The Strange Fate of Kitty Easton (28 page)

Ah, the architecture of the true God, crushing the rustic stones and mistletoe groves of the superstitious ancients.’ Patrick laughed, the sound echoing off the walls. ‘Well, let’s explore. Perhaps it will make us both famous.’

Had he forgotten about his search for his niece’s bones, Laurence wondered, or, once she evidently wasn’t in the crypt, had he been able to relax?

‘We’ve come a long way already,’ he said. ‘We could come back better equipped. It may not be safe.’ It sounded weak, even to him.

‘We might never get back at all. Or we might have to tell people.’ Patrick gave one of his boyish smiles. ‘I’m not very good at sharing. I like secrets. It comes of being the youngest child, I suppose. Or learning not to trust anybody.’

There must have been something in Laurence’s look which communicated doubt.

‘Not you, strangely. You seem to know all my secrets. All the ones that matter. The best and the worst. The stranger who reveals our hopes and fears.’

He paused, pulled out a cigarette and lit it.

‘An archaeologist of the soul.’

His odd, embarrassed grin offset the intensity of his words.

‘Eleanor tells me you have no family. I’m sorry. But then again, it may be why you give off this sense of being unaligned. You move through the world, uncorrupted by the demands of blood and history.’

Laurence’s first reaction was that it was blood and history that had taken what life he once had and had hoped to have, but these feelings passed in a second and were replaced by amusement.

‘I’m afraid my soul, if I have one, is much murkier and much less ascetic than your fantasies,’ he said. ‘Perhaps that’s because in reality I actually have a rather bossy older sister and more nephews and nieces than one man should bear alone.’

Patrick laughed again, this time entirely naturally. He clapped Laurence on the back.

‘I hope all this,’ he waved around the chamber, ‘gives you a taste for my sort of business. I’d like to get to know you better, away from Easton damn Deadall.’ He took one last draw at his cigarette and surveyed its tip: ‘Burning beautifully—at least there’s plenty of good air down here. It’s getting in somewhere. Anyway,’ he said, examining the two further portals, at which Laurence’s heart sank again, ‘left or right? Or shall we toss for it?’

Again they turned right, although the path swiftly split in two. Instinctively they took the right-hand fork and continued for some distance. When they entered a chamber similar to the previous one, Patrick simply muttered, ‘Curiouser and curiouser. This must be utterly unique.’

This time he didn’t even ask Laurence but just kept on, taking the right-hand passage. It led away at a sharper angle and Laurence thought it was descending slightly but after a while it forked again. This time a roof fall had blocked the right-hand side. Laurence felt the back of his neck prickle and his nausea returned.

‘Patrick,’ he said, much more urgently than before, ‘we should go back. We’re God knows how many feet underground, nobody knows we’re here, and we don’t know what sort of system we’re in or where it leads.’

‘But look,’ Patrick said, ‘the side that fell has been constructed out of dry-stone walling. On this side, the roof is bare rock. It’s safe.’

He plunged on. After what might have been fifty feet or more, they reached a T-junction. Patrick took the right-hand passage, saying breezily, ‘This should bring us back in the sort of direction we were going.’

Laurence started to fall back. He was tired and began to worry about the far frailer Patrick. Then he heard Patrick cry out, ‘Damn.’

The right-hand turn had ended in a blank wall. It had no crevices or mortar.

‘Shine your torch in the corners,’ Patrick said, but there was nothing.

For the first time he sagged, visibly.

‘We’ll have to turn back,’ he said reluctantly.

They both leaned against the wall. The silence around them fell heavily.

‘Let’s retrace our footsteps,’ Laurence said and started more slowly back the way they’d come. He turned sharp left and walked on.

After a while Patrick said, ‘I think we missed the fork. It’s all so shadowy.’

Laurence shone the torch downwards, but there was no sign of footsteps in the fine layer of silt. They turned and retraced their steps until they found a disturbed surface.

Patrick said with what sounded like forced cheer, ‘We’ll reach the second chamber in a sec.’

It took them longer than Patrick’s sec, and much longer than Laurence remembered, to regain the chamber and it was as much a relief as it had been oppressive the first time.

‘Let’s stop for a minute,’ Patrick said. Laurence couldn’t see his face or its pallor but he sensed him tiring.

They sat on the floor with the lantern burning in front of them. Patrick pulled his knees up to his chest. Laurence leaned back against the rock. His head throbbed and he was beginning to feel thirsty.

‘Eleanor said you were quite the hero back in France? MC and so on?’

‘I was just about the only living chest left they could pin one on.’

‘Digby’s chest was shot all to hell but they still gave him one.’

Laurence nodded. Dead heroes were always popular. No medal for Julian, though, who had to watch men cut down all around him.

‘Though Victor Kilminster—our soon-to-be-returning son of Easton—got the Military Medal,’ Patrick said. ‘Perhaps that’s why Julian is so cross about it.’

‘I gather he helped him settle in Australia with a bit of money. Maybe he doesn’t like his charity being thrown back in his face.’

‘Perhaps.’ After a pause Patrick said, ‘You don’t believe Julian and Lydia killed Kitty, do you?’

‘You were there, not me.’ Laurence tried to clear his head, glad to have something to focus on. ‘But for me there are too many unanswered questions, too many alternative interpretations for what you saw. As you said, archaeologists formulate a theory and find evidence to support it. I don’t think you have that evidence. You think Julian may have helped murder your niece. I don’t, can’t, see him as any kind of killer.’

Patrick didn’t seem offended. ‘I assume he might have fired his gun in the war?’ he said mildly.

Laurence didn’t bother to answer.

After a moment or two Patrick said, ‘Julian’s not the man he was back then. All the same, I don’t believe he killed her either, but I do think he covered up. That’s the sort of thing Julian would do: cover things up to keep everything nice at Easton. If he’d found this dead woman you stumbled across, you can be sure he would have popped her in the car and taken her on a ride to Chippenham. Then the police could be picking over Chippenham families and Chippenham houses, not Easton. And for Lydia he’d do almost anything.’

‘I think he half hoped William and I would find out what had happened to Kitty,’ Laurence said.

Patrick shrugged. ‘Safe enough if he knew she couldn’t be found.’

‘You never saw your niece, nor any weapon. You saw Lydia with blood-stained clothes and with your brother. Both looked distressed. It could have been an accident.’ He flailed for a few seconds. ‘It could have been some female affliction.’

Patrick looked up. ‘It could have been. But when you see your brother and sister-in-law sneaking around in the middle of the night, covered in blood, carrying bundled bedding, and in the morning a child is missing and both claim to have remained in their rooms all night, then I think you might come to the same conclusion as me.’

His voice was firm.

‘If it was an accident, Lydia would have gone to Digby. If it had been a female “affliction”, as you call it,’ he raised his eyebrows, ‘surely she’d have woken Frances, or even the nanny, Jane Rivers. She’d hardly go first to my unmarried brother.’

‘When you say they claimed to have slept in their rooms all night, do you mean that’s what they said when questioned by the police?’

Patrick nodded.

‘But presumably their rooms were searched? Finding traces of blood is something police are trained to do.’

‘They did find a tiny bit of blood,’ Patrick said, ‘in Julian’s handbasin, but it was little enough to be accounted for by a nosebleed. He does have nosebleeds, by the way, something to do with his war injuries.’

‘But where’s the linen you saw? Where’s the child’s body? You don’t really think she’s down here, do you?’

Patrick shrugged. ‘I thought she might—
might
—be buried in my mother’s hidey-hole. It felt right. To anyone who knew it was there, though God knows who did know, it would have been easily done. She was a very slight child, not heavy.’

His voice was emotionless, but he rested his head on his knees as he spoke.

‘But the floor was solid and untouched,’ Laurence said. There was no response for some minutes.

‘We should go on,’ Patrick said eventually. Laurence looked up. From where they were, he could see one further exit ahead. He shone the torch along the wall they were sitting against.

‘I don’t think we’re in the same chamber we were in before,’ he said, trying to keep his voice steady.

Patrick’s head shot up.

‘Of course we are. It’s only minutes from the junction.’

But Laurence, watching him in the faint glow of the lamp, saw his eyes dart from one exit to another.

After a few seconds Patrick said, ‘Well, we can retrace a bit. Our footsteps will be clear on the floor.’ He got to his feet and pushed himself away from the wall. Holding the lantern high, he carried it to the nearest exit and then, wordlessly, to the other.

Laurence’s mind was reeling but he tried to reason sensibly. ‘I think we should mark this place so we know if we return,’ he said.

Patrick was silent. They both knew it was an admission that they were lost.

Laurence dug the broken knife into the rock beside the exit, moving it backwards and forwards, then repeated it in the opposite direction, making an uneven cross. He hoped it wasn’t an omen. As they walked on, he switched off his torch. Its batteries were new but they needed to conserve light.

They moved much more slowly this time. He didn’t know how long the lantern might burn for. Had Patrick even filled it right up before his impulsive adventure? He couldn’t bear to ask.

As they trudged on, Patrick said, ‘I could do with a drink,’ and once again Laurence had to take deep breaths to calm his barely suppressed panic.

He had supposed that he would never feel naked fear again, once he had come back from France, but now it returned to him with full force. In the dark, with only Patrick’s lantern to light the way, he began to think the air smelled less sweet. Strange shapes were thrown up on the ceiling and Patrick’s shadow, made huge, shambled along with them. Now he began to hear noises. Not just their footfalls and Patrick’s laboured breaths but something behind them, something that also breathed. If he stopped, it stopped too, but when he walked, the thing followed. Twice he whirled around, but, beyond their small glow of light, there was nothing.

They came to a fork.

‘Right,’ he almost shouted.

The passage was narrower, he was sure of it, and he thought the roof was slightly lower. There were no roots here. Did that mean they were deeper in the earth?

His heart was crashing in his chest and his mouth was sticky. He swallowed with difficulty and licked his lips.

They went on in silence. Then, ahead of them, stood another of the stone doorways and with relief they collapsed into the larger space beyond it. It seemed to Laurence that the lantern was growing very slightly dimmer and when he looked up Patrick was staring into space.

‘We should have brought string,’ Laurence said.

Patrick turned his head very slowly and even in the soft light the strange expression on his face, half wonder, half fear, made Laurence uneasy.

‘Bartram,’ he said, ‘you’re a genius. How could I not have seen?’ He shook his head as if trying to clear it. ‘I can’t have been thinking. Too busy trying to find a way out.’

There was a catch in his breath.

‘Easton Deadall. Daedalus. The famous Easton maze that your chum’s trying to re-create. It was never just a bastardised Latin name, never a pretty row of bushes.’

He was speaking so fast that Laurence had difficulty understanding him.

‘Not even a pattern on the church floor. This is the maze. We’re in it. Under the house, or pretty close to it. This is Easton’s maze, old as the hills, right in the middle of all the other prehistoric remains. A giant barrow or system of connected barrows. Or perhaps something else.’

He sounded excited.

‘Built to hide something or for the burial of a great chief, or who knows what, but here it’s been under Easton all the time. The pavement in the church was a representation of what lay beneath. Perhaps even a map—it was a pretty damn convoluted thing.’

He laughed, but it turned into a cough.

‘Of all our little secrets, this has to be the best. The one we never knew we had.’

He had run out of breath. The lamp flickered but Patrick, apparently miles away, didn’t notice.

A maze. Think of Knossos. The Minotaur. Think of Ariadne, with her string. You saw it. String. You realised.’

Laurence’s ears were ringing. He passed a dry hand over his face. Even in bush mazes, he had a yearning to kick through the close-packed hedges. Early in the war, when he was on home leave with Louise, they had gone to Hampton Court. Although there was a constant flicker of passing visitors on the far side of the yew and voices rose all about them, he had wanted to hurry through and was reassured by places where the yew had thinned.

The purpose of a maze was to confuse or to remove man from his material world on to a path where he was in the hand of God. Mazes had never been a game. He was angry, both with Patrick and with himself, and suddenly very sad. He put his hand in his breast pocket to find his handkerchief, when suddenly, with a feeling approaching joy, he felt something hard.

‘My compass,’ he said.

He had used it so often in the church and out on walks, yet here, where they most needed it, he had forgotten that he had it. He opened the battered khaki case.

‘When we left the church we were heading almost due south, I think. So if we head north whenever we can, we...’ He thought ‘might’ but said,
‘should
get back to the church.’