‘You don’t remember me, do you?’
‘I can’t even bloody SEE you!’ yelled Kate Sparrow. ‘How the hell am I supposed to remember you?’
‘You’ve met me this weekend,’ he said. ‘You looked right at me. You said my name. You asked for my help… and even then you didn’t recognise me.’
‘Wait… stop this bloody sand,’ she choked. ‘I can’t hear you properly. It’s blocking the signal on this radio device.’
‘No it’s not,’ he said. ‘I can hear you and you can hear me, because that’s exactly what I planned. I want to hear you all, right to the end. I’d like to see you, too, but the video doesn’t work in the dark. Audio will have to be enough.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake — just tell me who you are and why you’re doing this! What the hell did we do to you?’
‘It wasn’t what you did to me,’ he said. ‘You weren’t nice to me, but I could live with that. It’s what you did to Tessa.’
Lucas couldn’t see anyone on the cliff top now. There were lines of stunted trees and wild grass, all curved with the prevailing sea breeze, but no sign of anyone among them. Sid, though, was zoning in on the killer and by now there was no doubt. The guy in silver whom he’d sent Francis after wasn’t dangerous. That was one small consolation.
It didn’t outweigh, though, his overriding certainty that Kate was in severe peril. He could sense — and see in his mind’s eye — her scared and angry patterns knotted up with the killer’s. The killer wasn’t scared. He wasn’t even angry. Every frequency that spun away from him, like spider threads on the wind, was iron grey and iron hard. Bitter grief and vengeance were the only drivers working within this individual. He didn’t care about being caught. In fact, Lucas realised, he fully expected to be caught. The only thing he feared was losing his liberty before he had finished the job.
Lucas ran, powering through the ever worsening pain in his bad knee. He was dimly aware of Francis somewhere off to the west, with someone else, also moving fast. But not fast enough. There was so very little time now. He estimated he could reach the cliff inside a minute if he could keep up this pace, but it might be too late for Kate and her friends. The sensation of slipping land rolled through him again. He felt as if, at any moment, he might be running on air.
Above him, to the north, he could both hear and sense a high-pitched buzz. Glancing over his shoulder he made out a black speck, moving too steadily and purposefully to be a bird. It looked as if the police had got a drone up. That was good news… maybe. Or maybe it would only hasten the murderous plans of the man on the cliffside.
For that’s where he was — halfway down the short, crumbling and tumbling slope that led down to the shingle. And he had metal tubes with him… guns? Maybe. But bigger than that. Slipping… land was slipping… darkness was engulfing the three life forces inside an old, old box that could only be one of the bunkers.
‘Mike,’ said Kate, realisation dawning. ‘Mike on security.’
‘Well done,’ said the voice from the corner, the pinprick of light pulsing with each intonation.
‘You… you were Mickey back then, weren’t you?’ she said. ‘I thought there was something familiar about you… but you’re much bigger now. You were a skinny lad back then; you must have put in a lot of time at the gym.’ She wasn’t trying to flatter him; she was thinking aloud and hoping, of course, to distract him from drowning them in sand.
Because the sand was not letting up. At first she had thought it might genuinely be another landslip, and the sand finding its way in might peter out. But now she could hear a clanking and realised that it was being funnelled in deliberately, maybe through piping or guttering of some kind.
‘What happened to Tessa?’ she asked as the sand poured on, forming dunes around her feet.
‘Don’t you say her name,’ he snarled. ‘You’re not fit to say her name.’
‘Come on, Mickey!’ she yelled. ‘How can we be sorry if we don’t know what for? We were idiots back then — we didn’t think about anyone but ourselves. We’re older now. We’d get it this time. What happened with… your sister? Was it your sister?’
‘She came here for fun!’ he yelled, emotion in his voice for the first time. ‘To hang out with me and have fun. And I wanted her to be proud of me, so I’d told her you were all my friends. But you weren’t, were you? You didn’t have any time for me at all, any of you. You couldn’t be bothered with me… or with my little six-fingered sister.’
Kate heard Nikki make a yelping sound and glanced around to see startled recognition in her eyes. Bill had been talking only last night about Little Mickey and his six-fingered sister.
‘We heard you all talking,’ he said. ‘We were in the next chalet. You lot always went up a hundred decibels whenever you were pissed. We heard everything you said about us.’
Kate winced, recalling the girl now, awkward and lumpy; a pale thing with wispy hair and blotchy skin, clinging onto her brother’s arm. A flashback of Bill and Nikki came to her, both doing a skit about Mickey and his little sister while they were all lounging about in Craig and Bill’s chalet. She recalled Bill throwing in all the mandatory Norfolk inbreeding gags, choking with derision about the awkward way Tessa walked and the strange lump on the outer edge of her hand, which they decided was a stunted extra finger. Bill had come up with the Six-Fingered Sister
