The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  They were efficient and well equipped, with their short-wave radios and clinometers and ascenders and descenders and pulleys and cow’s tails and compasses and charts that mapped the entire White Scar complex, beside which her hand-drawn effort looked infantile.

  Still, they were cavers, and they knew her as one of their own, and did what they could to be kind about it. ‘That’s good … it’s really good. We did this one in November and it was hell on wheels. Easy to see how he’d fall at the pinch point …’

  ‘That crawl along the ledge … nightmaresville … We should have bolted it when we first went in. He went off there, did he?’

  ‘The drop over’s at least four hundred feet. Is that where he went off, aye? At the pinch point?’

  ‘… water at the bottom. Might still be alive …’

  ‘You think there’s an opening up in the wall? Really? And cave paintings in the cavern? We could try for it tomorrow, maybe. You’d get first claim on the route, of course, but we could map it out properly. Andy? Where’s Andy? Has anyone seen …?’

  ‘Good thing you weren’t roped together. That was good planning. It was here, at the pinch point, yes?’

  ‘I! Don’t! Know!’

  The echo of her shout rolled round the mountain. A thick silence rolled after it. Stella could feel the glances exchanged over her head and the half-rolled eyes and the sudden switch to brisk efficiency which saw them all pack up their gear and make ready, communicating by hand signals and eye contact.

  They left her in the charge of the young woman police sergeant who was working the radio and had been asking all the right kinds of questions. All the time, the skull-stone lay in her backpack, radiant as lightning, whispering its constant warning.

  For the skull-stone, for its urgent insistence, she told half-lies with no telling the consequences at the end of it. For the skull-stone and for Kit, because he had risked his life for it, and the danger had been real and she did not know yet if he was safe.

  For both of these, she did not say why they had been in the cave or what they had found in the cavern or that she had no idea where he had fallen or even if he had fallen at all because she was too far behind; she simply said where she thought it most likely to be and prayed that she was wrong.

  ‘We’ll be an hour in. Maybe a bit longer. You should eat something, aye?’ A neoprene hand patted her shoulder. Half a dozen faces grinned at her and offered themselves in to the dark on her behalf, for an untruth, poorly told. She smiled for them and tried not to look hysterical and went down to stand by the car.

  ‘Mrs O’Connor?’

  A new police officer came for her; a tall man in a flat hat with more polish to his uniform than the young WPC she had left at the cave’s mouth. He strode long-legged down the hillside, alive with urgency.

  ‘Mrs O’Connor …’

  Sheep grazed, half hidden in the bracken; ewes and their long-tailed lambs, which still thought more of playing than feeding. A buzzard wheeled in the high blue. The skull-stone reached a single-pitched note of warning, just as it had in the cave.

  Stella wondered if perhaps she were going mad, and stooped to look in the car’s wing mirror, to make sure she was still the same woman who had risen that morning, with joy firing her heart. Her own face looked back, angular, sharp-boned, with too many freckles ever to be elegant, and now too much mud where the wet-wipes had missed and unattractive lines of red and then weary blue beneath her eyes. Kit’s ghost kissed her hair. Beautiful woman. I love you however much mud you choose to paddle in.

  ‘Kit …’

  ‘Mrs O’Connor—’

  Breathless, the officer reached her. He bent and placed his palms on his braced knees and fought to make his straining lungs work.

  ‘Mrs O’Connor … we need you to … come up the hill. The caving team are … on the radio. They think they’ve found—’

  A car door slammed, solidly. ‘Her name’s Cody. Dr Stella Cody. You’re not doing anyone a service by diminishing her achievements.’

  ‘Tony!’

  She swayed. Her knees unlocked. Tony Bookless was a tall man, with an impeccably tailored suit and short silvery hair. He caught her arm and held it. She found her voice and made it work for him.

  ‘You didn’t have to come … I didn’t call to ask you to come … it’s such a long way.’

  He hugged her close. His voice hummed through her chest, deeply. ‘I didn’t come from Cambridge. I was in Harrogate, at the conference; it’s no distance at all. The office phoned me just after you’d called them and I left as soon as I could. Tell me what you need me to do?’

  Tony Bookless, forty-third Master of Bede’s College, Cambridge, was old enough to be her father, solid, certain, sure, with the bearing of long-ago military heritage and a mind honed by years in the ivory tower. He had been one of the two witnesses at her wedding. Stella gripped the hand he offered and felt human again for the first time in hours.

  ‘Make Kit be alive?’ Her voice sounded harsh in the sudden silence.

  ‘Oh, Stella …’

  He drew her in to his chest, where the world was safe. Over her shoulder, he held out his hand and introduced himself to the officer behind her. ‘Professor Sir Anthony Bookless, Master of Bede’s College, Cambridge. I was – am – Dr O’Connor’s employer. I will shortly be Dr Cody’s employer. If I can be of assistance, please tell me. You are …?’

  ‘Detective Inspector Fleming, sir, North Yorkshire Police Authority. Our caving team has followed Mrs O’Con— that is, Dr Cody’s excellent directions and they have found … the place she described. They’re at the bottom of a four-hundred-foot wall and they believe they have found … what they were looking for.’

  Four hundred feet. Gravity sucked at her again, the yawning blackness, the sliding slope of the ledge to an unknown drop.

  That’s enough to kill us when we fall off and hit the bottom.

  We’re not going to fall off.

  Four hundred feet.

  She looked up. Two men were looking back at her, waiting.

  Numbly, she said, ‘What do you need me for?’

  Fleming stared at his feet. He was sharp and polished and had none of the people skills of his colleague. ‘At some point, we’ll need an … identification, but not until they come out, which won’t be for a bit yet. In the meantime, it would seem we may have a … murder investigation. Sergeant Jones tells me that there was someone following you in the cave – that Dr O’Connor may have been pushed off the ledge. You have given a statement to that effect?’

  He was speaking around her in wide ellipses of meaning through which only one fact stood out. She said, ‘You’ve found Kit? Is he all right?’

  ‘My dear, we are rarely asked to identify the living.’

  Tony Bookless had never treated her as less than an equal. While Fleming pursed his lips and tried to think of new ways to obfuscate, the Master of Bede’s, Kit’s mentor, employer and friend, took Stella’s shoulder and turned her away, bringing himself down so that his eyes and hers were level. In the simple, steady compassion of that act was the truth she could not face.

  For the first time in her life, Stella felt reality break apart around her. Part of her stood on a hillside, facing an inspector of the police who wanted to start a murder investigation. The greater part was in darkness, standing on a finger’s width of rock, with a light bobbing past below. In that part alone, Kit was still alive.

  She saw Tony Bookless’s mouth open and close, like a fish under water. From a great distance, she heard him ask a question. ‘Inspector Fleming is asking if there was someone else in the cave, someone who may have wished you harm. Can you remember?’

  A part of her that could still function said, ‘I was looking down on him. Perspective does strange things, but he looked big, the same as both of you.’

  ‘It was a man, then, you’re sure of that? You saw him?’ Fleming flashed his notebook out.

  She had had her fill of Inspector Fleming and his clinical
enthusiasm. Anger made her lucid. ‘No, I didn’t see him. Yes, I think it was a man but I couldn’t be certain. I was on the wall above the ledge. Kit took my spare light and went on ahead – he’s a runner, he thought he could get out faster alone than with me. I climbed up the wall above the ledge to get out of the way. Whoever it was passed beneath me. I didn’t see more than his head-torch.’

  ‘You climbed a cave wall in the dark, with no lights?’ Tony Bookless looked at her with a new kind of awe. ‘Stella, that’s … immensely dangerous.’

  It was a compliment, of sorts. She felt herself flush. ‘I was desperate.’

  Fleming was not so easily impressed. He came to stand over her, with his hand on the car roof. ‘There must be something you can give me. We’re four hours past the time of the event. Every passing hour loses us evidence. You do understand that?’

  She stepped out from under his gaze. ‘I had no light. I was holding on to rock with a ten-degree overhang. I was trying not to fall off and die.’

  ‘We’ll see if we can send in anybody to find any prints, then, aye?’ Fleming had a radio in his pocket. He turned away and spoke into it, urgently.

  Tony Bookless sighed. For her ears only, he said, ‘There stands a man who believes what he sees on television. He’ll have a team up here in the night, running reconstructions, just see if I’m right.’ His eyes were on her face. ‘At least that made you smile. I’m glad. But I still don’t understand why someone would be chasing you in a cave. You and Kit are the last people on earth to have upset anyone that badly.’

  ‘He wasn’t after us. We found—’

  She was shrugging off her pack to show him the stone. The words were shaping on her tongue, of discovery, of explanation, of triumph that only a man like Tony Bookless would fully understand.

  They never took form. In the blue place of her mind, the heart-stone stole her words and slid in others of its own.

  Glibly, she said, ‘Kit had the crystal skull. Cedric Owen’s blue heart-stone. It was in his pack. Whoever it was wanted the stone, I’m certain of that.’

  ‘Cedric Owen’s heart-stone?’ Tony Bookless’s eyes were sudden windows to his soul and it ached. ‘It went over the edge with him? It’s lost?’

  To hide her own face, she gave him another hug. ‘I’m sorry. It won’t have survived a four-hundred-foot fall on to rock. The best we can hope for is that they find his pack. At least we could have the shattered pieces of it to show why we went in.’

  As all lies do, this one grew roots and became real.

  With Tony Bookless and DI Fleming tracking behind, she retraced the path to the cave’s exit, where Sergeant Ceri Jones doubled as the radio operator for the Rescue. She sat close to her set, listening to the crackle and wheeze of short wave transmitted in relays to the surface, because however new the technology there will always be limits to the human ability to communicate underground.

  She fed out the news in bursts of static, a slow drip-feed of hope and unhope. ‘They found water at the base of the wall. No one’s been down there before. They didn’t know.’ She was wiry and blunt-nosed and kind. She spoke directly to Stella, not through the two men; caver to caver, Yorkshire lass to Yorkshire lass, in the accents of home that had always held hope.

  ‘Water?’ Stella said. ‘Not rock?’

  ‘Water.’

  And so hope.

  A breeze curved round the edge of the slope, lifting strands of hair, taking the edge off the wild sun. Stella clutched her hands across her body and stared at the cave’s mouth and saw nothing.

  The radio crackled again. Ceri bent to it, playing with the reception. ‘They’re pulling him up on a stretcher. The medics think …’ Kind eyes met hers. ‘Don’t hope too much.’

  ‘Do they have his pack?’ Tony Bookless asked. His hands were on Stella’s shoulders. ‘I’m sorry, but it is Cedric Owen’s stone.’

  Ceri Jones stared at him, flatly. ‘They didn’t say. Probably not high on their list of priorities. They’ll be here in ninety minutes, give or take. You can be patient till then.’

  Jones was a caver before anything else; she rated her world by the ability to crawl a sloping ledge and climb a wall at the end of it. Professor Sir Anthony Bookless did not feature in her scale of reckoning and it showed.

  Stella saw him discomfited for the first time in her life. He stepped away from her and sat on a rock, twisting his hands over each other. ‘I wish I’d known you were going for the stone. I could have helped; made sandwiches, held a radio outside … something.’

  ‘It was Kit’s present to me, that we should do it together, alone. After Friday …’ On Friday they had married, with Tony Bookless casting rice in handfuls over their heads.

  ‘Ah.’ His smile was brief and sad. ‘Private.’

  Stella said, ‘Kit thought you knew at the register office when you warned us of the deaths that attended the stone. He thought he’d said something incautious and blown it.’

  ‘Did he? I’m sorry, perhaps I wasn’t paying enough attention. I knew the two of you were looking for clues to the heart-stone’s location, but it didn’t occur to me that you might already have found it. I suppose I was arrogant enough to think Kit would have told me.’

  Professor Sir Anthony Bookless had made his name co-writing the definitive biography of Cedric Owen. More than anyone else, more than Kit, far more than Stella, he was linked to the blue stone and all it represented. The hurt in his eyes was a tangible thing.

  Gently, Stella said, ‘Kit wanted to bring the stone back to show you as a surprise. You were so clear in your reading of the legends, about the dangers that went with the stone, but he thought you’d change your mind if—’

  ‘Stella …’ Bookless edged off his rock and came to sit on the heather at her feet. He held her two hands between his own and looked up at her earnestly.

  He was so polite, so very English.

  She said, ‘What?’

  He looked down at his hands. His signet ring bore Bede’s fiery dragon faced by an unarmoured knight, wielding a delicate sword. He said, ‘It’s not about changing my mind, it’s about the integrity of scholarship. Cedric Owen is the closest Bede’s College has to a saint. He took his degree with us, he shed his life-blood at our gates, that he might bequeath to us his very considerable fortune. He left us gold and diamonds enough to lift us from being a second rate Plantagenet project to punching so far above our weight that we’re on a par with Trinity and King’s and the Ivy League in the States. On top of all that, he left us thirty-two years of quite astoundingly meticulous accountancy ledgers, which have set us on the map of academic excellence in a way nothing else could have done.’

  ‘Tony, I’ve been at Bede’s nearly a year. I do know the history—’

  He caught her arm and dropped it again. ‘I know you do, but listen to me. Owen’s skull-stone has not been seen since his death. Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster to Elizabeth I, the man with the most extensive network of informants the medieval world had ever seen, searched the length and breadth of England looking for it after Owen’s death. He failed to find it. As have at least three dozen others in the time since. Could you tell me, then, what Kit found that four hundred years of dedicated scholarship failed to uncover?’

  The truth was harder to tell than the lie. Stella reached for her water bottle and drank, and felt in the recesses of her mind for where the skull-stone crouched, catlike, cornered, or waiting; she could not tell which.

  Her fingernails were still dirty. She picked at one forefinger with the other and then clenched her hands and pushed them under her knees.

  In his perfect, assured, Cambridge voice, Bookless said gently, ‘Stella, you can tell me. Whatever it is, it can’t be worse than Kit’s death. Believe me, if he could be made alive, I would give my own blood to do it.’

  They were on a hillside, in late afternoon, and there were at least two others listening. Even so, her world had shrunk to this one man and the ease with which she could rock his founda
tions.

  Quietly, distinctly, over the crack and hiss of Ceri Jones’s radio, Stella said, ‘We broke the cipher in the Owen ledgers. It wasn’t written by Cedric Owen. Kit thinks it was written by Francis Walker after Owen’s death.’

  Tony Bookless frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘The ledgers are fakes, Tony. At least the last half-dozen are, and if they are, the rest might as well be.’

  There was no way to say it kindly and Stella did not try. Bookless stared at her. His eyes were a pale brown, made richer by the descending sun. They searched her face now, as if an answer might be hidden in the streaks of grime from the cave.

  It was easier to speak than not. Patiently, she said, ‘When Kit finally got his software to work, he wanted to test it on the Owen ledgers: thirty-two volumes, written by the same man over thirty-two consecutive years, with almost a fifty-fifty mix of text and numbers. He thought that if the algorithms could make sense of a medieval accountancy manuscript, they’d chew through our modern attempts at scribbling signatures in seconds.’

  ‘I know this. He came to me to ask permission to enter the archives.’

  Before he was a teacher, Tony Bookless was the Master of Bede’s; it mattered to him that the world know its history. He looked up to Ceri Jones and Fleming. ‘Bede’s has some of the most advanced archiving facilities in Europe. The Owen manuscripts are a set of accountancy ledgers dating back to Owen’s time in the New World. They’re our most precious academic resource and we keep them locked in a sealed archive with temperature, humidity and atmospheric controls. The copying process was long and very slow. Kit was commissioned to write a program that would analyse and compare any handwriting by any individual at any point in their life and verify it as authentic. He only started the analysis in January of this year. He’s been very quiet since. I thought – forgive me, Stella – I thought he was preoccupied with other things.’

  Other things. You.

  She tried to imagine Kit distracted from his life’s joy, and failed.

  To Tony Bookless, she said, ‘No. He was preoccupied with how to tell you that Bede’s entire academic basis is a sham. The ledgers were written in five years, not thirty, and by two different people. Cedric Owen wrote the first two dozen or so volumes; someone else wrote the remaining six. They tried to copy his handwriting and to the untrained eye it looks the same, but when Kit scanned it in, it blew his program out of the water. Cedric Owen may have written the first lot, but he didn’t write the last half-dozen; the handwriting for those matches a letter sent to Barnabas Tythe after Owen’s death signed by someone calling himself Francis Walker.’