“I won’t, but try anything funny and it’s straight back in here. Understand?”
Jones nodded. Harlan helped him out of the boot and into the front passenger seat. Jones cried out as his weight came down on his pulverised hands. Giving him a warning look, Harlan cut the tape binding his wrists. He rebound his hands in front of him.
“Which way?” asked Harlan.
“Just get onto the motorway and I’ll tell you when to leave it.”
As fast as he dared, Harlan drove to the motorway. He kept one eye on the road and one on Jones. Jones watched him right back as if trying to work out what he was thinking. “I know who you are,” he said suddenly, eyes widening with realisation. “You’re that guy who killed Susan Reed’s husband. I’ve seen your face on the news. Your name’s H…Ha…”
“Harlan Miller.”
“Yeah, that’s it. You used to be a copper, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“So you know you’ll never get away with this.”
“Who said anything about getting away with this?”
“You want to go back to prison?”
“I want to find Ethan Reed.”
“I understand. I get it. You want to save the boy to make up for what you did to his old man. But you and I both know he’s long beyond saving. Whoever took him did his thing and killed him weeks-”
“Shut up,” broke in Harlan, a twitch pulling at the corner of his mouth.
“Look, what I’m saying is there’s no need for this. You tell your copper mates about the caravan and they’ll find it in no time. Just let me go. Let me go now and I promise I won’t give your name to-”
“One more fucking word and it’s back in the boot for you.”
Jones grimaced at the threat. He fell to studying his hands. A great shudder racked him. “Maybe it’s best if you kill me,” he murmured. “Because if I can’t paint, I…I don’t know what I’ll do.”
I don’t know what I’ll do. The threat implicit in those words made Harlan go cold. He didn’t doubt for a second that Jones had been, at least to some degree, telling the truth when he’d said that painting kept him straight. Without it, surely it was just a matter of time before he answered the call of his own darkness. And then more people — children, their parents, relatives and friends — would suffer. The cycle of devastated lives would continue, expanding and intersecting like ripples in a pond. And, Harlan reflected with a mounting sense of guilt, it would be his fault. Unless, unless…The itch in his mind became a burning, and spread. No, he said silently but vehemently to himself, no! He wound down his window. Tears sprung into his eyes as the air hit him like ice-water. The heat receded again. But for how long? he wondered darkly. For how long?
They stayed on the M1 and then the M62 for nearly an hour and a half, passing fields of crops and livestock, lonely industrial estates, and the sleeping outskirts of Wakefield, Leeds and Huddersfield, before crossing the black peaty spine of the Pennines. “Come off here and head towards Saddleworth,” said Jones, gesturing at a junction, beyond which hills loomed like solid shadows in the moonlight.
Twenty minutes or so after leaving the motorway, having been directed into a snarl of narrow lanes, Harlan asked with a note of doubt and warning in his voice, “How much further?”
“Shh,” hissed Jones, looking intently at the passing landscape. “Let me concentrate.” He pointed at a humpbacked stone bridge that crossed a stream. “I remember that. It’s not far now.”
The moon was hidden from sight as they passed into a mixed wood of towering deciduous trees and pine plantations. “There!” said Jones, pointing at a wooden gate with a sign on it that read ‘PRIVATE NO PUBLIC RIGHT OF WAY."
“Are you sure this is it?” asked Harlan.
“Yes. I remember laughing because some joker had scratched out the L in public.” Jones didn’t smile at the joke now.
As Harlan turned off the road, the car’s headlights illuminated a narrow wheel-rutted track cutting between uniform ranks of pine trees. He got out of the car and approached the gate. It was secured with a chain and padlock, but the frame was so soft with rot that he was able to loosen a nail and unhook the chain. He drove through the gate, then closed it, returned the chain to its place and pushed the nail back in with his thumb — if anyone else came to the gate that night, he didn’t want to give them a hint someone had been through it.
“How far to the caravan?” asked Harlan.
Jones shrugged. “About a mile, I think.”
“You think?”
“Yeah, I think, I think. What do you expect? Like I told you, I haven’t been here for donkey’s years.”
Harlan leaned in close to Jones, eyes glinting like steel beads. “Well you need to do better than just think. You need to be certain. If this friend of yours, the Prophet is-”
“He’s not my friend,” Jones was quick to point out. “He’s just someone I bought some stuff off.”
“Whatever. If he’s already at the caravan, I don’t exactly want to announce our arrival.”
“Okay, okay. Just give me a moment.” Jones closed his eyes, forehead wrinkling as he dredged through his memories. “These pine trees go on for a couple of hundred yards, then…then the road goes down into a dip where it crosses a stream. That’s where the pines stop and the oaks and beeches start. From there it’s about two or three hundred yards to a clearing set off to the right of the road. That’s where the caravan is.”
Harlan drove slowly along the track. Like Jones had said, after a short distance it descended into a valley with a shallow, boggy stream at its bottom. The car rocked from side to side as it wallowed through the mud and climbed the stream’s far bank. The trees closed in thickly on either side, their branches brushing the car, almost blotting out the sky. Harlan had a sense that he was entering somewhere cut off from the rest of the world. He’d used to love such isolated places before becoming a copper. But the longer he’d been in the job, the more their silence and secrecy made him uneasy. Where another person saw a romantic spot to spend a night or two, he saw somewhere where someone could commit murder and hide a body without fear of being seen or heard. He switched off the headlights and crawled along for another hundred yards or so, watching for a gap in the trees where he could pull off the track. There wasn’t one. He stopped the car. He didn’t like leaving it in full view, but he couldn’t risk continuing any further until he’d checked the caravan out. He popped the boot and turned to Jones.
“No, please, please don’t make me go back in there,” begged Jones. “I’m not gonna try to get away. I mean, come on, where would I go out here in the middle of nowhere?”
Harlan got out of the car and made his way around to Jones, who recoiled from him, shaking his head frantically. He took out his knife and brought the blade close to Jones’s face. Jones stopped struggling. Dragging in a quivering breath, he stood out of the car and shuffled to the boot. He lay limp and resigned as Harlan wrapped more tape around his ankles and mouth. Harlan retrieved the torch from the backseat, before heading along the track. He covered the lens with his fingers, letting out just enough light to illuminate his way. Again, Jones’s memory proved reliable — after maybe two hundred yards, the wall of trees gave way on the right to an overgrown grassy clearing. The caravan, a tiny oval tourer, its roof livid with mould, was set to the back of the clearing. No lights showed in its windows. There was no car outside it, but the grass was flattened in places as though one had been there recently. To its right was a roughly built shelter, a beard of vines dangling from its tarpaulin roof.
Resisting the urge to investigate further, Harlan made his way back to the car. He drove past the clearing, stopping out of sight of it around a bend. Thinking about ringing Jim, he checked his phone. It had no signal. There’d be no calling for backup out here.