Spear of Destiny

PROLOGUE

Christmas came to Woodmancote that year on wings of ice, amid flurries of snow that banked steeply against the stone walls and barn doors of Hamberley Farm. It had been a late winter in coming, but once its time had arrived, it descended with exceptional ferocity, turning autumnal skies to craggy ranges of arctic cloud. On Radio 4, they said it was due to global warming, and down in the Cap in Hand, old heads nodded and said it would get worse before it got better. They were droll old men, and they’d seen too many winters, lived through too many Christmases.

Snow covered fields and roofs and hedgerows with a solid sheet of white velvet, and for day upon day it would not melt. When the last flakes had fallen, there were nights of moonlight and starlight and shining lamps, nights when the whiteness of the countryside turned to silver, nights so crisp birds fell from the trees and berries froze and cracked on the branches. Animals died in their multitudes, sheep in the open fields, squirrels in their nut-filled trees, owls in the solitary darkness of the yews.

Throughout the week before Christmas, Woodmancote Hall was ablaze with light. Light from electric bulbs and candles, from twenty log fires, from a dozen chandeliers, from a thousand twinkling white fairy lights that sparkled on trees and mantelpieces. Softly from inside, music played: King’s College Choir singing the carols of all our lifetimes, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘Remember, O Thou Man’…

Seen from outside across the east lawn or the vast expanse of Parget’s Meadow, the house seemed like a liner sailing on waters of driven snow, a place of comfort and cheer, a haven from the bleak midwinter. Before the curtains were drawn across the tall mullioned windows, the lights inside each room would stream out across the untouched fabric of the snow, crisscrossing it with bars of light and shadow.

Old Gerald Usherwood, lord and master in Woodmancote, his family’s home for seven centuries, had been a King’s man in his day. It would be his eighty-third Christmas and, the day after, his eighty-fourth birthday. The lights and music were in his honour. A great party was planned, a party that would span the Christmas season and mark both his birthday and the Nobel Prize in economics he’d received at a ceremony in Stockholm two weeks earlier.

The family were there en masse. Though substantial, Woodmancote Hall was not a great house, and its ten bedrooms and hastily tidied attic rooms were far from enough to accommodate such a tribe of grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Some late arrivals who could not be fitted in at the house or the lodge had to make do with rooms in the village or Bishop’s Cleeve. The allocation of rooms had caused not a few headaches to Gerald’s oldest son George, who, with his wife Alice, had taken overall responsibility for the grand gathering.

The house party was made up of four groups of Usherwoods, some Draytons, a handful of Cornwallises, the Canterbury Grevilles, one or two Ellises, the Naseby twins, and a pair of distant cousins from Madeira who hadn’t set foot in England in over forty years. Some had travelled further, from the United States or Canada. Gerald’s sole surviving brother, Ernest, was there, riddled with cancer but determined to see another year pass. ‘Chips’ Chippendale, his fellow survivor from his days with the Long Range Desert Group during the North Africa campaign, was there and in fine fettle. Four of Gerald’s five children had made it a point of honour to be there with their spouses and children. The party would be lavish. A great part of the prize money had been spent on it.

As the days passed, between preparations for Christmas lunch and the birthday bash, guests came and went like ghosts, now here, now gone again, half glimpsed through a closing door. They brought presents and clamoured for commemorative photographs with their host. The children among them, caught up in the spirit of Christmas and a party whose end was not yet in sight, romped timidly or brashly through the crumbling passages and winding stairways of the hall like the children of Alain-Fournier’s lost domain.

One of the last to arrive was Ethan Usherwood, hot on the heels of his father, Guy, Gerald’s youngest son. Ethan turned up on Christmas Eve after driving down from Quedgeley, just outside Gloucester. Of all the Usherwoods, Ethan lived nearest to Woodmancote, to which he was a regular and welcome visitor. But he worked as a detective chief inspector with Gloucestershire Constabulary, and had only been able to escape in time for the main party by dint of lavish arse-licking, some judicious Christmas presents, and a promise to put in some heavy overtime in January. The homicide case he was working on had gone dead, and he hadn’t been in the least unhappy to put it to bed for the Christmas season.

‘Sorry, Granddad,’ he said as he walked up to Gerald in the Bentham Room, Woodmancote’s illustrious central chamber, with its Elizabethan wainscoting and the remarkable Grinling Gibbons fireplace. The old room was festooned today with every possible decoration. Ivy, holly, mistletoe and sprigs of berried juniper hung in swags across the walls, their dark green colours setting off hundreds of golden balls suspended from them. Stockings hung from the mantelpiece. On little tables around the room stood bottles of home-made sloe gin, all lovingly laid down by Gerald several months earlier and ready, as in every year, to bring warmth, cheer and inebriation to the Christmas festivities.

‘Got a mind to put you over my knee and spank you, young man,’ Gerald replied. His eyes twinkled. Ethan knew his grandfather was unpredictable. He might have taken his late arrival as an affront. ‘It’s the same every year. Last to turn up, first to leave.’

‘A spanking would constitute an assault on a police officer. You wouldn’t want me to arrest you on Christmas Eve, would you? You wouldn’t want to be hauled down to the nick, surely?’

Gerald cuffed him on the shoulder. He was clearly in a good mood this evening. Ethan smiled back. With a younger man, he’d have hugged him, but not with his grandfather.

‘Come with me. Have some sloe gin,’ said Gerald, grabbing him by the sleeve and steering him to a table on one side of the mantelpiece, right next to the nativity. ‘It’s better than usual this year,’ he went on. ‘Bigger berries and weeks early. Longer time to stew. It’s got a bite to it.’

He poured his grandson a glass and waited to see his response. Ethan took a couple of sips and nodded enthusiastically.

‘It is good,’ he declared, and took a longer sip. ‘Just the thing after the drive. It’s freezing outside.’

‘Didn’t I tell you to bring your young woman along, boy?’

Ethan imagined a wagging finger, and remembered Christmases long gone. ‘Why didn’t you bring that chum of yours from school?’ ‘Where’s your sister?’ ‘Where’s that girl I’ve heard so much about?’ ‘Where’s that wife of yours?’

Yes, Ethan thought: where is my sister? Where is that wife of mine? A verse of Byron’s that had been used in Abi’s funeral service drifted through his mind.

They’d used the same verse at Pauline’s funeral years before. His sister had died of leukaemia at fifteen, two years his junior. Before her illness, she had dazzled everyone in sight. A glorious future had been predicted. All in the grave now, her name chiselled in stone above it.

Abigail had been twenty-five when she died. It was eight years ago now. He’d been thirty. Now, almost forty, he could not bear the starkness of mornings or the oncoming of sleep. The thought of her at such times tunnelled through his brain like a worm that had no end.

‘I don’t have a young woman, Granddad.’

Gerald frowned.

‘I’d understood—’

‘You understood wrong. Women don’t stay long with me. I’m married to my job, they all say that.’

‘Man needs a woman, boy. You should know that by now. Even when we were out in the desert on some bloody awful trip, we’d head straight for the Berka when we got back. Or have a night out with one of those gals from the MTC. You don’t have to love them, you know.’

Ethan smiled and said nothing. Women were one of his grandfather’s obsessions. He’d been married to his wife Edith for over forty years, but that hadn’t stopped him taking up with a steady string of ‘lady friends’. Edith had died fifteen years earlier, forgiving him, and it was said he hadn’t seen another woman once since then.

One of the grandchildren, an Ellis by the look of him, ambled up and pulled Gerald away. Ethan stayed by the nativity, a fine Arts and Crafts job with Italian pieces. His father found him there, and dragged him off to join the melee of aunts and cousins, half of whom he’d never met before.

After dinner, the younger children, all in a state of high excitement, their thoughts fixed on chimneys and men in white beards, were sent to bed or driven off to the village. The rest of the party settled down in the Long Room, with its selection of battered armchairs, sofas, and window seats. Old friendships were revived, old animosities buried or given new life.

‘You must be Ethan,’ said a voice beside him. He looked round to find a woman standing next to his chair. A dark-haired woman in her mid- to late-twenties. He did not recognise her, and yet something about her was familiar. He got to his feet.

‘Afraid so,’ he said. ‘You must be…?’

She laughed.

‘You haven’t a clue, have you?’

He shook his head.

‘You’re familiar, but I don’t think we can have met.’

‘Of course we have. Think hard.’

He scrutinised her features. Short black hair, green eyes that danced, pale cheeks, a full mouth that might have been made from cherries. As he struggled to place her, he realised he wasn’t dealing with memory at all, but with the surprising clarity of her face, its beauty and the secret claim it seemed to make on him, whether from the past or the present.

‘I’m Sarah,’ she said. ‘Your niece, in case you’ve forgotten. We last met when I was ten years old. Your parents brought you down to Canterbury. I thought you were terribly grand. In fact, I had a crush on you for weeks, you were my divine creature next to Mr Boko, my pony.’

He looked at her, and the memory flooded back. The pony had been piebald and short-winded.

‘You’ve changed a lot,’ he said.

‘Thank you.’

He shook his head.

‘I didn’t say you’d changed for the better.’

‘Ethan, when I was ten I was a geeky little girl with bad teeth. Old Boko looked better than I did. Surely I’ve improved since then.’

He thought back to the impression he had formed back then, when she was ten and he was twenty.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘You have improved. Quite a lot, actually.’

He looked at her admiringly. If only the rest of the family were as elegant and poised, he thought.

‘Sit down again,’ she said. ‘I’ll pull up a chair. We have eighteen years to catch up on.’

Two hours later, they’d gone about ten years down the line and were just settling in to the next eight when Ethan’s father got to his feet.

‘It’s half past eleven, everybody. Those who want to go to midnight mass had better get a move on. St Benedict’s isn’t at all large, so there’ll be standing room only if we get there late.’

As though summoned by him, a magus in tweeds, the bells of the parish church started clanging through the still night. As though angels had come to Earth. Or, some thought later, demons in the disguise of angels.

Hats and coats were fetched, galoshes grabbed from the hall, little groups formed. The road between the hall and the church had been cleared earlier that day. While the older folk cadged lifts, anyone below the age of sixty walked, and soon a crocodile of worshippers crept down the icy path, their way lit by the gentle fall of moonlight as it glittered on icicles and varnished the snow. Ahead, the lights of the little church shone out like beacons on a world become a virgin filled with God. Even the solid band of non-believers shivered, not from cold, but the mere beauty of the scene. As they drew near the church, the sound of singing reached them across the snow.

Sarah took Ethan’s arm and stood with him at the rear throughout the service. The parish choir sang valiantly, carol after carol booming through the decorated nave, medieval songs mingling with modern lullabies, as though all was at peace in the world. They sang against the darkness and the cold, against grey misery and black grief. The coming birth of the new god seemed to exorcise all evil from the world, to draw a line between past and present, darkness and the coming light.

Ethan watched and listened, joining in the hymns when called upon, remembering, trying to forget. Sarah slipped her hand through his arm. She’d heard of his demons, of the night that shadowed his days. And though she did not believe in angels or powers or principalities, nor worship a god in a manger, she prayed for him.

Gerald and his old mate Chips had stayed behind at the hall, along with half a dozen of the seriously old brigade. Leaving the others to a round of bridge, the two old soldiers went upstairs to Gerald’s study. Chips stepped for the first time into a cluttered room where the master of Woodmancote kept a lifetime’s souvenirs, some scattered across desks and tables, others locked away in dark cabinets or shoved into drawers. The walls were lined from floor to ceiling with bookshelves, these latter crammed with a higgledy-piggledy collection of books. The volumes were of every colour, size and binding; some stood straight between the shelves, dozens were laid horizontally across their fellows. On the floor, piles of books had grown like stalagmites, some built into tall towers, others crumpled as though they had rested on a geological fault and come to grief. The study was the inner sanctum of the house, a hideaway to which few outside the family had ever been admitted.

On either side of a wide fireplace sat two easy chairs, old, battered and, to tell the truth, no longer very comfortable, save for the air of habitude and familiarity they exuded. To these the former comrades repaired. On his way, Gerald picked up a bottle of his beloved Benromach, which he sat on a low table between them. Two tumblers and a jug of water had been placed there earlier by Mrs Salgueiro, the Portuguese housekeeper.

It was over ten years since the pair had last met. In that time, old friends had grown ill, and some had died. There were no more annual reunions, hadn’t been in years. Memories once sharp as blades were blunted now, but if much of the past had blurred in their minds, the time they had spent together in the deserts of North Africa was as if it had been yesterday. As they talked between sips of whisky and puffs on their foul-smelling pipes, the past came alive for them, a living thing, as vivid to one as to the other, Gerald’s recollections sparking off anecdotes from his friend, Chips’s store of off-colour jokes bringing back long days and nights when death had seemed a likely thing, and a moment like this beyond all credence.

‘Do you keep them by you still?’ Chips asked after his third tumbler of whisky.

Gerald nodded.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Where they’ve always been.’

‘Who will have them after you?’

A shrug.

‘Don’t know. Haven’t thought. Maybe a museum. Couldn’t say.’

‘You know we ruled that out,’ said Chips, raising the glass to his lips. He was a tall man, somewhat stooped now, but wiry, as if his muscles had not lost their flexibility and strength.

‘And you?’ Gerald asked. ‘And the others?’

Chips shrugged.

‘They’re happy for you to hold on to them. But you’re getting old; we’re all getting old. It’s time to find a keeper. We’ve talked of this many times before. We have to talk of it now.’

Gerald looked at his old friend. So many years had passed, it was hard to believe how close they had grown during the years of fighting. They’d stuck together, all of them, through the gross inhumanity of the war and its dreary aftermath. Someone had nicknamed them The Invincibles; but after Leary was killed by a landmine, the name had dropped out of common use.

‘Do you mean tonight?’ Gerald murmured. ‘I thought perhaps to wait until the festivities are over. Till they all leave. Maybe Donaldson will come after all. Skinner possibly. They were both invited. The roads have been blocked, they may not have made it through. You were lucky.’

Chips ran a hand over his cheeks, his fingers scraping the stubble. He’d worn a beard when he was younger, but shaved it in middle age, once it started to show traces of grey and white.

‘What about the girl?’ he asked.

‘Girl? Which girl?’

‘Don’t be provocative. The one I saw tonight. You know perfectly well which girl I mean.’

Gerald nodded.

‘Sometimes I forget. There have been so many girls. In any case, she isn’t a girl, not any longer. She’s a grown woman. You can’t have missed that.’

‘Does she know?’

Gerald poured a little water into his glass and sipped anxiously. His liver had been playing up recently; Doc Burns had told him to ease up on the spirits. He shook his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Haven’t told her. She’s not ready yet. When the time comes, old boy. You know that.’

Their cheeks flushed, their hair coated in rime frost, their breath become plumes of mist against the lamplight, the guests returned to Woodmancote Hall. They came in groups of two and three, laughing, chatting earnestly, full of Christmas spirit. Ethan escorted Sarah again, and she held on to him tightly, her arm locked through his, fearful of a spill in the oversized Wellington boots she’d picked up for the walk. Her head was filled with carols and her lips, when seen in the light, were blue with cold. She talked volubly, answering his questions, piquing his curiosity. They spoke of books and films and journeys, of parents and cousins, of the numerous times their paths had almost crossed. It was too soon to speak of his dead wife or her brother, committed to a mental hospital at twenty-one and unlikely to leave it. By some instinct grown of adversity or conscience, they knew there would be time for all that later.

Indoors, there was much puffing and panting and stamping of frozen feet. Compacted snow fell on doormats and began to melt.

Senhora Salgueiro had warmed mince pies and set out mulled wine in the drawing room. The adults crowded round the table, ravenous from cold and the rigours of standing so long on the uncarpeted stones of the church. The older children, who had accompanied them, were sent straight off to bed, where hot pies, ginger beer, stockings, and fitful sleep awaited them.

The adults, with less to buoy them up by way of anticipation, felt the effects of age, overeating and a late hour more keenly than their offspring. For all that, sitting round a twinkling Christmas tree in such fine surroundings and in what was, for the most part, good company acted on their sense of nostalgia. They wanted sleep, yet were driven to prolong the moment. One by one, they gave up the struggle.

Ethan showed Sarah upstairs to her room.

‘Thank you, Ethan,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very kind to a poor relation.’

‘Sarah,’ he chided, ‘I’m a policeman, not a banker.’

‘That may be, but I’m an academic, and that means poverty, as in church mouse.’

It was the first time she’d said anything about her work.

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘I only finished my PhD a few years ago, so I’m a lowly lecturer with dismal prospects. I might get a readership when I’m fifty, if I’m lucky. Now, with your permission, I’ll retire to bed. To be truthful, I’ll crash out. And so will you. Which means Father Christmas won’t visit us.’

He leant over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She blushed and said goodnight before slipping into her room.

It is not known if Father Christmas arrived that night, for the house was woken prematurely, at about five-thirty, by a piercing scream, followed by a series of screams that descended in the space of several seconds to mere sobbing and, at last, to silence. In their rooms, all but the most heavily sleeping of guests sat bolt upright in bed. Ethan was the first to his feet and the first in the corridors.

The screams, he was certain, had not come from any of the rooms in his immediate vicinity nor, indeed, from the attic floor at all. They had been located somewhere below, on the second floor. Wrapped only in a light dressing gown and shivering in the bitter cold, he hurried for the narrow staircase. As he started down it, he heard other doors opening in the corridor behind.

As he came through the doorway that led onto the floor below, he became aware that a commotion had begun. Several of the bedroom doors stood wide open, and half a dozen guests, all men in pyjamas or dressing gowns, had gathered round a sobbing woman. Mrs Salgueiro, her hair in curlers, her quilted housecoat wrapped tight against the chill air, was being comforted by Ethan’s father. From time to time she would exclaim in Portuguese, ‘Ai, que medo! Que susto! Os pobres homens!’ then recommence her sobbing.

Guy Usherwood, not knowing what to make of these utterings, sighed with relief when he saw his son coming towards them.

‘Father, what’s going on?’

‘Don’t know. I can’t get the woman to speak in English. She’s had a bad turn, that’s obvious. Look at her: she’s as white as a sheet and shaking all over.’

At that moment, another door opened, and Sarah stepped into the corridor. She was wearing a black gown trimmed with gold, and her hair was sticking up in post-slumber spikes. Seeing what was amiss, she went up to the weeping woman and put her arms round her, uttering soothing words, trying to calm her.

Bit by bit, the sobs subsided, and the senhora came a little to herself.

‘Senhor Usherwood! His friend. No gabinete…in study. Please…’

She burst into tears again, putting her hands to her face, as though to cover her eyes from some dreadful sight.

Ethan’s father, the most senior family member present, made to enter the room, but Ethan stopped him.

‘Dad, it’s obvious something’s wrong. Grandfather may have had a heart attack. I’m more used to this sort of thing than you. Let me go in first.’

His father hesitated, then backed off. Ethan put a hand on the doorknob and turned it reluctantly. If something had happened to his grandfather, it would cut him to the heart. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

A couple of lamps had been left alight. The fire had burnt down, however, leaving the room chilly and imperfectly lit. It took Ethan’s eyes several moments to adjust to the low lighting. He reached for a light switch near the door, but could not find one. As he recalled, the old study had never been fully lit.

With his dark-accustomed eyes, he scoured the room. And he saw what Senhora Salgueiro had seen, saw what had come close to driving her insane. Hardened as he was to sights of criminal horror and gross domestic violence, nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight that now met his eyes.

To the right of the curtained window ran a long row of bookcases, divided into narrow sections by a series of fluted oak pillars. To these pillars had been nailed the body of Ethan’s grandfather. The Nobel laureate’s throat had been sliced right across the windpipe, and his hands had been lifted above shoulder level, where they had been fixed to two pillars with small knives. These must have been rammed home with force, for they held his body hard in place. Ethan could make out signs of blood on other parts of his torso, suggesting that he had been stabbed several times before receiving the coup de grâce. Blood soaked the carpet all around him.

Chips Chippendale had been despatched in a different manner. His killer had decapitated him before suspending his body from cords attached to two wall lights, then set his head at his feet. The eyes had been removed and placed on a china plate that sat next to the head. A pool of blood had gushed from the severed torso, and now lay congealed and frozen in the light from a desk lamp.

It was Christmas morning, and Ethan fancied he heard in the heavens a sound of vast, harrowing wings. Not the wings of angels, nor the pinions of cherubim or seraphim, but the coarse leather wings of demons. He shook his head, knowing he heard nothing in truth but the rush of vital blood as it coursed dizzy through his brain.

Taking a deep breath that seared his lungs with the cold morning air, he went to the study door and opened it a fraction. He slipped through the opening, shutting the door firmly behind him, and turned to face the expectant crowd of relatives that had assembled in the corridor outside.