by Clare Carson
It was still spitting when they arrived. There were guided tours, but Jim didn’t want to go on the tour because he hated being organized and hated going with the crowd. They paid for their tickets at the mill, collected a torch and waited for the gap between two tours when the gate was left open. There wasn’t anybody else in sight. From the west as they approached across the fields, Maeshowe looked like an oversized mole hill. When Sam turned around and looked back, though, she could see the line that ran from the cairn’s long, low tunnel entrance through the solitary giant Barnhouse stone to the dip in the hills of Hoy. Even if she hadn’t known this gap was where the sun set on the day of the winter solstice – slicing the top of the Barnhouse stone, shining along the cairn’s passage to the far wall of the tomb’s interior – she would have found the alignment moving. Neolithic. Stone Age. She thought these were inaccurate names for people who, she sensed, were in some ways more sophisticated than them.
She pointed at the Barnhouse stone as they trekked through the sodden grass to the cairn. ‘See that standing stone over there. See how it lines up with the...’ Helen yawned.
‘Look, please don’t make the mistake of thinking that just because I’m here, I’m actually interested in any of this history shit.’
Jess said, ‘I see what you mean, though – it’s a ley line, isn’t it?’
Helen jabbed Jess sharply in the ribs with her elbow, unable to tolerate her sister’s rebellion against the hierarchy.
‘Ow.’ Jess knocked Helen’s arm away. Helen whacked her back.
Jim, striding ahead, stopped and bellowed, ‘Will you lot stop faffing around.’
He was worse than all of them put together, Sam thought.
He waved the torch. ‘I’m going in.’ He ducked and disappeared. Sam ran to catch up, dropped and bent double as she edged along the tunnel, the floor wet beneath, the huge, damp stones pressing down above, guided by the dim light ahead. It wasn’t as claustrophobic as Cuween Hill, where the entrance passage was longer and lower, but it wasn’t far off; the smell of wet earth cloying. Jim was standing in the centre of the tomb, shining the torch around the vast, long slabs of rock, stacked and layered so neatly.
‘Corbelling,’ he said. ‘How did they manage it?’
Jess and Helen joined them. He pointed the beam at the four upright corner stones with their angled tops.
‘I’ve never taken much notice of those before, but they remind me of the stones at Stenness.’
‘Oh, you’re right. The tomb is a bit like a house built around a miniature stone circle.’
‘A home for dead people,’ Jess said. ‘Lovely.’
‘Here, hold this a minute.’ Jim handed the torch to Helen. ‘Shine it on that lintel. I think that’s where the Viking dragon is carved.’
Helen obeyed. Jim went to have a closer look.
‘Welcome to the House of Darkness.’ Helen said it dramatically. It was a while since she’d performed the House of Levitation chant. Sam was amused by this version, customized for Maeshowe. Helen pulled Sam’s sleeve, drew her closer. The three sisters huddled in the middle, while Jim inspected the tomb’s walls.
‘What’s that dripping noise?’ Jim asked, eyes still searching the stones for Norse runes.
‘Water,’ Helen observed. ‘Dripping.’
‘I know it’s water dripping,’ Jim said testily. ‘Where’s it coming from?’
‘There’s a leak in the roof,’ Jess said. The drip, drip echoed around the chamber. ‘It’s like Chinese water torture.’
‘Belt up,’ Jim said.
Sam felt Helen’s arm tense.
Jess seemed oblivious to Jim’s mood, chattering almost nervously. ‘Oh god, wouldn’t it be awful if we were trapped in here and it filled with water?’
‘I said shut it.’
‘This House looks dark,’ Helen said.
The water dripped.
‘This House is dark.’ She flipped the torch switch, plunged them into immediate and total blackness.
Jim shouted, ‘I told you. Stop fucking about. Switch the torch on.’
Helen continued, unperturbed.
‘This man looks ill.’
‘Turn it on.’
‘This man is ill.’
Jim issued a strangled noise, half man, half beast, alarming in the pitch black. Sam’s head pulsed, she couldn’t catch her breath. What was wrong with him? What was wrong with Helen? In command of the torch and refusing to switch it on. She could hear shuffling, feet moving, hands on surfaces – Jim, huffing and muttering. Fuck. Fuck. Get me out.
‘What’s going on?’ Jess said.
Silence. Apart from the drip, drip, drip of the water.
‘This man looks dead.’ Helen seemed determined to complete her chant. ‘This man is dead.’
‘I think he’s gone,’ Jess said.
Helen illuminated the torch.
‘I think he’s gone mad. What’s got into him anyway?’
She said it quite calmly.
‘I don’t think you should have done that,’ Sam said.
‘I didn’t do anything he didn’t ask for. He behaves like a jerk half the time, so why shouldn’t I?’
She shone the torch on Sam’s face. ‘What are you upset about anyway? He might be a psycho, but I doubt whether it’s genetic.’
‘Why do you have to be so horrible about him?’
‘Why do you have to be such a daddy’s girl?’
Jess said, ‘We’d better go and see if he’s OK.’
They squeezed through the puddled tunnel to the daylight. Jim was a megalith standing in the field, his back to the cairn, ahead of him the Barnhouse stone, and beyond, the dark mountains of Hoy. Part of the ancient alignment. Out here, he seemed sturdy. Dependable. And yet he had just flipped, for no apparent reason. She regarded him, outlined against the dark slope of Hoy, remembered his Waulkmill Bay eruption, and thought she could guess what was eating him. Water... fault. She wondered whether either of them, Jim or her, would ever be able to feel quite so at ease in Orkney again after the events of the previous summer. The year of the heatwave had left its mark.
CHAPTER 27
London, October 1989
BLACKNESS THICKENING AS the water closed over her head. She wanted to breathe but she couldn’t open her mouth. Pain in her lungs. Head. Fingers twisted her hair, forced her under. A light glinted in the dark. She couldn’t tell whether it was above or below and she thought it was the end. She wanted the pain to be over. She tried to swim but she couldn’t reach the brightness. She heard a shout and she broke the surface, spluttering, gasping for air.
‘Sam, are you OK?’
Becky’s voice. She was standing by the door, hand on light switch. Sam wheezed. No oxygen in her lungs. An iron weight on her chest. What had woken her? She knew this sensation. It had happened before when she was a kid, hearing somebody shouting, waking, spluttering. A man’s voice yelling.
Becky sat beside her, arm around her shoulder.
‘Breathe through your nose.’
She inhaled. The wheezing subsided, eyes still weeping.
‘I didn’t know you suffered from asthma.’
‘I don’t.’
‘What happened? Did you choke on something?’
‘No. I dreamt I was drowning.’
‘Did your life flash before your eyes?’ Becky sounded more curious than sympathetic.
‘No. I wanted to open my mouth to breathe but I couldn’t, and everything was black.’
She rubbed Sam’s back.
‘Yeah, the life flashing before your eyes is a bit of a myth. Drowning is actually a form of asphyxiation – the body’s reflex keeps the mouth shut to prevent water entering, but then the brain doesn’t get any oxygen and ends up smothered with carbon dioxide.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘You’re OK now?’
‘Yes, I think so. What time is it?’
‘Five.’
The night-time escape from Execution Wharf
had left her knackered, bruised and sniffling. She had spent two days dozing and drifting, the room dim, dawn, noon and dusk blurring in London’s overcast autumn haze.
‘Listen, somebody knocked on the door and asked if they could come in and talk to you.’
Sam inhaled, coughed, face reddened. Reznik. His enforcer. Had they found her? Becky patted her on the back again.
‘God, what is wrong with you?’
‘Who?’ She managed to push the words out between breaths. ‘Who knocked on the door?’
‘A woman. She’s got blonde hair. She says she lives on a houseboat.’
Karina. Her trachea narrowed. She wheezed.
‘Sounds like asthma to me.’
Sam swung her legs over, perched on the side of the bed, hands either side, head hanging, deep breaths. The floorboards bucked beneath her feet. ‘Did you let her in?’
‘She’s in the kitchen. Was that a mistake?’
‘No. No, it’s fine.’
‘You seem a bit better now.’
Sam nodded.
‘I’ll leave you to it. I’m going out.’
‘Where are you going?’
She didn’t want Becky to leave; she needed her friend’s normality, her refusal to be intimidated by the shadows and secrets that haunted Sam.
‘I’m on the prowl. It’s the best cure for a dumping. I’m going to meet a friend in Brixton then we’re going to the Fridge.’
‘Venus Rising?’
‘Yup.’
Becky headed for the door. ‘Come and find me if you fancy a dance later.’
‘I don’t know...’
‘Don’t tell me, you’re meeting Tom.’
‘No, it’s not...’
‘You don’t have to make excuses.’ Becky clumped down the stairs. ‘See you.’ The front door banged.
Sam made her way to the kitchen. The back door open, cigarette smoke wafting in, Karina leaning against the trunk of the rowan. A sparrow hopped among the leafless branches, striking at dangling red berries. She smiled nervously.
‘I’m sorry, I had to come.’
Piled blonde hair glinting, lines across her brow softened in the darkness. One of those women who would skip middle age, remain girlish until old age caught her and made her brittle.
‘It’s OK. Don’t worry.’ Sam found herself reassuring Karina, as if she were a child. ‘Do you think anybody followed you here?’
‘No. I took evasive measures.’
‘Evasive measures?’ Sam was relieved Karina had been careful, but perturbed by her professional language. ‘Are you trained?’
Karina laughed nervously. ‘No. I know that life because of my father, even if I’m not part of it.’ She held a cigarette delicately between two fingers, smoke curling around her face. ‘I wish I didn’t know about it, but I do. People tell me things.’
Sam edged down across the yard, closer to Karina.
‘I can’t always be sure why they are telling me things, or whether the things they tell me are true.’ Karina cupped her right elbow in her left hand, the red tip of her cigarette dangerously close to her hair. ‘But in this case I believed them and I had to do something.’
Her left hand flitted from her elbow to her neck, fiddling with the chain of her pendant, the white edge of the mosaic tile visible above the dip in her shirt.
‘I have been told that Pavel has returned to London. Of course, Pavel wasn’t his real name.’
‘Oh?’ Sam tried to sound surprised.
‘No. I always thought he was untrustworthy. His real name is Reznik.’ She puffed, eyed Sam through the cloud of smoke. ‘And he knows where Davenport is living.’
‘That’s not possible.’ Sam’s reaction was immediate. Defensive. She hadn’t revealed Pierce’s hideaway. She had said nothing. She had a sudden sense this was a trap; Reznik didn’t know where Pierce was hiding, she had been allowed to escape from Execution Wharf and Karina had been primed to follow her. Karina sensed her scepticism and her face crumpled, eyes brimming.
‘You have to believe me, please. I don’t know anybody else who can help.’
Such intense feelings for somebody she hadn’t seen for thirteen years. She didn’t even know his real name; in love with a spectre. Sam lifted a hand to comfort her, retracted it, confused.
Karina said, ‘I wish it wasn’t true, but I am scared that Reznik will hunt and kill him.’
‘How do you know all this?’
‘I told you, I grew up with people from this world. I still have contacts. Sometimes they are reliable. Sometimes not. But in this case, I am sure the information is correct. I am told it is from Reznik’s solicitor. He let it slip to somebody who knew my father – a family friend, I suppose. A Czech. I don’t think the solicitor was aware of the connection.’
A bad slip for the solicitor to make; she didn’t fancy his chances of survival if Karina’s information was correct and Reznik discovered the source of the leak. Unless, of course, he’d realized his number was already up and was playing games to undermine Reznik and save his own skin.
‘My father’s friend is a property dealer and was supposed to be signing a contract on a place Reznik is buying. He’s been chasing him for weeks, but Reznik has been evasive. He managed to corner his solicitor this morning at one of his other developments – Execution Wharf. Reznik wasn’t there. The solicitor allowed him to look around the place, and when he went out on the balcony, he found a pair of binoculars on the table and saw my houseboat in full view across the river.’
Sam didn’t say anything; unwilling to reveal how much she already knew. She had instantly liked Karina and judged she was genuine, but her history was complicated, her loyalties not straightforward. Perhaps she was being used, her strings pulled in ways she herself could not discern.
‘This contact said he couldn’t put his finger on it, but he thought I ought to know. Instinct for danger, I suppose, after so many years living behind the Iron Curtain. So this friend came and told me straight away. I was unsure at first that it was anything serious. But then he told me Reznik used to operate under the name Pavel, when he was in London last, in the seventies, and then I felt scared.’
‘But did the solicitor tell your friend that Reznik was after Davenport?’
‘He made a joke about an ex-big game hunter becoming the hunted. That has to be Davenport.’
‘Oh.’ A movement in the ivy fringe of the fence caught her eye; a rat emerged, assessed the courtyard and slunk back to the undergrowth. ‘What else did you hear?’
‘The solicitor said Reznik might be away a couple of days, because he has to find this man.’
‘Find him? I thought you said Reznik knew his location.’
‘Not exactly. Apparently Reznik has gone to some island off the north coast of Scotland.’
How had Reznik discovered Pierce was in Orkney? Pierce had told her that only a small handful of people had ever known where he was living; a couple of trusted colleagues in Intelligence, Jim and herself. Jim was dead. She hadn’t given the information to Reznik. If he had been betrayed by one of his Intelligence colleagues, they would have given him the precise details of his hideaway. There was one other person who knew he was in Orkney and might have a motive for betraying him, she suspected. Harry. He didn’t have much time for Pierce, although he had been vague about his reasons. She thought about the note slipped in her pocket. Don’t trust Harry. Was it possible that Harry had found Reznik and told him the location of Pierce’s hideaway? Sam poked a mound of leaves with her toe, recoiled when a worm slithered away.
‘Sam, please take this.’
She looked up. Karina had removed her necklace and was holding it in the air. The Fisher King’s treasure twisted, ghostly white.
‘Take it.’
Sam caught the tile in her hand; its coldness burned her skin.
‘Maybe you can find where Davenport is hiding?’
Sam didn’t dispute Karina’s suggestion; her voice was so pleading.
; ‘It’s urgent.’
Sam dangled the tile by its chain, let it twizzle.
‘Please, take the necklace to him and warn him he is in danger.’
Karina had that strange mixture of knowingness and naïveté she recognized in herself; a child of the shadow state.
‘If I take this to Davenport, then I might also lead Reznik to him. Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe the solicitor is setting you up. Setting us both up to lead them to Davenport.’
‘It’s too late to worry about that. Reznik has set off anyway, he will find him whether you look for him or not. If you are quick, you can reach him first. You, I think, know these islands better than Reznik.’ She gave her a sly glance. ‘I saw a book about the Orkney Islands on the kitchen table when I walked in. Please, if not for me and Davenport, then for your friend Anna. She would be unhappy if anything happened to her father, I am sure. Whatever you do, please do it quickly.’
She smiled sadly, paced away through the kitchen without saying goodbye, let herself out the front door, left Sam standing amid the rowan’s decaying leaves.
*
TOO LATE TO do anything that evening anyway. She clasped the pendant around her neck and toyed with Karina’s plea. Her head told her it was best to take Anna’s advice and mind her own business. Her gut told her it was her own business. Her past, her fate, her future, was tied up with Pierce’s. She had turned to face the shadows and she had to see it through. Karina was right: whatever Anna said about her father, she wouldn’t want to be an orphan. If she reached Pierce in time, he could persuade his Intelligence friends to deal with Reznik, and then they would all be safe – her, Anna, Pierce, Karina. And anyway, if Pierce was killed, she would never find out exactly what Jim had done, in the long summer of ’76.