by Sam Christer
‘Bit of both, I suppose.’ She hadn’t told him everything. Only some of her speculation about Lock and Timberland. Why they’d been drawn to the site, the lure of the solstice and its sacred connotations. She’s interested in his professional opinion. ‘You think it’s daft to consider a cult rather than a kidnap gang?’
He shrugs. ‘Aside from the odd one or two, the Charles Mansons of this world, I don’t believe cults are anything more than a few nutty fanatics who like a strange dance and the odd prayer or two before a bit of dressing up and frantic sex.’
She laughs.
‘Listen, Stonehenge is commercially marketed as being magic, mystical and all that stuff. The security staff over there actually tell you it’s a sacred site, they warn you that you mustn’t on any account even touch the stones. They are paid to say that, to perpetuate the myths. It’s a pagan place of worship. Go there any day of the week and you’ll see nut-jobs from all over the world kneeling and praying before those rocks. You’re bound to come across stories about cults and all their oddities.’
She’s missed being able to talk to him like this. Confide in him. Bounce work off him. ‘So you don’t buy it? It’s all just legend and folk tales. Like turning water into wine and feeding thousands with a loaf of bread and a couple of fishes?’
‘You know, Meg, Wiltshire is full of ghosts and myths. St George is supposed to have slain a dragon over at Uffington. Merlin is supposed to have been at Stonehenge.’ He laughs as he stands up. ‘Don’t get too hung up on it all and I wouldn’t go mentioning it to anyone at work who is brighter than Jimmy.’
He bends down and kisses her. ‘Got to go.’
‘Thanks. Tell Mum I’ll call her later.’
She hears his feet thunder down the stairs and the front door slam.
Adam starts up his old BMW, a four-year-old three series he bought cheap at auction. He backs off the drive and calls the station to see if anything urgent is happening. He’s struck lucky. Sounds like a nice quiet shift ahead.
Next he swaps phones and makes a private call. The kind he doesn’t want Megan knowing about. ‘It’s Aquila,’ he says. ‘I’m not entirely sure, but I think we might have a problem.’
118
The Henge Master sits in the flickering candlelight of his chamber and muses on the tricky issue of timing. Three days until the first twilight of the first full moon after the summer solstice. The time the ritual must begin. He must be precise. The sacrificial offering has to start in astronomical twilight on the evening of this coming Sunday and be completed by the start of nautical twilight on Monday morning.
There is much to plan. Bearers to be chosen. Lookers to be detailed. Trusted Followers will soon start arriving from across the world. They will be ensconced as guests in the homes of their British counterparts.
The police activity has lessened but it is still considerable. Too intense to take chances. The newspapers write of little else but the young woman held captive just metres from him. She is less troublesome now. Six days without food has taken the fight out of her. After the pointless escape attempt she has become more placid. He thanks the gods for small blessings.
Then there is Gideon. Spread out in his chamber are the coded diaries Chase brought with him. The Master can’t make sense of what they say. The boy has probably made copies of them. He’s not stupid. Seems every bit as smart as Nathaniel was. Every bit his equal. Should he survive the effects of the initiation, he may prove an asset rather than a liability.
The door to the chamber opens and the hooded form of Draco enters.
‘What is it?’ The Master’s clipped tone betrays a building tension.
‘Thank you for seeing me at short notice. I was contacted this morning by our brother Aquila. His wife, a detective inspector working from headquarters, is starting to make the kind of connections we don’t find helpful.’
‘In what way?’
‘About the American girl and her English boyfriend. She has been speculating that they had been drawn to Stonehenge because of the solstice. That the American had been kidnapped close by.’
The Master is unconcerned. ‘I’ve read as much in the tabloid press. The police won’t make it their focus. ‘They know the media make up a new line every hour.’
‘But this woman is also investigating the Nathaniel Chase suicide,’ says Draco. ‘And a missing person. The young man chosen as our last sacrifice.’
The Master nods. ‘Now I understand. It is good that you raise this. And good that Aquila reported his concerns with us. I will have the detective taken care of.’
119
Jimmy Dockery is missing.
He hasn’t turned in to work. No one has seen him. The computer on his desk is off. There’s no response on his radio. He hasn’t phoned in sick and from the checks Megan has done he’s not at home. No car on the drive. No sign of life.
There could be a perfectly reasonable explanation. But that’s not what she’s thinking. She’s imagining the worst. And with good reason. Gideon Chase is also missing. He doesn’t answer his landline or his mobile. He’s not at home either. She just drove back from Tollard Royal and there’s no trace of him.
Could Jimmy be with Gideon? It’s the obvious connection. But why? Was Jimmy following up on things they’d discussed? She censors more sinister thoughts. Megan would like a face-to-face with Dockery Senior. She’d love to look the Deputy Chief in the eyes and see if he knows anything about his missing son. She can’t believe she’s thinking like this. She remembers what Adam had said. That it would be professional suicide to start talking to other people at work about what is going on in her head. She shakes off the dark ruminations and determines to busy herself. Wait for either Jimmy or Gideon to turn up.
Master butcher Matt Utley is top of her to-do list. She heads to the property office to take another look at the evidence recovered from the burglary. She now feels sure that the axe she noticed in the recovered bag will turn out to be some kind of butcher’s cleaver.
Megan briefly passes the time of day with Louise, the recently widowed property officer, and tells her what she needs. They carry on chatting as the fifty-two-year-old disappears in the back and shouts above the noise of rooting through paper bags and boxes on metal shelves. ‘You sure about the dates and case number, Megan?’
‘Sure I’m sure.’
Louise reappears. ‘Let me check again.’ She types in the reference in her computer. ‘Sorry, I don’t have any entry record.’ She looks puzzled. ‘There’s no trace of anything at all being logged. These numbers you gave me, they don’t match anything in the back.’
Megan is thrown. ‘Then where is it? I saw this evidence personally. I went over it with the PC who recovered it and my own DS said he was—’ She runs out of words.
Jimmy told her he’d log the evidence in. She clearly remembers him picking it up off her desk. Her blood runs cold.
Another thought hits her.
She thanks Louise and rushes back to her desk. Opens her computer mailbox. Frantically scrolls down the messages. Panic makes her heart race. She types quickly into the search box.
Nothing.
Types again. This time slower. Scrolls manually through the messages. Still nothing. Flushed with shock, she checks her recent documents tags and deleted files section.
Blank.
They’ve all been permanently erased. ‘Oh God.’ She covers her face with her hands. The automated mail that alerted her to the face-recognition match with Matt Utley has vanished.
She has nothing on him.
Every shred of evidence has disappeared.
120
‘You don’t look so arrogant and full of yourself now,’ says Draco, leaning over Gideon and looking into his bloodless face. The Keeper of the Inner Circle knows what he’s been through. Hell. He’s been there himself.
Draco picks up a wrist manacle, puts a key in it. The chain is dangling to the screwed hook in the stone floor. ‘Before I let you out, I need to know if I c
an trust you.’
Gideon is weak, traumatised. ‘You can.’ His voice is slow and hoarse.
Draco unlocks the manacles. Two men materialise out of the shadows and lift Gideon to his feet. He is a dead weight and has trouble standing. Blood rushes painfully to his head. He feels incredibly weak, hungry.
He drifts light-footedly across the Great Room, disorientated, as though in the middle of an out-of-body experience. The hooded men around him seem to be shimmering, surrounded by golden auras that expand and shrink as they breathe in and out. When Draco speaks, clouds of white waft from his mouth. Like breath on a cold winter’s day.
He knows they are moving him down passageways but he can’t feel his feet. Can’t feel anything. Yet his sight and hearing are highly sensitised not dulled. He can hear the moisture shrivelling up in the hewn sandstones around him. He can see the entire corridor reflected in the dark eye of an ant in the mortar where the wall meets the floor.
They stop in a panic. Their halos mingle and seem to catch fire. Their voices overlap, spill on to each other, their words are green, red, brown. Gideon laughs. They spin him round. He senses uncertainty. There are other men across from him. Men and a woman.
A beautiful woman. Young, dark haired and gorgeous.
His mother.
Gideon knows it is her. She is alive. They pull him away from her. But she sees him. For a split second, he is sure his mother’s eyes catch his.
He is wrestled away. He cranes his neck and looks for her over his shoulder. But she is gone.
121
Megan knocks lightly on the door of Jude Tompkins’ office and peers in. The DCI is a long way from being a friend, but seems to be the only person she can turn to now.
‘Ma’am, I’m very sorry to disturb you. I need to talk in confidence about an important development.’
The office is dark. Tompkins frowns through the puddle of yellow light spilled from a desk lamp. ‘What is it, Baker?’
‘Ma’am, Jimmy and I have been following up on the Naylor case.’
The DCI looks up, casts her mind back and remembers the file. ‘Tony Naylor?’
‘Yes, ma’am, that’s right.’
She downs her pen and sits back. ‘Okay, come in. Tell me quickly. Gibson and Rowlands have got me chasing my own tail.’ She gestures to a seat.
‘Thank you, ma’am.’ Megan shuts the door and sits. ‘To cut a long story short, Naylor is dead.’
Some of the tension on the DCI’s face eases. In terms of time, money and resources, a dead missing person is usually better than a live one. ‘You’ve got a body?’
‘Sort of, ma’am. Naylor’s body was reduced to fertiliser and spread across a field.’
The DCI puts her head into her hands. Wearily. A dead murdered person is a whole other matter. The last thing she wants right now. She scrubs at her mat of lacquered hair, tries to get the blood flowing. ‘You have forensic evidence, Baker?’
‘We got a sample from his parents, ma’am. The match is perfect.’
Tompkins widens her tired eyes, sits more upright and stares across the desk. ‘Have you told them any details?’
‘Not yet.’
‘You said he was fertiliser?’
‘Maybe a wrong description, ma’am. Somebody, some thing, pulverised his body then spread it across what used to be a crop field near Imber.’
She pulls a sour face. ‘So how did you find it?’
‘We got a lead from a dog tag found by a jogger. Naylor’s sister identified it, from the inscription on the back, as one she’d bought for him.’ Megan can see by the exhausted look on her boss’s face that now is not the time to mention the rather unorthodox deployment of Turkey vultures. ‘DS Dockery organised a search, brought back soil samples. The lab ran quick PCR tests on them and found scraps of human flesh in the earth. These samples were taken from a huge field, from right across it. And all of them contained the same DNA. Labs then matched those to the familial DNA we took.’
Tompkins is impressed. ‘Well done. Another time, this would be our major case of the year.’ She glances down at the files on her desk, a mass of papers, the photographs of Jake Timberland and Caitlyn Lock. ‘Was that what you wanted to discuss confidentially, or is there something else?’
‘There’s more.’ Megan gestures to a giant map of Wiltshire on the wall of the office. ‘It’s where we found Naylor’s remains that disturbs me, ma’am.’ She gets to her feet, walks over to the map. ‘Here.’ She lands a finger out in the desolate woods and fields of Salisbury Plain. ‘It’s barely a mile from where Jake Timberland’s body was found.’
Tompkins gets up to join her at the map. She peers at the bleak spot. ‘So who owns this section of land?’
‘That’s what’s interesting, ma’am. If you look at the Land Registry, it says the Ministry of Defence owns everything out there. But that’s not quite true. I dug around a bit and it transpires they own 99.9 per cent. The 0.1 per cent they don’t own is this section. The bit with our field and our barn in it. The place where we’ve discovered the remains of two bodies within a matter of days.’
‘So whose is it?’
‘It’s owned by Nathaniel Chase. Or at least it was, until he killed himself. Now it belongs to his son. Gideon.’
122
The rule of three. It was one of the first things that producers taught Caitlyn when she went on Survivor.
Rule one: humans can’t survive more than three hours exposed to extremely high or low temperatures unless they are wearing proper clothing. Rule two: humans can’t survive more than three days without water. Rule three: humans can’t survive more than three weeks without food.
Caitlyn thinks they should have added a fourth: humans can’t survive when they’re imprisoned in a block of stone and mind-fucked by whack-jobs in dressing gowns.
The cramped conditions are physically gruelling. The lack of fresh air is an agony. She is permanently shivering with cold. But what’s really killing her is the boredom. She’s being crushed to death by her own fears and imaginings.
Her teeth chatter. She knows her body temperature is falling critically but there isn’t enough room to do any form of exercise vigorous enough to generate heat. They are giving her water but she’s dehydrating. The persistent migraines are so bad she feels like she’s going to black out. Hunger pains are constant and it’s so long ago since she ate she can’t remember. In the Camper with Jake. That must have been it. A lifetime ago.
Another stomach cramp chews through her abdomen and Caitlyn doubles up in pain. She knows exactly what’s happening to her body. Wishes she didn’t. It’s eating itself. Chewing through her reserves of fat and muscle. Laying to waste all the years of good nutrition and hard work in the gym. Already she can feel her well-toned biceps and quads softening, shrinking.
After her appearance on Survivor, Caitlyn was signed up as an ambassador by GCAP, the Global Call to Action against Poverty. So she knows every dirty detail about starvation. On average, it’s how one person dies every second. Four thousand an hour. A hundred thousand a day. Thirty-six million a year. She doesn’t want to be one of them. Not another awful statistic.
Dizziness washes over her again. She slides to the floor so she doesn’t fall and crack her head. A sickening blackness engulfs her. She’s uncertain now whether she’s awake or hallucinating. Men are lifting her out of her cell and walking her to the showers. Her vision is blurred and she feels faint, struggling to breathe.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees a dark huddle. People moving towards her. Hooded captors, holding someone.
Jake.
He’s alive.
She struggles to focus. Sees him surrounded by other men, robed and mean-eyed. Like the monsters who have been guarding her. He looks naked. His chin is sagging on his chest as they lead him by the arms. She wants to say something but her mouth won’t work. Wants to run to him but can barely stand. Blood rushes through her like a queasy tingling virus and she collapses in the smothering
dark.
123
Megan and her boss are still staring at the map. They’ve come to the same conclusion.
Two dead bodies found in such a small area, both discovered within days of each other, and on land owned by a rich and powerful man who unexpectedly killed himself. It’s a combination of factors that can’t be ignored.
‘Pull Gideon Chase in and give him the third degree,’ says Tompkins. ‘Rattle his cage and see if he’s a grieving son as white as pure driven snow or whether there’s something else to him.’
‘Ma’am, I’ve been trying to get in touch with him all day, without any luck.’ She hesitates before adding, ‘I’ve also been unable to contact DS Dockery. He seems to have gone off radar.’
Tompkins fears this is a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing. ‘Is he already with Chase, Baker?’ The thought amuses her. ‘Is your DS already a step ahead of you?’
Megan doesn’t rise to the bait. ‘Perhaps, ma’am. But that doesn’t explain why I can’t contact either of them. Chase’s landline is tripping to answerphone and I’ve tried both their mobiles and left messages.’
‘Then perhaps Jimmy’s dragged him out to the middle of the Plain. Reception out there can be bad.’ The thought jolts her into a more strategic worry. ‘Actually, we need to get operational support to cordon off the scene where you found Naylor’s remains and find a forensic archaeologist to search the area.’
‘I’ve already had the scene secured, ma’am. I took the liberty as soon as the results came in. You were unavailable at that time, otherwise I’d have updated you earlier.’
The DCI’s door opens and her secretary leans in. ‘The Chief and the Deputy would like to see DI Baker, ma’am.’
Tompkins looks surprised. ‘Why?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know. The Chief’s PA didn’t give a reason, just said I was to find her urgently.’
In Megan’s experience, ‘urgently’ isn’t a good word. Never has been. Never will be.