Beyond the Bone

by Reginald Hill

  Malcolm and Lakenheath looked at her together and the latter, realizing that he made a large part of a communal target, released his grip and stepped back.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘but I was wearing him down.’

  Then he subsided gently to the floor.

  Malcolm took a step towards her.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Zeugma, listen to me,’ he said reasonably. ‘It’s all over. All I want to do now is go in peace. This American’s right. I nearly choked when I opened that inspection hatch. If the urn’s in there, then we cannot get it, not without equipment. So I’m pulling out. Will you let me go?’

  ‘I don’t think I can do that, Hasan,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? It’s a big world. And there are worse people in it than me.’

  ‘Name six,’ she said.

  ‘I was your first lover,’ he said seriously. ‘I remember our days together with tenderness. This is no way for such a thing to end. Let me go.’

  He moved towards her and she found herself against her will and intention retreating before him.

  ‘Can you shoot me? No, I think not. Put up the gun, Zeugma. It’s all over. No one is much harmed. Put up the gun and we will go.’

  She was now back against the wall. She was dimly aware that the Peat–Jonathan bout had been suspended and the contestants while keeping a tight hold of each other were watching the main confrontation as keenly as the others.

  Lakenheath was trying to push himself off the floor to return to the fray.

  ‘Don’t listen,’ he mumbled through bloody lips.

  ‘Zeugma, be careful ! ’ urged Pasquino.

  ‘Blow his bloody head off !’ pleaded Diss.

  But she felt helpless, paralysed, as Malcolm slowly approached, a friendly smile on his lips, hand outstretched for the weapon which seemed to pull with increasing weight against her arm muscles.

  ‘Give me the gun, Zeugma,’ repeated Malcolm.

  She ought to shoot. She knew she ought to shoot. But she did not know how anyone ever found the strength of hatred to press a trigger and send another human being spinning off into the emptiness beyond.

  ‘The gun, Zeugma.’

  ‘Zeugma, my love,’ said Pasquino rapidly, urgently. ‘Forgive me. This man is evil. Many good men have died because of him. Many. Your father among them. He didn’t drown by accident. He killed himself because this man …’

  Zeugma did not hear the rest. She saw the change on Malcolm’s face, saw him hesitate in his advance, saw him step back and begin to retreat in the face of her own new expression.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No.’

  Jonathan took Miss Peat by surprise, threw her from him and rushed at Zeugma. She saw him coming but did not change her aim. Carefully she squeezed the trigger.

  ‘Hasan !’ screamed Jonathan.

  But he was calling to someone who was no longer there.

  For a moment he knelt on one knee by his brother’s body. Then he rose, stared white-faced at Zeugma, and said, ‘You shall know me.’

  And, seizing the table with both hands, he overturned it, shattering the oil lamps and sending trickles of liquid flames running over the wooden floor.

  After that it was chaos. Zeugma and Miss Peat struggled desperately to untie the two captives while Lakenheath beat his jacket vainly against the flames. Jonathan meanwhile had disappeared, but that he had not instantly fled from the centre was apparent when Zeugma helped Pasquino to his feet and saw that the door was blocked by a wall of fire. Through the windows she saw that flames were beginning to burgeon all over the centre. Lines of fire were running along the corridors of the quadrangle buildings with a speed that indicated that Jonathan’s talk of burning the place down had been no idle threat. Only trails of paraffin could explain the rapidity with which the fire was spreading.

  They would have to escape by the windows and this proved more difficult than Zeugma anticipated. Sayer in his post-hippy enthusiasm for security had had them all fitted with internal padlocks and Lakenheath’s master-keys were not intended to open these. Finally and with great difficulty they smashed the glass and were almost roasted in the upsurge of flame caused by the night air rushing in.

  As they clambered out, Zeugma thought she heard the noise of Jonathan’s motor-bike, but she could not be sure.

  Diss was helping Pasquino, and she and Miss Peat supported Lakenheath, despite his protestations of strength and vitality. They made for the main gate which was flanked now by tall pillars of flame from the buildings on either side.

  ‘Like hell-mouth,’ said Lakenheath as they approached. ‘Abandon hope.’

  ‘But we’re going out,’ rejoined Zeugma.

  Moments later they were through and at the Range Rover into which they all climbed with great relief, though Pasquino looked a little put out when he saw the shattered windscreen.

  ‘You drive too fast,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘My car’s tucked out of sight just off the road,’ said Diss.

  ‘May I offer you a lift?’ asked Zeugma formally.

  ‘I’d appreciate it.’

  ‘Look,’ said Miss Peat.

  They followed the direction indicated by her outstretched hand.

  The centre was now a solid square of flame and the light this cast touched the heights of the ridge from which Lakenheath had overlooked the buildings two days earlier.

  Someone was up there. No, Zeugma realized. Two people.

  ‘Who the hell’s that?’ asked Diss.

  ‘Let’s take a look,’ said Zeugma.

  She sent the Range Rover bumping up the gully which led to the track below the ridge. Pasquino drew in his breath in amazed disbelief when he realized that only one headlight worked, but he did not speak.

  When Zeugma reached the foot of the ridge, she stopped and climbed out. From here the centre itself was not visible but the glow in the sky formed a bright backcloth to the figures silhouetted on the crest above. She had known who they were as soon as Peat had pointed them out, but this close confirmation filled her heart with relief and concern.

  Without speaking to the others, she began to scramble up to where Jonathan and Crow confronted each other above the blazing centre.

  ‘Hang on. What happened to Florence Nightingale?’ complained Lakenheath. She turned, took his reaching hand and began to help him up the slope. He had a right to be there too.

  As though sensing this, the others remained by the Rover.

  Above, the two men had joined in a desperate struggle all the fiercer for being conducted in almost complete silence. Crow had thrown his long sinewy arms around his younger opponent and locked his hands together in the Cumberland wrestling style at which he was so expert. Jonathan subscribed to no particular style but was ready to launch attacks with fists, feet, elbows, knees, teeth — anything at his disposal. All Crow seemed to be doing was holding on, and from the brief glimpses Zeugma got as she made her way up the slope at Lakenheath’s slow pace, it sometimes appeared to her as if the form and size of Jonathan had changed within that formidable circlet of arms. Sometimes Crow seemed to be wrestling with a creature of great bulk and ferocity, at others it was as if his arms were wrapped round nothing at all. It was an illusion, Zeugma decided, caused by the uncertain light and the rapid foot movements of the pair as their struggles forced them to and fro along the ridge. At times they descended towards Zeugma, at others they sank almost out of sight down the other side. But always Crow’s grip held and the struggles of Jonathan began to smack less of fury and more of despair.

  Finally, inevitably, as Zeugma helped Lakenheath up the last steep section, the young man’s body slackened and, still bound by those relentless arms, he sank to his knees on the damp coarse grass which their feet had trampled almost to mud.

  Crow held him still for a moment then unclasped his arms.

  ‘You have defiled this ancient earth,’ he said. ‘Go now. Leave it, if you can.’

  Jonathan almost fell as the support
ing arms let him go. Then he rose, his body wrapped in a sinister miasma of perspiration, and rushed down the slope a few paces to where his motor-bike lay.

  ‘You can’t let him go !’ cried Zeugma as he started the machine.

  ‘Wait,’ commanded Lakenheath, holding her back.

  Jonathan pointed the machine down the slope towards the flaming centre. There were no farewell dramatics from him; every instinct of his body cried out for flight.

  Even in her anger at his escape, Zeugma had once again to admire the grace and authority of his riding. So might some young priest have escaped astride a dolphin from the monstrous catacylsm that engulfed Atlantis, she thought as she watched his progress north along the burning perimeter of the centre.

  ‘Crow,’ she said. ‘Are you hurt? What happened to Amine?’

  ‘I could not help,’ he answered strangely. ‘Outside the circle, she was lost.’

  Zeugma opened her mouth to ask another question, but a strange noise like a grumbling in the earth interrupted her. Then the ground beneath her feet seemed to shudder.

  ‘Look !’ said Lakenheath.

  Below them an area of ground on the west side of the centre was in turmoil. The coarse-grassed turf of the waste seethed and stirred like some turgid liquid coming to the boil in a cauldron.

  Jonathan was on the fringe of the disturbance and, standing high on the footrests, he rode it like a surfer in turbulent seas. It was hard not to feel an impulse to applaud as he gained the safety of solid ground. But now came a second grumbling and again the earth stirred. This time he seemed to be in the middle of it.

  ‘What’s happening?’ screamed Zeugma.

  ‘My God !’ It was Diss who had come scrambling up the slope, closely followed by the others as the earth-tremors reached them. ‘It’s the fuel silos. The fire must have got to the inspection tunnel and the vapour’s going up.’

  Once again Jonathan was performing the impossible, urging the bike forward as the ground bubbled up and fell away beneath his wheels. Once again he made it and this time he pointed the machine due west, away from the centre and into the red-tinged mist which modulated into blackness and safety. But there was no path for him that way. A shape ran from the mist – was it Twinkle? It had to be Twinkle; but there were other shapes there too, it seemed to Zeugma, some on the ground, some in the air, changed, corrupted, perhaps even created by the deceiving vapours. Whatever their reality, Jonathan changed his course, heading north and parallel to the centre once more.

  And now came the final tremor, longer and more violent than the others.

  This time there was no escape. The earth did not bubble, it opened. One moment Jonathan was there, a man, living and striving for life, next he was gone.

  Then the earth was still and only the crackling of the centre fire which also seemed to be failing disturbed the night silence.

  Without speaking they all descended from the ridge, all except Crow, who stood there clutching what looked like a small branch stripped from a tree.

  When they reached the hole into which Jonathan had plunged, they halted. It was deep but the flames let them see to the bottom. There was no sign of his body, though a wheel of the motor-bike protruded from the broken earth and still spun silently.

  Zeugma turned away and put her arms round Pasquino, seeking comfort and forgetfulness. He pressed her to him.

  ‘Well, if Healot left his urn down there, it’ll be shattered to oblivion now,’ said Diss.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pasquino. ‘But, I say, now that looks interesting. Excuse me, my dear. Let me have that torch, will you Miss Peat?’

  Disengaging himself from Zeugma, he descended into the hole and, on his knees, began to brush the earth away from a fragment of stone which the upheaval had left on the surface.

  ‘This is interesting,’ he said with enthusiasm. ‘Zeugma, take a look at this. By heaven, it’s going to be worth going over this area very carefully. Very carefully indeed. It’s an ill wind and all that.’

  Zeugma turned from the pit and began to walk away. A few yards behind her stood Lakenheath, who regarded her with an expression of sad sympathy which he tried to disguise as she walked past him.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘It was Babes in Arms.’

  She didn’t even pause.

  ‘You can go to hell too,’ she said over her shoulder.

  He watched her disappear back towards the ridge and after a while slowly began to follow.

  17

  But the long habit of living indisposeth us for dying.

  It had rained all night, but with Utopian timing the showers had died away at dawn, and now halfway through the morning the clouds were mere outcrops of puffballs on a rich blue ground. It was possible to believe in summer once more.

  Zeugma looked down from her vantage point above the centre and wondered how long it would be before the landscape assimilated these modern ruins as thoroughly as it had done the Romans’. Barely a fortnight had passed since the fire and already wind had scattered the finest ashes and rain had bound together what remained and the tough, irrepressible moor grasses were sinking roots in this strange compost.

  The police had gone and the press had retreated, leaving a few outriders in the bars of Brampton. Official noises, both soothing and warning, had kept the story within limits, though these themselves were sensational enough. There had been inquests. The Upas brothers’ deaths had been declared accidental. ‘What they had been doing in the deserted centre we do not know and perhaps it is better that we do not know’, said the coroner sternly. ‘But it may be something of a poetic justice that they themselves caused the fire which killed them.’

  This strong hint accompanying a verdict of murder in the inquest on the exhumed bodies of Lakenheath’s cousin and her friends gave everybody much cause for speculation. The police declaration that they considered both cases closed confirmed the connection. The part played by Zeugma and the others had never been mentioned.

  The subterranean explosions had caused some interest and concern among experts who had been amazed at their violence. Jonathan’s body, though not visible on the night of the event, had been found lying on the surface the following morning as though the earth had rejected it. Now the hollow had a canvas shelter over part of it and drainage trenches radiated from its lowest corners as Pasquino sifted through the disturbed soil with obsessive enthusiasm.

  Zeugma turned away and strode energetically across the waste, her gum-boots kicking up fountains of water-drops from the tussocks of grass. After recent events, this landscape ought to have been unbearably sinister to her, she thought. But somehow it was not so. On the contrary, today it felt like a holy and blessed place, gentle swells of earth, grass and rock running away to horizons against which time and mutability scratched in vain. Inside these invisible limits, whatever is, or had been, or would be, existed together without the conflicts called progress or history. She began to sing and wild creatures all around ceased what they were doing to listen, amazed. It was her old school song, she realized. Suddenly for the first time in her life its rhetorical optimism made sense.

  She was in a more subdued mood when she reached Crow’s cottage, for she now realized, that, unawares, she had made a decision.

  She knocked at the door. There was no answer so she pushed it open. As on her last visit here, she sensed life within but this time she was determined not to be startled and her entrance was ultra-cautious.

  ‘Boo !’ said a voice, and she jumped in fright.

  Sitting by the fireplace with one of Crow’s drinking bowls in his hand was Lakenheath.

  ‘Aren’t you coming in?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes. Of course. I came to see Crow,’ she explained annoyed with herself.

  ‘I didn’t expect that you’d come to see me,’ said Lakenheath.

  Indeed, they had seen very little of each other since the night of the fire, and when they had met, the circumstances had never been conducive to private conversation. Zeugma had seen hi
m at the inquest on Julie and the sight of his white strained face had touched her more deeply than almost anything else that had happened.

  Now he looked much better and his ankle resting on a cushion of peat turves before the hearth, looked as if its proportions were back to normal.

  ‘What do you want with Crow?’ he asked, as she sat down at the other side of the hearth.

  ‘I came to say goodbye,’ she said. ‘No, that’s not true, really. I just set out to see him, but on my way here I realized I was coming to say goodbye.’

  ‘So you’re going. Well, well. Has the greatest archaeologist in the world decided to go and discover Atlantis then?’

  She ignored the gibe.

  ‘No. Leo’s staying. They think he’s looking for bits of Healot’s urn in that hole, but he’s not. He reckons he’s found a fragment of the gnomon from the sundial on the Bewcastle Cross. I think he hopes the actual cross-piece itself may turn up. After that he’s still got his Solway Firth project, so he could be around for quite a time.’

  ‘But you are going,’ he repeated.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. He asked for no explanation and she was glad. The best she could have offered was that at twenty-five even short fat girls no longer needed guardians. Or more honestly perhaps that when Leo had told her the truth about her father’s death, the only thing he had been guarding her against had disappeared, and she had since realized that he could offer her no other kinds of protection.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked.

  ‘Me. Oh, I’m going too,’ he answered. ‘I can hardly stay on, can I? Even if the office weren’t going to fold up, which it is. It was just a front, you see. A nice easy way of keeping an eye on parties interested in the centre. That’s why I got the job. They didn’t want anyone good and experienced enough to see that it was a load of nothing. Just a figurehead with Miss Peat really running matters. She knew I’d made up Diss and Charnell Bearings, of course. But they weren’t quite sure why. So when that American hatchet-man expressed an interest, she suggested he should call himself Diss to stir me up a bit.’

  ‘And Sayer?’