The Buried Circle - Jenni Mills [198]
Shit. What’s he taken? Mushrooms?
‘How did you get in?’
‘Doesn’t matter.’
I can guess: I opened the window in the kitchen to let out the steam while I was washing up, must’ve forgotten to close it. He’ll have climbed in over the sink.
And why? Well, everything goes back to that summer in Tolemac, doesn’t it?
He strokes my hair. ‘Sssh. No hurry. Your friend isn’t comin’ back for a while, is he?’
‘It was you who broke in at Frannie’s, wasn’t it? How did you come to hurt her, though? Did you knock her down accidentally?’ I don’t want to believe it could have been anything else. The grip on my throat has eased fractionally. But even if I managed to scream, the nearest neighbour is elderly and takes her hearing aid out when she goes to bed. The loudest pagans drum with impunity behind her cottage.
‘She opened the door to me.’ There’s a high note of surprise in his voice, which suggests it’s all unravelling so fast he’s amazing himself now. ‘The Hag!
He doesn’t mean it the way ordinary people would. He means the Goddess.
‘She opened the door and said: India’s at work. And I was thinkin’, Right, yes, I knew that, I suppose, and then she’d closed the door on me again. Realized she didn’t like me. Put up with me, when she used to see me, only because of Meg.’ The back of my hair lifts with the vibration of him shaking his head–that wonderment again. ‘See, it all happens on both planes, doesn’t it? The real, and the extra-real? The Goddess wears three faces: Maiden, Mother, Crone. If you hold the Crone tight, she shifts shape, releases the Maiden again. I went round the back and broke in. She didn’t scream: she called me Donald. I told her, my name’s not Donald, it’s…’
This is possibly the longest speech Bryn has ever come out with, in my hearing.
Except it isn’t Bryn, is it?
‘What the hell happened to you, Keir?’ I ask.
CHAPTER 56
29 August 1942
Mr Keiller was in the sitting room, wearing his police uniform, standing with his back to the empty fireplace, the light from the lamps striking a marmalade sheen on his thinning, oiled brown hair, and his inspector’s peaked hat laid careful on a side table like he was expecting to have to pick it up again to go out. First time it struck me how much older than me he was: older than Mam, God rest her, near as old as Dad. Tonight all those years were scratched into the skin of his face, his jowls saggy with a kind of defeat, his tense mouth reluctant to let out the words repeating what they’d told him when the call came through about the plane that had crashed on Easton Down that afternoon. Crater. Explosion. Instant. No hope.
‘You know, Heartbreaker, I’m sick to death of this bloody war,’ he said. ‘For two pins I’d…’ He shook his head. His oiled hair gleamed in the lamplight. ‘Why is it the best ones who go, I ask you? Why is it the ones with the brains and the balls? Donald…’ His voice cracked up. ‘Poor old Donald. Such a silly bloody thing to happen.’
Not even the glory of being shot out of the sky by the enemy. And what about Mr Keiller’s Brushwood Boy? Was any of that shininess in the corners of his eyes for Davey?
‘Did you go to…where it happened?’ I asked him. ‘Were they…?’
He shook his head. ‘Would have been an irony, wouldn’t it? No, a couple of constables from Devizes did the necessary. I’ll go up first thing tomorrow.’
‘Can I come with you?’ Knew immediate he was going to say no.
‘I don’t think that would be advisable, do you, Mrs S-T? Frances looks like she needs helping to bed, and a good long lie-in tomorrow.’
Maybe I did look bad, hunched like an old woman next to a glowing two-bar electric fire Mr Young had brought from upstairs. I was wrapped in a blanket, hugging a hot-water bottle, one of Mrs S-T’s dresses hanging off my shoulders because my clothes had been soaked through, my teeth still chattering.
Mr Keiller picked up his brandy glass, swirled