Mo Hayder - Pig Island

In my last year at university there was a book doing the rounds of the halls of residence: The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices. Written by a Californian academic who went by the unlikely name of Brenda Love ('Yeah, right,' said all the undergrads, 'like that's her real name'). It was on everyone's must-read list. 'It's, like, crammed to the ears with mind-boggling things to do with your todger,' Finn told me, when he sent me a copy from the States. The closing line of the section on zoophilia (or bestiality, if you want its common-or-garden name) was the one all the undergraduates kept whispering to each other, creasing up about: 'Sex with a partner that has little intelligence, superior strength and who panics easily, is risky…'

Page 298: Zoophilia

Zoophilia involves sex between humans and animals and generally takes more forms than does sex between humans. Some of our ancestors felt that sex with animals held a magic power…

There are different kinds of zoophiliacs, and if you really think your head's on tight enough you can track down that encyclopedia and read all about them: androzons, avisodomists, bestial-sadists, formicopbiliacs, necrobestialists, ophidicists. But the one I kept thinking about time and again was the 'gynozoon'. A Roman obsession this, a gynozoon was a female animal trained for sex with a human male.

At university I'd read The Encyclopedia of Unusual Sex Practices from cover to cover, taking it all in: guys who can't get off without electric shocks, or armpit sex, or licking their partner's eyeball. (Making it up? I wish I was.) There was still a copy of that book somewhere in my study in London, but I hadn't thought about it for years. Not until now. Now I thought about it over and over again until my head was thumping. I kept thinking about the gynozoon. A gynozoon.

Page 92 I: Dysmorphophilia

Dysmorphophilia: (dys: abnormal. morphe: form. philia: attraction) Those who are sexually aroused by deformities in their partners. It's linked to acrotomophilia and apotemnophilia and for some dysmorphophiliacs the strong sense of compassion or fear may condition them to… confuse this excitement with sexual arousal. Others feel emotionally secure or in control when their partner does not have the ability to leave them for someone else. Others need to nurture or rescue a sex partner to feel love of bonding and some are simply attracted by novelty…

I walked out of the rape suite and into the pouring rain and I didn't have a clue where I was going. I just put the car into gear and went, not thinking about the turnings I was taking, half blind to my surroundings. I wanted to be out on the road, Lex and Angeline behind me. When Lexie called I switched off the phone, threw it on to the passenger seat and went on driving. On and on and on, dodging trucks and coaches, the Massive Attack CD in the deck playing until it was making a hole in my head. I didn't even notice when the rain eased off, changed to drizzle, when the passing cars switched off their headlights, and the weak autumn sun burned out from the clouds. It didn't cross my mind I was heading west. It was only when I'd been driving for two hours and saw a sign I recognized that I slowed the car down and woke up a bit. The post office at Ardfern. I was on Craignish Peninsula. The hairs went up on the backs of my hands. Something had led me back here, like it was the most familiar place I could turn.

I drove on a little further, slower now. I hadn't been here since the night I came back and picked up our stuff. The bungalow drive was barer now autumn was here, more visible from the road. I turned up it, leaning forward to study the bungalow as it evolved out of the trees, all shut up and dull-looking, its windows filthy from the earlier rain. This was the last place I'd slept a night through — instead of lying there like a torture victim, thinking either about Malachi Dove or about his daughter. The bungalow hadn't changed much.

Half-way up the track I stopped the engine. I chocked the wheels and stared out of the windscreen. Now I didn't have the mindless business of driving to deal with, I started to shake. It was early afternoon and the storm must've gone west to east, because the sun was reflecting little dewdrops of rain in the trees like diamonds. Across the loch a flash of coloured light came from the shore. I stared at it, thinking about Lex standing in the rain in Dumbarton, crying as I drove away. I balled my fist, rested it on my temple, wanting to hit myself, wanting to knock the thoughts out of my head.

'You stupid fucking arse.'

I hadn't seen her cry in years. It was the kind of crying you do after a shock, the same kind of crying I did after the massacre. I'd never wanted to see her doing it. Never had. I looked at the phone on the passenger seat. What did I do now? Did I just turn round, pick up the phone and say, I'm sorry, babe, been meaning to mention it to you for months — our marriage is in the toilet. Or did I lie? It was going to have to be a lie. I'd have to lie to her. I reached for the phone, was about to pick it up, when something made me stop. Something I hadn't registered properly till now. I dropped my hand and slowly, very slowly, a thought racing over me like a shiver, I raised my eyes back to the loch.

The point of light was still there. Sunlight reflecting off a window. I stared at it, my thoughts going dead slow, dead cautious. There were some cottages over there, just a few clustered round the shore. They were due south, on the other side of the loch, where the land curved round to face the peninsula. Suddenly, without knowing how I knew, I realized I was looking at Ardnoe Point. The place they found the dory.

I opened the car door and got out, buttoning my jacket, staring at the light. I'd been there once, with Struthers, three days after the massacre, just to have a look. Wasn't much to see: a few cottages, a beach that wasn't a beach at all, just a tidal mud-flat, marshy, matted with eelweed stretching dimly out to the water, one or two pieces of police tape still snagged in the weeds' clumps. The boat had been lying on its side, not tied up — another reason Struthers thought Dove had floated up here by accident, then bailed out. We'd talked about it a bit. What we'd never realized was how, if we'd just turned a bit to our right, we could've seen the bungalow across the loch.

I leaned into the car and pulled out the roadmap from the webbing at the back of the passenger seat. I opened it on the roof of the car and studied it closely, my elbow on it, looking up from time to time at Ardnoe Point, still glinting in the distance. No pen in my pockets so I used my thumbnail to make a mark on the map — a neat cross over Ardnoe Point. Then I walked backwards a few paces, going up the track until I got to the place in the bungalow gardens where you could see inland, over to where Loch Avich must be. The bothy, the place I'd gone with Danso that night, trying to work out what Dove was planning, was in the mountains over there.

I stood for a few moments, letting my thoughts slosh dreamily around. Ardnoe Point was to my left. The bothy was behind me and to my right. And the shopping centre at Inverary was… I snatched up the map. It took me a moment to focus. When I did my heart started to beat, very slow and deliberate, in my chest.

I will run rings around you. I will, in the final hour, will run rings around you.

The bungalow. When I looked at the four points, Ardnoe Point, the bothy, Inverary and Pig Island, they made a circle round Craignish. Round the bungalow. I slammed my hand flat on the map, my heart thumping hard. For the last week Malachi had been circling the bungalow. He thought we were still there. I raised my eyes, scanning the horizon, the trees, the bungalow behind me with its blank windows.