Mo Hayder - Pig Island

I sat next to her at the table, hunched forward, my chin cupped in my hands. I made it seem as if I was concentrating on the computer, but I wasn't. My eyes were rotated sideways to watch her. I got very close to her until I could see every detail of her face — the colourless skin, the big forehead illuminated by the computer, and the small nose, like a young boy's.

'This was taken west of the island.' Oakesy leaned between us and clicked on the RealPlayer icon. The video started. 'Two years ago. Before the fence went up. Here.' He pointed to the end of the tree-line. 'Just here — watch this bit.'

I didn't turn to the screen — I'd seen the video enough times before. This time I watched its mirror image reflected in the glassy curve of Angeline's left eye: the bobbing motion of the boat, the men in their football shirts holding up beers to the camera, and then the long grey expanse of Pig Island's flank rising above the waves, below it the woods coming down to meet the beach. I knew exactly the place on the screen where the blurry figure would appear, with its lurching walk, coming out of the trees for one or two steps on to the sand. I knew the pause, the quick turn back, the disappearance into the trees, the shouts of the men on the boat.

When it was over Oakesy leaned over and stopped the video. I sat motionless, staring at her eye, fascinated by the way it was flickering from side to side as if it were trying to escape. Then a clear disc of liquid appeared, bulging rapidly, trembled for a moment on top of the iris, then broke and fell down her face. She put her palms together, the tips of her fingers on her nose, and started trembling, as if the temperature in the room had plummeted.

'You all right there?' Oakesy said. 'You want to-?'

'I was born like it,' she said. She pushed the chair back with a screech and put her fists to her eyes, pushing at them as if she'd like to punish them for leaking. 'It's not my fault. I was born like it. You can't blame me for it. You can't.'

Oakesy and I exchanged a look. He leaned forward a little and I think he was going to touch her, but something must have stopped him because his hand got half-way to her shoulder then stopped and went uncertainly back down to the table. 'Listen,' he said, 'nobody thinks it's your fault.'

'They'll think I'm trouble. Like they did on Cuagach. They thought I was a -' She broke off, took deep breaths. Her face was bright red now and there were two lines of snot coming out of her nose. 'They said I was an abomination. That's what they said. They said I-'

'You didn't really believe all that,' I said. 'You're disabled, that's all.'

'Lex,' Oakesy said.

'Well, Oakesy, we've all seen it now, the three of us. There's no point in being coy. And anyway… I'm sure there's something that can be done for you, Angeline.'

When I said that she went really still. She stopped crying and all the colour drained out of her skin. She lowered her hands and stared at me with an odd, cracked look, her irises slightly off-centre as if her eyes had broken.

'It's true. I see people every day with spinal injuries and deformities and I'm sure there's a very simple operation you can have.'

'To make me normal?'

'I can help you. My friend's a neurosurgeon — the best in the country. Would you like that? Would you want him to look at you?'

'I–I…' She pressed her palms to her cheeks, taking a few deep breaths, looking from me to Oakesy and back again. She was trembling so hard her teeth were almost chattering. 'I don't know. I don't know.'

Oakesy stood up and switched on the light. He rustled through the carrier-bags we hadn't unpacked yet and pulled out the bottle of Jack Daniel's he took everywhere with him. He went through the cupboards until he found a child's plastic cup with Spiderman on it, filled it half full with JD and pushed it in front of her.

'Oh,' I said. 'Alcohol — I don't think that's a very good-'

She picked up the drink and without even sniffing it, or questioning it, swallowed it in one. I closed my mouth and watched her, amazed. She pushed the beaker back across the table to him. He filled it again and she drank another two beakerfuls down in one. Well, I thought, someone's done that before. Oakesy kept filling it up, watching her face as she drank. A slow flush spread long fingers up her neck towards her chin and by the fourth beaker she'd stopped trembling. Instead of knocking this one back, like the town drunk, she took one or two sips and returned it to the table. Then she straightened a little and wiped her nose, gathering her courage, her eyes going nervously from me to Oakesy and back again.

'You all right?'

'Yes.' She paused. 'Have lots of people seen it? The video.'

'Lots,' Oakesy said, not meeting her eyes, the way he does when he's embarrassed. 'Lots of people know about it.'

'The police? The one that said «devil». In the police station he said devil.'

'Yes. The police. They know too, I suppose.'

She took a long breath through her nose, letting this sink in. She looked up at the laptop screen and seemed to be putting it all together in her head. 'And — and that's why you were on Cuagach in the first place? To write about me?'

He looked awful now. Really guilty. 'Uh, yeah,' he admitted. 'That's why I was there.'

'Dad didn't know that.' She shook her head and gave a short laugh, staring at her hands on the table. Her fingers were pale and bitten, with red tips. 'He thought you'd come back to haunt him.'

'To haunt him? What does that mean? Why would he think that?'

She closed her eyes and opened them, as if it were a trick question and she needed to think about her answer. She glanced over at his camera sitting on the kitchen worktop. Then she looked at the laptop, then back at him. 'Um — because you're Joe Finn?'

He stared at her, his mouth open a little.

'You are? Aren't you?'

'Yeah,' he said hurriedly. 'Yeah, I… How did you know?'

She looked surprised — as if to say, 'Didn't you know this already?' 'But I've always known about you,' she said. 'I've known about you all my life. I've always known one day I'd meet you.'

There comes a time in every person's life when an opportunity presents itself. The test of character is how one chooses to respond to the challenge…

Downstairs Oakesy was watching the news and Angeline was in bed, the door to her room closed tight. I was in the front bedroom, sitting on the damp, lumpy bed with Oakesy's laptop open on my knees, tapping at the keys. The curtains were open with the orange streetlight coming through and falling on the computer screen. The police car was still out there — I'd checked, and a man was sitting in the dark watching us. According to Danso, we didn't really need him: he was just there to make us feel secure.

Today I find myself in just such a position [I wrote]. Today I have been presented with a riddle, an opportunity. And the challenge is — do I attempt to solve the riddle myself, or do I pass it to someone I trust, someone whose professionalism and skill is better suited to deal with it than mine? Someone who will benefit enormously from involvement in this fascinating, high-profile case…

I'd titled the email 'Unusual Spinal Abnormality. High Media Interest' and sent it under an anonymously set-up Yahoo account, because I knew if I used my real name that that witch of a secretary would leap on it and rip it out of Christophe's inbox in a flash. I still blame her for what happened. I mean, who was it who tried to make something sinister out of my relationship with him? Turning it round, telling people I was making a nuisance of myself? That I'd 'bombarded Mr Radnor with correspondence on the clinic's intranet'. Which is a wild exaggeration, of course, because I'd sent little more than a few good-luck messages when he was off on one of his overseas trips, once for the tsunami and once to help a little spina bifida boy in the Ukraine. Oh, and a couple of copies of my CV. It was probably those CVs that did it. She knew I was a good contender for her job — she knew she'd need to pull up her socks with me around. And there was that poisonous little comment I overheard her whisper on the day I'd announced my resignation: 'Jumped before she was pushed.' It was probably her who dumped all the photos I'd framed. I found them — did I tell you? — in the clinic's waste along with all the shredded office documents and Pret a Manger sandwich bags.