I remembered what we'd talked about downstairs: that Jodie worked for an insurance firm now.
'She left the company?'
'It was her decision - I didn't ask her to.' He looked frustrated. 'I didn't stop her, either, but staying on there, our relationship wouldn't have worked. She'd poured so much of her energy into it that she ended up seeing more of him than she did of me, and I wouldn't have been able to carry on like that. I guess she knew that. So she chose me.'
'Okay.'
And then what? I wondered.
What Scott was talking about had happened two years ago. Had Jodie been carrying on an affair with Simpson the whole time? And had the 50/50 Killer talked to him about that as well? Surely, he must have done.
But Scott was becoming distressed.
'She chose me,' he repeated.
I thought his use of words was telling: 'She chose me.' He was fumbling in the direction of what had happened, and if he found it he wasn't going to like what he held in his hands.
'It's okay,' I told him. 'Like I said before, the man who did this to you, he was talking about that to hurt you. Do you understand? He was using it to upset you.'
'Is that "the game"?'
I looked at him, considering what to say. He seemed desperate for an answer, but the truth might be too much for him.
'What do you remember about that?'
'I just remember those words. He said something about a game. He said I'd thank him for it in the end.' The half of his face that was visible suddenly looked determined. 'Tell me.'
I stared at him. His expression didn't change. Part of me was sure I should back off at this point, but the truth was we needed information and I'd said I'd press him as much as I could. If he was willing to ask, I should be willing to answer.
'The "game",' I said quietly, 'is that he targets couples. One of the couple has to die at dawn, and it's always up to one of them to decide which it will be. He picks one, and then uses emotional and physical torture to force them to betray their partner. That's what the game is.'
It sounded harsh and bleak, but there was no safe way of explaining it. 'Tell me,' he'd said. There it was. I leaned back.
On the surface, the determination remained, but something else was creeping in. Memories surfacing, perhaps, or the implications of what I'd told him. The determination disappeared. Ever so slowly, panic began to take its place.
'So I betrayed her?'
'We don't know that.'
'That's what it means--'
'Whatever happened,' I interrupted gently, 'there was nothing you could have done.'
He swallowed. His voice trembled slightly: 'Why?'
I leaned forwards.
'Why does he do this?' Scott demanded.
That was the question.
And it's always the question, isn't it? I'd asked it myself enough times in the last six months, and I'd always been left with the same inadequate handful of answers. Why did she drown? Because of the events that took us to the beach. Because of the physics of the waves. Because of the biology of a body in the water. Those are the only reasons. I wanted something deeper than that, but the truth is, the world doesn't care about what seems important to me.
Why did the 50/50 Killer do this to people? He did it to destroy the love between them, to make them turn their backs on each other. He was a wolf of space, whatever that might mean. A devil. But all of that only raised more questions. When you ask 'Why?' the answer is the sum of a hundred different reasons, none of them satisfactory on its own, none of them satisfactory together. Like me, Scott didn't want those answers. He was asking 'Why?' on a level where answers don't even exist.
'We don't know,' I admitted. 'All we can do is interpret the facts and make theories. When we catch him, perhaps then we'll be able to ask him why he does it. But what's important right now is that we stop him before he hurts Jodie.'
Any more than he already has.
The panicked look hadn't left Scott's face, but at least the emotion hadn't overtaken him yet.
I reached into the file I'd brought, picked out the photograph of Carl Farmer and passed it to Scott. He took it from me and looked it over, his face growing still. His hand started shaking.
He asked, 'Is this him?'
'I was hoping you could tell me.'
He concentrated, staring at the photograph intently.
'I've seen him before. I know I have. He's been to the house. A few months ago. He checked our meter.'
'Okay.'
I thought: yes. That was two IDs we had now, from two independent sources. However unlikely it might seem, the 50/50 Killer really had allowed us to see his face.
'But I don't know if it's the man in the woods.' He passed the picture back to me. 'All I remember is that he looked like the Devil. Not just because of the mask. The man in my head ... he wasn't even a man.'
He turned to face the blinds, and I allowed his comment to hang in the air. Daniel Roseneil had said something very similar:
He was the Devil.
He wasn't, of course. There was no such thing as the Devil. There were just malformed people who had grown up twisted. But even though I knew that, I wasn't so sure that Daniel and Scott were entirely wrong. In our unsatisfactory world of cause and effect, where the answers never satisfy, maybe it was as true as it could be.
'Stone walls,' Scott said quietly.
He was still turned away from me, still facing the window. Despite myself, I felt a flutter of excitement.
'Stone walls?'
'The place I was in, it had stone walls.' He swallowed. 'I remember that. It was narrow, cramped. The walls were close to my shoulders.'
'Okay, Scott. That's good.'
So he'd been held inside one of the buildings in the woods. That limited the scope of the search a little - there were several, according to the map, but it wasn't impossible. Perhaps we had a chance of finding Jodie alive before dawn after all.
'Can you remember anything else about it?'
'I remember the stone walls. He was crouching in front of me, talking to me.'
Scott kept nodding very slightly, over and over. Something was hurting him, but he was enduring it for as long as he could.
'He was whispering to me in the dark. Right up close. I was so frightened. '
I'd got everything I needed from this second interview, and my gut instinct was to back off - move Scott away from wherever his memory was leading him. But actually, that wouldn't be fair. It was too one-way. If he was prepared to talk, I had to be prepared to listen.
'Was it pitch black?' I asked.
'No. There was some light.'
'A fire?'
'Yes. I think so. He used it to--'
Without warning, the memory arrived. He stopped nodding, stopped talking, and became utterly still. Then he raised one hand slowly to his face. I fought an urge to do the same.
'It's okay, Scott,' I said. 'It's okay.'
'There were stone walls.'
'Thank you. You've done well.'
'Old stone walls.'
He didn't start crying this time, but he kept his hand up over his injured eye. I'd done this to him; I'd caused this. So I felt I should stay, and do anything I could to help him cope with the memory he'd just uncovered. But I was going to have to leave him for a while. I needed to get this information downstairs and let Pete know where his search teams should be looking.
'I'll be back as soon as I can, Scott.'
I felt guilty as I stood, picking up the recording equipment and making my way to the door. As I reached it, I turned back.
'Thank you,' I said again.
But he showed no signs that he'd heard me. He was facing towards the window, his hand still half touching the bandages on his face.
4 DECEMBER
4 HOURS UNTIL DAWN
3.20 A.M.
Charlie
The war had begun.
Charlie huddled, shivering, at the back of his shelter. It wasn't from the cold. There were nerves as well; nerves which were making his body shake. Sweet threads of excitement were firing in his stomach, and his heart was trembling. The Moment was coming.
The sky would crack and there would be ...
He frowned in the dark. Well, there would definitely be heat, and he guessed there would probably be light, too. Beyond that, maybe he should have some faith. Maybe wait and see. Until it happened, he had the fire, and that was giving off enough heat and light for now.
'You need to make a big fire,' the devil had told him. 'You make a big fire, and then they can't see you.'
Two days ago, it had shown him how. He'd come back to this camp and found the devil sitting cross-legged in the centre of the small clearing, conjuring up kindling. There had already been a large pile of dry wood beside it, which the devil had slowly added to.
Can you see it appearing?
Charlie couldn't at first, and it had deflated him to think that perhaps he wasn't worthy after all. The devil had been disappointed, too, but also reassuring, encouraging him to stare at the pile and concentrate. Eventually, narrowing his eyes, he had seen it grow. The elation had been like nothing else he'd ever felt.
The devil had approved.
'When this is over,' it had promised, 'I'll teach you how to do that yourself. And not just with wood.'
Charlie's shelter was set back among the trees, and the fire from that magic wood was burning about ten metres away, in the centre of the small clearing. It was a dancing crown of flame, large enough to fit the brow of a giant. The sky threw down snow; the fire repaid it with smoke and curls of ash, floating up on immense waves of heat. Despite the weather, it remained bright and hot: a circle of tethered Hell, raging defiantly against the heavens. The wood charred and glowed. Occasionally, a log collapsed, and a plume of burning dust flowered in the air. Even this far away, the heat was rolling off it. His cheeks felt swollen and his body was damp with sweat.
He swapped the knife to his other hand and rubbed his hand down his leg. Then swapped it back and took a good grip on the handle. He needed to keep himself on form. Needed to be ready.
It was a good fire - but then, it had to be.
'You're one of my soldiers now,' the devil had explained. 'You know what that means? It means when the angels fly overhead, they look down at you and all they see is fire.'
The angels were flying now. There was no going back.
'So you need fire to hide yourself.'
He'd been hearing them in the sky for the last hour, and if there'd ever been any doubt about the devil's words and promises, it had disappeared completely. The angels were terrifying. They roared through the air, the noise like a hundred heavy swords whirling round. Down below them, the trees quivered and shook with fear. Charlie held himself still in the midst of it. In the distance, lights were flashing down from the sky. The whole time, he kept calm.
The Moment was coming, and he needed to be steady when it arrived.
It had started about a week ago.
Until then, Charlie's life had been fairly regimented. The council paid for him to stay in the Home on the Hill, which meant bed and board and three square meals and everything. Unlike some of the other residents, he was allowed to stay or go more or less as he pleased. The nurses were concerned about the man who spoke to him in his head, but it was a long time since he'd told Charlie to do anything wrong. More often than not, he found the things the man said to him upsetting, and when it got very bad he took the nurses' advice and went to bed and ignored everybody. The man shut up after a while. Charlie was happy to socialise, and the nurses didn't mind him going into Town, or for a walk, or whatever he wanted. Sign out, sign in. But he didn't like Town. The man told him people there were different and didn't like him. He preferred the isolation of walking in the woods. It was quieter here. There was nobody around, and that made him happy.
But last week, walking a little deeper than usual, he'd realised he wasn't alone. He'd been moving casually along the trail, glancing here and there, when suddenly the hairs on the back of his neck had stood up. Something was different. The man in his head told him to stop walking, and so he had.
For a moment, all he'd been able to hear was birdsong. Then the breeze had picked up, making the tops of the trees rustle together: a sound like a waterfall. And then, off to his right, a stick had cracked.
Look over there
, the man had told him, and so he had.
The devil had been about thirty or forty metres away, walking down a path that ran nearly parallel to the main trail. Charlie couldn't see much of its body, which seemed to be almost totally black, but he could see its head very clearly because the red skin stood out against the evergreen leaves and the browns of the tree trunks. He began to shiver.
The devil had walked on, apparently oblivious of Charlie, but then just before disappearing out of sight, it had paused. It hadn't looked at him; all it had done was cock its head slightly, as though listening to some internal radar; but he'd known full well it was sensing him. It didn't seem to care. A couple of seconds later, it had been on its way again, vanishing into the undergrowth.
Follow it
, the man had told him urgently.
No. Charlie had shaken his head. He didn't want to.
Follow it!
Charlie had stood there for a minute, frightened, upset, but also intrigued. Part of him didn't want the devil to get away so that he never saw it again. The man in his head seemed to know that, and so he beamed streams of words into that part of Charlie's brain and made it grow, until it became too much to ignore.
His body had started moving without his consent. He was cutting through the undergrowth between the paths and, as always, everything felt a lot easier and simpler now he wasn't holding himself back.
But the devil was gone. He hadn't found it that day.
When he returned to the Home, the man had cautioned him not to say anything to anyone, not even his friend Jack, and that worried Charlie. It was a long time since he'd heard the man sound so hushed and serious. He was miserable and couldn't sleep very well, and when he did the man spoke to him in his dreams, reassuring and convincing him.