But that had been many miles from here. This room could hold no ghosts.
Instead it held chaos. The floor was torn up, the walls had huge pits gouged out of them, even the ceiling had been torn away to reveal the metal cross-beams. It was as if some pickaxe-wielding poltergeist had conceived a deep and bitter hatred for this place.
This was where the leaf-scattering draught had come from. Two of the large window-panes were shattered and the frame itself sagged to one side as a result of the violent assault on the wall.
Lakenheath surveyed the mess in bewilderment. Aimless, savage vandalism in urban areas was accepted almost without comment, but who would come to this lonely place just to destroy a single room?
It looked fairly recent. Indeed it must be fairly recent.
Had it been done before Sayer and Diss made their visit? Or even during the visit? That was an interesting thought, but one on which he could build no viable hypothesis.
He switched off the torch and resumed his tour.
Twenty minutes later he had been round the full square and, apart from Healot’s room, found nothing. The noise had continued, however, and once more he sat down on the floor and examined his plan. There had to be a solution which did not admit of supernatural agencies.
If, he said to himself, if there is a noise being transmitted via the radiator pipes, and if I have been in every room in the centre which contains a radiator, then the noise must originate … where?
The answer was ludicrously simple.
From the actual starting-point of the pipes. The boiler-room itself !
He rapped his foot angrily with his stick and yelled with pain. This was where he should have started. The trouble was, the plan included neither the bunkers beneath the quadrangle buildings nor the basement of the hospital. And it was in the latter that the boiler house was situated.
Back to square one, he thought, as he trudged wearily along the covered walk once more. He made no attempt at concealment this time. If there were anyone or anything alert and watching in the centre, he must have been spotted long before this. In addition his ankle was throbbing distress signals, he was very cold and he was beginning to feel very ill-tempered.
He let the anger build up, though one part of his mind was able to see objectively that what he was really doing was finding a substitute for his ebbing courage. The wear and tear on the nerves of his solitary vigil had been greater than he had foreseen, and to tiptoe stealthily down the basement stairs now seemed mentally as well as physically impossible.
It was also rendered pointless by what he discovered when he reached the large oaken door which led into the stairs. It was locked, the first locked door he had encountered in his perabulations round the centre.
It was of course the third key he tried which opened it, and there was no question of turning keys deftly in the oiled wards; they rattled, the lock made protesting clicking noises and the door screeched grimly on rusty hinges.
Below all was dark and silence. If anything lived down there, it lay still and waiting.
Slowly Lakenheath descended the stairs. The torch was switched on, but its beam which before had seemed so strong and broad now shone feebly and narrowly. How much this was purely subjective, Lakenheath was in no position to assess. His heart was beating fast and he had to swallow hard two or three times to ease the constriction of his throat before he reached the foot of the stairs and turned into the boiler room itself.
The narrow finger of light slowly traced the room’s outline, finally resting against the broad cylinder of the flue which ascended from the central-heating boiler. Slowly it ran down the dull metal tube till it lighted on the bulk of the boiler itself, a huge installation to deal with the heating needs of such an establishment. Square and squat it sat, menacing, like all dead machines. The finger sought and found the radiator pipe which set off here on its long journey round the centre. It began to follow its course towards the damp, unplastered wall. But the smooth line of the pipe was broken after only eighteen inches. Something was wrapped round it. Something … a joint-lug? a piece of lagging?
A pair of hands.
For a second which seemed much much longer, Lakenheath thought the hands clasped together round the cold metal pipe were disembodied. Just hands. Nothing more. Then in the shadows beyond the pipe he saw a darker shadow. Arms, stretched almost parallel to the pipe. And whoever lay so was concealed by the bulk of the boiler.
‘Who’s there?’ demanded Lakenheath.
There was a grim non-human noise, the hands moved, thin fingers stretched out, there was a rattling of a chain.
Forgetting his ankle, he moved swiftly round the boiler, stick upraised. The figure that lay there turned towards him. At least he assumed it did though it was difficult to say for its head was enclosed in a featureless black hood.
‘Who are you?’ demanded Lakenheath, and when no answer came, he reached forward, seized the hood and dragged it free. And he staggered back from what he saw. A face twisted and distorted, a mouth gaping open in a rictus of pain with sounds squeezing their way out between bloodless lips as though the tongue had been ripped from the throat.
He dropped the torch, almost deliberately. Darkness was better than this. And oblivion would be best of all.
‘It is quite simple really,’ said Malcolm Upas. ‘In Britain I am my father’s child, in North Africa my mother’s. What complications having two names saves !’
He smiled and Zeugma found herself responding easily, willingly to the smile. Five years had not changed him a great deal, she thought. His face was a little fuller, that was all.
‘You never told me about Jonathan and Amine,’ she said reproachfully.
‘I think I did,’ he answered. ‘But they were still very young five years ago. Sixteen, fifteen. Children. Our talk, I recollect, was of more adult things.’
He glanced at her questioningly. For all his self-assurance, he is uncertain of our relationship now, thought Zeugma.
Jonathan and Amine had discreetly retired almost immediately, and for a couple of minutes thereafter Zeugma had found herself stuttering and stammering in a most un-Whitethornish way. But now she was in control once more and things were beginning to fall into place. As the controller of Leo’s correspondence for seven years, it had puzzled her slightly that she had lacked all knowledge of the Upases, friends close enough to whisk him away in the middle of a dig. But now the Upases’ double identity was revealed, it left her with another puzzle.
‘Why didn’t you come back with Leo as soon as you met him?’ she asked forthrightly. ‘Instead of leaving me to toil – and worry – all by myself?’
Malcolm chose his words carefully.
‘I wanted to, of course. But Leo did not mention that you were with him straightaway. And he seemed – how shall I say it? – concerned that no offence should be done to your feelings. I am his friend, but I do not think he approved of our old relationship. He is very protective, dear Leo !’
He ended with a laugh in an attempt to lighten the situation.
‘I suppose he is,’ agreed Zeugma, thinking, Yes, it figured. Leo might be delighted to meet Hasan again, but be less than pleased at the thought of what effect his sudden reappearance might have on his ward. No doubt there had been some fairly free-speaking during the past couple of days before he had consented to the dinner invitation being transmitted.
Zeugma felt both flattered and offended by these efforts to protect her. She was, after all, a grown woman, and in any case her feelings for Hasan had long since been tucked away among her other bitter-sweet souvenirs. So she reassured herself, though his presence here was the most unsettling thing she had experienced in these days of unsettling experiences.
‘Was it because of anything Leo did or said that you went away in Cairo?’ she asked.
‘You haven’t change, I’m pleased to see,’ he said. ‘Direct as ever ! In a way, I suppose it was. He said you were very young, talked of the future. By implication, asked if my i
ntentions were honourable – and if so, in the context of which of my cultures. But it was not just Leo. Far from it. There were other things at that time. Things were unsettled in my country. I had many personal worries. The future was dark to me. It seemed best to leave before too much harm was done. Let me be direct too. Was too much harm done?’
He leaned forward and looked deep into her eyes.
‘Well,’ she said shakily. ‘It was rather painful at the time. But then, so’s toothache.’
He sank back, relieved.
‘The so philosophical Zeugma ! I have always believed in your resilience.’
She thought, You blind self-satisfied bastard. Don’t you know that fat girls have plenty of room to cry inside?
But her pleasure in his company soon soothed her irritation and it was a disappointment when twenty minutes later Amine arrived to announce that dinner was ready.
It was an excellent meal. The main dish was a haunch of spicy venison cooked to a tenderness rare in Zeugma’s previous experience of the meat. She ate with relish. Whitethorn had taught her that whatever else a girl might lose there was still hope if she kept her appetite. The others made no effort to keep pace. Hasan ate delicately and led the conversation, quizzing her gently about the site she was working on at the moment. Jonathan was rather withdrawn. He ate mechanically and made do with one small helping. Amine did not even go as far as this, the food on her plate remaining quite untouched. She sat with her elbows on the table, turning a wineglass slowly before her face so that the candlelight by which they ate was caught and broken in the crystal.
She was, Zeugma decided, either a very intelligent woman or one of those hateful creatures possessed of so much natural grace and personality that everything she said sounded knowledgeable and wise. Even with the talk centred on archaeology, Zeugma felt her own expertise was a very small and deep-buried talent.
‘This is a hobby of yours?’ she asked, hoping by the stress to establish something of the gap between the dilettante and the professional.
‘An interest only,’ said Amine. ‘Like Malcolm, I am intrigued. It is Jonathan who is our expert.’
Zeugma looked with surprise at the younger Upas, who was so deep in reverie that even the mention of his name did not rouse him. In repose, his face more than ever seemed familiar.
‘I didn’t realize,’ she said. ‘Does he have any special interest?’
Amine pushed a three-stemmed candelabrum towards her brother until the flames flickered so close to his face that their small heat must have been sensible.
His features seemed to rearrange themselves under the moulding touch of the fingers of flame and suddenly he was back with them.
‘Forgive me,’ he said with a smile of great charm. ‘I am being ill-mannered.’
‘Yes,’ said Amine. ‘Your guest was enquiring if your archaeological interests cover any special field.’
‘Why yes,’ said Upas. ‘Did you not know? I am interested mainly in tombs.’
It was an amateurish answer and ought to have given Zeugma some professional reassurance, but instead the word resounded in the air as though it had been spoken in the dry emptiness of a funeral chamber itself.
‘Tombs, of course, are a very fruitful source of information and artefacts,’ she said in her brightest pedagogic manner. ‘But it is the light they throw on the life of a period which makes them so important. Don’t you agree?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Jonathan.
‘It is the dangers that attract him, not the scholarship, Miss Gray,’ said Amine.
‘Dangers?’ echoed Zeugma in surprise, looking into the deep dark eyes of the other woman.
‘Yes. Like the motor-cycling. To disturb the dead must often be attended by danger. Don’t you agree?’
Amine used just enough of Zeugma’s own intonation in her question to rouse a suspicion of mockery.
‘Oh, you mean the curse of the mummy, all that Hammer Films stuff,’ sneered Zeugma in reply.
The remark seemed to fall on fairly stony ground for some reason. They all looked at her in silence and suddenly she had a sense of them as a family, linked by bonds which must forever keep her out. Not that she any longer had any hopes of getting in, she reassured herself.
‘Jonathan must show you his museum before you leave us, Miss Gray,’ said Amine, breaking the silence.
‘You have a museum here?’
‘A small collection of little interest to someone familiar with the great museums of the world,’ said Jonathan modestly.
‘Oh no. Please. I should like to see,’ answered Zeugma.
Upas didn’t argue and after the meal was over (which meant when Zeugma stopped eating, the others having been mere spectators long before the end) and they had drunk bitter Arab-style coffee in the lounge, he invited her to follow him. Malcolm laughingly refused to join them, saying he had been bored enough in the past by Jonathan’s collection of antique crockery. Amine whose supple length elegantly overflowed from an inadequate chaise longue made a gesture which might have been acquiescence or denial and Zeugma who even at Whitethorn had always found her appetites to be healthily normal was concerned to realize what an impression Amine’s strange beauty was making on her.
The house was quite still, except for the sound of their own steps on the stone-flagged corridor. Somewhere the unobtrusive shadowy-faced woman who had served their food might be closeted with the dishes but the place felt empty.
It was the kind of silence, thought Zeugma, prompted perhaps by her own recent reference to Hammer Films, which seemed created to be broken by a spine-chilling scream.
The mood was maintained by the sight of the huge double door which lay at the end of the passage, its wood darkened beyond identification by age. The lock into which Jonathan now inserted his key was far from ancient, Zeugma noticed. He must imagine he’s got some pretty valuable stuff locked up here, she thought with amusement. But she entered the room with the illogical excitement of an optimistic art dealer climbing to the old attic in which might lie an unrecognized Titian.
Behind her, Jonathan switched on the light and she drew in her breath at what she saw. The room was an unwindowed cube, its only furniture consisting of a tier of four strong wooden shelves which ran round the bare stone walls. These shelves were loaded. When Jonathan said he was interested in tombs, he hadn’t been joking. Here were examples of all that vast variety of objects each successive age took with them to the grave like children clutching dolls for comfort in the dark. Weapons and ornaments, crosses and cooking pots, tools and artefacts of all kinds. And among them, more grisly relics still, lay bones. Sternum, clavicle, humerus, scapula, ulna, radius, femur and fibula, the grisly piles lay heaped in every corner, each jauntily surmounted by a skull.
What struck Zeugma at once was the haphazard arrangement of the collection, though a closer inspection made her wonder whether perhaps it was haphazard merely in conventional indexing terms. Certain groupings had an air of the deliberate about them which made her look twice, but the link between, for instance, a medieval dagger and a Middle Bronze Age urn was too idiosyncratic for her comprehension. Something about the urn caught her attention, however, and she was about to remark on it when the door opened and Amine appeared on the threshold. She did not enter but stood in the doorway wrapping her thin arms around her body as though she found the room ineffably cold. Zeugma was surprised by this, as the atmosphere was so comfortably warm that she could not self-deprecatingly put it down to her own superior insulation.
‘Yes?’ said Upas, sounding annoyed by the interruption.
‘Telephone,’ she Amine laconically.
Upas did not ask who it was or indeed pass any comment but pushed past his sister with a brusqueness just this side of discourtesy.
Amine remained in the doorway for a moment, then made the smallest of shrugs, a gesture so elegantly expressive that Zeugma felt her mouth corrugate with the lemon-bitterness of envy.
She turned to the urn.
&nbs
p; ‘Has anyone noticed,’ she enquired, ‘the apparently Roman inscription on the neck of this apparently neo-lithic urn?’
There was no reply. Amine had gone. Zeugma thrust out her tongue in the direction of the door, a gesture surpassing Amine’s in expressiveness at least.
Then she looked at the urn once more, leaning over the table to get a closer view. The inscription was undoubtedly of much later date than the urn. Could the urn have been disinterred twice? Once by some Roman archaeologist, killing time during an overlong posting to the Wall, then a second time two thousand years later by Upas?
She must ask him when he returned. Meanwhile a spot of interpretation might throw some light on the matter.
Carefully she lifted the urn over the other relics and held it up to the light. Something rolled about inside it like a round pebble, but she ignored this, full of disappointment at what a casual glance now told her. The lettering was more recent than two thousand years ago. At a rough guess she’d say it was only a day or two old, hastily and almost illegibly done with a sharp implement. The medieval dagger, perhaps. The inscription was difficut to make out, but Zeugma thought she recognized it as a symbol she recalled seeing fairly often during Pasquino’s three-month stay in Italy as a guest of the University of Padua. Kilroy was here, Leo had interpreted it. Could Leo have done this? she wondered. She doubted it. He disapproved of those who vandalized history almost as strongly as Zeugma did of those who vandalized the countryside.
Perhaps it was just a whim of Upas’. It was his urn. She made to return it to its place, determined that he should not know of her interest in it. But the rolling sound within made her pause.
Gently she tipped the urn forward. The object inside rolled down the inner curve, hesitated momentarily at the bend of the neck, then plopped heavily on to the shelf. For a moment Zeugma thought it was a child’s marble.
Beyond the Bone Page 13
