Eventually they got me in the back, and Lance fired me on the spot. Then he fired me again the next day when I woke up and didn’t fucking remember it happening.
Sigurdsson blinked himself awake. A sickly morning sun leered in through a gap in the window blinds, shrouded in dark clouds and a spiteful rain that had thickened but still seemed to be only a portent of the storm to come. He had become used to this routine: waking up naturally after a fitful sleep, around ten minutes before the alarm clock on his phone was due to go off. Sure enough, when he scrabbled on the bedside table for the device, it confirmed that the time was 06:48 (his obsessive brain didn’t allow him to round it to ‘quarter to’ or ‘ten to’ – facts were important).
He switched off the alarm and forced himself up and out of bed, wiping sleep from his eyes as he began to assemble the day’s plan in his mind. He wanted to meet the pathologist to go through the conclusions he’d drawn from the post-mortem examination of Schultz’s body. They needed to interview Zheng, who had been missing from the previous night’s congregation. And they ought to talk to the ‘April’ that Penman had mentioned last night – Schultz’s girlfriend, presumably?
He glanced around the threadbare room that would be his home until the case was solved. His travel bag still rested in the middle of the floor, an affront to the order and precision that his brain demanded. Unpacking it efficiently, he ironed a fresh shirt for the day ahead before changing into his running gear. At 07:24 he was ready to go out for a jog before Mason picked him up, and before the weather worsened any further. He locked the door behind him and walked down the corridor, across the worn burgundy carpet and past the peeling wallpaper to the lift once again, and pushed the call button.
The doors creaked open above a sheer drop into blackness.
Jesus, that was dangerous. He would need to report it. He found the stairs and hurried down to find a portly middle-aged man on reception, writing in an old-fashioned ledger of some kind. Perhaps this was the husband of the cadaverous woman who had welcomed him the previous evening? He looked up as Sigurdsson approached.
‘Your lift is out of order,’ Sigurdsson told him. ‘I’ve just nearly fallen down the open shaft. You need to get it fixed urgently.’
‘Oh dear… certainly sir. I will get that seen to as soon as possible. We’ve had a lot of problems with the lift lately. The whole place is just… falling apart.’ His accompanying gesture might have referred to the entire island. His eyes were sad and watery, as if lamenting Salvation’s plight.
Sigurdsson was happy to leave the mournful place and step outside, despite the chill wind that immediately tore at his exposed legs and arms as he undertook his stretching routine on the pavement. He began to trot along the promenade, noticing immediately the lack of any signs of life, even at this relatively late hour of the morning. No one seemed to be going to work, or out like him for some early exercise. Many of the shops still seemed to be closed, some of them boarded up. There didn’t even seem to be any seagulls wheeling overhead. Just the rabbits, gathered in despondent clusters, their heads close together like conspirators.
He saw a group of them beneath a bench and ran towards them to take a closer look, but they scurried immediately towards the shadows of the nearby alleyways. They were thin, anaemic-looking creatures. He thought about their lives, lived in quivering terror. He thought about his own fears, his own fixations. He thought about myxomatosis, swollen eyes clogged with tumours. Disease, pestilence. Inevitable death.
His brother, Marcus. A car thundering forwards like an unstoppable juggernaut, smashing through flesh and bone.
A rabbit caught in the headlights.
He shook his head and concentrated on his footfalls, on his breathing. A regular motion, pounding against the grubby pavement, pounding in his chest. He was heading west, the sun an ailing blob of bilious light behind him as his feet splashed through puddles and amongst the old newspapers and other detritus that blew along the walkway. There was still no sign of another soul. It was as though the entire island was closed down, abandoned, like a diseased village that had been placed under quarantine. As though the island itself was a cancerous, dying thing. The mist that hung around it seemed more and more like a toxic pall, driving the island’s inhabitants indoors, each lungful slowly poisoning him.
Maybe this was why Mason was so angry; she was like the sheriff of a ghost town.
As if to emphasise this point, the houses to his right gave way to a long chain-link fence, broken and fallen down in places. Beyond it was a patch of weed-choked ground covered in rubbish and discarded beer cans, and then beyond that, the sad spectre of an amusement park. The Ferris wheel that he had seen from the boat loomed above the derelict scene like a sombre monument.
He stopped running, approaching the fence, squinting through the rain and fog.
There were rabbits everywhere. The ground was pocked with holes like cavities in rotten teeth, and hundreds of the creatures squatted near these entrances, ears and noses twitching as they sniffed at piles of garbage or chewed at forlorn clumps of grass. He wondered how many more of them were beneath the ground, the ones not hungry enough to be driven out into the rain. Maybe the big, strong ones sent their emaciated cousins out to forage for them. Maybe there was a gigantic, monstrous King Bunny lurking somewhere deep within the bowels of the island.
Sigurdsson laughed at the nonsense of his racing thoughts, but the noise seemed alien in this dismal corner, and it died on his lips. This place was getting to him, somehow.
He decided to head back to the hotel.
The reception area was deserted as he passed through and ascended the stairs. After showering (turning it as hot as he could make it, trying not to think about flesh being boiled from rabbit bones), he changed into one of his nondescript work outfits and headed back downstairs. The old man on reception still wasn’t there. A beeping horn sounded outside and he found Mason in an idling squad car, wipers waving maniacally as if trying to scare the rain away. Mitchell wasn’t with her this time, so Sigurdsson slid into the front passenger seat, feeling a strange relief at finally seeing another human being.
‘Morning,’ he said. She grunted a response, peering through the rain that had worsened into a deluge, hammering against the windscreen.
‘So where are we heading?’ he persevered.
‘The station, of course.’
‘I thought we might go to the morgue first, so I can talk to the pathologist.’
She started to reply but was interrupted by the hiss of the radio.
‘Chief?’ crackled a voice through the static.
‘Yep, I’m here,’ she replied. ‘Go on Mitchell.’
‘You were right, Adams turned up. But the ferry isn’t running; nothing is getting off the island because the storm is about to hit. He was furious about missing his flight.’ Sigurdsson realised it was the first time he had heard Mitchell’s voice.
Mason smiled. ‘Good. He seems too keen to get away if you ask me.’
‘Shall I bring him in?’
‘No, there’s no point yet – we know where he’s staying. I’ll see you back at the station;