But Vi didn’t hear. She was bending into the shelf under the counter, looking for her bottle.
Outside, Ron lit a cigarette while Silva picked up the sandwich board sign and took it inside. When she came back, he nodded toward the Land Rover, and Silva clambered up into the passenger seat. As they drove off, Vi was staring out at them across the window display of faded boxes and dusty bars of fudge with her drink in one hand, waving with the slow, clawed fingers of the other. Ron pulled onto the road and turned left toward the bridge.
“Stop! What are you doing? This is the wrong way!” Silva said. “We can’t go over the bridge, we have to go to Netherloch. To the little bridge.”
Ron shook his head. “There’s a bottleneck at Netherloch. If we go that way it’ll be over an hour. This way you’ll be across in less than twenty minutes. You won’t even get your feet wet.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, I won’t make you row. Trust me.”
“Row? We are going in a boat? I can’t! I can’t go in a boat!”
“Why not? You want to swim?”
“I can’t swim!”
“Well, you’ll be better off in the boat then, won’t you?” Ron laughed, rolled down the window and threw out his cigarette end.
“I can’t go in a boat!”
The sudden rush of air from the window felt white and clear, like a beam of cold light. Silva was aware he had half-turned and was looking at her and at the same time was somehow, almost magically, keeping his attention on the road. He had careful, strange eyes; they traveled out and over her as she sat there, dissolving the shadows around her so that she might be unconcealed to him, fixed and memorized. She felt she was being recorded like a specimen, categorized as an example of something or other, but she had no idea what.
“You can go in a boat.” He spoke matter-of-factly, winding the window up. “You’ll be fine.”
For a while Silva stared ahead at the road until she felt safe enough, in the dark of the cab, to look at Ron again. She could see that his face was grainy with white stubble and his square, shaved head sat on his shoulders like a boulder on a ridge. Why had she agreed to this? She had no reason to trust him. The back of the Land Rover was dark but obviously not empty: every bump and curve in the road brought dull clunking noises from an uneven mass of vague, heavy shapes behind. There could be guns in there. Knives. Chains. Rope. Even with just a pickax and spade he could kill her and nobody would ever know. Or out there on the river in the pitch dark, he could push her overboard. She turned back and gazed through the window. Her body might be buried among the trees or under the dark hills or lost at the bottom of the river, and Stefan would never know where she was. Would Anna, growing up, explain her mother’s absence to other people with three words: she went missing? It came to her suddenly that disappearance was worse even than death. Where were they?
“You’re not from round here,” Ron said.
“No.”
“But you’re not a tourist. Are you a student?”
“No.”
“Your husband. What sort of work was it you said he was looking for, again?”
“I didn’t say.”
He gave a short laugh and lifted his hands from the wheel for a moment, in mock fear. His eyes rested on her again.
“Okay. None of my business. Here we are, anyway,” he said, tapping on the steering wheel with straight, thick fingers, and turning off the road onto a gouged-out patch of land lit by a single orange light, bordered by a chain-link fence. He parked beside a security shed and got out, took a hard hat and a flashlight from the back of the Land Rover, and spoke a few words to the man at the shed window. The man snorted and shrugged, then handed another hard hat out through the window, which Ron told Silva to put on. The man came out and unlocked the gate in the fence.
“ ’Night, then, Ron. ’Night, madam,” he said, assessing Silva as she walked through. “Mind how you go.”
“She’s just going across the river,” Ron said.
The man laughed. “Hard hats must be worn at all times!” he called after them.
Ron led the way down a track of deep tire ruts, past giant machinery and stacked stone blocks and mounds of sand, silent under a misty glow from the moon. Bright electric light and music and men’s voices from other sheds at the far edge of the site spilled over the darkness. When they reached the jetty, Ron handed Silva the flashlight and swung himself down a metal ladder into a motor launch bobbing in the inky water. Silva handed over her bag and the flashlight, and he helped her down and onto a long seat that ran around the side of the boat. He started the motor, and at once, from somewhere among the sheds and piles of machinery, the barking and howling of several dogs rose into the air. The engine stalled. The barking grew louder and more vicious; two men shouted. Silva turned to Ron.
“Security. They’re locked in. Don’t worry.”
At that moment the boat surged away from the jetty with a force that pushed her back against the stern. Her hands found a rope, and she clung on. Icy spray flew up and soaked her face as the boat cut a path through the water into darkness and a night wind that carried the scent of oil and seawater.
Out on the river it was impossible to speak above the noise of the engine and the wind. Ron took off his hard hat and motioned to Silva that she could do the same. Immediately her hair flew up in a tangle, and as she pulled at it and tried to gather it into a roll under the collar of her jacket, she heard him laugh. The pitch of the motor rose, and the boat rocked and raced on. In another two minutes they were more than halfway across and Ron slowed down. The wind eased and the black water turned satiny under the light of the mooring they were heading for, the pontoon at the construction site near the bridge’s south end. Silva could see that the bank was dotted here and there with tiny bonfires, glowing on the shingle between the river and the heavy, dark shadow of the scrub that grew almost to the water’s edge. She strived to get her bearings in the dark. Beyond the last of the bonfires, the bank curved inward, and set deep and hidden into that curve some way farther up was the trailer. The last fire couldn’t be all that far from it. Or were there more fires around the bend in the river, presently out of her sight line-or could there be one at the trailer? Could it be Stefan? Ron cut the engine, brought the boat to, jumped out, and attached the rope. He helped Silva onto the jetty.
“That wasn’t difficult, was it?” he said. “You made it safe and sound.”
Silva was peering anxiously upstream. “What are those fires?”
“Bums, turned off their patch. Where they camped out, it’s the salvage site now,” Ron said. “They won’t be bothering you. Don’t worry.”
She fixed her attention on the lights of the service station up ahead across the cleared wasteland, then glanced again at the bonfires receding into the dark of the riverbank. “Well. Well, thank you. I should go.”
But she stood where she was. How could she move from here, not knowing what the fires meant? She didn’t know whether to run toward or away from them. “Where to?”
“I don’t know. I mean-”
“Where do you live?”
“I-Up there.” She nodded in the direction of the service station and the road. “Not far from there.”
“Come on, then. I’ll go with you.”
“Aren’t you going back across?”
“Don’t need to rush back. Come on.”
He steered her up from the jetty and across the ground that, just as on the opposite side, was now a site for the bridge salvage and rebuilding.
When they got to the service station entrance, he said, “You hungry? I am. Want some coffee?”
Silva shook her head. “I need to go.”
“You always look frightened. Are you in trouble? Where are you going?”
She waved a hand vaguely down the road. “Not far.”