A Place of Hiding (Inspector Lynley, #12)(225)

He was pulled and jerked and then shoved forward. Then he was free of the wild growth that filled the paddock and he was blundering in the wake of Le Gallez, their object the dolmen.

For it still stood as it had stood for one hundred thousand years already: granite hewn out of the very stuff that was this island, fitted into more granite, walled by it, floored by it, ceilinged by it. And then hidden within the earth itself which gave forth man who would attempt again and again to destroy it.

But not succeed. Even now.

Le Gallez was giving orders. He’d taken out his torch and he was shining it into the interior of the dolmen, where it lit the dust which floated out and up like liberated souls on the Day of Judgement. He spoke over his shoulder to one of his men who asked him something, and it was this question—whatever it was, because St. James could take account of nothing but what lay before him, inside that place—that made the DCI pause in the doorway to reply. That pause gave St. James access where he otherwise might not have had it, and so he took it. He took it in prayer, in a bargain with God: If she survives I’ll do anything, be anything, try anything You want, accept anything. Just not this please God not this. He didn’t have a torch, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t need light when he had his hands. He felt his way inside, slapping his palms against the rough surface of the stones, banging his knees, in his haste smashing his head against a low lintel of some sort. He reeled from this. He felt the warmth of his blood as it seeped from the wound he’d made on his brow. He continued to bargain. Be anything, do anything, accept anything You ask of me without question, live only for others, live only for her, be faithful and loyal, listen better, attempt to understand because that’s where I fail where I’ve always failed and You know that don’t you which is why You’ve taken her from me haven’t you haven’t you haven’t you. He would have crawled but he couldn’t, trapped in the brace that held him upright. But he needed to crawl, needed to kneel to make his supplication in the dark and the dust where he could not find her. So he tore at the leg of his trousers and tried to reach the hated plastic and the Velcro and he could not reach it so he cursed as much as he prayed and begged. Which was what he was doing when Le Gallez’s light reached him.

“Jesus, man. Jesus,” the DCI said, and he shouted behind him,

“Saumarez, we need a better light.”

But St. James did not. For he saw the colour first, copper it was. Then the mass and the glory of it—how he had always loved her hair. Deborah lay sprawled just before the slightly raised stone that she had described to him as an altar, in the place where Paul Fielder told her that he had found the painting of the pretty lady with the book and the quill. St. James stumbled to her. He was dimly aware of other movement round him and of greater light sweeping into this place. He heard voices and the sound of feet scraping against stone. He smelled the dust and the acrid stink of dead explosive. He tasted the salt and the copper of his blood and he felt first the cold hard rough stone of the altar as he reached it and then beyond it the pliant warm flesh that was the body of his wife.

All he saw was Deborah as he turned her over. The blood on her face and in her hair, her clothing torn, her eyelids closed. Fiercely he pulled her into his arms. Fiercely he pressed her face to his neck. He found himself beyond either prayer or curse, the centre of his life—what made himself just that, himself—torn from him in an instant that he had not and could not have anticipated. Without an instant more to prepare.

He said her name. He shut his eyes against seeing anything more, and he heard nothing.

But still he could feel, not only the body that he held and swore he would not release and would never release, but after a moment the sensation of breath. Shallow, quick, and against his neck. Mercifully, dear God. Against his neck.

“My God,” St. James said. “My God. Deborah. ”

He lowered his wife to the floor and shouted hoarsely for help. Awareness returned to her in two forms. First was the sound: a highpitched vibration that never varied in level, tone, or intensity. It filled her ear canal, pulsating against the thin and protective membrane at its core. Then it seemed to seep past the eardrum itself to permeate her skull, and there it stayed. No room remained for ordinary sounds, cast from the world as she knew it.

After sound came sight: light and dark only, shadows posing in front of a curtain that seemed to comprise the sun. Its incandescence was so intense that she could expose herself to it for brief seconds at a time, and then she had to close her eyes again, which made the sound in her head seem louder.

Always the vibration remained. Her eyes opened or closed, herself awake or drifting in and out of consciousness, the noise was there. It became the one constant she could grasp on to, and she took it as an indication that she was alive. Perhaps children heard this as their first sensation of sound when they emerged from the womb, she thought. It was something to hold on to, so that’s what she did, swimming up towards it as one would swim for the far-off surface of a lake, its undulations heavy and shifting but always sparkling with the promise of sun and air.

When she could bear the light against her eyes longer than a few seconds, Deborah saw this was because constant day had finally become night. Wherever she was had altered from the brilliance of a stage illuminated for a watching audience to the dim interior of a single room in which one thin bar of fluorescence atop her bed cast a glowing shield downward onto the form of her body, indicated by those hills and valleys in the thin blanket that covered her. Next to the bed sat her husband, in a chair drawn up to her side so that his head could rest against the mattress on which she lay.