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JIM
I woke up with my head in a vice, mouth dried out and the urge to vomit, which turned out to be
unproductive. I was still in my clothes.
Woodley picked me up at quarter past seven. It was still dark, and freezing cold. Woodley had the
heaters in the car turned up full, pumping warm air around. I’d just finished fumbling with the seat
belt when he tapped the dashboard with the flat of his hand. ‘Ready, boss?’ he said.
‘Are you going to put the address in the satnav then?’ I asked. ‘Or will we guess how to get there?’
He got going. Tucked into the footwell by my feet was a newspaper. I picked it up. The first page
headline had moved on from Ben Finch:
SUPER STORM SANDY
Hurricane heads towards New York
Sixty million Americans could be affected by high winds, rain and flooding as super storm expected to make landfall on the East
Coast on Tuesday.
I flicked through, found him on page four:
HIT A WALL?
Police investigating missing Benedict Finch still ‘pursuing multiple lines of inquiry’.
I didn’t bother to read on. It wasn’t good, but at least it wasn’t nothing, and they didn’t have news
of the arrest yet. The blog was bad, negative publicity was bad, but no publicity was worse.
I dropped the paper back into the footwell.
It was dark and shiny wet on the road, taillights ahead of us blurring when the wipers swiped
intermittently. We left the motorway and were immediately on country roads which twisted and turned
so that oncoming headlights loomed out of nowhere, blindingly, and forced us into the side where our
wheels hit deep puddles, sending spray clattering up onto the windows.
As dawn broke, the landscape around us began to emerge: low rounded hills in washes of black ink
against a blue-black sky. The sky finally lightened as we made a steep descent into Pewsey Vale,
showing us that it lay flat and wide below us, a dense white mist lingering at its lowest points so that
it resembled an inland lake. It was a freezing mist and once we were down into the valley it settled
firmly around us so that our headlights were muted and reflected back at us in the whiteness.
As we got closer to the cottage, the lanes got narrower, and the mist thicker still until we could see
only yards ahead, and the car decelerated until we were crawling. Tall, dense hedges reared up
oppressively on either side of us, and Woodley had to drive carefully to avoid the potholed verges.
We pulled into a lay-by that was about half a mile from the cottage according to the satnav. We
were too early to call on Nicky Forbes. It was only 8.30 and we needed to kill a bit of time. Fraser
didn’t want her complaining that we were harassing her.
I got out of the car, and lit a cigarette. I went to stand beside Woodley’s window. He wound it
down a touch.
‘Did you notice if we passed any houses on the way here?’ I asked.
‘Closest one I saw was about half a mile down the road.’
‘Same here.’
I felt uneasy. The mist was impenetrable, limitless and disorientating, and inhabited by a deep cold