The Castle of the Demon

by Reginald Hill

  ‘You should go away,’ he said finally.

  ‘Yes, yes. I am,’ she answered aggressively.

  ‘Good. Good.’ He sounded as if he meant it. ‘Where are you going?’

  She almost listed the two or three alternatives she had been thinking of, then cut herself short just in time.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said, congratulating herself on spotting the trap. ‘That’s my business from now on.’

  ‘True,’ he said. ‘True. After the divorce, that is.’

  Divorce. After what he’d said before she’d stopped visualising the prospect of the real freedom offered by a divorce. The best she could hope for was some Reno-like trumpery perhaps, if she could afford it. But real, good old English divorce, pronounced in open court by a bewigged judge and reported in the Sunday papers, that she could not hope for, not with Sterne.

  ‘Yes. After the divorce,’ he repeated.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, unable to keep the suspicion and disbelief out of her voice.

  ‘You must have your holiday,’ he said gently. ‘Think things out. If you are still resolved, we must each seek our freedom.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said uneasily. ‘I will.’

  She knew there had to be more to come.

  ‘It occurs to me you might perhaps combine business with pleasure, a bit of my business with your pleasure, I mean,’ he said musingly. ‘You might be able to do me a small service during your holiday.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Do you remember mentioning to me a place called Skinburness? On the Solway Firth? I believe you went there as a child. Would that be the kind of place you envisaged for your holiday?’

  It wasn’t. It was just the opposite of what she had in mind. But strangely the second Sterne mentioned the place, her childhood memories returned and it seemed infinitely attractive and desirable.

  ‘It might be,’ she answered guardedly, keeping this emotion out of her voice.

  ‘If it were, by any chance, you might be able to help me in a business matter in which some small degree of discretion is needed.’

  ‘What would I have to do?’

  ‘Nothing positive, my dear. Just accept delivery of a packet. It will have a book in it. You needn’t open it, just accept it, if it’s given to you or left with you. And then give it in turn to me.’

  ‘What’s this all about, Sterne? Why not use the post?’

  ‘The safety factor, my dear. And time. If you did receive it, I’d expect you to break your holiday short and bring it down to our home straight away.’

  There was a faint underlining of ‘our’.

  ‘Let me get this straight,’ said Emily finally. ‘Are you saying if I do this you’ll give me a divorce?’

  The direct question did not seem to disturb Sterne at all.

  ‘I was merely asking a favour of you, dear. I would trust we are going to remain good friends even after our marriage has ended.’

  That had been it. A bargain struck, however vague. Emily knew her husband well enough to believe that an understanding had been reached even if he refused to acknowledge the precise form of words she used.

  Two hours later a messenger had delivered a letter to her from Sterne. It told her that Solway Cottage, Skinburness, had been booked in her maiden name for a fortnight in two days’ time, and added that during her stay a book might be delivered to her in a brown-paper parcel. If this happened she would oblige her husband by returning to town immediately and delivering it to him personally. He wished her a pleasant and health-giving stay.

  What the book might be, Emily had no idea. But if this was the price of divorce it could contain pornographic pictures of the Archbishop of Canterbury for all she cared.

  So two days later she pointed the gleaming white nose of her Triumph up the M.I and arrived in Skinburness the same day. Since when the only book that had been delivered to her in any form had been Michael Scott’s. And that had not remained with her long.

  Her stomach ached at the memory as she scrawled her signature at the bottom of the letter.

  To hell with Sterne! What did it matter if they never got divorced? She was not likely to want to marry again in a hurry.

  And it was quite imperative that she got out of this place as soon as possible.

  She thought of trying Parfrey again. She thought of just locking every door and window in the place and sitting in front of the fire all night.

  Instead she found herself pulling on a warm sweater and zipping up her anorak while Cal watched her expectantly. She pulled a woollen ski-hat on to her head, then stood still for a moment. There was something else she needed. In the old-fashioned umbrella rack standing outside the kitchen was a small but extremely sturdy child’s spade. As she took it out she dislodged a whole wigwam of old golf-clubs and walking sticks and surprised herself by not starting in the least at the sudden noise. Cal, on the other hand, was very shocked and leapt round teeth bared, mane bristling.

  ‘You’re too excitable by half,’ said Emily, and at the open door of the cottage she turned, raised her index finger and said firmly, ‘Stay!’

  Disappointed, the big dog reluctantly stretched himself out over the threshold, though he brightened visibly when Emily added the much more positive command word, ‘Guard!’

  She was unable to decide exactly why she had not taken him with her, and indeed her conscious mind deliberately shied away from the puzzle. But vague ideas about covering her retreat, and even vaguer ones about having someone to go back to flitted around the back of her mind in a recess even deeper than the control room.

  But she was not a woman who could put up with too much vagueness too long.

  As she passed through the broken wire fence which prevented the Philistines from driving their cars along the Grune, she paused and spoke to herself inwardly with great clarity.

  Inwit the archaeologist, she said, is possibly the man who attacked me, just about here, last night. I have no way of proving that. Also possibly he has in the company of Plowman buried the body of Fenimore Castell in the middle of a gorse clump. That I can prove or disprove. And that is what I am about to do.

  Facing facts, she now decided, was not the rapid road to comfort and self-respect her R.I. mistress had so frequently promised.

  I must be mad.

  It began to rain.

  At least the ground will be soft! she giggled to herself. And found her legs had carried her another hundred yards or more without her noticing.

  After that it was as easy to go on as to go back.

  She recognised the sentiment as being one of the more profound of Macbeth’s, a man whom she regarded as the most stupid of all dramatic heroes, with the possible exception of Faustus. The recollection made her pause again.

  Visibility was rapidly worsening and she found that in this light, in this atmosphere, bushes really did begin to look like bears. But she knew also that the only thing which could bring her real peace of mind now was for her quest to prove fruitless and Inwit’s trench to turn out to be nothing more than a trench. So on she went once more.

  When the faint outline of the college showed up through the mirk to her right she slowed down. It was not far past here, she recollected, that she had turned off. Things looked very different now from their appearance in the bright sunshine of midday.

  She made several false starts, actually penetrating right to the centre of one clump of gorse and briar before deciding it was the wrong one. Inside there it was fairly sheltered and comparatively dry. Despite the throattickling, musty smell of the place she was tempted to rest for a moment with a cigarette. Then something rustled in the grass and startled she hurried away, scratching her hands and face as she forced her way through the clinging briar.

  Out in the open again she gulped in huge lungfuls of damp air and after a moment could almost smile at her panic. Almost.

  The next path she investigated was the one. She knew it immediately and followed its twists as easily as though it were a pavement sh
e’d walked along a hundred times.

  But when she reached the open place where she had encountered the archaeologists she suddenly ceased to be certain. It looked right and felt right. But there were no signs of digging there, no freshly disturbed ground, no piles of earth.

  Puzzled, she stooped down and began to feel her way over the grassy turf, already half convinced she was mistaken. But a minute’s examination at this level reassured her.

  Well now, she thought. What a tidy little man you are, to be sure, Mr. Inwit! Fancy, you’ve put every one of those sods back just as you took it out. And brushed away any loose dirt left over. It would be almost impossible to tell you’d ever been here.

  Swiftly she began to pull the sods up, using her spade for leverage where necessary. In fact the sods had been replaced too recently to have re-bound themselves with the earth beneath, which in any case was soft and loose. She could burrow more swiftly down through it with her hands than with her tiny spade and she knelt astride the trench, scrabbling out the loose earth between her legs like a dog.

  It was hard work, none the less, and soon her stomach muscles began to ache abominably. When she had scooped out a hollow of about two feet in depth she took a breather.

  I really must be mad, she thought again, wiping a mixture of sweat and rain from her brow with a hand so dirty it all immediately turned to mud.

  ‘Right!’ she said out loud. ‘Another foot. If he’s deeper than that, he can stay there!’

  Her frivolity sprang from a conviction that her search was going to be utterly fruitless, that nothing at all was there. A sudden hardening of the earth supported her theory. She must be at the bottom of the freshly dug stratum.

  Though, of course, her uncontrollable control room added, if you buried a corpse, you would probably stamp down very hard on the layer of earth immediately above it.

  At that moment her fingers touched a piece of glass. Gingerly, worried in case she cut herself, she tried to pull it out of the earth, but it wouldn’t come. In any case, her careful probe told her, it didn’t seem to have any sharp edges. And it seemed to be perfectly circular in shape.

  Her heart lurched.

  Praying softly, she moved her index finger slowly along the smooth surface till it reached the edge. Then a little further. A little further.

  Gently she bumped into some kind of protuberance.

  And knew at once, before the message reached her conscious mind, that it was a human nose.

  ‘Oh God,’ she said, her nerveless fingers tracing the outline of this earth-strewn face still invisible at the bottom of the trench. ‘Oh God!’

  Slowly she rose, slowly turned, but once it was behind her she began to run. The twists and turns of the narrow path were forgotten now. It was only a few yards long, but she seemed to plunge and duck for half a mile through clutching arms of briar and fists of gorse, before she fell almost full length on to the main path and could hear clear once more the swell and pull of the sea.

  But there was something else too. A drumming in the earth beneath her shivering body. She looked up. Out of the dark loomed a shape so large that she knew it would fall on her and crush her where she lay.

  She screamed.

  ‘Whoa!’ cried a man’s voice and the shape reared up over her and instantly became a horse. Large but not monstrous. Almost movingly familiar.

  She scrambled to her feet.

  ‘What the hell? You!’ said Michael Scott.

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Yes. Please, please …’

  She was ready to collapse and weep in his arms or round his horse’s neck. Anywhere, in fact, but the sympathetic murmurings did not materialise.

  ‘You damned fool!’ said Scott. ‘I warned you to get away from here.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she faltered, amazed to hear herself apologising so abjectly, but ready to do anything to retain the pleasure of his company.

  ‘You may be sorrier,’ he said savagely. ‘Let’s get you home before any more harm’s done.’

  ‘Oh, it’s too late for that, I’m afraid, Mr. Scott. Far too late. The harm’s done now!’

  The voice was Plowman’s. He laughed as he spoke.

  What happened next was so rapid that it was only much much later that Emily sorted it out into sequence and scripted it. Total acting time, she decided, was about ten seconds.

  She turned at the voice. Behind her, having obviously just come along the path, were two dark shapes she knew at once were Inwit and Plowman. The former carried a trenching tool before him like a short battle-axe. The latter stood like a country gentleman on his estate, all tweedy, with the smooth, dully-shining barrels of a shotgun resting in the crook of his arm. They both wore knee-length gumboots.

  A strong hand seized Emily from behind and dragged her round into the neck of the black horse. Something rose on the saddle in front of Scott and looked at her inquiringly.

  It was Miranda.

  ‘Get up!’ cried Scott, lifting her bodily one-handed by the neck of her anorak and trying to throw her over the horse in front of him.

  The shot-gun came smoothly up in Plowman’s hands. The horse turned and reared, Emily clung desperately on. Plowman ducked away from the plunging hooves and fired. The horse screamed as pellets scored a bloody line along his neck. Scott gave a low groan, clapped his right hand to his left shoulder and his fingers slowly relaxed their grip on Emily, who was thrown to the ground with Miranda on top of her as the horse reared again and bolted with Scott lying loosely forward in the saddle half over to one side.

  The gun came up again, levelled after the rapidly disappearing horse, when a smaller shape just as black detached itself from the ground and launched itself upwards at Plowman’s face. It was Miranda. The man screamed as he fell backwards with the cat spitting and clawing at his face. The second barrel went off harmlessly into the air. Inwit, who had moved menacingly towards Emily with his trenching tool at the ready, hesitated, then turned and ran towards his partner.

  Something told Emily this might be the last chance she would ever have to make an independent decision. She scrambled to her feet and ran blindly off along the path. Logically she would have preferred to be running back towards the village. But that would have meant running past the archaeologists. So she ran wildly through the rain in the direction of the Point.

  Ten seconds, she worked out later. No longer. Ten seconds to send a wounded, perhaps dying man galloping along the shore on a panic-stricken and bleeding horse. Ten seconds to provoke a raging, fearless cat to try to claw your eyes out. (With a bit of luck she might even have succeeded.) Ten seconds to send a terrified helpless woman running into the night in peril of her life.

  A good ten seconds’ work, Mr. Plowman and Mr. Inwit.

  But these thoughts came much later. Now there was only the rain in her face, the wind buffeting her weakening body, the uncertain ground betraying her every step. And, worst of all, the sense of pursuit.

  She knew as surely as she had ever known anything that whatever else Inwit and Plowman had to do that night, or any other night, first of all they had to kill her.

  She stumbled and fell heavily, her foot twisted in a rabbit hole. She had seen them running over the sand earlier in the week, gambolling in the early-morning sunlight. And she had blessed the animal creation as fervently and unconsciously as the Ancient Mariner.

  Now consciously, but just as fervently, she damned them all to hell and gingerly fingered her ankle.

  She was lucky. It all seemed in order. She tried it out. There was no pain. So far, so good. This enforced halt could be a blessing in disguise. She crouched nearer to the bushes against which she had fallen; not too near, that might trap her; just near enough for concealment.

  Good. She was thinking logically again. She forced into her mind a picture of the Grune. A peninsula about one mile in length and one quarter mile in width bounded by the Solway on one hand and Skinburness Creek on the other … The words, she realised with a humourless smile, were none othe
r than Inwit’s, spoken to Amanda Castell only two nights before.

  Her problem now was to get back to civilisation, people, light, as quickly as possible. The nearest building was the college, but somehow she did not fancy that. It held too many mysteries. The quickest way to the village was to return the way she had come, but she fancied that even less. Inwit and Plowman had seemed faintly comic as archaeologists. As hunters she was ready to treat them with much more respect. Miranda would have only delayed them. She hoped the beast had as much discretion as it had courage and had beaten a retreat when Inwit went to his partner’s aid. They didn’t look like members of the R.S.P.C.A.

  She forced her mind back to the problem in hand. Not backwards; that was out. Alternatives were either to cut across the Grune and make her way back via the fields which lay along the middle of it or to continue forward and follow the path round the Point, along the creek and so back to the hotel. The route was the shorter and thus had obvious appeal. But she would be on unfamiliar ground. There would be fences, hedges, crops. One of the fields had wheat in it she seemed to recall. The kind of noise she would make in that would surely attract attention very quickly. Or there might be animals to disturb. Cows lurching up out of the darkness, mooing in fear, while she stood in a fear greater than they could understand while Inwit and Plowman homed on the sound.

  No. Round the Point it was. She knew that route well. It was longer, but much much safer, she decided. And, having decided, she felt strangely reluctant to move.

  It was comfortable crouching here. Familiar almost. The bushes gave her some measure of protection from the rain. She felt well hidden.

  It’s movement that’s dangerous, she heard some part of herself saying. If I stay here nice and quietly, I’ll be safe. I won’t even need to be here all night. Someone will come looking for me.

  Who?

  The question rang so loudly in her mind she wondered if she had spoken it out loud. The answer trickled into her mind with a sibilant slowness.