by Tim Weaver
‘I was heavily sedated, so a lot of it was just background. Maybe an engine. Maybe some traffic noise. They blindfolded me, taped my mouth, put things over my ears, so even when I felt lucid, it wasn’t like I could make use of my senses.’
‘Do you remember being in a tight space?’
‘That I do remember.’
‘Do you remember anything about it?’
‘Just that it was like being in a coffin, not a trunk.’
I’d thought the same thing.
‘What about the sequence G76984Z – does that mean anything?’
She frowned. ‘No. What is it?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said, rubbing at my eyes. ‘I can’t figure it out.’
We talked some more, about who she was, who I was, our families, our cases, about the double murder that had marked the beginning of her hunt for Adrian Vale. I talked about my search for answers at Black Gale, about Patrick Perry and Freda Davey, and then about the closure Freda had sought in asking for Patrick’s help. As I spoke about it, I started to feel emotional again, the words catching in my throat, and I realized I was probably in a delayed state of shock, one that wasn’t even necessarily provoked by this case. I’d barely got over what had happened to me at Christmas and now I was here, twenty minutes from nine bodies in the ground, mourning their loss, the loss of Beatrix Steards, and the forty-six days I’d spent in darkness and silence.
I thought I’d been ready for this case.
I’d told Healy I wasn’t broken.
But I was.
I was hurting.
And the next morning, I found out how much.
Part Nine
* * *
HOME
69
The morning that Jo and I left Adrian Vale’s house in the forest, the sky was clear, pale as milk, the trees silhouetted against it. We moved across the grass in front of the veranda, heading in the same direction that Mills had taken me the day before, to the graves of the Black Gale villagers. As we did, we passed the body of Vale, still in the same place he’d died, but now covered in a tarpaulin we’d weighted to the ground with rocks to stop the animals getting at him. Once we hit the trees, the light began to dwindle and everything seemed to pull in towards us, huge trunks in vast lines in all directions. It was freezing cold, the forest floor like iron.
I grabbed a torch from my pack and switched it on.
Light scattered ahead of me, shadows lurching and changing direction, and we picked up the vague hint of the trail we’d come back to the house on after I’d found Jo in the shack. She was close behind me, her shoes making a heavy thump every time they landed: her build was small, her frame slender, but the only boots we could find in the house for her were men’s, a size eight, so she’d had to make do. Both of us worried about blisters, about the discomfort of walking miles in footwear that didn’t fit, but we had little choice. The clothes she was wearing were too big for her as well – but they were warm, and they were preferable to what Vale had put her in.
‘Any reception on the phone?’ I asked her.
She checked the Nokia. ‘No, nothing.’
We’d divided up what we’d needed: I was carrying food and water, some spare clothes and a couple of blankets, as well as Isaac Mills’s notebook, and she had more spare clothes, another blanket, a first-aid kit, and then the car key and mobile phone.
‘How are the shoes feeling?’ I asked.
‘Like I should be in a circus.’
I smiled, and we chatted some more, Jo discussing her husband, me talking about Derryn, and then we fell into a comfortable silence until we reached the clearing. Mills’s body was still under the plastic, exactly where we’d left it, the sheet weighted down with rocks for exactly the same reason as Vale’s. After we got out of the forest and alerted the authorities, they’d want to examine the bodies, and we needed to preserve the evidence as best we could.
Once we locked the shack, we paused for a second, looking from the place in which Isaac Mills had died to the graves on the other side of the stream, barely visible yet in the low light of the forest. And then we nodded at one another, Jo asked me if I was good to go, and we headed out, past the graves, to where the hand-drawn map had shown a trail. This time, it was harder to follow, the trees inching in closer every time we moved forward, Jo ducking under branches with ease, the six inches I had on her forcing me to be more careful. Once or twice, the light was so subdued I almost walked right into a rigid limb, but mostly I was able to protect my face with an upturned arm.
After an hour, the forest had barely changed, except for the dark: the sun was up fully and we could see more of what was around us, but I was unsure if it was better like this or not. The more we could see, the more colossal the forest seemed, an infinite ocean of trees moving in all directions, so distant and so vast they eventually faded into mist. Previously, all we could see was what was immediately around us, and that had allowed us to think we were getting closer to something; that the trail was leading us somewhere good, away from this labyrinth.
Two hours in, we stopped for water and something to eat, and Jo said she had to go to the toilet – so I sat down, gave her some privacy, and got the map out again.
I didn’t know if we were on the right trail.
I didn’t know if the map was even accurate.
I looked ahead of me and felt the first flutter of panic. It was already after 9 a.m. and it felt like we hadn’t even got anywhere. The trees were all exactly the same, the terrain hadn’t altered; if anything, the canopy had grown thicker, not thinner, and the sounds of the forest had deadened. There wasn’t a breath of wind any more. Any birds sounded miles away. It was just a perpetual hush all around.
‘What are you thinking?’
Jo was beside me now.
I looked up at her, then out at the forest.
‘I’m thinking I don’t know where the hell we are.’
‘Is the map wrong?’
I looked at it again, at the line that represented the trail from the house to what I hoped was a road. But maybe it wasn’t a road at all. Maybe it was just another trail. Maybe what Mills had drawn here was totally worthless.
‘This isn’t the direction they would have come,’ I said.
‘No,’ Jo replied, eyes on the trees. ‘I don’t imagine it is.’
She knew what I knew: there was no way Vale and Mills had carried one person this far, let alone the nine from Black Gale – not through growth this dense. So had they headed south from the house, not north? Was that where their car was? The way out?
Were we headed in completely the wrong direction?
‘Do you want to turn around?’ Jo asked.
I looked at her. ‘I don’t know. What do you think?’
She looked into the trees again.
‘It’ll mean we’ve just walked two hours for nothing.’
‘I should have asked Mills how to get out of here,’ I said, annoyed with myself, ‘not relied on this.’
‘He had a gun to your head, then he had a gun to his, then he blew his brains out.’ She turned in the direction we’d come. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself.’
I took a mouthful of water.
‘I don’t suppose there’s any reception on the phone?’
She got it out of her pocket and checked it.
‘Nothing.’ She looked at me. ‘Let’s just keep going for a while.’
We started walking again.
Jo went ahead of me this time, but if I was hoping for a change of luck, we didn’t get one. The trees didn’t get smaller, they didn’t thin out or break up. There was marginally more of a path now, and the sun was arcing through the branches, arrows of soft light spearing the mud, the twigs, the needles, but otherwise we could have been back where we’d started, only minutes from the house.
Another hour passed.
And then another.
After the fifth hour, I noticed something: the ground was beginning to change, the flatness of the earth
leaning away from us, in a slant. Jo noticed it too, but her reaction was more muted. She’d long since started to flag, the boots hurting her, her gait uneven; she was holding her sprained wrist across her chest like a broken wing, and her damaged finger had bruised the colour of ink. She glanced over her shoulder at me, to check that I was seeing what she was, and then told me to go ahead of her, to see how far the slope went, and to where. Very quickly, I realized I wouldn’t have to.
Through the trees, I could see a lake.
A road.
We both stopped, looking at the tarmac drifting in and out of view through the wall of branches and trunks. I glanced at Jo and could see tears in her eyes, and when I looked again, at the grey ribbon cutting around the lake, I began to get emotional too.
I’d started to think we were lost.
I’d started to fear we might never escape the forest.
‘You ready?’ I asked.
She wiped her eyes.
‘I was ready five hours ago,’ she said. ‘Let’s do this.’
We started moving again, with more purpose now, any pain forgotten, bruises, cuts, grazes, scars, all fading to nothing. The terrain beneath us continued to drop, a steep slope forming, the trees as thick as ever but the sounds fading back in: we could suddenly hear birds again, a breeze, the far-off murmur of water lapping on a shore.
‘What’s the first thing you’re going to do when you get home?’ Jo asked with a smile on her face, looking at me, then down at her boots. ‘I’ll be getting a foot bath.’
I laughed, moving even faster, the road maybe a mile away, maybe even less. The sound of our footsteps, the scuff of our soles on the forest floor, became quicker; I listened for cars but couldn’t hear any, couldn’t see any either, but it didn’t dampen my excitement. We were a mile from the road; a mile from this hell coming to an end.
And then it all changed.
As I turned, Jo was already falling: she’d lost her footing, a tired leg catching the knot of a root, and she tumbled forward, hitting the ground about seven feet away from me, too far for me to stop her. She kept falling, propelled by the natural incline of the hill, her head hitting the ground, then her ribs, then her head for a second time. I lurched in her direction, sliding against the camber of the ridge, desperately trying to get to her before she passed me – but it was too late. She had built up way too much speed and all I could do was watch as she went beyond me.
She hit a tree about twenty feet down.
The impact was so hard, it seemed to send a tremor through the earth. Worse, the moment she made contact with the trunk, she was still: no sound, no movement.
‘Jo?’ I said, my voice frenzied, terrified. ‘Jo.’
She didn’t even react.
I almost slipped as I ran down the slope, shoulder-barging a tree and spinning out from it in a desperate attempt to get to her faster. She was wrapped around the trunk, stomach facing in, her coat torn badly, her hair matted to her face with blood.
‘Jo?’
I placed two fingers under her jaw.
There was a pulse.
Sliding my arms under her, I hauled her up and staggered into a clearing a little distance away. She moaned, her eyelids fluttering, and then I shuffled the backpack off her, tossed it aside and took off my coat, using it as a pillow. Without my jacket on, I could instantly feel how cold it was, the air like ice, so I took off my own backpack, unzipped it and removed both blankets I’d been carrying.
She moaned again.
‘David?’
I heaved a sigh. ‘Yeah, I’m here, Jo. It’s okay.’
‘I think I blacked out,’ she said groggily.
‘It’s okay,’ I said again, but – just as I was getting ready to put the first of the blankets over her – something fell away inside of me. I hadn’t noticed it as I’d carried her here, but I could see it now: a sharp, compact branch embedded in her gut.
Shit.
Shit.
I glanced down the slope to the road.
‘Go,’ she gasped.
I looked at her again.
‘Go,’ she repeated, more forcefully this time, her hand on my arm. ‘Go and get us help.’ As she spoke, the wound bled, bubbles forming around the branch, her top already soaked. Her breath crackled and wheezed, and I started to realize she had a cracked rib, maybe a broken pelvis too. I looked from her to the road, then back to her. I didn’t know what to do. How could I leave her here like this? But how could I not?
‘David.’
I met her gaze again.
‘You need to go.’
A tremble rippled through my throat.
This time, I nodded, yanking my backpack towards me, emptying my food out on to the ground next to her. I left my water bottles there as well, three of them in a line.
‘You need to drink and eat,’ I said.
‘Okay.’
‘I mean it, Jo.’
‘I know.’ She forced a smile. ‘Take the phone.’
I fumbled around in her coat pocket for the Nokia, thinking that a signal might save us, and when I got it out, I discovered that we finally had something: a single bar, flickering in and out. I held it up to the sky, hoping it would hold, but then it dropped out altogether. Placing it in her hand, I said, ‘You keep the phone. I’ll be back, okay?’
She nodded.
‘Stay strong for me, okay?’
A hint of a smile. ‘Okay.’
I pulled the blankets up over her, held her eyes for a moment – her fear written across them like words – and then I headed down the slope, trying to move as rapidly as I could. I kept going, and going, using my arms to sling me between trees, my head down, watching every step I took, every movement, my entire focus on getting help.
Four hundred feet from the road, I finally saw something.
There was a car coming.
Family
2018
The Forest | Now
Jo lay with her head against the ground, looking at the trees directly above. She wondered where David was, whether he’d managed to find anyone. She wondered how close they were to civilization. She tried to listen for car engines and voices. But all that came back was the whisper of the trees, the soft crackle of pine needles hitting the ground, and her own, shattered sobs: they shuddered out of her throat, as broken as the bones under her skin. She couldn’t feel her legs. The pain seared across her stomach. Just breathing hurt her more than any injury she’d ever had in her life. She cried some more, letting it all come out, letting the tears run unhindered down the sides of her face, and then, when she’d gathered herself, she brought the cellphone in closer, still gripped in her hand.
She’d expected to find no bars.
But there was one.
Very slowly, trying not to move her hand, trying not to let the reception get away from her, she pushed 9 three times and then pressed Dial. It failed to connect.
She tried again: 999.
Nothing.
The reception dropped out for a moment, then came back again. When she tried to get through to the police, a paramedic, anyone, anything, the same thing happened for a third time – it just kept refusing to connect. As she looked at the display, at the bar blinking in and out in the top corner, she began to cry again, a huge wave of emotion hitting her.
Confusion. Pain.
And then, just for a second, some clarity.
As quickly as she could, she raised the cellphone again – her arm juddering, a spasm of agony flashing across her chest – and, as steadily as she could, she began to put Ethan’s number in. She was struggling to see properly, struggling to focus, but once it was in, she tabbed down to the message space. She blinked the tears away, steadied the emotion that was rocking her hand from side to side, and typed her message.
Ethan, it’s Mom. I’m in trouble.
I need help. I don’t know where I
am but I’m hurt
She stopped, watching the cursor blink.
The text might not
even send – and even if it did, how would anyone ever find her? What if this was the last message she ever got to send to her son?
It didn’t matter how much you loved a person.
Eventually, you had to let them go.
She started typing again.
I love you so much. I need to let
you know that in case I don’t
make it home. You are
everything to me. Absolutely
everything. You are all that ever
mattered. Be safe. Mom x
Jo pushed Send.
As she waited to see if it would go, she closed her eyes, tired now – and the second she did, she felt herself drift.
Darkness.
And then, gradually, something else.
A kitchen.
Suddenly, she was inside their old home in the Valley, and the three of them were having dinner, all exactly as they were now.
Jo, sixty-seven. Ethan, thirty-five.
And Ira.
Thirty-six, handsome, dressed in an LA Raiders T-shirt.
Exactly the same as the day he’d died.
‘I’m so proud of you, son,’ Ira was saying, reaching across the dinner table to Ethan, putting a hand on his boy’s arm. ‘You’ve made your mom and me so incredibly proud.’
Ethan smiled at his dad.
He didn’t seem to notice they were the same age.
‘Thanks, Dad,’ he said. ‘We really miss you.’
‘I know.’ Ira looked between them both and took Jo’s hand in his, his skin warm, alive. All three of them were joined now. ‘I know you do. I miss you both so much – more than you could ever know. But I’ve been watching, don’t you worry about that.’ Ira studied his son, blinking, and then glanced at Jo. He was becoming emotional, his voice trembling. ‘I’ve been watching Davy Crockett here.’ He smiled at Jo, and Jo couldn’t stop herself this time: she began to cry. ‘I told you that you could do it,’ he said to her, tears welling in his own eyes now. ‘I told you, Kader, didn’t I?’
Jo laughed, nodded, gripping her husband’s hand. ‘You told me,’ she replied, never wanting to let go of him, never wanting him to slip away again.
