Berserk Read Online Free Page B

potential future reflected in his eyes. Nobody expects catastrophe, Tom thought. Everyone knows it’s coming at some point, but nobody expects it. We just can’t live like that. But that makes it so much harder when it arrives.
    Tom wiped the dust from Steven’s picture and smiled, and a peculiar thought came to him unbidden. Coming to see you, son.
    “Tom?” Jo stood behind him, watching him stroke the picture frame.
    “I’m coming now, babe.”
    “We’re doing the right thing, aren’t we? You don’t think this will just dig it all up again?”
    Tom winced at her choice of words. “Jo, we’ve agreed that we’ll go, and I think it’s the right thing to do. Really. Besides, it’ll be good to get away. Steven will be on our minds, but it’ll be a break for us too. A break from everything.”
    “Some things you can’t escape from,” she said.
    He nodded, hugged her. “Let’s go.”
    Jo hugged him back, and as Tom looked around the room he held on hard to his wife.
     
    * * *
     
    They were silent for most of the journey. Jo made occasional comments – pointing out a hovering sparrow hawk, an air balloon, asking Tom whether he wanted some mints – and Tom answered briefly, with a yes or a no, or sometimes with a nod or a shake of the head. It was not because he did not wish to talk, nor even because he knew that Jo really only wanted to sit there and think about the coming weekend. His silence was borne mainly of frustration.
    In his back pocket sat the envelope he had found shoved beneath a windscreen wiper blade when he had been loading the car. He had not yet had a chance to open it without Jo seeing. And he had a feeling – a – that whatever it contained he would not want to share with her. certainty
    He must have waited outside the pub, followed me home.
    “Shouldn’t be long now,” Jo said. Tom nodded.
    Couldn’t finish the story face-to-face, and now it’s there in my back pocket, more hints at the truth.
    “It’s been a long time since we were down this way.”
    Tom was certain the envelope was from Nathan King. Anything else would be a huge coincidence, and a cruel one.
    The miles swept by and Jo nodded off. The envelope burned in his trouser pocket. Read me, read me. He even began to reach into his pocket, but the car drifted into the next lane and the blare of a lorry’s horn startled him back to awareness.
    “Shit,” Tom muttered, heart pummelling him for his stupidity.
    “You want me to drive the rest of the way?” Jo said, yawning.
    “No, no, I’m fine. Fine.”
    Don’t feel fine. Feel fucked.
    The motorway filtered down to dual carriageway, then they turned onto an A-road, and then B-roads led through startlingly beautiful countryside to the village where they were staying.
    Not far from here, Tom thought. Not far from here at all.
    After a few minutes they pulled up in the driveway to their holiday cottage.
    “You check out the box in the shed where they said they’d leave the keys,” Tom said. “I’ll start unloading the car.”
    As soon as Jo’s back was turned Tom pulled out the envelope, and though there was no writing in the clear window, Tom’s name had been scrawled across the front in red ink. Whoever had written his name had pushed so hard that the pen had torn the paper, like a cut in pale flesh. He ripped it open, glanced at Jo disappearing around the side of the cottage, and pulled out the sheet of folded paper.
    It was a map, an enlarged OS section of part of Salisbury Plain. And near the centre, away from any distinguishing features, sat a small, neat ‘X’. It was marked in red. There was nothing else, but no explanation was needed.
    “X marks the spot,” Tom whispered, and then he heard Jo’s footsteps in the gravel behind him, and he crumpled the map and envelope in his hand.
    “Lovely cottage,” he said, even though this was the first time he had even glanced at it.
    “Don’t break your back unloading the car, will you?”
    Tom smacked