Friends of the Dusk (42 page)

As for the summoner… the
maleficus
…

It was all around. Jane went back to Ella Mary Leather, looked up the case at Capel-y-ffin, just over the Welsh border in the Black Mountains, that Hartland had referred to in his introduction. Took a long time to get to Capel-y-ffin by road but, as the crow flew, it was barely six miles from Cwmarrow. Mrs Leather quoted a man from nearby Longtown.

Was he ever confined to his grave? The book didn’t say.

Six miles away… it wasn’t much. And even closer… another kind of summoner. Mrs Leather recorded the alleged experience of a man known as Jack of France, ‘an evil doer and a terror to all peaceable folk,’ who this time was a victim.

And this was at Dorstone, the nearest large village to Cwmarrow.

Suddenly, Jane felt driven, the way she hadn’t been for quite a while. It wasn’t about archaeology, it was about something bigger, and bigger, too, than anthropology. These stories lived, they were part of the living countryside. In the early years of the twentieth century they were being told to Mrs Leather by people who
remembered.

Jane was back at the window, looking down on the ancient black and white houses, her hands on the oak in the wall, harder than old bone.

None of this was over. She could still feel her own mixed-up horror at the sight of the woman in the dead leaves at Cwmarrow. Who might well have been this Aisha who had crowed on Facebook about a relationship across the Divide, where the blood was only the start.

Jane felt a shivery kind of energy in her spine.

The Welsh stuff, Eirion might know. Suddenly, she really wanted to call him.
See
him. Like in the Biblical sense. Whatever had happened between Sam and her, while drunk… whatever had happened, she wasn’t going to find out she was pregnant, was she?

And no way was she going anywhere near Wiltshire.

Something flared in Jane like sunlight. She started to laugh. Couldn’t stop.

She threw herself on to the bed, hugging the pillow, bouncing up and down with this insatiable insane mirth. Heard the phone ringing loudly downstairs like it was joining in. So it was back.

Jane came off the bed and ran down two flights of stairs, grabbing the phone in the hall just before the machine could kick in.

‘Ledwardine… vicarage. Sorry, out of breath.’

‘Mrs Watkins?’

A woman with quite a small voice.

‘She’s not here.’

‘Will she be long?’

‘I’m not sure. I’m sorry. I’m her daughter, if that—’

‘No. I’ll call her. I’ll call her again.’

‘Can I give her a name?’

‘Well, just… just tell her it’s Caroline, would you?’

The line went dead.

56

Blame

T
HERE WERE TWO
cops, one female, one male, both reassuringly overweight.

‘Don’t look, lovey,’ the one called Patti said. ‘Come on, try to breathe slowly.’

But it was too late. She swallowed a mouthful of wind and rain, but it wasn’t enough. Something contracted inside and she turned away and threw up into the hedge.

‘Come on.’ Streaks of blood in Patti’s blonde hair. ‘Best you sit in our car, there’s an ambulance on the way.’

‘I don’t—’

‘Oh yes, I think you do.’

With her waxed coat torn and one side of her face wet and smarting, she let Patti guide her away to the edge of the field, and she looked back once, had a sense of smoky, spent violence around the twisted metal, branches clawing the air. You never realized how monumental and vital each tree was until one came down. Maybe a hundred years of growth and now it was windkill.

And killer. She closed her eyes, and it was imprinted on the screen of her eyelids like an old photo negative, the great tree bending like a crane on a building site, slowly but not that slowly.

What were the odds against this in a normal world?

The Freelander was a couple of years too old for airbags. She remembered keeling over on the seat with her hands over her
head, feeling the car crushing around her like big boots were standing on it. She remembered that the driver’s door had jammed. She remembered squirming across and grabbing the handle of the passenger door then lying back and pushing at it with both feet. A scraping and rending of metal, as a gap was forced, and then her feet had been in the branches, one shoe hanging off, and she must have lost consciousness then, not sure for how long.

More police were visible down towards Cwmarrow. And other people you couldn’t see from here. She could hear a woman wailing.

‘They’re not letting them come any closer,’ Patti said, ‘for obvious reasons.’

‘Could I perhaps…?’

‘No way, lovey. I don’t want them seeing anybody’s blood.’

Merrily put a hand up to her face. It came away slippery.

The wind was quieter. The crows were up around Cwmarrow Castle.

‘Looks like he was in a hurry,’ Patti said. ‘If the tree hadn’t come down when it did, it begs the question, would your two cars simply have collided head-on?’

‘I don’t know. I didn’t even see him coming.’

‘Country roads are the worst. You just don’t ever go fast on country lanes. They were made for horses and carts. Tarmac’s just cosmetic.’

‘He wanted to be a countryman,’ Merrily said.

Patti looked at her, curious, and said nothing.

Merrily moved towards the Freelander’s side of the tree.

‘Woah,’ Patti said. ‘Don’t touch anything.’

‘Can I get my bag? I need… nicotine.’

‘We’ll get it.’

Merrily nodded, stepped away. She was sure she hadn’t even seen the Mercedes coming up from Cwmarrow. She knew now that the Freelander had become wedged under one of the bigger branches, its windscreen smashed by another, on which
she might easily have been impaled. The Mercedes was skewed under the main trunk, as if the driver had swerved as the tree came down. One headlight was still on, the other was like a shut eye on the side that was pancaked. The driver’s head had been out of his side window, and that was what she’d seen before she threw up: the face and the head of Adam Malik, hanging off, almost severed.

She spun round.

‘Where’s the girl? Was there a
girl
?’

‘With her mother and her gran,’ Patti said. ‘You asked before.’

‘Did I?’

‘We think she might have a broken arm. She got out by herself. She’ll go in the ambulance, too.’

‘That’s her dad in there,’ Merrily said.

‘I’ve seen him at the hospital, a time or two. And he came out to a crash on Dinmore Hill. Took off a woman’s leg to save her life. He was a good man. He cared.’

‘Yes. Yes, he did.’

She felt disconnected, incapable and so cold inside and out. ‘He’ll be missed,’ Patti said.

Merrily looked down the narrow road to where he would be missed most, and back at the Mercedes crushed under the tree, not more than an arm’s length from the bonnet of the Freelander on the other side. For a darkly glowing moment, she saw both cars as low-worth, expendable pieces in some cosmic chess game, sacrificed for some hideous victory.

She was shaking.

‘We’ll want a statement from you, Mrs Watkins,’ Patti said. ‘What you can remember. Why you were here. Formalities. Shouldn’t take long. Nobody’s at fault here. Act of God, as we used to say.’

‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘Blame God.’

Patti stood looking at her, hands on her big hips, yellow waterproof flapping but otherwise unmoved by the wind.

‘You’re a vicar, aren’t you?’

‘At present.’

Jane tried 1471, but the woman on the phone had taken the trouble to conceal her number.

Twice, she’d been sent into the hall by a ping from the phone, as if it was about to ring, but it hadn’t. The way she was feeling today, there was something ominous about it.

tell her she’ll be called.

called forth singly and by name

Stop it! For Christ’s
sake.

She spun away from the phone, as the doorbell rang, as if the two were linked:
summoners.
She glanced out of the hall window, and he was looking directly at her from the shelter of the porch.

Mum had left by the back door. The front door was still locked and bolted; it took half a minute to get it open.

He wore a short brown overcoat with a velvety collar and a tired, tilted smile, and like no way was she going to be intimidated. It was another part of pulling herself together.

Right then.

‘Good morning, Mr Khan,’ Jane said.

‘Ms Watkins.’

‘Mum’s out.’

‘Damn.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Any idea when she might be back?’

‘Not really.’

‘I don’t suppose another chap’s been? I’m rather later than I expected, due to the conditions.’

‘No. Nobody.’

‘Oh. Well. I’m very sorry to have bothered you. It’s… Jane, isn’t it? I suppose I shall have to try to reach your mother… somehow.’

‘Always worth phoning first,’ Jane said. ‘Can save a lot of time.’

‘Indeed it can. I shall call ahead next time. Or she may like to telephone me, if you can convey that—’

‘Did you get your car fixed? I mean the bodywork.’

He looked at her in silence for a few beats and then a smile twitched into place.

‘I did. In fact…’ His hand went to an inside pocket, came out with a narrow, buff envelope. ‘This is some money I received to pay for the repair. Quite inadequate, but a touching gesture. I was going to return it.’

Jane grinned.

‘Jude Wall? No, Dean, right?’

‘Is that the older one? The money was left for me at my Hereford office, without an address. Or a name, come to that. Luckily one of my staff recognized him and knows where he lives… roughly.’

‘He’ll be gone by now. Has a job and so does his mum. Some days Jude even goes to school. Erm… you came all this way for that?’

‘Well, not really, but…’

‘But you’re returning Wall’s money?’

‘As a way of conveying to him that he remains in my debt.’

Wow. Jane felt her eyes widening. Either his tongue was well into his cheek or this guy was shameless.

‘Is that saying what I think it’s saying?’

‘And what do you think it’s saying, Jane?’

‘I think it might be saying that you might, like, approach him or his brother one day with, erm, an opportunity to repay what he owes you. And if he doesn’t…’

Raji Khan laughed, sliding the envelope back inside his coat.

‘What imagination! Tell me… I’m curious. There was an attempt to inscribe on my car a word that looked like “children”. I couldn’t, for the life of me, think what that might refer to.’

‘Oh, I can tell you that. When they were here, in the porch, trying to blag some money, you did actually refer to them as children. They were offended.’

‘Ah!’ His hands came up. ‘Of course. A matter of respect. My goodness, how discredited that word has become.’

‘They’re just kids. When Dean saw what they’d done, he was… not at all happy. He was like… well, the words
shit
and
scared
come to mind.’

‘Gives me no pleasure at all to inspire such an adverse reaction.’

‘I bet it doesn’t.’

He looked almost affronted.

‘Tell you what,’ Jane said. ‘To save you another journey, how about
I
give Wall his money back?’

‘You’d do that for me?’

‘
Oh
yes.’

Raji Khan peered at her, hands clasped over his chest. Then he looked back up the drive. Obviously still waiting for someone, or hoping Mum would drive up. He looked back at Jane, wry smile.

‘You know, Ms Watkins, there’s something about you which, in spite of my instincts, I do rather admire. You have your mother’s…’ He separated his hands, made small motions with the fingers. ‘If not more so.’ He took out the buff envelope. ‘You
really
want to do this?’

Jane thought of the weight of gritty history between her and Dean Wall, right from when she and Mum had first arrived in Ledwardine and he and his mates had come after her and poor Collette Cassidy in the churchyard at night.

‘It would give me no end of pleasure, Mr Khan,’ she said.

‘It wasn’t so hard after all,’ Vaynor said in Bliss’s office. ‘I told Turner that at present we were looking for a killer, that was all. Indicating that other issues might be overlooked if we feel we’ve been assisted in our principal task. Was that all right?’

‘You didn’t record that, did you?’

‘No, I didn’t, boss.’

Bliss nodded.

‘When’s he sending?’

‘Karen’s dealing with it, and that computer guy from Worcester. There are some download firms that can get it done quickly, once the compatibility problems are sorted. Might still take a few hours, though, for him to dig it out. He says.’

‘I’ll run this past ma’am first,’ Bliss said, ‘but I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea, when we’ve had a look at it, to screen it for the masses in the MIR. Few fellers in there who might recognize faces that were before our time.’

‘Let’s just hope nothing goes wrong.’

‘Put it this way, Darth. If Turner says it got deleted during the process, tell him you’ll be taking steps to have him extradited. Now go and supervise.
What?
’

Vaynor had stopped in the doorway, looked back at Bliss over a shoulder.