Pig Island

1

Dear Mr Taranici

I certainly hope you are coming to understand why I had to cancel last week. Apparently you said I didn't give you enough warning to waive the fee and, of course, I apologize for that, but I really think you should try, as a professional, to understand just what things are like up here. They are so… I don't even know how to say it… so completely awful that I have absolutely no idea when I'll be back in London. So maybe you can see why one cancelled appointment doesn't seem all that catastrophic to me. (By the way, just for the record, being nagged by your receptionist didn't help. I mean yes, surprisingly, I do know I've got to pay you. Haven't I always paid on time? And don't you remember why I'm here in Scotland in the first place? To find a way to tell Oakesy about it all, my job and everything? I've told you I'm going to get him to help me with my bills, but your secretary rubbing it in that I haven't got any money is just making my anxiety levels rocket.)

Do you recall saying if I hit an anxiety barrier a good coping mechanism would be to write things down? Remember? To soothe myself? Well, that's what I'm doing now. Writing it all out. How about we treat this letter as my session? Then I won't be paying for empty time after all and we'll both be happy. The other thing I've been doing is reading the chart you gave me (filling it in religiously every day, actually) and trying to identify the 'life/situation/relationship/practical problem' that triggered this catastrophic anxiety. And what do I find? Surprise surprise, at the very root of it all is the usual thing: you-know-who, and his *#%*$* job and his total inability to take me seriously or even notice me. God knows how I'll ever get him on to the subject of money. Especially with all that's happened to him.

You remember I told you we were up here for him to cover a story on Cuagach Eilean? Pig Island? Well, yes, I can just see your face now because you must have heard that name in the news this week. I assume you've already put two and two together and guessed who has managed to get himself caught up in the whole dreadful thing. And now he's the centre of attention and I'll never get listened to or my needs met.

Honestly, it's been horrible, just horrible, from the moment we got here. I'd spent ages choosing my wardrobe for this holiday — I mean, the attention I paid to detail. I bought three sets of shorts, quite shorty ones. Yes, I can hear you saying, 'Alex, are you sure you should be sexualizing another negotiation?' Well, you'd be very pleased with yourself in this instance, because the shorts didn't work. He just spent the whole time on his computer, hardly noticing I was there. And to cap it all he left me on my own in this horrible bungalow with water that's piped down through peat so it's an awful brown colour and makes the toilet look dirty, and this huge picture-window, which lets the sun come in and bake everything until you can't breathe. You couldn't imagine it in your worst nightmares. Fake beams, squares of cardboard daubed with pink ant-killer in every corner, not a soul for miles around.

How long do you think he was gone for? One day? Two days? Ha! No. Try again. Three. Three days I was there, miles from the nearest house, with nothing to do but go back through my credit-card statements for the zillionth time, or stare out at the clouds of midges in the trees. Just when I was really panicking, when I'd gone through nearly all the money he'd left and was thinking there was no point in hanging around in Scotland at all because he wasn't going to be interested in talking to me anyway, suddenly he turns up on the doorstep.

Well, that was almost the end for me. He'd been in a fight. He was totally unrecognizable — half paralysed and bloody, half his hair missing where it had been pulled out. I really had to struggle to keep my temper with him. Oh, I put him to bed and did the devoted-wife number, but I was furious. It turns out that Malachi Dove (you've heard that name in the papers a few times this week, I bet), Oakesy's nemesis for years, is alive and kicking and living on Pig Island. And, typical of Oakesy, he's gone out of his way to provoke a confrontation with him. Honestly. He could have been killed.

It's a class thing, Mummy says. Remember I told you she's got this bee in her bonnet about Oakesy being my rebellion against her? That marrying outside my class is a guarantee cracks will come to the surface sooner rather than later? Well, I've got to the point where I'm almost agreeing with her. I mean, why does he have to drink so much? Where are his social graces? (Incidentally, I'm convinced this is why there were such sparks between me and Christophe — and whatever you say there's no doubt there were sparks. It's a simple fact of life. We looked at each other and recognized someone from the same class, and that's all there is to it.)

It took Oakesy two weeks to get back on his feet. And then he was straight back out there, hiring a boat to take him to Cuagach. But if I thought that put me on edge, sent my stress hormones into overdrive, I had no idea of the nightmare that was about to start. Early Sunday it was, and I was asleep when the phone rang. It was you-know-who calling from his mobile, shouting above the noise of a boat engine, saying something about getting dressed because we were going out when he got back. I propped myself up on the pillow and looked at the clock. It was four in the morning.

'I'll be home in half an hour,' he shouted. His voice kept going in and out of range. Fading away. He hadn't even waited to get a good signal. 'Get… and don't… in a hurry. Get dressed.'

'For heaven's sake,' I mumbled. My head was all thick and cottony with sleep. 'For heaven's sake…'

'Just do it. Get dressed.'

And when he said that it really jolted me awake. I sat up in bed, suddenly thinking about Malachi Dove, about all the nightmares I'd been having. 'Oakesy?' I said, scared now, looking up at the window, at the curtains and thinking of the silent woods out there and the long driveway surrounded by rhododendrons. 'What's the matter? What's happening?'

'Wait next to the front door. I won't be long. And, Lex, don't take this the wrong way, but it might be a good idea to-'

'Yes? Might be a good idea to what?'

'To lock all the doors and all the windows.'

'What? What do you mean? Oakesy?' But the phone hissed static back at me. 'Oakesy?' He was gone, leaving me sitting bolt upright in the dark, clutching the receiver, staring at the window.

You know how level-headed I am. Don't you? You know it takes a lot to rattle me. But with that twenty-second phone call he'd got me scared — really anxious about how dark the bungalow suddenly seemed. I got out of bed and went shakily to the kitchen, getting the first knife I could find out of the drawer and standing with it pointing out in front of me in the darkness. Don't take this the wrong way, but lock everything. I went round the bungalow without switching on a single light, holding the knife in both hands, double-checking every lock, my hands shaking. When I tested the window locks I did it really quickly, only slightly opening the curtains, not the whole way. I didn't want to find a face staring back at me through the glass.

In the bedroom I put the light on and got dressed with my back to the wall so I could see the window and the door, my hands shaking so hard I could barely do up my jeans. I got my shoes on and went to sit in the living room, on a chair against the wall between the window and the front door, the knife still clutched in my hands. I kept thinking of the acres of wood surrounding me, pressing in on the bungalow. Every sound was magnified a hundred times: the strange click-click-click of the immersion-heater coming on in the airing-cupboard, a bird walking across the shingled roof. When the phone rang again I snatched it up, my heart thundering.

'Yes? Is that you?'

'I'm outside. I'm going to let myself in.'

I heard the key in the lock. The door opened and he came in wearily, dropping his rucksack on the floor.

'What is it?' I jumped up and stood in front of him. 'What's happening? You're frightening the life out of me.'

He didn't answer. He stood there, looking at me with bloodshot eyes, his T-shirt torn and covered with blood. Hadn't shaved, of course, and his skin was all leached and sick-looking under the tan. There was a pause and then another figure shuffled in from the darkness and stopped just inside the door, blinking and turning round in a confused circle. It took me a moment to realize it was a woman because her hair was really short and black, with these patches of skin showing through, and she was very tall, almost as tall as Oakesy. She was wearing this awful belted imitation-leather coat, and a denim skirt that reached all the way down to her chain-store trainers — you know the sort, with flashing lights in them, except the lights didn't seem to be working. When she turned and caught sight of me she put her hands up defensively as if I was going to pounce on her from the darkness.

'My wife,' Oakesy said. He slammed the front door and bolted it. 'Lex.'

She subsided a little. Slowly she lowered her arms and turned her head sideways, a wary eye fixed on me. She would have been quite pretty in a way if her hair didn't look like it'd been cut with pinking shears and she hadn't got that closed-up, sullen scowl on her face. She had the appearance of those teenage white boys you see hanging around the town centre in Oban sniffing glue, with their washed-out skins and shadows under their eyes.

'Who's she?'

'Angeline,' he said. 'She's Angeline.'

'Angeline?'

'Angeline Dove.'

'Angeline Do-' I stopped. I wasn't sure I'd heard him right. 'Angeline Dove?'

'His daughter.'

I turned to stare at her. 'Is that true?' Oakesy had never said anything about children. 'Is it?' She didn't answer. She just went on studying me doubtfully as if she was ready to run away. 'Hey,' I said, waving a hand to get her attention, 'hello-oh. I asked you a question.'

'It's true,' she muttered quickly. 'It's true.'

'It's all right, Lex,' Oakesy said.

I swivelled my eyes to him. 'All right?'

'She's cool.'

'Cool?'

'Yes. Really.'

I shook my head, putting my fingers to my temples. I've lived with all the stories about Dove for long enough and I think I can be forgiven if I was a little taken aback. Can't I? 'Oakesy?' I said, turning from him to Angeline, and back again. 'Do I deserve to be told what's happening?' I stared at her coat — filthy and cheap and covered with grass stains — then at him: just as bad with his T-shirt all stained and ripped, his bare legs grazed, dirt and gravel embedded in the congealed cuts. 'Why is she here? What's happened?'

'I'm sorry.' He sounded so sad. I've never heard him sound like that before. 'I'm sorry, Lex, we've got to go to the police.'

2

Outside the world was silent, as if it was holding its breath. It was still dark but there was a faint flush of morning starting at the horizon. We stood in the doorway, blinking out at the trees, listening for movement. It was silent. No dawn chorus, no flutter of wings in the branches. Oakesy paused for a second then hurried us out — come on, come on — across to the cold little Fiesta, our feet crunching in the gravel, ushering us into the car.

He wasn't telling me what had happened. He wasn't telling me why he was scared, why he locked all the doors as soon as we got into the car. He started the engine really quickly and we were off — jolting down the driveway, out on to the dark lane that led to the top of the peninsula. When we got out on the coast road he kept leaning forward to peer out at the forests and the little rocky coves rushing past outside as if he was searching for something, slowing at one point as we passed a pebble beach to study a boat pulled up there.

'Oakesy? What's happening?'

But he shook his head as if he was concentrating on something very important — the sort of focused look he'd get if he was trying to balance something on the top of a very thin stick. He wouldn't answer. And in the back Angeline Dove was as silent as he was. She sat awkwardly cantilevered over on to one side, her hand up to grasp the seat in front of her as if she was injured. I glanced at her from time to time in the wing mirror. She had her nose to the window and was staring really hard at Pig Island with her shadowy eyes. Whenever we turned a corner and it disappeared behind the headland her eyes went blank, as if she'd retreated back into herself. She's cool, Oakesy had said. Cool. Cool? Well, she wasn't like her dad, that was certain — she looked like she'd lived in a dungeon all her life: her skin was pinched and sallow, and now it was getting light I could see she had a rash of acne round the corners of her mouth. The haircut was so bad there were bits of curls in one place and patches of scalp next to them. My God, what a mess. I wondered who her mother was.

We'd gone about three miles when Oakesy started tapping his fingers agitatedly on the steering-wheel and swallowing noisily.

'What is it?' I said, looking at his hands. 'What's the matter?'

But before I could finish the sentence he swerved the car off the road, pulling it into a layby with a spume of gravel. He threw the door open, jumped out and walked away from the car half bent over, his hands pressed to his stomach. Oh, God, I thought, here we go, he's going to be sick. I got out of the car. It was really cold and still outside. My breath was hanging in the air as I crunched across the layby towards him. He heard me coming and turned, and I saw that he wasn't being sick, he was crying. His face was swollen and red. His nose was running.

'I shouldn't,' he said, hunching his shoulders and wiping his face on the sleeves of his sweatshirt. 'I shouldn't — I mean, look at her. She saw the whole fucking thing and she's not crying.'

'What whole thing? What whole thing? How can I talk to you if you won't tell me what happened?'

'It's all my fault, Lex.' He wiped his nose with the back of his hand and shook his head, taking deep breaths, slowly getting the crying under control. 'If he'd never found out they let me on that fucking island in the first place-' He took another few shaky breaths, then drew himself up, red-eyed. He raised a hand towards the firth, glittering and twitching pink in the dawn. 'People are dead, sweetheart.' He shook his head, sad and exhausted. 'Out there, on Cuagach, people are dead.'

I'd taken a breath to answer before his words sunk in. When I realized what he'd said I closed my mouth and turned my head to one side, lowering my voice. 'Dead? Is that what you said? Dead?'

'Yes.'

'What do you mean dead?' I took him by the sweatshirt, at a point just above his belly-button, and turned him so he had to look me in the eye. 'You said people are dead. Dead how? Oakesy? Tell me this isn't what those types in the pub were telling you about.'

He closed his eyes and sighed. 'You don't want to know, Lexie, please, believe me you-'

'Don't patronize me, Oakesy. Whatever's happened to you out there I can promise you I've seen it before. Don't forget who I work for. Now, tell me.'

And in the end he did. He sat down wearily on the freezing gravel on the side of the road and while Angeline peered at us through the steamed-up car window, and the sun spread orange and molten across the horizon, he told me.

I'm sure you think you know what he said because it's all been in the papers this week, and everyone probably imagines they know exactly what happened, but I can promise you don't know the half of it: some of the things he kept coming back to — over and over again as if they'd got stuck on a loop in his head. I mean, you never saw in the newspapers about a face peeled off, did you? But Oakesy kept coming back to that, showing me with his hands how big it was, the way it had been hanging, drooped over the edge of something. And you never read in the Sun about pigs tearing apart a teenage girl and carrying her foot away. Or the way her foot had tried to stay attached to her leg bones. Or the guy blown by the blast on his side, just his little toe facing the ceiling, or — I could go on and on — the people with no heads, their necks just red stalks, a bit of vertebra protruding from the flesh, half a skull with its contents sucked away by the explosion…

I can say it all quite calmly now, a few days later, but as much of a professional as I am, as much as I've seen with Christophe's work, I'm not completely atrophied, you know. I couldn't even look at Oakesy as he told me. I listened with my eyes locked on the frozen blades of grass at the edge of the layby, my arms folded, half of me wanting to scream at him, 'Shut up.' When he was finished I was quiet for a long while, feeling my heart knocking deep against my stomach. Then I turned round to where Pig Island just peeped out beyond the headland. It was too far away to see anything, of course — not the village or the chapel or anything — just this great silent shape taking all the light away.

'Lex?' He put his hand on my foot. 'You OK?'

I looked down at his hand. 'I've seen things, you know. At work.'

'I know,' he said, rubbing his eyes. 'I know.'

There was a bit of a silence while we both thought about the island. Then he stood and felt in the back pocket of his shorts. He pulled out a crumpled piece of paper and passed it over. I took it, my eyes not leaving his face.

'Well?' I said. 'What's this?'

He didn't answer. He put his hands in his pockets and stared out to sea, as if he'd just handed me one of those awful private-detective photos — him with another woman. I unfolded the paper shakily, my heart thumping.

'It's the rental agreement for the bungalow.'

'Yes.' He bent his head and scratched the top of his scalp hard — the way he always does when he knows he's done something wrong. For a moment I thought he was going to start crying again. 'Found it in Dove's cottage,' he said, his voice all thick. 'I took her to get a bag packed and I found it. I never said, but it was missing from my rucksack — after he gave me that twatting.' He paused. 'You know what it means?'

My blood was racing now. Oh, yes. I knew what it meant. Now everything made sense. Like why he'd called me and told me to lock the doors. Like why he was so anxious. 'My God,' I said faintly. My legs felt like jelly. 'He knew where I was? All that time?'

'I'm sorry.'

'All that time.' I looked back down the long, empty road in the direction of the bungalow. I was scared out of my mind. I kept picturing the woods surrounding the bungalow, thinking how close I'd been. Maybe he'd been out there, watching me. Maybe he was there now. 'My things. Oakesy, I left all my things in the bungalow.'

'Yeah.' He got to his feet and put his hand on my back. 'The police'll deal with it.'

The walk back to the car was only a few yards — but it felt like miles. I kept my back stiff, resisting the impulse to whip round. I knew if I turned all the mountains and clouds would be glaring down at me, scrutinizing my back. As Oakesy put his hand on the driver's door he stopped and looked round quite suddenly as if someone had called his name. He stared up at the mountains, at the dark green, almost black ribbons of trees on the upper slopes.

'What? What did you hear?'

'Nothing,' he said. He gave a long, violent shiver as if he wanted to shake something off his back. He threw a glance out at Pig Island, then got into the car, locked his door and leaned across me to lock mine. 'Come on,' he said. 'Let's go.'

3

I don't know if this is a good time to point something out, but you may as well know, if you haven't already guessed: your comments about Christophe really hurt my feelings.

'Lexie, would it be very difficult for you to accept that Mr Radnor wanted nothing more than a professional relationship with you?'

That's what you said. Remember? Well, I've thought about it and the other day I remembered an incident I should have told you about before. It's something that absolutely proves there is more to Christophe's relationship with me than you could ever guess at.

It was one morning when I'd been at the clinic for only about a month. He came in early because that was his habit — all clean and scrubbed and smelling of aftershave — his Telegraph tucked under his arm. Usually he'd just raise a hand as he passed my desk, but that day, maybe because no one else was around, he stopped and looked at me curiously.

'Good morning,' he said, as if he'd never seen me before and was impressed with what he saw. I was wearing a very neatly pressed white blouse with a matelot collar and a rather sweet black skirt that ended mid-thigh. But Mr Radnor is too much of a gentleman to be staring at my legs. Instead he pretended to be admiring the vase of fresh yellow ranunculus I'd placed on the counter-top. 'This all looks very attractive,' he said, taking in the gleaming floors the magazines lined up neatly, the plasma screen monitor polished carefully. 'Yes,' he repeated. 'All very attractive.'

Well, off he went into the lift and that was where the exchange ended, short and polite and not very remarkable. But I'm not stupid. I knew quite well the message he was sending. His choice of words, very attractive (used twice), wasn't lost on me. From that day on I kept the reception area shining and bright, squirting perfume into the air and sweeping the floor every time a patient walked leaves and dirt in from the street. Every day Christophe came breezing through; no matter how late he was or how stressed, he always found time to comment on how attractive it looked, and every day I worked harder at it, always thinking ahead, trying to do what would please him.

I think I've told you — and you probably knew anyway — about all his pro bono work, the fabulous things he's done for people around the world too poor to pay for operations? Well, I'd saved a lot of the press cuttings, interviews and photos of him with the people he's helped, and it suddenly occurred to me how nice it would be to have them framed. I found someone in Tottenham Court Road to do them quite cheaply and two weeks later I got to work early and spent an hour hanging them around the reception area until they looked perfect. Then I polished everything, swept the floor, straightened my blouse and sat neatly, waiting for him to come in

He was a few minutes late. He came in, shaking his umbrella and propping it in the corner. 'Good morning, Alex.'

'Morning, Mr Radnor,' I said, my smile getting wider. I could hardly keep still I was so excited. 'What filthy weather.'

'Dreadful.' He looked up, and when he saw all the pictures arrayed behind me, his expression changed. He paused, then came forward slowly, a hesitant smile on his face. 'Those are nice,' he said uncertainly. He stopped at the desk, unbuttoned his raincoat and seemed to be thinking hard. Then he said, 'Maybe not entirely suitable in Reception? I wonder if they look a little — uh — showy. Do you think?'

My smile faded. 'You've got a lot to be proud of, Mr Radnor.'

'I tell you what,' he said kindly, 'don't you think they'd look rather good in my office?'

'Your office?' And then, of course, I understood. He wasn't upset or angry — he was being modest. That's the sort of man he is. I stood up behind the desk, very erect and proud. 'Yes. Your office. Your office it is.' I turned and began to take them down, piling them efficiently on the counter. 'I'll carry them up for you.'

'Oh, no no no — no need for that.'

'None of the staff'll be here for half an hour. I can lock the door.'

'It won't be necessary.'

'But I'd like to.'

I stood on tiptoe to reach the top ones, and here I blame myself — because I didn't give a thought to what it might do to him to see my skirt ride up and reveal the tops of my legs in my black tights. When I got the last picture down and turned to him, his expression had hardened. He was red in the face.

'Come on, then,' he said, picking up half of the pictures. 'I'll get the lift.'

I'd never been in his office because that dragon of a secretary guards it like Cerberus. Well, it was absolutely exquisite, with oak-panelled walls and elegant curtains and a marvellous view of the rain-spattered roofs of Harley Street. You could even see the tops of some of the trees in Regent's Park. I stopped and sighed, looking around me.

'Oh, it's lovely, just lovely, up here. It's exactly what I expected.'

'Thank you,' he said, taking off his raincoat and hanging it on the hatstand behind the door. 'You can put them on the window-seat. I'll deal with them later.'

So I took the pictures to the window-seat, with its lovely raw-silk cushions in a dusty apricot colour, and put them in a pile. Then I loitered for a moment or two, next to the window where the sun could come through and show the highlights in my hair. Christophe sat down at his desk and switched on his computer.

'Was there anything else?'

I smiled and stretched up on tiptoe once or twice, my shoulders up, I was so full of excitement. This was like a secret game we were playing.

He smiled, a little tightly. 'Sorry. I said — was there anything else?'

'Your secretary's got a great job,' I said. 'It's the sort of job I'd love.'

He nodded, and looked at the door, then at the computer screen. Then he rubbed his top lip a little anxiously, with the side of his finger.

'Don't worry,' I said, because I know that's the thing with men and sex — it overwhelms them, like a wave. He needed time to come down to earth. 'I'm going. Call me if you need anything. I finish at five.'

I stopped at the door and turned round to give him a last little wave, but he was busy with the computer, clicking through his appointments — like the professional he is — so I went back to my desk and spent the whole day glowing with that amazing feeling you get when you know you've met someone who is going to change your life.

I didn't tell you any of this before out of respect for Mr Radnor — the medical community is like a grapevine, isn't it? And, God knows, it's not easy for a man of his age, struggling with these feelings. But don't think I'm dismissing what you said: in fact, when you said, 'professional relationship', I think you were closer to the truth than you realized. Because in the last few days it's become very clear to me: what Christophe needs is an excuse to have a closer professional relationship with me. He needs a bit of breathing space to relax around me, so the real thing between us can develop. What's ironic is I didn't see any of this until what happened that awful morning with Oakesy and Angeline Dove.

4

Sometimes you surprise yourself. When we drove away from the layby I was trembling with shock. But then I wound down the window and put my face into the slipstream, the cold air racing up my nose and into my lungs and I thought of one thing. Ithought about Christophe. I thought about the things he's endured — the human tragedies, the danger, the disaster zones — all the appalling conditions he's confronted (without, incidentally, ever being reduced to tears). The sun floated free of the horizon and warmed my face, and suddenly I felt very close to him. I had the strange feeling that what had happened on Cuagach was going to unite us in some way. By the time we got to Oban I wasn't trembling any more. If anything, I was excited. I was in the middle of something enormously important. No one at the clinic would be able to ignore that for very long.

The seaside town was absolutely silent: aside from the early Mull ferry in the harbour, lit up like a Christmas tree, the only sign of life was the remains of last night's drinking sessions — chip-wrappers blowing along the cobbled street, a seagull tugging at a half-eaten kebab in the gutter. Oakesy parked in a back alley and we all got out of the car, our faces stony and shocked in the early sun. Angeline took a little longer getting out, struggling a bit. I think it was then I realized there was something wrong with her.

Earlier I suppose I must have thought she'd hurt herself on the island and that was why she was sitting strangely. It's amazing that, with all my experience at the clinic, I didn't give it much thought. But now, as we walked to the police station, I studied her out of the corner of my eye and it dawned on me that something was very wrong. She limped slightly, lurching a little, as if her right leg was shorter than the left, and once or twice held her hand up, as if to reach for something to catch her balance, the hem of her coat swaying. She kept up with us — but whenever I slowed down to try to get a glimpse of her from behind she slowed too, so I couldn't see. But I was getting an impression, even out of the corner of my eye, of a strange bulk at the back — looking at her, you'd think she was wearing a bag strapped under her coat.

The police station was in a dark brick building on a main street, and while we waited in Reception for someone to come to the desk, she stood with her back to the wall, arms folded tight round her, eyes darting from side to side as if she expected to be ambushed. The man behind the glass shield was friendly enough until Oakesy told him why we were there. Then his smile froze and the friendliness left him. He looked from Oakesy, to me, to Angeline and back again, as if he was sure we were having him on. 'Wait there,' he muttered, and disappeared for a while. When he reappeared he didn't meet our eyes, but ushered us through a door, down a corridor and into an office, a small stale room at the back of the police station, full of filing cabinets, with chipped mugs on the desk. 'Wait in here,' he said, switching on the light. 'DS Struthers is out on a call, but he's coming back to speak to you. I'm going to get you some coffee.'

We sat in the office waiting for our coffee, none of us speaking. Oakesy spent the time bent over, inspecting his legs, running his fingers down the messy long grazes already scabbing over. I kept watching Angeline. She could hardly keep still she was so nervous: swallowing over and over again and putting her coat sleeve up to dab at the sweat that kept popping out on her forehead. It was strange the way she was sitting, half on her right leg, one hand clutching the seat as if she was sore or something.

After about five minutes a sleepy-looking man in a rather creased suit appeared in the open doorway. We all glanced up at him expectantly, but he didn't say anything, just stood there, studying us all. He was young, probably only about twenty-nine, and slightly overweight (what do they say about the Glaswegians? That they've got a lower life expectancy than the Ethiopians or something?). His hair had been shaved at the back of the neck, with the front all spiked up and the tips bleached yellow.

'I'm DS Callum Struthers,' he said, after a while. 'The desk FSO told me your story and what I'm wondering is…' He looked from one of us to another, taking us in. '… is it true?'

'It's true.'

'You were out on old Cuagach? The three of you?'

'Just me,' said Oakesy. He nodded to Angeline. 'And her.'

'And what are you going to tell me? You saw the devil of Cuagach? A wee maddarous beastie creeping through the forests?'

Next to me I felt Angeline stiffen. She dropped her face and began to scratch compulsively at her shorn head. Her chest was rising and falling, her mouth moving noiselessly; she was muttering something under her breath as if she was talking herself into not getting up and running away. Oakesy turned to Struthers. He had that heavy, red-eyed look that he gets when he's angry.

'Are you sure your desk sergeant told you what happened?'

Struthers lowered his lids and nodded. 'Aye. But to be fair with you, it's not the first time I've heard this story. People love a good hoax call when it comes to old Cuagach. Human remains washing up on the Craignish Peninsula? I mean, what do they think we are?'

'Don't say that word again.'

'What word?'

'Hoax.'

Oh-oh, I thought, there's going to be another fight. But then Struthers seemed to back off a bit. He came in and sat down, studying Oakesy very carefully for a while.

'Our dispatchers in Govan have got a lad nipping out to Cuagach for a keek at what's happening out there.' He glanced up at the big map on the wall. 'They'll've sent someone out of Lochgilphead and he'll've chartered something out of, I don't know, Ardfern or somewhere, because the launch won't come up from the Clyde, not for a ho-' He paused. 'Not until we know what's happening. So that'll be…' He sucked in a breath through his teeth and looked at his watch dubiously. 'What? Two hours before we know how the land lies out there?'

'This isn't a hoax. Do we look like teenagers?'

Struthers didn't say anything for a moment or two. Then he opened a filing cabinet and pulled out a folder, kicking the drawer closed. 'Tell you what. Why don't I do the right thing? Get your statements. Get it all clear in our heads.'

Oakesy went first, leaving the room with Struthers, wooden, still containing his anger. Angeline and I were left with some undrinkable coffee in polystyrene cups that the desk sergeant had brought. We didn't speak. She sat opposite me in an uncommunicative huddle. She'd stopped that compulsive scratching and had her hands pressed between her knees. Her closed little face was lowered, but from time to time she looked up at the door as if she expected someone to come running in. I tipped my head forward, resting it on my fingertips so that she wouldn't be able to see me sneaking glances at her. She was all tilted and awkward, as if she was sitting on a large cushion or something. I thought about the way she'd reacted to what Struthers had said and suddenly my heart started to race, my hands sweat. Something incredible — something strange and unbelievable — was in my head. Something about the mass she was carrying around under the coat. Why doesn't she take that coat off? She must be baking in it…

The video.

A human tail — it sounds like a fantasy, doesn't it? But you as a doctor will know that actually hundreds of children a year are born with tails, it's just that most of them are removed in the first few hours. The sacrococcygeal growth. The vestigial human tail. I'd seen a paper about them in one of the journals at the clinic. There are all these different kinds of human tails, some are haemangiomas — I stared at her with this fixed smile on my face, all the scientific stuff going through my head — and some have something to do with spina bifida. There had been photos in the journal. One was of a little boy in India with a long, skin-covered tube of fat dangling from the bottom of his spine. What was the term they used? Occulta? Spina bifida occulta? But his tail had been quite small in comparison: no bigger than a large worm. So what about something as big as what was on the video?

And then, with Christophe's face in my mind and all these ideas racing around, something else occurred to me. It went click-click-click into place, and I almost smiled. This dreadful thing might have a silver lining, after all. Oakesy was sitting on something big with this story, much better than a feature on the Positive Living Centre. This would be tabloid front-page stuff — the end of our financial troubles. Angeline would give Oakesy everything he needed to know about Malachi. But it wasn't just Oakesy she could help: this was a story Christophe would kill to be involved with. I could just imagine his face, smiling out of the newspaper from Angeline's post-op bedside, maybe holding her hand. And I'd be the one who had found her for him. An excited little itch was starting in the palms of my hands.

I glanced at the door, then sat back, sipping my coffee and smiling at her. My heart was beating, very cool and hard, because I knew Angeline Dove was going to help us. First she'd help Oakesy. And then she'd help me.

5

It didn't take two hours, as Struthers predicted, but just fifty minutes before the news came through from the dispatcher. Then everything changed. In the time it took for Oakesy to give his statement, the station was transformed from a sleepy backwater to a place full of noise: people busying around, carrying forms and bulging folders, phones ringing in distant offices, doors slamming, police radios firing off bursts of white noise. They were supposed to use a courtroom in Lochgilphead, but that was being renovated so they were setting up an incident room here in Oban, in a building that was too small, and by lunchtime there were arguments raging up and down the corridor between the local police officers and the women in the HOLMES team, who'd just arrived from Glasgow with their computer equipment: there weren't enough parking spaces — where in the name of God were they expected to leave their cars? And what? Only one ladies' lavvy? In the whole building? 'And that's got a broken water-heater that'll scald you if ye're not careful.'

For lunch me and Oakesy sat in silence at Struthers's desk and ate supermarket sandwiches, like office workers on a rainy lunch-hour. Angeline couldn't eat. She tried but you could see it was like trying to swallow pebbles. When Struthers came to get her to give her statement she stood, but she was shaking so much they had to call a female officer to come and help her away.

'She's in shock,' Oakesy said. 'Take it easy with her.'

Ten minutes later he was taken off by a detective who said he was the 'senior identification manager'. He needed help in making up a list of missing persons. Well, that took almost two hours during which time guess who was left alone in the office, with nothing to do but read through the Strathclyde Police leaflets from Reception — Loch Safety; What Happens If I'm Arrested?; Cadet Programme: So You Think You're Too Young to Join the Police? — and stare at the area map. Nobody said anything about getting our stuff from the bungalow, no matter how many times I asked, and I didn't have my phone with me to send a text.

'No one's even offered me a cup of tea,' I told Oakesy, when he and Angeline came back to the office. 'Not a thing since lunch. I wouldn't mind a cup of tea.'

At four p.m. an intimidating team of plainclothes men arrived from Dumbarton, silent, grim-looking in their suits. At their helm was the subdivisional chief inspector: a bit older than Christophe, maybe mid-fifties, very thin and austere, the height of a basketball player with the long, serious face of a professor. When he came into Struthers's office he didn't say hello or anything: he went past us to the window, put his nose to the pane and studied the view thoughtfully. I knew what was out there — God knows, I'd had enough time to look out at it: a little parking area behind the station, two marked cars and a row of dustbins. Beyond that the back-street rooftops… then purplish, heather-pocked hills, deserted and alien.

After a few minutes he closed the blinds, twisting the slats so they met each other neatly and didn't let any daylight through. Then he switched on the fluorescent lights and came to sit down opposite us. He didn't speak for a while, just studied us carefully, one after the other.

'I'm Peter Danso,' he said eventually. 'I'm the police incident commander, which means, for your purposes, I'll be heading up the investigation. I'm sorry it's taken me some time to come and speak to you. There's been a lot to — to deal with.' He leaned over and shook our hands. We all said our names in turn, like children at register time. It was making me nervous, the way he seemed so worried about us. He turned to Oakesy and Angeline. 'I've read your statements and there are a few things I want to say to you both. A lot of issues around your mental welfare and what we can do to support you, of course. But what's on my mind, what I'm here for now, is to discuss your plans.'

'I'm staying,' said Oakesy. 'I'm staying here.'

Danso nodded slowly, taking him in: his scabbed knees and battered hands. The measured look in his eyes. 'You know there's nothing to stop you just getting out of Strathclyde right now? I'm not going to lie, you're crucial to our investigation, and in a perfect world I'd have you stay, both of you.' He looked at Angeline who was staring at the floor, bright red in the face. 'But I want this clear — all I can do is advise you to stay. I can't force you.'

'I know,' Oaksey said. 'I'm staying.'

'OK, OK.' Danso propped an elbow on his desk and scratched his ear uncomfortably. 'Look, I don't need to tell you how serious this is. And reading through your statements just now one or two red flags came up for me that made me want to think carefully about your safety. With the trouble this lass's father is in… well, in my experience it makes him dangerous.' He met Oakesy's eyes and held them. 'Very dangerous indeed. In the next few hours someone'll be thinking about doing an impact assessment and that'll address just how worried we should be…'

On Danso's belt his phone rang. He checked the display, put it on to answer and looked back up at us.

'We had a vehicle stolen from the car park at Crinian Hotel on Saturday night — at about eleven. Do you know Crinian? It's one of the places boats put in to when they come off the islands.'

'He took the little dory, the one they had at the centre. It was missing.'

'Aye, and my head's telling me the stolen car is just some kids come up from Glasgow, but my ticker's got a mind of its own on the subject. Now, you've got history with him, Mr Oakes. He's already injured you once.'

'Yes.'

'He knows where you live? And he threatened you?'

'Yes.'

Danso sighed and rubbed his temple. He dropped his hand away from his head in Oakesy's direction. 'It's a pity you didn't report it. If you'd reported it at the time we could have-'

'I know, I know. Tell me about it. It's gone through my head about a million times — if I'd told you then, you could've done something about it.'

Danso nodded. He studied Oakesy for a long time without speaking, as if he was trying hard not to say something nasty. My heart was still going fast, thinking about the close call I'd had, but I had a moment's faint satisfaction. I'd begged Oakesy to report it, but would he? It will come back to haunt you, Oakesy.

'Look,' Danso said eventually, 'I'm going to be honest. I don't have a lot of experience with endangerment of witnesses, but…' He pulled out a drawer in the filing cabinet, rummaged a bit and found a folder. He held it up, clearing his throat and giving us an apologetic look. '… Strathclyde Police has got a dedicated witness protection scheme. Sorry to come over like a PR exercise, but we're one of the only forces that has.' He opened it and distributed a set of stapled papers to each of us. I looked at the top page in my lap. 'These are the unit's criteria forms. I think it'd be worth filling them out and sending them down to Headquarters to see what they think.'

Oakesy flipped through the pages, his face tense. Angeline took her copy without meeting Danso's eyes. She read in silence, the paper in her lap, her hands up to her face.

'It's not going to happen overnight. Even if it comes back from Pitt Street with a tick in the box it's still going to take time to process, so in the meantime my lads back in Dumbarton have been calling the locals to find somewhere safe for you. They've come up with a place — on my home patch, as it happens. My feeling is, it'll be better than anything the witness team can offer you.'

'A safe-house?' I said. 'Is that what you mean? A safe-house?'

Danso looked up at me and smiled. His face was suddenly pleasant, not austere any more. 'Hen, if you want to call it that then be my guest. I hope you won't be disappointed. It's a property we use for visiting police officers. It used to be a hidey-hole for victims to give their evidence. Vulnerable victims, if you're with me: racial harassment, child abuse, rape.' He let that sink in. 'Put it this way, it's not the Hilton.'

'All my things are still at the bungalow. He knows the address.'

'We've got someone out there already, having a look round. When we've cleared it we can pick your stuff up.'

'Or this could be a good time for you to go and see your mum, Lex?' Oakesy said, turning to me. 'This is going to be over in a few days and then I'll drive down and get you. We'll take her to that tapas place she likes and-'

'No. That's OK — I'll stay. I'll come to the safe-house.'

'I think you'd be better off-'

'I mean it,' I said, cutting him off. 'I'm not going anywhere. I'm staying with you. And…' I leaned over and put my hand on Angeline's arm. She dropped her hands from her face in surprise at the touch and stared down at my fingers, white and clean-looking, the nails quite pink and nice next to her earth-stained skin. '… and you must come with us too,' I said. 'You really must. You need to be with someone who can care for you.'

6

Angeline's mother, it turned out, had been dead for two years. Angeline had been on the island all her life and she had no contact with friends or relatives on the mainland. There was nowhere else for her to go. Danso said, 'Look, hen, a doctor can examine you if you want, see if you need any psychiatric care or medical attention.' Here, he glanced vaguely down at her hips, then back at her hair, which looked, I agreed with him, diseased. But for all his offers she just stared ahead of her, occasionally looking warily at him and grunting an answer. It was only after about ten minutes that she spoke. 'Him,' she said stiffly, nodding at Oakesy. 'I want to go with him.'

A plain-clothes officer came with us in the Fiesta to the bungalow. They'd had a team out there, checking the place, and they said it was clear. Oakesy wanted to go back and collect our things, then go on to the safe-house. Danso had to take us out the back of the station because by the time we were ready to go — after Oakesy and Angeline had given their fingerprints — the press had gathered in front, growing in number from two or three incongruously battered cars at ten a.m. to forty or fifty now, all lined up in the seasidey street, their drivers' doors open, the occupants waiting patiently, a BBC television van in their midst. 'Fucking hyenas,' Oakesy muttered, apparently forgetting what he does for a living. 'Grubby little shits.'

Oakesy drove — I went shotgun. The 'babysitter', a small shaven-headed man in a poloneck who had shadowy patches on his fingers that looked as if they might have once been LOVE/HATE tattoos, sat in the back with Angeline. He didn't speak much. All the way through the narrow back-streets he hooked his hand on the back of the seat and stared out of the rear window, watching the other cars.

The nights were drawing in, and by the time we got to the bungalow it was dark. There was an unmarked car at the foot of the driveway and a marked one parked at the top, the blue lights flashing silently on and off, lighting up the interior of the woods like an electric storm. Oakesy stopped the Fiesta and he and the babysitter got out and went to speak to the driver, leaving Angeline and me sitting in the car with the engine still running. Our headlights made yellow cones, reflecting off the police car and the men's faces, but beyond this halo of light the woods, the driveway and the bungalow were cloaked in the sort of compressed, borderless darkness that you never see if you live in the city. I stared in the direction of the bungalow, my eyes swimming in and out of focus it was such an impenetrable black, wondering why I hadn't thought to leave a light on before I left. It wasn't like me not to — I always leave a light on. So why had I forgotten to do it this morning? I shuffled forward in the seat and put my hand against the windscreen, shading my eyes and trying to see past the lights up to the bungalow, my breath steaming up the glass.

The driver had got out of the marked car and all the men were standing at the side of the driveway now, just at the very edge of the pool of light, all peering at something on the ground. Oakesy said something, and both policemen glanced at his face, then looked thoughtfully back along the driveway for a while, then at the police car. The driver went to it and got down on his haunches to examine the front wheel, pulling a pen out of his pocket and digging into the tread as if he was searching for something. The other two men watched him, exchanging a sentence or two, and after a while the driver stood up and shook his head. Oakesy and the babysitter came back to the car.

'What?' I said as they climbed in, bringing a whiff of night smoke and the chill of an early frost on their clothes. 'What did you see?'

'When?' said Oakesy, turning his eyes to meet mine.

'Just now. Over there.'

'Nothing.' He disengaged the handbrake and swung the wheel round. 'Just tyre marks.'

'Tyre marks? Whose tyre marks?'

'His.' He nodded at the marked car. 'That's all.'

I stared at the car as we drove slowly past it. The policeman was in the driver's seat now, studying something — a map or a notebook, a penlight shining down, making a reddish blur of his profile. 'Are you sure?' I said, trying to keep my voice level. Earlier I was sort of excited. But now it was beginning to be nasty all over again. 'Are you sure they were his? Could he have got them confused?'

'I'm sure.'

He stopped at the bungalow and switched off the engine and we all leaned forward and peered at our reflection in the huge plate-glass window for a moment or two.

'Has anyone been inside?'

'Checked it before we got here and it was all locked. No sign of anyone.'

'Do you think they switched the light off?'

'I don't know. Probably.'

The other policeman started the engine of the car behind us and switched on the headlights, coming up the drive and stopping behind us, the lights dazzling us all.

'Bastard,' said the babysitter, holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the glare bouncing off the rear-view mirror.

'Coming?' Oakesy opened the door.

I shivered and glanced up at the bungalow. 'No, thanks.'

'OK. Won't be long. Ten minutes. Going to take a meter-reading for the landlord too.'

'Don't crease my clothes. Lay them flat.'

He looked at me for a long time, as if he was trying to decide what to say. Then he sighed. 'Don't worry,' he said, climbing wearily out of the car. 'I won't crease your clothes.'

When they'd gone the car began to get colder and colder. The officer in the car behind switched off his lights and the engine and, slowly, silence came down. The darkness seemed to stretch round the car and the bungalow. Behind me Angeline sat chewing a nail and staring blankly out of the window. For ages it was just me and her, and our breathing, which seemed to get louder and louder in the quiet.

'Angeline?' I said, after a while. 'Do you think your father's going to try to find Joe? I mean, do you think he could have been here? In these trees?'

There was a pause. 'Don't know.'

I waited for her to go on, but she just went silent again. So, I thought, no more communicative than when we were at the police station. I dropped my head back against the seat and put my hand in my shirt pocket where I usually kept my mobile, but of course it was still inside the bungalow. It was so odd to have no contact with the outside world. With Mummy or Christophe. I had a picture of Christophe in my head. I tried to keep it there, so I didn't have to think about the woods around us.

Eventually I sat up and swivelled round in the seat. Angeline hadn't moved. She was sitting near the window, holding the handle above the door, using it to lift some of her weight off her backside. A little stray light was shining off her forehead, which looked big and domed because of the weird haircut. In the car behind, the silhouette of the police officer was motionless. 'Angeline,' I said carefully, 'what do you think the detective meant? DS Struthers? About the devil? The devil of Pig Island — do you know what he was talking about?'

At first she didn't answer. She just looked out at the bungalow, at the door where Oakesy had gone, her eyes fixed, the skin round her mouth tightening. I put my elbow on the back of the seat and lowered my chin on to it: watching her.

'Angeline? I was asking if you knew what he meant. Because I think I know. I think I've seen what he was talking about. I've seen it on a video.'

There was a moment's silence. Then she turned very quickly and stared at me. I could see a vein beating rapidly in her temple.

'Didn't you know? There's a video, Angeline, a video of something. Walking along the beach of Cuagach. It's a bit blurry. But there's no doubt what it is. It's a creature on the beach — half man, half beast.' I licked my lips and glanced out of the window at the police car. Suddenly it seemed important that no one was watching me too carefully. 'Or maybe,' I said, in a low, clear voice, leaning over the seat and pinning her gaze meaningfully, 'maybe it was half beast, half woman…'

7

Lightning Tree Grove (God, doesn't the name just say it all?) is the nearest thing to hell on earth. It's an abandoned estate between Dumbarton and Renton, one of those wretched fifties and sixties examples of bad urban planning, and it's basically already dead and just waiting for the undertaker's hearse to arrive. Number twenty-nine Humbert Terrace is a three-bedroom semi at the edge of the estate and when I lift up my head from writing this letter and look out of the window, what do I see? Three hundred houses shivering at the edge of miserable, deserted fields, some of the windows grilled up by Environmental Services because they've found asbestos in the attics, all the walls covered with graffiti, tiles flapping around on roofs, and a cul-de-sac where cars come from Dumbarton to fly-tip, so that the streets are littered with Buckfast tonic-wine bottles and dirty nappies. It's going to be concreted over so they can build a leisure centre, but there are still about twenty people clinging on to their pitiful lives here: mostly squatters and asylum-seekers — lots of women in headscarves loping along the streets with long, timid faces. God knows what they must think of the place. Talk about out of the frying-pan and into the fire.

Of course, when we first arrived it was dark so we had no idea how horrible it was. It just seemed very, very quiet and deserted. The babysitter unlocked the door, struggling a bit with the unfamiliar keys, and let us in, clicking on the light. We all filed in behind him, to this horrible, damp little house. Oakesy went straight to the windows and began rattling them, checking the locks, and Angeline, who hadn't said a word on the journey, shuffled sideways and sat down on the nearest sofa with her coat pulled tight round her, glaring at the floor. I stood in the middle of the room, looking around feeling really depressed.

It was much, much nastier there than at the bungalow, I could see that straight away. Everything was rather stiffly positioned, as if it had been doing a mad dance in the dark before we arrived and had to freeze when the babysitter's key rattled in the lock: two peeling fake leather sofas sat at untidy angles, and a dust-covered TV on a black veneer video cabinet was pushed into the corner. All still and noiseless, you could imagine the place was waiting for us to leave, tensed, hating our intrusion. It was open-plan, the ground floor, and beyond the seating area was a kitchen someone had tried to make cheery with bright yellow-papered walls and turquoise tiles, primrose yellow mugs on a rustic mug tree. But it felt like a deserted institution: 'Do NOT use the grill!!!!' said a sign taped to the oven. 'The grill has been disabled for your safety!!!!!''

'Aye.' The babysitter wandered over to the corner, where a bundle of wires poked out of the ceiling above an empty bracket. He hooked a finger round the bracket and gave it a small tug. 'Used to be a camera here. And over there. Which means somewhere there'll be a…' He opened a cupboard in the kitchen, peered inside, then closed it and went into the hallway where he opened a door under the stairs. 'Yes, here. The console room.' Oakesy and I crowded round and saw a little control panel, all the electronics ripped out, the holes pocked with spider-webs. An ageing rota sheet was thumbtacked to the wall. 'Yes.' He put his hands on the doorframe and leaned his head back outside the cupboard, craning his neck to follow the wires that led up the wall and out of sight under the stair carpet. 'They told me this used to be the rape suite.'

'The what?' I said. 'The what suite?'

'Rape suite.' He turned to me and the instant he saw my face his expression changed. 'Yeah,' he said hurriedly, ducking back out and closing the door. 'I know. Daft expression. It's just what the lads call it. Some of the lassies who used to come here had been-' He broke off, blushing and scratching his head in embarrassment.

'Raped, you mean? We know. The chief inspector told us.'

'It's somewhere safe, isn't it? Safer than being in the station. You're safe here.'

'Are you sure?'

'Of course. And, anyway you can coorie down here better. It's more cosy here than the station.'

I rubbed my eyes and sighed. Cosy? Cosy? It was horrible. Just horrible. If you ask me, all those raped girls and abused children and victims of racial harassment must have left something behind them in the house — some of their distress still clinging to the rag-rolled wallpaper — because when I did the rounds that night shivers went down my spine, just as if something very bad had happened there. Or was going to happen. At the back of the house, behind the kitchen, there was an examination room, still with a couch in the corner, as if we needed reminding what the place was once used for. None of the rooms had been properly cleaned — there was a stained baby's cot in one of the bedrooms with a patch of dried vomit on the wall behind it, dead flies all over the carpets and a used condom in the kitchen sink. Viva bureaucracy, I say. I hooked the condom out with the end of a spoon and dropped it into the bottom of a white bin-bag, where it lay, dried out and brown, as transparent as old human skin.

8

When the police had gone we carried our bags upstairs and chose rooms — Oakesy and me took the front room, Angeline the one at the back. Later, when I went in there, I saw she'd unpacked the bag she'd brought with her and put all her clothes on hangers arranged along the plaster picture rail. Dreadful things she had: long denim skirts and ageing blue and white Kappa T-shirts, all washed so many times they'd faded or gone grey.

Downstairs we made a dinner from the things we'd brought from the bungalow, a bit of tomato sauce that I poured over some sausages and called a casserole. I wished I could have put some broccoli or something on the plate because she didn't look as if she'd ever had a vitamin inside her. She ate a little bit, not looking at either of us, her head down so all we could see was that big, chapped forehead. It was only much later when I was at the window, my back to the room, peering out at the broken windows and the police car parked at the top of the street, and Oakesy was in the kitchen washing glasses, that she spoke. 'I think,' she said, out of the blue, 'I want to see the video.'

I dropped the curtain and turned — disconcerted to hear her voice after all this time. In the kitchen Oakesy had stopped what he was doing and was looking at her in surprise, the glass he was holding dripping water on to the floor. She was sitting on the sofa, her shoulders slumped, her head hanging, and although she'd said it quite clearly you could be forgiven for thinking she hadn't spoken at all, because her eyes were on the floor and she was chewing her lip, that paranoid, defensive look to her as if she'd never be able to meet another person's eyes.

'Did you say something?' said Oakesy.

'Yes. I want to see myself.'

He blinked. 'You know about it?'

'I want to see it.' She raised her eyes to him. 'If I'm in it I want to see it.'

There were a few moments' silence while Oakesy took this in. He turned to me.

'She had to know,' I said, opening my hands. 'Someone was going to tell her eventually.'

He didn't say anything. I think he was too tired to argue — or maybe he could see the sense in what I was saying. He went resignedly to the hallway and picked up the laptop from where we'd leaned it against the wall. He brought it back to the kitchen, pulled one of the chairs away from the table and spoke to Angeline. 'Sit down. Here.'

She hesitated, then got up and limped over unsteadily, resting her hands on the table to hold her weight and tentatively lowered her awkward body on to the tiny aluminium chair. Oakesy switched on the laptop and put it in front of her. He got a beer from one of the carrier-bags and switched off the kitchen light so the screen was the only illumination and Angeline's face was bathed a greenish-blue.

I sat next to her at the table, hunched forward, my chin cupped in my hands. I made it seem as if I was concentrating on the computer, but I wasn't. My eyes were rotated sideways to watch her. I got very close to her until I could see every detail of her face — the colourless skin, the big forehead illuminated by the computer, and the small nose, like a young boy's.

'This was taken west of the island.' Oakesy leaned between us and clicked on the RealPlayer icon. The video started. 'Two years ago. Before the fence went up. Here.' He pointed to the end of the tree-line. 'Just here — watch this bit.'

I didn't turn to the screen — I'd seen the video enough times before. This time I watched its mirror image reflected in the glassy curve of Angeline's left eye: the bobbing motion of the boat, the men in their football shirts holding up beers to the camera, and then the long grey expanse of Pig Island's flank rising above the waves, below it the woods coming down to meet the beach. I knew exactly the place on the screen where the blurry figure would appear, with its lurching walk, coming out of the trees for one or two steps on to the sand. I knew the pause, the quick turn back, the disappearance into the trees, the shouts of the men on the boat.

When it was over Oakesy leaned over and stopped the video. I sat motionless, staring at her eye, fascinated by the way it was flickering from side to side as if it were trying to escape. Then a clear disc of liquid appeared, bulging rapidly, trembled for a moment on top of the iris, then broke and fell down her face. She put her palms together, the tips of her fingers on her nose, and started trembling, as if the temperature in the room had plummeted.

'You all right there?' Oakesy said. 'You want to-?'

'I was born like it,' she said. She pushed the chair back with a screech and put her fists to her eyes, pushing at them as if she'd like to punish them for leaking. 'It's not my fault. I was born like it. You can't blame me for it. You can't.'

Oakesy and I exchanged a look. He leaned forward a little and I think he was going to touch her, but something must have stopped him because his hand got half-way to her shoulder then stopped and went uncertainly back down to the table. 'Listen,' he said, 'nobody thinks it's your fault.'

'They'll think I'm trouble. Like they did on Cuagach. They thought I was a-' She broke off, took deep breaths. Her face was bright red now and there were two lines of snot coming out of her nose. 'They said I was an abomination. That's what they said. They said I-'

'You didn't really believe all that,' I said. 'You're disabled, that's all.'

'Lex,' Oakesy said.

'Well, Oakesy, we've all seen it now, the three of us. There's no point in being coy. And anyway… I'm sure there's something that can be done for you, Angeline.'

When I said that she went really still. She stopped crying and all the colour drained out of her skin. She lowered her hands and stared at me with an odd, cracked look, her irises slightly off-centre as if her eyes had broken.

'It's true. I see people every day with spinal injuries and deformities and I'm sure there's a very simple operation you can have.'

'To make me normal?'

'I can help you. My friend's a neurosurgeon — the best in the country. Would you like that? Would you want him to look at you?'

'I–I…' She pressed her palms to her cheeks, taking a few deep breaths, looking from me to Oakesy and back again. She was trembling so hard her teeth were almost chattering. 'I don't know. I don't know.'

Oakesy stood up and switched on the light. He rustled through the carrier-bags we hadn't unpacked yet and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel's he took everywhere with him. He went through the cupboards until he found a child's plastic cup with Spiderman on it, filled it half full with JD and pushed it in front of her.

'Oh,' I said. 'Alcohol — I don't think that's a very good-'

She picked up the drink and without even sniffing it, or questioning it, swallowed it in one. I closed my mouth and watched her, amazed. She pushed the beaker back across the table to him. He filled it again and she drank another two beakerfuls down in one. Well, I thought, someone's done that before. Oakesy kept filling it up, watching her face as she drank. A slow flush spread long fingers up her neck towards her chin and by the fourth beaker she'd stopped trembling. Instead of knocking this one back, like the town drunk, she took one or two sips and returned it to the table. Then she straightened a little and wiped her nose, gathering her courage, her eyes going nervously from me to Oakesy and back again.

'You all right?'

'Yes.' She paused. 'Have lots of people seen it? The video.'

'Lots,' Oakesy said, not meeting her eyes, the way he does when he's embarrassed. 'Lots of people know about it.'

'The police? The one that said «devil». In the police station he said devil.'

'Yes. The police. They know too, I suppose.'

She took a long breath through her nose, letting this sink in. She looked up at the laptop screen and seemed to be putting it all together in her head. 'And — and that's why you were on Cuagach in the first place? To write about me?'

He looked awful now. Really guilty. 'Uh, yeah,' he admitted. 'That's why I was there.'

'Dad didn't know that.' She shook her head and gave a short laugh, staring at her hands on the table. Her fingers were pale and bitten, with red tips. 'He thought you'd come back to haunt him.'

'To haunt him? What does that mean? Why would he think that?'

She closed her eyes and opened them, as if it were a trick question and she needed to think about her answer. She glanced over at his camera sitting on the kitchen worktop. Then she looked at the laptop, then back at him. 'Um — because you're Joe Finn?'

He stared at her, his mouth open a little.

'You are? Aren't you?'

'Yeah,' he said hurriedly. 'Yeah, I… How did you know?'

She looked surprised — as if to say, 'Didn't you know this already?' 'But I've always known about you,' she said. 'I've known about you all my life. I've always known one day I'd meet you.'

9

There comes a time in every person's life when an opportunity presents itself. The test of character is how one chooses to respond to the challenge…

Downstairs Oakesy was watching the news and Angeline was in bed, the door to her room closed tight. I was in the front bedroom, sitting on the damp, lumpy bed with Oakesy's laptop open on my knees, tapping at the keys. The curtains were open with the orange streetlight coming through and falling on the computer screen. The police car was still out there — I'd checked, and a man was sitting in the dark watching us. According to Danso, we didn't really need him: he was just there to make us feel secure.

Today I find myself in just such a position [I wrote]. Today I have been presented with a riddle, an opportunity. And the challenge is — do I attempt to solve the riddle myself, or do I pass it to someone I trust, someone whose professionalism and skill is better suited to deal with it than mine? Someone who will benefit enormously from involvement in this fascinating, high-profile case…

I'd titled the email 'Unusual Spinal Abnormality. High Media Interest' and sent it under an anonymously set-up Yahoo account, because I knew if I used my real name that that witch of a secretary would leap on it and rip it out of Christophe's inbox in a flash. I still blame her for what happened. I mean, who was it who tried to make something sinister out of my relationship with him? Turning it round, telling people I was making a nuisance of myself? That I'd 'bombarded Mr Radnor with correspondence on the clinic's intranet'. Which is a wild exaggeration, of course, because I'd sent little more than a few good-luck messages when he was off on one of his overseas trips, once for the tsunami and once to help a little spina bifida boy in the Ukraine. Oh, and a couple of copies of my CV. It was probably those CVs that did it. She knew I was a good contender for her job — she knew she'd need to pull up her socks with me around. And there was that poisonous little comment I overheard her whisper on the day I'd announced my resignation: 'Jumped before she was pushed.' It was probably her who dumped all the photos I'd framed. I found them — did I tell you? — in the clinic's waste along with all the shredded office documents and Pret a Manger sandwich bags.

'In my opinion,' I wrote, trying hard to remember the language of the referral letters I'd seen at the clinic, trying to combine it with the article in the journal, 'this anomaly will almost certainly prove to be associated with spina bifida and therefore of great interest to you. In order to decide what can be done for the patient it will be vital to assess how much «tethering» there is in the spinal cord. To that end I suggest we make an appointment to meet as soon as possible.'

I nibbled my cuticles, wondering if I should say anything about Cuagach, about what had happened out there. But in the end I decided 'high-profile' would be enough to pique his interest. I finished the email: 'I very much look forward to working with you on this, a case that can only cement your reputation as a surgeon of repute and integrity.' I clicked send and sat back, waiting for the out-of-office acknowledgement to pop up on the screen.

My head was tingling. I was going to be back at the clinic by the end of the year.

1

I dreamed about Pig Island. Cuagach Eilean. I dreamed of dark clouds trailing long fingers down to stroke the cliffs, I dreamed of helicopters flying over the gorge in the moonlight, of tree branches, like hands, reaching up to grab them. I saw a police launch bouncing across the waves, blue lights flashing, I heard the words 'improvised explosive device' over and over again, echoing from the mouths of women and men, a chorus of moving lips.

I woke with a jolt on the sofa — dry mouth, stiff neck and a whisky stain on the carpet where the glass had dropped in my sleep. The curtains were drawn, the TV was on, flickering across my face — replaying my dreams: Pig Island in daylight, pictured from above, a shoreline rising up from the sea, familiar grass-covered cliffs, white tents dotted around the village. The words 'improvised explosive device' again. The helicopter banked and dipped above it, then the shot switched to show a small ferry bobbing in the waves close to a shingle beach. An aluminium pontoon connected it to the land. Two soldiers were winching an army truck up it.

I pushed myself upright, blearily, my body creaking, shaking myself out of the dream. On screen Danso appeared seated at a trestle table, a directional mic on the table in front of him, another on his lapel. A blue thistle, the Strathclyde Police logo, was projected on to the backdrop behind him. 'Crinian is one area we're looking at closely and-' He lifted his chin to listen to an inaudible interruption from the press floor. 'That's right — from the car park of the Crinian Hotel…'

'Shit, shit, shit.' I pushed myself upright and staggered to the kitchen, hating the way it all had to come back — had to force itself back at me. I hung my face over the sink, waiting, wondering if I was going to puke. I thought of the senior identification manager, a short guy called George who'd spent two hours with me in Oban carefully filling in his yellow 'misper' forms, one for each missing PHM member, thirty in all. Yesterday I'd made a promise to him — a poxy promise when I thought about it: I'd promised I'd go out to Cuagach today to identify bodies. The thought of it made my head ache — like there was something hard and egg-shaped inside it.

I turned on the tap and stuck my face under it, letting the water splash in my hair, my face, my mouth, staying there for more than a minute, getting colder and colder. By the time the mobey rang in my back pocket my face was numb with cold. I straightened, fumbling for it.

'Yeah?' I lifted the hem of my T-shirt to rub my face. 'What?'

'You're alive, then?'

'Finn,' I said. 'Hi.'

'Thanks for calling to tell me you're still breathing.'

'Why wouldn't I be?'

'Why wouldn't you be?' He sighed. 'Switch on the TV, Oakes. That fucker Dove, he's all over the fucking headlines.'

'Yeah,' I said, scanning the miserable little kitchen for a kettle. I needed coffee. 'I know.'

There was a moment's silence. 'You know?'

'Yeah. I was there.'

'You were there? What? On the island?'

'Yeah. It was me called the police.'

'Shit, Oakesy — you serious?'

'As a heart-attack.'

'Holy fucking Christ.' There was a long silence while he took this in. I could picture him in his World's End office at his leather-topped desk. When we did the States together he'd been pure Seattle Sound: prison jeans, flannel shirt and Soundgarden T-shirt, one of the first people in the world to wear Converse sneakers. Now he was establishment: he was losing his hair and every day he went to work in a suit he hated. 'What're you going to do with it? The nationals are popping veins trying to figure out what was happening on the island-'

'That's easy.' I tucked the phone under my chin and carried the kettle to the sink, sticking it under the tap. 'He had a harassment order on them — I showed up, he put two and two together, figured they were trying to get him into the court of protection. Which they were, by the way.' I plugged the kettle in, went to the window and opened the curtains. It was a bright, blustery day, a cold sun glinted off the police-car windscreen and the broken windows in the house opposite. I looked to the right, out across the playing-fields, all blistered and brown-looking, a stiff cold wind blasting across it. A good day for viewing dead people. 'But,' I said, 'I can't sell it.'

'Why the fuck not?'

'No. Can't put my head above the parapet.'

'Why not?'

'Did you see them on TV say they've got him? They've found him?'

'No.'

'And who do you think he's got the horn for now? Me. They've got us in emergency accommodation. Strathclyde's answer to an Amish village.'

He was quiet again, thinking. 'Oakesy?' he said cautiously, like something was just coming to him. 'Listen… I think this is… I don't think it's bad. I think… I think it's good. Yes, you know what? It is. In fact it's…' He must have jumped up then and almost dropped the phone, because the line got muffled for a moment. When he came back on he was shouting. 'It is. In fact it's unreal — fucking unreal.' He took a few breaths and I knew he'd be standing now next to the arched window above the King's Road traffic, moving his arm up and down to calm himself. 'Right — cool thinking, cool thinking, Finn. Oakes, if you don't sell it to the papers, right, if you can keep the story down until it's all over, there's a book in it — OK? As long as you keep it from the papers.'

'You're my agent now?'

'Yes. Yes! Listen, Oakesy, listen… This is what we do. I'm going to have a natter with some interested parties and in the meantime I want a two-page synopsis and the first fifteen K words. It's so fucking easy. I'm telling you, you can write an article, you can write a book… You can do that — can't you?'

I opened the window and breathed in the cool air. I didn't blame him — you have to see the reality of death before you understand the chill weariness that comes over you. Thirty-six hours ago, the moment I saw a pig dragging Sovereign's foot into the trees, my work head had switched off, powered down. But I'd had a night's sleep and now Finn was making it twitch again. Old Gorgon Joe-journalist inside me was waking up, giving a sleepy kick, and lifting its ugly, sticky head. I was thinking about the story that was out there in the sunshine. I was remembering why I'd come to Cuagach in the first place.

'Can't you? Tell me you can.'

I dropped the curtain. 'Yeah,' I said. 'I can do it.'

'Dude. We're model We. Are. Made. Get it?'

While he talked I got myself ready. I went to the hallway, got my digital camera from my jacket pocket and put it on to charge. I made coffee in the kitchen, and listened to him plan-making. This was the project we were always meant to do together — we were going to celebrate with a slammer party; we were going to pay off our mortgages.

'So,' he said, 'before the crap hit the fan did you get to the bottom of it?'

'The bottom of what?'

'Y'know — the video and shit. The hoax. The devil of Pig Island. Did you figure out what it was?'

I paused, the coffee cup half-way to my mouth. 'Yeah,' I said. 'I did.'

'Well? Well?'

I didn't speak for a moment. I lowered the cup and turned my eyes to the stairs, thinking of the door to Angeline's room — closed so tight it was like a statement.

'Oakes, come on! I'm waiting. I want to know what you're thinking…'

'It was a kid,' I said, tipping the coffee down the sink and turning on the tap. I didn't want it now. I wanted tea. 'Just some local kid got himself out to the island in some outfit he cooked up with his mates. Like I always said.'

2

'Have a look at this for me,' DS Struthers shouted, above the boat engine. He was sitting wedged up against the cabin bulkhead of the chartered pleasure-boat, his legs crossed, one arm resting along the gunwales, the other holding up a Polaroid. 'Might be interesting.' He sat forward and pushed it under my nose. 'Might be very interesting.'

I had to raise my hand against the sun and squint to see that the photo showed an outboard motor-boat pulled up at an angle on a beach.

'Recognize it?'

I took the photo from him, ducked into the cabin out of the sun, studied it and knew immediately: it was the orange-striped dory, a bit battered, resting on the beach, its bow line trailing in the shingle. I stepped back on to the deck and handed him the Polaroid. 'Where d'you find it?'

'Ardnoe Point. An off-duty woolly pulley out walking her pooch. Naughty lass — spends her days off fiddling with the police scanner if you ask me. Some people just can't leave their job behind, can they? What I think is, she's heard about it last night on the scanner and then, six o'clock this morning, she's walking her dog and finds she's staring at it in the flesh. So what's she going to do? She's got to phone it in.'

'And Ardnoe Point is…?' I turned and looked back at the mainland.

'That way.' He waved a hand to the south. 'It's making our missing car look a little nicer because it's not far from Crinian where the car disappeared on Saturday. A long way. It's where you'd drift to with the tide they had that night, so maybe he was heading there. Or maybe he just didn't know how to drive the thing.'

'Near Crinian…' I murmured, gazing at the coastline. In the morning sun it looked fresh and cold, the granite fingers on the shore eerie and architectural. The trees billowed like they'd been melted down and poured across the landscape. What are you doing out there, Dove baby? I thought, staring south at the firth glittering in the distance. Where are you heading? What's in Ardnoe Point, then? I like that you went south and not north towards the bungalow…

'I think you can relax,' shouted Struthers, behind me. 'You're not going to see Pastor Malachi Dove again.'

I turned. He had put the Polaroid away and was leaning against the bulkhead, his head back, his eyes scrunched up, scanning the mainland.

'I'm not going to see him again?'

'No. Too close to the edge now, isn't he? He'll be a suicide.' He nodded, wiping salt spray from his face. 'Aye — in my professional experience he's going to be a suicide. Some hill-walkers'll find him, all maggoty and shit. Or he'll be dangling off some bridge, or bumping around in a weir with his face all smashed to fuck. Yes. That'll be the next time we see Malachi Dove.'

'In your professional experience?'

He tapped the side of his nose and smiled. 'Got a copper's nose. Always have had, since I was a bairn. I'm telling you he'll be a goner by now.'

I gave him a cold smile. As an undergraduate, when I was getting the chicken-liver article finished, I had a fantasy, or a fear, that I knew Malachi Dove as well as I knew my own bones. It came back to me now that I was connected to him in a way that none of the others were — maybe even Angeline — and I knew Struthers could have no idea what was really in Dove's head. He was right: Dove was thinking about how to end it all. But it wasn't going to be that easy. I will, Joe Finn, in the final hour, run rings around you…. When he'd said he'd fuck with my peace of mind he didn't mean what he'd done in the chapel.

'Aye. Lost the plot, hasn't he? If you ask me-' He broke off and licked his lips. 'If you ask me, that lass is an orphan by now. As if she hasn't got enough problems.'

I looked thoughtfully at Angeline. She was sitting in the stern, arms crossed, chin lowered, staring into the middle distance and pulling sullenly at her lower lip. The bits of skin you could see through her patchy hair were red and chapped.

'Hey,' Struthers whispered, leaning close to me so I could smell his breath. He was squinting at her, taking in the faded football shirt you could just see peeping out from under the coat, the worn-out trainers. 'Something I wanted to ask you.'

I didn't meet his eyes. I knew what was coming.

'She told the boss she had polio. That's what she told him.' He licked his lips again. 'But it's not polio, is it? It's something else.'

I closed my eyes slowly, then opened them.

'Is it? It's not as simple as polio and I think-'

'Do you know,' I murmured, 'what would happen if the press knew about her?'

I felt him smile. 'Oh, yes,' he whispered. 'Which is why you're one lucky bastard, Joe Oakes. We can't talk to them about you because you're «vulnerable», according to the procurator fisk, which gives you the exclusive as soon as you want to crawl out from under your stone. I've got about a hundred good friends in the press up here who'd give up their bairns for the chance you've got. Not that I'll hold it against you.' He laughed and gave me a slap on the arm. 'Right,' he said, looking over his shoulder. 'The Semper Vigilo. We're nearly at the press cordon.' He stood and held his arm out to Angeline, beckoning her. 'Time to get you both in the cabin. Come on, hen.'

I stood. Ahead, bobbing in the waves, thirty or so chartered boats hovered in an untidy pack, surreptitiously nosing their way forward. Facing them, throwing up glittering spumes, bucking and rotating like a bull in the ring, a fluorescent yellow-painted police launch held them at bay.

'I mean now,' said Struthers. 'If you don't want them to see you, do it now.'

So we all crowded into the fume-filled cabin with the skipper and stared in awe at Cuagach growing bigger and bigger ahead of us, the army helicopter banking above it, searching the cliffs and forests for the one thing we all knew they weren't going to find: survivors.

3

The police operation was massive. The army had been called to make the island safe, and the nearer we got, the more you could see how much they were throwing into this. There were about eight launches moored off the shore and everything on Pig Island seemed covered in police tape and tarpaulins: from the moment we got to the jetty and gave our names to the officer on guard there, it was like walking on to a movie set.

It had totally fucking changed — beyond recognition. As we logged in at the rendezvous point and came up the coast path the first thing we saw on the village green, a hundred yards or so behind the Celtic cross, was the force's HM40 helicopter, crouched and silent, its rotor blades dipping gently in the wind. The corpse of a giant insect. The grass to the north — where the ferry had offloaded the vehicles — was churned up and hatched with vehicle tracks, and arranged in a circle round the green, like a wagon train round a fire, were two army trucks, four small inflated shelters and three white and blue police Land Rovers, each with a photocopied sign taped to the side. 'Communications,' said one. 'Casualty Clearing Station', another. The signs flapped as we walked past. It was like being at some weird village fete.

We headed to the top of the green in the direction of a van marked 'Dockards and Vinty, Land Surveyors. 3D Laser Technology'. Rubberized power cables snaked out of it, linking it to a generator, and behind it, parked so it blocked the windows of the Garricks' cottage, stood a mobile officer trailer, the Strathclyde logo printed on the door.

'Control point,' said Struthers, mounting the steps. 'Hey, boss,' he said, to the interior. 'I'm back.'

The trailer creaked a bit, Danso maybe turning to face him. 'Christ, Callum, have a word with George, will you? Chief's given him a title, keep him sweet — senior identification manager. Now he thinks he runs the show — says he needs a casualty bureau with six phone lines, ten staff and five more men out here at locus. That's fifteen men! Meanwhile I've got a procedures adviser on the phone to me every two minutes with a new bit of policy he's remembered, an incident room the size of my hand and a HOLMES team busy screwing every penny of overtime they can out of me.' He sighed audibly. 'You find me dead somewhere, Callum, look for the puncture marks on my neck because this Major Incident protocol is sucking the blood out of me.'

'I've got the witnesses.'

Danso stood up. He came to the back of the trailer and peered out at us. 'I'm sorry.' He jumped off the steps and shook our hands. He was wearing a fleece in place of his suit jacket and his skin was grey — like he hadn't slept. 'I'm sorry — I thought you were coming after lunch.' He peered at me. 'Well?' he said. 'Did you sleep OK?'

'It's warm. The house.'

He smiled. 'Good. And have you had your breakfast?'

I nodded, letting a kind of half-laugh come out of my nose. 'Now you're going ask me am I ready for this.'

'Aye. And what's the answer?'

'No. Of course it's no. I'll do it, but I'm never going to be ready.'

4

Turns out these Strathclyde lads aren't the genius bizzies they fancy themselves. They knew I was a journalist, Struthers had given me chapter and verse about it, but did anybody search me that morning on Cuagach? Did anybody find the mini digital camera stashed in my jacket? Did they fuck.

At ten thirty Angeline went away with Danso and a small bald man — 'The Crime Scene Manager', Struthers told me. She was going to show them where she'd been hiding when she saw her father pushing the explosives into the chapel window, which route he'd taken to arrive there, so they could sketch it out and get a laser 3D capture for Forensics. Someone brought Wellington boots and gloves for me, and Struthers and me headed off to the north, following photocopied sheets that flapped on tree-trunks: Body Holding Area This Way

It was a leafy path I'd never been along before, quiet and cold. To its right, the land sloped down to the rocks and from time to time a wind came up off the sea and slapped us with its salty spray. On our left was the dark forest, where police tape fluttered among the tree-trunks. Beyond the tape I could see white lines laid out on the ground like a grid, each line numbered with a red marker.

'You know what I was thinking?' Struthers said. 'I was just thinking, this place must be covered with your prints, eh?'

There was something needling in his tone. I didn't look at him. 'Yeah, I suppose.'

'How about in the chapel?'

'I was in there once,' I said, 'for about five minutes. I told you yesterday. Remember? You got elimination prints from me at the station.'

'So, nothing else, then? The CSM's not going to find anything else, hairs or other — uh — traces?' He gave me an unhealthy smile, showing dull yellow teeth. 'I mean, old man, you were on the island for a few days, and things happen between people. Know what I mean?'

I stopped. He'd gone on a few steps before he realized I wasn't with him. He came to a halt and looked at me. The end of his nose and the tips of his ears were a bit red from the exercise. Behind him, out to sea, the horizon was a dark, unwavering blue.

'No,' I said coldly. 'I don't know what you mean.'

'Just trying to work out what sort of relationship you had with these people. Whether it was good or not.'

'It was good. But not so good that I fucked any of them, if that's what you're asking.'

Struthers laughed and turned, continuing down the path, his hands in the air. 'OK, OK. Just trying to get a feel for what the atmosphere was like out here. Sue me. There's a CAP 1 form back at the station.'

I didn't move. I let him go on ahead, watching his back, fleshy and broad-shouldered. We were destined not to get along, Callum Struthers and me. Star-crossed sparrers. He was everything I'd expected from a Strathclyde bizzy: overdressed, opinionated, vain. He tried to sound more intelligent than he was (why did he think it was smarter to say 'individual' and not 'person'?) and he smelt like he was on one of those diets that give you kidney damage. Struthers, for his part, had taken one look at me with my scabbing knees and my Scouse accent and I know the first thing that went through his head was Is there any way I can make this guy's life really difficult?

Now he disappeared round the bend ahead, leaving me alone on the path. And there, I saw, he'd given me a little gift, although he didn't know it. I counted off a few beats of time, then turned and peered into the trees. The chapel was somewhere in there, only a few hundred yards up, if I'd got my bearings right. 'Video,' someone was shouting from deep in the trees. 'Video, please. Over here — eighty-three/twenty. Can you hear me, camera team? Need video at eighty-three/twenty.''

I pulled out my camera, crouched under the police tape, steadied my hands on a branch — couldn't use flash — and rattled off ten photos. I shielded my eyes and checked the display. The zoom wasn't great, but you could just make out two ghostly figures in pale blue suits half hidden by the dark tree-trunks. The search-and-recovery team. Not outstanding as photos go, but not bad.

'Hey?' Struthers called from ahead. His voice was faint. 'You with me?'

I ducked out of the forest, pocketing the camera, back on to the path. It turned left, away from the cliff, and led upwards into the forest. There, about a hundred yards ahead, he was standing, watching me.

'This is it,' he said, as I joined him. 'I think this is it.'

We turned and looked down to where the land dipped, forming a natural hollow, cold and leaf-shaded, shielded on the coastal side by screens. One or two sharp blades of sun pointed like lasers through the tree canopy. It was weirdly silent, the only sound the low humming of the generator that powered two refrigeration trucks. We were looking at their roofs, the ventilators opened to the fresh air. Next to them was a packing crate the size of a small car. It had been opened so you could see the contents: grey fibreglass coffins, opaque like cocoons, piled one on top of another. A photographer, in a green fluorescent tabard, helmet and boots, stood in front of the crate, peering down at the display on his camera, scrolling through shots like I'd just been doing.

Struthers ran his hand across the back of his head. He didn't speak. You could tell from his face he didn't want to be here.

'Come on, then.'

We started down the path. We were half-way into the clearing when the doors of the nearest truck opened. George, the guy I'd spent the afternoon with at Oban, jumped out. He was wearing full body-suit and galoshes, and was followed by another man dressed the same. They both said something to the photographer, who lowered the camera and looked up into the woods in the opposite direction from me and Struthers. They all stood for a while, looking expectantly in the same direction towards the chapel. After a few moments there was a rustle of leaves and two members of the search-and-recovery team came quickly out of the trees, almost at a jog. Between them they carried something heavy wrapped in thick plastic, a pink form taped to the top of it. They lowered the package to the ground, said something to George, then swivelled and headed back into the woods at the same half-jog. The three men gathered round the package.

'This is where I start to earn my money,' Struthers muttered at my side, a bit sick-sounding. 'This is the bit no one wants to do. C'mon.' We came to the bottom of the path, out into the clearing, jumping down the last two feet. 'George,' he said, raising a hand in greeting.

'Yeah.' He didn't look up. 'With you in a minute, gentlemen. Just finishing with the doctor here.'

We stood for a few moments, a bit awkward, looking for somewhere to put ourselves while the photographer circled the package, clicking off photo after photo. The doctor crouched and untaped the pink form, handing it to George. He carefully unfolded the layers of plastic. Inside was a thick lump of flesh wrapped in cloth. I stopped breathing, thinking, No way — this is a joke. Someone's got a bit of pig meat and put it in a T-shirt. Who are they trying to shake? Next to me Struthers opened his mouth and started breathing through it. He tried to do it subtly, but I could hear it anyway.

George clipped the form to his board and began to tick off boxes. 'Right — what've we got? Number 147, grid ref 52–10.' He broke off, frowning at what he was reading. 'Oh, what's the sodding point?' he said, dropping the clipboard to his side in frustration. 'No one listens to a thing I tell them.'

The doctor looked up. 'What?'

'Look at this. Section twenty-two. Box ticked? Number one.'

'Yeah?'

'Box number one,' he repeated, nodding significantly at the parcel. 'How many times have I got to tell them? Box two. If it's just a body part, they tick box two. Incomplete.' He shook his head and corrected the mistake, then went bad-temperedly down the list, ticking off boxes as he went. 'So what've we got — the usual? Human. Life extinct-'

'Yes-'

'- at, let's see, eleven oh-four a.m. And what? Caucasian?'

'Yup. Male.'

'And you're saying it's…?'

'Torso.' The doctor turned the meat over. He looked at the underside for a few moments then lowered it. There was a neat circle of bone under the skin — I knew what it was: it was a severed spinal column. I thought about Sovereign and her pink jelly sandals and her dozy way of speaking. I imagined George piecing her brittle leg bones together on a trestle table. I thought about the old missionary and his broken toe pointing at the stars. I turned and sat quickly on a nearby tree-trunk, shaking. I had to spit, had to use my fingers to loop the taste out of my mouth and shake it off them, splattering it on to the ground. 'Malachi, you fucker,' I muttered. 'You arse.'

'Yeah, it's torso,' said the doctor. 'Half the thoracic, all of the lumbar section.'

'So what's that? Everything missing except oh-six and oh-seven?'

'That'll do.' The doctor peeled away the piece of torn T-shirt and held it up for George to inspect.

'A T-shirt.' He ran his pen down the list, tutting. 'When did Interpol write this? They've got a code for a corset, for Christ's sake, even one for a girdle. But is there a code for a T-shirt? They need a course in twenty-first-century living.' He wrote in large angry letters. 'T-SHIRT.'

'What colour would you call it?' The doctor said. 'Brown? Purple? Milly says I get my browns and purples mixed up.'

George peered over his glasses at it. 'Wine-coloured,' he said, after a while.

'Wine-coloured,' the doctor agreed, dropping the cloth into a bag. 'Exactly.'

George completed his form, the doctor initialled it, then the two men refolded the parcel, taped the form back on top and, facing each other, each taking one end of the plastic, shuffled sideways and lifted it laboriously into the lorry. Struthers didn't say anything. After a while he came and sat down stiffly next to me, not looking at me or speaking. Every other breath he made a sound in his throat, like he was trying to dislodge phlegm.

'Well,' he said eventually, 'that'll be a DNA jobby. More money. Boss'll be ecstatic.' A muscle in his face twitched. Just under his right eye, like a nerve was trapped in there. 'DNA,' he repeated carefully, like I might not have heard of it, coming from Liverpool and everything. 'D-N-A.'

5

'Colour-coding. It's the only way to go. I've seen a file organizer with colour-coded compartments. The way I'm thinking is I can put my ante-mortem forms in the yellow tray, my PM forms in the pink tray. Looks like there aren't going to be any evacuee forms so I'd keep the blue compartment for when I've matched my PMs and mispers.'

Me and George were inside the refrigeration truck. The doors were open behind us but the light was dim, so the photographer had given me a handheld halogen lamp for the viewing. I waited in silence, the lamp dangling in one hand, the other pinching my nose while George moved around in the semi-darkness at the far end of the truck, opening and rearranging two fibreglass coffins, dragging them into the middle of the floor.

'What you said yesterday about them having no medicals, no dentals? Well, you were right. We're looking but so far no biopsies, no X-rays, not even a print on file. It'll be ninety per cent genetic IDing, because if we get a visual on ten per cent we'll be lucky bastards indeed. I'm going to be up to my pointy little ears in paperwork.'

I switched on the lamp and ran it over two piles of plastic-wrapped shapes pushed up against the right side of the truck, all milky and opaque from the cold. Some of the bodies had burned in the fire after the explosion, and in places I could see blackened shapes pressing against the plastic. A pink notice hung above the furthest pile: 'Incomplete 1-100'. I moved the light across the walls, the beam bouncing off the textured aluminium panelling. The sign above the second pile read: 'Incomplete 101–200'. I switched off the lamp, my heart thudding loudly.

'I've only got two for you today.' George straightened and looked at me. The shadows on his face were etched and solid. In the gloom I could see he'd opened both coffins and folded the black rubber body-bag away to reveal the faces. 'The only two who made it out of the chapel after the blast. Must've been in the corners behind the others — that's how you get through an explosion. Someone else takes the force for you. Course, doesn't mean you survive in the long run.' He picked up his clipboard from the floor and showed me two yellow sheets. 'I got these out earlier. Our chat yesterday? Remember? I think I know who our two are. Still, I'd like you to give me the thumbs-up.'

I knew who he meant. The missionary and Blake Frandenburg. There wouldn't be anything of Sovereign left to identify. I switched on the light and approached, holding it down at an angle. In the first coffin lay the missionary, his face intact, eyes sunken. I looked at him in silence.

'Okonole?'

I nodded. 'Okonole.'

George wrote a neat three in a box at the top left-hand of the yellow form and tucked it with some satisfaction behind the other. We moved to the second coffin where Blake Frandenburg lay, his eyes like holes, his leathery face emaciated, like death had taken half his body weight. One of his hands poked stiffly out of the body-bag as if he was reaching for something — a light, or the sky maybe. I stared at that hand, thinking of him sitting in the cottage holding a fire poker, well ready to take me on at twice his size.

'You OK there?' asked George. 'Want some time on your own?'

I turned stiffly to him. 'Sorry?'

'Do you want to be alone?'

'Uh…' I stared at him. It took a moment or two but then the question set off a cog somewhere in my head. 'Uh, yeah,' I said. 'Yeah. Sure. Just a few minutes.'

He left the truck, going noisily down the aluminium steps. 'Hey, Callum,' I heard him say, 'when you get back to Oban get the station officer to look in the stationery catalogue, will you? Tell her page three hundred, there's a file organizer with colour-coded…'

I waited until the voices had moved round to the side of the truck. Working quickly, I fumbled out my camera. With the halogen light in my left hand, held up at arm's length and angled down to minimize the shadows, I squeezed off five photos of Blake's corpse. After each one I stopped, listening for the voices outside, wondering if the camera's mechanism could be heard out there. Then I photographed Okonole, and swung round to do the two piles of body parts. I shoved my camera into my pocket and got to the doors as George was coming back up the steps.

'How you getting on there? You feeling OK? We've got some bottled water here from the catering truck. If you want.'

'It's Frandenburg,' I said. 'Is that what you thought?'

He smiled and held up the yellow form on his clipboard. It read in capitals BLAKE FRANDENBURG. He took out his pen with a flourish and wrote a firm number '1' in the box. He put the pen away and nodded at me.

'See? That makes me happy. That's two for my green compartment.'

6

There was a catering truck on the island, if you can believe that, and at twelve thirty everything stopped for lunch. Like I said, you'd think we were on a film set. I queued for one of the plastic shrink-wrapped trays and carried it over to where Angeline sat with her back to the others, just at the edge of the lawn where the land sloped away and you could see the open sea above the police Land Rovers.

She was in a green director's chair, slouched on to her left side, her right leg crossed far over the other. Her dinner wasn't eaten: the tray rested on her thigh and she was sawing aimlessly at it with a serrated plastic knife. When my shadow fell on her she stopped sawing and went very still. I pulled a chair over to her, and after a moment or two she put down the knife and leaned forward, her body covering the tray, one hand crossing her chest and tucked into her armpit. The other hand she dropped to the ground and began to make idle sketches in the sand.

'What's up?' I said, sitting down. 'Not hungry?'

She shook her head and went on drawing in the sand. There were hot, sullen patches on her cheeks.

I unwrapped my tray and read from the sandwich label: 'Brie and grape on French bread. I mean, the bollocks these caterers come up with.' I dropped the sandwich into the tray and sat back, folding my arms. She still wasn't looking at me. 'So? They put you through your paces, then?'

She stopped drawing but she didn't look at me. She lifted her hand, tucked it under the other armpit and sank back down on to her thigh, crumpling the dinner tray.

'Well?'

'I told you — didn't I tell you?'

'Tell me what?'

'I said no one would trust me. They know who I am and they think I'm a liar.'

'Them?' I nodded over my shoulder in the direction of the police. 'Why? What did they say?'

'They definitely saw the video. It's like they think I'm…' She sighed and pulled moodily on her bottom lip. 'It's like they won't believe anything I say.'

'Who? Danso? Struthers?'

'Both. I showed them where I was hiding when I saw him — you know, what he did — and now they're saying because of where I was standing in that path over there, I couldn't've seen it was actually him who did it.' She sat up a bit and chewed the side of her thumbnail with her small teeth. 'Even though of course I knew it was him, because I'd followed him across the gorge and I could hear him banging in the nails, now they're saying I've got to get my story straight and the young one said-'

'Struthers?'

'He's going on about how I'm not a credible witness and how he's going to have to put in a supplementary statement or something.' She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. 'And I know it's because they've seen me on the video.'

I gave a short laugh. 'No, Angeline. They believe you.'

She looked up at me.

'They believe you. Really. They're just being cops. They're not thinking about how to catch your dad, they're a year ahead of us — in court already, thinking how your evidence is sounding.'

She studied me and for a while it was like she was going to say something. Then she changed her mind. She made a small, discontented grunt and went back to pushing her fingernail into the sand. Silence fell. A breeze chased through the grass and made the inflatable shelters behind us flap like sails. I unwrapped the Brie sandwich and ate. The lines in the sand at her feet got bigger and bigger, more and more complicated. I finished the sandwich, drank some coffee and ate a fruit salad out of a plastic cup with watermelon pips floating in the juice at the bottom. Then I screwed up the napkin and refitted the lid on the tray.

'Angeline?'

'What?'

'No one knew Malachi had a child. Did you know that? He let them think you were stillborn.'

She made a contemptuous snort. 'It would have been better if I was.'

'No,' I said, and thinking about it now, I'm amazed at how gentle my voice came out. 'It wouldn't be better. It really wouldn't.'

She was still for a moment. Then she raised her eyes. There was a guarded, puzzled expression on her face, like she was trying to decide if I was joking. Her eyes had got very red round the inside rims. For a long time the only sound was the distant roar of the helicopter, hovering somewhere out of sight, searching the forests. When she spoke it was a whisper: 'Joe?'

'What?'

'No one would be interested, would they, if I told them what he did to me? No one would listen?'

I hesitated. I saw Finn, in his office, getting excited: There's a book in this.

'They'd listen,' I said, 'if you told it the right way.'

'The right way? What is the right way?'

'I don't know.' I glanced casually at the tray, then up at the sky. Folded my arms. 'But I suppose you could tell it to me. I suppose that's always an option for you.'

Danso and Struthers wanted Angeline to help them go through Dove's paperwork. I told Struthers he needed me to come too, to help with her, and he went for it without a thought. Somewhere over the last twenty-four hours I'd been appointed her minder. They put us into a police launch and took us to the south of the island.

It was fresh and chilly and the sky was a deep blue, a string of baby-dragon-breath clouds chugging across the horizon in the west — perfect light for photos, I thought, squinting up. The launch bounced across the waves, its engine echoing back to us from the granite cliff faces of Pig Island's eastern shoreline, making flocks of black-back gulls wheel and croak out of the clifftops. The south of the island looked more parched than I remembered, a scorched red-brown after the green of the village, like a drought had come across and touched only this side. Even with the armed officers at the jetty talking on their radios a weird silence hung over the place.

A forensics team had been out there yesterday and they'd worked fast, releasing the site this morning at eleven. They'd collected hairbrushes, toothbrushes and dirty underwear, anything that would help them build up Dove's DNA profile. While they were at it, they'd uncovered a collection of aged quarrying dynamite and drums of fertilizer in an outbuilding half a mile from the cottage. Dove's explosives arsenal. The army disposal team had been there since dawn, sealing off ten acres on the eastern flank. As we clambered off the boat we got glimpses of them in the distance, wearing flak jackets, leading dogs around on short leashes.

Angeline hadn't said a word since our conversation. She walked around with her arms wrapped across her chest, moodily chewing the inside of her mouth, not looking at anyone. From time to time I'd get the idea when my back was to her she'd looked up and was watching me, and I'd turn, just in time to see her attention scuttle away like nothing had happened. But mostly she was still upset and embarrassed by what Struthers had said. When he stopped next to one of the galvanized-steel fence posts, and said, 'So, pet, who put this up for Dad?' she shrugged. She put her hands into her pockets and dropped her chin. Dug her toe into the soil and glanced self-consciously over her shoulder, like a teenager checking she wasn't being watched by her mates.

'Angeline?'

'It was him,' she muttered. 'Did it himself. Wouldn't've let anyone else come out here.'

'Good with his hands, was he? Knew his explosives — knew how to put a hole in granite?'

She shrugged again and stared off into the distance, like she wasn't connected with the words coming out of her mouth. 'Yeah. S'pose.'

It was kind of embarrassing the way she kept up with these monosyllabic answers — Yes. No. Maybe — not offering any more information than she was asked. She led us round grudgingly, showing us the handbarrow Dove used to bring the supplies dropped by the shopkeeper in Bellanoch up from the jetty, taking us to where he kept his outboard motor under a tarp near the jetty, tightly chained and padlocked.

Up at the cottage the generator had run out of oil, and when we came inside there were no lights. We all crowded into the small room at the front where. Dove kept his paperwork, looking around ourselves at the torn curtains, the filthy windows, the two walls filled from floor to ceiling with battered notebooks and photos.

'He's taken the photos.' We all turned to look at Angeline then, because it was the first time she'd spoken without being asked. She was staring at two stained gaps on the peeling wallpaper. 'He's taken photos from there. And he's taken… notebooks. One. No-' She turned round, her finger out, tracing the air. 'No, two. He's taken two notebooks.'

'Which photos?' asked Danso, standing next to her and looking at the gaps really hard, like he'd pick up some supernatural vibes if he did. 'What did they show?'

'Him with Mother. And one of him praying.'

'Praying?'

'He looks dead,' I said. 'Lying on his back, hands over his chest. It was his habit.'

Struthers rolled his eyes. He'd spent a lot of his time in uniform in Glasgow dealing with crazies. 'What about the notebooks?' he said. 'Which ones are missing?'

Angeline lowered her eyes and pulled the coat round her like it was suddenly cold. 'The PHM philosophy on death,' she murmured. Behind her, Struthers and Danso exchanged a glance. 'It was always there — on that shelf. And another one — the PHM philosophy on suicide.'

'I told you so,' Struthers mouthed under his breath, giving me and Danso a slow, reptilian smile. He was over the fucking moon. He thought he was the only person in the world who'd predicted Dove's suicide. 'Didn't I tell you so?'

'If only,' I said. 'If only it was that easy.'

7

While Struthers, Danso and Angeline pulled notebooks from the shelves, opening up the PHM's records, finding file after file of furious hermeneutical letters to the C of E synod, reams of Bible verses, written and rewritten in Dove's looping hand, I slipped outside, muttering something about needing a smoke. No one stopped me. I just walked outside, free as a bird, into the cold, bright day.

I went quickly, retracing our steps, getting photos of the outside of the cottage, the empty Scotch bottles piled in a mountain behind one of the sheds, the generator and the piles of rubbish. I went to the army cordon and got some long-lens shots of the explosives team working in the distance, then turned north, giving the cottage a wide berth and moving through the silent woods until I came to the mine. Today it was quiet, no wind reached the clearing, and an empty silence hung over the rusting old machinery.

I turned to face the south. In the distance, a long way past the treetops of Cuagach, I could just see the headland of Crinian, the sky above it stained with dark clouds. I pulled out the camera, switched it on and focused on that distant coast. None of them, not Danso, not Struthers, had the instinct I had for Dove. He wasn't going to commit suicide. Not until he'd finished with me. It was like I could feel him in my brain, creeping around making his plans.

Ardnoe Point? Crinian? What are you planning, Malachi? Why Crinian?

I clicked off some photos of the coast, then fitted a new lens and ambled around doing some shots of the mine: rusty wheelbases of long-forgotten vehicles, ageing barbed wire strung over adits. Every now and then I'd stop and look thoughtfully out at the coast. A swarm of flies hovered round the hole where the pig was wedged. When I flicked them away I saw maggots like moving rice grains in the pig's eyes and something brown and frothy coming from its snout. I took ten shots.

Why Crinian?

He hadn't drifted there because he couldn't start the boat engine, whatever Struthers thought. He had meant to go there. I cranked open the aperture for the light and moved round the pig, firing off shot after shot, my thoughts rolling out like ticks on a metronome: What business have you got down there, Malachi? Why south? I was north. Does that mean you're not going to come after me direct? And if you're not going to do that, then what are you going to do? How else can you get to me? Or do you think I've gone back to London?

A twig snapped behind me. I spun round, raising the camera, ready to swing out. It was Angeline, her face red, her breathing rapid, staring past me at the pig in the shaft. She'd got right up behind me without me hearing. She made a grab for my sleeve.

'Hey.' She caught me off-balance and I'd hopped along a few feet before I got my footing. 'Let go. Come on — let go.' I scrabbled at her fingers, trying to unpeel them. She resisted, then let out a gasp and snapped her arm away like it was burnt.

'Christ.' I closed my hand over the camera, steadying it against my chest. My heart was racing. 'Don't do that again.'

She stood for a moment, half turned away, trembling, her hands crabbed up in front of her chest.

'What's up?'

'The pig.'

I wiped my forehead and looked over at the dead animal. 'What about it?'

A long shiver went up her body, something visible that travelled from her stomach to her shoulders, then kind of shook itself off into the air. She closed her eyes and put her hands over her mouth.

'It's dead,' I said. 'It won't hurt you.'

'It looks like it's watching me.' Her voice was quick and whispered, like she thought the pig might hear her. 'I know you'll think that sounds stupid but I mean it. It's watching me.'

'Then walk away.'

'It'll watch me.'

I sighed, and clicked the lens cap in place. 'What do you want me to do?'

She shook her h" I tail.??< strap-on your us Show bonehead. old you Malachi,>

I stared at her. Sovereign. I remembered the way I'd stalked along the fence, desperate to get a shot of Angeline in the grass. Something pinched at me now. Something that must have been pity or shame or something. 'They wanted to kill you. They had plans.'

She shrugged, like this wasn't a surprise. She chewed a little more on her thumbnail. Her coat hung open and I could see under the football shirt that she was thinner than I remembered, sort of starved-looking. Lexie said she looked like she was on drugs. 'When they read what you write about me,' she said, nodding at the tape player, 'you know, in the papers, do you think people will still be scared of me?'

'No,' I said. 'Not at all.' I pressed pause on the machine and checked how long we'd been talking. Forty minutes. 'But it won't be yet. I can't go to the papers with this. Not until they find him.'

We were silent for a while, holding each other's eyes. And then, like we were both thinking the same thing, we turned and looked at the window. The curtains were still open, and outside the orange streetlight was flickering like it was going to short out any second.

'What do you think?' I murmured. 'Angeline? Do you think he's going to kill himself?'

She didn't turn back to me. She kept her eyes on the streetlight. 'Yes,' she said. 'He'll kill himself. But you're right. I think he's got something else to do first.'

11

When I went upstairs that night and started to get undressed in the damp bedroom at the front of the house, I saw Lexie was awake. She had her hand behind her head, the duvet pulled up to her chin, and was looking at me knowingly. I paused, the ripped sweater half way up my chest.

'You weren't asleep.'

'You made enough noise coming in.'

'You didn't want to come down? See how we got on?'

'Didn't want to interrupt.'

I pulled off the sweater and stepped out of my jeans. There was nowhere to hang them and my true instinct was to put them back on again and climb into bed. But she was watching me in silence. So I dutifully laid them flat on the floor and climbed into bed.

'She was talking to you.' Lex rested a hand on her chest, dropped her head sideways and looked at me. 'I heard her. She didn't stop talking.'

I rubbed my eyes. 'I've got the story — got it all. Tomorrow I'll speak to Danso.'

'Speak to Danso?'

'He needs to find her somewhere else to go.'

Lexie pushed herself up on her elbow and stared at me. 'No, she can't go, not yet.'

'She's not our responsibility-'

'Yes,' she hissed. 'She is. You can't just let her go.'

I turned to her. The broken streetlight outside was reflected orange in her eyes. 'What?'

'We can't let her go. Not yet. I've got someone to look at her. It's in Glasgow not London, because there are some — oh, some stupid professional hoops to jump through before we get her down to see Christophe, but it's next week so we have to keep her with us till then.' She bit her lip, searching my face. 'Oakesy? Just a few more days? Monday?'

I sighed. I put a fist into one of the appalling pillows, punched it — a pathetic attempt to get some air into it — and lay back on my hands, staring at the ceiling. I think I'd just realized how knackered I was. 'Go to sleep now. OK?'

But she didn't. She was still staring at me, chewing her lip. I closed my eyes and rolled away from her. 'Oakesy,' she said, tapping my shoulder, 'did she say anything? Did she say what's wrong with her?'

'I don't think she even knows herself. Can I go to sleep?'

'Hasn't she got an idea?'

'Don't think so.'

'Well, what about you? Haven't you got an idea?'

'Lex, please, I'm not a doctor.'

'Do you think she'd let me have a look?'

'Why don't you ask her?'

'You're not interested. Are you? You're just not interested.'

'I am,' I said. 'Of course I am.'

But I was lying. I didn't care what was wrong with Angeline. When I closed my eyes and fell back inside my head, the face I saw wasn't Angeline's or even Lexie's. It was Dove's.

Malachi. Malachi… My head was throbbing. What is your plan?

12

Danso was as scared as me about Malachi's plans. Instinct told him to listen to me, not to Struthers. But his head had gone further than mine and he'd started thinking about those suicide bombers in London, about all the capabilities Dove had, and whether his spectacular death would take out someone more than himself. The ACC had consulted with the home secretary, and over the next few days senior officers from London's SO 13 terrorist team flew up to meet him. Suddenly the incident room at Oban was crammed with criminal profilers and explosives experts, tearing apart the community's computer. Every ex-member of the PHM was being tracked down, every donor, anyone who had sent a letter or email in the last ten years. They'd got HOLMES actions raised to interview anyone who might have known Dove, even people involved in the arson or IRS investigations over in New Mexico. Some of the locals and national TV stations in Scotland had run appeals for sightings of the blue Vauxhall stolen from Crinian and the usual attention-seekers crawled out of the wainscoting — at least twenty people had seen the car and more than half of them had recognized Dove. They knew he was the Pig Island killer from the press, who were busy jumping up and down on Dove's sacred head. Mystery of Missing Preacher: The Mad Monk of Pig Island. All of which was funny, Danso said, because the force was still waiting for the procurator fiscal to let them name Malachi Dove publicly as their suspect.

'But what's good,' he said one morning, standing in the kitchen at the rape suite, still wearing his raincoat, 'what's good is we might know where he went after Crinian.'

It was Friday. Six days had passed since the massacre, and that, as everyone knew, wasn't good. The golden hours for a case, the first twenty-four, had passed. But now Danso was holding up a video-cassette for us to see. 'There I was, thinking it was all going down the cludgie, when this turns up.' He went to the TV on his long, awkward, ostrich legs, slotted the tape into the machine and stood back, aiming the remote at the video player. 'Inverary.' He looked at Angeline, who was sitting on the sofa, arms folded. 'It's about fifteen miles from Crinian. Ever heard of it?'

'No.'

'Dad never mentioned a friend in the area? Family? Someone who'd been with the PHM?'

'All the people he knew were in America. Or London. He was born in London.'

'You can watch it as many times as you need. Don't be afraid to say you don't know.'

Me and Angeline and Lexie all sat hunched round the TV, staring at the screen. It was grainy black-and-white CCTV footage but continuous action — easier to watch than the cut-price time-lapse of most shopping centres. The time code clicked away in the top corner and shoppers moved back and forward along the walkway, some stopping to sit on one of the four benches arranged round a concrete planter full of palm trees. A checkout girl in the window of Holland and Barrett opposite the camera gazed out at the passers-by, idly biting her cuticles.

'In about two seconds you're going to see him come from this side and — wait… wait… there. See him? Here?'

A man, the top of his head turned to the camera, appeared on the walkway. He shuffled across the screen, arms hanging listlessly at his sides. He was about to disappear off when something caught his eye in the window of a Superdrug shop. He turned his back to the camera and we had time to study his longish hair, the unremarkable sports jacket, the dark slacks.

'This is the best look you get at him. It was the sandals that did it. Sandals and socks. You both said sandals and socks in your statements. It's the kind of detail sticks in people's heads.'

I inched a bit nearer the screen, staring at the figure. If it was my own dad I wouldn't've been sure from this angle. I waited for him to face the camera. But he didn't. He peered through the chemist's window a little longer, then turned and continued off the screen. There was a long, silent pause. We all turned to Angeline. I'd expected her to look blank, but the second I saw her face I knew. She'd sat up a bit, her head was straight and she was staring at the screen. Her hands were on her knees, clenching and unclenching.

'Angeline?' Danso studied her. 'Want to see it again? There're a lot of these wee characters out in Inverary and-'

'No. Not again.' She blew out a long breath from pursed lips, a long fooooo sound, like she was trying to keep calm. 'Bastard,' she muttered at the TV. 'That bastard.'

It was the jacket she'd recognized. She'd washed it for him at the beginning of the summer and that was how she knew it was him. It had needed to be hand washed because there was blood on it from the pigs. Danso passed the news back to the incident room, then came and sat with me on the sofa. We had the shopping-centre video in the player and were watching it over and over again. On the sixth time Malachi stopped in front of Superdrug I caught up the remote and paused the tape. I took a chair and placed it in front of the TV.

'What is it?'

I sat so close to the screen that the static popped against my nose. I clicked the video, frame by frame, until Dove came backwards into the walkway and turned to the chemist's window again. 'I want to know what he's staring at. We're not seeing something. We're not seeing this through his eyes. There's something here…'

I searched the screen a little longer, trying to decode the blurry pixels, the areas of grey and black and white, and when I still couldn't figure out what I was looking at I pushed the chair back, got the Ordnance Survey map from my jacket pocket and opened it on the kitchen table. I ran my finger down the list of place names: Inverary, Inveraish, Inveranan. I drew a pencil ring round Inverary and stared at it, looking at what surrounded it. A scattering of estates, a sewage-treatment plant, a power station.

'What's there, Malachi?' I murmured, tracing the line of a Forestry Commission sector with my thumbnail. 'What's there?'

Danso got up and came to the table, looking over my shoulder, so close I could smell the dry-cleaners' chemicals on his suit. 'If we could look at this through his eyes, tell me, what would we see?'

I shook my head. 'Twenty years ago I could have told you. Believe me or don't believe me, it's true. Twenty years ago I could have told you what he had for breakfast.'

'And now?'

'Now…' I sighed and turned to look at him, rubbing my temple, wishing my head would stop thumping. Now, the answer was no. I didn't know.

'That's because he's changed,' Danso said, reading my thoughts. 'He's killed thirty people and it's made him a different creature. There aren't any rules any more.'

13

Danso had twenty officers on door-to-door in Inverary. He'd issued stills from the videotape to the press and was talking to profilers every hour on the hour. But the unease wouldn't let up. He wasn't sleeping. Long nights trying to catch some kip curled up on a desk or an armchair in the station had caught up with him and the chronic disc herniation in his third and fourth lumbar vertebrae had flared up. The sleeping pills his GP had given him weren't working.

'This is killing me,' he said. 'Had a Casualty Bureau meeting seven o'clock this morning. Signed two laissez-passers, one for the US, one for Nigeria and all before eight o'clock. I do not call this a civilized timetable.'

It was Tuesday morning. Angeline was due at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary at eleven, and Danso was driving us. He knew Glasgow traffic better than we did. But I guessed the real reason he'd offered the lift. There was something he had to tell us.

'George is saying how usually when something like this happens you get hundreds reported missing — ten times more than you've got bodies to match. But-' He checked in the rear-view mirror. He indicated and changed lanes, crossing the traffic on the Dumbarton Road. In the back Angeline and Lexie sat in silence, staring out of the windows at the decaying railway bridges, the stained and graffitied pebbledash houses lining the street. 'But this thing on Cuagach happens and only twenty people come forward.'

'That's how they worked — the PHM. Cut off ties with relatives. You wouldn't expect anyone to know where they were living after all these years.'

'Yeah, but twenty. That's eleven fewer than the bodies we've got.'

We'd driven on for a while and passed two roundabouts before what he'd said sank in. I turned to look at him. 'You don't mean eleven. You mean ten. You just said eleven.'

'I mean eleven.'

I laughed. 'Peter, I have to tell you, I was maybe one of Mrs Leeper's worst students for sagging, but when it came to maths I was the four-foot genius. Twenty plus ten makes thirty. Always did, always will.'

'I mean eleven. That's what I want to tell you.' He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. 'There were thirty-one people in that chapel when it blew up.'

'No. There were only thirty members of the PHM.'

He made a face, pushing out his lips and nodding, like this was a reasonable thing to say. Like I could even be right. 'So you said. You're sure you didn't forget anyone?'

I stared at him. Then I fumbled a pen out of my pocket. I had a glimpse of Angeline watching me, her eyes puzzled and unblinking in the rear-view mirror. I scribbled down the initials of all the people I could think of on my arm. I'd been through all this before with George and I knew I was right. Blake had said thirty members. The website had said thirty. I'd met thirty.

'See?' I said, holding up my arm in front of him.

He pushed my hand away. 'I'm trying to drive.'

'There were only thirty. I'm not missing anyone.'

'They weren't hiding someone?'

'Hiding them?'

'Yeah.' He licked his lips and glanced in the rear-view mirror, checking the cars behind us. 'Pig Island was that sort of place. You say it in your statement: "the sort of place people migrate to when things go wrong". It wouldn't be the first time a community has taken in someone on the run. There couldn't have been a wee hidey-hole on Cuagach?'

'If there was they kept it quiet.'

'Aye, well, someone was out there. It doesn't come down to much — not much more than a wee bit of skin and hair. The rest is just — well…' He shot a look at the women in the back, then leaned sideways towards me and lowered his voice. 'Might not find the rest of him.'

'Him?'

'Aye.'

'Dove? Injured in the explosion?'

'Already thought of that. DNA doesn't work.'

'One of them was pregnant?'

'The hair's adult.'

I shook my head, looking out at the rows of thirties houses we were passing, the boarded-up petrol stations, the businesses: Larry's Laminate Land; Kwik-Fit; Fred's Foamwash and Valet. 'I don't know. Another hack maybe? Perhaps when I left they got another hack out there. Someone else to spread their message. Or a lawyer.'

'I don't know.' He set the indicator and crossed the traffic again. We were getting to the city centre. 'But have a think about it for me. See if you remember anything.'

The car went on, the dull rocking motion of the engine in the soles of my feet. I put my head against the window and stared up as we went under the spindly Erskine bridge; high overhead, cars teetered along it, dark against the sky. I wasn't thinking about that extra victim. I was thinking of what Dove had achieved with a bit of fertilizer and picric acid, what he could achieve on the mainland. I was thinking about Inverary and the chemist's and the Forestry Commission land. I was thinking of one word: 'memorable'. Why is your death going to be memorable? It's ironic that that was how my head was working because, looking back now, I see that what I should have been concentrating on was that sentence of Danso's: Have a think about it for me.

Because it was this that turned out in the end to be the best piece of advice I got in the whole sorry episode: to try to figure out who that thirty-first victim was. Didn't know it at the time, but I'd learn my lesson. Oh, fuck, yes. Given time I'd learn my lesson.

1

Dear Mr Taranici

I'm writing again because I've got this dreadful, dreadful sense that time is… I don't know, that it's running out somehow. It's quite ridiculous, of course, because as you know I'm too level-headed to believe in premonition, but I can't tell you how horrible this feels. Just horrible. At first it was sort of exciting, knowing we were in the middle of a drama all the country was reading about. But now it's gone beyond funny and, honestly, I'm wishing it had never happened.

Oakesy's keeping something from me. He and Danso are always talking secretively, looking at maps and reading through Dove's paperwork. If I ask Danso, he says don't worry, everything's going to plan: they've filed reports on all the DNA they found in the cottages, developed 'profiles' on the relatives they've traced, and all the human remains have come off the island and been transferred to a temporary mortuary (that's basically a warehouse on an industrial estate near Oban. It's big enough for them to drive the refrigerated trucks inside and Oakesy says they like that because they can unload out of sight). But, I say, if it's all going to plan then where's Malachi Dove?

I'm sorry. I can't help it. This morning I opened the window and looked at the solid grey Ballantine's factory, and the playing-fields that come away from it and sweep down almost to the front door. I've never seen a soul on those fields. They're always completely silent, the trees at the side all dark, and you can't help imagining there might be someone in those trees, just like at the bungalow, someone watching the house. No one — not the police or anyone we ask — can explain why those fields aren't being used. At night, when I wake up, I imagine something out there gathering, closing in on us. I have a nightmare of it clinging to the house in the dark: pulsing like a giant heart.

I've thought about getting away. I've worked out what to do — I can't drive the car because it's a manual, but if I told Oakesy I was going to Mummy's and made up some excuse about my bankcard not working I could buy the rail ticket on our joint account. I've ferreted away almost thirty pounds too, just from the loose change I empty out of his shorts at the end of the day.

But, of course, I'm not going to leave. How could I leave when there's so much at stake? When I'm this close to Christophe. I can't just drop it because I'm scared, for heaven's sake. I had to wait it out — a whole week until this wretched doctor at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary would see us. The reply to my email was pretty quick: 'Mr Radnor regrets he cannot see you personally. Without an examination it is very difficult to make a diagnosis and ordinarily it would be appropriate to refer you to a GP. However, given the circumstances, he is delighted to refer you to a colleague.' No prizes for guessing which self-appointed arbiter of human values was behind that. Somehow she'd weeded out my email and stopped it getting to Christophe. Of course I knew that the moment the doctor saw Angeline he'd be on the phone to Christophe double quick and then it'd all come out and Cerberus would look pretty stupid, not passing on my messages. But in the meantime there was nothing I could do except wait. So you can imagine, given the circumstances, that by the time the hospital appointment rolled round I was jumpy. Very jumpy indeed.

Guy Picot was waiting for us in the office, dressed in something lightweight and elegant. I was surprised by how good-looking he was. He hasn't got Christophe's force of personality, of course, but he really knows how to dress. If we'd met under different circumstances, if I hadn't been so anxious, who's saying there wouldn't have been sparks between us?

'After this consultation,' I said, when we'd all filed into his office, 'will you speak to Mr Radnor directly?'

'I'll send him a letter. Out of courtesy.'

'A letter?' A letter wouldn't reach Christophe's desk. Not with her guarding the postbag. 'Can't you phone him?'

He gave me a long look. 'I'll send him a letter. And I'll send one to Angeline, the patient. With all the pertinent points of our meeting today. I'll need an address.'

Oakesy wrote down the address of the PO box we'd rented at the local shop and I relaxed a little after that because I'd have access to the mail every day and at least I wouldn't be completely sidelined. Guy Picot made us green tea in gorgeous half-glazed Japanese bowls (green tea in the NHS!!!), then settled down, tapping a patella hammer distractedly on the desk and looking thoughtfully at the way Angeline was sitting.

I didn't say anything, but I noticed all the questions seemed to be lifted directly from my email. He might as well have been reading from a script. Was she continent? Did she have mobility in both legs? What, both? But when he put her on the examination couch he didn't invite me in. He pulled the screen tight, as if he thought I was trying to sneak a look. Next thing, I thought, I'm going to be accused of prurience, so instead I went very quickly to the opposite side of the office and stood looking out of the window, my back very firmly to the room so anyone could see I wasn't interested in peeping, for heaven's sake.

When he came out he was red-faced and flustered. 'I'll be honest,' he said. 'I wasn't warned what to expect. I was expecting something smaller.' But apart from that he made every effort not to talk to me or acknowledge how unique this case was. Of course, I wasn't fooled: he managed to arrange not only an X-ray but also an MRI in under three hours — and how many times have you known an NHS doctor do that? He even got two radiographers to give up their lunch-hour for the MRI.

'No pacemakers? Surgical clips, pins or plates or cochlear implants?'

By one o'clock Angeline was in the MRI room, dressed in a pale blue hospital gown, going through a questionnaire with one of the radiographers.

'No IUDs?'

'What's an IUD?'

'A coil. No, never mind. We'd have seen it on the X-ray.'

Oakesy and I were in the glass-panelled control area with Guy, where we could hear what was happening through the intercom system. Oakesy sat in the corner, all preoccupied — probably worrying about the thirty-first victim Danso had been telling him about. I was next to the window watching Angeline, and Guy was at the intercom mic, barking instructions to the radiographers: 'Get her comfortable. Doesn't matter if she's on her front.' He pulled Angeline's X-rays out of the brown folder and held them up to the light. 'That's it — that's the way.'

He switched off the mic and turned away, stopping when he caught me staring at the X-rays in his hand. He knew I'd got a glimpse of them. He knew from my expression.

'Are you going to let me have a look?' I said. It had been only a few split seconds, but it was long enough for me to know there was something very odd about those X-rays. Very odd indeed. 'I'd really like to see them.'

'I'll be getting a second opinion before I share my thoughts.'

'Mr Radnor?'

'No. Someone here, I expect.'

He shovelled the X-rays away, but that grey and white and black image stayed in my head. A ghostly imprint of a human. I looked round at Angeline being arranged on the MRI table. The radiographer asked her to move her feet forward and as she did the gown moved a little and I saw behind her calf a fat, sausage-coloured slab of flesh, the skin slightly hardened like a cuticle. She realized what had happened but she didn't try to hide it. She was staring blankly at the glass window. She didn't even seem to register me — there was this thoughtful, distant look on her face. I turned back to Guy Picot.

'I know why you won't let me see. I know.'

He shook his head, opening his nostrils and continuing to watch Angeline, as if I was a fly bothering him. But I wasn't going to be put off. 'I can read an X-ray, you know — I'm not imagining what I just saw. I saw calcium. In the growth, I saw a mass of something and I'm sure it was calcium, and that means-'

'That means?'

'Bones,' I said. My voice wasn't much more than a whisper, because something vague and distant was going through my head. Ectoderm, endoderm, mesoderm… a few half-remembered words from the journal. There was a long silence while I looked at Guy Picot without blinking. Heterogeneous elements…'

'But it can't be,' I murmured. 'It can't be. She should be dead….'

2

In retrospect, I can see it was right after the hospital appointment that Oakesy's behaviour, as if it wasn't bad enough already, took a turn for the worse. The next morning, when I was still half asleep, he leaped out of bed as if he'd been bitten, disappeared into the bathroom and stayed there, in the shower, for almost an hour. When he came out he looked awful, just awful, his skin all grey and damp as if he had a virus. He wouldn't speak to me, just slunk around looking really shifty, pale and uncommunicative, finding every excuse to keep a distance from me and Angeline, not meeting our eyes, sitting at breakfast with an uncomfortable, drawn-up look on his face, shutting himself in his room upstairs the moment he had a chance.

'What did the doctor tell you?' he asked me, later that night. We were in bed. 'What were you talking about? When you said you saw calcium on the X-ray, what did that mean?'

I tipped my head sideways and frowned at him. It was almost the first thing he'd said to me all day. He was staring at the ceiling, really unhappy seeming, moving his tongue around as if he'd found something foreign in his mouth.

'I don't know,' I said. 'There's only one thing it could be.'

'What?'

'A tumour. But the only tumour I know that's got bone in it is…'

'Is?'

'A teratoma. And if it was that she wouldn't have survived. They go malignant, teratomas. I'm sure I remember reading that somewhere — they go malignant.'

'Then what? What is it?'

'I don't know.'

'You must have an idea.'

'No,' I said.

'But you must.'

'No,' I said, irritated. 'I haven't got a clue.' Up until now Oakesy couldn't have cared less what was wrong with Angeline. Now all of a sudden he was showing this interest? And expecting me to have all the answers? 'I just told you, I don't know. We've got to wait for Mr Radnor to call.'

It wasn't until much later, when he'd gone to sleep and I was lying awake listening to that ghostly wind coming across the playing-fields and rattling the windows, that it dawned on me what was going on in Oakesy's head. I rolled my head sideways on the pillow and looked at him, hunched up, the duvet pulled over his head as if he wanted to shut out the world. He must have seen the growth, like I did, in the MRI room, with its slightly unreal, rubbery-looking skin. Suddenly everything made sense — the way he'd gone around all day yellow-faced and distracted, the way he couldn't meet Angeline's eyes. I stared at the bulge of his shoulders, the duvet rising and falling as he breathed, and I pushed out a dry, irritated laugh. How typical of a man. How bloody typical.

Overnight a wind came up from the Irish Sea and pounded the west of Scotland, blowing round the house, rattling the windows and shaking drifts of leaves from the trees at the edge of the estate. When I went downstairs in the morning the kitchen was dark as if winter was already here. Out of the window, rain pelted the road, dark clouds trailed long fingers down to stroke the roofs and the flame-effect gas-fire in the living room barely took the chill off the air. In the night someone had left a shopping trolley on the pavement outside the boarded-up house opposite. It just sat there, occasionally moving a few inches in a gust of wind, the chain at the coin slot dangling back and forward.

'You know,' I said, when Oakesy came down for breakfast. It was just the two of us: Angeline was still asleep, her door closed tightly. He sat opposite me, not meeting my eyes, pretending to be reading the proposal he's putting together for Finn. 'You know it would behove you to hide your feelings a little better.'

He looked up at me. His pupils opened and closed a couple of times, as if he was struggling to take me in. 'What did you say?'

'Oh, come on.' I gave a short laugh. 'I know you so well. You're really upset. And it's not just because of Malachi Dove. It's her.' I jerked my head in the direction of the stairs. 'It's her too.'

He stared at me then, as if I was a complete stranger, as if I was someone who had just wandered in off the street and sat down opposite him at the table.

'Don't look so embarrassed, Oakesy. I do know. I know exactly what's going on in your head. I'm not stupid.'

He kept looking at me — so hard that a vein in his forehead rose and began to pulse steadily. 'Lexie, I know you're not stupid, I never thought you were, and I…' He trailed off. There was a pause, then he said, 'What's going on in my head?'

'You're disgusted.' I laughed. 'You don't like even sitting in the same room as her.'

'Disgusted?' he repeated, like a mantra. 'Disgusted.' Slowly, not taking his eyes off me, he laid down the manuscript and stood up, rather woodenly. He went to the sink, turned on the tap and scooped some water into his mouth.

'There's one basic rule, Oakesy,' I said to his back. 'One fundamental guideline for decency not only for medical professionals but for all human beings. You should try as much as possible to conceal your disgust. Especially from the person you find disgusting.'

He straightened then, his back still to me. He took several deep breaths, as if he was trying to control himself. Water ran down his arms and dripped off his fingers on to the floor. Just when I was about to speak he raised a foot and slammed it into the cupboard door, sending a crack shooting down to the bottom.

'For God's sake.' I stood up, stunned. 'What on earth do you think you're doing?'

He didn't answer. He stood there, arms dangling, head down, staring at his toenails where lines of blood had appeared at the edges. He turned, not meeting my eyes, and came to the table, dropping into his seat. He sat there in a heap, shoulders slumped, staring dully at the coffee-pot. He looked terrible.

I sat down cautiously, a little knot of anxiety tying itself in my stomach. He knows something, I thought. He knows something about Dove. 'Joe? What is it? What's going on?'

'Alex,' he said, not looking at me. 'I love you. You know that, don't you?'

I opened my mouth, then closed it. 'What? Well — yes. Of course I know. What's that got to do with anything?'

He breathed in and out, very, very slowly, as if the effort of just sitting upright was too much. For a long time he didn't speak. The only noise was the sound of rain pounding against the window. 'Nothing,' he said eventually, in a strained voice. 'Nothing's going on. I just want you to know that I love you.'

Well, that was it — he wouldn't say any more. He went upstairs and locked himself into the third bedroom, leaving me sitting at the kitchen table and looking in stunned silence from the broken cupboard to the stairs and back again. Now, I thought, putting my hands to my head, now I know the world has gone mad.

1

If I've got my hand on my unreconstructed heart, when I met Dr Guy Picot — he pronounced it the French way Ghee Peeko — I didn't like him one bit, with his wide, sculpted neck and these big kind of classical lips, and curls that looked like they'd been carved out of soap or stone or something. Adonis of the Gorbals. It's a mystery to me how anyone can get through the day dressed like a Versace model and not feel a total prat.

He didn't say anything to start with — just hello — then sat us in a line on the other side of his desk, watching Angeline as she settled down, taking her in from toes to head, staring particularly at her feet. Lex was anxious. She kept asking Picot who he'd got the referral from, was it directly from Mr Radnor. If I'd been thinking a bit clearer I'd've noticed this. But good old Oakesy, he of the concrete head — never do listen to the important stuff, do I?

Picot asked Angeline some questions — mostly about her feet, for some reason. Then he put his pen down, looked at her carefully and said, 'Angeline.' He got up from the desk and pushed back the screen. 'I'm going to give you a gown and I'm going to ask you to get undressed. Are you OK with that?'

She didn't answer straight off. We all turned to look at her. She was staring at her hands, moving them round and round compulsively, breathing hard in and out. The rash round her mouth had cleared up, I noticed, and she'd put on some of Lexie's makeup, but it didn't stop you seeing the blood pumping round her face.

'Angeline, would you like to-'

'Yes.' She stood abruptly, her eyes wide. 'Yes.'

It was awkward — her limping away behind the screen, the sound of her undressing — and for a while there was a silence in which none of us could meet each other's eyes. Lex and me both picked up a magazine and pretended to flick through them. Then Angeline called, 'Ready,' and Picot went behind the screen, pulling on his gloves.

It was an old-fashioned screen, with green fabric strung over the frame, like something from a Carry On film. There was a slit in both sides and Lexie tilted her chair back as far as it would go, craning her neck to look through the gap and see what was happening back there. After a moment or two she put down the magazine silently and crept, very carefully, towards the screen. She stood, side on, her chin drawn into her neck so she could just peep through the slit.

'Hey,' I said, kind of disgusted by her. She shook her head, put a finger to her lips and was about to step closer when, from the other side, Picot tugged the screen closed with an impatient noise. She froze for a second, not looking at me, colour gathering in her face. I thought she was going to say something, be pissed off with Picot, but instead she made a little huffing sound — like 'These doctors're all the same' — snatched up the magazine from her chair and went to the window at the far end, standing with her back to the room, staring out at the car park.

I watched her for a bit, then went back to my magazine. I wasn't reading it: I was thinking about Dove, about that bridge. Spectacular. 'My death will be spectacular.' I glanced up and saw that when Picot had moved the screen he had accidentally opened one of the slits nearest to me. I could see part of what was happening in there.

I didn't move. I sat totally still, hardly breathing. I could see obliquely along one side of the table, could see the little toe on Angeline's right foot poking out from a heavy white sheet, her hand holding the side of the table, and Picot standing next to her, his gloves pulled over his shirt cuffs.

'Now, I'm not going to hurt you,' he said, his head on one side, looking down to where her face must be. 'I'm just going to look. Is that OK?'

I shot a glance at Lexie. She was still staring out of the window, tapping her nail on her teeth, not interested in me. Behind the screen, just out of my eyeline, Angeline must've nodded because Picot was folding down the sheet. 'I'm going to feel your spine and…' He stopped and I sat up a bit, watching his expression. He was staring down at Angeline's lower half, just out of view, and you could tell he didn't know what to say. There was a moment's more hesitation, then he must have sussed Angeline was looking at him, because he put his shirt-sleeve briefly to his head and said, 'Yes, good. Just — uh — let me see now. Turn a little — this way. That's it. On to your side.'

There was a long, long silence, when no one spoke and no one moved, and the only sound was the distant clatter of trolleys in the hospital corridors. Then he cleared his throat. 'Right,' he said. 'Angeline, I'm looking at your spine. OK? I'm just going to run my fingers down it…' He swallowed and took a step towards the head of the table, bending sideways and moving both hands just out of sight, drawing them downwards, his tongue between his teeth. 'OK. Now, can you shuffle towards me a bit? That's it — no, stay on your side. I want to see how strong your ankles are.'

Angeline moved, and suddenly, into the small space between the screen and Picot's shirt front came the yellow underside of a foot, and then, when she'd shuffled a bit more, the section of her back that extended from her shoulder-blades to her knees. I was looking up the length of her body. The growth had arranged itself away from her legs so it lay straight down the table towards him, and I could see the exact point where it converged with her spine. I could see the eye-shaped crevice neatly creased between her thighs, just like any other woman, and I could see further up to the point of the eye, to the junction where the growth began, widening away from her coccyx. I blinked. This was weird. I put my hand to my chest. My heart was thumping hard under my shirt.

'I'll just cover you here,' said Picot, reaching under the chair for a blanket, which he placed over her buttocks, so that it hung down into the gap behind the growth, shutting off my view. 'Then I want you to tell me what you can feel and what you can't.'

I shot Lexie another look. She had opened the magazine and was leafing through it — still with her back to me, like she was making a point. I shifted very, very silently in my chair, taking care not to make it creak, so I could watch what Picot was doing. I'd seen the growth before — just for a bit, in the house on the island, but I hadn't seen its base: it was wider than I'd expected — as wide as a wrist — and very pale, with almost the quality of marble to it. I'd had this image of what she'd look like down there — I wouldn't have admitted it to anyone but I'd spent a long time in the last few days wondering about it — and it hadn't been like this. I hadn't expected anything so — I fumbled for the word — so beautiful. Yes, I thought, feeling like a bit of a tart for the choice of words: beautiful. That bit of flesh had something I couldn't put a name to — like a sculpture, or a piece of architecture.

'OK,' Picot said, after a while, and there was something different about his voice — a nervousness. He lifted the sheet to cover her. 'I'm — I'm… let me see.' He fiddled uncomfortably with his tie and stared at the telephone on the wall, like he wanted to call someone and ask for help. After a while he scratched his neck and, like someone invisible had just asked him what he was going to do, said, 'An X-ray, then an MRI. Yes — right, right.' He pulled off his gloves. 'OK. If I can arrange it, I want to do an MRI. Do you know what an MRI is?'

Angeline shifted on to her back and began to sit up so that everything I had been looking at was replaced by her left hand. 'I think so. It's a-' She broke off. She had moved upright so quickly that I hadn't had time to look away, and she'd caught me staring at her from the other side of the office: pale, bug-eyed, my magazine clutched tightly in my hands. I was frozen, couldn't drag my eyes away, and for a moment we were stuck there, holding each other's eyes, both too surprised and embarrassed to know what to do.

'Angeline?' Picot said. 'Are you…?'

'Yes,' she said hurriedly, grabbing the sheet and pulling it round her protectively. She hadn't taken her eyes off me. 'I'm ready. Where do we go?'

One of Danso's PCs drove us back to the rape suite. I didn't say a word. I sat in the passenger seat, elbows on my knees, smiling rigidly at the windscreen, my head pounding. I was fighting the sinking feeling that this had been waiting somewhere inside me for a lifetime, that it had always been destined to be dragged to the surface one day.

He was a shrewd one, Picot, keeping his cards close to his chest. Even after the MRI he wasn't giving away what he thought was wrong with her. Instead of answers, we came away with nothing except more questions and a limp, flesh-coloured surgical support. It was just a piece of bandage, boiled soft and covered with hospital laundry marks, and we all knew, when he held it out to Angeline, that it wasn't designed for her and probably wouldn't fit or make any difference anyhow. Back at the house she sat on the sofa under a duvet, one hand hidden beneath it. I couldn't see for sure, but I think she was feeling herself, walking her fingers down her body, re-examining it. I walked round the place, not knowing where to put myself, avoiding meeting her eyes. In the end I went to bed early and lay there, wondering why the fuck I couldn't get what I'd seen out of my head. That night I had an erotic dream about her.

She was sitting on the edge of a swimming-pool, her feet dangling in the water. She was wearing some kind of pink bikini thing, shorts up to her waist, the growth peeping out of one of the leg openings. It lay next to her left leg, glistening with pool water, the tip of it in the pool like it was a creature sucking up water. I was a few feet away in the pool, staring at it, mesmerized. I said something to her, something indistinct and meaningless, and she raised her eyes, smiled, and let the tip of the growth move up her left calf, pausing at the knee. I opened my mouth to speak again, but this time the water rose in a wave behind me and carried me towards her. She opened her arms and her legs and snaked the tail out, like an arm, to pull me hard against her. I woke in the sticky sheets, my heart thudding, buzzing with excitement and sadness.

'What is it?' Lexie murmured sleepily, throwing out a hand. 'You all right? You ill?'

I swung my legs round so my back was to her, put my feet on the ground and sat up to stare at my wet thighs. It was early morning — there was a faint line of light round the curtains. 'I'm fine.'

I waited for the feelings to go — a feeling in my chest like I'd just taken a drug straight in the heart, pure nicotine or one of those amyl-nitrate poppers we used to do at uni. When the blood stopped pounding and my head came back to the ground, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, staring at myself.

Man, I thought peering at myself. Hair and muscle and dick. That's all we amount to. I looked down at my cock, still red and half hard. What is going on here, Oakes? I asked myself. What is happening to you?

2

Later that day Angeline went missing. She was gone for four hours, and it was me who found her. I took the Fiesta and drove round the deserted streets, the sound of syringes cracking under the tyres. She was half a mile away, on the main road that bordered the estate. There was a newsagent with bars on the windows and a postbox outside, and she was standing in front of them, staring at the traffic going back and forward. We'd given her some money to spend in Dumbarton and she was dressed differently now: under her leather coat she was wearing a skirt she'd patched together out of two others and a ribbed brown sweater with a McFly badge pinned to it. I watched her for a moment or two from the car, trying not to think about what was under that coat. I'd made up my mind. It was time to tell her to move on.

I pulled into the kerb, leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. 'Hey. We didn't know where you were. Everyone's worried.'

She hesitated. Then she climbed into the car and closed the door, arranging the coat round her, rubbing her nose. I didn't look too close, but I got a sort of thumbnail image of raw eyes and veins broken in her cheeks. She'd been crying. We sat there for a long time not speaking. The billboard outside the newsagent said, 'Terrorist Experts in Nationwide Manhunt'.

'Angeline?' I said. 'Were you trying to go somewhere? Someone's house? Do you want me to drive you somewhere?'

She shook her head and wiped her eyes. 'No,' she said thickly. 'I just wanted a walk.'

'There's nowhere I can take you?'

'I don't know anyone. Only you.' She pulled on the seatbelt, the way she'd seen Lex and me do it, and sat, her hands on her lap, looking out of the windscreen. 'I've been thinking,' she said, 'about what happened yesterday.'

I felt the muscles in my face lock solid. I knew she was looking at me, shyly searching my face, trying to make sense of me.

'I've made up my mind. If there's an operation I'm not going to have it.' There was a long, long pause. 'You think I'm right, don't you? You think I'd be wrong to have an operation.'

I should say something. I was supposed to say something — something adult. But my head had gone rigid. I reached across her and locked the door. 'Do something for me, Angeline.' I put the car into gear and took off the handbrake. 'Don't come out here again. You don't know who might drive past.'

The next few days there was this slow, pressure-cooker feeling in the rape suite. Angeline ignored what I'd said about going out on the road: every day she'd leave the house and be gone for hours. The surveillance car didn't follow her either: me and the officers had talked about it and decided to stop arguing with her, decided we weren't her keepers. Secretly I was relieved. It was easier when she wasn't around. I didn't like the way she kept watching me, like she was waiting for me to say something.

Lexie knew something was wrong. She kept staring at me and asking me weird questions until my chest was tight and my head felt like it was full of blood and I spent as much time as I could away from her, locked in the office I'd rigged up in the third bedroom, the one with the cot and puke on the wall, trying to work on the proposal. I shut myself up and wrote like crazy: two K words a day, trying to cram all my thoughts on to the hard drive, my hands clamped to my head, moving ideas around until my brain was like catfood and I knew how the Sputnik monkey felt. But it didn't matter how hard I wrote, I couldn't get two people out of my head: Angeline Dove and her dad, Malachi.

Danso and I talked about it all the time: we spent hours going through the paperwork from the cottage, pushing it all around. Every night he'd stop by on his way home from work and every night he'd bring things for us. Bribes to keep me sweet, I decided, to stop me going back to London. One day it was a bottle of Jura malt whisky. One day a pound of farmed smoked salmon. Fuck knows where he was financing it from — his own pocket maybe — but none of us complained. Lexie got one of the guys in the surveillance car to bring down a jar of capers from Oban when he came on duty and we ate them with the salmon, using our fingers, sitting in a circle like cave people. I always asked Danso about the sightings of Dove. I asked him to show me on the map where they all were and I plotted them. When he'd gone I'd spend the night looking at the map, thinking about what these random sightings meant.

Then, suddenly, on the Thursday morning, the police got a lead.

Someone had spotted a blue Vauxhall near the southern tip of Loch Awe. Within an hour someone else called in a report: Dove wandering near a stone bothy tucked up in a crevice of the nearby hills in Inverliever Forest. The police brought out the Royal Logistics Corps — used to clearing military land and unexploded Second World War ordnance. They stuck a specialized probe into the bothy window and siphoned off air into absorbent cartridges. When the explosives test came out negative the support unit got sent in to batter down the door. There was no one inside.

'Empty,' said Danso, that evening at the rape suite. 'But the thing is, it's only a mile from a chalet owned by one of the ex-members of the PHM. And she was on our TI list.'

'TI?'

'Trace and Interview. We'd cleared her on Tuesday, but then this came up and started sounding klaxons.'

I pulled on my coat.

'What are you doing?'

'I want to see it.'

'There's nothing to see. He's not there. It's just a wee bothy with a load of crap in it.'

'There is something to see.' I pulled my car keys out of my pocket. 'You're just not looking at it right.'

Danso sighed. He massaged his forehead, like I was making him tired. 'We're not looking at it through his eyes?'

'That's right.'

'And you're going to explain to the missus why I'm late home again?'

'You don't have to take me. Tell me where it is. I don't need you to hold my hand.'

'Yes, you do,' he said, all weary. 'Yes, you do.'

"We drove in convoy: me clinging to the tail-lights of his black Bimmer. We headed north along the B840 and at eight o'clock we hit the edge of Inverliever Forest — those fuck-off, dark-as-hell mountains that swept out of the night skies and disappeared vertically below the still, dark waters of Loch Avich. We were a long way north. I wondered what it meant that Dove had changed direction. He'd gone north and not south towards London. When we stopped, in a small lane that wound up along the edge of a burn into the cleft between two mountains, it was like we'd gone into another universe.

'See the chalet?'

We'd walked half-way up the path when Danso stopped and turned to look down to the road and the loch. He pointed at a small shingle-roofed house on the shore, outlined in silver by the water behind it. It was planted with a border of leylandii and as I looked a security light came on briefly — a cat or a hedgehog maybe, lighting the trees from inside.

'The family's gone now, off to their home in London. Left us with a key, but we've checked. It's clean.' He turned to the west, pointing a long finger, pale in the half-light. I looked across the sky to where the stars and a few clouds were reflected in the loch. 'The Vauxhall was over there, at the far end, just parked in a layby at teatime on Weunesday. You can't see the layby from here. Then we've got a taxi-driver says he stopped for a whizz down here, at the bottom of this path where we've just left the cars, and he looks up and sees Malachi Dove standing in the door of the bothy, staring down at him. Said it was like being watched by an eagle.' Danso turned and began to walk up the path. 'That's when the night shift DS gets on the phone and gets me out of the first decent sleep I've had in a week.'

I followed him, keeping my eyes on his good shoes that his missus must've picked for a quiet day in the office but which kept slithering on the hummocky grass. Sheep lumbered away from us in the darkness, heavy, cloudy shadows, hoofing into the higher slopes. The wind scattered leaves and parted the grass like hair, but under my coat I was sweating. I tried feeling inside myself, trying to put a finger on my fear, but I couldn't. Dove wasn't here. He wasn't here. In front of me Danso walked with his shoulders wide, back stiffened, his face and chest open. He was scared too, I saw. But he wasn't going to tell me that.

We crossed a cattle grid and there was the bothy, tucked between two sheer rock faces. Ten feet away we paused and looked at it in silence. The roof was moss-covered, the window-frames rotted away into two dull sockets. A thin line of police tape flapped in the wind.

'It was locked when we got here,' Danso said. The wind took his voice and blew it into the empty building, battering it against the cold walls. 'The SG sergeant kicked the door down like it was a matchstick. Here.' He handed me a torch. 'Have a look.'

I approached the building and slowly opened the door, nothing more than five planks nailed together and hung from rusty hinges. It was dark and there was a smell that sent an uncomfortable prickle along my hairline. For a moment I thought I could hear breathing, something reedy and thin bouncing off the walls. I clicked off the torch and waited, my heart thudding. Then the wind changed direction and popped my ears, and I decided I'd imagined it. I shone the torch into the darkness. I saw flashes of a bare earth floor, plants growing on the inside walls, a stack of White Lightning cider bottles in the corner.

'What're they?'

There was a pile of towels bunched in the corner.

'We think he was injured. There was blood on some of them. The science boys have got them over in the labs now, trying to make a match.'

I stepped away from the bothy. I went up a small path to where the land rose so I could survey the area. I clicked the torch on and off, a nervous tic. 'What's out here?' I murmured, looking at the faint greyish line of the path winding back down to the road, the glimmer of the loch beyond. 'What's here?'

'The chalet?' Danso came and stood beside me. 'It's only over there.'

'No. The chalet is how he knows this place… but it's not why he came here. He came for something else.'

I switched off the torch and we stood in the darkness, our ears reaching out across the mountains and the forests, pinging our thoughts like sonar against the glassy surface of the loch. I turned to Danso. He was staring at the sky, a gnawed-at, hungry look to him — the way people get when they're close to the end of their energy.

'He scares you,' I murmured, 'doesn't he?'

There was a moment's silence. Then he said, 'I've never worked a mass death before. Missed Dunblane, Ibrox, Mull, Lockerbie. Missed them all. I've never seen more than three dead bodies in the same place at the same time and that was an RTA.'

'I don't mean that. I mean him. He scares you.'

He hesitated, shuffled his feet. 'I'd like to know how he knew we were coming.' He glanced over his shoulder at the bothy. 'No one saw him leave. When the SG kicked the door in they thought he was in there. You'd think he had a tunnel or something, the way he got out so quick.'

'That's what I mean. He scares you.'

Danso met my eyes. He held them seriously for a long time. Then he clicked on his torch and shone it down on my shoes. They were covered with black slime. 'Sheep shit,' he said. 'Sorry. I forgot to tell you to put boots on. There're sheep all over the place here.'

1

Dear Mr Taranici,

Please believe me when I say things have gone very wrong. Very wrong indeed. I've done so many things in the last hour, said things that I can never, ever take back. Really I think I might be going mad because the world is upside-down. The worst thing is, I don't know who to believe any more. I've discovered I'm being systematically lied to. And no, before you even think it, I am not being paranoid. I know it for a fact.

I was on the sofa this morning watching the news — more about the hunt for Malachi — and Oakesy was up in his room, working. It was another awful day, with rain lashing the house, and I was vaguely aware of someone upstairs moving around, but I wasn't really paying attention. It was only when I heard a door slam that I muted the TV and looked up at the ceiling: someone was walking around on the landing. Another door opened and closed. The floorboards were creaking in the bathroom, a bath was running. At first it was just that and the rain pelting down outside. Then from the landing I heard Oakesy say, very sadly, as if he was about to cry, 'I love my wife.'

I stared at the stairs, my mouth open. I love my wife? A toxic little bubble of suspicion detached itself from the bottom of my stomach and floated upwards. He must be talking to Angeline. But why was he talking about me? I leaned over and switched off the TV, feeling suddenly very cold. A whole stack of images shuttled down behind my eyes, unbelievable, ridiculous things, things that had been staring me in the face when I thought about it: Oakesy standing in front of the sink, kicking the cupboard; Oakesy stricken and sick-looking in the car on the way back from the hospital, echoing my words, Disgusted? Disgusted. And Angeline beginning to look after herself since the visit to the hospital, even washing and putting on makeup, combing her hair so it covers the bald patches, somehow getting her skin cleared up, all in all looking quite wholesome. I looked at the cupboard. It couldn't be. Couldn't possibly be…

And then he appeared, coming heavily down the stairs. I went to the foot of the stairs and when he saw me he stopped. He shook his head silently, as if he didn't trust himself to speak, as if what he had to say was just too awful.

'Joe,' I said faintly. 'Joe, why did you just tell Angeline you love me?'

Well, he could have answered any way he wanted and I'd have probably listened. He could have denied it, or laughed, or been affronted. But he did none of those things. He did something worse. Much worse. He said nothing. He just stood there, staring at me.

'It seems such a funny thing to say,' I said wood-enly, feeling as if someone had put their hand inside my ribcage and was squeezing my heart. My skin went hot and cold, then hot again. 'Joe? Please, Joe, please. Tell me you're joking. Come on. This is a joke.'

'I'm sorry.' He pulled his jacket from the banisters and threw it on, pulling his keys out of his pocket. 'Lex, you won't believe me, but I'm sorry.'

He pushed past me and headed for the door.

'Joe?' I stared at him, disbelief washing up and over me. 'Joe? Wait. Wait-' He pulled the front door open. A gust of wind and rain came into the hallway, nearly taking me off my feet, but he leaned forward into it and went out, into the streaming day, his jacket whipping and slapping around him like a parachute, leaving me in the doorway. I stood there for a few seconds, thinking stupidly that my shoes were lying on the floor in the kitchen and I couldn't go out without them. Then I saw him hold the key up and heard the beep as the car doors unlocked and I knew then it was real and he was going. I ran out barefoot into the rain, the wind driving water into my eyes. 'Wait, Joe. Wait!' He was already swinging into the car. He slammed the door, and as I got to the kerb I heard the central-locking system clunk closed and that made me panic. I scrabbled at the handle, the wind driving me flat against the car. 'Open the door!' I hammered at it with my bare hands. I could see the side of his face through the greasy, rain-drenched window. He looked grey, cold. He wouldn't look at me as he reached down and turned the key.

'For God's sake, Joe. Talk to me!'

The headlights went on. The engine came to life. He took the handbrake off, twisted the steering-wheel and pulled away. The tyres sent up a massive whoosh of water from the gutters, soaking my trousers, making me take a shocked step backwards. He got to the top of the street and the brake-lights came on, turning all the raindrops around them to rubies, then he was gone — swallowed into the dark storm, leaving me standing barefoot in the pouring rain with the wretched shopping trolley moving up and down the pavement opposite, thinking, What? What just happened? What just happened?

2

For those first few minutes after he'd gone I really didn't know what to do. It was like I was in a dream. I stood there soaking, thinking he was going to come back and say, 'Ha ha — got you.' When he didn't I limped back into the house, streaming with water. I stood at the foot of the stairs and stared up at Angeline's door, thinking, No, no. This isn't happening. She's deformed. She's ugly. So ugly.

I got my phone out and dialled Oakesy's mobile, my fingers numb. It was impossible to believe. Oakesy and Angeline… And it was me who'd had the idea of her staying with us in the first place. 'Answer it. Come on. Answer it.'

But the phone rang and rang. My head thumped as if it was going to split right open. The call went to answerphone.

'No! You bastard. NO!'

I called again and this time it clicked straight through to his messages. He'd switched it off. Didn't want to speak to me. I called him again — and when it went on to answerphone I immediately hung up and called again, jabbing my thumb furiously at the phone, three, four times, crying now, and when I still couldn't get through I went into the kitchen, shakily got his bottle of Jack Daniel's out of the cupboard, poured two inches into a cloudy glass, then filled it up with some flat cola from an opened can in the fridge. I drank it down straight, shaking like a leaf, dripping water everywhere, tears running down my face. Then I poured another and sat at the table, the phone held at arm's length, jabbing his number in over and over again. When I'd dialled twenty times and his phone was still switched off I hurled my phone into the wastepaper bin and went to the window. I stood there for a long time, holding my face, my nails digging into the skin. That's when I remembered something you said to me once.

You're an achiever, Alex.

Do you remember those words?

You are clever, Alex, whatever you think, and you've got the ability to achieve whatever you set out to do.

I paused, standing there at the window, looking at the shopping trolley, and at that very moment something inside me went cold and hard. I actually felt it freeze into place, solid, just like that. I stopped crying. I wiped my eyes. I was very calm. And angry. Very angry. I turned away from the window and looked up at the door at the top of the stairs. Then I limped over to the bin and hooked out the phone. I dialled Guy Picot's number. I'm an achiever. I am not weak. I do what I set out to do.

3

Guy Picot pretended he didn't recognize my voice. When I explained who I was he was a little cool. To put it mildly. 'Yes, Alex. I was going to give you a call today — to let Angeline know I've sent her a referral letter.'

'And you're sending one to Christophe?' I kept my sentences short because I was shaking and I didn't want him to know I'd been crying. 'He'll contact me directly. We're very old friends and colleagues.'

'It's more orthodox for the doctor to liaise directly with the patient. Angeline didn't say she wanted an intermediary.'

'Look, really, this is the smoothest way. Mr Radnor knows I've been involved in this from the start. He'll deal with Angeline through me from now on.'

There was a moment's hesitation, then he said, 'The referral letter doesn't have Mr Radnor's name on it.'

I opened my mouth to say something, then closed it. I went to the bottom of the stairs and looked up to make sure her door was closed, then I went and stood at the window. Outside the rain tipped down on the dead playing-fields, streamed down the sides of the Ballantine's factory. 'I beg your pardon,' I said, in a much quieter voice. 'If you're not referring her to Christophe, then where are you referring her? You're meant to refer her to Christophe.'

'It was a very difficult decision. I had to decide between referring her to an oncologist or a paediatric surgeon. I still may be proved wrong, but I've decided on the latter. I'm passing her on to Great Ormond Street.'

'Great Ormond Street? This isn't something for a paediatrician.'

'Angeline's condition is not in Mr Radnor's field.'

'Of course it is.'

'No. Really it isn't.'

'Why ever not?'

He sighed. 'When we were talking in my office your husband mentioned something that stuck with me.'

'My husband's got nothing to do with this.'

'Angeline's mother lived near a chemical dump, that's what he said. Herbicides. Dioxins. Richard Spitz's team will explain it to you,' he said. 'They've seen the MRI scans, and they're showing great interest. They really want to-'

'Richard Spitz?' I stopped him. 'Did you say Richard Spitz? The Richard Spitz?'

'Yes. The Richard Spitz.'

'My God,' I said distantly, staring out at the trees bent almost double in the wind. Everything was becoming clear. I had a friend who'd once worked for Richard Spitz and I knew exactly what Guy was saying. 'My God. Now I get it.'

'Now you get what?'

'That's why there's bone. That's why she's still alive. That's why.'

Guy Picot was right: Christophe has no background in what's wrong with Angeline. Her 'tail' wasn't a tumour at all. And nothing to do with spina bifida either. Which means everything I've done for her has been a complete waste of my time. Absolutely everything.

1

The landing was dark when I came out of the third bedroom — no electric lights. There was a little weak daylight coming from the bathroom where the door stood open and the sound of a bath running. I knew who was in there. I wasn't stupid. I knew who was running the bath. So why didn't I just go back to my work? Oh, no. That would be too easy for Joe Oakes.

I took a silent step forward and stopped in the doorway. She was in there, hazy in the steam, a towel wrapped round her, bending over the bath to swirl the water. It took her a moment or two to sense me standing at the door, and when she did she stiffened. She didn't look up. She went very still, her hands motionless in the water. A slow, hot colour crept across her bare shoulders, up the back of her long neck into her cropped hair. It seemed like for ever before she straightened, her back very stiff and strong, and turned to me.

We stood for a long time totally silent, neither of us knowing what to say. I could see in her eyes how totally full of questions she was. Her triangular little chin was down almost on to her collarbone and she was shaking violently. But she didn't take her eyes off me. She took a deep breath and put her shoulders back. It was like she was pulling all her courage up inside her, into a tight rod. She turned slightly, not breaking eye-contact, dropped her hand and in one movement lifted the towel up high — as high as her waist so I could see everything: her naked legs, the naked place the growth jutted out from at the bottom of her spine.

'Shit.' I took a step back. I steadied myself on the banisters behind me. 'Shit-' I dropped my head and stared at the floor, the blood pounding in my face. Tried to gather the right words. 'Listen…' I went, but my voice came out slushy and flat — like I was drunk. 'Listen. I'm sorry — I'm sorry. You've got me wrong. I love my wife. I really love my wife.…'

2

In my last year at university there was a book doing the rounds of the halls of residence: The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. Written by a Californian academic who went by the unlikely name of Brenda Love ('Yeah, right,' said all the undergrads, 'like that's her real name'). It was on everyone's must-read list. 'It's, like, crammed to the ears with mind-boggling things to do with your todger,' Finn told me, when he sent me a copy from the States. The closing line of the section on zoophilia (or bestiality, if you want its common-or-garden name) was the one all the undergraduates kept whispering to each other, creasing up about: 'Sex with a partner that has little intelligence, superior strength and who panics easily, is risky…'

Page 298: Zoophilia

Zoophilia involves sex between humans and animals and generally takes more forms than does sex between humans. Some of our ancestors felt that sex with animals held a magic power…

There are different kinds of zoophiliacs, and if you really think your head's on tight enough you can track down that encyclopedia and read all about them: androzons, avisodomists, bestial-sadists, formicopbiliacs, necrobestialists, ophidicists. But the one I kept thinking about time and again was the 'gynozoon'. A Roman obsession this, a gynozoon was a female animal trained for sex with a human male.

At university I'd read The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices from cover to cover, taking it all in: guys who can't get off without electric shocks, or armpit sex, or licking their partner's eyeball. (Making it up? I wish I was.) There was still a copy of that book somewhere in my study in London, but I hadn't thought about it for years. Not until now. Now I thought about it over and over again until my head was thumping. I kept thinking about the gynozoon. A gynozoon.

Page 92 I: Dysmorphophilia

Dysmorphophilia: (dys: abnormal. morphe: form. philia: attraction) Those who are sexually aroused by deformities in their partners. It's linked to acrotomophilia and apotemnophilia and for some dysmorphophiliacs the strong sense of compassion or fear may condition them to… confuse this excitement with sexual arousal. Others feel emotionally secure or in control when their partner does not have the ability to leave them for someone else. Others need to nurture or rescue a sex partner to feel love of bonding and some are simply attracted by novelty…

I walked out of the rape suite and into the pouring rain and I didn't have a clue where I was going. I just put the car into gear and went, not thinking about the turnings I was taking, half blind to my surroundings. I wanted to be out on the road, Lex and Angeline behind me. When Lexie called I switched off the phone, threw it on to the passenger seat and went on driving. On and on and on, dodging trucks and coaches, the Massive Attack CD in the deck playing until it was making a hole in my head. I didn't even notice when the rain eased off, changed to drizzle, when the passing cars switched off their headlights, and the weak autumn sun burned out from the clouds. It didn't cross my mind I was heading west. It was only when I'd been driving for two hours and saw a sign I recognized that I slowed the car down and woke up a bit. The post office at Ardfern. I was on Craignish Peninsula. The hairs went up on the backs of my hands. Something had led me back here, like it was the most familiar place I could turn.

I drove on a little further, slower now. I hadn't been here since the night I came back and picked up our stuff. The bungalow drive was barer now autumn was here, more visible from the road. I turned up it, leaning forward to study the bungalow as it evolved out of the trees, all shut up and dull-looking, its windows filthy from the earlier rain. This was the last place I'd slept a night through — instead of lying there like a torture victim, thinking either about Malachi Dove or about his daughter. The bungalow hadn't changed much.

Half-way up the track I stopped the engine. I chocked the wheels and stared out of the windscreen. Now I didn't have the mindless business of driving to deal with, I started to shake. It was early afternoon and the storm must've gone west to east, because the sun was reflecting little dewdrops of rain in the trees like diamonds. Across the loch a flash of coloured light came from the shore. I stared at it, thinking about Lex standing in the rain in Dumbarton, crying as I drove away. I balled my fist, rested it on my temple, wanting to hit myself, wanting to knock the thoughts out of my head.

'You stupid fucking arse.'

I hadn't seen her cry in years. It was the kind of crying you do after a shock, the same kind of crying I did after the massacre. I'd never wanted to see her doing it. Never had. I looked at the phone on the passenger seat. What did I do now? Did I just turn round, pick up the phone and say, I'm sorry, babe, been meaning to mention it to you for months — our marriage is in the toilet. Or did I lie? It was going to have to be a lie. I'd have to lie to her. I reached for the phone, was about to pick it up, when something made me stop. Something I hadn't registered properly till now. I dropped my hand and slowly, very slowly, a thought racing over me like a shiver, I raised my eyes back to the loch.

The point of light was still there. Sunlight reflecting off a window. I stared at it, my thoughts going dead slow, dead cautious. There were some cottages over there, just a few clustered round the shore. They were due south, on the other side of the loch, where the land curved round to face the peninsula. Suddenly, without knowing how I knew, I realized I was looking at Ardnoe Point. The place they found the dory.

I opened the car door and got out, buttoning my jacket, staring at the light. I'd been there once, with Struthers, three days after the massacre, just to have a look. Wasn't much to see: a few cottages, a beach that wasn't a beach at all, just a tidal mud-flat, marshy, matted with eelweed stretching dimly out to the water, one or two pieces of police tape still snagged in the weeds' clumps. The boat had been lying on its side, not tied up — another reason Struthers thought Dove had floated up here by accident, then bailed out. We'd talked about it a bit. What we'd never realized was how, if we'd just turned a bit to our right, we could've seen the bungalow across the loch.

I leaned into the car and pulled out the roadmap from the webbing at the back of the passenger seat. I opened it on the roof of the car and studied it closely, my elbow on it, looking up from time to time at Ardnoe Point, still glinting in the distance. No pen in my pockets so I used my thumbnail to make a mark on the map — a neat cross over Ardnoe Point. Then I walked backwards a few paces, going up the track until I got to the place in the bungalow gardens where you could see inland, over to where Loch Avich must be. The bothy, the place I'd gone with Danso that night, trying to work out what Dove was planning, was in the mountains over there.

I stood for a few moments, letting my thoughts slosh dreamily around. Ardnoe Point was to my left. The bothy was behind me and to my right. And the shopping centre at Inverary was… I snatched up the map. It took me a moment to focus. When I did my heart started to beat, very slow and deliberate, in my chest.

I will run rings around you. I will, in the final hour, will run rings around you.

The bungalow. When I looked at the four points, Ardnoe Point, the bothy, Inverary and Pig Island, they made a circle round Craignish. Round the bungalow. I slammed my hand flat on the map, my heart thumping hard. For the last week Malachi had been circling the bungalow. He thought we were still there. I raised my eyes, scanning the horizon, the trees, the bungalow behind me with its blank windows.

Where are you now?

Just like it wanted to answer my question, a car on the road slowed to watch me. I closed the map very slowly, staring at it. It was an English car, dark blue. A cold line of fear traced its way up my spine, into my hair: the car stolen from the Crinian car park was a dark blue Vauxhall. I was at least two hundred yards away but I could tell it was a bloke driving it — a bloke with sandy or blond hair and dressed in something pale: a golfing sweater, maybe. Shit, I thought, my heart thudding, my limbs going a bit numb. Is that you? Is it?

I opened the door and threw the map inside, trying to look calm. The car didn't move. I took the keys out of the Fiesta's ignition. Staying casual, even though I was shaking, I turned and began to walk towards the road. I was going to speak to him. Just talk. That's what he wanted. A flock of birds twisted and banked in the flat blue sky above us, menacing as a stormcloud, and from somewhere distant came the thin, briny cry of a curlew. I didn't look up at the sky — just kept walking, my paces even, measured, my breathing steady.

As I got nearer I could see that what I'd thought was sandy blond hair was a baseball cap, pulled down close over his ears, and just as I was about to get a good view of the driver he floored the accelerator and sped away. I broke into a run, skidding in the gravel, stopping at the centre of the road, feet planted wide, staring at the dwindling dab of darkness on the road: vanishing to the south, in the direction of Lochgilphead, away from Craignish Point.

It's not him. Of course it's not him.

I stood there, suspended for a few beats of time in a silent bubble of disbelief, that dot of colour disappearing in my retina. Why would he be so casual? It was just a local — slowing down to see if I was on the rob. But my blood was up now. I raced back to the Fiesta, fired it up. Not a chase car, it struggled and whined as I forced it along the road — sixty, seventy, eighty, my heart pounding. Off the peninsula and right along the coast. The car reached a forest, then abruptly, with no warning, swung to the right and we were in the flat marshlands near the river Add. Over a bridge and the road became a narrow canalside single-laner. The Fiesta screamed along it, passing a turning to the right — that way, or stay on this road? — and another, and another. Then a bridge to the left over the canal and a glimpse of red-painted narrow-boats, bikes chained to the roofs. Rusty chimneys puffed woodsmoke into the cold air.

I fumbled the mobey off the front seat and switched it on, my eyes going up and down from the display to the car in front. It chimed out a tune, the screen flaring up. Twenty-five missed calls from Lexie, and before I had time to jam in Danso's number, it jumped to life. Lexie again. I tossed the phone on to the passenger seat, and floored the Fiesta down the narrow lane. I turned another corner and saw, less than a hundred yards ahead of me, a camper-van lumbering along, fat-bellied, taking up the whole of the road, brushing the hedgerows. I jammed on the brakes and came to a halt in the middle of the road, hands clenched on the wheel, leaning forward, my nose almost pressed to the windscreen, breathing so hard I could've run the last few miles. I was beaten. I knew it. These roads were straight and uncompromising, but they were a warren for a chase. Dove could be anywhere by now.

The camper-van waddled and swayed until it was swallowed into the distance. On the seat the mobey rang again. I pulled the car over and waited for Lexie's call to go to answerphone, then I snatched it up and jammed in the number for the Oban incident room. Got Danso to send out a couple of patrol cars. Then I drove around, slowing to peer down any driveway or farm path or layby. Every five minutes the phone rang on the passenger seat, twisting and turning on the upholstery, arsed off I wasn't answering. She wasn't giving up. I couldn't talk to her. Not now. I took a left and continued in an arc over the head of the Crinian canal. After about twenty minutes I saw one of the police cars — unmarked, but you could have spotted it a mile away — cruising slow, predator-wise, in the opposite direction, the driver and passenger both chewing hard, craning their necks and staring, gagging to get into a high-speed chase. I didn't acknowledge them, just drove past, anonymous. I knew it was over. All I could do now was check the same places again and again. The phone began to ring and this time I nosed the car into the hedgerow and snatched it up impatiently.

'Look, I'll call you back.'

'No, you won't,' she said coldly.

'We'll talk later.'

'Fuck you, Joe. We'll talk now. Don't insult my intelligence. Please.'

I killed the engine, pulled the phone out from where I'd wedged it under my chin and clamped it against my mouth so she'd hear me better. 'Lex, we're going to talk, but not now. I'm in the middle of something.'

'I'm going to ask you a question,' she said, in a controlled voice. 'And when you answer it's going to be an honest answer. I want to know the truth. The truth, Joe,' she said emphatically, like it was something I was a complete stranger to. There was a long pause. Then she said, 'Do you love me?'

'I'll come home. We'll talk-'

'I said, do you love me?'

I took a deep breath. In the distance a car pulled on to the road and headed towards me. I stared at it, just a dot, my eyes aching.

'It's an easy question. Not quantum physics, Joe. Do you love me, do you fancy me, do you still want to fuck me, the woman who has stuck by you for years and fucking years while you piss away your degree up a wall, or do you want to fuck some ugly shitty little shitty little bitch cow?' She broke off, breathing hard. I could almost smell her bitter breath down the phone. 'Do you know what's wrong with her, Joe? Do you? Have you got any idea, or are you just content to leave it to me — the one who's actually bothered to get herself some kind of medical training?'

I stared blankly at the road, a tightness straddling my windpipe. I wanted to sort it in my head, find a response, something to say. But I couldn't. Just couldn't get my head to work.

'She's a freak of nature and if you fancy her you are a pervert — and you should be put out of your misery, you fucking horrible, horrible freak-'

'Lex, listen-'

'I'm going upstairs now and I'm going to tell her that she DISGUSTS YOU. YOU get it? And then, when you come back, you're going to go into her room and tell her that SHE DISGUSTS YOU. You're going to tell her you don't fuck freaks.'

She broke down into a series of staccato sobs, her breath hitching and catching. The car drew nearer, the grey sky reflected milkily on its windscreen. My hand was stony on the steering-wheel. Grey. There was a long time while I listened to her sniffle and get herself under control.

'You're not saying anything,' she muttered, after a while. 'You've gone quiet.'

'When I get home we'll sit down and talk about this.'

'No, fuck you, Joe. I'm not sitting down with you and-'

'Fuck you, Lexie.'

She took a furious breath, gobsmacked that I'd answered her back. 'Don't you dare talk to me like that. Don't you d-'

'What? You get to talk to me like that but I can't do the same?'

'I'm not the fucking adulterer in this relationship,' she screamed. 'Being cheated on gives me some rights.'

'I haven't cheated on you.'

'But you want to. Don't you? Don't you?'

I didn't answer. I thumbed the cancel-call button, switched off the phone, dropped it in my lap and put my elbows on the steering-wheel, resting my chin on them. I sat there for a long time, moving my chin back and forward so that the skin wrinkled and stretched, wrinkled and stretched, watching the car draw near and slow to a crawl to pass me: it was a 2.4 family in an SUV, two stocky, buzz-cut kids in the back, battering each other with helium Nemo balloons. Not Dove. Not him at all.

1

After the phone call to Oakesy I was shaking so hard my teeth were chattering: actually banging against each other. I'd given him every chance — every chance — to weasel out of it. But he didn't. He just went back to that awful guilty silence. I got up and stood at the bottom of the stairs, breathing in and out, trying to stop crying, knowing I was about to do something I'd regret the rest of my life.

Going up to her room was an effort. Every step I wanted to cry. But I wasn't going to let her know that, of course. I stood on the landing outside her door and pushed the tears off my face, taking a deep breath, pulling myself up as straight as I could. I didn't knock — why should I? — I just pushed the door open and stood there, tall and straight, in the doorway. The curtains were closed and the bedside light was on. She was sitting on the bed with her back to the wall, looking at me in surprise, defensive and wary. Her legs were curled up under her, hidden in a mishmash skirt with grubby-looking patches of Indian silk, Paisley and suede all sewn together. My heart beat really hard when I thought about what was under that skirt. What I knew that she didn't…

A small pelvic girdle with free extremity, adipose tissue, muscles and a rudimentary bowel sac… That's what I'll be telling Mr Spitz-

'Angeline,' I said. 'I'm going to tell you something.'

'T-tell me something?'

'Yes. Now, take off your clothes. Put them on the floor, then stand in front of the bed and I'll tell you something.'

She stared at me uncomprehendingly.

'I said, take off your clothes.'

'No,' she said faintly. 'No.'

'Yes!' I licked my lips. 'Yes, Angeline, you will because — because I know what's wrong with you. I've been talking to Dr Picot.'

She stopped shaking her head when I said 'Dr Picot'. Her chin went up and her eyes locked on mine.

'I know what's made you like you are. I know what's made you into a…' I put my hand on the doorframe, digging my nails into the wood. I knew if I didn't concentrate very hard I might cry. Parasitic. Acardiac and anencepbalic — no heart and no head. Parasitic… 'Into a freak. I know why you're a freak. So-' God, I had to gulp the air down to stay in control. 'So — now. Take. Off. Your. Clothes.'

She stared at me, a little pulse beating in the side of her neck, every corner of her brain processing what I was saying. An age seemed to go by. Then, just as I was about to say it again, something happened. She seemed suddenly to collect all her courage. She pushed herself off the bed on to her feet so quickly I took an instinctive step back, but she stopped a few inches in front of me, her arms at her sides, trembling like a leaf, and for a moment I just stared at her speechlessly. Then she pulled off her sweater and threw it on the floor.

I blinked very, very slowly, letting my eyes stay closed for a few seconds until my heart calmed down. Then I opened them again. She was wearing a short-sleeved T-shirt; her arms were bare and unexpectedly muscular. She was still looking at me, but her throat was working as if she was trying hard not to be sick or to cry.

'The rest,' I said hoarsely. 'Take everything off.'

She pulled off the T-shirt, raising her arms, giving me a flash of underarm hair. She was very thin with small breasts and waist, but her hips were really wide and layered with muscle. She was wearing a greying, lace-trimmed bra that looked as if it had been washed about a hundred times. She unhooked it and let it drop to the ground, showing me her tiny breasts. I had to fight not to lower my eyes.

'And the — the skirt.'

She unzipped it and stepped out of it, kicking it aside. She wasn't wearing underwear. It was just her legs, thin and a bit scarred round the knees, and her dark pubic hair, but she didn't try to hide herself. She was looking me right in the eye. The blood raced to my face.

'Turn round,' I whispered. 'Turn round and face the bed.'

She didn't move. We stood there for a long time, holding each other's eyes, and I had this sense we were teetering on an edge, that this could go either way. Something in my head was screaming for it to stop, stop.

'I said, turn round.'

The room was silent. Downstairs the washing-machine went into its final spin and that was the only noise, apart from us both breathing. Then Angeline swallowed. I could hear it, could hear all the ligaments and muscles clicking together.

'Whatever,' she said tightly, tears welling in her eyes. 'Whatever you tell me — I've thought about it. And I'm not going to have an operation. I'm not ashamed.'

And before I could answer she took a step away from me to the bed and turned and suddenly there it was, all displayed in front of me. I put my hand on the doorframe to steady myself, my eyes wide and fixed. The tail — except I knew it wasn't a tail — came out of her spine like a giant tree root. It went out backwards a little, then hung down slightly to the side.

A collection of calcifications in the pelvis, a single deformed long bone erupting from the sacrococcygeal region. Parasitic…

Her hands hovered in the region of her back for a second, then she raised them — straight up in the air so there was nothing I couldn't look at. I could see now, now that I knew, I could see clearly that it wasn't a tail but a deformed leg.

Parasitic. A parasitic limb…

There was a thick, visible vein that ran along the top of it, down to the swollen tip, which must have been a crude, spade-shaped foot. I pictured what I knew was inside her: half a twin with its mouth open, drinking Angeline's blood, yawning and hiccuping and baring its bloodied teeth the way a baby does in the womb. I pictured her heart pounding, thinking of it working hard to feed her twin. I wanted to hit her. I wanted to pull at the leg, tear it out of her. It was unthinkable Oakesy could fancy her. With her looking like this… how anyone could want to…

I bit down hard on my tongue, a bud of blood welling through my teeth until the urge to hit her went.

'Duplicata incomplete,' I said, my voice coming out louder than I'd expected. 'Duplicata incompleta. Incomplete separation.'

There was a pause. Angeline's arms seemed to waver a bit, as if they were suddenly heavier. But she raised them up again, trembling with the effort. 'I'm not going to have an operation,' she said, in a small, strained voice. 'I'm not like this because of anything I did and there's nothing-'

'A parasitic twin. No head. No heart.' I paused to let this sink in. 'Just that leg and a few vertebrae sticking up inside you.'

She sagged. She made a noise in her throat, then her whole body seemed to convulse. She toppled forward on to the bed, rolling away and trying to gather the limb up to her at the same time. Self-pitying tears ran down her face.

'Don't cry!' I was the one who should be crying. Not her. 'Stop it. Stop it now.' I took a few steps forward so I was standing above her, looking down at her body, her scarred legs. 'Stop it!'

But she was sobbing, her forehead hard against her knees, which were pulled up, showing everything down there, everything normal at the front — labia majora with a sprinkling of hair. (Don't forget I'm a professional — that's why I can be so pragmatic about it.) Her hands were clasped round the leg, holding it tight against her bottom: it ran straight against her thigh, then hung a little, stiff and scaly, as if it wanted to droop to the bed but couldn't. I crouched down so I was eye-level with her vulva, smelling its faint peppery odour. When she realized I'd moved she opened her eyes, meeting mine, and tried to sit up, this panicky look on her face. But I didn't give her time to speak. I got on the bed and pushed at one thigh, pressing it out to the side and putting one knee on it to hold it there. The other I forced down so I could see everything.

'No,' she sobbed, her hands reaching up to me. 'Please-'

But I pushed her hands away. Her vagina gaped a little. I saw a little bit of moisture there, glinting silver at me, and then I saw her smooth reddish perineum leading back, ducking away to a V shape, and behind it the flat slab of the tail, a faint pucker running along it, like the seam that leads down the underside of a scrotum. Then, and I don't know what made me, but then I inserted two of my fingers into her vagina. She gasped, but I pushed my fingers in deeper, digging them in, the idea flashing through my head that if I only dug deep enough I'd find whatever it was that Oakesy wanted. And if I found it, I'd pull it out of her, and give it to him, wrapped in a bloodied handkerchief.

'Get off. Get off me.'

She grabbed my wrists and tried to twist away, her feet scrabbling on the bed. But I followed her, moving my fingers from her vagina to her anus. I thought of membranes tearing as I pushed my fingers up there, feeling her muscles clamp on me, feeling the smooth insides of her even though she was scrabbling at my wrist, digging her nails in. The twin was in there somewhere — I pictured its face, hands, fingernails, gut, spine, all concertinaed down to a bundle of bone and muscle the size of a foetus inside her pelvis. Maybe I was going to brush against a nose or an ear. Poke my nails into its eyes.

'Get off me!'

She rolled away and my nails raked along the inside of her as my fingers came out. She let out a long gasp and rolled out of my reach, clamping her hands between her legs. I stood back, sweating and trembling, breathing hard, my head pounding.

'He's disgusted by you. Do you know that? You make him sick.' The tears were rolling down my face. 'He said that the first time he saw you he went away and puked. Did you know that?'

'No.' She lay weakly on her side, shivering and crying. 'He didn't say that.'

'Yes.' I looked down at my fingers, splayed out, sticky and shaking. 'That's what he said. Believe me.'

I went woodenly to the bathroom and washed my hands, using hot water and lots of soap, my teeth chattering as if I was freezing. I knew I'd crossed a line. I knew I couldn't go back. I kept washing and washing and washing until my hands were raw and the urge to cry had left me. Then I went into the bedroom and changed my trousers and blouse. I've made up my mind. It's time to go to London. I haven't got anything to show Christophe — but if I don't see him, talk to him, I'm going to go crazy.

1

People get lines in their head like a record, grooves they move along when they think they know everything they need to know. They stop trying. With Lexie, I thought I knew her so well I'd stopped thinking about her in the right way. That was why I never expected what I found when I got back to the rape suite that day.

It took two hours, dawdling along the tourist roads, stuck behind caravans chugging out sooty fumes, testing strategies as I went, the Massive Attack CD ramming itself into my head. I'd thought about Lexie so much I should have felt better when I pulled up outside the rape suite. Instead I felt like the king of all shits, caught flat-footed, and busy eating myself alive from the inside out. I couldn't go in. I had to sit for a long time, my hands on the steering-wheel, staring at the lines of grime under my fingernails, my thoughts inching laboriously into opening sentences, mentally walking myself into the house, mentally sliding into the conversation. The storms had passed. The streets were wet, glistening in the late sunlight, but the curtains in the living room were closed and I pictured her sitting in there, bolt upright in one of the blue Formica chairs, staring at me when I came in. Angeline would be upstairs.

When I'd been there for five minutes and I still couldn't think of an opening sentence, I started the car and moved it forward a little, coming to a halt at the crossroads. I looked left, right. The police surveillance car was in its usual place, facing me about ten yards to the right, parked casually, just far enough along for the officer to see the front of the rape suite. The sunlight bounced off the windscreen and for a second or two I didn't realize there were two people in the car. Then a cloud rolled across the sun, the light dimmed, and I saw Angeline in the passenger seat, a handkerchief jammed into her eyes. The officer had his arm across the back of her seat. Not actually touching her, but only inches away.

I parked the Fiesta and jumped out, crossed the road, knocked on the window. The central-locking system disengaged and the officer shot a thumb over his shoulder. I opened the back door and stuck my head in. 'What's going on?'

'An argument.' He turned to me. He had very messy red hair and I noticed he didn't take his arm off the back of Angeline's seat. She was inclined towards him, as if at some point she might have been crying on his shoulder. She kept pinching her nose, like she was trying to hold something in. She's a cripple, mate… have you noticed? A cripple. Let me tell you about what she's got under that coat.…

'Two young ladies. Had a wee misunderstanding.'

I got into the back and closed the door. They had the heating on full blast and one of them had been drinking. Or both of them. It stank in there like a south London minicab.

'Well?' I said to Angeline. 'What's happened?'

She shook her head, pressing her eyes with the handkerchief. The sound of her tight breathing filled the car.

'I'll know eventually, so you may as well tell me. What happened?' The officer shot me a glance in the mirror and I caught it, raising my eyebrows calmly at him. If he said, 'Don't be harsh on the lass,' I'd ask him why he had his arm round her and why he had a face like a dog's arse. 'Angeline. I asked you a question. What's been happening while I've been gone?'

She dropped the tissue from her eyes and met my eyes unsteadily in the mirror, this congested look on her face. So, I thought, it's you who's been drinking.

She's no one, Oakes, no one to you. You've known her five minutes.…

'I took some money from your briefcase.' She wiped her nose and began to pull things out of her pockets, placing them on the dashboard in front of her. Two packets of kids' sweets, three miniature Stolichnayas, four miniature brandies and a couple of empty Doritos bags. It all went rolling across the dashboard, into the air vents and on to the floor. The officer had to pull his arm off her seat and make grabs for it all.

'Easy there, hen. Ea-sy.'

'She was in your bedroom and I went into the kitchen and borrowed money from you.' She jerked her chin in the direction of the Spar shop on the other side of the estate. 'Got all of this and some vodka and I'm already drunk. You see?' She pulled a handful of notes and change from the other pocket and dropped it on the dashboard. A five-pence piece rolled off, hitting the gear lever and falling tails up, an inch from my toe into the leather sleeve at the bottom of the handbrake. 'I'm a thief and I'm drunk and I'm probably just like my father because I hate her and I hate you too…'

'Hey, hey, hen, go easy on yourself.'

He put his hand on her shoulder and she dissolved into tears. I sighed and looked out of the window at the rape suite. What a shitty fucking place to be doing this, a godforsaken abandoned scheme with its crap lying around everywhere, dead lawns and the horizon bruised yellow, like there was a poisonous cloud coming up from the west. A car nosed out of the street parallel to the rape suite, the road that went to the playing-fields. When it saw our car it did a hasty right and disappeared. Fly-tippers. Offload your shite. Come here to Shitening Grove Estate and offload it. Leave it on the tracks. Someone else'll deal with it.

'Wait here,' I told Angeline, opening the door. 'When I come back we've got to talk.' I hesitated then tapped the officer on the shoulder. 'I'm going to be ten minutes. But I'm only over there. I can see you from the front window.'

He started to say something, but I closed the door on him. I stood, zipping up my jacket, turning up the collar and staring across at the rape suite. Like High Noon or something, which is a joke, because when I got over to the house all I was facing off with was stale air and some ageing soft furnishings. Lexie wasn't there. She wasn't in the house.

2

I stood in the living room, blinking at the chairs, the blank TV, the cold kettle. I went up and checked in our bedroom, but she wasn't there. She'd gone. I stood in the hallway for a few moments, my head thumping, thinking, She's left me. Not the other way round — she's left me. Then I went back to the car. This time the officer didn't wait for me to knock. He opened the window and looked at me blankly.

'She's not there.'

Angeline turned, her cheeks red and mottled, and looked past me to the house. 'She was there when I left.'

I put my elbow on the roof and dropped my face into the window close to the officer's. 'Well?' I said slowly. 'What time did she go?'

A line of red appeared across the bridge of. his nose. Another travelled from his neck up to his forehead. There was a few moments' silence, and then it dawned on me.

'Oh, you fucking clown. You left your post. Didn't you?'

He glared at me, grinding his jaws in small, tight circles.

'You left your fucking post.' I slammed the roof of the car, making him jump.

'He came to find me,' Angeline said. She got out and faced me blearily over the top of the car roof. Her breath was white in the cold air and I could see she was suddenly panicky, looking over my head at the rape suite. 'It was my fault. I went for a walk and he came to find me.'

I didn't answer. I looked around myself at the empty streets, the bleak houses and the burning horizon. The curtains closed in the rape suite. I turned and headed for the house, a sweat breaking out over my skin. Angeline limped behind me, unsteady, worried. 'Don't panic,' she said. I could hear in her voice she was as scared now as I was. She was sobering up quickly. 'I'm sure everything's all right. She said she was going back to London. She said she was going. I'm sure she's OK.'

A J-cloth had been hung over the kitchen tap to dry. As I waited for Lexie's mum to answer the phone I watched a drip forming under the cloth, slowly fill until it was too heavy, then drop with a metallic ping into the sink. We didn't get on, me and Lexie's ma. She'd never quite swallowed the fact that her daughter had married me, a Scouser who didn't even make a token effort to conceal his working-class roots. Where she came from, you boasted that the kids had got into Oxbridge; where I came from, you boasted that they'd stayed out of the nick. And another thing, she'd told Lex, I didn't make enough money. Not nearly enough. So you can see it was never going to be the world's best relationship. When the phone rang six times, then shuffled over to answerphone, part of me was relieved. I didn't leave a message. I called the house in Kilburn and left a message: 'Call me, Lex, when you get in.' I hung up and went into the kitchen to make a brew.

The house was silent. Angeline had gone upstairs. Probably knew the stray voltage that would crackle up if we tried to talk just now. I listened for her as I made the tea, threw some milk into the cup, turned to put the teabag into the bin and…

I stopped, the bag extended on the spoon, a little pulse beating in my temple.

Lexie's bag was hanging on the back of the chair.

It was her brown leather Gap bag. Her favourite because it had straps that could make it a rucksack or a tote bag. I'd got it for her for Christmas last year — she used it all the time, swimming or shopping or the pub. She was never separated from it.

Very slowly, like a quick or unexpected movement would make the bag leap up and scuttle away, I dropped the teabag into the bin, threw the spoon into the sink, unhooked the bag from the chair and unzipped it with trembling hands. A faint smell of leather and Airwaves berry chewing-gum came up from it, and inside I found a pocket packet of tissues, a half-finished tube of Lockets, her spiral-bound diary and a spare pair of tights, still in their packaging. I fumbled it all out on to the table, my mouth dry. At the bottom of the bag was her wallet. Her wallet, her keys and her mobile phone.

I stared at the phone in my hand, at the zigzaggy signal icon, my pulse falling to a low, monotone thud. The wallet was closed, and when I opened it I found some loose change, our joint NatWest card, a newspaper cutting of her boss, her library card and a tattered picture of me, tanned and with lots of young-man hair, standing on the Tarmac in front of a Boeing 747 at Athens airport on the way back from our honeymoon in Kos.

I stared at the picture, blank and welded where I stood, all the light and sound in the kitchen muffled. Lex, Lexie — you wouldn't have left this if you were going to London… would you? I went woodenly into the hallway and began to climb the stairs, moving arthritically, clutching the wallet in my numb fingers. I was at the top when I saw Angeline, coming out of the bathroom door. I knew instantly something was wrong.

'Joe,' she whispered, her eyes bright and glittering. 'Joe. Look in the bathroom. I think you'd better look.'

3

'This is a crime scene.' Chief Inspector Danso stood on the landing with his hands in the pockets of his navy raincoat, peering into the bathroom. Earlier when I came upstairs the door had been standing half open, just enough for me to tell that no one was in there. But I hadn't bothered to push it open wide. If I had I'd have seen the shattered glass in the window above the sink, letting in a cold square of greyish outside light, I'd have seen the towels thrown untidily in the bath, the shower curtain ripped from the rings overhead. 'I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to call it a crime scene. Let's go downstairs. The Crime Scene Manager'll be here any time now.'

We went down in silence. Police car lights flashed blue outside. From the moment I'd seen Angeline's face on the landing I'd known. I'd known that whatever I thought I'd seen over at Crinian, Dove had been here in Dumbarton all the time. The driver in the cap was a doppelganger — a spectre, a blind coincidence. It was only now, with Danso here and back-up cars on the way, that shock set in. As I got to the bottom of the stairs I began to keel sideways.

'Hey up.' Danso came up behind me, catching me under the arm. 'There you go, big man. That's it, through here, let's sit you down before you fall.' He led me into the living room and lowered me on to the tattered sofa where I sat heavy, my feet planted a pace apart, my hands on my knees, staring at nothing, solemn and stony as old Lincoln in the Washington memorial. Angeline sank on to the sofa opposite me, blinking rapidly, her eyes puffed from crying. 'Still with us, eh?' Danso, bent over with his hands on his knees so he was eye-level with me, studying my face, reassuring himself I wasn't going to fall over like a skittle. He straightened and scanned the living room and kitchen. 'Have you a drop of something about the place?'

'Jack Daniel's.' I nodded automatically. 'Yes, Jack Daniel's.' I looked up at the kitchen, and then, like the noise of my own voice might drown the static in my head, I repeated it a few times, 'Jack Daniel's. Jack Daniel's. Jack Daniel's. Over there. See it? In the kitchen.'

'Will I fetch you a drop, then? Just a little — just to get your head back on, eh?'

If there was any evidence worth preserving in the living room Angeline and I had already destroyed it, walking back and forward down there, waiting for Danso to arrive. But the bizzy habits were in Danso's blood, and he went carefully, automatically tearing off a length of kitchen roll to pick up the bottle because with these break-ins they always make a beeline for the booze. When he saw the cracked cupboard door he took a step back, like he'd been slapped, holding his hands up.

'Me,' I said dully, shaking my head. 'Me. The other day. Bull in a china shop.'

He looked at it a bit longer, then slowly lowered his hands. He got a cracked Rangers mug from the back of the shelf, splashed a couple of inches of JD into it and handed it to me. The mug smelt of coffee and sour milk, but I sipped it gratefully, hearing my breath come back at me from inside the mug.

Danso went to the chair. 'This her bag, then?'

'Yes.'

'And she hasn't taken any clothes?'

'Nothing.'

'Your bedroom just as you left it?'

'It's just the bathroom. The bathroom's the only place that anyone has-' I broke off and pressed my fingertips to my throat, moving my Adam's apple in a circle as if that would stop me choking. 'Anyone has… you know…'

'Yes,' Danso said quietly. 'Yes. I know.' He scratched his head, then pinched up his trousers by the knees and sat on the sofa next to me, his giant spider's legs black and sharp and thin. 'When you came in, did you notice anything unusual about the house? Anything strike you as odd?'

I stared out of the window in silence. Danso's driver was standing next to the car, speaking into a radio, one hand on the car roof, one on his hip so his coat was pulled back just far enough to show the glint of handcuffs on his belt. Every now and then he turned and stared off in the direction of the red line of trees, their shadows lying flat and long across the playing-fields.

'No,' I said. 'Nothing.'

Danso tapped his fingers on his knee. There was a long silence. Overhead the immersion-heater came on, a chirruping, tapping noise like a trapped beetle in a joist. 'The back door was locked.' He leaned over and stared out down the corridor, as if to reassure himself that he had remembered correctly. 'And the front door was-'

'Locked.' My mouth was numb, drugged. The words were coming out painfully — like pulled teeth. 'I used the key.'

'And is there anywhere she could have gone? Has she got any friends or relatives in the area?'

'Her ma's in Gloucestershire. She'd have used her mobile to call. But the only calls on it are to me and to the Royal Infirmary…' I trailed off and turned to look out of the window, a memory coming to me.

'Joe?'

'A car,' I said faintly, my finger floating up to point out at the street. 'There was a car in that road half an hour ago. It was leaving.'

Danso sat forward, frowning at me. 'A car?'

'White.' I half stood, staring at the boarded-over houses opposite. 'White or silver, maybe…'

'Saloon? Hatchback? Estate?'

'Saloon — I…' I was on my feet, throwing the front door open, walking out stiffly to stare down the road in the direction it had gone. The officers in their cars stopped their phone and radio conversations and turned to watch me. Danso came out of the house and caught up. He stood shoulder to shoulder with me, staring at the same grey piece of road between the houses. 'It was fly-tippers,' I said faintly. 'I mean, I thought it was fly-tippers.'

'Don't suppose you got a registration number?'

'It went too quickly.' I blinked, staring out at the road, trying hard to force the thoughts. There had been something… something…

'Did you see who was driving?'

'No.' Was she in the car, you fucking twat? Did you sit there and watch him drive her away? Something about the back of the car… 'I only saw it for a couple of seconds — couldn't see who was driving or if there was anyone else in the-' I broke off. It had come to me in a flash. 'Boots,' I said. 'Football boots. Little ones — the ones you hang off a mirror. And a miniature Celtic strip. Right up there, hanging over the back shelf, like there could have been kids in the car. That's why I didn't think anything of it.'

As information went it was piss-poor, but it was all I could force out of my memory. Danso took it to the officer, and he sent a PNC marker on his radio. Danso's face was tense as he turned, a little apprehensively, to scan the fields and the empty streets behind him. Then we traipsed back inside, feeling beaten. I sat down next to Angeline. Upstairs the immersion-heater began to knock rhythmically, as if it had come loose from its moorings.

'I'm sorry,' Angeline said quietly. 'I'm really sorry.'

I looked at her. She was still in her coat, bunched-up and miserable-looking, her chin almost on her chest as if she was beyond crying or moving. That flushed-drunk look had gone. Now she was wiped clean of colour. Her feet in the brown boots were turned inwards, like she was trying to disappear. 'I shouldn't have left the house.'

'It's not your fault,' I said. 'It isn't.'

'It's my dad. My dad. And I shouldn't have gone out. You told me not to. It's just that we — Lexie and I — we had a fight and…' She broke off. 'If I hadn't been staying with you he'd never have come here.'

I shook my head sadly. 'It's not your fault.'

She nodded and tried to smile but I could tell she didn't believe me. Danso sat down and was about to speak when the noise from the immersion-heater interrupted him. He turned his eyes to the ceiling. 'That's a noisy wee set of apparatus up there.'

'Everything's falling apart in this place.'

'I'll speak to maintenance about…' He trailed off as the knocking got louder. Now Angeline and I turned our eyes upwards to stare at the place on the stained Artexed ceiling where the sound was coming from. For a long time none of us spoke. Then Danso lowered his eyes and met mine. A little wash of pale pink was already creeping across his cheeks. He swallowed and gave me a pained smile. 'Joe,' he said evenly, as if he was asking me nothing more serious than what time it was. 'Before you called us, did you check all the rooms upstairs?'

4

'I need some space here.'

'And I don't? I've got to get this Hartmaan's in. You told the consultant you'd keep out of our way.'

The forensic examiner, a female GP from the south of Glasgow, was arguing with a liaison nurse from the Burns Unit. The doctor's cardboard kit sat on a chair in the Glasgow Royal Infirmary's Intensive Care Unit, open, spewing out sealed tubes and latex gloves. The nurse kept having to squeeze past it as she moved round the bed where Lexie lay motionless, legs swaddled in webbed petroleum bandaging, monitors on mechanical arms hovering above her, three different tubes connecting to taps on the Venflon central line going into her neck.

'Why's that green?' said the doctor. She was pointing to the catheter bag. 'Is that something you're giving her?'

'Propofol.' The nurse pushed past her. 'Neurologist doesn't want her moving around. Wants deep sedation until they know what swelling she's going to get from that head injury. Now, would you like to check her fluid output or do you trust me to manage?'

'Just trying to do my job,' the doctor muttered. She bent and took a sealed tube from her bag. 'Just trying to do my job.'

Danso watched from the corner of the private room, face grey, arms folded. He'd asked me to leave for this bit, but I'd said, no, I wasn't leaving her, whatever happened. I sat inside the privacy screen on a wobbly plastic chair, silent, watching numbly as the doctor examined Lexie's limp hands, carefully scraping under the fingernails, sealing the wands into test tubes, each labelled and dated, checking the wall clock for a time and handing the tube to Danso to sign. It was seven o'clock and the day had gone in a blur. Lexie was alive. Alive. But no one could figure out why. She should be dead. That was what they kept telling me.

I turned stiffly, like my head might explode. Angeline was there, sitting a few feet away, white and shocked, staring unblinking at me. All day long I hadn't spoken to her. I hadn't even acknowledged her.

'You'll talk to her,' I said. 'When she wakes up you'll tell her what to do.'

She opened her mouth. It looked to me like she was moving in slow motion. The inside of her mouth was pink. 'What?' she whispered. 'What did you say?'

'What to do now she's…' I paused and turned to look at Lexie again. They'd put her on a dark blue air mattress that was supposed to take the pressure off the burns that ran all the way down the backs of her legs. Her airways were clear, none of the burns circled her legs, and the consultant said all of this was promising. But no one was pretending there'd be any getting away from the disfigurement. That was hers. For life. The first paramedic to arrive at Lightning Tree Estate had gone pale when he saw the burns. I remember him trying to wrap her legs in clingfilm, the crime-scene manager yelling at him to hurry up, hurry up, and I knew from everyone's faces there wasn't much could be done about those burns. 'It's the pensioner syndrome,' someone muttered in the confusion. 'Saw it once on an old stiff I got called to. Died in bed. When I got there he'd been simmering on an electric heating pad for six days.'

The noises from the immersion-heater hadn't been the sound of it switching itself on: that had already happened a long time before I got back to the house. What Danso, Angeline and I had heard from the living room was Lexie's heels drumming out a reflex tattoo on the hot-water tank. It was a neurological spasm, a tic, because she was unconscious when I opened that cupboard door. She'd been placed on top of the tank, legs astride the copper pipe that led up to the tank in the attic, her arms flopped backwards. Her mouth was open and her head was back against the wall, not lolling but alert and upright even though her eyes were closed. That weird angle to her head wasn't an accident: she'd been pinioned there, her head jammed over and over again into a nail that stuck out of the wall. He'd done it so hard, and so many times, that there was a hole in the back of her head the size of a shot glass and he must have thought for sure she was dead. He'd have loved to see my face when I found her.

I'm fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.

The doctor unsnapped the kit from its Cellophane and began to lay out its contents. A dull ache started in my back and my knee joints: the tiredness that sets in after an adrenaline jag. I knew what that kit was. I knew what she was going to do. Lexie's legs were burned so badly because Dove had removed her tights and knickers before he hauled her up on the tank. The lagging had come loose so the top of the hot copper tank had been in direct contact with her thighs and buttocks for two and a half hours. I managed everything else, all the stuff about the nail rammed through her skull, about the bruises on her face, the red welts on her neck where he'd strangled her, but that detail of there being no underwear… It was that detail took my legs out from under me, sent me dry-heaving over the kitchen sink.

Danso helped me like he was my father: he kept close to my face, talking to me constantly, kept me from losing it. He stayed with me while we went to the station and I went through the miserable process of giving DNA, because, yes, we were still sharing a bed even though the sex was pretty much dead and buried. I let the arse of a doctor take what he needed: hairs and a tube of blood. I spent the rest of the day trying not to picture a lab technician somewhere in Glasgow sorting my DNA from Dove's.

I'm fucking with your peace of mind, Joe.

The nurse stopped what she was doing and watched as the doctor pulled a speculum from the kit. 'Is that what I think it is?' she asked. 'Did the consultant tell you that was OK?'

The doctor peered at her over the top of her glasses. 'As a matter of fact, yes. I believe he did give his permission.'

'Because that burn to the perineum. That's really complex. You know that, don't you?' She moved closer to the bed, to where the doctor was pulling the sheets down, gently moving Lexie's legs apart. 'It's the worse for swelling.'

I looked up and found Danso's eyes on mine. I knew what he was saying: You don't want to be here for this, you don't want to be here. I held his eyes, the blood pumping in my head. The doctor peeled the wad of bandage from between Lexie's legs, careful not to move the catheter tube — and that was enough for me. I stood shakily and left the room, standing in the corridor and breathing carefully. A moment later there was a click and when I turned Angeline stood behind me, expressionless. She had unbuttoned her coat in the warm hospital air and was clutching a tissue in her right hand, maybe to dab her forehead or her eyes.

'What?' I said. 'I had to come out here. I can't watch that.'

'I know.'

She stood there for a while, looking at me, saying nothing.

'What? What do you want?'

'Joe?' she said quietly. 'When she wakes up?'

'Yes?'

'When she shows you. You won't…'

'Won't what?'

'You won't let her see you're disgusted?'

I stared at her. For a few minutes I wasn't getting it. 'What?' My head was so drum tight, nothing was sinking in. 'What did you say?'

There was a pause. Then she said, 'Don't let her think she disgusts you.'

'Angeline.' My voice was stiff. 'I didn't say it. Whatever you think… I never said it.'

5

Nine the second morning Lexie's ma arrives, trailing luggage. Bony calves in expensive hosiery poking out from under her tweed skirt. A Harrods astrakhan hat crammed on to springs of auburn hair.

'This was always going to happen, Joe,' she says crisply, as she comes in. 'And forgive me if I blame you. You and your job.'

I don't answer. I watch her kiss Lexie. I watch her summon the nurse to clean the thin line of saliva that runs down Lexie's chin. I watch her survey the room and get comfortable, hang up her coat and hat, arrange her belongings, and sit down primly, one hand on her skirt because I'm definitely enough of a pig to try getting a look at her knickers, the cacky old mare. And I don't say a word.

We sit like this for thirty-six hours, locked in a monumental battle of wills: the first to wilt, to give up the vigil, is the loser. I spend my time slumped in my chair, staring sullenly across the room, a leaflet they've given me crumpled in my hand: Managing the Future After Burns: Psycho-Social Needs. She sits upright, her mouth pursed as she peers at the Telegraph crossword over the top of her specs. I keep studying her, making sure she never tries to switch on her mobile phone. We've all been told not to have any contact with the outside world, not even with relatives and friends, and I'm not going to give her a chance. Because the police have got a problem.

At first when the word came through about Lex everyone up at Oban was secretly relieved: Malachi Dove had done his bit to fuck with my head and it had taken out just one person, not hundreds like they'd been afraid. But now they saw the catch: in Dove's head his job was over because he thought Lex was dead. Reality was different. A local reporter had got wind of a 'domestic' at the rape suite. He hadn't connected it yet to the Pig Island massacre, but when his usual police contact stonewalled him over it he knew there was more and he was starting to dig. Danso was going crazy trying to contain it: he knew Dove was finished now, but Danso wanted to be sure before they let anything out to the papers. We wanted Dove's body. There were blinds on the private room and every nurse and doctor who came through was warned not to speak to anyone. Not even a friend. Still, you got the feeling that any time now the bag was going to split and it was all going to come out. If Lexie's ma so much as moved her hand near to her phone I was going to be on her.

Angeline had been trying to get us to leave the room, to get some proper rest — there were couches in the relatives' room we could stretch out on, and she'd call us if anything happened. She kept limping in and out of the room, ferrying coffee and Snickers bars, asking when they were going to wake Lex up. At eleven a.m. on day two she brought in four doughnuts in a pink-and-white-striped box. There was a blue picture of a chef's hat on it. She placed a napkin on the chair next to Lex's ma and carefully put two doughnuts on it.

Lex's mother looked down at them and gave a small laugh. 'And they say the nation's youth don't know how to eat properly.'

Angeline paused, and for a moment I thought she was going to take the doughnuts back. But she didn't. Instead she straightened and moved calmly to my chair, putting the box down and setting the coffee next to it. 'My mother's dead,' she said, addressing no one, but making us both raise our eyes to her. 'My mother's dead, but she was beautiful. She was beautiful and she was kind. And she loved me.'

I looked at her. Somehow in the last two weeks her hair had grown enough to cover the bare patches of scalp. It was brushed and there was even a bit of light reflected in it. She looked like she'd put some mascara on and there was something defiant about her as she stared at Lex's ma.

'Yes,' she said, almost trembling with the effort of keeping her voice in control. 'And you know what? I think she was right. I think she was right to love me.'

She rested a napkin on top of the doughnut box, and, like nothing had been said, like we weren't both staring at her, she sat on the chair in the corner, pulled the lid off her coffee and drank.

6

Autumn was coming, and out of the window, level with the third floor, the monuments and mausoleums of the Necropolis towered dark against the cloudbanks. On the roadway below the ward patients stood in dressing-gowns and slippers, smoking quick and intent, trying not to look up at those grave markers, at the austere statue of John Knox. Angeline sat in silence, watching me from the opposite side of the hospital room.

It was the third day and it had been a morning of skin. The Burns Unit nurse brought in a fringed tape to measure for pressure garments, leggings that would stop the scarring and make sure Lexie could move her joints when she healed. She'd have to wear them for a year and a half, said the nurse. A technician from the Myskin labs came to take biopsies. Where he worked, they could take small pieces of skin and grow them into sheets ready to graft back. At lunchtime the plastic surgeon started pushing the neurologist a bit: he wanted to debride Lexie's legs, snip away the dead flesh. The neurologist hummed and hah-ed but in the end they settled on that afternoon. By the evening Lexie would be out of theatre and in a high-dependency ward on the Burns Unit. Awake. She'd know all about her future, about the clinical-psychology services, and about how her skin was being grown in a lab a hundred miles away.

In the chair next to Angeline, the Ice Queen was dozing, her chin on her chest, a society mag crumpled on her lap. When Danso arrived he didn't come into the room, probably didn't want to face her. Instead he stood at the door with Struthers, looking like Columbo or something in his crumpled raincoat, and tapped on the windowpane, beckoning to me and Angeline.

'We're taking you for coffee,' he said, when we came out. He was holding the day's local newspapers and you could see it in their faces: something was up. Especially Struthers. He looked like he'd been given an extra pint or two of blood overnight. 'Something's changed and we're taking you for coffee.'

Danso set off in the direction of the hospital cafeteria and, without hesitating, I followed, keeping pace with him, going through the plastic crash doors, out through the car park, the drizzle plastering our hair to our heads. Struthers hung back with Angeline, offering his arm to her as she limped along.

'I'm going to tell you this now,' Danso said, as we went ahead of them through another set of plastic doors, back into the main building, our feet squeaking on the polished floor. He didn't turn to look at me: he kept his eyes on the door of the cafeteria at the end of the corridor. 'I'm going to tell you while he can't hear.'

'Struthers?'

He nodded. 'It's not why we're here but it's important to you and I wanted you to hear with a bit of privacy.'

'You wanted me to hear what?'

'We got the results back. This morning. From the forensic examiner.'

I was in mid-stride. I let the step hesitate a bit, my foot slowing in mid-air, then continue down in slow motion. It hit the floor and I carried on at the same speed. Like he hadn't said anything at all.

'They came back,' I said, my voice level. 'And?'

'And he left nothing. Nothing under her fingernails. No hair, no skin.'

'She'd have fought.'

'Yes. Three of her nails were torn off. The others…'

'The others?'

'He'd cleaned. Scrubbed. They watch so much crime TV they all know how to cover their forensics these days. She'd have been unconscious.'

I kept walking, letting this settle on me.

'What does that mean, Peter, he left nothing?'

Danso stopped. We'd reached the cafe and he stood, his hand resting on the door, looking at me seriously. A ghost scene of him as my father played briefly in my head. I'd had that before, with Danso.

'He didn't get to her, son,' he said, resting a hand on my shoulder. 'Why did he leave her naked? Who knows? But he didn't touch her, so you can let that go.'

I stood there, getting an embarrassing urge to put my arms round him because a huge, paralysed section of my mind had clicked a bit and started to function again, like an iceberg coming free of the icecap. Then Struthers and Angeline appeared at the end of the corridor, coming towards us, and the moment was gone. Next I knew we were in the cafe, pulling off wet coats and finding a table near the radiators.

7

Danso drank tea from a stainless-steel pot and the rest of us had coffee in plastic filters that dripped all over the table. We ate damp ginger biscuits from heavy white plates still hot and cabbagy smelling, like they'd come straight from a dishwasher. The cafeteria was a Turkish bath, the tea urns and the hotplates steaming the place up, making the windows drip with condensation.

Danso and Struthers kept us waiting. They fed us snippets of information that hadn't got anything to do with the big news. They said they thought Dove had found us through the rental car. Somehow, Christ knew how, he must've picked me up on one of my drives, maybe from Oban police station, and had been watching the rape suite for days. They told us there had been seventy-eight public sightings of the saloon car, because it turns out a Celtic kit hanging over the back shelf isn't such a rarity in that part of Scotland. They showed us a tiny column in the Glasgow Herald saying the police were refusing to confirm or deny an attack in Dumbarton, which had left one woman critically ill in hospital.

'Which reminds me…' Danso wiped his mouth and looked at me. 'Something else I wanted to ask you.' He swallowed his mouthful of biscuit. 'The car. You sure you didn't see that car parked?' He pulled a biro from the inside of his jacket, and uncapped it with his teeth. He unfolded a napkin and made some rudimentary lines on it. 'See, we think it could have been parked here.' He made an X on the road that led to the east of the estate along the playing-fields. 'What do you think?'

'Could have been. When I saw it,' I pointed to the parallel road, 'it was here — on this road.'

'So, let's get this straight. You'd driven in from here,' he marked the west road, 'from where your babysitter was, so you stopped here, facing this way, and you saw him here, parallel to Humbert Place.'

'Yes.'

'So he'd parked either here or here. Anyone on this road, or walking in the fields, would have seen him.'

'Anyone except our babysitter.'

Danso cleared his throat. 'We're just trying to plot his movements on the estate.'

'Because you want to get your lad off the hook?'

He sighed. 'Joe, I'm sorry. I see you think we came here to antagonize you. But we didn't. The officer wants to apologize to you when his disciplinary's over.'

I breathed out and sat back, my arms folded, giving him a disbelieving smile. 'Please. Don't jerk me around.'

'I'm serious. He wants to say sorry. It'd do him good to speak to you. What do you think?'

I grinned brightly at him, then at Struthers. A fake, face-splitter of a grin. 'What do you think I think? Did you really think I'd say yes?'

Danso ran a finger inside his collar, uncomfortable. 'Aye. That's how we thought you'd feel.' He glanced sideways at Struthers. 'We didn't think he'd be happy. Did we?'

'We didn't.'

'OK,' Danso said. 'I'm not going to force the-'

'I mean it. I'm not going to speak to him. I don't want to hear him whingeing about how difficult it was to see Dove on that estate.'

'That's not why we're thinking about Dove's movements.'

'Then why?' I put my hands down, looking at them both. I could feel a beat of anger flaring in my temple. 'What other reason do you need to know which way he drove on to the fucking estate to put my wife in a fucking coma?'

'Because,' Struthers interrupted, his face a bit red, 'we want to know when he posted this.' He pulled a brown envelope from his briefcase and put it on the table. 'That's why.'

There was a moment's silence. Me and Angeline stared at the envelope.

'He cleaned up the house,' Danso said irritably. 'I told you — there was nothing of him in there, nothing. Couldn't even place him on the estate until this. It's the only evidence we've got.' He opened the envelope and tipped out the contents. There were two black-and-white photographs and a manila envelope sealed in plastic evidence sheaths. 'Posted in the box on the estate some time before the collection at three on the day he did Lexie. If it's what we think it is, then everything's going our way.'

'Everything's going our way?'

'Everything.' He looked at me, then at Angeline, then back at me. 'It's a suicide note. He's telling us when he's going to do it.'

8

The envelope wasn't stamped. It was addressed to Danso at Oban and it contained the two photos of Malachi Dove gone from the study on Pig Island. The first showed him posed with Asuncion, Angeline's mother. It might have been the wedding because she wore flowers in her hair and he had one in his lapel. The second was the photo of him praying. Lying on his back, dead-looking. When we saw it me and Angeline both reached out.

'Uh-uh,' Struthers warned. 'No touching. I had to sell my soul to the productions officer to get these for the afternoon. He's got "continuity of evidence" written on his heart — I bring them back covered in your prints he'll have my knob on a stick.' He gave Angeline a sickly smile. 'Sorry, pet. Pardon the French, eh?'

'They're his,' Angeline said, staring stonily at him. 'They're from his study.'

'Aye. We know. They're covered in his latents.' Danso turned the photos over to show lines written in a small, curled hand. He pushed the picture of Dove and Asuncion towards us. We leaned forward and looked at the writing. Straight away I felt the tug in it.

'It's about you,' said Struthers. 'It's about you and Alex.'

I pulled the photo nearer.

I have ploughed with your heifer, my friend [he'd written]. And now that you have paid the uttermost farthing you are bound in fetters of iron, your torment is as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man. To live in grief is worse than death. In your days you shall seek death and you shall not find it: you shall desire to DIE, but death shall flee from you…

A nasty smile twitched on my face. The words were dragging me back to the old days in Albuquerque when he was my adversary and my head was full of the cojones he spouted, and I was young and angry enough to have stabbed the bastard. Except this time I was the winner, because Lexie was alive. It was like one end of my life was being brought round to touch the other end.

'And this is the one you'll really like,' Struthers said, after a while. It was the back of the prayer photo. 'See if he's telling us what we think he's telling us.'

He'd divided the top of the page into two columns, one headed Taken by God and one headed Taken by the Antichrist. Under the Antichrist heading he'd written Judas and Ahithophel. Under the God heading he'd written: Abimelech, Samson, Malachi Dove. And at the foot of the page were a few lines:

I was wounded in the house of my friends and now my harvest is past, the summer is ended, my days are as grass, the wind passeth over them and they are gone. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O GOD I will fly away. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself, here, at the end of my fifty years.

There was a long silence. In the kitchen someone dropped a stack of plates. A door banged. Someone laughed. But at the table none of us spoke.

'At the end of my fifty years?' I said, after a while. Struthers and Danso nodded. They were looking from me to Angeline, watching us filter the information. Waiting to see if we came to the same conclusion. 'His birthday?'

'That's what we think.'

'Which is the twenty-fifth of September,' said Angeline, faintly.

'Exactly.'

'And that is…'

'Tomorrow.' Struthers nodded. 'Tomorrow. All we have to do is keep Alex out of the papers for another twenty-four hours.'

Which was how we came to spend the whole of the next day on the edge of our seats, waiting for the day to crawl across the sky and be over. Thinking that if we could get past his birthday we'd be OK. Which is all very fucking funny, all a fuck-off laugh at my expense, when you consider that by the time his birthday was over it wasn't Malachi Dove I was thinking about. I'd forgotten to give a shit about him, and where or how they were going to find his body. Because by the night of his birthday the only thing I was thinking of was Lexie and how come it had worked out that she was dead. Of septicaemia. Nine-thirty on 25 September. Age: thirty two.