***
She walked quietly back to the town, through the teatime streets and into the hotel. Roger must have arrived; the receptionist was opening her mouth to say so. "Cook was wanting to know-was
"Has anyone been asking for me?"
"Cook has, to know if you'll be-was
"You know what I mean. Has anyone been here looking for me or left a message?"
"I'd have said if they had," the receptionist said huffily. "But I need to let cook know-was
"I expect I'll be having dinner," Sandy said, and trudged up to her room. Could the girl have been instructed to withhold any messages to her or even to tell callers that Sandy wasn't staying at the hotel? Could Roger have already been and gone, having been told she'd left or had never been there? She mustn't grow paranoid, it was only her period thinking for her. Most likely Roger had been delayed and had failed to let her know, or perhaps the receptionist at Staff o' Life wasn't prepared to accept messages for her. Now Sandy thought about it, it had been somewhat cheeky of her to assume that anybody would.
She dialed Roger's number and listened to the ringing until her head began to throb. She considered driving back to London, leaving a message at the hotel in case he was on his way, but even if she set out now she would have to drive most of the way in the dark. She went downstairs to apologize to the hotel receptionist for having been brusque with her, and couldn't bring herself to say she had changed her mind about dinner.
Dinner ended with bread pudding that tasted strongly of the Redfield special, and after that she felt too heavy even to dream of driving home. She went out to walk off her meal. The night had closed down like a lid, and the streets were illuminated by lamps of a kind she hadn't seen since early childhood, bolts protruding from both sides of their necks. The Staff o' Life complex was lit and rumbling. In the pubs, and in some of the houses, she heard snatches of folksong above the tuneless continuo of the wind. The light from a bedside lamp hovered on the ceiling of a child's bedroom, and a woman was humming a lullaby. In another house Sandy heard a shot, a scream, the Vaughan Williams melody of a Staff o' Life commercial. Out beyond the northern edge of town, where the tower soaked up the night, the fields were pale and restless.
Back at the Wheatsheaf she stood under the awning and gazed along the main road, hoping dreamily to see headlights that would prove to herald Roger's arrival. She felt too sleepy to be discontented. She didn't know how long she had been standing there when the receptionist approached her. "I'll be locking up when you're ready, Miss Allan. Nobody's come for you or called."
"Well, that's men for you," Sandy said as they went into the hotel.
The girl gave her a look so placid it was beyond interpretation. "What does your man do?"
"Writes."
"And you too?"
"No, I'm from television," Sandy said, disconcerted to realize how long she had had to be wary of saying so. She thought she could be open here, but she changed the subject anyway. "He'd have to come along that road from London, wouldn't he?"
The girl locked the front doors and withdrew the key with a loud rattle. "Aye, that's the only way, the Toonderfieldroad."
Sandy faltered, her mouth tasting suddenly stale. "Which road did you say?"
"The road through Toonderfield."
"Where's that?"
"Toonderfield? Why, you came through there yesterday. It's the edge of Redfield, past the Ear of Wheat as far as the wee wood." The girl stared at her, the iceberg of a countrywoman's contempt for urban ignorance just visible in her eyes, and snapped the key ring onto the belt of her uniform. "You'll see it when you leave," she said.
***
So Giles Spence had died on Redfield land. That needn't seem sinister or even very surprising, Sandy told herself as she brushed her teeth. Lampooning the Redfields hadn't helped his film, and so he'd come back. It seemed clear that Lord Redfield had waited to be sure that she wasn't aware of it before he would discuss Spence's first visit, but after all, Redfield had been protecting his family from suspicion. Or perhaps she was being too suspicious, and he genuinely didn't know where Spence had died, given that he himself had been barely out of his cradle at the time. As for Spence, if he'd driven off in a rage after having failed a second time to shake the Redfield poise, the copse beyond the humpbacked bridge was a likely spot for him to have lost control of his car.
She unbolted the bathroom door and padded to her room. The wall-lamp by her door had died; the glass bud among the wooden leaves was gray as a parched seed. The other lamps illuminated sheaves that were printed on the wallpaper, all the way along the uninhabited corridor to the empty stage of the landing. She wondered where the staff of the hotel slept; wherever it was, she couldn't hear them. They wouldn't be able to hear her, but why should that worry her? She let herself into her room and locked the door. Toonderfield might be a contraction of Two Hundred Acre Field, she thought as she brushed her hair. The insight made her feel sleepily contented, not least because it seemed self-contained, a bit of information that was already tidying itself away at the back of her mind. She stood up from the stool in front of the dressing table and stretched and yawned, and was ambling to the bed when she heard a sound beyond the window.
She parted the thick curtains and opened the window wide, and leaned out to see what the regular sound might be that made her think of pacing claws. The streetlamps sprouted from their plots of light, but otherwise the street was deserted. Of course, the hotel sign was making the sound, ticking as it swayed in the wind.
She closed the window and the curtains, and climbed into bed, catching hold of the light cord to let herself down into the dark and sleep. She must have been exhausted last night not to have heard the restless sign, the wind blustering at the window. The weight of tonight's dessert sank her into sleep.
Silence wakened her. The wind had dropped. At some point, she realized, she'd heard the rumbling of lorries from Staff o' Life. Lying under the quilt in the midst of the silence, she felt peaceful and warm and safe. She listened to the muffled noises of the hotel sign, which sounded even more like the pacing of an animal now that there was no wind to blur them-but if there was no wind, the sign shouldn't be making a noise.
The thought stiffened her body, held her still and breathless, straining to hear that there was a wind after all. She was wide awake now, her nerves buzzing. She lifted her head from the pillow, wishing that she hadn't drawn the curtains so closely that no light could reach the room, and then her neck grew rigid as she realized what she was hearing. The sound of pacing wasn't beneath her window, it was in the corridor outside her room.
She kicked off the quilt, grabbed the light cord and hauled at it so fiercely she thought it would snap. The small cosy room sprang into view, and it felt like a cell. Some part of her mind had hoped that the light would drive away the sound, but it was still there beyond her door, a rapid clicking like claws on the linoleum. "So now you know I'm in here," Sandy cried, "let's see what you look like," and flung herself off the bed, ran to the door, grappled with the lock and snapped the bolt back. Seizing the doorknob with both hands, she threw the door open and stalked into the corridor.
It was deserted. A moment before she had looked out she'd heard the pacing just outside, but the corridor was deserted. The doors of the empty rooms paraded away to the stairs, reminding her how alone she was up here. Nobody could have got to the nearest room, let alone the fire exit that led to the car park, in the time it had taken Sandy to look; an animal, which was what the noises had suggested to her was prowling the corridor, couldn't even have opened a door. She tried to think that the staff quarters were on the floor above, that the noise had been coming from there, but the trouble was that the corridor wasn't quite empty, after all. A faint smell lingered in it-a smell she fancied she had met before.
She stared along the corridor and thought of heading for the stairs, but then where would she go? She backed into her room and secured the door. She could ring the switchboard and raise the
staff from wherever they were sleeping, but what would she tell them? Deep down she was nervous of calling unless she absolutely had to, in case nobody responded. She leaned her cheek against the door and listened, and eventually crept to the bed and pulled the quilt over herself. She couldn't quite bring herself to turn off the light; why should it matter if the light showed where she was? As she closed her eyes she had the unpleasant notion that she would be just as easy to find in the dark, if not easier. It took her some time to doze off, even when she had managed to suppress that idea. Not only was she listening nervously, but she was trying not to recall while it was still dark where she had first encountered the faint decaying smell.
***
In the morning it was gone. A smell of toast drifted upstairs. Sandy found she had slept late again, and ran to the bathroom with hardly a glance along the corridor. She'd meant to call Roger as soon as she awoke, so early that if he hadn't left London he was bound to be in his flat, assuming that he wasn't sleeping somewhere else. She went back to her room and dialed, and galloped her fingers on the bedside table while she listened to the ringing, ringing, ringing. At last she dropped the receiver daintily into its cradle. Whatever he was playing at, she wasn't prepared to wait any longer. Today would be her last day in Redfield, she promised herself.
She dressed in a T-shirt and denim overalls, and went downstairs. The receptionist greeted her warmly, if slowly. "The breakfast's ready when you are," she said, and Sandy hadn't the heart to leave without eating, since they would be cooking it only for her. It would have done for two people: the slabs of fried bread under the bacon and eggs were as thick as the slices of toast in the rack. Since this would be her last taste of the Redfield special, she indulged herself, and almost gave in when the waitress asked if she wanted more toast. "Do you all sleep in the hotel?" she said instead.
"Aye, downstairs."
Perhaps the noises had been coming from down there or even somewhere else entirely. Perhaps they'd been caused by a fault in the plumbing; that would explain the smell. They hardly mattered, since Sandy was leaving, though not straight away. When she plodded upstairs to brush her teeth she felt too full to begin driving at once. She needed a walk, especially since she would be spending most of the day in the car.
She couldn't move fast enough to elude the receptionist, asking the question the waitress had already asked. "Will you be having the lunch?"
"I shouldn't think so," Sandy said, and received a look of polite skepticism as she left the hotel. All right, yesterday she'd said she wouldn't be here for dinner, but today was the end. "You'll see," she muttered, low enough not to be heard by the women who were gossiping outside the nearest shop. "Good morning," they said as if they were inviting her to join them. She couldn't imagine being content just to gossip and shop.
She walked to Staff o' Life and called the receptionist there to her window. "Nobody's asked for you, Miss Allan," the young woman with the horsey smile said. Half of the waiting was her own fault, Sandy thought, for assuming she meant more to Roger than in fact she did. Serve her right for making so much of a one-night stand- for not realizing she needed to. At least she was learning a few truths about herself.
The walk had made her feel lighter, if not exactly energetic. She came out of the visitors' entrance and saw the graveyard, reaching alongside the factory toward the fields. It ought to be a good place for a last stroll and for her to be alone with her thoughts. She walked out of the factory grounds and around to the churchyard gate.
The church was early English: austere walls, windows full of tracery that led up to pointed arches. Given the extent of the graveyard, she concluded that the church must have been raised on the site of an older building. Feeling nostalgic, she strolled among the graves.
The youths she'd seen working here yesterday had gone, having finished what appeared to be a thorough job.
The grass was neat, the plots were weeded. There were no trees, only shrubs whose shadows the sunlight was tucking under them. Flowers in vases decorated mounds, wreaths that looked freshly plucked lay against headstones. As Sandy followed the gravel paths she read inscriptions: "Dust to dust," "Called home," "As ye sow so shall ye reap." Many of the epitaphs referred to harvesting, predictably enough. Most of the graves were family plots, but she saw very few inscriptions for children or young people: another tribute to the local diet, she supposed.
She was in the eighteenth century now, and nowhere near the limit of the churchyard. She stepped off the path to glance at stones that weren't readily visible. There were more images of harvesting; the tops of some of the headstones were carved into sheaves. "Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter," an epitaph said.
Toward the field the blackened stones grew greener. Weeds spilled over the rim of a cracked urn on a pillar; an angel so weathered it was almost faceless had lumps of moss for eyes. Beyond the angel the graves were marked by horizontal slabs. Sandy strolled among them, musing over the inscription carved on the angel's pedestal: "Nor shall the beasts of the land devour them." She was treading on the seventeenth century, where some of the inscriptions were decidedly savage. "He slashes open my kidneys and does not spare," for heaven's sake! Admittedly this would have been in the time of the bubonic plague; perhaps the inscription, or the treatment it referred to, had been intended as a deterrent to the townsfolk, though she couldn't quite see how. She stepped over several mossy decades. "A wild beast has devoured him," said a stone she almost trod on. The angel hadn't helped him, then, but of course the angel had been erected later-most of three hundred years later, she assumed. She stooped to the date, which was more overgrown than the epitaph. Fifteen-something: 1588, comfortingly distant. A couple of strides took her back another few decades, to an inscription that made her shiver: "He led me off my way and tore me to pieces." She wasn't even nearly at the hedge that enclosed the far side of the graveyard. There must be markers as old as any she had ever seen, but she wasn't sure that she would bother exploring that far, especially when another epitaph caught her eye: "One who goes out of them shall be torn in pieces." She could just distinguish that it dated from the fifteenth century, 1483 to be precise. The date wasn't as reassuring as she felt it should be; the past no longer seemed quite dead enough. She turned toward the church, the town, her car, and then stopped short. She peered fiercely at the slab, and bit her lip. The final digit had been partly obscured. The date wasn't 1483 but 1488-exactly one hundred years before the last date she had deciphered.
The inscriptions were disturbingly similar, but couldn't that be a coincidence? She hurried toward the path, and saw another epitaph. It was for a woman, yet the text read, "And his nails were like birds' claws." Its blurred date might be 1433, except that the last two digits weren't quite the same: the final one was incomplete. Beyond it another slab proclaimed "Their land shall be soaked with blood." The thought of going any further made Sandy's mouth taste stale and sour. She picked her way back over the slabs, looking for the ones she'd read, praying that she would be proved wrong.
She snapped a twig off a shrub and poked the moss out of the date beneath "He led me off my way," and sucked in a shaky breath. The year of the inscription was 1538. She stumbled to her feet and went from grave to grave, willing there to be a date that didn't fit, that would show her she was imagining a pattern where none existed. But she already knew that "A wild beast has devoured him" referred to 1588, and now she remembered the date of the inscription about kidneys: 1688. The gap between those wasn't even slightly comforting; after all, there were many stones she hadn't read. The last date on the angel's pedestal was 1888, and "Thou hast made us like sheep for slaughter" was dated 1838. Worse than any of this was the thought that Giles Spence had died violently at Redfield in 1938-fifty years ago.
She mustn't think about that now, mustn't make herself nervous when she was about to drive, to escape. There would be time for reflection when she was well on her way. She hurried past the church, forcing herself to breathe slowly and regularly
, and then she faltered. Three women were waiting for her just outside the churchyard gate.
***
She should have been able to find them absurd. They reminded her of rose-growers converging on a judge who had given someone else the prizes they coveted, or diners cornering a waiter to complain about afternoon tea, or members of a townswomen's guild confronting a civic blight. All three wore hats like garish lacy coral, pinned with imitation pearls. One carried a basket of vegetables, one held a long loaf under her arm like a club; the third, whose hands were even larger and stronger than those of her companions, carried nothing. "Had enough?" she said.
Taken singly none of them would seem threatening, Sandy told herself, and the three of them seemed so only because they were between her and her car. "Enough of what?" she said as calmly as she could.
"Of us. Of our town."
How could they know she was leaving? She saw their broad unsmiling faces, their stout bodies blocking her way; she felt the graveyard at her back. "Why do you say that?"
"Why do we say that?" The woman turned to her companions. "Why do we say it, she says, when we saw her running through the churchyard like a hare with the hounds on her tail."
"Like a scared rabbit," the woman with the basket said.
"A scalded cat, "said the one with the loaf.
Their deliberateness felt like thunder, like a threat of violence underlying the docility of the town. The way they blocked the gate like three sacks of potatoes made Sandy want to lash out at them. Her impatience quickened her mind instead, and gave a cold edge to her voice. "I dropped something, that's all. It blew away."
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