Healer (13 page)

He shook his head, looked at his watch, and found he'd missed the seven o'clock news. By miles. He was sure he hadn't slept, but time had done a curious trick, collapsing almost an hour into a few minutes of sunny brooding. The train must have stopped several times, unnoticed, because it was crowded now. People were standing all down the centre aisle. And outside the windows lay factories and tower blocks and railway sheds and all the sprawl of outer London. The train rattled and snaked its way on. It was 7:23. Mrs. Butterfield would have found Pinkie's bed empty just after seven. They'd have worked out by now that Barry was missing, too. Perhaps Freeman was phoning the police at this very moment. Five minutes to Waterloo Station if the train was on time…

Pinkie woke of her own accord, and he helped her cram her half-dry shoes on over his socks.

Nobody was waiting at Waterloo. Barry felt very exposed and obvious as they rode the two miles across London to Euston. A policeman was strolling across the main concourse there but barely glanced at them as they lined up for tickets. They bought hot milk and tasteless hamburgers at the cafeteria, and Barry listened to the eight o'clock news. Surely by now … But no. Lebanon, CND, Test Match, fire—nothing. The train north left at 8:58. It was less than half full.

Now Barry dared sleep, dipping in and out of darkness, never sure till he looked at his watch whether he'd been unconscious for seconds or minutes or even hours before some change in the beat of the wheels had broken through to wake him with a false signal of getting there. Fragments of dreams recurred: They had arrived, got down normally, but then things, absurd things but still sinister, had started to happen—Pinkie somehow still on the train as it moved away, or the bike chained with the wrong lock, or policemen waiting on the platform, but why were they wearing swastika arm-bands? Or crossing the moor, and the helicopter hovering lower, and the bike melting away, and the good thick gorse that had seemed to screen them withering to nothing while the drub of the rotor (the drum of the train wheels) closed in…All nonsense, known to be nonsense, even while the dream was running, but repeated over and over, both boring and panicky…

Barry wasn't aware of the dreams ending and himself falling into a true, deep slumber, or of the weight against his side as Pinkie came and snuggled there. He'd last seen her curled up on the seat opposite, but she was fast asleep against his side when he was woken by the word “Stafford” on the train intercom. He came to with a panic start and heard the message repeated. Perfect. He shook her shoulder, and she woke blinking.

“Almost there,” he said. “Good dreams?”

“I don't have dreams.”

“Sometimes wish I didn't. I don't know. Listen, this might be the dodgiest place yet. I'm going to give you your ticket. Come through the barrier a bit after me. Try and look as if you belonged with someone else. Okay?”

But there were still no police, no questions. Pinkie stood guard over the bike while Barry bought food and spare shoes and socks for her; her own were good as dry by now, but it would be stupid to get caught like that again. He walked the bike away from the town centre, leaving her to trail along behind. As soon as the streets were clearer, they mounted and rode, for the first mile or so along a main road but after that off into the lanes, heading north-east towards the hills. This route he'd only been able to plan from a map; there'd been no chance to explore it, but in thirty miles he reckoned he'd be reaching roads he had covered from Marsden Ash.

The rain had fallen heavily here also, a great wide front moving across England and clearing away to leave a steamy, sodden landscape, blue sky mottled with hummocky white clouds, a strong noon sun. It was hot work hauling along the lanes, even at a gentle pace. At any serious rise he got off and made Pinkie walk, too. There was no hurry. They ate their lunch at the edge of a fresh-reaped field. Flies came out of nowhere and swarmed around. It was a country of stodgy little villages and small fields, with the odd coal tip heaving up. Not pretty like Hampshire or Thursley, not hard and dark like the valleys around Marsden Ash, but friendly and close, in a grubby sort of way. The farms were busy with early harvest. But although it felt a different sort of place from the ones Barry knew, in anything that mattered it was the same. The people here, if they guessed who the young man and the child were at the edge of this field, would…Hey! News! He looked at his watch. Almost one o'clock. He just caught the headlines. New missile system. Preparations for CND rally. Lebanon. Test Match off. Floods in Cumberland. Fall on stock exchange. Nothing about a missing kid and night porter.

“What's up?” he muttered.

“He hasn't told them.”

“Why not? He must have. He'd be crazy … He is crazy, I suppose.”

“He knows you won't hurt me.”

“Yeah … yeah, I suppose he does.”

“And he doesn't like the wrong people knowing.”

“Yeah … Listen! There's more than one kind of wrong people, isn't there? Did you say anything to Mrs. Butterfield about what he's been giving you?”

“You said to.”

“Right. And she'll have asked him … Hey! He might decide she's in it! She asked me to get you away!”

“Poor Louise.”

“Don't you see? One lot of stuff he gave you sounded dead like LSD to me. He'd go to prison for giving that to a kid. If he thinks we've got that far, he can't go to the police!”

“Louise would tell him.”

“He won't believe her. Liars don't.”

“He'll do something. He's clever.”

“Yeah. We'll carry on according to plan, right? Act like everyone's on the lookout for us.”

“If you want. I don't think anything's going to happen today.”

“Not if I can help it, it isn't … Wait a minute. What do you mean?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you know something I don't?”

“I don't think so.”

“I don't mean … Listen, I know things by seeing them, or reading or hearing about them, or working them out from other things I know. That's the only way I can know anything. But you—you've got to accept you're not an ordinary kid, Pinkie. When you help people get well, you're in touch with something pretty mysterious, right?”

“It's just there.”

“For you it is. But you don't understand how it works, do you?”

“Don't want to.”

She was answering stiffly now, unwillingly, but he pushed on.

“What I'm trying to get at is this. Whatever you're in touch with—mightn't it do more than helping you get people well? For instance, mightn't it tell you things?”

“What sort of things?”

“Like knowing nothing's going to happen today?”

She frowned and shook her head.

“You wouldn't have to know how you knew,” he said. “You'd just know.”

She picked unhappily at a fray of her jeans. A fly crawled down her cheek. She didn't seem to notice. Another thought struck him.

“And you knew about Bear,” he said.

“It's just a name.”

“Do you really think so? It's important, Pinkie. Important to me.”

He reached out and took her hand. She didn't pull it away, but it felt somehow dead in his grip. Nothing happened: no flow, no strange warmth, no sense of being in touch with all the intricate universe. They sat in a warm field on their cycling capes, and flies hazed around them. He let go.

“Perhaps it's not my sort of thing,” she said. “It isn't always.”

“Last night when we were riding to Alton, it was all right then. In fact, it was terrific. Magic. And that was you.” She looked around the field.

“Perhaps this isn't a very good place,” she said.

“Oh, come off it! You can't … Sorry, it isn't your fault, but that's got to be rubbish.”

“Thinking doesn't help.”

“That's got to be rubbish, too!” he said—shouted almost.

She turned her head away, withdrawing into herself.

“Sorry,” he said again. “Like I said, it's not your fault.”

She remained withdrawn. All the exhaustion, all the nervy waiting and action of the last eighteen hours flooded suddenly through him, like a physical event, some unwanted chemical spreading through his system with the moving bloodstream. Now the twenty-five miles to the cave above Brant seemed an impossible distance, though they had all afternoon and evening to get there. He glanced at Pinkie, still picking at her jeans. Why'd he bothered? he wondered. It was all rubbish. She couldn't do anything for him, and look what he'd done for her. At the same time he hated himself for the feeling. Suppose she knew about it. Suppose she were to reach out her hand and take his and switch on the flow and make him feel good again—what would that prove? Nothing. Except that Pinkie was able to control him, the way she'd controlled Norah.

The sourness increased, the feeling of everything having somehow come out wrong. Perhaps it was the effect of tiredness; perhaps the letdown of finding that probably the police were not after them, so most of his effort and precaution hadn't been needed; perhaps frustration at his failure, after all, to talk to Pinkie about Bear. Or was it frustration? Was it something else? Almost a sense of relief because Pinkie wasn't going to do anything about Bear?

Couldn't do anything about Bear? Why'd he wanted her to anyway? He needed Bear, didn't he? Bear was his secret friend, his only friend, the only one he could trust. .

Pinkie turned her head and looked at him.

“There are
places
, you see,” she whispered. “He's right about that.”

“Who is?”

“Dad.”

He snorted to his feet, picked up his cape, and rolled it to put in the basket. Pinkie did the same with hers. They bicycled on towards the hills.

14

The pale blue invalid car took an age to climb the lane to Ferriby. Barry watched it, standing back from the rim of the parking lot so that only his head projected over the skyline. At the same time he studied the rest of the lane. One of the reasons he had chosen Ferriby for a meeting place was that he'd be able to see, with plenty of warning, whether anyone was following Mr. Stott up the hill. No sign of that, only the little blue blob threshing slowly up. In his mind's ear Barry could hear the noisy engine, roaring at the limit of its power to reach ten miles an hour, and Mr. Stott cursing it on. The whole hillside was sharp with dawn light, but the main road in the valley bottom was blurred with thin mist and shadow. The actual point where the lane turned off from the road was concealed by the long bulk of an old mill, with blind and broken windows and a sinister dark stack. There was very little traffic so early, but even so it was difficult to check that everything that disappeared one end of the mill came out the other end. In fact, one dark car did seem to vanish and not emerge, but a police car had come swirling along in the other direction just at that moment, with its flasher blinking and its siren audible even at this distance in the dawn stillness, and naturally he'd been more concerned to see that go the whole way through. He wasn't especially bothered. It would take even a fast car several minutes to climb the lane, and by that time he'd be well away with Pinkie on the track to Brant. They couldn't bring a car up there after him.

“Hey! Pinkie!” he said. “Back a bit, or I'll have to lock you to the bike.”

She was in a state of high excitement, jumping around or darting forward for a better view. Just now the blue car had disappeared behind a copse, and she seemed to think that by getting herself right out onto the skyline, she would somehow be able to see through the trees. Barry was glad to see her so lively. She'd been listless and silent ever since yesterday's picnic in the field. The cave had been a worse idea than he'd expected, and neither of them had slept much, though he'd managed to make what should have been adequate mattresses from the hay some farmer must have stored there before last winter, and they'd needed to get up before daybreak to get here this early, so no wonder the kid was tired. But she had perked up when Barry had pointed out Ferriby Circle and told her they were reaching the rendezvous, and now she was almost out of control.

When the car emerged from behind the copse, he could hear the burr of its engine and see the shape of the driver in the single seat, though, of course, not yet make out it was Mr. Stott. Hey! Suppose old Freeman … Oh, rubbish. He checked the lane. Still empty. Couple of vans on the main road and in a farmyard beyond the mill a tractor being got out. All clear.

At last the invalid car nosed over the lip of the lane and into the lot. Barry waved to Mr. Stott, signalling him to wheel and park so that the car was out of sight from below but near enough for conversation while Barry kept his eye on the lane. Pinkie skipped beside the car as it circled. The rackety little motor stopped with a sputter, the door swung open, and Pinkie jumped in. The car—little more than a hoked-up motorcycle really—joggled on its springs as she hugged her grandfather around the neck and kissed his scarlet cheeks. He snarled happily at her to leave him alone.

She let herself slither down onto the rough surface and stood jumping up and down. Mr. Stott heaved his body around on his powerful arms and sat glaring at Barry through the open door.

“Bloody near didn't come,” he said. “Been nothing on the radio. Thought you'd mucked it up.”

“Anyone try to follow you?”

Mr. Stott snorted.

“Think I'd be here?” he said.

“What about watching your house?”

“Who's to tell? See it from a mile off. You get campers all over the shop this time of year, stupid sods—they'd only have to set up a tent. I thought of that, so I left before it was light. Been half around Derbyshire to get here.”

“That sounds okay then.”

“Your idea is this quack hasn't gone to the police?”

“Doesn't look like it.”

“Course he has.”

“He likes to keep things to himself. And you remember I said in my letter I thought he'd been giving drugs to Pinkie to pep her up for the Harmony Sessions? Suppose he knows I know, and suppose some of that's illegal—”

“Wanted to ask you about that, young woman.”

Rather reluctantly, Barry thought, Pinkie began to roll up her sleeve. Mr. Stott craned to study the needle marks with the same malevolent-seeming intensity with which he used to peer at some boring little alpine in his garden. Barry's eye was caught by a movement at the bottom of the lane. He edged sideways for a better view. It was only a tractor—the one he'd seen starting in the farmyard—now coming up the hill with a few bales on a trailer. A shepherd sat on the bales with a dog beside him, a nice peaceful image. Better than that, the tractor would block the lane for a bit.

“That daughter of mine know about this?” barked Mr. Stott.

“We think that's why he sent her to America,” said Barry.

“Mum wouldn't like it,” said Pinkie.

“He hasn't got her completely under his thumb then?” said Mr. Stott. He sounded pleased. Barry realised that though he said he loathed his daughter, and though he was telling the truth, still, in a way he admired her. He actually wanted her to go on being the way she was.

“I tried to get her address, but she's moving around,” said Barry.

“Silly cow. Got to tell her, though, somehow. Now listen, young man, I've found you somewhere to stay. Here.”

Mr. Stott handed him a piece of card, the sort he used for his file index of alpines. All it said was “Elsie Tannick, 19 Palmerston Road, Brant.”

“That's great,” said Barry. “What do I tell her?”

“Told her already.”

“The truth, you mean? But—”

“She won't let on. Wanted to marry me, forty-eight years ago, stupid woman. Well out of it, I tell her. Been helping her with her pension, few pounds a week, these nine years. You'll be all right with her.”

“That's terrific!” said Barry.

Problems seemed to be solving themselves slap, slap, slap, like a house of cards falling down. No police after them, meeting up here as planned, somewhere safe to hole up …

“Do you know a doctor we can trust?” he said. “If we could prove what Freeman's been doing to Pinkie …”

“Have to think about that. Now, young woman …”

Barry moved back to the edge of the parking lot to check the progress of the tractor. It was just disappearing behind the copse. Nothing else in the lane. Pinkie was trying to explain about the Harmony Sessions and what she did in them. Better let her get on with it. He walked quickly across the parking lot and up the steep bank to the moor. The whole bleak bowl lay empty, except for his bike on its side near the track. Good old bike, he thought. You've done us proud. Sorry I cursed you so to begin with. He trotted back. Everything seemed to be going incredibly smoothly, but he couldn't relax. Old Bear was stirring, wanted to growl. It had something to do with being so tired and keyed up and then having the pressure ease so suddenly. Bear wasn't ready for this. He was still sniffing for danger.

Mr. Stott never cleaned his car. In places the dirt was so thick that he could almost have grown alpines on it. As he came back across the lot, Barry noticed (or did Bear notice? If Bear hadn't been on the prowl, would it have meant anything?) the print of a man's hand on the curve of the back bodywork, just above the bumper. It was splashed with recent road muck but still clear, so it couldn't have been put there all that long ago. With a vague prickle of alarm Barry knelt and peered under the car. Eight inches from his nose, wired to a chassis member, he saw a black plastic box, dirt-spattered with spray from the road, but much cleaner than anything else around. He felt around it with his fingers. There seemed to be no cables or pipes connecting it to the machinery of the car. He scrambled out.

“When did you last have anything done to the car?” he said.

Mr. Stott glared up at him.

“Couple of months. Why?”

“Something wired underneath. Something new.”

He darted to where he could see the lane. Still only the tractor, quarter of a mile down. False alarm. Perhaps the gadget—bleeper or whatever it was—wasn't working; perhaps Mr. Stott had lost his followers despite it, driving around before dawn; perhaps it wasn't a bleeper anyway, just something to do with the car .

He was still staring at the tractor when the man on the bales shifted his position and laid his hand on the dog's collar. The gesture spoke, but for a moment Barry didn't understand it. The man was wearing a flat cap and had a sack draped around his shoulders, but …

It was Sergeant Coyne.

The dog was Norah.

“Pinkie! Quick! Bike!” he shouted.

“What's up?” said Mr. Stott.

“Tractor coming up the lane. I thought it was only shepherds, but …”

“Off you go. See if I can block them.”

“Right.”

As Barry raced across the cinders, he heard the noisy little engine clatter into life. He caught Pinkie up as they scrambled up the bank.

“Is it Dad?” she asked.

“Couldn't see who was driving. But it's Sergeant Coyne. And Norah.”

“Oh.”

He held the bike for her as she climbed into her seat, then mounted, rose onto the pedals, and just managed to get moving on the surface of the track. It was both soft and slippery, desperately hard going and treacherous, too. He seemed to be making barely more than a walking pace, and of course, they were leaving the trail of their tyre prints, clear as clear. On the way over he'd walked the bike beside the track all this last mile. The ground hardened for a few yards, letting him pick up speed before the next soft bit. If he could keep this up … He hadn't thought of a tractor—go anywhere on that—have to stop and uncouple the trailer—if Mr. Stott could hold them up in the lane a couple of minutes—how fast tractor go over rough ground? Twelve? Bike couldn't do that, not this bit—over lip, downhill, track harder, twelve easy—yes, get to place where track cut sideways across steep scree—tractor couldn't take it—topple over—come on, Bear!

The hill silence spread around them, spoiled at the centre by a little knot of noise, the rattle and squeak and groan of the bike as it took the uneven ground, the whispering slither of the tyres, the rasp of breath in his throat. And then, from behind, came the tock of the tractor as it crossed the horizon, that sound of unescapable pursuit he had heard in dream after dream, heard as train wheels, engines of tanks, rotors of chopper, closing, closing. He looked around.

His head seemed to twist on his neck before his mind could order it not to be stupid. He saw nothing before his front wheel wobbled, veered, caught a tussock at the side of the track, and sent the back wheel slithering out sideways. Down they came.

Pinkie shrieked. Barry sprawled clear across the rasping heather, scrambled up, and turned. The bike was on its side, Pinkie half under it. He rushed to pull the bike off her. She shouted. The bike was caught in something, caught somehow around her leg. She'd managed to jam her right leg in between the back wheel and the support of her chair. He lifted the bike more gently and let her ease herself free. She'd lost her glasses.

“You okay?” he gasped.

“Something's happened to my chair. It went soft. I felt it.”

Barry looked. Yes. The right-hand support, never built for her weight, had buckled at last under the impact of the crash. The chair seat had been forced down onto the mudguard, jamming that against the tyre. Nothing he couldn't straighten out in five minutes, except that the chair would go again. You can't do much about once-bent metal …

He turned with a sigh to see where the tractor was. It came jolting across the moor, only a few miles an hour, still with the trailer attached, picking its way. Sergeant Coyne's head and shoulders projected above the cab. Barry couldn't see who was driving because the windshield was half misted.

“Leg okay?” he asked calmly.

“Sore,” said Pinkie, and took a hobbling step. “What's happening?”

“Find your glasses in a sec,” said Barry.

No chance of outrunning them, with Pinkie's leg. No chance of outrunning them anyway. Coyne was a keep-fit fanatic. Still moving slowly in the strange lull between action and action, Barry bent and took the bike chain from the basket. In a certain kind of Bear fantasy he had sometimes fought off a street gang, swinging the chunky padlock at the end of the chain. He wasn't planning to use it like that now. He wasn't planning anything really. It was an almost instinctive move to make Coyne pause, to give him a chance to start arguing his case. He was wrapping the end of the chain around his right palm when Norah hit him.

He saw only the last instants of rush and leap, saw but did not understand the black and tawny blur, the glitter of fangs, the mauve of her tongue. He was still turning, still off balance. She belted the wind out of him as he sprawled.

At once she was on him. Her black lips wrinkled to bare her teeth six inches from his face. Her deep snarl froze him. She raised her head and began to bark, a steady, unhurried signal, telling Sergeant Coyne that she had done her job, caught her prey.

Instinctively, now that her head was up, Barry tried to wriggle sideways, but he'd scarcely twitched a muscle before her jaws were slashing close above his face and the warning growl froze him once more, helpless. Even if his mind had decided it was worth the risk, his body was too frightened to move.

Pinkie came into sight, hobbling forward, arms feeling vaguely toward the noise. Her lips were moving, but Norah's snarl drowned the words.

“Keep clear!” he managed to croak. “For chrissake, keep clear!”