Some places on earth you go to escape into the quiet: to feel relaxed and get away from everything. But there are others that are dangerous for those exact same reasons, and the woods north of our city were generally felt to be the latter type of quiet place. There were people there who were attracted to the isolation for their own reasons: homeless people with nowhere else to go; criminals with private business to conduct. There were even rumours that, closer to the mountains, you'd find separatists, living in small bunches. Nobody a defenceless, civilised person would want to meet while out walking. It would be like heading a long way into a zoo and then realising there weren't any bars on the cages.
Not an easy place to search at noon on a sunny day. At two thirty in the morning, in weather like this, it was going to be more or less impossible.
Live on the video feed, Pete looked like he was in the Arctic. The collar of his coat was turned up, his shoulders were hunched, and his cheeks and forehead converged as he squinted against the snow, as though he'd been grimacing and the wind had changed. In all my life, I'd never seen anyone look so cold and miserable.
Greg had moved to a different screen, where he was cropping an image of what looked like a map. Mercer sat down at the desk in front of the webcam. I stood between and behind.
'Hi, Pete,' Mercer said. 'You've got Greg here, too. And that's Mark you can see in the background.'
He grunted. 'Right.'
'How are things going?'
Pete's expression said that might be the stupidest question he'd ever heard.
'Slow,' he said. 'And cold.'
'Progress?'
Pete looked around. 'Well, I'm standing where our Mr Banks ran out onto the road. We're setting up the cordon at the moment. One man every hundred metres or at bends in the road, in order to keep a line of sight. If anyone comes out of the woods, we'll see them.'
'Good,' Mercer said. 'Have they found the van yet?'
'We've got the van,' Pete said. 'Half a mile from here. Parked and covered in snow.'
'Excellent.'
Despite his obvious tiredness, I thought Mercer seemed a little brighter. The fact the van had remained at the scene supported his theory that the killer had, too.
'Get the bomb squad to check it before forensics go in.'
'Yes, John.'
'In the meantime, let's have a look at the search area. Greg, how are we doing?'
Greg leaned back in his chair. He looked a little dissatisfied with the results of his labours.
'Best I can do.' He turned the laptop so we could see. 'Not great.'
A white line curled across the base of the monitor, which I guessed was meant to represent the ring road at the northern edge of the city. Each of the men forming the cordon along it was attached to the department's satellite tracking system; they appeared as small yellow circles spreading out from the centre. Every few seconds, the screen updated and they moved further apart.
A cluster in the middle of the screen was marked as Pete's position, and also where Scott had come out of the woods. A cluster further to the left was where the van had been found.
Above this, the bulk of the screen showed a rough map of the woods - light and dark patches of green separated by occasional bright lines representing the known paths. The main path led directly up from the cluster where the van had been abandoned, went north for a couple of miles and then curved round to the right, turning slowly until it came back south to the ring road. In effect, it formed a large, lower-case n, resting on the ring road. The van had been found at the base of the left leg; Scott had emerged slightly to the right of this.
Above all this, the curling blue thread of a stream cut across, forming a lopsided smile towards the top of the screen. It didn't quite touch the bridge of the n.
Greg moved the mouse pointer over the screen.
'A lot of this is just woodland, and the paths probably aren't as clear as this.' The pointer touched several small white outlines dotted around the screen. 'These are old stone buildings. Broken-down structures.'
Pete had been looking at all this, his expression growing more dubious with every word.
'That's fantastic, Greg,' he said. 'We'll take this in with us, shall we? Fill it in while we fucking go?'
Greg held his hands up. 'Don't shoot the messenger.'
'Well, no, it looks really pretty onscreen. But from where I'm standing, those trees back there are just a long, black, fucking wall. So I'd like a bit more guidance, please, before I start sending good officers into the middle of that.'
Mercer had been peering intently at the screen. Now he reached across and took the mouse from Greg. The pointer moved to the cluster of yellow circles by Carl Farmer's van.
'This is what's obvious to me,' he said. 'Banks and his girlfriend were taken into the woods here. Along this path.'
He moved his hand and the cursor traced the white line up the monitor - the left leg of the n.
'Judging from where Banks came out of the woods, I think at some point they must have gone into this area here.'
He moved the mouse pointer across, circling it between the legs of the n.
I nodded to myself. It was guesswork, but it was educated guesswork. Scott had run from wherever he'd been kept prisoner and emerged out of dense, difficult woodland between two paths. If he hadn't been in that area already, he would have had to cross one of those paths to get there. Surely, if he'd been running through undergrowth and had stumbled across an easier route, he would have shifted onto that instead.
It was only an assumption, of course. Given his disorientation, Scott might have blundered across a path without realising it. And even if the killer was still holding Jodie alive somewhere in there, he might well have moved her, taken her deeper into the woods. But it was a good call, simply because it wasn't possible to search forty square miles of dense woodland in the time we had left. Even cut down by the pathways, it was ridiculous. But by designating a more limited search area, Mercer had turned an impossible task into something that felt more manageable. We had a place to start.
'Okay.' Pete sighed. 'Let's say you're right. That's what? About eight square miles?'
'If that. You've got warm bodies?'
'I've got bodies, not warm ones. Thirty officers, apart from the ones in the cordon - nowhere near enough. We've got volunteers from Search and Rescue here, too. Ten civilians, three dogs.'
'Have the dogs picked up anything?'
'Not yet. The handlers have got them here and by the van. But the dogs are trained to find people who are lost, not track down where they've come from. And the snow's not helping. There are no marks on the ground, and the scent trail's buried.'
Mercer looked unimpressed by this. 'What about the helicopter?'
'Against their better judgment, it's in the air and on its way.'
'That's something. We need it to feed back any heat traces it finds; each and every one needs to be checked. In the meantime, there are all those structures to be looked at.'
Pete grimaced, perhaps at the prospect of the task ahead, but more likely at the use of the word 'we'. If Mercer noticed it, he ignored it:
'Chances are he'd be holding her indoors. He wouldn't want to be outside in weather like this.'
'No,' Pete agreed, 'he wouldn't. But that doesn't mean he isn't. He could be anywhere.'
He could be on the other side of the city by now.
'Well, we have to limit the search somehow, don't we?' Mercer said patiently. 'Otherwise it's impossible. So we'll assume he's inside one of these buildings. And also check out heat traces as they come up. Unfortunately, it's all we've got to go on for now.'
For a second, snow falling around him, Pete simply stared out of the screen. Then: 'So we haven't got anything from Banks so far?'
'Not yet,' Mercer said. 'He seems to be blanking a lot out.'
I sank a little inside, annoyed at myself for not recognising the way the conversation had been steered. Pete was dismayed, even borderline antagonistic, about the scale of what needed to be done out there; and I was reluctant to press Scott. Mercer had turned two problems against each other, probably figuring that any objections I had wouldn't cut much ice with a man standing out in the snow facing a difficult, lengthy search. And of course he was right.
'Well, I appreciate that,' Pete said. 'But we're assuming his girlfriend's life is at stake here. Anything he can tell us is going to help. Even if it's just remembering being inside somewhere.'
Mercer turned to look at me. I glanced at the map and then looked at Pete's grim face on the screen, snow falling in the background. My objections suddenly seemed trivial, and I didn't have the energy to argue.
'Okay.' I sighed quietly. 'I'll talk to him.'
4 DECEMBER
4 HOURS, 30 MINUTES UNTIL DAWN
2.50 A.M.
Scott
As the night went on, the tone of Scott's dreams had begun to shift. His sleeping mind seemed to be at war with itself. Something had happened to him. Part of his subconscious was insisting that it be brought out and examined, while another part was attempting, increasingly ineffectively, to bury and hide it. On the surface the dreams were comforting, but increasingly he could feel poison seeping up from below the surface.
Happier thoughts and memories were a house made of tissue, the foundations resting in a pool of black ink. Gradually, everything was darkening.
In this dream, the phone had woken him, and for the duration of the call his mind remained tangled in the last sticky threads of sleep. On the other end of the line, Jodie was crying. When she spoke, her voice was shaky and weak. She told him what was wrong. She told him what she'd done.
He was sitting upright on the edge of the bed, listening. As he did, he was twisting the cord with one hand: tangling the coils around his fingers. He stopped and reached out, moving the yellow curtains aside, eyes flinching against the early-morning sun. Six twenty. Already, it looked warm. It was going to be a hot day in the office.
'I don't know what to say,' Jodie told him.
That should have been his line, shouldn't it? It was absurd to feel so unaffected. He'd always been the patient one in the relationship - the one who remained calm, the one who reacted with understanding - but this was ridiculous. Jodie might as well have been sleeping in the bed behind him, rather than a hundred miles away, phoning to tell him what should have been the most horrible thing he could imagine.
He said, 'I don't know, either.'
Cars were heading past. The world outside seemed oblivious. He let go of the curtain and the bedroom settled back into a more comfortable darkness.
'I've been up all night trying to think of something to say.'
'It didn't work, did it?'
She deserved that, but straight away he felt the urge to apologise for being so sharp. Don't. For once, he needed to suppress that side of himself.
'I guess not. I was rehearsing this, trying to make it into something coherent. I guess I've fucked that up like I fuck everything up.'
Normally, when she wandered into this kind of self-recrimination, he wanted to reassure her. But that would be out of place. He wasn't going to turn this round and give comfort to her, as though she was the one who'd been hurt.
'You've not slept at all?' he said.
'No, I've been up all night. Being sick, mostly.'
He didn't laugh.
She told him again, 'I don't know what to say.'
'Well, you said that already.'
'But I don't know what else there is.'
There's nothing, he thought. You just have to keep saying that, because for now it sums up everything perfectly. I don't know what to say.
For the rest of the conversation, they circled each other. Jodie asked whether their relationship was over; Scott told her he needed time to think. In reality, though, he needed time to feel. He was surprised at himself for taking it so well. Generally, he was quite an insecure person, but for some reason this didn't feel like the end of the world. She'd fucked her business partner? It wasn't so bad. Only the sensation that he'd been hollowed out deep inside convinced him that, some time soon, he was going to collapse inwards and start caring very much.
I am emotionally concussed.
Nothing could be worked out over the phone. But even so ...
'I'll call you after work,' he said.
'Do you promise?'
It was ridiculous: she sounded so wounded and upset, as though he'd done something wrong. Half of him wanted to reach across all that distance and slap her as hard as he could. The other half wanted to hold her and tell her it was okay. Ridiculously, there was something about the battle between those two sides that almost thrilled him.
'I promise,' he said. 'I just need to think about things.'
That produced a new burst of desperation: 'Do you love me?'
'I've got to go.'
The telephone clicked down, cutting off the sound of her crying.
Scott sat there for a few moments, feeling the silence crawl all over him. The air was pressurised: it was like being underwater. He could hear the cars outside, people's voices, but he was numb to it. He was an empty house. The light was hitting windows while nobody looked out; the wind was hitting the walls, the walls not feeling it.
On the bedside table, the clock said 6:34 in bright red figures.
He heard a noise behind him. A breathing sound.
Scott turned around very slowly, the bed creaking underneath him.
The thing was standing in the doorway, its shoulders rising and falling quite heavily, as though it had been forced to run a long way to find him. It was holding something in its hand.
When he saw that, Scott tried to move - but he couldn't. His forearms were held pressed against his thighs, held tightly in place by bonds he couldn't see.
Panic.
'Number Eighty,' the thing said. Its voice sounded more normal than it had in the earlier dreams. '"You chose me." What does that mean?'