The Fetch (15 page)

Michael could see that his father was uncomfortable, hands in his pockets, shoulders tightly hunched as he walked and talked with his visitors.

The woman, by contrast, was intriguing and pleasant. She had long red hair and her skin
was deeply tanned. She wore a cream-coloured man’s suit and had an unmistakably French accent. She was also very aware of Michael. Indeed, as she walked she suddenly turned and looked up at the house, glimpsing Michael and smiling, waving at him. Although Michael drew back quickly, he knew that she had seen him. When he peered back round the window’s edge she was still looking up, her head cocked slightly to one side, a smile of amusement, slightly teasing, on her lips.

There had been a very strange incident, minutes earlier, shortly after the guests had arrived. Michael had been in the garden, still in his school clothes, looking for suitable plants to draw for the next day’s lesson. He heard the car pull noisily into the drive, then the sound of voices. The two visitors had come round to the back of the house with his father, making conversation about the garden and the drive from London, and then had gone indoors. But as they stepped into the kitchen, the woman cried out, slammed her hands against the door frame and stood, head bowed for a moment, moaning in what Michael could only think was pain. His father and the other man were naturally very concerned.

‘What’s the matter?’

‘No!’ was all the woman said. ‘Oh, God. No ! I can’t go inside. It’s too strong!’

‘It’s all right,’ Richard said. ‘We’ll stay outside for a while. Can I get you a drink? Brandy?’

Suddenly the woman relaxed, taking a deep breath and laughing. She seemed suddenly embarrassed. ‘I’m sorry, Dr Whitlock. I didn’t mean to startle you.’

‘Not at all. What can I do for you?’

‘I can’t enter the house for a moment. Sometimes the shock …’

Richard was clearly bemused, but he made encouraging sounds and again the three of them strolled slowly through the small orchard,
a man on each side of the shaken woman. She glanced towards Michael’s hiding place, once, but didn’t appear to see him.

Michael took the opportunity to dart indoors, going up to his room to watch from the window.

He felt nervous of the woman, yet also comforted by her. It was an odd conflict of emotions that he hardly understood: a combination of intrigue with her, and worry that she would see his Castle. So he frowned as they set off down the garden, drew back as she teased him out with her sudden, startling glance, and when they had started to cross the field to the quarry he followed at a distance.

Halfway over the field he heard his mother’s car, and Carol’s usual excited chatter. But he couldn’t help it if he was seen following the visitors. He wanted to know what the red-haired woman would find in the chalk pit.

He raced breathlessly to the wood at the top of the chalk, wormed his way through the bushes, under the protecting wire, and lay down where the land cut sharply away, dropping steeply to the quarry below.

Soon the strangers’ voices reached him. He saw them approach, amused to see them following the straight path through the quarry, led by his father, and not the circular, secret route.

The woman, however, was looking up, waving her arms about and making sounds of surprise.

He heard her say. ‘Dr Whitlock—’

‘Please call me Richard,’ his father interrupted.

‘I’m sorry. Richard … there
is
something here. I can’t tell what, not yet. But it’s very strange. It’s almost in the air.’

‘What does it feel
like?
’ asked the other man. He was carrying a broken stick and used it to strike at the gorse, damaging the leaves.

Listening from above, Michael grimaced and pushed himself lower against the grass as
he heard her words in reply: ‘Like walls. And gates. Yes, like a
castle
. There are barriers. Your boy has a powerful imagination. The castle he has invented is very strong in the air …’

Richard laughed, and something in the laugh disturbed Michael, but the thought faded away as the trio came closer to the chalk wall and passed into the camp, the small clearing where Michael could feel the old sea and the vanished beach most strongly. They stayed in the camp for a while, kicking around. The woman crossed her arms and seemed to feel cold. Could she feel the cold sea?

She looked up the cliff, suddenly, frowning. Michael’s heart thumped, but he didn’t move. His eyes met her gaze, willing her not to see him, and after a moment her focus shifted. She looked around, scanning the chalk wall left to right, then turned away. He heard her say, ‘There are some good fossils. Do you collect them?’

‘Once upon a time.’

His father went on, ‘This is where Michael claims to have found the golden wolf-girl. And I found traces of terracotta here after he brought home the Mocking Cross.’

Michael leaned further over the edge, puzzled. The ‘Mocking Cross’? What was that?

The other man said, ‘There has to be a cache around here. He must be getting this stuff from somewhere. Dumped from the cliff top maybe?’

Michael jerked back as the man stared up towards him.

‘I don’t think you’ll find a cache,’ Richard said quietly, hands still in his pockets. ‘I’ve searched the place thoroughly. Someone is bringing the stolen objects to him, Jack. Someone a little out of the ordinary.’

Jack began to walk away from
the others and Michael squirmed forward again to see where he was going. He was ambling towards the dungeon, kicking at the brush, reaching down to pick up stones, chalk blocks and pieces of wood, examining everything. He called back, ‘This is where you excavated the dog-shrine, isn’t it?’

‘Just about there. Yes,’ his father said.

The woman was hunched, shivering, staring back towards the curve in the quarry that led out to the farmland. Michael wondered if she could hear the sea. She seemed to be listening.

‘There’s a terrible smell here,’ Jack called suddenly, and again Michael felt anxious. The man was kicking at the gorse cover over the iron-grilled passage where the rags and bones were stored, the things that Michael hadn’t wanted to bring home.

Grimly, his teeth biting sharply at the inside of his lip, he watched the man in black leather pull up the gorse and disclose the passage, banging the iron with his broken stick.

‘Christ!’ came his voice. ‘There’s something dead in here. A dog or something … Really
rotten!
’

Richard joined his colleague. The woman stayed where she was, again glancing up the cliff, yet not seeing the boy who watched her from his invisibility.

Jack said loudly, ‘It’s an old tool housing, I think, probably from the quarry days. Covered by an iron grille. Help me with it. Can you?’

The two men tugged at the iron, grunting and straining. The bushes rustled and moved where their stooped bodies struggled.

‘Christ!’ Again, from the other man. ‘If it’s human we could be in trouble. I hope you realize that. What a
stink.
’

Then came the sound of something giving, metal on flint, or chalk. Disturbed, Michael
drew back from the edge, stood up and looked thoughtfully into the distance, towards the sea.

They had found the dungeon. That meant they would find the dead things. He didn’t know how his father would react to that. The woman had helped them in their discovery, but he felt sure she would be friendly to him. He was sure she could see the castle, and although she was frightened, or scared of something, she had almost broken the barrier without the map!

But they had found the dungeon, and that meant questions later.

Michael turned and ran home, hiding in his room behind the closed door, but listening hard, listening for the strangers’ return.

Jack Goodman backed out of the chalk tunnel and tossed a black object down on to the pile of remains. One hand over his mouth and nose he drew a deep breath, his eyes watering. A few yards away Françoise Jeury stood without expression, her eyes narrowed as she surveyed the growing collection of rotten, rotting objects.

Richard poked and prodded at the artefacts, fascinated and appalled at the same time. The smell was hard to cope with, but pure curiosity had taken over.

‘That’s about all of it,’ Goodman said hoarsely. ‘Christ! I hope you’ve got a good brandy up at the house. I’m about to die. Tomb robbing isn’t my speciality.’

‘Stop complaining about the smell,’ Richard said. ‘Look … This is human.’ He had seen a greying, shrivelled finger, part of a large, male hand. It had been torn, not cut. The nail was smooth and clean and a slightly lighter colouration at its base suggested that it had once borne a ring.

The main source of the smell of decomposition
was a goat’s head, with green and red decorative beads tied and tangled in its hair. The head was buzzing with flies even now. It had been cleanly severed at the neck.

‘Here’s your cache, Richard,’ Goodman said. ‘The boy has taken all the best stuff, leaving just the junk. Well, not
quite
just the junk. This is interesting.’

He was turning the dulled blade in his fingers. A wide, leaf-shaped knife, the ivory handle inlaid with amber and faïence. The metal was bronze, much tarnished and very pitted. It was possible to see the pattern in the blade still, although its delicacy was much obscured.

The rest of the haul was wood and bone, carved and shaped, dressed and decorated, but without meaning beyond some lost function of ritual. The head of the goat, the human finger and the roughly torn tail of a horse, its hair bound round with bright fabric, were all the obvious organic remains, though Richard found that inside the dress of a crude doll, something that looked Northern, shamanistic, the body consisted of a mummified rat.

Goodman said: ‘The tunnel goes deeper. There’s more animal stuff in there, I think.’

Turning the tarnished knife in his fingers, Richard murmured, ‘What sort of a cache – if by “cache” you mean stolen goods – what sort of cache contains rotting meat as well as gold, emerald and bronze? It makes no sense.’

‘You’re assuming that the gold and bronze was hidden at the same time as the animal remains.’

‘That goat is newly dead. Days, not hours. But recent.’

Like a savaged dog, in a wicker cage …

‘Maybe someone’s trying to discourage kids from nosing around in the hiding place.’

Richard shook his head. ‘I can’t believe that.’

‘Nor can I,’ Goodman said, rubbing his eyes and replacing his dark glasses. ‘I need some air … let’s get away from here.’

But Françoise stepped over and
reached out a hand. ‘May I see the knife?’

‘Of course.’

She cradled the blade, touched it to her mouth, licked it, turned it over and rubbed her slender fingers across its pitted surface. Richard watched her curiously, not yet knowing what to make of her, aware that something strange was happening to Michael, something irrational, but something which might be a part of this woman’s experience. He had been sceptical of the supernatural – Hungarian magic and family tradition not excluded – until Michael’s haunting had begun. Now he was intrigued by the claim that Françoise Jeury made: that she could tell age, and feeling, in objects that had been associated with powerful events.

She had been employed – albeit surreptitiously, it turned out – by the best archaeological research institute in Britain. If she was a charlatan she was at least convincing. But if she was genuine, a psychic, then she was potentially of enormous use to the Whitlocks.

‘It’s old,’ she said quietly, her accent less pronounced. ‘But not very. A few generations. A hundred years. Not thousands. It has no age in it like that. No feeling of real age. And no violence. Just an old knife. A hundred years or so. Maybe more. But not
that
much more.’

Goodman was surprised. ‘That would make it a Victorian copy. But this doesn’t look like a copy. I’d place it with the Wessex culture. Two thousand, two thousand and more BC. A
very
old artefact. I’ve seen them … This has been ripped off from a museum.’

‘I’ve seen them too,’ Richard said. ‘They preserve well. And this looks … Well, it looks right.’

‘But it has no age,’ Françoise insisted. Richard saw Goodman’s half-smile. She went on, ‘And a hundred-year-old copy would pit and tarnish just like this, wouldn’t it? If not preserved in the
heavy earth of a tumulus.’

‘That’s true.’

The knife passed between them.

They looked down at the rest of the spoil. Françoise prodded at the oak effigy of a human, armless, legless, the features grimly and sparsely carved in the wood. She picked up a shattered bone, where fresh reds and blues of paint still filled beautifully the carved grooves that formed the shape of a bison. This was probably how ancient bone-carvers had fashioned their charmed long-bones. Coloured with ochres and other paints, filled with life, they had been far more vivid and striking than the faint, crumbling remains that were unearthed fifty thousand years after the shamans had used them to sketch their world.

So: another copy. But a good one.

And Françoise, holding the bone, said, ‘It feels strange, this piece. It has no age to it. No feeling of age. But it has power, like … like wildness. And wilderness. I have handled bone implements often and I can sometimes feel the time they have been in the earth. But not this. And yet, it is not like handling a modern bone …’

She shook her head and dropped the fragment. Looking up at Richard wearily, she said, ‘I am confused and disturbed by all of this. When I arrived at your house something hurt me very badly … here …’ She placed a hand on her belly, a finger extended, as if being stabbed. ‘A sharp pain,’ she confirmed. ‘Like being opened. Something in your house is terrifying. I think I should touch that terrifying thing. It might help. If it came from this cache, then perhaps it will tell us more.’

‘Your son is watching us,’ she said as they made their way up the path from the field. Richard could smell fresh coffee being percolated. Carol was running down to meet them, her writing pad held under
her left arm, her face a wide grin of pleasure.

As he reached the child, and stooped to pick her up, he glanced up at Michael’s window, but saw nothing. ‘Where? Where is he watching us?’