He came through the gate, still using the walking stick he’d found earlier, still not admitting to himself how useful it was—he was too old to be scrambling up cliffsides; that was a job for young men and fools—and rested for a moment just short of the right-angled corner where the road dwindled into a lane. And that’s where he was when the car went past, bucking and slewing across the snow-packed surface like a drunk on a skateboard, with Lucas Harper at the wheel.
When the corpse’s phone rang, River had taken cover. Standard practice: if you were heading back to base, you let whoever was guarding know you were on your way, in case they got jumpy. Being jumpy was no longer in this guy’s future, but whoever was calling didn’t know that. There were bootprints leading round back of the barn and he followed them rather than make new ones, and though it quickly became obvious what the space had been used for, he had no time to find a better spot: the dead man’s phone rang again, and stopped, and a minute later a car made its laborious way up the snowed-on track.
Within the frozen smell of excrement River crouched, listening to an engine idle and cough and then stop altogether. Heard a car door open then shut. Imagined bitter breathing and angry eyes as whoever it was found his dead colleague, then J.K. Coe, under a tree, his insides partly out.
Whatever had haunted Coe these past years, he was safe from it now.
River eased the gun from his pocket.
Whoever it was stopped moving, as if weighing up options. River approved of the strategy—size up the situation before committing yourself—even if he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t one he generally adopted himself. He wanted to check the gun, see how many rounds he had left, but it would make too much noise: every snap, every wiggle, would magnify in the cold country air. Just holding it was noisy. And he could barely slip a finger through the trigger guard, but didn’t want to remove his glove yet, in case his hand froze before he needed it . . . And then more noise from out front: the guy had formulated a plan, which, by the sound of it, involved dragging the dead inside the barn.
He was halfway through this task when he was joined by someone else, arriving on foot.
One of them was Lars, he gathered from the greeting. J.K. Coe had identified them by name: Lars and Anton and Cyril. So Lars was upright, and either Anton or Cyril was dead. And Frank, of course, had gone over a cliff, but River would have been happier if it had been two cliffs. Frank wasn’t the kind to die quietly, and he’d barely made a sound when he’d dropped out of sight.
There were more sounds from inside now, mutterings in German, and noises of dragging and splashing. And then the car started up, and he assumed they were off, and thought:
They drove the car into the barn and killed the engine.
River stopped moving.
Splashing noises, he thought.
He could hear the men going out front again, the stamping of boots, a murmur of speech.
The fizzing of matches.
Then the barn exploded.
Louisa reached the High Street, looked left, looked right, and saw no Lucas. She wondered if he’d returned to the cottage—a wounded animal move. Go back to what smelled familiar. He’d be hiding in that cupboard under the stairs, or under a duvet in a corner of the bedroom, or—
Or none of those places, because here he came, jackrabbiting up the street in a tortured car.
And behind him, on the pavement, Frank Harkness.
Others, too, because Lucas was making a splash. If he’d driven before, he hadn’t done so through snow, and was making the job of it you’d expect. The car wasn’t so much moving forward as undergoing a series of irregular detonations, and if the road hadn’t been gritted by staff from the nearby Healthcare Centre, would have either stalled completely or flipped by now. But whatever you called it, progress of a sort was being made, and Lucas hit a sudden spurt as he reached the turn-off to the Centre’s car park, where the snow was flattened through use, and approached the junction with the High Street at twenty miles an hour.
She saw Frank Harkness see her, and even at this distance—he was a hundred yards down the road—could tell there was something wrong with the shape of his head, but it wasn’t slowing him down. Here he came.
The people strewing grit had stopped to watch Lucas’s erratic performance, and one of them dropped a shovel and raised an angry fist—the car’s owner?
Beyond them, way down the bottom of the road, a woman had appeared through the gate to the estuary footpath. She was shouting, waving, summoning help, and Louisa thought
