He's not just a loner any more. He's lonely. But the habit of solitude is something that has to be kicked, like a drug, and Tom Amis isn't sure that he has the reserves. There's a party at Liston Hall tonight; he could have gone, but instead he's here, same as every night, in this hundred year old hunting lodge with its rambling outbuildings and its faulty generator and only a photograph to talk to.
And the radio.
Some nights, he calls up the late show DJ on the request line. He never gives his name, and he always asks for the same dedication. They love that kind of stuff on late night radio. They call him the mystery man with a record for his mystery girl; people have been writing in wanting to know more, women especially, but Amis doesn't have the will to respond. Six months ago he'd have gone for it, maybe written back to some of them, seen it as a way out of the rut that his life had become… but not now. There's no way of explaining the rules of attraction, and Amis is even less expert than most.
He stretches out on his camp bed. The lights flicker to the beat of the generator. He looks at his photograph.
He took it himself, out on the terrace at the lakeside restaurant. Amis doesn't have much in the way of material goods but his camera, like his watch, is one of the best. He ran off almost an entire film that day, mostly on views, but of all the shots this one was the best of them. What does it show?
His waitress.
He stares at the photograph. He knows almost nothing about her.
But he can't get her out of his mind.
He wonders why.
In another town, outside yet another radio station, Pavel Ilyitch returns to his car. It's still in the shadows where he left it, grimy windscreen reflecting the neon tracery of a department store sign on the next block. Five floors below, somebody is sounding off as the traffic before them makes a slow start at the lights.
Will it be here? Will this be where he finds her?
Pavel levers himself into his car, forcing movement out of a body that longs for sleep more than anything else. The most that he can promise it will be a few snatched hours on the back seat in a quiet place somewhere. This is how almost all of his days have been spent, casting bait, checking behind him, moving on; apart from odd nights in hostels where he can get a bath and about thirteen hours of near-coma to catch up, he's been continuously on the road since the dawn that he stole the car and the cash that has become his fighting fund.
The car is barely recognisable now; so filthy that some kids have finger-written their names in the dirt on the boot. He's had a couple of bumps, as well, one of which has left a long and jagged crease in the body almost from headlight to taillight; that one wasn't his fault, but he drove away from it fast to avoid the questions that would certainly follow. The inside is a mess, even though he's come to look on it as his only home and so tries to keep it straight.
He switches on the interior light and picks up a bundle from the passenger seat. The main part of the bundle is the Daily Mail Yearbook, much-creased and stuffed with notes and odd bits of paper. It's held together by an elastic band which has two ballpoint pens clamped under it. He takes the band off and starts to sort through; he ticks off one more name from the Yearbook's list of radio stations, and then copies its telephone number across onto his checklist. When he's exhausted the list, he isn't sure what he'll do; he's heard of pirate stations and Citizen's Band clubs, but he'll have to find out more.
The idea of giving up is no longer a real possibility. For Pavel, as for Alina, there can be no going back.
He yawns and then he rests an elbow on the steering wheel, his head on his hand. Nobody is around. Nobody will mind if he just grabs a few minutes' rest before he moves on — although rest, for Pavel, has become little more than a bothersome physical requirement with no spiritual element in it. Pavel is driven, and the edge has become his home territory.
Someone raps on the window.
Pavel is jerked awake; he sees a uniform.
The man mouths at him through the glass.
"This is the hotel's car park, you know. Not a public doss house."
Pavel nods, embarrassed, and he doesn't meet the parking attendant's eyes as he starts the car.
And as he drives away, he's thinking not about the assertiveness of a petty official, but about the horizon. In the province of Karelia, close to the border with Finland, the horizon beyond the land and the lakes is always flat and far away. This was the landscape in which Alina spent her childhood; he wonders in what kind of landscape she finds herself now, and if her chances of happiness are any greater.
He's doubtful.
Because he knows that no matter how hard you might try to reach it, no horizon ever gets any closer.
PART FIVE
TWENTY-FIVE
The next time that he saw Diane was at the funeral, some three weeks later. She came alone, as a representative of the Liston Estate, and she stood alongside him in Three Oaks Bay's tiny hillside churchyard. Together they watched across the old gravestones as Ted Hammond waited patiently by the lych gate, thanking each of the mourners as they left.
"I don't know what to say to him," she admitted.
"Who does?" Pete said.
Ted was looking dignified, but broken. His clothes didn't fit, his skin was grey, his eyes were dead. His sister had come over with her family from the next valley and was standing just behind him; Shaun had flown home as well, a taller, broader Wayne-that-might-have-been, but he hadn't yet come out of the church.
When Pete finally turned to move away, Diane had gone. Standing in her place was Alina, red-eyed and waiting to be taken home.
They'd found them after five days, with Sandy's parents hammering at Ted every minute of the time. Ted's initial fear was that they'd done something stupid and run away together, but then after a while he'd begun to hope for this and nothing worse. The missing keys to the boat house and to the Princess had been the clue, spotted by Pete and reported to Ross Aldridge in a phonecall when Ted was out of earshot. It all made a horrible kind of sense, and he hoped that he was wrong. But he wasn't. Aldridge had found the lights shorted out, the cruiser's batteries run down, and the two children lying just under the surface of the water inside the big sliding gates. They'd been entwined in an embrace, and Sandy's hair had been spread like a fan; by Aldridge's account it had been a touching, harrowing sight.
The inquest was local, held in the parish hall and presided over by a doctor from the big resort town further down the lake. The locked doors, the circumstances, and the lack of contradictory medical evidence led to a verdict of misadventure within fifteen minutes. One of the tabloids got a couple of columns out of it — Teen Lovers' Nude Death Riddle on Dizzy's Yacht — but mostly the papers left it alone. The entire village closed down on the day of the funeral, and the trickle of early-season trippers found themselves looking around bemused at the drawn curtains in the houses and the handwritten notes in the shop windows before shrugging to themselves and passing on through. Two kids drowning in an accident didn't sound like much to the world outside.
Neither Pete nor Alina spoke during the drive home afterwards. Alina had sniffled her way through half a box of Kleenex from the glove compartment, and she seemed even more disinclined toward conversation than Pete. He couldn't help noticing how much she was being affected; it was a sign, he supposed, of how she'd come to consider the valley her home and its people her own. On a day when good feelings were pretty scarce, it didn't seem wrong to spare just one moment to be glad for her.