He still did not fully understand why it was he wanted her so much. Perhaps because she was one of the few things in his life that had not come easy. Winning had always come easy to David. Lisa was a challenge. One he was determined to beat.
For her part she was glad they had made up, was in need of his moral support. There was no one else, after all. She glanced at him as he drove. She wanted to say, I’m scared, but was frightened to admit it. All those brave words — I’m going to find my father. The reality was very different. And she was frightened, too, of the unknown. Of the stranger she was going to find. She would have liked to turn to David and say, I’ve changed my mind. But it was too late now. She was trapped by her own pride.
‘Listen, I want you to telephone me when you get to your hotel,’ David said. ‘So I know you’re alright.’
‘I will.’
He allowed himself an inner sigh of relief. As long as she kept in touch by phone he would retain some measure of control over what she did.
They checked her in at the British Airways desk and took her luggage, and she and David sat in the departure lounge waiting for her flight to be called. She had gone very quiet, subdued by nerves. He took her hand and squeezed it.
‘It’s a long flight,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘I’m looking forward to meeting him.’ She looked at him, surprised, and he forced himself to laugh. ‘After all, he’s the one I’m going to have to ask for your hand in marriage.’
She tensed and drew her hand away. ‘Don’t, David.’ It was as though he was making fun of her.
‘Oh, come on, I’m sorry. It was a joke, that’s all. I know you don’t want to hurry things. And I don’t want to push you.’ He took her hand again and decided to steer the conversation in a different direction. ‘You know what hotel he’s staying at?’
‘The Narai.’
‘And if he’s not there?’
She hesitated. ‘I went back to see the Sergeant.’
He turned his head sharply. ‘You never told me.’
‘I was going to. But I thought — well, I thought that you might be angry.’
‘Why would I be angry?’
‘Because you’ve behaved very strangely over everything to do with my father.’ The defiance in her voice again.
I’ve behaved strangely! he thought. But all he said was, ‘What did he say, the Sergeant?’
‘He said he thought my father would still be in Bangkok. If he wasn’t at the hotel he gave me another address to try. A man who might be able to help me. A man called Tuk Than.’
Chapter Nineteen
McCue had been watching the pig for some time from a concealed position a metre back from the path. It was somnolent and off-guard in the late afternoon heat, snuffling about in the undergrowth, foraging idly for something to eat. Elliot and Slattery were sleeping, and McCue was nearly at the end of his two-hour stint on watch. He was refreshed and alert after five hours’ sleep. The pig moved nearer the trap, infuriatingly slowly. But the tunnels had taught McCue patience. The beast was quite large and thickly haired with a long snout and two sharp tusks. McCue knew the dangers of provoking a wild pig into attack. It could knock a man over, and its tusks could inflict serious injury, often dangerously close to the femoral artery on the upper leg. He had seen a man bleed to death from such an injury.
Something close to McCue seemed suddenly to draw its attention, and it began lumbering down the path towards him, still contentedly unaware of his presence. As its forelegs broke the tripwire, the sapling sprang and the two sharpened bamboo stakes plunged deep into its chest. It let out a blood-curdling squeal and rolled over on its side, still twitching. It was not dead, but quickly failing. McCue approached with caution. It could still be dangerous. He raised the butt of his automatic and moved in to finish the job, clubbing the beast several times over the head. The twitching subsided and it lay quite still. A rustling in the undergrowth behind him made him swing round, drawing his knife to meet his assailant. It was Elliot.
‘What the hell’s happened!’
McCue smiled a rare smile. ‘We got pork for dinner,’ he said.
Slattery still slept while Elliot put water on the fire to boil and then made his way to the small clearing McCue had hacked out with his machete to prepare the dead animal. Four stakes were hammered into the soft earth and lashed together into A shapes, a bamboo pole laid across the top. The pig was hung upside down from the pole, tied by the hocks. McCue had made two neat incisions in the carotid artery behind the ears, allowing the blood to drain into a pot beneath the head. ‘We should save the blood,’ he said.
Elliot shook his head. ‘We can’t carry any more than we’ve got. We’ll have to eat what we can and leave the carcase.’
McCue shrugged. ‘Pity. This little mother could have fed us for days.’
Elliot watched, fascinated, as McCue wielded his hunting knife with dexterous ease to gut the pig. He pinched the abdomen as high as he could, raising a pouch of flesh and cutting a slit big enough for him to slip in two fingers. Using the fingers as a guide for the knife he cut upwards towards the anus, taking care not to damage the internal organs. Then he cut downwards the same way as far as the breastbone, holding back the gut with his left hand as it began to spill outwards. When he had completed the cut, he let the gut hang down so that he could inspect it for signs of disease. ‘Looks okay,’ he said. He removed both kidneys and the liver, then cut through the membrane covering the chest cavity and took out the heart and lungs and windpipe. ‘Better bury this stuff.’
Elliot started digging a hole to take the animal’s innards. ‘You not going to skin it?’
McCue shook his head. ‘You never skin a pig. We’ll have to remove the hair over the fire. Did you boil that water?’
Elliot nodded. ‘Where’d you learn to use a knife like that?’
McCue sat silent for a while, his lean cadaverous face taut and thoughtful. ‘My Pa was a small-time farmer in the Midwest,’ he said. ‘He was a real hard bastard, but I guess I loved him. Ma died when I was just a kid and Pa had to raise me and my three brothers on his own. I was the baby of the family. When we was having bad times, like when the crop would fail or the animals got diseased, he would pack me off to his sister’s. I spent half my life there when I was a kid, but I guess they didn’t like me too much. I was none too happy staying there neither. I used to run off sometimes, and then I would get sent home and my Pa would beat the crap out of me. I didn’t mind that, though. I just wanted to be home.
‘He didn’t have much patience, my Pa, and his temper worked on a short fuse, so I got the buckle end of his belt more times than I can remember.’ He paused, lost in some childhood past. But there was reverence in his voice, more than rancour, when he spoke of the beatings. ‘He taught me to use my fists. Stand up for myself. I was a bit of a runt, even then, and he said I had to be big in other ways.
‘I was about nine or ten when he took me out in the yard one day and gave me a knife and told me it was my turn to kill a pig. ‘You seen how it’s done,’ he said. ‘So do it right. Kill it with the first stroke. You get it wrong I’m gonna beat the shit outa you.’ So I got it with the first stroke. He taught me everything I needed to know about using a knife. Never needed nothing else since.’