by Phil Rickman
Meeting place (THUMP, THUMP)
A weird bloke in a bird suit stirring up primeval forces. Now also the man with the big-money balls. Bizarre.
Maiden unlocked the communal front door, entering the hallway. Keeping the keys in hand as he strolled across to the door of his ground-floor flat. And found he didn’t need any keys for this one.
OK, he wasn’t expecting it – was anybody, ever? – but it was no big, devastating shock to find the door of his flat splintered again, all around the lock.
The first time this happened to you, even as a copper, you felt sick, invaded. You were never going to settle until you’d seen the bastards in court. The second time, it was a profound inconvenience but it didn’t keep you awake.
This was the fourth time. Maiden felt weary. There was nothing worth stealing in there, except the portable TV and the CD-player. Three hundred quid the lot.
Still, he went carefully. One time, they’d still been inside. A steel toecap had messed up his left eye.
He kicked open the door and stepped back into the hallway.
Nothing. Maiden was sure he could somehow tell these days if a place was empty, that he could sense a presence. He walked in and switched on the lights. Stood in the doorway and looked around.
Nothing. Everything as it was. The CD-player on its shelf, the TV on its stand over by the bricked-up fireplace.
He went back to look at the door. Unsubtle. A crowbar job. There would have been some noise involved, unavoidable, but it didn’t look as though they’d cared. Five flats in the building, but two of them empty. Students in the others, out most nights.
But why? What was the point? They hadn’t even turned the place over. He went back in, kicking something which skittered across the boards and finished up on the rug.
Stanley knife with the blade out. He didn’t touch it.
He looked across at the wall with the three canvases hanging on it.
Stood gazing at the joined-up picture for nearly a minute.
They must have spent quite some time on it, because the lettering was quite regular, spread over all three canvases, each letter about three inches high, carved out of the misty flank of the Black Mountains.
It looked like the Hollywood sign.
It said
CONGRATULATIONS SIR
X
HAVING BEEN STORMED IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY BY THE WELSH pretender, Owain Glyndwr, and later plundered for stone by generations of local builders, the castle’s surviving tower was probably only half its original height.
But still the best place from which to observe invaders.
Yes, yes, this was a little early in the year for invasion. Nearly a month before Easter and the first carloads of cretins. Can I buy a guidebook? Where are the toilets? Do you sell ice-cream?
Read the bloody signs! Marcus would roar. Piss off!
Continuing problem when your house was inside the remains of a medieval castle. It seemed entirely beyond the comprehension of the average bloody tourist that not all historic masonry was there to trample over, picnic on, have sex under or turn into a bastard adventure playground.
… and if that child jumps twenty feet to his death, under the impression that all castles are bloody bouncy castles, I don’t want to hear you whining to me, madam!
But all this was weeks away. At six-fifteen on a brisk March morning the highest part of the castle was a place where a sick, congested man could go to breathe.
After – at best – a fitful night’s sleep, Marcus had woken at five, his nasal tubes like concrete and his temper in rags. He’d gone stumping across the farmyard to the sawn-off tower, stumbling up the remaining spiralled stone steps to emerge into the grey-pink dawn sky and the high, fresh air.
Recipe for surviving influenza: start with fresh air, progress to single malt … if you could get it.
In his ancient naval officer’s duffel coat, he and Malcolm were slumped over a stone slab smoothed by the centuries, waiting for the red sun to flare over the Malvern Hills and suspecting it wasn’t going to happen …
… when the car appeared.
Marcus sat up. It was unusual for any vehicles, even Land-Rovers and tractors, to use the narrow, mountain road this early in the day, especially this early in the year. Marcus recalled, with an unpleasant tingle, the time he’d been occupying this very spot, with only a damaged pitchfork to use against two armed, homicidal thugs who’d arrived in a featureless white van.
This vehicle was dark, possibly green, and as big as the van had been. Seemed to be one of those posh Jeeps beloved of obnoxious city dwellers with weekend cottages. Marcus didn’t know anyone in this area who owned one. When the Jeep slowed at the final bend, he tensed. Couldn’t possibly be coming here.
But it bloody well could … curving into the damned entrance and out of his line of sight. Marcus moved to the edge of the tower, leaned over, heard someone get out and open the gate, then watched the big green vehicle cross the yard twenty-five feet below.
Malcolm quivered, and Marcus clamped a hand over the dog’s muzzle as the car stopped and the person who had opened the gate came into view.
Marcus sprang up.
‘Underhill! What the bloody hell—?’
And, oh Lord, who was that with her?
Several times on the journey, the horrific green-pepper moment had sprung up at her and she’d shaken her head and said despairingly, ‘We have to call the cops.’
‘No way.’ Persephone Callard steering the Grand Cherokee with one hand low on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road and maybe some other place that Grayle couldn’t even imagine. ‘Out of the question.’
‘But what if he—?’
‘So?’
‘Well, OK, you can say that. You didn’t do anything. You were just a victim and you stayed a victim the whole time. Me …’
Callard had packed a case and then they’d cleared up the lodge and hung dust covers so it looked like no-one had been living there. Callard had an apartment in London but could not go back, she said, because of the media.
But it wasn’t just the media now, was it? The media were the goddamn least of it.
Grayle had thought at once of the dairy at Castle Farm, where visitors stayed, where – fate, destiny? – Persephone Callard could become reacquainted with the only person in my entire fucking life who ever pitied me. And where Grayle might just find out what all this was really about before the cops took her away.
How could she hang it on Marcus, a sick man?
On the other hand, it was Marcus got her into this.
‘Grayle, for Christ’s sake, what else could you have done?’ Callard had demanded, as they came down from Gloucester towards the M50, with the first amber lines of morning in the southern sky. ‘What else could you have done sufficiently drastic to get us out of there?’
‘Maybe I could’ve explained that to the cops …?’
‘You do not deserve’, Callard said firmly, ‘to spend hours in some smelly police interview room for that …’
‘The interview room I could take. If it ended there.’
‘Yes, well I’m afraid one can’t necessarily trust the police any more. Or, indeed, believe in British justice.’
The famous Seffi Callard driving coolly on, her hands unshaking on the wheel. Her upper lip was swollen where one of them had hit her and then squeezed her face before applying the masking tape. But she seemed already separated from the terror. She actually looked less gaunt than last night, less hollowed. Driving efficiently, with purpose. Maybe she also had that sense of fate and destiny, was thinking that Marcus Bacton would know what to do, make things all right.
‘I just want to believe the two halves of that guy’s face are still joined together, is all,’ Grayle had said miserably.
* * *
She stepped down from the big, plushy, air-conditioned Jeep.
The air was hard and made everything real again. Her legs felt like saplings.
She watched Marcus and P
ersephone Callard approaching each other slowly across the yard, which was still half-shadowed from the night.
Marcus’s eyes were wet. Just the flu, Grayle hoped.
‘She was right.’ Callard had stopped a few feet from Marcus. ‘You’re not well, are you?’
Like they hadn’t seen each other for … maybe several weeks.
Callard had on this long, baggy, cream jumper with a leather belt and a heavy cowl neck. Kind of medieval and suited to the location, except she was part of Marcus’s history, not the castle’s. Grayle pictured her as she’d been not five hours ago, all taped up like a sado-masochist’s Christmas present.
At the thought, she started to shake again, breathed out hard and leaned over the hood of the Jeep. So deeply relieved to be back that she wanted to kiss the castle stones.
Marcus stood there in his overlong duffel coat, blinking behind his glasses.
Marcus astonished. Marcus Bacton lost for words.
Jesus Christ.
The dog, Malcolm, growled.
‘Look …’ Marcus backed away. ‘I … don’t come too close, Persephone. I’ve got this … virus. Germs everywhere.’
‘I don’t catch things from other people.’ Seffi Callard smiling her crooked, damaged, loose-lipped smile across the yard at Marcus. ‘Never have.’
Damn germs wouldn’t have the nerve, Grayle thought. She was a little freaked at Marcus – the guy was behaving like this was some kind of royal visit. Anybody else, he’d be asking what the fuck they were playing at turning up unannounced at goddamned cock-crow.
‘Marcus,’ Grayle said, ‘just, like … quit gawking and make us some coffee, huh? We … we’re in some kind of shit.’
XI
GRAYLE SHIVERED DEEPLY – LIKE TO THE BONE – AND HUNKERED over the opened stove in Marcus’s study, close to hugging the blazing logs. Maybe she’d finally picked up his flu.
‘Had a sleep?’ Marcus appeared in the doorway.
‘Oh sure, what do you think?’ Folding her arms for warmth, noting that he’d been upstairs, changed into the retired-colonel-style tweed suit. And the bow tie. Still haggard with the flu but making a bid for the old dapper Bacton.
All for Persephone.
Who, after a haphazard meal prepared by Grayle and involving mainly toast and Marcus’s disgusting instant coffee, had been shown to the Castle Farm guest apartment, the small, whitewashed building which used to be a dairy.
Persephone. Finally, a person Marcus didn’t address by her surname. Grayle didn’t like this one bit.
On the lumpy sofa, she’d had four hours of anxiety dreams involving Justin with a red opening where his moustache had been and Ersula, liquefying in the red soil.
Woke up shivering and Callard had not reappeared.
‘You’d better tell me,’ Marcus said. ‘Don’t you think?’
She could see it all again, like a slow-motion sequence. Because that was how it had seemed to happen, real slow. No big explosion, just a dampening, the blood soaking through the guerrilla-mask.
‘But … like massively. All of it soaked. And he … he’s just standing there … like he can’t believe it.’
The glass chinking against her teeth. Water. Just when you needed whisky, Marcus had no whisky left.
‘And I’m there with this … big, heavy blade hanging from my hand, like … like an executioner, you know?’
Marcus just nodded. Well, thanks, Marcus.
‘And then he like … he raises one hand to his face and when his hand touches where the wound is he just screams. This one long, awful scream. And he’s wheeling round now and trying to tear off the hood, and there’s blood all over his hands, and he can’t do it, it’s too painful and … and when his head turns there’s this like mist of blood spraying off of it. And he starts to sob, he lets out this long, shuddering kind of sob, and he suddenly rushes out the room and through the kitchen and out the house.’
She took a drink and coughed.
‘Leaving the other guy, right? The other guy’s standing very still and like just staring at me through his eye holes, like he’s taking in every detail of my face, and I want to drop the big knife but I can’t, and I … this single drop of blood falls from the blade to the floor. Like plop. His friend’s blood. And this guy, he’s just looking at me and it’s real still, you know, the atmosphere is soooo still, and the guy goes, he looks straight at me through the holes and he goes – and this is just like a whisper, I wouldn’t even know that voice again, and he goes … You … are dead.’
Grayle stood up, walked across to the window and looked out towards the castle walls for signs of life, imagining the second guy clambering through the ruins with a twelve-gauge shotgun. She turned back to Marcus.
‘And then he goes after his friend and like … Well, he turns just once in the doorway and he points at me … his finger real stiff and steady … Then he walks out, and after a while there’s the sound of a car starting up. And it’s like whole hours have passed, but just a couple seconds I guess, and I see Callard all trussed up, edging herself upright in the corner, and I… drop the knife. And I just like burst into tears.’
‘He didn’t touch you?’
‘I figure only because I was still holding the big knife.’
‘And Persephone? What had they done to her?’
‘Bust her lip was all. I think to shock her, stop her screaming. We were both pretty … fraught. I wanted to call the cops, but Callard’s like, “Don’t be stupid, you hurt that guy bad, they’ll haul you in, you’ll be all night making statements, they’ll have you saying stuff that isn’t true.” She just wanted out of there.’
They’d spent about an hour cleaning themselves and the house up. Following the trail of blood to the back door. They’d nailed some hardboard over the window in the door which the men had broken getting in.
‘All the time I’m thinking, What if they come back? but I guess that was pretty unlikely. The guy would’ve needed hospital treatment. Marcus …’ Grayle felt herself begin to come apart again ‘… suppose he’s dead? I mean, suppose I put the knife into his brain? Suppose, when they cut off the hood, half his damned face came away like … like a piecrust?’
‘These things are never as bad as you imagine,’ Marcus said inadequately. ‘You can get an enormous amount of blood from a common nosebleed.’
‘You don’t know. Do you?’
‘Well, no. I suppose not. Did Persephone say what happened before you came downstairs?’
‘She said she woke up and heard noises downstairs, and she thought it must be me, and she listens out for me coming back upstairs, and I don’t and she goes down and into the kitchen where there’s a light on, and one of them grabs her, the other hits her. They don’t speak, they don’t … touch her sexually or stuff like that. They’re businesslike. They tape her mouth and then they tape her hands.’
‘Look, I …’ Marcus was groping for a tissue and his senses. ‘I don’t understand. Who were these men?’
She told him about Justin, who’d come to attend to her car, had made sexual overtures and expressed a possibly prurient interest in Persephone Callard. But she knew it didn’t fit, somehow.
‘And you’re saying this man could have been one of them? You recognized his voice?’
‘No, I … the one guy, I heard him talking to Callard, saying he didn’t wanna hurt her, calling her a slag. I didn’t recognize his voice, it wasn’t Justin. The other one, I only heard him scream, and that didn’t even sound human.’
But if it wasn’t Justin and some sicko friend of his, then who were they? Burglars? Not much worth stealing in the lodge, but maybe they were figuring Callard had keys to Mysleton House. Tie her up and strip the big house?
‘You should’ve gone to the police.’
‘What I feel, Marcus, is Callard will do anything to avoid publicity. They’d gone, they weren’t gonna come back with the cops and, Yeah, that’s the broad carved up my friend after we broke in and blah, blah, blah …’
‘What did you do with this hedge hacker?’
‘Dropped it in the River Wye at Ross.’
Marcus closed his eyes.
‘So there’s no way we can go to the cops now. We left the scene, we destroyed evidence.’
‘Well,’ Marcus said, ‘I suppose you can explain all that, if necessary. You were in shock. Let me think about this … That’s Persephone’s vehicle outside, is it? In which case, where’s—?’
‘Still at the damn garage,’ Grayle said miserably. ‘Still at Justin’s place.’
Marcus sighed. ‘So if this man’s found …’
‘Dead.’
‘… badly injured and they find your car at his garage …’
‘What do you suggest? Like I go back, and the guy who told me I’m dead, he’s there? You gonna come with me, Marcus, threaten him with your nasal spray? Listen, I’m gonna go home for a while, think this over.’
The little terraced cottage in St Mary’s had never seemed more appealing. Bar the door, light a fire, banish all thoughts of last night.
Marcus looked alarmed. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t leave me alone with …’ He glanced behind him.
‘What? In case she seduces you for old time’s sake? What’s the matter with you, Marcus?’
‘This man … this Justin … have you tried to ring him?’
‘OK, I’ll do it now.’
She found Justin’s card in her bag, picked up the phone, punched out the anonymity code then the number.
A computer told her the mobile phone she was calling had been switched off. Well, sure, he might be out someplace, helping extricate cars from a smash up; didn’t have to be getting his head sewn together under major anaesthetic – cops waiting outside for news of his death, other cops tracing the number of the antique Mini in the garage. After which … the banging on the cottage door. Grayle Underhill? Would you come with us, please, Ms Underhill? The statements, the hearing, the whatever passed these days for deportation.
Grayle cut the line.
‘Bit of a bloody nightmare really,’ Marcus conceded.
‘Can I borrow your car to get home?’
‘Can’t you just stay here tonight?’