’s rim, favouring the hand with the injured thumb. Taryn set to helping him. At first her pace was that of an idle child on a beach, wrapped up in a project, busy but not compelled; then Jacob tapped her arm and made a speed up gesture. She began digging in earnest.
Jacob left the rim to her and began excavating around the tyre, making discouraged noises as the water flowed back into the hollow he was making, carrying more sand down with it. ‘What’s around the bend?’ he asked.
‘Same as here, except the bank flattens out a bit at the turn. Opposite to the side we came from. Also, there’s mist over the sea, but I couldn’t say where it was headed.’
She looked up to check the movement of the clouds. Wind came into the channel, but it was difficult to tell which direction it was blowing. The clouds seemed to indicate a north-easterly. The mist might flow into the inlet, or it might stay out from the coast, following the sea lanes, as if stalking ships.
Taryn had lost the feeling in her fingers. They were bright red and her nails were black, fine sand jammed into the cuticles as well as under the nail. She’d nearly cleared the rim.
The bed of the channel had begun to sparkle. Streamwater was no longer filtering far down in the sand, but welling up, coaxed by the pressure of the incoming tide.
Taryn drew Jacob’s attention to the fluent water.
‘If I undermine the tyre here it should tilt into the depression I’m making,’ Jacob said. He didn’t mean it would by itself. They would have to lift it. She didn’t know if that was possible. She could see what Jacob was trying to do—that if they could get the tyre up on its rim, they might roll it out of the channel and across the flats. That’s why he’d wanted her to take a look at the banks downstream. She thought of the incline at the lowest place, where she used to climb out of the water, a series of sand steps formed by each retreating tide, steps the shape of sedimentary rock but as soft and powdery as dry rot.
It would be very difficult. And it might be impossible.
Jacob told her to get up and free the spare lengths of her chain from the tyre as much as possible.
She lifted and shook it until it crossed the well of the wheel and pooled at her feet.
Jacob said, ‘I’ll get under the tyre and push. You can pull from the side where the chains are fixed. You’ll have to stop pulling when I say, and get your hands back on it to steady it. We don’t want it going all the way over.’
Taryn saw she’d have to be low for her pulling to tilt the tyre and not just drag it a little way across the sand—though she doubted that any force she could assert could do that. She got onto her knees and wrapped the chain around her wrists.
Jacob squatted and told her, ‘Now.’
She flung herself backwards, hauling. It was the wrong angle. Several links popped through the slit, and each time it happened the tension went off the chain.
‘Stop,’ Jacob said. He came around the tyre again and bent over his water-filled excavation and burrowed, as energetic as a dog. The blood from his thumb reddened the water. Taryn was about to say something about the problem of the play of the chain through the two slits, when she suddenly saw what Jacob had already seen—exactly what the Muleskinner had in mind for them.
He hadn’t just meant them to pick up their ends of the chain and, as the water rose, step from the sand onto the tyre and perch there shouting for help, in the great estuary, hidden in a sound-deadening channel. No, that wasn’t enough for him. And he hadn’t just wanted them to balance on top of the tyre, fighting to keep their footing in the currents as the tide flowed in, then losing their footing to swim, chained like boats to a mooring buoy, trying to stay afloat for however long the tide was full, and slack, and ebbing. He hadn’t just planned for that, which would be impossible anyway, since the chains were too short, and their bodies weren’t buoyant boats at the top of a tide. What the Muleskinner had planned and provided for was worse. Jacob and Taryn were tied at either end of one length of chain. It had some play through the slits in the tyre, and could be pulled either way. The stronger of them—Jacob, even with his injuries—would have the choice, when it came to it, when the waves were at his lips, of keeping his head above water if he pulled Taryn under. Yes, it would be she who drowned. The Muleskinner’s ideal scenario hadn’t
been two deaths, but a desperate contest, and Taryn’s death at the hands of someone she trusted.
‘Again, Taryn!’ Jacob yelled. ‘Pull! Keep your angle as low as you can.’
Taryn pressed her chain-wrapped fists towards the sand and hauled down and back.
The tyre came up with a loud sucking noise. Jacob frantically delved under it and got a grip, and a tiny bit of leverage. ‘Go,’ he grunted. He put his strength into it while Taryn leaned all her weight back and took a couple of quaking, skidding steps backwards. She heard the sucking noise again and felt the tyre’s inertia change to weight.
‘Stop, stop.’ Jacob’s voice was muffled.
She stopped and sat down, keeping the chain taut.
The tyre was tilted up a bit. Jacob had a leg jammed under it. He was resting before making another effort, and wriggling in farther, as far as he could. His face was white with effort and pain.
‘He wants you to drown me,’ Taryn said, panting.
‘Yes, and I will. You know I will. So we have to get out of this.’
He certainly knew how to make a motivational speech. But he wouldn’t meet her eyes after saying it and Taryn was forced to accept he was making a statement of plain fact, a prediction about himself, and that, when it came to this sort of situation, he’d know full well what he was capable of.
Taryn was hot. Her hair clung to her neck. Her pants were soaked, the sand under them was now filmed with water. She was hot, but shaking hard.
‘All right,’ Jacob said. ‘Get ready.’
Taryn pulled back and got in position.
‘On three.’ He counted. Taryn threw herself backwards. The sky swung over her. Two herons flew by, up the channel, crying, harsh and dark. The sky went red. Taryn’s shoulders and elbows popped. And then she fell back as the strain abruptly went off the chain. She didn’t pause but rolled up and scurried back to help Jacob steady the tyre, which was on edge, vomiting sandy water from its interior, and teetering, threatening to go all the way over.
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