by Jason Foss
Supper comprised chicken in black bean sauce, chop suey vegetables, special fried rice and a bottle of something execrable. The pair spent the evening seated under the stairs in one of Soho’s cheaper Chinese restaurants. Feet clomped overhead as patrons hunted the loo.
‘So can you read Latin?’ Flint, as Grant Selby, glugged the last of the wine into Michelle’s glass.
‘What?’
‘Medieval Latin.’
‘God, no, I failed all my ‘O’-levels, except Art and English.’
‘Then the book would have been useless to you.’
‘What book?’
‘De Nigris, John Eastney. Remember, it’s what brought us together.’
‘Oh, yes, I suppose so.’
‘I was intrigued by the number of people who were after it. I mean, I’d never heard of it. What on earth made you want to own a book like that?’
‘I dunno. Just curious.’
‘You know what it is?’
‘I think so.’
‘It’s a grimoire, a spell book.’
‘Yes,’ she gave a little laugh and looked into the wine glass, ‘I told you, I’m interested in that sort of thing.’
‘So am I, in a sort of way.’
‘I know, I can tell. I do fortunes.’
‘What method do you use?’
‘Tarot – and I read palms.’
Flint extended his right hand.
‘Oh, I’ve had too much to drink.’
‘So we’ve got an interest in common...’ he began.
‘Another interest,’ she corrected, ‘we like the same music. We fit together well.’
What did she mean by that? He studied that round face, trying hard to like her. She took his probing for interest and seemed inflated by it.
‘You intrigue me, Michelle.’ Flint was telling the truth for once. ‘There is more to you than meets the eye.’
She giggled, almost happy for her obscure interests to be drawn out.
‘Your book collection is something else.’
‘I bet you’ve got ten times as many,’ she said.
‘So I do.’
How should he attack the subject? When should he attack the subject? Flint hovered on the brink of plunging into an interrogation, but drew back. Michelle could turn and walk away and he would lose the only firm grip he had on the situation. Game playing had to continue. Lucy would have understood.
‘You know you said you wanted to see Cats?’ Flint started another oblique ploy.
‘Did I? Yes, I’ve wanted to see it for ages.’
‘I got us a pair of tickets for next Tuesday.’
‘Oh...’ Her enthusiasm was punctured as she realised the date. ‘I can’t, not then, can you change them?’
Something within Flint cheered. Tuesday was October 31st.
‘I don’t know, I’ll try,’ he replied after letting her dangle for a few moments, ‘I could always take my landlady.’
‘Is she pretty?’ Michelle was downcast.
‘She may have been, circa 1953.’
Her anxiety relaxed. ‘Could you make Wednesday?’
‘No, I have...’ he almost said a night school to run.
‘I have an appointment.’
He had so nearly tripped up and betrayed himself. Flint made a note to keep on his guard, but began to worry in case he had already let tiny clues slip from his lips. When the meal was over, they took a taxi back to her flat and she went through the charade of making them coffee whilst he again looked at her books.
‘You’re really into the occult,’ was his comment as she came back in with the two mugs, each the product of an English craft potter.
‘It’s a sort of hobby,’ she said.
‘A growing hobby,’ Flint continued to flick through an A to Z of Weird Britain. He closed it with a snap and whirled around. ‘Do you know, I read that neo-paganism could be the growth religion of the new millennium.’
She sat down, looking worried.
‘And not before time,’ he said, joining her and extending an arm, ‘we could do with some decent home-grown religions instead of importing everything from the Middle East.’
She touched his thigh and dug fingernails through the leg of his slacks. ‘Do you really mean that, Grant?’
‘Sure, I’ve read up on just about every religion there is. The way I see it, neo-paganism brings everything and everyone together. Man, woman, animals, planet. I met this coven of witches when I was at Glastonbury,’ he went on to detail his moonlight dance with the West Country girls. ‘It was all terribly jolly, it beats psalm-singing any day.’
Michelle gripped him tighter. ‘Make love to me, Grant.’
‘Now?’
‘Now.’
After half an hour, Flint lay on the bed feeling as a whore must feel. He felt nothing for Michelle, and had covered this by the intensity of his erotic assault. Inwardly he grimaced; these people were dragging him down, slowly, into their pit. Darkness was rising around him. Stonehenge had been the beginning, so many flirtations with obscure books and eccentric beliefs had followed. Now there was this degrading use of a fellow human being, one who was willing, even happy to be used.
Michelle lay half on top of him, making purring noises. ‘Grant, would you mind if I were a witch?’
His pulse quickened, but he allowed himself to relax. ‘Are you a good witch or a bad witch?’
‘Good.’ She ran her fingers around in the hairy patch on his chest.
‘Hmm, you’re very good,’ he said in character, thinking this was the sort of comment lovers made.
‘I’ve got these friends...’
‘…Who call you Willow?’
‘You guessed!’
‘I’ve read all the books, seen the films, I know. I’m a minor expert in this field.’
‘You should join us,’ she said softly, ‘we’d be ever so happy together.’
First she had seduced him, now she was recruiting him; this was becoming serious. Either he was succeeding in getting through her defences, or she was breaking through his. Who was using who, he wondered.
Chapter 21
A new wine bar had opened beside South Kensington tube station. Halloween week provided the excuse to string up a few paper bats and allocate ghastly names to the cocktails.
Vikki Corbett never missed an opportunity to come up to London and was intrigued by the invitation to dinner. Jeffrey Flint was normally penniless and might not even own a tie.
She had made herself up heavily – too heavily she decided on the Tube, when it was too late to rectify the damage. How did Jeff like his women: with make-up or without? Clean, or caked in mud? On being shown to her table, she was stunned by what she saw. Jeffrey Flint had a smoothly shaved, rather weak chin and wore a well-cut navy blazer with co-ordinated tie.
‘Jeff, I didn’t recognise you.’ She gave the waiter her long purple coat and slung her handbag over the chair back. ‘Honestly, you look ten years younger.’
‘What, like a fifteen-year-old?’
She took a few moments to absorb the quip. ‘And where did you rip off that jacket?’
‘I borrowed it off one of my hard-up students.’
‘I’ll bet it was that Tyrone.’
‘It was.’
‘He’s a real wide boy, that one.’
A ghostly waiter passed a menu over her shoulder. She ordered a Vampire Venom to clash with Flint’s Blue Demon and opted for the steak.
‘Stake, vampires, get it?’ She pressed a pun of her own.
He got it, groaned at the joke, then opted for the tagliatelle. They small-talked around her holiday in Corfu and his in Turkey.
‘Vince was a real sleazebag,’ she admitted. ‘I thought he’d improve on holiday, but he was worse – always boozing and leching.’
Flint’s expression appeared to brighten. When the drink arrived, the archaeologist began to tell her about the Bradford conference where the establishment had savaged his iconoclastic paper on th
e third century.
‘I called it “Crisis, what crisis?”, after the old Private Eye scandal. The radicals loved it, the red-nosed classicists were outraged and both reactions gave me the utmost pleasure.’
She thought she would draw him away from archaeology in case he decided to explain his paper in minute detail. ‘Do you bring women here all the time?’
‘Oh, I’m a reincarnation of Casanova, haven’t you heard? I’ve done nothing else this past fortnight but date women.’
‘Jeff! That’s not funny.’
‘It was a joke.’
‘It’s still not funny – now what’s going on? Why are you lashing out on all this?’ She indicated the vault-like interior of the wine bar.
‘I’m on expenses.’
‘Of course. Doctor Barbara Faber, née Gray. She doesn’t like me. She thinks I’m a vulture.’
‘And why would she think that?’
‘Is she one of your women?’ Vikki prickled with hostility, wondering what his game was.
‘No, I’m avoiding her. I send her bills, she rings me up and becomes melodramatic. Her mother took the fun at Forest Farm very badly.’
‘It proved that Lucy is dead.’
‘Hmm. I have a growing hunch about what happened to Lucy, and where she is.’
Vikki had switched her eyes towards the steaming plates being brought fresh from the microwave. Her attention snapped back at his words.
‘What?’
Slowly, Flint began to narrate what he had done since the summer, the clues he had unearthed, the questions which he wanted answering. He would stop and concentrate on his food at intervals, perhaps using the time to edit his story.
‘And I thought it was all over.’ She sawed away at the steak as Flint related the tale. ‘You should have been a detective.’
‘I am, after a fashion.’ Using his fork as a trowel and his tagliatelle as a model, he began to expound.
‘I’m an archaeologist, they train us to think, stick together bits of incomplete jigsaws that don’t really make sense on their own. When we excavate a site, Vikki, we first strip off the overburden, that’s all the modern junk which gets in the way of what we’re looking for. Then we dig the archaeological deposits layer by layer, slowly going back in time. Fifteenth century, fourteenth century and so on. Gradually the whole picture emerges, but it is only when the process is completed that you can look backwards at it and reconstruct the history of the site.’
‘But how do you know when to stop digging?’
He dug his fork viciously into the mutilated pasta. ‘When I strike natural soil, undisturbed by man. The deepest layer, where there is nothing left to excavate. Then I know I’ve found everything I can.’
‘So you’re digging? How far down are you?’
‘Extending the metaphor, somewhere in the Dark Ages. The superficial has been removed, the deepest secrets are still to be revealed.’
‘Very mysterious.’ She had lapsed back towards disbelief. ‘You’ve ruined your meal.’
‘Well, I’ve had better. How’s the steak?’
She pushed aside a strip of fat with her knife. ‘So-so. I was surprised to hear from you, but I came because I had the same ideas. After the cremation of Piers Plant I met his ex-wife and we had a woman-to-woman chat. You know why she divorced him?’
‘Impotence?’
‘Shoots blanks.’ Vikki had a tongue in her cheek as she nodded. ‘So we know why he went into all this kinky stuff. He felt inadequate, especially in the company of other men. She said he became more and more unbearable and started to act oddly.’
‘What did he think of children?’ Flint had still not told Vikki about Lucy’s pregnancy.
‘He loved them and so did she. She talked about adopting, but he just wanted to try a few crazy remedies and it all fell apart. She ran off with another teacher and they’ve got three sprogs now. I asked her if Plant had any close friends, and she said, “Have you spoken to Monica?” She said that this Monica and Plant used to be like brother and sister. It was something else his wife hated.’
Flint’s eyes narrowed. ‘We’re talking what, seven years ago?’
‘Something like that. Anyhow, I did talk to her before Plant disappeared and I went back again after the funeral, but she says she hasn’t had much to do with him in the past few years.’
‘Nor has anyone else. I know Monica – the health food lady – she came digging this summer, we get on well.’
‘Is she one of your women?’ Vikki was both intrigued by the older woman and also oddly jealous of her. Monica Clewes was all beads and joss-sticks; perhaps Jeff’s new image was purely cosmetic.
‘We get along – she’s been helping me round up the evidence. But more important, I’ve met a girl, who I’m sure is part of the London branch of whatever network Plant and his friends belong to.’
‘What’s her name?’ Vikki reached for her handbag. The notepad was out in an instant.
‘No names.’
‘You don’t trust me, do you?’
‘As they say in the best movies, I don’t trust anyone.’
He bared all his teeth in a wide grin. ‘Smug bastard. And I thought we were friends.’
‘Guess what happens if you print a story advertising my latest theories. Someone killed Lucy, I’m certain, and it wasn’t the Demon Curator. That same someone then tidied up the plot by arranging for poor demented Piers to commit suicide. If he can kill two, he can kill four.’ Flint unrolled a computer print-out. ‘This is Tyrone’s list of suspects. I want you to find out everything you can about them.’
She looked at the list. ‘This will take for ever.’
‘No it won’t. Next Tuesday is Halloween, Walpurgis Night, Samhain, one of the two holiest days in the Pagan calendar. Somewhere out there, our friends will be enjoying a rather cold moonlight party.’
‘I’m not staking out another one of your standing stones, we’ve played that game,’ Vikki warned.
‘No, Tyrone has another cunning plan, Plan B, he calls it. I think it stands a chance of working. We’ll run around in the moonlight whilst you telephone everyone on this list. If they’re at home, cross them off.’
Vikki looked at the list again, a frisson rippling through her. She prodded Flint’s glass, which was empty save puddles of ice cubes.
‘What did that blue stuff taste like?’
‘Paraffin.’
‘Let’s go for the green ones, then.’
She called the waiter and ordered two Glowing Ghouls. ‘Witches meeting for moonlight mass would make such a good story for Halloween,’ she said with a hint of whimsy in her voice, but Flint cut her short.
‘No stories!’ He thumped his empty glass on the table.
Vikki sat back, suppressing a giggle. ‘I’m only teasing, don’t hate me for it. My lips are sealed. Now tell me all about Plan B.’
*
Tyrone had not enjoyed the Bradford conference. He hated northern towns and his bias was increased by the rough ride his paper had been given. It may have been a mistake to imitate Flint’s cavalier style of delivery so closely, but more of a mistake to launch incomplete ideas on to an unreceptive audience. ‘The end of Roman Britain is a fallacy’ had been a suitably Flint-ish title, but Tyrone realised he still had much to learn.
Plan A had been a farce at Lugnasadh, but for Samhain, Flint had suggested a resurrection of Plan B. This time there would be no mistakes, Tyrone would have the personnel and the equipment required to ensure success. The Hunt Saboteurs loaned their three walkie-talkies for a small contribution to the cause, whilst a rental company provided two mobile phones. Beers bought volunteers from members of the college AeroSoc and by Tuesday, October 31st, Flint knew he was going to make the breakthrough.
Tyrone had always wanted to tail someone, so Halloween saw his wish come true. He sat inside his Spitfire watching No. 37a, with one of his volunteers lounging in the seat beside him. They had seen Michelle close her curtains as it had grown dar
k, then waited for two toe-numbing hours.
A brown Allegro slowed to a halt and stood with its motor running amidst a cloud of steam, flushed orange by the street lights. ‘Glyn! Scramble!’ Tyrone hissed.
‘Is that her car?’
‘Target at two o’clock.’
The figure of Michelle was seen briefly darting from house to car, and as soon as she was inside, it moved slowly away. Tyrone started his own engine, barking out the registration number of the Allegro for his co-pilot to jot down. Flint had safely predicted that Michelle would catch a train to one of four stations in the Valley. Plan B was already going awry.
Glyn had practised with the mobile phone, communicating with Flint in the Durring station car park. He took up the phone and after a few minutes’ repeated attempts, got through. Tyrone took the handset from him and talked whilst he followed the Allegro into traffic. ‘She’s been picked up in a car.’
Flint let out a clinical obscenity.
‘Hey Doc, we’ve got one registration number and I’m hard on his tail.’
‘Tyrone, you’ll lose him before he leaves London.’
‘But there’s only one road he can sensibly take, wait Doc.’
Tyrone told Glyn to hunt out the OS map. They then suggested that Flint and his Land Rover full of AeroSoc students wait in the layby for the Allegro to pass. He would chase from behind.
The Allegro was lost within ten minutes. Tyrone tapped his wheel whilst his companion hopefully checked cars elsewhere in the traffic queues. It was one of those damp, clinging nights with a fine mist never quite turning into rain. Traffic thinned as the city was left behind, then Tyrone stamped down his foot and accelerated into the night. If he reached the Land Rover without seeing the Allegro, it was somewhere behind him. Otherwise, he would catch it – unless it too was driven by a frustrated fighter pilot.
‘Shit!’
Through the spray at almost ninety miles per hour, the unmistakable hunched shape of the Allegro was visible after ten or fifteen minutes. They had already checked two such cars at close quarters, but after tail-gating the third car for a mile, Tyrone was able to read the plate and drop back.
