The Buried Circle. Jenni Mills
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Название: The Buried Circle
Автор: Jenni Mills
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Зарубежные детективы
isbn: 9780007335695
isbn:
We’d been watchers all our short lives, Davey and I: people who waited on tables and polished cars and cleared up after rich people. But when it came down to it, the only difference was they had more money. In the moonlight, drunk, they acted silly as any fool. That younger man at the back, with hair that flopped over his eyes and a cigarette in his hand, sauntering about like he owned the place, he was one of the archaeologists–I’d seen him in the fields with a notebook and a measuring tape. I wanted to be following them, a pale ghost in my own silky dress. All you had to do was believe you deserved to be among them, and act ridickerlus as they did.
The heavy Manor door shut with a thud and coming out of the porch was Mrs Sorel-Taylour, the short, buxom lady that was Mr Keiller’s secretary, keeping her distance to make sure nobody thought she was so daft as the rest. She was carrying a torch instead of a candle.
Mr Keiller raised the gurt white pizzle up high–had to call it that, didn’t know any other word for it, then, and right enough it was near as big as a bull’s or a stallion’s. Moonlight poured down on it, making it look like bewitched silver. Everybody bowed to it. Davey pulled me back into the shadow of the stable wall, in case they came our way, but there was no need because Mr K led them instead round the corner of the house into the more private bit of the garden where we couldn’t see what they was up to.
‘Whew,’ said Davey softly. ‘What do you think they’re going to do there?’
I didn’t want to think about it, but I did think about it, and Davey’s fingers on my arms. And Mr Keiller’s face too, solemn like it was carved out of stone, holding up the thing made of glimmering chalk like the high Downs. For all that what we’d seen was silly, it stirred something else in me, something I couldn’t explain. Magic, some of it to do with floaty dresses and film stars, but some of it the old sort of magic. The sort that makes me feel cold now, makes me need to feel warm again, but there in’t no fire that’ll warm that kind of cold once you have it in your bones.
‘Mad as hares,’ I said. ‘Maybe that medium lady’s going to raise the dead to ask ‘em where they put them stones.’
‘More’n the dead they’ve raised,’ said Davey, sliding himself against my back, all accidental-like. ‘We in’t going to see any more tonight.’
‘Don’t think that means you’ll get a cuddle,’ I said. But something had stirred in me, too, and I didn’t understand what it was.
As the sun starts to sink towards the dykes on Wednesday afternoon, the car park of the Red Lion is already filling, several cars displaying blue disabled badges. Wednesday is biker’s night at the pub, but the Harleys and Beamers won’t roar into the village until later. The public meeting to show the 1938 cine footage has been timed to lure out older people before dark, but Frannie showed no enthusiasm for coming along, though it was filmed during the years she grew up in Avebury. Despite my best efforts to persuade her, I left her at home in her slippers, settled in front of the TV with a pot of tea and a packet of gingernuts.
The letter I found down the side of her armchair has been bothering me all week. It looked like it’d been there a long, long time–possibly since right after she moved back to Avebury, four years ago. I don’t know how to raise the subject with her: she’ll accuse me of prying again, and maybe get upset, the way she did when I was trying to find out more about Davey Fergusson.
Close to the door of the pub, a black 4×4 has drawn up, an orange and white logo on the side: Overview TV. My heartbeat begins to quicken. A woman in a maroon suede jacket and a black polo-neck is unloading a cardboard box from the tailgate, and I follow her in.
Every time I come into the Red Lion, breathing in a comforting smell of beer and cigs and chips, I remind myself that this is where it all began, the renaissance of Avebury, in the inn at the heart of the circle. It’s 1934 or thereabouts. The Marmalade King has, as usual, booked every room in the pub for his staff, and is digging the West Kennet Avenue. Late one night Stuart Piggott is woken by AK hammering on the door of his room. He bursts in like a force of nature. I know what I have to do, he announces–it’s always a have to with AK, always an announcement–I’m going to buy up the whole village. I imagine him lighting a cigarette, pacing up and down Piggott’s room, ignoring the startled archaeologist in the bed and staring through the walls to the dark landscape beyond. Yes, he says, I’ll buy up as much of the place as I can and devote my life to the study of Avebury.
This afternoon the tables in the snug have been rearranged, with chairs facing a screen set up on the far wall. Almost every seat is filled, and the curtains have been drawn, though it’s not yet dark. A young man with deep-set, intense eyes is standing behind a TV camera on a tall tripod, panning round the room and filming people at the tables. They nudge each other and whisper every time they catch the lens pointing their way–no doubt why the cameraman’s jaw is clenched with frustration.
At the back of the room is a long table with a reserved sign. The woman in the suede jacket has set down the cardboard box and is laying out DVDs in neat piles. She glances at me and smiles, as if she knows me, but it’s the professional smile of the TV person, warm and inclusive and utterly meaningless.
‘Hello, girl,’ says a voice beside me, and there’s John, at a table by himself, with a pint at his elbow and the usual scrawny rollup smouldering in the ashtray. ‘Orright? Come and park yourself with me.’
I sit down, checking to make sure I won’t obstruct anyone’s view of the screen, since I’m half a head taller than most women in the room. ‘Didn’t think you’d be here.’
‘Couldn’t miss a chance to appear on the telly.’
‘They aren’t going to be interested in you,’ I say, watching where the dark-eyed young man is pointing his camera. ‘They want people like the Rawlins brothers, who are in the film. You going to spin them your idea about a northern avenue?’ Not that I believe for a second that John’s enthusiasm for dowsing is likely to reveal the archaeological discovery of the decade.
He shakes his head. ‘Get your mates at the National Trust to take the idea seriously and do a full geophysical survey’
‘On the say-so of a mad old hippie with a pair of bent coat-hangers?’
‘You’ll be laughing the other side of your face when I make the cover of British Archaeology! He takes a mouthful of his pint, and tucks back a strand of greying hair that has escaped his ponytail. In 1982 he had short hair and a rifle that killed an Argentinian in the Falklands. ‘No point, though, in pitching it to this TV crew. They’re only interested in Keiller.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Don’t be nave, Indy–you used to work in the business. Telly people get an idea in their heads, that’s the programme they make, never mind the truth. They’ll turn him into a bloody archaeological СКАЧАТЬ