The Buried Circle (23 page)
‘I’m not used to this,’ I say, reaching inside for the smaller camera. ‘Never worked on a production with budget for a full crew.’
Ibby gives me a withering look, opening the tailgate and loading big flat camera batteries into her pockets. ‘I do things professionally. But that doesn’t mean wasting money.’
She
is
scary. I unpack the camera in a hurry.
‘Where do you want him?’ asks Harry.
‘That diamond-shaped stone. Two sizes, please, wide and MCU.’
Martin raises anguished eyebrows.
‘Medium closeup!’ yells Ibby. ‘But I haven’t the time to nursemaid you. From now on, it’s never apologize, never explain.’
Harry wanders around, stopping now and then, bending his knees to dip and squint, framing possible shots. So far he’s not smiled once. Ibby’s eyes follow him hungrily. He’s probably only a couple of years older than me, which makes him at least ten years her junior, but that doesn’t seem to bother her.
We’re onto the fourth or fifth take before Martin overcomes his nerves and hits a rhythm. ‘…The stone weighs approximately thirteen tons. Hard to know what happened, but the likeliest explanation…’
‘Cut.’ The soundman pulls off his headphones. ‘Aircraft.’
‘You sure? I can’t hear anything,’ says Harry.
‘Long way off, but could be coming in this direction.’
‘Shit. That was going really well.’ Ibby straightens up from the portable monitor on the grass. ‘You’re starting to look like you’re enjoying yourself, Martin.’
‘Actually, I
am
.
In the distance there’s the high mosquito whine of a microlight. ‘Just what we need,’ says Ibby. Her voice sounds relaxed, but she’s massaging the back of her neck as she glances at her watch. ‘I hate the little bastards. They should issue an anti-aircraft gun as standard filming kit.’
‘We’re going to lose the sun if he doesn’t get a move on,’ says Harry.
‘Engine note’s changing,’ says the soundman, clamping one headphone to his ear. ‘He’s heading away.’
‘OK, ready to go again when Keith gives us the all-clear,’ says Ibby to Martin.
‘Hold on,’ says Keith the soundman. ‘There’s a chopper as well’
My stomach tenses. The helicopter is a long, black-bodied machine flying high and fast.
‘You seen that footage on YouTube, Harry?’ asks Keith. ‘Round here it happened, wasn’t it?’
‘Bloody terrifying,’ says Harry. ‘Is it still there?’
‘What footage?’ asks Ibby, but my gut has already turned to ice.
‘Helicopter crashed while it was being used for aerial filming.’ Harry applies his eye to the viewfinder again. ‘Cameraman let go of the camera, and it bashed the director’s brains out–tape still running. Someone posted it on YouTube last week. Bound to make ‘em take it off once the family finds out. You don’t see much, but it starts with a clear shot of the bloke’s face as the helicopter goes into a spin, and the sick bit is knowing the poor bastard dies.’
‘Cameraman’s revenge,’ says the soundman. ‘Now you know, lb, what happens to directors who demand too much.’ He draws a finger across his throat and guffaws.
My hands are shaking as I dial Ed’s mobile number in the ladies’ loo at the Red Lion. Somehow I managed to hold it together through the morning’s filming until we broke for lunch. My head’s pounding and I’m too nauseous to eat.
Nothing happens. I look down at the mobile screen, already knowing what I’ll see.
No bloody signal.
* * *
‘You all right, blossom?’ asks Martin, at the picnic table outside the pub, veggie burger in one hand. ‘You’re a bit pale.’
‘A bug.’
I sit down, my knees wobbly. Why did this have to happen when I thought I was over it? I didn’t know the camera had gone on recording. Who put the video on YouTube? What does it show? Not much more than a blur, the camera jerking and tumbling, a final glimpse of Steve’s lolling head, a red flower on a broken stalk? Please God, don’t let it be in focus…
‘Have a chip,’ says Martin.
‘Really, I don’t want anything.’
‘What’s the plan for this afternoon, lb?’ Harry returns from the bar with a tray of drinks. ‘Shoot the shit out of the stone circle?’
‘Martin, I’d like an introductory piece from you,’ says Ibby. ‘What was Avebury for? Feasting? Healing? Giant astronomical computer?’
‘Forget all that seventies bollocks,’ says Martin. ‘It’s the place of the dead.’
‘How d’you reckon that?’ asks Harry.
‘It’s a stone monument. The theory goes, wood for the living, stone for the dead.’
I didn’t go to Steve’s funeral. His parents had him cremated at Golders Green, then scattered his ashes in a park near Elstree. Essence of Steve floating on the breeze, drifting across the garden of the
Big Brother
house. I check my phone again for a signal, and imagine his open, dead eyes staring back at me from the screen. Haunting me, like Frannie’s buggerin’ lights. Like the ghosts that whisper to me from the trees at Tolemac.
‘Ten minutes,’ says Ibby. ‘Then we need to make a move.’
‘Slavedriver,’ says Martin, sounding completely happy about it.
As soon as we leave the pub the rain starts, sheets of it, sending us scurrying for the shelter of the museum.
Martin and I, trying not to get in the way, stand next to Charlie’s glass coffin while Harry sets up to film the Barber Surgeon’s scissors.
‘What you said about Avebury being a place of the dead?’ I ask, sidestepping as Keith the soundman comes past with a couple of lighting stands. ‘Literally? Are there burials?’
‘Well, there’s the odd thing,’ says Martin. ‘The burials seem to be almost entirely outside the henge–like Charlie here, on Windmill Hill’
As if on cue, the whole room is washed in a harsh glare as Harry switches on one of the lamps, shining through the side of the glass and illuminating the child’s skeleton in its foetal crouch.
‘But inside–’ Martin stops suddenly, narrows his eyes, whips out his glasses and peers at the skull. A trick of the light makes it a different colour from the rest of the bones, emphasizing its grotesque distortion. He frowns, then shakes his head. ‘Sorry, petal, thought for a moment–never mind. Thing is,
inside
the henge there seem to be hardly any burials, apart from the odd jawbone. The only complete prehistoric skeleton found was at the bottom of the ditch, near the southern entrance. The diggers almost missed her in the mud–one of them actually stood on the skull, unfortunately. This was years before Keiller and his more thorough excavation techniques. It was a woman, lying on her side, surrounded by a ring of small sarsens.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘Who knows? A ritualized burial right by the entrance suggests a deliberate killing. Maybe the stones round her are a miniature Avebury, confining her spirit, so her ghost focuses the magic of the place.’
‘Wow.’ Easy to forget, seeing visitors in floral wellies patting the stones in sunlight, that Avebury could have so dark a past. ‘So when Keiller’s team finds the Barber Surgeon
under
a stone…’
‘Exactly,’ says Martin. ‘They get the wrong end of the stick altogether, at first.’
I told you,’ said Mr Cromley ‘Sacrifice. The killing of the priest-king. Blood feeds the corn.’
‘Tosh,’ said Mr Piggott.
‘Peace, children,’ said Mr Keiller. The three of them stood on the lip of the pit, staring at the skeleton under the massive stone.
‘Well, what else could it be, Alec? Frazer cites examples from every culture. The Marimo Indians, for example, always slaughtered a short fat man: sympathetic magic, to represent the desired shape of the young ears of ripening corn.’
Stu Pig snorted with laughter.
Mr Keiller took Mr Cromley more serious, though. ‘We must allow the possibility, Piggott–though I have to agree with you that Don’s a touch too keen to smell magic in the air. We need to lift this chap out.’ He looked away and closed his eyes, as he did when he was thinking hard. ‘Our first skeleton from the circle. Something for you to sketch, Heartbreaker, and don’t linger over it. We should parcel this chap off
toute suite
to find out how he died and, if possible, when. Don’t want the padre finding out, in case he tries to commandeer the bones for immediate Christian burial.’
Terrible disappointment. They brought him out, bone by bone, and with him came a bodkin and a pair of scissors and three silver coins, dating to thirteen-something. So he wasn’t near as ancient as Mr Keiller hoped.
‘A tailor, maybe. Or a travelling barber surgeon. Yes, I like that explanation better. Cuts hair, pulls teeth, sets bones.’ Mr Keiller tapped the rough sketch I had done. ‘This is good, by the way, Heartbreaker. Can you work it up into something that shows us what might have happened? Passing one day, sees the villagers toppling a stone, lends a hand and gets in the way as it comes down. Dead as a doornail, they can’t pull him out–his foot is trapped underneath. So they bury him with the megalith.’
Mr Cromley raised one elegant eyebrow. ‘How do you know it was an accident?’ We were watching Mr Young treat the bones with a solution of acetone and cellulose. It came out of the glass jar thick like honey, the sharp smell making our eyes water. When the preservative had dried, the skeleton was to be sent to the Royal College of Surgeons.
‘Don,’ said Mr Piggott, witheringly, ‘leave off, will you? Not everything in the world has to be sinister.’
‘So
much more fun if it is, though,’ said Mr Cromley.
Davey had taken to hanging around the dig when he’d nothing else to do. If I saw him in time I found myself an errand, anything to look busy. Sometimes I couldn’t avoid him. Mr Darling’s stables at Beckhampton had trained the Derby winner, Bois Roussel, and Davey, like half the village, had put a couple of bob on him.
‘Come on, Fran, we got to celebrate. Slap-up tea at McIlroy’s in Swindon? Pictures?
Too Hot to Handle
is showing–we’d be in time for the bus…’
‘Not tonight.’
‘You told me you like Clark Gable.’ Wide, hopeful eyes. He was so sure I’d say yes.
Mr Keiller appeared from behind the newly erected Barber Surgeon’s stone, deep in conversation with Mr Cromley. Mr K was wearing his blazer, MIAR embroidered on the pocket. Handsomer than Clark Gable. If I went blonde like Carole Lombard, would he want me? He saw Davey and me, and smiled. Something went cold and uneasy in me. Which one of us was he smiling at?
‘In’t every day a man has money burning a hole…’
‘I told you, not tonight.’ It came out sharp.
Davey tried to be light about it. ‘Later in the week?’
‘I’m not interested, right? Too busy here.’
The hope died in his eyes, and his jaw tightened with the effort of hiding he was hurt. I felt bad, but sometimes his smooth skin looked so girlish I wanted to make him cry.
Mr Cromley caught my eye, and winked.
When I wasn’t at the site I now had a desk in the Map Room to work up my sketches of the dig. All that brown made it a dull place to me, everything laid out neat and tidy and just so. If someone moved anything, Mr Keiller’d come and rant at Mrs Sorel-Taylour. She’d do her best to soothe him, but he’d sometimes sulk for days.
I drew the stones one by one as they were stripped bare, shading the sides of the pits with neat cross-hatching, making sure everything was to scale according to the measurements Mr Piggott and Mr Cromley supplied. The leather brownness of the room was oppressive. Sitting at the tall stools in there, bent over my drawings, sometimes I caught myself looking down to check there was a skirt on my legs, afraid the place would have redressed me in a brown woollen suit too, like a man.
The consolation was Mr K. He was often in the Map Room. He worked there himself, hunched over big charts with his set-squares and rulers, his big hands tracing delicate lines with a fine-nibbed pen.
‘I learned my draughtsmanship in an engineering factory, Heartbreaker,’ he’d say. ‘No room for inexactitude in car design or archaeology.’ I became used to him standing behind me, watching me as my hands moved nervously over the paper. Sometimes he’d lean over to correct a detail of my drawing, and the spicy smell of his hair oil would lift me like incense. Or he’d explode on the room, filling it with colour.
‘Miss Robinson! Haven’t you finished that drawing of the Barber Surgeon yet? Never mind, too fine a day to hang about indoors. Come for a jaunt.’
Mr Keiller believed in jaunts. If he had to give a lecture, he preferred not to go alone; it was an excuse for a trip with a whole party of pals. They’d stay in some posh hotel, seeing the sights, maybe traipsing out in the evening after cocktails to a boxing match. Or he’d chivvy Mr Piggott and Mr Cromley and anyone else he favoured that week into a convoy of cars to visit a cathedral or castle, or some other archaeologist’s site. I’d never been invited, though sometimes Mrs Sorel-Taylour would go with them because she was friendly with Miss Chapman.
So when he come bursting into the room announcing a jaunt that sunny morning, I could feel myself puffing up with excitement.
‘Bring the drawing with you. We can look at it over lunch,’ said Mr K. ‘The Kegresse is outside.’
Oh. My spirits was sinking already. Couldn’t go far in the Kegresse, which was a funny old car Mr K used to trundle about the fields. He’d bought it years ago for the snow in Scotland; instead of proper wheels at the back, it had a caterpillar track like a tank, so it’d go anywhere. Mr K loved it, called it the Caterpillar, and claimed he’d even taken it up a mountain for a shooting party.
‘We’ll have a picnic at the Long Barrow,’ he went on. ‘You look like you need fresh air–far too pale and peaky. The course of true love not running smooth, eh, Heartbreaker?’
I coloured up then, like I always did, and that would usually make him torment me more. But today he was in too much of a rush. All he said was ‘Be outside in ten minutes,’ then disappeared into the main part of the house, calling for Waters the butler to bring the hamper out.
There was room for four in the Caterpillar, two in the front and two in the back. By the time I left the Manor, the drawing of the Barber Surgeon tucked safely inside my handbag, the car was parked in the stableyard on the cobbles, its engine already running. Mr Keiller hadn’t arrived yet, but Mr Piggott had settled himself in the back seat, and Mr Cromley was leaning against the museum wall, smoking a cigarette. When he saw me coming down the path between the lavender beds he threw it down. ‘Miss Robinson! How delightful’