‘So am I just now,’ Neve said, confidingly. ‘And I might say “under strict instructions” is a very odd place for me to find myself.’
‘Then you’re not shopping for yourself?’
‘I’m not a collector.’
‘Except of people,’ Jacob muttered. Battle was close enough to hear and looked at first alarmed, then eager. He hurried back behind the counter, dropped the leaf, and made obsequious motions to let Neve know she should proceed ahead of him. They went through the curtain.
Jacob stood where he’d been left. He was aware of his reflection in a security mirror opposite the counter, his stretched, silvered figure against the bamboo forest of book spines. Neve and Battle had passed beyond his hearing. What he could hear was the air brakes of a bus turning into the Visitor Centre at the abbey, and hooting laughter from the terrace of the pub across the road.
Jacob waited.
Fifteen minutes later he heard cries of protest, thumps, objects knocked over. Before Jacob could lift the flap and hurry to investigate, Jason Battle staggered back through the curtain. The man was sobbing and nursing one hand, which Jacob saw had a broken thumb. Battle dived behind the counter and emerged with a phone in his good hand. Jacob lunged forward and slammed his hand over Battle’s and pushed the phone flat on the counter. He leaned all his weight on the hand and pinned Battle in place.
Somewhere behind the curtain came the sound of a window breaking—a bright smash and tinkle of falling glass. The atmosphere stirred; sun-warmed air flowed out of the shop and cool air breezed in, with smoke on its breath.
Neve came through the curtain. She was holding a fire extinguisher. Its seal was broken. It was armed, but Neve had taken it from Battle before he was able to use it—breaking his thumb in the process.
‘What the hell have you done?’
‘Expedited matters.’
Jacob leaned right across the counter, flung one arm behind Battle’s back and hauled him across its surface. The invisible Hands bracing his spine hardened completely to help him. Jacob felt no pain, no weakness. He pulled Battle hard against his body and clapped a hand over the man’s mouth. ‘We have to get out of here,’ he said. ‘And we have to take him with us.’
‘We can come back later to rake over the ashes,’ Neve said.
‘How is this going to help?’ Jacob shouted. ‘The ashes might be hot for days. And the crime scene will be crawling with firefighters and fire inspectors and insurance investigators and police. And sooner or later the antiquarian uncle. I’m here for my local knowledge. That is all “local knowledge”.’
‘The Firestarter is merely charred after its passage through many fires over many centuries. Its seals will hold.’
‘And that’s the only problem you can foresee?’
‘The only one that might matter.’
‘And how will the heat not ruin what’s inside the box?’
‘It won’t,’ Neve said, with blunt certainty. ‘It’s not possible. Come on, Jacob, we can decamp for now. If the box is here, let the fire find it for us.’
‘Right,’ Jacob said. Then to Battle, ‘You will go with us quietly or I will break your neck.’
Neve fished in a pocket of her soft peach-coloured linen overdress and produced a cape gooseberry. Its lacy paper casing was split and crumpled, but the dark gold fruit within was perfect. She held the berry up to Battle’s eyes. ‘You will eat this,’ she said. Then to Jacob, ‘Please uncover his mouth.’
Jacob did so.
Neve broke the berry out of its sheath, asked Battle to open wide, and popped it into his mouth. Then she leaned against him, so that the man’s faintly musty body was pressed between her and Jacob. She stroked Battle’s sparse hair, his cheek, his neck, all the while examining him on the flavour of the berry. ‘More perfume than any other fruit,’ she said. ‘Do you like it?’
‘Yes,’ Battle answered, his voice mushy.
‘Are you refreshed by it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you nourished by it?’
‘Yes, thank you.’
‘Will you come along with me now?’
‘Yes.’
She took Battle’s hand and led him to the door. He stood stupidly for a moment then, prompted, unlocked the door. The three of them emerged onto the street.
Jacob’s desire to run was urgent, but his training stood him in stead; that, Neve’s brazenness, and Battle’s bewitchment. They sauntered back the way they’d come, crossed the road, and were all the way to the bridge before the fire was discovered.
‘That shop shared its end walls with two other buildings,’ Jacob said. ‘People could get hurt.’
‘It’s broad daylight. The village is full of sightseers. The houses are so squat that their windows are less than twenty feet from the ground.’
‘So you class it as a calculated risk?’ Jacob said, unconvinced.
By the time they rejoined the others on Offa’s Dyke Path the fire engines had arrived and were blocking Tintern Parva’s narrow high street. A clatter of high-pressure water hitting slate roofs and the roar of the pumping appliances were audible all the way across the river. Smoke rose above the trees.
Taryn ran to meet them. ‘What have you done?’
‘Neve did it,’ Jacob said.
Neve leaned Battle against the tree, as stiff as a ladder until the trance relented and permitted him to sit. Neve kept her hand on him.
Aeng said mildly that he failed to see how destroying what they were trying to find would gain them anything. ‘But I suspect I don’t have the whole story.’
‘What about the books?’ Taryn shouted. ‘Precious, irreplaceable books!’
‘Jacob was concerned for the occupants of adjacent houses,’ Neve said, in a censorious way.
Taryn began to cry. ‘I rode the rails in Purgatory for this,’ she said. ‘I never wanted to be party to book-burning. I hate you people. You don’t have souls.’
‘Souls may be endemic to this part of the universe,’ Aeng said, ‘but so are flies. Flies far out at sea. Flies on mountaintops.’
Taryn drew her sleeves up over her fists and dabbed her eyes. Then she properly looked at Battle, and blinked.
‘It’s Jason Battle,’ Jacob said.
Taryn shot Battle a look of horror, and walked away. She separated herself from them and went to sit in a deep patch of shade just off the path. She seemed to gather a length of shadow around her, like a shawl.
Neve gave Battle two more cape gooseberries, a mother doling out sweets to keep a child quiet.
‘We will need a forcebeast to turn over the burnt brands,’ Aeng said to Neve. ‘We should sequester ourselves in the forest and make one.’
Neve raised her voice to ask, ‘Did you sleep?’
There was no response to her question. She didn’t seem to be asking Aeng, and Jacob couldn’t see why Neve would want to know whether Taryn had slept. Besides, Taryn wasn’t about to be coaxed out of her sulk.
Neve acted as if she’d had an answer. She nodded again. ‘All right.’
‘Your fire really took,’ Aeng said, in a congratulatory way.
‘There was a bottle of methylated spirits under the sink in the shop’s little kitchen. Battle didn’t even notice me pick it up. I pulled books out of the storeroom shelves and stood them on their ears so the fire could get right into them.’
‘Ears?’
‘Legs,’ Neve said. ‘I don’t really know all the words for parts of books.’ She returned her attention to Battle and took his face between her hands. ‘Come a little way into the forest with me. I’ll find a nice dry mossy place for you to lie down and perhaps have a little sleep.’
Jacob was left with the sulking Taryn. Her personal shade had retreated, as if the sun were hurrying down the sky. Eventually she joined him on the Devil’s Pulpit and they watched the fire, the smoke become steam, then the steam diminish. The windows in the shop proper were broken, but the upper floor of the building and its roof were still intact
, and the houses beside it unharmed.
The Visitor Centre at the abbey had closed, but cars remained in the car park. Jacob assumed people were being waived a late fee since the fire had jammed up the traffic. They’d had to stick around. Jacob could see that the terraces of the café and pub were crowded.
They had to climb back off their vantage point whenever sightseers arrived and wanted to take photos, of the fire, or of themselves with the view. Jacob even obliged some of them by taking a photo for them. Whenever they were displaced, Taryn would walk a little way downhill. It seemed she didn’t have anything to say to him.
The light mellowed and turned gold. The trickle of hikers dried up, and the sixth time Jacob and Taryn returned to the roost he asked her if she had any idea how long it took to make a forcebeast.
‘What I know about forcebeasts is that it takes three or more sidhe to make one. Three is the lower limit, and those individuals must be very strong. And I know the makers have to stay awake to keep the beast in existence. Forcebeasts are an emergency measure. They’re heavy machinery, or weapons.’
‘There aren’t three sidhe here.’
Taryn looked at him, solemn. Her eyes were a little sunken, a little bruised. ‘Oh, Jacob,’ she said, sadly.
He went back to watching the fire appliances. They were detaching their hoses from the fire plugs and restoring the yellow-painted metal plates that covered them. Taryn said, ‘Tell me what you know about Aeng.’
Jacob did willingly. Eagerly. After all, Aeng was his favourite topic, the matter uppermost in his mind. First he sang Aeng’s praises—his beauty, his tenderness and grace. His unfailing interest. How he was always wholly present, whether passionate or companionable. How he looked while he slept. The colour of his hair by moonlight. Jacob told Taryn how Aeng lived in Quarry House in the summer, and in the winter had a number of residences, some of them hunting camps. There were some sidhe who loved to hunt. It was practical—kept them supplied with dried white meat—but that wasn’t the purpose of it. They hunted to cull animals whose populations weren’t quite managed by the predators at the top of the food chain. Rightly the sidhe should be at the top of the food chain, but owing to their dietary restrictions they didn’t eat whole classes of herd animals. Culling was practical, but Aeng and his fellows hunted for the thrill of the chase. They stalked their prey on foot, or pursued it on horseback. Some had eagles trained to bring down deer or even wolves. They hunted in the high mountain passes for the white foxes and wolves and rabbits whose fur was prized. They walked or rode horses or travelled by boat between gates, and used the gates to go far and wide. ‘You know that, don’t you? How they all use the gates, though only the glove can swing them around?’
‘The glove and who?’ Taryn asked. She was trembling.
Her question puzzled Jacob.
‘I promised Neve,’ Taryn said. ‘She made me promise.’
‘No one can compel a promise, Taryn. There’s persuasion and extortion, and the latter isn’t much different from knocking someone on the head and locking them in a room.’
‘Or chaining them to a tractor tyre with the tide rising,’ said Taryn. ‘But there’s other kinds of compulsion.’
‘There are better choices,’ Jacob said. ‘Can’t you see how happy I am?’
Taryn dropped her head until her hair hid her face.
‘By the end of autumn I’ll be hardy enough to join Aeng in his winter hunting. He says it’ll be an occupation equal to my nerve and suited to all my skills.’
‘What a flatterer he is.’
‘It’s honest praise, Taryn. We are incapable of honest praise.’
‘We humans?’
‘We British. We can’t offer straightforward compliments on anything of substance. We operate on the meanest band of enthusiasm and—if we’re of your class—remind people that too much fervour is vulgar. While my class just josh people out of their enthusiasms, make mock, burst the bubble of anybody giving themselves airs—anyone who has made a bubble just to be able to breathe.’
‘Okay,’ Taryn said. ‘I actually agree with most of that.’ She looked a little happier. Pleased he’d lost his temper. She put a hand on his arm, not to placate him but because she was about to be serious.
‘Your plans with Aeng sound—well—they sound like a life. Like a future. But they make me think of the afterword in movies based on real events. The paragraph or two that appear to tell you what happened afterwards. How so-and-so lived many years, or emigrated to Australia, or invented this or that, or won the Nobel Prize, or finally saw justice in the next millennium. What came to pass. Your plans remind me of all that’s left to say when the story is over.’
‘Oh, you mean this is the story?’ Jacob gestured around him. ‘Are you saying I don’t care about finding the bloody Firestarter? I do. And I think we will find it. Then there is an afterwards, and I mean mine to be fulfilling. You can’t seriously expect me to go back to London, my apartment, the CID?—who wouldn’t have me anyway, the constantly absent Jacob Berger.’
‘You said it.’ Taryn began to cry.
Jacob watched her, feeling helpless and guilty. He told her she was overtaxed. He’d seen this before. ‘You mentioned Purgatory. That must have been tough. And you were at the Moot.’
‘You were at the Moot.’
Jacob had a moment of bafflement. Another moment of bafflement. He remembered being at the Moot, on the beach, nestled in cushions and bolsters in the shade of a silk awning. He remembered the residual heat in the sand, the soft evening breeze on his face, and Aeng’s proprietorial hand sometimes cupping the back of his neck, sometimes resting on this thigh. He’d been stupefied by the aftermath of lovemaking, the cessation of pain, Petrus’s tincture of opium, all of it washing and backwashing from his brain to his muscles. He remembered the long negotiations in the language of which he still had only fragments. People sang and played musical instruments. People like him. Petrus floated candles and crystals and mirrors in the air. Jacob lay back and Aeng gently wiped a soft palm down his face, closing his eyes.
Jacob stared at Taryn. Her face was dim—the sun had gone down and, though the late summer sky was still a crucible melting light of different colours and densities, the forest was dark. It was as if they were standing in a cool shadowy interior and the Devil’s Pulpit was a window.
Jacob glanced away at the lights of the emergency vehicles splashing the stone walls of the narrow village on the terrace by the river. He could still feel Aeng’s palm passing down his face, but what he remembered as a caress and a release came to him as a terrible draining away. It was similar to the feeling he’d had when McFadden slashed him the second time, after he and Taryn had dragged and lifted and rolled that tractor tyre for hours, when they were in sight of safety and suddenly found themselves in danger again. It was the same sensation. Jacob felt his life leaving him. Or his afterlife.
‘Taryn,’ he said, ‘am I under a spell?’
She nodded. She looked hopeful, and sympathetic. ‘It’s very strong.’ She was trying to tell him he must not feel ashamed about it.
‘What kind of spell?’
‘I’m not sure. A glamour of some sort. One that’s altering the appearance of reality in a very precise way. It’s piggybacking on another spell that is much stronger, but similar.’
‘Is it Aeng?’
‘I promised not to tell.’
‘I doubt you’ve promised anyone whom you owe more than you owe me.’
‘True,’ she said. Then she looked away and noticed something that caused her to jolt, then freeze. He looked too and saw the bright beams of flashlights coming along Offa’s Dyke Path. He didn’t imagine they were day walkers any more than Taryn did. He seized her hand and hurried her into the forest. They crashed through ferns and barked their ankles on tree roots. Jacob pulled Taryn down into a thick pile of leaves in the hollow between the roots of a giant beech tree. They stifled their panting to listen.
There was something in the voice
s, the urging, repetitious tone of everything that was audible. Jacob thought, Police dog handlers, encouraging their dogs.
It was a tranquil dusk, the ground between the trees was obscure, the tree trunks black on grey. There would be enough light for a little while for him and Taryn to make their way. But the dog handlers had torches.
‘Where exactly are they?’ Jacob asked. ‘Aeng and Neve.’
‘Christ,’ Taryn said, in rage and frustration. ‘I would have thought that you, having eyes only for Aeng, took note of which direction he went. Anyway, is it wise to disturb them?’
‘Is it wise to let ourselves be apprehended?’
Taryn snatched her hand out of Jacob’s grasp. She hissed, ‘Honestly, I don’t think it makes much difference.’ She stood and waded out of the sink of dead leaves and went towards the lights. Or not exactly towards. The angle she took might bring her to the path along Offa’s Dyke before she was intercepted by the dogs. She didn’t hurry, wasn’t furtive, just careful of her footing.
A moment passed, then Jacob saw Taryn’s body outlined by light, the halo of her red hair. She’d lit up the torch on her phone. She directed its light at the ground and walked faster.
Jacob jumped up and sprinted after her. He got to her the same time as the most eager of the dogs, which was nose down and hauling with its shoulders as if trying to climb out of its harness. Of course the dog was still on its lead, since its handler wouldn’t release it until he’d made an identification, or someone was foolish enough to flee before them.
Taryn came to a halt and tucked her hands into her armpits. ‘Hey,’ she said to the handler. ‘You better keep a hold of him.’
Jacob called out, ‘Taryn! Are you okay?’ All anxious boyfriend. He bustled up and put himself between her and the dog. ‘Go easy okay?’ he said to the dog handler.
The second handler arrived, followed by two constables. They were all wearing stab-proof vests and carrying heavy-duty torches. Jacob enviously eyed their boots. He’d rather not be wearing his hard-heeled sidhe walking boots, and the man farthest from him seemed to have the right-sized feet.
The Absolute Book Page 51
