They came past Jago. The path was below but close to the rock he sat on.
They were two dark shapes, seeming joined at the hip and shoulder. She was supporting him. They had no torch so would barely have been able to make out the path and might have fallen off it. He heard the woman curse, and a moan from the man. Again he heard her voice, soothing now.
He knew it was them.
Jago couldn’t see the face. He hadn’t seen it when they’d come out of the hole in the wall. He had known where it would be and had focused on it, but the handyman had blocked his view at the critical moment. He had seen her – there had been a moment before the torch was doused when it played on her features. Calm, in control. Jago had seen the man’s shoulders and then they had ducked to the side. He had not seen them again until they were almost upon him. The moan told him the punishment he’d inflicted. It was time to be gone. He knew each footstep he must take, each sharp escarpment he’d scramble up, and each sapling strong enough to bear his weight when he levered himself higher up the slope towards the road. There was the airline equivalent, out of Lamezia, of the milk train – they’d find a seat on it for him. He’d get to a bar on the road back to the west side of the peninsula and call Consolata. She’d meet him, and give him back the last of his possessions. It had not been Jago Browne’s fault that she had been on the hill – she’d had no call to be there – had been found, driven down and stripped. He could not have intervened. He would call and she’d drive him to the airport. There was a way up the slope if he caught at the saplings above and used them to lever himself to the next level. He would go fast then and . . .
But Jago hadn’t seen the face. He hadn’t completed what he had promised he would do. He did not consider that madness governed him, or that he was a changed man from the one who had sat in a park, killing time, watching the death of a fly in a spider’s web not a week ago. He had mapped the way out. He stretched, felt the stiffness in his joints, the tiredness in his legs and jumped off the rock. He sprawled on the path, then pushed himself to his feet.
They led him.
Jago understood where the refuge would be. He had been there. The path was overgrown and stones that had once been steps had slipped askew in rain torrents. There were places where trees had fallen and he had to crawl, steep banks to his right and a drop to a stream bed on his left. Years before – twenty, thirty or even forty – the path had been dug so that it could be used in daylight or at night, in summer or winter. They would have come at least once in every twenty-four hours to visit the child. The helicopter was louder, no longer a faint rumble in the night sky. They made more noise in front, which was good for Jago. He thought the girl had brought the old man as fast as he could manage, but they dared not use a torch and it would have been hard going for them. They were like the wolf, lost, vulnerable and hunted . . . At the bank they would have been on the way home, or already there, paying off the nanny and feeding children, working out in the gym, jogging along the circuits of the Tiergarten or shovelling bundles into a washing-machine. Or worrying whether an old woman had a good return on her investments and wondering what the bonus might be after a half-yearly assessment. None of them knew where he was or what he was doing.
The helicopter circled. Ahead, they went faster, needing the sanctuary of the cave. Any teenager from Canning Town knew what gear was slung underneath a police helicopter. After thieving or a mugging, they knew the helicopter would be up and would carry on its belly a thermal-imagery camera that located body heat, and a NightSun searchlight, with a grotesquely powerful beam. The body-heat job was what they needed to avoid: the cave would do it.
He followed. She went faster. The engine roar was closer. The helicopter had started to circle the house.
The ‘big bird’ in the air always made Fred feel warm. He and Carlo were in need of the comfort factor. The young man with them, Luca, would either be well on the way to colonello in five years, or sewing blankets at some remote outpost, probably Sicily . . . They were all smoking. Luca was between Carlo and Fred, holding the little screen. It showed the images from the helicopter.
Not promising.
They saw Mamma, slow on her feet, taking down the washing from the line, holding the pegs in her mouth, like shark’s teeth. It seemed far below her dignity to look up and acknowledge the pounding rotor blades of the Bell Agusta. She took down her washing and replaced it, showing no sign of the crisis around her: a grandson’s body in a coffin, a village priest, her friend, shot dead, a husband in flight, a daughter-in-law disappeared, and a form of vengeance carried out by a stranger. She held the pegs and folded the sheets.