He was dragging Cyril across the snow when Anton arrived.
The handkerchief he’d field-repaired his boot with was soaked through, and he’d lost all feeling in his toes. The part of his brain that kept a running tally was worrying at this: his head was going to look lopsided with half an ear missing, but losing toes was way more significant if he didn’t want to walk with a limp evermore.
But another part of his brain, the part in charge of telling him to man the fuck up, was calculating how much of a lead his quarry had.
Frank was approaching the end of the estuary path; could see the road leading up to the High Street. It was smothered in snow, the cars lining one side comically behatted and bewigged, but there were figures carrying buckets, liberally strewing sand over the road surface. The town was coming alive. He’d already passed a group of locals on the path through the trees; they’d eyed him suspiciously but he’d replied with the hard stare, and no fuss had been made. But his presence had been noted. And would be again once he stepped onto the streets.
Had to be done, though.
He came through the gate, still using the walking stick he’d found earlier, still not admitting to himself how useful it was—he was too old to be scrambling up cliffsides; that was a job for young men and fools—and rested for a moment just short of the right-angled corner where the road dwindled into a lane. And that’s where he was when the car went past, bucking and slewing across the snow-packed surface like a drunk on a skateboard, with Lucas Harper at the wheel.
When the corpse’s phone rang, River had taken cover. Standard practice: if you were heading back to base, you let whoever was guarding know you were on your way, in case they got jumpy. Being jumpy was no longer in this guy’s future, but whoever was calling didn’t know that. There were bootprints leading round back of the barn and he followed them rather than make new ones, and though it quickly became obvious what the space had been used for, he had no time to find a better spot: the dead man’s phone rang again, and stopped, and a minute later a car made its laborious way up the snowed-on track.
Within the frozen smell of excrement River crouched, listening to an engine idle and cough and then stop altogether. Heard a car door open then shut. Imagined bitter breathing and angry eyes as whoever it was found his dead colleague, then J.K. Coe, under a tree, his insides partly out.
Whatever had haunted Coe these past years, he was safe from it now.
River eased the gun from his pocket.
Whoever it was stopped moving, as if weighing up options. River approved of the strategy—size up the situation before committing yourself—even if he’d be the first to admit it wasn’t one he generally adopted himself. He wanted to check the gun, see how many rounds he had left, but it would make too much noise: every snap, every wiggle, would magnify in the cold country air. Just holding it was noisy. And he could barely slip a finger through the trigger guard, but didn’t want to remove his glove yet, in case his hand froze before he needed it . . . And then more noise from out front: the guy had formulated a plan, which, by the sound of it, involved dragging the dead inside the barn.
He was halfway through this task when he was joined by someone else, arriving on foot.
One of them was Lars, he gathered from the greeting. J.K. Coe had identified them by name: Lars and Anton and Cyril. So Lars was upright, and either Anton or Cyril was dead. And Frank, of course, had gone over a cliff, but River would have been happier if it had been two cliffs. Frank wasn’t the kind to die quietly, and he’d barely made a sound when he’d dropped out of sight.
There were more sounds from inside now, mutterings in German, and noises of dragging and splashing. And then the car started up, and he assumed they were off, and thought: Okay, this is it. He checked his gun under cover of the engine: one round left. They’d be in the front seats, so he’d shoot the driver, bluff the passenger onto the ground. That depended on him arriving at the front end of the car before they left, so—
They drove the car into the barn and killed the engine.
River stopped moving.
Splashing noises, he thought.
He could hear the men going out front again, the stamping of boots, a murmur of speech.
The fizzing of matches.
I really shouldn’t be here, he thought.
Then the barn exploded.
Louisa reached the High Street, looked left, looked right, and saw no Lucas. She wondered if he’d returned to the cottage—a wounded animal move. Go back to what smelled familiar. He’d be hiding in that cupboard under the stairs, or under a duvet in a corner of the bedroom, or—
Or none of those places, because here he came, jackrabbiting up the street in a tortured car.
And behind him, on the pavement, Frank Harkness.
Others, too, because Lucas was making a splash. If he’d driven before, he hadn’t done so through snow, and was making the job of it you’d expect. The car wasn’t so much moving forward as undergoing a series of irregular detonations, and if the road hadn’t been gritted by staff from the nearby Healthcare Centre, would have either stalled completely or flipped by now. But whatever you called it, progress of a sort was being made, and Lucas hit a sudden spurt as he reached the turn-off to the Centre’s car park, where the snow was flattened through use, and approached the junction with the High Street at twenty miles an hour.
She saw Frank Harkness see her, and even at this distance—he was a hundred yards down the road—could tell there was something wrong with the shape of his head, but it wasn’t slowing him down. Here he came.
The people strewing grit had stopped to watch Lucas’s erratic performance, and one of them dropped a shovel and raised an angry fist—the car’s owner?
Beyond them, way down the bottom of the road, a woman had appeared through the gate to the estuary footpath. She was shouting, waving, summoning help, and Louisa thought Emma—Emma’s body had been found.
Lucas reached the High Street junction and ploughed straight on into a craft shop window.
Way off in the distance, maybe a mile out of town, a thin black plume of smoke spiralled skywards.
Much nearer than that, uniformed police officers were emerging from their station along the road.
Louisa was first to the crashed car, but only just. Onlookers had formed a cordon round the shop front almost before she’d checked that Lucas, though dazed, appeared unhurt.
One of the police officers approached, while the other pair went haring down the road towards the shouting woman, and the wood where Emma’s body lay.
Frank Harkness halted on the opposite pavement. He looked up the road, down the road, then focused on the tumult round the car. To Louisa’s eye, he was calculating odds.
Specifically, now, he was looking straight at Louisa.
The police officer was asking Lucas if he was okay, asking the assembled onlookers to move back, but Louisa ignored her and remained where she was, on the pavement next to the driver’s door, on a carpet of broken glass and snow.
She was wearing dead Emma’s coat, of course, and tapped its breast pocket slowly, never breaking eye contact with Frank.
I’m armed, she was lying. Don’t even think about it.
He stared at her for a full quarter minute, while all around the small crowd pulsed and wobbled. A siren was starting up somewhere: she guessed an ambulance.
And eventually Frank nodded, a minor tip of the head, then walked off down the road, his walking stick carried level with the pavement: a pointless accessory.