Puzzled, he leant down and pressed the button that was preset to Classic FM. Mallory liked classical music. Maybe there would be a concert. But there was no music. Once again, all he could hear was the strange whispering. They were definitely the same voices. He could even make out some of the words they were saying.
“EMANY… NEVAEH… NITRA… OH… WREHTAF…”
What the hell was going on? Frantically Mallory pressed button after button, his eyes never leaving the road. It was impossible. The same voices were being transmitted on every station, louder now, more insistent. He turned the radio off. But the whispering continued. It seemed to be everywhere, all around him in the car.
The cold was more intense. It was like sitting in a fridge – or a deep freeze. Mallory decided to pull over on to the hard shoulder and stop. The rain was coming down harder. He could barely see out of the windscreen. Red lights zoomed past. Blinding white lights sped towards him.
He pressed his foot on the brake and signalled left. But the indicator had failed and the car wouldn’t slow down. Mallory was beginning to panic. He had never been afraid in his life. It wasn’t in his nature. But he was afraid now, knowing that the car was out of control. He stamped his foot down more urgently on the brake. Nothing happened. The car was picking up speed.
And then it was as if he had hit some sort of invisible ramp. He felt the tyres leave the road and the whole car rocketed into the air. His vision twisted three hundred and sixty degrees. The whispering had somehow become a great clamour that filled his consciousness.
Mallory screamed.
His car, travelling at ninety miles an hour, somersaulted over the crash barrier. The last thing Mallory saw, upside down, was a petrol tanker hurtling towards him, the driver’s face frozen in horror. The Honda hit it and disintegrated. There was a screech of tyres. An explosion. A single blare from the loudest horn in the world. Then silence.
Matt was sound asleep when the covers were torn off him and he woke up in the chill of the morning to find Mrs Deverill in a black dressing gown, looming over his bed. He looked at his watch. It was ten past six. Outside, the sky was still grey. Rain pattered against the windows. The trees bent in the wind.
“What is it?” he demanded.
“I just heard it on the radio,” Mrs Deverill said. “I thought you ought to know. I’m afraid it’s bad news, Matthew. It seems there was a multiple pile-up on the motorway last night. Six people were killed. Detective Superintendent Mallory was one of them. It’s a terrible shame. Really terrible. But it looks as if you won’t be leaving after all.”
OUT OF THE FIRE
The next few days were the worst Matt had experienced since he had arrived in Yorkshire.
Mrs Deverill worked him harder than ever and Noah never left his side. The hours passed in a tedious procession of cleaning, painting, chopping, mending and carrying. Matt was close to despair. He had tried to escape to London and he had failed. He had gone looking for clues in the wood but had found almost nothing. Two people had tried to help him and they had both died. Nobody else cared. A sort of fog had descended on his mind. He had given in. He would remain at Hive Hall until Mrs Deverill had finished with him. Maybe she planned to keep him there all his life and he would end up hollowed out and empty, like Noah, a dribbling slave.
Then, one evening – Matt thought it was a Saturday, although all days had become very much the same – Mrs Deverill’s sister Claire came to dinner. He hadn’t seen the teacher since his encounter with her in Lesser Malling. Sitting next to her at the kitchen table, he found it hard to keep his eyes off her birthmark, the discolouration that covered most of her face. He was both drawn to it and repulsed at the same time.
“Jayne tells me that you have been missing school,” she remarked in her strange, high-pitched voice.
“I haven’t been to school because she won’t let me go,” Matt replied. “I have to work here.”
“And yet when you were at school, you regularly missed class. You played truant. You preferred shoplifting and loitering on motorway bridges, smoking. That’s what I heard.”
“I never smoked,” Matt growled.
“Modern children have no real education,” Jayne Deverill remarked. She was serving some sort of stew out of a pot. The meat was thick and fatty, and came in a rich, blood-coloured gravy. Road kill in a primeval swamp. “You see them in the street in their shapeless clothes, listening to what they call music but what you or I would call a horrible noise. They have no respect, no intelligence, no taste. And they think the world belongs to them!”
“They’ll soon find out…” Claire Deverill muttered.
There was a knock at the door and Noah appeared, dressed in what might have passed for a suit except that it was about fifty years old, faded and shapeless. He wore a shirt buttoned to the neck, but no tie. He looked to Matt like an out-of-work funeral director.
“The car’s ready,” he announced.
“We’re still eating, Noah.” Jayne Deverill scowled. “Wait for us outside.”
“It’s raining.” Noah sniffed the food hopefully.
“Then wait in the car. We’ll be out soon.”
Matt waited until Noah had gone. “Are you going out?” he asked.
“We might be.”
“Where?”
“When I was young, a child never asked questions of his elders,” Claire Deverill said.
“Was that before or after the First World War?” Matt asked.
“Pardon?”
“Forget it…”
Matt fell silent and finished his meal. Jayne Deverill stood up and went over to the kettle. “I’m making you a cup of herbal tea,” she explained. “I want you to drink it all, Matthew. It has a restorative quality and it seems to me that you’ve been rather on edge since the death of that poor detective.”
“Are you going to arrange for him to phone me tomorrow?”
“Oh no. Mr Mallory won’t be coming back.” She poured steaming water into a squat black teapot, stirred it and then poured out a cup for Matthew. “Now you get that down you. It’ll help you relax.”
“It’ll help you relax.”
Maybe it was the way she spoke the words. Or maybe it was the fact that Mrs Deverill had never made tea like this before, but suddenly Matt was determined not to touch the liquid he was being offered. He cupped it in his hands and sniffed. It was green and smelled bitter.
“What’s in it?” he asked.
“Leaves.”
“What sort of leaves?”
“Dandelion. Full of Vitamin A.”
“Not for me, thanks,” Matt said. He tried to sound casual. “I’ve never been that crazy about dandelions.”
“Nonetheless, you will try it. You’re not leaving the table until you do.”
Claire Deverill was watching him too carefully. Matt was certain now: if he drank the tea, the next thing he knew it would be the morning of the next day.
“All right.” Matt lifted the cup. “If you insist.”
“I do.”
The question was – how to get rid of it?
Finally, it was Asmodeus who helped him out. The cat must have crept into the kitchen while they were eating. It jumped up on to the sideboard and caught a jug of milk with its tail, causing it to topple and break. Both sisters turned round, their attention momentarily diverted. Instantly Matt reached down and up-ended his cup under the table. When the two women turned back again, he was cradling the cup in his hand as if nothing had happened.