Pig Island (29 page)

“I’ll just cover you here,” said Picot, reaching under the chair for a blanket, which he placed over her buttocks, so that it hung down into the gap behind the growth, shutting off my view. “Then I want you to tell me what you can feel and what you can’t.”

I shot Lexie another look. She had opened the magazine and was leafing through it—still with her back to me, like she was making a point. I shifted very, very silently in my chair, taking care not to make it creak, so I could watch what Picot was doing. I’d seen the growth before—just for a bit, in the house on the island, but I hadn’t seen its base: it was wider than I’d expected—as wide as a wrist—and very pale, with almost the quality of marble to it. I’d had this image of what she’d look like down there—I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone but I’d spent a long time in the last few days wondering about it—and it hadn’t been like this. I hadn’t expected anything so—I fumbled for the word—so
beautiful
. Yes, I thought, feeling like a bit of a tart for the choice of words: beautiful. That bit of flesh had something I couldn’t put a name to—like a sculpture, or a piece of architecture.

“OK,” Picot said, after a while, and there was something different about his voice—a nervousness. He lifted the sheet to cover her. “I’m—I’m … let me see.” He fiddled uncomfortably with his tie and stared at the telephone on the wall, like he wanted to call someone and ask for help. After a while he scratched his neck and, like someone invisible had just asked him what he was going to do, said, “An X-ray, then an MRI. Yes—right, right.” He pulled off his gloves. “OK. If I can arrange it, I want to do an MRI. Do you know what an MRI is?”

Angeline shifted on to her back and began to sit up so that everything I had been looking at was replaced by her left hand. “I think so. It’s a—‘ She broke off. She had moved upright so quickly that I hadn’t had time to look away, and she’d caught me staring at her from the other side of the office: pale, bug-eyed, my magazine clutched tightly in my hands. I was frozen, couldn’t drag my eyes away, and for a moment we were stuck there, holding each other’s eyes, both too surprised and embarrassed to know what to do.

“Angeline?” Picot said. “Are you … ?”

“Yes,” she said hurriedly, grabbing the sheet and pulling it round her protectively. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me. “I’m ready. Where do we go?”

One of Danso’s PCs drove us back to the rape suite. I didn’t say a word. I sat in the passenger seat, elbows on my knees, smiling rigidly at the windscreen, my head pounding. I was fighting the sinking feeling that this had been waiting somewhere inside me for a lifetime, that it had always been destined to be dragged to the surface one day.

He was a shrewd one, Picot, keeping his cards close to his chest. Even after the MRI he wasn’t giving away what he thought was wrong with her. Instead of answers, we came away with nothing except more questions and a limp, flesh-coloured surgical support. It was just a piece of bandage, boiled soft and covered with hospital laundry marks, and we all knew, when he held it out to Angeline, that it wasn’t designed for her and probably wouldn’t fit or make any difference anyhow. Back at the house she sat on the sofa under a duvet, one hand hidden beneath it. I couldn’t see for sure, but I think she was feeling herself, walking her fingers down her body, re-examining it. I walked round the place, not knowing where to put myself, avoiding meeting her eyes. In the end I went to bed early and lay there, wondering why the fuck I couldn’t get what I’d seen out of my head. That night I had an erotic dream about her.

She was sitting on the edge of a swimming-pool, her feet dangling in the water. She was wearing some kind of pink bikini thing, shorts up to her waist, the growth peeping out of one of the leg openings. It lay next to her left leg, glistening with pool water, the tip of it in the pool like it was a creature sucking up water. I was a few feet away in the pool, staring at it, mesmerized. I said something to her, something indistinct and meaningless, and she raised her eyes, smiled, and let the tip of the growth move up her left calf, pausing at the knee. I opened my mouth to speak again, but this time the water rose in a wave behind me and carried me towards her. She opened her arms and her legs and snaked the tail out, like an arm, to pull me hard against her. I woke in the sticky sheets, my heart thudding, buzzing with excitement and sadness.

“What is it?” Lexie murmured sleepily, throwing out a hand. “You all right? You ill?”

I swung my legs round so my back was to her, put my feet on the ground and sat up to stare at my wet thighs. It was early morning—there was a faint line of light round the curtains. “I’m fine.”

I waited for the feelings to go—a feeling in my chest like I’d just taken a drug straight in the heart, pure nicotine or one of those amyl-nitrate poppers we used to do at uni. When the blood stopped pounding and my head came back to the ground, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, staring at myself.

Man, I thought peering at myself. Hair and muscle and dick. That’s all we amount to. I looked down at my cock, still red and half hard. What is going on here, Oakes? I asked myself. What is happening to you?

Chapter 2

Later that day Angeline went missing. She was gone for four hours, and it was me who found her. I took the Fiesta and drove round the deserted streets, the sound of syringes cracking under the tyres. She was half a mile away, on the main road that bordered the estate. There was a newsagent with bars on the windows and a postbox outside, and she was standing in front of them, staring at the traffic going back and forward. We’d given her some money to spend in Dumbarton and she was dressed differently now: under her leather coat she was wearing a skirt she’d patched together out of two others and a ribbed brown sweater with a McFly badge pinned to it. I watched her for a moment or two from the car, trying not to think about what was under that coat. I’d made up my mind. It was time to tell her to move on.

I pulled into the kerb, leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. “Hey. We didn’t know where you were. Everyone’s worried.”

She hesitated. Then she climbed into the car and closed the door, arranging the coat round her, rubbing her nose. I didn’t look too close, but I got a sort of thumbnail image of raw eyes and veins broken in her cheeks. She’d been crying. We sat there for a long time not speaking. The billboard outside the newsagent said, ‘
Terrorist Experts in Nationwide Manhunt’
.

“Angeline?” I said. “Were you trying to go somewhere? Someone’s house? Do you want me to drive you somewhere?”

She shook her head and wiped her eyes. “No,” she said thickly. “I just wanted a walk.”

“There’s nowhere I can take you?”

“I don’t know anyone. Only you.” She pulled on the seatbelt, the way she’d seen Lex and me do it, and sat, her hands on her lap, looking out of the windscreen. “I’ve been thinking,” she said, “about what happened yesterday.”

I felt the muscles in my face lock solid. I knew she was looking at me, shyly searching my face, trying to make sense of me.

“I’ve made up my mind. If there’s an operation I’m not going to have it.” There was a long, long pause. “You think I’m right, don’t you? You think I’d be wrong to have an operation.”

I should say something. I was supposed to say something—something adult. But my head had gone rigid. I reached across her and locked the door. “Do something for me, Angeline.” I put the car into gear and took off the handbrake. “Don’t come out here again. You don’t know who might drive past.”

The next few days there was this slow, pressure-cooker feeling in the rape suite. Angeline ignored what I’d said about going out on the road: every day she’d leave the house and be gone for hours. The surveillance car didn’t follow her either: me and the officers had talked about it and decided to stop arguing with her, decided we weren’t her keepers. Secretly I was relieved. It was easier when she wasn’t around. I didn’t like the way she kept watching me, like she was waiting for me to say something.

Lexie knew something was wrong. She kept staring at me and asking me weird questions until my chest was tight and my head felt like it was full of blood and I spent as much time as I could away from her, locked in the office I’d rigged up in the third bedroom, the one with the cot and puke on the wall, trying to work on the proposal. I shut myself up and wrote like crazy: two K words a day, trying to cram all my thoughts on to the hard drive, my hands clamped to my head, moving ideas around until my brain was like catfood and I knew how the Sputnik monkey felt. But it didn’t matter how hard I wrote, I couldn’t get two people out of my head: Angeline Dove and her dad, Malachi.

Danso and I talked about it all the time: we spent hours going through the paperwork from the cottage, pushing it all around. Every night he’d stop by on his way home from work and every night he’d bring things for us. Bribes to keep me sweet, I decided, to stop me going back to London. One day it was a bottle of Jura malt whisky. One day a pound of farmed smoked salmon. Fuck knows where he was financing it from—his own pocket maybe—but none of us complained. Lexie got one of the guys in the surveillance car to bring down a jar of capers from Oban when he came on duty and we ate them with the salmon, using our fingers, sitting in a circle like cave people. I always asked Danso about the sightings of Dove. I asked him to show me on the map where they all were and I plotted them. When he’d gone I’d spend the night looking at the map, thinking about what these random sightings meant.

Then, suddenly, on the Thursday morning, the police got a lead.

Someone had spotted a blue Vauxhall near the southern tip of Loch Awe. Within an hour someone else called in a report: Dove wandering near a stone bothy tucked up in a crevice of the nearby hills in Inverliever Forest. The police brought out the Royal Logistics Corps—used to clearing military land and unexploded Second World War ordnance. They stuck a specialized probe into the bothy window and siphoned off air into absorbent cartridges. When the explosives test came out negative the support unit got sent in to batter down the door. There was no one inside.

“Empty,” said Danso, that evening at the rape suite. “But the thing is, it’s only a mile from a chalet owned by one of the ex-members of the PHM. And she was on our TI list.”

“TI?”

“Trace and Interview. We’d cleared her on Tuesday, but then this came up and started sounding klaxons.”

I pulled on my coat.

“What are you doing?”

“I want to see it.”

“There’s nothing to see. He’s not there. It’s just a wee bothy with a load of crap in it.”

“There is something to see.” I pulled my car keys out of my pocket. “You’re just not looking at it right.”

Danso sighed. He massaged his forehead, like I was making him tired. “We’re not looking at it through his eyes?”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re going to explain to the missus why I’m late home
again
?”

“You don’t have to take me. Tell me where it is. I don’t need you to hold my hand.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, all weary. “Yes, you do.”

“We drove in convoy: me clinging to the tail-lights of his black Bimmer. We headed north along the B840 and at eight o’clock we hit the edge of Inverliever Forest—those fuck-off, dark-as-hell mountains that swept out of the night skies and disappeared vertically below the still, dark waters of Loch Avich. We were a long way north. I wondered what it meant that Dove had changed direction. He’d gone north and not south towards London. When we stopped, in a small lane that wound up along the edge of a burn into the cleft between two mountains, it was like we’d gone into another universe.

“See the chalet?”

We’d walked half-way up the path when Danso stopped and turned to look down to the road and the loch. He pointed at a small shingle-roofed house on the shore, outlined in silver by the water behind it. It was planted with a border of leylandii and as I looked a security light came on briefly—a cat or a hedgehog maybe, lighting the trees from inside.

“The family’s gone now, off to their home in London. Left us with a key, but we’ve checked. It’s clean.” He turned to the west, pointing a long finger, pale in the half-light. I looked across the sky to where the stars and a few clouds were reflected in the loch. “The Vauxhall was over there, at the far end, just parked in a layby at teatime on Weunesday. You can’t see the layby from here. Then we’ve got a taxi-driver says he stopped for a whizz down here, at the bottom of this path where we’ve just left the cars, and he looks up and sees Malachi Dove standing in the door of the bothy, staring down at him. Said it was like being watched by an eagle.” Danso turned and began to walk up the path. “That’s when the night shift DS gets on the phone and gets me out of the first decent sleep I’ve had in a week.”

I followed him, keeping my eyes on his good shoes that his missus must’ve picked for a quiet day in the office but which kept slithering on the hummocky grass. Sheep lumbered away from us in the darkness, heavy, cloudy shadows, hoofing into the higher slopes. The wind scattered leaves and parted the grass like hair, but under my coat I was sweating. I tried feeling inside myself, trying to put a finger on my fear, but I couldn’t. Dove wasn’t here. He wasn’t here. In front of me Danso walked with his shoulders wide, back stiffened, his face and chest open. He was scared too, I saw. But he wasn’t going to tell me that.

We crossed a cattle grid and there was the bothy, tucked between two sheer rock faces. Ten feet away we paused and looked at it in silence. The roof was moss-covered, the window-frames rotted away into two dull sockets. A thin line of police tape flapped in the wind.

“It was locked when we got here,” Danso said. The wind took his voice and blew it into the empty building, battering it against the cold walls. “The SG sergeant kicked the door down like it was a matchstick. Here.” He handed me a torch. “Have a look.”