Epstein was puzzled. ‘But I received nothing from you.
‘That’s because I burned it all, every last scrap of paper,’ she said. ‘It killed my daughters, and it killed my fool of a husband. I wanted no more part of it. I did what he told me to do. I stayed quiet, and I lived.’
Now he was certain. ‘He was on his way to New York,’ said Epstein. ‘He was bringing Malphas to me.’
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Wildon, this empty woman, this shell of grief, brittle as the Lladró figures that stared down from her shelves. ‘And I didn’t care. My husband didn’t understand. He never understood.’
‘Understood what, Mrs Wildon?’
Mrs Wildon stood. Their meeting was over.
‘That it wouldn’t bring them back,’ she said, ‘that it wouldn’t bring my little girls back to me. You’ll have to excuse me now, but I have a plane to catch. I’d like you to get out of my home.’
Malphas. I found that I had written the name on the open page of the Gazetteer.
‘Malphas was the passenger on the plane,’ said Epstein. ‘Ampell went missing on the same day as Wildon. He owned a Piper Cheyenne aircraft, which that week was based at a small private airfield just north of Chicoutimi. The plane has never been found, and Ampell never filed a flight plan. They didn’t want to draw attention to themselves, or their cargo. They didn’t want anyone to suspect, but Wildon had to tell his wife. He wanted her to know that he’d succeeded in finding this man, except she didn’t care. She blamed her husband for what had happened to their children: Malphas was just the instrument.
‘And Malphas survived the crash, Mr Parker. That’s why there were no bodies in the wreckage. He removed them, or perhaps they survived too, and he killed them and disposed of their remains.’
‘But he left the list, and the money,’ I said ‘The money might not have been important to him, but that list was. If he survived, and was strong enough to kill anyone else who had lived, why did he leave the list where it could be found?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Epstein, ‘but it’s another reason to be careful in those woods.’
‘You don’t believe that he’s still out there?’
‘He had been discovered, Mr Parker. They hide themselves away, these creatures, especially when they’re under threat. Those woods are vast. They can conceal an aircraft, and so they can conceal a man. If he’s alive, where else would he be?’
46
Wolfe’s Folly was silent as night fell, and the only movement came from the shifting of the shadows thrown by the trees upon it, or so it appeared until one small shadow separated itself from the rest, moving against the direction of the wind. The crow circled, cawing hoarsely, then resumed its perch with its brethren.
The passenger had no memory of his original name, and little understanding of his own nature. The plane crash, which he had caused by breaking the arms of his seat, freeing him to attack the pilot and co-pilot, had left him with significant injuries to the brain. He had lost the capacity of speech, and he was in constant pain. He retained virtually nothing of his past beyond fragments: scattered recollections of being hunted, and an awareness of the necessity of hiding himself, instincts that he had continued to follow ever since the crash.
And he remembered, too, that he was very good at killing, and killing was his purpose. The co-pilot did not survive the crash, but the pilot did, and the passenger had stared at his face, and one of those shards of memory had glittered in the darkness. This man had hunted him, and therefore the pain in the passenger’s head was his fault.
The passenger had pushed his thumbs into the pilot’s eyes and kept pushing until the man ceased moving.
He stayed in the wreckage for a number of days, feeding on the candy bars and potato chips that he found in the co-pilot’s bag, and drinking bottled water. The pain in his head was so terrible that he would black out for hours. Some of his ribs were broken, and they hurt whenever he moved. His right ankle would not support his weight at first, but in time it healed, although imperfectly, so that he now walked with a slight limp.
The bodies in the plane began to stink. He pulled them from the wreckage and dumped them in the woods, but he could still