Mrs Green didn’t have much to add to what she had already said. Yes, she agreed that her story didn’t seem likely, but it was true. She had explained it to the police at the time and she stood by it now, six years later.
Mallory had drunk two miniature bottles of whisky on the train back to Ipswich. A copy of Matthew’s file was on the table in front of him, as well as the late edition of the Evening Standard. The newspaper belonged to one of the passengers sitting opposite him. Mallory had almost snatched it out of the man’s hand when he saw the story on the front page.
A bizarre suicide in Holborn. A twenty-year-old criminal called Will Scott had been found dead in a street close to Lincoln’s Inn Fields. The cause of death was a knife wound to the heart, which police believed to be self-inflicted. Scott had a record for aggravated burglary and assault, and was a known drug dealer. Three witnesses had seen him following a middle-aged woman, dressed in a grey suit with a silver brooch shaped like a lizard. Police were urging her to come forward.
A coincidence?
Mallory remembered the brooch Mrs Deverill had been wearing. She had arrived late to the meeting, and she might well have come through Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He felt certain she must be the woman referred to in the article, although he had no idea how she could have been involved in Will Scott’s death. But from that moment on Mallory had been worried. He had found himself thinking more and more about Matthew and he was certain that the boy shouldn’t be in her care.
Then, only a few days later, he had intercepted a routine transmission from a police station in York: something about another death, one that had been reported by a fourteen-year-old boy from the LEAF Project. It had been enough for Mallory. He had cleared a space in his diary and headed north.
Now, driving back from Lesser Malling, he was very glad he’d done it. What he had seen had been a disgrace. The boy looked ill. More than that, he looked traumatized. And Mallory had quickly noticed the welts on his arm. Well, he would soon put a stop to it. He would hand in his own report the very next day.
He checked his speedometer. He was doing exactly seventy miles an hour. He had moved into the central lane and cars were speeding past him on both sides, all of them breaking the speed limit. He watched the red tail lights blur into the distance. It was raining again, tiny drops splattering against the windscreen. Was it his imagination or had it become very cold inside the car? He turned on the heater. Air pumped out of the ventilation grilles in the dashboard, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. He switched on the windscreen wipers. The road ahead shimmered and bent as the water swept over the glass.
Mallory glanced at the clock. It was half past nine. He was at least another two hours away from Ipswich – it would be midnight before he was home. He turned on the radio to listen to the news. The voices would help keep him awake.
The radio was tuned to BBC Radio 4 but there was no news. At first Mallory thought there was nothing on the radio at all and wondered if it had broken… like the heating. It really was very cold. Perhaps one of the fuses had blown. He would have to take the car into the garage when he got back. But then it came on. There was a burst of static and, behind it, something else.
A faint whispering.
Puzzled, he leant down and pressed the button that was preset to Classic FM. Mallory liked classical music. Maybe there would be a concert. But there was no music. Once again, all he could hear was the strange whispering. They were definitely the same voices. He could even make out some of the words they were saying.
“EMANY… NEVAEH… NITRA… OH… WREHTAF…”
What the hell was going on? Frantically Mallory pressed button after button, his eyes never leaving the road. It was impossible. The same voices were being transmitted on every station, louder now, more insistent. He turned the radio off. But the whispering continued. It seemed to be everywhere, all around him in the car.
The cold was more intense. It was like sitting in a fridge – or a deep freeze. Mallory decided to pull over on to the hard shoulder and stop. The rain was coming down harder. He could barely see out of the windscreen. Red lights zoomed past. Blinding white lights sped towards him.
He pressed his foot on the brake and signalled left. But the indicator had failed and the car wouldn’t slow down. Mallory was beginning to panic. He had never been afraid in his life. It wasn’t in his nature. But he was afraid now, knowing that the car was out of control. He stamped his foot down more urgently on the brake. Nothing happened. The car was picking up speed.
And then it was as if he had hit some sort of invisible ramp. He felt the tyres leave the road and the whole car rocketed into the air. His vision twisted three hundred and sixty degrees. The whispering had somehow become a great clamour that filled his consciousness.
Mallory screamed.
His car, travelling at ninety miles an hour, somersaulted over the crash barrier. The last thing Mallory saw, upside down, was a petrol tanker hurtling towards him, the driver’s face frozen in horror. The Honda hit it and disintegrated. There was a screech of tyres. An explosion. A single blare from the loudest horn in the world. Then silence.
***
Matt was sound asleep when the covers were torn off him and he woke up in the chill of the morning to find Mrs Deverill in a black dressing gown, looming over his bed. He looked at his watch. It was ten past six. Outside, the sky was still grey. Rain pattered against the windows. The trees bent in the wind.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“I just heard it on the radio,” Mrs Deverill said. “I thought you ought to know. I’m afraid it’s bad news, Matthew. It seems there was a multiple pile-up on the motorway last night. Six people were killed. Detective Superintendent Mallory was one of them. It’s a terrible shame. Really terrible. But it looks as if you won’t be leaving after all.”
OUT OF THE FIRE
The next few days were the worst Matt had experienced since he had arrived in Yorkshire.
Mrs Deverill worked him harder than ever and Noah never left his side. The hours passed in a tedious procession of cleaning, painting, chopping, mending and carrying. Matt was close to despair. He had tried to escape to London and he had failed. He had gone looking for clues in the wood but had found almost nothing. Two people had tried to help him and they had both died. Nobody else cared. A sort of fog had descended on his mind. He had given in. He would remain at Hive Hall until Mrs Deverill had finished with him. Maybe she planned to keep him there all his life and he would end up hollowed out and empty, like Noah, a dribbling slave.
Then, one evening – Matt thought it was a Saturday, although all days had become very much the same – Mrs Deverill’s sister Claire came to dinner. He hadn’t seen the teacher since his encounter with her in Lesser Malling. Sitting next to her at the kitchen table, he found it hard to keep his eyes off her birthmark, the discolouration that covered most of her face. He was both drawn to it and repulsed at the same time.
“Jayne tells me that you have been missing school,” she remarked in her strange, high-pitched voice.
“I haven’t been to school because she won’t let me go,” Matt replied. “I have to work here.”
“And yet when you were at school, you regularly missed class. You played truant. You preferred shoplifting and loitering on motorway bridges, smoking. That’s what I heard.”
“I never smoked,” Matt growled.
“Modern children have no real education,” Jayne Deverill remarked. She was serving some sort of stew out of a pot. The meat was thick and fatty, and came in a rich, blood-coloured gravy. Road kill in a primeval swamp. “You see them in the street in their shapeless clothes, listening to what they call music but what you or I would call a horrible noise. They have no respect, no intelligence, no taste. And they think the world belongs to them!”
“They’ll soon find out…” Claire Deverill muttered.
There was a knock at the door and Noah appeared, dressed in what might have passed for a suit except that it was a
bout fifty years old, faded and shapeless. He wore a shirt buttoned to the neck, but no tie. He looked to Matt like an out-of-work funeral director.
“The car’s ready,” he announced.
“We’re still eating, Noah.” Jayne Deverill scowled. “Wait for us outside.”
“It’s raining.” Noah sniffed the food hopefully.
“Then wait in the car. We’ll be out soon.”
Matt waited until Noah had gone. “Are you going out?” he asked.
“We might be.”
“Where?”
“When I was young, a child never asked questions of his elders,” Claire Deverill said.
“Was that before or after the First World War?” Matt asked.
“Pardon?”
“Forget it…”
Matt fell silent and finished his meal. Jayne Deverill stood up and went over to the kettle. “I’m making you a cup of herbal tea,” she explained. “I want you to drink it all, Matthew. It has a restorative quality and it seems to me that you’ve been rather on edge since the death of that poor detective.”
“Are you going to arrange for him to phone me tomorrow?”
“Oh no. Mr Mallory won’t be coming back.” She poured steaming water into a squat black teapot, stirred it and then poured out a cup for Matthew. “Now you get that down you. It’ll help you relax.”
“It’ll help you relax.”
Maybe it was the way she spoke the words. Or maybe it was the fact that Mrs Deverill had never made tea like this before, but suddenly Matt was determined not to touch the liquid he was being offered. He cupped it in his hands and sniffed. It was green and smelled bitter.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
“Leaves.”
“What sort of leaves?”
“Dandelion. Full of Vitamin A.”
“Not for me, thanks,” Matt said. He tried to sound casual. “I’ve never been that crazy about dandelions.”
“Nonetheless, you will try it. You’re not leaving the table until you do.”
Claire Deverill was watching him too carefully. Matt was certain now: if he drank the tea, the next thing he knew it would be the morning of the next day.
“All right.” Matt lifted the cup. “If you insist.”
“I do.”
The question was – how to get rid of it?
Finally, it was Asmodeus who helped him out. The cat must have crept into the kitchen while they were eating. It jumped up on to the sideboard and caught a jug of milk with its tail, causing it to topple and break. Both sisters turned round, their attention momentarily diverted. Instantly Matt reached down and up-ended his cup under the table. When the two women turned back again, he was cradling the cup in his hand as if nothing had happened. He just hoped they wouldn’t notice the steam rising out of the damp carpet.
He pretended to drink until the cup was empty, then set it down on the table. Something stirred in Jayne Deverill’s eyes and he knew she was pleased. Now to see if his theory was right. He yawned and stretched his arms.
“Tired, Matthew?” She spoke the words too quickly.
“Yes.”
“No need to help with the dishes tonight then. Why don’t you go up to bed?”
“Yes. I’ll do that.”
He stood up and went to the stairs, making his movements deliberately slow and heavy. He didn’t turn on the light in his room. Instead he lay down on the bed and closed his eyes, wondering what would happen next.
He didn’t have long to wait. The door opened and light spilled into the room.
“Is he asleep?” It was Claire Deverill’s voice.
“Of course. He’ll sleep twelve hours and wake up with a chainsaw of a headache. Are you ready?”
“Yes.”
“Then let’s go.”
Matt heard the women leave. He listened to their footsteps on the stairs. The front door opened and closed. The engine of the Land Rover started and the headlights swung round as it turned in the yard and then set off up the drive. Only when he was sure they weren’t coming back did he sit up on the bed. Everything had happened just as he had anticipated. He was alone at Hive Hall.
Half an hour later the lights came back on at Omega One. Matt had been expecting that too.
Dressed in black jeans and a dark shirt, he grabbed the bike and pedalled away from the farm.
It was time to go back into the wood.
It didn’t take Matt long to find the entrance. The little flag he had made from his T-shirt was still there, tied round a branch. Grateful for the pine needles underfoot, he made his way along the corridor of trees, making sure he didn’t stray off the tarmac strip that Tom Burgess had shown him the last time he was here. The moon was behind the clouds but he used the glow from the power station to guide him. When he looked back, the wood was pitch-black. An owl cried out. There was a scurry of leaves as some night creature batted its way up towards the sky.
Matt heard the villagers before he saw them. There was the sound of crackling and a murmur of voices. They were very close. He pulled aside a pair of low branches and realized that he was back at the fence that surrounded the power station. He knelt down and looked through the wire. An incredible sight met his eyes.
The flat circle of land surrounding the power station was bustling with activity. A huge fire blazed outside the sphere, throwing out vivid snakes’ tongues of flames. Thick black smoke curled into the air. Four or five people were throwing armfuls of twigs and shrubbery on to the fire, the damp wood hissing and snapping as it was consumed. Overhead, a line of arc lamps cast a brilliant glare over the field. It was a strange mixture: the building, with its electric lights, was modern, industrial; the bonfire, with the shadowy figures of people grouped around, reminded him of a scene from primitive times.
There was a car parked between the fire and the fence – Matt thought it might be a Saab or a Jaguar. A man got out but he was silhouetted against the light and Matt couldn’t make out who he was. The man raised a hand and the gold signet ring he was wearing momentarily flashed red, reflecting the light of the fire.
He had given a signal. A lorry that was parked on the other side of the clearing immediately began to reverse right up to the corridor that joined the giant sphere of Omega One to the rest of the building. As Matt watched, the doors of the lorry were thrown open and several men emerged, dressed in strange, cumbersome clothes. They congregated together, then lifted something: a large silver box about five metres long. It was obviously heavy. They took a lot of time lowering it to the ground.
Matt couldn’t quite see what was going on. He had to get closer. He followed the fence back to the gap he’d discovered the last time he was here and waited, making sure nobody was looking in his direction. But all the villagers were concentrating on the lorry. Matt chose his moment, then dived forward, head first. He felt the jagged edge of the wire tear his shirt and scrape his back, but he was lucky. He hadn’t drawn blood. He landed face down on the grass and lay still.
A large, bearded man walked across the clearing, heading towards the lorry. It was the butcher from Lesser Malling. The ginger-haired chemist was there too. And Matt also recognized Joanna Creevy, the woman who had been at Glendale Farm when he returned with the police. She was talking to Jayne Deverill. Matt looked back at the bonfire. The village children were standing round, poking sticks into the flames, making the sparks leap up. There were forty or fifty people at Omega One and suddenly Matt knew that he was spying on the entire village. Young or old, every one of them had made the journey into the forest. They were all in on it.
All his instincts screamed at him to slip away before he was spotted. But at the same time he knew that what he was seeing was important. He just had to work out what these people were doing, why they were here. And what was inside the silver box? The men had disappeared inside. The villagers were queuing up, about to follow them. The man with the signet ring began talking to Mrs Deverill. Matt was desperate to hear what they were saying.
He crawled over the ground, keeping low, hardly daring to raise his head. The closer he got, the greater the chance of his being seen. He hoped the long grass would provide some sort of cover, but the light of the flames seemed to be reaching out to him, eager to show that he was there. He could even feel the warmth of the fire on his shoulders and head. He heard laughter. The man with the ring had cracked a joke. Matt wriggled further forward. His hand caught something and pulled it away. Too late he saw the thin plastic wire that ran along the ground. Too late he realized that he should never have touched it.
The stillness of the night was shattered by a siren. The villagers spun round, staring out over the field. Three men ran forward, shotguns appearing in their hands. The children dropped their sticks into the fire and ran over to the lorry. The man with the signet ring slowly passed through the crowd, his eyes scanning the ground. Matt clutched the earth, burying his face in the grass. But there was no use trying to hide.
Mrs Deverill was standing beside the bonfire. She shouted a brief sentence in a strange language and took something out of her pocket. Then she waved her hand over the flames. It was trailing a cloud of white powder, which hung for a moment in the air before falling.
The flames exploded, leaping almost as high as the power station itself, bright red light flooding the field. Something black began to take shape within them, moulding itself out of the shadows. In seconds the blackness had solidified and now it sprang – seemingly in slow motion – out of the fire and on to the ground beyond. It was some sort of animal and, moments later, a second one appeared, bounding forward to join it. Behind them the bonfire shrank back to its normal size. The wail of the alarm stopped abruptly.
They were dogs, but like no dogs Matt had ever seen.
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