Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(15)
“I...” he began, and had nothing to say.
“Yes.” Glyde’s fingertip brushed, very lightly, over Saul’s lips. “I wish to heaven I understood the role you’re playing.”
“I’m not playing a role,” Saul managed. Glyde’s fingers were sliding up the other side of his face now, into his hair, sending shivers over his scalp. The blood was pounding through him. He wanted to fall to his knees, or simply to stand here with Glyde’s fingers on his face for ever.
“We’re all playing roles.” Glyde had that little frown of concentration again as he stroked the hair that sprang from Saul’s temples. It didn’t take much of an angle to turn his winging eyebrows into something positively Satanic. “The only question is, are you an actor or a puppet?”
“Oh, a puppet.” Saul wanted to lift his hand to Glyde’s face in return, and didn’t dare. He didn’t think it would be unwelcome, but he couldn’t find the courage. It had been too long since the last time; it had hurt too much. “That’s quite clear.”
“Mmm. I wish you’d find another job.”
Saul jerked away. “What?”
“I don’t like this.” Glyde lowered his hand, and the strange moment of intimacy shivered into nothing, leaving Saul feeling bare and absurd. “I don’t like the way I keep meeting you, and I don’t think puppethood suits you.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, that’s rather the point.” Glyde looked, for a second, extraordinarily weary. “You’re getting mixed up in something ill-judged at best, and I very much wish you would take my advice and stop.”
“Leave my position?”
“Let Peabody play his game out, whatever it may be. He seems to me a man liable to end up with ancient masonry falling on his head, and I don’t think you ought to be at his side when it happens. Find a different post.”
“You saw my record,” Saul said “How many employers do you think would jump at the chance to have me? I can’t get a place as a third-rate clerk; I’ve tried. This is the first position I’ve found since I came back to England, and if I leave it I’ll starve. What on earth do you have against Major Peabody? He’s a harmless old coot obsessed with fairy tales, and the worst he’s doing is wasting his time and mine on half-baked ideas. Isn’t it?”
“I know nothing against him, except that he and you keep turning up in the wrong places.” Glyde grimaced. “Or the right ones. What brought you here today?”
Saul opened his hands. “This is the site of a manor house that was owned by Geoffrey de Mandeville in the twelfth century. Major Peabody thinks it’s a sacred site.” He felt awkward, somehow, using the word as he stood here.
“What has a medieval nobleman to do with the price of fish?”
“He’s buried in Temple Church, which is another sacred site. Don’t ask me to explain; all I do is follow the bees in the Major’s bonnet. And given that, how is it that I keep running into you? What are you doing here?”
“That, unfortunately, would be telling.” Glyde reached for Saul’s hat, which was hanging on a tree branch, and handed it to him. “I understand your predicament, and I am inclined to believe in your innocence, or at least your ignorance. But if you were able to point your employer to a different hobby—macramé, say, or stamp collecting—I think it would be to everyone’s advantage, including his. Otherwise who knows where this may lead, and I shouldn’t like anything unpleasant to happen to you.”
His voice was so smoothly meaningful that Saul couldn’t tell if the words were an expression of goodwill or an open threat. He met Glyde’s eyes, startled, and found himself held once more by their compelling gaze.
“Goodbye, Mr. Lazenby,” Glyde said softly. “It’s time to leave the island.”
Saul didn’t quite think about anything as he crossed the bridge back to the park, where the birdsong sounded deafening, or walked back to Cockfosters station. He didn’t begin to think, in fact, until he was safely on the train, at which point the utterly bizarre nature of the encounter dawned on him, like the belated realisation while shaving that a troubling memory was nothing but a dream. Except that, in this case, it had happened.
“What the devil,” he said under his breath.
Glyde wasn’t mad, even if his behaviour was inexplicable. Saul was increasingly sure of that. He was beginning to harbour a theory that the man worked for the Government in some hush-hush aspect, and to feel very afraid that perhaps Major Peabody had stumbled on some, some...
That was the problem. Saul couldn’t imagine the Major’s researches pointing to anything important at all. Had the tree in Oak Hill Park been ignited by a new weapon, perhaps, the kind of which one read in pulp novels? Was there some strange chemical compound in that well-water? Saul could still feel a lingering tingle on his skin and a coolness in his chest, and there had been something else, an effect on his mind. He was sure of that, the more he thought about it. The entire experience had felt like a hallucination from the point he crossed onto Camlet Moat.
Which was, of course, before he’d drunk the water.
God rot it. Saul had an urge to get off the train, take the next northbound one back to Cockfosters, find Glyde up to whatever he was doing, and blasted well demand what was going on. That or to push him against a tree and tell him to finish what he’d started, because the memory of Glyde’s fingers caressing his face, combing through his hair, was making it hard for him to breathe.