It lay in front of the barn doors, blood pooled around its head, as if someone had dropped a can of paint on it from a height, which was farcically unlikely. Its throat was as open as the barn behind it, and some doors, having been opened, can’t be closed. There was nothing to do but step through them. Ultimately, that’s what this one had done, though he appeared to have thrashed about on the threshold, unwilling to depart.
One of the Annex C characters, thought River Cartwright. Anton, Lars and Cyril. He couldn’t remember their full names. But one of them.
Not far away, sitting in the snow with his back against a tree, was J.K. Coe.
River went to join him.
When Frank had gone over the cliff, River had lain breathing heavily for maybe a minute, staring at an empty sky; a huge grey vault of untouchable space. He could still feel Frank’s grip on his upper arms, and was unsure of the sequence that had thrown him free. At last, though, he’d got up and approached the cliff edge. When he’d looked over, there’d been no sign of Frank. The drop wasn’t sheer, which didn’t mean Frank hadn’t ended in the water way below, and didn’t mean he wasn’t spread-eagled on the rocks, camouflaged by his parka. Alternatively, River supposed, he could be clinging on somewhere invisibly, or making his way, handhold by handhold, back up the steep drop, like a family-sized Tom Cruise. If so, River supposed he’d be seeing him again before long. Frank wasn’t one for a quiet exit.
He’d hunted about a bit, recovered his gun, and decided to head back inland, find Coe and Shirley. If Louisa and young Harper were hiding out along the coastal path, Frank would have found them. And if he’d found them, he’d have let River know: the man had been incapable of not making speeches. So this was another dead end. He’d walked back along the path, rejoined the road, and navigated his way to the turning Coe had taken; towards the first of the barns he’d identified on his map.
And here he was.
He sat next to Coe, and neither spoke for a long while, until River at last said, “Okay.” Then said it again, breathing it out slowly, making it a paragraph.
“O—kaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyy . . .”
Then he closed J.K. Coe’s sightless eyes with his palm.
From a distance, Coe had looked peaceful, as if he were taking a rest after combat, his hands folded across his stomach. Up close, he had clearly been holding his stomach in. The knife—the other man’s knife, River guessed—lay on the ground beside him, staining the snow, and if an expert might have been able to choreograph the moments preceding this tableau, it was enough for River to know that Coe had won the battle, having made his way to this tree once the fighting was done. Though even a partisan view would have to admit that, long term, you’d have to call it a draw.
“I’m sorry,” he told his dead colleague, then went through his pockets, removing Coe’s ID and phone. Unlike River’s this still had some charge in it.
As if his looting had triggered an alarm, a phone in the other body’s pocket chose that moment to ring.
Emma was dead.
When Lucas arrived at the gate marking the end of the estuary footpath, instead of heading straight up to the High Street he veered left, along a lane skirting the town’s southern edge which a signpost warned led nowhere. He left a broad, scattered mess behind him in the shape of frightened tracks in the snow, but there was nothing he could do about that.
Emma was dead.
He’d explored this town a million times, on boring holidays. Had arrived every year hoping some major refurbishment had taken place—an amusement arcade, a multiplex, an international athletics stadium—and hunting for them had left him familiar with the tiny sidestreets, all the rubbish business premises. There was a garage along here; not a city-type garage, with a car showroom attached, but an oily little yard where a man in overalls tinkered with bits. His mum had brought the Skoda here once to have a tickling cough in its engine cured: the car had been left out on the lane for her to collect, its keys balanced out of sight on its onside rear wheel.
Emma was dead.
There was no escaping the rhythm of the thought: it was there in the heavy tread of his feet on packed snow, in the pounding of blood in his ears. Emma was dead. Lucas had met her for the first time just the previous night, but that had been long enough to cause her death, because that was the short brutal truth of it: Emma would still be alive if not for Lucas.
And Lucas, too, might be dead soon, because whoever was looking for him was out here somewhere in the snow.
