‘But it’ll just go to waste. There’s crisps and stuff.’ He was crouching now, checking labels and looking for something other than plain water. She jerked him to his feet and turned to go, then saw Johann bending inside the van. He had waited for them to leave so he could search it for the envelope. Where the hell had he been hiding? She froze, slipping a protective arm around the boy, tightly muzzling him with her hand when he went to speak.
She started to back up along the line of abandoned cars, carefully placing one boot behind the other, dragging Ryan with her, but the crunch of hard snow in the blue stillness was enough to alert him, and he stared up at her through the windscreen.
Their sight of each other was like a static shock. Like it or not, she had a connection with him, and in that moment they both recognised the subterfuge. This was no longer about the envelope, which was still tucked inside the wheel arch of the Toyota, but about something unfinished between them.
Sweeping Ryan into her arms, she abandoned caution and ran.
‘A clear sky, perfect landing conditions for air rescue,’ sniffed Bryant, squinting into the iceberg-blue of the morning. ‘Why don’t they come?’
‘I don’t know,’ May admitted. He and Bryant had headed back to the truck, to take another look at the driver’s corpse. ‘Perhaps they only just reached base and have to refuel before returning. We can’t wait any longer to tell someone about the body, Arthur.’
‘By the time they send out locals to investigate, our man will have gone.’
‘Where? Where can he go?’ May waved a hand at the silted landscape. ‘There are no tracks in any direction other than up and down this road, and the only fresh footprints are ours. He can’t run across the moor without risking his life. He has to be in one of the cars.’
‘Then we conduct a proper search, from one end to the other.’
‘And do what, exactly? Does it occur to you that he might be stronger than either of us? We don’t know what we’re up against. We have no power here. We can’t involve innocent drivers without placing them at risk, and although I hate to bring up the subject, you’re too old to tackle murderers.’
‘We can still outthink them, even if we can’t outrun them,’ Bryant muttered. ‘I know you dread the idea of acting your age, tinting out your grey and sucking in your stomach whenever you talk to attractive women, or even hideous ones; I’ve seen you.’ Bryant looked about the cabin. ‘I know one thing. He’s a young French hitchhiker, possibly from a mountain region.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He was sitting here in the passenger seat with his feet on the dashboard. Nobody over twenty-five ever sits like that. He boarded the truck in wet snow and his boot prints dried out, see? He’s wearing Merveilles, a brand of French ski resort trainer you can only buy in Alpine regions; he’s probably at home in the snow. There’s a customs clearance form in the glove box. The driver’s details are printed on the customs form. My guess is he picked up our man as a hitchhiker.’
‘That is pure supposition, Arthur. We don’t have any real information. And I don’t think we should spend any more time in this cabin wrecking the crime scene. You look frozen.’
‘We have to keep searching the cars,’ said Bryant. ‘For all we know, he’s moving from car to car, preying on the innocent without fear of capture.’
May did not wish to stress his partner’s lack of suitability for a search conducted in inhospitable conditions. He knew how Bryant would react to the subject of his own mortality. ‘Then stay in the car and let me conduct the search,’ he said. ‘There’s no need for both of us to freeze. We should have stayed in those potholers’ outfits.’
‘I could barely walk. The crotch was around my knees. And what if something happens to you? You could die out there all alone. Don’t be ridiculous.’ Bryant snapped his scarf around his neck and pushed out of the cabin, dropping up to his knees in a snowdrift. He fought to maintain his balance for a few seconds, then tipped over onto his face.
‘That’s exactly the kind of thing I’m talking about,’ said May, helping him up and dusting him off. Linking arms, the pair of them set off like children in the dark, wading past the column of vehicles.
Half an hour later, Bryant was puffing like a kettle and showing signs of distress. A gleaming crust had formed across the snow, levelling the drifts over potholes and ditches, making walking perilous and exhausting. May knew that they had come too far to turn back now, but he needed to find shelter. The wind was rising once more. Fresh flurries blew across the sparkling ridges of ice like sand skittering over dunes. Several times Bryant nearly fell, but was hauled back on his feet. He weighed nothing. Against the blinding snow, he appeared like a character from a Dickens Christmas, a dark bundle of oversized clothes topped by a tonsured head and a bulbous blue nose.
‘We’re too old for this sort of thing,’ May puffed.
‘What you mean is I’m too old.’ Bryant beat snow from his coat for the twentieth time. ‘I know right now I look like something that belongs on the wall of a second-rate cathedral, but I’m stronger than I appear. Our family is a hardy breed. My mother was an usherette for twenty-two years, and then cleaned the same cinema until she was eighty. We’re used to standing about in the cold.’
‘Why tempt fate?’ asked May. ‘Divine providence isn’t going to intervene and lend a hand. There’s no-one within a hundred-mile radius who can help us.’
‘Don’t be so sure,’ said Bryant, raising his hand. ‘Look.’
‘Oh, no—tell me I’m dreaming.’ May gave his forehead a theatrical smack of the hand. ‘What on earth is she doing here?’ He stared back at the painted army truck and read the unfurled purple and yellow pendant on the side: Coven of St James the Elder (North London Division) Prop. M Armitage (Grand Order Grade IV White Witch).
Just then, a hatch in the rear door opened and a dyed crimson head poked out. ‘I thought that was you, Arthur,’ called Maggie Armitage, dubious doyenne of the London witch world and occasional helpmate of the Peculiar Crimes Unit. ‘I didn’t expect to see you until the convention. We took to the B roads because Maureen is our designated driver and she suffers from tunnel vision, so she tends to rely on the advice of her spirit guide, Captain Younghusband, and he’s not at all trustworthy when it comes to overtaking. He died long before the motorcar was invented, you see, so he’s a bit surprised whenever she goes over twelve miles an hour, and she drives quite fast because the situation with her waterworks is such that she requires a comfort stop every twenty minutes.’
‘I thought I told you, John,’ Bryant explained with a pleased grin. ‘Maggie is booked to perform the Opening of the Ways ceremony on the first night. It grants spiritualists unparallelled access to the Netherworld for the duration of the convention.’ He made it sound like she was selling tickets for a fairground ride.
‘I brought some of the coven members with me in the truck,’ said Maggie, her smiling eyes closing to mascara’d crescent moons as she beckoned them. ‘The convention centre called Wendy, our organist, to ask if she would protect the entrances of their car park from Cornish spirit-suckers by casting runes in salt and chalk—apparently the little buggers like to nip over the border and torment believers. Wendy can speak Piskie, and made us stop on the moor to commune with them, but they stole her jump leads, stranding us here. Come on in.’
The army truck had been filled with crimson cushions, divans and heavy velvet drapes. Crystal pendants, joss-stick burners and animal bones hung from the crossbars, lending it an air of decadence. ‘We’ve been using it as a mobile pagan temple,’ Maggie explained, ‘a place of spiritual fulfillment.’ Its stuffy, incense-filled atmosphere reminded May of an unhygienic brothel he had once visited in Tangiers, strictly in the course of an investigation. ‘May I introduce Dame Maud Hackshaw…’
A middle-aged lady with improbable mauve hair and telescope-dense spectacle lenses eagerly clasped their hands. ‘Hello, ducks,’ she said, ‘charmed, I’m sure.’
> ‘She’s a true force for positive energy,’ said Maggie. ‘She’s predicted so many births that the spiritualist newspapers nicknamed her Madame Ovary. Over there, Junior Warlock for our northeastern branch, Stanley Olthwaite. He came to our Winter Solstice snack ’n’ spells party to help with the washing-up, and ended up staying on.’
A skinny young man in Wellingtons and a patched tweed overcoat eagerly removed his flat cap. ‘ ’Ow do.’
John May started to feel as if he had wandered into an old Will Hay comedy. Something was making him itch. He resolved not to touch anything unusual.
‘Maureen you’ve already met. Don’t get up, love, it’s not worth the risk. And Wendy, our organist.’ Looking at the outrageously buxom, slender-waisted Wendy, rising to greet them as much as her tight spencer would allow, May understood why Stanley Olthwaite had elected to stay.
‘Vicky said they needed a hand, like, at the centre,’ Olthwaite told the detectives. ‘I came out of the army with nowt; I’d done tours of duty in Northern Ireland, Kosovo, Basra, and ended up working as a bloody security guard in Newcastle.’
‘Then he heard the call,’ said Maggie, clasping her hands over her bosom. ‘These are spiritually lean times, and we needed someone who could manage heavy lifting. Plus he had his own spade and socket set, you see. Actually, we were just in the middle of a séance, but I put it on pause when I saw you coming, a little trick I learned from my new book.’
‘A volume of invocations?’ asked Bryant.
‘No, it’s the instruction manual for my DVD player, but the principle’s the same. I’m glad you’re here, because funnily enough your name came up just as Maureen started her spirit writing. Grab a seat.’
‘Well, we really can’t—’ May began.
‘No, I think this is important because there’s something very strange going on out here. We’ve been picking up some disturbing signals. The indications suggest we are in the presence of death. Snow elementals like to provide mortals with signs; it makes them feel useful.’
How could she know? thought May. How does she always know? Whether one was a believer or not, the cheerful little witch possessed a talent that had been tempered in adversity. She had never exploited her skills, but had dedicated her life to helping those left in pain and confusion by loss. May suspected she was more of a natural psychologist than most people, and this gave her abilities others ascribed to supernaturalism. Certainly, she had a phenomenal success rate in helping the PCU, even if her advice often seemed somewhat tangential to the investigation at hand.
Stanley helped the detectives inside, and Maggie closed the rear door. Bryant’s watery blue eyes had trouble adjusting after the blinding glare of the snowscape. As he found himself in the middle of a circle lit by a pair of paraffin lamps, it seemed as though he had stepped back into some dim-remembered past. The scene reminded him of a chiaroscuro painting by Wright of Derby, the flickering amber uplighting the faces of the group, the whispering drapes casting twisted shadows, the rising wind creaking against the struts of the truck walls. No matter how many times his partner had tried to dismiss the coven of St James as an anachronistic absurdity, the conviction of its members drew them both towards belief in the unthinkable. The strange intensity of those within the circle had the power to siphon off cynicism and breed conviction in the unknown.
‘What form do these indications take?’ asked Bryant.
‘There is a dark vibration in the air that can be read with a mind trained to such fluctuations of the spirit,’ said Maggie. ‘Maureen and I have both felt it very strongly. It could mean that someone has died as the result of being trapped in these freezing temperatures,’ said Maggie, ‘but I don’t think so. Different types of death elicit different readings. The quiet ebbing away of a life force is very different from the sensations created by an act of violence. One might compare these feelings to seismic readings, the former a series of gently undulating waves, the latter jagged and tightly packed. I should have known you were here. The signs always grow stronger in your presence, Arthur. Your life is so often at risk. Now they will read the signs for you.’
At the centre of the circle, perched beside a folding card table and preparing for the impromptu séance, sat Maureen, a fleshy, sallow young woman in a brown roll-neck sweater and jeans. Her right hand rested lightly on a ballpoint pen, at the centre of a dozen sheets of foolscap. Her head had fallen forward and was partly obscured by a curtain of lank brown hair. She might have been asleep. The pen moved with almost imperceptible slowness, but picked up speed as Bryant approached. As neat letters formed—too neat to have been drawn freehand with one’s head bowed—the coven members read aloud. The intense concentration of the group would have impressed the most staunch nonbeliever.
The woman’s pale hand drifted across the sheet, leaving behind a letter C. The pen jumped, forming an R, then an O. Bryant felt the tiny white hairs on the back of his neck begin to prickle.
‘Crow,’ said Wendy.
‘Crotch,’ said Stanley Olthwaite.
‘Cormorant,’ said Maggie.
‘Crossroads, she’s trying to write crossroads,’ said Dame Maud. ‘The unholy spot where the guilty were jeered by the mob, then hanged and buried alive in punishment for their sins.’
Another O appeared on the paper.
‘Or perhaps she’s missed an episode of Coronation Street,’ said Dame Maud.
‘No, it’s corridors,’ said Stanley softly, as if deciphering a crossword clue that had been eluding him. The pen moved again, but no ink appeared. With head still bowed, the spirit writer suddenly jabbed the tip into her left palm until it bled. Using the tiny pool of blood as a reservoir, she continued to scrawl in an unbroken flow. Not a word this time but a drawing, childlike and unfocussed, caused by the difficulty of writing without ink.
The face which formed was thin and young, with high cheekbones and sunken eyes where the blood spread into hollows, but it could have been anyone. Now Wendy had rocked back on her knees and was chanting something too softly for Bryant to catch beneath the moaning of the wind.
At that moment, the gusting stopped and the air became silent and still, revealing her whispered words. ‘Four pathways, two leading directly to death and two leading to salvation. Between God and Mephisto stand the white corridors.’ She fell forward, and was caught by Olthwaite, who gently set her on a stack of pillows.
‘White corridors always spell danger because they represent conduits through which evil can pass,’ whispered Maggie. ‘Do you have any way of interpreting this, Arthur?’
‘I think I may be able to shed some light,’ said Bryant, catching his partner’s eye. ‘We are looking for a murderer who has struck among the passengers trapped here. I think you’ll find that the first white corridor is right outside, the snowbound roadway on which we find ourselves marooned. The second is the corridor leading to the London mortuary where our friend Oswald Finch has been found dead, a crime we are equally prevented from solving.’
‘Then what are the other two?’ asked May. For once he felt no desire to ridicule Maggie and her colleagues.
‘The readings are not always literal.’ Maggie watched her friend as she wiped her bloodstained hand with a cloth and fumbled with her hair band, as disoriented as a patient emerging from anesthetic. ‘You have to look beyond the corporeal to find another interpretation. These corridors might represent states of mind. They are perhaps intended for you to find a path through disorder. Or they may serve to remind you of something only half remembered, some signifying event that you have tried long and hard to bury deep within your subconscious. There are other times and places than those our bodies lead us to.’
Outside the army truck, the freezing brightness of the snow and the glaring white sky broke the spell that had held May for the past few minutes. Blinking in the light he felt foolish, ashamed that age and doubt had led him to believe the things he had ridiculed in his youth.
‘There is help on the way, but your lives will be
endangered before it can arrive,’ Maggie called. ‘Pass safely. The message was personal, and directed at you both. We shouldn’t leave the truck now that Wendy has cast her circle of protection around us. But we’ll be here if you should need spiritual help.’
She watched them totter off through the snow arm in arm, and worried for their safety. Removed from the protection of the PCU, they looked so small and frail. ‘You must understand the meaning of all the corridors in your life, not just this one,’ she shouted after them, pointing to the obliterated road with its cars marooned like fishing boats in a frozen tide. ‘You must look into your hearts. Only then can we help you further.’ But her anxious words of warning were lost in the rising wind.
She knew the ways of men, knew that anger was clouding his mind in a raging fire. He would shove on through the snow, smashing his fists against the vehicles that imprisoned him here, scattering shards of ice across the road. She had hidden his new passport, his disgusting photographs. He would be looking in the fields and on the road, but would have sensed that neither Madeline nor her son were to be found outside, which meant they were sheltering in another vehicle. He was thinking that the roads were still impassable, so she had to be here within reach. All this she knew about him.
He would become more systematic in his hunt for her. He’d told her he had once gone hunting with his grandfather, and had killed a mountain boar from the safety of a hide. That was what he needed now, a vantage point from which he could watch their movements.
Madeline felt a kinship with her hunter. She knew he would find an abandoned truck and climb up onto its roof, lying on his elbows, where he could watch the entire column of cars. They had taken the food from the emergency blanket. Tracks led forward from it, towards the head of the traffic jam. He would count the vehicles in which she might have taken shelter, and check them one by one. Then, armed with a stolen weapon, he would slip down from the truck roof and make his way inexorably towards them…
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