My eyes flicked right, to the boot on the floor next to me. They were plain black. No pattern in them. No labels. Nothing distinctive. No red stitching. I couldn’t see much else. Grey combat trousers, the ends of the leg frayed. The boots must have been a size twelve. Bigger than Pell’s feet. As I tried to process what I was seeing, tried to formulate a plan – any plan – he released his hand from the back of my head and, inside a second, thumped me in the back of the skull. My face hit the floor. White spots flashed in front of my eyes. A ringing sound echoed from ear to ear. And then I drifted into darkness again and, by the time I returned, into the light, I was back where I started and he was on the log. Except this time he was facing me. And it wasn’t Duncan Pell. It never had been.
It was Edwin Smart.
81
Smart shifted the knife across the tree trunk towards him and then faced me, hood still up. The swelling had gone down, but the cuts and bruises remained bad, one of his eyes half shut and puffy, a huge cut running from the right side of his head all across his face. The gash was traced by a thick purple bruise. But I recognized him now, even with all the injuries. I could see his bent nose, recognized the stiffness in his gait even as he sat, saw the dark eyes – one of them bloodshot – and knew they were his.
‘Smart,’ I said, my voice cracked and soft.
Nothing in his face. No reaction.
I glanced at my phone, out on the trail, and remembered Craw’s call. His medical records list him as forty-one years of age, about fifteen stone, and somewhere around six-two, six-three. But that didn’t match the body they recovered from the staffroom in Fell Wood station and the autopsy was going to prove as much. Because that wasn’t Smart, it was Pell. Smart had blown Pell’s head off to prevent identification, or at least to delay it, and then he’d replaced Pell in the basement of his house and done the same: cut himself, smashed his face against a wall, let it bleed and watched the bruises form. All to give himself some time.
A chance of escape.
Except he wasn’t escaping. He was here.
‘Why aren’t you running?’ I said.
He looked down at the knife. ‘I intend to,’ he replied, his voice quiet, articulate. ‘I stayed ahead of the police for eighteen months, so I’m sure I can do it again, with or without this detour.’ He glanced at me. There was nothing mischievous in him, nothing playful. He spoke matter of factly; almost exactly the same as he had at Gloucester Road. ‘I don’t have much time, but I had to take the opportunity to show you exactly what you did.’
I glanced back at the trail.
‘No one’s coming for you,’ he said.
I looked at him. The hood was still up, his eyes dark under the ridge of his brow, glimpses of his shaved head visible when light escaped inside the coat.
Keep him talking.
‘I saw your footprints at the station,’ I said. He just stared at me. I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me. ‘You wanted to make sure I found Pell down in the staffroom, which is why you followed me there. Once you saw I’d found him, you shut yourself in with all the others and you waited.’ He didn’t respond, just studied the knife again. ‘When did you kill Pell?’
‘I asked him around Friday evening,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s why he never turned up for work. I knocked him out and kept him tied up in the basement. Then, when I saw you out at Fell Wood on Saturday, I knew you’d followed the clues I left at Duncan’s house. I watched you in the station, snooping around. You weren’t supposed to see me, but it didn’t really matter. I had Duncan’s boots on, so you still thought it was him. But even while you were chasing your tail with Duncan, I knew I wasn’t safe.’
‘So you used him.’
‘On Sunday, I transferred him from my house to the station.’
That’s where the blood on Smart’s carpet had come from: shifting Pell down to the staffroom. He probably walked him right out of the back door and across his garden like he’d walked the others out of their flats.
‘I knew you were getting closer all the time,’ he said. ‘After you spoke to me that first time at Gloucester Road, I started following you, and I knew you were clever. I could see that.’ He paused. ‘To be honest, I foresaw yesterday approaching fast, so that was why I decided to move the plan to its final stage. When you turned up at Gloucester Road yesterday, I had to take a detour on the way to see my father.’
‘You went to Fell Wood and killed Pell.’
‘I killed him, and then I went to the cemetery for the last time. After that, I came home and started cutting myself.’ He shrugged. ‘Forensic tests would have picked up that I’d drugged Duncan. I had to make him malleable; to make it look like a suicide. But I’m sure the police would have picked up that it wasn’t a suicide too, soon enough. It was only ever meant to be a diversion. I wasn’t sure if the police were as close to finding me as you, but I decided against making a break for it either way. If I ran, the police would pull out all the stops to get to me, and I would only have had a couple of hours’ head start yesterday afternoon. If I got to the hospital as Duncan Pell and I ran, I had a minimum of a day, maybe more, they had no real idea where I was headed, and they didn’t even know I was Edwin Smart.’
‘So when you tried to misdirect police with the red dots –’
‘It was just another distraction. The more questions without logical answers, the more difficult it is for them to find their way through them.’ He glanced at me. ‘I learned that early on when I was carrying out my work as the so-called Snatcher, even if – in recent days – I’ve been less accomplished. I’m afraid you panicked me, which is why I ended up making some stupid decisions.’
‘You mean leaving the phone on the line?’
‘Leaving the phone on the line wasn’t the mistake. If it had been found there, you and the police would have assumed Jonathan Drake had either dropped it from the platform, or dropped it through the window of the carriage while the train was moving through the station. It happens all the time. But I was watching that first patrolman and when he didn’t pick it up, I got nervous and I placed it on the bench so it would definitely be found. That was stupid. I should have known it would be noted, sooner or later.’
‘So why didn’t you kill me when you had the chance?’
He shrugged again, thinking back to the same moment as me: the darkness of the staffroom and then the tunnel on the old line where he’d put a boot through my face. ‘Again, a stupid decision. I suppose a part of me still thought it might play out how I wanted it to as long as I kept you focused on Duncan and Samuel. If you were alive, you could carry on down that route, but I should have figured out that you wouldn’t. Like I said, you’re clever.’
I tried to think of where to go next.
But then he got up from the tree trunk, the knife in his hand, handle hidden in the cup of his palm, blade facing off behind him into the trees. ‘Anyway, as I said, I want to make use of the time available to me, so I need to make you understand what you did.’
‘What I did?’
He looked at me – blood in his eye, more bruises than skin, streaks of mauve reaching down like fingers towards his throat – and came over, dropping to his haunches beside me. And for the first time I understood what Sam, Drake and the others had seen. Not the ticket inspector, not Edwin Smart. The man inside Smart. Within a couple of seconds he was a completely different man, a monster, without even having to speak.