Beyond the Bone Page 4

But he didn’t sound as if he believed it himself.

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Sayer coldly. ‘Miss Peat, ring for a doctor. If I were you, Lakenheath, I’d concentrate on getting on your feet again as quickly as possible.’

  He left and they heard him pattering down the stairs to make up the ground he had lost on Diss.

  ‘Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn,’ said Lakenheath. ‘Oh damn!’

  He stood up, tried to move towards his own office, stumbled after only a couple of hops and came to rest on Zeugma’s shoulder. She helped him through the door with more vigour than gentleness and deposited him in the chair just vacated by Diss.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said. He leaned forward and pulled open a drawer, taking from it a Guinness bottle which she recognized from her first visit. He banged off the cap on the side of his desk and caught the resultant gush of foam and liquid in his mouth without losing a drop. When he put the bottle down it was almost empty.

  ‘Medicinal,’ he said. ‘Now if we could get them to come up here …’

  He sighed and finished the bottle.

  ‘Why do you want anyone to come up here?’

  ‘Why not? All that land lying there doing nothing, it’s a waste.’

  ‘Don’t be so stupid! It’s not doing nothing,’ protested Zeugma. ‘Things grow on it, and animals and birds and insects exist because of it. Sheep graze on it, and some people even depend on it for a living!’

  ‘I note you always leave people to the last,’ he said scornfully. ‘Your kind always do.’

  ‘My kind!’ she screeched in anger. ‘It’s not my kind who go about persecuting harmless minority groups who prefer to opt out of your concrete-and-glass society.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning those people who squatted in the Thirlsike Centre, that’s who.’

  ‘Oh. So you heard about them,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Yes, I heard. It must be the first useful purpose that blasted eyesore has served. And you chucked them out. In the middle of winter too. Did you ever think what became of them, Mr Lakenheath?’

  He looked at her with such dislike that she stepped back as though he had offered to strike her. Then his expression relaxed.

  ‘The centre was built for a purpose,’ he said. ‘That purpose over, it’s part of my job to find another purpose for it. It harmed no one. It was built in the middle of a waste – Thirlsike Waste, I didn’t invent the name – it disturbed no one …’

  ‘What? Not disturbed? Do you know when they were ploughing up the ground for the foundations they came upon a Bronze Age urn-field? That the local archaeologists found out about, but too late to do anything but preserve a few urns. God knows what else was just bulldozed under! I believe in people, Mr Lakenheath, but people in the past, the present and the future ! ’

  She realized she was shouting and took a deep breath.

  ‘But I haven’t come here to quarrel with you, Mr Lakenheath,’ she resumed quietly. ‘I came to apologize for what happened this morning, that’s all. I’m sorry, and I hope that the matter can be allowed to rest there. Now I’ll leave you. The doctor should be here shortly.’

  ‘You don’t want any fuss!’ observed Lakenheath suddenly before she could leave. ‘That’s it! You don’t want to look silly on Border Television! Girl archaeologist loses ancient companion and even more ancient bones ! ’

  Zeugma felt her cheeks flush darkly at the accuracy of this nauseating man’s guess. He took this for the admission it was and laughed openly for a moment, then stopped abruptly.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll accept your apology. In return perhaps you might care to do me a little favour.’

  ‘What?’ she said suspiciously.

  ‘Nothing really. This ankle, it’s going to be a nuisance. No driving, I should think, for a while. Now, my job takes me all over the area, particularly up on the waste. You act as my chauffeur tomorrow in that expensive van of yours, and I’ll forget I ever heard of the incredible vanishing bones. How’s that?’

  ‘It’s blackmail!’ she answered indignantly, feeling the impulse stronger than ever to launch a total physical attack on the inane complacency of the face before her.

  ‘It’s a favour,’ he insisted. ‘That’s all. Okay? Good. Nine-thirty in the morning then.’

  ‘Go to hell,’ she said.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ he said indifferently.

  Zeugma paused at the door.

  ‘I hope you get gangrene,’ she said distinctly. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult for someone in your dirty business.’

  The noise she made as she slammed the door was music to her ears. Miss Peat did not even look up.

  5

  Time hath endless rarities and shows of all varieties.

  The bloody girl’s not going to turn up, thought Lakenheath gloomily.

  It was quarter to ten and for the last twenty minutes he had been attracting the amused but non-malicious attention of passers-by. The inmates of a small country town have to make their own entertainment and they rapidly seize the opportunities offered by a man seated on a shooting stick wedged in a crack in the pavement, particularly when his left foot is covered by a wellington boot and his right by a Turkish-style carpet slipper.

  It would have been better to wait inside, he thought, but he had omitted to tell the stupid woman that he lived in the hotel at the other side of the town square, and it seemed foolish to climb those fatal stairs merely to descend them again a few moments later.

  The weather was changing. The sun still shone, but a stiff wind was blowing ragged banners of cloud across the sky, producing a curiously artificial effect, like a badly projected cyclorama. Occasional gusts were strong enough to threaten his overthrow, an event eagerly anticipated by a group of women who had booked the grandstand window seat in the little café opposite.

  I’ll give her another five minutes, he thought. The temptation to say to hell with it ! and spend a day baiting traps for a not-unattractive Scottish chambermaid, who from time to time bared her teeth at him in a kind of threatening invitation, was strong. But the pull of self-interest is stronger and the thought of Sayer shepherding Diss around the area all day filled him with such unease that he had foolishly put his trust in the little fat girl with the Range Rover. Perhaps he shouldn’t have tried to blackmail her. She looked the type who might have responded more readily to some form of sentimentalism. A soft touch. Christ yes, she looked that all right. As if she was padded with Dunlopillo !

  The thought made him smile broadly.

  ‘I’m glad to see you looking so happy,’ said Zeugma.

  ‘You’re here ! Where the hell have you been?’

  She didn’t answer but engaged gear as he slid into the passenger seat.

  He waved at the openly disappointed café women as they moved away.

  ‘They’re going to miss me,’ he said with some complacency.

  ‘How’s your ankle?’ she asked.

  ‘A slight sprain,’ he said dismissively. ‘You needn’t feel guilty.’

  Zeugma felt herself getting angry again.

  ‘Oh, ball-bearings!’ she snapped. This fairly innocent explosion reduced Lakenheath to a surprising almost introspective quietness for a while.

  The silence lasted till the gentle but steady incline of the road had taken them out of the familiar agricultural countryside which lay around Brampton up into the fringes of the high bleak moorlands which run away to Scotland in the north and east. Lakenheath spoke in the end out of a desire to interrupt his own thoughts rather than a need for small-talk.

  ‘Has whatsit come back yet?’ he asked. ‘Your absent professor. Pagliacci.’

  ‘Dr Pasquino,’ she corrected. ‘No. He’s still staying in Liddesdale.’

  Something in her voice caught his attention away from his own troubles.

  ‘You’ve spoken to him?’ he asked casually.

  ‘No. Not exactly. Well, that’s it,’ she said with no kind of precision. He didn’t say anything. If the
re was more to come, it would come without prompting.

  ‘When I got back to the Old Kith yesterday afternoon, I thought he’d probably be back. Instead someone had been and collected his stuff. A young man, Charley said.’

  ‘But was there no message?’ asked Lakenheath, puzzled.

  ‘Oh yes.’

  She reached into the breast pocket of her bright red shirt and with difficulty eased a piece of paper out.

  Lakenheath took it. The calligraphy was elegantly indecipherable, a seventeenth-century hand. It took him some moments to interpret the message.

  Sorry to have missed you, it read. Leo is stopping for a couple of days and needs a change of socks! He sends his love and hopes you are making good progress with the work. He’ll ring you at the pub tonight or tomorrow.

  It was signed Jonathan Upas.

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Lakenheath. ‘The name rings a bell.’

  ‘It’s quite well known in the Borders evidently,’ said Zeugma. ‘I asked Charley. He hadn’t recognized the young man but the minute I mentioned the name he was able to give forth. It seems there was a Colonel Upas of Liddesdale who was a kind of low-key Glubb Pasha with a touch of the Lawrences in some Middle East oil state. He went up in smoke during a coup in the early fifties, thus saving his masters the trouble of paying his plane fare home when they sacked him. This was pretty certain it seems, despite the fact that he had almost gone native, embracing Islam and marrying a local lass. There were three children, two boys and a girl. They inherited his Scottish property of course and from time to time they spend a few weeks here. They keep very much to themselves, but even total invisibility wouldn’t keep a stranger totally out of Charley’s ken!’

  ‘Yes, I thought I knew the name,’ said Lakenheath slowly. ‘Well, at least that explains how your guardian knew them. I suppose he’s done a lot of jaunting around in North Africa. What did he say when he rang?’

  ‘Well, he didn’t you see,’ she answered. ‘I tried to ring him but the exchange said the Upas’s number was ex-directory and the stupid fools wouldn’t let me have it.’

  She spoke so angrily that Lakenheath laughed.

  ‘They’re not horses, you know,’ he said. ‘You can’t always get your own way by shouting. Relax. Enjoy yourself.’

  ‘Oh, let it drop,’ Zeugma snapped angrily. ‘It’s my concern and can’t possibly be of any interest to you.’

  ‘Now she tells me,’ said Lakenheath, then with a broad grin added unexpectedly, ‘Though of course it is my concern too, in a way. It suddenly strikes me, that’s why I’m here ! If you’d got their number and rung it, and talked to dear Leo, that would have been the end of it ! Off you’d have gone to your precious hole happy as a sandboy and I’d have still been printing a pretty pattern on my buttocks in the middle of Brampton. But dear Leo isn’t there to advise you, you’re a bit uncertain, a bit bothered, so much so that you begin to think you might as well pick up nasty old Lakenheath after all. Any company’s better than none, and besides, he’s such a prick, he could still spread that comic tale about the bones around !’

  It was (for the second time in twenty-four hours) such an accurate analysis of her private thoughts and motives that Zeugma felt herself turning puce with fury. She concentrated her mind with fierce intensity on the nastiest thing in the world. This was having your eyes put out prior to being raped, a suggestion which a Whitethorn confidante had assured her was actually contained in the Turkish Officers’ Training Manual up to the signing of the Geneva Convention. It’s easier if they can’t see, her friend had averred confidently, enjoying the horror within the confines of her limited empathy. It had made Zeugma quite ill. Not the notion of rape, though that was unpleasant enough, but the thought of losing her eyes. She had once seen Leo slipping his glass eye into place and had almost fainted. But being a practical girl, she had endeavoured to turn a weakness into a strength and the blood-draining properties of this particular thought had come in very handy when she felt herself over-reddening through anger or embarrassment.

  After a while she felt able to speak again.

  ‘Where would you like to go?’ she asked equably.

  Lakenheath had been too immersed in his own thoughts to pay much attention to Zeugma’s inner struggles. In any case he now accepted speechless rage as her most common mental state.

  ‘Oh, just drive around a bit,’ he said vaguely.

  ‘Look, I do have things of my own to do,’ protested Zeugma.

  ‘All right then. Make for the Thirlsike Research Centre. This thing will go over the waste, won’t it?’

  ‘Why, yes. But there’s a perfectly good road. In fact, typically, as it was built to be used by lorries and security men and civil servants instead of the people who actually live round here, it’s the best road in the area.’

  ‘I wouldn’t want you to be compromised by actually using it,’ said Lakenheath gravely.

  Zeugma pondered her companion’s real reasons for not wishing to use the road as a little further on she switched into four-wheel drive and sent the Range Rover clambering up the moorland slopes with which she was now very familiar.

  He must, she deduced, be expecting to find Sayer and Diss at the centre already and for some reason he did not want them to see him making a frontal approach. But why he should wish to spy on his boss and his client, she could not begin to imagine.

  Her theory was confirmed when twenty minutes later they reached the crest of a ridge overlooking the centre.

  ‘Hold it,’ said Lakenheath. ‘Run back down the slope a bit, will you?’

  She acquiesced without comment, reversing till the ridge lay between themselves and the centre.

  ‘Your boss is here then,’ she said as she applied the brakes.

  ‘He’s not my boss,’ replied Lakenheath. But he too had seen the distinctive shape of the ancient Morris parked just inside the gates. He had noticed that the car had gone from its usual parking spot that morning. Trust Sayer to be too mean to use his own three-and-a-half-litre Rover on official business !

  ‘He talks to you as if he were,’ said Zeugma.

  ‘You talk to me as if I were Attila the Hun and you the Virgin Mary.’

  Lakenheath scrambled uneasily from the car and limped to the crest of the ridge where he leaned forward on his shooting stick, looking for a moment like a hill farmer watching his dog rounding up his scattered sheep.

  ‘Why do you let him push you around then?’

  ‘He’s got some importance in the set-up that hired me. And he enjoys doing a lot of his own barking.’

  ‘While you feel it should be you, the professional polluter, down there selling that mess?’

  ‘Something like that,’ said Lakenheath. His attention was too firmly concentrated on that mess to react to this gibe.

  The Thirlsike Centre had been built in the early sixties as part of the European attempt to establish a rocket technology not too far behind the Russian and American. There were other centres for related research projects, like the one at nearby Spadeadam, but Thirlsike was the one which concentrated on purely military matters, namely the development of a new fuel for Bucephalus, the great European anti-anti-missile missile, bits of which now littered the deserts of Australia to the fury of prospectors equipped with geiger-counters.

  The centre had been built in this remote area partly for security reasons and partly because even government planners could see that an establishment capable, at a rough estimate, of producing a hole half a mile wide should some disaster occur was not best suited for an urban site.

  Thirlsike Waste had had a similar attraction to early nineteenth-century planners for different reasons. Then an old farmhouse, uninhabited since its owners had been snowed up in the fierce winter of 1798 and died of cold and starvation, had been converted into a fever hospital to cope with an epidemic of typhoid which had ravaged the north half of Cumberland. The track to the farmhouse had been hastily improved with cartloads of loose stone and this same track had bee
n the basis of the present modern road which Lakenheath could see running vacantly away to the south.

  The fever hospital had been in use only a few years, but the centre builders in one of those absurd (and usually expensive) fits of ‘economy’ so beloved by government departments had used the old building, or what remained of it, as the centrepiece of the centre. Around it ran the quadrangle of laboratories, test chambers and offices where the great work had been carried out until amid an increasing volume of protest both internal and external the project had been wound down, closing completely six months earlier. In a way Lakenheath suspected that the centre’s closure had helped create his own job. Here was not only a site, but plant with a good access road. Surely somebody must want it?

  But so far nobody had. It was a dismal, depressing-looking place and Lakenheath could not blame prospective customers for sheering off when they saw it. The waste had already sent in its pioneer forces of frost, wind and seed to commence the task they had been performing on the Romans for the past fifteen centuries. The story of the manner in which the last owners of the old farm had died was still told locally as if it had been just last year, and the same locals had nodded knowingly when within a month of his leaving the centre, the local paper reported that Dr Arthur Healot, the former research director, had been found hanging from a skylight in a California motel.

  Zeugma interrupted these cheerful thoughts with the not unreasonable demand, ‘What now?’

  He looked at her thoughtfully. Out here under the open sky with a fresh wind blowing and the earth burgeoning with new life, she looked rather different. In place, as it were. Healthy, vital, belonging.

  ‘Look, I don’t want to keep you from your work,’ he said, ‘so if you could leave me here and collect me in, say, a couple of hours, that’d give you a chance to get on with whatever it is you’re doing.’

  His solicitude for her archaeological project was manifestly so spurious that it couldn’t even be called hypocritical.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ she said.

  Two minutes later he was seated in his chosen place with a car rug round his shoulders to ward off the now biting wind and his binocular case in his hand.