Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'Yes.'

'So he'd parked either here or here. Anyone on this road, or walking in the fields, would have seen him.'

'Anyone except our babysitter.'

Danso cleared his throat. 'We're just trying to plot his movements on the estate.'

'Because you want to get your lad off the hook?'

He sighed. 'Joe, I'm sorry. I see you think we came here to antagonize you. But we didn't. The officer wants to apologize to you when his disciplinary's over.'

I breathed out and sat back, my arms folded, giving him a disbelieving smile. 'Please. Don't jerk me around.'

'I'm serious. He wants to say sorry. It'd do him good to speak to you. What do you think?'

I grinned brightly at him, then at Struthers. A fake, face-splitter of a grin. 'What do you think I think? Did you really think I'd say yes?'

Danso ran a finger inside his collar, uncomfortable. 'Aye. That's how we thought you'd feel.' He glanced sideways at Struthers. 'We didn't think he'd be happy. Did we?'

'We didn't.'

'OK,' Danso said. 'I'm not going to force the-'

'I mean it. I'm not going to speak to him. I don't want to hear him whingeing about how difficult it was to see Dove on that estate.'

'That's not why we're thinking about Dove's movements.'

'Then why?' I put my hands down, looking at them both. I could feel a beat of anger flaring in my temple. 'What other reason do you need to know which way he drove on to the fucking estate to put my wife in a fucking coma?'

'Because,' Struthers interrupted, his face a bit red, 'we want to know when he posted this.' He pulled a brown envelope from his briefcase and put it on the table. 'That's why.'

There was a moment's silence. Me and Angeline stared at the envelope.

'He cleaned up the house,' Danso said irritably. 'I told you — there was nothing of him in there, nothing. Couldn't even place him on the estate until this. It's the only evidence we've got.' He opened the envelope and tipped out the contents. There were two black-and-white photographs and a manila envelope sealed in plastic evidence sheaths. 'Posted in the box on the estate some time before the collection at three on the day he did Lexie. If it's what we think it is, then everything's going our way.'

'Everything's going our way?'

'Everything.' He looked at me, then at Angeline, then back at me. 'It's a suicide note. He's telling us when he's going to do it.'

The envelope wasn't stamped. It was addressed to Danso at Oban and it contained the two photos of Malachi Dove gone from the study on Pig Island. The first showed him posed with Asuncion, Angeline's mother. It might have been the wedding because she wore flowers in her hair and he had one in his lapel. The second was the photo of him praying. Lying on his back, dead-looking. When we saw it me and Angeline both reached out.

'Uh-uh,' Struthers warned. 'No touching. I had to sell my soul to the productions officer to get these for the afternoon. He's got "continuity of evidence" written on his heart — I bring them back covered in your prints he'll have my knob on a stick.' He gave Angeline a sickly smile. 'Sorry, pet. Pardon the French, eh?'

'They're his,' Angeline said, staring stonily at him. 'They're from his study.'

'Aye. We know. They're covered in his latents.' Danso turned the photos over to show lines written in a small, curled hand. He pushed the picture of Dove and Asuncion towards us. We leaned forward and looked at the writing. Straight away I felt the tug in it.

'It's about you,' said Struthers. 'It's about you and Alex.'

I pulled the photo nearer.

I have ploughed with your heifer, my friend [he'd written]. And now that you have paid the uttermost farthing you are bound in fetters of iron, your torment is as the torment of a scorpion when he striketh a man. To live in grief is worse than death. In your days you shall seek death and you shall not find it: you shall desire to DIE, but death shall flee from you…

A nasty smile twitched on my face. The words were dragging me back to the old days in Albuquerque when he was my adversary and my head was full of the cojones he spouted, and I was young and angry enough to have stabbed the bastard. Except this time I was the winner, because Lexie was alive. It was like one end of my life was being brought round to touch the other end.

'And this is the one you'll really like,' Struthers said, after a while. It was the back of the prayer photo. 'See if he's telling us what we think he's telling us.'

He'd divided the top of the page into two columns, one headed Taken by God and one headed Taken by the Antichrist. Under the Antichrist heading he'd written Judas and Ahithophel. Under the God heading he'd written: Abimelech, Samson, Malachi Dove. And at the foot of the page were a few lines:

I was wounded in the house of my friends and now my harvest is past, the summer is ended, my days are as grass, the wind passeth over them and they are gone. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O GOD I will fly away. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself, here, at the end of my fifty years.

There was a long silence. In the kitchen someone dropped a stack of plates. A door banged. Someone laughed. But at the table none of us spoke.

'At the end of my fifty years?' I said, after a while. Struthers and Danso nodded. They were looking from me to Angeline, watching us filter the information. Waiting to see if we came to the same conclusion. 'His birthday?'

'That's what we think.'

'Which is the twenty-fifth of September,' said Angeline, faintly.

'Exactly.'

'And that is…'

'Tomorrow.' Struthers nodded. 'Tomorrow. All we have to do is keep Alex out of the papers for another twenty-four hours.'

Which was how we came to spend the whole of the next day on the edge of our seats, waiting for the day to crawl across the sky and be over. Thinking that if we could get past his birthday we'd be OK. Which is all very fucking funny, all a fuck-off laugh at my expense, when you consider that by the time his birthday was over it wasn't Malachi Dove I was thinking about. I'd forgotten to give a shit about him, and where or how they were going to find his body. Because by the night of his birthday the only thing I was thinking of was Lexie and how come it had worked out that she was dead. Of septicaemia. Nine-thirty on 25 September. Age: thirty two.

Ten empty Newkie Brown bottles hanging on the wall…

There were ten empty Newkie Brown bottles lined up on the bog seat. Ten. I lay in the bath staring blankly at them, trying to work out how long it had taken to drink them. I couldn't talk myself into getting out of the bath and all the way over to the toilet, but I needed a piss — had needed one for the last twenty minutes, so I could have been here for, what? An hour? Two?

It was four months since Lexie died ('Sepsis,' the consultant had said. 'She would have been vulnerable to sepsis from the moment she was admitted and I find it difficult to believe you weren't warned of the possibility') and I suppose it'd be fair to say I'd let myself go. I didn't know if I was more depressed that she was dead than I was depressed Dove had won, after everything. Every time someone found a corpse in Scotland, bones mashed into the side of a rock or something bloated bobbing like a dirty tarpaulin in the sea, they thought it was Dove's body. But it wasn't. I'd thought he was going to be easy to find. So I'd been wrong about that too. Some days I thought I knew the answers, others I knew I didn't.