The Sacrifice Stone (12 page)

‘
I
don’t,’ Adam murmured.

‘No, I’m sure most other men don’t either.’ She smiled indulgently. ‘Poor old Father. It’s sad, really.’

‘Sad for you, that you’ve had to suffer his extreme chauvinism.’

She looked at him, considering. ‘I did suffer,’ she said quietly. ‘I hated him, couldn’t see that he had any love for me whatsoever. But now — oh, I don’t know. Perhaps I’m getting wiser as I get older, but I can see that, in his way, he was trying to do what he thought was best for me. Even if he was wrong!’

‘What’s this job in the laboratory? What sort of lab is it?’

She was grateful to have something else to think about. ‘Pathology. I was a secretary first — I went there as a temp — and all I did was filing, a bit of typing and a lot of tea-making. You wouldn’t think people would come from analysing cervical smears and mucus samples and instantly down a cup of tea and a couple of biscuits — well, I didn’t when I started — but they do.’

‘Then you decided what was going on in the lab was more interesting than filing?’

‘Exactly. I was lucky, the head of the lab encouraged me — I thought it was a hopeless dream, wanting to be a professional scientist, but gradually I began to believe I could do it.’

‘You must be very grateful to him.’ Just like Father all those years ago, she protested silently, assuming my science teacher had to be a woman! But, unlike her father, Adam added, ‘Or her.’

‘It was her. I’m sure that was why she never let me get discouraged, because she too was a woman battling in what’s seen as a man’s world.’

‘There you were, then, with your A levels and your permanent post, and —’

‘I got a degree, too,’ she said diffidently: it still went against the grain to make any remark that could sound as if you were patting yourself on the back. ‘With the Open University.’

He stared at her. ‘This is going to sound like a patronizing male remark, but I have to say you don’t look old enough to have left school at, what, sixteen, spent ten years as a secretary, then done A levels and a degree.’

‘I’ve only just got my degree,’ she said. Let him work it out, she thought, I’m not going to tell him!

‘I really admire determination,’ he said. ‘Not to mention hard work. So, what’s the next step? What does having a degree mean?’

‘Dr Amery’s a specialist in forensic science, and she’s been training me in —’

There was the sound of a key in the front door.

She looked at Adam. ‘There’s Joe!’

He seemed to be having a problem getting his key in the lock, and she jumped up to go and open the door. ‘Hello, Joe, we came back and —’

It wasn’t Joe. On the step, pushing back long, tangled brown hair to get a better look at the lock, was a girl in jeans and a T-shirt that said ‘Red Hot Chili Peppers’.

Beth said lamely, ‘Are you sure you’ve got the right house?’

Then she saw Joe’s key-ring in the girl’s hand.

The girl pushed past her into the hall. Past Adam, too, who was standing in the workroom doorway.

‘Hi,’ she said laconically. ‘Joe sent me to get a bottle — he said it’s in the cupboard behind his desk. This his desk?’ Beth nodded. ‘Must be in here, then.’ She opened the front of the low dresser standing against the wall.

‘Make yourself at home,’ Beth said, too amazed to try to work out what was happening. The girl didn’t respond.

‘I’ll only take the brandy,’ the girl said, ‘he didn’t say to fetch anything else.’

‘The other bottles don’t belong to us,’ Beth said severely. ‘You mustn’t take them.’

‘I said I wasn’t going to, didn’t I?’ She sounded surly.

‘Where
is
Joe?’ Beth burst out. ‘What does he think he’s doing, sending some stranger round to raid the drinks cabinet?’ She went up to the girl. ‘And who the hell are you?’

Maddeningly the girl nodded, as if a long-held suspicion had just been proved correct. ‘He said you was touchy. But he said you wouldn’t be here so it’d be okay to come. Never mind, eh? Nice meeting you. And your mate.’ She smiled at Adam, edging her way towards the front door.

‘Just a minute! When’s he coming back? What about —’

‘He’s not coming back, not tonight.’ The girl was at the top of the steps, poised to leap off down them. ‘It’s an all-night party, and if him and me get tired, we’ll kip on the floor. I’ve got my sleeping bag.’ She grinned, looking suddenly lovely. ‘Plenty of room for both of us, it’s a double! Cheerio!’

Slowly closing the door, Beth leaned against it. Catching Adam’s eyes on her, his expression suggesting he didn’t know whether to sympathize or burst out laughing, she couldn’t think of one single thing to say.

After a moment Adam said, perfectly mimicking the girl’s diction, ‘ “If he gets tired, he can get in my sleeping bag and get his leg over.” ’

The shock receding, she started to laugh. As the ups and downs of the whole long day caught up with her, her knees went weak and, still leaning against the door, she sank down to sit on the floor.

‘Sorry,’ Adam said, ‘that was uncalled for.’ He went back into the workroom. ‘I’m going to have a look in your drinks cupboard. If there’s anything as decent as that brandy she’s just walked off with, I think we’ll both have a drink.’

12

As Adam ushered her to the sofa next to Joe’s desk, she said, ‘I didn’t know he had a girlfriend! I didn’t think he’d
ever
had one!’

Adam, still clearly struggling with laughter, said, ‘Are we using “had” in its colloquial sense?’

‘You’re not helping!’

‘No, sorry.’

‘I can’t get over it! Just can’t believe it.’ She took a large mouthful of whatever it was Adam had found in the cupboard — it was quite nice, tasting vaguely of apples — to see if it would aid credibility.

‘She seemed all right,’ Adam remarked. ‘Pretty, in a gamine way. Nice hair, and long legs.’

‘Quite.’ She wasn’t sure she wanted him to go on. ‘Do you think they know each other at home? Why didn’t he tell me she’d be here? I wouldn’t have minded, she could have done his note-making for him.’

‘He’s probably well aware you’d do it better.’

She looked at him. ‘Thank you.’

‘He might have picked her up here in Arles,’ Adam suggested. ‘Why are you laughing?’

She had some more of the apple-tasting drink. ‘Because that’s exactly what he accused me of. When you and I met at the Alyscamps cemetery, he said I couldn’t be away for five minutes without picking someone up.’

‘Rather hypocritical of him, under the circumstances.’

‘That’s my brother for you.’

They lapsed into silence. Adam topped up her glass — it was only a small one — and absently she sipped from it.

After a while he said, ‘This previously unsuspected side of Joe’s nature might have its advantages for you, you know.’

‘Yes? How come?’

‘Well, for one thing, once he knows you know about his girlfriend and her double sleeping bag, he can’t go on lecturing you from his position on the moral high ground.’

You don’t know Joe, she thought.

‘For another, that pretty little girl may well make him more human. She would me,’ he added.

‘Hmm. It’s always possible, I suppose.’ The concept of a new, laid-back Joe who laughed a bit more and wasn’t constantly carping at other people for having jobs unsuitable for girls, swearing, and simply having fun, was something she was having trouble with. ‘She’s not what I’d have thought of as the type he’d choose,’ she reflected.

‘No pebble glasses and tweed skirt? Now you’re stereotyping people, too.’

‘Too?’

‘Like your dad. “Girls can’t be scientists”.’

He was right. She giggled. ‘I’m the scientist. I ought to wear tweed and glasses.’

She drained her glass and looked round to see if the bottle was handy. ‘I’ve put it away,’ he said.

‘Why? I was enjoying it.’

‘I imagine you were, it was thirty-year-old Calvados. But it’s also about 40 per cent proof, which is why it’s back in the cupboard. Even if you only have to crawl off to bed, I shall have to drive home, eventually.’

‘Not to Northumberland?’

‘No, only across town for now.’

‘I could have had some more,’ she said wistfully.

‘It’s bad for you, drinking alone. Shall we have some coffee?’

‘All right,’ She got up, wobbled a bit, then went with him into the kitchen. ‘Shall I do it?’

‘No need. Just show me where things are.’

She waved vaguely at the cupboard above the fridge, then propped herself against the worktop. ‘Suddenly I feel very tired.’

‘I’m not surprised. It’s been a long day.’

The great British gift for understatement, she thought. Perhaps it gets more pronounced the further north you go. Northumberland. I remembered about him living by Hadrian’s Wall when I read about — what was it? Yes, the temple.

‘There’s a temple of Mithras on Hadrian’s Wall.’

He dropped a cup.

‘Oh, dear, there goes one of whatsit’s auntie’s mugs.’ She bent to help him pick up the pieces.

‘Don’t cut yourself,’ he said. ‘Sorry about that.’

‘Don’t worry, we’ll replace it when we replace her thirty-year-old Calvados.’ I was saying something — what was it? Yes, Mithras. ‘Do you know it? The temple? I saw a picture of it in Joe’s book — actually there’s nothing much to see but there’s an artist’s impression of what it looked like in its heyday. Shall I show you?’

He had his back to her, stirring boiling water into the coffee cups. ‘No need. I know it.’

‘I expect there are lots of Roman bits along Hadrian’s Wall,’ she said as they took their coffee back to the sofa. ‘Old forts, swords, coins. That sort of thing.’

‘Yes. There are some fine exhibits in the museums.’

‘I wasn’t thinking of them.’ Eyes closed, she was seeing a long wall winding away over hill and dale into the misty distance. A man was striding along the top, his heavy cloak billowing in the fierce wind. ‘I was thinking of all the things there must be buried deep in the ground that nobody will ever find.’

The silence extended for so long that she thought he must have dropped off — she was nearly asleep herself. Opening her eyes, she turned to see. He was awake, staring at the opposite wall as if some fascinating film were being projected on to it.

‘Adam? All right?’

He didn’t speak at first but reached to take her hand. Holding it tightly, she heard him sigh. ‘Adam?’

‘I’ve got a confession to make.’

‘Good grief! Whatever is it?’ She spoke lightly, but the shiver that his words sent through her had been unmistakable.

‘I really don’t know where to start.’ He sighed again, withdrawing his hand. ‘I’ve misled you — I’m not here to research a film.’

‘No? You’re not a film-maker?’

‘Yes, that bit was true, as was the claim to be doing one on the gipsy routes. I
am
going to, but something’s got in the way.’

‘Go on.’

‘Researching into the
gitans
and their songs and legends is, as it happens, a very convenient cover — I very much needed to come down to Arles, to the Camargue, and to say I was coming to research a film — one I’d already announced I was going to work on — provided me with an excuse. I have actually done some work, as you well know.’ He glanced at her.

‘Thank God those twenty-five verses weren’t all for nothing,’ she said fervently.

‘No, they weren’t. It’s funny, really — I’d had the idea for the gipsy film before — before this other thing. Sometimes I think it was all meant to be, that Fate, as they say, has been taking a hand. I just can’t turn my back on it, and I’ve tried, believe me — it’s illogical and probably a complete waste of time, but I think I’m hooked.’

‘You’re not explaining very well. Could you try a bit harder?’

‘I can, but I may not succeed.’ He stopped, clearly thinking. ‘Beth, do you know anything about spiritualism?’

‘Not much. Séances, do you mean?’

‘Yes, in that séances are one way in which people in this world try to get in touch with the spirit world.’

‘You believe in all that?’ Somehow she was surprised.

‘I do and I don’t. I don’t because my logical mind finds it hard, if not impossible, to accept that we in this life have a mental pathway through which we can contact the dead. Or, more accurately perhaps, through which they can contact us. I do because ...’ he hesitated, then said, ‘because I think someone has got in touch with me.’

The man in the toga hovered in her mind’s eye, wavered, disappeared. ‘Oh, yes?’ Her voice was barely audible.

‘I went with a friend to sit in a spiritualist circle.’ He spoke firmly, as if, having at last made up his mind to tell her, he wanted her to get an accurate picture. ‘I enjoyed it — I found it most stimulating. Somehow the deeply relaxed state you get into makes access to the unconscious much easier, at least it did for me, and I started going regularly. I’d been seeing the same two images again and again, almost since I began going — a lion, and something that looked like a thunderbolt symbol — and then one day I experienced what some of the others had said happened to them. I’d been hoping it would, and it did.’

‘What was it?’ She almost prayed he wouldn’t tell her: she had a strange urge to get up and put all the lights on.

‘I saw someone. I was sitting there with my eyes shut, involved in some long and fascinating thought process to do with my mother’s rose garden, and suddenly someone was beside me. I always sat at one end of a long couch — we met in a member of the group’s living room — and this figure was standing on my right.’

‘Someone could have walked into the room.’

‘Beth, it’s not like that. You’d know if they did, and anyway we usually sat with the door locked. No, this man just appeared.’

‘I thought you said you had your eyes shut.’

‘Yes. Which is why I believe it must have been an apparition: I could see him with my eyes open or closed.’

She tried to imagine what it would have been like, and failed. ‘What — what sort of a man was he? Was he — did he frighten you?’

‘Not in the least. He was just a presence at first — I could hear him breathing. He gave out reassurance — it was almost as if he wanted to make quite sure I
wasn’t
afraid, probably because if I had been, I’d have panicked and the channel would have closed.’

‘What did you do?’

‘I just sat there, experiencing him — I can’t think of a better word. Gradually I started seeing pictures — Hadrian’s Wall, the legionary fort at York, a legion marching, the eagle standard flying above their heads. And, just as before, the lion and the thunderbolt symbol.’

‘Was it like in the films, the marching and the fort?’

‘Nothing like that, if you’re thinking of some Hollywood epic. This was Roman Britain without the glamour — you could almost feel the chilblains prickling.’

‘Was he making you see those things?’

‘Who can say? Yes, I think so, but, although I’d never seen them quite in that way before, they were all scenes and places I knew.’

‘The legionary fort in York doesn’t exist any more.’

‘No, but I’ve seen diagrams. Reconstructions. I wouldn’t put it past my imagination to make a reasonably convincing image.’

‘I’m not pouring scorn on what you’re saying,’ she said quietly.

‘I know. Believe me, you’re not making any objections I haven’t already made myself.’

‘What did he do next, this man?’

‘I started to notice that the same figure appeared in all the scenes. He was a soldier — sometimes he looked young, as if he’d only just been recruited, and sometimes he was more mature. Once I saw him with a child, a boy, and a bored-looking woman in a long gown. And in all the visions, wherever they were, this man was there, so I guessed it must be him. The apparition. And, for some reason, he was linked to those two recurrent symbols.’

‘I don’t see what he has to do with you coming to Provence.’

‘You will. Over successive meetings, he widened the range of what he showed me. It was almost as if the early pictures had been to establish a link between us — one of the places he showed me on the wall, for example, has been a favourite spot of mine since childhood.’

‘Perhaps he saw you there. Perhaps he’d been waiting all that time to get through to you.’

He turned to her, eyes alight. ‘That’s just how it seemed to me! I tested it out — one winter evening I went to the place and stood on the wall in the rain to see what would happen. He came. Stood beside me so that we looked out over the rolling moors side by side, like two centurions planning an advance. Then he went away.’

‘All right then, bona fides established, what did he do next?’

‘I started to see other places, and again, he was there. I saw Provencal scenes — the amphitheatre here in Arles, what looked like the old Roman forum, a country house with cypress trees round it and a mosaic of a dolphin on the floor. And the Camargue.’ He broke off.

‘You saw that place on the poster,’ she supplied for him. ‘That’s why it spooked you so much — your man had put it into your head, hadn’t he?’

Adam nodded. ‘Yes. It was one of the images he gave me at the last meeting before I came away. He kept showing it — if my mind stopped concentrating on it, he brought me back. Those three reed-thatched buildings, the tamarisks and the ditch are etched on my brain as if they’d been tattooed.’

‘Why are they so important?’

‘I’ve no idea. But I always associated them with suffering, with pain and deep unhappiness. Actually going there was — well, rather a trial.’

Not just for you, she thought. ‘Has he shown you anywhere else with the same insistence?’

‘One other place. But I can’t talk about it.’

He spoke calmly, but she knew better than to try to make him: poor man, she thought, he’s suffering enough as it is.

‘Why do you think he’s opened this channel to you — is that the right expression?’

‘Yes, it explains it perfectly. I’m not sure, but I’m beginning to suspect he wants me to do something for him.’

‘And will you?’

‘I’ll decide that once I know what it is. But, although I can imagine there might be danger involved — and please don’t ask me to explain that, either — I honestly don’t believe it would be anything evil. He’s just not that sort of a man. He’s a good man.’