side, resting on the floor of his inn, his apron pulled up over his head. Countless thin branches, none of them any bigger around than Jessica’s thumb, had skewered him through his chest and abdomen and throat. Blood, more than she had imagined could be in a person’s body, had trickled, was still trickling, down his body, pooling on the floor, shiny and black. She rolled him over, the branches resisting her, and pulled the apron from his face. One scraggy branch had been driven through his eye, and something clear oozed from the corner of it down the side of his nose. His other eye rolled and looked up at her and she screamed.
Rose twitched his hand as if to reach out to her, then he went slack by degrees. His legs never moved, but his hands fell loose, then his arms, then his upper body seemed to relax and his head lolled on his neck and the scraggy branch plucked its way out of his eye socket and whipped a spray of blood at Jessica.
She backed away and bulled her way through the top of the tree, headed toward the murkiest part of the room, the smokiest, where she thought she had last heard Peter. The tree had settled and shifted, rolled slightly to one side, and she no longer knew where she was in relation to anything else, but the smoke was her guide.
The inn had never seemed so large to her before.
She pushed on a branch and it sprang back at her and struck her across the eyes. She cried out and felt tears welling up, running down her cheeks. Where was Peter?
“Miss Jessica?”
She turned at the sound of his voice and looked up. Peter was balanced on the huge branch she had fallen from. He was practically hanging there, his good arm wrapped around an overhead tree limb, shirtless and grinning down at her with his hair wild and smoky, his face and his furrowed chest smudged, like some wild boy from the jungle. His shirt had been tied around his neck and made into a sling to support his damaged arm.
“Peter? How did you. .?”
“He sent me for you. Because I’m smaller. It’s easier if you go this way. The branches are more broken over here.”
He grinned again and scampered along the giant limb. Jessica followed him and, gradually, the branches did thin out and she began to smell fresh air. She hadn’t realized how warm she was until she felt a lovely cold draft against her wet cheeks.
And then she was outside.
The far wall of the inn was completely gone, vanished under the crushing weight of the centuries-old tree, buried in a tunnel somewhere beneath her. Peter ran past her, his feet bare in the snow, and stopped at the side of a man who stood with his back to her, slightly stooped under a weight. The man turned and she was relieved to see that it was Dr Kingsley. He was cradling the small still body of Anna Price. He looked at Jessica and then down at Anna and he smiled.
“She’ll be all right,” Dr Kingsley said. “We were lucky the tree knocked us out of there before it did its nasty work on your inn.”
“How did. .?”
“The branches really are somewhat sparse over there. I was able to get to young Peter, but he was very brave to find you.”
“He made this out of my shirt,” Peter said. “My arm feels better.”
“Is anyone else still in there?” Kingsley said.
Jessica shook her head. She didn’t know whether Peter had seen Rose’s body and she didn’t want to say anything out loud. The children had already been through enough.
Kingsley nodded. She watched his breath drift away on the breeze. “Well, then,” he said, “the boy has no shoes and the girl has had a shock. We ought to find shelter for them. And quickly.”
There was another tearing sound from the inn and some part of the tree invisible to Jessica crashed down, sending a shower of sparks into the night air. A portion of the wall caved inward, and fire sprang up to take its place.
“The fire will take this whole road,” Jessica said. “Everything on it.”
“The detective will help,” Peter said. He beamed at her, his eyes glittering in the firelight, and Jessica did her best to smile back. Then she saw what he was pointing at. Two shadowy figures struggled toward them holding lanterns aloft.
“Hallo!” Inspector Day said.
Jessica gave a great sigh of relief. Her legs disappeared from under her and she toppled into the snow. Before she lost consciousness, she heard the inspector shouting out orders.
“Henry, can you carry the schoolteacher? I’ll get the boy. Good gracious, he has no shoes.”
60
Hammersmith trudged forward through the snow, driven as much by the nothingness behind him and all around him as the desire to catch Oliver Price’s killer. He passed through his own exhalations, his warm vaporous breath freezing in his eyelashes, gluing them together and threatening to drag his eyes closed. His mouth was sealed shut by a crust of snot. He could not have opened it if he tried, but he didn’t try. He thought of nothing.
The Black Country was different than Wales had been, and they did things differently here, but a coal mine was a coal mine and Hammersmith looked without thinking for the familiar signs. He did not think of his childhood, not of the ponies clopping through the long, dark tunnels, not of the rats crawling over his legs, not of the silence or the loneliness. He simply followed the depressions in the snow of Sutton Price’s boots and looked for the dark shape of a pit.
And, eventually, there it was, a snow-covered mound, a scabbed-over black maw that had recently been scraped open. The snow around it was trampled and had been smoothed back over by a fresh accumulation. Hammersmith ducked and entered carefully. He listened, but heard nothing. He backed slowly down the wooden rungs and into the mouth of the seam. It was warmer here, and he sank down, rested with his back to the dirt wall, gave himself a few minutes.
He was in no shape to deal with a murderer and he knew it.
61
The train depot had sunk five inches into the tunnels beneath Blackhampton. Each tremor had driven the small building another inch into the ground. Calvin Campbell and Hester Price were inside when the first tremor hit, moved out into the snow before the second tremor, but had stayed inside since then. The building was solid and unadorned, and there was nothing inside to fall on them, except the ceiling. There were no shelves or statues or lamps, just three squat benches bolted firmly to the planks of the floor. And so they sat inside and listened to the earth tremble and the wind howl. Hester nestled against Calvin and he put his arm around her, and they stayed like that through three successive tremors, riding the depot as it sank.
“The train should have come,” Hester said.
“It’s the storm,” Calvin said.
“Will it still come tonight?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
He took his arm back and stood, stretched, and went to the tiny window, the glass shattered and crunching underfoot, snow piling up on the sill. There was nothing out there, no sign of an oncoming train. Only snow.
And, somewhere on the periphery of Calvin’s vision, a glint of metal.
–
