Will moved, breaking the tension that was thickening in the cabin.
“Eli,” he said gently, “Nula helped us. She helped us. We should be grateful.”
“And what would have happened to her if we hadn’t come after her, Will? What then?”
Nula offered Elisabeth a thick slice of bread spread with margarine. Despite her hunger, she spurned it.
“She’d have come with us,” Nula said, re-directing the bread towards Will, who took it. “She’d have been safe with us.”
“Safe?” Elisabeth mocked. “Safe?”
Sadie stood up. Groggily, she said: “I’m okay. They didn’t touch me. I promise.”
Elisabeth closed her eyes. She felt close to tears. Regardless of her mistrust of the old woman, she didn’t want to go back out into the cold and dark. The cabin, though cluttered and musty, was at least warm. “Let’s get out,” she said.
THEY WALKED IN silence until they rejoined the railway line. Before dawn, they scattered, hiding in the bushes as three helicopters chattered low overhead, arc lights swooping over the embankment and the tracks.
“Do you think they’ll come after us, those people?” Will asked. “When they find that Sadie is gone?”
Elisabeth shook her head. “Not if they’ve any brains between them,” she said. Will’s reluctance to report the incident had refreshed the frost between them that had until that point been gradually thawing. At lunchtime, exhausted, Will conceded that if they weren’t to alert the authorities about the camp, they should at least treat themselves to a decent lunch for a change. It would be worth the risk. And after last night, he privately considered, he wasn’t bothered any more. What happened now didn’t matter.
Leaving Elisabeth and Sadie on the edge of a car park, Will, conscious of how soiled and grizzled he appeared, tramped along a road to a supermarket where he bought bread and cheese and a bottle of wine without making eye contact with anybody. He wished he had enough money to enable them to take a train or a bus, one of which, cruelly, passed him as he made his way back to the car park, splashing him with some of the road’s surface water. The windows were misty with inner warmth; figures were black, lumpen, huddled into the enervation of their journeys.
Will could now see Elisabeth and Sadie perched on two small concrete bollards, talking, and the sight lanced him to the quick.
In the days leading up to Cat’s death, he had been imagining how the shape of his own baby might fill his hands. How the heat of it would travel through his fingers. He had imagined breathing the air that moved across its hot little head, and of what it might have smelled.
Being with Elisabeth too had re-opened in him a scar he thought long healed. The manner of their separation had always frustrated him. It had been avoidable, he knew, but neither he nor she had lifted a finger to arrest the slide. It was as though they had been fascinated by the speed of their decay, loath to prevent it in favour of observing something spectacular. From aisle to courtroom, their marriage had lasted three months. And for what? An imagined infidelity on her part; a suspicion on his that she had married him because he was the only person in her last-chance saloon at the time.
After the fallout (there had been much, and it had spread wide), Will had failed to come up with a satisfactory reason for their divorce. It was almost as if they had feared the dedication and commitment marriage demanded of them and had wimped out at the first opportunity. By then he had met Cat and was too involved to consider raking through the ashes to see if any embers remained.
“A feast,” he said cheerfully, as he rejoined them. Although he hadn’t said as much, he was mightily pleased to have Sadie back with them. Finding her in Fleece’s caravan, he had hugged her and told her how sorry he was. But then Fleece had entered, his arm and chest sodden with wet blood, and, upon seeing Will, had turned and hurried outside, tripping as he did so and winding himself on the ground.
“Wait here, just a second,” he had told Sadie and ran after Fleece. In the dark, before Fleece had a chance to muster the breath to call for help, Will knelt on his back and caught his chin between his hands. Summoning all of his strength, and thinking of Cat alone with those evil, evil bastards, he wrenched Fleece’s head back, relishing, yes,
And then the old woman, scurrying through the dark, her Wellington boots scuffing across the ground. Bringing him out of it.
Sadie and Elisabeth wolfed their food and traded secretive glances as they ate. At one point they laughed out loud. Will, his gut full of food, picking crumbs from his jumper and in as good a mood as any since leaving the farmhouse, asked them about the joke they were sharing.
“Don’t look now,” Sadie said, “but look behind you.”
This nonsense set Elisabeth off again. Will, happy that they were happy, glanced over his shoulder and started laughing too.
There was a man in the car park in a crash helmet. Huge coils of rope were slung over his shoulder. He was climbing. He was climbing the car park. Horizontally.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: WETWORK
Sean put the page back in its folder and tossed it into the box where all the other files sat on the back seat. He’d gone on what? Nine, ten jobs with Vernon now, and there had been no progress. No feeling of getting under his quarry’s skin at all. Vernon was holding back from him. Vernon didn’t want him too close. Sean thumbed through the documents filing cabinet of his memory and tried to find some clue that he might have missed, but always, at the moment of closure, he was sent away.
Oliver and Victoria, both in their late sixties, had been a middle-class couple retired to comfortable life in Stockton Heath, to the south of Warrington. Victoria contracted a virulent form of Parkinson’s disease. Oliver was caring for her full-time. Pitiful man, he was, Sean now remembered. Gone to seed but trying to put on the hard man act. Photographs of him as a young man, Kray-like in his intensity, his polish, were arranged around the rooms. Sepia pictures of him shadow boxing, or in the ring waiting for the bell to release him from his corner. Pictures of him and his mates standing on a street corner, toy gangsters in white shirts with big collars and dark suits.
Victoria needed medication every two hours. They received no relief from social services or the NHS – Victoria was assessed as not needing medical care – so it was left to the pair to make ends meet alone. Their savings were not large and would soon run out if they were to get nursing care or a stay in a home. Oliver, the hard man, was being ground down. No way out. What help did he get from Vernon? What promises?
And the others.
Homeless Cheryl, twenty-five, unable to get any kind of housing other than a night shelter haunted mainly by old men. Wasn’t she HIV+? Sean remembered her whimpering as Vernon stood over her in a dark archway connecting Sankey Street with the delivery road behind Woolworths in Warrington’s town centre. She told Vernon
