Turquoiselle (8 page)

In
the lane the streetlamp nearest the village was on, but farther up darkness,
technically unimpeded, reassembled. The boughs were bare enough even so at last
that they left wide holes through to the sky, clear and starry, and with a new
moon already high.

Carver
waited briefly near the house, looking over at it, noting too the way the woods
were, and the tree-fringed fields behind him.

How
cold everything appeared, colder than any actual coldness of atmosphere, a
night-scene painted with ink-stained ice and shut behind a frozen pane of
glass.

Carver
thought after all he would send a short memo to Latham via the phone in the ‘playroom’.
He should maybe mention the man in the woods too. Whoever had put the action
on, there had been a lot of it.

What
would happen next, tonight?

Carver
knew he must
sleep
tonight. It was
an early start tomorrow. The train to Lynchoak and then the drive up to London.
Perhaps therefore eat, then take a break of five hours, that would be enough.
Then woods-watch sentry duty again. He unlocked the house doors, aware all the
while of the night pressing through its ice-glass at his back. He glanced out
from the inner doorway, as usual. The sheer silence had a kind of sound. Sara,
his mother, had been sometimes hysterically afraid of the dark.

Downstairs
the phone, the landline, had again begun to ring. This had happened seven times
now since eight o’clock. Each time too the mechanical voice offered to receive
a message, and each time no message was given.(But the phone did play up. All
the phones did.)

Reluctantly
he had gone to see who, or what, made the calls. There was no number. A glitch
then. Or cold calling, maybe. They, human or robot, could be persistent. He
thought he would unplug the phone when he went up to sleep, and when keeping
watch.

He
had eaten steak, burnt as he preferred it, and tomatoes bought from the farm shop.
He made more coffee. From time to time he switched channels on the TV above the
kitchen breakfast bar, (reception was poor), but there was no report that
seemed to have anything to do with Dusa, or her death. Perhaps by now he should
reckon there would not be.

The
phone rang again as he closed the dishwasher door.

He
went out, and noted a number which, on this occasion, revealed itself. It was
Maggie’s landline.

With
a sort of inevitable extra unwillingness, Carver put the phone to his ear.

He
did not need to speak. The female voice was already screaming.

“Car
– I have to come home! I
have
to! Oh God, Car – please – are you
there
? Is it
you
?”

“Yes,
Donna, of course it is.”

“Car
– please help me, Car – please – I have to get home–”

“Try
to keep calm. What is the matter? I thought you wanted to stay on?”

“She’s
keeping me here–” shrilled Donna. She seemed frightened, nearly demented. When
her voice dropped, as next it did, it was breathless and shaky. “I’ve only got
a moment – she went out – to get some wine, she said – I can’t use my phone,
Car – she’s stopped me recharging it – so it doesn’t work – and her two – she’s
hidden
them – she’s
keeping me prisoner, Car – Car you have to believe me – I’ve only got a minute –
seconds – Car help me – get me out–”

“Do
you mean Maggie?” he asked slowly, quietly and distinctly .

“Yes
– yes – Maggie – who else?
Maggie
. She’s been drugging me or something –
I kept falling asleep – she kept saying I had to rest, I was all in – I don’t
know what she gave me – it may harm the baby–”

Ah,
the baby again. Carver said, “Donna, are you really saying your mother has gone
crazy and has–”

“I
don’t know if she’s gone crazy, Car. I don’t know, Car. She’s always been –
well, odd, sometimes... Carver –
I
can’t leave this fucking house
–” The last
sentence came over in a thin savage wail. “She locks me in if she goes out. Takes
the keys. Car – please – you have to come–”

He
thought, with a horrible lack of startlement, let alone compassion, or any
sense of personal sadness,
She’s gone crazy
herself. She’s beyond reason
. It was as if a
wall of granite, miles thick, miles high, separated them. It was as if she were
an actress, acting all this very badly in a lousy TV drama he must now switch
off. He wanted, he found, to switch it off quickly. And he wanted to stay
behind the granite wall.

“Donna,”
he said, “I can’t come over tonight.” She said nothing. “I have stuff I have to
see to, can’t get out of it. I’ll come tomorrow evening, after I get back from
London.” Lynchoak, he thought, was near enough to Beechurst. It would be
simple. If he had to, he could bring this mad woman home then. But not now. Not
tonight. He must keep tonight – between them.

He
was very tired, that was it. He would not be safe driving all that extra
distance, after all the driving already today, and only one hour’s sleep caught
up on the previous night. He would be a fool to try to drive. God knew what was
wrong at Maggie’s. Nothing, probably. Donna was drunk. Or something in the
pregnancy – if there was one – had upset the chemicals in her brain. Which
chemicals anyhow never entirely kept steady, going on her general demeanour
over recent years.

“Just
try to keep calm,” he repeated to her new silence. “Take things slowly. Maggie
isn’t going to hurt you. We’ll sort it all out tomorrow.”

Then
she breathlessly whispered, and he grasped she had not listened, had not heard
his denial of her, his decision of not yet going over, rescue deferred. “
She’s back
. She’s
back
. Her
car’s
there. I’ll –
Oh Christ–” and the phone, presumably put down, went dead.

Carver
stood in the hall, listening himself again to the other silence of the
darkness, which was not like Donna’s silence at all.

Could
something so irrational be going on? Maggie of the Chevrolet off her head – but
why – for what reason? Maggie was fairly grounded, sufficiently
sane
. It was Donna
who might not be.

Donna
who had alleged Carver had attacked her. Donna begging him – the attacker –
Please Car – please, Car
– to save her
from a blonde dragon with such nicely moisturised scales and elegantly
manicured talons, and an independent bank balance donated by several approving
and satisfied male lovers who had never found fault.

Carver
left the phone active, he would not unplug it yet. That would be his single
concession to Donna’s outcry. She could have a further twenty minutes, before
he grabbed his four or five hours of sleep. Twenty minutes to evade her
wardress with the drugged wine, and call him again.

Upstairs,
as the computer in the ‘playroom’ shuffled its files for him, he thought Donna
herself had doubtless forgotten to recharge her mobile phone, or lost it – she
had lost two in the past six months, leaving one in a pub in Beechurst, she
said, somehow dropping the other during a ramble through a park somewhere. Had
she always been this feckless, this ‘dotty’? Not in the beginning. No.

The
file flicked open its screen pages.

He
read, as he had done already several times, the introductory paragraphs.
The Third Scar
purported to be
a script in the making, sponsored by a movie outfit that required some private
funding. It had been dressed up, Carver thought, rather like a modern mystery
for a nouveau Sherlock Holmes, with the implicated supernatural undertow
inherent in, say,
The
Hound of the Baskervilles
or
The Sussex Vampire
. A curse was
threatened with the manifestation of a Third Scar. But the scar had three rival
meanings: 1) A mark on the left arm or hand, of some unspecified sort, 2) A
scar (or
scaur
) being the
steep craggy outcrop of a cliff or mountain. The third meaning was stranger. 3)
Postulated the use of Scar as a family name, the final descendants to bear it,
three in number; the third and last being the child of the other two.

The
plot involved, inevitably, crimes and secrets, not least the apparent curse
that brought potential death no less thoroughly than the danger of a phantom
hound, or a predilection of some thirsty foreign female vampire.

The
phone rang again.

Despite
himself Carver tensed. He got up, went to the door and along to the head of the
stairs. There he stayed. The mechanical voice broke in, offering the caller its
message option.

What
would Donna say now?

A
night-cold, night-silent rage pulsed through Carver, gushing upward from his
feet – and perished as another voice than Donna’s entered the house.

It
was male. Seeming young. Diction exact. Not wasting a word. For it only offered
one. “
Silvia
” said the
voice. Nothing else. Message given and ended.

Carver
sprang down the stair. The phone showed only that the number was withheld.

He
had already texted Latham, by the agreed channel, to register the tail to
Tunbridge and on the train. And the visitor in the woods. There had been no
response, nor had Carver expected one. Like the Donna problem, that was for
tomorrow.

But
this
. What to do with
this
?

He
checked the games key Icon again. The signal had begun to blip. But it was the
same clue, the verdict of the judge which still indicated the initials S.D. The
Alert Level however had gone down to Blue – today’s Lucky Stone was now
Aquamarine
.

The
computer seemed jumpy, too. It froze, came back... He shut off the
Scar
file, and
unplugged the machine. Downstairs he did the same with the landline. Later he
would expunge all the house lights again, aside from that of the glassed-in
porch. For now he left them on. It was later than he had planned. Almost ten o’clock.
He could not, now, sleep as long as intended.

He
would not bother with the news. Opening the kitchen’s back door, Carver stepped
out on to the patio, among the beaming outdoor lamps. He looked about and down
the garden, the ornamental (mental) benches, the lawn, the bushes and
established trees, the pear that sometimes fruited a harvest with the scent of
honey and the taste of rotten wood; it had done nothing this year.

Leaving
the house shut and lit up, Carver moved down the garden. Seen from outside, the
uplighter glare from the village still bloomed against the clear indigo glass
of the sky. The white slender moon was westering, but bright. Nothing
suspicious was about. He could hear far-off traffic.

He
walked towards the shed.

The
blue-green luminescence inside the shed had either not been there, or was
unnoticeable in the beginning, Carver thought. And when at first it began to
show, he had dismissed it as his own misperception, at least for a short while.
It was quite pertinently like the glow – the
after
glow of thieving — that had lingered for
him on those things he stole in his childhood and teens; an optical illusion no
less profound and affirming for being recognised and labelled. But now, little
by very little, as the amount of small scattered objects he presently conducted
home, and so into the shed, grew in number and sequent density, so the
glow
had increased.
Less than a bloom, it magnified to a sheen. And after this, an actual
illumination. Everything he took currently, of course, came from the Mantik
building in Whitehall, and in itself was unvaluable. Pristine unused discs and
cartridges, batteries, unink pens, tiny and now nearly redundant notepads,
grips, clips, tags, tabs...the very last item to date had been the memory card
for a make of camera with which Carver himself had never been issued. That
theft he had placed inside the shed on the morning after Donna enacted her
initial five-star mad-scene, the morning
before
Carver met Silvia weeping mercury tears
in the corridor, and she had said
Go to hell
,
and then
I
must talk to someone
.

None
of the thieved articles, as they never had been, were of any lasting use, and
normally of no use to him. If they could have been, he never used them.
Practical use was not their worth or significance.