SEVENTY-NINE

Amber jogged upstairs to fetch her portable hard drive from the study and her laptop from the bedroom; all of her electronic files were saved to both devices.

She unlocked the study and flicked the lights on. Picked up the back-up hard drive from her desk, keeping her eyes averted from the faces and headlines plastered to the wall. The room looked like the secret chamber of an obsessive, a spy, or a stalker. And she acknowledged with discomfort that she may be all three of those things about her own history.

Amber drew the blinds to see the vista outside. Her vision swept the garden and the rolling green mounds of maize beyond the foot of the rear fence, and took in the copses of trees dotted about the land where hedgerows met at the corner of the hilly fields. The giant swelling of the ocean beyond the hills glinted in a thin line of white gold on the horizon. And within the gentle sway of row upon row of long, supple maize leaves, she picked out the presence of what she thought was a leafless tree, withered black by age or even scorched spindly by a lightning strike.

She had gazed out over these fields each morning for a week and recalled that no tree stood in the centre of this field, particularly one that suggested a direct line from itself to the rear gate of her garden.

Amber screwed up her eyes.

The thump of her heart became too noticeable and irregular between her ears. Her scalp prickled.

This was no tree.

The figure was the only black in the green sea of crops, and seemed to draw in the shadow of a passing cloud to stain dark the wide open space that circled the silhouette’s lonely vigil. This was a man. A tall man standing with his head bowed.

Amber hoped hard enough for it to feel like a prayer that this was a farm worker, or an unusual rambler studying a map. Because the indistinct head was lowered or bent over something that it seemed to be studying: an object held close to the chest and cradled like a baby. The thin, uneven silhouette of the head soon revealed itself to be close-cropped and bony by raising itself so that far off eyes could peer back at her.

Amber dropped the hard drive and only held onto her laptop by her fingertips.

She staggered away from the window to evade the piercing scrutiny of a face obscured by distance, the features seemingly blackened by soil or soot, though the figure was too far away to reveal what discoloured the flesh. The idea of the thin and unsightly sentinel being aware of her introduced a stutter to her breathing. She ducked down from the level of the window sill, backed out of the study in a crouch, and fled for her room and for what was locked inside a small aluminium case within her bedside drawer.

Amber stopped short of the bedside cabinet, pulled up hard by a better idea: take a picture.

She wrenched at her iPhone in the top pocket of her denim jacket. Ran back to the study and willed herself through the door and across the room and up to the wide window frame. Focused the camera on the field of maize, shining with sunlight and no longer concealed by passing clouds. A field now empty of anything but the crop.