was the drop down into the forest, the darkness below looming like a living presence. The Lexus rammed him just behind the driver’s door, the side of the Toyota buckling and compressing him and the impact shunting the Toyota so that its passenger side hung poised over the edge. The man’s face was close again, separated from Purkiss’s by the narrow gap between the opposite-facing cars. Teeth clenched, eyes narrowed, he raised the gun. Purkiss ducked but the shot didn’t come. Instead he felt the Toyota rock as the Lexus disengaged. He knew the man was reversing, getting ready to ram him a final time and send him over the edge.
He felt the revving of the Lexus’s engine transmitted through the road and the chassis of his own car. When he judged it was almost on him he grabbed one of the phones from the passenger seat and straightened, took a split second to aim, and hurled it through the open window at the driver, a good solid shot that caught the man in one eye. Because the missile was coming in at an angle from the left the man flung up his left hand, which meant that his right hand dragged downward on the steering wheel, causing the Lexus to veer to the right. At the same time Purkiss floored the accelerator of the Toyota to try and pull it out of the path of the oncoming Lexus. With two wheels over the edge of the drop, all the Toyota could manage was a couple of inches forward. The Lexus slammed into the Toyota behind the rear door, and in a grinding of chassis against rock the back of the car heaved over the edge.
Purkiss felt the jar of the seat against his back as he was flung against it and the world tilted crazily, the sky far above the treetops suddenly and incongruously in front of him through the mangled windscreen. The weight of the car bore down behind him. Helplessly he began to be dragged down with it. He turned his head to the left and saw the front of the Lexus tipping downwards, the chassis pivoting on a point just behind its centre. The phone he’d thrown had put the driver off his aim so that he’d rammed the Toyota just obliquely enough not to lose his own momentum, and he’d been unable to stop the Lexus’s front wheels from crossing the edge of the drop. Purkiss groped with his left hand for the release button of the seatbelt and found it crushed by the impact, the clasp jamming the belt in place. Reaching across with his other hand he picked up the other phone from where it lay against the back of the passenger seat. The car continued its relentless grind backwards, and he transferred the phone across to his left hand and began to bash at the seatbelt clasp, feeling plastic splinter. Across from him through the open window of the driver’s door he saw the face of the driver, florid and contorted, as he leaned forward against his own seatbelt. As Purkiss watched the man freed himself, the seatbelt rolling up with a snap. The man toppled forwards against his windscreen, and the movement was enough to push the Lexus the final few inches. With a groan it passed the point of no return and plunged out of sight, the man’s scream drowned in the noise of smashing wood and rending foliage.
Something gave in the seatbelt clasp. With both hands Purkiss pulled the belt free and disentangled himself and jackknifed his body so that he was reaching up through the remains of the windscreen. He fell back, and the impact of doing so jarred the car so that it slipped down. He twisted his head round and, through the gap where the rear window had been, he saw that the back of the car was propped against the base of a pine trunk which protruded at an angle from the slope. It was a youngish tree, and even as he watched it was shifting, its movement accompanied by the graveyard sound of roots tearing through soil.
He faced the front again, drew breath, and expelled it as he jackknifed again, abdominal muscles on fire. This time he caught hold of an exposed root. He got his other hand round it and hauled, but it was giving way and so was the trunk behind and beneath the car. He got his feet against the back of the seat and pistoned his legs just as the loop of root broke free at one end and the car dropped away from him. For a moment he was hanging in mid-air from one end of the root, before he got a purchase on the slope with his other hand and pulled himself up. Behind him was the awful screech of metal against rock and ancient wood and a final plummeting grind punctuated by the smashing of glass.
Then, nothing but the hammering in his head and his chest.
Sixteen
He hung clutching at the slope for what seemed like an hour but was probably a minute. Then he clambered up over the edge. Crouching on the bank, he turned to look down the drop.
Far below, the only sign of it a hint of its buckled white door panels among the foliage, was the Toyota. It had turned sideways during its descent and had left a wake of smashed branches and fragments of glass. Closer by, ten feet below Purkiss, the Lexus was wedged nose-down in a fork created by the trunks of two huge trees. One of its rear wheels was twisted sideways, almost wrenched off the axle. From its engine came an occasional desultory tick. The smell of petrol swamped the pine scent.
Purkiss had had the presence of mind to turn off the ignition after the back of the Toyota had gone over the edge. He didn’t know if the other man had done the same with the Lexus. Of the man there was no sign, and Purkiss wondered whether he’d fallen through the windscreen and dropped down into the forest, or whether he was still inside the car.
A car was approaching along the road. Purkiss debated for a moment but decided against flagging it down and crawled swiftly over the edge and squatted out of sight on the slope until it had passed. He moved, crabwalking, looking for the least treacherous way down, and began to make his way towards the Lexus, sliding on his bottom and gripping the roots and rock protrusions for support. Just above the car the slope dropped away, sheer. Vertigo made him reel and press himself against the slope. When it felt safe to look down again he peered straight through the rear window space of the car. He could see the dark shape of the man inside, folded against the windscreen, which hadn’t entirely given way. There was no movement.
Purkiss turned onto his belly and sidled down the slope using his elbows until he felt his feet touch one of the trunks between which the car was jammed. He tested the strength of the trunk by stamping a little — it seemed solid enough — and reached out and took hold of the rear bumper of the car. He gave it an experimental shake. The metal protested against the trunk, and he felt the minutest shift. So it wasn’t securely wedged; any significant weight would drive it through the other side and send it plummeting.
He knelt on the trunk and leaned over as far as he dared. Again dizziness took hold of him. The front end of the car hung below the trunks over a sheer drop of perhaps a hundred feet, a great cleft in the earth coated with trees. Secure though the trunk was, his movement on it produced further creaking from the car.
Craning his neck he peered through the driver’s window just below the trunk. The driver was concertinaed against the webbed windscreen, his head locked in place by a branch that had been driven through the windscreen into his left eye socket. His mouth was agape.
He was in the way. Purkiss clambered back along the trunk to its base and moved across to the other trunk. This one did not feel as secure, and swayed palpably as Purkiss edged along it on his hands and knees. By lying along its length he was able to cling almost alongside it and look through the passenger window. On the dashboard he saw what he wanted. It appeared undamaged.
The problem was getting to it. He could climb into the car through the rear window or the passenger one, but that would certainly push the Lexus all the way through the fork and send it falling. His arm wasn’t long enough to reach it from where he was clinging to the branch.
He hugged the trunk, and thought about Claire, and Fallon, and the three Service agents, one or more of whom were betraying him. And he thought about how the forest around him was darkening as the afternoon set in, and how this was the last afternoon before Fallon set in motion whatever he had planned for the morning.
He needed a way in, and urgently.
Purkiss shuffled up the trunk until he was directly over the passenger window and braced his hands on the trunk, testing the strength in his arms. He swung down so that once again he was hanging in the air, trying not to imagine the drop below him, the consequences of slipping and falling. He pressed his feet together and pushed them through the window hole, catching the back of the seat with his shoe as one of his hands slipped. He regained his grip but the nudge to the seat produced a terrible growl from the metal and it shifted against the ancient bark. The Lexus jolted a foot further through the wedge.
He had to withdraw his feet to steady himself. Once more he dangled, flailing. He tried again and this time he got one foot hooked around the back of the small box on the dashboard. Tongue between his teeth, he groped with the other foot, pressed it against the box and tugged gently, feeling it shift in its slot. In a second it was free.
