Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'What is it?'

I sat so close to the screen that the static popped against my nose. I clicked the video, frame by frame, until Dove came backwards into the walkway and turned to the chemist's window again. 'I want to know what he's staring at. We're not seeing something. We're not seeing this through his eyes. There's something here…'

I searched the screen a little longer, trying to decode the blurry pixels, the areas of grey and black and white, and when I still couldn't figure out what I was looking at I pushed the chair back, got the Ordnance Survey map from my jacket pocket and opened it on the kitchen table. I ran my finger down the list of place names: Inverary, Inveraish, Inveranan. I drew a pencil ring round Inverary and stared at it, looking at what surrounded it. A scattering of estates, a sewage-treatment plant, a power station.

'What's there, Malachi?' I murmured, tracing the line of a Forestry Commission sector with my thumbnail. 'What's there?'

Danso got up and came to the table, looking over my shoulder, so close I could smell the dry-cleaners' chemicals on his suit. 'If we could look at this through his eyes, tell me, what would we see?'

I shook my head. 'Twenty years ago I could have told you. Believe me or don't believe me, it's true. Twenty years ago I could have told you what he had for breakfast.'

'And now?'

'Now…' I sighed and turned to look at him, rubbing my temple, wishing my head would stop thumping. Now, the answer was no. I didn't know.

'That's because he's changed,' Danso said, reading my thoughts. 'He's killed thirty people and it's made him a different creature. There aren't any rules any more.'

Danso had twenty officers on door-to-door in Inverary. He'd issued stills from the videotape to the press and was talking to profilers every hour on the hour. But the unease wouldn't let up. He wasn't sleeping. Long nights trying to catch some kip curled up on a desk or an armchair in the station had caught up with him and the chronic disc herniation in his third and fourth lumbar vertebrae had flared up. The sleeping pills his GP had given him weren't working.

'This is killing me,' he said. 'Had a Casualty Bureau meeting seven o'clock this morning. Signed two laissez-passers, one for the US, one for Nigeria and all before eight o'clock. I do not call this a civilized timetable.'

It was Tuesday morning. Angeline was due at the Glasgow Royal Infirmary at eleven, and Danso was driving us. He knew Glasgow traffic better than we did. But I guessed the real reason he'd offered the lift. There was something he had to tell us.

'George is saying how usually when something like this happens you get hundreds reported missing — ten times more than you've got bodies to match. But-' He checked in the rear-view mirror. He indicated and changed lanes, crossing the traffic on the Dumbarton Road. In the back Angeline and Lexie sat in silence, staring out of the windows at the decaying railway bridges, the stained and graffitied pebbledash houses lining the street. 'But this thing on Cuagach happens and only twenty people come forward.'

'That's how they worked — the PHM. Cut off ties with relatives. You wouldn't expect anyone to know where they were living after all these years.'

'Yeah, but twenty. That's eleven fewer than the bodies we've got.'

We'd driven on for a while and passed two roundabouts before what he'd said sank in. I turned to look at him. 'You don't mean eleven. You mean ten. You just said eleven.'

'I mean eleven.'

I laughed. 'Peter, I have to tell you, I was maybe one of Mrs Leeper's worst students for sagging, but when it came to maths I was the four-foot genius. Twenty plus ten makes thirty. Always did, always will.'

'I mean eleven. That's what I want to tell you.' He glanced at me out of the corner of his eye. 'There were thirty-one people in that chapel when it blew up.'

'No. There were only thirty members of the PHM.'

He made a face, pushing out his lips and nodding, like this was a reasonable thing to say. Like I could even be right. 'So you said. You're sure you didn't forget anyone?'

I stared at him. Then I fumbled a pen out of my pocket. I had a glimpse of Angeline watching me, her eyes puzzled and unblinking in the rear-view mirror. I scribbled down the initials of all the people I could think of on my arm. I'd been through all this before with George and I knew I was right. Blake had said thirty members. The website had said thirty. I'd met thirty.

'See?' I said, holding up my arm in front of him.

He pushed my hand away. 'I'm trying to drive.'

'There were only thirty. I'm not missing anyone.'

'They weren't hiding someone?'

'Hiding them?'

'Yeah.' He licked his lips and glanced in the rear-view mirror, checking the cars behind us. 'Pig Island was that sort of place. You say it in your statement: "the sort of place people migrate to when things go wrong". It wouldn't be the first time a community has taken in someone on the run. There couldn't have been a wee hidey-hole on Cuagach?'

'If there was they kept it quiet.'

'Aye, well, someone was out there. It doesn't come down to much — not much more than a wee bit of skin and hair. The rest is just — well…' He shot a look at the women in the back, then leaned sideways towards me and lowered his voice. 'Might not find the rest of him.'

'Him?'

'Aye.'

'Dove? Injured in the explosion?'

'Already thought of that. DNA doesn't work.'

'One of them was pregnant?'

'The hair's adult.'

I shook my head, looking out at the rows of thirties houses we were passing, the boarded-up petrol stations, the businesses: Larry's Laminate Land; Kwik-Fit; Fred's Foamwash and Valet. 'I don't know. Another hack maybe? Perhaps when I left they got another hack out there. Someone else to spread their message. Or a lawyer.'

'I don't know.' He set the indicator and crossed the traffic again. We were getting to the city centre. 'But have a think about it for me. See if you remember anything.'

The car went on, the dull rocking motion of the engine in the soles of my feet. I put my head against the window and stared up as we went under the spindly Erskine bridge; high overhead, cars teetered along it, dark against the sky. I wasn't thinking about that extra victim. I was thinking of what Dove had achieved with a bit of fertilizer and picric acid, what he could achieve on the mainland. I was thinking about Inverary and the chemist's and the Forestry Commission land. I was thinking of one word: 'memorable'. Why is your death going to be memorable? It's ironic that that was how my head was working because, looking back now, I see that what I should have been concentrating on was that sentence of Danso's: Have a think about it for me.

Because it was this that turned out in the end to be the best piece of advice I got in the whole sorry episode: to try to figure out who that thirty-first victim was. Didn't know it at the time, but I'd learn my lesson. Oh, fuck, yes. Given time I'd learn my lesson.

Dear Mr Taranici

I'm writing again because I've got this dreadful, dreadful sense that time is… I don't know, that it's running out somehow. It's quite ridiculous, of course, because as you know I'm too level-headed to believe in premonition, but I can't tell you how horrible this feels. Just horrible. At first it was sort of exciting, knowing we were in the middle of a drama all the country was reading about. But now it's gone beyond funny and, honestly, I'm wishing it had never happened.

Oakesy's keeping something from me. He and Danso are always talking secretively, looking at maps and reading through Dove's paperwork. If I ask Danso, he says don't worry, everything's going to plan: they've filed reports on all the DNA they found in the cottages, developed 'profiles' on the relatives they've traced, and all the human remains have come off the island and been transferred to a temporary mortuary (that's basically a warehouse on an industrial estate near Oban. It's big enough for them to drive the refrigerated trucks inside and Oakesy says they like that because they can unload out of sight). But, I say, if it's all going to plan then where's Malachi Dove?