Mo Hayder - Pig Island

'Yes,' I said quietly. 'Yes, I am.'

When he'd gone I went to bed. It was still daylight. I took my clothes off and I lay on my back, watching the grey sky out of the window. After a while Angeline came in from the garden. She'd taken off her coat and scarf and was wearing a belted olive-green cardigan. When she came into the room I rolled on to my side, my head resting on one hand, looking at her.

'Hi.'

'Hi.' She'd come up because she knew I was there. But she was timid. It was new to us, this. It hadn't really sunk in. 'Well,' she said, when I didn't say anything. 'I'll — I'll come to bed.'

She undid her belt and cardigan and dropped them. Underneath she wore a skirt and a thin-strapped vest, showing her narrow shoulders. She took it off, unzipped the skirt and stepped out of it, and then she was naked, wearing only a pair of grey knee-high socks. You could see the long muscles in her legs even though she wasn't moving.

She gave a small laugh. Shy. She stayed for a moment or two, resting her left foot on the right. She knew I was looking at her body. Peeping from behind the calf was the end of the extra limb, tapering unevenly to the battered, deformed foot resting against her ankles. I pictured its roots high up inside the smooth basket of her stomach: a bundle of limb, bone and sinew packed away inside it. Something else living inside her. I looked at her belly, at the little crease above her pubic hair.

'Well?'

'Well what?'

'I've been thinking about it all day.'

'Finn?'

'What did he say?'

'He said.' I scratched my head. Tried not to smile. 'He said he loved it.'

There was a pause. A smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. She got into bed, pulled the cover up and mirrored me, her elbow on the pillow, her head resting on her hand, holding my eyes, fighting to keep a smile off her face. We looked at each other without speaking. In the slanting light from the window I could see microscopic details of her face: fine downy hairs, cushiony diamond creases of the skin. Last night we'd sat here on the bed for two hours. She'd been half turned from me and the limb was lying on the sheet between us. She let me examine it. I'd held in my hand the pea-sized nodules inside the skin where toes were meant to be. I'd moved them around, letting them click and grind against each other. I'd rested my hand over a swollen place half-way up the limb, where the flesh strained against the skin: a weird tension of muscle tethered to bone. A knee.

'And did he think it was weird? Me, I mean. What did he think?'

'He thought you were beautiful.'

'Beautiful?'

'Yes.'

There was a pause while she bit her lip, fighting the smile. 'What? Really? Beautiful?'

'Really.'

'My God,' she said, and now the smile came, breaking out, showing her small teeth. 'I can't believe it.' She shivered, half laughing, lifting her shoulders and squirming in delight under the covers so that her cold knees touched my legs.

'Excited?' I said.

'And scared. Really excited, but really scared too. Both.'

We'd talked about it: about how much she needed people to know all about her. I had to remember she was nineteen years old. Just nineteen. And I was thirty-eight. I'd forgotten what it was like to want normality the way you want a drug. For her being public, very public, was the fastest route to normality she knew. Didn't matter what I thought. In a closed-off section of my calloused old head I sort of knew I had to put my unease to one side. I nodded, tried to smile. Tried for more enthusiasm.

'It's going to be three months,' I said. 'So, not long.'

'Not long?' She grinned and shivered again. 'Three months seems like for ever.' She shuffled towards me, pushing her face close to mine, her swimmy eyes magnified so I could see my own face in them: grey, drawn, not at all certain. 'For ever,' she murmured, tilting her face sideways and putting her mouth over mine, the breath from her nose warm on mine. Her hand came up, fumbling round my neck, pulling me closer.

I closed my eyes and kissed her. I reached under the covers and dragged her body hard towards me, thinking if I pressed her stomach tight enough to mine the anxiety would go away and I'd stop thinking, Three months, three months is nothing. And they still haven't found Malachi …

We were in Finn's office when we got the news. That was the irony. We were actually signing the book deal. Angeline was sitting neatly at Finn's desk, wearing a coat I'd never seen before with embroidery on the sleeves and fake fur round the collar, and she was dead excited and flushed. I was next to her, wearing this huge sweater because I was cold all the time, these days, and trying not to think about this sick feeling in my stomach. Finn had been brokering the contract for days, and although it wasn't the total off-the-scale deal he'd hoped for, it wasn't bad. 'Enough to keep you in Newkie Brown for a couple of years.' And I was going to be paid separately for the photos too, so that was a little icing. Still, my guts were in knots over it. Just three months.

'Now,' Finn said, 'initial these pages and sign here — on the last.' He handed Angeline this big show-off fountain-pen. She was going to be joint signatory on a clause that tied her into publicizing the book. 'Because,' said Finn, pushing up his sleeve to bare his suntanned arms and the dingy old Glastonbury braid, 'you are the best-kept secret, Angeline, after where Saddam hid all that uranium — which, as we all know, was up Tony Blair's arse.' He winked at her. 'The press are going to be all over you. We're going to make sure we play it right.'

There were a few moments' silence. The winter sun came through the giant arched window and on to her curly head as she leaned over the contract. No one spoke. The only noise was the scratching of the pen. She lifted her head and handed it to me and, with a moment's hesitation, I pulled the contract over and signed quickly, turning the pages and initialling fast before I changed my mind. There were ten pages and it was the exact moment I lifted the pen off the paper that the mobey rang in my pocket. It was Danso.

'Joe,' he said, 'where are you?'

'London.'

Sitting at the desk opposite, Finn was looking at me, silent.

'Got your car?'

'Yes.'

'OK. Would you do me the honour of getting into that car, and bringing that lass with you?'

A beat of unease went through me. 'Yeah,' I said cautiously. 'Probably could, if you tell me where you are.'

'Dumfries, just over the border.'

'Dumfries? And what's in Dumfries?'

There was a pause. When he spoke his voice was low, excited. 'Joe, we think we've got him. We really do, Joe. We think we've got him.'

Dumfries in southern Scotland is a good hundred miles south of Pig Island. It lies near the English border on the Solway Firth to the west of Lockerbie. They'd picked him up at eleven o'clock the night before in a forest two miles outside the town and now he was lying on a mortuary block in the Dumfries and Galloway Royal Infirmary.

It took me and Angeline five hours to drive there, and it was dark when we arrived, but Danso was waiting for us outside the undertaker's loading bay, looking calm, a little pleased. He came forward to open the car doors. Angeline had been shivering with nerves most of the way but when she got out of the car she managed a small smile.

'Hello there, lassie.' Danso held out his hand to her, slightly surprised to see her so confident. 'You're looking very bonny, I must say. Suits you, does it? London?'

She shook his hand. 'I suppose it must do.'

Struthers came out of the hospital mortuary, pulling on his coat, and when he saw her he paused for a second, a little flush coming to his face. 'Hi,' he said hurriedly, when he realized we were all watching him. He wiped his hand furtively on his trousers and gave it to her to shake, his eyes on her face. 'It's been a long time.'