FROM THE BENCH at the edge of the green, the man watches the gate bang shut, the woman and child disappear into the furrowed field beyond. Standing in the doorway of the pub, the chef looks over at him and raises a hand, but she frowns slightly, as if she can’t quite place him. He flashes a reassuring smile, and the chef smiles back. The trace of suspicion is gone, just like that. Villages like this, they always clock an outsider, but the injured man has taken steps to appear as if he ought to belong, and that’s the most important thing. Dressed in a tweed jacket and walking boots, he knows that he looks the epitome of a middle-class, higher-income-bracket, older man, taking a rest after a morning stroll. The chef steps inside and shuts the pub door, no doubt forgetting she even saw him, her mind moving on to the next thing. She can’t have guessed that the man has taken the jacket and boots he is wearing from the unlocked boot room of a large house ten miles south, that he’s been walking the canal path, searching for the boat he knows was, until recently, moored at a wharf near York. She can’t have guessed that the flat cap covers up an almost circular injury on the back of the man’s head, or that his hands bear small wounds where he ripped out his drip.

The man leaves the bench and makes a slow circuit of the village green, standing for a while to admire the ducks on the pond. No one is watching him as far as he can tell, but it’s worth a little stroll around to make sure, if there are curtain-twitchers in the vicinity, that he isn’t considered suspicious. After a minute or so, he climbs into his stolen car and sets off at a leisurely pace in the direction of the Ripon terminal, knowing he’ll have more than enough time to change both his vehicle and his appearance before Nessie has traveled even halfway there.

CHAPTER

45

NOW

Joanna

Thursday, December 27

JOANNA WAS AWOKEN by the soft boing of her email alert.

Ruby had turned her phone on, and the system had sent her the location. She knew there was a time lag, but when she saw exactly when the phone had been turned on, she swore. It was forty-eight hours ago; time she’d spent listening in to the police radios and conducting her own ground searches of local wooded areas, using the hospital as a midpoint. There had been no sign of the fugitive. She’d been crossing her fingers that he’d be found dead in a ditch, but after what she’d seen, she knew better than to underestimate him. Jo scrambled out of bed and into the car.