The Woodcutter (40 page)

But that implied they knew he was coming home.

He put that problem aside with the phones.

There were lots of old plastic sheets in the barn, remnants of better days.

He set about parcelling up the bodies, placing large rocks alongside them before securing the plastic with baler twine and wire. He then loaded the grisly packages into the Defender and returned to the house to clean up the mess on the landing. The blade of his axe he washed beneath the running tap in the kitchen.

The bullet that had burned Sneck was buried in the bedroom wall. He would dig it out later.

He went back to the barn and opened the lid of an ancient but still solid metal feed box. It was in here that he’d found on his return, neatly packaged and labelled, all the stuff that had been his as a boy. At some point during his runaway years, his father must have collected all his gear together and set out to make sure it would still be to hand and serviceable on his return. It had made him weep to see the care with which the task had been carried out, and to imagine Fred’s state of mind as he went about the job.

Of course when he came back he’d been, in his own eyes at least, a man and far beyond childish things. Looking back now, he found it unforgivable that his fixation on Imogen, and his euphoria at winning her, had deadened him completely to any real appreciation of what he’d put his father through. It wasn’t till he himself experienced the gut-searing pain of loss all those years later that he came, too late, to understand.

Now he lifted out of the box the inflatable dinghy that had been in the kitchen on the occasion of Luke Hollins’s first visit. It had required very little work to render it serviceable. Look after your gear and your gear will look after you, was a lesson Fred had drummed into him, and he practised what he preached. The rubber had been heavily oiled and the inflation nozzle coated in a thick layer of protective grease. How many times had his father renewed it over the years – as if by preserving it he also preserved the hope that somehow the young boy who had left him would return unchanged?

He put the dinghy and the foot pump in the back of the Defender. Then he went into the kitchen, stoked up the fire and set the kettle to boil again.

He didn’t have much of an appetite, but he knew he had a long night ahead and his body needed fuel. So he opened a can of stew, heated it up and ate it straight out of the pan, wiping the sides clean with a hunk of bread. Sitting drinking tea and chewing on a muesli bar, he checked out the mobile phones. No messages. He brought up their phone books. None of the numbers was familiar. Next he checked their photo stores. One specialized in close-ups of female genitalia. Maybe it was some kind of trophy thing. They did nothing for Hadda. The other had shots of a family picnic, a handsome woman with an Eastern European look and a couple of young kids, sitting on a sunny hillside overlooking the sea. This did something for him. It made him feel bad.

He looked at his watch. It was eleven o’clock. Three hours had passed since he came home. But it was still too early. He fed Sneck, who seemed none the worse for his close encounter with the intruder’s gun, then he settled in the wooden rocker by the fire and closed his eyes.

In Parkleigh he had learned to sleep almost at will and to wake at whatever hour he ordained, but sleep came hard now. When he finally nodded off he went straight into a dream in which he was being pursued through a dark forest by two men whom he couldn’t shake off no matter how he twisted and turned. Then in the space of a single stride he was no longer the pursued but the pursuer, his quarry not two men but a single woman whose skin as she ran naked through the moon’s shadows gleamed first white as pearl then dark as ebony.

He awoke to find he was sexually aroused.

‘What the hell was that all about?’ he asked the dog who lay at his feet, watching him.

It was one o’clock. He stood up, made another pot of tea and drank a burning mugful. The rest he poured into a thermos flask which he put into his backpack with a couple of bars of chocolate. He changed into his warmest mountain gear and pulled on his walking boots.

‘Right, Sneck, how are you feeling?’ he asked.

The dog rose instantly.

‘OK, if you’re sure. But we could face a long walk.’

The Defender, as ready it seemed as the dog, burst into life at first time of asking and he set it bumping back up the frozen lonning.

He found the intruder’s car exactly where he’d estimated. It was a Toyota Land Cruiser. Now he knew where he’d seen the first dead man before. But he was pretty sure the other body wasn’t that of the other man on Drigg Beach, the one called Pudo. Probably still recovering from a broken jaw.

The Land Cruiser had a capacious boot so there was plenty of room to transfer his grisly cargo and the rest of his gear. As an afterthought, he took the jerry can of petrol he always carried in the Defender and tossed it into the back of the Toyota.

‘OK, Sneck, here we go,’ he said.

The narrow winding road he followed ran up the remote western valley of Wasdale. It ended at the valley head, so unless there was anyone heading late for the tiny hamlet situated there, or the old inn, he was unlikely to have company at this hour of a freezing winter night. It wasn’t just the remoteness that attracted him. It was Wastwater, the darkest and deepest of all Cumbria’s lakes, lying between the road and the Screes, the awful precipitous slopes plunging down from the long ridge between Ill Gill and Whin Rigg.

He parked as close to the edge of the lake as possible and set about inflating the dinghy. As far as he could make out in the near pitch darkness, his father had done an excellent job of storage and the rubber expanded and tautened and held its shape when he finally stopped pumping.

He lifted the topmost body out of the car and laid it in the dinghy. As expected, there was only room for one of the bundles. Indeed, there was scarcely room for himself and he had to kneel with his knees resting against the dead man as he began to paddle the vessel out from the bank. An unimaginable distance above him the sky was crowded with stars but the light that had set out earthward so many millennia ago seemed to fail and lose heart as it was sucked into the terrestrial black hole of Wasdale’s lake.

Ahead was darkness, behind was darkness, all around was darkness. He struck with the paddle and struck again. The temptation to push the body over the side then turn to regain the shore was strong, but he knew he had to go much closer to the furthermost side. At its deepest the lake measured more than two hundred and fifty feet, well below the safety limit for the district’s recreational divers. But it was the Screes ahead that plunged to this forbidding depth and to deposit his burden too soon might mean it would come to rest on the much shallower northern shelf.

Now it seemed to him at last that the view ahead was mottled with different intensities of blackness and a couple of strokes later he began to make out the detail of the precipitous slopes soaring two thousand feet above his head.

He laid the paddle in the dinghy and tried to ease the body over the side. Lifting it in and out of the car had been hard enough. Moving it all in the unstable confines of this small craft was backbreaking and perilous. For a moment one side dipped down beneath the surface and water came slopping in. He had no illusions. Weighed down with boots and clothing as he was, he would find it hard to survive long enough in water at this temperature even to struggle to the visible shore. Then he’d have to walk all the way along the boulder strewn track to one end of the lake or the other and back along the road to the car.

It would take the best part of a couple of hours, he would be wet, cold, and exhausted, and he’d still have the second body to deal with.

The thought steadied him. Human beings are better at avoidance than achievement. When things are bad, don’t look for a good to struggle to, look for something worse to struggle from!

He wondered how this downbeat view of the human psyche would appeal to Alva. All that mattered now was that it worked for him. At last he got more of the plastic-wrapped package out of the dinghy than was in it and suddenly, as though it too had made a choice and opted for a peaceful rest in the dark deeps, it slid easily over the side and was gone.

Without that dead weight, it now seemed to him that the dinghy moved like an elfin pinnace (where did that phrase come from?) under his strong even strokes and what had felt like an immeasurable distance on the way out was behind him in no time and Sneck was welcoming him back on dry land with a wild oscillation of the tail.

But now it was all to do again.

He didn’t take a rest because he feared that if he did his heart might fail him.

They say that having performed a difficult task once gives you confidence and makes the second time easier.

As usual, the bastards lie!

The lake seemed wider, the night seemed darker, the dinghy rode even lower in the water, and at one point he felt so totally disorientated he could not with any confidence say in what direction he was paddling.

Then he got guidance, but in a form that was more frightening than the situation it rescued him from.

A car’s headlights came splitting the darkness along the road, heading up the valley.

It seemed to slow momentarily as it approached the point where he’d left the Toyota. And then, perhaps theorizing that the most likely reason for a car to be parked so late at night in such a remote situation was that the inmates were engaged in a very private activity, the driver speeded up again and soon the light faded as he wound his way to the distant inn.

This brief interlude of illumination deepened the resurgent blackness to impenetrability, but Hadda had once again got his bearings. A few more strokes, then, careless of the water he was shipping, he rolled the second body over the side and began to paddle back to the shore.

No elfin pinnace now, the dinghy felt heavy and wallowed through rather than cut across the water. But finally he made it. He was tempted to puncture the inflatable and let it sink, but that would be stupid. It wouldn’t go to the bottom, it would easily be spotted, people would get worried, the car driver might recall the parked vehicle, and even if his belief that the bodies were sunk too deep for retrieval turned out to be true, the incident might be picked up by someone anxious to know what had happened to the two men he had sent out on a murderous mission . . .

He deflated the dinghy, jumping up and down on it to remove the last bit of air, and flung it into the back of the Land Cruiser.

‘Right, Sneck,’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’

He drove through the hills, past dark farms sleeping under ancient stars, meeting no traffic till he reached a main road. Even here at this hour there was only the very occasional car. Eventually he turned off again and was soon back on the single-track fell road where he’d paused on his way home to let Sneck have a run before the light faded completely from the sky. At its highest point he bumped off the tarmac on to the frozen grass, keeping going till the engine finally stalled. Now he got out of the car with the dog at his heel. From the load space he retrieved his rucksack and the jerry can.

The dinghy he left lying there.

He unscrewed the jerry can and soaked the vehicle’s interior with petrol. His thinking was simple. Leave an empty car in the Lake District and eventually someone would report it, mountain rescue might be called out to do a search of the nearby hills while the police concentrated on tracing the owner of the vehicle.

What was relatively commonplace, however, was for a gang of local tearaways to help themselves to a car after a night on the beer, enjoy a bit of wild joy-riding on the quiet country roads, and finish up by torching the vehicle in some remote spot before heading off home.

So a burnt-out wreck would draw far less attention because it carried with it its own built-in explanation.

He laid a trail of petrol across the ground for some twenty feet or so from the car, then returned to hurl the jerry can into the back. Picking up his sack, he shrugged it on to his shoulder and made his way back to the end of the petrol trail.

Now he took out a box of matches, struck one and tossed it on to the ground.

‘Heel,’ he said to Sneck, and set off at a steady pace that would have surprised those who only ever saw him limping slowly across the ground.

Behind him he heard a whoomph! as the line of fire reached the car.

He didn’t look back until a few minutes later he heard the explosion that told him the car’s tank had gone up.

Now he stopped and turned.

He’d already covered a quarter-mile and climbed a couple of hundred feet.

Below him he could see the flames from the burning car licking the darkness out of the air. Two thousand years ago people would have taken it for a funeral pyre. In a way, it was. He thought of the two men anchored for ever (he hoped) to the bed of the cold lake. He knew from experience how long it took for the human mind to come to terms with responsibility for a human death. Eventually factors in mitigation would loom larger – they had, after all, been out to kill him – but for the moment their innocence or guilt did not signify. They were just two lives that he had brought to a sudden end. The man with the mucky pictures on his mobile and the man with the loving family were equally dead.

It would take a long time for him to deal with it, but seven years in prison had taught him how to compartmentalize his thoughts.

He turned his back on the accusing flames. It was five o’clock in the morning and he had a long walk ahead of him.

To start with his way lay east and already, though dawn was still hours away, he thought he could see the line of the dark hills before him beginning to be outlined against a paler sky.

There was always a growing light to walk towards as well as a dying light to leave behind.

And the ground he walked on was holy. His great mistake had been ever to leave it.

‘Come on, Sneck,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home.’

Book Four
The Noise of Wolves