I’d never tailed anyone before. When you get down to it, hardly anyone’s ever tailed anyone before, and few of us have been tailed. It sounds more difficult than it is. If you’re not expecting it, you’re not likely to notice. I followed Dennis from as far behind as I could manage without losing track, once or twice allowing another car to come between us. This led to anxious minutes — he might turn off; I could end up following a stranger — but at the same time had a relieving effect, as if the intermission wiped the slate clean, leaving my own car fresh and new in his rearview mirror when I took up position again.
But it turned out I couldn’t follow and pay attention to roadsigns at the same time. I’ve no idea where we were when he pulled in at one of those gravelled parking spots below the Long Mynd, leaving me to drive past then stop on the verge a hundred yards on. I grabbed my equipment — the new rucksack holding the waterproof, the torch, the binoculars, the knife — and hurried back.
It was midweek, and there was little evidence of other hikers. Besides Dennis’s, two other cars sat sulking; the rest was empty space, evenly distributed round a large puddle. The surrounding hills looked heavy with rain, and the clouds promised more.
On the far side was a footpath, which would wind up on to the Mynd. That was clearly where he’d gone.
Stopping by the puddle, I pulled the black waterproof from the rucksack; tugged the cap over my eyes. From the puddle’s wavery surface, a bearded stranger peered back. Far behind him, grey skies rolled over themselves.
The footpath dipped through a patch of woodland before setting its sights on the skyline. Just rounding a bend way ahead was Dennis. He wore a waterproof too: a bright red thumbprint on the hillside. If he’d wanted me to be following, he couldn’t have made it easier.
XIII
Twenty minutes later, I’d revised that. He could have made it easier. He could have slowed down a little.
To any other watcher, it might have seemed odd. Here was a man on a hike, on a midweek morning — what was his hurry? Dennis moved like a man trying to set a record. But I wasn’t any other watcher, and his speed only confirmed what I already knew: that this was no hike. Dennis wasn’t interested in exercise or views. He had a specific destination in mind. He’d always known where he was going.
I couldn’t tell whether his thighs ached, or his lungs burnt like mine, but I hoped so.
The red jacket bobbed in and out of view. I knew every disappearance was temporary; no way could a red jacket weave itself out of sight forever. But it also seemed that Dennis wasn’t heading for the top. Every time the footpath threatened to broach the summit, he found another that dipped again, and some of them couldn’t entirely be called footpaths. We broached hollows where newly formed ponds had to be jumped, and gaps where I couldn’t trust my feet. I needed both hands on the nearest surface: rock, tree limb, clump of weed. More than once, a fallen tree blocked the way. At the second I was forced to crawl under its trunk, and an absent-minded branch scratched me as I passed, leaving blood on my cheek.
From the heavy grey clouds, which seemed closer with every minute, I felt the first fat splatter of rain at three o’clock.
I’m not sure why I’d chosen that moment to check my watch. Nor whether I was surprised or not. It can’t have been later than ten when we started, though even that was a guess — what I really felt was that I’d never been anywhere else, doing anything else; that all the existence I could remember had been spent in just this manner: following a man in a bright red jacket through an alien landscape. But I do know that two things followed immediately upon my establishing what time it was.
The first was that I realized I was overpoweringly, ravenously hungry.
The second was that I looked up, and Dennis was nowhere in sight.
For some moments I stood still. I was possessed by the same understanding that can fall on a sudden awakening: that if I remain acutely still, refusing to accept the abrupt banishment from sleep, I can slip back, and be welcomed open-armed by the same waiting dream. It never works. It never works. It didn’t work then. When I allowed myself to breathe again, I was exactly where I’d been. The only living thing in sight, nature apart, was a worm at my foot.
I took two steps forward, emerging from a canopy of trees. The ground sucked at my feet, and the rain picked up a steadier rhythm.
In the past hundred yards, the terrain had changed. Not four steps ahead, the path widened: I was near the bottom of one of the many troughs Dennis had led me through. Against the hillside rising steeply up to meet the falling rain was sketched the brick outline of what I assumed was a worked-out mine — Michelle and I had seen others like it on our holiday. On the opposite side, the incline was less steep, though you’d have needed hands and feet to scale it. Had Dennis gone that way, he’d have been pinned like a butterfly on a board. And as for directly ahead—
Directly ahead, the valley came to a dead end. The incline to my right became steeper on its passage round this horseshoe shape, and the cliffside in front of me was obscured by a rustic tangle of misshapen trees and unruly bushes. With no sign of Dennis, unless — and there it was: a ribbon of red flapped behind a bush, then merged again with the brown grey and green. A strap from a jacket, nipped by a gust of wind. The rain was coming down harder, as loud as it was wet, and Dennis must have thought this the right place to take shelter... Had Dennis really thought that, though? Or had Dennis just had enough of playing cat-and-mouse?
Hard to say when the game began. When I set off after him on the footpath? When his car passed mine in the layby near the Yard of Ale? Or further back, even; back in my kitchen, with Michelle’s postcard in front of him, and an unused notepad next to the phone? He might have picked up on that clue. Dennis wasn’t a fool. No one could call him a fool.
In fact, now I thought about it, you could almost say he’d drawn it to my attention.
Which might have been the moment to pause. I could have stood in the rain a little longer, my cap soaking to a cardboard mess as memory made itself heard: He reached behind him for the writing tablet on the sill, and scrawled something on it... tore the uppermost leaf from the pad, and pushed it towards me. Was there more to it than that? If Dennis wanted me here, that was a point in favour of being anywhere else. I could have turned and retraced that long long ramble. Reached my car, eventually, and got in it, and driven away.
But I didn’t. Momentum carried me forward. Only my cap stayed behind; plucked from my head by a delinquent branch just as I reached the bush I was after: surprise! Dennis’s jacket hung like a scarecrow, flapping in the wind. What a foolish thing. The man must be getting wet.
Something stung my neck, and if it had been a mosquito, it would have been the biggest bastard this side of the equator. But it wasn’t a mosquito.
Brown grey and green. Green grey and brown. Grey brown and
I’d forgotten what the third colour was even as it rushed up to meet me.
XIV
“Do you remember?” he asks.
Well of course I do. Of course I do.
“Do you remember we used to be friends?”
It was long ago. But I remember that too.
I’ll never know what Dennis Farlowe injected me with. Something they use to pacify cows with, probably: it acted instantly, despite not being scientifically applied. He must have stepped from behind and just shoved the damn thing into my neck. I lie now on a three-inch mattress on a concrete floor. The only light spills from a barred window nine foot or so above Dennis’s head. There is a strange object behind him. It reaches into the dark. My rucksack, with all it contains — the knife, especially — is nowhere.