They sat in silence for a while, staring out into the gently falling rain like a family party on a day’s outing to almost any English seaside resort almost any day in summer.
‘What strikes me about it,’ said Zeugma finally, ‘is that it’s so small. I mean, it’s a jolly sight too big for here, in this particular place, but it doesn’t look as if much could have gone on there really. And why did they need to shut off so much of the surrounding countryside? I know it’s down now, but according to Charley, there used to be a ring of wire and warning notices about five miles in diameter.’
‘There’s a lot underground,’ said Lakenheath. ‘Several of the labs. And the test chamber too. And last, but not least, the fuel-storage chambers. Now there were four of those, all on the left hand side of the square, which is where the test chamber was. They staggered them for safety; the first starts about twenty yards out of the perimeter line, the next forty and so on.’
‘What do you mean, for safety?’
He grinned happily, his turn to be schoolmaster.
‘Don’t you know anything about rocket fuels?’ he asked scornfully.
‘No,’ Zeugma replied.
‘Thank God for that. Neither do I. But I gather that the stuff they’ve had down there ranging from ethyl alcohol to fluorine with a soupçon of liquid hydrogen and perhaps a dash of diborane could have lifted most of this terrain fifty feet in the air and flipped it over like a pancake. So you see why they had the warning notices spread so wide.’
‘It’s monstrous, monstrous ! ’ said Zeugma. ‘Thank God they’ve gone and taken their bloody fuel with them.’
‘Well, not quite,’ said Lakenheath.
‘What do you mean? There’s some left here?’
She made as if to start the car and drive away. He took her hand and held it from the ignition.
‘No, not that. But you’ve probably been warned sometime that even when a petrol can has been emptied and washed out, it can hold sufficient fumes to flash off if you drop a match in it? Well, these silos are just the same. But never fear. They blocked them off when they pulled out. Took out the pipelines and put concrete plugs in the holes. Couldn’t risk a distillery taking over the place and using the tanks as whisky vats! It’d be potent stuff, mind you. Like Crow’s! So no danger. All right?’
‘Thanks for the reassurance,’ said Zeugma. ‘But I still find it a creepy place. Are we going to sit here all day, just staring?’
‘What? Sorry. No, let’s go now by all means. I was just thinking about the centre. It really is the centre, isn’t it? That’s where whatever happened to Julie happened, I’m sure of that. You know, they, Julie and her mates, used to say the place was haunted, bumps in the night, that sort of thing.’
‘Just Crow’s cup of tea,’ commented Zeugma, starting the car.
‘Then something else struck me. Diss. He never gave me the keys back. He locked the gates behind him when he left the centre. Later after Sayer’s accident, it never occurred to me to ask for them back.’
‘Why on earth should he want the keys to that place?’ asked Zeugma.
‘Search me. Fortunately there’s a duplicate set in the office. Now I wonder, I wonder.’
He looked calculatingly at Zeugma, who thought, He’s going to ask me to do something else for him.
‘Doing anything special tonight?’ he asked casually.
‘Yes,’ she replied with great emphasis. ‘I have a dinner engagement. In Liddesdale.’
‘Ah. Upas. The young hero. Give him my regards. Look,’ he said, ‘what I was going to ask you was this. I’ve got a feeling it might be worth our while to keep an eye on the centre …’
‘Worth our while !’ she interrupted. ‘Where does that our come from?’
‘Well, you did break into Crow’s house because you were worried about a crime, didn’t you?’ he said almost apologetically. ‘No, what I meant was, a kind of vigil, just a couple of nights …’
Again she interrupted.
‘You want me to spend a night in that place with you? You’re crazy!’
‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘No, I don’t want you to stay there with me. What I would appreciate, though, is if you could find time to drop me there this evening before you go to dinner and pick me up when you come back.’
He said it as if it was the smallest thing in the world, a diversion of a hundred yards or so.
‘What a cheek!’ she exclaimed. ‘It’s miles out of my way! I’d have to come into Brampton to pick you up, then drive you out … no! I won’t think of it. Drive yourself. You’ve had the healing hands touch. Just test it out. Or get a taxi. It’s a crazy idea. I don’t want anything to do with it.’
But I will, she thought gloomily. I will. Years of Whitethorn experience had taught her that there was no method of stopping the elegant, the good-looking, the self-confident from getting their own way.
The rest of the journey was passed in silence. When they reached Brampton, he asked her to take him to his office in Front Street. She would then have driven straight off, but he staggered badly as he got out of the car and asked if she could help him up the stairs.
Sighing, she brought up the rear, ready to catch him if he fell.
Miss Peat sat in her corner, only her eyes moving as they entered. She looked as if she had not left her seat since last Zeugma saw her. Perhaps the cleaner just dusted round her.
Lakenheath greeted her cheerfully. Miss Peat had not been the most lively companion he had ever sat drinking with, but the ease with which she dispatched glass after glass of Pernod had given her a new human dimension. And she had been the perfect listener.
‘You might as well see those pics while you’re here,’ said Lakenheath to Zeugma. ‘Then we can chat about tonight’s arrangements.’
‘Oh no,’ she said, following him into his office.
He dug into his desk drawers and triumphantly emerged with a large buff envelope from which he spilled a couple of dozen aerial photographs.
‘Take a look at those,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear what the experts make of them.’
Her reaction surprised him. She seized the photographs from the table and thumbed through them with all the avid curiosity of a schoolboy with his first nudist magazine.
‘Is anything the matter?’ he asked.
‘Oh, no. No. They’re very good, aren’t they? And you had them done specially for the Development Council ?’
‘Right. You archaeologists want any of them, you buy the copyright from me.’
Zeugma smiled faintly. But as she did so she wondered in some bewilderment how copies of these same photographs taken so recently had come so soon into the hands of Dr Leo Pasquino.
11
’Tis opportune to look back upon old times. We have enough to do to make up ourselves from present and passed times, and the whole stage of things scarce serveth for our instruction.
Lakenheath must have been watching from the foyer of the hotel, for he came limping out of the front door just as she arrived.
‘You look as if you’re going to the office on the seven-twenty-five,’ she said, nodding at the ancient briefcase he was carrying.
‘Do I? It’s just a little light refreshment in case I get peckish. And some reading matter.’
‘How disappointing. I made sure you’d have an old service revolver at least,’ she said primly setting the Range Rover in motion.
‘No. Sorry. The service I did never reached the revolver-owning stage.’
‘Ah !’ she said. ‘You told me you were never in the army.’
‘No. I said I was never an officer in a fashionable regiment,’ he said. ‘But I was a boy soldier.’
‘What?’
‘Yes ! Signed on the dotted line when I was fifteen. I wanted out of that terrible school and I didn’t want in to the kind of job lads like myself were getting just then.’
‘Ah. The deprived child syndrome,’ she said, then flushed hideously and unconcealably as she felt his cool gaze rest on he
r profile.
‘Could be,’ he said, and fell silent.
‘What happened?’ she asked. To finish there would leave her very much in the wrong.
‘Oh, I stuck it for four, five years,’ he said. ‘Passed some exams I wouldn’t have got if I’d stayed at school. Saw a bit of the world before it ended. My army career, I mean !’
‘And how did it end?’ she asked.
‘Fortuitously,’ he said. ‘By the time I was nineteen, I’d had enough. Unfortunately I’d signed on for twelve years.’
‘So what happened?’
‘Like I said, fortuitously about this time the army decided to dispense with my services.’
‘Oh. I see.’
She didn’t see at all. The first picture that came into her mind was of Lakenheath getting the sack for turning up late on parade three mornings in a row, but surely even the modern army did not work like that? The second picture was of Lakenheath having all his badges of rank stripped from him on the open square while a muffled drum beat insistently in the background. But that was officers only, wasn’t it?
And for the third picture she had to turn to her memories of the girl at Whitethorn who was so expert on the Turkish Army Officers’ Manual. She had a brother seven years older than herself who she claimed had avoided National Service by faking both the only two fool-proof methods of making yourself unwanted by the army.
These were bed-wetting and homosexuality.
She risked a sideways glance at Lakenheath and tried to see him as either enuretic or queer.
Perhaps his subsequent career would give a clue.
‘What did you do then?’ she asked.
‘After the army? Well, I felt like a rest, something completely different. So I gathered up my little certificate, trotted round to my local education office and managed to get myself accepted at a teachers’ training college.’
She greeted this with even more incredulity than she had done the revelation of his army background.
‘You – a teacher?’
‘You – an archaeologist?’ he replied. ‘I lasted out my three-year course, though it wasn’t as much different from the army as I’d hoped; then I did my probationary year, just to get the service in. After that I went on a bit of a walkabout for eighteen months.’
‘Some walk ! ’
‘It was. I did the length of Britain to start with, not walking all the time, mind you. In fact, I started off with Julie and some of her mates, but they were too purposeless for me. I ended up in the Shetlands, worked my way across to Norway on a trawler, then trotted down Europe till I reached the Med. I got a bit ill in North Africa, so decided it was time I headed home. Back here I got a job in a technical college; I quite liked that and stayed on a couple of years. Then, the tech college got swallowed up in a bigger beast called a College of Advanced Technology which began to have university pretensions, and they started a Business Diploma Course. So I stopped being a teacher and became a student again.’
‘So you were at a university,’ she accused.
‘I suppose so. But not much like Oxford and Cambridge, I reckon! We worked hard. I got through, thought it was silly to waste my new-found abilities in the classroom and got a very junior job with a consultancy firm in the Midlands. Now that was really dull, but really. It was all words, you see. There was nothing concrete there, or if there was, then I didn’t get a sniff at it. A layer of groundbait, that’s all I was. So I wanted out after a year, saw this job advertised, applied never imagining that anyone as inexperienced as me would even be interviewed, and, lo and behold ! here I am ! ’
‘Applause, applause,’ she said. ‘They saw through the veneer to the sterling qualities beneath.’
‘Well,’ he said cheerfully, ‘they were dead wrong, weren’t they?’
Zeugma now glanced at the clock in the dashboard and pursed her lips. She would need to get a move on if she were to get back to the Old Kith in time for Upas. Though it might do that young man good to be kept waiting. His recent heroics had probably confirmed his beliefs in his own irresistibility.
No ! she told herself. I must get out of this awful middle-aged habit of deciding I know what might do other people good.
It was a dark, dark night, there was no star-light, and their only contact with the outside world was the swish of the rain from beneath the tyres and the cones of light the Range Rover pushed before it.
Suddenly the thought of dropping Lakenheath in these conditions in the middle of nowhere to sit and wait for God-knows-what was intolerable.
‘This is absurd,’ she said.
‘What is?’
‘You can’t go and sit in that place all by yourself all night. I don’t know how late I may be. The thought of you will spoil my dinner.’
‘Oh good. I thought for one moment a touch of the altruistics had crept in. Never fear. I’ll be fine.’
‘What about Diss?’
‘Diss-appeared,’ he laughed. ‘I checked at his hotel and he’s cleared out of there. No one seems to have seen him since you had your little chat yesterday. Perhaps he’s crept away with his tail between his legs.’
The mockery was gentle, but she was as ready to be exasperated as those whose unselfish solicitude is rejected usually are.
‘Well, I suppose you can come to no harm then,’ she snapped.
‘Just what I’ve been trying to say,’ he said, with the calm self-assurance of one who has won an argument beyond all doubt.
They didn’t speak again till they reached the centre. Lakenheath hopped out and unlocked the gates.
‘I’ll drive you up to the hospital,’ she offered. It was only forty or fifty yards but at Lakenheath’s rate of progress he would be soaked by the time he got there.
‘No thanks,’ he said. ‘I’ll have to lock the gate on the inside, otherwise it’s a bit obvious someone’s here.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘What shall I do when I come to pick you up ?’
He thought for a second.
‘Just blow your horn. Three blasts. Morse for S.’
‘And what does S stand for?’ she asked.
He grinned.
‘Whatever you like. Thanks for the lift. See you later.’
The gates crashed shut, she heard the key in the lock and then Lakenheath’s footsteps moving towards the hospital which, near though it was, was almost invisible in the sodden darkness.
She reversed and headed back along the road. By day she would have followed one of the moorland routes which had now become so familiar to her. But in these conditions with visibility so poor and the atmosphere of the deserted centre still touching her mind, she vowed nothing on God’s earth would get her driving across the waste that night. Nothing.
Upas was sitting at the bar talking to Charley when she entered the Old Kith.
‘At last,’ he said. ‘But well worth the waiting.’
He stood up, took her hand and gave it a kiss which got very close to being a bite, an impression confirmed by the way he pursed his lips reflectively afterwards as though sampling a new foodstuff, then he said softly, ‘… tasting of Flora and the country green, dance and Provençal song, and sunburnt mirth.’
Why do they all get around to Keats in the end? she wondered resignedly. All that vigorous sensuousness. If only someone would quote a Cavalier lyric at me. Or, better still, something elegant and polished and fleshless from the middle of the eighteenth century. Still, it was better than nothing, which was what she had got from Lakenheath.
‘Shall we go, or would you like another drink?’ she asked.
‘I think not.’
‘Oh. Black heart needs a clear head, is that it? Well, good-night, Charley. This, by the way, is Mr Upas.’
‘We’ve met,’ said Charley. ‘Drive carefully, sir. Lot of stray dogs round here. I’d hate for you to get close to one ! ’
Zeugma glared at him, angry at his rudeness, but Upas laughed out loud.
‘Someone’s been talking, I see. Well, ther
e’s always a second time.’
‘Not for paying debts, there isn’t,’ said Zeugma. ‘Ten pounds, remember?’
He looked at her quizzically, then reached inside the lose suède jerkin he had substituted for the riding leathers and produced a roll of notes.
‘I like to start even,’ he said, peeling off two fivers and passing them over.
‘Thanks, she said. ‘Let’s go, then.’
She expected to see a car outside. Instead there was just the motor-bike.
‘You’ve come on that?’ she said.
‘Yes. Climb aboard.’
‘No thanks,’ she said firmly.
‘No? Why not?’
‘First I’ve no intention of getting wet. Second, you may not have noticed but I’m wearing a skirt. I am not going to roll it up round my waist and be a free show for everyone we meet. Nor am I going to risk my neck by sitting on the pillion side-saddle. I’ll bring the Range Rover. You lead, I’ll follow.’
He didn’t argue, and a couple of minutes later they set off into the night.
The temperature had risen as the wind dropped that day, but it was still chilly and as they climbed out of the relatively protected valley in which Blackrigg lay, Zeugma felt glad for reasons other than safety and modesty that she’d rejected the bike. She’d no desire to arrive at her host’s house with her flesh corrugated with goose pimples and her hair like a rook’s nest.
Also travelling like this meant that there would be no need for anyone to accompany her back to the pub and she would be able to go direct to the centre to collect Lakenheath. In addition (a less positive advantage perhaps) there would be no opportunity for good-night grapples and muffled mutterings about warm, white, lucent, million-pleasured breasts. Though she might be doing Upas an injustice of course. Why should an attractive, self-confident young swinger like that have designs on such as she? If he’d been after her lily-white body, surely he’d have left his bike at the Old Kith and accompanied her in the Rover, thus ensuring that he made the return trip with her?
Her elation ebbed. It was one thing to have foiled the lecherous plans of a personable young man. It was quite another for there to have been no such plans in the first place.
Beyond the Bone Page 11
