Spear of Destiny Page 2

  ‘Do you keep them by you still?’ Chips asked after his third tumbler of whisky.

  Gerald nodded.

  ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Where they’ve always been.’

  ‘Who will have them after you?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Don’t know. Haven’t thought. Maybe a museum. Couldn’t say.’

  ‘You know we ruled that out,’ said Chips, raising the glass to his lips. He was a tall man, somewhat stooped now, but wiry, as if his muscles had not lost their flexibility and strength.

  ‘And you?’ Gerald asked. ‘And the others?’

  Chips shrugged.

  ‘They’re happy for you to hold on to them. But you’re getting old; we’re all getting old. It’s time to find a keeper. We’ve talked of this many times before. We have to talk of it now.’

  Gerald looked at his old friend. So many years had passed, it was hard to believe how close they had grown during the years of fighting. They’d stuck together, all of them, through the gross inhumanity of the war and its dreary aftermath. Someone had nicknamed them The Invincibles; but after Leary was killed by a landmine, the name had dropped out of common use.

  ‘Do you mean tonight?’ Gerald murmured. ‘I thought perhaps to wait until the festivities are over. Till they all leave. Maybe Donaldson will come after all. Skinner possibly. They were both invited. The roads have been blocked, they may not have made it through. You were lucky.’

  Chips ran a hand over his cheeks, his fingers scraping the stubble. He’d worn a beard when he was younger, but shaved it in middle age, once it started to show traces of grey and white.

  ‘What about the girl?’ he asked.

  ‘Girl? Which girl?’

  ‘Don’t be provocative. The one I saw tonight. You know perfectly well which girl I mean.’

  Gerald nodded.

  ‘Sometimes I forget. There have been so many girls. In any case, she isn’t a girl, not any longer. She’s a grown woman. You can’t have missed that.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  Gerald poured a little water into his glass and sipped anxiously. His liver had been playing up recently; Doc Burns had told him to ease up on the spirits. He shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not yet. Haven’t told her. She’s not ready yet. When the time comes, old boy. You know that.’

  Their cheeks flushed, their hair coated in rime frost, their breath become plumes of mist against the lamplight, the guests returned to Woodmancote Hall. They came in groups of two and three, laughing, chatting earnestly, full of Christmas spirit. Ethan escorted Sarah again, and she held on to him tightly, her arm locked through his, fearful of a spill in the oversized Wellington boots she’d picked up for the walk. Her head was filled with carols and her lips, when seen in the light, were blue with cold. She talked volubly, answering his questions, piquing his curiosity. They spoke of books and films and journeys, of parents and cousins, of the numerous times their paths had almost crossed. It was too soon to speak of his dead wife or her brother, committed to a mental hospital at twenty-one and unlikely to leave it. By some instinct grown of adversity or conscience, they knew there would be time for all that later.

  Indoors, there was much puffing and panting and stamping of frozen feet. Compacted snow fell on doormats and began to melt.

  Senhora Salgueiro had warmed mince pies and set out mulled wine in the drawing room. The adults crowded round the table, ravenous from cold and the rigours of standing so long on the uncarpeted stones of the church. The older children, who had accompanied them, were sent straight off to bed, where hot pies, ginger beer, stockings, and fitful sleep awaited them.

  The adults, with less to buoy them up by way of anticipation, felt the effects of age, overeating and a late hour more keenly than their offspring. For all that, sitting round a twinkling Christmas tree in such fine surroundings and in what was, for the most part, good company acted on their sense of nostalgia. They wanted sleep, yet were driven to prolong the moment. One by one, they gave up the struggle.

  Ethan showed Sarah upstairs to her room.

  ‘Thank you, Ethan,’ she said. ‘You’ve been very kind to a poor relation.’

  ‘Sarah,’ he chided, ‘I’m a policeman, not a banker.’

  ‘That may be, but I’m an academic, and that means poverty, as in church mouse.’

  It was the first time she’d said anything about her work.

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘I only finished my PhD a few years ago, so I’m a lowly lecturer with dismal prospects. I might get a readership when I’m fifty, if I’m lucky. Now, with your permission, I’ll retire to bed. To be truthful, I’ll crash out. And so will you. Which means Father Christmas won’t visit us.’

  He leant over and kissed her lightly on the cheek. She blushed and said goodnight before slipping into her room.

  It is not known if Father Christmas arrived that night, for the house was woken prematurely, at about five-thirty, by a piercing scream, followed by a series of screams that descended in the space of several seconds to mere sobbing and, at last, to silence. In their rooms, all but the most heavily sleeping of guests sat bolt upright in bed. Ethan was the first to his feet and the first in the corridors.

  The screams, he was certain, had not come from any of the rooms in his immediate vicinity nor, indeed, from the attic floor at all. They had been located somewhere below, on the second floor. Wrapped only in a light dressing gown and shivering in the bitter cold, he hurried for the narrow staircase. As he started down it, he heard other doors opening in the corridor behind.

  As he came through the doorway that led onto the floor below, he became aware that a commotion had begun. Several of the bedroom doors stood wide open, and half a dozen guests, all men in pyjamas or dressing gowns, had gathered round a sobbing woman. Mrs Salgueiro, her hair in curlers, her quilted housecoat wrapped tight against the chill air, was being comforted by Ethan’s father. From time to time she would exclaim in Portuguese, ‘Ai, que medo! Que susto! Os pobres homens!’ then recommence her sobbing.

  Guy Usherwood, not knowing what to make of these utterings, sighed with relief when he saw his son coming towards them.

  ‘Father, what’s going on?’

  ‘Don’t know. I can’t get the woman to speak in English. She’s had a bad turn, that’s obvious. Look at her: she’s as white as a sheet and shaking all over.’

  At that moment, another door opened, and Sarah stepped into the corridor. She was wearing a black gown trimmed with gold, and her hair was sticking up in post-slumber spikes. Seeing what was amiss, she went up to the weeping woman and put her arms round her, uttering soothing words, trying to calm her.

  Bit by bit, the sobs subsided, and the senhora came a little to herself.

  ‘Senhor Usherwood! His friend. No gabinete…in study. Please…’

  She burst into tears again, putting her hands to her face, as though to cover her eyes from some dreadful sight.

  Ethan’s father, the most senior family member present, made to enter the room, but Ethan stopped him.

  ‘Dad, it’s obvious something’s wrong. Grandfather may have had a heart attack. I’m more used to this sort of thing than you. Let me go in first.’

  His father hesitated, then backed off. Ethan put a hand on the doorknob and turned it reluctantly. If something had happened to his grandfather, it would cut him to the heart. He stepped inside and shut the door behind him.

  A couple of lamps had been left alight. The fire had burnt down, however, leaving the room chilly and imperfectly lit. It took Ethan’s eyes several moments to adjust to the low lighting. He reached for a light switch near the door, but could not find one. As he recalled, the old study had never been fully lit.

  With his dark-accustomed eyes, he scoured the room. And he saw what Senhora Salgueiro had seen, saw what had come close to driving her insane. Hardened as he was to sights of criminal horror and gross domestic violence, nothing in his experience had prepared him for the sight th
at now met his eyes.

  To the right of the curtained window ran a long row of bookcases, divided into narrow sections by a series of fluted oak pillars. To these pillars had been nailed the body of Ethan’s grandfather. The Nobel laureate’s throat had been sliced right across the windpipe, and his hands had been lifted above shoulder level, where they had been fixed to two pillars with small knives. These must have been rammed home with force, for they held his body hard in place. Ethan could make out signs of blood on other parts of his torso, suggesting that he had been stabbed several times before receiving the coup de grâce. Blood soaked the carpet all around him.

  Chips Chippendale had been despatched in a different manner. His killer had decapitated him before suspending his body from cords attached to two wall lights, then set his head at his feet. The eyes had been removed and placed on a china plate that sat next to the head. A pool of blood had gushed from the severed torso, and now lay congealed and frozen in the light from a desk lamp.

  It was Christmas morning, and Ethan fancied he heard in the heavens a sound of vast, harrowing wings. Not the wings of angels, nor the pinions of cherubim or seraphim, but the coarse leather wings of demons. He shook his head, knowing he heard nothing in truth but the rush of vital blood as it coursed dizzy through his brain.

  Taking a deep breath that seared his lungs with the cold morning air, he went to the study door and opened it a fraction. He slipped through the opening, shutting the door firmly behind him, and turned to face the expectant crowd of relatives that had assembled in the corridor outside.

  PART ONE

  ‘The hidden city of Wardabaha is white like a dove, and on its gate is carved a bird. Take in your hand the key in the beak of the bird, then open the door of the city. Enter, and there you will find great riches, also the king and queen sleeping in their castle. Do not approach them, but take the treasure.’

  From the fifteenth-century Arabic magical treatise, Kitab al-la’ali al-makhfiyya.

  1

  The Shifting Sands

  The Western Desert

  Libya

  16th May 1942

  The sandstorm came in from the south shortly after noon. It had been preceded by the hot wind the local Arabs called a qibli, a searing, all-engulfing torment that seemed to blow straight from the deepest pits of hell, burning and suffocating everything it came in contact with. They had sat out qiblis before now, wasted days during which all you could do was endure, grit your teeth, swear, sweat, and lie as still as possible in temperatures as high as 118°F.

  They’d been struggling through this particular qibli for the second day when Corporal Skinner had cut loose with a string of profanities enough to scorch even this overheated air.

  ‘I do not fucking believe this’ were the first intelligible words he uttered. He’d said them so often, so many times before, that no one paid him the slightest bit of notice.

  ‘Lieutenant,’ he said, ‘I think you should sit up and take a gander.’

  Lt Usherwood groaned and crawled out from the low camouflage canvas under which they’d been taking shelter.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Went for a pee, sir. Thought you should see this.’

  ‘What’s up?’ the commander asked, his tired voice little more than a drawl.

  Skinner just pointed. On the southern horizon, the light of midday was giving way to darkness, as black clouds roiled and tumbled across the desert sand. Gerald Usherwood snatched up his long-distance glasses and trained them on the clouds. Not clouds at all, of course, but huge billows of sand that stretched across the horizon from east to west, driven by a high wind that was picking up speed with every second it raced towards them.

  ‘Get everyone back on board,’ the lieutenant ordered. ‘It’ll be on us in minutes.’

  ‘We’re not too far from the RP, skipper. Should we try to head back while we can? Supplies are running short, and this could go on for days.’

  Usherwood shook his head.

  ‘There’s too much risk of losing our way in this. We won’t be able to take our bearings at night, and I don’t trust the sun compass in a storm. There’ll be time enough to head for the RP once this blows over. Hurry and get some canteens into the cabs.’

  The rallying point for the two-vehicle patrol was just over one hundred miles away, at Rebiana. They’d gone out from base at Kufra Oasis as a full patrol of six Chevvys, but the two trucks under Lt Usherwood’s command had carried on further west, deep into the Rebiana Sand Sea, on a search for wells. The others had gone north to Taiserbo, where there was talk of German forward units reconnoitring behind British lines.

  Something big was coming up. It had been all the talk in Cairo two weeks earlier, and there was a buzz at Kufra, the western HQ for the Long Range Desert Group which had been taken from the Italians just over a year before.

  The word was that Rommel planned a push on the Gazala line along the coast. The trouble for anyone trying to hold that line was simple: you could fix one end on the sea and defend it there against all comers, but down south it ran into open desert all the way down to deepest Africa. Jerry could slip down below your defences and twist round to spike you in the rear. R Patrol was probing for lightweight German manoeuvres, while Usherwood’s Sandboys were trying to open a path further west than anyone had tried before.

  They were looking for wells and hunting an oasis, a lost paradise called Ain Suleiman: Solomon’s Spring. This secret place had long been the stuff of legend. The Bedouin said it had once provided the water for the magical city of Wardabaha, built in the sands by King Solomon, the source of all magic in Arab tradition. According to some blue-veiled Tuareg of the Fezzan, it still existed and was inhabited by a tribe of their brethren, a branch of the Kel Ajjer of Ghat. But no modern explorer had set eyes on the place. It was on no map, save for a map of the mind, where it floated, now here, now there. At the Royal Geographical Society, men in sober suits made fun of Ain Suleiman and its hidden city of magic.

  But Gerald Usherwood had believed in it. He’d learnt enough Tamasheq to speak with the Tuareg in their own tongue, something the men in Lowther Lodge were incapable of doing, and he had come to trust them. Ain Suleiman was there, they said, but no one knew the way. It was in the worst part of the sands, they said, it was unreachable by camel, it was probably silted up by now. He knew they were hiding something, and guessed they knew their way there well enough but thought it wise to avoid entanglements with the Italians or Germans or British. If they were hiding something, he reckoned that meant there was something to hide.

  They had barely put their sand goggles over their eyes when the storm struck. One moment the sky was bright blue, the next they found themselves in a thick haze that dropped visibility down to around twenty feet.

  Closing the doors and windows kept the full blast of the sandstorm out, but the dust was like powder and crept in through every crack, chink, and cranny it could find. As time passed, a fine coating of sand covered every surface inside the trucks. The patrol wrapped their gutras tightly round their faces, but the sand was relentless. It worked its way inside the goggles, into ears and noses and throats, through clothing, down through ammo boots, where it irritated horribly.

  Gerald had been through so many sandstorms now he thought his lungs had turned to desert. He knew there was nothing to be done but to grit your teeth, keep your watering eyes closed, and sit it out. This was a bad one, he knew it straight away, one of the worst he’d seen. It could last a day or a week, there was no telling.

  All the other members of the patrol were old hands, and they’d seen their fair share of the desert winds. No one was chosen for the LRDG who wasn’t able to put up with a bit of discomfort. Whether they were British, New Zealanders, Aussies or Indians, they were that strange species of human being for whom the empty wastes and searing heat of the Sahara were more home than the Home Counties, Wellington or Calcutta. They positively longed for the silence and the ever-present danger. So they sat and waited, keeping radio silence, singing t
he latest hits and telling long tales of battles they had fought and women they had bedded.

  The storm did not let up for three days. When it ended, it did so suddenly, shortly after 6 a.m. on the third day.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Gerald. Back home in Gloucestershire, he had no time for a deity, and attended church only because he was the local squire and knew it was bad form to let the side down, the side being the Usherwood family. But here in the long vistas of the desert, beneath night skies thick with the eternal light of endless galaxies, he became a believer. Had he not been brought up in the C of E, he’d have made a happy Muslim ascetic, his heart grown fanatical from the harshness of the empty sands.

  Each truck had a sun compass perched above the dashboard. Along with the latest RAF navigational tables by day and theodolites by night, the sun compass allowed patrols to navigate through uncharted territory. It took moments to get their bearings again, and longer to dig the trucks out of the blown sand, using sand mats. At last, they brushed themselves down and headed west again.

  A barrier of seif dunes, all over three hundred feet high, pushed them further south, away from the route they’d planned to stay on. They drove through a waste devoid of life, beneath a cruel sky empty of birds or planes. Somewhere to the north, a war was in progress, but down here it seemed that the guns had fallen silent. It was as if the war had ended and all that remained was this desolation, this all-pervasive death.

  Dusk had started to fall when Staff Sergeant Chippendale, who was riding shotgun on board Gerald’s Chevvy, gave a low whistle. Max Chippendale’s great talent – and his main qualification for the LRDG – was his remarkable eyesight. He’d been scanning the horizon ahead with glasses, calmly surveying the sands each time they reached the crest of a dune, before the controlled drop to the west flank.