Paddling in the direction he remembered from their previous excursion, he scanned the curves of the river for the little island, separated from the shore by a wide channel that had not been visible until they were almost upon it.
Everything was softened now, the sinuous curves of the river seeming unfamiliar in their cloaks of lush spring growth. Yet when he came round a long bend and saw the brushy jut of land, he knew it immediately. He paddled in, beaching the canoe in the same little notch he and Doug had used that day, soaking his trainers in the process. Then he stood, orienting himself to the landscape. In February, it had been eerily silent except for the occasional birdcall. Today the air was filled with raucous birdsong, but there was no sense of human presence. Kincaid remembered Ryan saying that there was no mobile phone reception here, and he felt suddenly very alone.
Closing his eyes, he forced himself to concentrate on his recollections, then opened his eyes again. There, he thought, there had been the campsite, through that little break in the trees. Carefully, he made his way through the undergrowth to the area he remembered, marveling at how quickly nature took back its own. The site of Ryan’s fire pit was a mere indentation among the weeds and nettles. Surely, he thought, Ryan had left more behind than this?
It was hard to believe this had been a man’s hideaway, complete with tent and cooking fire and makeshift benches. He knew Ryan hadn’t taken the tent that day. Had someone come along and, finding it, considered it abandoned and fair game? Suddenly, he had a horrible feeling that he’d wasted his time coming here. It had been a whim, born of need and regret, and indulged when he should have been back in London trying to find out who had attacked Denis Childs.
He stood for a moment, gazing absently at the remains of the camp, imagining the echo of voices and the smell of wood smoke. Then he remembered the rifle. Ryan had greeted them that day armed with a rifle. When he’d come with them, he’d left it behind, but there was no sign of it now. Had it gone the same way as the tent?
Still, he began to look more carefully, starting in the center of the camp and widening his perimeter in careful traverses. There was no sign of the gun, rusting in the undergrowth. But as children, he and Juliet had pretended to be archaeologists, searching for “artifacts” their father had buried for them. That early recognition of disturbed earth had served him well as a policeman on cases he mostly didn’t care to remember. Seedlings liked the softened earth, and in those places the growth was sometimes a paler green. His pulse quickened when he found one spot, some yards from the main campsite. It was oblong, perhaps a yard long and half as wide. Progressing more carefully, he soon found another. When another circuit turned up nothing further, he looked around for a digging tool, cursing himself for having come so unprepared. In the end, the best he could do was a sharp stick.
It was well past noon now, and as he began to dig in the first spot, he could feel the midday sun scorching the back of his neck. He kept on, but when he reached the depth of about a foot in the area he’d selected, he stopped, leaning on the stick and wiping the sweat from his eyes. He couldn’t believe Ryan would have stashed something any deeper.
Wishing he’d bought a water bottle at the marina, he moved to the second spot and began working at the earth with his stick, more scraping than digging. He’d dug a few more inches when he struck something solid. And smooth. Clearing another few inches at the same level, he began to glimpse the obstruction. White, smooth, slightly rounded. PVC pipe, he decided, when he’d cleared a little more, and it certainly wasn’t plumbing.
He scraped and cleared with more enthusiasm, down on his knees at the end and using his already sore hands. Tossing the stick aside when the entire pipe had been freed, he lifted the tube out and examined it. It was about two feet long and six inches in diameter, sealed at one end with a glued cap, and at the other with a screw-on cap.
Carefully, he unscrewed the removable cap. The end of the tube had been stuffed with a bundle of blue cloth, filled, Kincaid found as he eased it out, with something heavy and granular. From the feel, he thought the contents were desiccant, the sort you bought in bulk. He looked again at the cloth. It was a bandanna, he realized, dark blue, Indian cotton. Ryan had been wearing it—or one just like it—the day he’d left the island with them.
He sat back on his haunches, suddenly reluctant to pull more of the contents out willy-nilly. Instead, he smoothed a level space on the pile of soil he’d removed. Then he canted the tube at the sealed end and gently tipped the contents onto the ground. There were two cloth bags with drawstring ties. The first contained a notebook, which seemed to be filled mostly with lists of camping supplies, a passport with Ryan’s photo under the name of Roger Meadows—Ryan had liked his initials, and his nature references, apparently—and a tight elastic-banded wad of one-hundred-pound notes.
Kincaid guessed what was in the second bag from its shape. He eased the bag free, and was glad he hadn’t dumped the contents without care. It was a handgun, a Walther nine millimeter, with a spare clip. He stared at it, frowning. If this was Ryan’s, where had the gun that had killed him come from?
He looked at the bandanna again. It was certainly possible that Ryan had had more than one of the cotton handkerchiefs. But he had left the island wearing one, and he’d not had one on when he died. If he’d only owned one, had he come back to the island?
Ryan had stayed with Doug for a week in February, during which he’d certainly not been a prisoner, and Doug had been gone all day at work. So Ryan had hours every day, unaccounted for. But if he’d come back, how the hell had he got here? Hitched? Hired a car? He’d had the cash to do the latter, as evidenced by the wad of bills. In that case, had he hired a boat? Or stolen one, so as not to leave a record?
If Ryan had come back, what, Kincaid wondered, had he taken away with him? Or, he thought, perhaps more important, what had he left behind?
Spurred by this thought, he picked up the last item in the tube, a peppermint tin, perhaps two inches by three and half an inch deep. Opening it, he saw miscellaneous camping oddments—some stick matches, a ball of drier fluff useful for starting fires, a little coil of twine, a mini Swiss army knife. Beneath them, he caught a glimpse of something small and flat and dark blue, perhaps the size of his thumbnail, in the bottom of the tin. Pushing the drier fluff aside, he lifted the little rectangle. It was a memory card.