by Mo Hayder
Lucia eyes him carefully. She doesn’t trust him. There’s something unstable about him. Unpredictable.
‘I said, is that right?’
‘I don’t have to answer that. I want to know what happened to my dog. Nothing should happen to my dog – she has done nothing. I want to speak to my mother. In private. I want to hear what happened to Bear.’
‘Yeah, like we’re going to let you do that.’
‘I want to speak to my mother.’
‘She doesn’t want to hear it.’
‘Yes, she does.’
‘No, Lucia. She doesn’t. I mean, ponder this. Ponder the fact that maybe your mother regards the dog higher than she regards her own daughter.’
Lucia says nothing.
‘I don’t know,’ Honey ruminates. ‘You do hear it said, don’t you, Mr Molina, especially with the ones further up the social scale, you do hear it said they prize their animals very highly. It’s a class thing, I think. I mean, me being from the dregs of society, I don’t get all this. Never saw how a horse or a dog could take the place of a human.’ He makes a thoughtful clicking noise in the back of his throat. ‘How about you, Lucia? Do you think your mother holds you in greater esteem than she does the dog?’
‘Of course she does.’
‘Because you are higher than a dog, aren’t you, Lucia?’
She closes her mouth. Stares at him defiantly.
‘Did you hear me, Lucia? Are you higher than a dog? Because I’m not a big fan of dogs – I don’t like the way they eat. It’s messy. Unappealing. Isn’t it, Mr Molina?’
‘Disgusting.’
‘You look like a lady with poise, Lucia. I bet you can be a lot tidier than a dog when you eat, can’t you? More discreet in your bodily functions?’
Lucia holds his eyes. ‘What did you say?’
‘There are other ugly, unappealing things dogs will insist on doing. Do you know the other unappetizing thing a dog will do, given half a chance? It’ll roll in the defecations of other members of its own species. Did you know this, Lucia?’
‘You won’t win this.’
‘I don’t know about that.’ He makes the clicking sound in the back of his throat again. ‘Sometimes dogs’ll go even further. They’ll even eat it. That’s putrid behaviour, in my book, the sort of thing only the lowest forms of life would do. Don’t you agree? I mean, when your mother places you lower than a dog, it’s kind of a serious thing to level at another human being – it’s implying that they’re capable of eating human faeces.’ He gives a long, weighty pause. ‘You’re not capable of doing something that disgusting. Are you, Lucia?’
She lowers her chin, keeping her eyes on him.
‘Are you?’ he repeats. ‘Capable of that?’
There is a breathless silence. In her head she keeps shouting at him: Fuck you fuck you fuck you … But Lucia is very good at knowing when to lose the battle in order to win the war. Now is not the time to fight.
She shakes her head. Lowers her eyes.
‘Good,’ says Honey. ‘Now we won’t be hearing another word out of you. I’m going to close this door and you’re going to be quiet now. Like a good girl. Get it?’
‘I get it.’
When the two men have gone she sits in silence. Her head is inside the house and outside too, all at once, plotting and plotting. She is tracking the two men from their sounds as they move around. She’s also tracking Bear in her imagination. Through the forests and the brook. Through the hedges. Lucia knows where she’ll head – up to the common where they sometimes walk. To the place where all the children go picking elderflowers on a Sunday. She’s got no chip, no identification. If someone finds her they won’t be able to track her back to the house. But at least she’ll be safe from all this.
Lucia wonders who will find her.
Part Two
The Walking Man
THE MOON CLIMBS, a clear unblinking disc. A hole in the sky. In the Chew Valley, at the foot of the Mendips, Amy sleeps, dreaming about the doggy called Bear with the bad paw. She dreams about the man with the sooty beard, carrying the dog to a nice safe house with a roaring fire. The man puts the puppy next to the fire, pats her, then turns and walks away into the woods.
Meanwhile, six miles away – up over the reservoirs and forests of the Mendips – DI Jack Caffery wakes with a jolt.
He blinks at the clock. Ten thirty. The alcohol has burned through him, leaving just a vague taste of cloves in the back of his mouth. Outside the rain has stopped. He sits for a while staring at the ceiling, trying to work out what woke him. His scalp is tight – his brain feels as if it’s sticking to his skull. But the sick feeling isn’t back.
He picks up his phone from the bedstand. There’s a text from the superintendent: Call me ASAP. He deletes it and opens his browser, finds Derek Yates’s interview again. Yates said something odd about the only person who visits him …
When he was on the inside he wouldn’t have been allowed near me – me being what I was, him being what he was …
Hurriedly Caffery fumbles for the notepad where he’s listed all Yates’s crimes. He stares at the dates. He looks back at the phone. He can’t understand why he didn’t make this connection before.
Him being what he was …
He knows exactly who that ex-prisoner is. Exactly.
He gets dressed quickly, finding a fleece in the back of one of the cupboards and a pair of Thinsulate gloves. He’s had too much to drink; if he gets stopped and breathalysed it’ll mean automatic dismissal from the job. But really, does he care any more? Does he honestly care? He snatches up his car keys.
His car smells familiar; it even has the lingering scent of tobacco from back when he still smoked roll-ups and not the designer steel things he uses now. The rain has stopped but the clouds hang silently in the west, shot through with veins of black – almost living and bleeding. He drives out from the house and goes north-east until he gets to the network of lanes that criss-cross the Chew Valley. As the stars come out he slows the car and begins to crawl along the lanes, keeping his eyes on the fields on either side. He is looking for a fire – the first of the flames that will be used to make supper for the man he is hunting.
The Walking Man is a nomad. As his name implies, his sole activity is to walk. By day he walks constantly. He stops walking at dusk and makes camp where he stands. At dawn he wakes and makes a fire over which he cooks a breakfast that will fuel him for another day’s walking. He moves day by day in a predetermined pattern; over the months, Caffery has logged the pattern and is fairly certain the vagrant is covering a giant circle – one which lies mostly in Somerset, but straddles the borders with South Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. A lemming urge: he moves from the centre to the outer edge of the circle, then around the perimeter of the circle a quarter of a degree, then back to the centre. Caffery isn’t sure how the Walking Man has decided on the size of the circle, but he does know he is marking the perimeter with a line of crocuses which he plants in some of the places he stops. The centre of the circle is at Shepton Mallet, the place the Walking Man’s eight-year-old daughter was abducted decades ago.
This is what links the two men. The Walking Man has lost someone to a paedophile the way Jack Caffery has. He too has no body to bury. Like is drawn to like. Jacqui Kitson thinks she’s been through all the grief a person can, but she hasn’t.
The search for his daughter’s body is what drives the Walking Man to comb the countryside day after day after day. When he finds an immovable object in his way – a road, a house, a city – he assesses it. If it was there before his daughter went missing, he skirts it. If it was built afterwards he does what he can to tear it away and check it hasn’t been built over a grave. He doesn’t care how often he breaks the law to achieve this. He’s spent enough time inside not to worry about that.
One of the Walking Man’s other characteristics is that he is almost impossible to find. It’s as if he chooses when he wants to be discovered. Caffery has hunted for
him for months, but in the Walking Man’s mystic, sly way, he’s dissolved himself off the face of the planet. Whatever grove or ditch or barn he’s bedded down in, he’s made sure not to be visible from the road. He is clever. Cleverer than the foxes he beds down amongst, and certainly cleverer than any cop. Tonight, when after long hours of hunting Caffery turns a corner and glimpses to his left a campfire, he knows it isn’t that he has found the Walking Man. He knows that the Walking Man has allowed himself to be found.
He must want something from Caffery.
The Amethyst Room
IT WOULD HAVE been better, Oliver decides, if the men had just assassinated him and the family the moment they first walked through the door. This drawn-out process is unbearable. Ten years ago, or even one year ago, Oliver might have been able to do something about it. He might have used brute force to prise apart the ageing bed he’s manacled to. He might have used one of the bed struts to smash his way out of the window – on this side of the building the drop is only two floors, and he might easily survive that. But the soft pulling on his sternum reminds him of the truth: he would die in the attempt.
And if he were dead, how desperate would that make the two men? What might they do to the rest of the family? To Matilda, and Lucia. Earlier he heard shouting and scuffling. For a while Lucia was screaming – yelling at the top of her voice. He couldn’t make out the words, but he heard the men come running. He has no idea what happened next.
Oliver already has an embryonic theory about these two men and what they represent. It’s an accretion of subtleties – the way Honey and Molina played their invented ranks of inspector and sergeant so naturally, one instinctively subservient to the other. The way they carry their arms – ever so slightly wider than their bodies – as if the muscles there are stopping them relaxing totally, or as if they’ve spent long years on parade in that stance. The methods they used for marching the women up the stairs also gave something away. Molina crunched down Lucia’s hand when she struggled and easily controlled her.
It is called the gooseneck manoeuvre, and it gives Oliver a hundred clues.
He isn’t sure if this means the family is more likely to survive. Or less.
Whatever does happen to them it will all be recorded by his security cameras, which feed directly to a hard-drive he has had discreetly located under a set of stairs in one of the turrets. He kept their installation a closely guarded secret, hid his trail by changing contractors several times. Even Matilda doesn’t know where the cameras are mounted – she’s given up asking. His only regret is that he gave in to Lucia’s insistence that none were placed here, in her room. Nothing that happens to Oliver in here will be recorded.
He rarely comes in here – she has kept the walls either black or purple for the last fifteen years – ever since Kable killed Hugo and Sophie. The curtains are a grey voile decorated with floating red skulls. Ordinarily he tries to avoid looking at the things his daughter decorates her walls with.
There is a clock in the shape of an electric guitar, and next to it a stark picture of a dark-haired woman in a petrol-blue ballgown, reclining so that her white breasts are almost exposed. The man supporting her at the waist – Oliver assumes it is a man – wears a high batwing collar and cravat. His black hair is long and swept to the side, his face is utterly white with the exception of his black-lined eyes and his lipsticked mouth. Oliver has no idea who this couple might be, though he knows they mean something to his daughter. Another poster is more familiar to him: it shows Patty Hearst in her olive combats and beret. Standing legs apart, her M1 Carbine aimed aggressively at an unseen foe; behind her the orange-and-black seven-headed cobra – the Symbionese Liberation Army symbol.
The door opens and Oliver turns jerkily to it. The one called Molina is standing in the doorway holding a tray. On the tray is a plate of food and a glass of water. He comes into the room and sets it carefully down on the floor, in a place Oliver can reach it. He stares at the tray, his pig-heart thumping loudly. His medication is on the tray next to the water.
‘You’re here because of me. Aren’t you?’
Molina turns cold eyes to him, but doesn’t answer.
Oliver says slowly, ‘I’ve met you before, at one of the companies I work with. Which one?’
‘Well, see, Mr Anchor-Ferrers, at this point that really is none of your fucking business.’
‘I won’t have you hurting my wife and my daughter, whatever the circumstances – that IS my business. I heard my daughter shouting – and that definitely IS my business. So you just tell me what you want and we’ll arrange it, like gentlemen.’
Molina sighs. He shakes his head as if Oliver is a monumental disappointment to him, turns without another word and goes out, locking the door, leaving Oliver to contemplate the contents of the tray.
Fire
THE CAMP IS next to a haulage yard where juggernauts stand like sleeping giants, the moon glinting off their windscreens. It’s a blustery night and the fire is sputtering and flitting, the smoke chasing in wreaths across the yard, banking into ornate curls at the wall of the empty portakabins.
Caffery parks on the road and makes his way by foot down the track along the perimeter. The yard’s nightlight comes through the grilled security fencing and makes criss-cross hatching on his face. When he arrives next to the camp the Walking Man doesn’t look up. He’s busying himself with the fire. Preparing dinner is his ritual.
He’s picked up a friend since the last time. Sitting with its back to the security fence, its face towards the fire, is a dog. A mongrel of some sort, wiry, its hair dark at the muzzle as if it has, like the Walking Man, been dipped in tar. It doesn’t move when Caffery arrives, but keeps its eyes on him as he stands at the edge of the clearing.
The dog may have acknowledged his presence, but the Walking Man will do no such thing. This is what Caffery expects – he knows the game now. Knows not to push. Knows that when the time is right the Walking Man will speak. And so he stands and watches the Walking Man pottering around, emptying tins into the makeshift pots he seems to be able to conjure from nowhere, sprinkling them with the herbs he’s gathered from the hedgerow or from private gardens he’s happened on.
He’s a white guy, the Walking Man, but you’d have to peer to be sure of that, covered as he is from head to toe in a kind of primordial grease. It coats his beard and his hair, it forms a carapace on his clothes. It borders and defines him. And yet, paradoxically, the Walking Man is clean in the ways it’s important. He takes enormous care of himself – especially his feet. You don’t walk twenty-five miles a day, every single day, without taking care of your feet.
He finishes heating the food and dishes it out on to plates. Two are standing ready, as if to confirm that Caffery was expected. This subtle prognostication is the Walking Man’s sign that he knows everything before it happens. Sees everything. Misses nothing.
‘Well?’ The Walking Man finally glances up at him. ‘Why are you here?’
Caffery massages his temples. ‘Can I sit?’
In reply the Walking Man unrolls a foam mattress. He has hidey-holes around the countryside where he keeps his belongings and somehow he always manages to have supplies on hand. Caffery sits and accepts the plate the Walking Man offers. There’s a mug of scrumpy too. He eats a little of the food and sips the cider, conscious of the dog’s eyes still on him.
‘You let me find you. I must be in favour.’
‘You read it how you will, Policeman.’
‘You’ve got a friend?’ He nods at the dog. ‘He wasn’t here last time.’
‘We’ll talk about that when you explain why you’re here.’
‘Derek Yates,’ he says slowly. ‘You visit him in Long Lartin.’
The Walking Man shows no reaction. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes. You visit him and he’s spoken about it to a journalist.’
‘Tsk tsk. What they allow in prisons these days.’
Caffery puts down his plate. He finds one of his blac
k-and-silver V-Cigs and clicks the cartridge in. That clicking sound has become as reassuring as the sound of his Zippo lighter used to be. ‘You are not known to be on the side of the nonces. In fact, you’re rather infamous for the lack of sympathy you show child molesters. And yet you have befriended a convicted paedophile.’
The Walking Man tortured his daughter’s murderer, Craig Evans, to within an inch of his life. Evans lives on – if living is the word to describe his existence – like a Skoptsy or like St Paul of Tarsus: castrated. Evans’s genitals have made a long journey from the moment they were separated from his body by the Walking Man. They have lived at various times in a biscuit tin on the windowsill in the Walking Man’s former house, in a storage locker at the mortuary in Flax Bourton, and ultimately, after undergoing a barrage of tests and having had several small amounts of tissue removed to be stored at a secure location in case of appeals at a later date, they have been incinerated in a furnace only a five-minute drive from the care home where Evans now lives.
He would have been able to sit at his window in the dayroom and watch the smoke from the incinerator burning his own genitals – had the Walking Man not also relieved him of his eyes.
The Walking Man was incarcerated in Long Lartin at the same time as Derek Yates. Caffery is convinced he is the one Yates is referring to: me being what I was, him being what he was.
Caffery says, ‘Yates is confused by you, by why you’ve chosen to visit him. But I’m not. I know you – I know that everything you do is for a reason. And I know it isn’t a coincidence you befriended him.’
‘Such confidence. Such intelligence.’ The Walking Man pulls off the black beanie he covers his hair with and dips his head. ‘I know when I am in the presence of greatness.’
‘You’re doing it to give yourself a weapon. It’s connected to me.’