1
The hoar frost hung in the curved canopy of the magnolia tree, a construction of ice as perfect as coral. The weight of it made the trunk creak in the still, Arctic air. Below it the dewpond was frozen, steaming slightly in the winter sun, a single carp below the powdered surface dying for air.
Joe stood, admiring its gasping beauty, each of his own breaths a plume which drifted briefly, catching the rays of the sunset. Lighting the cigarette he had made indoors, he drew the marijuana deep into his shattered throat. He sat on his bench with a rowan at his back, heavy with blood-red berries.
‘Christmas,’ he said to no one, surveying the circular horizon of the Fen.
He expelled the smoke, and replaced it with a surge of supercooled air, willing it to purge him of the cancer that was destroying him.
The house was fifty yards to the north and the only visible building: Letter M Farm was – he had long admitted – as good a place to die as any.
Inside the foursquare Georgian building the lights he’d left on shone into the winter afternoon, and through its double-glazed windows he could see the twin reflections of the open fire within.
He stood, turning to go back, swinging his sticks round to keep him steady. A wave of nausea made him stop, closing his eyes and wishing again he wasn’t alone. With eyes closed he drew deeply on the dope, letting the sweet relief flow like a current through his veins.
When he opened his eyes his wish had come true.
A man was at the house, coming out of the front door, putting something in his pocket. In his free hand he held a black bag, like a doctor’s, and Joe wondered if he’d come from the unit. He tried to shout but his throat failed him. Then he saw that the man’s head was obscured by a hood.
The man walked back towards the road where a small white van Joe hadn’t noticed before was parked amongst the uncut Leylandii. Joe hadn’t heard the vehicle approach and a thought insinuated itself: had it been there all day, waiting?
His eyes swam with the strain of focus. When they’d cleared the man was walking back towards him, a spade in one hand, a bucket in the other, the bag gone. From the way the man swung the pail as he strode over the frozen field Joe knew it was empty.
He shivered, aware that something had been planned, planned without him. He lifted a hand to take the cigarette from his lips knowing that even now, when he knew that death was coming anyway, fear could be a pungent emotion. Feebly he took another step forward, straightening his back and raising his arm in greeting when the man was almost upon him.
But there was no response from the face hidden within the shadowed hood. Joe scanned the fields, but the landscape was empty, a lifeless network of ditches, drains and reeds smoking with the mist of nightfall.
The man’s measured stride did not diminish. The pace of advance was relentless and suddenly Joe saw his eyes: a smoky grey-blue, the whites clear despite the shadow of the hood, the line of the mouth uncertain, a tongue-tip showing.
Joe took a step back but the man had timed his attack precisely. The spade swung out in a practised arc and crashed, the face turned flat, against his knee, which buckled and splintered beneath the wasted skin. He fell, the pain in his leg oddly distant. His cheek lay on the frozen peat, tiny perfect orbs of ice rolling away from the impact of his body. A hand gripped him by the collar and jerked his head round so that a small gold crucifix on a chain spilled out from around his neck and lay on the peat.
‘Who’s this?’ said the voice, younger than he’d expected, and perfectly modulated, stress-free. Its casual authority told him what he’d begun to suspect: that he might be granted his greatest wish, to die before his illness killed him.
Into his face was thrust a photograph, in a wooden frame, taken from the drawing-room mantelpiece. Four children pictured in the sun, a rolling beach, reeds, and a distant floating buoy in the middle of a channel cut through the sands.
‘This one,’ said the voice again, a gloved finger stabbing the figure of the child on the left. The boy with black hair and the immobile face.
‘We never knew,’ said Joe, desperate to understand. ‘We called him Philip – just Philip.’
Savagely the man let his victim’s head drop to the frozen earth and placed two fingers on his jugular, feeling the strength of his pulse. His assailant stood, surveying the horizon, silently listening.
‘You’re dying,’ he said finally. ‘I can’t wait.’
He took the spade and freed the fish from its icy prison in the pond, filled the bucket with glacial water and poured it carefully over Joe’s body, starting at the waist and working up to the chest and head.
The shock made Joe’s limbs jerk wildly. The second bucket stilled them.
2
Dryden had been unable to sleep, his propane gas heater failing to stop the frost penetrating the steel hull of his floating home –
