‘How did she die?’ he asked finally.
‘I don’t know. I was interrupted. Jonathan Upas came across me. I guessed who he was, and he seemed to know me. When he saw what I had discovered, he couldn’t let me go, of course. He made me cover up the small section of earth I had disturbed. Then he performed some strange antics over it, muttering away like one of Macbeth’s witches. He’s the worst kind of sadist, I feel. He believes there’s more to his violence than his own personal pleasure.’
‘Crow said he felt close for a while, then it went away again,’ murmured Lakenheath. ‘He must be a force to be reckoned with, this Upas.’
He nodded as though affirming a promise.
‘Crow?’ said Pasquino. ‘So you’ve met that old charlatan. A great fund of knowledge there, great. But he’s got no time scale, none at all. I honestly doubt if he knows what century he’s in ! ’
‘What happened next?’ asked Lakenheath, resuming his assault on the chains.
‘I was taken to their house where I met Malcolm again. It was quite clear they too had heard about Healot’s urn and had stayed on in Liddesdale in an effort to locate it. Their researches had been concentrated mainly within the centre itself.’
‘Yes. I saw Healot’s room.’
‘A vain effort, but not entirely misplaced, I suspect. Doubtless this was when they encountered your cousin and her friends. Perhaps their first meeting was friendly enough. But once the Upases discovered how relatively disconnected they were and also that Sayer had warned them off, then they became the perfect victims. A necessity in Malcolm’s eyes, a pleasure for those other two. So everyone was pleased and no questions asked.’
‘But I was asking questions,’ said Lakenheath.
‘Yes, I suppose you were,’ said Pasquino thoughtfully. ‘Tell me, you look as if you might have had an accident recently.’
‘Yes. I did as a matter of fact. Very minor …’
‘And this man, Sayer. He was driving the car you normally drive when he crashed?’
‘Oh Christ,’ said Lakenheath. ‘Then Zeugma was right. And Jonathan …?’
‘Yes. Far from trying to pull Sayer out, he was probably making bloody sure he stayed in ! ’
The anger in Lakenheath was now burning bright through all his body. He brought the brick down hard, once, twice, and the chain parted.
‘Well, thank you for that,’ said Pasquino, stretching his arms and luxuriating in his new-found freedom. ‘You wouldn’t happen to have a Burmese cheroot on your person, would you? Or a flask of brandy?’
‘I’ve got some Scotch upstairs,’ said Lakenheath.
‘Well, that will do, I daresay. And then we must organize ourselves.’
‘Yes. But you still haven’t said why you’re here.’
‘Haven’t I? Oh no. Well the thing is, I was foolish enough to let myself be provoked into hinting at my own theory which is that the urn must be in the centre. I did it as a double-bluff, to make them concentrate their attention on the outer terrain. But Malcolm’s very astute. He brought me here, tried a little elementary torture, but it’s not really his line. Then tied me up as you saw and said he’d be back later. No doubt he intends to bring something of Zeugma’s and threaten me with some harm to her.’
‘But you said …’
‘Oh, never fear. It’ll be a bluff, I think.’
‘But you’d tell him what you think you know?’
‘Would I, young man?’ asked Pasquino. ‘I’m not sure. Once I talk, I’m dead, you realize that. It’s only my gratitude to you that makes me tolerate your stupid questions. Though I might still have wriggled out somehow. I’m fairly ingenious.’
He laughed.
‘They locked me in young Upas’s so-called museum. What chaos ! I took my glass eye out and dropped it into a rather nice mid-bronze urn and scratched a little latin sign on the neck. Who knows? Some bright policeman might notice it. It’s remarkable what little clues an alert mind can leave to its passage.’
He preened himself and rose, staggering slightly and grabbing hold of the boiler for support. He was still very weak.
‘What if Zeugma spots your sign and finds your eye?’ asked Lakenheath.
‘What? If that happened and they knew it had happened, then she would be in the very greatest danger,’ said Pasquino.
‘Let’s go,’ said Lakenheath, beset suddenly by strong premonitions of disaster.
‘Wait ! ’ hissed Pasquino. ‘Did you hear something?’
‘No. Where?’
‘Through the door. On the stair.’
They listened together. The silence was so complete that after a while it became more menacing than any noise could be.
‘You were mistaken,’ said Lakenheath firmly. But he took up the candle and moved with great caution to the doorway, peering up the length of stairs to the paler darkness of the open door at their head. His view was uninterrupted.
‘There. Nothing,’ he said, turning back to Pasquino. But as he turned he sensed a movement behind the door, span round to see a figure emerging and leapt forward to grapple with it. The candle flame wavered wildly in the draught from the movement illuminating the face before him like a cloud-swept landscape.
It was Diss.
In his hands he held the shotgun whose acquaintance Lakenheath had already made. The barrel came up and he had time to feel that this might be his last moment in this most beautiful and deadly of worlds. Then Diss brought the barrel round in a short arc which ended at the side of Lakenheath’s head and he sank to the ground in a darkness more complete than that caused by the failing of his candle.
And out on the moor Crow was running beneath a wild sky, muscles and lungs strained to bursting-point, and in his ice-cold mind the growing conviction that he had delayed too long.
14
The dead seem all alive in the human Hades of Homer, yet cannot well speak, prophesie, or know the living, except they drink blood …
Nothing she had learned at Whitethorn nor anything she had experienced since had equipped Zeugma to deal with a situation like this.
Her first reaction was that it was some grotesque joke, but this theory did not begin to make sense. Such sense of humour as Leo possessed travelled in directions quite opposite to this. Perhaps, though, it wasn’t his joke. Upas’s then? But you didn’t separate a man from his glass eye without his co-operation. (Unless he were dead, said a traitor’s voice in her mind, but she ignored it.)
No, Leo must have put it there himself, and scratched the inscription on the urn too.
But to what end? To tell anyone clever enough and lucky enough to spot the urn and find its contents that Leo Pasquino had been here? But she knew he had been here. It was no secret. So why …?
She looked round the room as if it might give her an answer. And suddenly it did. Not an answer she liked, but one which fitted. This big, solid, windowless room with its formidable door was no longer an amateur archaeologist’s museum. It was a cell, a prison. Put anyone in here and there was no hope of getting out. And what did the prisoners do? They scratched messages, tried to leave some trace of themselves; especially when their case was hopeless … No ! this is absurd, she told herself. And looking at the door as she did so, she felt herself grow weak with fear at the conviction that it was now locked. So strong was this feeling that it hardly seemed worth taking the half-dozen paces necessary to check the truth. Somehow she forced her legs to carry her to the door, seized the metal ring which served instead of a knob, and pulled.
The door swung easily open without a sound, and she heard herself sob reflexively with relief.
So it had all been nonsense. But the small sphere of glass in her hand was real enough. That needed an explanation. She strode determinedly down the corridor in search of it.
Her life seemed to be a series of confrontations. The fairy who dished out diplomacy must have been unable to get near her cradle. Though God knows why, she thought bitterly. There could hardly have been a crush of generou
s donors !
She had long ago analysed that her lack of subtlety rose from fear. Anything less than confrontation smacked of evasion, and on the battlefield which she felt her life to be, even reasonable compromise loomed like defeat.
So now, with heart beating faster, a nervous sweat prickling under her arms, a deeper flush suffusing her rosy cheeks, she strode up to the lounge door. It was ajar. She thrust it open without breaking her stride and prepared to do battle.
So wrought up to combat readiness was she that it took a good ten seconds for two fairly obvious factors to make themselves felt.
First of all, the room was empty.
Secondly, it was not the lounge.
This room, lit only by a pleasant smelling wood-fire, seemed at first glance to be a study. The panelled walls on either side of the fireplace were lined with books and the other walls were hung with pictures whose subject matter the shifting shadows did not permit her to discern. But there were no desks or chairs. Indeed there was no furniture of any kind and the stone-flagged floor was devoid of any form of carpeting.
The lounge in which she had drunk her coffee must, she surmised, be the next room along the corridor. In fact, she now recalled a door at the end of the lounge which presumably led into this room and as her eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, she tried to spot the door in what at first glance looked like uninterrupted panelling. So well camouflaged was it that she had to approach the wall to convince herself that there was really a door there. The door knob was counter-sunk so that no protrusion spoilt the line of the panel, and her fingers, lightly caressing the grain of the wood, touched and shifted a small panel which swivelled over the key-hole. Through the hole thus revealed came a ray of light and on an impulse she dropped on one knee and peered through.
She had been right. It was the lounge she found herself looking into, and the three Upases were there. Or at least two of them certainly were. Amine’s head she could see resting against the end of the chaise longue. Jonathan seemed to be sitting on the floor beside her and they were both looking attentively towards their left, clearly listening to somebody, presumably Malcolm. To confirm this, Zeugma switched from eye to ear. At first all she got was a shell-like effect of the roar of the sea, but then by chance she found the optimum acoustic angle and voices came through fairly loud and clear.
Malcolm was speaking. The voice still sent a frisson of something over her body. Was it desire? Could she possibly still love him? But now the sense of his words began to cause other feelings.
‘I think she knows nothing,’ said Malcolm. ‘But even if she isn’t completely ignorant, it’s still better to leave her alone.’
‘This sounds almost sentimental, my brother.’
Jonathan’s voice, mocking.
‘No. I do what I do on rational grounds, not for my own indulgence.’
Malcolm again, contemptuous.
‘In this case, you may be right. She can offer little to a man of your well-known aesthetic sensitivity.’
A pause. Zeugma risked missing something and took a quick look through the key-hole. Malcolm had now moved into the picture and was stooping down over Jonathan. His voice when she heard it again was so cold and menacing as to be almost unrecognizable.
‘… troubles come from your self-indulgence. You are as foolish and as dangerous as the seller of opium who is also an addict. Believe me, you shall not destroy me with you. Amine, my sister, control him!’
‘We all do what we must. You too, my brother.’
Amine spoke in Arabic, but her words were easy enough for Zeugma to translate. The first part was a version of a common proverb. The term she used which Zeugma rendered to herself as ‘my brother’ was the respectful form of address used towards the head of a household. Its intention she suspected was ironic.
‘I must go now. You will make my apologies to the girl. And you will send her home. Tomorrow or the day after, she will hear the sad news.’
‘The car again?’
Amine.
‘Yes. But this time, efficiently.’
‘It was my arms which got burnt ! ’
Jonathan, querulously.
Malcolm uttered an expletive which it would have taken a lexicon of four-letter words to translate and the lounge door slammed.
‘He grows tedious ! ’
The outburst was Jonathan’s.
‘He is like our father. A man of prudence and reason. And he is right, Jonathan. Without him, we would find it hard. Do not cross him in this matter of the girl.’
‘But the time is right.’
‘Times return. We will find other times.’
Silence again.
Zeugma pressed her eye to the key-hole once more. Jonathan was kneeling before Amine, who held his head in between her hands and looked deep into his eyes. Slowly she drew him towards her and they met in an embrace that was far from brotherly.
Shocked by this, and sorely puzzled by what she had heard, Zeugma pushed herself upright to discover she had got pins-and-needles in the leg she had been kneeling on. It buckled under her and she staggered against the door. At the same time, the glass eye slipped from her hand and bounced like a marble across the stone floor.
The reaction of the Upases must have been instantaneous. The eye was still bouncing when the door from the lounge was flung open. Jonathan stood there and Zeugma smiled weakly at him, her mind desperately seeking a plausible story and her eye measuring the distance to the doorway into the corridor. But explanation and escape were cut off by Amine’s appearance there. She entered the room stooped gracefully, and picked up the glass eye.
‘Please may I have that,’ said Zeugma, after a long moment’s silence. ‘It’s Leo’s spare eye. I brought it with me in case he needed it.’
All things considered, she felt it wasn’t a bad try, but it did not win the applause it merited.
Amine held the eye up for Jonathan to see. A strange and disquieting half-smile played round her lips.
‘Brother,’ she said. ‘I think the case has altered.’
‘And she was listening,’ responded Jonathan. ‘Nor is she as stupid as she looks. She must understand something of this.’
‘To understand even a little is dangerous.’
‘So we cannot let her go.’
‘No, we cannot let her go.’
Zeugma wished she could find this casual assumption of power over her amusing, but instead she found it chilled her genial spirits and filled her with foreboding. This exchange between brother and sister sounded both tentative and purposeful as though they were casting around for a logical sequential path to carry them over uncertain ground to a longed-for destination. Somehow Zeugma did not fancy getting there. In this case she felt sure it was better to travel despairingly than to arrive.
‘What of Malcolm?’ asked Jonathan next. It was the first hopeful thing Zeugma had heard.
Amine shook her head impatiently. Their roles, Zeugma noticed, seemed to have been reversed, Jonathan was now the hesitant one, concerned about his elder brother’s reaction, while Amine who had previously counselled caution, was all for pressing on – with what?
‘He will be late,’ she said dismissively. ‘First to the town, then to the centre. It may be morning before he returns.’
The centre. What the hell did Malcolm want at the centre? wondered Zeugma. And what would he do when he found Lakenheath there ?
But Lakenheath would have to fend for himself. This cold debate, which concerned her so closely and which she found herself powerless to join was coming to a climax.
‘Must we wait?’
‘The season is ripe,’ said Amine.
‘The day is ripe,’ agreed Jonathan.
And Zeugma found herself recalling that it was the first day of spring.
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said stiffly. ‘But it really is rather late and I think I’d better be going now.’
They continued to ignore her, both turning and locking their
respective doors. Zeugma went from one to the other, trying them, still at the stage where her fear of making herself ridiculous was sufficient to restrain her mounting hysteria.
‘Please open these doors,’ she said in her best Whitethorn She-who-must-be-obeyed voice, reserved for complaints about bad service in restaurants and shops.
The two still ignored her, but they did open a door, a hitherto unsuspected one in the wall opposite the lounge door, and passed through into a small chamber. Zeugma did not attempt to follow immediately but did a quick tour of the room to see if it held any other concealed exits. If there were any, she could not find them, and what she did find was little to her comfort. The books were a comprehensive library of the occult, ranging from scholarly works like Professor Thorndike’s eight volume History of Magic and Experimental Science through the allegedly practical and autobiographic works of modern magicians like Levi and Crowley to what were clearly very valuable copies, often handwritten, of grimoires, or magical textbooks. Graeco-Egyptian texts abounded, some in specially designed perspex containers and of such obvious antiquity that Zeugma began to wonder just how far Jonathan’s tomb-collecting activities extended. Set into the wall above the fireplace was a relief carving in sandstone of a bull being killed by a young man whose features were disturbingly like Jonathan’s. It seemed likely that it had come from a Mithraic temple and Zeugma felt the serious archaeologist’s pang of indignation at the thought that this and other finds may have been stolen for personal delectation rather than exhumed in the interests of science.
But there was little room amid her growing anxieties for such unselfish emotions. She now saw that what she had thought were pictures on the walls were for the most part charts and diagrams, incomprehensible geometric shapes, symbols, patterns of letters, lists of names. But there was one picture, or piece of tapestry rather, in a deep red silk thread on a dark background, the pattern almost invisible at first, but as she looked, the light seemed to pick out and be reflected from the glossier silk and a picture emerged. It was a winged goat with a human body. On its forehead between the great curving horns was a pentagram or five-pointed star. The body had the breasts of a woman and a formalised male organ, erect and entwined by two snakes. The thighs and lower legs were goat-like again, ending in cloven hooves. It was a powerful albeit revolting piece of work and Zeugma found she had spent longer than she intended standing before it.
Beyond the Bone Page 15
