Serpent in the Heather

by Kay Kenyon

  But Alice was already rushing back to her lodging to make a telephone call to Owen. Kim must be put on alert. The old woman had killed a girl; it made her a stronger suspect than ever, of course. And Kim must be warned to stay on her guard.

  The lady of the castle was truly the bloody red baroness.

  32

  SULCLIFFE CASTLE, WALES

  2:20 PM. Kim slipped the key into the door of Powell’s room, and the tumblers gave way. With a stitch in her chest, she knew that this was the room that Idelle meant for her to be in. She entered.

  The bow of the turret commanded the far side of the room. Tall windows framed views of the sea, blue and silky and stretching forever. A cushioned window seat nestled into the curved wall.

  On the oversized bed lay a coverlet embroidered with the family emblem. Two button leather arm chairs, a writing table, the massive wardrobe, a faded Turkish rug. In a quick glance she took it all in, remembering her training. The surface things first, the secrets hiding in plain sight.

  If Idelle was acting rationally—and of course she might not be—there was something in the room that she meant Kim to see. She wished that Idelle had given her more information, even if it was in writing, but perhaps the arcane clues were an expression of ambivalence. Perhaps she feared what it would mean for her. Or for Powell, whom she genuinely appeared to love.

  Kim quickly took stock of what lay in the open: a discarded tweed jacket, books cast aside here and there, and on a crowded desk, letters and sheets of writing paper. The topmost letter was to a solicitor regarding bills. Another was to an acquaintance or member of Ancient Light thanking him for hospitality. In cubbyholes of the desk, she flipped through envelopes of correspondence. It was odd to think of Powell having this many friends to write to, but glancing at the contents, Kim realized they were letters from Ancient Light admirers. They might be evidence of attraction, in Powell’s mind.

  Turning to the chests of drawers, she pulled drawers open, some on old and uneven tracks. She probed through stacks of sweaters, socks, vests.

  At the armoire, the doors squeaked dreadfully and would not remain open. Shouldering one of them aside, she pawed through jackets, suits, formal wear, and starched shirts, patting the pockets and releasing a faint whiff of Powell’s cologne.

  What could she expect to find? Suspicious train ticket stubs, perhaps: Portsmouth, Stourbridge, Avebury. Or notes from Talon: Meet me in Cambridgeshire. . . . She closed the armoire. Pulling out the bottom drawer, she found a woman’s shawl and a small box containing a set of pearl earrings. A photograph of a young woman standing on the terrace with a twenty-five-year-old Powell. So, this was Margret. Where was she now? Scared off by Dorothea before Powell could bestow these gifts. She scraped the doors back into place, wincing at the sound.

  In growing frustration, she stood in the center of the room. Idelle. Just tell me. Just tell me.

  A bookcase in the corner. Dozens of books; she could not riffle through them all. Two shelves were given over to Powell’s own creation, Earth Powers.

  How long had she been here? It was 2:34. Fourteen minutes. It felt like an hour.

  The window seat drew her attention. On closer inspection, the facing, trimmed out as five separate panels, appeared to be freshly painted compared to the yellowed walls. Kneeling down, Kim ran her hand along the edges of the trim, tugging. The middle one sprang open on hidden hinges.

  Pulling it fully open, she found a compartment. Inside was a metal box some fifteen inches high and ten wide. On its front panel were dials, a toggle switch, and meters. Ventilation louvers pierced the sides.

  She sat back on her heels, heart racing. A wireless transmitter. Powell wasn’t a ham radio operator, or he wouldn’t have hidden it.

  He was communicating with his handlers.

  He had means to signal—likely Germany—and was keen to hide it. Although she had expected to find something, the discovery of the transmitter galvanized her. She reached into the recess but found nothing more, nor could she open the other panels. She closed the compartment door and stood up.

  The room was very still, the only sound the thud of waves pounding on the headland, perhaps enough to muffle the sound of a scrape on the stairs if someone was coming.

  To stay too long risked losing everything, and she now knew about the transmitter. Very damning. Still, she wasn’t satisfied.

  Her gaze swept over the bed with its coverlet bearing the Coslett sigil. They were proud of the symbol, though it was no true coat of arms. The dogwood blossom, the curl of symbolic waves. The three swords jutted from the stylized castle, pointing outward.

  What was it that Dorothea had said? People are besotted with stones and barrows. But they’re all connected by the sacred ground.

  Connected. Something flickered half-seen in Kim’s mind. She mentally reached out toward it. Connected by sacred ground. All connected. So, it wasn’t only hills and henges and barrows that were important but what lay between them. The lines between.

  Well, what of it? The murders were all over the countryside. What kinds of lines could be drawn? In her imagination, she concentrated on the map of England, but it truly did not seem . . .

  She looked at the bedspread again. Staring at the Coslett emblem, her view softened, and the design lost its simple, even crude layout. It became a mute message, trying to speak.

  The dogwood. That was for earth. The waves. For the sea. Sitting between, the castle. Human habitation. The center of spiritual life. And from that powerful node, the swords piercing. But they had a direction, pointing away. Where did they lead?

  She was out the door and heading down the spiral staircase before she had quite decided to move. Reaching the landing, she pushed into her room, shutting the door behind her, locking it.

  Leaning against the door, she closed her eyes, her mind snatching at insights before they evaporated. She knew what she needed, though. A map. She was in most acute need of a map of England. What were the chances there would be one in the room? Surely, a book with a handy representation of England? But there was no bookcase, nor were there books lying about. No handy basket full of tourist information.

  Except. By God, there was a map. It was in her LNER timetable with its helpful map of the railway lines of Britain.

  She snatched the timetable from the nightstand and turned to the page with the map of the British Isles. Holding the booklet open by placing the bedside lamp on the spine, she made a dark dot with her pen on the location of Sulcliffe Castle. Then central London. The approximate spot along the River Ouse in Cambridgeshire where murder number two occurred. Stourbridge, number five. Avebury, number three. Portsmouth, number one.

  She had packed her copy of Powell’s Earth Powers. It would do for a straightedge. Laying the book edge next to her dot indicating Sulcliffe Castle in north Wales, she drew a line from there to the murder site in Cambridgeshire near the town of Ely.

  That done, she was rather crestfallen. It was a line with two points. It meant nothing. You could connect any two points in the world by a line. But she had four more sites to go.

  Keeping the book edge fixed on the location of Sulcliffe Castle, she pivoted the edge until it connected to London.

  A frisson of amazement passed through her. The line to London intersected Stourbridge. She knew, then, what the third line would show.

  Again, she kept the straightedge at Sulcliffe and found Avebury. She drew a line connecting the two points and extended it to the south of England. Straight into Portsmouth.

  She had three lines spreading out from Wales, pointing directly at the sites of the five attacks.

  Turning the map so that Sulcliffe was at the top, and the lines she had drawn pointed down, it matched the trajectories of the swords on the Coslett emblem.

  For several minutes, she sat on the edge of the bed staring at the map. One reason no one had seen this before was that one was accustomed to seeing England with Scotland at the top and the English Channel at the bottom. Once you tu
rned the map, the lines from Sulcliffe were obviously the same as on the family shield.

  Someone was killing young people along lines that, beginning at Sulcliffe, connected places of imagined power. It was no proof, but in her mind everything was falling into place. Was Powell the killer and working with a second man, an accomplice? Were ritual killings how an earth worshipper might hope to receive the power to lead?

  She lay the timetable down on the nightstand, closing it. The castle emblem. It had been in front of her everywhere: reproduced on the flatware, monogrammed on pockets, hanging over the fire pit in the great hall that was never used. Her heart thumped loudly in her chest. She had to tell someone about this in case something happened to her, but the phone was dead, and she was without a car. To spend another night here was out of the question, unless she could tell someone—Alice, Owen, someone—what she had learned.

  The conspiracy would surely all come unraveled now. The Cosletts would be questioned, and the truth at last could be tracked down.

  She had taken Idelle’s key from her pocket and was gripping it rather hard. When she opened her hand, an imprint of the key remained in her palm. Idelle’s key had unlocked more than just the room. She must have known that Powell communicated using a wireless. Idelle slipped around the castle, silently, often dismissed as incompetent, but sometimes keenly aware of what went on.

  A click in the lock of her bedroom door.

  Kim dropped Idelle’s key on the carpet and kicked it under the bed.

  Turning, she saw Lady Ellesmere standing on the threshold. Behind her stood Donald and Royce, red-haired Donald looking cross indeed, and Royce as though he were terribly disappointed in her.

  Her shoulder bag with her gun lay on the table across the room.

  She stood up, marshalling her lies, her witless innocence, her cunning.

  “Lady Ellesmere,” she said.

  PART IV

  BURNING BRIGHT

  33

  A CABIN, THE SULCLIFFE ESTATE, WALES

  3:15 PM. “We can get you out. If I signal them now, they can have a boat here tonight.”

  Dries had heard Coslett’s report with growing alarm, but Coslett himself was subdued for a man who had murdered and now was attracting the attention of the police or the security service.

  “But how much do they know?” Dries asked. He did not like retreating in the face of an English advance. He would rather continue to outwit them.

  “They know enough to investigate us! They are gathering evidence, they’ve planted an informer, a spy in our midst! They’ll find out everything. I want you out of here.”

  “Baron, you must calm yourself.” The police would find out everything if Coslett fell apart. “They have not found me. If they had anything, they would storm the castle!”

  Coslett stared at him as though seeing him in a new way. A most unfavorable one. “It was never true, was it? My gift. It isn’t coming, is it?”

  Why not abandon pretense? Coslett had lost the will to continue and would be a liability in his present state. “Alas. I do not see evidence. There were times I thought that I did. But no, you are right.”

  Coslett closed his eyes for a moment, absorbing this confirmation of what must be his worst fear. How much did he blame Dries for their needless enterprise? Of course, it was needless only to Coslett. To Dries, it had been of the essence.

  The baron steadied himself with a hand on the back of the overstuffed chair, shaking his head, to and fro, to and fro. “I knew you were a monster, I knew,” came his hoarse voice.

  “Ach, more than you, sir?”

  The distraught fellow turned on him, staggering forward a few steps. “Yes, more than me! You lied to us. We never would have done this if it hadn’t been for the ‘flickers of light’ you saw around me, my powers waiting to flood in! Lies, oh lies . . .” He looked bleakly at Dries, perhaps hoping, even now, that they were not lies.

  Dries could not afford to alienate the man. “You must remember that Hitler believes you have done the Third Reich a great service: the damage done to British morale, the fear instilled in people to register as Talents. If war comes, it will have been a critical operation.” A small lie. Himmler would have preferred adult targets here.

  But it was though the baron had not even listened. “We are finished here,” he said. His words were dispassionate, as though the man were speaking of other people’s lives and not his own, disfigured fate. “You must leave tonight.”

  Dries was being sent away. Well. He could not work here without the Cosletts’ support. And it had been grand while it had lasted. To his surprise he felt a smattering of regret that he had used Coslett so. “Perhaps, Powell, you should get out, too.”

  “No. Never mind about me.” It did not seem to have sunk in that if he feared the authorities would uncover it all, then he was in danger of hanging. Coslett looked around the room as though trying and failing to find something to hold on to. He sank into the overstuffed chair. “She lied to me.”

  Ach. So that was it. The girl. He had—how did they say?—fallen for her.

  “Godverdomme, man. She has been trying to put your neck in a noose!”

  Ignoring this, Coslett said, “I haven’t told Mother that you’ll leave. She’s in high temper right now.”

  “Will you tell her?”

  Coslett stared at the floor. “I wish we had never done these things.”

  “If it is over, then it is over. One must be philosophical.” Coslett had been the perfect dupe for the intelligence service, or the Security Service or whoever the woman worked for. “You are heartbroken, of course. The future wife, your chance for happiness.”

  “She was never that. She was . . .” Coslett’s words ran out.

  “A spy, alas.”

  “There was something about her. . . .” He shook his head. “When the fellow from the newspaper called this morning, wanting to meet me, saying it was about Kim, I had a bad feeling. I disabled the phone. A bad feeling about her.”

  “It is an old trick, Baron, using a woman to lower the defense. Did she offer to come to your bed?”

  “No.” A frown of disgust.

  That he could find it within his murderous heart to be offended by a salacious remark was so British.

  “Well, then. You must make the call for the ship. Perhaps we should lose no time.”

  Coslett rose from the chair, squaring his shoulders. “They’ll wait for you in deep water. A small boat will approach but stay out beyond the surf. You will have to swim. That was the plan.” He looked at his watch. “Once I signal them, they will need at least six hours to move into position. Hide in the cove if you think the cabin is too exposed.”

  Dries sighed. The operation was over, then, truly. “So. What will you do with her?”

  “Do?”

  “With your reporter.”

  “When I get back, Mother and I will decide.” His haunted look belied his upper-crust composure.

  As Coslett moved to the door, Dries said, “You should come with me. Our German friends would welcome you.”

  He did not answer, slipping out of the cabin.

  Dries had a long wait ahead of him. He began collecting his things, slipping them into a rucksack. Calmer now, he admitted to himself he had grown disenchanted with the British killings. It had been different when Himmler had asked him to undertake the mission. But his conversation with the old woman yesterday had soured him on the enterprise. He did not like, did not at all like, for her to prescribe his methods: no churches, no stone circles. It exposed his essential dilemma: how could one take revenge on the British for the British?

  SULCLIFFE CASTLE

  3:20 PM. As Kim stood up to face her, Lady Ellesmere closed the door.

  “I thought you would be down at the fair,” the dowager said. “How odd that you have spent so much time at the castle, when the activities are all on the field.”

  A surge of anxiety yanked at her chest. “Oh, I was just leaving to join the festivities
.”

  “Were you? We did wonder where you had gotten off to. I gave a little speech at the stone ring. I’m afraid you missed it.” She came farther into the room and sat on the edge of the bed. This brought her rather too near the LNER timetable. Kim sank into a chair, bracing for the worst.

  “What is it, exactly,” Lady Ellesmere said with elaborate politeness, “that you are looking for here?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Is the name Lloyd Nichols familiar to you?”

  Her mind racing, Kim tried to think how the reporter from the Register could be a problem. “He’s a former reporter for the London Register.”

  “So I gather. Unfortunately for you, he has been investigating your involvement with the Earth Mysteries assignment.”

  “Has he? In what way?”

  “Mr. Nichols tells us that you are working for the authorities. In fact, that you are acting at the behest of the intelligence service.”

  Kim struggled to look perplexed instead of chagrined. “He’s trying to make trouble for me, then. I got the assignment he wanted, you know.”

  “Oh, he has definitely made trouble for you. He has brought facts to our attention, quite convincing facts.”

  “Facts? What facts? Lloyd Nichols is a drunk and has threatened me. Surely you’re not going to listen to someone like that!” What, she wondered, could Nichols possibly know?

  “Young lady. I do not wish to discuss your loathsome little charade any further. We believe him. That is all you need to know. My instinct told me that you were hiding something. I should have listened to it.”

  She was exposed at some level, but perhaps not in conjunction with Crossbow. Coslett might be thrown off the scent if Kim claimed she was investigating something else. Because if the woman thought it was the youth murders, she might not let her leave.