Ross took out her phone and held it out so that Milton could see it too. She had some sort of custom mapping application and Milton recognised the topography of the area surrounding the town. A circle had been drawn around the junction of the two roads. Milton tried to work out the scale and guessed that the circle had a diameter of around three hundred feet.
“That’s where it was transmitting before it went dark,” Ross said, laying her finger over a pulsing blue light. “It stopped an hour ago. Either it ran out of battery or it was switched off.”
The officer drove them out of town and into the arable fields that surrounded it. Milton watched Ross: she was gazing out of the window, her reflection faint against the glass. She must have sensed that he was looking at her and turned to him. “This is going to be a long night.”
“Probably.”
“Jesus,” she sighed. “I’m going to need something to keep me upright. I’m done in.”
“Big night last night?”
“Drinks with friends,” she said. “Then I might have stayed out a little too late afterwards.” She smiled ruefully. “I might have a small hangover.”
“If it’s any consolation, I’ve felt better, too.”
Milton could see that she was assessing him. She was attractive. The way she wore her hair, the tattoo that he had seen on her neck when her collar had ridden down low—she was fashionable and hip, all the things that he was not. She was younger than him, too, but that was irrelevant. There was no way that she could be interested in him and, even if she were, he was too professional to allow his thoughts to run away with him.
“What?” he said.
“I wondered,” she said with a wry smile. “You have the look of someone who likes a drink.”
“I do?” he said.
“Takes one to know one,” she said.
Ross’s smile widened. She was sharp and prickly and indiscreet and Milton found that he liked her more than he’d thought that he would.
The driver interrupted their conversation. “We’re just coming up to the junction,” he called back to them.
The driver indicated left and they joined the A12. There were trees on both sides of them, with thick darkness between the tightly packed trunks. Milton looked down at the map on the phone. The land to the north ran down to a wide tidal estuary where the River Blyth meandered out to sea.
“Slow down,” Milton said.
The road was quiet at this hour; the driver flicked on his hazard lights and crawled along at ten miles an hour. Milton and Ross stared out of the windows.
“Where is he?” Ross muttered.
Milton looked down at the phone. The blue dot had almost travelled across the whole diameter of the overlaid circle and there was no sign of the car. Milton looked back to the window again. They were a hundred yards from the junction when Milton saw it.
“There,” he said.
“I don’t see any—”
“Stop the car,” Milton said.
They were adjacent to a lay-by on the southbound lane. The officer pulled over into the bay. It was separated from the road by a dotted white line, and then, on its left, by a barbed wire fence that prevented access to a stretch of scrubland fringed with trees. Temporary signs had been planted in the verge: one for production staff attending the nearby Latitude weekend, and the other advertising the Aldeburgh Festival. Milton got out of the car. He had noticed that one of the fence poles supporting the barbed wire fence had collapsed. It was lying on the ground with the barbed wire loose around it. Now that he was closer, Milton could see that tyre tracks had been left in the dusty median, continuing down the slope and into the wooded area below. He stepped over the barbed wire until he was at the top of the gentle slope. It was too dark to see anything beyond the trees. Ross joined him and looked down as he pointed.
“I think he’s down there,” Milton said.
“I can’t see anything,” she said.
Milton turned to the police officer. “Got a torch?”
The man went to the car and returned with a Maglite. Milton lit it and turned its glow onto the trees.
“Shouldn’t we wait?” Ross said.
“Call it in,” Milton said. “I’m going to check.”
“Smith—we’ve been talking about a state-sponsored assassination.”
“I’ll be fine.” Milton drew his pistol. “Just stay here and call it in,” he said. “I’ll go down and check it out.”
He stepped carefully. A vehicle had definitely been down here. Its passage had dislodged a wide swath of dried earth, and footing was treacherous. Milton planted each foot deliberately, little avalanches of grit and dirt skittering down every time he lifted his boots. He was concentrating on getting down safely when he heard steps above him. He turned his head to see Ross following him.
“I told you to stay up there,” he said.
“Fuck that. If that’s Geggel, I want to know.”
Milton put his foot down without checking, and almost fell as loose gravel scattered. “Fine,” he said. “Just stay behind me. And don’t touch anything.”
Milton reached level ground. He brought up the torch and shone it into the trees. They were sparse here, with more than enough space between the trunks for a car to pass through. He shone the light on the ground and saw the tyre tracks again; they ran ahead, passing between two trees. He followed them, made his way beneath the canopy of leaves, and crossed a stretch of bracken that had been flattened to the ground. He walked for a minute, crossed a clearing with trees dotted around, and then saw the moonlight glittering across the surface of a body of water. It was the estuary that he had seen on the satellite map. The terrain became soft and sticky, and his boots were sucked down as he crossed the start of a wide mudflat. He swung the torch from left to right and saw the light glitter off a pane of glass. He tracked back until the beam was fixed on the object; it was the back of a car, tilted so that it was pointing up at a gentle angle.
Milton closed the distance to the car with Ross following a few feet behind him. The terrain grew boggier as he neared the water. It was obvious what had happened. The car had turned into the lay-by but hadn’t stopped; instead, it had crashed through the fence and continued down the slope and through the trees until it had come to a rest here, in the mudflats.
Milton held the Maglite against his pistol and approached the car. He maintained a safe distance as he drew alongside. The front of the car had ploughed into soft mud that fringed the water. The engine was silent; the car must have stalled when it came to a halt. Milton shone the light back so that he could look into the cabin.
Milton stepped closer and looked into the cabin. The torch burned bright, picking out the trash on the floor, the scuff marks that had been left on the carpet by muddy shoes, a can of Diet Coke that had been pushed into the cupholder in the central console. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat. He was old—Milton guessed that he must have been in his mid-sixties—and wearing a suit that looked shiny and cheap in the unforgiving glare from the Maglite. He was leaning forward, his head resting on the wheel and a deflated airbag. Milton tracked the beam up to his face and saw that his eyes were permanently open, glassy and unresponsive, and that a gunshot had mangled his head.
“Shit,” Ross muttered.