While Struthers, Danso and Angeline pulled notebooks from the shelves, opening up the PHM’s records, finding file after file of furious hermeneutical letters to the C of E synod, reams of Bible verses, written and rewritten in Dove’s looping hand, I slipped outside, muttering something about needing a smoke. No one stopped me. I just walked outside, free as a bird, into the cold, bright day.
I went quickly, retracing our steps, getting photos of the outside of the cottage, the empty Scotch bottles piled in a mountain behind one of the sheds, the generator and the piles of rubbish. I went to the army cordon and got some long-lens shots of the explosives team working in the distance, then turned north, giving the cottage a wide berth and moving through the silent woods until I came to the mine. Today it was quiet, no wind reached the clearing, and an empty silence hung over the rusting old machinery.
I turned to face the south. In the distance, a long way past the treetops of Cuagach, I could just see the headland of Crinian, the sky above it stained with dark clouds. I pulled out the camera, switched it on and focused on that distant coast. None of them, not Danso, not Struthers, had the instinct I had for Dove. He wasn’t going to commit suicide. Not until he’d finished with me. It was like I could feel him in my brain, creeping around making his plans.
Ardnoe Point? Crinian? What are you planning, Malachi? Why Crinian?
I clicked off some photos of the coast, then fitted a new lens and ambled around doing some shots of the mine: rusty wheelbases of long-forgotten vehicles, ageing barbed wire strung over adits. Every now and then I’d stop and look thoughtfully out at the coast. A swarm of flies hovered round the hole where the pig was wedged. When I flicked them away I saw maggots like moving rice grains in the pig’s eyes and something brown and frothy coming from its snout. I took ten shots.
Why Crinian?
He hadn’t drifted there because he couldn’t start the boat engine, whatever Struthers thought. He had meant to go there. I cranked open the aperture for the light and moved round the pig, firing off shot after shot, my thoughts rolling out like ticks on a metronome: What business have you got down there, Malachi? Why south? I was north. Does that mean you’re not going to come after me direct? And if you’re not going to do that, then what are you going to do? How else can you get to me? Or do you think I’ve gone back to London?
A twig snapped behind me. I spun round, raising the camera, ready to swing out. It was Angeline, her face red, her breathing rapid, staring past me at the pig in the shaft. She’d got right up behind me without me hearing. She made a grab for my sleeve.
‘Hey.’ She caught me off-balance and I’d hopped along a few feet before I got my footing. ‘Let go. Come on – let go.’ I scrabbled at her fingers, trying to unpeel them. She resisted, then let out a gasp and snapped her arm away like it was burnt.
‘Christ.’ I closed my hand over the camera, steadying it against my chest. My heart was racing. ‘Don’t do that again.’
She stood for a moment, half turned away, trembling, her hands crabbed up in front of her chest.
‘What’s up?’
‘The pig.’
I wiped my forehead and looked over at the dead animal. ‘What about it?’
A long shiver went up her body, something visible that travelled from her stomach to her shoulders, then kind of shook itself off into the air. She closed her eyes and put her hands over her mouth.
‘It’s dead,’ I said. ‘It won’t hurt you.’
‘It looks like it’s watching me.’ Her voice was quick and whispered, like she thought the pig might hear her. ‘I know you’ll think that sounds stupid but I mean it. It’s watching me.’
‘Then walk away.’
‘It’ll watch me.’
I sighed, and clicked the lens cap in place. ‘What do you want me to do?’
She shook her head, her hand over her mouth, her throat muscles working. ‘I don’t know. Just stop it watching me.’
Pigs. Turns out to be pigs that had marked Angeline’s life for the last six years. By the end of the day I’d understand why she thought they were watching her, why she wanted me to cover this one. I wasn’t going to bury the fucking thing, not in the state it was in, so I hauled a rusting fertilizer drum out of the pile and wedged it across the hole to cover its face, kicking and punching the drum to seal the hole. It stank, the pig, worse than I remembered from two days ago, and while I was doing it I had to keep forcing saliva into my mouth – rubbing my tongue against the hard palate.
Angeline watched from the trees about a hundred yards away. She lowered herself awkwardly to a sitting position, using a branch to hold her weight, and was sitting there, half in the shadows, staring. When I’d finished I went and sat next to her. Her knees were pulled up, her dusty trainers tucked in tightly. The folds of the coat spread out behind her, concealing the deformity. She was still shaking.
‘So,’ I said, ‘not a pig person, then?’
She closed her eyes and pressed her fingers into them, like she was trying to get rid of a picture in her head. There were beads of sweat on her forehead.
‘Going to tell me about it?’
She shook her head, drawing in a long breath. I brushed the rust off my hands, rested my elbows on my knees, and looked up at the sky, watching the clouds. My head was racing, thinking, how the fuck was I going to get her to talk? I needed her – she was all I had. The instinct that has in the past, I admit, allowed me to put my arm round the mother of a hit-and-run victim and say, ‘I feel your pain. If you give me that photo of your lovely little boy, the one on the mantelpiece, the reader will feel it too,’ – my journalistic instinct – was failing me.
‘Look,’ I started, but when I turned to her she was looking at me. Her whole head was twisted on her long neck. Her eyes were bloodshot, the whites round the black irises spidered with red.
‘He tried to pull me apart,’ she said, ‘the moment I was born.’
I stared at her, my head buzzing, kind of knocked off-centre by this. ‘What? What did you say?’
‘He thought he could pull it off me. My—’ She shivered and looked out at the clouds, at the way they were gathering in a long train above the headland. ‘My thing – my tail. He thought I would come apart if he pulled hard enough.’