Amanda’s laptop whirred as it frantically churned through data. She flexed her fingers above the keyboard, her gaze focused on the screen with laser precision.
‘Hey… are you awake?’ She didn’t turn towards Shane as he shifted beneath the covers. She remained hunched over her computer, the glow from its screen illuminating her face in the darkness. ‘Amanda?’ Shane was sitting up and creeping across the bed towards her. ‘Is everything all right, can’t you sleep?’
The names.
She squeezed her eyes shut, blocking out her laptop for a moment.
Will.
All of McAllister’s dark deeds danced around in her mind on a maddening carousel ride that never ended. Even in her quietest moments the thoughts found her.
Evangeline.
So much death. So much chaos. Losing his beloved daughters had hardened McAllister against the pain he inflicted on others. The trauma had hollowed him out so that now he was just a walking shell incapable of feeling empathy.
‘It’s late, you should rest.’ Shane nuzzled against her neck, his lips grazing her skin. It was almost enough to distract Amanda from her current task. ‘Come on, go back to sleep.’ He drew back from her, tensing when he glanced at the laptop’s screen. ‘Shit, Amanda, this is what you’re doing at three in the morning?’
Amanda said nothing. She zoomed in on the map she was studying, wishing the satellite camera could somehow penetrate the latticework of trees which obscured her view.
‘That’s his house, isn’t it?’ Shane pushed himself off the bed and turned on the light. He’d seen the gothic stone structure in the centre of the map, like the heart of a flower, with the dense woodlands which grew out of it like long, languishing petals. The picture had been taken in the autumn, when all the leaves had glowed yellow and gold. ‘Amanda, you need rest. It’s the middle of the night, can’t this wait?’
‘There has to be a route through these woods,’ Amanda traced a finger along the screen, letting it delicately glide across the image. ‘I can’t make it out from the satellite image, but it has to be there. I just need to find it.’
‘Maybe it’s really not there,’ Shane stretched and yawned, assuming the role of Devil’s Advocate with ease. ‘Maybe the jogging thing was just another lie, all part of the bigger yarn he was spinning.’
‘It’s not a lie.’ Amanda could still see the pictures on the wall of the smiling little girls. Their cherub faces were so sweet, not tainted by time or cynicism. Youthful optimism had oozed from every pore, just like it did with Ewan. McAllister had insisted the pictures had been placed there for her benefit but Amanda wasn’t convinced. He might protest otherwise, but she saw him for what he was; a bitter, haunted man.
‘This whole jogging thing is too tenuous, I don’t like it.’
‘All I need is to find his route.’ Amanda pulled her laptop closer, scrutinising the image in as much detail as she could. If these were the woodlands behind her home, where would she go? She’d want a route that was a circuit, a never-ending loop. It didn’t need to be challenging, full of steep hills and sharp turns, the whole point of her morning jog was distance.
The trees which bordered McAllister’s home were tightly packed, forming a maze of twisted branches. But Amanda knew there had to be a clearly defined route somewhere.
‘Can we go there, tomorrow?’ She was still studying the picture.
‘What? There?’ Shane pointed at her laptop accusingly, as if the device had somehow wronged him.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We’re not ready, Amanda. You’re still too weak to face him.’
‘I’m not going to face him.’ She opened up a new tab in her current window.
‘Then why do you want to go there? To sightsee?’ Shane was being sarcastic. He used to always hide behind sarcasm when he got really mad.
Amanda pursed her lips and tapped out commands on her keyboard. ‘Sort of.’
‘Sort of?’
‘I need to find the route,’ she stated factually. ‘First, I need to go and pick up some digital cameras. Then we need to go the woods.’
‘Cameras?’ Shane was shaking his head. ‘For-for what? You’re not making any sense.’
Amanda finally closed her laptop. It whirred for a moment and then the little fruit symbol on its cover dulled and it was still. ‘I need to figure out his route,’ she rested her palms against her precious device, ‘to do that I need to see what’s going on inside the woods. I need you to help me hide some cameras that I can remotely access. Ideally I’d have them with motion sensors to avoid draining the batteries unnecessarily.’
‘You want to go and booby trap the woods?’
‘No,’ Amanda straightened. ‘I want to go and spy in them.’
*
It was easy enough to get the digital cameras Amanda wanted since they were in a city. Shane went in on her behalf as she was still wary about being spotted around Glasgow. Even though McAllister wasn’t looking for her, fate could still decide to cruelly intervene and have their paths cross before Amanda was ready to face him.
‘The guy figured I was into studying wildlife,’ Shane dropped the cameras into Amanda’s lap before climbing into the driver’s seat. He kept going on about deer. And grouse.’
‘We’re hoping to study a more formidable creature,’ Amanda muttered as she started removing the packaging from each camera and syncing them up to her laptop.
A faint mist followed them out of the city and lingered in the rear-view mirror for several miles.
‘Are those things waterproof?’ Shane wondered, his hands resting on the steering wheel.
‘To a point,’ Amanda reached for a discarded box. She scanned the text on it and nodded. ‘As long as they’re not submerged.’
The rain became pellets which bounced off the car’s windscreen. ‘Up here it rains so much they might as well be submerged.’
Amanda smiled flatly at Shane. The term submerged was troubling her. She only had to think of it to feel the icy pressure of water all around her, trying to squeeze out the last breath from her lungs. What if she really wasn’t ready for all of this? What if the trauma of what had happened with McAllister was too fresh? Too real?
The car cut a path through the rain which had become a curtain upon the road. The windscreen wipers battled furiously against it. ‘Some summer,’ Shane noted dryly.
All of the cameras were now online. Amanda tested each of them multiple times to be sure. With the press of a button she could remotely access their feed, see what they saw.
‘Every morning at sunrise I go jogging through the woodlands that border my home. I run until my lungs burn and my legs go numb and I find that it helps.’
Amanda replayed the moment with McAllister in her mind. Every morning, he’d said. Not just some mornings. Not just when he could be bothered. It was a daily routine, habitual. At sunrise. So just as dawn was creeping over the horizon threading sunlight through the canopy of leaves.
Until my lungs burn and my legs go numb.
Distance. It was always about distance. He was trying to outrun his demons.
‘What if someone sees us?’ Shane tightened his hands against the wheel. ‘When we’re traipsing through the woods, one of McAllister’s guys could easily spot us. He might even have cameras of his own dotted throughout the place.’
‘It’s a chance I’m willing to take.’
‘I don’t think you’ve thought this through.’
‘No, I’ve thought it through,’ Amanda slammed her laptop closed, not caring as it whirred feebly in protest. ‘I’ve thought about it over and over. In moments that should just be mine; when it’s dark and I’m sleeping I think about it. It invades my every thought, even my unconscious ones. I have to do this, Shane. The woods offer me my one chance at getting McAllister alone.’
‘We could still just go back.’ The rain was easing, the windscreen wipers no longer having to thrash around with such vigour.
‘We can’t,’ Amanda stated tightly. ‘You know we can’t.’
‘Do you ever regret it?’ Shane turned down a side road at the satnav’s behest.
‘Regret doing all this?’
‘Regret meeting him. Marrying him. Cracking open the Pandora’s box that contained all his secrets?’ The car bounced along a dirt road.
‘Do I regret Will?’ The question alone felt like a betrayal. Amanda drew back against her seat, her arms hanging heavily by her sides like she were a broken butterfly.
‘Well, do you?’
They were close to the woods. A dense treeline bordered them on either side of the road.
Amanda thought about Will. About how he could flash her a smile that was both sexy and shy in equal measure. How he would curl up with her on the sofa with one arm always protectively draped over her shoulders, pulling her close. It would be so easy to tarnish all her memories, to let the truth of who Will really was bleed into them, distort the happiness that they held. But Amanda had boxed away every moment of her marriage, preserved them in her mind.
‘No,’ she choked out the truth she’d been holding on to too tightly. ‘Not even for a second.’
‘What about me? Do you have any regrets about me?’ Shane stopped the car, they’d reached their destination but his hands remained on the wheel, his knuckles white.
‘Don’t turn this into something which is you against him,’ Amanda threatened. ‘I can’t go back and change things, Shane. Neither of us can. We can only move forwards. And unless we accept that we’ll just be stuck in the past forever.’ She climbed out of the car and slammed the door. Then she remembered herself.
Amanda fearfully bent her knees and crouched beside the car, searching the gentle stirring in the woods for something more sinister like a footstep. Or a gunshot. But all she heard was the soft melancholy chorus of distant birds and the rustle of wet leaves.
‘Okay, well, this is it,’ Shane climbed out of the car and joined her, keeping his voice low as he peered into the woodlands close by. ‘This is where I parked up and waited. Our rendezvous point. The house is a half-mile straight through there.’ He pointed at the tightly packed tree trunks. They gathered together like nature’s army, blocking the way up to McAllister’s fortress.
‘Okay then, let’s go.’ Amanda waited for her feet to obey her but they remained in the mud beside the car, sinking.
‘Is this safe?’ Shane placed a hand on her back and angled his body to shield her from the treeline. ‘What if we’ve just walked into some kind of trap?’
‘I’ve pulled myself out of a trap before.’ Amanda drew in a deep breath, tasting the damp earth, and straightened. Her heart started to keep a nervous beat. ‘We just need to keep quiet, that’s all.’ She pulled up the hood on her khaki coat, doing her best to blend into the foliage around her.
Both she and Shane wore green. Green coats, green combat trousers. Short of smearing mud across her cheeks Amanda hoped she’d done enough to be able to slip through the woods unseen. She reached the treeline and pressed on. The rain lingered in a heavy mist but Amanda was grateful for its presence. It meant that the ground was soft, that her steps fell on damp leaves and wet mud, muffling the sound.
The woods were beautiful, even in the strained light of a wet afternoon. Tall trees stretched up towards the grey sky, their twisted branches threading together like withered arms. Green leaves fluttered and fanned out overhead so that each tree wore a glorious mane. The leaves flooded the woodlands with colour, pushing back the bleakness of the slate sky.
Amanda crept forward, keeping her body low. Her pockets were stuffed full of the little digital cameras, each waiting to be hidden away within the woods. The silence was unnerving. The deeper Amanda ventured, the more it felt like she was entering a vacuum of sound. There was no distant hum of traffic, no rumble from a plane passing by overhead. She felt like she was standing in a different world, in her own personal piece of Middle Earth.
‘Hey.’ Even though Shane whispered, the sound startled Amanda like it were a yell. She bristled and searched the nearby trees for him. He was crouched beside a grand oak, gesturing at something in front of him. Amanda hurried over. ‘This looks like a track, doesn’t it?’
It certainly did. Amanda ran her eyes along the rugged mud track which swept through the trees in a perfect curve before turning and disappearing from view.
‘Yes, this must be it,’ she fumbled in her pocket for her first camera. She wedged it in the hollow of a nearby tree which overlooked the track. Its black eye blended seamlessly into the shadows within the darkened trunk. ‘I need to plant some more.’ She scurried along the track. Though she didn’t walk on it directly, she lingered at its edges. She knew better than to leave obvious footprints for McAllister to find – a little trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow.
‘What happens after?’ Shane was watching her balance a camera on a fallen tree and then cover it in a carpet of leaves.
‘After?’
‘After you’ve… you know… ended McAllister?’
‘We go home.’
‘I’m thinking closer to the event.’ He nudged the fallen tree with the tip of his boot. ‘What happens to the cameras? They’re covered in your fingerprints, linked to your computer. If you leave them here you might as well plant a sign saying, “It was me. I was here.”’
Amanda instantly ceased touching the camera, holding up her hands as if the object had just bitten her. ‘Crap.’
‘So what was your plan?’ Shane pressed.
‘Dammit.’ Amanda felt the weight of the other six cameras in her pocket. She’d only planted two so far.
‘Forgive me for thinking like a cop but we need to be pragmatic about this.’
‘Yes,’ Amanda was nodding, feeling numb. ‘Yes we do.’
Her hands had been all over the tree. All over the cameras. And her footprints, they traced an uneven route all the way back to Shane’s car.
‘Shit.’ Her knees dipped into the mud and she cradled her head with her hands. ‘I wasn’t thinking. I was just so focused on finding him and—’
‘Two cameras, that’s it?’ Shane began to rub his hand in circles across her back.
‘So far.’
‘Two. That will have to do.’
Yes, but—’
‘I can find two. When we come back, two is a reasonable number for me to retrieve. No more.’
‘But our fingerprints? And footprints?’ Amanda lowered her hands and looked at them as if she no longer recognised them as her own. As if they’d betrayed her.
‘The rain will take care of that,’ Shane tilted his chin towards the sky. The darkening clouds hinted that the mist would soon intensify. ‘This time we’ve been lucky.’ He helped Amanda onto her feet and dusted off her knees. ‘Next time we need to be smarter, more prepared. You need to wear gloves. Your hair has to be under a hat. Wear shoes several sizes larger than what you usually wear.’
‘Right,’ Amanda was nodding as she tried to create a mental checklist for herself.
‘I slipped up today.’ Shane hung his head as his cheeks reddened.
‘What, no, this was me.’ Amanda reached for him and traced his jawline with her fingertips. ‘I was too eager to trace the damn jogging route. I wasn’t thinking straight, I’m sleep-deprived and—’
‘You’re clouding my judgement.’ Shane gently lowered her hands away from his face. ‘This… this thing between us. Whatever it is, it’s messing with my head. I’m getting jealous and being impulsively reckless and if I keep this up I’m going to get us both killed.’
‘This thing between us,’ Amanda laced her hands around his waist, drawing him to her, ‘is what’s keeping me glued together. Without you I’d have fallen apart long ago.’
‘Amanda—’
‘Without you I’d just become a ghost. I’d allow myself to disappear. You give me something to fight for. A future to hope for.’
‘What about Ewan? Isn’t he future enough?’
‘You’re what makes the future bright.’ Amanda grazed the cold tip of her nose against Shane’s. His green eyes glistened as they held her in place. ‘I want Ewan to be safe. I want him to have a home, to be able to grow up into a man. ‘But you,’ Amanda leaned in close so that their hearts were beating just inches apart, ‘you’re the light outside on the porch that always leads me back home. I need you, Shane.
‘If he’d never left?’ Shane’s hands were on the small of her back, holding her against him. ‘If he’d always been the man he’d said he was?’
‘I refuse to live in the past.’ Amanda wished there was a map she could follow back to simpler times, back to when they had sand beneath their feet rather than mud. But she couldn’t go back. There was only the present and what lay beyond it. ‘I can give you my future, isn’t that enough?’
‘Yes,’ Shane kissed her, his hands feeling their way up her back and getting tangled up in her hair. ‘Yes,’ he declared breathlessly when they parted, ‘that’s enough.’
As they retraced their steps back to the car, Amanda wondered just how much of a future she had to offer Shane. Were there decades stretching out before them or mere days? Maybe even just a few hours? Everything would be decided the next time Amanda ventured back into the woods.