December (95 page)

      
'You don't believe me. You never believed me. You humoured me
for years and you went your own way, and you fought, he's gonna get
straightened out one day, yeah?'

      
Tom keeps his hold on her shoulders. She can't really see his
eyes, but she knows they're staring far into hers.

      
'Darlin', this is as straight as I get.'

Right,' Gwyn Arthur tells
Case and Prof. 'Things are moving. The two PCs up the road have been detailed
to take a look at Grange Farm. There are others on their way.'

      
'Dreadful night, yeah?' Stephen Case says. He could be talking
about the weather.

      
'Put your handkerchief away, Steve.' Prof snorts. 'Not your style.'
Steve gives him that you'll-never-work-for-me-again look and Prof acknowledges it
with one finger. Gwyn raises an eyebrow.

      
He nods towards the ruins. 'Mr and Mrs Storey seem to have a
lot to talk about.'

      
'Leave 'em alone, eh?' Prof says,
      
'I think you're right, my friend.'

Tom has been talking
rapidly at Shelley, and the thirteen grotesque years of her marriage have been
leaping up at her, wiggling their flabby rubber hands like grinning cut-outs on
a children's ghost train.

      
Tom has been talking about seven-year cycles of death
maintained since the year 1175, and Shelley just wants to run away and bury her
head in some distant pillow.

      
'See, we was supposed to all piss off, shattered, after Dave died.
And the studio sealed off by the cops, who don't give a shit what's underneath
it. Another tragic accident in the music business - we kept saying that. But,
fanks to Moira, we don't piss off, we take the place apart and we find the
oak.'

      
Shelley just wants a quiet, dry place where she can have long,
unpublic hysterics. 'Yes,' she says tightly. 'Yes, OK.'

      
'Copesake knows. He's bound to know. Bound to've heard us
trashing the joint. And then this wanker Gibson turns up with Vanessa, and she
just stares at him, all big-eyed and solemn - you know the way she does?'

      
'Yes,' Shelley sobs.

      
'And it's the big taunt." Clutching her shoulder tightly.
      
'Telling him,
you blew it last time too.'
      
'I don't unders—'

      
'Cause we passed that death, like passing the parcel, Dave to
Moira, to me, to ... to Debbie. But at the end there was
life
. Don't you see? Life out of death, out of the flames. Life!
Vanessa
! Life born out of the Abbey.
There was life when- there shoulda been only death''

      
Under Tom's hands, Shelley's shoulders start to give way.
      
'The kid's a walking taunt,' Tom
says quietly.
      
'He's going to kill her, isn't he?'
      
Tom won't answer.

      
'He's
got
to kill
her. Hasn't he.
Hasn't he
?'
      
'Nobody's got to do anyfing,' Tom
says lamely.

      
'But by all the laws of this warped logic, the laws of the
Abbey, he has to do it. That's what you're saying.'
      
'You told me to fink aloud. That's
what I done.'
      
'So tell the policeman.'
      
'You fink he's gonna believe that?'
      
'
Tell him
!'

      
Urgent footsteps on the brittle grass,
female
footsteps, make Shelley turn, frantically hoping against
hope ...
      
'Tom? Oh ... Shelley. It
is
Shelley, isn't it?'
      
'Hello, Moira.'

      
Moira says, 'I'm sorry, Shelley, I need Tom.'
      
Tom says, 'What's wrong, Moira?'
      
Moira says, 'Please?'

      
Shelley screams, 'You've to tell the policeman!'
      
'What about Simon?'

      
'I've been learning things about that tower.'
      
'Tom, you've got to …'

      
Tom turns to Shelley, squeezes both her arms. 'Darlin' ...
you
tell him. You tell the copper.'
      
'Where are you going? Tom!'
      
'Tell him.'
      
'
Tom
!'

IX

Blues

They think he's a stupid, garrulous
old man, retired from work, retired from useful life.
      
Eddie Edwards, unwanted, has been
discarded, like the small, tubby child excluded from the football team and anything
exciting, like pinching apples from Morgan's orchard - aye, he remembers that,
too.
You keep watch Eddie. You can be ...
the lookout
. As if anything ever happened for lookouts to look out for.

      
He has been home for a warming cup of tea and to apologise to
Marina, who looks not in the least concerned - even she thinks he's too old to
worry about any more; what's he going to do in the teeming metropolis of Ystrad
Ddu, find himself another woman, a hot number in a tight skirt?

      
Nevertheless, he goes back on watch. He promised - hardly graciously,
but he promised
(... while my good friend
Mr Edwards remains here, on the offchance that the little girl should reappear.
Pah!).

      
He feels the most bitter when the police car whizzes past with
its beacons spinning. And then the ambulance. An ambulance! And then the
ambulance returns. But the police car does not. Gone to the Abbey!

      
So what action have the police been able to take? Who was in
the ambulance? Not even anyone he can ask. The street is deserted, the pub
closed now, the villagers locking their doors in some relief - relief that an
ambulance has passed by on the night of the eighth of December on a seventh
year, and neither they nor any of their loved ones are inside it.

      
Eddie prowls up and down between the church and the vicarage.
Once or twice he goes into the church - half fearfully, he has to admit, after
the business with the candles. What if the candles are alight upon the altar and
the church is fetid with the stench of human grease?

      
And why is it always so much eerier when you are alone? He
doesn't think he'll go back to the church again; not the kind of place a child
would hide.

      
What is he thinking about? He
knows
where Vanessa is. Or, at least, who she's with. And if bloody
Gwyn had not been so keen to shut him up, he would know too.

      
So cold it is. Eddie wraps his overcoated arms around his
chest and stamps his feet. This is a waste of bloody time. He marches up and
down the street, past the Dragon, closed now for the night and back towards the
church.

      
And it is then, above the church, in the mist, that he sees the
small, moving light.

'Mrs Storey.'

      
Gwyn Arthur turns away from the gate, beckons her with his
pipe. A uniformed policeman is on the other side of the gate, under the
searchlight. He is expressionless.

      
'And
Mr
Storey -
where is
he
?'

      
Something has happened. Something horribly serious. Shelley
starts to babble: Tom was tired of hanging about doing nothing. He's gone to
look for Vanessa. She doesn't know where he is, but he can't be far away.

      
'Pity. We rather need him. Mrs Storey, your firm's vans - what
colour?'

      
'Green. Dark green.' Real dread seizes Shelley.

      
'I'd like you to come and look at one, if you don't mind.'

      
'Vanessa?' Her voice cracks.

      
'No sign, I'm afraid.'

      
She goes with them in the police car on a journey lasting no more
than a couple of minutes, over rough road. When they stop, the headlights
reveal a farmhouse of grey stone and peeling whitewash. Another policeman is
waiting by an outbuilding whose double doors have been flung wide.

      
Gwyn Arthur says heavily, 'I wouldn't normally ask you to do
this but, in the absence of your husband and in view of the urgency of the
situation, I'd like you to take a look at a body.'

      
Shelley slumps in her seat.

      
They park in front of the barn, the headlights illuminating
most of the interior: rotting hay, a rusting motorcycle carcass and, in the
middle of the barn, one of the two dark green Love-Storey vans.

      
Shelley's breath locks in her throat.

      
'It's not Vanessa,' Gwyn Arthur emphasizes.

      
Even before one of the uniformed policemen swings the van
doors wide, Shelley starts to feel faint, knowing whose body this is going to
be.

Eddie remembers thinking
despondently, I shall soon be too old for this. Be too old before Zap is too
old.

      
He meant too old to use the narrow, stony footpath which crawls
stealthily behind the church to the great clefted rock of Ystrad Ddu. Too old I
am, certainly, to attempt it at night, in a heavy mist.

      
But the small, wan light still taunts him, glimmering in and out
of the murky canopy, like a candle behind filthy old lace curtains.

      
The light is somewhere up there, around the clefted rock.

      
Out of the question. Too old, too fat and only ever picked as
the lookout, the one rewarded with the most withered-looking apples in the
haul.

      
Anyway, perhaps it's only a couple of the village kids, up there
for a dare.

      
Really?

      
On the night of the eighth of December of a seventh year, with
ambulances racing past and police about? The night of the locked doors and the TV-volume
turned up high?

      
The night on which only the retired idiot, Edward Edwards, is
out on the street?

      
And a small, sad-faced handicapped child. And a woman with
both legs paralysed.
      
Do
you really have a choice?

      
Eddie pushes a leather-gloved hand into his overcoat pocket and
flicks on his Maglite.
      
He swallows. He's afraid.
      
Who wouldn't be?

      
The path can best be picked up at the far end of the
churchyard, under whitened yews. He shines his torch up the path; it looks
impossibly steep, slick with frost and has a big puddle at the bottom, too wide
to get round. Ice on the puddle has been broken, shards floating like dead fish
in the brown water.

      
Someone came this way.
      
And
I'm too ...

      
Eddie wades miserably through the puddle, feeling the water
seeping into his socks. He thinks of Marina hunched happily over a fat fire,
reading Danielle Steel.

      
... old for this.

      
The first diversion in the track is marked by a thorn-bush, as
they so often are in this area. One path down to the village, one upwards to the
great cleft. Among the thorns, twin circles of ice reflect the Maglite's thrusting
beam.

      
Eddie stops.

      
He takes off his leather gloves and inserts quivering fingers among
the thorns.

      
Bringing out a pair of large, round spectacles, with very thick
lenses.

      
He almost cries out.

      
Nothing worse than this. It makes for a rare and terrible
moment when, like a cold blade entering your chest, it becomes shockingly
apparent that your very worst fear is one hundred percent justified.

      
The lenses are rimmed either with the juice of berries - too late
in the year for that, obviously - or with some other substance, still sticky.

He doesn't know what time it
is. He has no watch. But the dawn must be hours away yet. So the vague
luminescence, which allows him to see the jagged shapes of stones at the edge of
the tower - the edge of his world - is more likely to be a moon of sorts,
beyond the mist.