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 passage. 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 fucking get it, then!’ Gallow kicked the door.
Which remained shut. There wasn’t room in the passage for anyone to get in a decent kick. As Gallow’s foot came back again, Marcus hurled himself round the corner. ‘
Gallow spun round and the pitchfork missed. When it connected with the wall at the end of the passage, both its corroded tines fell off.
Marcus stood there, holding a wooden shaft. Looking into a double gun barrel.
‘… the fuck are
‘Might ask the same question,’ Marcus said gruffly. ‘My bloody house.’
‘Back up.’
Marcus stood his ground.
‘I said
‘All right. All right.’
Gallow prodded him back along the passage 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
‘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 glasses 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 fuck …?’
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 glasses 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 fucking 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 shit 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.
‘
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.
‘Fucking
The boot came down on his mouth this time. Slowly enough for him to catch a brief, blurred, zigzag flash of rubber.
‘
Smell of metal. Two endless, black, metal-smelling tunnels under his eyes.
‘And so are
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 grass, 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.
‘Far as I’m concerned, Bobby, if they call this the King Stone and the circle’s known as the King’s Men, then this old chap has to be the boss. Getting better feelings, I am, from him, certainly. He hates these bars, but he’s kept his distance from some of the bad things that’ve happened in the circle. Hasn’t been tampered with much. Kept his integrity, see. I think I can work with him.’
Maiden and Grayle watched him in sceptical silence. Against a luminous backdrop of the most malign combination of dusk and stormclouds Maiden ever recalled, every hole and hollow and crevice in the King Stone was clearly defined.
This seemed crazy, time-wasting, probably irresponsible. Logically, Maiden thought, what they should be doing was simply calling the police.
‘Who would send two cars. Maybe three, if they were informed that the murderer Bobby Maiden was here. And then what? They’d arrest him, and he’d try to explain in the little time they had. It was impossible. Convincing even sensitive, reborn Maiden had taken many hours, plus the discovery of a woman’s body in a concrete grave.
