Free Pig Island by Mo Hayder Page A

and higher into the trees.
    “OK,” I muttered, thinking of the maintenance shed I’d passed the previous morning. “This, dear Father in heaven, is why you invented wire-cutters.”
     
     
    “Wait!”
    I’d found the cutters in the shed and was half-way back to the gate when I heard the voice. I halted in my tracks, heart sinking.
    “I said wait ! What do you think you’re doing?”
    I turned, shoving the cutters into my pocket. Blake was running up the path behind me, flushed and puffing, an expression of outrage on his face. “What in—in heaven’s name do you think you’re doing?”
    “I’m having a look round.”
    “No! You do not just ”have a look round“ on Cuagach. It’s against the rules.” He caught up to me, and stood, breathing hard and shaking his head. He was wearing a sports jacket over a long purple T-shirt, his naked feet shoved hurriedly into unlaced trainers. “You can’t leave the community. Do you understand?” He switched on a pen torch and shone it into my face, then on to my rucksack, then up the path. “Where were you going?”
    “Over there,” I said amiably. “Was just on my way to speak to Dove.”
    “No, no, no , Joe!” He snatched at my sleeve, holding it between thumb and forefinger to stop me moving. “Oh, no. You can’t just go and speak to him . It’s not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.”
    I stared at the hand on my sleeve. “Well, you know,” I said slowly, the instinct to thump him twitching briefly in my chest, “maybe you’re right—maybe it isn’t a great idea. But I’m going to do it anyway.” I pulled my arm out of his grip and began to walk away.
    “No!” he cried, starting to run again. I was going fast but he managed to insert himself on the path in front of me, holding out his arms and trotting backwards, trying to prevent me going any further. “Over my dead body.”
    I stopped and looked down at his scrawny legs, his weird, squashed skull. He weighed about half what I did. I shook my head, amused. “You’re not really saying you want to fight me?”
    “Don’t laugh at me,” he said savagely. “Don’t you dare laugh, boy. If I can’t fight you then the others will. They’d be here in minutes.”
    “Well, that sounds like a deal-breaker. It sounds like you don’t want me to do your publicity after all.”
    He paused and bit his lip. We regarded each other in silence, and after a few moments, without speaking, I pushed past him and continued up the path. At first I thought he was going to let me go. Then I heard his footsteps behind, running to catch up. I stopped.
    ‘ OK ,“ he said, panting hard. ”OK. I’ll take you. But this path ends at the gorge, and that’s where we stop.“
    “The gorge?”
    “Yes. It’s impassable, totally impassable—especially with a storm coming.” Almost on cue the moon went behind a cloud, dropping us into darkness. “See?” he said, switching on the torch and shining it on his own face, so he looked like a Hallowe’en pumpkin. “I told you. There’s a storm coming.”
    “What can we see from the gorge?”
    He shot his eyes up to the sky to where the tendrils of cloud were splitting like mercury, running away in fragments across the moon. “If this moon holds,” he said, shadows flitting across his face, “you’ll see everything. Everything you need to see.”
     
     
    I continued on to the gate while Blake went back to the cottage for the keys. When he came trotting back he was dressed in jeans and a turtleneck, a pair of binoculars slung round his neck. You could tell he was still pissed off with me. He unlocked the gates without a word and for a while we walked in moody silence, through the gates and up the path, cresting the cliff in the darkness, the only sound our footsteps and the wind stirring the branches around us. Clouds flitted across the moon, sending huge animal-sized shadows scuttling out of the trees, across the path under our feet, and disappearing back