Under a Watchful Eye(89)
Seb sank to his knees and placed his strengthless hands upon his seemingly hollow thighs. His legs seemed incapable of supporting his weight.
Mark glanced at Veronica, then whispered to Seb from the side of his mouth. ‘You can get through it. I did. They made me bring my books here and they insisted I stayed one night. You know, to make a point.’ He closed his eyes and winced at the memory. ‘They’re crazy, Seb. Both of them. They don’t even have running water. They use a stream. There’s no electricity here either. They exist in some bloody awful cottage over at the back. Place is cut off, but they keep it all going, for him, Hazzard. I don’t think they have much choice either. I’m guessing they’re all that’s left of the last SPR intake before Hazzard died. They’ve been here for bloody decades, going mad. And Hazzard will not release his last two followers. Don’t trust them. Just write the bloody book and hope for the best.’ Mark turned away and began moving down the slope, heading for the overgrown lower parkland.
25
The Discarded Coat
They had left him hours before. Not long after Mark disappeared from sight, the two women had walked away and disappeared behind the house, without a single backward glance.
Still dazed from shock, Seb had followed them at a distance, until they passed the walled garden and vanished into the woods beyond the roses.
He’d returned to the Hall, slumped upon a wall before the portico, and sat with the disarray of his thoughts for company. Occasionally, a shiver touched his neck as if a breeze or a cloud’s shadow had passed over him.
Even outside in strong sunlight, with a blue and cloudless sky above his head, the prospect of the night ahead had made him experience a physical frailty decades beyond his age. But the consequences of defying these unstable remnants of the SPR didn’t bear consideration. If he drove home, then what of later, what of tonight? Something would be sent after him. Was it better to be at home, in his own room, and to have his final cries unheard by any save those that gathered about the bed? Would he choose heart failure at home over a night at the Tor? That’s what his life had come down to: stay or die.
He was useful to Veronica and Joyce and what they served. That was all he had in his favour: their desperation for money. They had been forgotten and were captives. Mark had said as much, though how much he could believe of what any of them said was open to question. But who else could Veronica and Joyce turn to?
They must have seen Ewan as an opportunity and snatched at him to placate that restless presence on the top floor. He imagined Ewan’s bragging about his literary prowess after being caught trespassing. The fool had got in way over his head, had scarpered and lasted two weeks on the run. His last bad scene. Too much defiance from Seb too would fatally stretch the patience of Veronica and Joyce. Seb imagined they made reports to whatever existed higher up the food chain.
When a suspicion that he was being watched from the top windows of the Tor became uncomfortable, Seb went back inside. Indoors, he clung to a wall until an episode of panic passed. He then looked about himself in the musty darkness.
So how was it done? How was a night endured here? Mark Fry had managed it. Ewan too. But when Seb thought of those figures on the train, and of what he’d dreamed into life inside his hotel room in Manchester, he bent double and closed his eyes.
‘Oh, dear God.’
They were coming tonight.
Seb collected three blankets from the SPR bedrooms and took them downstairs to beat as much dust from them as he could using his bare hands. He unshuttered the windows in one of the large rooms and spread the blankets on the dirty sofa. One would go beneath him and two on top. Though he didn’t expect to sleep.
The light that passed through the grimy glass was welcome and would last until around nine p.m. He even wondered if spending the night outside would be safer, until he recalled a dream of being chased across the golf links in Churston by something with its head covered by a dirty sack.
Thin Len. The strangler. Child-killer.
Indoors it is.
He had most of one bottle of water left, and that would have to last until morning. The apple and banana he’d put inside his rucksack, and the flapjack that he’d bought while stopping for petrol early that morning would have to sustain him, though the mere idea of anything inside his stomach made him nauseous.
Seb also wondered if he should take the opportunity to look at the files in the basement. Maybe he could learn something useful. But his desire to get out of the building became greater. Until the dying of the light he would stay in the open.
Half a mile from the Tor, he came across an ivy-choked cottage, the home of Joyce and Veronica. They’d made no effort to maintain the small gardens. Two greening sheets of polythene had been untidily weighted down with bricks upon one part of the roof.
He suffered a quick and hideous vision of the two creatures being a part of his life from now on, his existence much reduced and compromised while he remained within their orbit. It would be like having two of Ewan around, only it would be much worse. Even worse than that. When does this end?
And what came next? A co-written book with all proceeds going to the SPR? Or did they have something more evangelical in mind, so that he would be required to put his name and reputation behind their cause?
Maybe they would accept a cheque now and leave him alone.
No, because he wanted to be in print again. That’s what they claimed. Hazzard wasn’t giving up on the earthbound prison.