Quarter Square (9 page)

Smith returned immediately, and the detectives turned the tape back on to wind up the interview.

At eleven o’clock they released me, and I walked from the station, free. I wasn’t allowed inside our old home—the crime scene—and had been told to let the police know if I planned to be anywhere other than Plymouth in the foreseeable future.

On my way to the house I remembered Dawson’s remark about my owning it all now. When Carole’s life insurance paid up, it would clear the mortgage on this place and I would own it outright, as well as the theatre in Plymouth. Other than providing renovation cash for the theatre through its sale, though, I wasn’t interested.

Without even looking through the windows into the house, I collected my van from the driveway and set off for Plymouth.

I was under surveillance. The black car that followed me back to the West Country made no attempt to hide.

I reached Plymouth at four in the afternoon. Twenty-eight hours had passed since my arrest, and I was drained.

The black car swept past when I pulled up outside the theatre, and I gave its two shadowy occupants a friendly wave as they turned the corner.

Min, Andrew and several other insiders were sitting in the garden. They’d been worried about my sudden disappearance, and Min stood to hug me.

They listened to my story about the events in London, and more people arrived as the word spread about my return. I had to repeat everything five or six times, until everyone had heard everything.

They were concerned, but Min was horrified. As the insiders discussed what I’d told them, and the conversation took on a life of its own without any need for my input, she pulled me to one side.

We settled in the quiet spot under the tree where she taught the kids, and she made me tell her everything again in the greatest detail.

“Tell me about all the policemen,” she said when I’d finished.

“The ones who interviewed me?”

“Yes. Start with them.”

I told her about Dawson and Smith. I didn’t know why, but she wanted more, so I described everyone I’d come into contact with since I last saw her: the two Plymouth guys who arrested me and took me up to London; the custody sergeant; the various silent policemen who had fed and guarded me; Merritt…

“Who?”

“Some guy called Sebastian Merritt. From the Home Office. Seriously up himself.”

“Tell me about him.”

I recalled everything from Merritt’s interrogation. I told her, word for word, what he’d asked and what my answers had been.

“What does he look like?”

“Tall. Dark hair and features. A good head of hair for his age. About fifty. He has one of those craggy faces with sharp eyes.” I scoured my memory for any other details that might lurk there. “Long fingers and bony wrists.” I glanced at my rough hands and bruised nails and remembered how I’d kept them under the desk after noticing Merritt’s manicure.

“I don’t know if it’s him,” she whispered.

“Who?”

Her eyes snapped back into focus. “Tyac.”

“Who the hell is Jack?”

“Not Jack. Tyac.” She spelled it.

“Sounds like Jack.”

She smiled through a film of tears. “Yes, I know.”

“So who is he?”

“An old enemy.”

“An old enemy of yours?”

“An old enemy of ours.”

Huh?

“I need to tell you something.” She checked around to make sure our conversation was still private. “It’s a big thing.” Her eyes bored into mine.

“Go on, then.” I kept my tone light but got the feeling this was going to be a serious conversation. I had no idea where we were going.

Min glanced around once more and took a deep breath. “We’ve known each other before.”

I smiled. “I feel that way too.”

She squeezed my hand. “It isn’t only a feeling. We
have
known each other before. We’ve been lovers for thousands of years.”

What the hell was I supposed to do with a statement like that? A nonchallenging expression was the best I could manage.

She started singing in a low voice, just for me. I didn’t recognise the language or the tune, but the spirit of her song slowed my heartbeat, and I inhaled deeply in wonder.

As she sang, visions of a land of purple mountains whose lower slopes were decorated with cultivated terraces appeared before me. White stone buildings shone in the sun; and a huge round temple with many columns supporting its roof stood proudly on a hill above a fertile plain that stretched to the dark sea in the distance.

I saw Min, many times in many different places and always smiling—always smiling at me. She held my hand, and the action was mirrored in the visions. We were always together and always in love.

Her song reached its end, and she gazed at me in silence.

“That was us you saw, Joe—you and me, together in the land of our birth, thousands of years ago.”

She was telling the truth. I knew it in my marrow, but it was difficult to accept.

She made sure nobody had wandered too close to us, and pitched her voice even lower. “I’ll tell you how it is with us. I am immortal, and you are reincarnated repeatedly. We fell in love in Atlantis, when I was a priestess in the temple of Cleito and you were a woodsman called Cayal.”

“Cayal,” I whispered.

“It means
golden lion.
”

We shared the Look.

“Is Min your real name?”

“Minsilvia.”

The way she said it made me tingle. “What does it mean?”

“
Daughter of the sea.
”

I started to remember fragments, as if it was all a dream, and Min allowed me time to come to terms with the knowledge.

“Where was it?”

“The mountaintops are now known as the Azores. Most of the land was lost when the sea level rose after the last Ice Age.”

“And when was it?”

“We first knew each other thirteen thousand years ago. We lived together again and again for a thousand years on Atlantis, before it was lost.”

The memory of a memory trickled into my mind. I focused on it, letting it solidify, and gasped suddenly in the certain knowledge that Tyac had poisoned me. “Who is Tyac? Why did he kill me?”

Min leaned forward and held on tight. “He was a powerful man, a priest in the silver temple of Poseidon. He loved me. He was determined to have me, but I rejected him because I loved you. So he murdered you.”

I closed my eyes, absorbing the information.

“I can show you, if you want me to.”

“Show me.”

Her new song began, softly, and the memory swelled.

At a fountain in the centre of a circular courtyard paved in yellow stone, surrounded by ornate pagodas and trellises, sunlight danced in the falling water and the scents of a thousand different flowers floated on the sea breeze.

The sun was low in the evening sky, and its heat was gentle. I sat on the low wall of the fountain and ate my supper while waiting for Min to finish her duties in the temple.

The stomach ache started small, almost as soon as I swallowed the honeyed bread, but it grew and hit me like a deep blow. I doubled over in agony.

I’d been poisoned. I knew it. I fell off the wall and couldn’t stand again. I was numb from the waist down, and my upper arms were going the same way.

I wanted Min. I was dying, and I wanted to hold her close one last time before I went into the darkness. I raised my head with difficulty, looked up at hundreds of stone steps towards the temple on the hill and crawled towards them.

Under normal circumstances I would have skipped up those steps in no time at all, but now I didn’t know if I could make it.

It took an eternity. I soiled myself, but I was beyond shame. I only wanted to see Min before I died.

The holy ones would be furious when I entered the temple, but I was beyond fear. I only wanted to see Min before I died.

Eventually, somehow I reached the golden entrance steps of the temple. I was a stinking mess, an empty husk, crawling on my belly and leaving a smear of blood and shit across the polished marble floor in the cool interior.

A woman’s voice had been droning a ceremonial song, but it faltered. My sight was fading fast, and only the white blurs of priestly robes were visible, but I guessed the singer would be Min’s mother, Shira, the high priestess of this temple. A hush fell over the holy ones as I dragged myself across the floor towards the altar.

“Cayal.” Suddenly Min was there, carefully lifting my shoulders and resting my head in her lap, her tears falling on my blind face. “What has happened?”

“Poison,” I gasped.

“Tyac!” she screamed. “This is your doing.”

“It is.” The hated voice echoed from the walls of the temple. “It
is
my doing. Who do you think you are to consort with an uninitiate? Who do you think you are to break our rules?”

Min trembled violently, and her voice broke. “You have killed him.”

“Min.” My voice was little more than a breath. “Forget him. Just hold me. I love you.”

She stroked my face with tender fingertips. “I love you, Cayal. I will always love you.”

Shira’s voice cracked across the temple. “Tyac. Who do you think
you
are, to murder an innocent and boast of it as if your victim doesn’t matter? This act will not go unpunished.”

The sound of several pairs of footsteps running and scuffling reached me.

“Hold him,” Shira commanded.

Fury strangled Tyac’s voice. “I curse you, Minsilvia. I curse you to immortality, to an eternity of barren loneliness without your peasant lover and without a family to comfort you.”

“And I curse you, Tyac,” intoned Shira. “We banish you from this land forever, and I curse you to take on the nighttime nature of the first nocturnal animal you see after leaving our borders. I curse you to immortality as a beast in the darkness. You will never find rest.” She shouted in power, “Cast him out!”

There were further sounds of struggle, and Tyac continued to shout as he was manhandled from the temple, but I couldn’t understand his words and I didn’t care. My time was near.

Min held me close and whispered in my ear, “Come back to me.”

“I will.”

A new scent reached me, and new hands helped Min support the deadweight of my body. Shira’s voice was close. “My daughter’s love, may you be born and reborn again and again for as long as my daughter’s immortality curse lasts, and may you two find each other again and again, so that you may remain together in love.”

Min kissed my forehead as I died.

And now, thousands of years later, I knew the pain once more as terrible agony spread from my stomach through my body. I slumped forward to lay with my head in Min’s lap.

“What happened to Tyac?”

“The first beast he saw that night was a wolf.”

I jerked upright, almost convinced my heart really had stopped this time.

Min stroked the back of my neck and steadied me. “I know. I know all about it.”

I laid my head in her lap again, enjoying the sensation of her stroking my temples, and wondered about all those lives I’d lived. I couldn’t remember them, but the memory of my first death was sharp, and the crushing sadness of tragedy weighed me down. I cried quietly into Min’s breast while she held me.

People approached, and she waved them away.

“This is how it works,” she said. “If I am with you when you die, I know where you will be born in your next life, although I never know when. Usually you find me. Or rather, you stumble across me, and I recognise you. If we’re not together when you die, we often struggle to find each other when you’re reborn. That’s happened several times. We’ve endured three long periods of separation when I searched for you while you lived a string of lives in sadness and longing without ever knowing why.”

Her tears fell on my face. I gazed up into her lovely eyes and remembered those times of deep sadness. Not the specific circumstances, but the dreadful emptiness.

The tears disappeared with a quick swipe of her hand. “When we meet, it always takes you a while to understand our relationship. I never push your understanding faster than you can manage, although from time to time there are circumstances like these when I have to accelerate your memory.”

“How many lives have I lived?”

“I don’t know. Two hundred maybe?”

“How many of them have we lived together?”

“Many.”

“Tell me about them.”

“You always want to know this, every single time.”

My distress was fading, but I stayed cradled in her arms, where I belonged. “I’ve always liked Arthurian legends and Celtic art. Was I ever involved in any of that stuff?”

She laughed. “The Arthurian chivalry stories are fake. They were copied from a myth cycle that originated in Brittany hundreds of years before the Romano-British era and was adapted to fit a later worldview. The mediaeval depiction glorified a courtly way of life that you held in utter contempt at the time. You hated that stuff so much.”

She grinned. “And the Celtic revival was a nineteenth-century invention that bore little resemblance to the ancient Britons people now call Celts.”

“You were there, through all these things.”

“So were you. You spent several lives as a Saxon, for goodness’ sake, often a master carpenter working for the chieftains who assimilated and reigned over the British people.”

I returned her grin as she giggled at my romanticism. “Will you tell me about my recent lives?”

“I haven’t seen you since we lost each other in the First World War. I’ve traced you twice since then, but both times you’d already died. Last time you were a reclusive scholar of Atlantis. The trail of your research paths led me to you after your death forty years ago.”

Her body tensed beneath me, and her tone turned serious. “You were murdered both times.”

“Tyac.”

“Yes. He hates us. He’s followed us through the ages, sometimes catching up and attacking us and sometimes losing track of us for generations. He’s murdered you many times, even when you were only an infant.”

“Is he a werewolf?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “That’s exactly what he is, and he might be Merritt. He’s an expert at changing his human appearance and often attaches himself to government bodies, royalty, organised crime, any organisation that will allow him to work in the darkness. He often achieves positions of power, although he never seeks fame or exposes himself to the public eye, and he uses that position to gain knowledge—always with a single aim: to find us.”

“I wonder if he was Jack the Ripper.”

“We wondered that at the time.” She gazed into the past. “In any case, whether or not he is Merritt, he’s on our trail again. From what you said about the murder-scene photographs, I’m positive Tyac killed Carole and Tony.”