The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps (6 page)

‘Thank you.'

‘No one would know.'

‘Not unless they tried to make me run up a hundred and ninety-nine steps, no.'

‘I'm really sorry.'

Siân patted Hadrian's head. It was as far as she was willing to go towards letting the dog's master off the hook.
Let him sweat
, she thought. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Every muscle on his torso seemed already to be defined with the stuff.

‘Speaking of contrition …' she said. ‘Your message in a bottle … your confession …'

‘Yes?' He seized the change of subject gratefully, his head cocked in deference.

‘The job is trickier than I thought. You're going to have to decide what's more important to you, Mack: knowing what that document says, or keeping it the way you like it. The shape of it, I mean. If I succeed in peeling those pages apart, I'll be doing well. I can't give them back to you in the form of a nice tight scroll inside a bottle.'

‘So what are you suggesting?'

‘I'm not suggesting anything,' she said, manoeuvring him gently towards where she wanted him. ‘It's
your
heirloom, Mack. I can glue the bottle shut again, return it to you tomorrow.'

She turned away to acknowledge Michael coming up the steps, greeting the poor little duffer with a cheery wave. Michael nodded back, squinting, almost tripping over his own feet in his attempt not to intrude. She could tell that in his myopic eyes, she and Mack were the enigma of romance, stumbled upon, unearthed, only to be handed over to experts for analysis. Sweet, shy little man – how she despised him …

‘I don't know,' Mack was saying. ‘There's something magic about it, just the way it is …'

‘Well, there
is
one thing we could do,' she said, figuring she'd softened him up enough. ‘I could make you a new scroll out of papier mâché, and stick a facsimile of the outermost page on the outside. I know how to make things like that look old and authentic. The original papers could be mounted on board, preserved properly, and you could have a replica that'd look pretty close to what your dad found.'

He laughed.

‘More historical fakery, eh?'

She looked him square in the eyes.

‘Do you want to know what the confession says or not?'

He pondered for no longer than three seconds. ‘I do,' he conceded.

That afternoon, Siân and her colleagues at the dig said goodbye to Keira and Trevor, who were decamping to the Middle East. In their place, the ‘very nice people' from north Wales had already settled in – another married couple who'd been together forever. They wore matching jumpers and identical shoes. They whispered to each other as they worked, and kissed each other on the shoulder or on the side of the head. Siân knew very well they were adorable, but disliked them with an irrational passion. They smelled so strongly of happiness that even on the exposed headland of Whitby's East Cliff, the odour was overpowering.

I want, I want, I want.

At three-thirty, the heavens opened and the site supervisor declared the day's digging at an end. Thirteen of the fourteen archaeologists hurriedly dispersed into the downpour, hunched under nylon hoods and plastic habits, like a herd of monks fleeing a new Dissolution of the Monasteries. The younger ones sprinted down towards the town, free to embrace the unimaginable luxuries of the modern world.

Siân, without a raincoat or umbrella, walked gingerly on the slick and treacherous terrain, watching where she put her feet as the rain penetrated her scalp and trickled down the back of her neck.

Every few seconds, she cast a glance towards the hundred and ninety-nine steps, hoping against hope that Mack and Hadrian would be coming up to meet her. They weren't, of course. Still she cherished a forlorn fantasy of Mack surfacing from the horizon, running up the steps, one arm holding aloft an umbrella. Pathetic. Saint Hilda would be shaking her head despairingly, if she knew.

The car-park between the abbey ruins and Saint Mary's Church, which ordinarily failed to register on Siân's consciousness at all, annoyed her intensely today as she crossed it. What was it doing here, littering a sacred space with automotive junk? Buried somewhere underneath this dismal moat of concrete, this petrol-stained eyesore, lay oratories and other buildings erected by simple Christians more than a thousand years ago. What would it take to clear away this garbage, short of a bomb?

Siân winced at a flash of recollection – the sound of the shelling she'd experienced in Bosnia, the blasts and rumbles that drove her deeper into the crook of Patrick's arm as they lay in bed, a few miles from the action.

‘Pretend it's a thunderstorm,' he'd advised her. ‘It can't hurt you.'

‘Unless it hits you,' she'd said.

‘Then you won't feel anything,' he'd said, almost asleep.

A lie, of course. Nothing dies painlessly. Even a limb that's long gone keeps hurting.

For more than an hour, Siân traipsed around the streets of Whitby, searching for something to eat. She was in one of those perverse moods where nothing seemed appealing except what was patently not on offer. A lively Greek or Turkish restaurant, with lots of different dips and delicacies and peasant waiters hollering at each other across the room – that would do. Or a Chinese buffet, with spiced noodles and tiny spring rolls and hot soup. She was most definitely not in the mood for fish and chips, which, in Whitby, was an unfortunate way to be.

Window after window, street after street, she peered through foggy panes of glass and read menus that offered her cod and potato in its various disguises, served with mushy peas, pickled egg, curry sauce, gravy. A sign on the front door of the Plough Inn said ‘Sorry, no food today'. A bistro that looked promising wasn't open till the evening. The Tandoori place near the station was good, but she'd eaten there yesterday, and besides, she wanted something instantly.

She ended up eating a banana-and-ice-cream crêpe in a café across the river. They served it with the ice-cream folded inside the pancake rather than on top, so the whole thing was already a lukewarm mess even as she made the first incision with her toothless knife. Chasing the disappearing warmth, she ate too fast, then felt sick.

If she'd been one of Saint Hilda's nuns, she reflected, she would have dined on bread and wine, in the company of friends. She would have drawn a circle in the air and someone would have silently handed her something wholesome, and there wouldn't have been this Top Forty gibberish blaring into her ears.

Dream on, dream on
.

She paid for her pancake and crossed the bridge to her hotel, still haunted, to top it all off, by the fantasy of Magnus cresting the horizon with an umbrella held aloft.

Siân's nightmare next morning was an ingenious variant on the usual. In this version, she had just a few precious seconds to find where her severed head had rolled and replace it on her neck, before the quivering nerves and arteries lost their ability to reunite. Her consciousness seemed to be floating somewhere between the two, powerless to guide her headless body as it groped and fumbled on the floor, its gory neck densely packed with what looked like gasping, sucking macaroni. Her head lay near the open door, inches from the steep stairwell, its eyes fluttering, its lips dry, licked by an anxious tongue. With a bump, Siân woke up on the floor next to her bed.

I really am losing my mind
, she thought.

Still, looking on the bright side, she'd slept quite well, and for an uncommonly long stretch of hours. Buttery-yellow sunlight was beaming through the velux window, flickering gently as seagulls wheeled over the roof. The screaming was over, and breakfast would be served downstairs. Most cheeringly of all, she'd made good progress last night on Thomas Peirson's confession.

Before going to bed, she'd managed to liberate the whole of the outermost page. Aside from those ‘o's and ‘e's already lost to the corrosive ink, there'd been no further mishaps; she'd proceeded with the utmost gentleness, ignoring the pangs of indigestion and … and whatever that lump in her left thigh might be. The lump was more palpable and more painful all the time, but she refused to let it terrorise her. She'd made a solemn vow, when she'd finally walked out of that hospital in Belgrade, feeling each clumsy step reverberating through the cushioned mould of her prosthesis, that she would never lie in a hospital bed again, ever. She would keep that vow. And if she was condemned to die soon, at least she'd die knowing she'd done a good job on this confession.

A hastily scribbled transcript of what she'd unwrapped so far was lying on the spare pillow of her double bed. Pity it had to be written on a cheap little notepad with a
Star Wars
actress on the cover, but that was the only writing paper to hand last night, and she was so impatient to share Thomas Peirson's secrets with Mack that she simply couldn't wait. He would be in seventh heaven when he saw this. He was just the sort of guy who'd be keen on murder mysteries, she could tell.

She scooped yesterday's skirt off the floor and held it up to the sunlight. It was well and truly ripe for the laundromat; she would wear something fresh today. To celebrate the first page.

All the way to work, the cheap little
Star Wars
notepad burned a hole in Siân's jacket pocket, and her ears were cocked for the sound of Mack's voice, or the heavy breathing of Hadrian. Neither sound came to her, however, and she joined her colleagues at the dig, tilling the soil for human remains.

At lunch-time, she wandered down to the kiosk and had a peek out into the world beyond the abbey grounds. Nothing. She considered going down to Loggerhead's Yard and actually visiting Mack at his house, but that didn't feel right.

After all, he might kill me
, she thought – then blinked in surprise at the idea. What a thing to think! Nevertheless, she'd rather wait until he came to her.

She strolled back to the abbey remains. The fine lunch-time weather was luring visitors to the site – not just tourists, but also the children of English Heritage staff. Bobby and Jemima, the son and daughter of one of the kiosk workers, were running around the ruins, shrieking with laughter. At seven and six years old respectively, they weren't worried that their scrambling feet would erode the stonework of the pedestal stubs littering the grassy nave. They were so young, in fact, that they could even kiss each other without worrying about the consequences.

‘Hi, Bobby! Hi, Jemima!' called Siân, waving.

The children were mucking about near the vanished sacristy, lying down flat and jumping up in turn, pirouetting gracelessly.

‘What are you doing?' said Siân.

Jemima was swaying on her feet, dizzy after another spin; Bobby was lying in a peculiar hollowed-out depression in a rectangle of stone, staring up at the sky.

‘We're tryin' to see the wumman jumpin',' he explained.

‘What woman?'

‘The ghostie wumman that jumps off the top.' Bobby pointed, and Siân followed the line of his grubby finger to the roofless buttresses of the abbey. ‘You spin three times, then you lie in the grave, then you see her.'

‘Have you seen her?' said Siân.

‘Nah,' said Jemima. ‘We've not spinned 'ard enough.'

And the two of them ran off, laughing.

Siân looked down at the hollow in the stone, wondering what it used to be before it served as a toy sarcophagus for superstitious children. Then she peered up at the abbey buttresses, imagining a woman moving along them, a young woman in a flowing white gown, her bare feet treading the stone tightrope with all the sureness of a sleepwalker.

‘
HUSH!
'

Siân almost jumped out of her skin as the dog shouted his greeting right next to her. She staggered off-balance, and did a little dance to regain her footing, much to Hadrian's delight.

‘Honestly, Hadrian,' she scolded him. ‘Who taught you
that
trick?'

‘My dad, I suppose,' said Mack, ambling up behind. He was dressed in black denim trousers and a grey Nike sweatshirt with the sleeves gathered up to his elbows; he looked better than ever.

‘That's right, blame the departed,' said Siân.

‘But it's
true
,' he protested. ‘I'm just a foster carer, stuck with a delinquent orphan. Aren't I, Hadrian, eh?' And he patted the dog vigorously on the back, almost slapping him.

‘You didn't need to pay £1.70 to meet me,' said Siân. ‘I would've come out eventually.'

He laughed. ‘Sod that. I want to know what that confession says.'

‘One page a day is the best I can manage,' she cautioned him.

‘I'll take what I can get.'

She pulled the notebook from her jacket pocket, flipped Princess Whatsername over and immediately began to read aloud:

Confession of Thos. Peirson, in the Year of Our Lord 1788

In the full and certain Knowledge that my Time is nigh, for my good Wife has even now closed the door on Doctor Cubitt & weeps in the room below, I write these words. In my fifty years of Life I have been a Whaler and latterly an Oil Merchant; to my family I have given such comforts as have been allow'd me, and to God I have given what I could in thanks. All who know me, know me as a man who means harm to no one.

Yet, as I prepare to meet my Maker, there is but one memory He sets afore me; one dreddeful scene He bids me live again. My hands, though cold now with Fever, do seem to grow warm, from the flesh of her neck – my beloved Mary. Such a slender neck it was, without flaw, fitting inside my big hands like a coil of anchor rope.

I meant, at first, no more than to strangle her – to put such marks upon her throat as could not be mistaken. Despoiled tho' she was, I was loath to despoil her more; I would do only so much as would spare her the wrath of the townsfolk, and secure her repose among the Blessed. So, I resolved only to strangle her. But