I washed my clothes in the basin, using a cracked old bar of soap, and hung them to dry, and then wandered back into the bedroom, a towel wrapped around my waist. Anne stood there in the room, flanked by her two goons. She looked me up and down.
"Nice," she said slowly. I was flattered for a second, but then the reality of her and this came back to me.
"Kiddie-fiddler," I said back. Snake Eyes grinned and the other guy chuckled. Anne's eyes narrowed.
"Give me your phone and your watch," she said shortly. "And just try to resist. Please."
"Take them," I pointed to where they lay on the bed. "The phone died a couple of hours ago anyway." I shrugged.
Anne nodded to one of her goons, and he pocketed the items.
"Where are your clothes?" she asked.
"In the bathroom."
"Check them," she told Snake Eyes. He grunted and stalked into the bathroom.
"They're all soaking wet," he called out.
"Fine," said Anne, and she turned on her heel and left. The goons glared at me intimidatingly, so I gave them the finger. I wasn't about to let them intimidate me too much. I figured that Anne would want me in one piece at the end of all of this, so there was a limit to what they could do to me.
Boy, was I wrong.
I went back into the bathroom and hung the clothes up again. Snake Eyes had dumped them on the floor, of course. I switched all the lights off and crawled into bed, and despite all the drama of the day and the dragging concern that I wasn't going to enjoy the next few days, I fell asleep within minutes.
Angus
Five hundred metres. That's how far apart Oliver and I could go before our strange connection fizzled out to a vague awareness the other's presence. Barriers didn't seem to affect it at all.
That night while Rebecca slept, I had taken Oliver to the isolated farm where I'd killed James Colborne. I'd forgotten to dispose of his corpse in all the manic violence that had erupted in the aftermath of his kidnap of Rebecca. I knew that the old tenant of the farm was more than half blind and half deaf, but I had no opportunity to assess his sense of smell, and I could not guarantee that he wouldn't smell rotting flesh in the outbuildings a few hundred metres from his house.
Fortunately it was too early in the year for the weather to have improved enough to allow much decomposition, and James' carcass was half frozen and hardly reeked at all. I wrapped it in a couple of old feed bags and carried it outside to my local unofficial cemetery. I had had dug a few extra circular plots during the summer last year, deep enough to take a body or two as well as a tree on top of it all. I even had a small selection of young trees in their bags standing nearby for occasions such as these. Doing my bit for the environment, you could say. I had to break a few bones to fit James in the hole, but he slotted in nicely after a few tries, and was easily covered with several spades of earth and a young apple tree.