But it bloody well could … curving into the damned entrance and out of his line of sight. Marcus moved to the edge of the tower, leaned over, heard someone get out and open the gate, then watched the big green vehicle cross the yard twenty-five feet below.
Malcolm quivered, and Marcus clamped a hand over the dog’s muzzle as the car stopped and the person who had opened the gate came into view.
Marcus sprang up.
‘Underhill! What the bloody hell-?’
And, oh Lord, who was that with her?
Several times on the journey, the horrific green-pepper moment had sprung up at her and she’d shaken her head and said despairingly, ‘We have to call the cops.’
‘No way.’ Persephone Callard steering the Grand Cherokee with one hand low on the wheel, eyes fixed on the road and maybe some other place that Grayle couldn’t even imagine. ‘Out of the question.’
‘But what if he-?’
‘So?’
‘Well, OK, you can say that. You didn’t do anything. You were just a victim and you stayed a victim the whole time. Me …’
Callard had packed a case and then they’d cleared up the lodge and hung dust covers so it looked like no-one had been living there. Callard had an apartment in London but could not go back, she said, because of the media.
But it wasn’t just the media now, was it? The media were the goddamn least of it.
Grayle had thought at once of the dairy at Castle Farm, where visitors stayed, where — fate, destiny? — Persephone Callard could become reacquainted with the only person in my entire fucking life who ever pitied me. And where Grayle might just find out what all this was really about before the cops took her away.
How could she hang it on Marcus, a sick man?
On the other hand, it was Marcus got her into this.
‘Grayle, for Christ’s sake, what else could you have done?’ Callard had demanded, as they came down from Gloucester towards the M50, with the first amber lines of morning in the southern sky. ‘What else could you have done sufficiently drastic to get us out of there?’
‘Maybe I could’ve explained that to the cops …?’
‘You do not deserve’, Callard said firmly, ‘to spend hours in some smelly police interview room for that …’
‘The interview room I could take. If it ended there.’
‘Yes, well I’m afraid one can’t necessarily trust the police any more. Or, indeed, believe in British justice.’
The famous Seffi Callard driving coolly on, her hands unshaking on the wheel. Her upper lip was swollen where one of them had hit her and then squeezed her face before applying the masking tape. But she seemed already separated from the terror. She actually looked less gaunt than last night, less hollowed. Driving efficiently, with purpose. Maybe she also had that sense of fate and destiny, was thinking that Marcus Bacton would know what to do, make things all right.
‘I just want to believe the two halves of that guy’s face are still joined together, is all,’ Grayle had said miserably.
She stepped down from the big, plushy, air-conditioned Jeep.
The air was hard and made everything real again. Her legs felt like saplings.
She watched Marcus and Persephone Callard approaching each other slowly across the yard, which was still half-shadowed from the night.
Marcus’s eyes were wet. Just the flu, Grayle hoped.
‘She was right.’ Callard had stopped a few feet from Marcus. ‘You’re not well, are you?’
Like they hadn’t seen each other for … maybe several weeks.
Callard had on this long, baggy, cream jumper with a leather belt and a heavy cowl neck. Kind of medieval and suited to the location, except she was part of Marcus’s history, not the castle’s. Grayle pictured her as she’d been not five hours ago, all taped up like a sado-masochist’s Christmas present.
At the thought, she started to shake again, breathed out hard and leaned over the hood of the Jeep. So deeply relieved to be back that she wanted to kiss the castle stones.
Marcus stood there in his overlong duffel coat, blinking behind his glasses.
Marcus astonished. Marcus Bacton lost for words.
Jesus Christ.
The dog, Malcolm, growled.
‘Look …’ Marcus backed away. ‘I … don’t come too close, Persephone. I’ve got this … virus. Germs everywhere.’
‘I don’t catch things from other people.’ Seffi Callard smiling her crooked, damaged, loose-lipped smile across the yard at Marcus. ‘Never have.’
Damn germs wouldn’t have the nerve, Grayle thought. She was a little freaked at Marcus — the guy was behaving like this was some kind of royal visit. Anybody else, he’d be asking what the fuck they were playing at turning up unannounced at goddamned cock-crow.
‘Marcus,’ Grayle said, ‘just, like … quit gawking and make us some coffee, huh? We … we’re in some kind of shit.’
XI
Grayle shivered deeply — like to the bone — and hunkered over the opened stove in Marcus’s study, close to hugging the blazing logs. Maybe she’d finally picked up his flu.
‘Had a sleep?’ Marcus appeared in the doorway.
‘Oh sure, what do you think?’ Folding her arms for warmth, noting that he’d been upstairs, changed into the retired-colonel-style tweed suit. And the bow tie. Still haggard with the flu but making a bid for the old dapper Bacton.
All for Persephone.
Who, after a haphazard meal prepared by Grayle and involving mainly toast and Marcus’s disgusting instant coffee, had been shown to the Castle Farm guest apartment, the small, whitewashed building which used to be a dairy.
Persephone. Finally, a person Marcus didn’t address by her surname. Grayle didn’t like this one bit.
On the lumpy sofa, she’d had four hours of anxiety dreams involving Justin with a red opening where his moustache had been and Ersula, liquefying in the red soil.
Woke up shivering and Callard had not reappeared.
‘You’d better tell me,’ Marcus said. ‘Don’t you think?’
She could see it all again, like a slow-motion sequence. Because that was how it had seemed to happen, real slow. No big explosion, just a dampening, the blood soaking through the guerrilla-mask.
‘But … like massively. All of it soaked. And he … he’s just standing there … like he can’t believe it.’
The glass chinking against her teeth. Water. Just when you needed whisky, Marcus had no whisky left.
‘And I’m there with this … big, heavy blade hanging from my hand, like … like an executioner, you know?’
Marcus just nodded. Well, thanks, Marcus.
‘And then he like … he raises one hand to his face and when his hand touches where the wound is he just screams. This one long, awful scream. And he’s wheeling round now and trying to tear off the hood, and there’s blood all over his hands, and he can’t do it, it’s too painful and … and when his head turns there’s this like mist of blood spraying off of it. And he starts to sob, he lets out this long, shuddering kind of sob, and he suddenly rushes out the room and through the kitchen and out the house.’
She took a drink and coughed.
‘Leaving the other guy, right? The other guy’s standing very still and like just staring at me through his eye holes, like he’s taking in every detail of my face, and I want to drop the big knife but I can’t, and I … this single drop of blood falls from the blade to the floor. Like plop. His friend’s blood. And this guy, he’s just looking at me and it’s real still, you know, the atmosphere is soooo still, and the guy goes, he looks straight at me through the holes and he goes — and this is just like a whisper, I wouldn’t even know that voice again, and he goes … You … are dead.’