The Buried Circle (57 page)
‘A triumph, I think you’ll find,’ he says, bustling in with two steaming plates of lasagne and sniffing the aroma. ‘Eat your heart out, Heston Blumenthal.’
‘I suppose there are people who would actually cook this from scratch,’ I say, propping myself against the sofa and balancing the plate on my lap.
‘Like Martin.’ Ed pulls an incredulous face. ‘I found raw meat and stuff in the fridge, actual ingredients. Though could he better this? Or am I just bloody starving?’
‘It’s sex,’ I say. ‘Always makes you hungry. Well, good sex, anyway’
‘Mmm.’ He settles himself on the sofa. ‘That was outrageously good sex. First time I’ve shagged in a stone circle, mind.’
‘Don’t,’ I say, with a shiver. ‘I mean, don’t remind me I’m here by myself tonight. Can’t you find someone else to fly your bloody helicopter?’
‘Can’t be done,’ he says. ‘Not if you want me to keep cooking you Mr Waitrose’s finest.’
Our eyes meet again.
‘That is, if you do want me?’ he asks.
He leaves an hour later. The stones are pale in the midsummer dusk, the henge banks dark against the sky, the lights of Swindon already casting a dull red glow on the underside of the clouds. Lamplight spills out onto the tiny front garden as I stand in the doorway to see him go.
‘You going to be all right on your own?’ he asks. ‘I’d come back later, but if it’s anything like the usual booking, the clients probably won’t even be on the brandy and cigars when I land. Unlikely to be back until two or three in the morning.’
‘You’d give me a heart-attack, hammering on the door at that time of night. I’ll be fine.’
He glances at the rosy-pink sky over the village. ‘Lovely night for flying. Good weather on the way.’
‘D’you think?’
‘Trust me, I’m a helicopter pilot. I’ll give you a wave when I fly over.’
‘Are you allowed to over-fly the village this time of night?’
‘Of course not. I’m joking.’ A few steps down the path, he comes back and gives me another kiss.
‘Better hurry,’ I tell him. ‘Your clients won’t be quaffing brandy all night.’
‘Oh, God, I hope they haven’t had too much. Better check the sick bags are on board.’ He lets himself out through the gate onto the lane, where his Land Rover is parked next to my Peugeot.
After washing up, I mount the narrow stairs to the one and only bedroom–just big enough for a brass bedstead–and check my mobile. I’d hoped the cottage would have a landline, but there isn’t one. At least I can pick up a faint and intermittent signal upstairs. Slightly puzzled there’s no further message from John, though it’s nearly half past nine, I send him a text to let him know I’m fine.
Outside, people are still wandering through the stone circle. A torch–or maybe a mobile–flashes between the stones at the back of the cottage.
Lights, buggerin lights
. It’s too early yet to undress and go to bed, but I switch on the bedside lamp, rest my head on the pillows and close my eyes.
I come awake again with a jerk, sweating, heart thudding, thinking I’ve heard something–phone? Knock on the door? The lamplight makes the bedroom windows seem shiny black, but the hands on my watch have hardly moved at all: a few minutes after ten, not yet full dark. I swing my legs off the bed, but there’s no further sound from downstairs, only the creak of the floorboards as I patter across the landing.
In the living room, the fire has died to embers. The short doze has disoriented rather than refreshed me, making everything feel muffled. I switch on the lamp and pull the curtains closed, half afraid I’ll see in the window Steve’s flat dead stare, or even Mick’s stoned pupils, but my ghosts have taken the night off and the only eyes in the glass are mine. I’m irritated with myself for feeling so uneasy alone in the cottage, and try to cheer up by thinking about Ed, thinking about me, on his lonely flight across the darkening countryside.
It doesn’t work. Instead I find myself worrying he’ll crash again.
I go back upstairs and check the phone. Still no reply from John. The only channel I can tune into on the television is showing a documentary about war casualties in Iraq. Martin’s travelling library consists of three academic paperbacks on Neolithic monuments, and a biography of Alexander Keiller. It’s the least daunting of the collection, so I brew myself a mug of decaff coffee and flip it open, looking at the pictures as much as the words. Keiller in a kilt, standing by a Bugatti racing car. Keiller driving some extraordinary vehicle with caterpillar tracks across a field. Relaxing on a deckchair, reading a newspaper under the trees, an open picnic basket beside him. Keiller grinning beside a huge pile of excavated chalk. The caption tells me this is on Windmill Hill, in the 1920s.
Lights, buggerin lights
. Who’s up on the hill now? Not Karl and Pete because they weren’t nighthawks after Bronze Age treasure. They were looking for…
A crashed plane on Easton Down.
Keiller in his wartime police uniform, grim-mouthed, gimlet-eyed. The text recounts that even on duty he couldn’t repress his archaeologist’s instincts: when a German bomber ditched his load on a nearby barrow, Inspector Keiller was there like a shot, measuring the craters.
Lonely stretches of chalk hills, peppered with barrows…
A plane crashed on Easton Down, probably in the Second World War.
And my maybe-grandfather’s memorial sits a few miles away in Yatesbury churchyard.
In Loving Memory. David Fergusson, killed 29 August 1942
.
Why Yatesbury? Why not Avebury itself? Or Swindon, or Chippenham, wherever Fran happened to be living during the war? What was the connection with Yatesbury? Could it have been–
Not far from where Davey’s plane went down?
If a plane crashed on the hills nearby in wartime, who would know about it, who would be first on the scene? Who would have known Davey Fergusson, because he’s mentioned in those letters?
I shove the guard in front of the barely glowing fire, grab my bag and a notebook, and turn out the lamps before heading out of the door.
I lock the cottage door behind me with Martin’s key and follow the lane towards the lights of the Red Lion. The moon’s well into its last quarter, but the sky is oddly incandescent, streaks of high cirrus glimmering electric blue against indigo.
The lights in one of the thatched cottages wink out as I pass, as if the occupants are giving me the cold shoulder. What made me think I belong? The truth is that people like the Robinsons no longer have any claim to Avebury. Most people who live in the village are blow-ins looking for thatch and roses round the door. Do the incomers ever think about Keiller, and what he did to the place? As the local saying goes, they know more in the churchyard than live here now.
The church tower is black against the glowing clouds, the windows of the Manor blind and expressionless. Perhaps the tenants have fled for Solstice week. The smell of lavender floats from the garden through the warm night. My mobile shows a weak signal, but still no messages; I’m surprised John hasn’t responded to my text. I send him another, for good measure, asking if there’s any news. Even if the scan’s been postponed, surely the police surgeon has arrived by now.
The museum, too, is in darkness, apart from the low-wattage glow of the gallery’s nightlight seeping through the windows. I key in the security code at the staff entrance, to turn off the alarm, and let myself in.
There’s no need to go into the gallery before heading upstairs, but I have that creepy sense, going into an unoccupied building at night, that it’s wise to check every room really is empty. Of course, there is no one, unless you count Charlie sleeping in his glass coffin.
‘Hi, Charlie,’ I say cheerily, to dispel the shadowy silence. ‘Sorry to disturb, come to do a spot of research.’ Closing the door on him, I make my way up the narrow stairs.
I’ve never been into the loft office at night before. The overhead striplight manages to be both harsh and dim at the same time. The curator has left behind a single Anglepoise lamp, but the bulb has blown. There doesn’t seem to be a spare.
The letters are in their usual place, in box files along the shelf, next to the photo albums. Further along, in another box file, are photocopies of W.E.V. Young’s diaries, meticulous accounts not only of the excavations but of life in wartime Avebury. There’s no guarantee Keiller went to an air crash on Easton Down: he might have been away when it took place, or some other officer could have been sent to deal with it. But at least this gives me something to take my mind off Frannie in her hospital bed.
Absorbed in an account of the icy winter of 1940, I almost miss the bleep from my mobile phone: voicemail coming in. Sometimes at night the signal is stronger. The Orange lady tells me the message was received nearly an hour ago, at 9.33 p.m.; my heart starts to sink.
Indy,’ says John’s voice. ‘Nothing to be alarmed about. Scan’s been done, couple of hours ago, though they haven’t yet said what the results are, but they don’t seem worried. I’m on my way home. Frannie was fine when I left. DI Jennings called. Whatever you do, don’t go back to Trusloe because the neighbours reported seeing someone suspicious hanging around this afternoon. I’m driving back that way to check, so if you
are
there, I’ll pick you up. Tried the landline a couple of times so I’m fairly confident you’re with Martin, but just want to be sure.’ He’s trying to keep it light, but I can hear the unease in his voice. ‘Text me, or something, will you?’
There are still a couple of signal bars showing so I thumb out a message: Don’t worry am fine. As an afterthought, to keep him happy, I add: with Ed and press send.
The phone tinkles to tell me the message is gone. Downstairs, something else tinkles, and my blood freezes.
My first reaction, hearing the unmistakable sound of breaking glass, is: it’s OK, all I have to do is keep quiet, the alarm rings through to the police station at Marlborough, they phone the main key holder, who is Michael, and he’s even closer at Broad Hinton. He’ll be here in five or six minutes to find out why the alarm’s going off…
Which alarm would that be, Indy? The one you turned off about fifteen minutes ago when you came in through the staff door?
To quote Frances Robinson,
Bugger
.
I’m surprising myself with how calm you can be, alone in an attic with no one in shouting distance except whoever is moving about, quietly but not in absolute silence, downstairs. He or she–or
they
–not bothering to tiptoe, either because they think no one is here (please, God), or because they know that I am, and my only way out is down the stairs.
The phone–
No bloody signal, now, of course. I stare at the screen, willing the satellite to orbit over Wiltshire, praying for a sudden surge of power in the phone masts. The signal bars remain obstinately blank. Rising to my feet as carefully, as silently as possible, I cast around the room: piles of bound periodicals teetering on every surface, old issues of
British Archaeology
, a feather duster, J-cloths, an aerosol of furniture polish with congealed silicon dribbles oozing under its cap, a box of disposable gloves, someone’s lost reading glasses…but no telephone. Since the attic office is no longer used except for storage, the extension has been taken away. The nearest landline will be in the staff kitchen, downstairs. Down a set of bare-board, creaky stairs.
The alternative is to stay where I am, at least until I hear furtive footsteps creaking upward. I throw one last, despairing glance at the mobile in my hand–
What do you take me for?
radiates its bland, blank face.
Technology that actually improves your life?
–then I edge cautiously round the table towards the door.
Downstairs there’s a rattle, a faint screeching sound, and the tinkle of more falling glass. A muffled thud. What the hell is going on? And
do
they know I’m here? The attic office has a single window, in the end wall. If they came through the churchyard, past the Manor, they’d have seen it lit up. But if they approached the museum from the other side, and broke in through the gallery, there’s a chance they’ve no idea there’s anyone upstairs…
A gentle snick: the sound I’ve been dreading. Quietly, furtively, downstairs the door from the gallery is opening, somebody stepping through. They only have to take a couple of steps, peer up the stairwell, and they’ll see the light’s on. Shit, shit, shit. Anywhere to hide?
None of the attic cupboards India-sized. The only place is under the table.
A stair creaks.
I’m under the table so fast I don’t remember how, crouched on all fours, back pressed against a strut, heart pounding, trying to control my breathing. I’d like to shuffle into a more comfortable position but there isn’t time: already the door is edging open. Two sandalled feet appear, hairy toes, the hem of faded green corduroy trousers.
Then everything goes crazy. A car horn blasts from outside, an engine revs, tyres crunch on gravel. There’s a shout downstairs of ‘Fuck! Get out’, the crash of a door bouncing off a wall, running feet, car doors slamming. The sandals swivel and disappear. I come out from under the table almost as fast as I went in, banging my head on the edge. Feet thunder ahead of me on wooden treads. I reach the landing in time to see a large white blur swooping round the bend in the staircase, grizzled dreadlocks flying. Shouts from outside, then another door crash shakes the building.
‘Oh, Jesus motherfuckin’ Christ,’ says a deep, American voice, followed by one that’s unmistakably English:
‘I really don’t care for blasphemy, you pagan cunt.’
I rocket down the stairs and into the staff kitchen. Michael, blessed, lovely Michael, St Michael, scourge of dragons, is barring the way, his back to me. He’s cornered the American Druid who led the Ancient Dead protest at Equinox, holding him at bay with a baseball bat. Looks as if it wouldn’t take much to make him use it. Graham strolls in through the other door.
‘Police are on their w—Bloody hell, India.’