And she’d got that right, Roddy thought. They’d scribbled on the man with a razor. All across his cheeks, as if they were using him as a memo pad: a brief reminder to themselves, and the whole of the rest of the world.
Can’t even fucking spell, Roddy thought.
The snow lay unruffled on the field, as far as they could tell.
“She might be under all that,” Shirley said. “It might not have snowed until after.”
After what, River didn’t ask.
Shirley elaborated anyway. “What I’m saying, her phone might still be in her pocket.”
“It was already snowing when she went quiet,” said River. “So there’d be tracks across the field.”
“Not necessarily. It’s snowed more since.”
But there’d be bumps and ridges, thought River. Wouldn’t there? If Louisa was somewhere in that field, or in the ditch that ran alongside it, traces of her passage would be visible; a coded message scribbled on the landscape.
He said, “The plough’s been past, so there’s no clues on the road.”
They all knew that anyway, but he needed to be saying something. In case it was true, and Louisa was out in that field somewhere, lying quietly beneath the snow.
“What’s that?” asked Coe.
He was looking ahead, at where the road crested against the skyline.
They drove on to where the parked car sat on a verge, half-buried by the plough’s passing.
“Louisa’s,” said Shirley.
River was already on the roadside, scraping snow from the parked car’s windows; tenting his hand to peer in. “It’s empty.”
Shirley had joined him, and went round back to open the boot. “Tell you what,” she said. “She keeps a monkey wrench in here usually. It’s not there now.”
River had a shrewd idea how Shirley knew about the wrench, and what use she might have put it to in the past. He tried the driver’s door, and found it unlocked. But the car was still empty, and there were no scrawled messages, no clues, to be seen.
Shirley slipped under his outstretched arm and popped open the glovebox. A pair of sunglasses dropped out. “When did they make it illegal to carry chocolate?” she grumbled.
“We know Louisa was here,” he said. “We know she dumped her phone nearby, next to the Fitbit she was looking for. But if she was under all that snow, there’d be traces of it happening. I think she got rid of it on purpose. She was going dark.”
“Which is protocol,” said J.K. Coe, “after hostile contact.”
“And she’s got her monkey wrench with her,” said Shirley. “Which means the hostiles might have suffered some contact themselves.”
And if one of those hostiles was Frank Harkness, River hoped the wrench had left a trough in his head. But he couldn’t see it happening: Frank was too cagey to be caught offguard by a blunt instrument. Though maybe all he meant was, he’d come off second-best to Frank himself, and in some hollow corner of his soul, didn’t want to believe Louisa was capable of doing better.
Shit.
He shut the car door. It was freezing to the touch; rather like himself. A night in a car and no breakfast. Who could blame him for his thoughts?
“You said you had a plan,” he said to Coe. “Care to share it with the rest of us?”
“Not a plan as such.”
“But anything’s better than nothing, right?”
Shirley said, “Does it involve food?”
“Shut up, will you, Shirl?”
“Shut up yourself.”
“That’s a good idea,” said Coe. “We could fight.”
“. . . Maybe later,” Shirley conceded.
“Your plan,” said River.
Coe waggled his phone. “Map of the area.”
“And?”
“If she’s gone dark, she’ll have looked for shelter. Uninhabited shelter. There are farm buildings marked on here. Barns.”
“Louisa?” said Shirley. “In a barn?”
“Well, I can’t see her building a treehouse,” River said. “You got a better idea?”
“Coming here wasn’t a great one to start with,” Shirley said. “I’m giving up on ideas for the time being.”
“We’ll need to split up,” Coe said.
“Dibs on the wheels,” said Shirley.
River said to Coe, “I’ll take Louisa’s.”
“With four flats?”
Jesus, right. He hadn’t noticed for the snow.
“Okay then,” he said again. “So two of us are walking. Where are these barns?”
Coe turned his phone to face them. Its screen showed white, with a tracery of grey lines, and could as easily have been a photograph of their surroundings as a map.
“Yeah, I’m gunna need more instructions,” said Shirley.
River took a closer look, and said, “This the kind of thing you mean?” He pointed at an oblong shape tucked into the corner of a larger oblong shape. A dwelling in a field, which odds on was a barn.
“Uh-huh.”
He tweaked the picture, made it smaller. The coastline appeared.
“I’ll take that direction.”
Coe nodded, then turned to Shirley.
“Whatever.”
“Okay. Go back the way we came, then take the first left. You’ll come to a wood. There are buildings just beyond it.”
“Sounds like a farm.”
“Might be.”
“Will there be dogs?”
“Dogs are a bit like fast-food restaurants,” Coe said. “Most maps haven’t got round to including them yet.”
“I thought you didn’t do jokes,” Shirley reminded him. Then she said, “You know what bothers me?”
