Restoration (12 page)

  Slowly they approached the peak, Haywood and Helen now only feet away. Ashe tried to catch a breath, determined to enter this moment as calm and focused as possible. He was about to take another life, the knowledge of that tightening his muscles more than even this damned cold could manage. Was this the way of things now? Was this the role he was trapped into playing, the man on the business end of death time and again? It seemed so.

  Walsingham, mistaking Ashe's pause for uncertainty – and maybe he was right – charged over the mound, running towards Haywood with that stupid flashlight in his hand, held aloft like a club. Ashe had little time to react, raising his gun even as Walsingham blocked his clear aim. Somebody else is about to die… Ashe thought, a stupid husband driven lunatic by his obsession for a cold and probably unfaithful wife. Haywood raised the rifle, Helen, shaking from the cold, got to her feet. Here it is, Ashe thought, here comes the gunfire… But Haywood didn't shoot Walsingham, he pulled the trigger sure enough but his aim was still on Helen. What came next was beyond Ashe's comprehension for a moment – but only a moment – he had got better at understanding the impossible these days. Helen vanished, just as the rifle fired. She had tumbled backwards, aware as Ashe had been that the moment had come for a trigger to be pulled. Then she was gone, a great cloud of snow erupting around her that settled to nothing. No, not nothing… even in that meagre light, Ashe caught a glimpse of the box. A dark shape against the white, a tiny glint of the moonlight on its hinges. Then Walsingham was on Haywood, the roar that erupted from him as unlikely a sound for the mild botanist as a barking horse. He brought the flashlight down, and even over the roar of the wind Ashe heard the crack of bone and wood as it met Haywood's skull. The doctor tumbled back, his mad eyes bulging further still. Walsingham hammered them back into their sockets, pounding and pounding with the flashlight, no more able to stop his attack than a bullet can change its course.

  Ashe cleared the summit and grabbed at Walsingham, dropping his – miraculously unfired – revolver into the snow so that he could loop his arms under Walsingham's. He felt a muscle in his stupid old back pop as Walsingham raged against him, determined to continue his assault on the man who had threatened his wife. There was nothing more to be achieved in that regard, it didn't take more than moonlight to tell that. Haywood's forehead was caved in, his mouth slack, eyes white. Walsingham had done what his rage had demanded. Now it was all just fire with nothing to burn.

  "He's dead!" Ashe screamed into Walsingham's ear. "Quit it! He's dead!"

  Eventually Walsingham did, falling back against Ashe, the pair of them on their backs in the snow. The splintered and bloody flashlight was still fixed to Walsingham's hand. Ashe imagined he would have an effort letting go.

  "He shot her." Walsingham moaned eventually. "After everything… he shot her."

  No he didn't, Ashe thought, at least I don't think so. The box did its job just in time. Though you may wish she had taken the bullet later.

  "I killed him," Walsingham said, his voice so quiet that Ashe could barely hear it even though the man's head was right next to his.

  "I know," Ashe replied.

  "Not Haywood," Walsingham replied. "Rhodes. I killed him."

  Ashe sighed, finding that once it was said he had somehow known that too.

  "Shouldn't have been fornicating with my wife." Walsingham said.

  He said nothing more.

 

 

Eventually, Ashe pulled himself out from underneath Walsingham and walked over to where Helen had vanished. He checked the snow for blood as best he could, it seemed there was none. "Vanished in time," he said to himself, picking up the box and putting it back into his coat pocket. He moved over to Walsingham, who was now utterly lost to himself, staring up into the falling snow as blindly as Haywood only a few feet away.

  "Come on," said Ashe, slapping his face until he saw a sign of life. "Helen's not dead." Yet anyway…

  "Not dead?" Walsingham asked, his voice still thin and dreamy.

  "No, so get on your feet and follow me."

  Ashe began the march back down the mountainside. He didn't check to see if Walsingham followed, once he'd got through to him he knew the man had little choice. He would follow Ashe to ends of the Earth if that's what it took to find his wife. It disgusted Ashe, though mostly because he disgusted himself.

  "Where is she?" Walsingham asked, skittering along next to him. "Where has she gone."

  "You'll see," said Ashe and would say nothing more.

 

 

Ashe half wondered if they would be refused entry to the monastery but, for once, Kusang's willingness to talk seemed to have acted in their favour. "Did you kill him?" the Tibetan asked as they appeared at the gate. "That crazy man of yours… did you kill him?"

  "Yeah," said Ashe, "we killed him. No more talking now. Tomorrow… we'll talk all you like tomorrow."

  For once Kusang didn't argue, whether it was the look in Ashe's eyes or just the relief that there was blood on the mountainside that wasn't his, Ashe neither knew nor cared. He walked up the stairs to the room above the stables, Walsingham trotting along behind him.

  Inside their accommodation, Ashe went straight to Haywood's food bowl, picked it up and sniffed it. There was a bitter smell there, sure as hell wasn't the meat. "Poisoned," Ashe said. "No more a drug addict than he was a murderer…" then he saw the dead body of the major and, for a moment, changed his mind. But no, the major's death was no more the fault of Haywood than an abused dog could be blamed for biting its owner.

  "Poisoned!" he shouted at Walsingham, who was now shaking by the front door. "You?"

  "I don't know what you mean…"

  Ashe shook his head, flinging the bowl against the wall. No, not Walsingham, he would never endanger his wife. "Close the door," he told him, "tight. I don't want that bastard Kusang eavesdropping and neither do you."

  No, Walsingham wouldn't have poisoned Haywood. To do that would risk endangering all of them –
had
endangered all of them – so that must have been Helen. So scared of the doctor in the party recognising her condition that she spiked his goddamned food. "Stupid bitch!" Ashe hissed, kicking at the wall.

  He was close to snapping, couldn't believe the mess he'd wandered into. Petty, selfish, obsessive, hateful… the only two members of the party he might have had time for were dead due to the sickening attitudes of the rest of them.

  "Where is she?" asked Walsingham.

  Ashe charged at him, holding him up against the wall, his old arms only too up for the job now they had anger to fuel them. "Where you'll never find her unless you do exactly as I say," he spat, "understand me? Because you've fucked everything. Your wife most of all." He let go of him, Walsingham's face crumpling as he began to cry.

  "Don't snivel," Ashe said, pulling the box from his pocket before thinking to glance at his watch. Just over twenty minutes left until his train… it would seem a lifetime if he was to spend it with Walsingham. "This box," he said, "is more dangerous than you could know." He rattled it in Walsingham's face. "It took your wife and only I can get her back."

  Walsingham was predictably glassy-eyed at this. "But it's just…"

  "It's not 'just' anything." Ashe pushed his face closer to Walsingham's. "Same deal as before, I need you to get Carruthers here – and no mention of any of this…"

  Walsingham was shaking his head. Of course he was, whatever he told people about tonight it would have precious little to do with the truth.

  "You get Carruthers here and you put this box in his hands… he'll be safe, Helen will be safe…" Oh how easily the lies come these days… "but only if you do it exactly as I tell you. Do you understand?"

  "Of course," Walsingham took the box, "and your masters? You know, the government…"

  Ashe had forgotten all about that little lie. He was a government man wasn't he? Occupied on weighty matters of state. "They will be suitably grateful that no mention of what you've done will leak out."

  "And Helen will be safe?"

  Oh one more, what the hell? Once you've started what use is stopping. "Safe and delivered back to you. But one mistake…"

  "I won't make any mistakes."

  "Better not, because if you do then not only will you be named as the murderer of Rhodes, Haywood and Kilworth but we'll make sure everyone knows you killed your wife too."

  Walsingham's face crumpled then and the rest of him wasn't far behind. He slumped to the floor in tears, clutching the box. "I love her," he said, "that's all."

  "Yeah," Ashe sighed, "tell it to the dead."

  He drew back the bolt and walked outside. Kusang was predictably close, Ashe beckoned him over. "Haywood killed all of them," he told him, in a voice loud enough for Walsingham to still hear. "He brained Rhodes, shot Kilworth and Helen and very nearly saw to us too."

  "The bodies?"

  Ashe shook his head. "Leave them. There's nothing of worth to bury."

  He walked down the steps, across the courtyard and out the front gate. Nothing could have made him look back.

 

 

"It will find you," the Controller had said after handing Ashe the tickets. Ashe didn't doubt it, the House had miracles to spare. It couldn't come soon enough for his liking. Not just to get him out of the cold but also the whole mess he had left behind. He had known that these trips would end up bringing the worst out in him, how could they not? He was now the ultimate pragmatist, he would do whatever needed to be done, all in the name of that damned box. It made him want to retch.

  Once he had got far enough away from the monastery, the landscape hiding it from view. He stopped walking and checked his watch.

  "Come on then damn you," he called into the wind, kicking at the snow to keep his legs moving.

  It burst out of the air as if tearing the night in half. Great waves of ice sprayed out from either side, like the curved wings of a bird in a child's drawing. Ashe couldn't bring himself to feel the least impressed, waiting for it to stop then climbing aboard and settling into an empty carriage. As the engine built up steam to pull out he lifted his gun out of his pocket and dumped it on the seat next to him. It was sticky with Major Kilworth's blood.

  "Not even fired but still painted in death," Ashe whispered as the train shot away back towards the House.

 

 

The warmer months brought a small thaw to the valley in which Dhuru lay. It also brought soldiers.

  Roger Carruthers – the renowned explorer, essayist and gourmand – was nervous in the mixed company but the mystery of what lay ahead made him tolerate it. The English were no longer so welcome in Tibet, if there had ever been a time when they truly were. The Tibetan soldiers that approached from one side of the valley – just as he and his party approached from the other – might mean conflict. Not that he was a stranger to such unsteady political situations – in his travels he had seen three civil wars, an invasion and a slave's revolt – but the idea that the day might end in crossfire was both fearful and irritating. He hoped Nigel was alright. The tone of his letter had been brusque to say the least, not to mention enigmatic to the point of blatant obfuscation. Not like old Nigel, he had thought, not like old Nigel at all.

  As his party approached the monastery, Carruthers could see Nigel Walsingham appear at the main gate. "An eager welcome," he murmured to one of the soldiers that accompanied him, a fresh-faced fellow from Portsmouth that Carruthers had taken a liking to. The boy had the restless feet of an explorer in him, Carruthers had decided, and he had put it on himself to encourage the chap to wander as soon as the opportunity arose.

  "Probably scared of the opposition, sir," the soldier replied, nodding towards the Tibetan soldiers who were now only a few yards away from the monastery themselves.

  "Roger!" Walsingham shouted, "thank goodness! I've been going spare waiting for you to arrive."

  "Well, rest easy now old chap," Carruthers replied, "though we may have a somewhat awkward clash of opinion with the locals forthcoming."

  "Never mind that," Walsingham snapped, shoving a small wooden box into Carruthers' hands.

  "What's this old chap?" Carruthers asked. "Not sure it's quite the time or place for…"

  A gunshot rang out and the soldiers around him snapped their rifles to their shoulders just as the Tibetans, mere feet away did the same.

  "Who fired?" shouted Carruthers. "Damn it! Who fired?"

  It was too late to worry about the finer details of that, as one of the Tibetans, no doubt convinced that the English meant to shoot them down, fired his rifle.

  One shot can almost be tolerated, when two have fired it will always bring more… both sides took their aim and pulled their triggers. Carruthers shouting in the middle of it, dropping to the ground where he appeared to vanish as if he had dived into water, not solid, Tibetan earth.

  A little way up the mountain, Ashe – who had fired the first shot – watched Walsingham run back towards Dhuru Monastery, hands above his head, screaming impartiality all the way. Ashe pointed the barrel of his revolver at him, wondering if it might not be better if he just…

  He put the gun away, quickly and with disgust. This is not who I am, he thought as he walked back into the mountains to catch his train.