Four of the old bus’s eight wheels left the road as Cyril wrenched the steering wheel to the right and pulled onto the track leading to the airstrip. The old springs that provided the suspension screamed in protest at the sudden change in direction as the bus lurched along the potholed track.
There was no plane on the small runway.
“Motherfucker,” said Cyril, then gasped, wondering where his sudden ability to swear had come from. He slammed his foot on the brake and brought the bus to a stop next to a tractor. Inside the open hangar, he could see one of the Wallace brothers—he could never remember which one was which—standing up and staring open-mouthed at him. Cyril hit the button for the door, there was a hydraulic hiss, and it swung open.
Behind him, there was a bark of anger as the colonel pulled himself to his feet.
“I don’t know what’s got into your stupid, fat head Perkins, but I promise you this: you’ll be out of a job by the end of today. Of all the irresponsible, foolhardy, dangerous,—”
“Shut up, Colonel.”
The retired army man went a deeper red than was his custom on a Tuesday morning.
“What?” he blustered. “What did you say?”
Cyril swung round in his seat and pointed a pudgy finger at the florid ex-soldier. “I said shut. The fuck. Up. Sit down. Now.”
Much to his own surprise as well as Cyril’s, the colonel shut up and sat down. Cyril turned to the shocked-looking German lads at the back of the bus. He pointed at the closest one.
“Du!” he said. “Komm her! Dies ist ein Notfall!”
As the young man got to his feet and hurried toward him, Cyril marveled at the fact that he had no clue what he had just said. He hoped it was good.
“Was just denn?” said the confused-looking German. Instead of answering, Cyril simply clamped his hand on the lad’s shoulder. The young man twitched as if he’d received an electric shock, his expression changed and he sprinted over to the hangar. Joe Wallace looked bewildered as the strange tourist from the out-of-place local bus ran in and put a hand on his cheek. A spider ran up Joe’s face and disappeared into his forehead. His eyes widened, he grabbed his cellphone and made a call.
The German lad got back on the bus, looking puzzled. He sat down with his friend, shrugging at the questions that were fired at him. The colonel seemed to have lapsed into a semi-catatonic state and was staring straight in front of him, his lips twitching slightly, making the ends of his mustache bounce.
Cyril swung back round to face the front and closed the door.
“What the ‘eck are we doing here?” He looked out at the tarmac of the airstrip, trying to piece together the events of the last ten minutes. Finally, he selected reverse and backed the bus away.
“Least said, soonest mended,” he said as the bus nosed back onto the road back to Elwick. Within five minutes, he was whistling Ticket To Ride.
Barry Nicolson had always wanted to learn to fly, and now that he had retired, he was making it happen. He was careful with his money, though—a teacher’s pension was hardly a fortune—so rather than commit to the expense of an accredited flying school, Barry had approached the Wallace brothers. Joe and Ed ran a small plane from the airstrip at the edge of their farm. They made enough money flying oil workers out to rigs in emergencies to keep one plane operational. They had been more than amenable to a bit of extra cash with no questions asked. Barry had learned all the basics for a fraction of the cost he’d been quoted by the flying school.
Today was a little bit special, as Ed had promised he could have his first try at a landing. As long as he followed Ed’s instructions, of course. Ed had turned out to be a natural teacher, much to Barry’s surprise. He’d said as much to the lad at the end of their third lesson.
“You know, there’s a shortage of teachers around here. You could make a real difference.”
“It’s not for me, Mr Nicolson,” Ed had replied. Barry had been unable to convince Ed to use his first name, but as he had been his headteacher for five years, he understood the conditioning that prevented it.
“I couldn’t leave the farm, for one thing,” Ed had said, then smiled. “And, come on. Mr Nicolson, admit it. You’ve been up in the Cessna a few times now. Could you give it up to stand in a classroom every day?” It had been a fair point.
This morning, conditions were perfect. Some cloud, but no rain, excellent visibility. They’d logged their flight plan with Newcastle air traffic control and taken off into a deep blue sky, spotting some seals pulling themselves onto the beach as they headed out over the water.
Ed had handed control to Barry as soon as they reached two thousand feet and Barry was finding it hard to keep a childlike grin off his face as he continued the climb to 12,000 feet, alternately watching the wispy clouds skip across the sky and the sun glint off the caps of the waves far below.
It was all shaping up to be a wonderful morning when Ed’s cellphone rang. Eric Coates’ iconic orchestral theme to The Dambusters squawked out of the phone’s tiny speakers until Ed picked it up.
“Joe?” he said. “Why aren’t you using the radio? Everything ok?”
Barry watched the younger man next to him stiffen, as if in surprise, then relax again. His face changed subtly, like an actor playing a role. He turned to Barry.
“I’m going to take control again, Barry,” he said. “Hold onto your cojones, this may get a little dicey.” He pushed the wheel forward, and the nose dropped towards the wave, putting them into a dive. No, not quite a dive - a very steep descent. Barry looked along the nose of the falling plane. They weren’t heading back to the mainland. They were heading north. The only land in that direction was the tiny island of Innisfarne.
Barry felt his stomach lurch as the plane plummeted. One thought kept going round and round in his mind as the island below rapidly grew bigger.
He called me Barry!
50
Innisfarne
Mee put the headphones on the desk and flicked the control room switch on the mixer. She wanted to hear how it sounded, find out if the intimacy she thought she had captured would still be there when she listened through the speakers.
Her voice, as it always did, sounded like a stranger, as if someone else had temporarily taken over the singing duties. She had always tried to achieve this by allowing a slightly dreamlike state to envelop her while she wrote, played or sang.
She nodded along as she listened. Stripped-down, bluesy, raw. Seb would really have liked it. It was about him, of course. Even after all these years, every time she sat down to create something, it ended up being all about Seb bloody Varden.
She realized she could do with a good cry. More of a howl, actually. It had been a while. Well, Joni was walking, Kate was busy, John was probably in the workshop. The room wasn’t quite soundproof but she’d chosen it for her studio because it was as tucked away as possible; upstairs, at the very end of a warren of corridors. She got up to close the door. If she was going to indulge in a bit of therapeutic screaming, she didn’t want to worry anyone.
As she put her hand on the door, it moved. She leaped backward and balled her hands into fists.
“What the—?”
Kate’s face appeared, and Mee relaxed, laughing at her own reaction.
“Oh, shit, Kate, you scared the crap out of me. I’m obviously not quite over our London adventure yet. All these years of meditation and you’d think I’d have some kind of default calmness ready to kick in, but nope, looks like…”
She stopped talking as she took in the unfamiliar expression on the older woman’s face, the tension in the way she was standing.
“What’s wrong?”
Kate took a breath, then let it out in a long, controlled hiss. She was struggling to retain her composure. Mee had never seen her so tense.
“Kate?”
“It’s John,” said Kate. “Something happened earlier. He was talking to me, then he remembered something. He tried to pretend it was nothing important, nothing
to worry about. He laughed it off. But, after he’d gone, I couldn’t stop thinking about the look in his eyes. He looked scared, Mee.”
“So let’s talk to him.”
“That’s what I want to do. But he’s not in the workshop. And there’s something else.”
“What is it?”
Kate shook her head slowly.
“Mee, this is ridiculous, I know it is. It’s crazy.”
“What is? Talk to me, Kate.”
“Every instinct in my body is bristling. I haven’t Used for twenty years, but if I was, I feel absolutely certain that I’d be sensing the same thing. Something feels completely wrong. He started to say Sian’s name, then stopped himself. I checked the big hall. She’s not there. And John’s not in the Keep.”
Mee frowned. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Sian’s a wreck. What has she got to do with anything? And where would she have gone? She’s scared of her own shadow.”
“I don’t know,” said Kate. “Please. Come with me, let’s check.”
“Of course,” said Mee, and the two women headed downstairs. Mee pushed her own sense of panic away. Adam was dead. Joni was safe. Whatever was going on, they would deal with it.
The Cessna’s wings made some quite alarming creaking sounds as Ed pulled on the controls and brought the nose level again. Almost immediately, he eased back the throttle and the small aircraft dropped even lower. Barry could see the rocky shoreline quite clearly. More clearly than he was comfortable with, if he was being totally honest. Some of the rocks looked quite jagged. And close. Very close.
“Right, Barry,” said Ed, unfastening his seatbelt.
What on earth is he doing?
“No time to explain, but since I’m a good news, bad news kinda guy, let me put it this way—.”
Good news, bad news kinda guy? Since when did a Northumberland farmer start talking like am American sitcom?
“Good news is, you’re gonna get a shot at that landing today.”
Ed reduced the throttle until the plane was barely keeping itself airborne, twenty feet above the waves. He undid the catch on the door and shouldered it open, grunting with the effort as he pushed against the pressure of the wind trying to force it shut.
“The bad news is, you’re on your own. See ya later. Good luck!”
The last two words were almost lost as Ed put both feet on the sill of the open door and, without a moment’s hesitation, stepped forward and dropped into the sea.
Barry scrambled around in his seat to see what had happened. He caught sight of the young man swimming toward the shore, then an insistent bleeping from the instrument panel alerted him to the fact that the engine was about to stall.
As he increased the speed, raised the nose and gained some height, he was startled by the Dambusters March starting up again, He found Ed’s phone on the seat next to him and picked it up.
“Ed?” came Joe’s voice, “is everything ok? Things have been a bit weird here this morning.”
“Hello, Joe, it’s Barry,” said Barry, his voice sounding unnaturally high to his own ears. He had to fight a terrible urge to giggle. “I’m afraid Ed has had to step out for a moment. Can I take a message?”
Kate and Mee had a quick look around the Keep, shouting John’s name. Sarah and Laura were talking quietly in the day room and had seen neither John nor Sian that morning. Finally, Kate insisted they find Sian, and the two of them walked through the yard to the last outbuilding.
Kate knocked, and they both waited. After a few seconds, she knocked again. She stood, waiting, unwilling—or unable—to break the rules she had lived by for so long.
“Oh, come on,” said Mee, and pushed the door open. She walked in, and Kate followed.
At first glance, there was nothing to see in the small, sparsely furnished room. Mee nodded at the open bathroom door, and Kate walked over and looked inside.
Mee walked over to the window and almost tripped over John’s body. For a couple of seconds, her brain simply refused to process what was in front of her. She stared down at him, and it was as if the facts of the matter had to be presented to her one at a time, so that she could deal with the reality of what she was looking at.
His lips were blue and drawn back from his teeth in a grimace of pain. Although he couldn’t have been dead for long, there was already an unnatural stillness about his face which left no doubt that he would never draw breath again. His eyes looked up and past her into nothingness. His body was twisted, his chin thrust back, exposing the livid mottled bruising around his throat.
Mee found herself repeating the word, “oh,” over and over, quietly, like a mechanical mantra of shock and grief. The information that John was dead was somehow being held at bay temporarily by the simple repetition of the word.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh. Oh. Oh.”
Even when Kate stood beside her and let loose a ragged cry of pain that ripped out of her body in an unrecognizable, almost animal, shriek, Mee still repeated the word and stared at John’s face. Seb’s brother. Always there when she needed him. As close to a father as Joni had ever known. A man who, when he had been given a second chance at life, had embraced it with every cell of his being.
John. Seb’s brother. Dead. Murdered.
As Kate took a couple of staggering steps backward and put a hand on the wall, leaning over, her body shaken by wracking sobs, Mee looked down at John’s hands. His left hand was open, fingers splayed, tendons straining to the last. The right hand was closed in a fist. He was holding something. Something dark, something that reflected in the light from the window. Something familiar.
Mee stopped speaking. Her lips were dry. She crouched down and pulled at the dark shape in John’s clenched fists. She suspected immediately what it was, but she had to be sure. Slowly, carefully, gently, she moved John’s cold fingers away from their prize. Then she stood up and held it in front of her.
Kate looked up and straightened slowly, her hand going to her mouth as her eyes opened in horror. They looked at each other, needing no words.
Mee was holding a long, black wig.
In that moment, everything else dropped away. There was no room in her for grief, fear or doubt. There was just the certainty that Adam was, somehow, alive. And he was here. When she spoke, her voice was steady.
“Joni,” she said.
51
Joni’s walk took her to the east first. Although she had grown up on Innisfarne, and knew the tiny island intimately, she’d rarely spent much time at the bay on the southeast corner. Despite the fact that it was one of the few places it was safe to swim, and it was closest to the Keep, Mee had almost always taken her to the smaller beach to the north. Now that Mum had finally opened up completely about Dad, Joni finally knew, and understood, the real reason.
She climbed to the top of a small outcrop of shale. Tough, coarse grass grew in straggly tufts there, in Nature’s final act of defiance before the sea claimed the rest. Joni looked down at the shoreline as the waves frothed and foamed, beating against the dark wet rocks. She wondered where, precisely, her father had stood before he disappeared. He’d stayed there for more than three weeks, Mum had said, not moving, not speaking. In some strange way, not really there at all. A horribly long goodbye before he’d vanished for good.
They all said he’d be back. Mum, Uncle John, Kate. Something similar had happened before, something out of his control, but he had always come back. Joni wasn’t so sure now. She was still struggling to make sense of his absence, given what they had told her about him. They described Dad as the most powerful being on Earth. He’d even held his own against a visit from an alien species with less than friendly intentions. So what kind of force could pull him away from his family and his home against his will? Uncle John said Dad had changed during those final few weeks before he came to the beach. He said they’d all known something was happening to him.
Joni wondered what it was like to have a dad. Uncle John was wonderful, sure, but he, like everyone e
lse, had always acted like Dad was coming back. They had all left that gap in Joni’s life wide open, waiting for Seb to come back and fill it. But it hadn’t been filled. He had never come back.
Maybe he didn’t fight too hard against whatever it was that took him.
Maybe he’d wanted to go.
Joni thought about her dream, the way she’d recognized her father, although he’d been non-human in appearance. She remembered him seeing her, knowing her somehow. She shook her head and pulled her fleece more tightly around her, feeling suddenly cold.
No. He will come back. If he can. She felt tears stinging her eyes in the wind as a small, but intense, burst of the secret, fierce, love she felt for her father bubbled to the surface.
“Dad,” she said aloud, looking out to sea, tasting the word along with the salt spray on her wind-dry lips. “Dad.”
She stood there for some time, staring out to sea without seeing anything. Then she created a reset point.
Finally, Joni turned her back on the sea and set off on her usual route back to the Keep. She liked to walk through the forest, which meant heading north first before swinging back toward home. There was something indescribably peaceful and reassuring about the presence of living things that were there before she was born and would still be there long after she’d died. She loved the sense of perspective the trees gave her, the way any sense of urgency just fell away from her when she walked under their ancient canopy. It was hardly a forest, of course, with fewer than thirty trees huddled together just north of the island’s center.
It was as she was about a hundred yards from the first of the trees that Joni realized she wasn’t alone. Walking from the direction of the Keep, shoulders hunched, a figure was heading toward the forest. Joni slowed her pace, then stopped and waited.
“Sian,” she called softly as the woman got nearer. She didn’t want to risk upsetting her by waiting until she was closer. She had gradually managed to get Sian to trust her a little and didn’t want to ruin it now by suddenly seeming to appear from nowhere.
The World Walker Series Box Set Page 93