He can’t hide his shock. ‘I don’t understand. Why me?’
The Master smiles. ‘I think you do, Gideon. I think you know why I have shown you mercy and favour. Why I have invested my personal trust and faith in you, despite those close to me doubting the wisdom of letting you live.’
Gideon feels a chill creep through him.
‘It is important to me that I go into the ritual with a clear mind and an open spirit. Tell me, Gideon. Is there something your father told you that you haven’t shared with me?’
Gideon shakes his head. His denial is true. But he knows what the Master is driving at. He sees his mother again. The frail old woman whom he barely recognises sits up once more in her deathbed. She speaks the words that turn his life upside down.
Nathaniel is not your father, Gideon.
The Henge Master reads it in his eyes. ‘Then your mother told you. I am your father, not Nathaniel Chase.’
136
Megan pulls the car into the kerb a street away from her house and walks the rest of the way. She’s trying to cool down. The meeting with Gibson and Willis had been a waste of time. Made her and Tompkins look foolish. The DCI said as much. The two Met men hadn’t believed a word that had been said. They wanted facts. Wouldn’t listen to anything else.
Megan feels alone. Vulnerable. Edgy. She’s not just walking to cool down, she’s also taking precautions. Adam might be at the house. Adam, the husband she thought she was falling in love with again. Adam, the man she saw sitting alongside burglar and police attacker, Matt Utley. She can’t see any strange cars near her home. She loiters in the quiet cul-de-sac for almost five minutes before she feels safe enough to go inside.
The house is empty. But he’s been here. She knows he has because there’s a note propped up on the dining table, bearing his writing. She snatches it away from the vase of flowers.
‘Meg. Gone back to mine. Call me when you’ve got your head together.
A x.
P.S. — we need to talk about me seeing Sammy.’
She screws it up, drops it in a full pedal bin. Her heart is racing. She gathers swimming clothes and thick towels for her and her daughter, takes a quick look around and then steps out on to the drive and locks the door.
There’s a man there. A man who has been watching her home and waiting for her.
137
Father and son look at each other across the ancient stone table.
‘When did you find out?’ asks Gideon.
The Master bows his head. ‘Not until Marie was dying.’ He looks up, his eyes glassy. ‘Nathaniel sent for me when she was in the hospice. She told me just hours before she passed. There was nothing I could do. It was too late to seek intervention.’
Gideon is surprised to feel anger rising. ‘And what was she to you?’
The Master scowls. ‘What was she? She was everything. Everything and nothing. She was the woman I couldn’t have but would have married. The person I would have spent my life with had we not argued and drifted apart. If she hadn’t met Nathaniel.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘We were childhood sweethearts. After our relationship broke up, she moved away, to Cambridge. It was there that she met Nathaniel, and married him. I didn’t see her until a year after the wedding when she moved back to Wiltshire.’
Gideon does the maths. His sainted mother had apparently broken her marriage vows with the monster sat opposite him only a year after pledging her eternal love to the man he thought was his father. ‘How could you?’ He stands, face flushed with anger. ‘She’d only just got married and you seduced her.’
‘It wasn’t anything like that,’ says the Master, undisturbed by Gideon’s rage. ‘It just happened. You’d have to understand how intensely I loved your mother to begin to realise how that one moment of weakness surprised us both.’
‘One moment?’ Gideon doubts it. ‘I was the result of one moment of weakness?’
The Henge Master gets to his feet and comes round the stone table. ‘I had no idea until your mother passed. How could I then approach Nathaniel? What could I have said to him about you?’
‘Did you know the cancer was genetic?’
He nods.
‘And you persuaded my father to join the Craft to protect your own son, to protect me?’
‘Yes. It is what a father should do. I needed to protect you.’
The Master embraces him. Holds him tight. As tight as a father would hold his long lost child.
138
Jimmy Dockery steps down the driveway towards Megan. He can see she is scared. ‘Don’t be frightened, boss.’
But she is. She backs off, retreats towards her own front door.
‘I need to talk to you.’ He takes another slow step her way.
She drops her handbag, turns the keys in her clenched right fist into a spiked knuckleduster.
He glances at the makeshift weapon, a dismissive look on his face. ‘You want to fight me?’
‘Come any closer, Jimmy, and I’ll kill you.’
He can tell she means it. He doesn’t have much time. He lurches forward and makes a pretend grab with his left hand. Megan falls for it. She throws a spiky cross with her right. He steps inside and blocks hard with his left forearm, knocking the keys from her fingers. He could pick her off now with one knockout blow to the jaw. Instead, he snatches her left wrist and whips it up behind her back. Slaps his other hand across her mouth.
Before she knows it, he’s bundled her around the side of the house. She tries to kick out but Jimmy is wise to it. He spreads his legs and holds her like an adult would a kicking toddler in a tantrum.
‘I’m not going to hurt you.’
Megan carries on kicking.
‘Boss, stop it. You were right, okay? I’ve been following Smithsen and you’re right.’
She’s not sure that she heard him properly. But she caught enough to stop thrashing and fighting.
Jimmy takes his hands off her.
She turns to face him. ‘What did you say?’
‘I know where they go. Where Smithsen and the others meet.’
139
The Henge Master opens the diary and points to his own name. ΟΩΜΥΖ ΙΥΛΦΗΩΣΚΛ. ‘James Pendragon,’ he says aloud. He puts a fist to his heart in a gesture of pride. ‘It’s a name to be proud of. A family line that stretches back through Celtic times. Back to the most famous king of Briton. Back into the mists of mythology and beyond. We are the stuff of history you and I.’
Gideon is familiar with both fact and the fiction. ‘King Arthur is more fairy tale than reality,’ he says.
The rebuke does nothing to cool the Master’s familial passion. ‘Really? Arthur Pendragon, the great Briton King? Or Riothamus the King, or the Cum brian King, Pennine King, King of Elmet, Scottish King, Powysian King or even the Roman King? You think all these are kings of fantasy? You are a learned man. These legends are rooted in more than mere myth. They have endured.’
‘And you?’ asks Gideon, a hint of bitterness in his voice. ‘What of you is fact and fiction?’
The Master shrugs. ‘I am certainly no king, but I do serve and lead our people, the Followers. I am the only child of Steven George and Alice Elizabeth Pendragon. I have never married, and apart from you I have no children.’
‘Are they still alive? Your parents, I mean.’