Tooth and Claw (36 page)

And there Carl was, standing in front of the fence and staring towards Lapslie, an old Lee Enfield rifle held in his hands, ready to fire. He was still dressed in the hooded top and dark trousers that he had been wearing when he had tried to stab Lapslie, but he had thrown an anorak over the top. There was no expression on his face.

He moved slowly around the corner of the fence.

Lapslie scrambled up out of the stream and ran along the side of the bank, air whistling in and out of his lungs, muscles burning with fatigue.

He reached the corner of the fence and stopped there, then eased his head around the edge.

The fields and banks fell away in the distance, to where a dilapidated warehouse sat.

There was no sign of Carl Whittley. No sign at all.

It was all falling apart in his hands.

Despite all the planning, and every iota of care he’d put into his preparations and execution, Carl could feel it all sliding away and out of control. All because of one moment of stupid anger.

As he moved quietly through the darkness of the salt marshes, rifle clamped in his shaking hand, making sure that he kept low so that his body was never silhouetted against the horizon and trying to ensure that whatever breeze there was blew away from him and out towards the amorphous area where the salt marsh turned to coast, he knew with bitter certainty that he would never get his family back together now. It didn’t matter whether his mother was humiliated or not; Carl had just blown it all apart with one ill-advised action.

But what else could he have done? His father had discovered his lair. It was all out in the open. The very least Nicholas would have done would be to get psychiatric help for Carl, and then his mother would have got involved because Nicholas could never have managed it by himself, and then everything would have spilled out like guts from a skinned animal.

And now he didn’t know what to do. He had no plan, no vision, no goal. Nothing apart from survival; the most basic drive of all.

He was scurrying along one of the streams that criss-crossed
the fields, carving out their own marshy grooves in the landscape regardless of what the farmers wanted to do with them. He was keeping low, with no aim in mind other than evading capture by that policeman and trying to keep his feet to either side of the water, rather than splashing in it. Small animals scurried away from him as he moved. Something surfaced in the stream, splashed at him, then vanished again. The smell of damp vegetation and rot was even more overwhelming in the darkness than in the daylight.

What had possessed him to take a shot at the man? Panic, that’s what; panic and a sense of frustration that he hadn’t been able to get Lapslie earlier, in his bedroom. If he hadn’t fired, he might have been able to sneak away in the darkness, but seeing the man there, standing by Carl’s front door as if he owned the place, Carl hadn’t been able to stop himself. He’d raised the rifle without thinking, from where he stood in the shadow of a Toyota 4x4 parked at the end of the street, and loosed three shots.

None of which had hit the man, although the other one, the one who had been at the restaurant with Emma Bradbury, had been hit in the chest when he crossed in front of Lapslie.

This was just a fucking disaster.

Carl stopped and sank down on his haunches with his head in his hands, regardless of the dampness of the ground. He could run, but where would he go? What could he do?

He risked a glance over the top of the banks which lined the stream. He could see the streetlights of the estate glowing above the dark line of the boundary fence, and against the lights he thought he could make out the shape of Mark Lapslie, standing like a statue, looking for Carl. Or
sniffing
for him, for God’s sake. He could take a shot now, blow the man’s throat apart and then run, run as far and as fast as he could. He brought the
rifle up, sighting through the groove at the back and along the barrel to the projecting triangle of metal at the far end, but by the time he’d lined it up the man had gone, vanished from Carl’s field of view.

Damn.

With Lapslie following so closely, Carl wouldn’t get far. Now that the policeman had been separated from the flock, Carl would have to switch the chase around, become the hunter rather than the hunted, and take Lapslie out of the equation. Then he could think of his next step.

Without his father. Without his mother.

It was her who had provoked all this. Leaving them. Abandoning them. And with Carl’s father dead, there was no way Carl could ever get the family back together again.

A crushing wave of grief swept over him for all the things he had lost along the way; a chance at a normal life, a family, a father, and now his entire future. He wanted to open his mouth and scream at the skies, but he was too paralysed by the weight of what had happened. The only thing that snapped him out of it was the gleam of absolute truth in the slurry of horror that he swam in.

Eleanor had to die as well.

It made perfect sense. If Carl couldn’t have the perfect family then he wouldn’t have
any
family. He’d killed Nicholas in a fit of rage, but he could kill Eleanor calmly and simply. And then he could move on.

Maybe find another family.

Maybe
start
a family.

The North Sea was somewhere over the horizon; fresh and nostril-tingling. Clouds were massing there in the darkness, blocking out the stars. In the moonlight they looked like shallow grey mountains. Part of him wanted just to make a break for
it; keep going until he hit the waves and then just keep walking out into nowhere, but he had a job to do.

He scrambled one-handed up to the top of the dip and rolled across the lip, ignoring the cloying mud. He crouched, looking around. There was no sign of Lapslie. He could see the dark bulk of the estate looming low on the horizon. If the policeman had any sense then he would head back to his friends, and if Carl moved fast enough then he could intercept him.

Keeping low, he moved across the field, keeping to the furrows where he could but crossing them diagonally when they led him away from the estate. The mud clung to his boots, slowing him down. He could hear the sucking sound as he walked, and hoped it didn’t carry. He tried to keep the barrel of the rifle from touching the ground in case it scooped up mud and became blocked. Then it would be useless.

He was coming up to the corner of the estate now. He didn’t dare look over his shoulder, but he had a sense that Lapslie was behind him, following him. It was like knowing that there was a bird of prey hovering above him, a hawk or a kestrel, sharp gaze fixed on the back of his neck. He slipped around the corner, letting his free hand trail against the wood of the fence. Splinters dug at the pads of his fingers.

It began to rain; fat splashes of water against his forehead and neck, trickling through his hair and tickling his scalp.

Once he was out of sight he sprinted along the fence and then slipped through a gap that he knew about – one of the ways he slipped out of the estate and into the wetlands and back again. He was in the back garden of one of his neighbours; a retired couple. He jumped the fence into the alley that ran between their house and the next and ran to the street. Glancing both ways, he couldn’t see anyone. All attention was focused on events around the corner, where his house was located. He
raced in the opposite direction, back to where the access road ran into the estate, and doubled back around the end of the fence. The salt marshes spread out in front of him, gilded with silver by the moon. One of the banks that divided the fields from the salt marshes ran parallel to the fence, about a hundred yards away. He quickly ran across the fields, jumping from furrow to furrow, to get to it, using the weight of the rifle for balance. His head swung from side to side looking for Lapslie or some other watcher, but there was nobody. He might have been the only person in the world.

When he got to the bank he scrambled up to the top. He kept himself hunched down, just another lump on an already lumpy bulwark of earth that extended to the horizon on either side. His gaze scanned the fields, the raised road and the various buildings on the far side of the bank heading out to the sea a few miles away, and then back towards the estate. There was no sign of Lapslie.

He waited, rifle laid out on the ground. Either the policeman had gone back to the estate or he was still out there, searching for Carl, but Carl had seen his eyes, outside Catherine Charnaud’s house, and again at the press conference, and then again in his bedroom when Carl had tried to kill him. He was a hunter too. He wouldn’t give up.

A gust of wind blew across the bank, bringing with it the smell of the sea and the sound of a distant horn from the Wallasea Island ferry terminal. Carrying with it, perhaps, Carl’s own particular spoor, but it was too late to worry about that now. Carl waited. The lights of a car swept along the raised road, illuminating bushes in bursts of green. Something splashed into a stream, too small to be a man. Raised voices drifted across from the estate. A moth fluttered close by his head. Somewhere above his head an owl swooped over like a
kite, silent wings outstretched, feathers reaching for the air.

Below him, a figure emerged from a culvert and stood up on the far side of the bank from the estate. Its trousers were stained with mud and water and its hair was dishevelled. It straightened up and gazed across the flat terrain towards the buildings that broke the horizon, hand raised to shield its eyes from the moonlight. It was Lapslie.

Carl reached down silently and picked the rifle up from the ground. He’d fired three shots already, which meant he had seven left. He raised the rifle to his shoulder and sighted along the barrel, towards Lapslie’s head. Everything else faded away into darkness; his vision was just a tunnel with his eye at one end and Lapslie’s face at the other. The policeman turned slowly, scanning the horizon. Carl could see him in profile now. When he pulled the trigger the bullet would speed directly towards Lapslie’s right temple, transit through his right frontal lobe and sinuses and exit somewhere around his left cheek.

His right index finger curled around the trigger. Just a small amount of pressure; that’s all it would take.

He tightened his grip slightly.

Lapslie vanished from his narrowed field of vision. Too late, the rifle jerked in his hand. He saw a divot of earth fly up as the bullet ploughed uselessly into the ground. Raising his head from the sights, he tried to locate the policeman. He seemed to have fallen, foot caught in a pothole. He’d been trying to lever himself up but the shot had startled him. He was rolling over the ground now towards one of the streams that meandered across the field. Before Carl could bring the rifle up again, Lapslie had rolled over the edge and into the stream.

Carl cursed. He’d missed his chance, and the policeman knew he was being tracked now. He glanced back over his shoulder, towards the estate. Was it his imagination, or had things gone
quiet there, shocked by the gunfire? Desperately he tried to trace the direction of the stream across the field. It headed towards the buildings on the horizon. Lapslie would be making his way along the stream towards them, looking for shelter; the hunter become the prey.

Carl set out in pursuit.

He headed directly across the corrugated field towards the buildings, but in the darkness he kept catching his feet on the tops of the furrows and stumbling, taking his eyes off the stream so he might miss the moment when Lapslie left its safety. After a few minutes he changed tack and ran along the furrows, towards the raised road. He reached it next to an industrial estate storing what looked like piles of sleepers for railway tracks. He knew, from having lived in the area for so long, and from his long walks out in the wetlands, that the road wasn’t a thoroughfare, just a hangover from the time when there had been more of a community there, a village that hadn’t really died but just faded away to invisibility. He sprinted along the road to where he estimated that the stream passed under it, passing a couple of dilapidated bungalows and a small church built out of dark grey stone which squatted in a small churchyard complete with leaning headstones. It looked almost medieval. It probably was; Carl had never been inside. A sign by the wooden lychgate said that the church was only open on Tuesdays and every fourth Sunday. In this area of Essex the grace of God was in short supply.

A few yards away was a barn-like structure of corrugated sheet metal. The doors were gaping open, and there was nothing inside but scatterings of hay and some rusty farm machinery which was painted in greens and reds, like fairground equipment. Carl jumped down off the road and into the field, straddling the stream at the point where it narrowed down to enter the culvert that would take it beneath the road.

No sign of Lapslie.

Somewhere in the distance he could hear the buzzing of a helicopter. Had the police called one out to look for him? It wouldn’t do them any good; he knew a thousand places to hide between there and the sea. He could outlast them, once he had got Lapslie out of the way, and then, when the hunt had died down, he could come back for his mother.

He gazed wildly around. There was nowhere else that Lapslie could have gone. Nowhere … except the barn. The policeman must have climbed up the side of the road while Carl’s attention was distracted.

He approached the barn slowly, cautiously. The moonlight pushed a few forlorn yards inside the doors and then petered out into cobwebby darkness, broken only by myriad rays of moonlight penetrating through rust holes and cracks in the corrugated metal structure. Dust motes and small insects, gnats or mosquitoes, circled in the silvery spotlights. He could smell mould, and beneath that a faint, unpleasantly rotten trace of old diesel.

He’d intended to call out something like ‘Make this easy on yourself!’, or ‘Come out where I can see you!’ but instead he heard the words ‘Is it true? Can you really smell where I’ve been?’ coming from his lips. They hung in the air, disturbing the paths of the insects and the dust, mocking him with their banality, their stupidity.