The Stonehenge Legacy

84

High on the hillsides surrounding the stones, Lookers watch the revellers gather like ants around the giant sarsens. The pilgrims hold hands, forming their own human circle against the Megalithic landscape. Throughout the dark hours of the night the men of the Craft have watched them come.

Thousands of strangers. People of multiple nationalities, ages and beliefs. Pagans, druids, Wiccans, heathens, Christians, Catholics and Jews. Some of them to worship. Others just to witness the spectacle. They have come. Just as they always do.

Out in the darkness, in the undulating Wiltshire fields, there are illegal camps and the crackle of small bonfires, lit as in ancient times to mark the passing of the solstice. The site itself has been flooded with a wave of pagan colour since access to the stones was opened in the night.

The mystique, the ancient customs and practice of the solstice come up against the machine of modern organisation. Crowd control, hygiene, traffic routing. And devotion to one of the oldest gods. Money. Even the samba bands are selling CDs of their own works, with souvenirs as plentiful as drugs and booze.

They have journeyed from across the world for this day and as they near the henge, they become aware that the intense police activity is not only for them. Word travels about the missing American girl and her dead lover and many kneel and pray out of respect and hope.

The drumming that has gone on all night picks up a heavier, more urgent rhythm. The air buzzes with excitement. White-robed druids rehearse their prayers. Bare-chested pagan men dance with pensioners in anoraks and hippy women with beads and flowers in their hair.

Primitive horns start to sound, the orchestra of the old infiltrated by new immigrant vuvuzelas. Waves of cheering, clapping and chanting ripple across the pond of people. Innocent eyes, some glazed with drugs, others bright with virgin anticipation, are now all trained on the pink sky, waiting for the magic, straining for the first flash of sunlight to pierce the most famous stone circle in the world.

The sun breaks and penetrates the ringed sarsens. A giant cheer erupts.

Aside from the Lookers, there are no Followers anywhere near the henge. They know better. Instead, they are gathered miles away in the Sanctuary. They kneel on the cold stone of the Great Room. The place where their gods are located.

85

When Gideon wakes he squints at his watch and knows instantly that he’d been right going back to the police. It’s nearly ten in the morning of the longest day of the year and he’s just had his first real sleep for almost a week. A weight has been lifted from his shoulders.

He showers, shaves and hurries downstairs. The security buzzer sounds just as he’s filling the kettle. He presses the electromagnetic release and on the monitor watches Megan’s car glide through the grand iron gates and up the gravelled driveway.

He opens the front door. ‘Good morning,’ he says brightly.

‘Morning,’ replies Megan, less enthusiastically. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Dockery.’

The DS smiles from beneath his sunglasses and offers his hand.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ says Gideon shaking it vigorously. ‘Come through to the back.’

The two officers trail him into the kitchen and settle around a rectangular pine table while he makes hot drinks and small talk. ‘I guess you’re busy with the solstice?’

‘Very,’ says Megan. ‘The roads are crazy. I should do what my ex does, stay away from work at this time of the year. Drives me mad.’

‘It alternates,’ says Jimmy. ‘One year the mob is well behaved and the next they let rip like wild animals.’

Gideon sorts out teas and coffees, milk and sugar and then joins them at the table. Megan sees this as her cue to gear-change the conversation. ‘Last night you spoke about your father’s diaries and implied that they might shed some light on his death. Can we see them?’

He puts his cup down and stands. ‘Yes, yes you can. But you need to know something.’

‘What?’

He walks to the foot of the stairs. ‘They’re not easy to follow. Wait, it’s best I show you what I mean.’

He goes to the hidden room and selects one of the volumes that he has decoded. He returns slightly breathless and hands the diary to Megan.

‘What is this language?’ She holds the book at arm’s length, as though it might somehow help.

‘Code,’ he explains. ‘My father wrote all the diaries in code. He devised it when I was a kid, as a way to teach me Greek.’

She squints at the open pages. ‘This is Greek?’

‘Not really. It is Greek but Greek backwards. The letters have reverse values to their English equivalents, so Omega represents A and so on.’ He reaches for a pen and on the edge of an old newspaper writes out ΜΥΣΩΛ ΨΩΞΥΗ. He hands it to Megan. ‘What do you think that says?’

‘Megan Baker.’

He looks spooked. ‘How do you know that? You barely looked at it.’

She smiles. ‘What else would you write? You’re trying to interest me, have me take a personal stake in understanding the language. So it follows that you would write something personal, and the only personal thing you know about me is my name.’ She turns the pages of the journal. ‘Why did your father do this? Why did he feel the need to write in a code that only you and he understood?’

Gideon is not completely sure. ‘So no one else could understand it?’

She weighs it up. ‘You write a diary because one day you want someone else to read it. People think otherwise but it’s true. If what your father has written is important, then he wanted you to read it and perhaps do something with it. Something he thought only you could do. Maybe he wanted you to translate and publish it?’

Gideon suspects publication is the last thing Nathaniel wanted. But her words have touched a nerve. ‘You think he wants me to approve of all this? Be a part of it?’

‘I don’t know. What is the “this” that you’re talking about? Why don’t you tell us?’

Over the next couple of hours he tries to. He reads them some of the important extracts he’s translated — about the Followers of the Sacreds, the powers of the stones, their roles as all-healing gods. He even discloses some details about his mother’s death, her fatal disease and Nathaniel’s fear that he may have inherited the condition.

Megan is not sure how to voice what’s on her mind without offending him. In the end she just comes out with it. ‘It is possible that your father was mentally ill.’ She tries to soften the blow. ‘He was a brilliant man. He could well have hidden something like that.’

‘He wasn’t mad,’ insists Gideon. ‘There’s a lot of truth in what he wrote.’

‘Provable truth?’ queries Jimmy.

Gideon gets up from his seat and goes to the window. He looks out over the lawns that his father walked. He feels uncomfortable having the police in the house, about discussing his father and his private life, but their scepticism gives him no choice. ‘When I was a kid, I was ill. Very ill. It was probably the start of the same disease that killed my mother.’ He looks back from the garden to the officers. ‘You know what my father did? He took me home from hospital and gave me a cold bath. A special bath that cured me. The water he sat and bathed me in was collected from Stonehenge. When I could walk again, he took me there and made me touch all of the stones, the giant sarsens and even the smaller bluestones. Since then I’ve had no trace of that disease. No illness. My health is remarkable. My skin and body recovers from cuts and bruises faster than anyone else’s that I know.’

Jimmy gives Megan a discreet but telling glance.

Gideon sees it. ‘I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m not.’ He returns to the table, reaches across it and takes Megan’s right hand. ‘You cut yourself, right? How long have you had that blue plaster on your finger?’

She looks at the dirty wrap. ‘I don’t know. Maybe a week. It was quite a deep cut.’

‘Look at my face.’ Gideon angles his jaw towards her. ‘You came to see me in hospital after I was assaulted. You saw the cuts and bruises. Do you see them now?’

She doesn’t.

‘What happened to the wound to my jaw that they wanted to put stitches in?’ He sees a flash of doubt in her eyes and tilts his chin. ‘And the split lip? Do you see any sign of it? Any trace at all?’

Megan’s heart races. She doesn’t. His skin is unmarked. Not even a scratch.

There’s a flash of triumph in Gideon’s eyes. ‘You still have a plaster on a little cut. From a week ago. Now tell me that my father was mad. Tell me that there is no truth in any of his writings.’

86

The top brass had a sleepless night. A call in the early hours turned the investigators’ lives upside down. A call from Caitlyn’s kidnappers.

By the time the Chief Constable and his team assemble in his office the story is already out. A tip-off, no doubt from inside the force. The world’s press is camped outside police HQ.

Commander Barney Gibson kicks off the emergency meeting. ‘At two a.m. a call was put through to the incident room. As a matter of routine it was recorded. I will play it for you in a moment. The call has been traced to a public telephone box. No surprise in that. Except this call box was not in England — it was in France.’ He waits for the significance to sink in. ‘It was made from a public box off Rue La Fayette almost in the centre of Paris. French police are at the scene and are looking for camera footage, but I’ll be very surprised if they find any. They’ll go over it for fingerprints or any other trace evidence that might match against our fingerprint or DNA databases.’

Hunt is anxious to move things on. Thom Lock has been informed and is on his way from his hotel. ‘Please play the tape, Barney.’

Gibson presses a digital recorder placed in the middle of the table. They hear a voice. Male. English. The sound quality is poor. ‘You’ve been expecting this call, we know you have. We have Caitlyn Lock and shortly you will hear our demands.’ A pause and a click. The girl’s voice floats eerily into the room. It’s low and sad. ‘My dad used to read to me. Every bedtime he’d sit beneath the quilt with me and read until I fell asleep.’ She laughs sadly. ‘He made up stories about a fairy princess called Kay and her adventures, and then …’ It’s clear she’s close to tears. ‘Then I’d fall asleep holding my daddy’s hand.’

Everyone around the conference table is a parent and the tape visibly distresses them. Caitlyn’s voice strums their nerves. ‘I don’t recall much about my mother. I guess I remember her tying yellow bows in my hair for my first day at school. Cos I hated the blue uniform. I remember making waffles with her at my grandma’s house. Almost every time we went round. And she used to sit me up on a cushion in her make-up room on the lot and have her own personal artist pretty me up.’

Gibson clicks off the recording. ‘Technicians are examining it and checking for authenticity. And Chief Constable, I believe you will be validating it with Vice President Lock this morning.’

‘I will. Thank you, Barney.’ Hunt turns to his press officer, Kate Mallory. ‘How widespread is the leak, Kate?’

‘Very, sir.’ She’s mid-thirties, balloon-faced with round glasses and straggly black hair. She slides copies of national newspapers across the conference table, her fingers black from print ink. ‘All the majors have it.’ The Mirror’s bold-print front-page headline screams: ‘France Now Key In Lock Case.’ The Sun leads with a giant screen-grab of Caitlyn in a bikini and just one word, Survivor?

Kate Mallory reads the first few lines of the Mirror article: ‘The search for kidnapped American beauty Caitlyn Lock, daughter of US Vice President Thom, sensationally switched to Paris last night as top British cops rushed to investigate a cross-channel call from her captors. Kidnappers made contact via a special line set up by the police for public information. The gang is understood to have played an Al-Qaeda style recording of Caitlyn, in which she revealed intimate details about herself, her father and her mother.’

‘Enough,’ calls Hunt. ‘For what it’s worth, I’ve put a call in to the editor to complain.’ He shrugs. ‘I guess we have little choice but to hold a news conference and answer their damned questions.’

‘You could consider a complete news blackout, sir,’ suggests the press officer. ‘It’s defendable on the basis that the young woman’s life is at risk.’

Hunt throws his copy of the paper down on the table. ‘What’s the point? The news is already out there!’ He looks around the faces and then back to Mallory. ‘Kate, we can’t conduct an inquiry of this scale if the press know about it before our own operational staff. Do your best to find out who leaked. I want a full investigation into this sloppiness.’

The door to the conference room opens and the Chief Constable’s PA leans in. ‘Vice President Lock is here, sir. He has two men with him who say they are from the FBI.’

87

While Chief Constable Hunt briefs Vice President Lock another tense meeting is under way in an office just down the corridor. FBI agents Todd Burgess and Danny Alvez are face to face with John Rowlands and Barney Gibson.

‘I’m really hoping we can help you guys,’ says Senior Supervisory Agent Burgess. Tanned and toned, he looks half his forty-five years. ‘Both Dan and I know Thom Lock and the President well and we can keep heat off your backs, providing of course you’re open and honest with us.’

Gibson understands classic Yankspeak when he hears it. Tell us everything and we’ll tell you nothing. ‘Who’s top of your likely list when it comes to kidnap gangs? Thom Lock especially piss anyone off?’

Both Americans laugh.

‘Thom has pissed everyone off,’ says Burgess. ‘New York organised crime families, Chicago animal liberation groups, west coast environmentalists, even the Russians over in Brooklyn.’

‘Then there are the terror groups,’ adds Alvez. ‘He’s a Republican who backs the War on Terror. A hawk in foreign-policy terms. Al-Qaeda, the Colombians, the FPM, PLF, ANO, they all stick pins in effigies of Thom Lock.’ He switches the heat back to Gibson. ‘What have you guys found so far?’

‘Not much,’ confesses the commander. ‘We’re working with intelligence services to grab everything we can. Data, email, voice messages. Anything that’s out there about Caitlyn, we’re on it.’

Danny Alvez is mid-thirties, Hispanic with dark eyes and short black hair. He’s been waiting for his chance to ask the big question. ‘What do you guys make of the tape?’

Rowlands gives him a straight reply: ‘We haven’t had feedback from the tech staff yet. To me it sounded genuine, though I’m suspicious of why they used audio tape and not video.’

‘Agreed,’ says Alvez. ‘It’s certainly Caitlyn though. We talked to Thom and Kylie and the information about the ribbon and book is accurate and to the best of their knowledge has never been made public.’

‘We pinged the tape to Quantico via a secure upload,’ adds Burgess. ‘Our labs say it contains multiple edits, made on several digital sound layers. They think an initial taping was done with Caitlyn, then it was drop-edited on to another recording device and the completed message played down the line from Paris.’

‘Why?’ asks Gibson. ‘Why would they do all that rather than just put her on the phone?’

‘They’re real pros,’ says Burgess. ‘They probably know all recording devices, even digital ones, leave a kind of sound DNA. By over-recording like this, you mix up the sample evidence. Machinery and source become much harder to detect.’

‘I just wonder,’ says Rowlands, ‘if the explanation is simpler than that. If the recording was faked somehow. What if Caitlyn’s voice was actually recorded here in England, sent to Paris and then played back down a French phone line?’

Alvez shakes his head. ‘Our analysts say the call was definitely made in France. They lifted the background atmos and they’re sure it was Paris.’ Rowlands’ theory grows on him a little. ‘Suppose the background noise could have been mixed in from the French side, but it seems a stretch.’

Gibson isn’t convinced. ‘Come on, they could have gone through the tunnel and been in Paris within four hours of the abduction. Thousands of illegal aliens get across the channel every year, it would be nothing for a professional gang bold enough to target a politician’s daughter.’

Burgess agrees. ‘Or by private plane, coast to coast in half that time. That’s the way I’d do it.’

Alvez nods. ‘Me too.’

John Rowlands is outnumbered three to one, but he doesn’t care. ‘She’s here. I’m sure she is. My gut tells me this tape is a wild goose chase. Caitlyn Lock is still within our reach.’

88

Publicly, Kylie Lock hasn’t said anything about her daughter’s disappearance. She let her husband fix everything with the British police, the Secret Service, the FBI and the President’s office. He’s good at all that. Despite all their differences, she knows he cares about Caitlyn’s welfare every bit as much as she does. If anyone can get those people to find her, it’s Thom. No doubt about it.

But sometimes he’s wrong. Out of line. Not that he’ll ever admit it. Oh no. Even now he won’t accept that it was a stupid mistake to have Eric look after Caitlyn instead of a Secret Service detail. Everything always has to be done his way.

Well, today is going to be different. Today it’s her turn to step up. And step up is what she is going to do. In a way only a mother can. From the heart. That’s why she’s called a press conference.

Kylie looks in the mirror a final time, hides her eyes behind her low-profile black Prada sunglasses. She is wearing a mid-length grey Givenchy dress, her blonde hair is swept and tied back. She’s ready for anything the world can throw at her.

After taking a deep breath, she walks into the top-floor conference room at the Dorchester. Settles behind the long trestle table covered in an immaculate white cotton cloth. It’s topped with a small angled sign bearing her name and she can see a cluster of microphones and Dictaphones. She looks up and the room seems to convulse. An explosion of shutter clicks and blinding white light. She can see the editorial heads of the BBC, ITN, Sky, AFP, Reuters, PA, CNN, Inter Press, Pressenza, EFE and UPI. And a million others. They have risen from their seats, out of respect for her, not as a famous actress but as a worried-sick mother.

She can feel the heat from the blisteringly hot TV lights strung on their steel poles. People everywhere. At the rear a long line of video cameras are sited on a raised platform. She is flanked by a giant suited bodyguard and a round-faced black woman in her early fifties. Charlene Elba, a rough-and-ready veteran of her Hollywood press campaigns. Elba taps the main desk mike, gets the ball rolling. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for coming. All of you are aware of the great efforts being made by law enforcement agencies in many countries to find Caitlyn Lock. Both Kylie Lock and Vice President Thom Lock are immensely grateful for the endeavours of those detectives and individuals. However, this morning we will not be addressing any issues relating to the inquiry.’ There is a pause. ‘Today Kylie would like to directly address whoever has her daughter. Afterwards, she will do interviews. The press session will last ninety minutes, after which Kylie has to leave for a personal meeting with the Chief Constable of Wiltshire and representatives from the British Home Office and the FBI. We thank you again for your attendance.’

Kylie takes a second to compose herself before attempting the task of making an impression on the audience. She can feel the cynicism. Hazard of the profession, she guesses. She takes off her sunglasses. Her eyes are bloodshot and it’s apparent that she is not wearing more than a brush of powder. The features are familiar to all of them. ‘Whoever you are, whatever you want, please don’t hurt my baby.’ There’s a tremor in her voice. ‘Think of your own mother, think of your own wife or your own sister. How would you feel if they were in Caitlyn’s place? What would you say to whoever had them? You’d say this. Please, please don’t hurt the person I love most in the whole world. Please let them go.’ She has no notes in front of her, just a plain piece of paper and a pen. She looks down at them for what seems an over-long period of time.

Then she looks up. Her eyes fix on the cameras and the watching press pack and they are brimming with tears. ‘My Caitlyn has a heart of gold. She is the most caring, loving, wonderful daughter that a mother could have. Her whole future is ahead of her. Half a century of life in front of her. She has the right to meet the man of her dreams and fall in love, to raise her own family, to sit her own grandchildren on her lap and to know she has made the world a better place with her presence and her legacy. Please don’t take that from her. Don’t take away all that love that she can give, all her dreams, all her future.’ She quickly blots a running tear from her cheek. ‘I would gladly give everything that I have to get my daughter back. And that is what I am prepared to do.’ She turns over the sheet of plain paper in front of her and holds it up to the cameras. ‘This is my bank statement. I am lucky. I have ten million dollars to my name. I promise that I will give you that whoever you are. Everything I have, everything I can raise. In exchange for the safe return of my daughter.’ Her eyes narrow and her face hardens. ‘But be aware of this, I am also prepared to give that money to anyone who successfully leads the police or any other investigators to your door and who can recover Caitlyn safely and bring you and anyone involved in taking my daughter to justice.’ She takes a long slow breath, seems to relax her shoulders a little. She gestures to the giant beside her. ‘This man is Josh Goran.’ She puts her trembling hand on his broad forearm. ‘He is America’s most successful private investigator and bounty hunter.’ She takes strength from talking about him. ‘He is a former major in America’s Air Force Special Operations Command unit. For the foreseeable future, he will be working solely for me and will be completely dedicated to securing my daughter’s safe return.’

Goran points a big finger straight down the eye of the nearest camera lens trained on him. ‘For those who have Caitlyn, I have a message. Please take the lady’s money now and give her up. It’s an honest offer that Kylie Lock has made. She means it.’ He looks around the room, up at the ceiling. ‘Please take up that offer. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. Real sorry if I have to come and take her from you.’

89

Megan is trying to forget being dropped from the Lock case and concentrate on the silver dog tag Jimmy Dockery has placed in the palm of her hand. It’s from around the neck of Tony Naylor, the missing bum case that Tompkins dumped on her desk just as everything else was getting more interesting.

The cheap tag had been handed in by a jogger out on Salisbury Plain and listed on a CID lost and found circular because of the inscription on the back: ‘Happy Birthday T. Luv Nat x.’ Jimmy had noticed the tag matched the one Tony wore in the train station picture taken with his sister. To round things off, Nathalie Naylor had just confirmed it as the one she’d bought for her brother.

What’s interesting Megan is not that it was found but where it was found. A lay-by in the middle of nowhere. But not any old nowhere. A nowhere on the closest main road to the burned-out barn where Jake Timberland’s body was discovered.

Jimmy is staring at her staring at the small silver block. ‘You trying to contact the dead?’

She turns the tag over. ‘I wish I could. I’d certainly ask Tony Naylor what he was doing out on that road. Not the kind of place you go for a walk. It’s bleak, desolate, unattractive.’ She hands the tag back to her DS. ‘Naylor was a drifter, no money, no home, certainly no car. How did he get so many miles from a town or village with nothing around but unploughed fields and scrub?’

‘Someone must have driven him out there or he hitched a lift.’

‘Why?’

‘Maybe he heard there was farm work?’

She looks at Tony Naylor’s photograph in the file on her desk. The thin-faced twenty-five-year-old has been unemployed most of his life. When he has bothered to earn a living, it’s never been far from a town centre and a pub. Back-breaking shifts as a crop-picker or farm labourer out in the middle of teetotal-nowhere-land are not his style.

Naylor is dead. She knows he is. She thinks it and she feels it. And she knows that very soon she’ll be picking up the phone in front of her and breaking bad news to his twin sister.

‘Jim, see if you can get operational support to divert some men from the barn and run radar over the field.’

‘You think he’s buried out there?’

Megan nods. ‘I don’t think it. I’m sure of it.’

90

There comes a point when you have to take the game to the opposition.

Change defensive into offensive.

Be proactive rather than reactive.

Gideon runs all the axioms through his mind as he stands nervously outside the office of D. Smithsen Building Contractors. It’s an ugly collection of Portakabins on a rundown industrial estate. In the yard are old and dust-ridden flat-bed lorries. Pot-holed tarmac is covered in boils of spilled gravel and cement. Incongruously, there is also a pristine, personally plated black Bentley.

Gideon takes a deep breath and breezes into the latent hostility of a sour-smelling and grubby reception area.

‘Good morning. I’m looking for Mr Smithsen. I have some work I need doing.’

The woman behind the cheap desk looks annoyed at the interruption. She puts her magazine down and gets to her feet. ‘Take a seat, I’ll see if he’s busy.’ She jerks open a sliding door, leans in and then turns back to Gideon. ‘You can come through.’ She drags the door wider and steps to one side.

David Smithsen rises from a torn leather chair to greet his visitor. ‘Mr Chase, how are you?’ He gestures to a seat.

‘I’m okay, thanks.’

Smithsen sits back behind his desk ‘You certainly look better than when I saw you last.’

‘That wasn’t a good moment.’

‘I’m sure it wasn’t. Now, how can I help you?’

‘Thought it was about time to get that work done. You know, the repairs to the study, the damaged brickwork. And the roofing.’

‘Roofing?’

‘You mentioned you were going to do some for my father. He’d given you a deposit.’

Smithsen slaps his forehead with his palm and smiles. ‘Of course. I’m sorry. I remember now. I thought you meant roofing over the study.’

Gideon smiles. It’s time to stop the pretence. He has no intention of hiring the builder. It was simply an excuse to confront the man. ‘When you came out to Tollard Royal, you went upstairs and snooped around, went through some of my father’s private books.’

Smithsen looks horrified. ‘I went to check out the safety of your ceiling, that’s all.’

‘No, you didn’t.’ Gideon’s voice is calm but he feels increasingly nervous. ‘Mr Smithsen, I knew exactly how and where I’d left those books and you’d moved them, tried to look for something and I think I know what.’

The builder stays silent.

‘You were looking for the same thing as the man who broke into the house, the one who left me in the fire.’

Smithsen tries hard to look offended. ‘Mr Chase, really I—’

Gideon cuts him off. ‘Listen, I know what you are part of. What you believe in. You think I want to expose you or stop you?’ He shakes his head. ‘The Craft is thousands of years old. I understand how important it is.’ He leans forward across the builder’s desk. ‘I want to be part of it. Talk to the Henge Master. Talk to those in the Inner Circle who have to be spoken to.’ He pushes the chair back and stands. ‘Then come back to me, Mr Smithsen. You have my numbers.’ He is halfway out the door when he stops and leans back inside. ‘By the way, the books have been moved. And I’ve arranged for couriers to deliver very detailed extracts and a personal letter to the police in twenty-four hours, unless they hear directly from me.’ He gives him a parting smile. ‘The clock is ticking. Be sure to contact me very soon.’

91

At six o’clock, Megan shuts down her computer and leaves to pick up Sammy. Adam is looking after their daughter and wants to buy them all dinner. Play happy families again. Despite instincts to the contrary, she finds herself giving in.

The Harvest Inn is not far from his house, so they walk over and sit outside. Adam brings a pint of lager, a large glass of white and an apple juice to the weathered wooden table and benches. He takes Sammy to the small swings while Megan orders their food. She sits looking at the evening sun dip behind the play area and for a moment things seem like they used to be.

Sammy runs from the swings to a sandpit. Adam makes sure she’s safe, then leaves her there to scrape up a mess and wanders back to the table. ‘She’s growing so quickly.’ He sits down and raises his drink. ‘Here’s to the great job you’re doing with her.’

‘And to you.’ She tilts her glass his way. ‘You’re a lousy husband but a good dad.’

‘I know. I realise that now.’ He looks towards Sammy, bent like a puppy scrabbling sand between her legs. ‘She is part of you and part of me. There’s nothing I wouldn’t do for her and …’ He seems to run out of courage, then adds, ‘… and nothing I wouldn’t do to have you back.’

‘Adam—’

‘No, please. Let me finish. I messed up. I’m sorry. Really sorry. Can’t we wipe the slate clean?’

Megan looks down at the table. ‘Things like adultery can’t just be wiped clean, Adam. It’s not spilt milk.’

The food comes and saves further embarrassment. By the time they’ve finished, Sammy is asleep on her father’s lap. They walk back to his house and Megan puts her to sleep in the spare room. Adam opens a bottle of brandy. The one they bought in France on their last holiday before Sammy was born. They end up talking. About work. About Sammy. About the reasons behind his affair. They talk until all the poison has seeped out and there’s no more cleansing and talking to be done.

Megan feels wrung dry. She kisses Sammy’s beautiful sleeping face and does what she knows she shouldn’t do. She goes to bed with her cheating ex. There’s no wild sex. No passionate bridge building. Just a truce, sealed by lying close together. Taking comfort in what they had. What they might be able to have again.

92

The morning sun spills through a split in Adam Stone’s cheap bedroom curtains and glints off an old mirror on the dresser opposite. Megan has been awake for hours, lying next to the father of her child, watching the warm daylight slip into the room and slowly climb the walls.

She’s about as confused as she can be. Her head full of regrets, hopes and warnings. Sammy comes running into the room and chases all her thoughts away. Her cheeks are red from sleep and her eyes are lit up like Christmas. She jumps on to the bed with a squeal and tries to scramble in with them.

Megan slows her down. ‘Shush, baby, don’t wake Daddy.’

Too late. Adam has been kneed into consciousness. He raises himself, bleary-eyed, into a sitting position, back against the padded headboard. ‘Come here, baby girl, give me a big love.’ She’s in his arms in a second and Megan is left even more churned up than she was ten minutes ago.

The three breakfast together in Adam’s small kitchen and he chats easily. Caringly. Just like he used to. ‘You got a busy day ahead?’

She pours coffee for them both. ‘Do they come any other way? Even off the Timberland murder I’m as busy as hell, and no doubt there’s going to be some cleaning up to be done after the solstice.’

He chews on buttered toast as he talks. ‘I checked last night with control. By that point, there’d been about ten public order arrests, half a dozen for possession and a couple for dealing drugs.’

Megan is relieved. ‘Thank you God for small acts of mercy. Did they say if there was anything new on the Lock case?’

‘The press are still feeding on the mother’s press conference.’ He licks butter from his fingers, hands her the TV remote and gestures to the small set tucked away across the room. ‘Try Sky, they usually know what’s happening before we do.’

She finds a news report on the film star’s presser. It’s made up of a soundbite from Josh Goran, a dull interview with a pale-looking Alan Hunt, several shots of men who could be FBI agents, a meaningless comment from someone at the Home Office, random shots of Paris and finally, footage of John Rowlands and Barney Gibson looking wiped out and pissed off as they leave police HQ in separate cars.

‘So,’ says Adam, finishing the coffee and looking for his jacket. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

‘Meaning?’

He smiles warmly. ‘Meaning, are you coming back here?’

She’s not sure. It seems too hard to simply forgive and forget. ‘Let me think about it. Right now, I have to go home and change. There’s something important that I have to do this morning. Can you drop Sammy at nursery for me?’

‘Sure.’ He tries his luck again. ‘And tonight?’

‘May-be.’ Her face softens. ‘Let’s just see how the day plays out.’

93

Jimmy Dockery steps into the road and flags down the camouflaged Range Rover. The driver, a sixty-year-old man dressed like a farmer, pulls to a stop in the deserted lay-by, gets out and briskly walks around the back. Jimmy follows him to the rear of the 4×4 with more than a little trepidation.

‘Morning, Detective,’ says the driver in an upper-class English accent. ‘Looks a nice day for it.’

Jimmy isn’t so sure. ‘Morning. Let’s hope so. How are the crazy monsters today?’ He peers through the glass of the tailgate at Tarquin de Wale’s two Turkey vultures caged in the back.

‘They’re fine,’ says de Wale. ‘Did I tell you last night when you came round that I raised them from chicks?’

‘You did.’

‘They’re of Canadian parentage, you know. Best you can get.’ He starts to slide the giant cage out of the vehicle. ‘Give me a hand.’

Jimmy has a moment of self-doubt. Maybe this is a crazy idea. The extra assistance that Megan told him to enlist from operational support hadn’t been forthcoming. Not a sniffer dog for miles around. And the ground radar team is booked up until Christmas. Tarquin’s vultures seemed an inspired way to search for dead flesh. Tommy Naylor’s dead flesh to be precise.

‘Can’t wait to see if the chaps can pull this off,’ says de Wale. Jimmy had read in the Police magazine about German detectives using buzzards to detect buried corpses and exotic animal breeder Tarquin de Wale had been quoted as saying he’d be willing to cooperate freely with any police force in England wanting to give it a try. Well, this is his chance.

According to reports, on every occasion the German birds had been tested they’d found the flesh. Buzzards are said to have an incredible sense of smell. From three hundred feet up, they can detect a tiny morsel of rotting meat. And unlike bloodhounds they don’t tire quickly.

The detective slips on his shades and for once they are necessary, the midday sun is high and bright. ‘Mr de Wale, if you make this work then we are both going to finish the day as heroes.’

‘Of course it will work,’ says de Wale, confidently. ‘Have faith.’

Jimmy helps him lift the back of a wire cage big enough to restrain two grown Alsatians. They put it on the ground. Wings extended, the birds’ full span is over six feet. They grunt and hiss at the intrusion.

De Wale slips a customised muzzle on the birds’ white beaks, then attaches GPS tracking bands to their legs so he can pinpoint the exact spot if they find anything. ‘You said you had something belonging to the missing man?’

Jimmy hands over Tony Naylor’s silver dog tag and de Wale holds it in front of the striking bald red heads of the two birds. ‘If he is out there, even if he’s buried, these two will find him. Even without this little trinket.’ He hands it back.

The exotic animal breeder walks to the front of the Range Rover to set up the electronic equipment in the passenger seat of the vehicle. After a few moments, he returns with a wide smile and eyes full of childish excitement. ‘Ready, old chap?’

Jimmy raises an eyebrow behind his shades. ‘About as much as I will ever be.’

94

The hour-long journey feels the longest and loneliest drive of Gideon’s life.

He spent most of last night lying awake, worrying about this day. And now it’s here. He sits in the car with the engine turned off, staring out of the window, hoping to halt time.

West Wiltshire Crematorium is set in ten acres of tranquil Semington countryside. But none of the beauty of the landscaping distracts from the fact that they are about to burn his father’s body. Incinerate it. Blast it in an oven until all that is left is a featureless grey powder. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. He’s heard the phrase a thousand times, but only now does he really understand what it means. From nothing to nothing.

Every emotional connection to his father will be gone. He will be left solely with memories. Mixed ones. Sure, there are Nathaniel’s books and tapes, but they’re purely factual artefacts. Archaeological reminders of the father he didn’t know rather than the one he did.

The morning sun is hot on his face as he gets out of the car and walks along the immaculately clean path. Up ahead, he sees the crematorium, a distinguished and understated building that looks modern with lots of hardwood beams and doors, bright stained-glass windows and a smart red-tiled roof.

Gideon hears footsteps and turns to see Megan hurrying to catch him up. He hadn’t expected her to come and is touched that she has. She’s wearing a mid-length black dress and black flat shoes, with a black raincoat over her arm. ‘Hello,’ she manages, slightly out of breath, ‘I hope you don’t mind me coming?’

‘Not at all. It’s very kind of you to bother.’

She affectionately touches the sleeve of his new black suit as they walk towards the front doors. ‘I guessed you wouldn’t know many people down here and thought you might appreciate some moral support.’

He takes a deep breath. ‘I do. Thanks.’

Megan misses out the fact that she’s also interested to see who else might turn up. What their relationship to Nathaniel Chase might be and how Gideon behaves during what’s bound to be a testing ordeal.

An usher shows them through to the chapel, where the coffin is already in place. He had declined the offer of following the hearse from Shaftesbury. Too slow. Too painful. And also rejected the idea of having any kind of eulogy.

Only Gideon and Megan are in the congregation as the casket slips out of public view. He bows his head and she squeezes his hand reassuringly. He tries not to think about his father’s corpse slipping into the retort, the special area of the furnace, where it will be exposed to savage temperatures of more than a thousand degrees. His archaeological training means he knows that cremation vaporises soft tissues and organs. Only hard bones will be left behind. Staff will use some kind of cremulator to pulverise what’s left, reduce it to dust, to powder.

Ashes to ashes.

He tries not to think of the man he has lost. The things he wishes he’d said. The words he regrets uttering.

Dust to dust.

He is here to get things done. That’s all. To fulfil his father’s request that he should be cremated and his ashes scattered at Stonehenge.

The service is over in less than fifteen minutes. No fanfare. No wailing. Nothing but silence and emptiness.

On the way out, a staff member tells him he can collect his father’s remains in a couple of hours or in the morning if he prefers. He chooses to come back later. He wants to end the day knowing that it’s over. That he never has to return here.

The two of them walk to their cars. Gideon stands at the door of his Audi looking lost.

‘Pub,’ she says, surprisingly. ‘We can’t go away from here without having a drink to give your dad a proper send-off.’

95

Caitlyn hears a terrible rumbling.

Cool air wafts into the fetid hole. Hands reach in through the wall and pull at her.

Her body is so stiff and heavy that she feels as though she’s been nailed to the hard stone slab. They pull her urgently out of the cavity and stumble her down a narrow dark corridor into a circular room lit by candles. Caitlyn tries to shield her eyes. Rings of small flickering flames burn painfully bright. Behind closed lids, circles are seared into the chemical screens of her retinas. She panics for a second, struggles for breath.

Two men loop ropes around her wrists. They walk her like a seaside donkey. Drag her clockwise. Always clockwise. Twenty circuits of the cold and featureless stone room. Caitlyn is dizzy by the time they stop and let her drink tepid water. Her stomach rumbles. Hunger pains stab and cramp her.

When they are done exercising and watering her, they take off the donkey ropes and retreat to the outer circles of the wall.

Now she can do anything she wants. Only there isn’t anything to do. There is nothing but space around her. Space in which she is trapped by the people on the outside of the space. She understands that this is some kind of mindfuck. First they brick her up in a wall so she can’t move. Then they give her as much room as she wants. And she still can’t move.

Free will. They are messing with her free will.

Caitlyn sits. Crosses her legs. Shuts her eyes and shuts out her world of horror. She tries to find herself. Tries to connect to some iron thread that can’t be broken, some invincible strand that she can always hold on to.

Gradually, she forgets the people around her, the smell and light of the candles, the cold of the stone floor, the cramps in her stomach and the burn of the gastric juices in her windpipe. The space. More than anything she shuts out the space. She is nowhere. She is in the safe darkness of her dreams.

Caitlyn feels her legs aching. She is growing weak. She feels herself falling. Tumbling backwards. The hooded men snap at her like a pack of dogs. They pick her up and half-drag half-walk her to the cleansing area. They push her into the steaming water. Watch her wash and re-dress. Walk her back to her cell.

Back to the place with no space.

Back to her nightmare.

96

In a black fluttering flash the birds lever themselves into the pale sky above the empty fields. They’re gone within seconds. Not even distant specks on the horizon. Tarquin de Wale looks at the sat-nav app on his laptop. He can see their flight lines tracking high into the wild-blue yonder. ‘Jolly fast, eh?’

‘What if they don’t come back?’ asks Jimmy. ‘You could spend the rest of your life trying to catch them.’

‘Vultures aren’t built to fly far.’ The old eccentric doesn’t take his eyes from the computer screen. ‘They’re lazy scavengers. They ride the thermals mainly. Until they get a whiff of food, then zoom.’ He smacks his hands together. ‘Besides, Wiltshire is the only habitat they know. Their natural home now.’

‘Lots of army activity around here,’ warns Jimmy. ‘I hope they don’t get shot down.’

‘No problem. Here they come,’ says de Wale excitedly.

The vultures swoop down low over the Range Rover and settle in the field about a hundred metres in front of the two men. Instantly, they start to forage. Senses bristling, they flutter and land a few feet away and nudge the earth again. The smaller of the two skips to the side and hammers his beak into rutted tracks two hundred metres from the remains of the barn.

Jimmy watches with mixed emotions. He’d hoped for more. Something spectacular like when sniffer dogs go crazy and start whimpering and digging as though they’re trying to find a short cut to Australia. But the vultures don’t provide any such show. They lazily forage for almost an hour and don’t venture out of the field next to the torched barn. Jimmy is feeling pretty dejected. He checks his watch. ‘Let’s call it quits. It was worth a shot.’

‘I’ll get a treat and clap them in,’ says de Wale.

‘Okay.’ Jimmy glances at the laptop screen while the buzzard master goes to get some dead mice out of a sealed sandwich box. The computer has been recording the birds’ flight paths using the GPS. Plotting lines on a grid. But these lines go pretty much straight up and down the field, almost as though they’d been mowing a lawn or ploughing crops.

It is a thought that he can’t shake. Strange creatures. Why would they do that? He goes back to his car. Roots in the boot until he finds some spare evidence bags and then climbs over the stile that leads to the field. Jimmy lines himself up with the pecking buzzards and starts to collect samples. Soil samples.

It is a long shot, but if he is right, the vultures have found what remains of Tony Naylor.

The missing man’s body has somehow been pulped and spread like muck across the open field.

97

Megan puts two glasses of wine down on the pub table that separates her and Gideon. It’s a schizophrenic kind of place. Half bistro, half old-fashioned boozer. Crab cakes and dominoes. Rocket salad and pork scratchings.

‘Thanks.’ He pulls the glass towards him but doesn’t drink. He’s got things on his mind. Things he wants to say. ‘Do you remember when you came to my father’s house, I told you that I thought he’d killed himself because of this secret society, the Followers of the Sacreds?’

She nods apprehensively, worrying about his mental health. ‘Yes, I remember. This was the secret organisation you said he mentioned in his diaries.’

Gideon detects the scepticism. ‘Do you think I’m crazy? All screwed up with grief and trauma?’

‘No.’ She tries to be sympathetic. ‘You’re certainly not crazy. But I do think you’re very stressed out.’ She leans forward and speaks quietly. ‘Gideon, it might well be that your father was involved in some kind of secret organisation, but I doubt it had anything to do with his death.’ She flinches at the thought of what she’s about to say. ‘I’m sorry, but in my experience people take their own lives for a lot of highly personal reasons, and it’s never about membership of some private club or other.’

He shakes his head and shifts the glass nervously around the table. ‘The man who broke into my father’s house and set fire to the place belonged to this group.’ He leans closer. ‘And this isn’t a scout group I’m talking about. This is something bad.’

Megan slips into her more official interview mode. ‘You might believe that but you can’t prove it, can you?’

‘I know it,’ says Gideon. He puts a fist to his heart. ‘In here, I know it.’

‘In law that’s not enough.’ Megan can see he’s hurting but there’s nothing to gain from letting him delude himself. ‘Don’t you think that if your father was in such a society, such a close brotherhood, then some of them would have turned up today to show their respects? There was no one there. No one but you and me.’

The comment stings. ‘Maybe they didn’t know about it. It wasn’t in any newspapers.’ He has another thought. ‘Maybe they chose to stay away.’ He looks at her icily. ‘Perhaps they expected the police to be there.’

She sees what he’s driving at. ‘That’s not only why I came.’

‘No, of course not.’ He realises it sounded bitter. ‘Sorry.’ He finally takes a drink of the wine. Sour apples. He has no taste or appreciation of anything at the moment. ‘I had a builder round the other day, said he’d heard there’d been a fire and wanted to help fix the damage. He told me he’d done work for my father, so I ended up letting him in to do a valuation. Next thing I know he’s upstairs poking around.’

She puts her glass down. ‘Did he take anything?’

‘Didn’t have time but I found him in my father’s private room trying to look through the diaries I showed you.’

She’s not sure what he means. ‘Your father’s private room? You mean his bedroom?’

‘No. The room next to it. He had built a secret area at the end of the landing. That’s where he hid all his journals. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never spot it. But I’d left the door open.’

Megan wonders for a moment whether he’d accidentally let a con man or another burglar into the house, someone sizing the place up for antiques. ‘This builder, did you get his name?’

‘Smithsen, Dave Smithsen.’

She digs out a pen from her bag and writes the name on a beer mat. ‘Do you want me to check that he really is a builder?’

‘No need. I went to see him. I asked him outright if he was involved in the Followers with my father. He denied it.’

Megan takes a long look at the tired and grief-stricken man across the table. Hidden rooms. Secret sects. Builders that he mistakes for prowlers. The guy is sick. Paranoid. She wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress.

‘Gideon, I think you’re reading too much into all this. You’re all churned up and need some time to get closure on your father’s death, the break-in and the attack on you. You’ll get respite when we lock someone up, and hopefully that will be soon. We’re running face-analysis data on the phone photo you gave us and we’ve got word out with our informants on the streets.’

He nods.

Megan sees it’s not enough. ‘We’re taking all this seriously. I promise you.’

‘No, you’re not,’ he snaps. ‘My father took his life because of something that this group was doing. Something awful. And you’re not taking it seriously at all. You’re just concerned with the damned break-in and no doubt your crime figures.’ He slugs down the rest of his wine and stands. ‘Thanks for the drink and coming out here. I’m going to go. Need to get some fresh air. Be on my own.’

98

Megan thinks about everything Gideon said as she drives back to Devizes. She’s sure his fears and paranoia are unfounded. He’s just mixed up and stressed out. By the time she’s back at her desk, she has a simple plan to banish any nagging doubts and prove there’s nothing in any of his accusations.

She hits the phone and uses her network of contacts to get the direct line of Professor Lillian Cooper, Head of Haematology at Salisbury District Hospital. The professor is a close friend of someone she knows. Megan dials the medic’s number and manages to coax out of her the result of the blood tests Gideon had taken when he was kept overnight following the fire.

‘The test results are negative. No disorders of any kind. Your man is the picture of perfect health.’ Professor Cooper sounds bored as she flicks through his file. ‘In fact, looking at his notes there’s been nothing wrong with Gideon Chase since he was a kid.’ There’s a long pause. The plastic tap-tap-tap of computer keys clacks down the line. ‘Well, I’m really not sure about the accuracy of what I’m reading.’ There’s surprise in her voice. ‘It seems he was misdiagnosed when he was young. There’s a record here of him having CLL, chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.’

‘What is that exactly?’

‘CLL is an awful disease. Doesn’t usually show in people under forty. Must be in the family. It manifests when the production of blood cells malfunctions and the process gets out of control. The lymphocytes multiply too quickly, live too long. You end up with too many of them in the blood, then they fatally overwhelm the normal white cells, red cells and platelets in the bone marrow.’

Megan wants to make sure she fully understands. ‘But he doesn’t have this — he was misdiagnosed?’

‘Yes, that’s right. Hang on.’ There’s another pause while she scans the notes again. ‘I’m sure he was misdiagnosed but no one seems to have admitted that they did it. Most peculiar. It says he exhibited an advanced stage of the disease and needed preliminary treatment. Then months later his blood tested clear, just as it did when we screened him.’ She sounds exasperated. ‘It just doesn’t fit. Simply doesn’t fit at all. CLL is an incurable condition, it never just vanishes.’

‘And professor, you’re sure he is clear of it now?’

‘I have to be cautious. You can never say anything terminal has gone for ever, but looking at the file in front of me, I’d have to conclude that he no longer has the disease that he was previously diagnosed as being fatally ill with.’

Megan thanks her and hangs up. It’s not what she expected to find. Not at all. The medical records support Gideon’s unbelievable story about being cured because he was washed in water from the stones at the henge.

The next call that the DI makes secures the business trading records of David E. Smithsen. She follows with requests for his work and home telephone records and his credit card bills and bank account details.

From the deluge of documents that electronically floods in, Smithsen appears to be a successful, respectable builder and professional landscape gardener. Megan uses Google Maps to look at aerial and 3D images of his business premises and his house. The home is lavish, detached, probably an old farm that has been converted. At least five, maybe six bedrooms. Several extensions. She zooms in. A swimming pool cum gym by the look of it. Big fences all around. Electric gates and cameras. Somewhere in the region of five to six acres. She values the spread at around three million pounds. Minimum. Megan taps her computer keys. And it doesn’t look like he has any mortgage. In fact, no debts of any kind. A DVLC search shows he has a soft-top Porsche, presumably for his wife and a Bentley bearing his personal plate. Another click of the computer keys and she finds he has a cool million in the bank.

Smithsen’s business accounts look in order. He and his wife are directors of a limited company with an audited annual turnover of eleven million pounds and a profit of one and a half million. The income seems consistent with his lifestyle. She runs a criminal records check and it comes back squeaky clean. Not so much as a parking fine.

Everything is completely above board, but it doesn’t feel right. She must have missed something. Megan looks more closely at the mobile phone records. He has the latest 4G iPhone but hardly uses it. She goes line by line down the itemised call list and sees he has rung home on it, booked the same restaurant a few times and downloaded a couple of emails. A guy as successful and busy as he is should be showing high call usage. She goes back to his landline records and scrutinises them. They show a similar pattern of low activity. Either he is terrific at delegating and has everyone running around making calls and money for him. Or he has another phone. One that isn’t billed to his work or home addresses.

Megan is sure he’s running an off-the-shelf, pre-paid phone. No contract and no trace of owner. A ‘burner’, as street kids call it.

Why would a millionaire businessman do that when he’s already got a state-of-the-art iPhone? She leans back at her desk and smiles.

He’s keeping something secret. That’s why.

99

As he walks in the dying evening light towards the stones, Gideon tries to remember exactly when he came here last. Probably twenty years ago just after he’d fallen sick.

He is carrying his father’s ashes in a scatter tube chosen for the purpose and he feels sad and nostalgic. He looks out across the field and gathering mist and remembers how his father had held his hand and led him across the misty fields towards the towering stones.

Two decades on he experiences an echo of that fear. A reverberation of the anxiety he had felt when he was eight years old and he’d been left for a few moments in the midst of the giants. It had felt like eternity. The shadowy ghosts, as big as trees, closed in on him. Crowded him. Reached jagged hands out for him.

Gideon recalls it all. His father had spoken strangely that day. Talked about how there were things in life that he wouldn’t be able to fully understand but should respect. Like the moon. A goddess watching over him. A powerful force linked to his unconscious powers and the cyclic rhythms of life — human fertility, crop growth, the changing of the seasons. He was too young back then to understand it.

Gideon looks across the great sarsens and bluestones. He sees his father putting a hand on one in the middle of the circle and reaching out to him. Telling him that the soul of the universe was buried deep in this rock, protected and preserved for ever.

He hadn’t wanted to take his father’s hand but he did. It was frightening. Like a charge of electricity surging through two points. A crackling, blistering energy that bound them together. Then his father took him around the circle. Made him touch all the other stones. Pressed him against them and held him there as the current pulsed back and forth between stone and flesh.

‘Good evening.’

The voice startles him. Comes out of nowhere. He turns quickly.

It is his father.

For a split second that’s what he thinks. His heart is beating crazily. He gasps for breath. The man in front of him is of the same size and shape as his father. Probably a similar age. In the gathering mist the resemblance is unnerving.

The old man smiles. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s okay. I was miles away.’

The stranger steps nearer. He is now taller and broader than Gideon first thought and has short grey-white hair. His eyes are piercingly dark. ‘You shouldn’t be in here, you know. Access is by appointment only. You have to book in advance.’

‘I’m sorry.’ Gideon looks off towards the car park.

‘It’s all right. I don’t mind. What do you have there?’ The stranger nods towards the tube.

‘My father’s ashes. He wanted to be scattered here among the stones.’

The man gestures to the henge. ‘I imagine then, that this place meant a great deal to him?’

‘It did.’ Gideon glances at the nondescript tube. ‘He was an archaeologist and studied them in great detail. He thought the stones were magical. Maybe even sacred.’

The stranger smiles. ‘Many people do. That’s why they come. I’m very sorry to have heard about your loss.’ He tilts his head respectfully. ‘I’ll leave you now to fulfil your father’s wishes. Good night.’ He turns and walks away.

Gideon stands for a second and looks around. It is now getting really dark and the mist is rolling in like a slow tide. He feels a chill, knows that if he leaves things much longer, he won’t be able to fulfil his father’s strange request.

The lid to the tube is tight but he carefully levers it free. He doesn’t know where to begin and where to end. Should he just shake the tube and walk away, grey powder streaming like a dud flare? Or should he try to distribute the remains as evenly as possible?

He remembers reading in the diaries how human remains were found all around Stonehenge. Hundreds more were buried in nearby fields, ancient camps where the stone workers had lived.

Gideon looks into the end of the tube and walks to the first stone in the opening opposite the Heel Stone. He heads clockwise, shaking the ashes out around the small circle of sarsens and bluestones. The container is empty before he reaches the end but he completes the ritual, shaking it until the circle is closed.

Then he finds himself strangely drawn to the middle and compelled to kneel. He mouths the words he couldn’t say when he saw the body at the crematorium. In the darkness he whispers, ‘I’m sorry, Dad. Sorry that we didn’t know each other better. Sorry that I didn’t tell you I loved you. That we didn’t find a way to overcome our differences and share our dreams. I miss you. I’ll always miss you.’

Black clouds creep across the pale rising moon. Before Gideon can get to his feet a hood is pulled tight over his head.

Four Lookers drag him to the ground.

100

Megan is about to switch off her computer for the night when it pings with a message. Tired, she opens it. It’s an alert from the force’s facial recognition unit. They’ve found a street camera match to the fuzzy camera-phone shot Gideon had taken of the burglar.

She reads the text: ‘An individual male matching the facial biometrics of your target has been identified by camera XR7 in Tidworth. Click on the icon below to view more stills and to contact coordinating officer.’

She shifts the cursor to a little picture of a camera and clicks it. Her heart jumps. The shots are fantastic. Close to a dozen of them. In several the suspect is stood outside a shop, locking and unlocking the premises. It is a butcher’s shop. Damn. She’d thought about a chef or catering worker, not a butcher.

The psychological profile she’d drawn up comes rushing back to her: white male, thirty to forty-five, manual worker, possibly in catering business, local pubs, restaurants. He fits it to a T.

Megan is so elated she doesn’t notice her ex and her daughter in the CID office until Sammy shouts.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ The four-year-old comes running between the desks.

Megan opens her arms and gathers her up.

‘Got a lost child here,’ Adam says. ‘Told me her mother was a famous detective. So I thought I’d return her in person.’

She kisses Sammy and rearranges her on her knee. ‘What are you doing here?’

He gives her a cheeky look. ‘I was working a tip-off that you might come out with us.’

Megan thinks about telling him to back off, take things more slowly. But he and Sammy look so happy together.

Adam sits down at her desk, just at the exact moment Jimmy Dockery walks into the room. The two men catch each other’s eyes. There’s a crackle of curiosity in the air. The kind that makes a cat’s tail stand up and fluff out.

Jimmy had come with news for Megan. Good news. Important news. But now he doesn’t want to give it to her. Not with her husband sat there. It’ll have to wait until the morning. He waves and wanders out of view.

Adam watches him go and allows himself a smug smile.

101

Gideon is trying to make sense of what’s happened. He remembers his head being covered, strong hands holding him, a sharp spike of pain in his leg. They must have drugged him and taken him somewhere to sleep it off.

The hood is off and he’s sat in the dark on a cold stone floor. Candles flicker in all four corners. It’s small. Small and has no door.

He’s in a cell.

Maybe it isn’t a cell. Maybe it’s a tomb.

Half-drugged, he struggles to his feet and sways unsteadily. He paws at the walls. There’s no way out. His father had written about people being buried inside a Sanctuary. This could be it. He has been walled up in the Sanctuary and left to die.

He feels anxiety climb his chest. There can’t be much air in this place. It can’t last long. He picks up a candle and extinguishes the others. No point burning precious oxygen. Standing with the single light burning out, he reasons that they’re not going to leave him here to die. He told Smithsen that he’d taken precautions, a planned delivery to the police of damning documents, unless he was free to call it off.

The candle burns out.

His heartbeat rises and his hopes fade. Surely they’re going to have to come to him, find out what he knows, how much he can hurt them.

There is a guttural rumbling of stone. Narrow slits of light appear in the middle of two opposite walls. Hooded, robed figures flood the small room. Gideon doesn’t fight as they overwhelm him, cuff his wrists and drag him through an exit. No hood or blindfold this time. Something has changed.

The corridor they’re leading him down is long and winding. Gradually the lighting on the walls becomes more ornate. It even starts to feel warmer. He’s flanked by two men. The one on his right pulls an iron ring sunk into a wall. Hidden pulleys go to work. A section of stone slides noisily back. They push him into a chamber.

The stranger he saw in the mist at Stonehenge sits in a hooded brown robe behind a circular table made of honey-coloured stone. ‘Sit down, Gideon.’ He waves a hand to the seating opposite him.

Gideon lowers himself on to a crescent of cold stone. His eyes never leave the robed figure in front of him.

‘You don’t recognise me, do you?’

‘I saw you at the henge.’

The Master smiles. ‘I met you several times before, when you were a child. Your father and I were friends.’

Gideon is surprised. ‘Then you know what he went through. What happened to my mother and what he had to do to save me.’

‘Indeed, I do.’ He studies Gideon. ‘You have clearly learned much, presumably from your father’s journals. But do you actually understand what you have been reading?’

‘I think so.’

‘So tell me.’

‘You are the Henge Master, the spiritual leader of the Followers of the Sacreds. My father was a senior and trusted member of your Inner Circle. You, he and many others give your lives to the protection of the Sacreds and the renewal of their energy.’

The Master cracks a thin smile.‘Not quite right. But close.’ He’s keen to learn how much more Nathaniel’s boy knows. ‘Do you have any idea how the spiritual energy of the Sacreds is sustained?’

‘Human sacrifice. Offerings made before and after both the summer and winter solstice. At specific moon phases. My father described them as necessary for the restoration of celestial and earthly balance.’

The Master looks impressed. ‘You are a good scholar. But there is a big difference between theory and practice.’ He folds his robed arms. ‘You sought us out, Gideon. What is it that you want?’

‘Acceptance. My mother and father are dead. You are my family. I am already a child of the Sacreds, you know how my father baptised me as a child.’

The Master nods. ‘Indeed. He bathed you in waters from the Sacreds and asked them to protect you from the disease that had killed your mother. He promised them his own life if they afforded you a long and healthy one.’

Gideon’s eyes well up. Once more Nathaniel’s words come back to him: ‘I will willingly give my own blood, my own life. I only hope it is worthy. Worthy enough to change things. To alter the fate that I know awaits my poor, motherless son.

The Master rises from behind the table and walks the chamber. ‘The Sacreds are not monsters. They do not demand arbitrary human sacrifice. It is a fundamental matter of give and take, part of the cycle of life and death. In return for protecting your life, Nathaniel promised them his own. He undertook to become a sacrifice.’

Gideon’s mind goes blank. ‘The suicide?’

‘No. That wasn’t an offering. That was a selfish act of desperation. He wanted to stop the Inner Circle following a course that he didn’t agree with.’

‘What course?’

The Master exhales wearily. ‘Your father made great studies and believed that the unalterable doctrine of the Craft was that those who received the gifts of the Sacreds were the chosen ones, the ones who should be sacrificed. He contested that anyone who had drawn from the divine well and prospered should in their later years pay the divine price. The Inner Circle disagreed. They believed that this ancient practice needed to evolve. That the Sacreds should pick their own sacrifices.’

‘How so?’

‘Easily.’ The Master opens his arms in a relaxed gesture. ‘People are drawn to them. The Lookers — the men who took you from the henge — they wait and watch. When someone is compelled to touch a specific Sacred, one that is in ascendancy in the sidereal zodiac, then they identify themselves as the correct human sacrifice.’

The Master sits on the stone bench next to Gideon. What he wants to say next will unnerve the boy, possibly shake him to his core. ‘The Craft is a democratic body. We follow rules laid down centuries ago. However, the interpretation of those rules is the right and duty of each successive Master and his Inner Circle. When your father took his decision to oppose the Circle’s views on sacrifices, he as good as sealed his own fate.’

Gideon looks lost. ‘I don’t understand. Why was my father’s opinion so important compared with everyone else’s?’

The Master sees that Nathaniel hadn’t told the boy everything. ‘Because, Gideon, when the matter was put to the vote, I wasn’t the Henge Master. He was.’

102

Caitlyn’s screams pierce the foot-thick stone like a high-speed drill. She can’t take any more. The blackness, the stillness, it’s driving her insane. She hammers her fists, knees and head against the rough walls of the vertical tomb.

The two Lookers guarding her rush to the detention crevice. They can’t let her harm herself. She mustn’t die before the chosen time. They trigger the release locks and Caitlyn tumbles out and crashes painfully on to her knees. Her body is a patchwork of cuts and her long black hair is matted with sweat and blood. She snarls and kicks out at them. ‘Get off me. You fucking bastards, let me go.’

The Lookers pin her down on her back. Her face is covered in blood and her manicured hands are cut to ribbons. Her forehead shows several deep gashes where she has crashed her skull against the stones. The men exchange glances. She has gone berserk in there. Thrashed around in some kind of deranged fit and tried to kill herself.

Caitlyn wants to end this nightmare now. Even if it means dying, she wants it to stop. But gradually she calms down. Her mind takes control again and the wild animal inside her is quieted. The men keep pressing her down on the cold stone floor. One is astride her, kneeling on her arms, pinning her wrists. The other is knelt across her ankles. Only now as the bloodrush subsides does it hit her.

They are amateurs.

She has seen Eric and his team carry out restraint techniques. They never do it like this. A twist of a wrist is enough to incapacitate anyone, if you know how. A finger dug into a nerve point can stop a heavyweight boxer, if you know how. These guys don’t. They are completely without ‘know how’. They’re making it up as they go along.

Caitlyn stares into the eyes of the hooded man pressing down on her. ‘Okay. I’m okay now.’

He eases himself off her arms. Stands over her. Wary and ready to pin her down again. ‘We need to take a look at her head wound,’ he says to the younger man.

They help her to her feet and are about to cuff her wrists when Caitlyn pulls her hands away. She drives a knee hard into the groin of the man in front of her. The second Looker grabs her from behind. She leans into him. Uses her body weight to knock him off balance then runs him into the wall behind them. As he hits the stone, she crashes her head up, making sure the back of her skull does maximum damage to his face. It’s a sickening blow. He loses hold and slumps down behind her. His nose is broken.

Caitlyn stands unrestrained in the torch-lit corridor of the Sanctuary.

103

Gideon is filled with a dizzying emptiness. The revelation that his father was once the Henge Master leaves him drained. This is not what he expected to discover. He’d sought the truth. Needed a reason for his father’s suicide. Someone to blame. He hadn’t been prepared for this.

The Henge Master is not concerned with Gideon’s feelings. He merely wants to learn how much Gideon knows, how dangerous a threat he represents. ‘Do you have any idea what this place is? Where we are?’

‘The Sanctuary.’ His voice is flat. His thoughts elsewhere.

‘And do you know its location?’

It’s a tougher question. One that drags Gideon out of his state of shock. ‘My father wrote only about the nature of the Sanctuary, not its location. That said, I haven’t decoded all of his journals. I am sure there will be passages where he gets more specific.’

The Master tries to read the boy’s eyes. It is possible that Nathaniel kept the location secret. It is also believable that his son knows it and understands that to reveal it would be dangerous. ‘You are well informed for an outsider. For a non-initiate.’ He clasps his hands. ‘And that presents us with a problem. What are we to do with you?’

Gideon moves closer to him. ‘Let me be part of things. Let me join you. I don’t know what else I am to do. Given the loss of my father. His vow. I am to be irrevocably linked with the Sacreds whatever happens.’

‘Should we even want to admit you to the Craft, I’m not sure you are ready. Initiation is a searching ceremony. It involves total trust between the Henge Master and the initiate. Trust is all the supplicant has to hold on to as his blood is shed. The pain is excruciating, unimaginable.’

Gideon hangs his head. ‘It is what I want.’

The Master puts a hand beneath Gideon’s chin, raises his face and looks into his eyes. ‘Who is to say you wouldn’t continue your father’s opposition from within our ranks?’

Gideon becomes animated. ‘I don’t wish you or the Followers harm. I want to be welcomed into the fold. Just as my father once was. I want my life to be lived to the full, under the blessing of the Sacreds. I don’t want it to be cursed with sickness. And I certainly don’t want to spend the rest of my years fearful that I may be attacked or have my home set ablaze.’

The Master can see there is good reason why Gideon should be motivated to embrace the Craft. And killing him poses the risk of their existence being made public. The Craft would be exposed and the ritual of renewal interrupted. He paces. ‘There is a way for you to demonstrate your loyalty, your commitment. If you were to fulfil it, I would personally vouch for your trustworthiness And the initiation would begin tonight.’

‘What is it?’

‘Your father’s books. Deliver them to us and you may become one of us.’

Gideon shakes his head. ‘I know what the initiation involves. I am willing to let you put a knife to my flesh and a hammer to my bones. Isn’t that enough?’

‘No. The books are the knife you hold to our flesh and your threats the hammer you raise above our bones.’

Gideon thinks of a way to break the stalemate. ‘I will give you a quarter of the books before my initiation and I will make the phone call that will ensure nothing is delivered to the police. After my initiation, I will give you another quarter of them. A year from now I will surrender another 25 per cent.’

‘That is only 75 per cent. When will we receive the final instalment?’

‘Perhaps never.’ Gideon smiles. ‘Or when I have learned enough of the Craft to please you. When you are ready for me to take over as Master.’

104

Caitlyn runs for her life. Sprints as fast as her bare feet can manage. She reaches the end of a short, dark passageway. It goes left and right. She chooses right. Barrels down the corridor, thankful for the looseness of the rough gown she’s wearing.

She’s fast. Gym sessions every day. Five kilometres on the treadmill. Five on the elliptical trainer. Now she is glad of every workout. They injured her, starved her and scared her, but she’s still strong and fit.

The passage curves and disappears into a dark haze. With any luck she’s following an outer wall. Outer walls mean exit doors. She glances over her shoulder. No sign of the men. The place is bigger than she imagined. Much bigger. The stones beneath her flying feet are inscribed with something. It looks like someone chiselled writing on to them. Gravestones. Caitlyn realises she’s running on graves. Her heartbeat kicks up another notch. She looks up and realises something else. The passage is circular.

Dead ahead are the two hooded men she fought off.

Only now there are more of them. Many more. All waiting for her.