I'm a good man, he thought for the thousandth time, and he pictured the farming family he could so easily have left weighted down at the bottom of their slurry pit.

And then it came to him. Not dwelling on what was nagging him brought it home; her voice, when it was loud enough to hear, had come from the northeast. He was not certain how he knew this but the knowledge was welcome, and undoubted. When he had picked up her voice on the way to the farm something inside had clicked, a direction-finder that he was unaware he even had. Turning his head left and right now did nothing, but when he heard her again, he would be sure.

At the next junction he turned right and headed east, reading a map book as he drove, trying to find a road that lead northeast.

Who knew, he might even luck out. Find the right road, come across Roberts burying his wife in some field, kill him and open the boot and stare down at Natasha, gloating right back at her as he placed the .45 against her leathery skull and pulled the trigger.

Just how is she improved?

Yeah, right, it would be that easy.

"Yeah, right."

Fucker …, he heard a few minutes later. Eat my shit, Mister Wolf … lost … going … fucker.

Yeah, right.

Tom remembered a story his mother had told him when he was in his teens. It had affected him strongly then, and now it seemed to say a lot about the situation he was in, both literally and in a spiritual sense. He found some solace in it; there was precious little else to comfort him. And remembering the story brought him somehow closer to his mother. However old a man may be, he always wants his mum in times of crisis and stress.

She was a nurse for much of her life, and when she was in her twenties she had befriended an elderly patient in the hospital where she worked. He was in his nineties, a veteran of two World Wars, blinded at Dunkirk, and a compulsive gambler. Horses were his preference, and he chose them by name alone. He liked names, he said, because they told him much that his ruined eyes could not. Tom's mother would take him on trips from the hospital during her days off, sitting with him at the bookies' while he placed bets and stared at the ceiling, listening to the races broadcast live over the radio. If he lost he would smile and pat her hand, and if he won he would buy her lunch and tell her about his life. She was more than content to listen, she said, because he was a fascinating old man. Whether he talked about the trench hell of World War I or his time on a farm as a youngster, his stories were always rich and compulsive. Perhaps such storytelling talent had something to do with being blind.

One day, on the drive back to the hospital, she looked in her rearview mirror and saw him smiling up at the ceiling, a look on his face she had never seen before. "What a beautiful light!" he said, and he was still smiling as his head rested back against the seat.

She pulled over and felt the old man's wrist, but she already knew that he was dead. She drove to a police station and told them what had happened, and when she said she was a nurse they suggested she should drive him to the hospital herself. So there she was, in the middle of London, a corpse in the back of her car with betting slips spilling from his pockets and that beatific grin forever on his face. She received more than a few strange looks from pedestrians and other drivers, and by the time she arrived at the hospital she was laughing through her tears.

Tom knelt in the front seat of his ruined car and stared back at Jo's corpse. There was no grin on her face, other than the clown's smile painted there in dried blood. And no one could mistake her as sleeping. Not with the wound in the back of her head, and the amount of blood on her nightclothes.

"I hope you found the beautiful light," Tom said, reaching back to touch his dead wife's hand. "You were my light. I'm sorry, Jo. It's all my fault. I'm so sorry."

Natasha, perhaps using her child's honest sense of what is right and wrong, remained silent as Tom wept.

Later, Natasha said, He's coming for us.

"So what can I do about it? He's a killer, he's got a gun. I have my dead wife and a child's corpse in a ruined car. It's finished." Tom found no hope in that morning's dawn, and the potential only for pain.

Not for Steven. Daddy, all this was for Steven, wasn't it? How can it be finished when it's only just begun?

"I don't believe you," Tom said. He was sitting in the driver's seat, trying to work out what to do. He could think of nothing.

Natasha retreated to a deep corner of his mind and began to sob. I'm only doing this for you, she said.

He wondered how a dead girl could cry. "I don't believe that, either."

The girl was silent, still sobbing, and she withdrew and left him alone.

Tom gasped at the sensation of being abandoned and leaned back in his seat. Was she lying? Could Steven really still be alive? He felt in his bones that he could, and if there was even the slightest chance that his son was not dead, he owed it to himself—and to Jo—to try to find him. There was little else left for him now, nothing to go home to, no future …

No future. His hopes and dreams of a gentle old age spent with his wife had been blasted away by that bastard's gun.

Grief birthed anger, and Tom realised that he had been angry since that first encounter on the Plain. It had kept him going, boosted adrenaline into his system and given his aging muscles precious fuel to drive him on. He had excavated a mass grave and crashed his way from a frontyard under fire. That was not real, not him at all, and yet he had mud under his fingernails and the dead wife to prove it all.

And the thing in the boot. He had that, too.

"Natasha?" he said.

Daddy?

He ignored that. Let her have her own dreams for now, whoever or whatever she was. "Natasha, how do you know where Steven may be? You have to tell me what you know if you want me to trust you. Look at it with my eyes … I'm sitting here talking to fresh air, and a corpse I just dug up is communicating with me in my head. You have to understand my doubt. You have to accept my uncertainty."

I already showed you something about me while you slept, she said. That was honest, wasn't it? It's bad to lie. Only naughty children lie. I'm not naughty. I'm a berserker, and my family were berserkers, and they kept us hungry so that we would do those things for them.

"Who?" But Tom already knew.

Them. The men. The soldiers.

"But why use you? Why not do it themselves?"

There's more to see, Daddy. I can show you if you like. But not yet, and not here. Mister Wolf is coming, I can feel him, he's getting closer. We have to go. You have to take me away from here. I can show you the way, but you're the only one who can look after me.

"We have to go to the police," Tom said, staring into the hedge beside the car. "Jo is dead. She was murdered. We have to tell the police. Have to. They'll catch him, they'll protect—"

Me? Natasha said, and her voice had changed. Still a little girl's voice, but older and wiser now. Harder. They'll protect me? One look and I'll be sent for tests, cut apart. And you, what will they do to you when they find me in your car? How will you explain me? And Mister Wolf is one of them anyway, they'll know him, they won't stop him, or maybe he'll kill them, too, and we have to go, because the Wolf is coming and I can't stop him and you won't stop him, not again. Nothing can stop him. He killed my family and he'll kill me in the end, if we don't go now.

"You're confusing me."

I'm telling the truth, Daddy. I wouldn't lie to you. He's a bad man, and no one can stop him, not the police, not you, no one. Our only chance is to find the berserkers that got away before he does, and then they'll help us.