'John, get me the car keys,' Cole said, already running across the yard. He guessed he had a few seconds before the woman gathered her senses. The reality of the gunshot would have muddled her mind. The sight of the cow dropping and sprawling in its own bloody shit had been enough to send her running, and Cole knew from experience that people unused to violence took time to react to it. Even if she had gone for the phone, her hands would be shaking too much to use it.
He leaped straight up the steps into the kitchen, almost tripping over the dropped shotgun, carrying on through to the hallway where he found Janet fumbling with the phone. He snatched it from her hand, dropped it and shot the connection box from the wall. The gunshot deafened him, and he hardly heard her scream. She stared at him wide-eyed and petrified, and yet there was still a glint of defiance in her eyes, a look that said, I'm scared shitless, yes, but give me a minute and you'll regret ever having found this place.
Cole believed her, and he could not help but be impressed. This is the sort of person I'm fighting to help, he thought, and the realisation was yet more validation for what he was doing, and what he had already done. He heard the crack of Nathan's neck and the woman scientist pleading for her life a second before he shot her, and he saw justification for those actions in this woman's hearty defiance.
He showed her the gun, waved it once in front of her face and then left the house, picking up the shotgun on the way.
The farmer and his son were standing together by the BMW, staring intently at the doorway. As Cole emerged the farmer muttered something unintelligible, tears coming to his eyes.
'I shot the phone box from the wall,' Cole said. 'To be honest, I think it would take more than a silver bullet to kill your missus. Now, I'm going. I guess you have mobile phones, or another phone elsewhere in the house, but I'd really appreciate it if you held off using it to call the police. I won't waste time pleading with you, but I'll say this: I could have shot you all. I could … have shot … you all. That way I'd ensure that I get away, and it would give me a lot more time to catch the man I'm after. And the more chance I have of catching him the better it is. For everyone. Am I getting through? Comprendez?'
The farmer nodded, eyes still wide.
'I should be talking to your wife,' Cole muttered. He nudged the farmer aside and pressed the remote locking button. The BMW opened up to him, he climbed in and started the engine. Smooth. Fast. But he'd have to dump it within the hour.
Shame.
'When will we get—'
'The cheque's in the mail,' Cole said. Then he slammed the door and screeched away, spraying cow shit from beneath the wheels.
Chapter Seven
Those echoes of Natasha had been too remote, she had offered no clues, and Cole had no idea which direction to take. Logic dictated northwest, back toward Wales and Roberts' home. But something else nagged at Cole, and the more he thought about it the more elusive it became. He headed north, listening out for Natasha, willing her to come back to him with her taunting faux child's voice, hating the idea of her in his mind but knowing that it was the only way to track her. The fact that he now believed she wanted him to follow changed nothing. She would slip up, or Roberts would make a mistake, and Cole would need only the slightest opportunity to put a bullet in the bitch's head.
He threw the farmers' shotgun into a field beside the road—it was too difficult to hide—and the .45 was back in the holster on his belt. The magazine had been reloaded. The near miss at the cottage had angered him, but he was doing his best to put that anger to good use.
He was trying not to think of the woman he had killed that morning. She had been in the way, that was all.
None of this was his fault.
'She didn't feel improved,' he said. 'She felt dead!' Natasha and her chains had knocked him out on the moor, and even though he had not seen her in the darkness he had felt her, a damp, slick thing, filled with no signs of life at all. Cold. Wet. She had been below ground for ten years. Cole could still remember putting her there, the cries for mercy that turned into screams of rage as the soil was piled in on top of her. I'll see you again, she had said.
I'm a good man, he thought for the thousandth time, and he pictured the farming family he could so easily have left weighted down at the bottom of their slurry pit.
And then it came to him. Not dwelling on what was nagging him brought it home; her voice, when it was loud enough to hear, had come from the northeast. He was not certain how he knew this but the knowledge was welcome, and undoubted. When he had picked up her voice on the way to the farm something inside had clicked, a direction-finder that he was unaware he even had. Turning his head left and right now did nothing, but when he heard her again, he would be sure.
At the next junction he turned right and headed east, reading a map book as he drove, trying to find a road that lead northeast.
Who knew, he might even luck out. Find the right road, come across Roberts burying his wife in some field, kill him and open the boot and stare down at Natasha, gloating right back at her as he placed the .45 against her leathery skull and pulled the trigger.
Just how is she improved?
Yeah, right, it would be that easy.
'Yeah, right.'
Fucker …, he heard a few minutes later. Eat my shit, Mister Wolf … lost … going … fucker.
Yeah, right.
Tom remembered a story his mother had told him when he was in his teens. It had affected him strongly then, and now it seemed to say a lot about the situation he was in, both literally and in a spiritual sense. He found some solace in it; there was precious little else to comfort him. And remembering the story brought him somehow closer to his mother. However old a man may be, he always wants his mum in times of crisis and stress.
She was a nurse for much of her life, and when she was in her twenties she had befriended an elderly patient in the hospital where she worked. He was in his nineties, a veteran of two World Wars, blinded at Dunkirk, and a compulsive gambler. Horses were his preference, and he chose them by name alone. He liked names, he said, because they told him much that his ruined eyes could not. Tom's mother would take him on trips from the hospital during her days off, sitting with him at the bookies' while he placed bets and stared at the ceiling, listening to the races broadcast live over the radio. If he lost he would smile and pat her hand, and if he won he would buy her lunch and tell her about his life. She was more than content to listen, she said, because he was a fascinating old man. Whether he talked about the trench hell of World War I or his time on a farm as a youngster, his stories were always rich and compulsive. Perhaps such storytelling talent had something to do with being blind.
One day, on the drive back to the hospital, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw him smiling up at the ceiling, a look on his face she had never seen before. 'What a beautiful light!' he said, and he was still smiling as his head rested back against the seat.
She pulled over and felt the old man's wrist, but she already knew that he was dead. She drove to a police station and told them what had happened, and when she said she was a nurse they suggested she should drive him to the hospital herself. So there she was, in the middle of London, a corpse in the back of her car with betting slips spilling from his pockets and that beatific grin forever on his face. She received more than a few strange looks from pedestrians and other drivers, and by the time she arrived at the hospital she was laughing through her tears.
Tom knelt in the front seat of his ruined car and stared back at Jo's corpse. There was no grin on her face, other than the clown's smile painted there in dried blood. And no one could mistake her as sleeping. Not with the wound in the back of her head, and the amount of blood on her nightclothes.
'I hope you found the beautiful light,' Tom said, reaching back to touch his dead wife's hand. 'You were my light. I'm sorry, Jo. It's all my fault. I'm so sorry.'
Natasha, perhaps using her child's honest sense of what is right and wrong, remained silent as Tom wept.
