He knew that behind him, higher, there was another vantage point, and at least one more watcher. The kid came up the track to the house and Jago saw a torch shone in his face and the outlines of two men, broader and taller than the kid. Cigarettes were exchanged, a lighter flashed, and he heard a low cackle.
The kid went to the back door, knocked and waited. When it was opened, the dogs bounded out. Jago realised they had been brought in during the storm, but not the washing. The kid left and the door was closed after him. He used no torch. Jago assumed he knew each stone, each trail; none was visible now.
The kid had gone up the slope behind the derelict shed, climbed higher than where Jago was hidden, then looped behind him. Jago’s scent had been washed away by the sea, and now the route he had taken through the trees and over the rocks that had been cleansed by the rain, all trace of him gone. The dogs moved behind and above him. He wondered how close they were to the point where a man had sneezed twice.
They would kill him if they found him. Well, he knew that.
He had never been so cold. He had never before lost the free movement of his limbs. He had never been so hungry.
He heard the dogs and the whistled commands. They said, at the money-laundering lectures he had attended, that the art of investigation was ‘follow the cash’. Jago had survived the storm and clung to a talisman. Follow the sheets. The dogs had gone, the wind was dropping and the rain had turned to drizzle. He could hear, if he strained to listen, the flap of the sheets as the pegs loosened.
He had endured, which might have been a triumph but was not: he had done nothing. The night closed in and an owl screamed. The washing line was locked in his mind.
10
The rain had stopped but the wind was stronger. Jago saw home: his mother, brother and sister, Christmas, a few presents under a plastic tree. He had not wanted to play the games she’d bought after they’d had the turkey and hadn’t wanted to wear a paper hat. He saw the big office in the big building and the man who had greeted him as if he was going to be a satisfying ‘work in progress’. A girl in Lancaster had laughed in his face when he’d suggested they go out to the pub, and so had another, who had been with him on the dunes near to Carnforth – they’d watched the cockle pickers far out on the sands.
The people in adjacent seats to his in the City were around him, as were those who sat near him in the Berlin office. He came back to the girl on the beach, to being in the sea and looking across the Strait. All was calm and peaceful – but those people were edging away from him now, and he wanted to call them back.
Eventually he saw the monochrome face – as from a photograph – of Bernardo in the old picture, which showed a man of middle age, smiling and confident . . . and, last, there was another girl, the wound on her face open and oozing.
Each time the madness unhinged him and the shout welled in his throat, he put his clenched fist into his mouth and clamped down his teeth until the blood ran. The pain brought respite from the dreams, but then he would slide back. When he was capable of rational thought he assumed he was subject to delirium, brought on by cold, hunger and lack of movement.
First he saw stars. Then he saw the edge of a cloud wall. At its rim, it glowed silver.
The daughter had come out to smoke again. Men had had torches and shown their faces when cigarettes were lit on the track.
The kid had been out again with the dogs, no light, and had gone behind Jago, then joined the men on the track to the house. The wind was fiercer and branches cracked. Water tumbled to his right. The cloud was pushed on fast.
The moon broke free of the cloud. The puddles under his body seeped away each time he wriggled. Jago thought, with the moon’s appearance, that the delirium might wane. The blood on his hand had dried. There were lights on in the house, more down the track, and a concentration of them in two towns, then the darkness of the sea. He thought he knew the family now and was almost a part of them. He knew the girl who smoked and the mother who ruled the kitchen. He knew the old man, the head of the family, whom he had never seen, and the handyman who drove the car. He knew Marcantonio.
He crawled from the hole in which he had been hidden, and the madness left him. He pushed himself up into a crouch, then stretched. The bones in his back cracked as he straightened. The wind blew against him. He picked up the groundsheet and shook off the water. He laid it in front of him, then started to strip.