Healer (15 page)

Her head jerked sideways. She yelped. Then she was out of sight as Barry fell.

The impact broke Pinkie's grip at last. Barry let his fall become a controlled roll which brought him to his feet, poised and steady, facing the next attack with the chain swinging from his hand. Everything seemed slow-motion but intensely vivid. He saw Pinkie still sprawled by a tussock of yellowish grass. He saw Mr. Freeman moving towards her. He saw, a hundred yards away, Sergeant Coyne turning and beginning to run. But all the time he was watching Norah struggling up a few paces in front of him. She shook her head once, then charged again.

This time it was different. She had lost her training. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her snarl. The lock must have hurt her badly. There was blood over her ear and along the side of her jaw. First time she had gone for his arm to pull him down and hold him helpless until Sergeant Coyne arrived. This time she was going for his throat.

He wasn't frightened. He did not think. He felt his lips harden to bare his teeth as he poised to meet the attack, left arm guarding his neck, right arm back, chain ready again. And Norah too seemed to realise that something had changed. In all her life, all her training and work, she had known that her prey was supposed to be afraid of her; when she attacked, they would cringe or run; when she caught them and snarled, they would freeze with terror where they lay. Now she was faced by a human who met her with other signals, with the grimace of a fighting animal. She answered snarl with snarl but converted her rush into a probing feint.

How did he know it was only a feint? How did he know to answer with no more than a warning twitch of the chain and a slight sideways leaning of the body? It was Bear knowledge, the primitive instinct of how to fight such an enemy coming to the surface when it was needed, telling him without thinking this was not only a contest between fangs and weapon blow but a battle between two wills, fought with signals. As Norah swerved from her feint, he took a half step forward. He jerked his wrist so that the chain swung whistling around his head. This, too, was a feint, an assertion of dominance. Norah answered with a growl and sidled off in an arc, looking for a fresh line of attack. It was thus that she came face-to-face with Pinkie.

Mr. Freeman must have reached Pinkie's side a second or two earlier, knelt, and touched her shoulder, and Pinkie had responded by jerking away and sitting up. Barry, concentrating on Norah, had been aware of movement at the corner of his vision. No one could know what Norah was aware of, what muddle of training and impulse made her attack this different target. Perhaps it was the suddenness of Pinkie's movement, perhaps what had happened in the garden two nights ago had caused her to think of Pinkie and Barry as being a sort of joint enemy, or perhaps she was simply half-mad from the pain of her hurt and would have attacked anything. For whatever reason, she suddenly flew at Pinkie, knocking her flat, and immediately made a violent lunge and seized her where the neck joined the shoulder. She twisted around and began to drag her back across the ground.

Mr. Freeman shouted and lurched forward on his knees to grab the dog by the collar, trying to pull her off and beating down with his free hand at Norah's head. Pinkie threshed, screaming. Barry rushed in, but as he came, Norah loosed her hold and turned on Mr. Freeman. The sudden movement took him by surprise and broke his hold on her collar. She lunged in beneath his forearms, and the pair of them went down with Norah on top, growling in a deep rumble though her muzzle was buried in his beard. Pinkie struggled up, her face white and her sweater mottled with blood.

“Tractor!” shouted Barry. “Get in the cab!”

She couldn't see it, of course. He gave her a shove in that direction, then ran to grab Norah's collar and try and heave her clear. He was heaving not only Norah but Mr. Freeman. She wouldn't let go. Then Sergeant Coyne was there, kneeling to prize her jaws apart. Barry hauled her off. The sergeant joined him and took her collar from the other side, whispering to quiet her. She paid no attention but wrestled violently between them, slashing at arms and legs. By keeping their grip and straining away from each other so that she was held at arm's length between them, they managed to drag her over to the tractor. On the way they passed Pinkie, hobbling in the other direction. Barry yelled at her to get in the cab, but she didn't seem to hear him. Sergeant Coyne slipped the leash through Norah's collar and fastened her to the tow bar. They ran back, panting, to where Mr. Freeman was lying with Pinkie on her knees beside him.

The golden beard was soaked with blood. There was a crimson pool in a fold of his cloak beneath his neck. The tanned face was muddy grey. His lips were blue but moving, and his gold eyes stared at the sky.

Pinkie was holding his left hand in both of hers and craning over his body, whispering to him. She didn't seem to notice their coming, even when Sergeant Coyne knelt on the other side of the body and lifted the beard clear to expose the neck. There was nothing to see but blood-smeared skin and flesh, with more blood coming in pulses from the middle of the wound.

“It's too quick,” said Pinkie in a desperate voice. “I can't. Oh, I can't!”

Sergeant Coyne felt methodically at the bloody mess, found a spot, and pressed hard with his thumbs. The blood pulse dwindled.

“In the tractor, lad,” he whispered. “Walkie-talkie. Switch on and press the ‘Talk' switch. Fellow called Brasher other end. Tell him to get an ambulance up here double quick. Then the police. Right?”

“Right,” said Barry.

He ran back to the cab, found the transmitter, worked the switches, and spoke. A voice answered, and he gave the message. It struck him as he switched off that the police would be coming for him. It didn't seem to matter any longer.

He was walking back to the others when he saw Pinkie let go of Mr. Freeman's hand. A moment later Sergeant Coyne stood up. It was over. Barry sighed and looked around the empty moor. Mr. Stott was still there, still wrestling his way along the track. The whole fight, from the moment of Norah's attack to when they'd pulled her clear of Mr. Freeman's body, must have taken less than a minute

15

Problems are never completely solved. What seems to be the answer becomes the start of several new problems or of the old problem in a new shape. Not even a death can break the chain, unless it happens to be your own.

From the first Barry knew that Mr. Freeman's death was an end but not a solution. He carried Pinkie back to Mr. Brasher's car, which now stood in the parking lot beside Mr. Stott's, and smeared her shoulder with antiseptic from Mr. Brasher's first-aid kit. The bite marks were not as bad as he'd feared, thanks to the layers of clothing Pinkie had been wearing because of the cold dawn start. He bandaged them best he could and put her on the back seat. She immediately fell asleep. Shock, he thought, so he covered her with a rug from the car and another from Mr. Stott's. He went back and helped Mr. Stott off the moor, then went and fetched his bike, took a wrench from the basket and removed the buckled chair and straightened the mudguard.

An ambulance climbed the lane, its blue light blinking. Before it reached the top, two police cars were on the hill behind it. The ambulance men brought Mr. Freeman's body down, then fetched Pinkie and took her, still fast asleep, to the ambulance. They whooped off down the lane, with one police car for escort. Two more police cars arrived. Nobody for a long time paid any attention to Barry. The policemen were up on the moor, photographing and measuring. Sergeant Coyne stood beside Mr. Stott's car, holding Norah on a leash. She seemed tame again now but whined a bit and shook her head, puzzled by the pain in her jaw. Barry felt intensely sad for her. For some reason this seemed to be a stronger emotion than horror at Mr. Freeman's death or worry about whether Pinkie would be all right or apprehension about what was going to happen to him now. Perhaps they'd insist on Norah being destroyed. It wasn't her fault. She'd been a sort of tool—rather like Barry, in some ways, he felt. Two of a kind.

Over and over his mind ran through the last few minutes after he'd seen the tractor climbing the hill and realised who was on the trailer. It was like that process you put yourself through when you've woken from a nightmare and work yourself free of its horrors by running it through your mind, changing details, erasing the stupid bits, inserting sensible episodes until the story, though still the same, is magically different, its monsters tamed, yourself in full, everyday control. But in this story there was nothing Barry could alter. There was nothing that he could ever have altered. Mr. Freeman's death had been a complete accident, absolutely unforeseeable, but from the moment Barry first set foot in the Foundation it had been going to happen, in this place, at this time, with this horror. He was sure of that. Only a minute before his death Mr. Freeman had spoken and acted as though something important was building up, and Pinkie, too.

It had been an accident. It had been inevitable. Yet it was still Barry's fault. He couldn't have done anything else, any more than Norah could have, but he was as much to blame as she was. More.

Time went slowly by. Sergeant Coyne and Mr. Stott talked a bit. They seemed to understand each other. They were both old soldiers, used to people being horribly killed. Mr. Stott must have seen what happened. He was a long way away, but he had good eyesight. That was something.

At last feet scrunched on the cinders where Barry sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the parapet while he stared unseeing at the hills opposite. The road below was busy with people going to work. The day was only just beginning for them.

“Right, let's have you now,” said a man's voice.

Groggily Barry stood. There were two men in plain clothes. One of them jerked his head, and Barry walked with them up onto the moor and along the track to the circle. The area near the missing stones was roped off with white tape on stakes and guarded by a uniformed policeman. A TV camera crew had arrived from somewhere. One of the plainclothes policemen began to ask questions while the other took notes of Barry's answers. Neither of them looked as if he ever believed anything. Barry gave his name and address, and then they took him straight into the details of Mr. Freeman's death. Barry found he could describe it with detached clarity—first
this
, then because of it
that
, but meanwhile
that
—as though he'd been telling a friend the plot of a film he'd seen. He pointed out the positions where he thought everyone had been at the various times. The policemen had evidently heard the story already, from Sergeant Coyne probably, though he couldn't have seen how the fight with Norah had begun. Mr. Stott had been too far off for details. There was only Barry who really understood—and Pinkie, if she remembered anything.

There was a long pause when he'd finished while the policeman taking notes went on writing.

“Okay,” said the other one. He'd sounded totally bored so far, but now a tinge of interest crept into his voice. “That'll do for that for the moment. Now about what you were doing up here with this kid in the first place …”

“I was bringing her to see her granddad. That's Mr. Stott. You see …”

“Long story, eh?”

“Well … yeah … bit …”

“Take it down at the station, then.”

Barry became used to police stations over the next few weeks—the hard chairs and the waiting, and the glimpses of other people in more or less trouble than him, and always the same lot of questions as last time. He thought, that first day, that he was going to spend the night in a cell, but Dad turned up and got him out somehow.

“Somehow” was the word. The most frustrating thing about getting caught up in something like a police investigation is that you never can see how the system works, why things happen to you, what's really going on. Nobody tells you anything. You may not actually be in a prison cell, but that's still how it feels, as though all you could see of the outside world was a patch of a courtyard, which you stare at through a small square window. Somebody crosses the yard, carrying a file of papers; you hear voices arguing; three doors in your corridor open and close, but not yours. You try to fit these events into a pattern; you can't help it, though you know they may have no connection with your problem. And when at last somebody does come to visit you, it's a stranger who doesn't tell you who he is, doesn't answer your questions, but asks you ones you've answered twenty times already and then goes away.

At times Barry almost believed they were doing it because somehow they knew about Bear, knew that this was just the way to infuriate him and drive him into the open, and then he'd do or say something which they could pounce on. But both Barry and Bear were too wary to let it happen. That moment on the moor when he had nearly attacked and killed Mr. Freeman had frightened them both, badly, in different ways. So Bear lurked grumbling in his lair, and Barry saw that he stayed there.

Slowly he discovered that the treatment wasn't, in fact, deliberate, wasn't even part of a general softening-up process. It was how things were, because the system was a system, and he might as well get used to it. From the first he told the exact truth (except about one thing, and they hardly bothered to ask him that). Yes, he used to keep an eye on Pinkie at school because her mum had worried about her; yes, she'd gone away, and he'd lost sight of her till Mr. Stott had given him money to fake an illness and get into the Foundation to find out how she was; he'd managed to exchange a signal with her that told him she wanted to get away; Mr. Freeman had given him a job, but he hadn't managed to see Pinkie alone for a bit; when he had, he'd tried to explain to her about the problems of running off with her, but then she'd told him about Mr. Freeman's giving her drugs and he'd realised he had to give it a go; and so on. They weren't much interested in the escape—nothing for them there—and they got bored with the fight on the moor after the first few times.

One morning there was a new man with the two he was used to. Same old questions, though; same old answers—Pinkie, Stott, the Foundation, the job, tea with Mrs. Butterfield, night duty, finding the lift shaft, Pinkie's cupboard, Pinkie's arm … Always the flat, oh-yes voices had prodded away at that bit. They didn't believe anything, but that least of all. When he suggested they should get Pinkie to confirm what he said, they just looked at him. They had, and they didn't believe her either.

This morning, though, it was different. The new man asked questions. He was interested. And the other two were bored in a different way from usual. Till now they had been the patient hunters, waiting for him to make a mistake. Now they'd given up.

They still didn't tell him anything, and he never discovered what had caused the change. He guessed that the new man was more interested in the Foundation than he was in Barry. Had Mrs. Butterfield told him something? Or Dr. Geare? Had he actually found the remains of what Freeman had been giving Pinkie? It didn't matter. Barry was off the hook now as far as the police were concerned.

It wasn't only the police. Barry had to go and see a social worker called Mr. Rucker, a grey-faced, bald little man with forty-three other problem citizens in his files. He was the sort of man who in the old days would have really stirred old Bear up. You could imagine him sending people off to prison camps with the same grey, unchanging frown and then making the same neat notes in their files. The police saw Barry as a quarry; Mr. Rucker saw him as a piece in a huge, messy, fluid, unfinishable jigsaw puzzle. Mr. Rucker's life was doing the puzzle, and he was good at it. He made Barry have an interview with the headmaster of a new school over at Manton, and despite the missed year and the term's being so close to starting, Mr. Rucker “somehow” worked the system so that Barry was offered a place, and “somehow” Barry found himself cornered into giving it a try.

There were journalists, too, for a bit. For a couple of days quite a crowd of them hanging around the doorstep. It was a bit like the first lodgings the Evanses had stayed in after leaving Thursley. That had been next to a pub, and you found vomit on the sidewalk when you went out in the morning. Now you found cameramen. But soon someone at the police station must have leaked the fact that there didn't seem to be a sex angle, and they had to switch to the much less rewarding guard-dog-slays-health-crank approach. It was just a stroke of luck that they didn't go for the child-saint-performs-miracle-cures story. It turned out that the BBC Checkpoint team was all geared up to do an exposé of the Foundation and had a lot of dissatisfied ex-patients waiting to tell their tales; these people being there and ready were the ones the journalists got hold of. Besides, Pinkie's mum was back in England. According to Mr. Stott, she'd taken Pinkie to stay somewhere secret about twenty miles away and was going back to America with her as soon as she could. Meanwhile, there was precious little chance of her letting anyone interview her daughter. When Barry himself talked to journalists, he told them the truth but not much of it.

Only once, in all these different kinds of questioning, did anyone ask him the thing that mattered. They all were looking through their own cell windows, all trying to piece together a picture that made sense to them out of niggling little clues. They couldn't even see the real point because it was too big for their windows—or too small to notice. It depended how you thought about it.

A policeman asked the question, casually, at the end of the session at which the new man had turned up and the hunt had gone dead. He wasn't especially interested. For him it was a sort of footnote, outside the main story—a bit of gossip for his wife that evening, maybe.

“Did you ever see Pinkie heal anyone, Barry?”

Barry shrugged, shook his head, produced a pitying smile.

When they let him go, he started for home. Mum always worried when he was at the police station. It wasn't fair not to go and tell her at once that it looked as if it was all over now. But he had a sick taste in his mind. Usually he did his best not to think about Pinkie much. That was over. Nothing like it was going to happen again in his life. In a way it was like Thursley—the more clearly you remembered it, the fouler life around you began to seem. Not that the policemen would have cared much if he'd told them yes, Pinkie could do it, it was real. Gossip for the wife still. Very few things that happen to you really matter. Why should you then feel bound to betray one of them, saying it's not true?

He prowled, purposeless, down High Street toward home. But he knew he wasn't ready to go there yet. On the corner of Carver Street he stopped and stood, muttering to old Bear under his breath, like one of those loonies you sometimes see lurching along the sidewalk, yelling to strangers or to no one at all about how somebody cheated them out of their rights twenty years ago. Was he going to become like that himself, one day?

The whole thing was over. Even the police had given up.

At the end of Carver Street lay Farm Road. A hundred yards along that stood the gaunt old warehouse with Viola Street beside it. At least he still had the sense, just, not to go mooning up that way.

He must have been standing on the street corner for twenty minutes, feeling steadily more and more at odds with himself, more and more unreal and meaningless, when a car rolled to a stop at the end of Carver Street and waited for a gap in the traffic. He wasn't consciously aware of its being there until the front passenger's door swung open and Pinkie ran toward him, laughing as he picked her up. She tousled his hair and wriggled with pleasure. She'd put on a bit of weight. Yes, she was almost fat. Over her shoulder he saw the car door close and the car reverse and park. It was a taxi. There was somebody only vaguely visible in the back seat.

“Great to see you,” he said. “I was just wondering if I ever would.”

“1 made them take me to Viola Street. I wanted to see it. Mummy didn't.”

She sounded smug.

“That's her there now?”