Cass sighed. ‘Either I’m getting drunk, orthey’relooking atus.’
‘Probably,’ he smiled.
She was on the floor beside his armchair, leaning against his knees. He stroked her gently, feeling how relaxed her neck and shoulders were. ‘I’ve read Max Holme’s book.’
‘Have you?’ she answered inattentively, adding that it was a bit of a mess.
He agreed. ‘I suppose that was because he never had the opportunity to put the final touches.’
‘I think it was only published because he was connected with Augustus. You know ... all that business, cashing in on it.’
‘It was a long while afterwards.’
‘Mmm. But the interest in scandal, sensation, never dies.’
‘He was your father’s friend.’
‘Nobody was my father’s friend, that was blurb talk.’ She yawned, tilting back her head, moving her neck against his hand.
‘Then why did he do it?’
‘Someone had to, there was a contract, or something. And after all, writing was Dad’s profession. Anyway, Augustus insisted.’
Why? Henry wondered. Vanity? The need — even in the distress that had by then consumed him — for yet another affirmation of his genius?
‘What sort of man was Holme? Film-struck, as you’d say, from the tone of his book.’
‘Glassy-eyed in that respect; his only weakness, I suppose. Repellent, really, one of those cold, self-contained people. Schemed and plotted his way up out of poverty, made money all over the place; ruthless as hell — like Augustus.’
‘A clash of egos.’
‘Mm, and neither of them the outright winner.’ She rubbed her head a little impatiently against his knee. ‘Does it matter? Why are you interested?’
‘Because, much as you disapprove, I’m interested in you. That’s natural enough. I wondered where he fitted into your world.’
‘Oh ... distantly. Just a boring adult on the outskirts of my heedless, gym-slipped life. About the only thing that made him human — and I’m not sure that it did — was the fact that he was besotted with Jessica. I didn’t take much notice, though. I mean, everyone wassupposed to be in love with Jessica, in a doomed sort of way.’
‘Was Augustus?’
‘No, he just owned her.’ She shrugged slightly as if to shrug away the tension he felt gathering in her muscles as he stroked her shoulders. Increasingly bored — or uneasy — with the subject, she would find some way of changing it.
He forestalled her. ‘I’m taking a day’s leave on Friday. It’s the Cricket Club dance on Thursday evening, I can make it just about in time. Will you come?’
‘No ...’ She never cared for such social occasions, but in her indifference there seemed a sudden sharpness.
‘Please.’
‘I can’t. Can I have another drink?’ She leaned forward, touching the cards.
He got up and went to the sideboard. ‘Well, think about it. Maybe you’ll change your mind. I’ll telephone you when I get here.’
‘Don’t, I shan’t be in.’ He had never telephoned her; perhaps it was the threat of this intrusion into her private world that made her evasive, possibly untruthful. He glanced back at her and saw how the firelight, moving on her face, illuminated a fleeting consternation before she bent her head and her hair slid forward.
He stifled a sigh, poured the drinks and went back to his chair. ‘That was an odd sort of story — about the Marching Stones. The film itself, I mean. It doesn’t come from any local legend, not that I recognise.’
‘You should know, you’re the expert on all that hand-knitted stuff.’ Generally, it took no more than a word to divert her into teasing him about his interest in folklore; in her repertoire she had a dedicated expression, fluting voice and imaginary pince-nez to assist her in disgusting lectures on fertility rites. This time she merely murmured half-heartedly, ‘Mercy on us, we’ll all be visited by a murrain or palsy.’
‘I know your father wrote the screenplay, but would the idea have come from him in the first place?’
‘He’d have cooked it up with Augustus, they always did, using bits of local stories, mythology, Augustus’s private obsessions.’
‘Did it really affect him the way Holme suggested? That he believed he was growing closer to some source of power?’
She stirred, plainly uncertain of the words to choose to answer him. In the hesitation that occurred between them, he said:
‘You’ve been up amongst those stones, Cass. Even if you see them in an unemotional way there’s something awe-inspiring about them. It’s said that certain people, sensitives, experience a physical charge, like a shock, when they touch them. Somebody impressionable, superstitious, would be inclined to overlook their original purpose — whatever that was — and invest them with a mystical significance. For instance,’ he chose a random example, aware of the cautious glimmer of her eyes in her sideways gaze, ‘the fact that they align with certain features of the landscape, natural or structured, that are linked by the old tracks — leys — makes it feasible that they were once part of an overall system of physical communication dating back to the Bronze Age. But some theories have gone beyond that, leading certain people to give credit to the possibility that utilised the tensions and vibrations of the life-force itself. The mark points and the leys that radiated from them harnessed this energy, which could be activated at certain times, or by certain ceremonies or concentrations of thought. What I’m trying to say is that these relics of antiquity, because they’re so desolate and mysterious, challenge the imagination — and in Wynter’s case, because he was predisposed to it — the darker side of the mind. Is that what happened?’
‘Augustus has always been highly superstitious. Creative people often are, though, it’s part of their driving force, their ability to waken response in others.’
‘And he has knowledge of the occult, hasn’t he? That’s what you meant by his “private obsessions”. He’s experimented, explored ... black magic, demonology, witchcraft, spiritualism, numerology ... anything, anything where there’d be the means to increase his power, feed his ego, test his strength. I’m right, aren’t I?’
She made a sound that could have passed for a laugh, the nervousness in it made him wonder. ‘Well, yes, he’s involved himself in some pretty strange things.’
‘And some of it has rubbed off on you — by association, an uncritical acceptance —’ Her hostile look warned him not to add —and perhaps, participation. ‘You remember when I said that the stones couldn’t be counted. You said they could — there were three sevens.’
‘Did I?’
‘You said it absently, repeating something you’d heard.’
She shrugged.
‘And with that film; he did feel he was handling something dangerous.’
‘Yes.’
‘That he must keep in control.’
She nodded.
‘But he didn’t did he? There was first a death, for which possibly, morally, he was accountable in some degree. But even if he felt himself to be, he still wasn’t going to let it interfere with his determination to make that film. His ambition, his genius, overrode the significance of one human life. He tempted fate, and it struck at him. It took his niece away. It punished him.’
For the first time she looked directly at him, in surprise. ‘How can you know that?’
‘It’s logical.’
‘Logic has nothing to do with this business; it’s another realm, another dimension. It can’t touch the mind of a man who’s the victim of fate, personal treachery, the terrible forces up there he tampered with. No, I don’t believe any of it, but I know what he believes, the mad hope he lives with that when she comes back he’ll be saved. Being logical and — inquisitive — and sensible has nothing to do with anything. It’s — it’s an intrusion — on us, on me, on our privacy. Why can’t you just take me as I am instead of always looking over my shoulder at something else. You and your damn curiosity’ She stood u
p, flurried, overstrung, the hem of her long skirt scattering the cards.
‘Why are you getting so uptight all of a sudden?’ he asked, meaningwhat are you hiding? And it wasn’t all of a sudden, she had been on edge from the moment she arrived, striving to keep some mental distance from him, but the strain was too much for her brittle control.
‘I’m sorry, I must go,’ she said, tautly polite, picking up her handbag, trailing the beautiful shawl in her nervous hands. ‘I didn’t intend to stay, anyway.’
‘Cass, don’t go.’ He did not attempt to conceal his disappointment; at the same time he studied her, his mind busy. ‘I had so little time with you last week. I’ve missed you. I want you.’
‘Can’t, it’s the wrong time of the month.’
That, by his rapid mental calculation, was a lie, but he could not see there was anything to be gained by pointing it out. She was already in retreat, mysteriously taken up by some exigency, murmuring apologies gracefully over her shoulder. In the hall, when he tried to put his arms round her, she slipped away, reaching back to touch his mouth with an intimate caress of her fingertips, some promise he only half heard to see him again.
She had gone, too suddenly, on the taffeta rustle of her dress, her scent still stirring in the air. He went back to the sitting room, exasperated, baffled, the physical hurt of desiring her dull inside him. He stood looking down at the cards, disordered to a jumble of half-glimpsed colours and shapes. He set about tidying them together, reaching out for one that had been caught in the flurry of her long skirt and was lying apart from the others.
As his hand went to it he saw that it was the final card of the pack, the world, and automatically he registered the breadth of its meaning: completion, earthly matter and the rhythms of the cosmos at last unified; the self realised, its destiny fulfilled ...
But when he picked it up he found that it concealed another card. The moon, the portent of crisis and intuition; of life in death.
*
He remembered the two cards a week later for, it seemed, no reason at all, because he had put aside speculation and returned to his working life.
In spite of what he had said to Cass about his aunt’s rapport with the tarot, it was beyond him to credit two pieces of coloured pasteboard with intrinsically magical qualities. But he had come across the theory that the function of the cards was to act as signposts to the subconscious, directing and gathering random associations down to the intuitive clarity that lay beneath the accessible level of the mind.
It could have been that process at work uncomprehended by him, when he imagined he had left behind in Marchstearn the tangle of thoughts concerning his aunt and Wynter, Cass, the missing child; although at night his sleep was disturbed by dreams that vanished the moment he opened his eyes, leaving only a flavour of something utterly strange, as if a phantom had walked through his undefended mind in the night. And when there was an instant of illumination, triggered prosaically by the calendar on his desk, he distrusted it, and in his practical way set about tracing its starting point.
October the thirty-first. He had looked at the date more than once during the day, before anything beyond its mundane significance occurred to him, before he thought: Samain. Then the two cards flashed on his inner vision and events, speculations began to link themselves together.
Samain, the night the gates of the underworld drew apart and the dead were free to return. Cass, impatient and uneasy, standing in the lamplit room saying ‘... when she comes back ...’ Notifbutwhen. And a week before that, when they had walked together on the green slope of the hill rising from the village and she had referred to the number of the stones in such an odd way:there are three sevens. Three sevens made twenty-one, and it was twenty-one years since the child disappeared.
This is something simple, Henry thought. Mad, but simple.
Wynter, preyed upon by remorse and despair, his sense of reality receding and his illusions taking over, obsessed by the idea that his fate was bound up with the power of the stones, would attach enormous significance to anything relating to them. Their number, its totals and divisions, their position; all the myths surrounding them; anything — everything would find its place in the dark and intricate pattern of his madness until, out of a life that had fallen apart, he had created a ritual formality which at all costs must be adhered to.
At all costs. The powers onto which he projected his delusions could not fail, that was unthinkable; only the human actors in the supplicatory drama could make the wrong step, omit the necessary propitiation, and when that happened, when the miraculous event failed to occur, there would have to be a sacrifice ... Henry thought bleakly of the labrador dog lying on the stone, seven years ago. And seven years before that? There would have been something — if he looked, he would find it.
And tonight?
He glanced at the clock, it was almost time for him to finish. He knew how soon he could be in Marchstearn, he had a fast car and a good motorway to travel on; but if there should be some unexpected delay and he was held up somewhere, fuming ...
He reached for the phone. Cass had never given him her number but he had taken care to find out what it was; he dialled it and the ringing-out tone began. He tried to imagine where the telephone might be in that vast house, and, as he waited, the possibility that his theory could be totally wrong occurred to him.
He turned the idea over in his mind, listening to the phone ringing weirdly into the silence. Well, it wasn’t the first time he’d done something idiotic, with no excuse but impulse and intuition — and who would know except Cass? He positively refused to contemplate what her baleful wit would do with him if he was wrong.
At last he put the receiver down and automatically returned to the papers on his desk, wondering what step to take next. The decision was made for him by a visit from the Chief Superintendent. Long years of practice had given Henry a robot facility for dealing with his personal life when it intruded on his official life: Marchstearn and all its problems were smartly, if temporarily, packed away.
The Chief Superintendent was such a born gentleman he managed never to draw attention to the fact that Henry wasn’t; for which, among other things, Henry greatly respected him. He perched himself with dapper precision on the desk and said, ‘Look, Henry, I’m sorry to drop this on you. There’s been an allegation of police corruption over in B Division. You know John’s on leave today, so this looks like being one for you. I’m waiting to hear from B Division; if they need us, you’ll have to go over and do the preliminaries tonight.’
‘Yes, of course, sir,’ Henry said, without so much as a mental recoil. He had a reputation for being hard, he also had integrity, unashamedly, and no room for bent coppers; his immediate job would be to decide if there were grounds for an independent investigation. ‘If there’s anything in it I’d like to nail them straight away.’
‘Mmm, the bastards need weeding out. Well, they’ll be ringing me back pretty soon, I’ll let you know.’
As soon as the Chief Superintendent left Henry returned to his problems with decision. If he had to go out on the enquiry there would be little chance of getting to Marchstearn until the early hours of the morning, and he could waste what time he had now by uselessly ringing that mad house where, he was convinced, no one was going to answer anyway. In his diary he found Constable Crowther’s number, correctly assuming that as it was almost teatime the constable would be in; he could imagine him shedding several small children while picking up the phone with one hand and a pencil with the other. ‘Hallo, sir, I didn’t know you were home. I’ve just driven past your place, I didn’t see your car.’
‘No, I’m at Headquarters. I’d like you to do a small job for me, straight away. I wouldn’t trouble you, but it’s important. You know where Miss Allen lives, don’t you?’
‘Yes, sir,’ the constable said, tonelessly enough to imply that he knew a great deal more about Miss Allen, specifically in relation to Henry; as no doubt the entire village did.
‘Not to worry, I’ll be there in two shakes on my faithful steed.’
Nobody else, Henry thought as he replaced the receiver, in the whole of the bloody force would refer to a mini-van as a faithful steed.
He glanced at the clock, calculating. If the corruption business turned out to be a false alarm he’d be free to go soon, making it to Marchsteam in good time. Then what? Then events would take care of themselves, at least he’d bethere. Otherwise ... at least an hour’s drive out to B Division, then the greater part of the evening taken up —
The inter-com buzzed, it was the Chief Superintendent. ‘It’s on, Henry. Lock up in there and come and see me.’
Henry said, ‘Yes, sir,’ and thoughtbugger. But Constable Crowther was a man to be relied on; when it seemed almost too late and Henry’s conscience would not allow him to delay in his office another moment, Cass’s call came through, her icy greeting, ‘What do youmeanby sending thatPlod ...’ giving him a vivid mental picture of the constable planted at some vantage point looking unconcerned and absolutely immovable.
‘I tried to phone you but there was no answer.’
‘I’m busy.’
‘I bet. Getting into gear for tonight.’ He spoke quickly but calmly, wondering what he would do if she put the phone down. ‘Look, it might seem like a game to you, and God knows it’s a silly enough charade, but you’d be better off away from there. Leave them to it. They can set the stage and play the parts but they can’t bring her back, you don’t really believe they can.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ she said on a false note, weak and astonished enough to give him the satisfaction, at least, of knowing he had guessed right.
‘Stop messing about, Cass. I haven’t got much time. Something’s cropped up and I’m tied up here, I won’t be able to get away for hours. Please, be sensible. Get in your car and drive off, anywhere, it doesn’t matter, away from there.’
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