Chapter Seven
Those echoes of Natasha had been too remote, she had offered no clues, and Cole had no idea which direction to take. Logic dictated northwest, back toward Wales and Roberts' home. But something else nagged at Cole, and the more he thought about it the more elusive it became. He headed north, listening out for Natasha, willing her to come back to him with her taunting faux child's voice, hating the idea of her in his mind but knowing that it was the only way to track her. The fact that he now believed she wanted him to follow changed nothing. She would slip up, or Roberts would make a mistake, and Cole would need only the slightest opportunity to put a bullet in the bitch's head.
He threw the farmers' shotgun into a field beside the road—it was too difficult to hide—and the .45 was back in the holster on his belt. The magazine had been reloaded. The near miss at the cottage had angered him, but he was doing his best to put that anger to good use.
He was trying not to think of the woman he had killed that morning. She had been in the way, that was all.
None of this was his fault.
"She didn't feel improved," he said. "She felt dead!" Natasha and her chains had knocked him out on the moor, and even though he had not seen her in the darkness he had felt her, a damp, slick thing, filled with no signs of life at all. Cold. Wet. She had been below ground for ten years. Cole could still remember putting her there, the cries for mercy that turned into screams of rage as the soil was piled in on top of her. I'll see you again, she had said.
I'm a good man, he thought for the thousandth time, and he pictured the farming family he could so easily have left weighted down at the bottom of their slurry pit.
And then it came to him. Not dwelling on what was nagging him brought it home; her voice, when it was loud enough to hear, had come from the northeast. He was not certain how he knew this but the knowledge was welcome, and undoubted. When he had picked up her voice on the way to the farm something inside had clicked, a direction-finder that he was unaware he even had. Turning his head left and right now did nothing, but when he heard her again, he would be sure.
At the next junction he turned right and headed east, reading a map book as he drove, trying to find a road that lead northeast.
Who knew, he might even luck out. Find the right road, come across Roberts burying his wife in some field, kill him and open the boot and stare down at Natasha, gloating right back at her as he placed the .45 against her leathery skull and pulled the trigger.
Just how is she improved?
Yeah, right, it would be that easy.
"Yeah, right."
Fucker …, he heard a few minutes later. Eat my shit, Mister Wolf … lost … going … fucker.
Yeah, right.
Tom remembered a story his mother had told him when he was in his teens. It had affected him strongly then, and now it seemed to say a lot about the situation he was in, both literally and in a spiritual sense. He found some solace in it; there was precious little else to comfort him. And remembering the story brought him somehow closer to his mother. However old a man may be, he always wants his mum in times of crisis and stress.
She was a nurse for much of her life, and when she was in her twenties she had befriended an elderly patient in the hospital where she worked. He was in his nineties, a veteran of two World Wars, blinded at Dunkirk, and a compulsive gambler. Horses were his preference, and he chose them by name alone. He liked names, he said, because they told him much that his ruined eyes could not. Tom's mother would take him on trips from the hospital during her days off, sitting with him at the bookies' while he placed bets and stared at the ceiling, listening to the races broadcast live over the radio. If he lost he would smile and pat her hand, and if he won he would buy her lunch and tell her about his life. She was more than content to listen, she said, because he was a fascinating old man. Whether he talked about the trench hell of World War I or his time on a farm as a youngster, his stories were always rich and compulsive. Perhaps such storytelling talent had something to do with being blind.
One day, on the drive back to the hospital, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw him smiling up at the ceiling, a look on his face she had never seen before. "What a beautiful light!" he said, and he was still smiling as his head rested back against the seat.
She pulled over and felt the old man's wrist, but she already knew that he was dead. She drove to a police station and told them what had happened, and when she said she was a nurse they suggested she should drive him to the hospital herself. So there she was, in the middle of London, a corpse in the back of her car with betting slips spilling from his pockets and that beatific grin forever on his face. She received more than a few strange looks from pedestrians and other drivers, and by the time she arrived at the hospital she was laughing through her tears.
Tom knelt in the front seat of his ruined car and stared back at Jo's corpse. There was no grin on her face, other than the clown's smile painted there in dried blood. And no one could mistake her as sleeping. Not with the wound in the back of her head, and the amount of blood on her nightclothes.
"I hope you found the beautiful light," Tom said, reaching back to touch his dead wife's hand. "You were my light. I'm sorry, Jo. It's all my fault. I'm so sorry."
Natasha, perhaps using her child's honest sense of what is right and wrong, remained silent as Tom wept.
Later, Natasha said, He's coming for us.
"So what can I do about it? He's a killer, he's got a gun. I have my dead wife and a child's corpse in a ruined car. It's finished." Tom found no hope in that morning's dawn, and the potential only for pain.
Not for Steven. Daddy, all this was for Steven, wasn't it? How can it be finished when it's only just begun?
"I don't believe you," Tom said. He was sitting in the driver's seat, trying to work out what to do. He could think of nothing.
Natasha retreated to a deep corner of his mind and began to sob. I'm only doing this for you, she said.
He wondered how a dead girl could cry. "I don't believe that, either."
The girl was silent, still sobbing, and she withdrew and left him alone.
Tom gasped at the sensation of being abandoned and leaned back in his seat. Was she lying? Could Steven really still be alive? He felt in his bones that he could, and if there was even the slightest chance that his son was not dead, he owed it to himself—and to Jo—to try to find him. There was little else left for him now, nothing to go home to, no future …
No future. His hopes and dreams of a gentle old age spent with his wife had been blasted away by that bastard's gun.
Grief birthed anger, and Tom realised that he had been angry since that first encounter on the Plain. It had kept him going, boosted adrenaline into his system and given his aging muscles precious fuel to drive him on. He had excavated a mass grave and crashed his way from a frontyard under fire. That was not real, not him at all, and yet he had mud under his fingernails and the dead wife to prove it all.
And the thing in the boot. He had that, too.
"Natasha?" he said.
Daddy?
He ignored that. Let her have her own dreams for now, whoever or whatever she was. "Natasha, how do you know where Steven may be? You have to tell me what you know if you want me to trust you. Look at it with my eyes … I'm sitting here talking to fresh air, and a corpse I just dug up is communicating with me in my head. You have to understand my doubt. You have to accept my uncertainty."
I already showed you something about me while you slept, she said. That was honest, wasn't it? It's bad to lie. Only naughty children lie. I'm not naughty. I'm a berserker, and my family were berserkers, and they kept us hungry so that we would do those things for them.