The Trawlerman, стр. 21
The security light behind her switched itself off and the copse became impenetrably dark. Switching the torch on on her phone, she pointed it into the branches.
An old wire fence, low enough to step over, held back the lower branches of a laurel. Alex shone her torch up and down; on the ground, something caught the light. She stepped closer, peering at it.
It was flat and round, like the lid of a jar, only darker; a black disc of some kind, several millimetres thick, newly enough discarded to be lying on top of a tussock of herb-robert. There was something sinister about the simple geometry of the shape.
She dialled Jill again. No answer. She checked the time. Four minutes past ten now.
Pushing down on the wire, she lifted one leg over the fence and then the next, steadying herself, then stopped to listen again.
The copse was silent. She had frightened away whatever creature had been in there, she guessed, or it was still somewhere in there, frozen in fear. Taking a step deeper into the thick wood, she pushed her way around the thin trunk of an ash sapling and tried to find the disc she had seen from the driveway. Though she was closer, she couldn’t see it. She leaned from side to side, trying to get a fresh angle.
Again, an unnatural shape caught her eye, but it was not the disc. A couple of metres away, in the scrub of undergrowth, was something else that was out of place, she realised. It took a while to understand the shape she was seeing.
A pair of black leather boots. Funny, her first thought had been, that someone should leave two boots side by side like that in among these trees. Then came the realisation that the boots were not discarded. Two legs, clad in some kind of camouflage material, extended up from them.
A torso.
A person.
She shone her torch up to where the head should have been, but instead there was only blackness.
Confused, chest tight, she took a jerky step backwards.
Lit by her torch, two bright white eyes materialised from the darkness, then below the eyes appeared white teeth and a red mouth.
The mouth roared. There were no words, just an inchoate noise.
Alex stumbled backwards falling hard against the fence.
Light suddenly blazed all around them.
It was a man, dressed from head to foot in camouflage, his face completely blackened.
‘I’ll fucking kill you,’ he screamed, as she pushed herself upwards, trying to find her feet again.
Fifteen
The first thing Jill said when her car pulled up back at Alex’s house was: ‘You are out of your bloody mind.’
‘So they say.’
‘You were just going to chase after that man?’
‘Instinct kicked in,’ said Alex. ‘I would have done it if you hadn’t turned up. He just stood there screaming at me for a second, then he ran way out of the woods and into the field.’
The man in the Manic Street Preachers T-shirt was sitting at the back of his house in the dark, smoking a cigarette. Jill clocked him and lowered her voice.
‘Lucky I was there to stop you. What is wrong with you? You were on your own, as far as you knew.’
Jill, it turned out, had been a couple of hundred metres up the lane trying to get a decent signal on her phone when she’d heard Alex shout her name the first time. When she had approached the back of the house, she had triggered the security light. ‘Man, approximately six foot tall, dressed in camouflage gear, black army-style boots with black greasepaint on his face,’ was the description Jill had called in. ‘Probably dangerous.’
‘My heart is still beating like the worst drill track you ever heard,’ Jill said.
Despite Zoë’s professed love of the environment, every light downstairs seemed to have been left on. They went into the kitchen, blinking in the glare of it. ‘Wine?’
‘How much have you got?’
‘That bad?’
‘I don’t know why you’re so calm. You were right next to him.’
It’s true. It was before she had seen the man that she had been anxious. In the aftermath she had just been strangely at ease and that had been a welcome feeling.
There was a half-empty bottle of white in the fridge door. She pulled it out, poured two glasses, thought for a moment, then put another bottle into the freezer because, knowing Jill, they’d be needing it soon enough.
Jill took an inch out of her glass and said, ‘And? So. Why did you say seven past ten?’
‘It’s a weird one.’
‘Nothing is going to get any weirder than tonight.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure. A friend of Zoë’s said he saw souls,’ she said.
Alex explained how Kenny Abel had claimed to have seen souls rising up from the roof of The Nest at exactly that time on the night of the murder. ‘And he said he saw them at seven minutes past ten. He was very precise about it because he was on the phone at the time and he could check his phone records.’
‘Jesus. You’re not wrong. That’s ultra-weird.’
‘Did you see anything tonight when you were waiting?’
‘Apart from a lunatic in the woods? You seriously expected I was going to see a ghost or something?’
‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Oh. So just because Alex Cupidi doesn’t believe in them means they don’t exist? I believe in them, I tell you. That’s properly freaked me out.’
‘I was wondering whether it was just some trick of the light. Something that anyone would see around there at that time of night. Or that there might just be some simple explanation.’
They looked at each other for a while. ‘Souls?’ said Jill.
‘I know.’
‘That gives me the heebies.’
‘Me too, as a matter of fact,’ said Alex.
‘And you don’t even believe in them.’ Jill had emptied her glass and held it out. ‘Can I – you know – stay the night, then?’
They stepped outside the back of the house so Jill could smoke.
‘I can’t help it,’