‘And how are you doing?’

He could hear her trying to control herself, trying not to cry.

‘Okay, I guess. It’s complicated. I feel disloyal to him, somehow, like I abandoned him. Does that make any sense?’

‘It’s guilt.’

‘Yes.’

‘For fucking an asshole like Jeff.’

She couldn’t help but splutter with laughter.

‘You’re the asshole, you know that?’

‘I get that a lot.’

‘Jeff’s been good, you dick. And, hey, you know what the weirdest thing about being at that hospital was?’

‘I get the feeling you’re going to tell me.’

‘You bet I am. It was the number of women who kept coming into the place asking about him. It’s like waiting by the bedside of King Solomon. There was a little dark-haired cop, and a woman from that town, Dark Hollow. You remember it? You ought to. There was shooting.’

Angel winced, not so much at the memory of the town itself but at the mention of the woman. Her name was Lorna Jennings, and she was the wife of the chief of police up in Dark Hollow. There was history there, the kind you didn’t want to discuss with the mother of a man’s child, even if they were now separated and he was dying in a hospital bed.

‘Yeah, it rings a bell.’

‘Do you remember her?’

‘Not so much.’

‘Liar. Did he sleep with her?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’

‘Jesus, I don’t know! I don’t follow him around with a towel and a glass of water.’

‘What about the cop?’

That had to be Sharon Macy. Parker had told Angel about her.

‘No, he didn’t sleep with her. I’m pretty certain of that.’

Angel tried to remember a more awkward conversation that he’d had, but failed.

‘And there’s another woman. She doesn’t stray far from the ICU, and I get the impression that she has police permission to be there, but she’s no cop. She’s a deaf mute, and she carries a gun. I’ve seen how she looks at him.’

‘Liat,’ said Angel. Epstein must have sent her to watch over Parker. She was a curious choice of guardian angel. Effective, but curious.

‘He slept with her, didn’t he? If he didn’t, he should have.’

What the hell, thought Angel.

‘Yeah, he slept with her.’

‘Trust him to sleep with a woman who couldn’t answer back.’

‘It was just once,’ said Angel.

‘What are you, his personal apologist?’

‘You’ve made me his apologist! I only called to see how you were. Now I’m sorry I asked.’

Rachel laughed. It was genuine, and he was happy that he had given her that, at least.

‘Will you come up to see him?’ she asked.

‘Soon,’ he said.

‘You’re looking for them, aren’t you, the ones who did this to him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Nobody ever got this close to him before. Nobody ever hurt him so badly. If he dies …’

‘Don’t say that. Remember what your daughter told you: he’s still deciding, and he has a reason to come back. He loves Sam, and he loves you, even if you are fucking an asshole like Jeff.’

‘Go away,’ said Rachel. ‘Do something useful.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Angel.

He hung up. Louis stood beside him, waiting. He handed Angel a Beretta 21 fitted with a suppressor that was barely longer than the pistol itself. The Beretta could now be fired in a restaurant and would make a sound only slightly louder than a spoon striking against the side of a cup. Louis carried a similar weapon in the pocket of his Belstaff jacket.

They were off to do something useful.

They were going to meet and, if necessary, kill the Collector.

48

Ronald Straydeer sat in the living room of his home near the Scarborough Downs racetrack. He held in his hands a photograph of himself as a younger man in uniform, his left arm encircling the neck of a massive German Shepherd dog. Ronald was smiling in the picture, and he liked to think that Elsa was smiling, too.

He wished that he still smoked pot. He wished that he still drank. It would have been easy to return to doing one or the other, or even both. Under the circumstances, it would not have been surprising or blameworthy. Instead he spoke to the picture, and to the ghost of the dog within it.

He was often asked, by those who did not know any better, why he had not found himself another dog in the intervening years. He knew there were some who said that those who kept dogs had to resign themselves to their eventual loss because of the animals’ relatively short lives. The trick – if trick was the right word – was to learn to love the spirit of the animal, and to recognize that it transferred itself from dog to dog, with each one representing the same life force. Ronald believed that there might be some sense in this, but he felt, too, that men might equally say the same thing about women, and vice versa. He had known plenty of women, and had even loved one or two of them, so he had some experience in the matter. But some men and women lost a partner early in life and never managed to give themselves again to another, and Ronald thought there might have been something of that catastrophic sense of loss to his feelings for his lost dog. He was not a sentimental man – although, again, some mistook his grieving for a dead animal as sentimentality. Ronald Straydeer had simply loved the dog, and Elsa had saved his life and the lives of his brother soldiers on more than one occasion. In the end he was forced to abandon and betray her, and the sight of her, caged and scratching at the wire as she was taken from him, had torn at him every day since then. His only hope was that he might eventually be reunited with his dog in a world beyond this one.

Now he told the ghost of the dog about the church and the girl and the shadows that had encircled her before she was dragged beneath the ground. He could have gone to the police, but there was a policeman involved. And what could he have told them: that he saw a girl kneel by a hole in the earth and then disappear? All he had was a fragment of pale material. Could they extract DNA from it? Ronald did not know. It depended, he supposed, on whether it had touched the girl’s skin for long enough, if it had touched her at all. He had placed the material in one of the resealable bags that he used for food and waste. It was before him now. He held it up to the light, but he could see no traces of blood on it, and it seemed to him to be stained only by dirt. He did not know her name, and he was not sure if he could have identified her from the glimpse that he caught of her in the greenish light of his night vision lens. He knew only that she was not Jude’s daughter. He had seen photographs of Annie. Jude had shared them with him, and Ronald retained an uncanny recall for faces and names. The girl swallowed by the churchyard was younger than Jude’s daughter. Ronald wondered if Annie, too, lay somewhere in that cemetery, if her fate had been the same as that poor girl’s. If so, how many others slept beneath the church, embraced by roots? (For they were not shadows that had wrapped themselves around the girl as she was taken, oh no …)

But Ronald also understood instinctively that, even if people were to believe him and a search was eventually conducted, men could dig long and deep in that churchyard without finding any trace of the girl. As he worked at the collapsed earth with his bare hands, hoping to reveal some sign of her, he had felt the presence of a perfect and profound hostility, a malevolent hunger given form. It was this, more than any inability to keep digging, that had caused him to abandon his efforts to find a body. Even now, he was glad that he had used the water in the Fulcis’ truck to clean his hands of the soil from that place, and one of their towels to dry them, and had then disposed of the towel in a Dumpster so that it would not be used again. He was grateful not to have contaminated his home with even a fragment of that cursed earth, and he kept sealed the bag containing the piece of material lest some minute particle of grit should fall from it and pollute all.