Lucas reached the High Street junction and ploughed straight on into a craft shop window.
Way off in the distance, maybe a mile out of town, a thin black plume of smoke spiralled skywards.
Much nearer than that, uniformed police officers were emerging from their station along the road.
Louisa was first to the crashed car, but only just. Onlookers had formed a cordon round the shop front almost before she’d checked that Lucas, though dazed, appeared unhurt.
One of the police officers approached, while the other pair went haring down the road towards the shouting woman, and the wood where Emma’s body lay.
Frank Harkness halted on the opposite pavement. He looked up the road, down the road, then focused on the tumult round the car. To Louisa’s eye, he was calculating odds.
Specifically, now, he was looking straight at Louisa.
The police officer was asking Lucas if he was okay, asking the assembled onlookers to move back, but Louisa ignored her and remained where she was, on the pavement next to the driver’s door, on a carpet of broken glass and snow.
She was wearing dead Emma’s coat, of course, and tapped its breast pocket slowly, never breaking eye contact with Frank.
He stared at her for a full quarter minute, while all around the small crowd pulsed and wobbled. A siren was starting up somewhere: she guessed an ambulance.
And eventually Frank nodded, a minor tip of the head, then walked off down the road, his walking stick carried level with the pavement: a pointless accessory.
Louisa breathed out at last, and stepped away from the car.
“Explosion” was an exaggeration, but still: there’d been petrol involved, and plenty of timber.
While the barn burned, River lay in the snow against a hummock, feeling his back grow colder, his front warmer, and knowing that the two bad actors, Lars and whoever, were heading along the footpath to the coast. One bullet wasn’t going to be enough, not out in the open. And somewhere in the flames in front of him, or in the black angry smoke roiling into the sky, J.K. Coe was taking leave of the planet.
If they’d packed up and left the scene, it meant their job was done. Which meant Louisa and the boy, Min Harper’s kid, were presumably ticked boxes by now; their lives scored off the register.
He didn’t want to think about Louisa being dead.
For once, just once, he’d like an op that didn’t turn into some catastrophic clusterfuck.
He used Coe’s phone, because his own was out of charge, and called Shirley.
“Where the hell are you?”
“Who the hell wants to know?”
“It’s me. River.”
“Why’ve you got Coe’s phone?”
River said nothing.
Shirley said, “Shit.”
“Where are you?” he said again.
“Heading back to the main road,” she said, her voice quieter than normal. “There’s a fire up on the hill.”
“That’ll be me.”
The flames were still biting chunks out of the morning when he reached the road to find Shirley approaching on foot. Which didn’t bode well for Roddy Ho’s car, but, never high on River’s list of priorities, Ho’s vehicular welfare was even less a concern than usual right now.
Shirley was holding something wrapped in kitchen foil.
“What happened to Coe?”
River gestured with his head back up the hillside, to the burning barn.
She looked that way, and he couldn’t read the expression on her face. Sometimes, Shirley Dander was an ABC. The rest, she was lost in translation.
She said, “Did you find Harkness?”
“Uh-huh.”
“And?”
River shrugged.
“What about Louisa?”
“Don’t know yet.”
Shirley said, “Well. She might be okay.” Then she handed him the foil package. “Here. I got you this.”
“What is it?”
“Sausage sandwich.”
It was warm to the touch.
He said, “You only brought one? What was Coe going to eat?”
She didn’t reply, and he thought, yeah, right. She’d brought it for Coe.
After a while he rang Lamb, and gave him the story.
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