I glanced between his face and his hand, the knife gripped so tightly his knuckles had blanched, and, briefly, I thought about making a break for it. But I didn’t know how much of the drug he’d given me, how much had left my body or how much of my body was even functioning. So I turned back to him, trying to face him down, and I saw something flicker in his eyes. A second later, I realized what it was.
A warning.
He drove the knife into my stomach, coming in towards me, teeth gritted, face contorted, and every atom of my body seemed to freeze. A piercing pain, cold and hard, drove into the spaces inside me, nerve endings firing, sending agonizing waves, like an alarm, shooting into my fingers, my toes and my head. Everything blurred: my sight, my hearing, the balance between dark and light, and the next time I was aware what was going on, he’d pushed me to the floor and was standing over me, knife in his hand, my blood dripping from it. I watched him bend over me, face coming down towards mine.
‘That’s what I never understood about you,’ he said, his voice still normal; soft and coherent. ‘You of all people should have seen what you were doing.’
I felt blood running free of my stomach.
My shirt sticking to my skin.
‘Your wife died of cancer too. You buried her here, just like I buried my father in Highgate. You must understand the importance of memories, of being able to reach out to them after they’re gone. You must get that. So why did you take it away from me?’
He came in even closer to me, his breath on my face.
‘My father was a violent, abusive, drunken prick, but he was my father. My father. It wasn’t your choice to make. You forced me out into the open, you fucked with me, and you fucked with the only day that ever really mattered to me. My father is buried in this city, and I can never come back here, never come back to his grave, never be here for him because you and that prick I keep reading about in the papers – that cop, Bartholomew – have got in my way.’ He swiped the knife across my face, the air shifting around me. ‘So now I’m going to kill you.’
But I could hardly hear him now. When I tried to breathe, it felt like air was being sucked into the wound, more going into my stomach than my mouth. He shifted position above me, and this time I couldn’t even hear his feet on the floor of the forest. There wasn’t just a depression in the sound, there was no sound. Only a faint ringing, deep inside my head somewhere, like a fire alarm going off in another room.
I watched him re-establish his grip on the knife.
This is it. This is the end.
And then he looked off towards the trail.
I was fading, my vision smeared, but I managed to roll my head in the direction he was studying, and make out two vague shapes coming up the path towards us. Smart glanced down at me, then back at the trail, and as the shapes came closer, my vision cleared momentarily and I recognized the people I’d seen earlier. The couple in their sixties. The woman was still holding the flowers, and they were still holding hands.
Smart glanced at me again.
Uncertainty now.
Turned the knife. Fingers tight around the grip.
Looked at the couple for a second time.
And then he ran.
He headed off, breaking on to the trail and left, out of sight of the couple, and made for the darkness of the entranceway. The couple were too far back to notice him, except maybe to see a blur of movement. I called out to them, screamed help as loud and as long as I could manage, but they didn’t seem to react. When they got closer, I shouted it again, straining every sinew, every fibre of strength I had left. Yet when I was done, they didn’t look over, didn’t change course, didn’t even seem to have heard me.
And then they walked on by.
I realized then I hadn’t made a single sound. Nothing. Not one word. The voice I was hearing I could only hear inside my head. My capacity to speak, my capacity to hear myself, everything I’d ever taken for granted, was shutting down. My vision flickered – grey to white to grey, like an old TV signal – and then I completely blacked out for a moment. When I emerged into the light again, when objects formed in front of me – trees and branches and leaves – I was back in the forest, thirty feet from the trail, dying alone.
Get to your phone.
Get to your fucking phone.
I grabbed some grass and pulled myself forward, pain coursing down the front of my chest. There was blood everywhere, but mostly it was pain. I got about five feet and had to stop, my lungs barely filling now, my heart seeming to slow. I thought of Liz, of the last conversation we’d ever had – a fight about what I did, and who I was – and then I thought of Derryn, of the moment I’d buried her here, in among these graves and tombs and memories. And then I reached around me for something else to grab on to, clamped my hand on a tree root and pulled again. And I kept on pulling, dragging myself forward.
Minutes passed.
Minutes that felt like hours.
But I got there, and when I got there I felt death moving in, as if my body had been prepared to hold out until I got to the trail, but no more. My vision blinked in and out, my hearing pretty much gone. I grabbed the phone, half hidden in grass at the edge of the track. My muscles were failing too now, but I held on to the mobile with everything I had and pushed Call. I didn’t know who it would get through to. I didn’t know whether it would even make any difference. I was dying. But I brought it to my ear and I waited for an answer.
‘Raker?’
It was Healy. I tried to say his name.
‘Raker?’ he said again.
‘Hea … ly …’
‘Raker – are you all right?’
I swallowed. Coughed. ‘Hea … ly … I’m …’
‘Where are you?’
‘I’m … dyin …’
I dropped the phone.
And, finally, there was only darkness.
82
7 July
There was only one space left in the car park, right outside the entrance. Healy swung the Vauxhall into it and killed the engine. The sun was shining, coming in over the roof of the building and in through the windscreen, and as he sat there in his shirt and tie, sleeves rolled up, jacket across the back seat, he watched the people gathered to his left.
On the radio, playing softly despite the engine being off, they were talking about how police had finally found Edwin Smart. He’d been on the run for eighteen days and had been discovered living rough in scrubland east of Glasgow. Everyone soon figured out why. After everything that had happened at Hayden Cemetery, Healy had been back to Raker’s place and been through his notes on Smart, and he saw that Smart’s father had been born in East Kilbride. If he could no longer visit the old man’s grave, maybe Smart figured the next best thing was his birthplace. The truth was, the relationship between father and son was, at points, too difficult to grasp. The father was a violent drunk, an abuser, a paedophile. The son was a killer in denial about himself, a kidnapper and torturer of men; he both loved and hated who he was, in the same way he loved and hated the man who had made him that way. In the days and weeks ahead, police and psychologists would begin to break the surface, but Healy wondered whether they’d ever be able to get at the answers within. By the time they did, if they even did, the public that was once so fascinated by the Snatcher, and the men and women at the Met who had tried to find him, would have moved on to something else.
Some other tragedy.
He turned off the radio, reached over to the back seat and grabbed his jacket, then got out of the car. Some people looked over, faces he recognized but didn’t want to talk to. He shrugged on his jacket and then stood there in the sun, enjoying the warmth for a moment and forgetting – just briefly – what he was here for. Then he noticed some of the crowd were looking past him, out towards the gates of the church, to the street beyond.