The Gawain Legacy

by Jon Mackley

  Lara shook her head. ‘You’re a pitiful little man,’ she said. ‘You try to justify your … horrible deceptions with these pitiful excuses.’

  Will gave a long, stoic sigh. ‘So you have no faith in anything I’ve told you?’

  ‘None whatsoever.’

  ‘It’s important to have faith,’ Will said sadly.

  ‘Not when the guru leading you is a lying, two-faced son-of-a-bitch, who would sell his grandmother if it got him one step closer to the end of an empty trail.’

  ‘But don’t you see, Lara?’ Will said suddenly enthusiastic. ‘It isn’t an empty trail. You know what the Gawain poet said in the Église Saint-Pierre. You know what code he was hiding. Please, tell me what it was. I can get away. I can follow up that code. I can finish off the trail. Please, Lara, trust me.’

  Lara sat bolt upright in bed and stared at him incredulously. ‘Is that what this is all about? After all you’ve done, you want me to trust you? You’ve got another think coming. You’re an evil, scheming little man,’ she said. ‘And this good cop —insane cop routine you’ve got with Marsh won’t help. I didn’t find anything in the Église Saint-Pierre and you know that. I was only in there for five minutes while you called for backup.’

  Will’s shoulders slumped. ‘I don’t believe you. I think you did find something. How can I persuade you that I believe in the code of the Gawain manuscript more than anything else in the world?’

  Lara smiled bitterly. ‘Oh I believe you. I have no doubts you’d stop at nothing to get your hands on whatever’s at the end of this trail. That’s why I’m stuck in a hospital room and you want to discover what I know. Well, forget it, Will. You sold me out. If I get out then you can leave me the hell alone.’

  ‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ Will said. ‘We were good together.’

  ‘“Were”, being the operative word,’ Lara said, anger seething. ‘You know, I hope you find what’s at the end of the trail. I hope it’s not what you expect. Just a massive disappointment.’

  Will stood up, slowly and deliberately. ‘I’m sorry you feel like that,’ he said again. ‘My attempt at peace has failed.’

  ‘I doubt you’re surprised, after what you did.’

  ‘You won’t be seeing me again.’

  ‘Thank Christ for that.’

  ‘I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Eric Marsh.’ He strode across the room, then stopped at the door. ‘It’s a real shame, Lara. In another place, another time, under other circumstances, we could have had something really good.’

  ‘Well, we didn’t,’ Lara said, and turned over on the bed, so she didn’t have to watch him leave.

  *

  Time had slowed again. She didn’t know whether it was the effect of the drugs, or sheer boredom. Her mind wandered, a daydream rather than the drugs. She thought about the man who had been scribing the poem. She had looked into the eyes of the Gawain-poet. And what had he said? Old codes, codes you should understand. But times are changing, and so must the alpha-beta. Her mind whirled, as she tried to fathom the message he had tried to give her. The alpha-beta, the alphabet, was changing, the use of letters such as ‘thorn’ and ‘yogh’ was coming to an end. This was the final code he was trying to explain to her.

  To the poet, the alphabet wasn’t the twenty-six letters that she knew. “I” and “J” were interchangeable. So were “U” and “V”. The letter “Z” was barely used. Instead, ‘yogh’ followed ‘G’, and ‘thorn’ followed ‘T’, to give a series of twenty-five letters.

  And, from the message she had seen in the Église Saint-Pierre, she knew the poet’s code meant that G=W. It was not, as Will had explained to her, the language developing and borrowing from French to English. This was a simple code wheel, like one she had used as a child. “W” replaced “G”; “Y” replaced “A”; “A” replaced “H”.

  ‘That’s all very well,’ Lara said aloud. She had the code for replacing the letters, but she had nothing to which she could relate it. There was no string of apparently random letters for academics to play with in order to find anagrams.

  Exhausted, she closed her eyes again. There was nothing else to do, no clock to watch the seconds ticking by. Whatever else Marsh was trying to do, he was succeeding in dehumanising her. Eventually, through sheer boredom, she would beg to tell him everything she knew.

  Her mind folded once again; she allowed herself to look back across the past. But this wasn’t the effect of the drugs. This was merely a desire to be free from the confines of the room. She dreamed that the past was like looking through a murky window.

  Her dreams were interrupted by the sound of a sliding bolt outside. Her eyes snapped open. Damn it, she thought, don’t I have any peace around here? No privacy? Won’t people knock before they come in?

  She pulled herself up in bed and pulled the sheet up to her chest as far as she could as Marsh entered. He dropped a pair of slip-on shoes on the floor by the side of the bed.

  She tried to stand. She lost her balance and steadied herself by the bedside. The muscles in her calves felt like they had contracted. Her ankles throbbed. Marsh did not attempt to help her. ‘Can you walk?’ he said. He did not smile.

  The pain in Lara’s legs subsided a little, becoming only a tingling in her toes. ‘A little way,’ she said. She slipped into the shoes.

  ‘You are to come with me,’ he said. ‘A shower has been arranged for you.’ Lara didn’t like the way he said “arranged”. It reminded her too much of the fatal showers in Auschwitz. But she summoned her strength and, concentrating, placed one cautious foot in front of another. It was a slow process. She leaned against the door frame.

  ‘Come on,’ Marsh said. ‘Time waits for no man.’ He cocked his head to the left, indicating she should walk that way down the corridor. He followed.

  The air was cold. The tunnel, barely illuminated, stretched into the darkness, punctuated by side passages. If this was the underground complex in which Will claimed to have hidden, she understood why the occupants had found it so hard to find him. She imagined she was right in the heart of it, as far from an exit as she could be. It would be folly to try to escape.

  Since folly you have sought, you deserve to find it, she thought. She’d read it in the manuscript.

  That damn manuscript, she thought, wishing she had never seen it. It should have been burned in the fire, and not left for maniacs like Marsh to use as a source of leverage against her.

  She could make out numbers painted on the white-washed walls, indicating storage areas. When she thought back, she recalled something Will had said, about this location being a storage facility in preparation for D-Day. As they walked, she saw the numbers decreasing and, as they passed an intersection, she peered to the right. She was in ‘J’ corridor, which meant she had to try to navigate herself through ten of these corridors to find her way to the surface. But then that meant accepting all that Will had told her about his confinement in the tunnel as gospel. Given the number of lies and half-truths that he’d already told, she wouldn’t trust anything that he’d said.

  Narrow iron tracks ran next to the walkway, no doubt a throwback to the war days. The passage had a thick odour of sulphur and stale smoke. Small wisps of stagnant cloud hung in the air. There was a foul stench of damp decay emanating from piles of rubble.

  Occasionally the passage broke into larger chambers, supported by white pillars. She saw ladders and wondered if they led up to the world above, or to just another level of this abyssal labyrinth. In other places, when the rails on the ground curved round a corner, Lara saw circular columns and rough walls in the distance. As they moved, the passage became more hospitable. They emerged into a long arched corridor. Rooms with heavy bolted doors were scattered along the way. The rooms without doors were filled with rubble strewn from other places in the complex. Water banged, trapped in long metal pipes. Air growled as it was circulated through a huge rusted convection fan.

  They turned another corner. Now the passage h
ad become a semicircle with a low roof. Lara had completely lost her sense of direction. But Marsh didn’t seem to be deliberately disorientating her. She thought that Marsh was too self-opinionated to waste time on a sight-seeing tour.

  ‘Watch your head,’ Marsh said, indicating low iron girders. Lara ducked. ‘You will turn left here,’ Marsh commanded. Lara did as she was told.

  After a while, she saw the warming glow of distant lights – perhaps the bunks and the mess hall. The rest of the corridors had been so dark, that she squinted against the glare as they moved towards them.

  The corridors were empty; no doubt Marsh didn’t want her to contact any of the workers in the area. Perhaps they might be sympathetic to her.

  He pointed to a small cubicle. ‘You will find all that you need,’ he said, in a curt voice. He gave a long, drawn-out sigh, as if Lara’s washing herself was a personal affront.

  ‘Sod him,’ Lara muttered. She pulled the shower curtain around her and quickly checked the cubicle for spy-holes. Finding nothing, she disrobed. She turned on the taps, not knowing what to expect, but bracing herself against a poison. It did not come. Instead, it was a bracing cold jet of water, which knocked the air from her lungs as it hit her skin. She gasped, but did not cry out. She washed herself quickly, using caustic soap that had a bitter smell of disinfectant. It was fast, but thorough. She enjoyed the moment while it lasted. The act of cleaning herself was more than just a physical act. It seemed to wash away some of the traumas which had etched themselves into her life. She wondered if the waters of Holywell would do the same thing, except that this would be more than a cleaning of her skin, but a cleansing of her inner soul, her inner spirit.

  ‘Come on,’ Marsh said, from outside. ‘I do not have all day.’

  She towelled herself down and found a clean set of underwear and a packet of sanitary towels, which she applied. Then she dressed in the hospital gown again and, wrapping the towel around her hair, returned to Marsh’s custody. He did not speak to her as they walked back along the corridor. Instead she was left to her silent observation.

  Through the maze of passages once more, Lara tried to trace a path through the darkness, something which would lead her away from her captivity. She glanced down at Marsh’s belt; there was no sign of a weapon. Evidently, he felt he didn’t need one.

  Despondency fell across her. Instead of seeing escape routes, she saw ladders that might lead to a single room in which she’d be trapped; she saw doors to the left and right that might lead into a room with no other exits; she saw passages which went on forever; weakened floor-boards that concealed a pit. Only Marsh could provide her with freedom, unless her fantasy dream-wanderings meant she could move her body as well as her mind.

  She wondered if she had been trying too hard and if she could relax a little, then she would be able to roam through time. But she caught the thought and dismissed it as soon as it had appeared. She did not believe in these hopes. She had to believe in something more logical. She had to believe in herself. That was where the problem lay. Will had drained her of any hope. She needed a reason to believe.

  Without knowing precisely where she was in the complex, she discovered they had reached her room once again. A large meal was waiting for her. This wasn’t the “bread-and-water” rations she’d expected. There was steaming roasted meat and fresh vegetables, dripping with gravy. Evidently, the shower and the walk through the passages had been timed down to the last minute, so the meal would be placed in her room and the carrier could scurry away before Lara turned the corner.

  ‘What’s this?” Lara asked with a smile. ‘A reward for good behaviour?’

  Marsh raised an eyebrow. ‘No. It’s the condemned’s last meal.’

  ‘What?’ Lara’s voice was incredulous. She tried to speak, but her words had frozen in her throat.

  ‘Since you are unwilling to disclose anything we wish to know, we assume you have outlived your usefulness. You are to be terminated in the morning.’ He gave her a malevolent smile. ‘Unless you can think of something to tell us. Something useful, something honest.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘Save it until the morning,’ Marsh told her. ‘And in the meantime, Bon appétit.’

  Suddenly, Lara had lost her appetite.

  14

  The sound of a bolt jarred Lara from her troubled slumber. She shook herself awake, couldn’t believe she’d managed to sleep in the face of Marsh’s threat.

  The door opened. She expected to see Marsh, either for his final inquisition, or with a squad of executioners. Instead, Will rushed in, breathless, panicked, carrying her holdall. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Get dressed. We’re getting you out of here.’ Lara didn’t move. Instead, she stared at him quizzically. ‘Come on,’ he urged. ‘We don’t have time. They’re coming for you soon.’

  She sat up slowly, wondering if this was another part of the trap, designed to fill her with a false sense of security, but Will’s eyes were full of desperation. He was already by her bedside, pulling out clothes from the holdall. ‘Come on,’ he urged. Sleep still pinned her down. Will came to the side of the bed, pushing the untouched plate of food on the floor out of the way. When he tried to help her out, she sprang away from him like a startled cat.

  ‘Don’t touch me,’ she hissed, and her voice was low and menacing. ‘Don’t you come anywhere near me, you bastard.’ Will looked hurt, but he kept his distance.

  ‘I’ll turn my back on you while you get dressed,’ he said. ‘But get a move on.’ Her senses were still confused by sleep, but as Will turned his back, she slipped out of the hospital gown and pulled on a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt.

  ‘Okay, I’m ready,’ she said. She sat down on the end of the bed and pulled on her trainers. Will reached for her hand, but she pulled away from him.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But come with me.’

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t trust you. This is a trap.’

  Will sighed stoically. ‘The other option is you wait until Marsh turns up to interrogate you. You don’t have any choice. Please,’ he pleaded. ‘I know what their interrogations are like.’

  Lara’s jaws ached. She was torn. She couldn’t stay here. If nothing else, the boredom, the frustration and the fear, were all too much to bear. But she also couldn’t trust Will to hold the keys to her freedom. Slowly, she moved towards the door.

  Will glanced out into the corridor then led the way. Lara followed. She looked over her shoulder as she hurried away. Her fingernails were digging into her palms. She couldn’t see anyone, but that didn’t mean they weren’t being followed or watched.

  Will turned right and then right again into a dimly lit subterranean car park; he opened the back doors to one of the vans parked there. ‘Get in,’ he said. Seeing her hesitation, he stepped towards her. ‘Come on!’ he almost screamed in frustration. ‘There are blankets in the back. Cover yourself over with them.’ Lara clambered in and hid herself among the blankets. The van doors slammed, then the engine started. The van crawled slowly through the compound; then she was tipped back as it went up a ramp.

  The van stopped, the engine idled. Lara heard a low murmur of voices. She could just discern Will’s voice, explaining that Marsh had sent him on an errand and he’d return shortly. Someone asked what he was carrying in the van. Will replied with a nonchalant grunt. Lara’s fear increased. Will was selling her out. She imagined him making a facial gesture to explain she was in there. Either the van would be searched and she would be discovered, or he was taking her to her interrogation instead of Marsh coming for her himself.

  She was shivering uncontrollably, pulling the blankets tight around her.

  Then she heard the clattering of electronic gates as they opened; the van started up again, as she heard Will breathing a sigh of relief. ‘We’re outside … you can come out now.’

  She didn’t move, and he didn’t speak again until he stopped the van. ‘This is Bath station,’ he told her. ‘I’ve got you a ticket to Lo
ndon.’

  He opened the door, then stepped back to let her out. She stared out uncertainly, seeing commonplace objects as if for the first time. She would never again dismiss a street light as unimportant, nor would she be able to avoid staring up at the stars without her eyes being filled with wonder. She clung on to her holdall, as if relinquishing her grasp would make this newfound freedom go away. She didn’t trust Will, didn’t trust his motives, but she knew better than to turn down an offer of help. When she peered up at the stars, she knew she couldn’t go back underground like a lab rat.

  ‘Your train ticket’s in your purse,’ he said. ‘From London, you can go wherever you want, as if you’d never heard of me.’

  ‘If only that were possible,’ Lara said acerbically. She wanted to turn on her heels and walk away, not saying any more, but a question burst from her lips. ‘I don’t understand. You went to a lot of effort to get me captured, why are you setting me free?’

  Will’s face fell. ‘Let’s just say I’ve had split loyalties all the way along. I’ve decided what side I’m on.’ Darkness seemed to be pressing down on him. ‘The reason why Marsh asked you about the manuscript is because I told him I didn’t have it. That was true. I mailed it to my sister, for safekeeping. She’s expecting you, if you want to finish off the trail by yourself.’

  Lara stared at him coldly. ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  ‘Then say nothing. I don’t expect you to forgive what I did. But one day you might understand.’ He closed the back doors of the van and looked at her sadly. ‘I’m sorry, Lara, I truly am.’ He stared at the ground. ‘I’d better go.’

  Her heart quivered with shock. ‘You’re not going back, not after setting me free?’

  ‘One way or another, they’ll find me,’ Will said with a long sigh. ‘I may as well give in gracefully and throw myself on their mercy, rather than keep running. That’ll just make them more angry.’

  ‘They’ll kill you,’ Lara said in an empty voice.