Refuge

by Richard Herley

  She had taken her time undressing. Each item of clothing had been folded and laid across the armchair. But now no obstacle, no delaying tactic, remained.

  He turned back the bedcovers. Her brown eyes, mutely pleading, did not leave his face as she climbed between the sheets. Bex got in beside her, his arousal so extreme that it was almost causing him pain. In that curious moment he thought of the tarot Tower, struck by diabolic lightning, of the two white-clad lovers falling to their death.

  ‘Go on. Grab it.’

  He again seized her hand, and made her comply.

  It was then, perhaps, that he received, as if from far off, from some distant outpost of her being, a whiff of otherness, an indefinable odour as of an orchid’s stigma, deep in the forests of Brazil: the petals waxy white, blotched with rust, the labellum twisted and disguised as something it was not, a cunning lure for carrion-minded beetles, brushed and rebrushed with pollen. As he mounted her, taking her from the front, Bex could not rid himself of the feeling that her disgust, her shudders, her limpness, had somehow been infected, in one tiny spot, with pretence. There, in the extravagant way her head had turned aside on the pillow, lay the very base of her grief. He had destroyed everything. Tears glistened at her tight-shut eyes. Not pausing as he rammed her, Bex instinctively bent and nibbled her left earlobe.

  At that, the spot of infection suddenly grew. It may even have been detectable by her conscious mind. He had dragged holiness into its own carnal filth, made it recognise itself.

  For the woman, there could be no sensation more degrading in all the world.

  Bex told himself that she had been too ready to give up her husband’s figurine. She had allowed him to find it too easily. She had divulged information about it, sealing the angel’s fate. And when Bex had crushed the thing, when he had pulverised her husband’s memory beneath the heel of the gun that had shot her father, her horror had not been complete.

  He felt orgasm attempting to overtake him. He tried to resist. He had wanted the time to tell her about the divination, but a moment later his mind encountered the knowledge that she knew full well he had eaten Martin’s eyes. That same night, in this same bed, he had taken pains to tell her so. His whispered account of the taste and sensation, the effect it had produced on his listener, now became fused with the memory of the abominable act itself, of Danzo’s hooking motion with the point of his knife, of the first of the two proffered morsels, of the sacrificial blood-taint of that vile, resistant jelly on his lips. And it was he, Bex, no one else, observed by the overawed faces of his disciples, who had calmly chewed and swallowed and held out his hand for the second of the pair.

  Stimulated beyond measure, he exploded inside her as though struck by all the lightning in hell.

  PART TWO

  1

  Four and a half miles on from the Manor House, having described a broad curve from north to east, Suter hit the lane at Sarratt. This, he hoped, was far enough ahead to prevent his pursuers from guessing his purpose too soon. If they did that, they might go back to Shanley, fetch the lorry, and overtake him on the road. Moreover, it was now ten to five. The rain had not relented. Under this sky no more than a couple of hours of daylight remained. Even if his new friends were close behind, he had not left them enough time for such a manoeuvre.

  Using the compass, he had threaded his way uphill through woodland and scrub, through overgrown gardens and the remains of a straggling line of cottages and village houses, and had come at last to a broken-down front gate in Victorian cast iron, set in a low flint-and-brick wall buried by bindweed and greater periwinkle. Beyond the lane, a hundred-yard width of young birch-scrub separated him from the row of houses opposite. He had, precisely according to plan, reached the old village green.

  Here the Gunpowder Plot had been commemorated each November with fireworks and a bonfire. The Half Moon, one of at least three pubs he could remember in the village, would be a little way along on the left. It had faced the green. There, on Bonfire Night, 2014, he and Helen —

  ‘Keinmal die Helen!’ he hissed. ‘Gar nichts! ’

  His internal language this afternoon had been heavily flavoured with German, a schoolboy German that always seemed to surface when the memory of his fiancée threatened to become too acute. ‘None of Helen! Nothing at all!’ Muriel had set it off: she had uttered the name. It applied now, apparently, to the head man’s daughter, the widow of the man Suter had found in the river. She might well be the only Helen left alive, anywhere in the world. He wondered how old she was. What she looked like.

  ‘Get going,’ he said.

  He was still finding it hard to believe that he had actually spoken to someone today. Yet there it was, the scratch on the right-hand objective of his binoculars, sustained during his retreat from the escarpment. The scratch was proof, like the loss of his rifle, like his very presence on this spot, that those events had taken place. He had found the body; Muriel had found him; he had seen her being tortured and felt impelled to intervene. The chain of happenings even assumed a sort of inevitability, like the garbled logic of a dream.

  ‘Nightmare, more like.’

  Squeezing past the gate, he peered cautiously from side to side. No one. The binoculars confirmed it.

  He stepped into the lane, turned to the left, and set off. He had not walked along an uncluttered road for – what? – eight years? Nine? Despite his weariness, it felt too easy to be proceeding like this, unencumbered by vegetation, to have his boot-soles met by such artificial firmness. It reminded him that long ago, before the plague, he had sometimes dreamt that he could fly.

  The villagers must have worked hard to keep this open. The verges had been regularly trimmed, with tractors, he supposed. That would make it even harder to detect a trail: to detect whether a man walking along the lane, a man such as himself, had decided to strike off at an angle and lie in wait with a pump-action shotgun. Those coming after him would have to travel very slowly, scrutinising every yard of either verge. Suter had taken such caution into account when planning his route. He needed the extra time it would buy to get ahead. For he knew the outcome would probably be settled the following day, and if he were to stand any chance at all it was imperative that he provided himself with comfort tonight. He needed a secure place where he could dry off, eat, and maybe get some sleep.

  The pub was approaching on his left. It stood a few yards back from the road, sheltered behind pollarded limes which, untended, had sprouted out of all recognition. As pubs went it was not large. It dated from the seventeenth century, with a low, uneven roofline that Suter now saw had almost completely collapsed.

  He stopped opposite the entrance to the saloon bar. A small and irresponsible part of him wanted to make a sentimental investigation, to look inside, to try to identify the spot occupied by the tiny table where he and Helen had sat that night.

  ‘Nur weiter! ’

  But he did not move forward. Having taken another backward glance along the road, he found himself pushing a hurried way through the dense, rain-soaked foliage of the lime suckers. Underfoot, the shingle hardstanding had disappeared beneath twelve years of leaf-litter. He reached up and with his fingertips tried to rub the algae away from the door-lintel, to expose there the painted sign bearing the name of the licensee. A few letters, a syllable or two, were all that remained.

  The door stood open.

  ‘You’ve seen enough.’

  But he might never come this way again.

  ‘Zwei Minuten.’

  He even checked his stopwatch before attempting to venture beyond the vestibule. He did not get far: the saloon bar was unrecognisable, heaped with rubble and rotting furnishings where the ceiling had caved in, borne down by tons of roof-tiles. He discerned a possible outline of the bar and, to its left, a hole in the wall that had been a window. That, there, had been the space where the little iron table and two bentwood chairs had stood, crowded in by others, surrounded by standing drinkers who had earlier been outside on the gr
een, watching the fireworks.

  ‘Bitch!’ Suter said, tears prickling his eyes, and barged back into the open air. He had not realised it would hurt him so much. Scarcely conscious of what he was doing, he returned to the lane and continued on his way, even faster than before.

  She had been drinking white wine; he, ever dutiful, tomato juice. They had driven here in his car, from her parents’ house. On the village green they had watched the rockets going up, showering the sky with light and exploding like shells, some so loudly that they had made her jump. It had been a hopelessly inappropriate moment to propose. He had been as much amazed as elated by her happy acceptance. And when, in the pub, she had let him put the engagement ring on her finger, his entire view of himself had been inverted. For the rest of the evening, for over eighteen months to come, he had been allowed to forget his deep-seated sense of worthlessness, his total lack of self-esteem.

  He had been twenty-six then. His work as a plant physiologist for Cornutus, the Swiss chemicals company, was based at their facility in Stevenage, an hour’s drive from Gerrard’s Cross, where his parents lived and where he had been born. He often came home for weekends or just the odd evening, mainly to see Helen. Sometimes she went to Stevenage to see him. In 2014 Suter had been promoted, attached to a project to design synthetic auxins, and his salary had increased to the point when he could consider buying a house and getting married.

  Apart from an unsatisfactory romance with another biologist while doing his doctorate at Northwestern University, he had had little success with women until Helen came along. He was too shy, too unsure of himself: and he was too conscious of and repelled by the hypocrisy of the rituals surrounding the act of human procreation. Before meeting Helen, he had been convinced he would never marry.

  ‘And you never did.’

  ‘Genug davon! ’

  ‘Genug der Petzescheiss! ’

  Enough! Enough of all that! Thirteen years of bitch-shit, feeding on nothing else for hours on end, his whole world Helen-obsessed, Helenocentric, until, simultaneously with all his other feelings, he had genuinely come to hate her.

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘You shut up!’

  ‘Are you talking to me, you frigging control-freak?’

  Herr von Christus, but hadn’t he driven himself stark staring bonkers, the loony legend made flesh, mental madness personified, way off on an apogean tangent, somewhere round the arse end of Saturn?

  ‘I like that. Apogean. It’s going in my diary. What does it mean, pray?’

  ‘Stop it! Stop it! You’re in enough trouble as it is!’

  He, Iron Man Suter, should never have contrived this Sarratt business; never have gone near the sodding pub; or at the very least, since his route had been made inevitable, he should have had the fortitude to keep on walking, not looked inside or risked such a shortcircuit, a brainblitz, a hundred megawatt misery overload. Yet had he not seen it coming all afternoon? Sarratt, indisputably, had been waiting there on his map ever since the moment it came off the presses: for Pathfinders were printed in four colours, needing four machines, one for the orange roads and contours, the next for the blue ponds and rivers and lakes and sea, and next the green, the village green, and finally, finally, its black bloody name, branded into his skull with Helen’s red-hot rejection-poker, a colour not permitted or admitted in the official Ordnance Survey palette …

  ‘Just … just.’

  He came to a halt in the rain.

  ‘Just stop it. All right?’

  Quite enough trouble. They were the reason for it, of course. What had happened today might unhinge anyone, not least a man of forty-one who had believed the world at an end and needlessly spent the past twelve years entirely on his own.

  ‘Bastards! Bastards!’

  Why couldn’t they have left him in peace? Just when he had come to terms with it, just when he had devised a system for coping, they had sent that body floating, drifting, bloated, slowly turning and part submerged, downstream past his home, until it had snagged in the fallen willow and remained there for him to find on his morning round. He wished, now, that he had let go of the rope. Wished with all his heart that he had heeded his own counsel and let it go. They would never have found him. Never would have found his home, his refuge, his secure headquarters, Fortress Suter, safely buried among the trees and hidden from all eyes.

  He discovered he was walking again. The worst was over. The pub had done it. Brought the memory to life. But now he was all right again.

  ‘Absolut? ’

  ‘Jawohl! All ist in Ordnung! ’

  Ordnung. His catchword. In German, natürlich, the language of order, precision, utter correctitude, his comfort in times of stress, distancing him from his unruly native tongue. He had learnt it at school, enough to read scientific papers, anyway. Used it at Cornutus, conversing with the management. On trips to Geneva and Zürich and Bonn.

  They had been bastards, too.

  He checked his stopwatch. Three hours, twelve minutes, nine seconds. Thinking about the way he had come, about all the things he had done to confuse and evade, a wry smile formed on his lips. Progress through the scrub had been hard for him, but it would be very much harder for them. Serve them right.

  A new idea seized him. He’d just solved the main problem. The pass-in-the-night problem. It had been bothering him for hours.

  In better spirits, the pub almost forgotten, Suter continued on his way.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  The western side of St Michael’s churchyard adjoined the Manor House grounds. To the south stood the school; to the north lay the disused vicarage with its wide-ranging views across the valley. The churchyard, extending mainly to the east, was hemmed in on its south side by a flint and brick wall enclosing a yew hedge. The diffuse crown of a single huge yew tree almost completely obscured the church tower from the north and east sides. This tree, its cavities repaired with concrete, one ponderous branch supported on a wooden crutch, had been judged to be at least a thousand years old, predating the existing church by centuries. Rows of closely trimmed Irish yews, of inferior age, formed an avenue from the lich gate to the porch with its massive, iron-studded door.

  Between these yews, the York stone path gleamed wetly. The rain had settled into a steady, consistent fall, soaking the monuments and slabs, the turfed mounds, the simple, uncluttered Anglican headstones. Water was gurgling through the leaden drainpipes and dribbling from the gapes of the gargoyles on the tower high above.

  As he emerged from the porch with his wife and two small daughters, Leigh Fernihough opened his red-and-white golf umbrella. A few members of the congregation had preceded them; many more were coming behind.

  Normally on Sundays there were two services at St Michael’s, both conducted by the head man. But today, as last Sunday and the one before, there had been no matins, and evensong had been a sombre, heavy-hearted affair. Fernihough was surprised that Bex had not forbidden worship altogether, or indeed any gathering of more than half a dozen villagers. Plainly, Bex’s contempt for the village was such that he had no fears of revolt. After all, he was holding the head man hostage. If anyone doubted his threat to kill Philip, if anyone thought of offering resistance, they merely had to remember what had happened to Jack, to Vernon, to Martin, and now – in as yet unexplained circumstances – to Muriel.

  Today the deputy, Goddard, had led the service. After prayers for Muriel, he had taken for his sermon Isaiah, chapter twenty-five. For once Fernihough had listened intently.

  Thou shalt bring down the noise of strangers, as the heat in a dry place; even the heat with the shadow of a cloud: the branch of the terrible ones shall be brought low.

  A knot of people was standing under umbrellas, discussing Muriel’s death and the gunfire everyone had heard this afternoon. At the threshold, Goddard accepted Fernihough’s hand and shook it.

  Fernihough said, ‘Will you come to supper with us, Peter? This evening. I’d like to talk.’

  Goddard
looked at him narrowly. ‘What about?’

  Fernihough’s wife, Melissa, cradling the two-year-old in her arms, moved closer to her husband, ostensibly to gain more shelter from the rain. ‘Philip. We want to talk about Philip. I think we should be allowed to see him. And Helen. No one’s seen her since yesterday.’

  ‘The Council has everything under review.’

  ‘Please,’ Melissa said.

  People were pressing from behind, trying to leave the porch.

  ‘Very well,’ Goddard said. ‘What time?’

  ‘Seven-thirty?’ Fernihough said.

  ‘Seven-thirty it is.’

  He reached past Fernihough and shook someone else’s hand.

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  A mile from the borough boundary, open countryside was replaced by an extensive interwar housing estate. Having now become a residential road called Baldwin’s Lane, the lane continued through it, slowly descending, Suter knew, towards the Metropolitan Railway and the course of the Grand Union Canal. A dormitory for London, this place had been almost contiguous with its suburbs, but not quite: the cheaper side of Metroland, a speculator’s paradise of flimsy bungalows and semi-detached houses. On Suter’s right approached what had been a parade of neighbourhood shops: the newsagent’s, the chemist’s, the hairdresser’s, the hardware store. Here the broad stripes of a zebra crossing led across the road, almost perfectly preserved, down to the defining square studs of shiny aluminium let into the asphalt on either side. The Belisha beacons on opposing kerbs yet remained. He half expected to see their orange-yellow globes alternately flashing, blinking on and off, protectively ushering, or hoping to usher, pedestrians from one side of the road to the other.