‘Walk.’
There was no way they could take him on: Michael was too weak, his hands still tied behind his back, and Langlais was too much of a chicken shit. They’d both end up dead.
‘What are you doing, Fallaize?’ Michael rasped. ‘You must know your only hope now is to turn yourself in. Failing that, just run, man. Go on, just leave us. Let Martin get me to the doctor. We won’t raise the alarm, will we, Martin?’
Langlais shook his head.
‘Where’s Tanya, eh? What has she told you? That you’re all going to play happy families? She’s going to try to pin all this on you—you know she is.’
‘She won’t need to. There’ll be nothing to pin on anyone. Not once you and Langlais are gone.’
‘You think the police force are going to stop a murder investigation just because I disappear? You know better than that Fallaize. They’ll get to the bottom of what happened to Reg, with or without me.’
‘I had nothing to do with that. Neither did Tanya.’
‘Like hell she didn’t.’
‘I’ve no reason to lie to you. Tanya went to Reg’s house that morning. Presume that’s how the kid ended up there. He’s always following her around. Reg did a lot of work for the business, going years back. He was losing his marbles, she was worried he would talk. But he was dead when she got there.’
Michael shook his head. ‘She’s got you right where she wants you, doesn’t she? How do you know she was telling you the truth? And what do you mean Reg worked for her going back years? She been running this since she was a kid, has she?’
‘It’s a family business.’
Michael tried to process what that could mean. ‘Family? Like who?’
Langlais whimpered. ‘Please, stop. Let me go, Richard. I won’t say anything, I swear. You can trust me. Years I’ve kept quiet about all this—’
Fallaize’s fist came out of nowhere. Langlais cried out, fell to the ground, dropped his phone, clutched his nose.
A whisper. ‘That’s how much I trust you, Langlais. Now get the fuck up and walk.’ He stamped on the phone, crushing it under his foot, then took a flashlight out of his pocket and shone it on the road ahead.
Langlais went first, cradling his face in his hands. Michael followed, dragging his feet, slower and slower until he felt the prick of sharp steel in his back.
‘Hurry up.’
‘I’m going as fast I can.’ He coughed, struggled to catch his breath. ‘I was done in already by the time you got here.’ It was true. It took all the energy he could muster to stay upright, never mind move, but Fallaize dug the knife a little deeper into the small of Michael’s back, and from somewhere, he gathered the strength to put one foot in front of the other.
He tried to get a proper measure of where they were. Fallaize kept the light close to the ground. A rough pathway. It was flat and straight. He saw glimpses of grass on their right and felt, instinctively, that the land there was open. A field. Damn cloud cover. On a clear night, the light from the stars, a crescent moon would be enough to see by.
‘What’s that?’ Langlais sounded congested. Michael suspected a broken nose. Or perhaps he’d been crying.
‘I heard something up ahead.’
They stopped. Fallaize lifted the torch. Shone it left and right. There were trees. Woodland. Michael knew where they were. The path to Port du Moulin. The Window in the Rock.
‘Nobody there. Keep moving.’ Fallaize moved on.
Langlais stayed still. Michael slumped forward, onto his knees.
‘There’s nobody there, I said—come on!’
‘I can’t.’ Michael’s shoulders ached with the strain of being twisted behind him. The rope round his wrists burned. The wound in his side still bled. And his head. The throbbing in his head, like the waves pounding the shore, relentless, all-encompassing. He closed his eyes. Drifted.
Pulling. Dragging. Langlais had one of his arms, Fallaize the other. They manhandled him into the woods, where the trees closed in around them so the path became more uneven, gnarled and knotted with roots, dislodged slate and granite shifting underfoot. Was it really so quiet, Michael wondered, or could he no longer hear? It was so peaceful. Or it would be, if not for the pain. It filled the silence. Each stab of it like the cracking of a twig inside his head. One, then another and another, until it was all around him, a cacophony of cracking twigs, and he wanted to put his hands to his ears, but he couldn’t, so he closed his eyes, gave in to the darkness.