The Bell Ringers (33 page)

‘No more than Christine or Jamie Ferris or
Alec
.'

‘So you've seen Shoemaker's familiars. Did you know they've all worked for Eden White? Alec Smith still does.'

‘Smith – does he indeed? White is quite the
éminence grise.
'

Cannon's index finger followed the grain of the wood on the table-top. ‘You see, my problem is that I will obviously have to handle the Eyam story, but I have no bloody idea how. When I saw you come in it struck me that we might be able to help each other.'

Kilmartin's steak arrived. ‘What d'you have in mind?' he asked when the waitress had gone.

‘I'd like you to give me heads-up when this thing is going to blow. JT thinks I can drop my trousers and perform without any bloody foreplay.'

‘He wants it all to come out?'

‘No, he knows it's just something we're going to have to deal with now that Eyam is—'

‘Yes,' said Kilmartin quickly and cut into the steak. ‘There's no guarantee I'll be able to give you much advance notice.' He looked at Cannon and noticed that the bottom of one eye was bloodshot and that his ears were flushed. Cannon was in his forties and wasn't wearing well. ‘It is, after all, a very novel situation.'

‘I'll say. Now, what can I do for you?'

‘Nothing yet, but I'm sure I'll think of something. I'd like to know of any developments you hear about in connection with Eyam – what that fellow Ferris is up to. And the election is interesting.'

They exchanged cards. ‘Probably better if I ring Number Ten once in a while,' said Kilmartin. ‘Cell phones can be unreliable.'

Cannon rested his chin in his hand, pushing the flesh of one cheek up. ‘You're not an assassin, are you, Kilmartin?'

Kilmartin continued eating for a little while, then put down his knife and fork and wiped his mouth with the napkin. ‘No, I am not an assassin,' he asserted quietly with a look that ought to have made Cannon apologise and change the subject.

‘I heard someone today say you can't kill a man who's already been declared dead. That worried me. And the murder of that lawyer at Eyam's place made me wonder if this is all going to turn ugly. We need
to protect the PM from that kind of madness. He's basically a good man, the best prime minister we've got; the country needs him.'

‘Yes,' said Kilmartin.

‘Forgive me for asking that, but you know what they say about governments these days – they are run either by gangsters or spooks.'

‘Yes, I have heard it said, though it seems a little on the simplistic side.'

Just before six, she left Dove Cottage by the back door. It was still dark: the air was cold and there were little patches of frosted grass that whispered under her boots as she walked along the track away from the road. An old canvas knapsack she remembered once seeing in Eyam's rooms in New College twenty years before was slung over one shoulder. In it she had packed two Ordnance Survey maps, a compass, the second edition of
Geology of the Welsh Marches
, Eyam's waterproofs, a torch, a bottle of water, a flask of coffee and some hastily made sandwiches. She took with her a long hazel walking stick, found by the back door, and tucked in the pocket of the old suede jacket were a pair of binoculars.

Rising early and stealing a march on the day made her feel strong and optimistic, a mood heightened by the last of the Blue Mountain coffee. The route to the map reference, about eight miles north-east of Dove Cottage, followed the ridge behind the cottage then plummeted down an escarpment into a narrow valley where two small rivers met below a village. She reached the escarpment by the time the sun rose, and sat on an outcrop of limestone, scanning the path behind her with the binoculars. Nothing moved. Then she swept the landscape ahead of her, probing the blue haze for a small hill, which was marked on the map by a disused quarry. Once she had found it she set off again, her mind filled with the beauty and the unusual emptiness of the countryside, and the hope that she would see Eyam.

As she drew near the quarry, moving cautiously along a sparsely wooded hillside, she began to focus on the note she had in her pocket. The map reference only provided a starting point. No destination was
given, merely a direction that she had worked out by using a map in the
Geology of the Welsh Marches
, which showed the bands of different rock groups. She waited ten minutes then moved down to a lane, which passed by the quarry, and followed it until the entrance appeared on her left.

The quarry was renowned for the fossils that had been laid down in the tropics as the Welsh and English landmass had crept north on the journey from a point sixty degrees south of the equator to its present position sixty degrees north. The message had said: ‘Leave from that which is named for the Silures and walk back through time to those that remember the Ordivices.'

Having transferred these boundary lines to the Ordnance Survey map, she saw there was only one way she could walk to cut across all the different strata, and that was more or less in a westerly direction. The strata in the quarry dated to the age named after the Silures tribe – the Silurian, which from her reading of the night before she knew to have been about 420 million years ago. If she followed a line westwards along a stream the rocks became progressively older until she reached outcrops from the Ordovician period, 450–500 million years ago, named after the Ordovices tribe that had lived in North Wales. That was what the note meant by going back in time. Clearly whoever wrote it had drawn from the same source, for the book specified that in a little over an hour the amateur geologist could see examples of shale, sandstone, flags and limestone, and along the way pick up fossils of trilobites, though only usually their tails, which apparently shed as the animal grew. She stopped at the quarry but saw nothing except a fox darting among scrub and gorse bushes.

After a tractor passed along the lane she left the quarry, found the stream and began to walk westwards, recalling the tedium of geography field trips at school. The air became cooler when she entered the gloom of a steep wooded valley that was more like the wilder Celtic fringes of Britain than Shropshire. The stream was in spate and where it had broken its banks and flooded the path she was forced to climb up and pick her way through the dripping undergrowth. The rational and lawyerly part of her character suggested that this whole adventure was ridiculous. As much as she was desperate to see Eyam and settle things,
she was also aware that she should have listened to Turvey's advice and returned to London. Instead she was running round the countryside with her little daypack like some love-sick Girl Guide.

She stopped, leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette which she realised she didn't want. At the moment she dropped it in the mud she heard a report above her as a stick gave under the weight of something or someone. The noise came from a patch of dense pine about fifty feet up. As she stared into the gloom she coldly reasoned with herself that if she were to be picked off by the same sniper who'd killed Russell, she wouldn't have got this far. She waited, resisting the primeval fear of the forest. No sound came for thirty seconds, then a gentle rustling as whatever it was withdrew up the hillside towards a bluff of rock, which could just be seen above the treetops. She slid round the tree and moved to the water. The stream was swollen and the current strong, but on her side she could just see the bottom. She crouched and put one boot into the icy water, then the other, and stood. Water rose above her knees. Probing the bottom with her stick, she moved into the centre of the stream and felt the rocks and shingle shifting under her feet as though they were on a conveyor belt. Four more uncertain steps brought the water to her waist. She lunged forwards, seized hold of a bough, hauled herself to the bank and clambered onto dry land where she shook the weight of water from her boots. She turned and peered up into the trees. From the new vantage point she saw that two bulky figures had moved above the pine trees and were looking down at her. Their faces were in shadow but there was an intent about them that made her jump up and push through the undergrowth towards the disused rail track that she'd glimpsed once or twice over the last hundred yards. For some reason she remembered Eyam's lines from the funeral – ‘And I'll wait for you here, Sister, till we take the waters wide.' And then she swore.

Between her and the old railway line was a strip of open ground about thirty feet wide. She sprinted across it, threaded her way through the silver birch saplings that colonised the slopes of the embankment and arrived on the open track. She glanced left and right, wondering which way to go. To continue on the westerly route seemed foolhardy, particularly as there were a only a few villages and farmsteads shown on
the map, and these were some distance away; but to return in the direction she had come would not guarantee her safety either, even though there was a hamlet about half an hour away. Cursing her desire to see if Eyam was really alive, she crossed the track under the calls of some ravens circling high above her, and dropped down the other side of the embankment, where the ground was firm and offered good cover from the far side of the valley. Deciding to maintain her original course, she set off at a jog.

Fifteen minutes later she'd put a mile or so between her and the two men, but the ravens seemed to have kept pace with her. She stopped, drank from the water bottle and dully watched the birds through the trees. Then she became aware of the faint ringing of Kilmartin's phone and fumbled for it in one of the side pockets of the knapsack.

‘Yes,' she said,

‘Where are you?'

‘On a walk, trying to dodge some men. I'm about eight miles from our friend's place.'

‘A rendezvous?' asked Kilmartin.

‘I guess so, though I don't know who with or where. Do you want to meet? I'm being watched at the cottage. I had to push two of them in the ditch yesterday.'

‘Look, they're onto our friend,' Kilmartin continued. ‘I've just been at Chequers.'

‘Did you see my friend Mermagen?'

‘I don't know him but I imagine he was there to talk about the election. Temple is going to call it very soon. But the important point is that they know everything. You understand? The situation has become more urgent than I anticipated and I sense an enormous effort is going into tracing Eyam. Every possible agency is involved. We need to meet.'

‘Right,' she said, taking out the map. ‘There's a town called Long Stratton not far from here. I can probably reach it on foot.'

‘I know it.'

‘Between six and seven this evening?'

‘I'll find somewhere beforehand and let you know where on this phone.'

She was about to hang up when she heard the unmistakable crack of a rifle shot from behind her. She dropped down, clutching the phone to her ear and looked around.

‘What's going on?' asked Kilmartin.

‘Someone's shooting.'

‘At you?'

‘No, I don't think so. Maybe at some birds.'

There were two more shots in quick succession, which seemed much closer.

‘Are you there?' demanded Kilmartin.

‘Yes,' she whispered and raised her head above a bramble bush. There were two men dressed in khaki, camouflage jackets and calf-length lace-up boots standing beside each other. One aimed a rifle with a telescopic sight at something in the sky, using the branch to steady the barrel. He was no more than thirty feet away. A fourth shot followed, then he lowered the rifle, slung it over his shoulder and the two men made towards her. With considerable astonishment she recognised the twins from the pub.

Kilmartin's voice was still in her ear asking if she was all right. ‘It's OK – I've got to go,' she said. ‘We'll speak later.' As she pocketed the phone she heard a loud clatter behind her as something hit the railway embankment.

‘What the hell was that?' she shouted.

‘The drone that's been following you,' replied one of them.

‘A drone!' she said incredulously. ‘How the hell did it know where I was?'

One twin brushed past her with a solemn expression and vanished up the embankment, then reappeared holding a machine, which measured about a metre across and possessed four rotors, one at each corner of its light plastic frame. Two were still spinning noiselessly. ‘There are four cameras on this little bird,' he said. He dropped it on the ground in front of her and heaved a rock onto the globe at the centre of the rig. What remained was crushed under his boot. Come on, we've got a car waiting over there.'

‘I thought you two were Jehovah's Witnesses. What the fuck are you
doing running around like a couple of paramilitaries in the woods? What happened to Life in a Peaceful New World?'

‘The government happened,' said one.

‘You coming?' said the other.

She looked from one to the other. They were slight and dark with thin elfin features and fine black hair. ‘They'll be coming to see what happened to their machine. They will know its last location.'

‘Where are you going to take me?'

‘To see Swift. But you stay here if you want. They'll be along to find this thing.'

She shrugged and they set off, keeping to the cover of the pine trees. After half a mile they reached a shelter where a long-wheelbase Land Rover was parked with no more than an inch or two to spare under the corrugated iron roof. One of the twins slung the drone into the open back with a look of distaste and told her to get in.

Inside there was a smell of diesel and dogs. A litter of chocolate wrappers, empty drinks cans and cigarette packets filled the dashboard tray in front of her. The one with the rifle sat with the gun between his legs and the other, who had collected the drone, started the engine and, pumping the accelerator, turned his head to reverse out of the shelter.