What Time Devours (44 page)

Thomas, now at the mouth of the barrow’s burial chamber itself, threw himself to the ground and lay quite still. For a moment there was nothing, and then he heard Bradley’s voice.

“Come out, Thomas,” he said. “Let’s not make this any more difficult than it has to be. We were friends, once.”

The strangeness of the remark struck Thomas. There had, after all, been no falling out between them. They had been friends until the moment Bradley tried to kill him.

But there was something else in the voice. Something deliberately casual that sounded fake.

Thomas focused his thoughts, and they came to rest on the night vision goggles. Even if they had survived the fall, Bradley wouldn’t dare try to put them on now. It would take too much attention, and with Thomas only a few feet away, he wouldn’t dare let down his guard.

And if he had been wearing them for several minutes at the very least, his eyes would have grown accustomed to them. Now he was in a very different kind of darkness, and his eyes were still getting used to it.

Thomas inched around the cave mouth, scuttling as quietly as he could across the gap to the next stone. He could hear Church’s ragged breathing in the center of the clearing. He moved again, and this time he thought he heard Bradley react, turning for signs of movement.

But there was no shot. Bradley didn’t know where he was.

Instead, he spoke softly.

“You of all people should know why this play has to be brought out where people can see it,” said Bradley. “You can’t let people like Dagenhart dictate the nature of art. Come out, and we’ll introduce
Love’s Labour’s Won
to the world. Together. A celebration of love and life. It would be tribute to everything you value, Thomas. Think of it as a memorial to Kumi.”

The last words pinned Thomas against the rock, rooted his feet to the earth. His mouth fell open and locked in a silent cry, eyes clenched. But only for a moment. Then a terrible anger welled up in him.

Thoughtlessly he sprang from his hiding place and burst into the circle.

Bradley wheeled and fired at him, but Thomas kept going, not knowing—not caring—if he had been hit. Four more yards, and then he swung the mattock in a broad, lethal arc, its bit catching a sliver of moonlight so that it flashed like a spark as it hit Bradley’s outstretched hand.

Bradley gave a shout of rage and pain and the gun clattered away into the darkness and was lost.

The two men fell on top of each other, rolling and scrambling, the mattock gripped by its handle between them as they each tried to press it against the other’s windpipe. Thomas used the breadth of his shoulders, but his right side was still weak, and he could not push the wooden haft down. Taylor Bradley’s eyes—only inches from Thomas’s—flashed with triumph, and he grinned as he pressed back, twisting the mattock till Thomas was rolling back and under him, his shoulder burning.

He brought his knee up hard, and Bradley’s grip faltered. Thomas released the mattock handle and punched with his left. Once. Twice. Then they were up, the mattock abandoned, the two men gripping each other like exhausted prize-fighters, flailing and butting desperately.

Bradley kicked, a neat, hooking stab with his foot, that whipped Thomas’s right leg out from under him, and then they were down again, scrambling, and Thomas knew he was going to lose. He took a blow beneath his left eye, and the sky went white for a moment. Then another. And another, and he could feel himself sliding toward unconsciousness.

He reached for a weapon but could find nothing. His strength, already taxed to the limit, was failing. The blows kept coming, and Bradley’s face—merciless now—swam in Thomas’s vision.

Then there was something else. A sudden moist coldness and an acrid stench so sharp it acted on his senses like smelling salts. He flinched away from it, and he saw Bradley hesitate, his face moving from confusion to terror in a heartbeat.

Then the mattock head swung into view above them. It was a weak blow, carried more by the weight of the weapon itself than any great force from the wielder, but it caught Bradley behind his left ear and he rolled sideways, half stunned, half furious.

Thomas squirmed out from under him, and there was light, first a speck, yellow and uncertain, then sudden blossoming above them. As Thomas fought to make sense of what was happening, he saw by the light in her hand, Elsbeth Church, wild as Margaret of Anjou or the weird sisters of Macbeth, blood streaked, her face crusted with dirt, her hair blown into a tangled fury, holding the burning play aloft.

“No!” screamed Bradley, staring at her.

“Yes,” she muttered.

Then she threw it to him, its flaming pages still just held together, and as he snatched it, the gasoline with which she had doused him exploded into flame.

CHAPTER 93

Thomas stumbled out of the stone circle and onto the path back to the Ridgeway with Elsbeth Church slung over his left shoulder. She had not spoken since collapsing back to the ground as Bradley became a screaming, flaming torch, and he was not absolutely sure she was still alive. The bullet had hit her low in the belly, and she had lost a lot of blood. He had no idea what kind of damage had been done inside, or how much his lugging her back to the car might yet do, but he knew she would die if he left her there, and no one else was around. He had taken off his shirt, torn it, and bound the wounds as tightly as he could. He doubted it would be enough.

Bradley had not survived the fire. The burning was bad—so bad that Thomas was glad of the night so he wouldn’t have to see it all—but he suspected his old friend had died of shock or heart failure.

The play, of course, had been incinerated utterly.

Dagenhart was dead too, though Thomas suspected that his last thoughts—if he had had time to realize he was dying—were probably of relief.

He reached the Ridgeway but knew with certainty that if Church was still alive, he could not get her the mile or so back to the car by himself without taking more time than she had. He couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead of him and wished he had brought Taylor’s night vision goggles. Still, he blundered on, sightless and determined, though he walked as if wrapped in failure. He trailed a chain of corpses, and the one thing he had sought to save had been lost to the fire. He had achieved nothing.

He pressed on between the hedgerows to a place where fields stretched out on his left-hand side and dense young pines rose up on his right. And then, as his legs began to wobble under the weight of his burden, as he weaved from one side of the path to the other, he saw two men approaching at a run. They were big men. Out here in the moonlight he could see them quite clearly as they got close. One was bald and wore an earring.

Thomas slowed to a halt and gradually lowered Elsbeth Church to the grass under the hedgerow. He thought her eyelids fluttered as he set her down, but he could not hear her breathing.

The two men had spread out a little as they approached. They still crammed their square bulk into coats and suits as they had when they had chased him through the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, and they had that watchful caution, as if they were penning a wild animal.

But Thomas felt anything but wild. He was exhausted. His legs trembled and he doubted he could have carried Elsbeth any farther even without their appearance. He had no energy to fight or fly, and he felt only desolation and despair. He bent down and found himself laughing, at the futility of his predicament, at his failed mission, at himself.

CHAPTER 94

“What’s so funny?” said the bald man.

The other nodded, his eyes still on Thomas. He had a tiny goatee.

“Yeah,” he said. “Forgive me for saying so, Mister Knight, but you don’t seem to be in what you might call a comic situation.”

Thomas laughed all the more at that.

“Neither, for that matter, is the lady,” he added. “Take a look at her, will you, Mr. Wattling?”

Thomas stopped laughing at that. He hoped the name was an alias. If they were calling each other by their real names, they didn’t expect him to be able to pass the information along.

“I don’t have it,” he said. “The play. I don’t have it.”

“Didn’t think you would have,” said the man with the goatee. “No offense.”

“None taken,” said Thomas, feeling the urge to laugh again. “It got burned. In Wayland’s Smithy. Doused with gasoline and burned to nothing.”

“Well, that is a shame,” said the big man, his eyes still on Thomas. “Gasoline. That’s petrol, right? Funny, isn’t it, how we come up with different names for the same stuff.”

Thomas considered him. The whole encounter was feeling increasingly surreal.

“How is she, Mr. Wattling?”

“Not good,” said the bald man, straightening up. “Alive, but only just. Gunshot wound to her stomach.”

“Where were you going to take her?” said the man with the goatee.

“To my car,” said Thomas, bewildered.

“That won’t do at all,” said Mr. Wattling. “She needs to get to a hospital.”

“I don’t have a cell phone,” said Thomas.

“You hear that, Mr. Barnabus?” said Mr. Wattling. “He don’t have a mobile.”

“Mr. Barnabus” pulled one from his pocket.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” he said, dialing. “Living in the twenty-first century with no mobile? And you an American! Got to live in the present, Mr. Knight. Time marches on, isn’t that right, Mr. Wattling?”

“Right and correct, Mr. Barnabus,” said Mr. Wattling. “Time’s wingèd chariot . . .”

“Waits for no man,” concluded Mr. Barnabus.

He turned sharply and spoke into the phone.

“Yes, we need an ambulance, please,” he said. “We’re on the Ridgeway between White Horse Hill and Wayland’s Smithy.”

As he gave what details he could and promised to try to move Church to the nearest road, Thomas stared from one to the other. The bald one with the earring—Mr. Wattling—gave him a nod.

“Apologies about last time, Mr. Knight,” he said. “We rather got off on the wrong foot.”

“You tried to kill me.”

“Not at all,” he said, waving the remark away as if nothing could be further from the truth. “You’re a big man. I had to take the initiative, as it were. Just wanted to scare you a little into telling us what you knew. Or, failing that, just scare you. Our employer thought that would put you off the scent a bit.”

“It didn’t,” said Thomas.

“Evidently,” said Mr. Wattling, with a rueful look down the Ridgeway.

“Who is your employer?”

“Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” said the bald man with a boyish smile.

“I think you owe me that much,” said Thomas.

“It’s not like we were really trying to kill you,” said Mr. Wattling.

“Felt real enough to me.”

“Well now, that was the idea, wasn’t it? But you know we weren’t actually trying to kill you because, well—you know—if we had, you’d be dead, like, wouldn’t ya?”

He grinned, ear to ear.

“Ambulance is on its way,” said the other. For a long moment, they all just stood there in silence, looking at each other. “So,” he added, looking back in the direction of Way-land’s Smithy. “How many bodies are back there?”

“Not including any that were buried there—like—a million years ago,” Mr. Wattling inserted, helpfully.

“Two,” said Thomas.

“Villains?”

Thomas didn’t know how to answer that. He guessed the word was commonly used in England to mean little more than
criminal
, but it was hard not to hear overtones of Iago, Iachimo from
Cymbeline
, or Edmund from
King Lear
. Neither Dagenhart nor Taylor Bradley seemed to fit the role. In answer, he simply said their names.

“Bradley?” said Mr. Wattling, his eyebrows raised. “Didn’t see that coming.”

“Still,” said Mr. Barnabus, “the thing has a certain—whatsitsname?—closure. Justice served, dead villains, and Mr. Knight here will live to fight another day. Very neat. Very—dare I say it?—Shakespearean.”

Thomas laughed again at that, laughed hard, till he started to cough. There was another long silence, and Thomas stopped wondering if they were still going to attack him.

“Gresham,” said Mr. Wattling, suddenly.

“The film guy?” said Thomas. “He hired you?”

“That’s right,” said Mr. Wattling.

Thomas looked at Mr. Barnabus, who was watching his colleague thoughtfully.

“Why are you telling me now?” asked Thomas.

“Like you said,” said Mr. Wattling, “owe you that much. But I wouldn’t share that information with anyone else.”

“Yeah?” said Thomas. “Why’s that?”

“Mr. Gresham . . . Miles, his first name was—didn’t know that, did you?—was ambitious, sometimes a little shady, but no more than most successful people. He was also married with two kids: eight-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy. The boy plays football for his school.”

“Soccer,” Mr. Barnabus clarified.

“Right,” said Mr. Wattling. “Thank you, Mr. Barnabus. I didn’t know they played soccer in school over there much, but there you go.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Thomas asked again, heavier this time.

“Just thought you should know,” shrugged Wattling. “Wouldn’t want you thinking of him as another villain, or just another victim. Faceless, you know? I know quite a lot about Mr. Miles Gresham. Like to hear some of it?”

Thomas shook his head.

“I think I get it.”

“That’s all right then,” said Wattling.

Two silent minutes later Thomas caught the sound of the hospital’s recovery helicopter thrumming its way over White Horse Hill toward them.

“See?” said Mr. Barnabus, gazing off to where the helicopter’s lights were stooping over the trees. “All’s well that ends well.”

“Wrong play,” said Thomas.

The helicopter came roaring overhead, then—once its floodlights had found them—veered off into an adjoining field and set down there. Thomas was watching the stretcher bearers hunkering down beneath the rotors when he realized that apart from the huddled form of Elsbeth Church, he was alone.