by L. J. Hutton
“Carol? Yes, actually she could. There’s a very small bone in the neck, called the hyoid bone, which gets broken when people are strangled but hardly ever in any other way. So Damien’s father actually strangled his two women, whereas Melissa died because Damien smothered her. We found her medical records you see – those are from when she went to see someone who you’d probably think of as a healer. She’d had trouble breathing with something we call asthma, and which you wouldn’t know of because you don’t live in places where the air is so dirty, but it meant she would have coped worse than most people would to having her breathing blocked.
“So did you witness her death?” He felt he had to ask even if they didn’t like him doing so, if only because it might answer why the violence at Damien’s death and yet no other’s. “Was that what set you to watching Damien? I’m trying to understand the sequence of events, you see, because at first I presumed that since Thomas Mulligrew died before Damien, that he was the one you’d spotted first?”
Helyglys nodded. “The father was the one we came across first. Grace and Hannah used to come up here and cry their hearts out. So much pain and sorrow left its mark here, and we came to try and ease it. At first it was simply a case of one of us coming to them when they were here, telling them when we could appear to them, and giving them some healing.”
“But it was after we had seen what Damien did to the woman you call Melissa,” Pelydryn continued, “that we became deeply concerned for their safety. When Hannah and Grace initially talked about what their father did to them, we did not fully understand. None of us would ever behave to another like that, so we had nothing to measure the violence against. But after we had seen the woman die, I was the one who came next to here, and for once the girls could see that I was upset. When I told them some of what I had seen, they said that it was like that for them too.”
“Rape,” Bill sighed, shaking his head in disgust. “Bloody animals, some men ...no, not animals, because they don’t behave with such malice.”
“You are correct,” Pelydryn agreed. “And because of that, we suddenly became very concerned for the safety of them. They said that their father had become even stranger of late. That he would forget things, or think that their mother was still alive, or even that one of them was their mother.”
“Good grief! So Thomas had dementia, did he?” Then Bill realised that he’d have to explain that too. “It comes with old age in our kind. Not in everyone, but in some people, as they get older the blood doesn’t flow as well through their heads and it causes things like loss of memory and confusion. I knew that Thomas had a failing heart, and because that pumps the blood around our bodies, that can cause vascular dementia.” He knew anyone with medical knowledge would probably wince at his clumsy description, but he wasn’t going to try and elaborate on something these elves would have no understanding of anyway. “So what did you do?”
Claerwyn confessed, “To the father, nothing at first. We had decided that the girls must come to live with us, you see, so the focus of our attention was on getting them away, and before that bringing those few little things up here that they would not want to leave behind. And it took some persuading for them to leave.”
“I can understand that,” Bill admitted. “They’d known nothing but this valley for so many years, any sort of change must have felt terrifying, even if they knew it would be for the better.”
He saw the dark-haired Helyglys tip her head on one side and look at him oddly. “You are a most curious person,” she said, as though it baffled her. “You are very perceptive for a human.”
Bill smiled. “Well I’d hope so. It’s my job to be perceptive. I wouldn’t be much good at what I do if I couldn’t understand different kinds of people and behaviour.”
“Hmmm,” she murmured, not saying anything more, but continuing to look at him hard.
In Bill’s estimation she was the tough-nut of the three women. She would be the one who would want vengeance, he thought, and that made him ask, “So why did you feel the need to be so violent with Damien, and yet not with the others? Surely Vijay Bose and Sanay Coast were every bit as savage?”
“That is easy enough to explain,” Tarian-derw said, joining in for the first time. “We had observed the man Damien coming to the hotel with two other women after the first one died, and each time he was most brutal with them. We all feared that he would kill again soon, and therefore must be stopped. Claerwyn had tried to distract him with his next victim after the one who died, for we had planned to get her away and then show him the evil of his ways. But that did not work, and I did not arrive armed that time, nor could we do more than appear to him since the portal was not fully open for us. The next time I did have my sword with me, but by the time we got to him, if I had stabbed him, I would have run the woman through as well.
“Therefore we decided that the only way was for one of us to lure him outside. He had seen Claerwyn, albeit only briefly, and so Pelydryn volunteered to seduce him.” He did another of the tosses of the head which seemed to be a family trait, and again the long locks flickered with an inner light. “I did not want her to do it. I feared it would be too dangerous.” Then he smiled and suddenly he was the most handsome man Bill had ever seen, and gave him an insight into Tarian-derw’s next words. “I was wrong, I am glad to say. He was a man of weak mind, and he fell easily for Pelydryn’s seduction.”
I bet he did! Bill thought. It was hard to rationalise, but the best he could do was think that the elves were ‘more than’. More than beautiful, more than dangerous, more than human. No wonder that old folk tales called them things like ‘the lordly ones’, but also that legends existed of light and dark elves, because it would depend on how they perceived you as to how they came across to you, and if they didn’t like you he suspected that their disapproval, or even contempt, would be quite something to witness.
“So Pelydryn seduced him,” Bill prompted. “I know he fell for that, but what happened when you stabbed him? Was it with that sword you’ve got with you now?” It was like no blade Bill had ever seen before, his best guess being that it was bronze, but it too was ‘more than’ in a way he couldn’t fathom.
Tarian-derw nodded. “Yes, it was. And in truth it was because I could sense the violence building within him. He was utterly beyond control of any sort as he pursued her and I feared for my sisters’ safety, even knowing of their strengths. Yet also, I did not know how else to stop him.”
Pelydryn swiftly added, “It was only later on, when we thought about how we had previously appeared to the father, and what his reaction had been, that we thought it might be possible to use that with others. We had believed the father had died because he was old, you see, but in his last moments, we saw into Damien, and saw how we terrified him in the same way. At that point we realised that Tarian-derw need not sully his soul by taking a life, not even one as warped and perverted as Damien’s was.”
That prompted Bill to ask, “Forgive me if this is too personal a question, but I know that killing is not a natural thing for humans to do, and that it can leave terrible scars when we force people to do it. Having heard how you talk about the world, is it far worse for you to take a life if you are more deeply connected to the living ...to the life force in everything, I suppose you’d call it?”
He saw that he’d shocked them with the question, but that they weren’t so much affronted as startled by him understanding.
Claerwyn was the first to recover, saying, “You are most remarkable! We would not have expected any of your kind to understand that, but yes, you are absolutely right. To take a life by violence is abhorrent to us. Tarian-derw is trained as a warrior, but the expectation is that he should use his skills only to defend himself or others. And even though in killing Damien he was effectively defending the lives of all of those other women Damien would have assaulted and possible killed, it was not an even fight. There was no honour in it. That monster grovelled and whined. In many ways it was worse even than
killing a wild creature that had gone mad, because even at the end he denied what he had done, refused to see anything except in his own way. Animals – even mad ones – act from instinct, whereas he knew what he was doing all the way, but chose to justify it to himself.”
Bill nodded sagely. “And yet he’d shown not a scrap of mercy to his own victims. Typical of the type, I’m afraid. All too willing to hand out violence, but not so keen on being on the receiving end, and incapable of grasping what it was like for those he’d harmed even when it was staring him in the face. Hmm...So once you’d realised that there might be another way, that was what made you tackle Bose only months later in a very different way?”
“Exactly,” Tarian-derw agreed, “but it wasn’t later for us. We had been observing him at the same time as we had been watching Damien. The only difference was that Damien was coming into our lands with increasing frequency, whereas we only saw the men at the quarry every now and then.”
Bill’s jaw dropped. “Bloody hell, of course! How did I not see that? Those bodies in the quarry had been piling up over a far longer time. Please, you have to tell me, now – when did that all start?”
Chapter 21
“THE FIRST TIME WE BECAME conscious of the quarry was around the time of the autumn equinox,” Pelydryn began. “We were only passing through when we became aware of the dead.”
Bill nodded. “My friend Carol said that the women had died in phases, and that the oldest ones they found were two women right at the back of the quarry, nearest to the wall. Were those the ones you found?”
“Yes, they were. We got no sense of their passing beyond the veil there, though.”
Again Bill nodded. “We are fairly certain that some of the women were killed elsewhere and then their bodies just brought out to the quarry. What made it hard to determine exactly when they had died, was my friend’s belief that their bodies had been stored somewhere for quite some time before they were left out in the open. So while normally she could take account of the effects of things like the weather, and work times out from there, in this case it didn’t work.”
Pelydryn smiled at him. “It is good to know that we agree on that, and that we were not mistaken.”
“So you found the oldest two bodies in the autumn,” Bill prompted. “When did you next go there?”
Claerwyn sighed. “Not until two moons later, unfortunately. But then we found two more women, and they had clearly died there not that long ago, and by terrible means.” Bill saw her shudder. “Their bodies were full of holes, and we could sense the iron within and by them. That meant that we did not wish to get very close to them, though at the time we had no idea what would do such damage – we only saw that later on. It was a terrible thing for us. Like a miasma hanging over the place, their terror and pain lingering for us, even though the likes of you would not have felt it.”
“Probably not as keenly as you by any measure,” Bill admitted, “but some of us are rather sensitive to places. I don’t have your extra abilities, but there are some spots that really make my skin crawl and the hair stand up on the back of my neck. So I can fully appreciate that for you it must have been overwhelming.”
“It was,” Claerwyn admitted. “And it worried us too. To have the first two women there was not good, but to then find two more spoke of someone making a habit of this killing.”
“After that we took turns to keep watch on that place,” Helyglys said, her tone clipped and hard. “Shortly after the winter solstice, they came again, but it was the wrong time for us and although I could see, I had no way to access your world.” Her beautiful face creased into an angry frown. “What I saw then was vile! I did not see the man who tried to help the women that time. He was not present.”
That’s interesting, Bill thought, wanting to ask more questions but sensing that of the three elven women, this one would be affronted by the interruption. So Tufty wasn’t with them, was he? Was Vijay already starting to suspect that his heart wasn’t in this kind of job? Had Tufty protested once too often already? But she was continuing,
“There was Sanay, whom I vowed to deal with, and the man you called Bose and another whom we never saw again.” Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “I have seen cats play with mice as those men did with the one girl. She was little more than a child, terrified and disorientated. They chased her when she tried to run and then they mounted her like mad beasts – the strange man twice! ...And then the man you call Bose put his hands around her throat and choked the life out of her. It was a foul and wicked thing to have to witness, and all the worse for not being able to reach out and help.”
“I can believe it,” Bill said sympathetically. “Look, I know you probably wish that you had never seen what happened that day ...or was it at night? But could you give me a description of that other man? If I can identify him, then we may be able to find traces of him on that girl and match them to him. That would mean we could lock him up for life.” He’d be an accessory to murder which would carry more weight than the rape, just as long as Bill and Carol could link him to the crime.
“I can do better than that,” Helyglys snapped, and before Bill could draw breath, she had swarmed into his mind and was replaying what she had seen for him in all too vivid images and sounds. As he mentally reeled under the assault, he suddenly became aware of the other three elves pulling Helyglys out of his thoughts.
As he came back to reality, panting from the exertion, he heard Claerwyn asking him anxiously,
“Are you alright?” and Tarian-derw chastising his sister with,
“That was not necessary! He has done nothing to harm us, nor anyone else! If nothing else you should have asked his permission before you entered. That was badly done, Helyglys, badly done!”
Yet Helyglys herself was suddenly looking most contrite.
“You are nothing like them,” she was saying in a rather shaky voice. “I did not expect that. I thought you would... that you would be... but you are not. Not even remotely.” Then she turned to the others saying in shocked tones, “And he has had contact with one of the ancients! One of the ancient ones has been close to him and very recently!”
“Surely not?” Pelydryn gasped. “We’d have felt their presence if they had been near here.”
Bill cleared his throat and managed to sit a bit more upright on the bench again. “Ah, I think that might be the one who I knew as Tapio. Yes, he is one of what you seem to call the ancients, but he’s not from around these parts. His normal lands are over the sea to the north, the far north in fact, and he’s back there now, but for a while around the turn of the year I helped him while he was here in England.”
“Incredible!” Helyglys gulped. “I do most deeply apologise to you. You must be quite extraordinary if you could help one such as that.”
“Well he was in the guise of a small boy at the time,” Bill admitted with a rueful grin. “It’s quite a story, and one I’m happy to come back and tell you some other time. But for now, can I ask you to finish telling me about what happened to you? You said that you witnessed the rape of one of the group of girls they killed at the quarry, and the time you’ve described is when we would call January. But how many girls were there that time?”
“Four,” Helyglys said with a sad shake of her head. “Two were so limp they were just carried out of the thing they arrived in. They were not dead yet, but their life force was so weak I could barely feel them. The other two, though, must have known what was going to happen, because they fought back. One of them spoke in a way that reminded me of people who used to live here long ago.”
That made Bill smile, while at the same time blessing Nick and the long conversations about how English had evolved as a language. “Ah! I think that means that she was from the area where the gang come from. It’s known these days as the Black Country, because for most of the last three centuries it was where men worked metals.” If that sword of Tarian-derw’s was bronze then they had some clue, but probably thought of it in terms of on
e craftsman working on one piece with loving care, and then only when needed, not as a continuous process. So how on earth to explain industrial scale and mechanised smelting and foundries to beings who wouldn’t touch iron, much less steel? “But to do that, they had to burn a lot of coal. That in turn meant that for a long time – at least in our calculations – there was a pall of black smoke over the area, especially when viewed from the higher land to the east of it.” Again, no point in saying things like ‘the Birmingham plateau’ when they had no comprehension of what the city of Birmingham was, or that people would make the distinction between what the elves would see as one patch of over-built and polluted ground from another.
What he could add was, “There is some thought that the local accent is very close to what was spoken a thousand years ago, even if a lot of the words have changed. Or so another friend who studies such things tells me.”
“How fascinating,” Claerwyn said, obviously the one who took more of an interest in things human.
Yet Tarian-derw was already carrying on with, “Helyglys came to us most distressed over what she had seen. She was determined to deal with at least one of those men, and it happened that the one called Sanay came back the next time whereas the other two did not.”
Another interesting point, Bill thought. So she might have tried her charms on Bose had things been different. Bloody hell, I’m glad she didn’t! Or at least not on her own. He was far more dangerous than Sanay ever could have been. Not that Bill had any doubts that Helyglys could have taken Bose, it was more that Bose might have seriously wounded her in the process, and he could imagine that if there was one thing that would have Tarian-derw charging out of the Otherworld, wielding his sword, and chopping Bose into so many body parts, his sister getting hurt would be it. And a man’s body getting discovered at that crime-scene, carved up like meat for the pot, would definitely have had a murder squad all over it like a rash. The only reason they hadn’t got involved so far was because there was no reason to look at anyone else beyond Vijay Bose, and maybe a few of his henchmen for rape, and with Bose himself dead, they were hardly having to search hard for perpetrators.