The dog looked questioningly at Donald. She heard him, the breeze carrying the words, ‘Good dog, FIND!’ The dog took off at speed; Donald remounted the quad bike and followed.
Wemyss ran in a zigzag fashion, pausing and sniffing the air, his keen nose sometimes down on the ground, sometimes pointing skywards. The breeze was blowing from the sea, fortunately for her, and the dog couldn’t get wind of her scent. He was puzzled, she could see that.
The two of them were now headed in the direction she had come from. All she could do was start jogging along the side of the ravine, up into the hills, hoping for some way of getting down the sheer side of the gorge and accessing the stream so she could wade upstream and lose the scent. Then, to her horror, the wind direction changed. It was now blowing down from the hill, carrying her scent towards the collie.
Any hope Hanlon had of escape quickly disappeared. She was aware of a movement by her side and looked down to see Wemyss at her heels, the muscular dog grinning at her as he effortlessly kept pace with her, enjoying the unexpected game. He barked happily, in sure expectation of another treat. Hanlon slowed to a walk, she couldn’t outrun the dog, and then, sure enough, she heard the quad bike and turned to face her pursuer.
He awkwardly and stiffly clambered from the machine, unslinging his shotgun as he approached her. Donald walked carefully and slowly towards her. His feet, supporting his seventeen or eighteen stone, sank up to their ankles in the soft ground. The expression on his face was one of quiet amusement, as if they’d been playing a game of tag and now he’d managed to catch her.
Hanlon stood facing him. She, by contrast, was light, muscular, elegant and poised on her feet. The time for running was over. The shotgun in Donald’s hands was large, ugly and menacing.
Hanlon breathed deeply. With the adrenaline coursing through her body, she was hyper-aware of her surroundings. Mindfulness, she thought ruefully, so prized these days, but look at the price I’m paying. Right now, she was conscious of the sloping rough pasture falling down to the track and the sea. She was conscious of Donald inexorably marching towards her. She was conscious of the gorge just a couple of paces backwards behind her, a violent, jagged slit like an irregular scar in the flesh of the rush-strewn field. On the opposite bank, the green pines rose impenetrably up. Hanlon could hear the noise of the water from far below, its powerful brown current with flecks of foam tumbling over both smooth and jagged boulders. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder. The sides of the gorge, virtually sheer, shaded by the trees, were covered in vivid green lichen, moss and other plants, and the emerald flash of the occasional fern.
‘Shame it had to end like this, Hanlon,’ said Donald. She noticed he was careful to stop a few feet away from her. ‘I never did get my threesome.’
‘You’re not my type, Donald, you fat arsehole,’ she replied.
Her keen grey eyes scanned the ground to either side of her. From where she was standing, she could see where the soil had eroded the edge of the land, creating treacherous overhangs at the edge of the ravine, the last couple of metres of the edge of the gorge lacking any underpinning. If an unwary person walked to the edge it could collapse in a heartbeat.
The ground behind her, like the brim of a hat or the peak of a cap, jutted out. She was standing practically on the edge of the cliff. A step backwards and she would be in freefall. Very little supported the ground that she was on. A kind of turf diving board. She knew that, Donald didn’t. As far as he was concerned, the ground beneath his feet, although boggy, was rock solid. Hope flared within her. The slightest heavy pressure and the ground could give way. The burn was about thirty metres down; a fall would be fatal.
Her heart beat like crazy. There was a chance! If she could lure Donald to the edge, the ground could fall away beneath them, collapsing and sending them hurtling down into the burn below. And Donald was heavy, very heavy.
Donald gestured with the shotgun and took a step closer to Hanlon. She moved back fractionally nearer the edge; she felt the ground give slightly beneath her feet. Good! she thought. Any moment now it would collapse. The low leaves of a tree growing by the edge brushed her wiry, unruly dark hair. She looked upwards at its branches. She could see the blue sky and sunlight through its leaves. The bough whose leaves were touching her hair was about twenty centimetres directly above her. It was a thick branch. It would take her weight. She guessed that the fine roots of the tree were all that was holding up the ground on which they were standing.
‘It is drugs, I take it?’ she asked.
Donald nodded; while he weighed his options he was only too happy to talk. He would much rather her death looked natural – the closer she was to the edge, the better. ‘My brother’s fishing boat meets a yacht, over from the Azores, the transfer is made at sea, we pick them up, bring them back here, then to the mainland. It’s sweet.’ He looked at the gun in his hands and at Hanlon and then at the ravine. His thinking was obvious: better that she fell or was pushed rather than be shot.
He came closer. Her body would be found, eventually. An accident, a slip. Easily
