The Cold Calling Part 54

Through the trees, she could see that Charlie had lit the candles on his altar. It was close to dark.

'... they're my friends.'

Marcus coughed.

It had taken him a while to build up the cough, and now it was out there wasn't much to it. But it was quiet in the castle precincts now that Gallow and Bez had split up. Malcolm had given up barking. There was just the sound of Bez kicking open the barn door, the more distant thrust and rattle of Gallow unsubtly forcing the rear door of the house.

So the cough was distinct.

It brought Bez out of the barn into the darkening yard.

A splintering sound from behind the house meant Gallow was in. Gallow ... loose ... in the house.

Malcolm barked once.

Bez said, 'Gallow?'

He stood in the yard looking over towards the castle walls. His hand went inside his jacket, came out with a pistol, a big one, automatic. They were completely b.l.o.o.d.y mad, Marcus thought. Drove halfway across England with an automatic pistol and a sawn-off shotgun in the van? What would they do if they were stopped?

Well, they probably never had been and so it wouldn't happen, and if it did they could always shoot it out. The mad, brutal arrogance of young men. No animal more dangerous.

Bez said, 'Gallow? That yow?'

Marcus smothered his second cough in his handkerchief. It was the cough of a man desperate not to cough, crippling himself to keep quiet.

It was enough.

Bez didn't say, 'Who's that?' or 'Come out.' Bez just wore his smile. The cough had made him happy.

At the top of the spiral, Marcus tensed, his arms so tight around the jagged stone that it rocked, and that stone must weigh more than the average anvil. Marcus closed his eyes as Bez put a foot on the first cracked stone stair. There were eleven steps before the stairs broke off. Seven before the final curve.

Come on then, b.l.o.o.d.y well get it over with.

Bez came up slowly. One foot on a step, then the other foot. Bez was, G.o.d forbid, some sort of b.l.o.o.d.y professional.

In the house, Gallow would be walking up the hall, being careful because he didn't know where the dog was.

Bez reached the fourth step. Gallow would have discovered the old treatment room. Three more doors to the kitchen.

Please, Malcolm. Under the table, you cross-eyed b.l.o.o.d.y idiot, stay quiet until he arrives outside the kitchen door and then he'll know you've been shut in and he'll simply turn away.

Unless he thinks there's someone in there with you.

G.o.d.

Fifth step.

Two and a half years he'd had Malcolm. Ugliest pup the RSPCA kennels ever took in. Poor old Malcolm.

Six. Bez stopped, listening. He'd see there was a curve ahead; he'd have his gun out in front of him. Marcus backed up the broken wall where the branches of the sycamore tree overhung. Sat on the top of the wall, leaning back into the branches which dipped under his weight. He was breathing hard, his gla.s.ses half misted. Braced himself against the biggest branch, holding on to it with both hands. Both feet wedged against the great stone that looked, from the ground, like a single battlement.

The yard was about thirty feet below. Break his b.l.o.o.d.y neck quite easily if he fell. And he'd rather fall than be shot by a moron.

And so Bez arrived on the seventh step and saw Marcus cowering on the edge of the tower, half into the sycamore tree. He relaxed.

'All right, pal,' he said. 'I'm looking for Maiden.'

'Sonny,' Marcus said, through gritted teeth. 'Be b.l.o.o.d.y lucky if you can find a maiden over the age of twelve between here and Chepstow.'

Bez didn't laugh. 'Funny man, eh?' Bringing the pistol into view. 'This oil yer memory, Grandad?'

'I've got an excellent memory, you c.o.c.ky little b.a.s.t.a.r.d.'

'Good. Yow gonna tell me where Maiden is?'

'Don't know what you mean.'

'Then yow ... are f.u.c.king dead.' Bez brought up the pistol. 'Old man. '

Marcus stared into the pistol's small, black hole and pushed both feet into the battlement stone.

The gun didn't even go off. It clattered down, from step to step, quicker than Bez as the stone toppled onto his chest and he clutched it to him with both arms as he fell backwards, half spinning. And when his head hit the stone lintel on the curve of the spiral, there was a very delicate, genteel little crack, like the sound of two crown green bowls meeting in the stillness of a summer evening.

Marcus stood on the top step for a moment with both hands over his face.

Then he heard Malcolm yelp and he s.n.a.t.c.hed up his pitchfork and staggered down the steps. At the bottom, his eyes met Bez's eyes and Bez looked astonished, both eyes wide open, his mouth too.

Bez was dead.

'Oh lord,' Marcus said, shocked into moderation. 'Oh G.o.d. '

And then stumbled across the dark yard to the house, edging round the building to the rear door, the pitchfork out in front of him.

The light was on in the pa.s.sage. Doors either side were flung open. In the Healing Room, bottles and jars had been swept from shelves; some were still rolling on the stone floor, and two clicked together, reminding Marcus of the appalling sound of Bez's skull smashing.

His back to the wall, his pitchfork pointed upwards, he slid round the L in the pa.s.sage. The kitchen door came into view. It was still closed. From the other side of the panels, the dog growled.

Marcus saw Gallow's gloved hands around the sawn-off aimed at the kitchen door. As he edged round the bend, trying not to breathe, he saw the whole of bulging-eyed, shaven-headed Gallow, backed up, the shotgun at groin level, the way he must have seen Sylvester Stallone or some other movie oaf doing it. Gallow's lips were pulled back over his clenched teeth.

'Come and f.u.c.king get it, then!' Gallow kicked the door.

Which remained shut. There wasn't room in the pa.s.sage for anyone to get in a decent kick. As Gallow's foot came back again, Marcus hurled himself round the corner. 'Baaastard! ' Pitchfork out in front, aimed at the shotgun.

Gallow spun round and the pitchfork missed. When it connected with the wall at the end of the pa.s.sage, both its corroded tines fell off.

Marcus stood there, holding a wooden shaft. Looking into a double gun barrel.

'... the f.u.c.k are yow?'

'Might ask the same question,' Marcus said gruffly. 'My b.l.o.o.d.y house.'

'Back up.'

Marcus stood his ground.

'I said back up, y' old f.u.c.k! '

'All right. All right.'

Gallow prodded him back along the pa.s.sage to the open rear door.

'Out. Slowly! Don't turn round.'

As if he could. As if he could take his eyes from those two black holes.

Gallow bawled, 'Bez!'

Marcus said nothing. Stepped out backwards into the yard. The only sound was Malcolm barking, way back in the kitchen.

'Yow on your own?'

Marcus raised his eyes to the snarlingly familiar, horribly dangerous face of the Boy with Something to Prove. Gallow was perhaps a couple of years younger than the late Bez, blotches of acne still fighting the stubble on his chin.

'I said ... yow on your own?'

'Not necessarily,' Marcus said belligerently, and Gallow's arms swung out, and several things happened almost simultaneously. With sickening force, the shotgun barrel smacked him in the jaw and left cheek. His gla.s.ses fell off. Something crunched into his left leg, just below the knee. He crumpled. The yard blurred up at him.

He couldn't move.

'Bez! Where the f.u.c.k ... ?'

He was kicked in the stomach.

'Where's my mate?'

He retched and tried to curl into a ball, but his knee wouldn't bend. He heard the crunch of his gla.s.ses becoming powder under the heel of Gallow's boot. He was wrenched up by the lapels, dragged a few inches in the dirt. Flung back, his head and shoulders meeting stone. The house wall.

He could make out Gallow's shape against the light. Gallow with his legs splayed, his shaven head like a hard-boiled egg.

'Yow move a f.u.c.king inch, I'll smash yer eyes out. Got that?'

Couldn't, if he'd wanted to. Marcus moaned over the sound of Gallow's feet skidding away.

'Bez? Don't s.h.i.t me, man. Bez!' The shouts echoing between the house and the castle, fading off.

The world had turned into a dark expressionist painting, full of violent blotches. Marcus gave up trying to focus on it, and consciousness slipped away like an ebb tide on a long beach. Along the beach skipped Sally, following a big, coloured ball, laughing, the laughter echoing.

'Bez! '

Marcus's one coherent thought was that Maiden and Lewis couldn't be far away. Maiden knew what these people were like. Only one of them left now, anyway. One man. And a gun.

Out of it again. Footsteps along the sand.

Sally?

Darkness. Then he couldn't breathe. His nose flattened under a great, flat weight.

'Dead.'

The weight lifted. He snorted some air.

'f.u.c.king dead. '

The boot came down on his mouth this time. Slowly enough for him to catch a brief, blurred, zigzag flash of rubber.

'He's f.u.c.king dead! '

Smell of metal. Two endless, black, metal-smelling tunnels under his eyes.

'And so are yow. '

There was a brief moment of total awareness.

An absolute knowledge of who he was, why he was here ... why he was here on this Earth.

No pain, only this brilliant crystal clarification of the Big Mystery.

Marcus closed his eyes and never heard the big bang.

He saw two smiling girls running hand in hand across a golden hay meadow. One girl was in sepia, the other in bright, glowing colours.

XLVII.

The King Stone, nearly eight feet tall, was like a caged beast inside its iron, schoolyard-type railings. To Maiden standing in an open field behind it, now it seemed like a huge head and neck attached to feet or claws, half sunk into the worn gra.s.s, clutching at the ground, as if it was preparing to spring out of there.

'Known as an outlier, this is.' Cindy set down his suitcase outside the rails. 'We often find them in the vicinity of stone circles, but set apart. For astronomical reasons usually, or it gives you a line on the rising sun. Not sure about this chap, never having worked here before.'

Maybe once, the King Stone and the Rollright circle had been part of the same prehistoric observatory or whatever it was, but now they were separated by a road and a hedge and part of a wood.

Cindy opened the case, brought out a rolled-up woollen mat. Maiden opened the gate in the railings and Cindy carried the mat through and spread it out next to the King Stone. The mat displayed an interwoven Celtic design, such as you saw on ancient crosses.