Triskellion (28 page)

Gabriel sensed her stare and looked up at her. “Well?” he asked, without opening his mouth.

“I can’t believe you just stood by and let it happen,” Rachel said. “I mean, the guy died in front of our eyes, in terrible pain. This is serious stuff. This is
life and death
stuff … not a stupid treasure hunt.”

“You’re assuming I had some kind of control over it,” Gabriel said.

“Well, you did. Didn’t you?” Rachel knew only too well what Gabriel was capable of. She had no trouble imagining that he had somehow controlled that swarm of bees.

Gabriel and Honeyman exchanged a glance.

“Maybe he had it coming to him,” Gabriel said.

Rachel couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
“What?”

“Maybe it was just payback for something that happened in the past.”

Honeyman nodded. “Something in the past…”

“Things catch up with people eventually.” Gabriel shrugged, coolly, as if he were talking about a minor debt.

“So a guy gets stung to death because he’s a nasty old
vicar?” Adam asked, shocked.

Gabriel smiled, but just for a second or two. “I’m not talking about him specifically,” he said. “But perhaps someone
like
him did something bad a long time ago. He hit you, Rachel, because you tried to stand up to him, because you’re strong-willed. A few hundred years ago, he would have burned you as a witch. A thousand years before that, he might have sacrificed you to please the gods.”

“A thousand years is a long time,” Rachel said. The vision of the knight and the maiden – of their final resting place and the hooded man brandishing the curved knife – flashed momentarily through her mind; an image rapidly replaced by a picture of the twisted, mummified bodies in the log coffin.

“Sometimes revenge
takes
a long time.” Gabriel sat back in his chair. He looked almost pleased with himself.

“Whoa. I don’t get this,” Adam said. “You mean, he’s taking the rap for something that happened in the past? Someone else did something bad and he pays the consequences? How’s that fair?”

“Who said anything about fair?” Gabriel said. “Do you think people have been fair to you? We’re all paying for stuff that was done in the past in some way or another. For things that were done by others.”

“Yeah, well, you can’t take it out on innocent people,” Rachel said. “If everyone thought like that we’d still be fighting the grandchildren of soldiers who did terrible things in the Second World War.” Adam nodded. They both remembered
with horror the stories their father had told them about his grandparents being driven out of Poland during the war. How other family members had not been so lucky; how they had stayed and died. “We’d still be at war with people whose fathers and grandfathers killed members of our family in the concentration camps. It doesn’t work like that, Gabriel. It
can’t
. You have to forgive…”

“Not where I come from,” Gabriel said, standing and looking from one twin to the other. “Where I come from, we get even.” After a few seconds he grinned suddenly, as if the conversation had never happened.

“What?” Rachel said.

Gabriel reached into his pocket. He pulled out a glinting Triskellion blade and placed it on the table in front of the twins.

“
You
stole it from the church,” Adam shouted. “Do you know how much trouble we got into because of that? They blamed us…”

“That’s not the blade from the church,” Honeyman said, putting cups of tea down in front of the twins. “It’s the one you hid under the floorboards in the cottage. It wasn’t very hard for him to nip in and grab it while you two were having a ding-dong with your nan. He was worried you’d spill the beans and tell them about it.”

Adam felt himself redden. It was true, he almost had told them. “Talking about spilling the beans,” he said. “You were the one who blabbed about the blade we found in the woods.”

Honeyman looked at his feet. “I didn’t have no choice,” he said. “They’d already hurt me once. Who knows what Hilary Wing might have done?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Gabriel said.

“Listen, you need to do what he tells you,” Honeyman said. “You’ve got to trust him.” He looked at Gabriel, who smiled at him benevolently.

“I’m glad somebody thinks so,” Gabriel said.

“You’ve got to stop blaming him or me, or worrying about what the old people think. None of it’s important. This is bigger than all that, and we’re nearly there now.”

“Nearly where?” Adam asked, confused.

“Nearly at the end of it all,” Gabriel said. “We’ve got different journeys home, but we all need the Triskellion back together before we can move on.”

“But we’ve only got one piece of it,” Rachel said, flatly. “The other one was stolen, remember?”

Honeyman took a quick slurp of tea, and began to fish in the deep pockets of his baggy trousers. “If you want to know who done the stealing from the church…” He pulled out a second blade, which he lay on the table next to the first.

Rachel and Adam looked open-mouthed at the blades which, seen together for the first time, looked brighter, more vibrant than either had done separately. They looked like new;
better
than new and their gleam seemed to give off more light than the single bulb that had begun to sway gently above the table.

“They’re beautiful,” Adam said.

The blades seemed to shimmer, then vibrate, rocking from side to side as if controlled by a magnetic force. Then slowly they began to spin, until they were positioned, point to point, their flattened centres overlapping.

Honeyman clapped his hands together, delighted. “See, they’re finding themselves. Getting their bearings.”

“Their bearings for what?” Adam asked, staring at the blades as they continued to hum softly against the wooden table top.

“We need the third one to find out,” Gabriel said. “We know where it is.”

“That’s right,” Honeyman said. “We know where it is all right.”

“But there’s only two people here who can go in and get it.”

As Adam and Rachel returned the stares of Gabriel and Jacob Honeyman, it became very clear to them who those two people were.

A
s soon as Hilary Wing had closed the door of The Star behind him, Tom Hatcham threw the bolts and drew a curtain across the window. Wing studied the silent faces, the forlorn figures sitting at tables staring back at him.

Most of Triskellion seemed to have gathered in the small saloon: the Bacon brothers; the couple from the bakery, the greengrocer, the butcher and the old woman who ran the post office; the entire staff of the village school, the cricket team and the committee that maintained the green and the village’s floral arrangements.

Hatcham went back behind the bar and poured a large glass of red wine. Wing took the glass, all but emptied it in one.

“Stone’s dead,” Hatcham said. “Toxic shock, the ambulance men reckoned.”

“I know,” Hilary snapped.

“Freakiest bloody thing. All those bees…”

Hilary turned to see his father sitting in the large armchair beneath the window, nursing a glass of whisky. Celia Root sat looking drained and traumatized beside him.

“There was nothing we could do,” Commodore Wing said. The old man had tried to sound authoritative, but his voice sounded as frail, as empty, as Celia Root looked. In truth, the terrible events at Root Cottage had shaken them to the core, and both were riddled with fear and doubt. And worse, with guilt…

Was any way of life, any
secret
, worth dying for?

Perhaps they had held on to the past for too long, and now they were paying in blood.

Wing could see the uncertainty in their faces and, with it, his chance to seize control. He leant down close to the table so that no one else in the room could hear. “So we still don’t know if they’ve got the blade?”

The commodore shook his head.

Wing turned round and addressed the room. “So where have these bloody children gone?” He looked from face to face. “Someone’s sheltering them.”

“All we know is that they’ve disappeared,” Hatcham said.

“They’re not with the telly lot either,” one of the domino boys added. “We checked.”

His friend nodded and chimed in. “They disappeared from the scene of a fatality, that’s all we need to know. Perhaps this really is a police matter.”

“Shut up, you moron,” Wing barked across the bar. The
room fell silent as the man reddened, and Wing wiped away the smirk on Hatcham’s face with one withering glance. “
Nothing
in Triskellion is a police matter.” Wing stepped away from the bar, began to move slowly between the tables. “Things that happen in Triskellion are
Wing
matters and have been for centuries.” He turned to look straight at the commodore. “They
used
to be handled by my father…”

“Still are,” the commodore growled. He tried to stand, but Celia Root reached across the table and laid a hand on his arm.

“I don’t think so,” Hilary said. “You’ve lost control.”

“That’s not true…”

“I’m afraid it is.” Hilary Wing raised his voice for all to hear. “There was a time when a TV camera wouldn’t have got within miles of this place. There was a time when we paid no heed to outside opinion and ran the village by ancient rules.” He turned his gaze to Celia Root. “And there was a time when bastard offspring wouldn’t have been welcomed back here with open arms.”

Celia Root took a sharp intake of breath. “Watch your mouth, Hilary,” she spat. “These are my grandchildren here and they’ve as much right to be here as you do. I am as keen to preserve our way of life as anyone else here.”

“Maybe that’s because you have more to hide than anyone else.”

“Shut up,” the commodore said, steel in his voice again.

Wing pointed an accusing finger at his father. “Maybe
that’s because both of you have something to hide. Because, actually, you have done more to damage this village than anyone else has
ever
done.”

Some of the villagers began to murmur and to look from one to another in confusion.

“I think you’d better explain yourself, Hilary,” Hatcham said.

The village greengrocer stood up. “That’s right. You’re going to start accusing people of something, you’d better tell us what you’re on about.”

Wing walked to the centre of the room. “How stupid
are
you people?” He looked at Hatcham, at the Bacon brothers, at all of them, knowing he was not going to get an answer, and spread out his arms. “This village is a special place. You know it is. You take it for granted that the crops around here never fail, that people don’t get ill as often as they might. How many of your parents and your grandparents lived well into their nineties? How old are some of
you
? You think that’s
luck
?”

The air of confusion in the room grew thicker. “What else could it be?” Hatcham asked.

Wing shook his head, like a schoolteacher losing patience with his pupils.

“This has always been a lucky village,” a woman said. “Nobody from here died in the First World War, nor the Second.”

“Blessed, that’s what we are,” another added. “Blessed by the ancient traveller, by the legend…”

“It’s no legend,” Wing said.

The women looked at each other, at Hatcham. “I don’t understand,” Hatcham said.

Wing swore under his breath, exasperated. “Why are you all here?”

“This business with Reverend Stone,” Hatcham said. “It’s not right, so we just thought—”

“He was murdered,” Wing said.

“Now you’re just being daft,” the greengrocer said. “He was stung to death. The commodore saw it happen.”

Wing waved his hand, dismissing the man’s remark. “I don’t care what anyone saw happen. Those children … the Roots and the …
other
one. They are responsible for this, and now they have stolen something that does not belong to them.”

Hatcham nodded. “The blade from the church.”

“There are three blades,” Wing said. “The three blades that make up the Triskellion. These children already have two of them and thanks to that television show the whole bloody world knows where the third one is.” He looked round, enjoying the reaction as his comments sunk in. “So, what do you think your precious legend has to say about
that
? Think this place will still be blessed if the sacred symbol of our ancient traveller is disturbed?” He glared at the villagers. “How much bad
luck
do you think that might bring?”

Tom Hatcham walked round the bar. He placed a hand on the shoulder of an old woman who looked close to tears;
nodded an assurance to several others who looked deeply disturbed by what they were hearing. Then he looked across towards the window. “What do you reckon to all this, commodore?”

Wing was not about to wait for an answer. “There’s going to be a change around here,” he boomed. “I am taking charge.”

“You have no right,” the commodore said. “Not until I’m dead.”

“Watch me,” his son said coldly. “Besides, we might not have too long to wait for that anyway.”

The commodore lowered his head, the fight all but gone from him. Celia Root took his hand in hers and squeezed. Hilary Wing turned his attention to the rest of the assembly.