The Trawlerman, стр. 49
The evening bird song was loud. She never had the patience to learn which bird was which. Zoë had told her which the one that sounded like a squeaky bicycle pump was, the one that said ‘A-little-bit-of-bread-and-no-cheese’, but never paid enough attention at the right time.
‘You were in Iraq and Afghanistan. I saw your records. I know I haven’t been through the half of it compared to you, but sometimes I think I’ve been going mad with it – making bad decisions, pushing the people away from me.’
She thought she could hear Bob Glass breathing now as he listened; a low, nervous scraping sound. So she continued: ‘I’m lucky. It must be very hard if you’re alone. This sense of the past always being alive in the present – that’s what it’s like, isn’t it? You carry it all with you. And feeling that something just as terrible is always about to happen again.’
He had not moved or shouted back at her.
‘Sorry. I know you don’t want to talk. I know you just want to be on your own. I just wanted to say this: if you ever need any help, I’d like to try and make it up to you.’
He didn’t answer.
‘One thing, though. I would like to ask you a question. You don’t have to say anything at all, but if it wasn’t you who argued with Ayman Younis a few nights before he killed himself, I wondered . . . do you know who it was?’
No answer.
‘I figure that camping here, you’re not far from the house. You would have heard it.’
Again, nothing at all from inside the tent.
‘OK. I’m leaving a card. It has a phone number on it. And I brought you some fresh fish. I don’t know if you like it, but it was caught this morning.’
Still nothing.
‘I’m just coming closer so I can leave it in the cool, OK? Then I’ll leave you alone.’
She waited a second, then stepped forward. As she did so, a gentle breeze blew towards her and within a second, her skin was suddenly cold and her breath was gone. Before she had even understood it, she knew something was very wrong and she turned to run.
She forced her lungs to fill, ordering herself to stay calm, to stay in the present, to quietly absorb what was happening to her instead of running. It took her another couple of seconds to realise what it was that had triggered that desire to run away screaming. The air around her carried a faint but familiar scent of something very bad.
‘Bob? Are you OK? Do you need help?’
As she stepped forward now, dropping the fish, the tent jerked. She ignored the impulse to run.
‘I’m a police officer,’ she said, loudly now. ‘Who’s there?’
The whole tent convulsed violently, as if it were being shaken by something invisible.
Thirty-six
Something dark crashed out of the tent, wide and low.
It took her another second to realise what she had just seen. She had watched these creatures often enough now, in the late evenings and early mornings when she couldn’t sleep. There had been a badger in Bob Glass’s tent, rustling around, probably stealing his food. It was the badger’s raspy breath she had been listening to, hiding in there. Terrified of being captured, it had burst through the hedge beyond the tent to escape. She laughed out loud at her own stupidity.
With comic timing, a cuckoo called, somewhere far beyond the Younises’ house.
But when she bent to pick up the dead mackerel, sprung from its newspaper, it seemed to stare right back at her with its dead eye. Inside the tent, she heard flies buzzing against the nylon.
She remembered something Bill South had once told her on one of those early summer evenings when they had lain on the ground together, binoculars at the ready. ‘Badgers will eat anything at all. They don’t care.’
She stayed in the dimming light until the officers had arrived to secure the site, and then, because she had stood crouched at the entrance of the tent, too, for the crime scene manager to arrive so she could record Alex as having been present at the site. I am going to be late, she texted Terry Neill, not knowing what else to say.
She had looked inside the tent. The badger had eaten what he could get at easily. The skin from Bob Glass’s face was gone.
‘You look like hell. What’s wrong?’ was the first thing he said when she finally arrived.
And when she had told him, he had put down a glass of wine, put his arms around her and hugged her, which was, right then, exactly what she had needed. When he finally released her, he said, ‘I don’t suppose you really feel like eating now.’
‘I left the fish behind anyway,’ she said.
‘No loss then. What about a drink instead?’
And when she woke in the morning, and found herself on his sheets, looking out onto the pale sand beach where browned grass was swaying in a light breeze, she was somehow not surprised.
It had been a very long time since she had slept with anyone.
She was alone. She could hear Terry downstairs. The view from his bedroom was better than hers. She looked out on a nuclear power station; he looked out onto a wide sea and sky. After a few minutes, he arrived, impressively naked and with coffee. He was older than her; she wondered if he felt it important to show how well-kept his body was.
‘You talk in your sleep,’ he said, putting the wooden tray on the bed. ‘A lot.’
‘So my daughter tells me.’ She was surprised she had slept at all. He had fallen asleep immediately afterwards. She had lain awake watching the stars moving through the half-open blinds, her mind still racing. ‘How long have you lived