To Tracy’s relief, the animal grew quieter, no longer trying to lift its head. Tracy welled up. Poor bloody thing. Courtney patted her hand. The deer’s eyes grew dull and it gave a great shuddering breath and lay still.
‘Is he dead?’ Courtney whispered.
‘Yes,’Tracy said, swallowing hard. ‘She. She’s dead. Gone to join all her friends in deer heaven.’ Sacrifices, to save the kid. Save the kid, save the world. Tracy put out a hand and stroked the deer’s flank. The kid passed the wand over its body.
The Audi was as mortally wounded as the deer. ‘I guess we’ll have to walk,’ Tracy said. ‘Find a garage.’ She heard the sound of another car approaching, the noise baffled by the fog. The fog didn’t feel like a friend any more.
They were going to have to take their chances. Tracy just hoped the car wasn’t being driven by the police. A grey car materialized out of the grey mist. An Avensis. ‘Shit,’ Tracy muttered as the driver climbed out of the car and approached through the gloom.
Tracy grabbed the kid by the hand and hissed, ‘Run.’ She could hear him shouting behind her as they crashed through the undergrowth. ‘Tracy? Tracy Waterhouse? I just want to talk.’
‘Yeah,’ she muttered to the kid, ‘that’s what they all say.’
She stopped and sat on the ground, exhausted, at the foot of a big tree. ‘Get our breath back,’ she muttered to Courtney. Had life with Kelly Cross been so bad, compared to this? Would Kelly still be alive if Tracy hadn’t bought the kid off her? The kid knelt next to her, picked up a skeletal leaf left over from autumn and tucked it into her backpack. Her priorities were different from Tracy’s.
The wood seemed to enfold itself around them. Tracy thought of Sleeping Beauty. They could die here and turn into leaf mould before they were found. A crack broke the silence, startling them both, and Tracy wrapped her arms round Courtney and clung on to her. Nerves screwed tight as piano wires.
‘Are there wolves in the wood?’ the kid whispered.
‘Not as such,’ Tracy said.
She understood she was on the edge of everything now, the abyss ahead, behind the darkness, desperation the only way forward. Kid smelled of last night’s shampoo, and something green and sappy. A woodland nymph.
‘Come on, let’s keep moving.’ She hauled herself to her feet, picked up the kid. She was too small to keep running. Wasn’t that what had made Tracy take notice of her in the first place? Tracy had assumed that Kelly Cross was running with the kid because she was late or impatient or just plain bad but perhaps she hadn’t been running towards something, perhaps Kelly had also been running away. What if, in her own fashion, she too had been trying to save the kid? Was that why she was dead? Had she been punished for finding the kid or for losing her?
Was the Avensis driver trying to get the kid back, was she someone’s property, a paedo ring maybe? The Avensis driver looked like he might be harbouring a pervert inside his grey skin. Was he this so called private detective, the Jackson bloke?
‘Where are we going?’ Courtney asked.
‘Good question,’ Tracy puffed. ‘I’ve got absolutely no idea.’
The trees started to thin and there was light ahead. Go towards the light, that was what they said, wasn’t it?
They crashed out of the wood. And nearly got run over.
Said he used to be a policeman. Anyone could say that.
He had woken dead on five thirty as usual. When he switched on the bedside light in his bedroom in the Best Western the first thing that Jackson saw was the dog standing next to the bed, staring intently into his face as if it had been willing him to wake. Jackson growled a greeting and the dog wagged its tail enthusiastically in response.
He drank a poor man’s cup of instant coffee in the room and gave the dog its breakfast. It wolfed its food down in seconds. Jackson was beginning to see that the dog always ate as if it was starving. He understood because it was the same way he ate. First rule of life, acquired in the army, reinforced in the police – if you see food, eat it because you don’t know when you’ll see it again. And eat anything that’s put in front of you. Jackson had no qualms where meat was concerned, he could eat his way from snout to tail without any queasiness. He suspected that the dog was equally omnivorous.
Half an hour later and he was checked out and ready to hit the road. Marilyn Nettles was going to have two unexpected visitors. One man and his dog. He’d been planning to go to Whitby anyway so, clearly, fate was talking to him. In a difficult foreign language, like Finnish, it was true, but you couldn’t have everything.
He informed SatNav Jane that he was heading for the coast on the scenic route and then, like Lot before him, he left the city behind without a backward glance.
The tracking device that the room-service waiter had attached to the dog’s collar was currently in the Saab’s glove compartment. Jackson had considered placing it on a long-distance lorry, imagining with some satisfaction the misdirection caused by an Eddie Stobart eighteen-wheeler pulling up in Ullapool or Pwllheli, but then he might not discover who wanted to keep tabs on him. Pursuit was a two-way enterprise, quarry and hunter united in the quest, not so much a duel as a duet.
The tracking device was a nice bit of kit. Jackson had no idea they made them so small these days. It was a while since he’d had reason to purchase anything from a spyware site. He would like to buy something similar for Marlee, a gadget so tiny that she would fail to notice it because she would never (‘No way!’) agree to carry anything that implied parental supervision or control. If he could, Jackson would have his daughter chipped, like a dog. Nathan as well, of course. He had two children, he reminded himself, it was just that one didn’t seem to count quite as much as the other.
Was the dog chipped? ‘Colin’ hadn’t looked the type to care enough about a dog to chip it but then Colin didn’t look the type to own a dog that didn’t exactly advertise his machismo. He was a pit bull man, right down to his St George’s tattoo and his shaved head. Did the dog, in reality, belong to a wife, a mother, a child? Was someone waking up each morning and feeling a lurch of sorrow for their missing pet? Going to put you down, should have done it the minute that bitch left, Colin had yelled at the dog in Roundhay Park. Jackson experienced a pinch of annoyance at the woman who had escaped Colin’s clutches but had left her dog behind to suffer.
What had been a light veil of mist in Leeds had grown thicker as he drove. It held the promise, although not the certainty, of a glorious day later, but in the early hours it had made driving perilous. He regretted now not having cashed in the prescription for spectacles that an optician had given him.
‘Things seem a bit blurry,’ he had said to the impossibly young girl testing his eyes. He wanted to ask if she was qualified but felt oddly vulnerable in the dark as she stared into his eye with a torch, so close that he could smell the mint on her breath.
‘Yes,’ she said, matter-of-factly. ‘The lenses in your eyes are growing harder. It happens at your age.’ Some things grew harder with age, some things grew softer.
On the road less travelled all kinds of wildlife were gambling recklessly with their lives on the unforgiving tarmac. A narrow miss with a badger a few miles back had tuned his reflexes up a notch. Jackson liked to think of himself as a knight of the road. It would be a shame to tarnish his shining armour with the blood of the innocent. He flicked the switch on the light-up Virgin Mary on the dashboard. The Mother of God might not have the candle wattage of the Saab’s full beam in her belly but perhaps she had a different kind of protective power. A sanctified figurehead leading him through the valley of darkness.