Spectred Isle (Green Men #1)(48)

He stopped in the porch to look at the stone arch, carved with three bands of monsters, the stonework indistinct with age. Before he’d probably have ignored the fen-grendels or seen them as wild men or shaggy demons. They looked very obvious now.

Inside the church was cool and dark, with green light spilling into it from above and glowing from the great window at the end, tinting the columns to give them the look of an avenue of trees. Saul went up to the pew where he’d found Randolph, wishing he were here now and wondering what he’d seen. He roamed up and down the aisle and along the walls, peering at the carvings and craning at the stonework, irritated he couldn’t find it. The damn thing was around here somewhere, he was sure—

He was looking for something.

He’d come to the church to find it.

Saul gave himself a moment to let the panic subside, then he went up to the top of the centre aisle, where he was bathed in green light. He narrowed his eyes till all he could see was the blurred glow, and let himself think once more of Camlet Moat, as if he were there. The trees rising around him, the bright eyes in the leaves, the smell of cool well water and growing green things, a gust of laughter on the breeze.

He walked without thinking to the arch that stood some little way before the altar, and over to one side where the hard, dark, ancient oak stood. There was a shape carved there, a face. Deep eyes, a mouth pulled to rectangular by the leaves and branches that sprouted from it. A Green Man.

Saul stared at it, and saw again the fen-grendel with ivy bursting from its mouth and eyes, and then he remembered.

Her kiss on his lips. Her ivy twisting into him. Her silver, cold and pure as Camlet Moat’s water, running through him. And the flood of knowledge that came with it all, like a book he’d read again and again in his childhood and somehow forgotten. Theresa Glyde, curling her tendrils into his heart, running her fingers through his mind, lighting up parts of him he hadn’t known existed until he was blinded by green and silver and the smell of Camlet Moat, and that last whispered instruction rang deafeningly in his ears. Green Man. Good luck. Take care of him.

Green Man. Saul stared at the wooden face, and deep-set bright eyes looked back.

“Mr. Lazenby!”

Saul turned. The Vicar was hurrying through the church with two men at his heels, a tweedy chap in his late fifties and a younger, taller, thinner man in an excellent suit who seemed to have come straight from a London office. “Mr. Lazenby, here you are. This is Mr. Delingpole and Mr. Bracknell, of the Shadow Ministry—Whitehall, you know. I sent for them yesterday and they have come to take you back to London.”

“The Shadow Ministry,” Saul repeated.

“Is that a term you recognise?” Mr. Delingpole asked. He had a long face, thin lips, with a hard look.

“Not really. Why would Whitehall men want to give me a lift?”

Mr. Delingpole gave him a very perfunctory smile. “Let’s not waste time, Mr. Lazenby. You’re coming with us.”

*

They caught the train from Cambridge, both Delingpole and Bracknell declining to answer any questions before then. The Shadow Ministry men secured a first-class compartment for the three of them, and sat together opposite Saul, giving him the unnerving impression of being under interrogation.

“Well,” he said as the train moved off. “Are you able now to tell me what’s going on?”

“I think it’s for you to tell us that, Mr. Lazenby.”

“You are asking the wrong person,” Saul told them wholeheartedly.

“No, I don’t think so,” Delingpole said. “Saul Nathan Lazenby, of St. John’s Oxford. Your war record makes interesting reading.”

Saul kept his voice level. “And I served my sentence, and you won’t find anything against my name since.”

“What is your involvement with Randolph Glyde?”

“I’ve met him. I wouldn’t say that constitutes an involvement.”

“You’ve more than met him, haven’t you?”

Keep calm, deny everything. “How do you mean?”

Bracknell gave him an incredulous look. “The Vicar, Mr. Herbert, assures me you went to the other side with him. What the devil’s that if not an involvement?”

“It wasn’t my idea or his. We just found ourselves there,” Saul protested. “Look, am I allowed to talk about this? I don’t want to speak about matters I shouldn’t, and my understanding was that this sort of thing is not to be discussed widely.”

“Very wise,” Delingpole said. “But this is our business. I assure you, you may speak.”

Saul nodded. “All right. But I can’t imagine why you’re talking to me and not Glyde if you want to know what happened because, to be quite honest, I don’t have the foggiest.”

He probably should be frank with these men, he knew. They were, after all, official, and he had no reason not to except Randolph’s distrust. He still didn’t want to.

Bracknell was scrutinising him. “I suppose you had to rely on Glyde a great deal.”

“Entirely.”

“I dare say he had a lot to say about Whitehall, too. About the conduct of the war, threats to the nation, and so on.”

“Well, we talked,” Saul hedged. “We were there for a while.”

“Yes, it would be. This isn’t your area, is it, Mr. Lazenby? There you are, in a most confusing situation, and of course you have to put your trust in Glyde—a very competent man, nobody would deny that. But if I may say so, you probably shouldn’t take everything he says at face value. He had a hard war, damned hard, and, well, he has a bee in his bonnet.”