by Nina Milton
I fell into it and slept like the dead.
By morning, I was thinking clearly. I knew what I had to do. I had to report Rey missing, and I shouldn’t delay. He could be anywhere. He could be lying in a lane, like Marty-Mac, his head bashed in with a brick.
Taken with a single sweep of the sword.
A keening sound came into my throat. I threw on some clothes, fed the hens, and cycled into town.
Even so, as I stood in the little lobby outside the locked doors of Bridgwater Police Station, I had to fight the desire to walk away. This place always made me feel uncertain and conspicuous. The door release buzzed and I heaved my weight against its heaviness.
The male officer on duty behind the bulletproof glass gave a grimace of acknowledgment.
“I need to speak to Detective Inspector Rey Buckley. Is he here?”
“I’m sorry, he’s not available.” He didn’t have to check the roster.
“I think he’s missing, actually. I can’t get hold of him.”
“And you are?”
I opened my mouth and shut it again. His girlfriend, his squeeze. “Can I have a few moments with his deputy, then?”
“I’m sorry?” He looked at me for the first time.“Who do you mean?”
“Pippa Chaisey.” I brushed my hair away from my face. My fingers were ice cold. “Please tell DS Chaisey that it’s Sabbie Dare.”
The officer spoke on an internal line. I didn’t hear his words. My breath whistled fast along dry nostrils. A woman in civvies arrived on my side of the desk. “If you could follow me, please, Miss Dare?”
She walked me through the corridors. We went up one level. We walked some more. I was weak with the thought of seeing Pippa—or rather, her seeing me, raw and red-eyed. I was unable to concentrate on where the woman was taking me. I hoped she’d show me the way back when the time came. The woman stopped outside a door and knocked. Pippa was sitting behind a desk she had not, in my view, yet earned, her laptop open upon it and several files piled near her elbow. I was sure Rey hadn’t had his own office when he was a sergeant.
“Sabbie,” she said. She sounded wary, as if she didn’t know what would be thrown at her.
I stepped into the office and the civilian closed the door on us. I heard her stilettos clip along the corridor.
“Do sit down.”
I eyed the chair. I didn’t want to sit. I wanted to launch myself over the surface of the desk, skid the laptop out of the way, and slap Pippa hard on one cheek.
“Sit down, Sabbie.”
I sat. I was trying to control my breathing, so that my voice would come out loud and confident. “Rey isn’t answering his phone.”
She smiled, but in my buzzing head it felt like a sneer, like she’d curled her lip at me. “I’m sorry, Sabbie.”
“What?”
“Rey is in custody. He’s been charged and not yet bailed. I expect he will get bail, but we’re still questioning him at this moment in time.”
“He’s not guilty.”
“You know, then, what he’s charged with?”
“Let me guess. The murder of Martin Macaskill? He’s not bloody guilty.”
“Please restrain your language. It never helps your case.”
“I don’t have a ‘case,’ Pippa.” I stopped to get oxygen into my lungs. She must have heard me pant, sitting on the other side of her hard-on desk. “You don’t have a case, either. Do you know that?” It occurred to me that yes, they probably did know they didn’t have a case against DI Buckley. Not a watertight, evidence-based case, anyway. There was more going on here than that. “You’ll never get a conviction. So what’s this about?”
“You’re upset,” said Pippa, with startling accuracy. Her next statement hit the bullseye too. “Rey hasn’t been keeping you in the loop, has he? I expect you feel you’ve been sidelined.”
“Rey Buckley didn’t kill Marty-Mac.”
“Let us be the judge of that.”
“Did Rey tell you about PC Wynche?”
She paused. She moved the laptop, the better to eyeball me. “Sorry?”
“Thought not. PC Wynche is the officer looking into a case of random attack on a man in Yeovil. Anthony Bale was assaulted on the morning of June the twenty-first. Has he mentioned Gerald Evens?”
“Sabbie, does this bear any relevance?”
“Of course. I’m not here to have a girlie gossip. Gerald Evens had his head pounded in on—yeah—the twenty-fourth of June, during a bright, sunny day at Glastonbury Abbey. It was a bad attack … I guess it could be attempted murder. I believe I’ve established links between both those attacks and the murder of Martin Macaskill.” I had to stop speaking because I’d run out of oxygen availability. I sat and puffed for several seconds, daring her with my eyes to interrupt my flow. “Certain things stand out and I want to present them to you now, so you can make an informed decision over who committed this crime. Three men have been attacked since the summer solstice. The modus operandi are similar; the injuries becoming more serious as the attacks go on. With Macaskill, the perpetrator finished what they’d started.”
“I’m sorry?” The impeccable cogs in her cop-perfect brain had stalled, and I ploughed on while I had the glimmer of an advantage.
“I need to report my concerns. My suspicions. That, I believe is the prerogative of the public-spirited citizen.”
“Yes, Sabbie, but you aren’t one of said citizens, are you? You are a woman trying to get her man out of the cells.”
“Not at all, Pippa. I’m trying to report something.”
“You’ve lost me. You lost me some time ago.” Pippa got out of her chair and it skid away on its five casters. “There’s nothing here for us. Nothing.”
“You haven’t heard me out.”
“This is a waste of your time, I’m afraid.” She remained standing. She was preparing to cut me down and send me packing. I didn’t get up. She’d been the one to implore me to sit, after all.
“I want to tell you about the anonymous emails my friend has been getting. They’re from someone calling themselves Morgan le Fay—” My voice broke. I was not going to cry in front of this woman. I was not. “It’s hard to get it all summed up—to get the measure of it all. I don’t know everything, ’course not, or how it all fits to make sense. I just know … Rey isn’t guilty—” I had an image of Rey, sitting on his cell bunk, staring at the wall. “If you’d just let me explain the thinking behind my suspicions. I need to lay everything out … how a person can’t perceive reality if all they see are shadows on a cave wall …”
“Okay. That’ll do. You can stick the lid back on your garbage.” She came round the desk and stood by me; over me, almost. “Rey has told me about you. Okay, he’s fond of you, but he knows you’re flaky. You deal in dreams and … suchlike. My investigations deal with data. Testimonials. Documentation. Results.”
“You don’t have a result,” I said. “You have a whitewash.”
I dashed a hand into my shoulder bag. Brice’s four emails were printed onto separate sheets and sealed inside an envelope, ready to hand over. I rested it on the desk. “Examine all that comes to you. That was what I was told to do. When you eliminate that which you no longer need, one possibility will remain.”
“Sabbie …”
“Yeah. Go ahead, remind me. I sound flaky. I can get the answers, Pippa. I’ve done so in the past.” I had to keep ahead of her. Find some rationale that would fit with her view of the world. “Surely if a member of the public believes they have witnessed, or understood, something suspicious, you need to take their statement?”
I watched her process my words. I felt her despair. She was not going to get me out of the station that easily. “Well. It depends on a number of variants—”
“I want to make a statement.”
She exploded into a laugh. “Come
on, Sabbie, you have nothing to state.”
“If I can’t make a statement, I will make a complaint.”
There was a pause. It went on and on, like someone had begun to drill foam insulation into the room; there was an invisible and increasing mound of silence, built from her seething fury and my doggedness.
Finally, it was Pippa who backtracked. “Okay. No, that’s fine. I’ll arrange for you to do that now, shall I?”
“And I want to see Rey.”
“That isn’t possible. Surely you must recognise—”
“Of course it’s possible.” I wasn’t gong to be pushed around any longer. “Don’t tell me that a prisoner cannot have a visitor.”
“You’d better come with me,” she said at last.
I gave my statement to DS Chaisey in the presence of the other woman, who turned out to be a constable seconded to CID. They must need as many investigators as they could get to do all the leg work necessary to pin this death on Rey. I told them all I knew. It turned out to be precious little, but it made me feel better to hand it over.
When they escorted me to Rey, it looked like I was going to be taken right to the door of his cell in the bowels of the station. I was made to walk between them, as if I was the one under surveillance. They didn’t speak, not to me, not to each other. Abruptly, the younger woman opened a door and stood there, waiting for me to enter the room.
I stepped in. Rey was sitting behind a table. I’d seen him in that position many times in the past, but it had always been the reverse of this; he had always been waiting to interview me.
Rey seemed the same as ever. He smiled, as if to reassure the witness. His folded hands lay before him on the table. I came closer. There was a darkness around his eyes. He hadn’t been eating properly, perhaps. Or sleeping properly. Or even breathing properly.
“You’re going to save me, I hear,” he said.
“Who told you that?”
“I have my sources.”
I glanced around. The door had been softly closed against us. We were alone.
“Compiling a case in opposition to the police investigation into a homicide is a risky business, Sabbie.”
“No one here is taking me seriously.” There was a chair, and I took it.
“You gave them the low-down on Morgan le Fay, in your statement?”
I eyed him, stonewalling. I was afraid that if I opened my mouth my perceptions would fly away, like thistle seeds.
“Sabbie Dare has run out of words,” said Rey. “That’s troubling.”
Slowly, our hands had been moving across the tabletop. At the first touch of flesh, Rey grabbed onto mine, gripping so tightly he pinched my skin.
“She’s not going to get your job, Rey. Is she?”
“Right now, my approach is that she’s welcome to it.”
“Oh, Rey …”
“It’s okay, Sabbie. Nothing is going to happen to me. Once they’ve had their fun, tried to give me a bit of a scare, I’ll be shunted off into some other position. Traffic, maybe. Missing Persons.”
“That would kill you.”
“Well.” A sudden grin lit up his dark-rimmed eyes. “We have this time together. All alone. My last wish before I walk to the scaffold. What shall we do with it?”
The sight of him smiling filled my heart. “We’re going work out the best way to get into the Hollow Hill and wake the Sleeping King,” I replied.
twenty-eight
sabrina
Of course, we did no such thing. Because there was no hollow inside Glastonbury Tor and the Sleeping King was a legend, a story of hope in bad times. We had precious minutes to kiss and make ourselves promises before Pippa and her henchwoman came back into the little room and hauled me out.
It started raining, cold July rain that would have been perfect for the funeral the previous day. As soon as I got home I put the central heating on, found a jumper, and heated some soup for lunch. I thought about the chain of events that had started with the decision to help Wolfsbane run a shape-shifting workshop. I’d felt such excitement at the idea of working with people at a heightened shamanic level. I’d had no presentment that it would end abruptly, disastrously, in sudden death and poison pen letters and horrific attacks.
Since Alys had died, nothing had been right in my world. Rey had been suspended, arrested and charged, all because—it seemed to me—I’d been accosted by Marty-Mac in the Angel Shopping Centre, where I’d never wanted to be in the first place. That was the day I’d met my grandmother. I’d learnt things I’d rather have never known and transformed myself into the Princess of Darkness in my cousin Lettice’s eyes.
Freaky had warned me. … families always mean trouble. Always. Always … I had heard his words, but gone ahead anyhow.
Grandma Dare filled my mind for a moment as I wiped my soup bowl with a piece of bread. Her erect frame, her ripe-plum voice, her sharp eyes. The softness of her pashmina in my hands. She’d plied me with sweet biscuits and talk of baronets. She’d told me I’d been named for my great-grandmother. Sabrina fair. Then she’d hit me with her bigotry and contempt.
It had been a lovely moment, when she’d recited that poem which had inspired her mother’s name. Milton, she’d said, as if I knew anything about any poet. I closed my eyes to bring the words back. Something about lilies, and amber hair, and cool waves …
My eyes popped open. My scalp prickled. I went into the therapy room and got out my shamanic journal. I had written those words, copying down what the Lady of the River had told me the day after Alys’s death … I am the river of cool, translucent waves.
I typed Milton + Sabrina into a search engine on my laptop. Almost the first site I tried was a copy of a long and rambling poem called “Comus” which was all about Greek deities and debauched rakes after the virtue of pure virgins. It took me ages to scroll down and down, reading steadily, but when I reached the little song I’d heard my grandmother recite it jumped out of the screen, and I couldn’t help but read, almost sing, it aloud.
Sabrina fair,
Listen where thou art sitting
Under the glassy, cool, translucent wave …
I read Milton’s story of Sabrina, line by line, my eyes screwed against the tight, tiny writing on the screen. Long ago, a girl, the daughter of an ancient British king, drowned in the River Severn and so became its goddess.
The Lady of the River had tried her best to direct me, but in the end it was my grandmother who’d given me the answer. The irony made me shake my head. Lady Savile-Dare had not intended to bequeath anything to me, but unwittingly, she’d given me what I needed most: the name of my spirit guardian.
Honey, rich, warm, running from the comb. The drumbeat singing from my CD player, the slight tickle of the scarf over my eyes. I was walking with Trendle above the fast-flowing River Severn. With each step, the deep foliage of the lime tree came more into focus, and the smell it exuded was more powerful in my nostrils. I couldn’t help but walk closer, breathing in the perfume.
I now knew that it was the tree itself that gave off the thick scent of honey. I had thought my Lady of the River had conjured it up, but I’d delved into my tree books and read how limes did this; they attracted a tiny insect to their bark and it exuded this sugar smell.
She was there, in front of the lime tree. She looked steadily into my eyes, while saying nothing. She was a frustrating enigma, often only half telling me things. I always felt I’d disappointed her, not done quite enough, not taken her advice well enough to heart.
“You don’t disappoint, Sabbie,” she said. “You ask more of yourself than I have ever asked of you.”
“I know your true name, my lady.” I dropped to my knees, desperate to tell her. “You are Sabrina of the Severn.”
Sabrina placed her hand on my head. It felt like a leaf had landed there. In the silence a question fell into my mind. I
t hadn’t been what I’d planned to ask, but I knew it was the right one. The deepest question that was in my heart. I looked up into her fluid grey eyes.
“It keeps happening, doesn’t it? I keep falling into … trouble. I keep meeting … sorrow and disaster. Since I started my shamanic work, I have met such people that I didn’t know walked in the apparent world. Evil. I’ve come face to face with evil.” I breathed deeply, desperate for the scent of honey, clear as if I held it on a spoon. “Damned. Depraved. Corrupt. Villainous.”
“It is your inheritance, Sabbie.”
My thoughts slowed until there were almost none at all.
“You come from two strong lines, Sabbie. In you, they’ve fused to shine with a light. And the further you pursue your practice, the more blinding that light will become. It is visible to others in a way you cannot see. It will always attract those with the deepest and the most troubled questions. Sorrow and disaster. And villainy, yes.”
“A strong line?” I thought of Lady Dare’s proud frame and suspicious eyes.
“Most of all, your father. And his father. All your fathers in a line before you.”
“I know next to nothing about my father,” I whispered. “An old address. And his name.” Such a name. Frivolous, mocking. Lucky Luc Rameau, the only thing I knew for sure about him, because it was on my birth certificate.
“Those strong lines gird you to take on the world’s trouble. Such people quiet the moving plates of the earth; they calm volcanoes. For you, the challenges are as you’ve described. The corrupt. The depraved, as well as the vulnerable. That is your path, and you will keep to it; I see that tenacity in you, Sabbie Dare.”
“Will you always be here to help me?”
“As I always have.” She chuffed a laugh. Its sound was the warmth and softness of a nighttime pillow, when you wake into darkness. “You have your father, also. Those roots penetrate deep. Those roots bind tight.”
I was still kneeling on the path. I could feel the dampness rise through my jeans. Small stones bit into my flesh. I didn’t move. “I did what you asked. I laid everything out in order—in a statement for the police—and things became … not clear, but …”