Hard Light (24 page)

There was hardly any traffic now. The snow had stopped, though a steady wind continued to blow gouts of white across the roadway. The landscape was mostly flat: I could see a far-off wind farm, lines of towering electrical pylons, a scatter of village lights. The clouds had pulled away, revealing an obsidian sky and a few stars.

“Look,” said Adrian. He slowed the Rover, rolling down his window to point something out.

Above the horizon hung a three-quarter moon that cast a radioactive brilliance across the blue-white plain. In the near distance, several distinct shadows appeared to hover above the ground—a trick of the lunar light. Adrian pulled the car onto the shoulder, turned off the ignition, and stepped outside.

I remained where I was while Adrian stood with his back to the vehicle, anorak flapping in the wind. After a minute he turned and beckoned to me. I retrieved the wrench and warily joined him, my boots crunching on brittle, snow-covered grass.

“What is it?” I asked.

Adrian said nothing. I stared across the plain, to where the hovering shadows resolved into blocks, dead black against the snow. Even from here I could see how huge they must be.

I turned to Adrian in amazement. “Is that Stonehenge?”

He nodded, the skin beneath his eyes glistening. “It is.”

“Have you ever been there?”

Adrian wiped his eyes. “Many times. It was easier twenty years ago. Poppy said they used to camp out under the Heel Stone. But it's better like this, from a distance. I think so, anyway.”

He turned and walked back to the car, calling out to me, “Ready to take over?”

I stood for another minute in the cold night, staring at the eerily moonlit panorama, and then returned to the Land Rover.

I hadn't been behind the wheel in months. It felt good, even as I tried to remember to drive on the opposite side of the road. Beside me Adrian slept, his head pillowed against his backpack. Krishna continued to snore in the jumpseat. I popped the can of Foster's and took a sip, balanced it on the seat beside me.

Adrian was right: The brakes were shit. Fortunately I didn't have much cause to use them. Outside, the moonlit plain stretched like the landscape of a dream. Adrian slept with his head thrown back and his mouth open, lank gray-streaked hair falling across his eyes. His breath came in quick shallow bursts, as though he were racing across the snowy fields that surrounded us, the last of the Focalin sparking in his brain.

I thought of Poppy lying on the couch with a spike in her arm, her preternaturally peaceful expression, no evidence of a struggle. Despite what Adrian had insisted about her relationship to heroin, maybe she had, in the end, welcomed the chance to go out on a wave of oblivion. I might make the same choice.

I looked at Adrian and tried to imagine him as a sixteen-year-old, seduced by a beautiful woman twice his age, someone he'd known and trusted since infancy. He looked younger, with his mocking smile gone and that sardonic laugh silenced. His sleeping face tugged at my memory, the same way that Morven's had when I first met her. Some long-ago photo of his father, Leith Carlisle, as a young man, or maybe a photo of the young Adrian I'd glimpsed somewhere—the Dunfrieses' flat, Krishna's—without registering who it was.

In the road ahead of us, several inches of snow had drifted. I downshifted to ease the Rover through the patch, glancing into the rearview mirror.

Krishna stared back at me, her teeth bared. Her dark eyes had sunken into a Medusa's face and black tendrils wormed across her naked scalp. I gasped and slammed on the brakes, remembered too late to yank on the handbrake. The Rover skidded several feet before coming to a halt just inches from a ditch. I whirled around to see Krishna reaching to grab Adrian's hair.

“What the hell?” I snatched her wrist and yanked her away from him. “What the fuck are you doing?”

For an instant I thought she'd spit at me. She seemed to think better of it. She looked quickly out the window, then slouched into the jumpseat. “Where are we?”

Adrian muttered and turned in his seat, pulling his coat over his head. I waited until his breathing slowed, spoke his name softly several times.

“Adrian? You awake?”

He seemed to be back down for the count. I let the Rover idle and turned back to Krishna.

“What the hell's going on with you and Adrian?”

She stared at me obdurately and said nothing. After a minute I grabbed my bag and began to dig through its contents, holding pill bottles up to the dashboard light until I found the Solpadol. I held up the bottle so Krishna could read the label.

“These'll help you sleep.”

“I don't want to fucking sleep.”

“Really? You feel like walking back to London?”

I cocked a thumb at the car door. Krishna ground her teeth, then leaned forward to look at the bottle. I poured three pills into my palm and held them out to her. Her eyes narrowed.

“How do I know that's not a roofie?”

“You just saw the bottle.”

“Yah, but you could have put something else in there.
You
take one.”

“I'm driving. Last chance…”

I started to withdraw my hand. Krishna grabbed it. “Anything to drink?”

“No.”

She gave me a half nod and swallowed the pills.

I waited a few minutes, debating whether I should try to find out if she knew anything about the Dunfrieses. I decided against it. Krishna was too much of a loose cannon; given her constitution, I hoped three downers was enough to put her out. If this was some sick lovers' quarrel, I didn't want to hear about it. If it had something to do with the three corpses back in London, the Solpadol might buy me a few hours until I could figure a way out of this mess.

When Krishna's eyes reached half-mast, I put the Rover back into gear and began to drive once more. It wasn't much later that Adrian stirred, yawning, and turned to me.

“Everything all right?”

“You missed the excitement. Krishna woke up and tried to throttle you.”

“Really?” He didn't sound surprised.

“Yeah. Is there something going on with you two?”

“No. She's a high-strung lass, that's all.”

I could hear the lie in Adrian's affected drawl, and felt a pang of unease as I caught the faintest trace of the spoiled-fruit scent that had signaled damage when I first met him in Krishna's flat.

“I gave her a few Solpadol to knock her out.”

“You're a human pharmacy. Her, too. Actually, I'm surprised you didn't have to use a tranquilizer gun.”

He peered over his seat at Krishna, sleeping with her fingers pressed against her mouth. Tenderness mingled with desolation in his expression. I quickly looked away as he turned to me and shot me a smile as false as his tone had been.

“Shall I drive? You should rest for a bit. You look knackered.”

“Yeah, sure.”

We traded places. I wedged myself against the door with my bag in my lap, so that I was facing him. I had no intention of sleeping: I trusted Adrian about as far as I could throw him. But the soft rumble of wheels on the snow-covered road and the monochrome world outside conspired to do me in. I zoned out. If any dreams broke through the wall of exhaustion that surrounded me, I never knew.

 

30

I woke some time later and sat up like a shot to see Adrian still behind the wheel. He appeared both wakeful and apprehensive, but also strangely composed, his gaze fixed unwaveringly on the road ahead. Wherever we were, it was not unknown to him. I looked outside.

The moon had set. On the eastern edge of the horizon, the night sky had taken on a violet tinge that gradually paled to green. Smooth hills and ragged stony outcroppings rose stark against the sky, as sharply defined as though they'd been cut from black paper. It all looked beautiful and unearthly, like a world under glass, or one of those intangible landscapes glimpsed inside a spun-sugar Easter egg.

There was no shoulder—the desolate road seemed only wide enough for a single vehicle. I rolled down my window. The cold air had a mineral scent, snow and raw earth, and the coppery tang of the sea.

I stared across the moor, overcome by a sudden yearning. Not for booze or Quinn or my own lost life; not even for the camera in my lap, the meticulously calibrated way it allowed me to experience the world at a safe distance.

Instead I was overwhelmed with longing for the world itself: the cold sting of air against my cheeks, the smell of diesel and the gradual play of shadow across the moorland, as the eastern sky brightened from beryl to gold. No camera could ever capture any of that.

I swiped a hand across my eyes and nudged Adrian. “Hey. Do you know where we are?”

“Padwithiel.”

“Are we near the ocean?”

Adrian nodded, yawning. “Yes—West Penwith. You're never more than a few miles from the sea here. Land's End is that way.” He pointed. “From there it's only three thousand miles and you're home. But you don't want to wander off. The moor is dangerous. I need to stop and lock the hubs to put this into four-wheel drive. The way gets a bit iffy up ahead.”

Krishna was still asleep. The rats in my head were starting to claw. Adrian drove a few more miles before stopping to lock the hubs. I got out to stretch and see if I could get a mental map of where we were. It was tough.

One side of the narrow road was bounded by dense hedges, too high to see over. On the other, a low tumbledown wall gave way to barren moor and gray-green fields studded with a few stone farmhouses that looked like they'd stood for a thousand years. A seemingly random jigsaw of stone walls and hedgerows crisscrossed the fields, as though a drunken giant had attempted to draw a map across it. In the near distance I glimpsed a standing stone, man-high, surrounded by gorse still studded with a few yellow blossoms. The sun hovered just below the horizon, and patches of snow shimmered like phosphorescence.

In a place like this, a film like
Thanatrope
made perfect sense.

“That's done,” said Adrian, straightening. The wind lashed his hair across his face as he turned to face the direction of Land's End. I was startled by how much at home he looked here. A sort of fierce joy overtook his features and he turned to me again, his anorak hanging loosely from his lanky frame.

“You know how they say the past is another country? Well, this is it.”

I hesitated, then slipped a hand beneath my layers of clothing and withdrew one of the thaumatropes on its rawhide cord. “You freaked out when I showed you this back at your place. Did Poppy steal it?”

Adrian's thin mouth tightened. “No.”

I dug Ellen Connor's card from my pocket and handed it to him. “A cop cornered me at a pub in Camden Town. Europol or something.”

“‘International Commission on Traffic in Illicit Antiquities,'” Adrian read aloud. “Did she try to shake you down?”

“Yeah. I blew her off and got out. Is she for real?”

“Define ‘real.' She's former law enforcement, if that's what you mean. But ICOTIA was disbanded several years ago. I'm not sure what Ellen's doing these days. We're out of touch,” he added delicately.

I scowled. “Well, she was pretty intent on giving me a hard time.”

“I suspect she's working for a private collector.” Adrian inclined his head toward the bone disc. “Even if she was still with ICOTIA, you would have been safe. Any British artifact made of bone, or clay, or stone—as long as it doesn't contain more than thirty percent gold or silver, you don't need to turn it in to the authorities.”

“Authorities meaning the British Museum? Inspector Wexford?”

“Under the Portable Antiquities Scheme, if you discover something you're supposed to report it. But the law's almost impossible to enforce. That's why you see nighthawks out with metal detectors at three
A.M.
They're looking for treasure. Saxon hoards, Roman coins—something like that can set you up for life, if you sell it on the black market. Or go through the legal channels and sell to a museum. Usually nighthawks will strike a deal with the landowner and agree to share it with him. Sometimes they go it alone. But they're looking for metal, not bone.”

I looped the cord over my head and held up the thaumatrope. “So something like this, you wouldn't be required to report it.”

“That's right.”

“But this isn't from the UK, is it?” I ran a finger across the disc's implacable graven eye. “I assumed it was from, I dunno. France or Spain, someplace like that. You know, with cave paintings. Ice Age stuff.”

“We had an Ice Age, too. Several of them.”

“Yeah, but were people here making things like this?” I wound the thaumatrope on the string and spun it. The ancient eye opened and shut, opened and shut. “Because that would backdate the British film industry about ten or twenty thousand years. That would be kind of a major scientific breakthrough, right?”

Adrian's eyes cut at me sharply. I glanced into the Rover to make sure Krishna was still asleep. In a low voice I asked, “Where the hell did this come from?”

Adrian extended his hand to let his fingers brush the bone disc. “The fogou at Kethelwite.”

“What the hell's a fogou?”

“An underground passage. Like a barrow. Fogous are a bit different—no one knows what they were actually used for. Some sort of Iron Age ritual, maybe. The one at Kethelwite has a long central passage with chambers branching off of it. I only went in there once—it scared me to death. There are ruins everywhere at Kethelwite; we played in them when we were kids. We were always digging up ax heads and flints.”

“Bones?”

“No. The soil's too acidic—anything buried a few thousand years ago is peat now. But there were all kinds of other artifacts. We'd pretend we were knights in Middle Earth. When Morven and Mallo bought the place in Crouch End, they took a good many with them. I think Morven only wanted them as souvenirs, at first. The gallery and black market, that came later.”