Then she deleted everything, unhooked the connection. She uncoiled the webcam and placed it on the windowsill facing outwards. Then she knocked on the door of Huw’s room.
There was no answer. She opened the door. The room was heavy with smoke, she could barely see to the other side of it. In one corner the pipe with the elaborately carved bowl was smouldering, and on the bedside table, a small chillum lay upturned. Huw was lying back on the bed in a silk paisley dressing gown and a pair of salmon-pink pyjamas. Two laptops were open playing films, one a recent private Seerland concert. It was one he must have had filmed privately, she didn’t remember seeing any reference to it on the band’s site’s official product listings. The other screen showed some obscure art-house film. But Huw wasn’t watching either. His eyes were half closed as he gazed fascinated at a cobweb on the ceiling. She felt a sudden flush of anger, prodded him with her boot
‘Despite the fires and the deaths, this is just a rich man’s hobby for you, isn’t it?’
He looked deeply hurt, and he bowed his head, said nothing. Immediately Catrin regretted what she’d said. He’s as much a victim as the others in his way, she thought, he’s given his life to this and he doesn’t know where it’s taking him.
He was smiling at her, pulling something out of a bag beside the bed. It was black, part sheer, part lacy, it looked exquisite. She knew of course he must have bought it before the trip. He’d already seen her as a sure thing, a done deal. Anger shot through her again redoubled.
‘I’m not your whore,’ she said, and slammed the door.
She changed into her trackies and Nikes, went down to the yard. Earlier she’d noticed behind reception an old wooden tennis racket, warped by the sea air, and some balls. She began pounding the wall under Huw’s window.
‘Sleep through that, you rich bastard!’ she shouted. She went through the full repertoire of her strokes, forehand flat, backhand slice, then forehand topspin, her most natural shot. She knocked the ball shallow to the wall so it looped up for slams and volleys.
No one came out to complain. They were the only guests, and the bar was on the other side of the building. As the minutes passed the walls began to fade into a line of dim green shadows, resolve themselves again into the trees surrounding a court in summer. It was the park where she’d played as a girl, she was sliding over the hot shale, beating the coach. She could smell the mown grass, the syrupy scents drifting over on the light breeze from the ice-cream van. For a few moments she was back there and free again.
5
They are at the door, the two men again.
The taller is kneeling over her, he takes out her mask. She cannot move her hands. Its shadow under her, another long, pointed beak.
They’re putting on the buckles at the back of her shorn head.
Their hands moving on her gently. In the shuttered half-light, she sees the two perching shapes on either side, shifting.
Over their eyes are mirrors. She tries to close her eyes, but she cannot. They are taped open. We will show you everything, the voices had said to her. Look into the mirrors, see yourself.
She sees herself in their painted arms. Her bound, open body, painted like theirs. She sees her oiled girlish limbs twisting under the long, hooked masks, under their vague flowing forms.
Was there nothing she hadn’t seen then? Then the lights in the mirrors on their masks are blurring, blurring the edges of things like the memory of something that had long ago disappeared from the world.
Catrin woke, sweating. It was the old dream again.
She took deep breaths, letting the air out slowly through pursed lips.
She lit a cigarette, stared at the wallpaper for what seemed an age. Slowly she was becoming calmer, the sweat cooling. She looked at her watch. She’d been asleep a full seven hours.
She went over to her Mac. Before she’d gone to bed, she had placed her webcam on the windowsill, focused on the car. She’d run the feed into a certain obscure Welsh countryside webcam enthusiasts’ site. It was one of the few that stored its contributors’ feeds for up to forty-eight hours. The images would not be particularly clear, but she had to work with what she’d got.
She lit another cigarette and studied the feed, fast-forwarding through the images. Nothing. No one had entered or left the building. No one had been near the car.
Strangely, though she had slept deeply, she felt very tired, her limbs aching as if she’d hardly slept at all. She wondered if she was going down with something. She went into the bathroom, pulled back the curtain over the tub. The shower had a weak flow, barely more than a trickle. She ran it over her aching body.
As she got out, the room felt suddenly very cold. She towelled herself quickly by the one feeble radiator. She wasn’t sure what it was, but she had a sense of something moving down below the window. This was a blind spot, out of range of the camera. She went to the curtain, drew it back fractionally, and peered down.
A tall, well-built man was walking along close to the wall. But there was nothing clandestine about the way he moved. He was striding away as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
At first she thought it might be the doctor, Smith. The man was wearing a long, dark coat, similar to the doctor’s. Then for a moment, he turned into the circle of light over the pumps and she saw he was much older.
He looked a somewhat eccentric figure. His hair was grey, but thick and long, still virile-looking, tucked into the collar of his coat. In one hand he held a long cane, with a carved handle.
Where had he come from? she wondered. Behind him lay only the cliff heads and the sheer drops below. He strode across the yard into the trees, and out of view. She waited but didn’t hear the sound of an engine starting up. Only the silence of the early morning, then from far down the coast the distant plaint of a foghorn.
Catrin stared at the trees where he’d disappeared. Something was still moving there, something spread out, low to the ground. She waited as her eyes adjusted to the dim light. She could see other figures now, threading in and out of the mist and the trees. They were moving in a single file, heads bowed, glancing back at her window. For a moment they seemed to be calling out to her. But no sound came from among the trees, it was too dark to see their faces. She was looking at children, she realised now, a column of children all dressed in the same old-fashioned black smocks. She remembered what the old man had told them, about seeing the children playing in the woods. But that had been four decades ago. So what was she looking at now, a trick of the light? The longer she stared at them the more they seemed to dissolve back into the darkness as if the trees were closing their branches around them. After a few seconds she could see nothing but the mist curling between the black trunks.
She dressed quickly, went into Huw’s adjoining room. The bedside lamp was already switched on and he was standing at the window. Using his Bushnell bird-watching binoculars he was scanning the hillside above the village, but the grey band of the early morning sky was empty of birds.
His skin was cool to her touch as she took the binoculars. She peered again through the mist at the trees. Nothing was moving. It was difficult to believe she’d just been watching anything moving.
‘You didn’t just see something?’ Her voice trailed off. It was obvious from Huw’s expression he hadn’t. He was raising his head slowly, kissing the lobe of her ear, the nape of her neck. She pulled herself reluctantly away, glanced at the lane snaking on towards the ruined rooftops. ‘This is a small place, if Rhys was here, someone must have seen him,’ she said.
Huw pulled on his coat. ‘We’ve tried the pub, so that only leaves the café that Smith mentioned, where he said the workers from the clinic go after their shifts.’
As they went out to the car, Catrin saw a van parked close up against the wall. Some builder’s tarps covered the rear window. Despite the cold, the driver’s window was open. An arm was tapping on the outside of the door to a soft trance-like beat drifting out from the cabin.
The figure at the wheel was the same strange man she’d seen earlier. In the morning light she could see his face around his eyes was deeply lined. As she approached, she had the sense he’d been watching her since she’d come outside.
She raised her hand in greeting and it looked as if the man was about to speak. But then the window closed. The van started up, pulled away out of the drive.
As she watched it disappear from view the man turned his head and glanced back at her. All the time Huw had been watching the van carefully, an uncertain look on his face.
‘I saw him from my window,’ she said. ‘And what looked like children up in the woods. They were all dressed alike in old-fashioned smocks. They reminded me of what Tudor said about seeing children up there all those years ago.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Not really, I’d just woken up, was feeling weird. It was still quite dark.’ She stared down the road at where the van had disappeared, then at Huw. ‘You looked as if you’d seen him before somewhere.’
‘A builder, maybe. Could be doing up some of those cottages we saw on the way in?’
‘He wasn’t dressed like a builder. His coat looked well-tailored and he was carrying a long cane, the kind of thing a nineteenth-century dandy might have carried.’
‘Another of the doctors perhaps.’
‘Then what’s he doing driving a builder’s van?’
Huw’s eyes told Catrin she was over-reacting. ‘It wasn’t the same van that followed us at the bridge, if that’s what you’re thinking. This one was darker.’
She got into the car, turned the headlights on full. The wind was stronger but the mist still looked thick down the road. She revved, pulled out fast. There was no sign of the van ahead, no other vehicles on the road. On either side the lanes led off among winter hedgerows and the abandoned cottages of the village.
She turned past the ruined church and came into the road that ran under the tunnel of trees. A break in the canopy of branches allowed another brief view up towards the large house. But all they could see were the pointed gables they had glimpsed on the road from the mainland. The rest was hidden by high walls and the low, sullen mist that seemed as permanent a feature as the hills themselves.
Once past old Tudor’s shop the road began to criss-cross the steep, wooded hillside, climbing through dense groves of oaks and beeches. At the crest of the hill they could see lights flashing around a small barrier across the road. A few branches had been torn down by the recent storms, but there was still enough room to pass. Catrin slowed about thirty yards short of the lights and looked down into the trees.
Then she cut the engine. ‘It was somewhere down there,’ she said, ‘those lights we saw from Tudor’s last night.’ She got out, not hearing what Huw was saying behind her. The wind was stronger than she’d expected. She walked over, pushing against the fierce gusts to the side of the road.
At the fallen branches she turned and made her way into the cover of the overhanging bows beyond them. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Huw following. He was opening his mouth as if to call her back, raising his hand, then dropping it, following her to the edge of the trees.
‘It was somewhere here,’ she said as he got nearer.
‘How can you tell? These woods all look the same from a distance.’ She could see he didn’t want to go any further from the road.
Between the trunks a thin trail of slush led down the bank, zigzagging between the dripping branches. She could hear Huw shouting to her, calling her back, but she kept moving deeper in. The branches formed a canopy over her head so that only narrow streaks of daylight crossed the forest floor. It soon became difficult to know if she was following an actual path or just the gaps between trees. She looked back and saw rows of trunks, no sign of the path she thought she’d just taken. But gradually she began to glimpse more daylight through the branches. Ahead the trees were thinning into a clearing. To the nearside of it lay piles of newly cut logs. In the centre were two long sheds, each about twenty feet long, and raised off the ground on cinder blocks, the windows covered with wire netting.
The hut on the left had lights on inside. Their glow illuminated the patch of grass around it, turning it a brighter green. Although the door was shut, with padlocks securing it, Catrin waited silently to see if there was any movement on either side. Between the two huts a path wound up into the mist towards the escarpment. Stepping forward she got a foothold on the line of blocks and put her face up to the glass.
She could make out two rows of troughs, the pipes of a watering system between them, at each end a cluster of grow-lights between silver reflectors, but then the glass clouded over with her breath.
Huw was coming out of the trees, silently moving alongside her. She looked into the next window along. ‘Someone likes their hydroponics,’ she whispered.
‘Mary Jane?’ he asked.
‘Not that I can see, but they’ve got some pretty peculiar stuff in there.’
She moved over to the next pane, rubbed her sleeve over the condensation and held her face back from the glass. Through the glare of the lights she saw several troughs of a plant with small, pointed greyish-green leaves, and beside it rows of pale green stems, about four feet high, with bright green leaves. Further down, low to the ground, were pots of a dark green herb with short stems and long leaves.
Among the plants she thought she recognised black henbane and jimson weed and mandrake, all members of the deadly nightshade family.
‘Why would someone be cultivating these sorts of plants?’ she asked.
‘Their alkaloids were used in the old days by pharmacists to make painkillers and anti-spasmodics,’ Huw said.
‘But not any more?’
‘Not likely. In the wrong doses they’re potent deliriants that can cause psychosis, even blindness.’
She remembered what Thomas had told her about how Huw had been one of the task force busting the specialist labs. It seemed he hadn’t entirely forgotten his pharmacological training from those days, though she wondered how dependable his knowledge was after so much time.
The other shed was in darkness. Huw produced a pocket torch that provided a narrow, but intense, beam of light. She gripped the window ledge again, found a foothold, shone the torch around the shed’s interior.
Here deeper pots were filled with black earth, covered with the pale lobes of mushrooms and other fungi of various shapes and sizes.
‘Someone likes a bit of magic with their mushrooms. They’ve even got those poisonous red ones with the white warts.’
‘Fly agaric. We used to bust growers sometimes back in the Eighties. The others are psilocybin based, standard hallucinogens, but that stuff is quite hardcore. It’s delirium inducing, could cause liver damage if you got the dosage wrong.’
‘Like a paracetamol suicide.’
‘Right. Wake up about three days later in screaming agony, and there’s nothing they can do to stop it.’
She followed Huw back into the cover to the side of the clearing.
‘Tudor could be selling to some lab on the mainland,’ she said.
‘I can’t think of any sort of lab that would want that stuff these days.’
‘This must all cost money, though.’
‘Too much money for Tudor. That watering system and those lights were top-end imports, it all looked well beyond the old man’s budget.’
‘Unless Tudor isn’t quite who he appears to be.’ She looked at Huw, but something in his face seemed to say he’d already dismissed the idea. ‘That shop of his isn’t doing much trade,’ she said, ‘so maybe he has other interests out here?’
‘Smith said he worked some shifts as a nurse at the clinic.’
‘He does, I checked their PAYE register last night. That must mean he has pharmacological training. He’d know what he was doing with this stuff.’
Huw was shaking his head sceptically. Catrin glanced back at the path winding up into the mist towards the escarpment, but all was still.
‘Then what about that figure dressed in the wig like Jones? The one who’s been ghosting us ever since we saw him at the estuary. This could be his shit.’
Huw still seemed unconvinced. He was making a low murmuring noise. She looked back at the sheds. ‘This might explain why he didn’t want the photos getting out. He could have interests out here which Rhys stumbled on. I seem to remember fly agaric and black henbane were used in witchcraft.’
Huw was crouching under the branches. ‘Tudor had a lot of that black arts junk in his shop. But most of the stuff was covered in dust, didn’t look like he actually used them.’
Catrin took a deep breath, saw her face reflected faintly in the glass of the window. ‘Maybe someone’s paying the old man to grow them. Could be the man in the wig. Rhys comes out here and so our man begins to close down anyone who knows about Rhys’s pictures. Close down anything that might lead here.’
Huw was moving back into the branches.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s get out of here.’
Fat, heavy droplets of rain ran down the back of their necks as they walked to the car. They slid into their seats, Huw immediately starting the engine so that the heater would kick in. For a moment Catrin thought she could hear faint sounds like the cries of children higher up among the trees. She glanced back, but nothing was visible there.
They followed the road for about two miles, through the ancient woods until it reached the café. Like old Tudor’s shop, the place was located behind a lay-by, a series of plain, prefabricated buildings. On each side they were hemmed in by the foliage of the surrounding trees.
The interior had white tiling on the floor and walls and rack lighting that gave the place a clean, aseptic feel. Men of indeterminate middle age in white trousers and jackets were seated in groups on steel chairs around small tables.