‘I have,’ said Crispin, pulling one free from his backpack.
Luke opened the door as far as it would go, then did the same with the other one, revealing an empty room that smelled vaguely of engine oil. ‘There it is. On the wall there.’
Crispin shone his torch up to where Luke was pointing. The inflatable boat was little more than a dinghy and didn’t look like it would hold six people. There was no engine attached and it didn’t even appear to have been properly inflated.
Then the torch picked up the deep slash-marks running symmetrically down each section.
‘Oh, Christ, what’s going on now?’ said Marla, staring up at the damage.
‘This is getting bad,’ said Luke quietly. He no longer seemed big and strong. Now he looked pale and scared and the expression in his eyes – that of a man frozen in the path of an oncoming locomotive – was exactly the same as I remembered it being immediately after Rachel’s murder. ‘What the fuck are we meant to do now?’
It was Crispin who answered him. ‘We don’t panic. That’s essential. We stay calm and we work out what to do next.’
Marla frowned. ‘Who did this? Surely it wouldn’t have been Charlie. Because that means he’s trapped himself on the island. What about that man I saw at the window last night? Could it have been him?’
‘But Charlie thought that was Pat,’ I said, ‘and his boat’s gone.’
‘Maybe he waited here overnight and took Charlie back,’ said Crispin, shining his torch round the floor space, its beam picking up a couple of boxes in one corner.
I shook my head. ‘No. That doesn’t make any sense. He’s—’
‘Jesus Christ!’ Crispin’s words reverberated through the gloom like gunshots.
We all looked at where his torch was pointing.
Marla made a long moaning sound that seemed to come from deep within her. Luke let out an almost childlike cry and began to retch.
I simply stood stock-still, unable to react in any way at all. Perched up on an otherwise empty shelf that ran the length of a far wall, like a grisly trophy, was Louise’s freshly severed head.
7
Her eyes were open and staring vacantly into space, her long, wavy blonde hair flowing down on either side of the pale, lifeless face. When we’d wrapped her body in the sheet, her hair had been tied in a ponytail, which meant that the killer must have untied it, in yet another act of defilement. There was something in her mouth too. A rolled-up piece of paper sticking out, like an oversized cigarette.
Marla ran out of the boathouse, sobbing, while Luke fell to his knees with his head in his hands. It sounded like he was crying too.
I could feel myself shaking as I tried to compute the full ramifications of what I was seeing. Someone on this island had not only murdered Louise, but had deliberately and carefully chopped the head from the corpse and left it in a place where we would see it. To be the target of such hatred is a terrifying prospect at the best of times. But when you know you’re trapped and that it could be your murder next, it’s a thousand times worse.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Crispin watching me, with something like sympathy in his eyes. He said something but it sounded faint and far away and I couldn’t make out the words.
Finally, he moved the torch light away from Louise’s head and then, as I watched, he walked slowly over and gently removed the rolled-up piece of paper from her mouth. Turning away, he put an arm on my shoulder and I didn’t resist as he led me outside, telling Luke to follow.
When we were all back on the beach and Luke had shut the doors, Crispin unrolled the paper and flattened it with his hands. I watched him carefully. He looked scared but nothing like as scared as the rest of us, and I was surprised by his ability to stay calm under such pressure. I’d always had him down as the most sensitive and vulnerable of all of us, yet he was now undoubtedly the man in charge.
‘What does it say?’ I asked, speaking for the first time since I’d seen what had been done to Louise, my voice weak and close to cracking.
Crispin didn’t answer, so I asked the question again, louder this time.
Marla, who’d been pacing up and down a few yards away, stopped and glared at him. ‘Come on, Cris,’ she said. ‘Tell us.’ He swallowed audibly, and for a moment he looked like he might lose it. But then he seemed to compose himself. ‘I don’t think you want to read it.’
‘Give it to me,’ I said, knowing I had to see what was written there, however grim it was. He handed it over.
It was a simple, made-up poem typed out in block capitals. Six devastating lines that sounded like my worst nightmare:
JUSTICE EVENTUALLY COMES TO ALL,
AND NOW ONE BY ONE THEY FALL.
LEAVING THE VERY WORST TILL LAST,
AS THEY PAY FOR THE SINS OF A DISTANT PAST.
MY KNIFE IS SHARP, BLOODY AND TRUE,
AND VERY SOON IT WILL COME FOR YOU.
The page shook violently in my hand and it was Marla who took it from me. I heard her curse as she read it too, but I was already turning away and walking rapidly down the beach, ignoring the shouts of the others.
I broke into a run, sobbing as all the emotions that had been swirling around me these past hours – these past weeks, indeed these past years – suddenly erupted within me. As I reached the empty jetty, I jumped onto it and sprinted right to the end, thinking for a moment of throwing myself into the sea, going under and never surfacing again.
But I stopped myself, the need for self-preservation still too strong to let go entirely, and stared down at the eddying grey water. In front of me the mainland was close enough to make out clearly – a mile, maybe two miles away, but no more. The sea was choppy and there were no boats out there today. No one who could help me. I wasn’t a strong swimmer. I’d never make the distance. I probably wouldn’t make a hundred yards.
I was trapped.
I heard footsteps behind me and swung round as a sudden wave of panic hit me.
It was Crispin. He approached gingerly. ‘Are you okay, Karen? We’ve got to hold things together.’
He looked so lean and handsome, standing there in the wind, that my panic was replaced with a deep sadness. ‘Why did it all have to go wrong, Crispin?’ I sobbed, refusing to call him Cris like all the others did. ‘Why did we ever have to meet that bitch, Rachel?’
‘Whoa, hold on. This isn’t about her.’
‘It is. She’s infected everything. If she’d never been part of our group, you and I would still have been together, don’t you understand? We’d have travelled the world, got married. Had kids … Had a fucking life!’ The words were pouring out of me now. I no longer had any control over them. Over anything. ‘But instead it all went to shit. Someone killed her and it was never the same again, and I’ve been punished ever since. I lost you, and I married a man I didn’t love, and then, when I finally did have something beautiful in my life, I lost her too.’ I pictured Lily, with her round soft cheeks and infectious little laugh – only five months old when she died. ‘I lost my little girl, Crispin. My child. Haven’t I been punished enough already without all this?’
As the knife I’d been holding all this time clattered to the decking, he took me in his arms and held me tight. ‘It’s okay, Karen,’ he whispered. ‘It’s going to be okay.’
I wished he hadn’t called me Karen. I wished he’d called me ‘little chick’ or ‘baby’ or any of the other pet names he’d used when we were seeing each other. Karen seemed so formal. But I tried not to think about that and held him back just as tightly, my head buried in his shoulder, taking in his scent, soaking up our memories, allowing his presence to calm me.
My sobbing stopped as the grief temporarily subsided. ‘What are we going to do, Crispin? We’ve got to find a way off this place.’
He nodded. ‘I know, and we will. But first things first, we need to get back to the house. It’s dangerous out here.’ He looked around.
‘It might be dangerous back there too. We left the back
door open, didn’t we?’
‘We’ve still got knives.’ He pulled his from his backpack. ‘And there are four of us and one of him, so the odds are in our favour.’
‘What do you think’s happened to Charlie? Surely he can’t have done this?’ It was impossible to imagine a man like Charlie – out of shape from too much good living, and looking like Bertie Wooster in his silk pyjamas and slippers – deliberately severing the head of a woman who’d once been his friend, and using it to taunt us.
Crispin took a deep breath. ‘God alone knows. Nothing would surprise me after what we’ve just seen. Come on, let’s go back to the house.’
I could see the other two waiting on the beach, and I picked up my knife and walked back along the jetty with Crispin, pulling out my cigarettes and lighter from the sleeve of my hoodie and lighting up. Right now, I didn’t care who saw me smoking.
‘I didn’t know you smoked as well,’ said Marla as we reached the other two. ‘Can I have one?’
‘I didn’t know you smoked, either,’ said Crispin, with a half smile, aiming the comment at Marla, and once again I was uncomfortably aware of an intimacy between them. ‘All right,’ he continued, ‘back to the house, everyone, keep your eyes peeled and your knives out. As soon as we’re back, we’ll lock the place up and work out our next move, and remember: whoever’s doing this can’t touch us if we all stick together.’
The wind was picking up now and the earlier blue sky was all but gone, replaced by a swathe of grey-white cloud. I looked up at the ominous wall of pine trees that led back to the house, and I felt the fear kick in again. Somewhere in those trees was a man waiting for his opportunity to pick us off one by one. Right now, we were still four and, as Crispin had pointed out, there was comfort in numbers.
But if we started losing more …
We walked two abreast along the narrow path, each person no more than a yard from the trees that rose up on either side of us, shutting out the sky. Although they’d been planted in careful rows, tangled bushes and clumps of ferns and heathers had grown up in the gaps, offering numerous places to hide, and we all scoured the surroundings with an intensity born of fear, keeping close together. Marla had somehow managed to make sure she was the one leading the way with Crispin, while Luke and I brought up the rear.
I asked Luke if he was all right. He was still very quiet, although thankfully he seemed to have shaken himself out of his earlier catatonic state.
‘I’m fine,’ he whispered tightly, without taking his eyes off the wood. ‘Concentrate on keeping watch. He could be right on us.’
I narrowed my eyes, keeping focused, my hand gripping the knife so tightly it felt numb, wondering if, even now, we were being watched by an unseen killer. I prayed that we’d make it back to the house safely. That whoever it was had decided against killing the rest of us, and had already left the island.
Something moved.
Behind one of the trees, maybe twenty yards in, partly obscured by a thick holly bush.
And then, without warning, a hooded figure – his face obscured – appeared, holding something out in front of him. It was a crossbow and it was aimed right at us.
‘Run!’ I yelled, immediately bolting in the other direction, my head down low as I knocked into Luke. I heard something whistle past my head; heard a scream; and then I was gone, into the trees away from our attacker, running for my life. I pulled off the backpack containing my stuff, not wanting to slow myself down, and threw it into some bushes. I zigzagged between the trees, charged straight through undergrowth, never once looking behind me. Even when I stumbled and fell, dropping my knife in the process, I was back on my feet and moving in an instant, picking it up as I sprung away, all the while ignoring the terrible burning in my lungs.
I don’t know how long I ran for, but it was probably no more than three or four minutes and then the woods ended abruptly, to be replaced by a wall of rock a good thirty feet high and, at least at the point I was looking at it, totally insurmountable. I ran down alongside the rock wall for about thirty yards as it tapered off, before finally giving way to a short but sheer cliff that looked down on the rock-strewn, bubbling sea below.
I thought about following the cliff round until I eventually came back to the beach, but decided against it. There was no shelter for me there, plus the killer might expect me to go that way. I stopped and crouched low behind one of the last of the trees, and forced myself to look back.
There was no one there. I couldn’t hear anything, either.
I crouched there, panting for a few minutes while I got my breath back, wondering if the others were all right. It wasn’t a surprise I couldn’t hear them. Like me, they’d be trying to keep as quiet as possible. But I remembered hearing a scream, so it was possible one of them had been hit. It had sounded like it had come from a man and, with a jolt of fear, I wondered if it was Crispin. That would be the worst blow. Of all of us, he was showing the most resilience.
I continued to scan the trees, thinking about my next move. I couldn’t stay here. I’d be trapped if the killer approached through the woods. Again, I wondered if it could have been Charlie. It was impossible to tell from the glimpse I’d got of him but, as unlikely a murderer as he made, it had to be a strong possibility.
I wondered what he’d do if he had me here, at his mercy. Could I possibly get through to him? We’d been good friends once. Of all the girls in our group, I’d probably got on with him the best. It was almost impossible to believe that someone I’d known so well would kill me in cold blood, but then if he’d thrust a knife into Louise’s heart while she sat facing him, he could probably just as easily do it to me.
In the end, I knew I had to try to make my way back to the house. As I cautiously stood and took a couple of tentative steps into the woods, keeping in the shadows of the nearest tree, it began to rain.
I moved slowly and quietly from tree to tree. A few yards a minute, never out in the open for longer than a couple of seconds, my ears straining against the wind that blew through the wood, in a life-or-death effort to hear the slightest noise that might indicate an ambush. Because that’s what this was. Life or death. The fear that I might be dead within the next few minutes almost knocked me over with its sheer power, and it took every inch of a willpower I didn’t even know I had to keep going.
I was moving at what I hoped was a rough forty-five-degree angle through the wood in the direction of the house, avoiding the path for obvious reasons. One way or another, the house represented my best chance of safety now that I knew for certain that neither Crispin, nor Marla, nor Luke was the killer, because I guessed all of them would be heading there too.
The rain was getting harder now and I shivered against the cold, resting for a second in the shadow of one of the pines.
That was when I saw him. Dressed all in black, a ski mask almost completely obscuring his face, creeping quietly between two lines of trees, holding the loaded crossbow in front of him as he scanned the woods for his prey. No more than ten yards away and getting closer.
I pulled my head back sharply behind the tree and kept my gasp of shock inaudible. Had he seen me? I didn’t think so.
But what if you’re wrong? said the nagging little voice that was always there. What if he’s coming towards you right now, finger tensing on the crossbow’s trigger, ready to fire a bolt through your brain and ending everything you’ve ever felt in an instant?
Run.
Stay put.
Run.
Stay put.
I held my breath, not daring to move a muscle, feeling the pressure build in my lungs.
I heard a twig break. Nearby.
It was taking all my self-control not to bolt for it.
Slowly, ever so slowly, I turned my head and saw him, almost touching distance away, creeping past the tree I was hiding behind, his face turned the other way as he prowled for victims.
As he turned round in my direction, I jerked my head back, still holding my breath, and i
nched my way round the other side of the tree, praying he hadn’t seen or heard me because otherwise I was dead. I’d had barely a second to observe him – not long enough to confirm whether or not it was Charlie, but I was pretty sure it wasn’t. This man moved like a hunter. I’d never seen Charlie move like that.
I counted to ten in my head, every second seeming to drag like an eternity of pure, ice-cold fear, before slowly exhaling and immediately sucking in a deep breath of air, and holding it in.
I counted to ten again and finally risked a glance round the tree.
He wasn’t there. My eyes scanned the woods but there was no sign of him.
I didn’t like this. He’d been moving slowly. He wouldn’t have got more than twenty or thirty feet in the time I’d been counting in my head, but he’d disappeared completely.
Was this some kind of trap? Was he waiting for me a few yards away, so he could take me down like an animal with his crossbow? But I couldn’t stay here. Eventually he’d come back and discover me. He had all the time in the world. I had none. I couldn’t be more than a hundred yards from the house. If I could get there, I was safe. At least that was what I was telling myself. The little voice that was always there was telling me to run. Now. As fast as I could. And hope for the best.
I didn’t want to look behind me – Jesus, I didn’t – and I had to force myself to slowly turn my head, knowing that whatever was behind me could well be the last thing I ever saw, and it was an incredible relief just to see the empty line of pines.
I made a decision. Taking one last look in the direction the crossbowman – whoever he was – had gone, I peeled myself off the tree and crept as quietly as possible past a fan of mature ferns, using them as cover, until I got to the next tree, then did the same again. The lines of pines had now given way to a sprinkling of oak trees as the woods thinned, and I could see the vague outline of the house through the undergrowth, no more than thirty yards away.
I looked back. Still no sign of my pursuer. For the first time, I felt a thin ray of hope. I took a step backwards, then another, manoeuvring round the tree trunk to make myself as invisible as possible.
Dead Man's Gift and Other Stories Page 16