80
I opened my eyes. I was on my back, a canopy of leaves and branches above me. When I turned my head to the right, I could see the trail – maybe forty feet away, maybe more – and the tomb I’d been standing in front of. I felt my eyes start to roll, as if I were being pulled back into sleep, and when I fought against it, my head started to swim, and above me the greens of the foliage mixed with the blue of the sky and I felt a spike of nausea.
I closed my eyes again.
Images and sounds filled my head.
The entranceway through a tunnel of leaves to my left … the sound of birds in the trees and a faint wind, cool against my face and hands … my hands … my hands being pulled across the forest floor … my whole body being pulled … being dragged off into the woods by my feet, blocks of sun cutting through the canopy above me … he’s going to kill me … hesgoingtokillme … hesgoingtokillme …
I ripped myself from the darkness.
Blinked.
Once. Twice.
Then I forced my upper body into action, moving left, back towards the trail, my legs barely even moving, crawling through the mud and the fallen leaves. I made it about two feet before I was exhausted. Turned over. Collapsed on to my back.
And that was when I saw him.
He was sitting with his back to me about ten feet to my right, perched on a fallen tree trunk. Black anorak. Hood up. He was looking through a break in the trees, down the slope to the car park about fifty feet below. I couldn’t see his face, couldn’t see anything of him except his hands, but as I looked across at him an image flashed in my head of the dream I’d had three nights before: a man in a coat, hood up, nothing but darkness inside.
Standing at the door to my bedroom.
Coming for me.
My body shivered, as if the ghosts of that dream were passing through me, and my eyes drifted to the tree trunk he was on: next to him was a hunting knife. Eight inches long, four-inch blade, charcoal-grey grip. His hand was flat to the grip, almost hovering over it, like he was threatening to pick it up. I noticed some cuts on his hand; blood dotted along the fold of skin between his thumb and forefinger.
Suddenly, my phone started ringing. I watched him shift, looking off towards the trail and the tombs around it. The tip of his nose came into view, but nothing else. I followed the sound myself, trying to see where it was, and then I spotted it – in the middle of the trail – just a black dot from this distance. It vibrated across the scorched, flattened grass. Four rings. Five rings. Then it stopped. I wondered who it could have been. Healy. Craw.
Liz.
The man turned back to face the trees in front of him. From where I was lying, the cars were just about visible in the car park below. Two. Maybe a third, although it could easily have been an edge of a building. One of the cars I could see was mine. That meant, in the whole cemetery, there was a maximum of two other people. I didn’t know if one of the cars was his but, either way, I couldn’t rely on anybody coming past and finding me.
The cemetery was massive, the number of people here minuscule.
It was why he wasn’t bothered about my phone.
‘Duncan?’ I said, trying to make the natural connections between events. Pell was on the run. It had to be him. ‘Duncan?’ I said again, and this time he jolted, reacting to the sound of my voice. His hand, still hovering over the knife, lowered on to it, around the grip. Then his fist closed around the handle, and all I could see was his hand and the blade coming out of it.
I tried to pull myself to my feet, using the nearest tree, but my legs buckled under me, giving way like there was no bone, no muscle, nothing inside them. They were like liquid. Whatever he’d injected me with hadn’t paralysed me, but it had slowed me down. I could feel it working its way out of me, feel my system fighting back all the time, but when I finally had the strength to walk out of here, it was going to be too late. He was already moving off the tree trunk and coming towards me.
Get the hell out of here.
I dug my fingers into the cracks in the earth, the palm of my hands cutting on thorns, skin brushing nettles, and tried to drag myself forward. Behind me I could hear his feet on the forest floor, branches cracking, dried leaves crunching, as he came around the tree trunk towards me. I got another three feet when a boot slammed against the ground to my right and he grabbed a handful of hair at the back of my head. I heard him grunt, felt his hand brush the skin at the nape of my neck, and then he forced his knee into the centre of my spine. It was like being in a vice. I couldn’t move. I looked out to the trail, left, right, praying someone was coming. But there was no one. We were alone. Even if I shouted out, forced up every sound I had, it would only be a second before he put a hand to my mouth.
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.