'Good boy, Aidan,' Jane said. 'Nice work.'
They found a case of shrink-wrapped mineral water, a tin of Quality Street chocolates, blankets and waterproof coats. A tripod and a camera bag. Jane unzipped the case and pulled out a pre-digital Nikon SLR. It was loaded with film. Three exposures taken. He thought about taking it with him, but he didn't know anything about development. Enlargers wouldn't work any more. Safelights wouldn't work any more. He had never been into photography before. And it wasn't as if the world hankered for a couple of family portraits while it smouldered to cinders and ash.
He tossed the camera back into the cabin.
'Look,' said Aidan. He'd been at the glove compartment and found passports, a bunch of keys, and a wallet.
'Mr and Mrs Lewis,' Jane read. 'From Plymouth.' The wallet contained one hundred and fifty pounds, credit cards, photo-booth snaps he didn't look at. He put it all back.
They rolled the blankets up, stuffed them inside black bin liners and strapped them to the top of their rucksacks.
'Thanks, Mr and Mrs Lewis,' Aidan said.
They walked south.
The things they saw.
A woman in a lay-by wrapped around a child, their ribcages fused together.
A man in a car, its windscreen blasted and molten, reset across his face in a syrupy gyre of bone and slag.
A dog on a leash impaled by what looked like part of a human femur.
'I'm hungry,' Aidan said.
'Can we stop for a while?' Becky asked. Something in her voice made Jane look up sharply. He couldn't tell if she were angry, or scared. Or both.
They got off the A1 and followed a track through a field to a farmhouse.
'Where are we?' Aidan asked.
'Yorkshire,' Jane said. 'Britain's largest county. Home of the pudding. And tea so strong you could arm wrestle with it.'
'I've had Yorkshire pudding,' Aidan said.
'I should hope so,' Jane said.
'And that thing you put on it. Brown juice.'
'Gravy.'
'Yes. I like that.'
'I'll make you some. I promise.'
'Richard.' Becky was frowning at him. 'Don't promise.'
'But I do. One day I will make you a roast dinner. I absolutely promise you.' He was about to say that it would be good meat, with a trustworthy provenance. No tattoos. But he kept his teeth clenched on that. He thought there and then that he might have gone a little mad. And why not? Who could go forward, given what had happened, without insanity shadowing them? He doubted everything he had seen, even as his hands moved through the thick furring of ash on a gatepost, or he hopscotched a way through the broken pieces of the dead. He wondered if the ghosts that pursued him were of his own imagining, and if the awful deaths of Chris and Nance were illusions too. That, or done by his own hand during a fugue that he'd believed was the result of a crack on the head.
For the first time he thought of abandoning Becky and Aidan. Perhaps they would be safer without him. He didn't know himself well enough to trust his actions any more. He doubted how the future might play out. Every possibility was edged with black, with blood.
They moved through a garden that sloped up to the farmhouse, their feet scratching through the thin bristle. Black remnants of haycocks dotted the fields around them. A rusted disc harrow embedded in lifeless, impacted soil, twisted and cracked augers, their spiral inner teeth spilling free, the tines of a shakaerator broken and bent as if set to work on earth turned to stone. The roof of the barn was punched in; a wall bending out from one corner, as if holding on for grim life. All of the machinery bore fresh pockmarks, as if it had been peppered with pellets. He turned back to the house. All the windows on the upper floor nude, framing black. It would have to've been a powerful air rifle if it had been fired from that distance.
'Let's have a look in the kitchen,' Jane said. A door flapped in the rising wind, providing a beat that their feet marched to. Jane held up a hand and they hung back a little once they were near. Jane waited, checking the broken windows for movement. The kitchen was magazine rustic. Wheatsheaves burnt to fingers of charcoal on a cupboard made from recycled scaffold planks. Crisped cushions in an inglenook. An Aga. Welsh-slate floor. Shaker-style cabinets. Copper pots. A Belfast sink filled with bloody water. Jane hesitated over that, feeling the warning signs begin: the skin gathering at his nape, the hairs rising on his arms.
They checked the drawers and cupboards. There was basmati rice in an old coffee tin. Dozens of cans of plum tomatoes. Spices stored in tins that had once contained Assam tea. In the cellar Jane found a freezer with its own generator. He opened it and recoiled at the stink of rotted chickens sloshing about in a defrosted broth. Another fridge containing bottles of wine, cans of bitter. No longer cold, but who cared?
Becky and Aidan got a fire going in the porch, where they were shielded from the brunt of the wind. Aidan was given a pestle and mortar and shown how to grind the spices to powder. He worked at their names as he did so, struggling at first, but reciting them like a mantra to the rhythm of the pestle.
Cor-i-an-der. Cu-min. Car-da-mom. Fen-u-greek.
While Becky drained tins of chickpeas and new potatoes, Jane made his way into the hall. A rush-seated stool stood in an alcove beneath a coat rack crammed with coats of varying sizes. A restored Bakelite phone on a stand. A shoe rack with muddy wellington boots. There was a living room off to the left. Inside it Jane found bodies lying under torn-down blinds and a plastic shower curtain. A man, two boys in pyjamas, one maybe five, the other seven. And a baby girl. All had been shot in the head. The eldest boy had a gunshot through the palm of his left hand. Where was the wife, the mother?
He closed the door, wishing there were a bolt he could shoot or a key he could turn.
He went back to the kitchen, considering what to say, but Becky and Aidan were engrossed in their cooking. Instead, Jane made his way upstairs. He stood for a moment on the landing, looking out at the field below. A good view of the dual carriageway from here; they could have been tracked easily as they approached the house. Someone with a gun would have made themselves known by now, surely? Warning shots?
Hands up. Turn around. Leave.
Dead, then. Or long gone.
Jane entered the front bedroom. The man was lying in a pool of blood. He could have been any age between twenty and sixty. A gunshot wound had opened up his thigh; he'd cut his trouser leg up the seam and the two halves of fabric hung off him like grey skin. He'd stitched himself shut but the wound had become infected. His head seemed dented. Blood had flowed and coagulated there; it sheened the shoulders of his biker jacket and it cracked whenever he moved. His skin was as pale and lustreless as wax. He was scut-bearded. A silver hoop glinted in his earlobe. He viewed Jane through a curtain of white, ratty hair. Jane wondered how much blood he'd lost. The walnut stock of a rifle was buried in his armpit. The barrel pointed at the floor. His bloodied fingers lifted and rested, lifted and rested on the trigger, the polished thumbhole. His other hand played in the fans of blood, drawing shapes, fingering the crassamentum. That bothered Jane more than the weapon.
'That's a nice gun,' Jane said.
'Too right. It's even got a ventilated butt.'
'It and me both,' Jane said.
The man laughed. There was death in it. He coughed and Jane saw him taste it, what was coming to him. It caused his face to screw up.
'Those prison issue?' Jane asked, nodding at his clothes.
'Yeah.'
'Where were you?'
'Lindholme. About fifteen miles from here. If you're travelling by crow.'
'What were you in for?'
'Stealing sweets off kids.'
Jane waited.
'Rape. Manslaughter.' He pronounced it
man's laughter
. 'I was bored. It was something to do.'
'How did you get this far?'
'Walked.'
'In that state?'
The man coughed, shook his head. 'I was attacked,' he said. 'Fucking crazy bitch comes running out the farmhouse, carrying this gun. She was screaming. I ran off but she shot me in the leg. She'd killed everyone in her family. Husband, two sons. Baby daughter. Claire. Told me that she'd always wanted a girl and it was their last try at it. Meant to pull the trigger on herself next but couldn't bring herself to do it. Told me that if I didn't shoot her, she'd kill me too.'
'You didn't kill them?'
'I didn't kill them.'
They regarded each other for a while. The man was in too much pain for Jane to gauge his honesty.
'So you shot her?'
'I shot her, yes. What else could I do?'
'So where is she? There's only four bodies in the room downstairs.'
'Outside.'
'Mind if I check?'
'I'm not lying.'
'Still . . .'
'Knock yourself out. Down in the barn.'
Jane bit his lip and eyed the gun. He'd be dead before he made one step to wrestle it from the man. 'I'll be here when you get back. I'm not going anywhere.'
He was turning to go when the man said: 'You been here a day earlier, could have been you she got hold of. Think about that, lucky fuck.'
Downstairs Jane pulled Becky to one side. Aidan was scooping rice into a pan.
'There's a guy upstairs,' he murmured. 'He doesn't know you're down here, I think. He's in pretty bad shape.'
'You want me to help him?'
'He's beyond it. He has a gun. I think he's dangerous, but he won't be able to make it down here. I need to check something out. I'm going to the barn. If you hear anything, movement upstairs, you shout at me, loud as you can.'
'OK.'
'He shoots me, you take Aidan and fast out the front door. Not the back. No trying to save me. OK?'
'OK.'
Jane went straight outside and moved fast to the barn. His back seemed to expand. He wouldn't hear the shot; but there might be enough time to see his heart as it exited his chest. He glanced to his left just before he met the collapsed barn wall and thought he saw skulking figures down by a clump of Corsican pine trees. Inside the barn he found the woman almost immediately. She was sitting up against the far wall, a photograph album in her hands. A single gunshot to her left eye. Jane looked around for something to cover the body but there was nothing. He noticed half a dozen big rats eyeing him and wondered whether they'd got started on the woman somewhere he couldn't see.
'Jesus,' he said, and picked her up. He blanched at the stiff, cold weight of her. The sudden change of position drew a sigh from her lungs that brushed his neck and made him cry out, but he did not drop her. He made to take the album from her hands but it wasn't going anywhere. He heard the scamper of claws as he took the body outside but the rats would not follow him into the field.
He got into the kitchen and Becky was saying, 'Oh, Richard.' And Aidan was saying, 'Who's she? Is she dead?'
'Don't let him in here,' Jane snapped as he kicked open the door to the living room. He put the woman next to her baby and covered them both. Could he have done to Cherry and Stan what this woman had managed to do to her family? No. No way. He didn't have it in him. He could kill himself, he reckoned, but not his boy. You survive and you think you're chosen for something special. You can't believe your luck. And then you find yourself envying the dead.
He closed the door and told Becky to wait with Aidan.
'I want to come with you.'
'There's nothing to see. Get dinner ready.' As if he could eat anything now.
Upstairs the man had died. His position had not altered. He stared at Jane but whatever it was that made life so beyond doubt was absent now. A sheen to the eyes. Elasticism.
A memory from childhood. Lying in bed, getting Dad to play his favourite track from the
White Album
one last time, before lights out.
Hey, Bungalow Bill, what did you kill, Bungalow Bill?
Such memories had not impinged as much as they might. It was understandable now, he supposed, yet when he had been on the rigs he had often thought of home, when he was a toddler, usually when he was struggling with a job in the gelid deep. The family garden had been large and well tended. Dad was proud of his lawn, trimmed regularly with his Webb mower so that there were pretty stripes patterning the grass.
What do you think, Rico?
His dad would ask him, sweating over the handles.
Wembley or Wimbledon?
They had grown all kinds of fruit and vegetables in that back garden. Carrots he'd eat straight from the ground. Gooseberries. Beetroot they chopped together for pickling.
That's glossy
, Jane remembered saying of the succulent slices.
Like a magazine
. His dad had been impressed with that.
Glossy . . . get you.