Triskellion (14 page)

H
ilary Wing opened the front door to his lodge. It was a small, red-brick building buried deep in Waverley Woods that had been used as shelter for the large Victorian shooting parties that once gathered on the estate. Hilary Wing looked none too pleased to see that he had a visitor, and fixed him with the full glare of his cold, blue eyes.

“Morning, Hilary,” Tom Hatcham said, adopting the deferential tone he used to speak to Hilary and his father. It was difficult to tell whether he meant it or not.

“What is it, Tom?” Hilary Wing pulled the door closed behind him. He rarely let people into the lodge and walked several steps away from the building to speak to the publican.

“I just heard that the hall’s been broken into.”

“What?” Hilary snapped.

“Well, yes, I just seen Mrs Vine in the village and she said that the commodore, your father, had told Fred to change the locks, and—”

“Spit it out, Tom. I
know
he’s my father and I don’t want the bloody village gossip. Tell me what happened. Is anything missing?”

“Too early to tell, but it was them kids. The American ones … and the funny one. Mrs Vine seen the three of them walking up the drive.” Hatcham flicked a nervous glance towards Hilary. He knew he wouldn’t be pleased.

“The funny one? The weird gipsy kid? I thought you’d frightened him off days ago. You’re not doing the job I pay you for.”

“I did frighten him off, me and three others after we caught him on the church roof. Gave him a thick ear, so to speak. But it’s like he’s funny in the head or something; it’s all water off a duck’s back to him. Kid’s not frightened of anything we say or do.”

Hilary Wing stroked his beard, staring at the trees. “We’ll see who’s not frightened. And I think we know how to administer a short, sharp shock to our American visitors.”

Hatcham nodded. “Sooner the better, if you ask me. They’re snooping round the church and everywhere. Developed a keen interest in archaeology if you know what I mean. Old Bee-features has set ‘em off.”

“Digging about? I’ll soon put them off that. The strange kid, though, might require more drastic measures. See if you can find out what’s missing from the hall, will you? I’d ask the old boy myself, but, you know…”

Hatcham knew that Hilary no more wanted to talk to his
father than his father wanted to talk to him. He watched as Hilary turned away and went back into the lodge, shutting the door behind him without a goodbye or a backward glance.

The following lunchtime, having armed themselves with rucksacks, trowels, a compass and various tools, the twins gathered once again at Honeyman’s shack. Gabriel was already waiting for them outside.

Honeyman had added to the work done by the bees, and there were sketches and calculations scribbled on pieces of paper scattered all over the floor. On the map itself there were bits of cotton tied to pins and lines had been drawn on tracing paper laid over the original document.

Honeyman pointed to a spot right in the middle of Waverley Woods. “You want to start looking about here,” he said, stabbing a finger at a clump of three trees that had been illustrated on the map.

“I hope it’s nowhere near that encampment we saw,” Adam said, shuddering at the memory of the beating they had witnessed.

“No, no,” Jacob said. He waved his finger over another part of the map. “All the crusties and hippies gather over the other side, near the new pine growth.”

“Crusties?” Rachel asked, unfamiliar with the word.

“We call them crusties, I suppose, because they live outdoors a lot. Camping, living in tree houses and what have you, so they don’t wash much.”

Rachel looked at the circle of grime around Jacob Honey-man’s frayed shirt collar. The comments about personal hygiene were a little rich coming from him.

“Do they actually live in the woods?” Adam asked.

“Some do, but mostly they move around, going to music festivals and celebrating the solstice. Mind you, they protest about new roads being built across old land, so they’re not all bad.”

“What was the second thing you said?” Rachel asked.

“Solstice? There’s one in the winter and one in the summer. It’s when the sun is either furthest from or nearest to the earth.”

“Like the longest and shortest days of the year?” Adam asked.

“Exactly,” said Jacob. “The longest and shortest days, which were worshipped by the ancient druids as the beginning and end of the seasons. A lot of our monuments, like Stonehenge and even our own chalk circle, were put there to line up with the sun at the solstices.”

“So what exactly do these crusty guys do?” Adam asked.

“They do whatever Hilary Wing tells them.”

“
Hilary Wing?
”

“D’you know him?”

“Well, I’ve seen a picture,” Rachel said.

“Well, he’s their leader and he fancies himself as a bit of a shaman or high priest or whatever, and he winds them up to believe that they’re all descendants of the druids and that
they should worship the sun and suchlike. They uphold the old traditions of woodcraft and witchcraft, and all that nonsense. So, at the solstice, he rounds them all up and they worship round the Triskellion as the sun goes down. Then they dance about like nutters and get drunk as farts mostly.”

Honeyman grinned and rolled his eyes, but Adam and Rachel remembered the man with the blackened face in the woods. The power that he had had over his fellow wood-dwellers. Now they knew that the charismatic man was Hilary Wing himself.

“So you don’t believe in any of that stuff?” Adam asked.

“I believe in archaeology,” Jacob said decisively. “I believe in what I can see, what I can dig up, evidence of what’s actually been here.” Honeyman put his hand firmly on Gabriel’s shoulder. “And I believe in what I can touch, what I can hold in my hand.”

Gabriel, who had been sitting in silence since they’d arrived at the shack, looked up at Honeyman and smiled.

“Keep believing,” he said.

At the edge of the woods, Gabriel held up Jacob’s newly drawn map and attempted to plot where they stood. Rachel looked over his shoulder and laughed.

“You’re holding it upside down,” she said, pushing him in a friendly way and snatching the map. “Look, I think we’re about here.” She pointed to a spot where field and wood came together.

“Navigation was never my strong point,” Gabriel said.

Adam was studying the compass. “So if we walk through the woods in a straight line from here, towards the east…”

“I think we should spread out and walk in three straight lines,” Gabriel said. “That way, we have three times the chances of finding the tree with the twisted trunk, if that’s where we’re supposed to start digging. We can meet up in the centre of the woods later on.”

“No way.” Adam jumped in quickly, then regretted his haste. “I mean, these woods are really big, we’ll just get lost.”

“I agree with Adam,” Rachel said. “We almost got lost before.”

“Fine,” Gabriel said. “You two go together from here, I’ll start two hundred paces round the outer path to the south and I’ll meet you in the middle.”

“How will we know when we’re there?” Rachel wound a lock of hair round her index finger, betraying her nerves.

“If Jacob’s right, it’ll be obvious. We’ll just know.” Gabriel gave a small wave and set off. Rachel looked at Adam, who shrugged, and together they took their first tentative steps into the crackling undergrowth of the woods.

Jacob Honeyman had two reasons for not joining Rachel, Adam and Gabriel on the first leg of their dig. Firstly, he saw this initial outing as more of a reconnaissance mission, un-likely to uncover anything straight away. He would join the kids later on with trowel and metal detector once they’d
established a few more clues.

Secondly, since the phones had come back on for the first time in days, he had some catching up to do. He had research of his own to be getting on with.

He waited what seemed like an age for the old, grimy PC to boot up. There was a long series of buzzes, clicks and boings, and, once the mail window had launched, he began to compose his latest mail.

Jacob entered the address in the box at the top of the mail window:
[email protected]
.

He pressed “send” then waited, rocking back and forth in his chair, watching the development of the progress bar then marvelling as his email shot out into the ether.

He wandered through to the kitchen and pulled out a celebratory can of beer from the fridge.

He had good reason to be excited, and hopeful.

But he’d lived in this village all his life, so he knew that he also had very good reason to be afraid.

A
dam held the compass in a shaft of sunlight that cut through the dense tree canopy overhead. As the needle swung and settled, he pointed out a track that headed east. Though it was clearly a path, it was one that had not been trodden regularly for some time, with ferns and spiky brambles tangled across it, and it snaked away into darkness where the forest grew denser.

Rachel and Adam hesitated a moment as they considered their options. The wood was unnaturally quiet, save for the faint humming of bees somewhere over their heads and the noise of other insects rattling and clicking in the undergrowth. By now they had reached that part of the wood rarely penetrated by sunlight, and the damp forest floor smelled rotting and musty.

“Creepy, isn’t it?” Rachel said. “Why does Gabriel always insist on doing everything differently?”

“Wish your Gabriel was here to protect you, do you?”

Rachel punched her brother in the arm. “He’s not
my
Gabriel.”

Adam winced and rubbed his arm. Rachel always punched hard and he knew there would be a bruise later. “Anyway, I’m glad he’s not here. He always gets us into trouble.”

“Like we can’t do that for ourselves?” Rachel’s sarcasm was wasted on her brother, who was already pointing the compass at the two other available paths.

“That one’s definitely north … and that one’s south-east.” He thought about it. “It’s got to be
that
one.” Adam nodded again at the tangled path ahead. “We’ll need some sticks.”

Moments later, Rachel and Adam were swishing long branches across their path, battering back the foliage in front of them. The ferns fell back easily, allowing them to move forward, but the prickly brambles were more tenacious, snapping back at them, scratching their hands and pricking their legs through their jeans. After several attempts, they found that the best way of making progress was by one of them beating down an area, then allowing the other to step over it while holding back the brambles with the stick. Progress was slow and, in the damp air of the wood, they were quickly tired and sweaty and it wasn’t long before they had to take a break.

They found a small clearing beneath a large chestnut tree. Rachel looked at Adam’s reddened face, his hair plastered to his forehead as he examined the scratches on his hands and attempted to pull a thorn from the flesh of his thumb.

“It doesn’t hurt while you’re actually doing it,” he said. “But as soon as you stop everything stings.”

Rachel nodded her agreement. She was keenly aware of the stinging prickles on her legs, hot and sticky beneath her jeans. She guessed that her face was every bit as red as Adam’s and the sweat was clammy on her neck. She felt as if hundreds of the tiny insects disturbed by their progress were crawling all over her. As the idea took hold in Rachel’s mind, she felt compelled to scratch urgently at her head, her scalp tingling. She pushed her fingers hard through her thick hair, feeling the instant relief as her short fingernails scraped the skin underneath, finding small bits of twig and bramble trapped in the tangles.

“Got it,” Adam said, extracting the small barb from his thumb.

Rachel looked across to her brother, and saw something dark swoop towards her head. She screamed in surprise as the bird hit her and yelled at Adam.