The Deadly Game (10 page)

‘I’m going out to explore Glastonbury,’ he told them after they’d parked the cars. ‘Anyone fancy coming with me?’

The others declined: Andy wanted to take Woody for a long run; Robert wanted to read a newspaper and do the crossword, and Michelle said she had some work to catch up on.

‘OK,’ said Jake. ‘We’ll meet back here at seven, if that’s OK with everyone. Hopefully Weems will be off duty by then and settled down in front of the telly.’

‘And ready for my very boring call about local planning regulations.’ Robert grinned.

Jake headed into the town. As well as needing to be on the move, he reasoned it was a good idea for him to continue to be seen to be checking out all things Arthurian and keep up their cover. It was as he walked along the high street that he became aware of a couple of hippies he was sure he’d seen before.

Not that there should be anything particularly suspicious about that; after all, the place was full of visitors traipsing around, going in and out of shops and exhibits, and the odds were that people would keep bumping into one another. But there was something not quite right about these particular hippies. For one thing, they were young. Most of the hippies walking around Glastonbury seemed to be of an older generation, as though they had got stuck in a time warp in the 1960s, but their bodies had continued to age, and now they were grey-haired and frail-looking echoes of a time long gone by. But these two, although dressed in clothes from a time when tie-dye and sheepskin may have been cool, looked much, much younger. There was also a sharpness, an alertness about them, about their faces and their eyes, that didn’t fit with the laid-back look of their clothes. The same alertness was also in the way they moved; they were nimble on their feet. Not that hippies shouldn’t be nimble, but these two looked like people disguised as hippies. The man wore a tie-dye waistcoat over flared blue jeans, and the woman wore a long, shaggy sheepskin coat. Both wore coloured beads around their necks, and the man wore beads wrapped around one wrist. It was all too much, thought Jake.

He wondered if they might have been undercover police officers from the drugs squad. That could explain the discrepancy about how they looked, and how they acted. He tried to remember where he’d seen them before. Then it came to him. They’d been sitting at a table in the garden at the Grail and Thorn when he and Robert had arrived. Jake was sure they’d had drinks on the table with them, but they could have been empty glasses, or belonged to someone else. Then he was sure he’d seen them when he’d done his earlier solo walk around Glastonbury.

Had it just been coincidence? Or had Robert been right when he’d said that whoever was watching them would already be at Glastonbury, waiting for them? Had this couple been waiting for them? If so, why hadn’t they followed them when they’d gone to dig in the fields?

Jake stopped outside a shop selling crystals and other Arthurian artefacts and examined the display in the window. He stood there for at least three minutes. Then he turned and looked along the street. The couple were still in the same place he’d last seen them, standing outside a café, seemingly reading the menu on display.

Jake headed away from them, along the high street, and as he did he was aware of them moving off after him. Again, it could be coincidence, but there was one way to find out.

Jake did a U-turn and began to head back the way he’d just come, heading straight towards the couple. They stopped and began to look in a shop window as he passed them. Jake headed towards the same café where he’d seen them standing and apparently weighing up the contents of the menu. He went as if he was going to go in, but instead suddenly crossed the road and headed down a narrow cobbled side street, following a side that read ‘Public Toilets’.

The public toilets were in a small block in a little garden-like area at the end of the narrow alley. A wooden bench was near them. Jake went to the bench and sat down on it, and as he did so he was sure he saw a flash of light-blue flared jeans appear at the end of the narrow alleyway, but then disappear out of sight. Jake jumped up and headed back towards the alley. The man with the tie-dye waistcoat was standing there. There was no sign of the woman in the sheepskin coat.

The man hesitated. Jake guessed he was upset at being caught out like this. Then the man hurried towards the toilet block and went into the gents.

Again, it could have been coincidence, there weren’t that many public toilets in Glastonbury, but Jake was sure the man had been following him and had been forced to go into the toilet to avoid blowing his cover.

So where was the woman? Maybe waiting at the far end of the alley, by the cafeteria, ready to pick Jake up and continue following him if he reappeared. Well, he wasn’t going to give her that satisfaction. If she wanted to follow him, she’d have to work a bit harder. Jake crossed the small patch of garden area and headed for another narrow cobbled alley, this one leading towards a Pilgrimage Centre, according to the signpost. Not that it really mattered, Jake reflected. After all, the couple knew Jake and the others were staying at the Grail and Thorn and could pick them up at any time.

Jake wondered who they were, and who they were working for? His instinct was that they were working for Gareth, a pair of MI5 spooks checking that Jake really was in Glastonbury on a quest for King Arthur. Well, they’d be able to report back that Jake had spotted them and given them the slip. Not that he thought they would. After all, they wouldn’t want to look bad to their superiors, and — as Jake had said — they knew where everyone was.

But say they
weren’t
working for Gareth and MI5? If that was the case, who were they working for?

Chapter 15

When they met up in the pub car park at seven that evening, Jake told the others about the hippie couple, and him giving them the slip. Michelle was dismissive.

‘Maybe he really did want to use the toilet in a hurry,’ she said. ‘Hippies need to pee, too.’

Robert shook his head.

‘I think Jake’s right,’ he said. ‘We always guessed we were going to be watched when we got here.’ He grinned. ‘I just think they got it wrong using that sort of disguise. From Jake’s description, I remember seeing the pair of them in the garden when we arrived and thinking they looked like they were going to a fancy dress party. Not the best outfits to wear if you want to keep a low profile and not be spotted.’

‘Why all the interest in us?’ asked Andy.

‘Because of what we’re looking for,’ said Jake.

Andy shook his head in awe.

‘This must be some very special sort of book,’ he commented.

Michelle looked at her watch. ‘And the sooner we get our hands on it, the better,’ she said.

They pulled into the lay-by by the field at half past seven. No one followed them, and there was no further sign of the hippie couple. Jake wondered if the couple had realised they’d been spotted by Jake and had been pulled off the case. In which case, who had taken their place?

As the others got out of the cars, Robert dialled Weems’s number.

‘Mr Weems,’ said Robert cheerfully. ‘Robert George calling. We met earlier with my friends in a field.’

Then, while Robert continued the conversation, outlining a hypothetical planning situation and asking complicated questions that would require a whole series of long answers, Jake, Michelle, and Andy with Woody in tow, took spades and a trowel from the boot of the car and headed down the narrow track to the place where Woody had got so excited earlier.

‘We’d better be quick,’ said Michelle. ‘Weems is going to get suspicious if Robert talks for too long, and the next thing we’ll have the police on us.’

As before, Jake let the dog sniff at the old oiled book cover, and Woody immediately went straight to the same spot and began barking and turning in a circle.

‘Definitely the place.’ Andy nodded.

Andy pulled Woody to one side, and the two kept watch for anyone approaching, while Jake set to work, digging, with Michelle filming the whole process.

After a few minutes of digging, with no success, Jake felt his arms tiring and his back aching.

‘There’s nothing here,’ he announced bitterly.

‘There is,’ said Andy confidently. ‘Woody’s never wrong. You need to put more welly into it. Dig deeper.’

‘And faster,’ said Michelle, focusing her camera on the hole that Jake had excavated. ‘Robert can’t keep Weems talking for ever.’

Jake grimaced, then returned to the task. Despite the urgings to go faster from Michelle and Andy, Jake dug carefully; worried in case the blade of his spade might puncture the leather casing around the book and release whatever might be inside. The image of the man who’d turned into a vegetable at the construction site in Bedfordshire still haunted him.

‘There it is!’ said Michelle excitedly.

On hearing her exclamation, Andy hurried over, keen to see what was happening. Jake stopped digging and peered into the hole. Yes, there did appear to be something poking out from the earth. He dropped the spade to one side and picked up the trowel, and began to carefully scrape around the dark object he could see. Gradually, a shape was revealed: a small box-like rectangular shape. Jake scraped away more of the earth, and finally exposed a black leather packet embossed with a letter M with a snake writhing through the letter. The symbol of Malichea. He’d found it! He’d found one of the books!

‘Stand away and put your hands in the air!’

They all turned, and saw two men standing glaring at them, one old and one young. They looked like father and son. The older of them was holding a shotgun pointed directly at Jake.

Woody may be a great dog for sniffing out things, but he wasn’t much of a watchdog, thought Jake bitterly. But even as he thought it, Woody growled and bared his teeth, and Jake was sure that if the dog hadn’t been held tightly on a lead, he’d have hurled himself at the man with the gun. Andy made a clicking noise with his tongue, and the dog settled down, but kept his eyes all the time on the man with the gun.

‘Hand it over,’ snapped the man with the shotgun.

‘Hand what over?’ asked Jake, looking up at the men from his position inside the hole.

The man with the shotgun scowled.

‘That thing you’ve just dug up,’ he said grimly.

As Jake straightened up and turned to face them, stepping out of the hole, he slid the package down inside the back of his jeans.

‘We haven’t found anything yet,’ he insisted.

‘Don’t lie to me,’ grunted the older man. ‘Just hand it over.’

‘Do you have a licence for that shotgun?’ asked Andy, speaking with a note of confidence in his voice that surprised Jake.

The older man frowned.

‘Yes I do, as a matter of fact,’ he said. ‘And you’re trespassing and illegal treasure hunting. This is my land.’

‘We’ve got permission to dig from the landowner,’ put in Michelle.

‘That don’t matter,’ snapped back the older man. ‘This was my land before they took it over and there’s things here that belong to me and mine.’

He’s a Watcher, thought Jake. Weems must have alerted him after he found us.

‘That may be,’ said Andy, ‘but we’re not here for treasure.’ He reached into his pocket and produced an identification card. ‘Search and rescue, working with the police. We’re looking for evidence of a crime.’

The older man looked at them, puzzled, and Jake noticed the look of concern that crossed the young man’s face.

‘What crime?’ asked the older man.

‘That’s official business,’ said Andy crisply. ‘And at the moment you’re committing another one, pointing a loaded gun at plain-clothes police officers.’

‘It ain’t loaded!’ burst out the young man.

‘Shut up!’ barked the older man at him.

So, thought Jake, definitely Watchers, come to scare us off and stop the book being taken, but not using real violence; just a threat.

Andy pushed his ID card at the young man.

‘Take a proper look at that if you don’t believe me,’ he said.

The young man took Andy’s ID card, looked at it, and compared the photograph on the card with Andy, then offered it towards the older man.

‘That’s what it says, Dad,’ he said. ‘Search and rescue.’

As I thought, father and son, mused Jake. Handing down the Watcher tradition.

The older man spat on the ground.

‘Cards like them don’t mean anything,’ he said. ‘People make ’em up on computers.’

‘There’s a phone number on it,’ said Andy. ‘Phone and check. And then put down that gun and let us get on with the job we’re here to do.’

The old man looked uncertain, and very unhappy. His son looked even unhappier.

Jake let out a deep sigh which made everyone look at him.

‘It’s not here,’ he said, looking into the hole. ‘Looks like our information was wrong. If it was really here, we’d have found it by now.’ He shook his head. ‘Guess we’d better get back to the station and tell the boss the bad news.’

‘What you looking for?’ asked the younger man, curious.

‘Official business,’ said Andy again curtly. ‘Need to know.’

‘So, we’re giving up?’ asked Michelle.