Mr. Turner looked surprised at that; then he smiled, and actually chuckled. Which was disconcerting; Laura have never heard anyone actually do that before.
“Does Professor Turner have a role to play?” he said. He took a couple of steps toward her, bringing him center stage, proudly, as if about to receive an award. “Does he, indeed?”
Laura presumed he was now being rhetorical. Even more worrisome—the man was referring to himself in the third person.
“Does Professor Turner have a role to play?” he said again. “Why not ask whether Professor Turner can be appointed dean of either of his departments, given his twenty years of faithful service, his many doctoral studies on the antiquities, and his own personal role in discovering the last remaining cairn grouping on Bodfyn Moor? Oh no, certainly not. We’re not even certain we can find another position for Professor Turner when the school closes.”
“Sorry,” said Laura, trying to sound sympathetic.
“So no,” he resumed. “Of course Professor Turner has no role. Certainly not in an age like this one. And certainly not here. Not in this Shakespearean thing, this play, called … called … what is the name of this play?”
“Macbeth?” said Laura.
The man raised his head. His eyes glimmered. His lips smiled.
“Hah! You said it!”
He pointed victoriously at Laura. She wasn’t sure why.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“You said it—the word at the very top of the list of the thoughts that cannot be expressed, the images that cannot be depicted, and the words that cannot be said!”
“Oh. You mean Macbeth? Really?” said Laura.
“Oh no, don’t pretend it doesn’t matter. There are rules about what can be said, and they exist for a reason. Whether it is the curse on saying Mac—well, you know—or something more recent—such as carving a nonbeliever’s name in a sacred stone—who are we to decide which is more valid? Such rules are what give order to society. And the more troubled the times, the more dangerous are troublesome thoughts freely expressed. Clearly you weren’t paying close attention to my lectures; how you passed the tests, I’ll never know. But now—we are ready to rehearse the ceremony!”
“Ceremony?” said Laura.
Mr. Turner jumped down from the stage.
Laura knew now that something was terribly wrong.
But as oddly as Mr. Turner was behaving, she was not at all afraid of him. Even at fourteen, she had been as tall as he was. She could certainly handle him now, if he was about to get out of order in some strange way.
And, of course, she had the sword. As Mr. Turner advanced toward her now, she tightened her grip on it, and got ready to raise it.
But she had forgotten about the couple behind her. They had seemed so innocent; there had been no reason to assess their capabilities.
The man, although some thirty years older than Laura, was bulky, with more muscle in his forearms than his coat revealed, and—with the advantage of surprise and the help of his lady friend—he suddenly had Laura’s hands pinned behind her back.
And now Mr. Turner advanced on her with a cloth in his hand that she strongly suspected was chloroformed, but she could do nothing about it.
15
The moon was intermittent, with heavy, rapidly moving clouds concealing it one moment and then revealing it again the next.
Four figures moved fitfully across a field and away from Bodfyn. They had tried to remain out of sight on the moor, navigating through the low heath and white rocks, but now they had to risk coming back to the road just long enough to cross over the creek bridge.
What slowed their progress the most was that the bound and hooded figure was resisting, every uncertain step of the way.
“I told you we would need more help,” said the portly middle-aged man.
“Shut up,” said Mr. Turner. “You said you had training.”
“Forty years ago, I did my two years in the army, yes,” said the portly man. “But you didn’t say she’d be like this. A bloody hellcat.”
“I told you to watch her most recent film. That should have given you a clue.”
“Please,” said the portly man’s wife. “We don’t watch superficial action-adventure films.”
There’s an idea, thought Laura. So far, she’d been reacting solely by instinct. Now, it occurred to her, wasn’t there some clever thing in any of the last three serial adventure films that would help her in this situation?
She ran them all quickly through memory.
No, actually, there wasn’t. Unfortunately, nothing she’d been able to do in any of them lined up with her current reality. Many of the scenes—such as the ones where she was supposed to ride sidesaddle and shoot villains out of trees with a crossbow—had required stunt doubles. Laura’s publicity agent was still sending hospital flowers to one of them every month.
Now they crossed the bridge. Laura felt the cobblestones under her feet and heard the water gurgling below.
And suddenly she knew exactly where she was. Mrs. Hatfield had driven them into town this way after their plane landed.
That meant that to her left must be the rising slope and the rocky tors and cairns of the moor.
And to her right must be the plane.
She stopped struggling. She tried to remember everything she could about Mr. Turner. There wasn’t much. As she thought back now, it had always seemed that he stared quite a lot, but at fourteen, she had just chalked that up to his probably needing spectacles.
She remembered the ego, though. None of her teachers—and only a few people she had met since—had seemed quite so full of themselves.
Surely she could make use of that. She gave it some thought. Probably it wouldn’t help just to compliment him on retaining most of his hair, but there had to be something.
Laura relaxed her arms and stopped struggling.
“Mmmmff, mmf. Mmf,” she said through the gag in her mouth. She moved her head back and forth for emphasis, in the direction of Mr. Turner.
“I think she wants to say something,” said the portly man.
“Mm-hmmm,” said Laura, nodding. “Mm-hmmm.”
“It’s too late for that,” said Mr. Turner.
“Not if it will stop her struggling,” said the portly man. “My arms are getting tired, and every time I have to rein her in when she lurches, I can feel my sciatica acting up.”
Mr. Turner stopped walking. They all did. He looked at Laura—well, at her hood at least—for a long moment.
“Do you have something you want to say to me?”
Laura nodded.
“Do you promise not to scream if I remove your gag?”
Laura nodded vigorously.
“It won’t help to scream anyway, you know. We are too far out. No one will hear you.”
Laura shrugged.
“All right, then,” said Mr. Turner.
The portly man started to remove Laura’s hood.
“No, no, not the hood,” said Mr. Turner. “That will spoil the surprise. Just reach under and untie the gag.”
The portly man and his wife jockeyed around a bit to get in the right position for that task. Finally, while the man held Laura’s arms, his wife reached under the hood and untied the gag.
Laura gasped with relief. The sides of her mouth where the gag had pressed were as sore as if she’d been to the dentist, and she had to work her jaw back and forth, and shake off the pain, before she could speak.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Oh, I think you know.”
“I don’t. Really. I’ve tried to suss it out, but I just can’t seem to get it. That’s not really my fault, though, is it? You’ve always had a much more sophisticated intellect than I.”
He nodded in agreement.
“You should try, though,” he said. “Don’t make excuses, young lady. Do your best. Where would I be taking you? Really now, think about it. Why should I be taking you anywhere at all?”
; “For my own good?”
“Close. Try harder.”
“I am trying, but it’s so difficult,” said Laura, and then she tried again.
“Oh, wait. I think I’ve got it! Of course, I should have known; it’s what you’ve always tried to explain to people, but most of us are just too dense and caught up in our own little worlds to understand. What you are doing is for the greater good!”
Mr. Turner stopped walking. He looked at Laura, still with the bindings on her wrists and the hood over her face, and he let out the satisfied sigh of a man who has finally achieved a lifelong goal.
“Remove it,” he said to the couple.
They both gave Mr. Turner a puzzled look.
“Are you sure?” said the portly man. “I believe the hood is to remain on. That’s how I translated the runes.”
“Runes?” said Laura.
Either they couldn’t hear her through the cloth of the hood or they ignored her deliberately. Their discussion continued.
“This is only the rehearsal,” said Mr. Turner. “Just go ahead and remove it, please.”
It was an ambiguous directive. The woman thought this meant she was to loosen Laura’s wrist ties, and she began to do so, with no one paying particular attention, as her husband and Mr. Turner continued to argue.
“A true rehearsal should follow the ritual precisely,” said the portly man.
“Nonsense,” said Mr. Turner. “If we did that all the way through, the fire would consume everything, and we’d have no one available to offer up for the event itself.”
“Very well,” said the portly man. “So long as we put it back on her before she is actually placed on the pyre.”
He removed the hood.
“Pyre?” said Laura.
“See?” said the portly man. “I told you. Now she’s going to be even more of a problem.”
Mr. Turner looked at Laura, sighed, and then shook his head, as though she were a recalcitrant child.
“You’re right,” he said to the portly man. “And anyway, she’s nowhere near as charming as I remember. Put the hood back on.”
The portly man stretched the burlap sack out to its full width again and raised it up to put it over Laura’s head.
As he did that, he was focused more on the hood than on Laura, and he was standing between her and Mr. Turner, which meant that at that moment, Mr. Turner didn’t have a good line of sight on her, either.
Laura knew it was the best chance she would get—and she took it.
She jabbed her right elbow behind her into the portly man’s solar plexus. Her range was limited by the remaining wrist ties, but still it was enough. As he gasped and bent over, she stomped the heel of her right foot backward into the instep of his wife’s foot.
And then she took off running.
The only tormentor capable of immediate pursuit was Mr. Turner.
She heard him scream at her as she ran, and then, very quickly, the screams turned to cursing.
The terrain was low-scrub heath, with wild grasses that cut at bare ankles like blades, and, even more problematic, rocks.
In the intermittent moonlight, Laura could see the gray-white boulders if they were a foot or more high, just barely in time to avoid them. But smaller rocks were scattered everywhere, concealed by clumps of wild grass like deflated footballs.
She couldn’t take the time to see and avoid them. She twisted her right ankle within the first dozen yards, felt the sharp pain, and had to ignore it.
She ran toward a stand of pine trees, a windbreak planted long ago, visible in dark silhouette some two hundred yards across the rocky heath. On the other side of those trees, she was certain, was the field where she and Reggie had landed their plane two nights ago.
She looked back just once, and then didn’t bother again—she knew that the portly couple had now joined the pursuit—but she was sure from the sound of the cursing and bickering that she had put a little distance between herself and them.
The field grew even rockier as she approached the stand of trees. At the very edge of the stand, there were even more obstacles—not just the natural strewn rocks but also little man-made stacks of them—cairns, from centuries ago.
She got past those and into the trees. She stopped for just a moment behind a large pine, caught her breath, and got her bearings. Yes, she was in the right place. Fifty yards ahead was the break in the trees, and the green field where they had landed. Another fifty to the right should be her Cessna 150.
She heard the aggravated shouts closing in behind her, and she began her final sprint to the plane.
She saw the fixed white wings in the moonlight, the narrow blue stripe that ran along the fuselage. She guessed there might be three hundred yards of level field in front of the plane for her to take off. It was not really enough; she would not be able to get sufficient speed. But she would have to try.
She jumped in the cockpit and pressed the ignition. The engine coughed and sputtered. She saw Mr. Turner now, running toward her. She tried the ignition again, and this time the engine started.
She throttled forward in the dark. She could see silhouettes of the trees some three or four hundred yards out, but not the ground itself.
She got as much speed as she could over 100 hundred yards, 200 hundred, 250—and then she had no choice; she was close enough to the trees now to see individual branches. She pulled back hard on the yoke.
The little Cessna went up at a sixty-degree angle, then stalled and went right back down—and that was all that Laura remembered.
16
LONDON, THE NEXT DAY
It was all one structure, all the way from the corner to midway up the block. It was a polished limestone building, modern (by London standards), with wide glass doors at the main entrance, and an engraved copper placard above them that read BAKER STREET HOUSE.
A tall fiftyish man in a worn full-length mac and carrying a violin case walked up to the entrance. He knew this was the right place, but he was delayed when he got to the doors, because tourists, mostly American and Japanese, were milling about in front of him, with puzzled expressions and mobile phone cameras at the ready, walking back and forth between these doors and the door of the next establishment up the block.
As the tall man began to open one of the heavy glass doors, one of the American tourists turned toward him.
“Is this where—”
“No.”
“But the next door up is the Beatles store at 233 Baker Street, and there are no other address numbers between here and the beginning of the block. So this must be where—”
“It isn’t, he doesn’t, and he’d be long since dead even if he ever did. Excuse me, please.”
“But—”
“Please, you are blocking the door,” said the tall man as he finally pushed through and into the wide marble-floored lobby.
He shook his head, annoyed with himself. He should not have been rude. He especially, because he, more than most people, fully understood.
But he hadn’t much time.
In the lobby, the employees of Dorset Bank, which had offices on the main floor, were arriving at work in proper business attire, walking back and forth with cups of cappuccino from the sandwich shop across the street.
One of them gave the tall man a sideways look, followed by a glance at the security guard to get the guard’s attention.
The tall man didn’t mind. If he had seen a man in a full raincoat and carrying a worn black musician’s case containing God knows what, he would have said something, too. Especially having been a bank teller at one time himself.
The security guard, a white-haired man, elderly but in seemingly excellent physical condition for his age, was seated at the security desk at the center of the lobby. From the way he was blinking and putting his glasses on and off, it was obvious that his eyesight was not the best. The tall man helpfully went directly up to him.
“Good morning, Hendricks,” he said.
“Ah, good morni
ng, sir,” said the security guard. He took his glasses off now and began to clean the lenses. “Haven’t seen you here in quite a while.”
“Hasn’t been necessary in quite a while,” said the tall man.
“I’m afraid none of the leasing committee is in at the moment,” said the guard. “Or the board of directors, either. Although Mr. Rafferty is expected back soon.”
“That’s all right. Today I’ll just pay a visit to the second floor.”
“Very good, sir.”
The tall man went to the lift. The directory there listed only one name for the second floor. It was for a sublet tenant—something calling itself Baker Street Chambers.
The tall man got in the lift and pressed the button for that floor.
* * *
On the second floor, a fiftyish woman, short in height and comfortably plump in the English way, dressed in pleasant shades of business gray and pastel apricot, sat behind the receptionist’s desk with her head in her hands.
On her desk was a stack of incoming letters and an opened laptop.
She raised her head to look at the photo image that was displayed on the laptop, but just as every time before, the worry came back, her lungs tightened, and her head sank in her hands again.
Now, mercifully, her phone rang. She picked up immediately.
“Nigel, it’s about time!” she said. “Why haven’t we heard from them?”
“Can you speak up a bit?” said the voice at the other end. “It’s not a great connection, and I’m on the Ventura Freeway.”
“I said, I haven’t heard anything from them at all!”
“I shouldn’t worry if I were you,” said the voice through the phone. “Although if I were me, I would, and I will when I get back, given that all of Reggie’s disgruntled clients find a way of letting me know that they regard me as a poor second choice.”
“It’s me they complain to first,” said Lois. “The barrister’s clerk always takes the heat before anyone else. But that’s not why you should be worried. You should be worried because he’s your brother, she’s your new sister-in-law, and you have no idea where they are. Or so you say.”
“I don’t,” said Nigel. “And that’s the way they wanted it. They are on their honeymoon, for God’s sake, and if they have the energy to keep it going, who am I to track them down and interrupt? I expect we’ll hear from them when they’re good and ready to return, like adolescent cats.”
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