They were still arguing over who'd left the caravan's door unlocked. Both parents suspected each other and blamed themselves. The truth of it would probably never be established, not for certain, but when the one time welder had risen in the morning it had been to find the door wide open to the day and the boy missing. Also missing had been an inflatable crocodile that belonged to the caravan and which they'd stowed, fully inflated, in the space underneath rather than face the effort of pumping it up afresh for every lakeside play session. The crocodile, being bright green and buoyant enough to sit high in the water, had been spotted within the first half hour of the search. The child, floating low in his sodden pyjamas and looking more like a log in the undertow, had been found much later in the day.
Aldridge moved to the door, the entire van trembling at his every step. There was nothing for him here. He took one last look back, and then opened the door to fresh air and daylight. Now he could tell the owners that he'd checked out their property and that everything was in order; he could finish his report and then file it and move on. As he stood on the wooden steps outside and locked up after him, he couldn't help noting that the door was a poor fit. The catch barely held it. One sharp tug, and maybe…
He tugged.
The lock held. But only just.
But enough to keep in a five year old, he thought, and he turned and descended the steps. He walked down the dirt access track to the main paved avenue of the site, and when he reached the administration block he dropped the keys through the mail flap rather than talk to the site owner again. He could sense that the man was watching him as he crossed over to his car, but he didn't look back.
The lake was calm. Many of the vans overlooked it and the site had its own beach, of a kind; several tons of sand that had been trucked in and dumped at the water's edge. This for the kids, a Country and Western club for the parents. It was modest and inexpensive and probably a five-year-old's idea of paradise. What had happened here was wrong, in a sense that had stirred Aldridge deeply; almost as if Death had slipped in and stolen the child and then led it on a dance, over the hills and far away like some shadowy, irresistible piper. He couldn't help thinking back to the stillborn form that they'd let him hold, all cleaned up and wrapped in a shawl, in a room next to the hospital's chapel for all of half an hour; half an hour of fatherhood, spent with a daughter who would never know of his love. Whatever jealous force took children in this way, whatever face it wore — disease, accident, ill intent — he knew that there was only one somewhat old fashioned word to describe it, and that word was evil. True evil. He'd looked into the faces of regular murderers and seen only the commonplace; but in the death of children, he saw ultimate darkness.
He started the car. He had a thousand and one things to do, and not one of them seemed terrifically important to him right at this moment. Two days before he'd been giving his evidence in the Coroner's Court and his eyes had briefly met those of old Doctor McEnery up on the bench, and something had flickered between the two of them… nothing unprofessional that could have been seen by anyone else in the courtroom, but almost a recognition that they were occupying the same places and going through the same routines rather too often for comfort. The details changed, the form remained the same. The Hammond boy and his girlfriend. Walter Hardy, drowned in his own bathtub. The drunk who'd fallen overboard at a yacht party and whose disappearance hadn't even been noticed until the next day. The dinghy accident.
The others.
The verdicts of accidental death had come in, one after another, and nobody had known better than Aldridge how unavoidable these conclusions were. He'd checked out the scenes, he'd talked to the people. And yet…
Death by drowning, or something like it, again and again. Inevitable when you considered how much of the territory was taken up by a lake that was virtually an inland sea, but disturbing in its frequency. Maybe there was such a thing as luck, and its bad luck counterpart; he'd noticed it with air disasters and rail disasters, how they seemed to hit the news in clusters, and he wondered if something similar might be an influence here. If it was, it made him uneasy. Such things were fine for the pages of downmarket photo magazines, tucked in between the horoscopes and the sob stories, but the thought of something so hard edged and yet unknown entering his life was something else.
Coincidence, he told himself as he drove out through the site gates and rejoined the main road. Traffic wasn't too bad and, as ever, they all touched their brakes and slowed at the sight of his car.
Coincidence.
What else could it possibly be?
TWENTY-NINE
Pavel checked the needle on the gauge. He was down to a quarter of a tank, and almost into the red-lined sector. The car had never let him down yet but, by God, it used up the juice.
But then this was hardly surprising, given that he was now spending about eight to twelve hours of every day on the move. The times that he didn't spend in the car, he seemed to spend in public phone booths feeding the slots from endless bags of change. Now his cash was getting low again. Not crisis-low, but low enough to nudge him into action; he knew that rock bottom was the hardest place to get up from, and he didn't want to be there again. He'd only let it happen to him once since the very beginning, and he'd pulled himself out of that by shoplifting books which he'd then messed up a little and sold as secondhand. He hadn't liked it, but he'd done it.
He shifted in the seat. A lot of the time he got sore, and his back got stiff.
But he could ignore that.
There was a gang of about half a dozen on the corner ahead. No good, but he slowed and took a closer look at them anyway. They all stared back; all of them black kids in their late teens, one or two of them with their hair in those long knitted caps that looked like overstuffed cushions. One of them broke away, and started to walk toward the car. It was a notorious part of town, and this was unlikely to be the local glee club. That didn't matter, but the numbers were too high; Pavel picked up speed and moved on.
Of course, this had been a police car… and although it had no markings, there was probably something about the make and the year and the neutral colour and the lack of any personalisation that gave off a definite signal like a lowlife's version of a pheromone. But surely, he was thinking, the effect had to be a diminishing one. As the car was roughened up more and more, its driver became rougher still. Nobody now could take a close look at the two of them together and leap to the conclusion that here was a Mister Clean in his Clean Machine. Depending on where he cruised, they'd more likely offer him sex or drugs or perhaps even the services of an underage boy… at which point they'd get a big surprise, and Pavel would wipe out however much of the night's earnings they carried.
He didn't pretend that it was any kind of justice, but it did feel better than plain thieving. Although it didn't always work as well as it might; two teeth on one side were still feeling loose after a kicking he'd received behind a small-town nightclub a couple of weeks before, and the bruises had taken most of that time to fade. But it was worth the occasional risk because the approach had the advantage of causing no official complaints, so that he continued to sail onward and stay invisible. Methods and the local territory might have changed, but there was so much here that he could recognise from his other life.