Omega (51 page)

The Section had got to work. After twenty-four hours Davidson had still said nothing except to rail at Harley as 'a witch-ridden megalomaniac'. The implications of a leak about his relations with Savernake Forest had alarmed Harley and he had ordered the interrogators to be less squeamish in their methods. This proved unfortunate, for the lieutenant died under questioning, and the captain and the sergeant, who had been brought in to watch what to expect when their turn came, somehow managed to commit suicide in their cells.

Left only with Davidson, who seemed impossible to crack, Harley did some rapid thinking.

Colonel Davidson, bruised and aching though he was, knew better than to be surprised when he was cleaned up, brought a fresh uniform, given a good meal, and taken under escort to Harley's private quarters where the escort handcuffed him to a chair and left. Here comes the softening-up bit, the sweet reasonableness, the proffered deal, he told himself. God damn Harley, that won't get him anywhere, either.

Harley came into the room, a young woman with long black hair at his side. So that's the Black Mamba, Davidson thought, deliberately ignoring her. The colonel's own spies had been efficient.

'I'm sorry about the handc
uffs,' Harley said pleasantly. ‘I’
d have done without them but my watchdogs won't let me. They insist on you being physically harmless before they'll leave you alone with me.'

'How right they are,' the colonel told him.

'Come now, Colonel, the time's past for dramatic gestures. So pointless. Your conspiracy has lost its leaders and hasn't a chance of succeeding. You may disapprove of me but I'm sure you'll agree that with
your
chance gone, even my regime is preferable to anarchy. So why not be sensible and cooperate?'

'With you - and
that!
'
He jerked his head towards the woman.

The woman laughed.

Apparently unruffled, Harley went on and on, calm, reasonable, placatory. The colonel was puzzled. He sensed that it was all meaningless, that Harley knew perfectly well it would not succeed but that he was continuing the interview for some hidden purpose.

The woman just sat there, unspeaking, a faint smile on her face. In spite of himself, the colonel found himself glancing again and again in her direction, drawn by that face, drawn by those eyes. They were an unusual shape; the colonel, who knew his Far East, was certain there was no oriental blood in her but could understand why people thought there might be. And the
size
of them
...
the depth
...

He was back in his cell, sitting bolt upright with a start.

When they had dressed him for the interview, they had given him back his watch. It was still on his wrist and he looked at it incredulously. He had lost at least an hour and a half, between succumbing to those great eyes and receiving the mental order to wake up. He
knew
it had been a mental order; he could still feel the impact of it, the quality of mocking triumph, even the femaleness of its sender.

What had he said before he was led back to the cell? In that hour and a half, what names had he given, what plans explained, what good men and women betrayed? Had black sorcery achieved what torture could not?

Colonel Davidson could only feel, with an awful certainty, that the pocke
ts of his mind had been picked,
emptied, rifled. For the first time in years he lowered his face on to his hands and wept.

General Mullard, anxious about morale, wanted the executions to be carried out secretly. But Harley decided otherwise. Seven officers, twenty-three other ranks and nine civilians were marched, handcuffed, for half a kilometre along frequented corridors to a large empty store-room, where they were led in and dealt with four at a time. The firing squad had been picked by Harley personally from the Hub Defence Battalion which was known colloquially as 'the Big Chief's Own'. Thirty-nine prisoners, four at a time, meant ten volleys, which echoed down the Beehive corridors for quite a distance. Six of the thirty-nine had been women.

At the same hour, five w
ere executed in the Cardiff Beehive and two at the Norwich one, the only places outside London where Davidson had managed to plant supporters.

There were no more conspiracies and informing on even flippant critics of Harley's regime became a normal self
-
defensive reaction. General Milliard, a little grudgingly, admitted to Harley that he had been right.

Brenda, no longer in Harley's confidence, had known nothing of the would-be
putsch
until the mass arrests had included one of her own library assistants. Within an hour, news of the swoop had been all round Beehive and it had been a nerve-racking hour for Brenda, quite apart from her distress over the assistant whom she had liked and known for years. She was frightened both for herself and for Gareth. She expected to be picked up and questioned because of her closeness to the arrested assistant and she had feared that Gareth might be involved in the conspiracy. She did not think he was but knowing his secret views she had to face the possibility of it and of his having hidden the fact from her for her own safety. But no questioning occurred, then or afterwards, and Gareth rang up her up with a routine library query the obvious purpose of which was to let her know that he was not in trouble.

He came to her room that evening and, signalling to her to be careful, began a meticulous search for any newly installed microphone. Brenda understood and kept up a harmless conversation till he had finished.

'All clear,' he announced at last. 'I was pretty certain you hadn't been bugged since the last time I looked, when the Chief chucked you out - but with all this going on, I'd rather be quite sure.
...
I heard about your chap Farmer. I really am sorry about him. Been with you a long time, hadn't he?'

‘
Yes, he had
...
Were you
...
?' She did not know quite how to put it.

'In on the round-up? No, love, I wasn't. I knew Davidson and the other three had been arrested, the other day, but the whole business suddenly became very hush-hush.

No one in the Section was told what was going on except the people actually working on it. Next thing the rest of us knew was this morning when the other thirty-eight were pulled in simultaneously.'

"What'll
happen to them, Gareth?'

'The charge is treason, Brenda. Every single one of them, including your pal - I'm sorry, love.'

'So Reggie
’
ll have them shot. Oh, my God
...
Who else will they find?'

'My guess is no one. With a thing this size, I know how the Section works. If they
did
expect ramifications, every last one of us would be on overtime, questioning the prisoners' contacts. But we're not. It was neat, quick and complete. I know the signs and I'd bet a year's pay they're satisfied they've rounded up everybody. One of the leaders must have talked and convinced them he'd left nothing out. Don't ask me how. It's all very untypical.'

'I did wonder myself,' Brenda admitted. 'When they arrested Jerry Fanner, they didn't question me or any of the staff. They didn't even search his desk. Just took him away...' She smiled bitterly. 'A grilling was the least I expected, now that I'm out of favour. . . . Though it's a couple of months now since Reggie dropped me. I suppose I'm not even "out of favour" any more. Just unimportant.'

'Not to me,' Gareth said quietly.

'I know . . . Why do you put up with me, Gareth? I use you as an emotional punching-bag and you never complain.'

He shook his head diffidently and after a while he asked: 'Do you still miss him?'

T wish I could answer that one,' she said, frowning. 'I just don't
know.
Sometimes I think I miss the man he
used
to be - but how much of that is really nostalgia for the old days, before the earthqu
akes and the witch-hunt and the
Dust?
...
I thought I'd miss the status of being Madame Pompadour, with everyone afraid of offending me. But I don't. There's no real satisfaction in having everyone scared of you. I thought the wolves'd be on me as soon as I fell from grace - but do you know what, Gareth? Most of them just steered clear of me, as though I were going round with a bell crying "unclean, unclean". . . . And the
real
people were much more relaxed with me, as though I'd rejoined the human race. . . . The worst time was in between, when I knew that bitch had taken him over already but he kept me on out of habit - when
she
wasn't in Beehive, at least. I was humiliated but I was as stubborn as hell. I was
not
going to give in to her. . . . You said he "chucked me out". He never actually did, Gareth. Just treated me as part of the furniture till the humiliation outweighed the stubbornness. Do you know how it happened in the end? We'd come back to his quarters together and I let us in with my key. I always kept it separate from my key-ring - don't know why, caution I suppose. Anyway, he was being emptily charming, talking about nothing and not thinking of me at all and all of a sudden I hated him for excluding me. I put down the key on the table - sort of instinctive gesture of rejection. I went to pour a drink and when I came back the key had gone. I had a feeling he wanted me to
...
to abase myself by asking for it back. I couldn't. He went on being emptily charming, as though nothing had happened - he still is, if we meet by accident. I never went back and we never mention the fact.' She smiled unpleasantly. 'My God, Gareth, if
I
were a black witch I'd have his wax image right here, stuck full of rusty nails. Hers, too. Does
that
mean I miss him? Go on, psychoanalyse me.'

He shook his head again. 'I almost wish you
were
a black witch. You'd be doing the country a service.'

'Don't tempt me . . .' Her smiled faded. With your , dangerous thoughts, I'm surprised
you
weren't in there with Colonel Davidson. Thank God you weren't. I'd as sure as hell miss
you'

'No, Brenda. When the time comes, that won't be
my
way of fighting him.'

Brenda took a deep breath.

'Our
way, Gareth,' she said.

23

'I sometimes wonder,' Norman Godwin told his wife, 'why the hell we ever took on this bloody Castle.'

'You've been wondering that every week for months -and you know very well why,' Fay said.

The early sunshine bathed the perfect mandala of the sunken garden, below the East Terrace on which they stood, and softened the massiveness of the thousand-year-old fortress of Windsor at their backs. The lawns of the quartered circle were not as immaculate as they had once been, certainly; but they were still not bad, for the Castle group kept them mown on a rota system, as a labour of love. Only one feature was new - the two-metre-wide altar, neatly built of stone blocks, where the north-pointing path of the equal-armed cross met the outer circular path. The ornamental pond at the centre, too, was kept meticulously clear of floating leaves.

'It might really have been designed as an outdoor witches' temple,' Norman mused.

'You've said that before, too.'

Norman smiled. 'Stop taking the mickey, girl. You were the one who spotted it in the first place.'

They stood brooding, remembering the day they had come; the three covens from Slough, banding together for defence through the worst of the Madness, with friends and families making up nearly sixty people. They had been lucky to survive, for this part of the Thames Valley had been hit hard; and they had owed that survival to the nostalgia of a middle-aged woman from County Limerick. Maeve Kiernan was a quiet hard-working member of the Godwins' own coven, who had lived in Slough for thirty years or more, but who still tuned in to the Radio Eireann news almost every day. So she had picked up the Taoiseach's announcement on vinegar-masks days before the earthquake - and those who listened to her had escaped the Dust. Apart from the covens and their immediate friends, there had been few enough to listen; for the anti-witch mania was intense locally and on one occasion Maeve had narrowly escaped lynching as a panic-mongering witch when she had bravely stood up and tried to pass her news to a cinema audience.

The defensive band, practically unarmed, had fled from Slough in convoy during the demented hand-to-hand fighting, and dodging fissures, had found themselves at the gate of the Castle. Strangely, there had been few people about and those that there were had been busy fighting each other. The band had managed to lock themselves in the Round Tower, where they had been unassailable, till the peace of death had settled on the turmoil outside.