Flint, the mountaineer, drove with one hand while the other searched his Berghaus waterproof for a tube of mints.
“Where was it you said you were going?” Flint asked. Will couldn’t see his mouth through the tangle of red beard. His eyes were dark, sharp and turned nasty by a ridge of black brows that reared away from his head. The hair was long and straggly, held back in a pony tail by an elastic band. It was a hard, north Wales voice, barely softened by years of travel.
“I didn’t,” Will said. “Where are you going?”
“Scotland way,” Flint replied, finally tracking down his elusive Trebors. He offered one to Will. “I want to get up to the Old Man of Storr, eventually. Always fancied that, though I’ve never done a stack climb before.”
“Well, we’re heading up to Warrington, if it’s convenient.”
“Nothing’s convenient, the way these roads are being systematically buggered.”
“We’ve been out of the loop,” Will said, conscious again of the state of his clothes. He wondered if he was starting to smell, but judging by the state of Flint’s Camper, he didn’t think it was something that would be noticeable here. “We’ve not heard any news.”
Flint coughed and spat out of the window. “Since the first wave of bombs, on the motorway, there’ve been daily attacks. Single explosions on A roads, B roads, bridges. Nobody has a clue why. Al-Qaeda have gone out of their way to dissociate themselves with it all.”
Off the motorways, progress was still frustratingly slow. The mountaineer had picked them up outside Nuneaton. They had followed the A5 around Birmingham to Shrewsbury, where they joined the A49 going north. Flint told them that this road, if it was safe, would take them straight into Warrington. So far, it had been ignored by the terrorists, but it was a main road that ought to be a target, if the roads that had been attacked over the past few weeks were any indication.
Flint was from a tiny village outside Wrexham. His father had died in a lead mine and he had been forced to bring up his brother and look after his mother, who had lung cancer, without any outside help. He said it had toughened him and made him feel able to deal with any situation. Climbing, Flint explained, was the only pastime that helped him feel alive, gave him back the youth that had been lost to endless days of cleaning and feeding and being the role model to his younger siblings.
“Have you ever fallen?” Will asked, feeling faintly stupid once the question was out, but enjoying the ebb and flow of the older man’s voice.
“Never,” Flint replied, sucking carefully on his mint. “I’ve seen plenty accidents, mind. I’ve seen a man fall twenty-five feet into the Bergschrund on the Hotlum/Bolam ridge, Mount Shasta, this is. California. A fourteen K peak. No injury. Not even a split lip. But I’ve seen death on the rock from the slightest fall. I was with a guy called Errol about five years ago. We were climbing some top-quality granite out at Oak Flats, in Arizona. Errol was this close to topping out when a flake came off and did for him. I was in the roof crack and was pulling slack up to clip when the rock came away in his hands. Nasty wet noise on the slab. I heard it forty feet away.
“He was lucky. There was a doctor, an orthopaedic guy climbing in the area. He heard me screaming my tits off for help and he helped stabilise Errol while someone drove to the rescue camp for help.
“Errol was out cold the entire time. He was splinted, back-boarded, insulated, intubated, the lot. They probably put a bandage on his dick so it didn’t feel left out. Helicopter short-hauled him out in a Bauman Bag. Turned him over to Eagle Air Med who flew him to Phoenix, seventy miles west of the Flats.
“He was mightily shagged, I tell you. Skull fractured like a slab of treacle toffee, left arm radial, ulnar and wrist fractures, left hip fracture and left leg tib/fib and ankle fucked to Shreddies. He was unable to speak. No shit. He was three weeks in Surgical Intensive Care. And for what? A bit of loose rock.
“The worst deaths I dealt with were never anywhere near the face. The worst deaths happen in beds, let me tell you.”
“I can’t agree with you,” Will said, his throat constricting slightly.
“Errol went in bed. This six foot fuck-off meat hill. Strong. The mountain made an old man of him. All that medical care and he goes and necks a big bottle of paracetamol, first thing he does when he gets home. No way he was able to climb again, so he checked out.”
Flint went quiet, concentrating on pushing the tired blue Campervan through the south Cheshire countryside. At Tarporley, he told them that their destination was maybe a quarter of an hour away. Then he said, matter-of- factly: “Police.”
At the moment of his saying the word, Will saw the spastic blue lights pulse and skitter around the interior of the van. Elisabeth knocked twice on the separating wall.
Will said, “Look...”
Flint was smiling. “You’re in trouble, aren’t you?”
“What can you–”
“Well,” Flint said, “I can’t outrun them.”
“Somewhere in the back. We could hide?”
Flint laughed as he applied the brakes. “In a Camper? Piss off.”
“Then we’ve had it.”
“What did you do?” Flint said.
“They think I killed my wife.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“I believe you,” Flint said, simply. “Where is it you’re heading, exactly?”
“Sloe Heath,” Will replied, tensing in his seat as the police Rover pulled into the side of the road behind them. “The hospital there.”
“Right,” Flint said, and floored the accelerator. The van tore away, faster than Will might have expected. At the last moment, before Flint yanked the wheel to the left, sending the van bucketing over frozen shoulders of land, he heard sirens and the girls in the back of the van screaming. He saw Flint lean in close towards his face, lips peeling back into an obscene leer that didn’t seem possible in a mouth that had appeared so small. The black eyes consumed his as the van tipped into a fence by a small stream, sending it into a roll. The window smashed and Will felt himself bounce out through it, enveloped by sharp shards of night. He hit the ground hard and skidded across the topsoil of a field at the other side of the stream for about twenty metres until he came to a stop. Raising his head slightly, he saw two officers standing at the top of the road looking down at the upturned VW as steam billowed from its destroyed radiator.
Will stood up but his legs spilled him immediately. His shoulder flared with pain. Somehow he scrabbled over to the van but found it empty. The policemen were gingerly making their way across the stream. The intense dark in the field meant that he could not be seen. He risked calling out for Elisabeth and Sadie but there was no reply. More sirens. The feathered beat of a distant helicopter. Will saw its floodlight dancing across more distant fields than this one, approaching rapidly. He had to get moving, before its cameras picked him up. He moved through the field as quickly as his unsteady legs would allow, clasping his shoulder tight to him as he went. By the time he reached the far edge of the field, he was shivering violently and could not rid himself of the conviction that Elisabeth and Sadie were face down in the stream, unconsciously sucking water into their lungs.
A last look back as the authorities sealed off the accident site and searched for bodies. There was light everywhere, and mist resettling on the field where the movement had previously broken it up. Contained in one of these surging fists of fog, like something wrapped in a wad of cotton wool, Will saw a figure sprinting. It seemed far too tall and lithe for Flint, but suddenly it had flattened and spread into the elongated shape of a fast dog in full flight, changing so swiftly, so fluidly, that Will could not be sure he had thought the figure human to begin with.
Either the mist thickened, or the figure outran it. Either way, in a second or two, it was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKES
