Now darkness had descended again, and Ronald was preparing to spend another night in the woods when the car arrived. It approached slowly because it was driving without lights, and it stopped well before it neared the cemetery’s railings. Two men got out. Ronald turned his Armasight night vision binoculars on them. One was Morland, although this time he was out of uniform. The second was an old scarecrow of a man wearing a long coat and a felt hat. They didn’t speak as Morland unlocked the cemetery gate, and the two men entered.

A second car, a station wagon, came up the road. Morland and the scarecrow stopped to watch it come. It pulled up alongside the first vehicle and an elderly woman emerged from the driver’s side. Two more men climbed out of the back, although one of them needed the assistance of his companion and the woman to do so. He wore a small oxygen tank strapped to his back, and a mask covered his mouth. Supported by the others, he made his way into the churchyard.

Finally, from the northwest, came the pastor, but he was not alone. There was a girl of eighteen or nineteen with him. She wore a padded jacket over what looked like a nightgown, and there were unlaced sneakers on her feet. Her hands were restrained behind her back, and tape covered her mouth. To her right walked another man, a decade or so older than the pastor. He held the girl’s right arm above the elbow, guiding her so that she wouldn’t trip over the old gravestones, whispering and smiling as he did so. The girl didn’t struggle or try to run. Ronald wondered if she was drugged, for her eyes were drooping slightly, and she dragged her feet as she came.

She was brought to the place by the western wall of the church from which Warraner had cleared the undergrowth earlier that day. Ronald tried to get closer to them, but he didn’t want to risk making a noise and alerting the group below. He contented himself with shifting slightly so that he might see more clearly what was happening. It was a still, quiet night, and the voices of the group carried to him if he listened carefully. He heard Warraner tell the girl to rest, that they were almost done. The man who held her arm assisted her as she sank to her knees, and the others formed a halfcircle around her, almost obscuring her from sight. A blade appeared, and Ronald drew a breath. He put down the binoculars and switched to the night vision scope on his rife. It wasn’t as powerful, and didn’t give him such a wide view of proceedings, but if anyone tried to take the knife to the girl then, cop or no cop, he planned to cut them down before the metal touched her skin. The Browning was self-loading, which gave him four shots before he’d have to pause.

But the knife was used only to cut the bonds holding the girl’s hands. Ronald watched them fall loosely to her sides, and then the man who had been assisting her removed the padded jacket, leaving her with only the nightgown as protection against the cold. Through Ronald’s scope she looked like a pale ghost in the churchyard. He fixed his sights on the man with the knife and waited, his finger not quite touching the trigger of the rife, but the blade disappeared, and none of the others was holding a weapon.

They backed away from the girl, partially obscuring Ronald’s view of her. He could still see her nightgown, though, white against the dark. He moved his sights from one back to the next, watching for movement, waiting for someone to produce a weapon, to make a move on the girl, but nobody did. Instead they appeared to be waiting.

Ronald moved back to what he could see of the girl, and a finger of shadow crept across the pallor of her nightgown, as though the moon had suddenly shone on an overhanging branch.

But there was no branch, and there was no moon.

A second shadow came, and a third, like cracks on ice. There was a furry of movement, a blur of white, and single dull snap, as of a twig breaking. The watching elders came together, and for an instant the girl was entirely hidden from Ronald.

When they separated again, she was gone.

Ronald removed his eye from the scope and blinked. It wasn’t possible. He scanned the ground, but there was no sign of the girl in the white nightgown. Even had it somehow been stripped from her, her naked body would still have been visible on the ground, but Ronald could see nothing.

Now the group was dispersing. Warraner was heading back to his house, while the man who had come with him joined the others as they returned to their cars. Within minutes, the gates were locked once again, and the vehicles were making their way back down the road to the highway, still driving dark.

Ronald waited for fifteen minutes, then headed for the cemetery. He climbed the railing, heedless now of any hidden sensors, and approached the spot where he had last seen the girl. He knelt, and discerned signs of disturbance. Clumps of earth had been dislodged from the dry ground, and there were marks in the dirt where something had briefly been dragged through it. They ended where the hole once lay, but it had now collapsed, leaving only a slight depression in the ground.

Ronald put his rife aside and started to scrabble at the dirt with his bare hands. He dug until one of his fingernails cracked, but there was no trace of the girl, only earth and thick roots, although Ronald could not tell their origin, for there were no trees in the cemetery. He sat back on the ground, breathing heavily. Above him, the old church loomed.

A fragment of something pale caught his eye in the dirt. Lodged against a small stone in the dirt was a piece of pale cloth about half an inch square. Ronald held it between his finger and thumb.

I am not mad, he thought. I am not mad.

He picked up his rife and, using his boots, tried to hide his efforts at digging. When he felt that he had done all he could, he returned to his hiding place, gathered his belongings, and prepared to leave. He checked to make sure that he had not left behind any trash or possessions, even though he knew himself to be more careful than that. Still, it paid to take the time to be sure. When he was done, he started walking. It was not yet 11:00 PM, and by traveling carefully he made it to the town of Dearden shortly before midnight, where he huddled down at the outskirts and made himself as comfortable as possible against a tree. He called just one number along the way, but it was not 911. He used a cup of coffee to warm himself, but it did not stop his shivering, and his whole body was aching by the time the truck arrived. The Fulci brothers helped him inside, and drove him back to Scarborough.

45

Angel and Louis were parked close to the intersection of Amity and Henry, about four blocks south of Hunts Lane. They spoke as they walked, heads down against the rain.

‘So?’ said Angel.

‘He’s not telling us all he knows,’ said Louis.

‘But you believed what he did tell us?’

‘Yes.’

‘Why?’

‘Because there was a percentage in keeping information back from us, but none in lying, and he’s a man who works the percentages. He wasn’t the middleman on the hit, but he has more information about who was responsible than he’s shared with us.’

‘You could tell that just by looking in his eyes?’

‘I understand him. And I know that he’s scared of me.’

‘It’s not a very exclusive club.’

‘No, but not everyone in it has the resources to make a move against one of my friends. Cambion does, but he’s smart enough to know that if he involved himself then he’d have to take me out as well, and that didn’t happen.’

‘Which means that the shooters either don’t know about you, or don’t care.’

‘And you just know that it can’t be the latter.’