by Tim Weaver
Again, I felt a moment of indecision.
But then I started across the Brink.
73
Everywhere I looked, the Brink moved, its grass dipping and lurching as the wind rolled across the mountainside. I followed a vague trail, trampled out of the bogs, that seemed to follow the slant of the hill, but the further up I went, the more disorientating it seemed to become. It was like the whole place was mobile, changing and evolving, and even when it calmed in the lulls between gusts, it didn’t settle completely: snow flecked against my face; the ground squelched and shifted, as if it were about to slide out from under me; grass seemed to reach up – swiping at my hands, grabbing them.
It was mid-afternoon and some of the light had already disappeared, but it wasn’t the grey skies that were recolouring the plain, or the sunset that lay in wait, it was a mist. It wasn’t thick, in fact the opposite: I could see in all directions for at least two hundred feet. But it clung to the edges of the mountain like a gossamer sheet that had snared on some peg further up, and – beyond its limits – there were only shadows, traces of things, vague shapes that formed and dissolved, and it wasn’t long before I felt even more discomfited.
Just keep going.
I looked at my watch, saw it was almost four, and then looked again what seemed like twenty minutes later – except barely any time had passed, only five or six minutes. The marshland was drying out now, the peat dragging less and less at my heels. When Richard had talked to Beth about it, he’d described the lake being ringed by peaks, the arena in a coliseum of crests and summits.
I couldn’t see anything like that.
A vague sense of panic started to grip. I didn’t know where the hell I was or how far I’d gone, and the absurdity of coming up here without a map, without the right equipment or supplies, hit home. I’d been focused on the cabin, on finding answers. Now all of that felt secondary: as the wind cut through me, everywhere looked exactly the same.
Something moved.
It was right on the periphery of my vision, so far off to my left that I had to turn my entire body forty-five degrees. I looked down the pitch of the hill, south of me. There was no sign of the fence or the pillbox, although I knew both were somewhere in that direction. Between me and the ring of the mist nothing had changed: it was just mounds of tussock grass and streaks of peat, like puddles of oil sprayed across the earth.
I watched, waited.
Nothing.
I began moving again, glancing over my shoulder, then again, my heart starting to beat faster, a vibration that had nothing to do with the exertion of the climb. I looked behind me again and then again, each time scanning the mist, watching it form and re-form, as if it were maturing and growing. I picked up the pace like I was being pursued, but there was nothing behind me, just my own uncertainties and the echoes of the stories I’d heard about the Brink.
And then the landscape changed.
It happened dramatically, suddenly, the steady slant becoming sharper, a huge wall of rock climbing out of the ground in front of me. The closer I got, the more I realized it was the slopes of another ridge, formed out of Strathyde like a growth, and that the slope – its clefts, crevices and folds – was part of a wider range, sweeping off into the mist. A second after that, it clicked: it was an amphitheatre.
Partially hidden in shadow, I saw a natural passageway ahead of me, a ragged oval carved out of the face of the hill, like a tunnel without any roof.
Beyond that, there was a hint of water; a shimmer.
The tarn.
I quickened my pace. From my position it appeared shallow, an immense puddle, smooth except for the snowflakes dusting it – but I knew it was deep. It had that sense about it, an indefinable aura, its surface reflecting back the crown of peaks surrounding it, each one a different size and shape but every one a giant. I made it halfway when something seemed to change – the ground, the air itself.
Out of nowhere, a sound tore across the hillside.
It caught me so much by surprise I stumbled, the noise loud enough that I could feel it tremble through the earth. But I knew what it was.
The noise Penny and Beth had heard; Richard too.
The call of whatever was out here.
As it came to an end, the echoes of it seemed to hang in the thickness of the air. It was like the cry of an animal that had been distorted; one long note full of turbulence and static. It was bizarre and disconcerting, and the longer I stood there, the more exposed I began to feel. I tried to think rationally, tried to stay focused and logical, but I was so far up in the mountains and the sound felt so out of place in this moment, so alien, it was impossible not to feel unsettled by it.
I looked around me, and then quickly carried on up the slope until I had an unobstructed view of the tarn. On the opposite side of the water, a dark building came into view.
The cabin.
Then: another noise from behind me.
I looked back, down the part of the pathway I’d already walked, out at the plain I’d crossed to get here. Streaks of peat glistened. The long grass moved and the snow kept coming: it was light, fine and delicate, but as it swirled and changed direction, it gave the impression of things stirring. And then I fixed on something.
What was that?
What the hell was that?
Inside the mist, hidden in it, I glimpsed a silhouette. It was there and then gone again, like a shape standing at a window as the light snaps off. I raised a hand to my face, trying to protect my eyes from the snow, to see clearly, maybe to hear something too, but all I could see now was mist and all I could hear was my heart thumping in my ears and my breath whispering in my throat and chest.
Keeping my gaze fixed on the same spot, I started walking backwards, up the slope to the very edge of the tarn, trying to pull the memory into focus; reassemble what I’d seen of the silhouette, rebuild it in my mind’s eye. I stumbled on the scree, the stones slick with mud and snow, kept going and did the same again. I was drained, on edge, the exhaustion of the trip starting to eat at me. There were no more shapes, no hints of movement.
But that didn’t calm my anxiety.
I waited a while longer, unsure now of what I believed and what I didn’t, and then I zeroed in on what mattered: the case, the truth, what took place here.
I started heading to the cabin.
But I didn’t walk, I ran.
74
The closer I got, the more I could see, the building emerging from the mist like a ship sailing into existence. Small and compact, it was sixty feet back from the lake shore and constructed of dark wood, but the wood had become bleached with age, and the tin roof was so awash in moss and bird shit it was hard to see its original colour.
When I got to the steps leading up to the front veranda, the cabin creaked in the wind, the sound almost like a moan. It made me stop, and I looked back along the edge of the tarn, in the direction I’d come.
Beneath my feet, the stairs felt soft, the wood warped and rotten, bending under my weight. My first step on to the veranda seemed to send a shudder along it, as if I’d awoken something. The wind picked up and I watched the lake shiver out of its stillness, and then everything settled again: the windows, rattling in their frames, became silent; the creak of the walls faded.
There was a window next to me, its curtains pulled, but I could see hints of things inside: furniture, boxes, right angles. At the far end of the veranda was a log pile. It had collapsed, some of the logs spilling off the side, untouched on the ground for so long that grass had grown around them, enclosed them, trapped them.
At the door I removed from my pocket the key that Presley had given me. But I didn’t need it. The door was stiff, difficult to manoeuvre out from the frame, but it swung back, already unlocked, whining on its hinges towards the darkness of the entrance.
I paused, my pulse rising.
Why was it already open?
Immediately, I could see three more doors, on the left, on the right
and at the end. It was difficult to see into any of them from where I was, but I thought I could make out a black cast-iron stove in the back room, streaked with ash, and the outline of a table. I could hear something coming from that direction as well.
Uncertain of the noise, uncertain of what awaited me inside, I levered out the longest, thickest log I could find in the woodpile, gripped it like a baseball bat, and then headed through the door. I thought of everything I’d seen and heard until now, the stories, the silhouette in the hills, the noise.
Concentrate.
Floorboards groaned underfoot. The walls were panelled in dark wood, the ceiling a series of planks, lined up one after the other, like the underside of a boardwalk. I stopped at the first door, the one on my left, and peered around the frame. The room was empty except for a couple of chairs. In the room on the right, shelves were filled with tins, all decades old: food, oil, glue, nails and screws, rat poison, empty bottles. They were coated in cobwebs and everything carried the same stench of rust, a tangy scent that hung in the air and lingered in the walls.
I headed for the back room.
As I did, I heard the same noise again, more defined this time. It was like a clatter, the snap of wood hitting wood. I glanced behind me, back to the front of the cabin, snow blowing in from outside, and then arrived at the door to the last room. I saw the stove, archaic and idle, the table I’d glimpsed earlier set against one of the walls. There was other furniture too: an old red sofa, so worn and old it had become a light pink; more chairs, one still standing, one on its side, one smashed. There were shelves full of tins here too, food mostly, although none of it was new, and there was a radio, its antenna snapped, in among some canned soup.
But it wasn’t any of that that caught my eye.
It was the rose petals.
They were strewn across the floor of the room in a vague trail leading all the way to the rear door. This was also unlocked like the front and was being blown back and forth in the wind. I had the key Presley had given me pinched between my thumb and finger, but I didn’t need it now, so I pocketed it. I watched the back door hitting its frame, making the snapping sound I’d heard, that same clatter of wood against wood. As it did, I felt the breeze ghost past me, drawn from the back of the cabin to the front, and watched the petals scatter even further out.
As I inched towards the back veranda, my mind returned to the lido, to the moments after Bill Presley turned up. I remembered the stains at the knees of his trousers, evidence of earth, mud and grass. I remembered the dirt under his nails, as if he’d been digging in the ground. But mostly I remembered the rose petals.
They’d been stuck to his skin.
He’d been up here before he came to the lido.
I noticed something else too. The closer I got towards the back door, the more of them I could see: tiny holes embedded in the wall of the cabin, fanning off in a line. My eyes switched between the holes and the door, looking beyond the room to the rear of the cabin where a hillside full of long grass swept up and out of view about forty feet from the building. The glass panel in the door had fractured, cracking like ice on a pond, and as it swung back and forth in the wind, I could see mangled hints of the room reflected in it – and I realized I’d missed other holes in the walls behind me as well.
They’d all been made by bullets.
There were ten shots that I could see. There could have been more, but late afternoon was starting to give way to early evening and shadows were beginning to creep inwards. This time, as the door swung back in the wind again, I caught it and held it in place. Cold air swept past me as if the cabin were drawing breath, and I moved on to the back veranda. To the right of me, the far end, I was surprised to see another door, but my attention was quickly drawn from that to the hillside. Things moved through the long grass, flickers of white, and I realized it was more petals. They were being torn from the stems of flowers that had been left at the bottom of the veranda steps.
I thought of the mud stains on Presley’s trousers, the earth matted to his knees, and then looked out across the hillside again, up, following its ascent. There was something else dotted in the grass, other flashes of colour that weren’t flowers.
The back door snapped shut.
I turned automatically, watching it banging against the door frame, and when my gaze drifted into the cabin, I saw something inside the back room.
Movement.
I gripped the log harder and slowly began peeling the door open.
The room was still empty.
I let out a breath, my mind starting to fill with images of what I’d seen earlier – what I thought I’d seen – out on the slope, and then I moved inside, past old, broken furniture, past the stove, out into the hallway and down towards the front door.
It was darker in this part of the cabin now, the light fizzling out. I glanced at my watch and saw it was just before five o’clock.
I had about an hour and a half of light left.
And then I noticed something on the front steps of the house, sitting there as if placed. I took a step towards it. It was small and tubular, a C-shaped horn; a replica of the type of wind instruments that medieval huntsmen had used.
That’s it.
That was what I’d heard out in the Brink.
‘David.’
My heart hit my throat.
A voice, so close to my ear, it felt like it had come from inside my head. I turned, following the sound, but then a hand clamped on to the back of my neck, catching me off balance, and pushed me hard – face first – into the nearest wall.
Roland Dell wasn’t in London.
He was here.
75
He pressed my face into the wall and then released his grip, backing up. I turned, ready for him, but he didn’t attack. Instead, he retreated another step, pausing in the space between me and the entrance to the back room, and raised a weapon.
It was a crossbow.
The stock was bedded against his shoulder, and he was looking through the sights mounted to a bridge at the beginning of the arrow track. The bow was black, compact, no more than two feet in length, and loaded. Spare arrows were sitting below the end of the flight groove, each one streaked a luminous yellow.
He wasn’t in a suit any more; he was in black trousers, a grey fleece and a black gilet. His hair was hidden beneath a beanie, his black boots still showing the evidence of snow, of having come across the slopes himself.
He’d been the shape I’d seen inside the house.
He’d drawn me out.
‘I guess if you’re going to get a job done properly, you just have to do it yourself,’ Dell said, moving a little closer to me. Once he had, he eyed me, watching me carefully, as if I were about to launch myself at him. He looked every bit as tired as I did, a man who’d spent the past week on edge, worrying about how far I might get; a man who’d flown halfway around the world to stop me getting any further. He said, ‘I wasn’t going to leave Cape Town until I knew you’d been taken care of. So when I realized Alexander had failed, I sent Kilburn to find out what you knew and finish the job. Then he failed too, although I think that probably had less to do with your ability to cheat death, and more to do with Bill being an old drunk.’ He sighed and shook his head. ‘I stopped relying on Bill years ago and, judging by what’s gone on at the back of the cabin here, I’d say that was a pretty good decision, wouldn’t you?’
Did he mean the flower petals?
I kept my face neutral, making out like I knew what he was talking about.
‘What is it with you?’ he said. He used the crossbow as a pointer, jabbing the tip of it towards the front door, signifying the tarn, and the hills, and the mountain. ‘All this effort, all these miles, and for what exactly? Just to fill in a few blanks for a guy who’s better off not remembering anything anyway?’
‘Is he?’
Dell shrugged, the crossbow rising and dropping at his movement. ‘Well, it’s not going to make him any happier.’<
br />
He wasn’t playing with me this time. I looked at him, at the contours of his face, and then remembered something Presley had said to me about his son, before I’d left him at the lido. I read online that he can remember looking out at a beach as a kid. I read that they think it might have been where he grew up. It isn’t. He didn’t grow up by the beach. Just tell him to forget it.
Just tell him I’m sorry.
‘I wish I could have just killed him.’
I tuned back in, looking at Dell.
‘I wish I could have dealt with him like we dealt with Penny. But Richard was trickier. He had a police force on his side. He had a charity looking out for him. Local people, local media – they were interested in his story, where he came from. It would have been a circus if he suddenly vanished, or – worse – turned up dead. I’d have put myself at risk.’
‘Because it’s all about you.’
He smiled. ‘You know what this place is?’
I didn’t answer.
‘It’s a card trick. It’s the best card trick you’ve ever seen in your life. It’s a card trick so fucking good that it could have been invented by the Devil himself.’
I frowned, unsure what he meant.
He burst out laughing, his face partly hidden by the crossbow. ‘Look at you,’ he said, a derisory slant to his words. ‘You look like a soldier having flashbacks. Are you confused? Frightened? Have you shit yourself?’
He took another step closer, his movements becoming more aggressive.
‘How about now? Huh? I’m going to put an arrow through your eye and I’m going to bury your body out the back with the others.’
I tried to ignore the fear and focus on the idea that Dell thought I’d found something out back; something more than just petals in the grass. The others. He must have meant the hillside was the burial ground for Caleb Beck and Selina Torres.
Or was it even worse than that?
I thought of what Kilburn had said (You can’t even imagine how bad it got up there) and of all the bullet holes in the walls, and then an image started to form, a memory filling in from earlier: standing on the back veranda here, looking out at the hillside and seeing something else – not the petals, not the flowers, but other flashes of colour in the grass. I hadn’t recognized them for what they were then.
