The Buried Circle (58 page)
Michael risks a glance over his shoulder. ‘Nobody else upstairs, I hope?’ His tone isn’t entirely friendly. ‘What about the car?’
‘Heading for Swindon. Didn’t get the numberplate, I’m afraid–they’d smeared mud over it.’
The American smirks.
‘Take a look in the gallery, would you?’ says Michael. ‘The other chap was carrying something in a plastic bin-liner.’
‘I’ll go…’ But Michael’s face makes the words dry in my mouth.
‘I think we’d rather you stayed right here, India.’
‘No, hold on.’ My chest is so tight with panic I can hardly breathe. ‘You’ve got it wrong–I was upstairs looking at the Keiller archive…’
‘Hey, man,’ says the American, worried I might steal some of his glorious martyrdom. ‘Didn’ even know she was in the fuckin’ building.’
‘Nevertheless, India, I’d prefer you to wait with me for the police.’
Graham, avoiding my eyes and careful not to touch me, eases past into the gallery. His feet crunch on glass. The only sound in the kitchen is the American’s heavy breathing. There’s a look of fierce triumph on his face.
‘Well,’ says Graham, returning. ‘Good news or the bad?’
Michael closes his eyes, composes himself. ‘In whichever order.’
‘Bad news is that they’ve stolen a skull.’
The American’s lips have parted in a fierce grin. His teeth are perfect, glaringly white, a glimpse of fat red tongue curling between long gleaming canines. ‘Not stolen, my friend. Returning it to the ancestors…’
‘The good news,’ says Graham, his face utterly straight, ‘is that’s all they managed to grab, and it’s Charlie’s.’
The American’s brows knit, puzzled, as Michael and Graham explode into laughter.
‘So somebody’s busy conducting a Druid funeral for a plaster skull?’
Michael is opening cupboards, looking for a dustpan and brush to sweep up the glass on the gallery floor. Graham’s gone to look for plywood to tack over the window where the intruders climbed in. ‘Yep, that’s about it. Until they hear about their mistake on the news.’
Outside, the door of one of the police cars slams, and an engine starts up. As the car passes under the courtyard light, the back of the American Druid’s huge dreadlocked head is bracketed in the rear window between two smaller, helmeted ones. Bet those wolfish teeth aren’t on display now.
‘That’s how I could be sure you weren’t involved,’ adds Michael, producing a bin-liner from the back of the cupboard. ‘Hold that, will you, while I sweep? Anyone who works here would be aware Charlie’s skull is a cast. The real thing’s temporarily on loan for isotope analysis.’
‘Actually, I didn’t know.’
‘Didn’t you? Good grief, maybe it was an inside job after all’ He pats me on the shoulder, to show he’s joking. ‘Sorry for doubting you.’
‘Was my fault, though, wasn’t it? If I hadn’t turned off the alarm…’
‘They’d have got clean away. Frankly, this couldn’t have been a better result, apart from the mess. We caught one, and they made themselves look bloody silly. The broadsheets will love it–pity it’s too late for this morning’s papers.’ He crouches and starts brushing the glass into a glittering heap. ‘If you hadn’t been upstairs, the tenants in the Manor wouldn’t have phoned me ten minutes
before
the break-in when they noticed the light. I’d never have arrived in time to catch them otherwise. The rest of Charlie would’ve been long gone.’ He scoops the glass into the dustpan and tips it into the bin-liner. ‘Not that I want to encourage midnight research. But it was lucky you were here.’
Then the phone in my pocket sounds again, with a sick, stuttering trill, and all the luck runs out.
‘Go,’ says Michael. ‘I’ll finish up here with the police, and make things tidy.’
I race up the high street, dashing across the junction without a glance in either direction, breath rasping in my throat and a pain in my chest.
‘Get to the hospital fast as you can, Indy,’ John’s message said. ‘The bleeding started up again and they’re taking her into theatre tonight, after all.’ I tried calling back, but he must have driven to the hospital already, phone turned off as soon as he went inside. I keep thinking of her eyes, scared and pleading.
I don’t want to go to hospital. People die in hospital
.
The car is parked in the lane on the verge, but my car keys are inside the cottage. The lamplight through the curtains gives the place a homey glow. The key skids on the lock’s faceplate; somehow my shaking hands manage to push it into the keyhole and turn it, shoving open the door. Yellow lamplight washes out onto the path–
I turned the lamps off. I remember switching off all the lights before I left the cottage.
‘Ed?’
Can’t be Ed. He’d have no way of getting in because I have the door key, the
only
door key as far as I know…
‘Martin?’ He must have a spare.
Hovering uncertainly in the porch, peering over the threshold. No one in the sitting room. The Keiller biography lies open where I left it on the table, my rain jacket hung on the post at the foot of the stairs, my spare cardigan on the back of the sofa. Across the room, on top of the chest, my car keys glint under the lamp, next to my abandoned coffee mug. The fireguard is no longer in place, and flames lick the sides of a fresh log on the fire. A fat white candle is alight on a saucer, on the tiled corner of the hearth. Another candle burns on the window ledge, its flame swaying in the draught from the open door.
It
is
Martin, isn’t it? What’s he doing here? Is he upstairs? He’s supposed to be staying with his friend in Bath.
The log shifts on the fire as a lump of coal collapses, and my heart jumps, but the house is otherwise silent. This feels wrong. But all I need are the car keys, and I can be out of here,
have
to be out of here, whether or not Martin’s back, because there’s no time to mess around–time’s leaking away at the hospital in Swindon. There’s no one in the room. Go for it.
I’m halfway to the chair when there’s a blur of movement in the corner of my eye. He comes barrelling out of the kitchen and has an arm crooked round my throat before I’ve had a chance to turn more than my head. My handbag falls off my shoulder, while his other hand closes on the muscle at the top of my arm, forcing a squeak out of me, and the door key drops out of my fingers onto the carpet. Somehow he gets a knee into the small of my back, arching my body and pressing me against the back of the sofa so the air is forced out of my lungs. We must look, absurdly, like some sort of pornographic temple carving.
Then his voice sighs in my ear, ‘Indy,’ and I understand exactly who this is.
You stupid, stupid girl.
I can’t believe I’ve been so blind. I can feel tears pricking, panic clawing at my lungs making it even harder to breathe than it already is. He has complete control, sliding me down to the floor, my T-shirt rolling up and my exposed abdomen pressed against the rough hessian carpet, the mobile phone in my pocket digging into my hip, his knee pinning me down while his arm is yanking up my chin, making my neck and shoulder muscles scream.
On thy belly thou shalt go
‘Indy…’
I let myself go as limp as I can.
‘That’s better. Don’t fight me.’ The pressure on my throat eases fractionally.
‘I’m…not…’ He’s allowing me only enough airway to force out a whisper.
‘No point strugglin’.’ The arm eases off a fraction more. ‘See? I can feel your veins easing. When you strain against me, it’s like ropes of lights under your skin, your blood fizzing and sending off sparks.’
Shit. What’s he taken? Mushrooms?
‘How did you get in?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
I can guess: I opened the window in the kitchen to let out the steam while I was washing up, must’ve forgotten to close it. He’ll have climbed in over the sink.
And why? Well, everything goes back to that summer in Tolemac, doesn’t it?
He strokes my hair. ‘Sssh. No hurry. Your friend isn’t comin’ back for a while, is he?’
‘It
was
you who broke in at Frannie’s, wasn’t it? How did you come to hurt her, though? Did you knock her down accidentally?’ I don’t want to believe it could have been anything else. The grip on my throat has eased fractionally. But even if I managed to scream, the nearest neighbour is elderly and takes her hearing aid out when she goes to bed. The loudest pagans drum with impunity behind her cottage.
‘She opened the door to me.’ There’s a high note of surprise in his voice, which suggests it’s all unravelling so fast he’s amazing himself now. ‘The
Hag!
He doesn’t mean it the way ordinary people would. He means the Goddess.
‘She opened the door and said: India’s at work. And I was thinkin’, Right, yes, I knew that, I suppose, and then she’d closed the door on me again. Realized she didn’t like me. Put up with me, when she used to see me, only because of Meg.’ The back of my hair lifts with the vibration of him shaking his head–that wonderment again. ‘See, it all happens on both planes, doesn’t it? The real, and the extra-real? The Goddess wears three faces: Maiden, Mother, Crone. If you hold the Crone tight, she shifts shape, releases the Maiden again. I went round the back and broke in. She didn’t scream: she called me Donald. I told her, my name’s not Donald, it’s…’
This is possibly the longest speech Bryn has ever come out with, in my hearing.
Except it isn’t Bryn, is it?
‘What the hell happened to you, Keir?’ I ask.
Mr Keiller was in the sitting room, wearing his police uniform, standing with his back to the empty fireplace, the light from the lamps striking a marmalade sheen on his thinning, oiled brown hair, and his inspector’s peaked hat laid careful on a side table like he was expecting to have to pick it up again to go out. First time it struck me how much older than me he was: older than Mam, God rest her, near as old as Dad. Tonight all those years were scratched into the skin of his face, his jowls saggy with a kind of defeat, his tense mouth reluctant to let out the words repeating what they’d told him when the call came through about the plane that had crashed on Easton Down that afternoon. Crater. Explosion. Instant. No hope.
‘You know, Heartbreaker, I’m sick to death of this bloody war,’ he said. ‘For two pins I’d…’ He shook his head. His oiled hair gleamed in the lamplight. ‘Why is it the best ones who go, I ask you? Why is it the ones with the brains and the balls? Donald…’ His voice cracked up. ‘Poor old Donald. Such a silly bloody thing to happen.’
Not even the glory of being shot out of the sky by the enemy. And what about Mr Keiller’s Brushwood Boy? Was any of that shininess in the corners of his eyes for Davey?
‘Did you go to…where it happened?’ I asked him. ‘Were they…?’
He shook his head. ‘Would have been an irony, wouldn’t it? No, a couple of constables from Devizes did the necessary. I’ll go up first thing tomorrow.’
‘Can I come with you?’ Knew immediate he was going to say no.
‘I don’t think that would be advisable, do you, Mrs S-T? Frances looks like she needs helping to bed, and a good long lie-in tomorrow.’
Maybe I did look bad, hunched like an old woman next to a glowing two-bar electric fire Mr Young had brought from upstairs. I was wrapped in a blanket, hugging a hot-water bottle, one of Mrs S-T’s dresses hanging off my shoulders because my clothes had been soaked through, my teeth still chattering.
Mr Keiller picked up his brandy glass, swirled it, stared into it like it could tell him the future. Must’ve seen rain-drenched grass, mud, sheep, gurt grey stones leaning every which way like crooked teeth. ‘It’s all over, isn’t it?’ he said, more to himself than to us. ‘Someone else’ll have to finish here now. I haven’t the heart.’
I didn’t need him to describe what happened. Soon as I heard, I knew how it would have been.
They’d been called to scramble that morning. Their squadron flew night-fighters, fragile black-painted wooden Mosquitos that took two men to crew them, pilot and navigator. Donald, and Davey crammed in behind his shoulder, watching the flickering screen of the AI to guide them onto the tail of their target.
‘Tired,’ said Mr Keiller. ‘Poor devils, they’d been out half the night, and the squadron was under strength. Abortive sortie over Weston-super-Mare, chasing a report of some Junkers 88s, coming in to do Bristol some damage. Missed ‘em completely. Called back home, landed, as another set of bombers started slinking up from the south–broad daylight by now, mind, but Jerry could count on the weather giving cover that afternoon. Every other airfield within reach had their hands full with the raid on Bristol and, with the forecast so bad, inevitable Donald’s squadron of night-fighters would be scrambled again. Donald needn’t have gone, but he insisted.’
The little black wooden planes flying down the belly of Britain, out over the Channel towards Normandy, sunlight pinning them against blue sky at first, like night-flying moths caught in daylight. Not long before they were flying into weather, invisible among the massing black clouds. Davey in the navigator’s seat, tired, scared. Donald Cromley piloting, cocky, believing he could get away with anything, determined to bag a kill. Relying on the AI, the Airborne Interceptor, what they called radar later on, that Davey had trained on special. Looking for them Nazi bastards, finding bugger all, missed ‘em again. They Germans was already blowing holes in Drove Road, aiming for the Plessey factory, but instead hitting houses where little girls had been playing hopscotch on the pavement. Donald insists they keep going, looking for trade as he puts it. Pushing it as usual, flying that bit further than he should have. Out over the Channel, the boys had a skirmish with a couple of Messerschmitts–at least they think they’re Messerschmitts, hard to tell in the murk until you’re up close. Donald looses off a few rounds, some other bugger fires back, could have been one of them or one of us. Holes in the fuselage, doesn’t feel like there’s too much damage but all the same it’s given them a scare and they’ve lost the target anyway in the murk. There’s a lot of dense cloud around and it’s easy playing hide and seek. Weather too bad now, anyway, where Davey and Donald was, and fuel too low to do much more than turn round and set a course for home and hope to God they made it back.