Unholy Rites (28 page)

“That's Sheepwash Bridge, isn't it?” he asked. “Where ewes were dunked in the river for washing? Two or three drowned every year, as I remember.”

“That's sheep for you, Arthur,” said Dr. Geoff. “Life's dangerous if you're a sheep.”

The van bumped down the driveway towards a large garage. As his eyes fluttered closed, Arthur caught a glimpse of a tiny stone house with a leering gargoyle. Then he was falling down the rabbit hole . . . 

Danutia watched Arthur stride
off, his back straight, his fists clenched. Bright sunlight bounced off his coppery curls, making a halo. She didn't usually think of Arthur as angelic, but she found herself moved by the depth of feeling in his voice when he talked about the missing boy. He sounded like a father, she thought, and the thought surprised her.

She heard a shout behind her. Kevin had burst out of the building, his arms waving.

“Glad I caught you,” he said, huffing. “Eric's turned up at a Salford police station—that's Greater Manchester. I'm off to pick him up. Want to come along?”

“What are we waiting for?” Her spirits lifting, Danutia canceled her meeting with Hugh Clough as they passed through the station to the parking compound. She and Arthur had been wrong, gloriously wrong, she thought. Stephen was no sacrificial lamb, bound for the slaughter, merely a pawn in a domestic dispute.

“Does Alice know?” she asked as Kevin fumbled with his car keys.

Kevin looked up, his expression determined rather than elated. “Eric says Stephen isn't with Bob and never has been.”

His reply struck her like an arrow. Stephen was still in danger.

“Eric says a man who calls himself the Grand Master has taken Stephen. He thinks he knows where to find them, in a cave around Chee Tor. He says he can't describe the place, he'll have to show us.” Kevin opened his door, slid behind the wheel, and started the engine. “But if you don't want to come—”

“Wait, I'm coming,” Danutia said, hurriedly buckling herself in. “Remember me telling you about seeing Eric with Cameron Roberts on Saturday? Until you mentioned the Grand Master, I'd forgotten about their strange handshake when they parted and the pentagram on the rock where they met. And then the satanic stuff at Monsal Mill, with the sheep bone and the note in Eric's handwriting. We won't know for sure until we talk to Eric, but it seems that the Grand Master, the sheep killer, and Cameron Roberts could be the same person. If he has Stephen—” She left the thought unfinished. How big a step was it from sacrificing an animal to sacrificing a small boy?

Kevin flushed red, and Danutia looked at him questioningly.

“If anything happens to Stephen because I didn't take you and Fairweather seriously, I'll never forgive myself,” he said.

They lapsed into silence. As they neared Manchester Kevin told her the little he'd learned from the sergeant in Salford.

“Seems Eric hooked up with his dad on Saturday. He got worried when he heard the
TV
reports about Stephen, but his dad told him his bitch of a mother was just trying to make trouble. When Stephen didn't turn up yesterday, Eric begged his dad to go to the police, but Bob wouldn't listen. So this morning he slipped away. The sergeant asked him about this Grand Master, but he clammed up, insisted on talking to me.”

“He trusts you,” Danutia said, uncomfortably aware the boy had no reason to trust her.

Kevin made good time, despite road works and traffic congestion. Within an hour they were approaching Salford, a suburb southwest of Manchester city center. Their route took them well south of the bombed-out city core, only to bring them into an area that seemed equally hard hit.

“Was there an
IRA
bomb there too?” Danutia asked, gesturing across a large stretch of water towards razed buildings and construction sites.

“No, that's called urban regeneration,” Kevin said with a touch of irony. “That's where the Manchester Docks used to be, before the huge container ships took over. The shipping canal wasn't deep enough for them, so the shipping industry collapsed. Gradually the factories closed, and now the buildings are being torn down to build glitzy museums and such like. Meanwhile, the working poor are still poor, only they're not working. And so you get lots of crime. A fitting area for Bob Ellison to go to ground.”

Kevin turned into a side street. Urban regeneration hadn't made it to this side of the canal. Soot-begrimed buildings squatted on broken sidewalks and litter blew about the street. A blue light marked the local police station. Kevin parked and they hastened inside.

“You've come for the lad, have you?” said the sergeant on duty, a stocky man with receding dark hair. “We s'll be glad to be shut of him. Nought but a nuisance he's been, wanting this and wanting that.”

“Have you found Bob Ellison yet?”

“All the lad will say is that they were staying with some woman his dad knows. He claims he doesn't know the address and didn't notice any shops around. Won't rat on his da, I figure.”

The sergeant showed them to an interview room and retreated down the corridor.

Eric sat tipped back in a metal chair with his eyes closed, snapping his fingers to a drum beat audible across the room. On the table in front of him sat a Walkman, three empty pop bottles, and a litter of candy wrappings and crisp packets. You'd think he hadn't a care in the world.

“You'll ruin your ears,” Kevin said, plucking the headphones away with one hand and picking up the Walkman with the other.

Eric's eyes flew open and the chair crashed down. “What the fuck?” He grabbed for the Walkman, then relaxed as he recognized Kevin. “Oh, it's you.”

Kevin wound the headphones around the machine and pocketed it. “I want your undivided attention. You've breached the conditions of your Community Service Order. You're in danger of having it revoked. You know what that means, don't you? You help us find Stephen and I'll make things right with Clough and your parole officer. I'll even give back your cassette player. Understood?”

“Yessir. I understand.” A barely audible mutter, his eyes avoiding contact. “What's she doing here?”

“I need her help. And so do you. Come along then.”

When they reached the car, Kevin motioned Eric into the back seat with Danutia.

“Can't I ride with you?” Eric asked.

“Not this time. You answer the lady's questions while I drive. Then we'll all be doing our part to find your brother. That's what you want, isn't it?”

“Yessir.” Eric climbed in, bringing the locker-room smell of adolescent male hormones and cigarette smoke.

Danutia rolled her window down and raised her voice over the street noise that rushed in. “First thing, we need to know where you think Stephen is.”

Eric sighed and stared out his window. “There's a secret cave in Chee Tor. Near where they climb.”

Danutia thought about the distant peak in the well dressing. “That's west of Mill-on-Wye railway station, isn't it?”

“About a mile,” Kevin said. “Mountain Rescue will know the quickest approach.” He clicked on his radio.

Danutia studied the boy beside her. In the three months since she'd met him, his face had filled out and lost its sickly pallor; the scowl remained, however, his jaw clamped shut and worry lines creasing his forehead. He'd scratched a pimple on his chin until it bled. Saturday's faded black T-shirt was rumpled now, and underneath the locker-room odor she smelled fear. Fear for Stephen or fear for himself? Outside the car windows, jobless men lolled against vacant storefronts, smoking. A teenage mother furiously pushed a pram with one hand, dragging a screaming infant along with the other. Is it the present Eric fears, she wondered, or the future?

“That climbing apparatus you made was fantastic,” she said, trying to offer him a different vision. “How did it work out?”

He glanced around at her, his eyes brightening for a moment. “Good. Except for the arsehole that Mr. Clough ticked off.”

“Language, Eric,” Kevin said, then went back to his crackling radio. “Mountain Rescue says the nearest access is from Wormhill road,” he reported. “They're sending a team out. I've called for backup and an ambulance to meet us there.”

Danutia turned to Eric. “I saw you on the trail towards Chee Tor late Saturday afternoon. You were talking to a thin man with a broken nose. Was that the Grand Master?”

Eric nodded.

So she'd been right about his identity. But that wasn't the same as saving Stephen. She needed insight into the man's state of mind. “Why do you think he has Stephen?”

“He said he needed another helper, what with me being kept on a short chain, like.”

“Help with what?”

“The ritual, you know, holding the sheep. He said it didn't go right when he tried to do it by himself. His son died at well dressing time, see, and so he needed to make a good sacrifice in his son's memory. He wanted to check Stephen out, see if he could do it.”

At the word “sacrifice” Danutia's blood ran cold. “Tell me about this man. What's his name? How did you meet him?”

“I don't know. He says he gave up his name when he was called to serve Satan. Who we are in the everyday world isn't important, only who we are in the spirit world. He's the Grand Master.”

“Who are you in that world?”

“I'm his assistant, the Acolyte. I fill the chalice and light the candles, and when it's time for the sacrifice, I hold the animal. That's how it was, anyways. It was just the once. It was exciting. Mr. Clough teaches me stuff, but nuthin' exciting.” He turned to rub his window with a grubby finger. “You got anything to eat? I'm hungry.”

Danutia quelled her impatience. Too much pressure and Eric would clam up. She produced the cellophane-wrapped sandwiches she'd bought at the station's canteen. “Cheese or egg salad?”

“No crisps, like, or Mars bars?”

“Just sandwiches.” The anemic white bread didn't appeal to her either, but she'd done her best.

“Cheese then.” Reluctantly he took the package and the car filled with the sound of crinkling cellophane.

Danutia opened another and passed it to Kevin, then unwrapped her own. She waited till Eric had finished his second sandwich before picking up. “How did you meet this Grand Master?”

“It was a Satiddy night early January. Me and me mates were . . . anyways, me mates pissed me off, and so I'm down at the river, standing on the footbridge, like, midnight, maybe later, swearin' to God I'll get back at them, when I hear this voice saying, ‘No use calling on God, my son, God is full of tricks and lies. It's Satan who reveals the truth.' I turn around and there's this man in a long cloak, like a vampire or something. Anyway, we talk a little, and he tells me how Satan isn't this evil guy, he's the enemy of hypocrites who preach God is love when the world is filled with hate and wickedness.” He gazed out the window, his expression bleak, as though his experience of the world echoed the words he'd heard.

“Then what happened?” Danutia asked, keeping her tone casual.

“Then he told me his son had died. ‘The vicar told me it was God's will,' he said, ‘and right then I decided God wasn't for me.'” Eric fell into a twitchy silence, fingers drumming on his legs, head nodding to some internal beat.

They'd left Greater Manchester and its suburbs behind and the countryside began to open up around them, with occasional small villages. The hillsides were green and dotted with grazing sheep.

Danutia waited until Eric had calmed down a bit, then said, “I've heard stories about sheep ritually killed around Mill-on-Wye. That was the work of the Grand Master, was it?”

Eric nodded. “Sounds gross, doesn't it? But it wasn't like that at all. First we did the ritual in the cave at midnight, then we walked a long way north to a field where there were some sheep. I said I knew where we could find sheep a lot closer, but he said it was all part of the ritual. He said the words of offering, and then a quick twist of the neck and the zip-zip of the knife, and the blood oozing out. He said when I mastered the words and the knife, he'd let me do it. But in the meantime, he had to eat. So I brought him food.”

“Is that all you did for him? Brought him food?”

“And fags. I nicked some of me dad's when I had the chance. Other things he might need.”

No mention of the convenience store he'd broken into, Danutia noted.

“Mostly he just wanted me to talk,” Eric continued, and she caught the mingled longing and pain of a kid who'd never felt he counted for much. “He wanted to know where I was going and what I was doing, and then he'd tell me how Satan was working through him and through me to expose the real evil in the world, the evil done by so-called good people. He said I needed to learn the truth behind the appearances of things.” The boy turned again towards the car window. “It's all rubbish, isn't it? And now he has Stephen, and it's all my fault.”

“Are you afraid he'll hurt Stephen?”

“No fucking way. He may be weird, but he's not dangerous. But Stephen's such a baby, he must be scared out of his mind. He doesn't like being away from Mum.”

“You arranged for them to meet?”

“Yeah. There's this rock, see. The Grand Master didn't want me to know where he stayed. ‘The only way to keep a secret is not to give it away,' he said. So we met at this rock, like on Saturday. After I got nicked, I showed Stephen how to find it, so he could fetch and carry notes and the like. The notes were in code, we always wrote in code. It sounds daft, doesn't it? I'm almost fifteen, for chrissake.” Eric punched himself in the head, as though to knock some sense into it.

Danutia had a good idea where he'd learned that behavior. Damn Bob Ellison. She forced her voice to stay calm, noncommittal. “Tell me about Saturday.”