‘You’re all I have, Abigail,’ Julian called out, clambering up on the rocks. ‘Don’t make me do this, I’m begging you.’
He was calmer now, and seemingly not out of breath, though he had grown paler with blood loss, his unshaven cheeks sunken.
‘You’re going to have to,' Abbey wheezed. 'Because I’m not like you, Julian. You need to understand. If you can’t deal with that, you’re going to have to kill me.’
‘You don’t think I will?’
‘I’m counting on it.’
He lunged for her, knife outstretched. He missed, sliced through the fabric of her shirt and spun away, circling his large arm around her throat.
Her breath cut off, she grew limp, her feet dangling. With his free arm he brought the knife around and thrust into the same shoulder, inches above the first wound. She cried out as he turned the blade in, twisted it into the bunched nerves. She was mere seconds from passing out. Everything was turning white, the coastline snowing in and out of focus. She couldn’t draw breath, couldn’t even cough.
She grappled at his arm, tore away fingernails of futile flesh, but there was nothing tenuous about his grip. It didn’t react to her flailing, her scratching, as if it felt nothing.
With no options left, she began to relax as her lights dimmed. She didn’t want to go out fighting; she wanted to parallel the serenity of their setting. She closed her eyes and allowed the darkness to envelop her, cradle her, a rush of settling nausea embroiling her senses.
She waited for death to grasp the vapour trails of her escaping soul when she felt the sudden rush of cold air passing her, and the sharp pain in her knees. It took only a second to realise what was happening. She’d been dropped to the rocky floor in a crunch of scraping bones.
She scrambled away confused, her lungs padding out with fresh, clean air. There was a grunting over her shoulder, another battle raging on without her. She flung herself over to a picture of the unexpected. Julian was being gripped from behind in a vicious bear hug by Eric. The big man had come from nowhere, hoisted Julian off his feet and was crushing the air from him.
Tears streamed down Eric’s face as his enormous arms squeezed the life out of Julian, the audible cracks of the killer’s ribs snapping one by one. Eyes bulging, swollen tongue lying idly on his bottom lip, the killer stared at her pitifully as she climbed to her feet.
‘I guess you were right, Julian,’ she said softly. ‘There is always somebody watching.’
The spark in Julian’s throbbing brown orbs began to fade. Eventually he fell flaccid with one final popping rib, his head hanging limply on his chest.
For a moment neither she nor Eric moved. ‘It’s okay, Eric, you can put him down.’
Like an automaton, the big man took a few unsteady steps to the chasm’s edge and peered at her over his shoulder. She wondered if he was waiting for some kind of approval.
She didn’t give it.
He pitched Julian’s cadaver in anyway, sickening thumps echoing to the surface with every ricochet of the broken body. Then he turned and looked at her, the tears clinging to his cheeks. Never in her life had she seen an expression so lost.
62
The trek back to the camp was a quiet, disjointed one. Abbey supposed she should try and talk to Eric about his mother’s death, but she didn’t want to push it on him. She had little doubt that he would ask in his own time, but for now the topic remained buried, right next to her own inexplicable past. Anthony was dead. That was enough for now.
Tearing strips from her blouse, she bunched them and pressed them to the tandem of wounds at her shoulder. They stung like hell, but neither was bleeding too badly. She wondered if Eric was alright. He didn’t seem injured, so she didn’t ask.
And so they trudged in blessed silence, trailing the island’s circumference until they wandered gingerly into the remains of the camp. As they predicted, the storm had torn the beach apart. Not a single tent remained standing, the simple branch framework strewn across the beach amongst a confusion of blankets and meagre belongings. James and Oli climbed to their feet as they spotted the two bedraggled figures sauntering towards them, their passive faces betrayed by their defensive body language.
‘You don’t need to worry about him,’ Abbey said, referring to Eric. ‘He saved my life.’
With literally nothing to sit on she fell into James’s arms, sagged against him like he was made of stone. She then moved on to Oli and hugged him tightly.
Halting questions and rebounding offers of aid, she hastened them to a sandy perch as she unfolded her account of what had taken place. With Eric present, she left out the bodies she’d seen in the arroyo but included everything else: Anthony Turner’s real identity and his death, her lifelong stalker and his unexplained estrangement from Broadmoor, her childhood involvement with Nicolas York almost twenty years previous. She omitted nothing that didn’t need omitting, and when she was through, a serene and melancholic silence settled over the group. She didn’t fully understand the silence; it just seemed like the right thing to do.
From here onwards she was under little doubt that things would grow more strenuous, their strive for survival unremitting. Julian Faulkner was gone, that box was ticked, and tonight they would sleep soundly in their rebuilt tents under a predatorless sky.
With the sun now at full height, she sleeved the dots of perspiration from her brow.
‘Where’s Danielle?’ she asked sullenly, astonished she’d only just noticed the missing girl.
‘We don’t know,’ James replied almost apologetically. ‘We tried to comfort her when we got back to the
