And she does. After a little tree-climbing and a jump that Sammy would have applauded, she makes it on to the top of the wall. She goes down on her knees, grips the brick edge, hangs low and drops into the garden. She emerges from the soil and shade on to the long back lawn.
‘Gideon!’ she shouts up towards the house. Doesn’t want to spook him, have him mistake her for another intruder.
It takes several minutes to negotiate the lake and the back of the house. There’s no one here. His Audi is parked on the gravel out front and judging from the glistening spider webs spun across the wing mirrors, it hasn’t been moved for a while.
Megan rings the bell. Bangs with her fist and shouts his name again, even through the letterbox. Nothing. She scribbles a note for him to call her and pushes it through the metal flap. She withdraws her hand and stands frozen in thought.
The last time she saw Gideon was with Smithsen, right here. And he looked scared. At the time she wrote it off as a psychological reaction to his father’s death. Now she knows that she was wrong. Maybe he’s even lying dead on the floor inside.
She tries to rationalise. Smithsen wouldn’t really kill him, would he? Not after seeing her at the house, not after talking to her, a detective, on the driveway. He’d be mad to. The logic is enough to stop her breaking in. At least until she has spoken to Jude Tompkins.
Megan retraces her steps, climbs back over the wall and heads to her car. As she starts up the engine, she sees a flash of something in her rearview mirror. A man in a green jacket moves quickly out of her line of sight.
She is being watched.
They are following her.
128
Once past the King John Inn, Megan pushes hard on the Ford Focus’s accelerator as she heads into the open countryside around Ashmore. Sixty, seventy, eighty. Easy for the little car. If they are tailing her, then they are going to have to show themselves.
Just before a tightish left-hander, she catches a glimpse of another car, way back. It’s moving fast. Every bit as fast as she is. It could be the lure of the open road that has tempted the driver to put his foot down. She has to find out.
Megan knows that until they get to the aptly named Zig Zag Hill, the B road offers nothing more testing than gentle bends. The Focus is soon doing way over a hundred. She has opened up at least four hundred metres between her and the following car. As she hits the vicious right-hander at the foot of the hill, she pumps the brakes and the Ford deftly keeps its balance going into the left switchback that instantly follows. Her heart kicks like a mule. She works the brakes again, slowing as quickly as she can without smearing telltale rubber.
Megan glides the car off road into the copse of trees on the right. She stops as deep in the clearing as she can manage. Within seconds, the car behind her zips past. It’s a Mercedes. Cream-coloured. That’s all she can make out.
Now comes the real test. If Merc man is just driving for fun, he’ll work the hill and put his foot down as soon as he is clear of the bends. She won’t see him again. But if he is following her, within the next minute or so, then he’s going to be wondering where the hell she is. He’ll probably swing it around, check he hasn’t missed a turning, maybe even double back.
Megan reverses carefully out of the copse and cautiously resumes her journey to HQ at a more sedate pace.
She sees the Merc just past Cann Common. Pulled up. Brake lights on. Two people in the front. A cheap personalised plate ending: 57MU.
Matt Utley.
She remembers Gideon saying he saw Utley with a gun. The brake lights on the Merc go off and it noses out of the lay-by in front of her. She hits the accelerator and burns through the gears, as though she’s going to ram the car. She doesn’t. At the last moment she pulls right into a small access road to half a dozen houses set back from the road. It runs parallel to the main road and she uses it like a pit lane on a race track. Only Megan isn’t stopping.
The back end of the car drifts as it floats over the grass and tarmac. Somehow she keeps control. Swerves out of the close back on to the B road. Heading right past the Merc. For a second her eyes catch those of the driver. It is Utley all right. She has seen his photograph often enough and long enough not to be mistaken. She thinks she recognised his passenger too. She only got a brief glance of the thick-set man in a white shirt, but there was something about his outline, the curve of his shoulders and the shape of his head that was familiar.
She accelerates hard along Higher Blandford Road and doesn’t let up until she’s crossed Christy’s Lane and made it on to the much busier A350.
Megan keeps one eye on her mirror all the way back to Devizes. Her brain is reeling from what she’s just been through. What she saw.
The man in the front seat of the car with Utley was her husband. It was Adam.
129
They only let him out to go to the toilet.
The rest of the time, Gideon spends locked in the solitary confinement of the stone cell. They bring him meagre food and each passing hour makes him feel more like a prisoner.
He realises there are only two days to go before the Followers complete the ritual of renewal and offer up the life of the woman he saw. They can’t take risks. And he could well be a risk. They know his father tried to stop anyone outside the Craft being sacrificed, so there’s a chance he might try to do the same.
The bolts on the door are drawn back. It creaks open. Two robed men walk in, say barely anything, except that he is to be taken to the Master.
He walks the corridor his father walked and imagines the secret life of the man he never really knew. How had he felt after his initiation? What were his thoughts after he’d just been initiated into one of the oldest and most secret brotherhoods in the world?
The Lookers leave Gideon inside their leader’s chamber. The Master shows him to the stone table, where Nathaniel’s diaries are stacked. His voice is business-like. ‘Time for you to read to me. Illuminate me. Then I will enlighten you.’
Gideon opens one of the last of his father’s journals. He knows exactly the passage that he’s looking for. He clears his throat and begins: ‘If this diary is being read, I pray to the Sacreds that it is you Gideon who is doing the reading. You were always the most methodical of children, so I presume you will have started from the beginning and this will be one of the last entries you will read. Now you will know of my differences with the Inner Circle, of their desire to force me to accept their will. I cannot bend to their ways. I must not and I shall not. If you take, so shall you give. You personally. Not you by proxy or by threat. It is entirely wrong that if you take, you force someone else to give. This is not the way holy people repay their debts. It is the way of the selfish, the untrustworthy, the dishonourable. The way of a man I deemed a friend. A person I allowed into my own house and trusted like a brother. A man who tainted everything in life that I respected.’
Gideon stops reading, turns the diary round. ‘Here.’ He places a fingertip besides the inscription ‘ΟΩΜΥΖ ΙΥΛΦΗΩΣΚΛ’. ‘Do you recognise this name?’
The Master cannot read the code but he knows he is looking at his own name. It is hardly surprising to him to see it written disparagingly in Nathaniel’s diary. It proves something to him. The books are truly as dangerous as he feared they would be. ‘Your father and I didn’t always see eye to eye. Nor was he right about everything. He was a brilliant man, this you know. But it made him difficult. He couldn’t be reasoned with.’ He stands, moves away from the table and paces slowly. ‘Tell me, do you share his views?’