Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'What is it?' Lexie murmured sleepily, throwing out a hand. 'You all right? You ill?'

I swung my legs round so my back was to her, put my feet on the ground and sat up to stare at my wet thighs. It was early morning — there was a faint line of light round the curtains. 'I'm fine.'

I waited for the feelings to go — a feeling in my chest like I'd just taken a drug straight in the heart, pure nicotine or one of those amyl-nitrate poppers we used to do at uni. When the blood stopped pounding and my head came back to the ground, I went into the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror, staring at myself.

Man, I thought peering at myself. Hair and muscle and dick. That's all we amount to. I looked down at my cock, still red and half hard. What is going on here, Oakes? I asked myself. What is happening to you?

Later that day Angeline went missing. She was gone for four hours, and it was me who found her. I took the Fiesta and drove round the deserted streets, the sound of syringes cracking under the tyres. She was half a mile away, on the main road that bordered the estate. There was a newsagent with bars on the windows and a postbox outside, and she was standing in front of them, staring at the traffic going back and forward. We'd given her some money to spend in Dumbarton and she was dressed differently now: under her leather coat she was wearing a skirt she'd patched together out of two others and a ribbed brown sweater with a McFly badge pinned to it. I watched her for a moment or two from the car, trying not to think about what was under that coat. I'd made up my mind. It was time to tell her to move on.

I pulled into the kerb, leaned across the passenger seat and opened the door. 'Hey. We didn't know where you were. Everyone's worried.'

She hesitated. Then she climbed into the car and closed the door, arranging the coat round her, rubbing her nose. I didn't look too close, but I got a sort of thumbnail image of raw eyes and veins broken in her cheeks. She'd been crying. We sat there for a long time not speaking. The billboard outside the newsagent said, 'Terrorist Experts in Nationwide Manhunt'.

'Angeline?' I said. 'Were you trying to go somewhere? Someone's house? Do you want me to drive you somewhere?'

She shook her head and wiped her eyes. 'No,' she said thickly. 'I just wanted a walk.'

'There's nowhere I can take you?'

'I don't know anyone. Only you.' She pulled on the seatbelt, the way she'd seen Lex and me do it, and sat, her hands on her lap, looking out of the windscreen. 'I've been thinking,' she said, 'about what happened yesterday.'

I felt the muscles in my face lock solid. I knew she was looking at me, shyly searching my face, trying to make sense of me.

'I've made up my mind. If there's an operation I'm not going to have it.' There was a long, long pause. 'You think I'm right, don't you? You think I'd be wrong to have an operation.'

I should say something. I was supposed to say something — something adult. But my head had gone rigid. I reached across her and locked the door. 'Do something for me, Angeline.' I put the car into gear and took off the handbrake. 'Don't come out here again. You don't know who might drive past.'

The next few days there was this slow, pressure-cooker feeling in the rape suite. Angeline ignored what I'd said about going out on the road: every day she'd leave the house and be gone for hours. The surveillance car didn't follow her either: me and the officers had talked about it and decided to stop arguing with her, decided we weren't her keepers. Secretly I was relieved. It was easier when she wasn't around. I didn't like the way she kept watching me, like she was waiting for me to say something.

Lexie knew something was wrong. She kept staring at me and asking me weird questions until my chest was tight and my head felt like it was full of blood and I spent as much time as I could away from her, locked in the office I'd rigged up in the third bedroom, the one with the cot and puke on the wall, trying to work on the proposal. I shut myself up and wrote like crazy: two K words a day, trying to cram all my thoughts on to the hard drive, my hands clamped to my head, moving ideas around until my brain was like catfood and I knew how the Sputnik monkey felt. But it didn't matter how hard I wrote, I couldn't get two people out of my head: Angeline Dove and her dad, Malachi.

Danso and I talked about it all the time: we spent hours going through the paperwork from the cottage, pushing it all around. Every night he'd stop by on his way home from work and every night he'd bring things for us. Bribes to keep me sweet, I decided, to stop me going back to London. One day it was a bottle of Jura malt whisky. One day a pound of farmed smoked salmon. Fuck knows where he was financing it from — his own pocket maybe — but none of us complained. Lexie got one of the guys in the surveillance car to bring down a jar of capers from Oban when he came on duty and we ate them with the salmon, using our fingers, sitting in a circle like cave people. I always asked Danso about the sightings of Dove. I asked him to show me on the map where they all were and I plotted them. When he'd gone I'd spend the night looking at the map, thinking about what these random sightings meant.

Then, suddenly, on the Thursday morning, the police got a lead.

Someone had spotted a blue Vauxhall near the southern tip of Loch Awe. Within an hour someone else called in a report: Dove wandering near a stone bothy tucked up in a crevice of the nearby hills in Inverliever Forest. The police brought out the Royal Logistics Corps — used to clearing military land and unexploded Second World War ordnance. They stuck a specialized probe into the bothy window and siphoned off air into absorbent cartridges. When the explosives test came out negative the support unit got sent in to batter down the door. There was no one inside.

'Empty,' said Danso, that evening at the rape suite. 'But the thing is, it's only a mile from a chalet owned by one of the ex-members of the PHM. And she was on our TI list.'

'TI?'

'Trace and Interview. We'd cleared her on Tuesday, but then this came up and started sounding klaxons.'

I pulled on my coat.

'What are you doing?'

'I want to see it.'

'There's nothing to see. He's not there. It's just a wee bothy with a load of crap in it.'

'There is something to see.' I pulled my car keys out of my pocket. 'You're just not looking at it right.'

Danso sighed. He massaged his forehead, like I was making him tired. 'We're not looking at it through his eyes?'

'That's right.'

'And you're going to explain to the missus why I'm late home again?'

'You don't have to take me. Tell me where it is. I don't need you to hold my hand.'

'Yes, you do,' he said, all weary. 'Yes, you do.'

"We drove in convoy: me clinging to the tail-lights of his black Bimmer. We headed north along the B840 and at eight o'clock we hit the edge of Inverliever Forest — those fuck-off, dark-as-hell mountains that swept out of the night skies and disappeared vertically below the still, dark waters of Loch Avich. We were a long way north. I wondered what it meant that Dove had changed direction. He'd gone north and not south towards London. When we stopped, in a small lane that wound up along the edge of a burn into the cleft between two mountains, it was like we'd gone into another universe.

'See the chalet?'

We'd walked half-way up the path when Danso stopped and turned to look down to the road and the loch. He pointed at a small shingle-roofed house on the shore, outlined in silver by the water behind it. It was planted with a border of leylandii and as I looked a security light came on briefly — a cat or a hedgehog maybe, lighting the trees from inside.