The Night Hunter Read Online Free PDF Page A

Prius. She slides easily in her own blood. She is no real weight, her body sags as if it has no strength to hold itself together. She is nacreous in the beam of the headlights. Then a slight change to the colour of her skin reflects that the traffic light has changed to green again. It makes her look dead already.
    We lower her on to the ground. He is on his knees holding her neck as if it is the most precious thing in the world. I press on her chest and the palms of my hands fall through her ribcage like a stone through a wet paper bag. There is no compression here, there is no structure left in her ribcage. I sit back on my hunkers.
    ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.
    I place my fingers on her carotid. Nothing. Not even the faintest flutter. I look at him and shake my head. He looks down at her face, caressing her with his eyes. But his hands are still clamped tight. He is holding on, even though she has let go. I reach over and pull his fingers free. Her head rolls a little, comfortable in the pillow of my jumper.
    He looks up at the rock face above us, working out where she came from; it doesn’t make sense. We sit there for a minute. I can hear the munching of sheep down in the glen, the odd bleat. Somehow it helps to know that we are not alone out here.
    I pull the hair from her face. She looks my age. Her lips are bloodied. I smooth the matted hair which spikes across her cheek. She smells of decay already. I look at her face; it is barely human but … I feel I know her. She is a mass of blood and swelling. Mentally I fill in her features, in my mind she is smiling. I hear the voice of Avril, our police liaison officer, in my head. I hear her asking my mother if she knows her, asking if Sophie might have known her. Avril slipping the picture to me across the dining room table, keeping her fingertip on the photograph. I remember thinking what nice nails she had for a cop, French manicure or Shellac.
    The face on that photograph is lying in front of me now.

    The police arrive in a flurry of flashing blue neon. Sitting in the back of their car, I listen to the radio chatter in the night air. It is getting cold now; my jumper remains under the head of the woman lying on the road, a woman I think is Lorna Lennox.
    The car stinks of vomit and Dettol so I get out and close the door. Two officers stop their conversation. The older one with chubby grandpa cheeks walks towards me, slapping the other cheerily on the back as he passes. Even I think it strange that a man should be happy in a situation like this.
    ‘Miss McCulloch? Elvira?’
    ‘I think we’ve established that.’ What is it with cops and their uncanny ability to state the friggin’ obvious?
    ‘PC McAndrew. And you were driving …’
    ‘To Ardno, up beyond St Catherine’s.’
    ‘Why? Bit late to be out and about.’
    ‘Going back to work. I’m a nanny, paid companion, child minder, call it what you like.’ I give him the address and the phone number. Then the address of Mum’s house. And the address of my flat in Glasgow. Grandpa Cop looks at me. It’s complicated.
    He writes slowly, I can almost see his brain trying to spell without him moving his lips.
    ‘And what did you see? Did you see the woman in the road?’
    ‘No. I saw a man in the road. Panicking. I saw the woman on the bonnet of his car. At first I thought he might have hit a deer, then I got closer.’ I look across at the driver. His name is David. I know that he is thirty-six. Another cop is walking him up and down the grass verge to calm him. He has been sick twice already and he isn’t finished yet.
    ‘Brave. Stopping in the middle of nowhere like that. At night, lady on her own.’
    ‘The light was red.’ I stare him down. He is in his fifties and is still on traffic patrol or sheep patrol or whatever it is they call themselves up here, so I judge that he is not attending Mensa meetings on his night off. My story seems to be confusing him. ‘I am taking a year out of uni, I’m