Spend Game (22 page)

‘Why ask, Lovejoy?’ She put down the Bilston carefully. ‘You knew Leckie better than anybody. Do. you seriously think he would send you a useless message?’ She pursed her lips and told me that wasn’t her idea of Leckie. ‘He was cool as a cucumber when he scribbled it. He paused a bit, even smiled.’ Her eyes
were damp. ‘The fault’s in you, Lovejoy. Whatever it is you’re looking for you probably already have in your pocket.’

‘But this message didn’t say much –’

‘It will be enough.’ She leaned across and bussed me lightly on the face. ‘Lovejoy. I don’t know what’s going on, why the CID are everywhere asking about you. Why everybody you know seems to be dying in road accidents. But don’t let Leckie have done it for nothing.’

Before I knew it I’d flung myself into the Arcade in a blazing temper. Patrick shrilled some cutting remark after me, but I didn’t pause until I was through the back street and into the old pub yard. Some buskers were playing away there for the pedestrians. I stalked through the crowd, got a pint and sat at a table. The bloody cheek of it. I must have been white with rage.

Helen could have saved Leckie, the grumbling useless bitch. Yet all she did was carry a message, too late to do any good. Couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger. Simply criticizes me the minute I want some help. That’s the trouble with women. Full of useless bloody advice while they do absolutely sod all. Everybody knows that. I marched in for another glass, fuming.

By closing time I was sloshed. I got a taxi from the stand outside the cornmarket and got myself driven back to the cottage. It took practically my last groat.

I paid him off and staggered up the gravel path. I remember even now how quiet the garden was, how the afternoon seemed one for dozing through. Soporific, I think the word is. I started singing, but what I don’t know. I must have taken a year to unlock the door.

For an instant I thought it was Moll who had followed me in. When I looked around the woman was
standing there, blonde and fetching. I gaped and tried to keep upright.

‘We’ve never really met, Lovejoy,’ she said. ‘May I come in?’

‘You’re Julia,’ I said foolishly. It was Leckie’s wife.

She walked past me and went inside. I shrugged, followed her in and closed the door.

I’
M NOT SO
proud of that Friday night that I want to tell everything that went on, even if I remembered blow by blow, which I don’t. Julia seemed to expect it, so I fetched out my reserve bottle of dubious sherry. We talked about Leckie. She seemed really rather sad, genuinely so. I was sure she wasn’t putting it on. I remember consoling her. We had some more sherry. I decided we ought to have a party to cheer ourselves up. She vanished, came back with more bottles.

By dusk we were in the garden. It came on to rain which drove us indoors. I insisted on making her some grub and shared a meal some friendly elves had kindly left out for me. I vaguely remember singing her a song, and her watching me but not joining in. After that it gets vaguely woozy. I told her about me and Leckie in the army, the bridge of bamboo and that bloody tunnel. At least, I think I did. I can recollect doing something with matchsticks on the table to show how illogical it is to be scared of tunnels falling on you when they are built on mathematical principles. In my hazy memory of this particular night Julia doesn’t say much, just seems to be watching steadily. Then dusk fell and I had to put the lights on. I fell over a few things and I can
remember laughing like a lunatic at not being able to get up. Then I tried to demonstrate how a savage karate chop would decapitate any Brummie goon that lurched in. Things seemed so funny. I laughed and laughed.

I woke next morning with the light still on. Julia was gone. The room showed that a lot of activity had taken place. My divan bed, for instance, was a shambles. There was no note. I had a splitting headache. It took me an hour to put the bedclothes out on the line to air. The grass was still wet, but the rain had stopped. I brewed up and sat miserably in the cool air, wondering how much I had told her. It’s no good thinking I’m a crude vulgar layabout. I admit it. Julia and I had gone at each other like animals.

What worried me was a map, spread across the foot of the bed when I woke. I should have been more careful. It was the Ordnance Survey map of the Mount St Mary area. Worse still, I couldn’t find the little railway pass. Maybe I had dropped it somewhere in town, though. Had Julia, I wondered, said
why
she’d called round in the first place? If so, I couldn’t remember. I felt miserably that I ought to assume the worst. Maybe Julia simply knew I’d be easy, came and did her stuff and learned everything I knew about Leckie’s and Chase’s plan to recover the precious silver Contrivance, and simply find out from me whereabouts it was. I could have kicked myself. I had been ahead of Jake and Fergus in the race, and chucked all my advantage away for a mess of pottage, so to speak. That’s the trouble with willpower. Everybody else’s is so much better quality.

I showered and cleaned up. I shaved ferociously. I even swept the cottage out, as penance. I fed the
birds and washed the windows aggressively. I washed crockery, re-made the bed and folded it away. By noon I’d recovered, with some aspirin. I was still mad at myself, but some determination had crept back into my actions.

The pasties I hotted up for dinner were iron hard. Normally I sling them out, but this time I ground my way through them inch by inch in atonement. I had a cold bath after that. Two pints of tea, and I was ready to face my responsibilities.

From now on I had to assume two things. First, that I’d told Julia all I knew, and that Fergus knew as much as I did. All it meant was that I was now in a flaming hurry, whereas before I’d been ambling along like a fool just hoping things would solve themselves. Second, I had to assume that Helen had been right, that I was mentally shirking truths
that I already knew.
I’d have to face up to it all. If she was right about my self-trickery, I could easily guess why I was evading the issue. I was probably scared of the tunnel I might find deep inside that hill. It was high time I went over all the events leading up to this morning, especially those concerning Leckie. I might make up part of the leeway I’d just lost.

I walked up to the post hut and borrowed Rose’s local contour maps from her door. She’d be as mad as hell, but it was time other folk besides myself made a few sacrifices. I went back and sat on my wall. Listing all the things you know about a person isn’t all that easy. Try it. You tend to miss things out simply
because
you know them so well. Despite my reluctance, I forced myself to go over every single detail of our relationship, from the moment Leckie took my first
parade to the instant I saw him hurtle against the tree in that thunderstorm. There seemed nothing there, so I forced my mind on into the events of his death, right up to finding Jake and his nerk in that hollow on Mount St Mary in the severed line of gorse. I forced myself to go over what Gordon and Bert told me.

It took me three hours. By then I was bushed. I broke for a brew-up, knowing I was coming closer and closer. By four o’clock I was focused clearly and resolutely on the niggly bit that had rankled for so long. I’d found it. It was one of the things Margaret had said that day I phoned her from calling at Virgil’s in Medham. She’d said Leckie was a collector of religious relics. I hadn’t known that. I remembered how surprised I was.

I got the map out. A small circle was inscribed on a contour line. It would be just about where the hollow is on the Mount. My spine tingled. On the larger-scale map there it was again, inscribed as well. My chin was suddenly stinging with sweat and my elbow flexures became sticky. And abruptly I knew it. I said, ‘God Almighty.’ The birds took no notice but the robin on my arm looked shocked for a minute. The well. The tunnel had pierced an old well.

Now I knew how Leckie and Doc Chase had come together, how Leckie knew of Chase’s quest. I knew why Leckie considered himself the legitimate discoverer once Chase had passed on. I knew how old Jonathan Chase, that brave Victorian dignitary, had got out of the hill. And I knew exactly why he and the rescue workers hadn’t managed to get back despite the desperate labour of several hundreds of them. I knew why Doc Chase sat for hours just staring at a hillside instead of wandering about on it. And why he went
to Scratton to look briefly at a dull old tunnel before going ‘fishing’.
And I knew that the tunnel deep inside Mount St Mary could be reached.

But worst of all, I knew the way in. My teeth were chattering as I set the robin down and brushed the remaining bits off the paving with a broom. I’d have to go. Elspeth came in her car about then to take me to her training programme. I’d forgotten she was coming, but I went with her for company’s sake. You can imagine the state I was in afterwards; bad enough before.

We had supper in a pub that evening. She told me which drinks and grub had least calories. I said, great, and borrowed from her because I happened to be a bit short at the time.

I was up at the ungodly hour of five o’clock. I’d tried the night before to phone Tinker at the White Hart, but failed. No mates, no car, no money and no bird. In spite of it all I got my bike pumped up and was burning the road up north-west to Scratton before dawn.

There’s an advantage in a bicycle. It’s silent. It can be fairly fast. It can be concealed in a way a motor cannot. And it doesn’t need a motorway. I was certain nobody could see me as I mounted my trusty steed and freewheeled down to the watersplash. I crossed the river and pedalled laboriously up the other slope of the valley. The surgery at Six Elm Green was silent, and the village still kipping like a top.

From there I cut right, along a footpath leading due north. It runs between fields and through copses towards Scratton. I was surprised what a lot of cows were about. I thought they’d still be in bed. Only once I met some chap, a farm labourer leading a horse the size of an abbey. It frightened me to death, but he only
said, ‘Good luck, chum.’ Probably thought I was out searching for birds.

On a bike I could avoid even the side roads. Where the absence of footpaths forced me towards the metalled Mount St Mary road I got off and walked on the fieldwards side of hedges, my plimsolls wet with dew. By the time I came in view of the Mount I was aching from all the unaccustomed exercise. I’d taken longer than I really wanted and the day was full up. The hillside stood clearly outlined. Funny, but it appeared somehow less anonymous than previously, more personal, as if it was getting to know these crummy people who kept coming to poke at its scrubby surface.

A car or two ran south towards our town, saloons. Jake’s great heap was nowhere in sight. Surely a Brummie wouldn’t be stationed on the hillside? They are notorious townies, even worse than me. I got to the edge of the line of dense gorse bushes and walked along it, pushing my bike with difficulty along the uneven slope. I don’t suppose I did it very well, but I had this idea of using the gorse line as a screen from people down on the valley road.

It was seven-thirty when I reached the hollow where Moll and I had picnicked. Full of misgiving, I laid the bike down, covered it as best I could, and slid slowly down into the recess. It was the place all right. Its margins, tilted to accommodate the hill’s slope, were rounded. What interested me most was that about halfway down, the sides gave a sudden levelling, as if somebody had tried to create a sort of ledge all the way round. The hollow bore a scattering of hawthorns and sloes, not very many, yet more than the rest of the hill had. No stones were visible.

At home I’d found a protractor, a cheap bit of plastic
marked in degrees. I’d lashed a ruler and a pencil to it along fixed radii, using the Ordnance Survey map as a guide. If I pointed the ruler at the distant church spire, the pub below should fall exactly on the pencil’s line, sixty-eight degrees of difference. I climbed out and stood by the nearest gorse bush. Spot on. The church line and the pub line intersected exactly where I stood. I put my home-made gadget into the bike’s bag and sat down to look at the hollow, the hollow which I now knew marked the ancient well.

I don’t want to make it sound enormous, because it’s nothing like that. It can’t be more than eighty feet across, and is only maybe twenty-five feet from the bottom of the bowl to the margin where it splits the line of gorse. The thought that Moll and I had lain there and actually noshed a picnic made me feel uneasy. We’d played about on the covered top of a bloody great hole leading down, down, down into the heart of a living hill.

I got my bike up after looking carefully at the road in the valley. No. And no innocent fishermen across the river peering at me with binoculars. I slithered down the hill, bouncing my bike’s wheels for all they were worth, until I made the place where the gorse line began again. A freewheel bumpily down to the St Mary footpath and I reached the pub in a few more minutes.

There were a few more cars about. Nothing sinister. A cart pulled by a nag, a brewer’s dray unloading at the Three Tiles. I pedalled airily across the bridge and got to Doc Chase’s sandy fishing patch without being mangled by maniacal swans. It was hopeless trying to conceal myself there. I sat and watched the hillside just as the old man had done for so long.

The hill looked innocent again, utterly bland. Yet
I shivered as I inspected its surface again. The Right Honourable Jonathan Chase had climbed from the tunnel to safety, not, as had been assumed, along one of the seven vent-holes which had been spaced out along the tunnel’s course.
He had climbed up the ancient well.
Then, by mistake, he’d told the people he’d escaped from one of the regular vent-holes. The tragedy was that any workman would have been able to tell the difference between the ancient brickwork of a medieval well and that which formed the inner facing of a tunneller’s vent-hole. But an august dignitary probably wouldn’t. In the horror of that muddy darkness he’d climbed blindly, struggling to feel space, any space, as the mud and slime had closed about him.