Bardwell had always felt totally at home in the dark. Sometimes a velvet warmth, sometimes cruel, it embraced and concealed. Reminded him of his boyhood, camping trips and smoky fires, the feeling that he could touch and hear and smell his surroundings in a way that was somehow stunted by daylight.
In the wastes of Iraq, temperatures had plummeted with the sunset, so those who’d dropped from heat exhaustion during the day stumbled and fell away to hypothermia at night. Bardwell treated the landscape with the respect it deserved, almost reverence—an awareness of the dangers alongside the stark beauty. He survived because he harmonised rather than tried to master.
Now, in the moderate cool of an English June night, he moved across the unfamiliar terrain of Birkett Common like a ghost, picking his way by the light of a gibbous moon. He’d started out on the old Tommy Road, named after the First World War squaddies who constructed it, then broken away onto the rough ground, over the railway line, and dropped down towards the valley floor with Wild Boar Fell looming behind him.
In the quiet, Edith tumbled into his mind, the girl’s near hysteria when she’d come to him earlier. She was becoming a worry all right.
Have to do something about that.
Bardwell’s vision turned inside out, shooting backwards like speeded-up film, to a girl in Bosnia who’d shown him those same lustful eyes, brimful of cunning and promise while she’d fingered the muscles under his uniform and haggled about the price. She’d looked the same age, too, but had probably been younger. At the time he hadn’t cared.
Besides, she was the wage-earner of the family by dint of attrition. Her father was dead in an artillery strike, she told him, matter-of-fact. Her mother had gone one day to the market and simply never returned. One older brother claimed by ethnic cleansing. Another to shrapnel from a landmine. She had just a younger brother and a baby sister, barely walking, in a half-shattered apartment building on the eastern side of the town. She locked them in every day while she went out to provide for them.
As he’d laid down with her, Bardwell had thought he’d heard weeping somewhere at the back of his soul. He’d closed his mind to it, and had laid down with her anyway.
Two days later, she was reportedly caught in the open by a Serbian sniper. It was another week before he’d heard. Ironic that it should be one of his own select band of brothers who’d taken her. He tried, from her hazy descriptions, to locate the apartment block where she’d lived and to trace the two lost little children trapped inside. His failure, not knowing if their existence was real or simply imagined—maybe some justification for the acts she felt compelled to perform with strangers—shaped his waking dreams, even now.
Bardwell crossed the drowsy River Eden, plotted a course towards the main road to give each of the sporadic dwellings the widest berth. Not that most people chained their dogs out anymore, but the habit was ingrained.
His objective was a derelict barn, standing east of the road with a curve of trees less than a hundred yards behind it and no houses close by. He’d seen it by chance, driving down the valley. It had only one obvious approach, the incline steep enough to ensure all but the fittest would be moving nice and slow by the time they reached it.
Perfect.
Now, Bardwell followed the well-worn sheep tracks to mask his passing. He circled the building once, hands on the old stones as if to gentle them before he went inside. The rafters stuck out naked from the crumbling walls like ribs picked clean by time and weather.
It was empty save for the footprints of animals who’d sought shelter, and docks almost up to his chest. In the north end was a small doorway, an aperture that provided a portal from which to look up the valley, towards Nateby and Kirkby Stephen. A little fortress.
It wasn’t going to be easy, he recognised, to lure his canny prey into this designated killing ground. Harder still now they were forewarned. But Bardwell had a plan. Might work, too—if the girl could be relied upon just a little longer. And what more proof did his faceless former masters need that he was still up there, at the top of his game?
He stood in the doorway for a long time, listening to the owls in the wood behind him, the faint drift of the wind skittering through the branches. Above him, a shooting star trailed across the heavens, arced and died.
“Always a price to be paid,” he told the unclouded moon. “For all of us.”