Instinct made me crouch, squatting on my haunches, allowing the air to go still so I could listen. Sure enough, as the silence settled around me, I heard a low panting to my right. It sounded like a dog, biding its time.
I stayed down, figured no one would be looking for me at ground level. My eyes grew a little more used to the dark, silvery light from the moon occasionally appearing between the clouds. I didn’t move until I spotted him, a dark shadow, huddled against a clump of bushes. I calmed my heart rate by breathing deep and waited for my moment.
When the moon ducked behind a cloud, I launched myself. I hit him at waist height, fastening both of my arms around his torso and using the whole of my body weight to knock him off his feet. We slid down the slope together, him desperately trying to stay upright, me pushing for horizontal momentum.
I won.
We crashed through bushes, through small clear patches of mud and grass. Halfway down his legs finally gave up the fight and we rolled the last half together, getting bashed by rocks, discarded glass bottles and broken branches. We didn’t stop until we reached the path at the bottom, the one next to the stream. The gravel hurt my knees as I threw myself on top of him, eager to maintain my advantage.
‘What the fuck did you run for?’ I shouted. Pissed off, because I’d caught my cheek against something on the way down and it hurt like hell.
I could barely make him out. All I knew was I was sitting on his belly and his legs were behind me.
‘Bitch.’ He didn’t shout, just said the word, like it was a quiet statement of fact. His tone made me madder, and I punched him right in the chest, dead centre, just below the solar plexus – took the wind right out of him.
He tried to throw me off, and I had to ride him like a bucking bronco. I had his arms pinned and his coordination sucked. He was fatter than he’d looked running up the hill.
‘Don’t talk to me like that,’ I said, when he’d got his breath back. ‘I wasn’t rude to you.’
‘Jesus, lady. What’s your problem?’
I don’t know whether the moon came out at that moment, or my eyes had become still more accustomed to the dark, or whether I had a moment of psychic illumination, but I realized something. The guy I was sat on didn’t have porcupine-pierced lips. This guy was old and smelled of piss and Special Brew. This wasn’t the guy I’d chased through the streets of Woodhouse.
This guy wasn’t Brownie.
I scrambled to my feet, brushed down my trousers like I could rub off the smell, the dirt, the bits of leaves and God knows what I had stuck to me.
‘What you doing hiding out in the bushes, you freaking weirdo?’
‘Can’t a man take a leak without …’ He tried to sit up, but he lacked the coordination skills required for the task.
Please let his trousers be up, I thought, praying now for the moon to duck back behind its cloud. Pitch-black was preferable to the reality I was facing. But the moon resolutely ignored my pleas. Instead it seemed to brighten, illuminating the man on the ground in front of me.
He was dressed against the cold, some awful stinking anorak tied round his middle with what looked like a piece of rope. He had a woollen hat on his head. His breathing was shallow and fast, and an awful thought struck me. What if I’d caused him to have a heart attack? He didn’t look in the best of health. Guilt flooded my system. I held out my hand and tried to pull him to his feet.
‘Sorry. I thought you were someone else.’
He got as far as his knees and put a hand on the ground to steady himself. He bent over, almost doubled up and I braced myself for his collapse. I’d be charged with murder. I deserved nothing less.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve got a cigarette?’ he wheezed.
‘’Course.’ I dug out my packet of Golden Virginia. ‘Help yourself. Here, let me make one for you.’
As he pushed himself upright, I tried to roll him a fag. My hands shook, and my mouth was so dry I could hardly summon up the spit to seal the paper, but I managed to produce a fat one. He took a seat on a fallen tree trunk and reached for the cigarette.
‘Light?’
‘Yeah, sure.’ I handed him my lighter and watched him attempt to spark it into action three or four times. When the burst of flame finally came it illuminated his face for a brief second, so that I could see the ruddiness of his skin and the weather-beaten lines that zig-zagged across his forehead. I said nothing as he slipped my lighter into his pocket.
‘Could have killed me,’ he said.
I didn’t tell him the thought had already occurred to me. I didn’t say it because I knew there was still time.
‘Minding me own business, nice and quiet like.’
‘I am so sorry.’
‘Crashing through the bushes …’
‘Do you think you should go to hospital?’ I didn’t like the way he was breathing. His chest rattled like someone shaking a tube of Smarties. It didn’t help when he inhaled a long, deep lungful of smoke.
‘A wild animal.’ He coughed and spat onto the ground.
‘I’ve got a phone.’ I patted my pockets. What had I done with my phone?
‘Nearly finished me off.’
‘I could ring an ambulance.’ Please don’t make me ring the police, I found myself thinking, and cursed my own selfishness. I couldn’t leave him here.
‘Me leg might be broken.’
‘Lee?’ Jo’s voice floated down across the valley, filling me with relief. She’d know what to do. ‘Lee?’
‘Jo.’ I cupped my hands around my mouth to make my voice carry. I tried to think what directions I could give. ‘Down. Down here.’
The man stood up. ‘Who’s that?’
He looked terrified. The sounds of Jo crashing through the undergrowth didn’t help. I could hear her swearing as she stumbled down the hill.
‘Got the price of a cup of tea?’ he asked. ‘Something for the shock.’
‘’Course.’ I rooted around in my jeans pockets, emptying all the cash I had. I handed him a fistful of loose change and a couple of scrunched-up notes as Jo appeared, a small twig caught in her bleached blonde fringe.
‘What happened?’ asked Jo, panting like a steam train. She frowned at the old fella. ‘Where’s Brownie?’
‘I’ve just attacked this poor man.’ They say confession is good for the soul. For me, it just meant another flood of curdled guilt. ‘Thought he was Brownie.’
‘Could have killed me,’ the man said, for the second time. ‘My time of life.’
‘Well, she didn’t,’ said Jo. ‘So perhaps you’d better be on your way.’
‘Dodgy ticker.’ He banged his chest. ‘Doctor says it’s bad for me to get stressed.’
‘But you’re all right now,’ said Jo.
‘We don’t know that for certain,’ he said. He brushed the dirt off his coat. ‘Could have internal bleeding.’
‘Serves you right,’ said Jo.
‘Jo!’
‘Go find