It’s surprising the different and creative ways your imagination can find to torment you when you’ve got a guilty conscience.
I kicked the door open.
Mac hadn’t tidied up before leaving, and the flat revealed details about his private life I didn’t really want to know. A half-finished whisky bottle sat on the coffee table, next to a tatty copy of Barely Legal and a box of mansize tissues. There was a CD player on the sideboard, and the bookcase had a huge pile of batteries on it. The kitchen was a stinking mess. There was a small calor gas ring with a saucepan on it and a collection of tinned food sitting next to it; baked beans and macaroni cheese, mostly. A huge pile of empty tins and Pot Noodles lay in a pile in the corner, a beacon for rats and ’roaches.
In the bedroom the quilt lay half-off the bed, exposing crumpled, stained sheets. We hadn’t got the best laundry system worked out. I made a mental note to prioritise that.
Above the bed was a collage of photographs, blu-tacked to the wall. There must have been a hundred pictures. Most were of his family, but some were of friends, and there was one corner reserved for pictures of a pretty blonde girl I didn’t recognise. It’d never occurred to me that he’d had a girlfriend.
I didn’t want to linger here, to look at his pictures and see his crumpled bed sheets. I didn’t want these things making me think of him as an ordinary person, giving my imagination any more details to torture me with. But it was already too late for that. I knew that somewhere in my nightmares that blonde girl would appear, accusing me of murder, weeping over Mac’s chargrilled corpse.
Angrily I flung open every drawer and cupboard I could find. I rummaged through underwear and socks, spot cream, CDs, books and t-shirts until I found what I was looking for: the spare set of keys to the cellar. I left that room as quickly as I could and slammed the door behind me. I didn’t look back.
Rowles was already waiting for me when I got to the armoury. The small door that led down to the cellar was underneath the rear staircase in what had originally been the servants’ quarters. Mac had kept it padlocked and guarded at all times; I didn’t think we needed the guard.
I opened the door and switched on the light. The cellar smelt damp and musty. We went down the stone steps and found ourselves in a corridor with vaulted rooms lying off it to the left and right. There were six chambers down here; all but two were full of guns, ammunition and explosives.
Without being asked, Rowles selected a rifle for himself, picked up a magazine, and snapped it into place. He seemed completely at ease, as if operating a semi-automatic machine gun was the most normal thing in the world. I reminded myself that he was only ten and wondered if I’d be able to restrict guns to older boys. Would that weaken our defences too much? One more thing to worry about.
I was appalled by how comfortable I’d become with guns, how naturally the Browning nestled into my palm like an extension of my hand, as it was designed to. I didn’t want to be someone who always carried a weapon. I worried that I would come to rely on it to solve all my problems. After all, as Mac had pointed out, there was no-one to haul me off to prison for murder. The only thing stopping me ruling at the muzzle of a gun was my own determination not to let it happen.
But we were riding out of the school into unknown territory. Who knew what we’d encounter? Reluctantly I picked up the cold metal pistol and checked that it was loaded.
I promised myself that I’d return it to the cellar as soon as I got back.
WE SAW THE smoke long before we saw the farm.
Rowles, Haycox and I approached on horseback from the west, but we tethered the horses to a fence and made our final approach more stealthily. At first I thought it was probably a domestic fire, maybe someone burning rubbish or leaves, but as we got closer I could see that it was the dying embers of a much larger blaze.
Panicking, I started to run. My reluctance to carry a gun was forgotten as I drew my weapon, but I knew before I arrived at the farmhouse that there was nobody to shoot or save. This place was abandoned.
The main building was a shell. It could have been smouldering for days. There was a discarded petrol canister on the grass in front of the house. Someone had deliberately burnt this place down. Dispatching the others to check the outbuildings and oast houses, I peered in through the front door.
The floorboards had been burnt through and all that remained of the crossbeams were thin charcoal sticks. The ground floor was gone and the cellar was exposed to the sunlight for the first time in two hundred years. There was no way in here. I circled the building, looking in through the empty, warped window frames. All I could see was blackened furniture and collapsed walls. I didn’t see any bodies.
Rowles reported that the oast houses were empty, but we heard Haycox yell and we hurried to the stables. When I first saw the body of the young boy lying there, half his chest blown away by a shotgun, I didn’t realise the significance of it; after all, there was a lot of blood. It told me was that there’d been a fight, and the body was long cold. I reckoned he’d been dead about three or four days, which must have been when the farm was atacked. But then my stomach lurched as I saw that his hair was matted with blood. It wasn’t his own.
Matron and the girls had been taken by the Blood Hunters.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
WE HAD RIDDEN to the farm at a gentle canter, but we left galloping as fast as our horses could carry us. I felt the stitches in my side split. I ignored it.
Rowles rode back to the school to let Norton know what was happening. Haycox and I made straight for Ightham. The farm had been attacked three days ago, which meant the Blood Hunters had taken Matron and the girls captive before we’d stormed their HQ. My imagination started finding new ways to torture me. Perhaps they’d been held prisoner in a different part of the building and they’d burnt to death as a result of our attack.
I remembered the screams of the morning sacrifice. I’d been so grateful for the respite that had offered us. But maybe it had been Matron hanging from those battlements bleeding out in the moat. Maybe I’d swum to safety through her diluted blood.
I kicked the horse hard. Faster. Must go faster.
It took about an hour to reach Ightham. My horse and I were exhausted by that point. Haycox looked like he’d enjoyed the ride. We couldn’t just go storming in; the surviving Blood Hunters could still be here. We tethered the horses in the woods and approached through the trees, weapons drawn, on the lookout for sentries or stragglers. There was nobody around.
The building was still on fire. All the wooden parts of the house had collapsed into the stone ground floor, where they were burning up all the remaining fuel. The house was a shell, completely abandoned, but there were about twenty bodies in the moat. I really didn’t want to do this, but I had to be sure, so I found the wheel that controlled the level of water and turned it all the way. The water slowly began to drain away through the sluice gate. When it was down to knee height we jumped in and began to work our way around the building, turning over the bodies. Most were badly burnt. It was a tiring and grisly task, one of the most distressing things I’ve ever had to do. None of the dead were Mac or David, but the final body I turned over was Unwin’s little sister.
So they’d been here all the time we were rescuing the people from Hildenborough. I looked up at the burning building. They might still be inside, charred and lifeless. I could be directly responsible for their deaths. There was no way of knowing.