A couple of hours’ rest around dawn had done little to make Ben feel refreshed or any stronger, but the fear of being discovered curled up asleep in the old Daihatsu by a farmer or one of the hands had been all the incentive he’d needed to move on early.
Some horses in a nearby paddock had stopped munching and stared at him warily as he took a drink from a rainwater barrel that was fed from their stable-roof guttering. Then the strange, furtive creature seemed to vanish as suddenly as it had appeared, and the horses relaxed and went back to their grazing.
Through the morning and the early afternoon, Ben had kept moving on foot. Public transport was less risky in the city, where people tended to ignore each other and individuals could lose themselves in the crowd. In country areas folks took much more interest, especially in strangers, and a sleepy railway station or half-deserted bus stop could spell disaster out here. All it took was one curious local to recognise his face from the TV news, and he’d have Darcey Kane and her troops back after him like greyhounds running down a hare. Hitching a lift was too risky for the same reason, and trying to steal a vehicle from one of the villages or farms he passed by was just asking for trouble – and maybe a couple of barrels of bird-shot from someone’s twelve-gauge into the bargain.
He kept shy of main roads, keeping to the rural lanes as much as he could and avoiding built-up areas. The effort of the long walk quickly tired him again. His arm was burning in agony under the clean dressing he’d wrapped over the stitches. There were still some codeine tablets left, but the narcotic drug could affect judgement and reaction time; he needed to keep his wits about him as best he could.
Just after four in the afternoon, near the town of Castelo Branco, he heard the chug of an old diesel coming up the road and ducked into the trees as it came by. The pickup truck had seen better days. Its motor sounded like a bag of nails and a hazy blue mist of burnt oil smoke hung in its wake. Behind the pickup was a large trailer heaped with loose straw. Ben saw his chance to gain some ground. It was better than hitch-hiking. The driver, an old man with a face like leather and one deeply tanned arm dangling out of his window, looked too half-asleep to notice an uninvited passenger joining him en route. Ben waited until the pickup had lumbered past, then ran after it, grabbed hold of the tailgate of the trailer and jumped aboard. The straw was prickly as he dug in, concealing himself from any vehicles that might come up behind.
After a bumpy, rattling, twenty-five or so kilometres westwards, the pickup lurched off the road and headed up a sun-cracked earth track towards a farm in the distance. Ben parted ways with it, picking bits of straw out of his hair as he carried on walking. By his reckoning, Brooke’s place wasn’t more than about another nine or ten kilometres away.
The closer he got, the more he kept thinking about her. The thoughts helped him to forget the pain that lanced through him with every step – but brought a different, deeper kind of pain, a sense of desolation and terrible loneliness. He wished he could call her, just to hear the sound of her voice. He wondered where she was, what she was doing. He trudged on.
Another hour passed. His step was getting heavy, as if he were wading through desert sand, and having to skirt around the edge of a village slowed his progress even more. The heat was stifling and oppressive. Ben wiped sweat from his face and looked up at the dark clouds that were rolling in from the distant hills, gradually amassing to blot out the clear blue sky. His lips were dry and his throat was parched, but he had a feeling that before too long he’d have all the water he needed, and more. A storm was brewing.
After spending most of the day curled up on the sofa with her laptop and a pile of notes to work on her research paper, Brooke had changed into shorts and training shoes and gone for an early evening run through the forested countryside that surrounded her cottage for miles around. She was on her way back, still a couple of kilometres from home, when the sky turned ominously dark and she smelled the electric burning smell of an imminent storm. As the first rumble of thunder rolled across the hills, she felt the first heavy raindrop spatter on her arm. Moments later, the heavens opened. By the time she came running back to the shelter of the cottage, she was soaked to the skin and shivering.
Feeling invigorated after a long, hot shower, she lightly towelled her hair and pulled on a sleeveless T-shirt, a pair of loose jogging pants she used as pyjama bottoms and for general lounging-around duties, and her cosy old dressing gown. She trotted downstairs, put on some Django Reinhardt and idled away some time with a magazine while her hair dried before going into the little kitchen to start putting together a simple evening meal.
As she padded around the kitchen in her bare feet, the rain was lashing the windows and the darkening sky was lit up every few seconds by the lightning flashes. These late summer storms could go on for hours. After dinner, she planned to read a hundred pages of the paperback she was deep into, before getting an early night and listening to the wind howling and the rain on the roof. She loved storms. They comforted her, somehow.
Dinner was going to be a rice salad with mixed beans and some freshly sliced tomatoes from the garden. Brooke made a dressing with olive oil, garlic and just a little wine vinegar. She was grinding a sprinkle of black pepper onto it when the music paused momentarily between tracks.
That was when she heard the sound from outside. Brooke looked up from her pepper grinder.
It had sounded like footsteps outside, on the gravel path next to the house. She strained to listen, but then the thunder growled loudly again across the hills.
Maybe it was Fatima, she thought. The farmer’s wife could be coming by with some eggs or wine, the way she often did.
Brooke went to the front door, opened it and peered outside into the sheeting rain. ‘Fatima?’
No reply. There seemed to be nobody there. Brooke shut the door, then bolted it as an afterthought. She was just about to head into the kitchen when she heard it again – the same sound of shoes crunching on wet gravel, footsteps moving quickly round the side of the house.
A fleeting movement past the kitchen window caught her eye. It could have been anything in the falling darkness – leaves blowing from a tree, or a bird wrestling against the wind. But she could have sworn she’d seen the figure of a man hurrying past.
She caught her breath, stepped quickly across the kitchen and drew the largest of the carving knives out of the block on the worktop. She walked back to the front door. Her heart beat fast and her hand was trembling a little as she slid back the bolt and turned the handle.
‘Luis? Is that you?’
Still nothing.
Had she imagined it? It wasn’t like her to get jumpy in a storm.
Brooke strode back to the kitchen and replaced the knife in the block.
And looked up to see the face squashed up against the window pane.
She let out a gasp.
The man outside was staring at her. His hair and clothes running with rainwater. His face was wild, plastered with mud down one side.
It was Marshall.
‘Brooke – let me in,’ he implored. The aggression that had burned in his eyes last time she’d seen him in
