Unholy Rites (16 page)

Maybe it wasn't so surprising that he was thinking of Timothy and his fate. After all, the boy had died in a millpond amidst well dressing panels.

“Finding any bodies down there?”

Arthur looked up, startled. Danutia gazed down at him from the top of the bank.

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” she said.

“Surprised, that's all. It's been almost two weeks since I saw you last. We haven't even talked since the day after the accident.” He couldn't quite keep his sense of grievance out of his voice.

“I was ill,” Danutia said defensively. “And then I couldn't reach you. The bartender at the Reward said you'd gone to Manchester.”

Arthur slowly made his way up the bank towards her. His ankle still ached, and he didn't want to risk falling. “Never mind,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

“I dropped by Well Cottage on my way back from Bakewell and ran into Liz Hazelhurst. She told me about the clay digging, and gave me directions. I need to talk to you about a couple of things.” She paused to give him a once-over. “I was planning to buy you lunch, but you look like you've been rolling in mud. There's even some in your hair.”

Arthur put a hand to his head and realized he shouldn't have. His hands and arms were coated with yellowish clay, not to mention his gardening khakis and polo shirt. “I look like I've been rolling in something nasty. Not fit for polite company, I'm afraid.”

Clough spoke up from farther down the bank. “You've put in a good morning's work, Arthur. You might as well knock off. We'll be finished soon anyway. You can wash up at the Garden Centre. Just tell the shop assistant you're working with me and ask for the key to the employees' change room.”

As they crossed the field towards the Garden Centre, Danutia explained about the brake line.

“The line was cut?” Arthur exclaimed. “Who would cut your brake line? And why?”

“Good questions,” Danutia said. “At the moment we can't answer them. No fingerprints on the undercarriage, though there were some tiny scraps of material that haven't been identified yet. As to the why, it could be random vandalism, though that seems unlikely. Cutting a brake line is much more extreme than running a knife blade along a side panel or puncturing a tire. If the sheep hadn't been there, I'd have been a lot farther down the hill, and going a lot faster, before I tried to brake. You can imagine what might have happened next.”

Arthur could. Flying off a curve and the car tumbling over and over when it landed. Or failing to stop at the main road and plowing into a passing vehicle. “So it was most likely deliberate. Someone who wants one or both of us out of the picture.”

“I was sure it was Eric,” Danutia said. “I thought he was taking revenge because of some official dealings with him that I can't talk about. He knew where the car was and that we'd be away for a while, and then he disappeared when he should have been directing traffic. But Kevin had Eric's clothes tested. The fibres don't match.”

Troubled by what he'd just heard, Arthur left Danutia to poke about the Garden Centre while he retrieved his clean clothes from Clough's van and had a wash. When they reached Danutia's rental car, this one silver instead of dark green, he buckled up without protest. On the way to the country pub Clough had recommended, he chatted halfheartedly about the call from Brad that had taken him to Manchester, his mind preoccupied with the thought of someone trying to do them serious harm.

Danutia turned off at the sign for Beeley, a tiny village of honey-colored sandstone with a brook running beside the road. The Devonshire Arms, a solid two-storey rectangle with an arched stone entryway, was built of the same sandstone.

“There's a Devonshire Arms in a lot of the villages round about,” Arthur said as they drew up in front. “They all belong to the Duke of Devonshire, the owner of Chatsworth. In some places, he owns the whole village. Can you imagine?”

Inside, while they waited to be seated, Arthur pointed out a framed poster proclaiming that Dickens had been a visitor during the pub's days as a coaching inn. “Some people say that
Oliver Twist
was partly inspired by apprentices' stories about places like Monsal Mill.”

“I've seen
Oliver
,” Danutia said. “I expect the novel is even bleaker. It's an early depiction of what happens to children without caring adults in their lives, isn't it?”

Arthur thumped the poster. “It's more than that. Like a lot of Dickens's novels, it's an indictment of a society that fails to protect the poor and weak. Now he's become a poster boy for tourists.”

Their host arrived, a florid-faced man with a stomach bulging against the buttons of his dark suit. When he suggested that they would be most comfortable in the public bar, Danutia dug in her heels and insisted he find them a table on the patio.

Once the waitress had taken their orders, Danutia got down to business. “If Eric didn't cut the brake line, I don't think I was the target,” she said. “Which means you were, Arthur. There must be some connection to your mother and the problem she wanted to consult me about. You said you thought someone had been in your house while we were out walking—”

“Someone was in the cottage, for sure. The place looks a mess, so whoever searched wasn't too careful to put things back where he—or she—found them. It wasn't just my notes that were moved. For the next few days I kept finding other things slightly out of place. I tried to call you, but your imbecile of a landlord insisted you were away.”

“I told you, I was ill.”

Arthur choked back a retort as their waitress came out carrying their drinks and ploughman's lunches, each large enough to feed the ploughman and a couple of his close relations too.

They ate in silence for a few minutes, Danutia barely picking at her food.

Arthur speared half a pickled onion and tried again. “Let me tell you what I've discovered, then maybe we can work out how everything is connected.”

Danutia laid down her fork. “Okay, tell me.”

Arthur busied himself with cheese and Branston pickle. “I have to confess you turned me off with your pushy comments about looking at Mum's scrapbooks. But until my ankle improved, there wasn't much else to do. One night I was thumbing through a volume and there was the answer. Five pages devoted to a 1991 Manchester Museum exhibition on Lindow Man. I knew when I saw the brochure—”

“Just a minute, Arthur. You're going too fast. What's the Lindow Man?”

He held up his hand. “I'm coming to that. I didn't know either. The Lindow Man is an ancient body found in a peat bog called Lindow Marsh near Wilmslow, a town just south of Manchester. Bog bodies have been found in many places in Europe, but this is one of the best preserved. It's the tannin in the peat that does it, like tanning leather. What's special about Lindow Man is that his body shows clear signs of ritual sacrifice.” His hands moved as he described the grisly details. “He had been felled by a savage blow to the head, garrotted with a plaited rope, and his throat had been cut. These are clear signs of a ritual killing known in Celtic lore as the ‘triple death.' After the pages on the exhibition, she's written long notes on books she's read about the Celts. Almost always she mentions the triple death.”

Danutia had given up any pretence of eating, and was looking at him with troubled eyes. “Blunt trauma, strangulation, knife wound. Where are you going with this?”

Arthur drained his Boddingtons. “While I was in Manchester, I went to see the curator of the museum. It seems the Celts believed that if a person was put to death in multiple ways, his soul would travel to the Underworld faster, and would be able to return with wisdom for the tribe faster too. Lindow Man was sacrificed by the three most common means, but sometimes drowning might replace one of the others.”

As he said the words, a startling possibility emerged. Drowning. Timothy Roberts. A head wound. A rope around his neck. And drowned. Again images of the young boy's death flashed through his mind. Only this time, another figure stood there in the darkness. Slowly he spoke. “This morning when I was digging clay, I found myself obsessed with the details of Timothy Roberts's death, and I couldn't think why.”

Danutia leaned forward. “And now you know.” Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if she had an inkling of what was coming.

“Think of it, Danutia. A young boy apparently hits his head on a submerged rock, then somehow strangles himself, which seems freakish, and drowns. It's an odd accident, but there's nothing to suggest it isn't an accident. Except to an old woman with a special interest in the boy's fate, who years later reads about the Celtic ‘triple death' at an exhibition in Manchester.”

“That's why she wanted to talk to me,” Danutia said quietly, almost to herself. “She was convinced the boy had been murdered, and went looking for evidence.”

“Nothing suggests she found it. She must have known that, without evidence, people would just dismiss her suspicion as a crazy idea, as you're probably doing right now.”

“But if she was right . . .” Danutia left the sentence hanging.

“Then a killer has never been brought to justice.”

Danutia didn't respond, and Arthur followed her gaze, beyond the houses to the fields with their lines of dry stone walls making odd rectangles and enclosures. Like a map of the English counties, Arthur thought, a familiar and ordered landscape, something reassuring to hold onto.

Danutia's next remark blew his tenuous sense of order to smithereens. “The killing hasn't stopped,” she said. “First your mother, and now the attack on you.”

Outside their garden nook, car doors slammed and women began talking animatedly. Soon two young mothers with their infants and baby carriages erupted into the quiet garden. No more talk about murder here.

Arthur stood up, expecting Danutia to do the same. She remained in her chair, watching the sleeping babies with rapt attention until one woke and began to cry. Then she rose and followed him inside without a word. Arthur felt deflated. If she was so easily distracted, she must not take his discoveries seriously after all.

As they emerged from the pub, Hugh Clough drove up in his van.

“We've knocked off,” he said to Arthur through the open window. “I can give you a ride back, if you need it. We'll have to drop off the clay and the frames anyway.” He gestured towards the flatbed truck that had pulled in beside the van.

Arthur turned to Danutia. “It would save you the bother. But didn't you say you had two things to talk about?”

Danutia looked down at the pavement, an angle that emphasized her pallor and thin cheeks. There was something else different about her as well. Had she lost weight during her illness? Or was it just that she'd given up wool slacks and heavy sweaters because of the warmer weather?

“The other thing can wait,” she said, walking around to her car door. “I have plenty to think about, and so do you.”

Something's bothering her, Arthur thought as he clambered into Clough's van. And it isn't just the fact that someone out there wants to kill me.

She was pregnant all right.

As she drove to Ripley for her afternoon workshop, Danutia contemplated the news she hadn't shared with Arthur. “Five weeks, more or less,” Gloria's doctor had confirmed this morning, as though Danutia couldn't work that out for herself. Pinpointing the date of conception was no problem. The problem was what to do about it.

She was glad now that she hadn't blurted out her news to Arthur. He might have thought she was making a claim on him, or giving him a say in the matter. She needed time to decide what was right for herself.

The simplest thing would be to have an abortion. Yet that was not a path she could choose as easily as some women seemed to do. She no longer attended either her mother's Baptist church, which had held sway for most of the year, or her father's Greek Orthodox church, which had prevailed at Christmas and Easter. Her work had loosened the conservative views she'd once taken for granted, while awakening her compassion for women caught up in circumstances over which they often had little control. She'd worked with teenagers pregnant as a result of rape or incest. Whether they'd had abortions, given up their babies at birth, or kept them, some had rebuilt their lives; others had been lost to drink, drugs, or suicide, and the child with them. Older women sometimes had more resources, but often they too were struggling: with addictions, with abusive partners, with physical or emotional problems, with demanding careers that left little time for the nurturing a child needed. She no longer felt it was her place to judge what was in the best interests of the mother, or the child.

She couldn't even decide what was in her best interests, or those of the child she was carrying. Did she want a child? Yes. Did she want
this
child, now? A child fathered by Arthur Fairweather, whether or not he was in the picture?

She needed a long talk with her sister. Not because Alyne was a psychotherapist, but because no one knew her better. Alyne would listen, ask the right questions, and support whatever decision Danutia came to.

Nearing Bakewell, she put aside her concerns to focus on her driving. The A6 narrowed, buildings crowded in, pedestrians darted across the road. She flung herself into the roundabout by the gardens and was flung out again on the other side. Once beyond the town she caught glimpses of the Wye, hurrying towards its junction with the Derwent at Rowsley.

Rowsley. That's the village where Timothy Roberts had died. Correction: where Timothy Roberts had been murdered, if she accepted Arthur's interpretation of his mother's scrapbooks. Seeing the sign for the mill, she wondered whether it had a history of violence like Monsal Mill.

Half an hour later she turned into the spacious grounds of Butterley Hall, once home to a local industrialist, now headquarters of the Derbyshire Constabulary. Passing by the stately building with its rows of chimney pots and dormer windows, she parked near an old outbuilding refurbished as a classroom and hurried inside, snatches of Arthur's comments on ritual sacrifice still echoing in her head.