The Wanting

by Campbell Armstrong

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  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF CAMPBELL ARMSTRONG

  “Campbell Armstrong is thriller writing’s best-kept secret.” —The Sunday Times

  “Armstrong is among the most intriguing of blockbuster writers … near to unputdownable.” —GQ

  “While touching on suspense with a skill to please hard-core thriller addicts, he manages to please people who … warm to readable novels of substance.” —Daily Mail

  “Armstrong’s skill is not just an eye for a criminally good tale but a passion for the people that will populate it.” —The Scotsman

  “Subtle and marvelous … This is a dazzling book.” —The Daily Telegraph on Agents of Darkness

  “A consummate psychological thriller … Without doubt, Armstrong is now in the front rank of thriller writers.” —Books on Heat

  “Armstrong has outdone both Frederick Forsyth and Ken Follett.” —James Patterson on Jig

  “A full throttle adventure thriller.” —The Guardian on Mambo

  “A wonderful puzzle that keeps us guessing right to the end.” —Publishers Weekly on Mazurka

  The Wanting

  Campbell Armstrong

  For Sally and Colin, good friends, this small feast of bones

  1973

  PROLOGUE: Officer Metger thought there was something purifying, something uplifting, when it rained here in the California pine forest. A cleansing action that left the air sharp after the dry days of summer.

  But this rain was different, hard and sinister and cold. Already it had soaked through his uniform and he could feel it press against his flesh. He raised a hand, wiped large drops from his eyebrows, and then gazed back toward the forest, which was more secretive than usual; the rain wove a thin curtain between the trees. A spidery, gray camouflage.

  Metger cupped his hands and tried to get a cigarette going but he gave up in despair, his fingertips covered with flakes of damp tobacco. He raised his face to the sky. Low, heavy clouds shadowed the landscape and the forest caught the rain, echoing its sounds like a million unsynchronized pulsebeats.

  He shivered. Water had seeped inside his boots and his socks squished against his ankles. But the discomfort he felt could not be attributed simply to his wet condition.

  It was the slicing rain, the way it created a conspiracy in the landscape. He could sense the forest stretch on for mile after wet mile, the washes running like liquid ribbons, bedraggled birds perched in the inadequate shelter of trees, animals lurking in the cavities of trunks.

  He blew into his hands for warmth. Something streaked through the air in front of him. A sleek buzzard, wings spread vainly against the angle of the rain, hovered over the trees a moment, then was gone. The forest, Metger thought, is never still; it’s always shifting, stirring, whispering. You can never step into the same forest twice.

  And now apparently it had swallowed a child.

  As he stared at the trees he had the feeling that it wasn’t going to give the child back easily either. It wasn’t going to make him a gift because it wasn’t a generous entity. Unyielding, unresponsive, it staked its claims and held them hard and tight; it was furtive and indifferent and its moods completely whimsical. Now the trees seemed to come closer together in the rain, closing ranks against the policeman as if they had sniffed the presence of the enemy.

  You could lose more than a child up here, Metger thought. You could lose all the little threads that held your sanity together.

  He wondered if that was what had happened to the parents of the child. If they had somehow lost it. He turned and looked up at the sun deck of the house behind him and observed the faces of the man and the woman, understanding that they were waiting for him, a cop, a representative of law and order and regulation, to do something to find their missing kid.

  Metger was suddenly angry. Why the hell did people bury themselves out here anyhow? Why did they come up from their big cities to spend weeks and months in this hostile, unfamiliar environment twenty-one miles from the town of Carnarvon?

  Back to nature, he thought. That’s what they called it. Back to the primal landscape. Back to the soil, if only for a while. Liberated from freeways and traffic fumes and the general ungodliness of the cities.

  In the rain the faces of the parents were pale and moist, white and expressionless as blank paper. They were silent with the intense silence of parental anxiety. Already they were imagining their stray child dead and waterlogged in one of the fast-running washes. Or carried away by some massive animal that was the beast of a nightmare.

  It was more likely that the kid was out there lost. Probably sheltered beneath a tree and sobbing her little heart out.

  Metger moved, mud sucking at his feet, toward the trees. Although he knew this forest vaguely, although he had lived all his life around here, its desolation always got under his skin just the same. His area of patrol included the forest and he was sometimes obliged to drive the dirt road that skirted the edge of the trees, but that was all as far as he was concerned. Just another area that fell within the dominion of the most junior officer in Carnarvon Police Department.

  Conscious of the man and woman watching him, he moved farther between the trees. And all at once it came to him that there was something odd about this whole situation. He pushed aside an overhanging branch and he stopped, studying the trees ahead. As rain drummed against his cap he wondered now why the parents chose to stay behind at the house instead of accompanying him on his search—wasn’t that strange? You’d expect the parents to be out here digging trees up by the roots and hacking the whole goddamn forest apart to find their missing kid.

  But Mr. and Mrs. Ackerley had remained behind on the deck, faces bleached by rain, white hands clasped tightly on the rail. Although he wasn’t a parent himself, Metger imagined that if it were his kid no force on this earth could keep him out of the forest.

  He stopped and looked back the way he had come. The house was no longer visible, hidden behind the screen of trees. He tried once more to get a cigarette lit—a minor success this time, a few quick puffs before rain slid down his fingers and extinguished the thing.

  He felt suddenly very lonely out here. Even if the house was only a hundred yards or so away, it might not have existed at all, so dense was the cover of pines. He walked a little farther. Rain dripped from needles and cones and slithered from the visor of his cap down his cheeks, his neck and throat, dampening the collar of his shirt.

  Were the Ackerleys scared of the forest? Was that it? Scared to leave the security of their rented house? Mr. Ackerley, a law professor from Seattle, had said that he and his wife would remain in the house on the chance that their daughter would come back. They wanted to be there, he said. Metger had looked into the pinched face of the professor, seeing in those guarded eyes a flicker of pain—but maybe he’d misinterpreted that expression. It could have been fear of what might lie out here in the forest.

  Mrs. Ackerley, a dyed redhead who clung to her husband’s arm, hadn’t looked Metger straight in the face during all the time they had talked together. She just kept watching the trees and twisting her wedding band around and around on her finger. What Metger sensed was that the couple had had a disagreement of some kind, although he couldn’t say what.

  Maybe the husband hadn’t wanted the police called in just yet and the wife had insisted. Or it might have been the other way around. Whatever, the atmosphere around them had a tense, cutting edge—a sharp thing that wasn’t entirely connected to the missing kid. Metger had the feeling you got when you walked into a room at the end of a violent argumen
t, when the air was heavy with the clamminess of domestic discord.

  “She was wearing blue jeans. Red sneakers. A jacket. Brown, I think,” Mrs. Ackerley had said, offering Metger a description he thought was superfluous because it wasn’t as if he was going to run into scores of kids out there in the vast forest. It wasn’t exactly the most populous place on the planet.

  Apart from the redwood house the Ackerleys were renting, there was only one other home within miles. That was where Dick Summer and his wife lived, a reclusive old couple Metger had seen only a couple of times. They gave new meaning to the word “privacy,” Metger thought. Once, he’d actually seen them in Carnarvon, shuffling along the sidewalk together, arms linked as if each were afraid of losing contact with the other. They came to town rarely, though, presumably only for essential provisions. Metger had wondered what they did up here in the pine forest all the time and had decided that they had perfected the goal of all recluses, that of keeping yourself to yourself with a vengeance.

  “Her’s name’s Anthea,” Mr. Ackerley had said. And there was an undercurrent in his voice, as if he were repressing something. When he spoke his daughter’s name his expression changed—he blinked his eyes and swallowed hard and then gazed down at the floor like someone rendered suddenly shy. Then a current of some sort had passed between husband and wife, like an electric jolt coursing the length of a metal tube. Metger picked up on it.

  “She’s twelve,” Mrs. Ackerley added. “Only twelve …” The voice had been filled with an odd uncertainty. The red-haired woman glanced at her husband and then added, “She looks …”

  Infuriatingly, this sentence died on her lips as well.

  “She doesn’t look her age,” Mr. Ackerley put in.

  “She’s tall? Big? Is that what you mean?” Metger asked.

  Now, as he plodded across the mud, he realized he hadn’t received an answer to his question. It was a simple enough question, but the parents had evaded it, somehow managed to slide their way around it.

  She doesn’t look her age, Metger thought. Whatever. Out here, it didn’t matter if he was searching for a giantess, a twelve-year-old Amazon or a stunted dwarf—because if he ran into a child at all it was sure to be Anthea Ackerley.

  He collided with the arch of a drooping branch, which swiped him damply across his forehead. He cursed, walked a little way, then stopped. It was funny, though not altogether in a comical sense, how the forest seemed to lean on you, pressuring you, as if it were a conscious act of resistance on the part of the trees. Rain, blown at tattered angles by a sudden wind, filled his eyes and blinded him.

  It was hard to avoid the conclusion that the Ackerleys were concealing something, he thought. In a halfhearted way he toyed with the fantasy that perhaps they had murdered their own child and were busily creating a false impression of deep anxiety. But he rejected that notion at once as a trick of his mind, something inspired by rain and fueled by the dreary menace of the pines.

  He had asked the Ackerleys if the child was given to wandering through the trees. The couple had been quiet for too long a time, and then Mr. Ackerley had said the girl often went to visit the Summers. He said she often spent afternoons over there.

  Something in the way he uttered this simple sentence reinforced the idea in Metger that Mr. and Mrs. Ackerley were not being entirely forthcoming with him, that they were obfuscating. Your kid is missing, so why fudge around the truth like this? he thought.

  “She wouldn’t have gone over there today,” Mrs. Ackerley said.

  “Why not today?” Metger asked.

  “I understand the Summers have gone, Officer.”

  “Gone?”

  “A trip. They said something about a trip, I believe.”

  “Maybe your daughter’s over at their house—”

  “But the place is empty—”

  Metger interrupted the law professor’s wife. “Which might make it attractive to a kid. Right?”

  The couple said nothing. “When did you last see Anthea?” Metger asked.

  “Early this morning,” the mother answered.

  “How early?” Precision, Metger thought, I need precision.

  “Seven.” Mrs. Ackerley looked at her husband for confirmation.

  “Seven is about right,” the professor said.

  Metger examined his watch. “Ten hours.”

  Ackerley sighed with some impatience. “Officer, I feel sure she’ll turn up, she’ll come home. Maybe this is just a waste of your time.”

  So it was the professor who hadn’t been eager to call the cops. It was Mrs. Ackerley who had insisted, Mrs. Ackerley whose eyes were suddenly filled with tears and who pressed her face into her husband’s chest. There’s grief here, Metger thought. And he was dogged by the feeling that it was more than something caused by a child who might have wandered too far into the pines.

  “Now that I’m here, I might as well look around,” Metger had said.

  And here he was now, looking around but not seeing very much.

  Rain rattled branches and wind shook limbs and the pattering sound of water on the feeble plants of the undergrowth suggested the scampering motions of small animals. Then there was another noise, one that grew as he moved—the splutter of foaming water hurrying through a wash.

  When he reached the wash he observed the swirling muddy foam and the broken branches that were sucked down this narrow funnel in the land. Opaque and swift, the water yielding nothing, no drowned child, nothing but the surface debris of nature which the maddened water had grabbed on its twisting way through the fold in the landscape.

  Somewhere beyond the wash was the house where the Summers lived. To get there Metger would have to ford this crazy swollen river, this defiant bastard of the rain—not a prospect he found any pleasure in.

  He scrambled along the bank looking for a likely place. The roar of water filled his ears and he realized his discomfort had become intolerable.

  A good fire, dry clothes, a tumblerful of scotch—his desires were simple ones right now. Anthea Ackerley, why did you wander off on such a day? If indeed you have wandered. If indeed that was your choice.

  He studied the shifting wash like an explorer assessing his chances of survival. He peered at the opposite bank at the cluster of rainswept trees. He slithered down the bank, then paused.

  Over the roar of water and the incessant bickering of the rain, another sound came to him, one that he could neither locate nor identify at first. But it had a weird effect on him—the prickling of the hairs at the back of his neck and a coldness, nothing to do with the weather, that seemed to form in the marrow of his skeleton.

  His immediate instinct was to place his hand on the butt of his pistol, something that struck him later as uncharacteristic, because in all his six years in the Carnarvon Police Department he’d never drawn the weapon—indeed he’d come to forget that the damned thing hung at his hip.

  He turned his face and looked back the way he had come.

  The sound came again. Human, certainly, but unlike anything he could remember ever having heard before. It was both a scream of grief and a cry of madness and it assailed his senses as if it were the incomprehensible utterance of something alien.

  He scrambled up the bank and then the trees were surrounding him again and he was trying to run, to trot back to the redwood house as fast as he could, despite the impediments of the landscape and the rain—serrated, sharpened by wind—which blew into his eyes.

  When he heard the gunshot he stopped moving, a response that wasn’t a professional one, but the sound, muffled by wet branches, seemed to hold him paralyzed a moment. There was a feeling inside him that was close to pure dread.

  He started to run again. When the house came in sight he glanced up at the sun deck, empty now, strangely desolate as the rain swept across it, discoloring the redwood slats. The entire house, stained and dreary in the gray-green drizzle of the landscape, might itself have been completely empty.

  Metger moved around
to the front porch. He took his pistol from its holster and he thought of how complete the silence had suddenly become, filling all the spaces around him, a big wet world of total quiet.

  And he was afraid, scared to go inside the house, scared of pushing the door open and stepping in—the way a man given to nightmares might be afraid of falling asleep.

  He steadied himself, leveled the gun in his hand even as he felt ridiculous about having removed it from the holster, and he nudged the door with his knee.

  The living room was empty. He could see clear across it into the kitchen. The silence that had begun outdoors tracked him inside the house like some damp dog moving on his heels. When he reached the kitchen he gazed up at the recessed fluorescent light and the tiled ceiling, catching a smudged image of himself in reflection. He could hear rain clicking against the windows of the house.

  “Mr. Ackerley?”

  There was no answer.

  “Mrs. Ackerley?”

  A hallway opened out in front of him. There was a curious smell in the air, bitter and clinging and utterly unfamiliar to him. It gathered in his nostrils, then it seemed to prickle the back of his throat like something he’d tried to swallow—a fishbone, something that had become lodged at the back of his tongue. He felt nausea, cleared his throat; the smell remained.

  “Mr. Ackerley?”

  Now he found himself staring at the Ackerleys, who were standing apart from one another at the end of the hallway. Their bodies were motionless—they might have been the two subjects of a badly composed photograph, limp and listless, uncertain of their focus.

  Ackerley turned his face and his glasses glistened in the dull light of the hall. The law professor’s face became a patchwork quilt of incoherent emotion. A nerve worked under his eye, and his hands, which he raised loosely in the air in a gesture of futility, trembled visibly.

  Metger looked at Mrs. Ackerley. She wasn’t here, she wasn’t in this house, she wasn’t of this world—she had gone, been transported to another zone. Her eyes were blind and blank.