The scene in the fields round about resembled a TEWT — Tactical Exercise Without Troops — such as were held in the army, groups of figures poring over maps, writing in notebooks, gazing out over the countryside. My own guilty feelings, on such occasions, came back to me, those sudden awarenesses at military exercises of the kind that, instead of properly concentrating on tactical features, I was musing on pictorial or historical aspects of the landscape; what the place had seen in the past; how certain painters would deal with its physical features. That was just what was happening now. Instead of trying to comprehend in a practical manner the quarrymen’s proposals, I was concentrating on The Devil’s Fingers themselves.
The elder thicket was flowering, blossom like hoar frost, a faint sprinkling of brownish red, powdered over the green and white ivy-strangled tree-trunks, gnarled and twisted, as in an Arthur Rackham goblin-haunted illustration. In winter, the Stones would have been visible from this point. Now they were hidden by the ragged untidy elders. The trees might well have been cleared away, leaving The Fingers on the skyline. Possibly the quasi-magical repute attributed to elderberries — the mysterious bleedings of which Mr Gauntlett spoke — had something to do with their preservation.
I was mistaken in supposing Mrs Salter the foremost of our party, that none of the others had pressed so far as the elder thicket. That was what I had decided to do myself, a small luxury, before bending the mind to practical problems. Somebody else from the morning’s expedition must have had the same idea; got well ahead at the start, then moved on at high speed across the big field. Now he was slowly returning towards the rest of us. I did not know him by sight. The dark suit probably meant an official. Most of the other representatives of local authorities had moved off to the right and left by now, or withdrawn again some way to the rear. As this figure emerged from the elder trees, advanced down the hill, I felt pretty sure he had not been among those collected earlier at the stile. He must be a stray visitor, a tourist, even professional archaeologist, who had hoped to avoid sightseers by picking a comparatively early hour to visit the monument. Usually there was no one to be seen for miles, except possibly a farmer herding cows or driving a tractor. This man could not have chosen a worse morning for having the place to himself.
He did seem a little taken aback by the crowd of people fanned out across the landscape, the markers on the higher ground, their coloured flags looking like little pockets of resistance in a battle. He paused, contemplated the scene, then continued to walk swiftly, almost painfully, down the slope. There was something dazed, stunned, about his demeanour. The dark suit, bald head, spectacles, looked for some reason fantastically out of place in these surroundings, notwithstanding the fact that others present were bespectacled, bald, dark-suited.
‘Russell?’
‘Hi, Nicholas.’
Gwinnett was far less astonished than myself. In fact he did not seem surprised at all. He was carrying under his arm what looked like a large black notebook, equipment that had at first assimilated him with other note-takers in the fields round about.
‘I was told you live near here, Nicholas.’
‘Fairly near.’
‘What’s going on?’
He managed to establish a situation in which I, rather than he, found it necessary to give an explanation for being on that spot at that moment. I tried to summarize briefly for him the problem of the quarry and The Devil’s Fingers. Gwinnett nodded. He made some technically abstruse comment on quarrying. In spite of outward calmness he was not looking at all well. This was very noticeable at close quarters. Gwinnett’s appearance was ghastly, as if he had drunk too much, been up all night, or — on further inspection — slept on the ground in his clothes. The dark suit was covered in dust and scraps of grass. His shoes, too, were caked with mud. He brought with him even greater disquiet than usual; a general sense of insecurity increased by the skies above becoming all at once increasingly dark.
‘Have you been visiting The Devil’s Fingers?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You’re staying near here?’
‘Not far.’
‘With friends?’
‘No.’
He named an inn at a small town a few miles distant. It appeared from what he said that he was alone there.
‘I didn’t know you were interested in prehistoric stuff — or has this something to do with your Jacobean dramatists?’
Gwinnett, as was often his habit, did not answer at once. He seemed to be examining his own case, either for a clue as to what had indeed happened to him, or, already knowing that, in an effort to decide how much to reveal.
‘I’ve lost my way. Just now I came up the same path, as well as I could remember it. I don’t know how to get down to the road from here.’
‘You’ve been to The Devil’s Fingers before?’
‘We came up on foot last night. I couldn’t sleep when I got back. I thought I’d drive out here again. Make more notes on the spot. It’s because I’m tired I’ve forgotten the path down, I guess.’
‘You’ve got a car with you?’
‘It’s parked in a gully off the road. Beside some old cars that have been dumped there. I took the steep path up the hill. It stops after a while. That’s why I can’t find the place.’
‘You were here last night?’
‘Some of the night.’
His manner was odd even for Gwinnett. He talked like a man in a dream. It occurred to me that he was recovering from a drug. The suspicion was as likely to be unfounded as earlier ones, in Venice, that he was a homosexual, or a reclaimed drunk.
‘Were you one of the party dancing round The Devil’s Fingers last night?’
Gwinnett laughed aloud at that. He did not often laugh. To do so was the measure of the state he was in. His laughter was the reverse of reassuring.
‘Why? Were they seen? How do you know about that?’
‘They were seen.’
‘I wasn’t one of the dancers. I was there.’
‘What the hell was going on?’
‘The stag-mask dance.’
‘Who was performing?’
‘Scorp Murtlock and his crowd.’
‘Are they at your pub too?’
‘They’re on their own. In a caravan. Those taking part in the rites travelled together. Scorp thought that necessary. I met them near here. We came up to the place together.’
‘Who were the rest of the party?’
‘Ken Widmerpool, two girls — Fiona and Rusty — a boy called Barnabas.’
‘Was Widmerpool in charge?’
‘No, Scorp was in charge. That was what the row was about.’
‘There was a row?’
Gwinnett puckered up his face, as if he was not sure he had spoken correctly. Then he confirmed there had been a row. A bad row, he said. Its details still seemed unclear in his mind.
‘Did Widmerpool dance?’
‘When the rite required that.’
‘Naked?’
‘Some of the time.’
‘Why only some of the time?’
‘Ken was mostly recording.’