The morning was bright and the east-facing windows of Alan’s house were dazzling. Taryn stood at the heavy door and peered expectantly into the camera above her. The door did not open.
Taryn tried the code, but the door stayed locked. She should ring Stuart to get the changed code. But first she’d better find Jacob. She set off around the barbecue pit, cupped her hands to her mouth and called up and down the beach.
A faint voice sounded somewhere nearby.
‘Jacob?’
‘I’m around the back,’ came the answer. His voice sounded thin and tinny.
Taryn walked around the house to where its kitchen faced an expanse of groomed lawn that terminated in a stand of pines. The trees provided shelter not from the prevailing but the coldest wind, which came across an inlet, a miles-wide notch in the shallow bow of coastline. The inlet’s sands were bare at every low tide, and silvered over every high tide.
The top of the inlet was a bird sanctuary. It was too shallow for any boat with an engine, and too rapidly filled and emptied for kayakers to have time to enjoy themselves exploring it. When Taryn had lived with Alan she’d always preferred to go through the pines and walk on the inlet, away from the noise of the surf and the sight of the sea traffic, the big container ships slipping along the North Sea horizon, headed anywhere between the Baltic and the rest of the world. She had even asked Alan to cut down the pines. (It was one of only a very few things she asked for—before finally asking for the very big dispensation of a divorce.) The inlet had the most interesting view. Faraway ships didn’t provide as much variety as a big tide every twelve hours. But the pines had stayed, since Alan wanted to be able to land a helicopter and needed their shelter as protection from crosswinds.
Jacob was standing at the fringe of the shelter belt, his back to her. His collar was up, his hands in his pockets and a watch cap pulled down over his ears. He seemed to be looking intently at something on the ground.
Taryn’s heart changed weight, growing lighter. She had no reason to associate Jacob’s posture with unearthly mysteries, but she did. Taryn had been insistent about her obligations, her career, what she’d called her life. But now she understood that she didn’t want to attend festivals or ‘come up with another book project’. It was good to discover how she really felt, and to do so right this minute, with Jacob, because he was someone she could talk to about everything. She could tell him about Forsha Springs, mendings, Hands and forcebeasts; the Summer Road, the Island of Women, Jane and Neve, and the sword Neve had used to wound a demon. She could tell him about the Tithe, and he’d probably have insights into its politics. And she could tell him how Odin had got up at her session in Auckland to ask a question, one that was maybe a clue to how they should think about the thing they were all looking for. They—the author, the cop, the sidhe, the wizard, the god, demigods, demons—all together, or in opposition, but still together inasmuch as they were all apart from the everyday world.
Taryn hurried to his side, registering his crooked posture and that he was wearing a Norfolk jacket in Norfolk—an unexpected cliché for him.
She came up beside him, and he swung his arm back, she thought to draw her to him, so they could contemplate the unearthly sign together. Or perhaps he meant to draw her into an embrace. His arm passed behind her head then came back, accelerating, and struck her hard at the base of her skull.
Taryn fell forward, but kept her feet. Her sunglasses flew off and she heard them strike the boll of a pine. She stumbled to a stop and turned back, and the Muleskinner slapped her hard in the mouth, a backhand blow that mashed her lips against her teeth. She flinched away, and tried to speak, but she was spitting blood.
He snatched her bag off her shoulder, seized her ponytail, turned her around and marched her ahead of him into the darkness of the wood.
Taryn walked, harried by frequent shoving. They crossed a large patch of disturbed pine needles, scuffed all the way down to humus and white mould. There had been a struggle at that place.
They passed a half-buried bivouac, a bag lumpy with tin cans, and a pine needle-scattered sleeping bag that Taryn was sure was visible only because the Muleskinner wanted her to understand that he had been camped for some time in the pines behind Alan’s house. As they went by the bivouac he tossed her bag down among his things.
‘What have you done with Jacob?’ Taryn asked. She turned partway back to him so that when he shoved her again—extra hard—she lost her balance and came down on her hands and knees.
She didn’t immediately scramble up again. For long seconds, before he dug his hand into her armpit and hauled her upright, she made herself stay in this undignified position. Once she was up she went on, this time at the pace he set, and he stopped shoving her.
Taryn was thinking. He hadn’t kicked her in the backside while she was down. She had been waiting for the kick. She hadn’t planned to offer herself, but something inside her, some deep intelligence, told her to stay there and take the measure of his contempt.
At his trial Webber had said of Beatrice that he put her in his boot rather than his back seat because—with a cringing snigger—she’d ‘soiled herself’ and was ‘a bit of a mess’. Webber’s fastidious disdain had rearranged things inside Taryn, permanently. It taught her something a forensic psychologist might learn by interviewing multiple murderous misogynists. The Muleskinner had none of Webber’s fundamental contempt. He might only want to terrify her, and take her somewhere where they could be uninterrupted in whatever turbulent intimacy he craved. He hadn’t kicked her, so he might not kill her.
But where was Jacob?
They came out onto the shore of the inlet, a short slope of soft dry sand stitched with sea pinks. Taryn stumbled down the slope to the wet sand. The tide was near its lowest ebb.
The Muleskinner caught up to her and draped an arm across her shoulders. To most observers they’d be a strolling couple, the man perhaps a little domineering. He locked his forearm across her collarbones and held her close. She had to keep in step with him to prevent his grip from hurting her.
The sand was full of crab holes that bubbled with displaced water as the vibrations of their feet frightened the crabs further down their burrows. Mud had settled in every channel in the hole-stippled sand. Some patches were narrow enough to jump over; others they had to slog through, the treads of their shoes collecting a build-up they weren’t able to shed.
A breeze blew from the north, cold and steady. It stung the fresh splits in Taryn’s lips. She drew her lower lip into her mouth and nursed it for a time, then asked the Muleskinner what he’d done with Jacob. ‘I know he’s here somewhere. We arranged to meet. His car is in the driveway.’
‘You’ll see soon enough where I’ve put him. You can be patient. After all, you’ve expected me to be patient.’
‘If you’d left a number I would have been in touch. You put me in the position of having no way of contacting you.’
The Muleskinner answered her by producing a phone from his pocket. ‘You’re all slaves to these things.’ He pressed its screen. It spoke in Jacob’s voice. ‘I’m around the back.’ Taryn was now able to hear how stilted Jacob sounded, his voice strangled and compelled.
‘Is that Jacob’s phone?’
The Muleskinner didn’t answer her question. He returned the phone to his pocket. ‘You disappeared off the face of the Earth,’ he said—accusatory, and almost admiring.
‘I was ill. Then I was on the other side of the world.’
‘You don’t look ill. Far from it.’
‘I got better and was able to make my festival appearances. Look—you wanted to talk to me.’ Taryn tried to turn to see his face. ‘So talk to me.’
But he wasn’t interested in facing her, or in having her slow down, and forced her to hurry on.
Taryn’s neck ached from his first blow. As she continued to speak she could feel her saliva thickening with blood from cuts inside her mouth. ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Say what you want to say.’
/>
‘Give you my story?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like you gave me yours all those years ago?’
‘Hamish.’ Taryn said his name. ‘You came up with the terms of our agreement. I thought it pleased you just to do something for me. Something big that I couldn’t do for myself. To plan it all, and be in charge. At the time I guess it was convenient for me to think that far and no further. But I was twenty-six. What did I know about anything?’
‘It’s been so long,’ he said, in a high, whiny, reasonable voice, a cruel imitation of her own.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry for what we did.’
‘You didn’t do anything.’
‘I didn’t make you do anything.’
‘No. You only let me.’
Taryn began to cry, she turned away to conceal her tears, and peered through swimming rainbow lozenges at the sand flats. There was nothing vertical in sight. Nothing but the white blur of the triangular navigation mark on a small nub of greenery where the inlet narrowed into marshland more than a mile away. There were no other people out for a walk; no tilting masts of beached sailboats.
Taryn gritted her teeth and turned back to the Muleskinner. She let her tears spill and run cold down her cheeks until they reached her mouth and the lacerations on her lips. Her mouth ignited, and burned. ‘I damned myself,’ she said, bleak and matter-of-fact.
He was dismissive. ‘So—you’ve found God.’
‘I found Hell,’ she said. As she spoke she felt a forceful cleaving apart, as if something cruelly conscientious inside her wanted to do the work he maybe intended before he got to it. There was the usual division of her well self and her whole self—because they were different. There was the whole and savage Taryn who had persuaded this obsessively romantic man to kill for her, and a well Taryn who had been living Taryn’s life for the past seven years. This cleaving was a deeper digging down, as if some clawed creature had alighted inside her and was scraping away trees to make a clearing in the depths of a dark forest. She was changing—and it was too late to change.
‘That’s a strange thing for someone to say who’s turned herself into an intellectual.’
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I made myself visible, did I? My new self. My mature, erudite, intellectual self. Was that the provocation?’
‘You vain bitch,’ was all he answered.
But it was true, Taryn knew. One way or another her book had invited all these troubles into her life, or back into her life: demons, police, MI5, the Muleskinner.
It was mid-morning and a haze was building out over the sea, a whiteness thin as milk mixed with water, but enough to throw a veil over details at a distance, details like footprints that went out into the sand flats but had no return, or continuation.
A few minutes more walking and they met another set of prints, the tracks of two people heading out into the bay, as they were.
Taryn kept her head down, only glanced at the tracks. Both individuals’ feet were bigger than her own.
She hoped the Muleskinner was making nothing of the prints. She lifted her head now and then to keep them in sight. They veered away and seemed to run together as a white painted centreline does on a long stretch of highway. Taryn kept her eyes turned up painfully in their sockets to trace those footsteps.
Another five minutes and she noticed, off to one side, a single track of same-sized prints leading back towards the shore. These, like the others, were blurred by water, as if all these traverses had been undertaken after the tide had turned, but before it ebbed far enough to empty the sand.
Taryn suddenly understood what she was looking at. She stopped walking and began to weep. She turned on the Muleskinner and attacked him with her mud-cushioned feet and pummelling fists.
He seized her wrists and held her off.
The mud she kicked up spattered his face and throat and chest. Her head connected with his, hard enough that her vision filled with sparks. He swore and pushed her down onto the sand.
Let someone be looking now, she thought. She crawled and wallowed after his retreating legs, howling all the time like an animal.
The Muleskinner had taken Jacob out on the sands while they were still filmed with water, which filled their footprints. And then before too long—before the inlet had completely emptied—the Muleskinner had made his way back, alone, to wait for her.
Taryn got to her feet and for a time fruitlessly charged after him, flailing as he dodged and backed away. Her grieving voice sounded tiny to her. It had no more substance than her raw grasping. The silence of the inlet swallowed her sorrow, or diluted it and blended it with the cries of curlew and terns.
He wouldn’t let her get a hold of him. She couldn’t touch him. She would reach nothing with nothing for the remainder of her existence. The Muleskinner was leading her to Jacob’s corpse, and she would lie down there, the work of her life accomplished.
After a while Taryn stopped staggering about after the nimble man. She lay down. She cried without touching her face. She had sand in her eyes and her tears served at least to rinse it out. Sand in her eyes was too much pain, even for someone who knows she’s about to die.
The Muleskinner had been laughing at her as he dodged her attack. He’d taken no particular care to avoid her blows. He was unfazed, and scornfully amused. And, as she knelt with her eyes streaming, he said, in a tone of saddened reprimand, ‘Look at you.’ Then, ‘You’re not what you once were.’
Taryn gradually collected herself. She got up and waited, staring at him dumbly.
Something terrible had happened in his life to send him back to her looking for revenge. He believed she had been unlucky for him, and was to be blamed for some calamity, some failure or loss. But he didn’t want to tell her about it; he just wanted her to suffer, and be reduced, in his imagination and her own.
There was no point in understanding any of this if she couldn’t see a way through it.
He didn’t say anything more, only circled her and compelled her to walk on.
Jacob’s muscles were jumping with the impulse of his only plan. He was coming up to the moment when he’d have to make a decision and chance his arm. But until then the only good he was able to do for himself was to rest, and stay as warm as he could, and keep his head still so it would stop spinning and he’d stay conscious.
While he was out cold Jacob’s attacker had taken his hat and jacket and put them on. Later, once they were out on the sands, he’d removed Jacob’s shoes and had tossed them well out of reach, upstream, into the shell-studded bed of the channel.
After that the man clambered up the steep, scalloped side of the channel and disappeared southeast, heading back towards the house.
The man hadn’t had much to say to Jacob, apart from instructions, and one offhand not very reassuring reassurance. ‘I haven’t hit any major blood vessels. If you don’t use that arm, the wound could seal, for now.’
Other than that, his only words had been ‘Move’, and ‘Don’t try that again’, and ‘Sit down’.
He meant: Sit down on the tractor tyre, a third buried in the sand, with more sand built up around it than in its wheel well and rim. The tractor tyre that was not coated with barnacles, or white with weather, so hadn’t been found here by the man, but put here.
Jacob was pretty sure the man was Canadian. He was strong, clever, stealthy, skilled with his knife.
The Canadian had used something—probably the long serrated blade he carried—to make two holes in the top side of the tyre. Through them he had threaded a length of galvanised steel chain. One end of that chain was now fastened in two loops around Jacob’s neck, the deadlock resting on his shoulder under his right ear. The other end was gathered into three loose bunches, another lock threaded through the gathers to make a clinking flounce that could not be pulled through its hole.
Jacob had fought to stay free of the chain, and had for his trouble a torn ear and slashed hands. He’d landed a few blows on his attacker, but th
e stab wound under his arm had hampered and weakened him, and he was sure the man was at best only bruised.
Jacob inspected the chain—the place where it crossed the wheel well. He had understood what the Canadian intended as soon as the man had vanished from sight. Once the problematic and fascinating knife was gone from view, Jacob was able to stop planning attacks and looking for openings. He could get a proper measure of the danger he was in.
The man had gone to lie in wait for Taryn, who had sent a text early that morning to say, ‘I won’t make it until eleven.’
The trap the Canadian had set wasn’t a hastily thrown together one. It was possible the man had been lying in wait for some time—in his forest bivouac by night—some way further off by day, with his field glasses, foraging, not lighting fires. Perhaps he had serendipitously found the tractor tyre, seen its possibilities and managed to get it into this deep, steep-sided arm of the inlet’s main channel. He’d bought a chain and locks in a hardware store nearby, and had otherwise made do, like the outdoorsman he seemed to be.
What had drawn Jacob from the safety of his car, and out of the range of the security cameras, was a loud impact on one of the windows on the far side of the house. He got out and went to take a look. He found a smear on the glass of the kitchen window, and a large seabird—a cormorant—wallowing and flopping on the terrace, its wings loose and incompetent. Once he was standing over the cormorant, Jacob saw two other birds, stilts, he thought. One was on the far side of the lawn, waving its serpentine head, more lively than the other, which hung motionless, its dark wings barely visible against the black pine boughs, looking like St Peter, crucified upside down.
Jacob could hear yet another bird, somewhere in the pines, honking in distress, a ringing cry that choked and softened, then came back deeper and more pained.
Anyone would have gone out to investigate and assess the damage, call a wildlife officer, find an explanation—a downed microlight, a freak downdraught. Those things were in Jacob’s mind, as well as unearthly visitations. He hadn’t considered any danger to himself. He was just curious and concerned.
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