Mo Hayder: Pig Island

'I won't undermine you, Susan. Just tell yourself that if the public knows about Malachi's madness it can only strengthen our case.'

'But that's just it,' she said, appealing to me. 'He's not mad. He's evil. He's dabbling in things that no Christian should be in involved in and everyone, even Blake, knows it.'

'Dabbling?' I said. 'What's he dabbling in?'

She fixed me with her pale green eyes. 'Where there is light, Mr Oakes, there is darkness in equal measure. Let me put it simply: this is no madness. Malachi has learned how to summon the biforme.'

'The biforme?'

'Half man, half beast.' She lowered her voice and leaned a bit closer to me, searching my face accusingly. 'Why? Don't you think it's possible? Where do you think those mine shafts in the south lead to?'

I opened my mouth to answer. Then I closed it. Basic hack rule: never express doubt or ridicule. When someone says they've seen Elvis's face in the roof insulation, don't laugh. 'Mrs Garrick,' I said carefully, uncapping my pen and writing 'biforme' on the pad. I could feel Sovereign in the other room eyeing me, waiting to hear what I'd say. 'Blake suggests that the — the biforme on the video is Malachi himself. Disguised, maybe. He thinks that-'

'I know what Blake thinks,' she said crossly, 'but he hasn't seen that monster. And I have.'

'You've seen it?'

'Ah,' she said, pleased with herself. 'You see? I told you to take me seriously.' Smiling now, she got up and went to a drawer in the painted dresser that stood against the wall, returning to the table with a sheaf of papers. 'Almost three years ago, long before that wretched video came out.' She placed the papers in front of me. 'It was late. Everyone was already in bed and it was my turn to get the laundry from the kitchen. I was walking down that path over there…' She leaned forward and pointed out of the window in the direction of the refectory. The mist outside was rolling in thin spirals. '… when I had a feeling…' She hesitated. 'I had this dreadful feeling that I was…' She put her hand to the back of her neck, like she was reliving the moment. Grey shadows of raindrops on the window dribbled down her face like tears.

'Yes?' I murmured. 'You had a feeling that you were…?'

She coughed and shook her head. 'That I was being watched. All the hairs went up here — you know — on the back of my neck and I looked up and I saw it. Sitting in a tree, like a lion or something.'

'OK,' I said levelly. I put down my pen and picked up the top sheet, unfolded it and flattened it on the table. 'And this is…' I was looking at a charcoal drawing, slightly smudged and creased in places, but kind of skilfully drawn. Most of the paper was filled with sketched leaves, but a few branches showed through, and on one of these a carefully sketched human foot gripped the branch with the prehensile strength of a monkey. Squashed in next to it was a buttock and… Oh, Christ, I wanted to smile… a tail. Dangling down at least two feet below the branch.

'Can you see how it was sitting?' She lowered herself to a squat next to my chair, holding on to the table for balance. In the other room Sovereign blew air out of her nose, disgusted by her ma. 'See? Like this.' Susan lifted her blouse so that I could see her haunches in the brown leggings pressed down against the hiking boots and tweedy socks she wore. 'I could see all of this part.' She drew a vague circle round her foot and buttocks. 'From here to here. I couldn't see here — where the tail joined to the body — because it was hidden in the trees, but I could see the tail itself.'

'How long was it in the tree?' I picked up the next sheet. The same image, a slightly different scale.

'Not long after I screamed. It scuttled away.'

'We searched the whole of this side of the island,' said Benjamin. 'Couldn't find it. And, believe me, we looked.'

I riffled through the sheets, seeing the same image over and over again. 'The feet are human.'

'Yes — and all of it's got skin like a human, even the tail. Quite brown — you know, a sort of leathery brown. I saw it close enough to know.'

'It's latex. A clever costume,' said Blake. 'Malachi must have his reasons.'

'Well,' Susan said, straightening and putting her hands on the table, leaning forward to look Blake in the eye, 'answer me this, Blake. If it was a costume how did he make the tail move?'

'It moved?' I asked. 'What do you mean, it moved?'

'It twitched.' She used her hand to imitate a muscular flick. I thought immediately of a snake or a shark. 'You know, like a cat does.'

I dragged my eyes away from her hand and looked at Blake, waiting for an explanation. 'Look,' he said, impatiently, 'you can write it any way you like — it doesn't really matter what's going on over there. Just make sure that the message is clear. Malachi is behaving intolerably. He's insane. With enough contributions we can turn this island over to the people who care about it.'

'I want to know what else Susan's seen. You know about the pigs' heads on the fence?'

'Everyone's seen those,' said Benjamin. 'But there's more.' He turned in the chair to look to where Sovereign had been sitting in silence. 'Tell Mr Oakes what happened to you.'

But Sovereign wasn't paying attention to her father. She was smiling at me in that disconcerting, knowing way, like she was laughing at me, her feet in their pink plastic sandals tapping away distractedly. Benjamin turned and followed her gaze, as if it was a solid entity stretching across the room, and when his eyes landed on me his expression changed. 'Sovereign!' he said sharply, making her jump. 'Did you hear me?'

'What?' she said, blinking like she'd been asleep. 'What?'

'Tell Mr Oakes what you caught in the trap. The trap.'

Her face cleared. She smiled at me. 'After Mum saw — well, you know, after she saw all that weird stuff, I was like, my God, this is so cool, so I made this — this, like, trap thing.' She nodded out of the window. 'Out there in his forest. Because I'd, like, never seen Malachi, right? Only in photos, y'know? So I'm, like, I've really got to get to the bottom of this, see what this dude's up to, and so I went over there and dug a hole and I had it all covered up like some jungle thing — kind of cool, actually — and I left it for a few days. Then I went back.'

'Shall we show him what you found, Sovereign?' said Susan, getting to her feet and pulling a fleece from a peg on the door. She had changed since I first arrived in her kitchen: she had a victorious air to her, like she knew she was close to winning the argument. 'Shall we go to the freezers and show him?'

We took umbrellas. They didn't do much good — the rain was like a mist, atomized like we were standing near a jungle waterfall. It got into everything — our ears, our eyes. In the short walk to the refectory we were all covered with a fine dew.

'I'm so into photography,' Sovereign told me, as we walked. 'I'm the girl for you if you ever need someone to carry your bags, hand you lenses and shit. When I did the trap I had this totally wicked idea. I made this, like, tripwire thingy? Hooked it up to a camera — stuck the camera in the tree above the trap, so that if anything went into it I'd get a photo.'

'But Malachi ripped it down,' said Blake, as we stepped inside the refectory. 'He found it, didn't he?'

'Something ripped it down,' Benjamin said. 'We don't know it was Malachi. We haven't established who or what did it.'

'You should have seen that camera, Joe,' Sovereign said, shaking out her umbrella. 'I bet you've never seen a system like it. You'd be like, wow, this is so flare.' She led us through the refectory, where the trestle tables all stood, disinfected and shining, past the kitchen where the two men who always served dinner were moving around, rattling pans and plates, and into a side room. She switched on the light. Inside, three large chest freezers hummed quietly, and she rested her hand on one, looking at me, with a slight smile. 'This was what was in the trap. It totally does my head that there's a photo of it falling in on that camera he snatched.'