The Trowie Mound Murders (14 page)

Chapter Fifteen

I wasn't dead, but they were shoving me, ready to fling me overboard. The deck planks were wet with blood; it was smeared on my cheek and smelt sickly in my nostrils. I couldn't see their faces, although I was striving to open my eyes, and the no, no that I was trying to say was silent. They rolled me over, and I was falling, falling, then I was lying on
Marielle
's deck, the cold fibreglass under my back, except that it was covered with grit, I hadn't had time to sweep the decks, and it wasn't Alain but Anders who was lying beside me, one arm across my breasts, and he was kissing me, his neat beard rough on my cheek. In the dream I wanted him to go on, but not now, my head hurt too much, and I was trying to tell him that, turning my head away from him even as my body was arching against his. The scrape and thud of the great stone being eased into place echoed dully round me … 

I awoke then. My cheek lay on grit that smelt of things left to rot, long forgotten. It was my own arm that lay awkwardly doubled across me, fingers brushing the earth. I reached a little further and felt the hard grains below my fingers. My body was aching and cold. Worst of all, the darkness pressed around me. I hadn't realised that I was afraid of the dark. Even on the blackest night with the ship's lanterns glimmering through shafts of rain, it was never truly dark at sea. Now I felt it as a presence, drawing closer to suck the breath from me. It lay over me like a shroud, and however much I strained my eyes, hoping for one friendly pinprick of daylight, there was no variation in its thickness. Pain-heavy eyelids open or shut, it made no difference. Above the darkness was the weight of stone and peat and heather. I could feel it pinning me down until the last breath was crushed out of me and my bones decayed with the others. How would my ghost communicate with the Neolithic ghosts of so many centuries ago? If I died here, would my spirit be shut up under the earth, unable to ask Alain's forgiveness?

My head throbbed, and I wanted to be sick. My body hurt all over, arms, legs, wrists, ankles, as if I'd been stretched on a rack. Whoever had flung me in here hadn't bothered to handle me like a living person. They'd just rolled and dragged me inside the doorway and left me.

They didn't expect me to be a living person. It didn't matter what you did to someone who was going to die of thirst in the next couple of days. Maybe they'd meant me to die sooner than that. It had been an efficient clout over the back of the head. I wanted to raise a hand to feel the bruise, but it was too much effort. I knew it hurt.

I clenched my teeth. I wasn't going to die. I'd just told Gavin I was here. The minute I heard noises from outside, I'd shout until they heard me. I said it out loud to myself, to break the silence that pressed in on me, and the weight of centuries that hung above me echoed it derisively:
shout shout shout shout
until the word died in the whimper of a caught throat. No noise would escape through this solid bubble of stone and earth. Had someone said that, as they'd dragged me? A voice in my head whispered like a memory: ‘It doesn't matter. Nobody'd hear her through these walls.' I couldn't tell whether it was a man's voice or a woman's; the words dropped into the silence and curled in my aching head.
It doesn't matter … doesn't matter. Nobody'd hear her …

I was nearer to panic then than I'd ever been in my life, nearer than when that tropical storm had swept the Caribbean and we'd stayed crouched on deck all night, making our anchors hold, nearer than when Alain had gone and I had to go on alone. I made myself relax on the cold ground and took ten long, counted breaths. They were going to hear me. I'd find a loose stone and bang with it. I'd yell as if I was hurling orders to the top of the mast in a force 10.

I took ten more breaths. I wasn't going to lie and wait for rescue either. I'd try to get out. If I couldn't move the great stone from within, I'd find the entrance that Brian had used. I wasn't much larger now than he had been then. If he could get in and out, so could I. If he'd filled the hole, I'd clear it.

The first thing was to find out if I was injured. I eased my right arm from across my breast and laid it by my side. It felt stiff, but it wasn't damaged. I lifted my other hand, slowly, and felt my head. There was a bonny bump and a crusting of blood, but the skull was intact, with no dangerous indentations. Sore but not fatal. I lifted my head and turned it gently from side to side. No neck injuries. Nothing else hurt as it would if it was broken. I stretched my arms out cautiously. My wrists hurt where I'd been hauled by them, but otherwise I didn't seem to be injured. Legs, ditto. Your mistake, guys.

I needed light. I felt for my mobile, but the pocket was empty. They wouldn't risk me getting a signal in here. It didn't matter. One useful function of my otherwise very basic Timex was that it could go luminous by pressing the winding-handle. Peerie Charlie was fascinated by it, and one of his shipboard treats was burrowing down into my bunk and seeing it light up – and on the thought, I took my hand away from the button. I didn't need to know what time it was, and I'd see much better if I didn't look at the green disc. It would be my torch to help me get out of here. It worked by stored light, so it wouldn't last a huge number of flashes, perhaps eight, and they wouldn't throw the light far, but if I used them carefully that might be enough.

If you had a tricky manoeuvre to do on a boat, you thought it through first, because the sea didn't give second chances. Now I knew I could control the darkness that pressed on me, I wasn't afraid of it. I'd save my light until I was ready to use it. I groped upwards with one hand. There was nothing there to bump my head on. I inched both arms out, as if I was making a snow-angel, the way Inga and Martin and I had as children, and met only empty space to their furthest extent. Good. I eased myself up to a sitting position, ignoring all the protests from muscles that had lain in one position too long, then began to stretch and flex. I rubbed down my arms, massaging the wrists, then did the same to my legs and ankles. I focused on getting my body working for me again, leaving my subconscious to consider options and gather the evidence and memories I needed.

Once I was warm and loosened up I hugged my knees to me under my fleece, and thought. I was inside a circular mound ten metres across, and two high. If it was like the Tomb of the Eagles, there would be little cells all round the walls, with niches for the bones, and the doorway facing the sea. It would be worth looking at that door stone; perhaps I could lever it out from within. I could put first one, then a second, then more stones in the cracks, easing it forward. Archimedes: give me a lever and a place to stand, and I could move the world. Sailing ships were designed for strong men, and small women got very good at using levers.

If it wouldn't shift – and I wasn't hopeful – then I needed to find Brian's entrance. It wouldn't be through the walls; that would be so obvious that others would have found it too. What had Olaf said? I visualised us sitting together on the wooden bench outside the club house, with his hands making careful loops of twine around the grey rope.
A gap under one of the big stones, a rabbit hole that went right through
. Yes, he'd called it a tunnel:
He even filled in the tunnel we went through.

When the kitten had crept out to eat my sandwiches, I'd been sitting against one of the big stones on the left of the entrance, and the kitten had come from a metre further. If it was the same entrance, if I was lucky, I might be able to find this end of the burrow, somewhere between two and three metres from the entrance, to show me where to dig.

Which was my better bet? Which must I spend my light on, the entrance stone or the possible tunnel? If I used the light to locate the entrance, then I could work around the inside of the walls to the tunnel, searching for a dent in the earth, a dim glimmer of light, a current of outside air.

In Brittany, as in seafaring communities the world over, the men used to go for a last Mass dedicated to Our Lady for her blessing before they went to sea. I needed a blessing on this enterprise. I sat straighter, crossed myself, and breathed a fervent prayer for help to think clearly, to use my strength wisely, and for luck or God's grace to give me a way out.
In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit …
I took a deep breath, turned my watch away from me, and pressed the winder in.

Instantly the tomb was bathed in green light, sickly and flaring to my dark-dazzled eyes. I saw evenly spaced stone piers corbelling up to the roof, as though I was the hub of a great stone wheel, with dark voids between them where the light couldn't reach. I turned my head to the wider gap between two piers, the entrance stone, then let the button go. The blackness closed in again, stifling as stale air. Keeping my head very still, I sat for a moment, loosening the green glare from my eyes, then swivelled my body around until I was facing the entrance. The piers were a metre from me. I had to crawl forward for two metres and I would touch the great stone. As I went, I'd feel out for stones I could try to lever it with, and if I didn't find any, I could then work my way round the perimeter, looking for Brian's entrance. I wasn't hopeful about loose stones. That walling had been built to last. Those Neolithic men and women who had brought their dead here would have been proud of it – I shut that thought away. No need to conjure the ghosts of four millennia ago, although I feared their presence all around me. Cool Cass, Brian and Olaf had called me, practical Cass. Don't imagine bones, torchlit processions, long-dead men and women whispering you to join them, think about escape. I wasn't going to try pulling stones out of the piers, but there might be a place where some had fallen. If there was, I'd find it as I went round. For the moment, I needed to go forward those two metres to the entrance stone.

It was much harder than it sounded, to shuffle forwards into the dark. I inched forward on one hand and two knees, the other hand stretched out in front of me, expecting every moment to bump into the wall, or worse, some unseen
thing
which had crept towards me in the darkness. I concentrated on calculating: the wall was two metres away, and I'd moved my hand forwards ten times – fifteen – seventeen – twenty-one, before my outstretched hand met the smooth stone. Ten shuffles made a metre. Okay. I eased myself into a sitting position and felt the floor around me, as far as I could reach. There was no sign of any stones, just the grit, and that was no good. I put my shoulder against the entrance stone and pushed. There was no give at all. The stone felt as though it slanted inwards, which would make sense from the shape of the outer wall. That meant that what was holding it in place was its own weight, and gravity. I turned around and braced my back against it and put the full strength of my legs to the earth floor, pushing until my muscles began to tremble. Nothing. I mustn't waste my strength on the impossible. I gave it one more try, this time in short, rhythmic bursts of pushing, as if I was part of a watch heaving a heavy yard round, but there was still no movement.

If I had to, I'd come back to it. Now I'd try for Brian's entrance.

To feel around the perimeter wall, I'd have to go into each pier, where the bones had been laid. There was no need to be afraid; dry bones couldn't hurt me. All the same, I'd look before I touched. I shuffled back, reached out for the pier on my left and crawled to the opening of the space, then held my watch up again and pressed the button.

The tightly packed stones sprung up once more, in their green light, laid out like a brick bookcase. Grey dust lay over the shelves, over the bones laid in neat heaps, with a skull beside each pile of long bones. Hazed by cobwebs, the eye sockets confronted me.

I let the button go and crawled forward. Here, between the piles, the floor was two inches deep in powdery dust that stuck to my hands and swirled up to my face. Even as I coughed it away, I realised that meant something. There had been no dust in the centre of the mound; someone had cleared it. So the mound had indeed been used as a storage place. No wonder the person who had coshed me didn't want me investigating the entrance. Before I left, I'd use my last light in a final look right round.

I found the wall and felt carefully along the bottom of it. The floor was even under the soft, clinging dust. The burrow should be in the next cell. I crawled round the pier and began wiping my hand along the join between floor and wall, then drawing it backwards to feel the earth before the wall. I was beginning to think Brian must have filled his tunnel in completely when my knee went down, and I fell forwards, catching my hands with a scrape on a shelf. A smooth cane of bone was under my fingers. I snatched them back, pulled my knee up, and set my hands to explore what I'd found.

It had to be Brian's tunnel. It felt like a rabbit hole, as wide as my shoulders, and when I lay down and stretched my hands into it, they sloped down a little way, then began to go towards the wall. I stretched further, and my hands touched a tangle of stiff fibres: heather stems.
He even filled in the tunnel …
From what Olaf had said, Brian had filled in the tunnel to stop the archaeologists; it was an adult job of filling in. I felt around the heather stems until I found an edge, and another. Yes, he'd taken fells from casting peats, breeze-block slabs of heather tussocks and roots, and pushed them down. I wriggled my fingers into the sides of the first block and pulled until it began to give, then took a firmer hold and hauled it out, my mind exploding in triumph.
Thank you, God …
I was going to get out of here.

The second block came as easily. I stacked it on top of the first. For the third, I had to wriggle half into the tunnel, and it was at an awkward angle to pull. It came in a slither of earth and small stones, as if he'd bunged a couple of bags of loose earth on top to camouflage his fells. With the fourth came daylight, a dim film of grey that I'd used to help me place the fell on the others before I realised that I could see the pale blur of my hands on the dark block.