Beyond the Bone
Page 6
‘That sounds fair,’ said Upas. ‘But the dog deserves something surely.’
From his belt he pulled a short slender branch still freshly green where it had been torn from the tree.
‘Proof that I reached the grove,’ he said. ‘Perhaps your dog would like it to play with.’
Crow looked at the branch for a long half-minute. So, thought Zeugma with a Pasquino-like flash of vision, must the priest of the sacred grove have regarded the latest pretender to his post, knowing that death alone could settle the claim.
‘You keep it till I need it,’ Crow said finally. ‘Twinkle doesn’t fetch sticks.’
Then he broke into the low loping stride so reminiscent of the dog’s and the two of them ran off to the north.
Zeugma watched them go, till the noise of the motorbike engine startled her. Upas too was ready to make an abrupt departure.
‘Eight o’clock tomorrow evening,’ he said to her. ‘Be ready.’
‘Wait. I haven’t said …’
‘Debts must be paid,’ he interrupted. ‘Till eight !’
It was no use shouting into the roar of his exhaust and he didn’t have a rear-view mirror so even the abusive sign Zeugma sent after him was wasted.
Soon the engine sound had died away. Crow and Twinkle were now out of sight. Her only company lay beneath her. The dead. And even the dead were no longer totally reliable these days.
With a sigh whose source she did not altogether understand, she bent down and began unfastening the tarpaulin which she had drawn protectively over her excavations. She drew it back with her usual care till half the trench was revealed. Then with growing excitement and incredulity she hastily dragged it completely clear and stared down into the hole, unable to comprehend what she saw.
The bones had returned.
6
How the bulk of a man should sink into so few pounds of bones and ashes may seem strange unto any who considers not its constitution …
The wind grew stronger and colder. It was a wind to send most generously furred and blubbered animals to their folds, earths, warrens and caves. Lakenheath was discovering that even the long-practised Scots had not really learned how to fight the weather. A tartan rug over a Harris tweed jacket over a Fair Isle sweater was proving to be much less efficacious than a rabbit’s fur.
Below, nothing had stirred since Zeugma had left him here over an hour earlier. This did not surprise him. A series of covered ways connected all the buildings and from Lakenheath’s position only movement in the open or at the windows nearest to him would be visible.
His back was aching, he felt stiff and cold all over. He pulled the rug closer about him and shivered violently. Why, he asked himself, why am I sitting up here freezing when I could be in my hotel room, supping whisky and waiting for that insolent little chambermaid to come and make the bed? Scottish cloth may have failed me, but the nation has other sources of warmth.
He glanced at his watch. He had not made any firm agreement about the time of Zeugma’s return and he suspected she was capable of leaving him up here till nightfall. Or later.
Movement was necessary, he decided, if he were to deny her the pleasure of finding him petrified between earth and sky.
He rose, leaning heavily on his shooting stick till he was able to balance on his good foot, and began hopping around, arms waving, with what vigour he could muster.
At that moment two figures appeared at the gate of the centre and raised their faces towards him.
Without his binoculars it was not possible to work out if he had been spotted. They might be just casting pseudo-rustic glances at the sky. Or if they had seen him, they might take him for some local village idiot performing a fertility dance.
He sat down so that the crest of the ridge concealed him from view. This had been a stupid idea, he thought. It could produce nothing except perhaps pneumonia. There was rain in the wind now and with no guarantee of how long it would be before Zeugma returned, he would do well to start seeking his own salvation.
Carefully he rose to his feet and began to move downhill, making for the road. If the visitors had gone, he would seek shelter in the centre; if they hadn’t, then he would forget embarrassment, concoct some story to explain his presence and beg a lift back to Brampton. This was his intention but when, as he hopped down the last stretch of grass alongside the gatehouse, he heard a car engine cough into life like a septuagenarian smoker on a cold morning, some irresistible instinct made him fall to the ground and press himself into the damp earth for concealment.
When he looked up, the Morris Oxford was disappearing down the road.
‘Damn !’ he said. ‘Damn !’
On the other side of the road something moved, just enough to catch his eye. It was a rabbit and after this one little hop, it sat quite still, only an intermittent twitch of the ears showing it was a living creature. Such intrepitude in so timid a creature interested him and he slowly rose and started to hobble across the road. The rabbit still did not move. ‘Perhaps,’ mused Lakenheath aloud, ‘perhaps you are someone’s pet. What’s your name then? Hey, hey – Fluffy.’
There was a loud explosion and now Fluffy moved. Its belly was ripped open in a tatter of blood and flesh and the small creature was hurled backwards two or three feet before coming to rest with a stillness that made its previous quietude seem turbulent.
‘Jesus wept !’ exclaimed Lakenheath, spinning round on his good foot.
In the gateway of the centre, with a smoking shotgun in his hand, stood Diss. Behind him, invisible from the ridge, was the Buick.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ demanded Lakenheath, furious to find he was shaking.
Diss stared silently at him, if it could be called a stare that showed so little interest.
Finally he spoke very softly in what sounded like a foreign language. Lakenheath could not catch what he said.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Myxomatosis.’
Lakenheath turned and peered down at the remains of the rabbit. Its head which had survived untouched, was swollen and covered with sores. No wonder it had been sitting so still.
Diss had come to stand beside him and the shotgun barrel ran between them like a hand rail.
‘Fortunate you carry a gun in your car,’ said Lakenheath.
Diss inserted another cartridge and snapped the barrel back into place.
‘You never know when it might come in handy,’ he said. ‘Now let’s talk. You look weary. I’ll fetch the car.’
He walked into the centre and left Lakenheath to contemplate the remains of the rabbit. He had seen plenty of dead animals, even shot a few in his time though as a sport he felt it fell a long way short of table tennis. But he had never been so close to a creature at the moment of impact. His memory kept on re-running the incident in slow motion so that he saw the smoking swarm of pellets burrow and burn their way through the rabbit’s fur, saw the small body expand like an inflatable toy till finally it burst and the spheres of lead re-emerged in a nebula of blood and flesh.
It was a comfort when the Buick ran silently alongside him and Diss motioned him to climb in. No man would want a mess like that in his own car.
Diss himself climbed out, pulled the centre gates to and locked them.
‘I promised Mr Sayer I’d see everything was safely locked,’ he said on his return. ‘He seemed most concerned that the place shouldn’t be overrun with intruders. No hippy communes, that kind of thing.’
‘He told you about that !’ exclaimed Lakenheath indignantly.
‘I’m afraid so. Not to suggest inefficiency on your part, I may add, just as general information. Indeed, if he knew you were here now, he would be impressed as I am by your devotion to duty. Injured though you are, you still come out here in the wilds to assist your colleague. On foot too.’
There was no hint of irony in his tone, but there didn’t need to be.
‘I got a lift,’ said Lakenheath. ‘And it wasn’t to help Sayer
I came. Bird-watching.’
He tapped his binoculars. Diss nodded approvingly.
‘I like a man with a feel for nature. This is fine country.’
As he spoke his gaze passed slowly over the rolling moorland, empty except for the dark geometric shapes of conifer plantations, scattered like pieces of a child’s jigsaw on a grey-green counterpane. The sky was indeed huge but very dark now. The clouds must still have been ripping along at a smart pace before the unremitting wind, but the cover was almost too solid for the movement to be remarked.
‘What brought you here in the first place, Mr Lakenheath?’ enquired Diss. ‘The scenery?’
‘The job, Mr Diss,’ replied Lakenheath calmly. ‘What about you? What are you doing here?’
‘Me? I’m just a businessman looking for lebensraum,’ said Diss.
Lakenheath gave a disbelieving snort which self-interest then tried to turn into a cough. It sounded unconvincing, but then another sound reached them, very distant and almost drowned by the wind which bore it.
‘Is there a quarry close by?’ enquired Diss.
Lakenheath did not reply but pointed straight ahead. Momentarily the wind had torn a rift in the clouds through which the sun now trailed a sheet of light, its edges grey and tattered and even its central radiance stained by an oblique column of smoke.
Diss switched on the engine and the Buick accelerated away in one powerful smooth movement. Lakenheath felt himself infected by an illogical urgency as the big car ate up the long straight stretch of road which ran away from the centre. It wasn’t till they rounded the first bend required by the contours of the land that they saw anything.
A few hundred yards ahead a burning car lay on its side by the road. A black-clad figure shielding his face with one hand was trying to drag the car door open with the other, but the fury of the flames was driving him back. Even though the flames were running the whole length of the car, Lakenheath recognized it.
‘Oh Christ !’ he said. ‘Sayer !’
The man in black made another approach as they pulled to a halt and Diss leapt out and dragged him back. He was wearing gauntlets and a motor-cyclist’s helmet which had afforded him some protection from the fire, but clearly the heat was impenetrable.
Another vehicle came tearing cross country from the left. It was a jeep and a tall bearded man whom Lakenheath recognized as Jenkins, a local Forestry Commission worker, jumped out with a fire extinguisher which he began to play on the burning car. The jeep driver meanwhile could be heard on his radio giving details of the accident to his control.
Diss now produced a small extinguisher from the Buick and added his efforts to Jenkins’ while Lakenheath helped the motor-cyclist to the side of the road where his bike lay.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked.
‘A bit charred, I think,’ said the man. ‘But nothing much. It was terrible, I couldn’t get him out.’
‘What happened?’ asked Lakenheath.
‘I don’t know. I wasn’t on the road myself. I was doing some scrambling practice up there when I heard the bang. He must have blown a tyre, gone off the road and turned over. The car was blazing by the time I got to it.’
He sat with his head bent down between his knees and took several deep breaths. He was only a youngster, Lakenheath saw, and the shock must have been great.
The extinguishers had done their jobs, he observed, and the flames were now out, but the car still glowed and smoked making anything but a visual examination impossible. That this was enough was apparent from Jenkins’ face as he peered in through the heat-shattered windscreen. He came across to Lakenheath shaking his head.
‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘My God, Mr Lakenheath, I thought it must be you when I saw what car it was.’
Beside him the young man stirred and Jenkins bent to examine him.
‘Hang on,’ he said and went to the jeep where Diss and the driver were in conversation. He returned with a first-aid box and after carefully easing the scorched gauntlets off began to anoint the boy’s hands and face.
‘That was a brave thing you did,’ he said. ‘You nearly got him out. We saw from the edge of the plantation up there. If we could have come straight down with the extinguishers we might have saved him, but there’s a bloody stream in the way.’
‘He’s dead then?’ asked the youth.
‘I’m afraid so. Never mind. You did your best. What’s your name? I’ve seen you riding around before on that bike, haven’t I?’
‘Possibly. I’m Jonathan Upas. I live up in Liddesdale.’
Lakenheath looked up with interest at this information. So this was one of the fat girl’s Upases. But it wasn’t the time for an exchange of small talk.
‘You did well,’ he said, rising, and limped to the jeep.
‘They’ve raised the police and the ambulance men,’ said the driver whom Lakenheath also knew slightly.
‘You know,’ he went on, unconsciously echoing Jenkins, ‘for a moment when I saw the car, I thought it must be you in it, Mr Lakenheath.’
‘No,’ said Lakenheath unnecessarily. ‘No. Not me?’
He felt Diss’s gaze on him and met it unwaveringly.
‘It was lucky you took your own car, Mr Diss,’ he said. ‘Or you might have been in the Morris too. By the way, you never did say why Sayer left the centre before you did.’
‘I believe he had an urgent appointment,’ replied Diss.
‘An appointment,’ echoed Lakenheath.
He sat down by the roadside again despite the fact that it was beginning to rain in earnest. The fat drops sizzled against the hot metal of the burnt-out car and no one spoke until they heard distantly the oncoming sirens of the ambulance and police car.
7
Bones, hairs, nails, and teeth of the dead, were the treasures of old Sorcerers.
Zeugma after sitting on the edge of her trench for half an hour musing on the returned bones and tangential mysteries of Crow and Twinkle, Pasquino and Upas, Lakenheath and Diss, decided finally that this was no way for a Whitethorn product to behave. Looking into yourself was one thing; irritably reaching after fact and reason in the midst of uncertainties and mysteries was something quite different. Experience had taught her that whenever she felt bewildered (occasionally), outraged (frequently), or menaced (nearly all the time), the best anodyne was hard work.
The home-coming skeleton was complete save for the left hand. Interesting also was the manner of death, which seemed to have been violent, the rib-case and the skull showing signs of having been pierced by thrusts from a sword or spear. A theory began to form in her mind and she began to work with a will. And so successful was this as an antidote to the problems and cares of the world at large that when she at last rose to the surface of conscious life, flushed with exertion and with triumph in having conclusively proved (to herself at any rate) that this was a disposal pit for the carcases of executed soldiers, she was amazed to find how much time had gone by. It was late afternoon, the sky had succumbed wholly to the cohorts of cloud being spurred in from the west and the wind which had been piously tiptoeing round the exhumation hollow jumped out and grabbed her with unsuspected violence when she abandoned the shelter of the grave. There was rain in the gusts now, thin strands so icily cold that they fell across the skin like white-hot filaments.
Lakenheath ! she thought. A severe cold was no more than he deserved, but death from exposure was too high a price even for deliberate ill-manners.
Pausing only to ensure that her excavations were firmly topped with the sheet of canvas, she set out through the untimely gloom at a speed a little beyond that of safety. When she reached the knoll on which she had left Lakenheath, a glance was enough to tell her he was no longer there, but she still got out of the Range Rover and climbed up to the spot.
Below her Thirlsike Research Centre lay. Deserted buildings have an unmistakable look, she thought. Like a lost child on a beach. Or the pale face of a condemned man being led to the place of execution.
She shook him out of her mind. Tomorrow night she would be seeing him once more. Lakenheath was her present concern. Could he have clambered down the slope and sought shelter in the centre? Quickly she returned to the Range Rover and sent it bucketing over the rough terrain towards the road.
The huge metal gate suspended between smooth concrete posts was locked. Nevertheless she peered between the bars and called out.
‘Hello! Mr Lakenheath ! Are you there?’
There was no reply, but she thought she sensed a movement somewhere in the complex of buildings. It would be surprising of course if there weren’t living things inside. Birds, rats, foxes even. She squinted through the bars once more.
She had never been inside, but knew something of the history of the place from listening to Charley in the Old Kith. The grey stone building she could see almost straight ahead must be the old fever hospital. What a place to be brought to ! And not in an ambulance over a metalled road, but on a farm-cart, drawn by plodding horses over a rutted and broken track. What hope could anyone have had of return? It was a relief to get back into the Range Rover and back away from the gates.
What now? she wondered. Coming out with me on the moors is clearly the kiss of death.
The thought was grimly humorous but also extremely disturbing. Suppose the half-wit had set off to follow her and got lost? At least he wouldn’t have been able to get very far with his sprained ankle.
For the second time in three days she found herself driving across the bare and treacherous waste in search of a lost companion. This time she was more systematic, describing as far as the land contours would permit her a zigzag search pattern and stopping at each turning point to shout and listen.
Her search was taking her west and north, which seemed the most likely directions he would have strayed in. Worry and anger warred in her mind.