She cringed when she thought of her awkward attempts to catch him out, and the slow realization on his face. When he put the pieces together it became obvious to them both how flimsy the case against him was. That paralyzing smirk had hung between them for an eternity.
She could still hear Acharya shouting at her for fouling up his case. She ignored his threats to send her to RPU to clean up after unlicensed lorry drivers. She knew she wasn’t wrong. She needed one good chance to back the suspect into a lie. Next time. This time.
“Sarah... Sarah lost her job at the cannery some days ago. It's not something a bloke likes to brag about, is it? Don't hold a little stubborn paternal pride against me.”
Shit.
“Is anyone especially close to Steve? More than usual?”
Red and Darren looked embarrassed and shook their heads.
“And no one knows if he’s left the house since she saw him?”
“Not that I know of.”
“And has anyone thought to check that area for him?”
Darren chuckled, like he had remembered something very funny. “Have you met His Excellency? He's one of your lot. Foreign. English, I suppose, but for some reason his first language is French. He's the only person on the island who speaks French. One day I got a video from our Deb in Perth, and it was all in French. One of those old films, artistic, you see. There's this young man who quits school to go run on a beach or something. Damned if I could follow it. But I said to His Excellency, I said why don't you come over and we can make a day of it. Well, I put the tape in and we're watching the film. There's subtitles for all the good that does me, still can't follow the thing. So I'm asking him little things, why's he say that, what's that swear word really mean, you know just making conversation. It's not every day I get a French lesson straight from the frog's mouth. And then, do you know what happened?”
Emma stared. After a pause, it became unclear whether the question had been rhetorical. “Do I know what happens next in your story?”
“I don't even remember what I asked him, but he got dead quiet. I turn to look at him, and he's crying. His Excellency, if you can imagine! He says it's been so long, he's forgotten everything. A grown man, crying in my good chair. Now I guess there aren't any French speakers on the island after all!”
Emma held still, hoping the world would deign to make sense again if she didn't antagonize it. The air shifted, and the movement of wet, yeasty air felt like someone was breathing on her face.
Red leaned in again. “You were telling us where Steve's got off to.”
“That's not quite how I remember it. You were just telling me whether anyone has thought to look for him around the downs. I assume that's the first place someone would think to look if it's a dangerous place to be.”
Red made a dismissive gesture with both hands, sloshing his beer in the process. “Oh yes, you don't ever find what you're looking for on the downs, or The Culley. Last year, Sarah's cousin went looking for a goat that wandered off that way, all he found was a steep hole and a broken ankle.”
That was a world speed record for solving a missing person case. Missing man known to frequent remote area no locals will search? Not exactly rocket science. Now for the best part. Getting the hell out of The Rock.
“Thank you, gentlemen, I've got a wilderness to comb. Please check in at the station if you think of anything else about Ned.”
“You're not going out there at this hour, alone?”
“No, no. Of course not.”
David made it nearly ten minutes, where the top of the village street opened into a dirt path that ringed the mountainous center of the island, before complaining. It was a personal best.
“Let me get this straight. We're going to search the creepy moors at night by ourselves?”
Emma didn’t look back. “He could still be alive, if he has water.”
“I wonder, will they say the same about us in the morning? Oh, but of course the twist is that we're the only people barmy enough to come out here, so...”
“Watch where you step and you'll be fine.”
“I just want to know the rescue party hierarchy. Local recluse goes missing, recent interlopers go searching. Interlopers go missing, it's what... the sheep come to find us? Who rescues the sheep, Em? Did you think of that? By morning it'll be a team of badgers trying to find a plucky but foolhardy albatross.”
Emma used her ears to listen for more important sounds, but it was impossible to tell where anything was coming from in the howling wind. There was the rustling of the low grasses and heather, the whistling of wind through her own clothing, and always the crashing of the sea.
With nightfall the wind had reversed its direction, and the fog came down the mountain in ghostly avalanches. Looking uphill she could see it coming over a mile away. It was impossible not to feel that she ought to get out of the way, that it would crush her or hurl her into the sea.
In the opposite direction, the fog crashed into the shoreline where it could go no further. Great billows steamed and snarled, obscuring the sea and any approach to the island. The outline of a boulder teetered on the edge between land and water. In the gaps between the plumes the horizon was visible as the line where the stars ceased to flicker.
The slope from the central massif to the sea was broken by a radial network of canyons and crevices. David
