Chapter Text
It’s a long time since Robert’s been on the moors at night. Years, more than a decade. If you’d asked him, a month ago when he was drinking wine and laughing with Chrissie in the flat above Number 10, whether he missed the moors, he’d have laughed in your face. What’s there to miss? Even in the daytime, it’s just a great, bleak expanse of nothing. And at night, there’s not even a view. He didn’t miss it. He vowed, once, never to come back here.
But here he is anyway.
“Fuck, it’s cold,” he mutters. That’s the problem, really: that it’s cold, icy, the sky clear and hard and filled with freezing stars, the moon full and glinting off the thick hoar-frost on the grass. And ice. There’s a lot of ice on the road. Robert’s almost gone arse-over-tit twice already, but that’s not really the main problem. The main problem is that Robert’s flash car – the last remnant he has of his once-flash life – is in a ditch, intact, but no longer functioning. It’s after midnight in one of the loneliest, emptiest places in England, and Robert’s car is fucking fucked.
People in London don’t really know what it’s like to be in the dark. It’s never really dark there, not even in the middle of the big parks. There are streetlights, lit windows, skyscrapers. Something to aim for, to find your way back to the light. But here, on the moors, the few people who do still live here are long in bed, early risers, farmers and farm labourers, and there are no clouds tonight to reflect the distant light from Manchester or Leeds. There’s nothing up here, nothing except the moon and stars and the slippery, icy sheen of the road.
Robert shrugs his coat tighter around himself. It’s windy – not as bad as it could be, but the wind is biting, and he wishes he had better clothes. Clothes built for a North Yorkshire winter, not a London life where you’re only ever going from house to car, the door held open for you by the driver. His coat is Italian, worth more than the car his dad used to drive growing up, but it’s not much use against the teeth of the wind. His ears and nose are turning numb, and he’s starting to wonder if he should have just stayed in the car and waited for morning instead of heading out in search of a phone signal. But it’s been more than a decade, for God’s sake, surely the whole of the moors can’t still be a blackout zone for communications?
It’s possible, he concedes to himself as he pulls the phone out of his pocket for the tenth time and checks the bars, that it can. It’s possible that the moors will never, ever be a place where anything is improved or modernised. It’s possible that that’s one of the reasons Robert left in the first place. (The other reason, of course, being that his dad told him to go and never come back.)
The road slithers under him, and Robert goes sliding, flinging his arms out to stabilise himself, dropping his phone. It lands on the ice with a crack, and Robert, once he’s regained his equilibrium, bends down cautiously to scoop it up. The screen is shattered, displaying a sort of neon green LCD soup. If there’s signal, Robert is not going to know about it now.
“For fuck’s sake!”
Robert flings the phone back down in disgust (can’t get more broken than it already is), then picks it up again (important info in there) and shoves it in his pocket. He scrubs a hand over his face, then runs it through his hair, looking to left and right at the emptiness, just the faint glow of the moon on the frost stretching out in both directions. That’s it, then. Back to the car and hope not to freeze to death before someone comes past. He’s about to turn and start walking back, when he sees something that makes him pause and frown, staring into the darkness.
A light.
It’s a yellow light, that’s the thing that Robert notices about it. On a night like this, all the lights are white and silver, but this light – this light is yellow. Only a person could be making a yellow light tonight. Robert swipes at his eyes, blinks a couple of times. No, he’s not imagining it: there is a light.
“God, I hope you’re a pub,” he mutters to himself, and starts again, walking along the road away from the car. He has no idea how far away the light is, but he keeps it in sight, trying to focus both on that and where he’s putting his feet. He goes sliding another couple of times, but manages to keep his feet until he doesn’t, landing unceremoniously in the thick, frost-covered moor grass at the edge of the road. Which, well, it’s a lot better than cracking his head on the road itself, but it’s fucking cold and his arm goes through a hidden sheet of ice into a hidden puddle of freezing mud, so by the time he’s back on his feet he’s in an even worse mood than he was before.
And the light is a fire.
Robert blinks, forgetting his wet arm for a moment. It’s obvious, now: the way it’s flickering and dancing. It’s not a streetlight or a lit window. It’s a fire. After midnight, on the moors, someone is lighting fires.
“What?” he says. But a fire would be warm, and fires don’t just happen by themselves. There must be someone nearby, maybe someone who has a landline or a two-way radio. So Robert keeps moving, faster now. Too fast, in fact – because when he’s close enough to see that the fire is contained somehow, though not by what, he accidentally steps off the edge of the road into the ditch and twists his ankle sharply.
“Ow, fuck! Ah!”
Robert’s voice sounds sharp and brittle in the freezing air. He growls through his teeth, breathes through his nose, and lets himself stay in the ditch for a long count of three. Then he hauls himself to his feet and tries putting his weight on the bad ankle. Fucking ow. Ow. But it holds, and Robert can’t afford to let himself freeze to death in a ditch because he wants to wallow, even though he definitely does want to wallow, so he grits his teeth and hobbles on. The fire. He needs to get to the fire, find the person who lit the fire.
And eventually, he does get to the fire.
It’s down a gravel track that comes off the road about a hundred yards past where Robert twisted his ankle. The track leads through a gateway, the gate hanging on one hinge, down a long, gentle incline between tall dry stone walls, and into a yard. There’s a house, the black bulk of it silent against the stars, no sign of habitation. There’s a wide yard, the moon glinting off random chunks of metal that on closer inspection are bits of cars. And there’s a burn barrel, flames roaring up from it like someone’s gone a bit mad with the kerosene. Even from the entrance to the yard, Robert can feel the heat of it.
“Hello?” Robert says, looking around the yard. The moors are scattered with these kinds of places, old farmhouses, usually abandoned, with roofs rotting through and windows smashed. It’s too dark to tell with this one, but someone lit that fire. And there’s something else, too, something that Robert doesn’t hear straight away because of the roaring of the flames: an engine.
“Hello?” Robert says again. He skirts the burn barrel, enjoying the warmth but wary of how fierce the fire is, and turns his head from side to side to try and locate the engine noise. It’s coming from the back of the house, he decides, and hobbles in that direction. When he gets there, he finds a smaller building, single storey, details unclear in the moonlight – a big shed, maybe? The engine noise is coming from inside, though he can’t see any lights.
“Hello?” Robert calls. “Anyone in there?” He fumbles around the door, eventually finds that it doesn’t have a latch, just pulls open with a handle. He pulls, and the door resists. He pulls again, harder, and the door scrapes across the concrete apron in front of it and finally swings open.
Robert sucks in his breath to call out again, and then wishes he hasn’t. A great cloud of warmth rolls out of the doorway, enveloping him. But it’s not the warmth that’s the problem: it’s the smoke. The shed is full of smoke, choking, thick and warm, and Robert turns his face away, coughing harshly. The engine noise is much louder now, and when he turns back, eyes watering, he sees the moonlight glinting on the bonnet of a car, a big one, Landrover maybe. So it’s a garage, not a shed. A garage with a car inside with the engine running.
Robert blinks. His first thought is that he could take the car. It would solve all his problems, and clearly no-one’s here. He could return it tomorrow.
His second thought is that someone turned that car on inside that garage and closed the door.
His third thought is to wonder if that person is still in there.
“Hey,” he says. “Hey!” Then he decides to stop talking, because talking requires breathing in, and breathing in is pretty unpleasant right now. Instead, he stumbles into the garage. It’s pitch black beyond the pool of moonlight coming in through the door, but Robert fumbles along the car roof with one hand – the other arm across his mouth, breathing through his sleeve – and finds that the driver’s side window is open. He reaches in and turns off the ignition, pulling out the key and shoving it in his pocket. Then he steels himself and reaches back towards the seat.
There’s someone there.
Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Robert drags the door open and takes his arm away from his mouth, grabbing hold of the person with his hands under their armpits and hauling them out. The person is big, heavy – a man, and still warm, maybe not dead yet. Robert hauls, screaming inside his mouth as pain from his ankle shoots through him, hauls and drags and sweats and somehow manages to get this idiot out of the garage, flinging him down onto the frosty grass.
“Jesus,” Robert says. In the moonlight, he can see the man’s dressed in a bulky down jacket and jeans, has short hair and a serious beard, and is not moving. Robert goes to his knees and presses two fingers against the guy’s neck. For a second, he thinks there’s nothing there, but then he feel it: thump. He leans down, ear hovering over the guy’s mouth, and feels a puff of warm air. So just unconscious, then. Just unconscious and a moron.
Robert could take the car. He has the keys, he knows the car works. He could take the car, get to somewhere with phone signal, and call an ambulance. Or he could drag this guy back to the car and then take him to hospital. But if he does that, it’ll be all over the papers by tomorrow. But this guy definitely needs medical attention and if Robert leaves him here, he’ll freeze to death.
No, Robert decides. He needs this guy awake, so that he can walk into the hospital of his own accord. Fine. Fine, then.
Robert pulls his arm back and slaps the guy as hard as he can across the face.
What happens next is both immediate and unexpected: the guy sucks in a breath, his eyes snap open, and he lurches to a sitting position, fist swinging. Robert finds himself on his back, pain blooming across his nose, and the guy looming over him, wheezing and half bent over, but fists still ready.
“Who the fuck are you?” asks the guy, and then coughs a rattling cough.
Robert reaches up and gingerly cups his nose, trying to figure out if it’s bleeding. “What the fuck?” he says, his voice coming out muffled. “That fucking hurts!”
The guy staggers slightly, breath starting to sound even more laboured. He’s between Robert and the moon, features in shadow. “The f– Fuck do you–” he starts, gasping, and then staggers again, stumbling over to the corner of the garage before doubling over, throwing up copiously enough that it makes Robert’s eyes water in sympathy. Not that this bastard deserves a lot of sympathy when he just probably broke Robert’s nose. Arsehole.
Robert hauls himself to his feet and hobbles over to stand near the guy – though out of reach of his fists. “Hey,” he says. “I’m gonna take you to hospital.” The plan’s forming in his mind: drop this guy in the hospital car park, borrow his car, spend what’s left of the night in a warm bed at his sister’s or a hotel, bring it back tomorrow and get his own car fixed. Guy doesn’t die of carbon monoxide poisoning, Robert doesn’t end up in the papers yet again, neither of them ends up a frozen corpse. Perfect.
“Do one,” the guy growls, blowing an irritatingly surly hole in Robert’s perfect plan. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Robert raises an eyebrow. “You just almost died. You need to see a doctor.”
The guy coughs and spits, then manages to straighten most of the way up. “No-one asked you.” He wipes an arm across his mouth, then turns, ignoring Robert and stumbling into the garage. Robert frowns, following after him.
“Hey,” he says. “A bit of gratitude would be nice. I did just save your life.”
The guy’s mostly invisible in the darkness, but the car door opens and then closes, and then Robert finds himself nose-to-nose with him, mostly invisible still, but unmistakably present, a looming threat, breath grinding in his throat.
“You’ve got my keys,” he says.
Robert puts his hand in his pocket, wraps it round the keys. “It’s fine,” he says. “I’ll drive. You’re in no fit state.”
The guy holds his hand out, palm upwards, extending into the moonlight like a disembodied demand. “Keys,” he says.
Robert takes a step back. Not just because he wants to be the one to drive – because he needs to at least be in the car so he can get off this godforsaken moor – but also because it occurs to him that this guy doesn’t want the keys so he can drive himself to the hospital. He wants the keys so he can finish what he started.
“I haven’t got them,” he says.
The guy growls and then coughs, once, twice, and then uncontrollably, staggering sideways into the moonlight, gripping onto the doorframe. Robert takes the opportunity to back up, trying to figure out how he can get past this guy who’s looking increasingly like he might be seriously violent, get to the car and get out of here. He has the keys, which gives him the advantage. He just needs to get to the car. He keeps his eyes on the guy, trying not to think too hard about the car parts in the yard and the black emptiness of the house and the flames licking up from the burn barrel and how it all kind of feels like he might have stumbled on a serial killer.
The guy’s coughing fit subsides, and he hangs from the doorframe, gasping, trying to catch his breath. He doesn’t look that scary, actually, now that Robert can see him in what light there is, hunched over and shuddering in his big coat. Robert can make this work. He’s just spooked himself, what with the darkness and the quiet and being stuck up here in the middle of nowhere. This guy’s nothing to be scared of, he’s just some stupid farmer who couldn’t take the monotony any more and decided to take the easy way out. Robert can work with that.
“Hey,” he says quietly. “Things look bad right now, but in the morning it’ll seem better. Just let me drive you to the h–”
And then the guy lets go of the doorframe, lets out a hoarse growl that’s almost a roar, and barrels across the yard, catching Robert around the waist and dragging him to the ground. The fall knocks the breath out of him and he instinctively raises his arms to protect his head, only remembering too late that he still has the keys clutched in one hand.
Robert might not have noticed, but the guy instantly catches on, and grabs Robert’s hand, trying to peel his fingers back. He’s straddling Robert’s hips, bending over him, so focused on Robert’s hand that Robert realises he’s got an opportunity. He slams the heel of his other hand into the guy’s stomach, and if this guy was healthy then it probably wouldn’t have helped that much, but what this guy is is half-dead from poisoning his own lungs and blood, and he doubles over, wheezing, then collapses onto the ground beside Robert, coughing harshly. Robert scrambles back, dragging himself across the frozen grass. He’s freezing, and his nose hurts, and his ankle hurts, and for some reason he’s having the world’s least impressive fight with someone he doesn’t even know. Actually, this is all fucking stupid.
The guy rolls onto his back, chest heaving.
“Keys,” he says, sounding like he’s swallowed a handful of gravel.
“What do you want them for?”
A long pause. Gasping breaths. “How’s that any of your b– Your business?”
“Don’t be so fucking stupid,” says Robert, suddenly just feeling really over all this. “What, what’s the issue? Farm life so boring you can’t be bothered with it any more? Grow up, some of us have real problems.”
The guy turns his head and stares at Robert, eyes glinting slightly in the moonlight. Robert stares back. He hopes he’s not a serial killer. It’s probably not the best idea to antagonise a serial killer. Not that that would stop Robert, but still.
Then the guy hauls himself to his feet, slowly, deliberately, and there’s that air of menace again that Robert felt when they were in the garage, that looming threat. He starts to move towards Robert and Robert gets up, too. He gets up, and he sees the moment that the guy’s about to break into a run, and he throws the keys as hard as he can, into the darkness beyond the house.
“Fine, they’re all yours,” he says, and then, realising what he’s done, looks after them, into the pitch black that no doubt conceals an endless tangle of moor grass where a set of keys could stay lost forever even in broad daylight. “Fuck.” He turns back to the guy. “Are there spares?”
The guy’s standing still, head turned, staring in the direction Robert threw the keys. He doesn’t answer for a long, long moment, but then he seems to sag, shoulders dropping. “Nope.”
“Fuck,” says Robert again.
The guy ignores him. He coughs again, the sound sharp and harsh in the freezing air. Then he starts to shuffle back around the house, bent slightly over, not giving Robert a second glance.
Robert stares after him. “Hey,” he says. “Hey, where are you–” The guy disappears around the corner of the house and Robert hurries after him. “Hey!” he calls, moving slowly on his messed-up ankle, but still managing to catch up as the guy unlocks the door of the house. “Hey, my car’s in a ditch about a mile up the road, have you got a phone?”
The guy shrugs, back turned to Robert, illuminated now by the flickering firelight. “Nope.”
Shit. “Well – is there somewhere nearby that might have one?”
“Nope.”
The guy opens the door and disappears inside, and Robert reaches out just in time before he closes it in Robert’s face.
“You can’t just leave me out here,” he says. He considers adding don’t you know who I am?, but he gets the feeling that’s not going to work in his favour.
The guy’s invisible now, the darkness beyond the door so complete that Robert’s almost afraid to step through in case there’s nothing on the other side.
“Didn’t ask you to come here, did I?” he says, but he doesn’t try to close the door again, and after a moment Robert realises he must have stepped away from it.
Robert hurries forward, trying not to think about stepping into the blackness, and then the door’s closed behind him and he can see nothing at all. It’s cold inside the room and pitch black, but the guy doesn’t turn on any lights. Robert can hear him shuffling about. “I’ll have to stay here, then,” Robert says. “Till it gets light.”
The guy grunts. Robert hasn’t asked permission and he hasn’t received it. But he’s inside, and the guy hasn’t tried to physically throw him out, so – that’s something.
“I’m Robert, by the way,” says Robert. He’s assuming the guy’s already clocked that – despite it being so dark, his experience in the last three years has been that almost everyone can spot the Prime Minister at fifty paces, and in the last month he’s learned that being the ex-Prime Minister is somehow even more recognisable, maybe because the papers insist on splashing him across the front page every other day.
“I don’t care,” says the guy’s voice in the darkness.
Robert gets the feeling it’s going to be a long night.