And now he is reaching out, encircling his hands around the corpse that eddies with each movement of the water. The arms are taut and elongated, bound at the wrists with a wire that eats into the puffy white skin. He feels himself go under again, as if there are weights tied about his ankles: hands clawing at his clothes. He kicks out, hearing himself gasp and spit, water in his nose, his mouth, his ears. He tips his head back. Tries to shout. Gulps down another foul-tasting mouthful of brown slime. Turns himself over and feels the body bounce against his torso. Instinctively he lashes out. Pushes the corpse away with hands that do not feel like his own.
Spears of torchlight cast distorted polka dots onto the surging surface of the water. He tries to focus on the light, his teeth chattering, fingers numb. He is shivering, fading, unable to tell his body what to do, and then it feels as if somebody is dragging at his coat, pulling him away from his anchorage at the wall, and he is thrashing wildly, certain that the corpse is reaching out for him like a siren. He feels the meaty impact of his fist hitting bone. His gorge rises as his fingertips rake through the rotten meat of the dead girl’s flesh, as if pulling a rake through soft mud. He gasps, raising his hand high; an eager pupil, desperate to be picked: skin sliding free of muscle, tendon, bone … He tries to find something to hold. Clutches frantically at the dead girl’s skin.
He can see his breath rising, drifting upwards through the dark, and as his hands fasten around some solid part of the corpse’s remaining tissue, he feels a tug, as of a fishing wire snapping beneath the strain. The body rises up; seal-like, ascending in a spume of white-flecked spray. Cox looks into the empty eye sockets of the faceless corpse. Glimpses metal.
Cox feels a great sadness bloom inside him. Shivers, and blood runs into his mouth. Blood and dirty water, upon his lips, his tongue, his throat. He smells it. Rust and old machinery, raw liver and Irish stout. Smells iron. Smells blood.
He awaits the tunnel of the light: the triumphant song that will accompany his ascent into Elysium.
The silence is absolute.
He takes a great shuddering breath, eyes bright as alabaster.
And then the darkness closes over him like the mouth of a shark.
‘Like ink.’
Ethan reaches down and picks up the phone. Hears the sounds of violence. The ragged breathing of a dying man. Speaks before he can help himself; before his mother can leap forward and knock the phone from his hands.
‘Rufus?’
Then there is just the silence, and the bodies, and the familiar sound of Annabeth Harris sobbing to herself, quiet and contained, as she asks herself, again, how many bodies it will take to fill the void within her – how many she will have to kill before she regains that which was taken by a man who thought he could do what he wanted to her and who died without facing the consequences.
How many abusers will have to die?
She asks it of herself, as she has so many times. How many, before she stops being afraid.
The answer comes in a voice that is not her own: a white-hot sensation right inside her head.
All of them.
Every last one.
EPILOGUE
Detective Constables Ben Neilsen and Andy Daniells are standing in the courtyard garden at the rear of the big old hall where Griffin Cox grew up. His body was recovered last night from a hidden network of rooms concealed beneath the surface of the algae-covered lake.
Also discovered in the secret grotto were a grotesque collection of waxy body parts and defleshed bones. How he had come to meet his end remains the subject of speculation. Wilson Iveson is dead, and unable to offer any light in the darkness. Neilsen has hopes that Rufus Orton, should he ever wake, will be able to provide answers. He also hopes that he keeps his mouth shut about who it was who told him how to find his way to Iveson’s residence, and who wound him up like a clockwork toy and let him skitter away down a dangerous path.
It was Neilsen who broke the news to Bob Roberts. Told him that they were all but certain they had found Bronwen. Bob hadn’t spoken for what seemed like forever. Then he wanted to know if she had suffered. Neilsen hadn’t the heart to tell him the truth. He’d promised it was quick, and painless.
‘He’s a fighter, I tell you that,’ says Daniells, looking up at a mossed-over statue of a naked god of war. ‘Your writer mate.’
Neilsen nods. ‘His heart’s beating. I don’t know if that’s the same as “alive”.’
‘He’ll have a story to tell if he gets better.’
‘Sounds like a good enough reason to come back, I suppose.’
They stand in silence, looking up at the grand frontage of the old house, both lost in thought. Daniells feels as though he has been involved in something significant, but the pictures keep distorting and reforming: clouds glimpsed through smoke. He knows that in Griffin Cox he has glimpsed evil, but he fancies that he has inhaled the faintest trace of something else: something older. He feels as though he has been dumb witness to an act of primal vengeance: or restorative justice. He cannot define whether he believes Cox’s killer to be on the side
