Death of a God (31 page)

‘No way. Standard tread. The few we run this size are all Town and Country.'

‘Ah.' The Superintendent straightened up and looked about him.

‘I've studied the map,' he said, ‘so I know the general lie of the land. What I want you to do is describe to me in detail what there is to be seen over the brow of this hill.'

The young man looked puzzled. ‘I'll walk up there with you if you want.'

‘Not so much as a topknot is to show over that rise. Just tell me, if you please.'

‘Well –' the other considered: then, mentioning first things first, ‘There's the trees, of course, either side. Norway Spruce, just coming up for brashing.' At the expression on the Superintendent's face he quickly explained, ‘Cutting off the lower branches that'll be dying off anyway by now for lack of light. That lets us get in to mark the trees up for thinning, and –'

‘Tell me what else there is.'

‘Yes, sir,' said Mr Flotman, looking hurt. ‘Not much. Just the drove, straight as a die, a long gentle slope till it gets to Hob's Hole – about half a mile, I reckon. And that's as far as it goes, thanks to a conservation order on that bloody great hole in the ground. Left to us, we'd have taken it on for another three miles at least.'

‘Can you actually see the Hole from the top here?'

‘A sight better than you could a week ago. Then, there was still the old fence up, you'd hardly know it was there, it had got so buried in bramble and bracken and I don't know what. When we came in this time we thought we might as well do a bit of tidying up while we were at it. Matter of fact, if I say it myself, we did a damn good job. Only when we cleared the trash away, the fence itself just fell apart. We've put up warning signs, and we'll be putting in a concrete and link job soon as we get the go-ahead from the Ministry. In the meantime it's wide open, like a bomb or a meteor just dropped out of the sky.'

Correcting himself: ‘What you'd see from the top of that rise, to be accurate, is not the edge of the Hole proper, but which I can best call its rim. If you can imagine a beaker with a very wide lip – say, twenty-five, thirty meters – going all round, that's more like it: the gradient quite gentle, then suddenly there's the real edge, going down more or less sheer to the old flint workings. And that's about all I can think of. There's a footpath the other side, but you'd have a job finding it. Unless those fellows you're after try to get out under their own steam, there's nowhere else for them to go except back the way they came.'

The Superintendent said, ‘I'm relieved to hear it.'

Jurnet exclaimed, ‘That's terrible!' The young forester, affronted, went as red as his pompom. Jurnet addressed himself to his superior. ‘We've been reckoning on having the time it'd take them to get through that fence and all that scrub. We'd been reckoning on them having to get out of the car. But now –'

The Superintendent asked, ‘Then what are we waiting for?'

Under the trees it was terrible. Not a forest at all, Jurnet decided: a man-made timber factory that contravened every Act ever passed relating to health and safety at work. Beneath their feet, pine needles slimy with more than wet; above, an armoury of spikes and skewers that tweaked at their coats, their pockets, inserted themselves up sleeves and down trouser legs too many times for it not to have been done on purpose. Overhead, branches programmed with micrometric accuracy dropped small bundles of needles into the space between collar and neck.

Worst of all, thought Jurnet, was the smell. The next person to give him a bottle of pine bath-essence for Christmas was going to get it right back, in the kisser.

‘See that you move without noise,' had been the Superintendent's parting injunction as the different parties moved off – Jurnet, Ellers, and the Professor to the left; the Superintendent, Sid Hale and PC Nye to the right. The two local men were left to guard the exit to the road, and to be on hand to receive and forward messages.

They must have been in those woods before, Jurnet decided, to be standing there, grinning like hyenas. The Forestry Commission man, pleading for a role, had been sent, together with PC Blaker, to work round to the further side of the Hole and join up with some reinforcements arriving from Swaffham.

But, without noise! So quiet to outward appearances, the forest, once you were inside, creaked and rattled like an old tram-car on its way to the knackers. Elderly pine cones, trodden underfoot, cracked like bullets.

The three moved along unspeaking, each cocooned in his own cares, until Jack Ellers, who was in charge of the telemetry, tapped Jurnet on the shoulder, and jerked a thumb to the right; whereupon they turned at an angle and made their way thankfully towards the ragged fringe of daylight in the distance.

Jurnet found his throat suddenly dry. Not long now, he thought. God.

When he could see the side of the drove, where some long, elegant trunks of Scots Pine were laid out to season, he gave the order to get down. Not until the three were safely on their stomachs did he venture to raise his head.

Even then the trees mocked his intention, their reflections masking the car windows so that he could not make out with certainty who was sitting where; only that it was indeed there, as everything that had happened had predicted it would be, and that both front seats were occupied.

The car was parked at the very end of the drove, its rear wheels on grass, the front ones on the rough marl of that rim which Mr Flotman had described so accurately. A finger of wind, channelled by the surrounding trees, brushed teasingly up the drove road and back again, bending the long grass about the car's rear wheels now this way, now that.

After the forest it seemed very quiet. Too quiet.

Jurnet whispered, straining his eyes for movement on the further side of the road, ‘The Super's going to have a go at speaking to them.'

The sun was trying to come out. Professor Whinglass took off his glasses and put them away with donnish precision.

‘Reflections,' he hissed briefly. ‘Can't be too careful.'

The sun burst out in full glory, as if to applaud his foresight. The wind subsided. Coiled springs, poised for action, the three waited: when, without warning, out of the trees higher up the slope, tumbled a scrum of children, boys and girls with rosy faces and packs on their backs, pleased as puppies to be out in the air again after the dark of the wood.

They came down the slope shouting, singing.

‘My old man's a dustman,
He wears a dustman's hat.
He wears gorblimey trousers,
And he lives in a council flat –'

For a moment the three watchers stayed, petrified. Then Whinglass, with surprising, athletic speed, was on his feet, running into the road.

‘Leo!' he shouted. ‘No!'

Quietly, with only a whispering crunch of wheels over the marl, the car had begun to roll gently downhill towards the edge of the Hole, gaining momentum as the Professor came up with it. Yet somehow, by a superhuman effort, the man got the front door open, dragged out the passenger within. Bundled together, dust flying – impossible to say if they were clinging or grappling – the two disappeared over the edge a moment before the car followed, without fuss, its bright red coachwork giving it the look of a clockwork toy tipped carelessly off a table.

Contained by the side of the ancient mine, the resulting crash sounded muted, nothing much. The explosion which followed was of a different order. By the time Jurnet and his companions arrived at the Hole, the car, up-ended, was well ablaze, its bonnet wedged into the opening of a rudimentary tunnel where, long before history, miners wielding reindeer picks had scrabbled for the floorstone, the hardest flint. Plumes of flame emerged from beneath the chassis to curve upward and inward with deadly grace until the entire car was enfolded in fire as into the petals of some exotic flower, dangerous and devouring.

Jurnet ran along the edge of the Hole, the heat on his face, smoke acrid in his throat and his nostrils.

‘There has to be some way down!'

The Superintendent's hand on his subordinate's arm was iron-hard. Jurnet pulled away in vain.

‘Nothing you can do. Nothing anybody can do.'

‘There has to be!'

‘Nothing,' the other repeated, mouthing the syllables as if to one hard of hearing. ‘It's all over.' The Superintendent's voice held a cruel finality. ‘Now will you stop being sentimental, Inspector Jurnet, and come and lend a hand where you can be of some use!'

Fifteen feet below ground level, caught in a tangle of briar which threatened to give way at any moment, Professor Whinglass, blood dripping into his eyes and down his chin, held grimly on to his unconscious prisoner.

‘Sid better be the one to go,' the Superintendent ordered, uncoiling the rope with which, farsightedly as ever, he had thought to festoon his Burberry. ‘PC Nye,' he commanded abruptly, ‘get those children away from here and off Forestry Commission property.' Keeping his face deliberately turned away from the car, the column of smoke and flame: ‘There's nothing anybody can do in that quarter.'

It was no easy operation. The soft walls of the crater offered few holds. Soil and pebbles rained down on the stranded pair, red-hot shrapnel shot up from below. At one point, unwisely putting his trust in a gorse bush that looked as if it had been growing there since the Ice Age, the roped detective swung twirling into the smoke as the great, dusty mass, with its load of prickles, plummeted down an inch from the Professor's unprotected eyes.

Jurnet, the anchor man, hung on to the end of the rope and felt the skin scorching off his palms.

Only some unsuspected physical and moral resource, perhaps reserved to those who measure the survival of man in Ages rather than calendar years, enabled the Head of the Department of Archaeology to hold on to his burden until he was at last relieved of it.

When it was all over and they sat about awaiting the arrival of the ambulance, the Professor settling his glasses back on with trembling hands, Sid Hale limp, head on chest, Jurnet got up and walked over to the unconscious figure which had so narrowly escaped the holocaust: stood looking down at the hurt face, not knowing whether to be glad or sorry.

I love you. Have you ever had a murder confession which began with those words? I hope my saying them won't embarrass you or get you into trouble with the Chief Constable, or whoever it is who has authority over you. But I have to say them, and say them before I say anything else, because, of all the words I have to say, those are the most important.

Note that I say nothing about your loving me, even though – I don't think I am deluding myself – I believe you did love me a little, for a little while. A police officer can't be expected to love a murderess, I accept that. All I ask is that you don't hate me, or, if you do, hate me gently.

Have you so much pity for the killed that you have none left over for the killer?

For you to understand why I am that monster, I have to go back to the beginning – if there ever is a beginning, or an ending, for that matter – to the little town of Runstowe. I don't know if you know it? – in the corner of the county, between the fens and the forest; very isolated, very inward-looking, very much affected by its geography. A strange, ugly little place, inhabited by strange, ugly people who worship strange, ugly gods in underheated buildings of yellow brick with roofs of corrugated iron. I don't think, in all of England, you could find, in a town of that size, anywhere with as many chapels.

We – my parents, that is, and I, I was an only child – belonged to the Conventicle of the Elect. If you haven't heard of them before, you're lucky. I hardly know what they believed in, except that it was the opposite of everything that meant joy, or beauty, or laughter. My father was the lay preacher there, as well as maths master in the local Comprehensive, my mother taught remedial handicrafts to physically handicapped children, of whom – but that may be my imagination – there seemed to be an inordinate number in the town.

You have no idea how tender my mother was to those poor human accidents. How often, down on my knees beside my bed at night, I used to pray that I too might shake with palsy, or have to clump about in leg irons, so that she would take me in her arms and kiss me the way she did them! But for me she had no mercy. Not for nothing had they named me Mara, which means bitterness. To the Conventicle, life was one long struggle with Satan, and another name for Satan was sex. I was the ever-present reminder that they too, my mother and father, had once fallen headlong into that pit where men and women, lost to all sense of shame, coupled like animals. To have shown me love – even had they felt any – would have been to throw away all hope of eternal life.

I was brought up in the most perfect ignorance – no radio, let alone a television – and dressed in clothes that, anywhere else but Runstowe, would have had my contemporaries in hysterics. There was one girl who did laugh. She was a year or two older than I was, and she and her family had moved into our street quite recently. They not only didn't fit in, they didn't seem to care. To me, they seemed visitors from another planet, the father with his flowered shirts, the mother and daughter with their permed hair, their mini-skirts – yes, even the mother! – and their loud, happy voices.

Every evening Marilyn – that was her name – would come out of her house, with black on her eyebrows and around her eyes, and a new mouth painted in crimson over her own. Naturally I was not allowed to have anything to do with her.

When I was sixteen my grandmother died, the weekened before I was due to sit my ‘O' levels. She had been living in Newcastle with my aunt, my father's sister, and my mother and father went up north for the funeral. I'd have gone with them, if it hadn't been for the exams. Full of oblique warnings whose import was quite beyond me, they left to catch the bus, leaving me alone in my home for the first time in my life.