Broken Heart (50 page)

Egan
.

He stood there, slightly hunched and breathing hard, about six feet from me. I scrambled to my feet. He didn’t come for me this time. His skin was flushed, and there was blood running from a deep laceration in his gut. It was a knife wound, jagged and coarse. Korin must have got a hit in before he killed her.

He sliced his own knife across the air in front of him – the same knife he’d threatened me with at the Portakabin. I scrambled to my feet, able to see the caravan being reduced to ashes on the other side of the wall. He followed my gaze and then turned back to me, a faint smile on his face. But it quickly became something else: a wince; a grimace of pain.

Without warning, he rushed me.

I backed up automatically, and the ground seemed to give way. Sliding, I lurched to my left and fell, rolling through a tangle of ferns. As I tried to get to my feet again, I heard Egan’s footsteps thump against the wet grass directly to my right, and then he started slashing at the plants, slicing through them as he tried to get at me. I rolled again, in an attempt to get away, and then again, and again, feeling the ground angle away, my clothes soaked through with mud and rain – and then, with a crunch, I hit another wall.

I looked up the slope.

Egan was coming, backlit by the fire, a shape ripped from the fabric of the night. The knife swung at his side like a pendulum, glinting orange, and then he raised it, slashing the blade from left to right, as if he thought I was closer than I was. He lost his balance and staggered to his left. I tried to
imagine why he hadn’t just stuck me with the knife when he’d had the chance at the caravan – but then, as he swiped it across the front of him again, I realized his perception was shot. It was all fading for him. He’d had every intention of stabbing me earlier, of putting me down for good, but he’d missed. That was why I’d seen the flash of the blade come so close to my head. He’d gone for my face or my neck, and misjudged it.

I hauled myself up.

‘Billy,’ I said.

He stopped, his feet sliding a little on the grass.

‘You’re dying, Billy.’

He didn’t say anything, either because he couldn’t hear me or he didn’t have the strength to respond. There was blood all over his shirt. There was blood on his lips now too. He tried to make himself big again, to shake off the damage that Korin had inflicted upon him, and then he came at me a third time.

He had the knife out in front of him like a spear, his eyes like blobs of oil, his face contorted. But halfway between us, he lost his footing, sliding on a streak of mud, and then stumbled forwards and to the side, past me, into the wall. This one was smaller, and he smashed into it hard at thigh height, his momentum carrying his upper half forward and over the top. He hit the other side and rolled the rest of the way, out into the middle of another, smaller field, where the heavy rain had failed to drain away and formed a shallow pond in a cleft.

I sprang over the wall.

He’d dropped the knife as he’d fallen into the field, so I left it where it was and approached him. He hoisted himself up on to an elbow, searching for his weapon, and when he
didn’t find it, he tried to clamber to his feet again. He got about halfway and then staggered back. His legs seemed to roll out from under him and he collapsed on to his knees, half in the pond, half out. It was a slow movement, almost in stages and, when it was over, he stared down into the water gathering at his legs – his clothes soaked through with rain and mud, blood leaking out of his guts.

‘That fucking bitch,’ he said, looking at his stab wound.

If I’d felt any pity for him, it disappeared as I thought of what he’d done to Korin. And then something else hit me even harder, like an anchor dragging me down into the darkness of the lake itself:
Egan had tailed me all the way here
.

I’d just cost Lynda Korin her life.

I dropped to my haunches, suddenly woozy, nauseous, my head pounding. Egan noted the movement and looked at me, eyes narrowing, as if trying to read my mind. He broke into a smile, blood smeared across his teeth.

‘You got nothing,’ he said softly.

He glanced up at the slope, past the walls, to the caravan. It was hardly visible any more – just flames and smoke. Ten months of a life reduced to dust.

‘
You got nothing!
’

Egan screamed it this time.

His voice carried off into the darkness, and then there was only silence between us, filled with the soft patter of rain on the pond.

‘You got nothing,’ he said again, descending into a coughing fit.

‘The police know who you are, Billy.’

He smiled. ‘So?’

‘Zeller will take the fall for what you’ve done.’

He shifted position in the water. In the dull light carrying
down from the fire, I could see more blood ooze from his stomach. He only had minutes left.

‘They can’t connect me to him,’ he wheezed.

‘You’re his son.’

‘A son he couldn’t control.’

He meant Zeller would deny he ever knew what his son was involved in, or capable of. Then it became the police’s job to try and find a connection. I thought of Egan’s phone, which I’d found at the Portakabin, empty of numbers, calls, any Internet history, any activity at all. I saw the shape of a new phone in his pocket too. It would be the same. But there would still be a record of calls, texts and Internet history at the phone company.

‘The police will go to your phone comp–’

‘They’re burners. I brought them with me from the States.’ He stopped, coughing again. ‘They’re not even UK phones.’ Another pause. ‘You think the police will go to the effort of chasing down US phone companies for phones we’re dumping at the end of every week?’ He laughed, but then it turned into a series of hacks. ‘They won’t. And even if they did …’ He coughed again, raw and painful, and when it was over, he gestured up the slope to the fire. ‘I did this. That’s all the cops’ll need to know.’

One of Egan’s hands was planted in the water for support. He lifted it out and wiped at his eyes. Water trails ran down his cheeks, mixing with the blood.

‘You got nothing,’ he said again. ‘Anything you might have had …’ He stopped, his chest wheezing. ‘Anything you had, it’s lying dead up there or it’s …’ He coughed. ‘Or it’s burning to a crisp. You’re going down for Cramer’s death. And if the cops don’t nail you, the old man will see to it. Whatever it takes.’ He smiled, struggling to breathe.
‘Whatever justice Saul doesn’t get for me, whatever evidence he doesn’t have … he’ll find it. That’s what he does.’

He coughed again, a thick, distressed sound.

‘You got no proof … about anything.’

One last fading smile.

His eyes lingered on me for a moment more, and then they started rolling back into his head. He toppled sideways into the pond, like a collapsing building.

‘They’re … gonna … come for you.’

He meant the police. Or maybe he meant Zeller.

Either way, I knew he was right.

I had nothing.

73

I headed back up the slope, my legs feeling weak, my mouth tasting of blood. The heat from the caravan had faded, but flames still licked at its blackened skeleton.

I stood there, watching it burn.

I didn’t have any moves left to make. Korin was dead, and with her went my last hope of trying to prove anything. Even if what she’d pinned to the walls of the caravan was gone for ever, her testimony, her intimate knowledge of the case and her connection to the victims would have been infinitely more than I had now. Instead, as smoke belched into the night sky, and the smell of burnt plastic carried off on the wind, I had to face reality: the man who’d killed her mother, who’d coldly set up her half-brother, and who’d changed the entire course of her life, was going to get away with what he’d done. There was no one left to dispute Zeller’s account of what happened in 1953. He was protected not only by money, influence, power – but also by history, and by time. Six decades on, anyone who had ever cared for any of the victims was dead.

I got out my phone and looked at the display. In everything that had gone on since I’d arrived at Wast Water, I’d forgotten to turn it off, to take the battery and the SIM card out. It had been like that for a couple of hours, maybe longer. If the police were looking to pick up my location, I’d made it even easier for them.

As another part of the caravan collapsed in on itself, I
thought about how detectives might come after me. I tried to think clearly about how to connect dots, how to avoid falling into their traps, whether there was anything I could defend myself with. And then my mind began to wander, back to the phone call I’d had with Craw.
She was leaving
. It had barely registered with me at the time, because I’d been so focused on Korin, but it hit hard now: she was leaving me, the case had escaped me, the police were on their way.

I was alone. I’d failed.

I was done.

Then something moved.

Through the melted, twisted remains of the caravan, on the opposite side of the vehicle, I could see it. At first, it was difficult to make out, a swirling sheet of rain creating a gossamer curtain on that side of the caravan. For a second, I thought it was an animal, crawling through the grass.

But it wasn’t an animal.

It was Lynda Korin.

I immediately broke into a sprint, tearing around the burning wreckage of the caravan, to where Korin was lying, belly down, in the grass. As she heard my footsteps, she started to moan – a terrible, glutinous gurgling in her throat – and then her fingers tried to gain purchase in the mud. I dropped to my knees next to her, speaking to her softly, and saw blood all over her top, all over her trousers, all over her face.

‘Lynda,’ I said. ‘It’s David.’

She stopped trying to crawl away but couldn’t angle her body in order to see me, so I slid an arm around her waist and another around her neck and rolled her over. She made a great sigh, like a breath of wind, and then tried to find me.

Her eyes rolled in her head.

It was hard to look at her, to see her like this. She had burns down one side of her body, her clothes reduced to cinders, her skin melted like candle wax. In the light from the fire, I could just about trace her path back to the caravan, a trail marked out with flattened grass and the blood from a knife wound Egan had put high in her chest. Hers must have been the blood at the door. She’d shrugged off her red anorak inside and managed to make it out.

Resting her head on my knee, I grabbed my phone and dialled 999, even though I knew it was futile. It would take them too long to get here, whether they came by road or by air.

Korin was dying.

Egan had killed her – and I was the one who had led him here.

Suddenly, an overwhelming sense of remorse shrouded me. I wasn’t sure if it was for Korin, for the role I’d played in the death that was surely coming for her, or whether it was the certainty that some aspect of me – an innocence that had always been a part of my DNA – had escaped and wasn’t coming back. Out of nowhere, I thought of my doctor, Jhadav, and what he’d said to me –
If you’re not careful, this job of yours might cost you your life
– and I started to wonder if he had been talking about moments like this. Not my life coming to an end, not being buried in some cemetery where all that would be left of me was dirt and a headstone, but instead being altered in some way. Maybe this would be the illness that would eat me up from the inside – not blackouts and headaches and disease. Maybe it would be the weight of these moments. The regret I felt for them. The idea that I could never take them back.

On my lap, Korin shifted, her breathing shallow and
painful. She opened her good eye. It was filmy and unfocused, like a cloudy marble.

I ran a hand across her face, through hair that had become matted with dirt and blood, and thought of all that she’d told me in the hours before, the strength she’d shown, the suffering she’d had to endure, and wished I’d had the chance to know her better in life.

Again, she shifted against my leg.

But this time, haltingly, she moved her hand to mine, dug her nails in and directed my hand to her pockets.

She tried to speak, but all that came out was a low moan, like a whimper. When my hand reached her left side, she pressed my fingers hard to her trouser pocket and then her own hand slipped away, and mine stayed there, on her hip. There was something inside. I reached in and took it out.

It was two matching keys on a ring.

I looked down at Korin’s face, but her eyes were shut, and there was water leaking out from under the lids.

‘Lynda, what are these for?’

She didn’t respond.

‘Lynda?’

She moaned slightly. ‘An … gel …’

Angel.
Automatically, I looked back at the caravan and, as I did, I saw something lying in the grass about ten feet to the right of me. It was covered in her blood, in mud and rain – but it was there.

The angel
.

She’d grabbed it before crawling her way out.

Laying her down as gently as I could, I went to pick it up and then brought it back to her – but her eyes remained closed, her breathing shallow and laboured.

‘Lynda?’

Nothing.

‘Lynda, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. I don’t know how it can help.’

When she didn’t respond, I looked into my hands.

The wooden angel. A set of keys.

I glanced from her to the caravan, and then from the caravan to the farm, and a memory came back to me. I remembered heading past the farmhouse and skirting the barns. At the back, there had been an annex, close to the pigs, old and faded, smelling of wood and paint. The annex had a faded red door.

The door had two slide bolts.

And on the bolts were two padlocks.

74

I carried Lynda Korin to my car and placed her on the back seat, and as I headed towards the farm again, I could hear police sirens for the first time. They were a way off yet, but they’d be here before long.

I quickened my pace.