by Tim Weaver
Only branches moved.
Only the trees made any sound.
Another weapons search soon proved fruitless: there was nothing close by, nothing serrated or edged, and certainly nothing to compete with a rifle.
I’d have to improvise.
Reaching over the side of the veranda, I scooped up a handful of hard, crumbly earth and stepped back, beside the door, so that I would be behind it when it opened. Delaying for a moment, trying and failing to still my pulse, I took a breath and wondered if it would have been better to have run, and taken my chances among the trees. But it was too late now.
I launched the dirt up, on to the roof.
As soon as it hit the wood, it scattered and spread, a noise like waves crackling across a shingle beach, and then there was movement – instant, quick – from inside.
The door creaked open.
I turned, my back against the wall, and watched it inch out in my direction. It had no glass in it, but two of the wooden slats had slightly warped and, between them, I glimpsed the vague hint of a man.
A hand came to the end of the door, fingers along the edge of it, holding it in place, and then the barrel of the rifle drifted into view, pointing down towards the veranda. Come on. A bit more. A creak sounded and he took another step forward, more of the gun barrel extending out past the door: the fore-end, the tip of the scope.
More.
At the bottom of the door, I could see his boot now.
Halfway up, the zip on his coat.
A bit more.
A smooth, unblemished hand on the fore-end.
Come on, more.
I needed to trap his arm in the door.
Force him to drop the rifle.
More.
Instead, he stopped, as if he’d seen something.
I looked out at the forest, trying to imagine what, but all that stared back at me was the twisted darkness behind every trunk.
And then I realized something.
I turned, looking through the warped slats of the door.
It wasn’t something in the forest he was looking at.
It was me.
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I didn’t have time to think.
As soon as I saw the flash of an eye between the slats, I smashed into the door with my shoulder. It snapped back, whipping on its hinges, and Vale got jammed between the door and the frame.
Grabbing the door handle, I yanked it towards me and smashed into him again. It gave him a fraction of a second to try and move, to retreat even further inside, away from the door, which he did – but not all of him made it. I crunched the door into his arm, just below the elbow. He yelled out in agony, his grip instantly loosening on the rifle.
I kicked at it – his hand, his wrist, the gun. Anything.
The rifle spun off and hit the veranda floor.
As soon as it did, he pulled his arm in and my weight – still against the door – forced it back into the frame. The door clattered into place and clicked shut.
I reached down, picked up the rifle and pointed it towards the door, gripping hard – and then the wind came again, rigid as bone, and I realized how cold I was. I couldn’t feel my feet at all now, could hardly feel the ends of my fingers. My skin was starting to turn blue and my head was swimming: I was hungry and tired, confused, still unbalanced by weeks and weeks of darkness. Keep it together, I told myself, keep it together, keep it together, but it didn’t matter how many times I repeated it, I could barely clear the fog. Every limb felt heavy, every muscle arthritic. I was so frightened I could barely even breathe.
The wind picked up again, the chant of voices, the crackle and scratch of pine needles on top of the house, and as it did, I looked down at the rifle: I hadn’t held a gun like this for decades – not since my dad had taught me how to shoot as a kid on our farm.
Keep it together, I thought again, keep it together, keep it –
I could hear his voice.
I stepped closer to the door, to the warped slats through which I could see nothing except darkness, but now it was quiet again.
Reaching down, I grabbed the handle.
My fingers were trembling.
I stepped back, arching my body slightly, desperately trying to calm myself but nothing worked. The cold and the fear were too deeply embedded. I didn’t know what other weapons he had. I didn’t even know where he was.
I’m going to die out here.
I forced the thought down, forced everything else down with it, and gripped the handle as tightly as I could. Bringing the rifle across my chest, I quietly sucked in a breath and looked down at my hands.
Do it.
I yanked the door open, instantly raised the rifle and jammed the butt into my shoulder. But Vale didn’t rush me. As I looked along the scope, through it, either side of it, the house remained utterly still. Ahead of me, a hallway branched off into three rooms. A bathroom on the left. A kitchen on the right. A living room straight ahead. I’d been wrong: there was no bedroom. Instead, in the living room, I could see a sofa bed, pulled out and set up, the sheets untidy on top. There were some books on a stand next to it, some candles too. There didn’t seem to be electricity here, but if there were surveillance cameras, the house wasn’t without power: there was probably a generator somewhere.
My bare feet hardly made a sound on the floorboards, just a velveteen murmur. The more I edged in, the more I could see: the fire in the living room, little more now than a pile of smouldering ash; the kitchen; a bathroom with a free-standing bathtub and a bucket. No basin. No toilet. The taps on the bath weren’t connected, they were just for show: if Vale wanted to bathe, he’d have to use a water butt I’d seen out front. Maybe a generator heated the water, maybe it didn’t, but one thing was obvious: wherever we were, no one was going to find it.
We were off the grid.
A noise, in the living room: I gripped the rifle even harder and tilted my head to the side slightly, looking past the muzzle. Something popped in the fire – a spark glowing for a second before dying again – and that was when I heard the same noise. It was clearer this time and much easier to place.
A door, banging against its frame in the wind.
A back entrance.
I took another step forward, trying to see into the living room, then stopped again.
A floorboard creaked behind me.
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Instantly, I swivelled, swinging the rifle around.
The length of the weapon saved my life: Vale couldn’t get close enough with his knife, the long barrel of the rifle – caught in the space between his bicep and his ribcage – keeping him an arm’s length away. He had his knife out in front of him, its blade flashing silver, and he awkwardly slashed it from left to right, off balance and trying to avoid the gun. I felt the knife rip through the cotton of my T-shirt, slicing a shallow cut in my skin, but as I stumbled back, I was alive – I knew it, and so did he.
I fired.
The shot was off target: behind him, wood splintered, a flute of dust erupting out of a door frame. I fired again, and again: I didn’t know where the first shot went, but the second hit him in the chest and the impact sent him staggering away, out of the door, to the veranda. Propelled backwards, he hit the handrail and toppled over it.
I heard a low, dull thump.
Scrambling to my feet, I followed his path out of the house, his blood dotted up the walls around the door, on the floor, over the veranda. When I got to the handrail, he was already on his knees, trying to get to his feet, one hand clutching his chest.
There was an exit wound on his back.
The shot had gone right through him.
‘Stop!’ I shouted, the word carrying all the anger of however long I’d been kept here – the days, weeks, maybe months of living in darkness, alone and abandoned.
He turned.
His eyes were wild, terrifying – even though I was the one with the gun – his fingers wriggling at the grip of the knife he was still holding. He fina
lly stood, but then rocked forward on the balls of his feet, unbalanced, wincing, trying not to show me that he was hurt. But the chest wound was bad: against his coat it seemed almost black, the shape of it spreading like a charred flower. He staggered to a stop six feet from me and looked up.
‘That fucking prick Mills,’ he said, dots of blood on his face, saliva foaming at the corner of his mouth like a rabid dog. ‘Mills!’ he screamed into the forest, and I looked beyond him, realizing now that Vale wasn’t the one who’d opened the hatch. Mills was. Vale had been preparing for it, which was why I’d seen him loading his rifle – he’d been getting ready to finally put me down – but Mills had got there first.
Mills was here.
I looked out into the forest again, then behind me, into the emptiness of the house, and as I turned back Vale moved, staring at his chest wound, at the blood spilling over his fingers, as if the injury were Isaac Mills’s fault, not mine.
‘He was so persuasive about keeping you alive,’ he said, wiping his face. He must have been talking about the night at the cottage, about Mills warning me off rather than cutting me down. Vale was the one who’d torn our investigation from the walls. He was the one on the phone who’d listened in to Mills and me talking.
‘Where are the people from Black Gale, Adrian?’
He didn’t respond, dropping to his knees again.
Frozen grass crunched as he hit the ground, and then his eyes swept across the vastness of the forest, his expression almost serene.
‘Are they buried out there?’
He swayed.
‘Adrian?’
‘No,’ he said.
He was suddenly different now, as if he could feel the end coming.
‘So where are they?’
‘I never buried them.’
He said it quietly, matter-of-factly.
‘You mean, you just left them where you killed them?’
He didn’t even look like he’d heard the question. I stared at the colossal sweep of the forest. Where the hell did I even start to search?
‘You just left them where you killed them?’ I repeated.
He nodded. ‘No one’s going to find them here.’
My whole body sank: I’d known it was coming, I’d known that there was little chance any of them would still be alive – but hearing it was different from imagining it.
‘It began somewhere like this,’ he said, his voice muted, as if it were coming from miles away. ‘That’s why I always liked it here. It’s the silence.’ He shifted on his knees, flinching, and looked up at me; it was hard to know what to make of him now – the threat was gone, the rage, the animal in him. ‘Big Bear Lake. That’s what it reminds me of.’
‘In California?’
He nodded. ‘I took a girl up there once, right back at the beginning. Martina. I liked her, I suppose. We had so little in common but I found her fascinating.’
‘Is she dead too?’
‘Yes,’ he said, but there was a sadness to him. ‘She overdosed.’
I watched him.
‘Tell me where the bodies are, Adrian.’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t remember.’
‘You don’t remember where you left nine bodies?’
‘Do you know how long you’ve been here?’ he said by way of a response.
I looked out at the trees, a part of me scared to know the answer.
‘Do you know how long?’ He grimaced.
‘How long?’
‘Forty-six days.’
The news hit me hard.
Forty-six days. It had been the middle of March when I’d last seen daylight; now it was almost the end of April. I looked around me, at the trees, the frosted grass; felt the chill of the air against my skin. This had to be somewhere up north: it would explain why the weather was still so cool, the remoteness of the place, and it made sense of the vague memory I had of being enclosed inside a boot for hours – heavily sedated and tied up – and driven somewhere.
‘G76984Z.’
It took me a couple of seconds to find my feet again.
‘G76984Z,’ Vale repeated. ‘You recognize that?’
The sequence Mills had written on the Dictaphone.
The sequence I’d seen in an email at the house in Highgate.
‘Do you know what that means?’ he asked.
His fingers fell away from the wound.
‘You don’t, do you?’
He laughed, caustic, broken.
‘So what’s it mean, Adrian?’
He turned to the forest again and it was like I could instantly see his concentration wane, a light malfunctioning at the end of its existence, its power almost gone.
‘Adrian? Is it some kind of map reference?’
‘Do you know why I left you here so long?’ he said distantly, the question he’d asked me forgotten. ‘I’ve been out of the country for almost five weeks. Endless shareholder meetings in places I fucking hate, and then some Foreign Office bullshit I couldn’t get out of. If I didn’t go to those things, I would have let people down, and then they’d have started asking questions, and questions are what I’ve spent my life trying to avoid.’ He sniffed, blood specked up his cheek in an arc. ‘So I got you here and left you. I would have preferred to have just got rid of you straight away – walked you out to the forest like everyone else – but there wasn’t the time to do it, to make sure it got done properly, and I thought to myself, “If nothing else, a little stay will soften him up a bit.” I thought it would be fun to see you emerge from the dark a month and a half after I put you down there. But I guess I underestimated you. Or Mills. Or both of you. I thought nothing could touch me.’ His words fell away. ‘It’s another thing I found out about being rich. You start to think you’re invincible.’
‘So if you weren’t here, who was feeding me?’
‘Mills,’ he said mutedly. ‘He was babysitting you until I could get here. He probably spent the entire time trying to work out his little plan of attack today: using you to get to me was the only way he could be free. He’s tried to walk away before, but I’ve always had too much on him – too many insurance policies ready to kick in if he fucked me.’
‘Tell me where the bodies are, Adrian.’
He didn’t move.
‘What difference does it make to you now?’
No response.
‘Is Beatrix Steards out here too?’
He took a breath, the sound rattling in his chest.
‘What about Joline Kader?’
This time, I got a reaction.
‘Kader,’ he said, almost whispering the name.
I took a step closer.
He glanced at me. ‘You and her, you’d have got on. That bitch had the same’ – he waved his bloodied hand around in front of him, searching for the word he wanted – ‘obsession as you. The same eyes. Always searching for a fucking lie.’
I tried again: ‘Why take all nine of the Black Gale villagers?’
He was growing smaller, sinking in on himself.
‘Why not just take Patrick Perry and Freda Davey?’
His eyes closed.
‘Adrian?’
He opened them again, but his body was shutting down.
‘Is Beatrix Steards here too?’
He shook his head.
‘Where’s Beatrix?’
‘London,’ he said.
‘Where in London?’
He touched his fingers to his wound again, like he’d only just noticed it was there.
‘Adrian, where in London is Beatrix buried?’
He collapsed forward, hitting the grass.
He was motionless now.
‘Adrian?’
But there was no answer.
Just the quiet of the forest.
And, somewhere among its trees, nine people from Black Gale.
Circle
2018
London | Two Weeks Ago
The flight landed at Heathrow almost twenty minutes late.
She followed a family out, into the corridors of the terminal, watching as the son and daughter – neither more than four or five – discussed the films they’d been watching when they should have been sleeping. The flight had been turbulent, the eastern seaboard like a rollercoaster, so Jo hadn’t managed to sleep much either, and now her eyes felt dry and her throat scratchy. She grabbed a bottle of water from her backpack and hurried past the family, trying to get ahead of the crowds spilling out of flights all the way down the walkway.
The lines in immigration were still huge, a snaking queue that went across the hall and back again. She got out her phone and waited for it to connect, then texted Ethan to let him know she’d arrived safely. She told him to give Claire and Maisie a big hug from her. After that, she went to her Dropbox and accessed everything that she’d collated on the village of Black Gale.
She moved forward in the queue, inch by inch, footstep by footstep. It had taken her a long time to get here.
Almost two and a half years.
She remembered the call she’d got the day after she retired from UCI. If the British guy hadn’t mentioned Adrian Vale, maybe she would have forgotten about it entirely, despite the things that bothered her. She was sixty-five at the time, exhausted, actively looking to leave the reminders of her working life behind. She’d been worried about whether she’d find a similar sense of purpose in retirement, the same drive to get up every day, but not worried enough not to do it. Soon after the call, she’d flown up to San Francisco to see Ethan and his family, spent four weeks with them, and, when she’d come back, allowed her retirement to take over in earnest and the ghosts of her working life to wither. She’d actively gone out to meet friends, she’d invited old LAPD colleagues around for dinner, she’d taken up Pilates and tried her hand at golf. At weekends, she’d gone on walks with other retirees she knew at Seal Beach, along the coast into Sunset and Huntingdon, into the rolling hills of Crystal Cove, sometimes on the ferry across to Santa Catalina Island. She’d been out on some dates too, although none of them ever felt quite right, even after so many years. They were perfectly nice men, polite and interesting, but they weren’t Ira and, eventually, she stopped.