Page 5

Five

John looks up into the trees at the side of the trail.

“What do you want?”

The crow perched in the branches above him stares back, its head tilted to one side curiously. The bird is out of reach, but still close enough for him to see the petrol-purple sheen on its black wings and—just about—the glint of the early morning sun reflected in its eye.

What does it want? He knows the old stories about birds carrying the souls of the dead to the underworld. But while he’d like to believe in an afterlife, he doesn’t. It’s only wildlife doing what it does. Probably just waiting for its chance. As a younger man, he might have thrown something to startle it away, but he’s worked hard to be less angry over the years. And who knows: maybe those old stories are true. In which case, he doesn’t want to be making enemies he might be meeting again before too long.

“Don’t get any ideas,” he tells it.

Then he slides the phone into his pocket and takes a deep breath. Nothing to do now but wait. The scene is a mile from the nearest road, and it will probably be half an hour or more before backup arrives.

Not backup , he reminds himself .

It is still difficult to accept that he’s no longer police. When he called in the scene just now, he used a phone number he still knows by heart, and for a second had almost given his rank as well as his name. But he’s just plain John Garvie now. And while the sergeant he’d spoken to had been a colleague for years, he had spoken to John the way he would have any other civilian. That’s all he is now.

He looks up and down the trail.

Empty in both directions. But the sun has barely risen and the tourists will still be in their beds.

Nobody out here but you, old man.

Except that isn’t quite true.

He looks down into the grass at the side of the trail.

He spotted the remains from a distance, although at that point they were partially concealed in the undergrowth, the dirty black and brown of them barely visible in the bright green between the trees. As he drew closer, he mistook them for a pile of charred wood. But then he realized what was lying here: a body, burned beyond recognition. None of the facial features remain. Any clothing has melded with the blackened skin. One arm pokes up in the air a little, and the exposed bone has the cracked, mottled texture of a stick in the ashes of a cold bonfire.

There is something small and pitiful about the remains. Fire diminishes a body, like a hand clenching slowly into a fist. But these remains seem tinier than most. Once upon a time, this was a living, breathing human being: someone full of motion and movement, love and laughter. But the remains in the undergrowth are so empty and still that it’s hard to square them with that idea, and the sight of them stirs familiar emotions inside him. The sadness at this loss of life. The frustration of wanting to protect someone, and it being far too late. The anger.

I will find who did this to you , he thinks.

It’s no longer his job, but it’s there anyway: the need for justice. The feeling that the scales have to be tilted back to right, or else his own world will always be askew.

Keeping a careful distance from the remains, he examines them as best he can from the path. There is no damage to the surrounding undergrowth, and so it’s obvious that the woman—and he’s sure the remains are female—did not die here. Her body must have been burned elsewhere before being brought out into the woods.

John looks around again. He knows these trails well, and works through a mental map of them now, trying to work out how she might have been delivered here. There are only a handful of possible routes, and even the most remote of them would take daring. The most likely scenario is that she was brought here under cover of darkness. And it would have to have been during the night just gone. If she had been here longer than that, someone would have found her already.

Or something would , he thinks.

He looks up.

The crow is perched in the branches above, its head tilted to the side.

“Why bring her out here?” he asks it.

The crow just watches him.

It’s a good question though. And having gone to all that effort, why leave her so poorly concealed? The island offers a thousand isolated spots in which a body could be more effectively disposed of than this. Even here, if the remains had been carried just a few meters farther into the undergrowth, they might have remained undiscovered a while longer.

Assuming it happened under cover of darkness, he supposes it’s possible that whoever did it imagined they’d done a better job than they had. Or perhaps they’d got spooked and just wanted to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible. Except the kind of man who would burn a woman’s body and carry it into the woods in the middle of the night doesn’t strike him as the type to get spooked easily.

He checks up and down the trail again.

A part of him wishes the culprit was walking toward him right now. That way he might have a chance to let out some of the anger he’s feeling. But there is nobody is in sight. The woods are empty and silent. And another part of him is glad about that.

He looks back down at the remains .

I will find who did this to you , he thinks again.

And then he takes out his bottle of water and waits.

It is close to forty minutes before the police arrive.

He’s beginning to worry that another walker will chance upon the scene first, but then he spots them in the distance. The two officers are ambling along casually. Not a care in the word.

Liam Fleming and David Watson.

Watson raises a tentative hand as they approach, and John nods in return. Fleming doesn’t acknowledge him, of course. He has his hands in his pockets and is studying the trail, little tufts of dust at his feet like he’s looking for a rock to kick into the undergrowth. Fleming never took John seriously as an officer, he knows. Now he no longer even has to pretend to.

“David.” John nods again as the officers reach him. “Liam.”

Fleming still doesn’t look at him. Instead, he walks past—a little too close, as always—and then, his hands still in his pockets, he rocks up on his tiptoes and peers down into the undergrowth. His expression is blank; he might be looking at fly-tipped rubbish.

“I walked north from Garrett Rocks,” John tells them. “Didn’t see a soul along the way. It was seven twenty-three when I found her and called it in. My guess is that she was left here sometime last night.”

“Her?” Fleming is still looking down at the remains. “She?”

“Just a hunch.”

Fleming nods, as though he hadn’t been expecting anything stronger.

“She wasn’t killed here,” John says.

“Obviously not.” Fleming leans back up and looks at Watson. “We need to cordon off the path. North and south end of the trail. South is the priority, but there might be a few campers closer to the Reach, and we don’t want anyone else stumbling into this.”

“Yes, sir.”

John fights to keep his patience.

“There’s the Brady path too,” he says .

“What about it?”

“It connects to the road a mile or so that way.” John nods to the east, even though Fleming still isn’t looking at him. “Not that many people use it. Quiet place to park, I reckon. It would still be a risk for whoever brought her out here, but I think it’s the most likely route they’d have taken. Less chance of being noticed.”

Finally, Fleming turns to him, angling his body slightly. Fleming is a big man, used to his physical presence holding center stage and pushing others away to the wings. Once a bully, always a bully , John thinks. The old red mist begins to rise, and he forces himself to keep his fists unclenched.

“That should be cordoned off too,” he says. “It’s crucial to preserve evidence.”

“Yes,” Fleming says. “I know that.”

“Because this is a wrongful death.”

“I know that too.”

They stare at each other for a couple of seconds.

Then Fleming looks away and breathes out, so long and hard that John can smell a hint of last night’s drink on the man’s breath.

“We’ll need you to make a statement, Mr. Garvie.”

“I know that,” John says.

“A sergeant will talk you through the process. We’ll want a record of exactly what happened. The route you took and anything you saw along the way. However inconsequential it might seem to you, it might be important to our investigation. And your whereabouts over the last twenty-four hours, for what that’s worth.”

“Yes,” John says. “I know that too.”

“But the first thing I need you to do is remove yourself from my crime scene immediately.”

Fleming looks back at him.

John makes a point of staring back. The humiliation stings, and there’s a moment when he wants to swing for Fleming. But there’s nothing he can do. As much as it burns him, he isn’t police anymore. He has no authority here. And if Fleming is the kind of man to rub his face in that fact, there’s nothing much he can do about that either .

Nothing much he can do about anything these days.

So he turns and walks away down the trail. But he feels that sense of duty pulling at him, like a rope tethered to his chest, and he glances back. Watson is on the radio, following his orders. Fleming is squatting down on his haunches, peering at the dead woman in the undergrowth.

Both men appear to have forgotten him already.

John looks up. A small black arc flits across the sky above the trees: the crow, flying away now. Taking its cargo off to the underworld, if that’s what you believe. And although John doesn’t, it’s difficult to shake the sensation that the bird had been perched there the whole time waiting, wanting to watch the encounter that was about to unfold below.

To see who this man was that had found the woman’s body.

What he was going to do.

And if so, he wonders what it thought of the little it saw.

Times passes.

That’s what it does, if you’re lucky. Which is exactly the kind of homespun aphorism that John has always despised and yet has found himself deploying more and more recently. I’ve gotten so old , he’ll think, and then a voice in his head will answer back, Better than the alternative . But is it? As though that’s some kind of comfort. It’s like he’s trying to find something positive in a life that increasingly feels lived for the sake of it. There’s no real consolation to those phrases. Ultimately, they all mean the same thing.

What—you expected something more than this?

Maybe.

He supposes it’s natural in old age to look back on your life and take stock. When you’re young, there’s so much time left ahead of you. You can still achieve something. But then suddenly you realize that time is mostly behind you now, and there’s only the fact that you didn’t.

Daniel doesn’t call.

It’s tempting to phone his son himself, but his self-respect won’t let him. It’s not that he wants to talk to Daniel so much as for his son to want to talk to him, and making the call himself won’t make that happen .

In terms of looking back and taking stock , he knows that Daniel has turned out well, but it never feels like he can take any pride in that. He remembers how badly he floundered as a single father, winging the whole thing and crashing constantly. All the missed conversations and closed doors. Whatever his son has achieved in his life is as much despite of John as because of him. And even though things are better between them these days, it’s no real surprise that his son doesn’t call.

In his bleakest moments, he thinks:

Who is even here for him to talk to?

Times passes.

Yes, that is indeed what it does if you’re lucky. John fills it as best he can. He reads voraciously; he watches television; and there are his files to attend to—all the unsolved cases that have caught his attention over the years, and which the internet allows him to pursue from a distance. He prepares his evening meals carefully, and then sits alone at the kitchen table with a glass of wine from his growing cellar. He works the heavy bag, but not as hard as he used to, no longer quite sure what he’s imagining himself hitting, or why.

He takes his morning walks.

For a week, he chooses a different route. But then he returns to his normal routine. The place where he found the woman’s body is already indistinguishable from the rest of the undergrowth, but it still seems quieter when he reaches that part of the trail. There’s a residual sadness to the air, and he carries it away with him afterward, as though he’s walked through a cobweb.

At first, the murder is covered heavily in the local news, so much so that he comes to resent the sight of Fleming in front of the cameras. Then he begins to resent the obvious lack of progress. He can’t help thinking that he would solve the case if he was in charge, even though he knows deep down that he wouldn’t. It’s just a feeling of emptiness and worthlessness, along with that sense of duty, weighing him down. Whoever the murdered woman is, the crime doesn’t make the national news, and a fortnight later, there is as little trace of her on the airwaves as there is in the undergrowth.

Times passes .

One evening, he is sitting on a bench at the seafront. The sky is a canopy of smeared yellows and purples, streaked in places with threads of vivid-blue cloud, as though the world has been dappled by a child’s finger paints and then smeared and swirled. The island is a small and shabby place in many ways, but there is still beauty to be found here. It’s just beauty that makes him feel even more small and irrelevant.

After a while, he becomes aware that one of the runners on the promenade has changed paths and is approaching him. Sarah Ross. The front of her pink top is damp with sweat, and a few strands of hair are sticking out from under a blue baseball cap.

She’s breathless. “Hey there, Mr. Garvie.”

“It’s John , Sarah.” He smiles. “Surely you know that by now?”

“Old habits die hard.”

“Yes,” he says. “Tell me about it.”

She sits with him for a time, chugging water out of a bottle as they talk.

How’s Daniel doing? she asks. He’s doing fine, John tells her. Not heard from him for a while, but he’s okay. He’s busy.

How are you keeping?

I’m keeping busy too, he says.

He doesn’t ask about her home life. It still baffles him that she’s ended up with a man like Liam Fleming—but he has a nose for these things, and she doesn’t strike him as being settled here on the island. There’s a part of her that still wants something more , and he hopes to God she ends up following that instinct. He still remembers the girl who would show up for Daniel on the doorstep, wide-eyed and excited. Do you want to go on an adventure? There aren’t many of those to be found on the island. His life is one long testament to that.

“I’m sorry about what happened,” she says after a while.

He raises an eyebrow as a question.

“The woman’s body,” she says. “It must have been horrible.”

“Oh.” He shifts slightly. “Yes, it was. But I’m glad it was me who found her. Better me than a tourist. At least I’ve seen things like that before.”

He hesitates .

“What’s happening there?” he asks. “Do you know?”

A little, she says. She tells him that the woman still hasn’t been identified, but it doesn’t seem like she was anyone from the island, and so the police are looking at missing persons from the mainland. Apparently the woman had been dead for some time, and they can tell she was still alive when someone set fire to her.

“But she’d been hurt before that,” she says.

“How so?”

“There were knife marks on the bones.”

John closes his eyes at that.

What he told her was true: he has seen things like that body before. But only in the most mundane and everyday sense. Accidents; tragedies. As far as he knows, he has been in the vicinity of actual evil only once in his life, at the rest area all those years ago, and it remains impossible for him to comprehend such gratuitous cruelty. He knows what Daniel would say to that, of course. It’s never gratuitous for the perpetrator; there’s always a reason; they’re human beings, not monsters. But John can’t bring himself to go there. He can’t get far enough past the suffering the victim must have endured in order to visualize the man behind it.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” Sarah says.

“I don’t think Liam should be telling you it either,” he says.

Time passes.

He does what he does, continuing to wear his path into the landscape of the world like an animal pacing back and forth in its cage. He tries to cling to the small moments of beauty in the world. A sunrise here; a well-cooked meal there. But it feels like wearing a heavy mask that he’s only putting on for himself now, and the question keeps occurring to him. Why make the effort?

One afternoon, he drives to the Reach.

He parks and walks close to the edge. The sea stretches out far ahead and he can hear the water crashing against the rocks far below. The wind is cold enough to sting his face. He kicks a pebble off the edge and imagines it disappearing into the maelstrom below .

What would the world be like without you?

Not so very different , he thinks.

He spends a while standing there, hoping for a different answer to arrive, but none does. There have been moments over the years when he’s come here and asked himself the same question. On those occasions, he was driven by the feelings of worthlessness and self-hatred that have flowed inside him his whole life, erupting uncontrollably from time to time. Days and weeks when the air he breathed was nothing but red mist. His inner land feels so much calmer right now, and yet for some reason the answer remains the same. It makes him wonder what he was ever expecting.

It wouldn’t be so difficult, would it? Just a few steps farther and then nothing at all.

It’s something to think about.

He drives home again. As he’s closing the front door, he notices the envelope lying on the mat. The post arrives first thing here and today’s delivery has already been, so this must have been put through the letterbox afterward by hand.

He picks it up.

There is no writing on the envelope. It hasn’t even been sealed. He slides the contents out and finds a single sheet of paper. When he unfolds it, he sees that it’s a photograph that someone has printed out. But while he recognizes what he is looking at, it makes no sense. How can this be? And then, as the image settles, a shiver runs through him.

There he is, standing in the woods that day.

With the dead woman in the undergrowth at his feet.