Beyond the Bone Read online

  When I find the idiot, she thought furiously, I’ll kill him !

  And then the answer would come that perhaps there would be no need.

  The rain was now coming down in real earnest, no longer in fine filaments but with the brutal and unavoidable lash of a cat-o’-nine-tails. It was getting very dark also and the cloud cover was growing thicker and lower all the time. Even if she headed straight to the nearest telephone now, it was going to be difficult to get any properly organized search going in time. On the other hand, she thought with grim humour, she might find a message waiting for her saying that Lakenheath too had gone to stay with the Upases in Liddesdale.

  One more sweep. She halted, sounded a couple of blasts on the horn, reversed, flicking the headlights on and off as she did so, then climbed out and shouted.

  Once again as at the centre she sensed a movement She shouted again and this time got a fix on it; to her right and down a steep declivity out of which grew some close-set and incredibly hardy whins. It was probably just a rabbit, but the chance that Lakenheath might be lying there, injured and half-conscious, sent her scrambling down the slope to investigate.

  Halfway down she clung tightly to a fistful of the thin branches and leaned out to peer into the shadows below. The rain ran down her neck, her slacks clung damply to her legs, and even her anorak was rapidly surrendering to the ferocious onslaught.

  ‘Anyone there?’ she called.

  The answer came from behind. A heavy weight crashed on to her back, she felt a length of flesh and muscle grapple her close to itself, hot breath burnt on her neck as she tried to twist round. She shrieked and released her grip and she and her assailant rolled down the slope in a furious tangle of limbs and sodden whins. Her head struck something solid and the strength ebbed from her body. There was no way she could resist.

  Then a stern voice spoke, like God from a cloud.

  ‘Twinkle ! ’ it said. ‘Heel !’

  Crow hardly fell over himself to be apologetic. Indeed the only words of explanation he offered were, ‘He keeps a good watch.’ But some actions speak louder than some words and when the man led her unresisting to the dwelling place so ferociously guarded by Twinkle and gave her an earthenware drinking bowl filled with a thick, sweet, powerful liquid, Zeugma felt herself adequately compensated.

  Even though she had come close enough to Crow’s house to merit Twinkle’s attentions, she doubted if she would have noticed it without his guidance. It was a single-storey dry-stone structure, its interstices plugged with turf and moss and the whole set into a hillside so that it was hard to tell where the natural ended and the man-made began. It was built in the style of a medieval long-house. There was a central living chamber with a corner hearth well placed so that little of the peat smoke drifted into the room. Off this were two other rooms separated from the main chamber only by a kind of arch or buttress in the walls. It was too dark to see what they contained. The one to the right in the traditional medieval set-up ought to have been a byre. She would have been surprised to find cattle on this part of the waste, but certainly a distinctly animal odour pervaded the place. Crow’s sleeping berth she surmised was the broad slab of stone jutting out of the wall by the hearth like a crusader’s niche in a church. The chair she sat on was stone too, but covered with a comfortable rug of soft pelts.

  Zeugma took another long pull at her bowl and screwed up her eyes and opened her mouth in exquisite pain as the golden mixture trickled like sweet lava down her throat.

  ‘What is this?’ she asked when the anaesthetic effect had worn off her vocal cords.

  ‘Whisky and honey mainly,’ Crow said. ‘Athole Brose, the North British call it.’

  If he had said ‘ambrosia’ she would not have been surprised.

  ‘It’s jolly good,’ she said inadequately. ‘You must give me the recipe.’

  ‘You’re soaked through,’ he said abruptly. ‘Better get out of those clothes.’

  ‘No, no, I’m fine,’ she said uneasily. ‘I’ll just steam dry here.’

  He laughed, a noise like a magpie’s call.

  ‘Do as you will,’ he said. ‘Or as you must.’

  Something almost scornful in this last remark got to Zeugma. She took another draught from the bowl.

  ‘All right,’ she said, rising. ‘Where?’

  He jerked his head towards the shadowy right-hand chamber.

  ‘There are some blankets there,’ he said.

  There was no door to close behind her, but the rough buttresses provided some protection and after checking that Crow remained sitting on his bed-slab peering into the fire, she quickly removed her clothes. Her eyes were becoming used to the light and she had no difficulty in finding the blankets which were stored in a kind of open stone dresser built on the Stonehenge principle of pillars supporting cross pieces. The blankets were rough-woven with an intricate patern of red foliage curving through the light grey background. The harsh wool made her skin glow as she towelled herself down with a vigour that Miss Akenside would have approved of.

  It seemed silly to exchange wet clothes for a damp blanket, so she draped the makeshift towel over a stone projection and helped herself to another blanket.

  Something fell to the ground as she pulled it off the shelf. She stooped and picked it up.

  It was a shoe. Left foot. Tan suède. In need of some repair at the heel. Caked with dry mud. Size four. A woman’s shoe. She smiled. So Crow was human, after all.

  Tucked inside the shoe was a nylon stocking and a piece of newspaper; to hold the shape while drying, Zeugma thought at first. But it was not bundled up, just folded and laid inside the shoe. Curiously, she unfolded it.

  It was a cutting from an eighteen-month-old copy of the Cumberland News. It contained an account of an inquest into the death of a Brampton girl, Sharon Anderson, whose naked body had been discovered a few days earlier near Bewcastle.

  Discovered by a man called Crow. The account of the inquest was thorough, almost verbatim. Clearly such a treat came but rarely to the good people of Cumberland.

  The cause of death had been asphyxiation. Bruising round the face and traces of woollen fibres in the nose, mouth and lungs led the pathologist to suggest person or persons unknown had held the girl’s head beneath a woollen article, possibly a blanket, till she had died.

  She had also been beaten across the shoulders and buttocks with a solid but supple weapon, possibly a thin branch of willow or similar wood, hard enough to raise weals but not draw blood.

  She was not a virgin, but there were no signs that she had had sexual intercourse, either willingly or forcibly, in the hours prior to her death.

  But, the pathologist had added with justifiable pride in his craft, she had eaten a substantial meal of wild duck and drunk a great deal of alcohol, probably whisky, within two or three hours or being smothered.

  Zeugma burped gently, an uncontrollable reaction of hers when frightened, and tasted the Athole Brose in her mouth. The shoe weighed heavily in her hand. Angrily she thrust it back to the rear of the shelf. It was only a shoe, after all. A common man-made thing.

  But her hand now touched something that felt less familiar, less everyday. Carefully she pulled the new find to the front of the shelf and peered at it in the dim light filtering from the main chamber. And immediately wished she hadn’t.

  Before her lay a hank of blonde hair and a little pile of small bones.

  ‘Come back to the fire,’ commanded Crow suddenly, and she started, almost displacing the bones from the shelf. Hastily she thrust them back and, with trembling heart, she drew the blanket so tightly around her that the rough fibres scratched her skin, then returned to the fire and sat down.

  Instantly Crow rose and towered over her, one half of his long, lean face lit up by the fire’s glow, the other half in shadow. She felt her body tense itself for struggle, but he merely turned, went to the end of the building and after a moment came back with her wet clothes which he draped over a length of rope which st
retched across the fireplace.

  After that he sat down once more and looked at her in silence for some minutes, a silence Zeugma felt herself unable to break.

  ‘What brought you to my dwelling?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Something to be dug up for the old bones it contains?’

  ‘No !’ she protested. ‘It was an accident. I had no idea. Really? Anyway, what I’m doing is preserving things in a way, giving new life to the past.’

  The banality made her squirm, but she felt a desperate need to keep the conversation at the level of a discussion of her work. What else there might be to dig up in this house she did not know. Nor did she wish to find out just now.

  The drinking bowl had been replenished and she poured a quarter pint down her throat before she realized what she was doing.

  ‘New life?’ he said harshly. ‘Those poor criminals have found their peace. Eighteen hundred years is not long to forget such suffering. Not long. Though for others the suffering was greater and the waiting is just beginning.’

  His eyes were almost closed as he spoke these enigmas and even the heat generated in her belly by the honeyed brose could not prevent Zeugma from shivering as she gazed at the ageless face, drawn and still like a death-mask, which the light of the flickering fire scarcely seemed to touch.

  How long they sat like this was hard to say. Ten minutes, twenty, half an hour. The drinking bowl lay invitingly beside her, but she did not care to taste any more. Outside the wind raged and screamed still, rising to a pitch of agonized sound which it seemed must be produced from a human throat.

  Suddenly she recalled her actual purpose in wandering round the moors in this foul weather and overcome by guilt and dismay she exclaimed, ‘Lakenheath !’

  ‘What?’ The exclamation seemed to bring him out of his coma.

  ‘That’s why I came,’ she gabbled. ‘I was with someone, not the man you saw me with, Upas, not him, but somebody else before I saw you, if you understand. Lakenheath. Oh, he’s an awful man and he wants to build factories all over the waste, but he’s got a sprained ankle and I’m worried in case he’s got lost somehow and is in trouble somewhere.’

  She rose suddenly, angry with herself for losing precious minutes of light. A sound like a distant saw-mill made her freeze. Twinkle in his corner was growling gently as he watched her with much suspicion. His sagacious eye was a long way from owning an inmate.

  Crow leaned forward and poked the fire with an ash stick. A peat turf fell apart, revealing its glowing heart like the flesh of a pomegranate. He peered into it as though into a book.

  ‘No,’ he said finally. ‘Be easy. There’s none that suffers on the waste this moment. Though suffering there has been this day. Great suffering.’

  Zeugma eyed him dubiously.

  ‘Yes. Well,’ she said. ‘I still think I’d better be going, if you don’t mind.’

  If Twinkle doesn’t mind, she really meant.

  Crow glanced at the dog and smiled a positive identifiable smile this time. ‘Twinkle,’ he admonished. ‘Miss Gray is a friend. Friend.’

  The dog went to sleep. It looked as if it was smiling too.

  Zeugma grabbed her almost dry clothes, retired to the shadows once more and dressed with an anti-productive haste. Crow still did not move from the fire, merely glancing up at her as she returned fully clothed.

  ‘Thank you for the drink,’ she said formally. ‘Goodbye.’

  He did not answer but nodded once and returned his gaze to the fire.

  Turn you blind and give you potted-meat legs, thought Zeugma, remembering a favourite warning of her Whitethorn housemistress.

  She did not utter it aloud, but left. The blast which hit her as she stepped out of the house felt like the welcoming caress of a friend. It wasn’t until ten minutes later as she directed the Range Rover carefully through the sodden gloom that she paused to wonder among all the other mysteries how Crow had also come to the conclusion that the bodies in her trench had been cast there after a Roman execution in the second century A.D.

  8

  Oblivion is not to be hired. The greatest part must be content to be as though they had not been …

  Lakenheath sat on the single hard chair his hotel provided and poured himself a toothglass of Scotch. Next he manoeuvred his injured foot on to the bed and pondered the day’s events so deeply that even the appearance of the provocative chambermaid to turn down his coverlet passed unremarked.

  He had not been close to Sayer, indeed had never liked the man. One of the complex of reasons for hanging on to this job had been to increase by delay the pleasure of telling Sayer what he could do with it. But the man was dead and the manner of his dying made Lakenheath’s reaction more than merely conventional.

  In addition he could not put out of his mind the words of Jenkins, the forestry man. When I saw the car I thought it must be you. Anyone seeing the car would have thought that. And had it not been for the damage to his ankle, it would have been him.

  He had Zeugma to thank for that. He stirred guiltily at the thought of her, then dismissed it. She had left him there to freeze. It would serve her right to be a bit worried about his disappearance.

  He thought instead of Diss. The man with the gun. The last man to talk to Sayer. The last man to be any where near the car before the accident.

  He shook his head and drank some more whisky. Diss was a bit of a mystery, but shortly he would be someone else’s. He was presently at the police station with the Forestry Commission men, giving an account of what they had seen. Jonathan Upas, despite his protests, had been taken to the local hospital to have his burns properly dressed. He had not seemed to like the idea of being a hero and had expressed some concern for his motor-bike which had finally been transported with him in the ambulance. Lakenheath too had been treated gently as an invalid and Sergeant Fell had promised to send someone round to take his statement at the hotel.

  There was a knock at the door and Lakenheath thought it must be the police.

  ‘Come in ! ’ he called.

  Diss entered, closing the door behind him and taking up a faintly menacing position against the wall.

  Lakenheath looked at him with some hostility for a moment, then felt it die. He was in no position either physically or morally to be hostile.

  ‘I’ve just come from the police station,’ said Diss. ‘A sad business.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lakenheath. ‘Do they know what happened yet?’

  Diss shook his head.

  ‘Some mechanical failure perhaps. Or a blow-out. What do you think?’

  Lakenheath looked at the other for a long moment.

  ‘Mr Diss,’ he said finally, ‘there’s something I want to say to you.’

  It never got said.

  The door burst open, pinning Diss behind it and Zeugma made another of her furious entrances. Only this time she was not brightly flushed but very pale.

  Her voice had lost none of its soprano indignation, however.

  ‘What the hell’s going on?’ she demanded.

  ‘I’m sorry. Look, can’t it wait?’

  ‘Wait? What for? I want explanations, Mr Lakenheath. I deserve them. It wasn’t my idea to take you out on the waste so you could spy on that fellow Diss …’

  Lakenheath contorted his face warningly, but Zeugma took this merely as a visual threat and continued.

  ‘… who by the way is not called Diss, at least not as far as the police are concerned, so he’s a fraud to you or them, I don’t know which …’

  Lakenheath’s expression now became violent enough to frighten her and she stepped back a pace, permitting Diss to slip from behind the door.

  ‘Miss Gray,’ he said with a polite nod. ‘Mr Lakenheath. If you’ll excuse me.’

  He left.

  Zeugma for once was speechless.

  ‘You were saying?’ prompted Lakenheath.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Zeugma. ‘I didn’t know. Look, what’s going on? I spent ages looking for you and finally I came
back along the centre road and saw a break-down truck with the remains of your Morris hanging from the back of it. Well, I went straight to the police station. They kept me hanging around there for quite a while and I began to get a bit annoyed.’

  ‘No ! ’ interposed Lakenheath. ‘Not really?’

  ‘Then Diss came out of a room with Sergeant Fell. Only the sergeant didn’t call him Diss but Calgary, something like that. Well, he went off, then I discovered that Mr Sayer had been killed in the accident and I came right round here.’

  ‘Without pause for thought,’ said Lakenheath. ‘You know as much as me now.’

  Briefly he told her of his version of the afternoon’s events, skirting round the terrible manner of Sayer’s death, and ending with unqualified praise for Jonathan Upas’s part in the events on the Thirlsike road.

  ‘Well, well,’ she said. ‘So he’s the hero of the hour. And who’s the villain?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’m not soft you know, Mr Lakenheath. There is something going on, isn’t there?’

  ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ answered Lakenheath, taking another mouthful of Scotch.

  ‘Don’t you? You’re not going to tell me it’s love of your work that sends you crawling across the waste in this weather with a busted ankle! Oh no. I’ve had some small experience of observing your type, Mr Lakenheath …’

  ‘Yes, it would be small,’ interposed Lakenheath gently.

  ‘… and you feel the world owes you a living and not one that requires any strenuous effort on your part either ! So what’s going on?’

  Why does she get so angry? wondered Lakenheath. Normally she’ll just about do; nice and homely, you can imagine her in a farmhouse kitchen with flour on her hands, giggling as some amiable yokel waggles a buttercup under one of her chins. But angry ! she’s like one of these furious cherubs puffing out the North Wind in some old illuminated map !

  ‘Just what is my type, Miss Gray?’ he said aloud, sidestepping her question.

  ‘Type ! ’ she snorted. ‘You’re an anachronism, a comedian, something out of Wodehouse. Cut you open like a stick of rock and you don’t find flesh and blood, you find public school, Oxbridge, good regiment printed all the way through!’