The Boat House

FORTY-SIX

"He should have reached us by now," Diane said. "The bastard, he isn't coming."

"I've got to get up there," Pete said.

The implication of this was obvious. With Diane more or less hopping along and Pete having to support her, they'd been making only minimal progress. They were barely a quarter of a mile from where they'd started, and they were getting slower and slower. They'd nearly reached the boat house, which marked no more than a fraction of the distance they'd have to cover. Pete had tried the radio again a couple of times, but neither Aldridge nor anybody else had replied.

"On your own?" Diane said. "Come on, she'll be getting desperate now."

"I know her better than anybody."

"You thought you knew her yesterday, Pete, but then look what you learned. You don't know her at all."

"She owes me, and she knows it. She said she'd never hurt me."

"She killed her lover and burned him in his own car. The lady isn't noted for her scruples."

There was silence for a while as they limped on, a three-legged twosome getting wearier by the minute. It was a stubborn silence, and there was only one way that it could come to an end.

"Go on, then," Diane said with a sudden flareup of anger, getting free and pushing him away, and she almost lost her balance in the process. "Go to her. Go running to her, if she's the one you really want. See if she treats you any better than the others."

Pete stopped, and looked at her. Diane's cheeks were bright and streaked with tears, and she made an ineffectual attempt to rub them away with the sleeve of her jacket. Her eyes were blazing and steady.

"I've never touched her," Pete said.

"No, but she's the one you dream about. Isn't she?"

There was an opening, a hint of uncertainty in her look now, and he went for it.

"No, I never have," he said.

She watched him, and perhaps they both knew that there was some part of the truth, some part of a lie in what he was saying, and that whatever was to happen between them from now on would depend on what she chose to believe.

She said, "Then, why do this?"

"Because I brought her here. She hurt the people closest to me and I'm responsible. I can feel sorry for her. But I know she's got to be stopped."

Diane looked down.

"At least take the gun," she said.

He put his arm out to support her again, and she let him slide it around her.

"I wouldn't know how to handle it," he said. "Do you still have the key to the boat house?"

He passed close behind the Hall on his way upslope, climbing over gates and wire fences to take the most direct line that he could. Aldridge wasn't going to meet him, halfway or any other way, so there was no point in watching for his car. By going across country he could pick up the middle track a lot faster, and follow it along until he found some trace of the others. At one point he tried the radio again, once more turning the volume up all of the way and once more getting the strange effect that he hadn't wanted Diane to hear.

It was the sound of breathing. Or something very like it.

He was climbing through coniferous woodland now, so dense that there was permanent twilight underneath with bare ground where nothing was growing. Daylight and the rest of the world could be dimly glimpsed as a distant filigree pattern of branches, leaves and silver sky in the middle distance. He had to duck frequently because many of the lower branches were at head height; some trunks were streaked with birdlime, and one or two that he saw had been rubbed bare of bark by animals. Deer, at a guess, although he couldn't be sure.

He pressed on. Smaller trees had stunted and died and then fallen. Even the healthy ones looked as if they'd been painted with light green moss on the windward side, moss the colour of Nile water. All around him was slow growth, and slow decay.

While ahead of him lay… what?

Within minutes he was emerging, breathless and somewhat scratched, onto the roadway not too far from the broken gate where the limo's hubcap still lay like a marker. He followed the tyremarks to the small auto graveyard that stood in the clearing, and there he made a careful circuit of all the vehicles so that he could look without actually touching any of them.

Nothing moved. Nothing made a sound, apart from the wind in the leaves.

He saw the two aligned holes in the front and rear screens of the Toyota, and he saw the widening spray of blood and glass fragments across the bonnet; but he saw no bodies, and he saw no signs of where they might have been taken.

He did find his heavy breather, though. In one of the trees over on the edge of the clearing he spotted a radio — Ivie's, presumably — hanging by its carrying strap from one of the lower branches. The breeze was moving it gently, and probably making a fair imitation of a human sound. He walked over to it and took it down, noting the way that the transmission button had been taped with a piece of yellow insulation plastic that was probably out of the Rover's toolkit.

What he couldn't see, was its purpose in being there.

But of course! he realised after a moment. Bait… and as the word came up into his mind, something very hard and moving very fast made a good, solid contact with the back of his head.

Definitely bait, he acknowledged as he folded like a sack.