Then realized that, although she was deep in shadow, the concrete between her hands was gleaming palely in the lamplight, and Cornel looked up and saw it, looking for a moment puzzled, confused.
As Kenny Mostyn’s knee lifted from the floor and Kenny’s arms shot out, fingers clawing the air as if to throw himself forward. Like he was finding himself again, Cornel backed up and brought the barrel of the gun down in direct line with Kenny’s half-bowed head.
Jane pushed herself forward, and her pathetic little arms gave way and she had to let go of the concrete.
76
The clouds had cleared and the moon lay cold as rock salt over an alley of conifers. Barry stood inside the wire, looking at the three of them, shaking his head.
‘How your life turns on its head. Not much more than a kid, and you’re out in the field with a handful of crack professionals, all with special skills – linguistics, engineering, advanced first-aid, bomb disposal. None of them much more than kids. Or that’s how it looks to me now, at the age of fifty-eight.’
‘Fifty-eight, eh?’ Gomer said. ‘So what point you tryin’ to make yere, boy?’
‘Forget it,’ Barry said.
Doing his recce, Lol thought. Standing among close-packed conifers on the edge of the compound, with its buildings and footpaths, taking his time. Lol was very agitated now, but Barry wouldn’t be hurried.
‘Four big sheds, one concrete, no windows, so I’d guess equipment in there. Three caravans, say two for staff accommodation, and the other one looks like a canteen. Two tents in that sloping field up towards the woods – might be people in there, can’t rule it out. Small toilet block.’
They’d started talking in whispers now, Lol noticed. The air among the conifers was sharp and damp and acrid. The surface of a big pond, off-centre, was shining dully like tinplate under the non-committal moon.
‘No cockfight here,’ Barry said. ‘That’s for sure.’
By the time the call had come through from Danny, Barry was changed into his running kit, had his old Freelander waiting outside the Swan, leaving Marion in charge.
‘Tell me again,’ he said to Danny.
‘We come out onto the Credenhill road, and we done mabbe two hundred yards and Mostyn suddenly stops, and we gotter pass him, see? So we turns round and creeps back on sidelights, and he’s found this ole van in the bushes side of the road. And then he gets back in and he’s off along the lane like a bullet then, up this track.’
No compromises on this track. It was steep and unmade. Without a four-by-four you’d be in trouble. Halfway up, that sign, black on white.
THE COMPOUND TRAINING CENTRE TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME
The moonlight was so bright on it this time that Lol made out a small amendment, half scrubbed-out. It actually said: TRESPASSERS UNWELCOME.’
‘Trespassers here seem to have had their uses,’ Lol said.
He’d also told Barry on the way here about the smashed CCTV camera and the cut wire. How the police had thought it was him. Barry had said he was a stupid bleeder for even getting out of his truck.
‘ Gomer,’ he hissed now. ‘Stay in the trees.’
‘Looks like an ole JCB down there, boy, back o’ the big shed.’
‘Yeah, well, leave it alone for now. In the absence of poultry, the best thing is probably to get the hell out.’
‘He’s got a bloody cockfight somewhere,’ Gomer said. ‘Sure to. We was told.’
‘We’d hear something, would we not? And frankly I can’t see Byron permitting it. He don’t do entertainment, on any level.’
‘Might not start till later, boy. This en’t bingo. And he’s in yere. Mostyn.’
‘He works here. Bleedin’ hell, you never give up, do you, Gomer?’
But it was clear they were going in.
Lol wondered if it would feel any different entering the compound by what passed for an actual entrance. Going in mob-handed, unblooded. He checked his mobile to see if there was anything from Jane and found a short text from Merrily.
This is getting weird. please don’t go anywhere
It was on the way home, anyway.
Almost.
Still wearing the atheist’s coat, Merrily stood close to the grave of Jane Winder, whose potted history was spotlit by the moon.
AND DIED AT BRINSOP COURT,
IN THIS PARISH, OCTOBER 16, 1843.
IN THE 43 YEAR OF HER AGE
Poor Jane. A stranger. From Off. No age at all. By night, the stone was a monolith in front of the trees on the dark pond – which was labelled moat on the map – and all the mysterious humps in the moon-scratched fields below Credenhill. And you held on to it to steady yourself against what seemed like an irreversible madness.
Brinsop Church was locked for the night, of course. Merrily had thought about calling the local team minister, Dick Willis, but she wouldn’t have got away this time without an explanation.
She stood there, an arm around Jane Winder’s cold shoulder, and took in the long view to the right, where it was as though the whole wide area overshadowed by Credenhill had been stripped back by the full moon. Nothing but a skim of soil and rock and clay over what remained of the Romans. The men that have been reappear. A poet’s imaginative exercise, probably nothing more than that. Nothing about a brutalized religion reinvoked from the soil. But the poem had been there, in the book left out by Syd.
A rabbit hopped across the graveyard and sat by the church porch, sniffing the night.
No Bible, no Bergen, no cross, Merrily slipped away out of the churchyard and over the stile to the field where the Dragon’s Well lay in sodden grass, its round stone like a small cider wheel. A modern metal drain cover was embedded in the stone.
Ewes and big lambs were watching her from the hedge. Round eyes like lamps. Could be innocence, could be cynicism. If you were looking for an adversary, it could be the dragon but was more likely, in this place, to be George.
Merrily lit a cigarette.
‘Advice, Syd?’
In her darkest moments she thought that, if exorcism hadn’t found her, she might not have stuck this job. How feeble was that, if the only way you could convince yourself that you were more than just another badly paid professional carer was by re-enacting medieval rituals and seeing what happened? The psychic son et lumiere and the bangs and whistles that real mystics discounted as foreplay.
‘But that wasn’t you, Syd. You didn’t want any of it. Came out of the army, looked back in horror.’
Leaps I can’t make, he’d said to her, smoking in his church. Aspects I can’t face.
‘Any more,’ Merrily said. ‘ “Can’t face any more” – that was what you meant.’ She sat down on the wellhead, watched the smoke rising from her fingers towards the moon.
‘The Bible in the Bergen, Syd. This is what I think. A reminder of which side you were on now. Well, sure. But going up Credenhill with that on your back, it’s like Christ carrying his cross. A constant reminder, every step you take – the tug of the pack, the weight of the book, brass-bound, bulky, uncomfortable. Every step you take up that hill, you feel it. Who you are, what you’re about. The weight of responsibility.’
