Page 34 of The Man Made of Smoke

“We can go to my study,” he says quietly.

It’s a study in the sense that John’s a police officer. There’s still some of the right furniture, but its role is clearly very different these days. It’s just the smallest room in a three-bed house. There’s a desk along one wall, but the rest of the room is taken up by a packed clothing rail and cardboard boxes, and the air smells musty and old. There’s a computer and a mess of paperwork on the desk. Space enough for two chairs. Old habits die hard; John waits for Field to sit down in one seat before taking the other.

“Talk to me, Darren,” John says.

Field stares at the floor, rubbing his hands together.

“Are you police?”

“Why?”

“Because it matters.”

“Have you been you expecting—?”

Field looks up suddenly, his expression deadly serious. The meaning there is clear. This conversation is going nowhere until he gets an answer to the question he just asked.

“No,” John says. “I’m not police.”

“Who are you then?”

“I’m the man who found her body.”

Field flinches at that.

John leans forward.

“You know who I’m talking about, don’t you?”

Field looks down again and then nods miserably. The tears the man was suppressing at the front door are coming now. His face is out of sight, but his shoulders are beginning to shake, and John glances at the closed door. The stairs had creaked as they made their way up, and he hasn’t heard anything since, so Field’s wife is probably out of earshot. But if Field starts sobbing loudly enough then she might come up.

“It’s okay, Darren. Just talk to me.”

“I don’t know what to say.”

“Start at the beginning.”

Field doesn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he seems to gather himself together and he takes a deep breath. For some reason, it reminds John of a man crossing himself.

“It was dark,” Field says. “And it was cold.”

Ten

It was dark, and it was cold.

That was all he was aware of to begin with, and both those realizations came gradually. He was drifting awake, and for a few seconds he found it hard to distinguish between reality and the unconsciousness he was emerging from. Dark and cold. What else? His body was juddering slightly, and a quiet rattling noise filled the air.

Where am I?

All he could tell was that he was horizontal and in motion. When he tried to move his arms and legs, they were held in place. There was something restraining him. He was strapped down on a gurney of some kind, and even his head wouldn’t turn; all he could do was flick his eyes from side to side. The darkness and the shuddering movement of the trolley beneath him made the world hard to make sense of. He caught flashes of what looked like foliage, and there was a dusting of stars above him. The night sky. So he was outside somewhere.

Had there been an accident?

Was he being taken to hospital?

He was moving feetfirst. While he couldn’t tilt his head back to look, he was aware of a presence just behind him, pushing the trolley along.He could hear a ragged breathing sound, as though they were struggling with the effort.

A doctor perhaps.

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