the pain in his joints and a dampness in his left shoe. The leather was coming away from the sole. He hadn’t noticed it before. A couple of stitches would see it repaired, though. He lived frugally, mostly out of habit but also to ensure that his wife could spend the rest of her days in this place. He hadn’t wasted a dime of the money from the plane, although the thought of it never failed to cause his stomach to tighten. Years later, he was still awaiting the hand upon his shoulder, or the knock on the door, and the voice of authority, flanked by uniforms, telling him that they wanted to talk to him about an airplane . . .
He seemed to be the only visitor that afternoon. He supposed that the state of the roads had kept a lot of people at home, and he passed patients napping, or watching TV, or simply staring out of the windows. There was no conversation. It had the silence of a cloister. There was a separate secure wing, accessed by a keypad beside the doors, for those who were more troubled than the rest, more likely to wander when they got confused or frightened. His wife had been there for a couple of years, but as the Parkinson’s got worse her capacity for roaming was reduced, and now she was not even able to leave her bed without assistance. In a way, he was happier that she was in the general area: the secure wing, for all its comforts, felt too much like a prison.
The door to his wife’s room was slightly ajar. He knocked gently upon it before entering, even though he had been told that she was sleeping. He was more conscious now than ever before of maintaining her privacy and her dignity. He knew the distress that a sudden invasion of her space could cause her, particularly if she was having one of her bad days when she failed to recognize him at all.
His wife’s eyes were closed when he entered, her face turned to the door. He noticed that the room was cold, which surprised him. They were very careful about ensuring that the patients did not get too cold in winter or too warm in summer. The main windows were kept locked and could only be opened with special keys, mostly to prevent the more disturbed patients from climbing out and injuring themselves, or running away. The smaller top windows could be opened slightly to let some air in, but Harlan could see that they were all sealed shut.
He stepped further into the room, and the door slammed behind him. It was only then that he smelled the man. When Harlan turned he was standing against the wall, smiling a dead smile, the swollen purple goiter at his throat like a huge blood blister waiting to burst.
‘Take a seat, Mr Vetters,’ he said. ‘It’s time we had a talk.’
It was strange, but now that the worst had happened, Harlan found he was not afraid. Even as he hoped that it might not be true, he had always known that someone would come, and sometimes, in those dark dreams, a man had appeared on the periphery of the pursuit, his profile deformed by his own obesity and a terrible growth that distorted his already bloated neck. This was the form that vengeance would take when it came.
But Harlan was not about to confess, not unless he was given no other option. He assumed the role that he had always determined he would play if this moment came: the innocent. He had practiced it well. He could not have said why, but he believed it was important that this man did not discover the location of the airplane in the Great North Woods, and not just because of the money that Harlan and Paul had taken. The ones who had come looking for it over the years – because, once he and Paul had come to understand their purpose, they grew better at spotting them, better at recognizing them from the tales told by bemused guides – bore no resemblance to one another: some, like Darina Flores, were beautiful and some, like this man, were profoundly ugly. Some looked like businessmen or schoolteachers, others like hunters and killers, but what they all had in common was a sense that they meant no good for God or man. If they wanted something from that plane (and Harlan had