by Tim Weaver
For some reason she thought of their old house on 81st Street, to which she’d come back after leaving London. She pictured her and Johnny on the front porch, sun glinting off the windows. Rebekah saw her dad too, at the grill, steaks sizzling. She saw Mike, laughing at something.
And she saw Kyra and Chloe.
The girls had never been to the house on 81st Street. They’d never met Mike, and Chloe had never met Rebekah’s father. That house had come before them, when Rebekah’s life had moved on, when she was a doctor, and a wife, and then an ex. But, in her head, she could see the girls clearly, Kyra nine or ten, Chloe walking around, their smiles lighting up.
‘Keep moving.’
The man’s voice ripped her out of the memory. They were almost at the tree roots now: maybe only a couple more feet.
Rebekah squeezed her brother’s hand even tighter.
‘I love you, Johnny.’
‘Me too,’ he said softly.
She couldn’t remember the last time he’d got as close to saying I love you as that. Maybe because he never had. ‘This is all my fault, Bek,’ he said. ‘This is all my fault.’ And then he hugged her so hard it muffled the sound of her tears, raw, and desperate, and final. When he let go, she heard him exhale, felt his whole body contract, and then they were there.
At Stelzik’s corpse.
They turned and looked down the slope, hands still laced together. The man was much closer to them now, feet away.
‘Gimme your phones,’ he said. Johnny reached into his pants and got out his cell, tossing it towards the man. He let it land at his feet and then his attention switched to Rebekah. ‘You hard of hearing?’
Rebekah put a hand into her pocket.
She didn’t want to give him her phone: it was like a cord binding her to the outside world, her family, her girls. But what difference did it make now?
They were both going to be killed here.
And, by the way the man was looking at her, she understood something else.
She would die first.
40
Roxie watched Rebekah from the passenger seat, obviously sensing a change in the mood, but uncertain how to make it better. As rain pounded against the roof of the Jeep, the dog pressed her muzzle into Rebekah’s breast. She looked down at Roxie – at the brown flash of her good eye, at the white dressing on the other – and slid an arm round her, bringing her in closer.
Roxie whimpered a little, then settled.
Once they got back to the store, Rebekah managed to get a fire started outside, under a slant of overhanging roof, using some old wooden fence panels and the Zippo lighter she’d found on the first night. And that evening, she and Roxie ate rabbit.
After almost seven weeks of tinned food and candy bars, it tasted amazing, even if it was tough and overcooked. Skinning the rabbit had been horrible, not because it had made Rebekah squeamish, but because it had taken her so long – yet it was worth it. Again, she divided up the meat, trying to make it stretch for as many days as possible, and managed to supplement it with some marked brown apples: she’d found an old orchard not far from the lighthouse, and although all the trees had largely emptied for winter, and what had fallen had turned to mulch or been eaten by worms, there were enough to fill half a bucket.
As Rebekah sliced some, cutting out the bruises, the brown flesh, insects that had lodged in the skin and the core, she knew that if she’d been at home she would have dumped apples this bad straight into the trash. But here, on the island, they tasted sweet as honey. She’d found a bowl of sorts for Roxie – really just a mesh cover for a fishing bucket – and they ate at the back of the store, on the Main Street sidewalk, both wrapped in blankets.
‘Today was shit,’ she said, rubbing Roxie’s belly, still feeling tearful about the helicopter turning back, ‘but at least the food tastes better.’
Roxie was too busy chewing rabbit to reply.
Rebekah stroked her head and her ears. ‘You know,’ she said, ‘there’s a couple of little girls back in the city who’d love to meet you one day.’ Roxie looked at her, blinked, then Rebekah began to feel the drag of that statement.
Roxie nuzzled her leg.
Her bad eye was still covered with gauze, which she kept trying to shake off, but the swelling was down, and in a day, Rebekah would be able to remove it. She’d had a thorn on her lower eyelid, and the skin around it had blown up, but it was healing. As she continued to stroke Roxie, Rebekah let herself return to her daughters, to hold them in her mind.
‘You’d love my girls, Rox,’ she said, her hand resting on the dog’s head now. ‘Kyra’s almost three, and she’s super-smart. I know I’m biased but it’s true. I mean, she’s her mother’s daughter, what can I say?’ She winked at Roxie. ‘Chloe, she’s a little sweetheart, but she’s going to be boisterous. The day before I got here, you could tell by her face that she was already thinking about escaping the bouncer. It was like she was staring at the living room and saying to herself, “I can cross this. You just watch me.”’ Roxie’s fur beneath her fingertips felt warm, comfortable – reassuring somehow – but, still, a sadness weighed on her as she pictured her daughters. ‘You’re the reason I’m still here, Rox, you know that?’
Roxie looked at her.
‘Have you even got the first idea?’
She blinked, her eye searching Rebekah’s face.
‘I don’t know if I’ll go home alive after this is all over,’ she said, running her hand across Roxie’s belly again, feeling its rise and fall. ‘I don’t know if I’ll even survive until this place reopens. I mean, we’ve got to get through – what? – another three and a half months.’ She blew out a breath, a cloud forming in front of her face. ‘Look how cold it is already. You’re going to have to find a hell of a lot more rabbits if we’re not going to starve.’
She smiled at Roxie.
‘But I know something with absolute certainty. There’s still a chance I’ll get home to my girls alive – and that isn’t anything to do with me.’
Rebekah dropped closer to the dog, sliding an arm around her.
In return, Roxie moved her head to Rebekah’s thigh.
‘It’s all because of you.’
Before
Rebekah threw her cell towards the man and closed her eyes.
Her fingers were laced through her brother’s.
She was waiting for the shot, for the sound to rip across the forest, for the force of the bullet to tear her away from Johnny’s grip.
But it never did.
She heard Roxie before she saw her: a brief patter on her left, the crunch of frozen grass, then a pained wail from the man who’d come to kill them.
Rebekah’s eyes snapped open.
The man hit the ground. She heard the rustle of his body rolling down the slope, the dog following him, teeth bared, one of her paws embedded in the side of his face. As soon as the man hit the trail, the dog came again, scratching at him, ferocious, unrelenting. Rebekah glanced at Johnny, he at her, and could see they were thinking the same thing. This was it.
This was their chance.
Run.
Rebekah grabbed her cellphone off the ground and they sprinted in the direction from which they’d entered the gully. Behind them, the dog growled, the grass crunched, the man said something – a shout, almost a yell, unintelligible – and then, suddenly, there was a gunshot.
He just killed Roxie.
Rebekah couldn’t look back. Instead, she accelerated, heading up the side of the gully, back towards the main path that would take them to the dig site. As they did, another shot rang out, hitting a tree to their left. The trunk detonated, spitting bark into her eyes, and as Johnny broke through to the main path at the top, Rebekah stumbled and hit the ground four feet behind him. She started crawling on her hands and knees, her eyes shut, sore from the dust, her palm piercing on broken branches.
She felt Johnny grab her under the arm and drag her the rest of the way onto the main path, then another sh
ot rang out. Johnny grabbed her a second time, and as she cleared her eyes, she saw him, just ahead of her, in a crouch. A third shot, a fourth. One hit another tree, the other disappeared into the forest. Rebekah looked back again, over her shoulder. One eye was still closed, the other blurred, watering, but she could see enough.
The man was coming.
She scrambled to her feet and started running hard, following Johnny back along the trail. Her eye was still watering, but it had cleared, and she remembered all the running she’d done as a kid. Her performances for her county had got her the scholarship to the private school. Another shot rang out. But she wasn’t running for the finish line any more.
She was running for her life.
Another gunshot. Another.
Was that six now? Seven?
She tried to think how many bullets were in a gun, how many would be in the type of gun that the man had, and how many he would have left. But it was taking all her focus and energy just to run, to put one foot in front of the other, to watch where her feet were landing. In front of her, Johnny batted away a succession of branches, but his eyes were constantly flicking back to check that Rebekah was still with him.
Another shot.
And then a second almost instantly.
This time, Rebekah was knocked off balance.
It took her a split second to react, to process and understand what had happened. Then she looked down and saw a hole in the outer edge of her coat. A bullet had passed right through it, millimetres from her left hip. White insulation spilled out of the hole, black marks scorched the circumference – and, in the moment it took her to look, she’d taken her eyes off the contours of the path. Her foot caught on a stray tree root. She tumbled forward, smashing into a tree.
Black.
It lasted a couple of seconds.
As Rebekah pinged back into focus, confused, she saw the man – fifty feet away – looking in her direction. She glanced, to see if Johnny was nearby, but he was gone. He didn’t know she’d fallen.
Where Johnny had gone, the trees formed a kind of mouth, the trail darkening, the canopy drawn together. She looked again at the man, even closer now, his gun up in front of him, then to the path. When Johnny came back for her – because he would, she knew he would – he’d be a sitting duck. The way the path wound and closed, he would never even see the man until it was too late.
Don’t come back for me, Johnny.
Please don’t come back.
But then she heard him calling for her.
‘Bek?’
His voice, short and desperate.
‘Bek!’
She sprang to her feet.
The instant she did, the man caught sight of her. He fired into the trees, the bullet fizzing past her and hitting a pale, scrawny oak to her right. She headed away from the path, away from Johnny, deeper into the forest, looking over her shoulder to make sure the man was following her. He broke from the path into the undergrowth, kicking and chopping his way through a maze of vines and scrub. Rebekah heard Johnny calling her name again, further off now – his voice like a cry from another room – and then, finally, the sound changed: it was just the noise of Rebekah, stumbling, and her pursuer, breathless, behind her.
He shot at her again.
It came close, a low hiss in the air to her right, but then she veered left, making use of a break in the scrub and tried to alter her direction. Somewhere – so far off she wasn’t even sure if she was hearing things – Johnny called her name again, and then the ground became uneven. As trees clotted around her, the forest floor pocked, and her ankle jammed into a hole, five inches deeper than the rest of the terrain. It jarred the whole side of her body, ankle to hip. She’d barely even lifted it out when she hit another, less deep but much wider, and this time her ankle rolled into the empty space.
She fell.
Her hands cushioned her, but the impact still hurt. Every part of her hurt. She was so scared her bones ached. She pushed herself up, stumbling forward, hitting a tree, bouncing away from it, then hitting another.
She fell a second time.
Beneath her, the ground had altered again: it was starting to slope away from her, and she could hear something. She could smell it too: salt.
She was nearing the coast.
Maybe I can find help there, she thought, clambering to her feet. There might be people or fishing boats. She looked behind her, to see where the man was, to see how much distance he’d gained on her, and faltered.
Where was he?
A shot rang out.
The bullet came so close it was like she could feel the air move in the spaces beside her head. Her immediate reaction was to shield herself with her arm, protect her eyes, her skull, even though it was too late, even though the flesh and bone in her arm would be as effective as paper if he got the next one on target. As she did, she wobbled, the lunge of her arm shifting her weight – and she took a jolting step into another hollow. Her cellphone fell out of her pocket. Loose change went with it.
And then she started to tumble.
This time, there was nothing to stop her.
The ground dropped away beneath her: she’d been on the edge of another gully, but this one was smaller, much deeper, and disguised by a swathe of scrub. She went straight through the scrub, taking some of it with her as she tried to stop herself falling, and hit the sides of the gully hard. One roll, another, another, each one faster, each turn of her body pounding so hard against the frozen ground it was like a series of grenade blasts going off inside her. Halfway down, she pierced her head on something sharp – a branch, a root, the pain an immense flare along her face and neck – and then she landed so hard in a bed of dead, dried leaves it sucked all the breath from her. Leaves puffed up around her. Her body became cocooned by them. And then she became still.
She stared up at the sky.
It was grey, like dead skin.
Is this it?
Is this the end?
She tried to reach a hand to her face, to the injury she could feel next to her right ear, but it felt like everything had disconnected. Her arms weren’t doing what she was asking them to do. Her chest was on fire. Her breath was catching, and when she tried to clear her throat, she wheezed. Seconds later, everything smeared. There was blood in her eyes.
Briefly, her vision went red.
And then, once again, everything turned to black.
Missing Hours
Travis paused the DVD of the interview with Johnny Murphy.
There were a couple of moments in it that he hadn’t paid much attention to the first time around, and hadn’t placed any great emphasis on in the times he’d watched the footage since: the pauses between words or after sentences; Murphy’s head dropping, his fingers coming together; his eyes flicking between Travis and the camera. It was all tiny, possibly insignificant, stuff but Travis wrote down the time codes for all of them so he could easily refer back to them later. Once he was done, he turned back to the monitor, to the frozen image of Johnny Murphy.
Take a second look, the caller had said.
But a second look at what?
Travis opened his notebook again.
He’d been through the computer on day one to see if Murphy had a record, any markers in his history, but he’d been clean – not even so much as a parking ticket. His alibi for the night was backed up by cellphone records and security cameras: he’d dropped Louise at the fundraiser at 6 p.m., and GPS data showed him heading to the ER at NYU Langone in Brooklyn, as he’d stated. Travis pulled video from cameras at the hospital to make sure, and Murphy had appeared on film, at the entrance; that, in turn, coincided with a text received by Louise’s cellphone, from Murphy, a minute later, apologizing for ‘abandoning her’. Back in October – following the interview with him – it had been enough for Travis to dismiss him as a suspect.
But two months on, perhaps there were potential gaps.
The video that Travis had pulled of Murphy at the ER covered o
nly a very brief time period – 9.29 p.m. to 9.51 p.m. – when he was visible at the entrance. Before that, the information was much less overt; in fact, Murphy’s cellphone appeared t0 have been switched off completely between the time he arrived at the hospital, at 7.01 p.m., and when he first appeared on camera at 9.29 p.m. Travis had spotted the anomaly shortly after the interview, and called Murphy about it, and Murphy had given a credible reason: he was in a hospital, in an environment where certain areas of the building, and certain equipment, might have been sensitive to the presence of a phone, and therefore he’d been encouraged to turn it off by hospital staff.
But what if that had been a lie?
What if he’d turned it off because he didn’t want to be traced – and that was because the two hours and twenty-eight minutes that his cell was off coincided with the last time anyone had seen Louise at the fundraiser? It coincided with the split-second glimpse of Louise that Travis had found on one of the cameras at the Royal Union Hotel too: she’d been in the bar at 9.01 p.m. Ten minutes later, her cell had died. Both of those fit into a timeline where Murphy could have headed back to the fundraiser. Those two hours and twenty-eight minutes would have given him more than enough time to drive from the hospital back to the hotel, then make it back to his friend Noella’s bedside in order to send the apology text to Louise. The question was why? Why do it that night, when his friend was sick? Why do it at all?
Travis still couldn’t answer any of those questions because Murphy still felt like an empty space. So the next step seemed obvious.
He had to speak to Johnny Murphy again.
Nick Tillman sat in the corner of a deli in Sunnyside, watching the time. On the table in front of him was a notebook. He’d filled most of its pages already.
He preferred paper to a phone because paper was easy to dispose of. Phones weren’t. They melted, they shattered, you could throw them into a river or bury them in the ground, but they still left a trace: a single text or the briefest of internet searches, and suddenly you were on a server somewhere, for ever. He hated that idea.