Winter

by William Horwood

  Reece appeared on the afternoon of the third day to announce that the live cameras were now all up and running at Woolstone, inside and out, every corner of the property covered. The place was being monitored 24/7.

  ‘In case there are intruders, or visitors, whether human or . . .’ Reece smiled dismissively, he had yet to be convinced, ‘er, hydden. Let me show you.’

  They sat down in one of the base’s communication rooms to look at a big screen linked to Woolstone.

  ‘We see things differently this way than on the ground,’ said Reece. ‘The facility includes head cameras used by the patrols. If it moves we’ll pick it up.’

  They worked through some of the cameras, room by room, starting with the outside of the building and then in through the front door.

  ‘Untidy place,’ said Reece.

  ‘Always was,’ said Bohr. ‘Arthur needed what he called a “creative mess” to function. Margaret . . .’

  ‘Margaret?’

  ‘His wife. Deceased a few months ago. Margaret wasn’t much better. They worked facing each other in the library . . . his desk, her desk. His books and hers.’

  ‘Sweet,’ said Reece.

  There were three cameras in the library. Bohr stared at images of shelves, books, desks, waste bins, computers and chairs. There was not much else.

  ‘Found anything?’ wondered Reece.

  Bohr shook his head.

  ‘And in that material you’ve been through?’

  ‘He sanitized the lot,’ he said.

  ‘Books are hell,’ said Reece. ‘Too many of ’em, too many pages, too damn obvious. You checked them out?’

  ‘My people have been through them,’ said Bohr. ‘I ordered them to after Professor Foale disappeared.’

  ‘Just checking,’ said Reece. ‘No offence, but your guys were local.’

  ‘Were?’

  ‘We took full command this afternoon. Left them to guarding duties. Back-up to our technology.’

  ‘Like these cameras?’

  ‘They work continuously and detect movement, heat, change. Men can’t do that, not all of it – and there are always lapses in concentration . . .’

  Bohr shrugged. He was content to leave the practicalities to Reece so he was free to focus on the other stuff, whatever that was. As of now he had no idea.

  They moved with the cameras down a corridor to a scullery, then the kitchen, a lower store area with the ancient arches of which Arthur was proud, and finally the dilapidated conservatory. All in colour and sound.

  One of the men on the stairs saw the camera move at Reece’s distant touch, and saluted.

  ‘First floor?’

  They did a virtual tour upstairs, turning this way and that.

  One of the corridors showed an untidy pile of dirty washing.

  ‘Marines!’ grunted Bohr.

  ‘Your lot,’ responded Reece, meaning the personnel put in place immediately after Arthur’s disappearance. ‘Mine are better disciplined.’

  It was a huge house in which almost anything might be hidden anywhere. But Bohr knew that Arthur didn’t work that way. If there were clues to find they would be in a logical place – but what? And where?

  They continued their virtual tour into the garden.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’ said Bohr, pointing at what seemed interference on the screen. Thousands of randomly moving white dots were obscuring the image. ‘Birds?’

  ‘Snow,’ said Reece, tracking the camera back to focus on two large conifers in the distance, the rough lawn in between and the snow.

  ‘Just flurries. The worst is yet to come according to the Army forecasters. They’re doing it the old-fashioned way, by calculation. A lot of the relevant satellites are down.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Bohr. ‘We’re running out of time. We’re done here. Time to get to Woolstone. I’ve ordered a car.’

  He said it wryly, without much hope Reece would buy it. He fancied forty miles of gentle English countryside.

  ‘That’s a no-go,’ said Reece predictably. ‘Too dangerous. The roads are not secure. Some are blocked and there are vagrants roaming the countryside. Forget it.’

  An old Huey UH-IN helicopter got them to Woolstone in just over twenty-five minutes, flying over the blocked roads, burnt-out housing and empty countryside Reece was wary of. They saw no one and little movement but for rooks and gulls circling over a reservoir and a herd of horses stampeding round a soccer pitch, as if chasing their own tails. They skirted Oxford, whose medieval towers and colleges, narrow streets and wan gardens looked like the abandoned set of a film that never got finished.

  The pilot, at Bohr’s request, took them along the line of the Ridgeway, hovering briefly over the White Horse before turning north towards Woolstone itself. The house was easily recognizable and, from the air, as his researcher had said, the henge was easy to see. The trees formed a circle of sorts, with two distinctly taller conifers marking an entrance facing the house itself. They landed three hundred yards away on a landing pad in another property. Reece’s people had had it repainted yellow and white.

  They had decided to sleep at the house, which was large enough to accommodate all of them, the patrols establishing billets on the ground floor, while Reece, Bohr and his assistant Ingrid Hansen commandeered rooms upstairs. The conservatory was converted into a command centre-cum-office and housed the computers.

  Bohr left Reece to his people, to make a swift tour of the garden, starting with the henge itself.

  The trees towered above him. He pulled out the plan of them Arthur had sketched long before but it looked nothing like the real thing.

  ‘“Charles Haddon . . .” ’ he read out aloud. ‘What the hell have you got to do with all this?’

  The Woolstone henge was impressive and its majesty and endless wind sound high above stilled something in Bohr’s soul.

  ‘Arthur, how the hell did you work out how to use a place like this?’ he muttered. ‘How did you even think it could be done?’

  A tinkling of sound made him go back out onto the lawn to some shrubs, where what he took to be wind bells and charms hung. Bohr remembered Margaret Foale showing him the Chimes, as she had called them. The sound, she said, never stopped. It was hypnotic and it still was, but Bohr was not yet ready to be hypnotized and he turned up towards the house.

  The sight of a dead fox at his feet in the grass, head blown apart, stopped him short. He knew that kind of bullet wound when he saw one. Had one of the security personnel he had put in place or one of Reece’s done it? He had no idea, but either way, not good.

  The study was bigger than he remembered it and a lot bigger than it appeared on screen.

  There were two desks: a big one and a bigger one. Margaret’s and Arthur’s faced each other with barely a gap between. Hers was turned to face the room, so she sat with her back to a big casement window. His faced hers, with the window beyond her and the door, a big wide one, to his left, her right. Behind his chair was a wall of books, and to his left and right as well

  Her library was much smaller, confined to the area between the window and the corner of the room, and then the return towards where Arthur’s shelves began. Unlike Arthur’s, her shelves were uniform and the books neatly ordered by subject and author. Mainly literature, most of it old – Old Norse, Old English, Old German, Icelandic – and dictionaries, a dozen of them in different languages, on different literary and etymological subjects. A few journals, but nothing recent, and some historical fiction.

  It was obvious from the way the books had been put back, without being quite tidied properly, that someone had been through the lot for inserts. A few of the books in both collections were smudged grey-white with powder for finger-printing.

  Right on cue Reece’s forensic specialist, an ex-military policeman, whom Bohr had asked to see, appeared. He stood relaxed, as special forces often did. They were comfortable in their own bodies. Bohr never ceased to be impressed by these men and women. He had been fit himself on
ce, but these were fitter than in his day, or more honed. They could do more too, apart from killing people with one finger and having reactions as fast as wild animals. Well, maybe.

  ‘Sir,’ he said neutrally.

  ‘You went through them?’

  The man nodded. ‘We went through the lot, sir, every page of every one.’

  ‘Hers as well?’

  ‘Them too. Sorry, but your people missed stuff. Found receipts, a few notes, a Christmas card used as a bookmark . . .’

  ‘Signed?’

  ‘From her to him. It’s all on her desk, along with what we found in which books.’

  ‘And you dusted them for prints?’

  The ex-MP nodded his head.

  ‘Wanted to see who accessed which book. A library like this is old stuff, shelved and rarely looked at again. The quickest way to find out where something is hidden is with dust and infrared. We can date the access too, more or less. She accessed twelve of his, mainly journals. We marked them with small yellow stickers. He accessed a good few of hers, marked with red dot stickers. Question marks mean a long time ago. It’s hard to see the stickers . . . shall I . . . ?’

  Bohr shook his head. ‘If something’s there I’ll find it,’ he said.

  When he was gone, Bohr began looking along Margaret’s shelves at the marked books the ex-MP had mentioned. He was surprised at their number and variety. It took longer than he expected to work his way through each one, seeking for clues.

  Sometimes he got diverted. One that interested him was a collection of translations of Anglo-Saxon poetry, made by Margaret herself. Touching that Arthur had looked at it. Forensics had even marked the page he had recently opened. It meant nothing to Bohr.

  After a while, dispirited, he took a break.

  When he came back he stumbled almost at once on a title that was promising. It was an old book, very old, and had been re-bound and gold-stamped with its original title, Orchesography 1706. The author was Anthony L’Abbé. The ex-MP had question-marked it, meaning Arthur had not accessed it in a while. It was quite thin, the pages greyish, the print old-fashioned and beautiful, and there were sketchy illustrations, each with music at the top and a title in the middle and the sketch, which was asymmetrical, around it.

  It was a book of dances. Obviously the book went back to the days when Margaret and Arthur danced together. He noticed that the title of several included the word ‘Chaconne’ but nothing more. He closed the book and was about to put it back on the shelf when he felt a sudden chill down his spine that came with a moment of revelation.

  Bohr liked crosswords and knew a mnemonic when he saw one, or rather one that had been spelt out.

  Charles Haddon Attacked Charlotte On North North East.

  The penny dropped.

  ‘Chaconne!’ he said aloud.

  He opened the book again and it did not take him long to work out that a chaconne was a dance and the pages were eighteenth-century notations of different ones. Bohr’s heart beat faster as he turned to the beginning of the book and began working his way through. Some of the stuck-in pages were of vintage paper, probably from another book. This was a codex, a collection. Some of the pages were modern, the dances sketched in the same form as the eighteenth-century originals. There were seventy-eight pages, consisting of twenty pages of text and fifty-eight different dances, each with a line of music and a title: ‘The Favourite: A Chaconne Danced by Her Majesty’, ‘Galathee’, ‘Mistress Isabel’s Chaconne’. They showed paired mirror-symmetric steps, most of them clearly beginning and ending in the same place.

  But for a few, which at first glance appeared printed but, Bohr saw, were handwritten using Indian ink. Bohr’s facility with numbers and patterns kicked in and he began looking for differences. For one thing these were not symmetrical and for another there was only one odd man out: this alone showed movement from the bottom of the page to the right . . .

  ‘To the right, or dexter, as Arthur would have said,’ murmured Bohr.

  It showed large dots and small, unpatterned, which Bohr’s mind instantly related to each other and something else he had seen that day: Arthur’s sketch plan of the henge. The distribution of the big dots showed a third of the trees on the right-hand side and three to the left. Lines between them in pencil, very faint and lost among the arrows and a single bigger arrow, north. And a three-digit number.

  The page showed not just any dance, it was surely the dance. A spiral that ceased to be a spiral; a confluence that broke into three parts; a roundel that repeated itself; a chain whose links turned over, interlocked, unravelled and finally broke free.

  Bohr’s ability to read music was not great but he knew enough to work out the score at the top of the page whose predominant notes were A and F. Arthur Foale.

  ‘And the title!’ Bohr exclaimed aloud, ‘The Dancing Master’s Favourite!’

  It was pure Arthur, simple and clever. Of course he had to leave a record. He was a scientist, an explorer, whose life work lay in things verifiable, not things forgotten. It was a record expressed in a medium of love for Margaret and himself.

  Bohr felt both satisfaction and apprehension. It was one thing to explore Arthur’s work, a very different thing to now embark on replicating it by actually going to the henge and trying the dance for himself.

  His mobile buzzed in his pocket. It was Reece.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In the library.’

  ‘You better get outside. Down by the two conifers, to the left . . . I’ll meet you.’

  Reece was grim-faced, puzzled, alarmed. His cool seemed shattered.

  ‘We found it by the smell.’

  ‘The fox? I saw it earlier. I meant to . . .’

  ‘Not the fox.’

  He led Bohr past the remains on the lawn to a creature by the edge of the wood. It was tight-bound with netting and it was dead.

  ‘What the hell’s that?’

  ‘It’s what’s called a muntjac. That’s the smell but it’s not what I wanted you to see.’

  Some of Reece’s other men were there, but they were standing off on the lawn, guarding the location uneasily. Odd, thought Bohr, for men as tough as them.

  Reece led him into the wood away from the group. Reece pointed at something on the ground. It was strangely shadowy and hard to make out. ‘Another muntjac?’

  He wanted to peer closer but Reece shook his head and shone a torch. Still Bohr could not make it out. It was . . . it seemed . . . it . . .

  ‘What is it?’ he asked with a mixture of horror and bewilderment in his voice.

  Then: ‘Jesus, Reece, is this a child?’

  He said it with something more than horror in his voice because it was trussed up horribly, mesh cutting into skin, fingers stuck through here and there, clothes flattened and patterned with the net, and a head and hair.

  Reece shook his head.

  ‘It’s a dwarf,’ he said quietly, ‘a bloody dwarf.’

  ‘Is it dead?’

  Bohr moved a shade closer to get a better look.

  It looked dead, very dead.

  Reece kicked it, first with one boot, then another.

  It was time, Jack decided, to open his eyes.

  25

  A WELCOME

  Very wise was the Modor and very old.

  Old as the Earth some said, therefore old as time.

  Wizened, eaten up, lined, existing in dank shadows, dressed in Mirror-knew-what for garb, though some said – and still say – she could morph into something beautiful.

  But no one living ever saw that happen, nor seemed likely to.

  Age was her habitat, all bent and crooked she was, with arthritic fingers like the exposed roots of an ancient tree.

  Modor was female once, but was she still? Did she have a vestige left of that soft form? She shuffled and grumbled and muttered when folk came to see her, keeping them waiting in the cold while she peered suspiciously through her bothy window, or round its rotten doorpost, peered at th
em and the world.

  But it was worth making the effort of getting there.

  The few who did didn’t leave the same, but better. Once she had heaved her rackety door open and smiled her smile of welcome, they felt they’d come home at last after a long time wandering alone.

  Her visitors would enter and, sitting by her fire, they wondered how her skinny arms clung on to her skewed frame and how it was that the last few of her straggly hairs managed to hang on to her scabby skull. But then she smiled and none of that mattered any more, because she made them understand what it was that really did matter.

  ‘You look tired,’ she would say, ‘so rest a little. No need to talk, just sit and be still awhile.’

  She would look into their eyes and they knew again what it felt like to be loved.

  ‘Tell me,’ she would whisper, pouring them a steamy brew of heady herbs, ‘what’s happening out there in the world I left behind?’

  ‘The same as always, Modor. Nothing changes.’

  ‘Yes it does,’ she would chide them gently, ‘if only you wish it so. Now, tell me, why is it you have come to see me . . . ?’

  Then they would talk and she would listen so well that they knew they were heard.

  At the end, when she grew tired and they knew they must leave, she would ask, ‘Have you seen my consort, the Wita?’

  At that they had to shake their heads, feeling it was best to say nothing. Everyone knew that the Wita was gone and not likely to come back. In all their lives they never saw him.

  ‘Being wise,’ she would say, reading their thoughts, ‘and loving others does not mean you cease to yearn for another’s touch. I miss him. Tell him, if you see him, it must be time he came home to me.’

  The Modor’s domain lay high up in the Harzgebirge of Germany, where, whatever she sometimes implied, she really did live with the Wise One, her beloved consort, the Wita. He was just errant, that was all, absent without leave, away too long, and that was why she complained about him to visitors, but most especially to those she called her friends.

  One of these few, the very few, who had an affinity with her and loved her and was not afraid was the Lady Leetha, mother of Jack, and, through him, grandmother of Judith the Shield Maiden. Leetha often visited the area nearby and used, when she was younger and nimbler than when she sailed to Englalond and back, to dance all the way up through the forests to the top of the hill and say hello. But time catches up with everyone, even Leetha, who . . . who had been thinking of the Modor.