The cavalier smile.
‘Take my hand.’
Reaching back.
The hopelessness was devastating. On what, truthfully, had she based her hope that Saskia was alive? A feeling? How could her intuition compare to the forces that could undo the fabric of a building’s worth of metal and plastic, swimming pools of fuel, this tonnage of raw meat? Saskia was hopelessly gone. Perhaps her superimposed spirit watched, alongside fellow passengers and crew as Jem lifted her phone and sobbed, ‘Ego, what now?’
But the phone had died. She pressed the power switch. Nothing happened. Was the battery too cold? She slipped the phone into her waistband and stepped back from the debris, fleeing, heading towards the blackness. The powder reached her knees as she strode. She pressed the car key. Nowhere did indicator lights blip.
She had been cut off from Ego and the heavy torch was no longer a comfort. It was painting her like a target. She turned it off.
Unseen, a branch broke.
‘Sss-sss-sss,’ she stammered, looking for the branch. ‘Sassssssssssskia?’
Calm. Only the weight of snow had broken it.
She backed against a trunk and slid down. Clods of snow struck her shoulders. She felt as though she could stay here. She put her nose to her knees and pulled a full, chill breath.
Her neck straightened.
Perfume.
‘It was made for me in the south of France.’
Her muscles, tired to the point of collapse, quivered as she stood.
‘Sssssss,’ she whispered. ‘Sss-sss…’
Her sudden, downhill strides slit the dunes. She fell from one tree to another. Fronds scratched her scalp. The powder grew wet underfoot and the dampness reached her ankles. The perfume was a will-o’-the-wisp; present and absent by turns. When, seconds later, she reached the trough of the valley, her exhaustion could no longer be outrun. She let her forehead rest against bark.
Snow quietness descended.
Yet the air was not empty. There was an element of static, of ssssssssssss.
Running water.
Jem crawled on, though her palms flamed with cold. Her breath shrank to snorts. A stone struck her shin and she was felled. She tumbled down a stony bank and stopped, sitting upright, with her boots on a hard surface. She had lost the torch but she could see a frozen stream sparkling beneath a sickle moon. There was a hut on the opposite bank. The wide, low roof was decked with firs. Behind it, trees rose. The forest and the hut had combined like the hands of father and son. Only a halo of red suggested the doorway.
Jem walked upstream and crossed the water on three concrete stepping stones. She placed each foot heel-to-toe until she reached the door. It did not squeak as she pushed it open. Warmth and smoke and a meaty smell puffed from the interior: a room lit by oil lamps and the flickering roundel of a pot-bellied stove. She looked about in wonder. A chandelier of powdered sausages and game birds hung from the low ceiling. A Dutch drier rocked over the stove. It held camouflaged trousers, long underwear, socks, and a dripping newspaper.
‘Hello?’
Jem closed the door and pulled across its blackout curtain. There was a cloth-covered table beyond the hanging sausages. She remembered her mobile phone and placed it near the stove to warm. On the table were empty beer bottles and a stack of newspapers. Next to them was a half-bitten piece of bread. An opened plastic container held some sliced meat and a paring knife.
Chapter Twenty
On the hill that overlooked the small hut, there was a triangular clearing formed by three ancient pines. The limbs of the largest had bent under the weight of snow. Tolsdorf, the woodsman, was braced in a familiar wedge halfway up the trunk. His deer-hunting rifle rested in a notch convenient for surveillance of the hut and its small hinterland of piled wood.
Tolsdorf was as still as the tree. He felt twenty years younger. He had gathered his wits to a single point: his left eye, open on the rifle’s burning green image intensifier. He breathed through his nose. He was not too cold; rather, the cold of this night had entered him and calmed him.
He had been settled against the trunk for more than four hours and was now ready to climb down and call this night done. But, in the instant before he looked down to place his feet, he heard a new note in the sounds of the forest. The new note did not belong.
Sure enough, she came from the south-east. Her footfalls told him that she was no native of the forest or the snow. She was easy to locate with the rifle. Her arms were outstretched like bird wings, aiding balance, whiskers for tree fronds in the dark. Everything about her confirmed that she was the help Tolsdorf had been waiting for.
At first, her physical weakness puzzled him. How would she be able to fight the Ghost? Could it be that her purpose was to bring the killer here, nothing more? Tolsdorf tried to arrange the discrete elements of his knowledge as though they were playing cards in a hand, but his concentration—narrowed to that green, blazing disc—was not equal to it. The scattered pieces were little more than knucklebones. They told him nothing beyond his fears.
He felt for the bar of chocolate in his hip pocket, broke off a piece, and chewed slowly as the woman crossed the stream. He saw only part of her face beneath her hood. She stopped. Looked around. Looked at Tolsdorf, who she could not possibly see. Tolsdorf smiled. The lower spike of his three-point crosshair rested on her chin.
And then she was gone into the hut.
Tolsdorf’s bristling at this trespass was, he noticed, both automatic and useless. The sensation made him smile. So I am not dead yet. I am still connected to something of the world. There is still meat on the old bones.
Behind this feeling was one of excitement.
It is happening. The Ghost is coming.
Tolsdorf did not know how long he would have to wait. He knew to expect that this man was following the girl. But at what remove? Might he be biding his time? How strong was his knowledge of the forest? Could he read the forest like Tolsdorf could read it? Did he know that Tolsdorf waited, armed?
These questions itched at him. He was no man to answer them. He was old and wily, but no strategist.
A second, discordant note rang through the empty air. It was dulled by the snow but Tolsdorf’s heart accelerated again.
‘So soon,’ he whispered.
The sound of his voice surprised him, and its disagreeable edge of satisfaction. This would not be easy. He would need to play this like the most serious of hunts. This was not deer. This was the Ghost.
It was no less than fifty metres to the hut. The air was empty. Fresh snow might fall soon, but for now Tolsdorf could see the hut in great clarity. Intensified. Raging green: the halos of the doors and windows. The moving fringe of branches at the eaves. And there: twenty metres beyond the woodpile, the unmistakable brilliance of fluorescent material.
As Tolsdorf eased his index finger through the hole in his glove, the fluorescence—two horizontal strips, perhaps—moved slowly down. It could only mean that the person wearing the jacket had crouched. Were they taking cover? Had Tolsdorf been seen? He doubted it. The man had crouched because he was cautious. Perhaps he had just caught sight of the hut.
The overall range was less than seventy metres. Tolsdorf did not hesitate, though part of him was doubtful, still trying to read the knucklebones of this moment. Was it not foolish for the Ghost to approach the hut wearing such conspicuous clothing? But the man had no reason to suspect that Tolsdorf even existed, let alone had an open shot from an elevated position.