Daniel Easterman
Spear of Destiny
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
DANIEL EASTERMAN is the bestselling author of seventeen international thrillers. Before taking up writing, he studied English, Persian, Arabic and Islamic studies at the universities of Dublin, Edinburgh and Cambridge, and lectured at the universities of Fez in Morocco, and Newcastle upon Tyne. He has also written eight critically acclaimed full-length novels as Jonathan Aycliffe. When not writing, he listens to the sad and enchanting music of Portuguese fado and its beautiful poetry. He lives in the north of England with his wife, the health writer and homeopath Beth MacEoin.
PROLOGUE
Christmas came to Woodmancote that year on wings of ice, amid flurries of snow that banked steeply against the stone walls and barn doors of Hamberley Farm. It had been a late winter in coming, but once its time had arrived, it descended with exceptional ferocity, turning autumnal skies to craggy ranges of arctic cloud. On Radio 4, they said it was due to global warming, and down in the Cap in Hand, old heads nodded and said it would get worse before it got better. They were droll old men, and they’d seen too many winters, lived through too many Christmases.
Snow covered fields and roofs and hedgerows with a solid sheet of white velvet, and for day upon day it would not melt. When the last flakes had fallen, there were nights of moonlight and starlight and shining lamps, nights when the whiteness of the countryside turned to silver, nights so crisp birds fell from the trees and berries froze and cracked on the branches. Animals died in their multitudes, sheep in the open fields, squirrels in their nut-filled trees, owls in the solitary darkness of the yews.
Throughout the week before Christmas, Woodmancote Hall was ablaze with light. Light from electric bulbs and candles, from twenty log fires, from a dozen chandeliers, from a thousand twinkling white fairy lights that sparkled on trees and mantelpieces. Softly from inside, music played: King’s College Choir singing the carols of all our lifetimes, ‘Once in Royal David’s City’, ‘Silent Night’, ‘Remember, O Thou Man’…
Seen from outside across the east lawn or the vast expanse of Parget’s Meadow, the house seemed like a liner sailing on waters of driven snow, a place of comfort and cheer, a haven from the bleak midwinter. Before the curtains were drawn across the tall mullioned windows, the lights inside each room would stream out across the untouched fabric of the snow, crisscrossing it with bars of light and shadow.
Old Gerald Usherwood, lord and master in Woodmancote, his family’s home for seven centuries, had been a King’s man in his day. It would be his eighty-third Christmas and, the day after, his eighty-fourth birthday. The lights and music were in his honour. A great party was planned, a party that would span the Christmas season and mark both his birthday and the Nobel Prize in economics he’d received at a ceremony in Stockholm two weeks earlier.
The family were there en masse. Though substantial, Woodmancote Hall was not a great house, and its ten bedrooms and hastily tidied attic rooms were far from enough to accommodate such a tribe of grandparents, parents, children, aunts, uncles, and cousins. Some late arrivals who could not be fitted in at the house or the lodge had to make do with rooms in the village or Bishop’s Cleeve. The allocation of rooms had caused not a few headaches to Gerald’s oldest son George, who, with his wife Alice, had taken overall responsibility for the grand gathering.
The house party was made up of four groups of Usherwoods, some Draytons, a handful of Cornwallises, the Canterbury Grevilles, one or two Ellises, the Naseby twins, and a pair of distant cousins from Madeira who hadn’t set foot in England in over forty years. Some had travelled further, from the United States or Canada. Gerald’s sole surviving brother, Ernest, was there, riddled with cancer but determined to see another year pass. ‘Chips’ Chippendale, his fellow survivor from his days with the Long Range Desert Group during the North Africa campaign, was there and in fine fettle. Four of Gerald’s five children had made it a point of honour to be there with their spouses and children. The party would be lavish. A great part of the prize money had been spent on it.
As the days passed, between preparations for Christmas lunch and the birthday bash, guests came and went like ghosts, now here, now gone again, half glimpsed through a closing door. They brought presents and clamoured for commemorative photographs with their host. The children among them, caught up in the spirit of Christmas and a party whose end was not yet in sight, romped timidly or brashly through the crumbling passages and winding stairways of the hall like the children of Alain-Fournier’s lost domain.
One of the last to arrive was Ethan Usherwood, hot on the heels of his father, Guy, Gerald’s youngest son. Ethan turned up on Christmas Eve after driving down from Quedgeley, just outside Gloucester. Of all the Usherwoods, Ethan lived nearest to Woodmancote, to which he was a regular and welcome visitor. But he worked as a detective chief inspector with Gloucestershire Constabulary, and had only been able to escape in time for the main party by dint of lavish arse-licking, some judicious Christmas presents, and a promise to put in some heavy overtime in January. The homicide case he was working on had gone dead, and he hadn’t been in the least unhappy to put it to bed for the Christmas season.
‘Sorry, Granddad,’ he said as he walked up to Gerald in the Bentham Room, Woodmancote’s illustrious central chamber, with its Elizabethan wainscoting and the remarkable Grinling Gibbons fireplace. The old room was festooned today with every possible decoration. Ivy, holly, mistletoe and sprigs of berried juniper hung in swags across the walls, their dark green colours setting off hundreds of golden balls suspended from them. Stockings hung from the mantelpiece. On little tables around the room stood bottles of home-made sloe gin, all lovingly laid down by Gerald several months earlier and ready, as in every year, to bring warmth, cheer and inebriation to the Christmas festivities.
‘Got a mind to put you over my knee and spank you, young man,’ Gerald replied. His eyes twinkled. Ethan knew his grandfather was unpredictable. He might have taken his late arrival as an affront. ‘It’s the same every year. Last to turn up, first to leave.’
‘A spanking would constitute an assault on a police officer. You wouldn’t want me to arrest you on Christmas Eve, would you? You wouldn’t want to be hauled down to the nick, surely?’
Gerald cuffed him on the shoulder. He was clearly in a good mood this evening. Ethan smiled back. With a younger man, he’d have hugged him, but not with his grandfather.
‘Come with me. Have some sloe gin,’ said Gerald, grabbing him by the sleeve and steering him to a table on one side of the mantelpiece, right next to the nativity. ‘It’s better than usual this year,’ he went on. ‘Bigger berries and weeks early. Longer time to stew. It’s got a bite to it.’
He poured his grandson a glass and waited to see his response. Ethan took a couple of sips and nodded enthusiastically.
‘It is good,’ he declared, and took a longer sip. ‘Just the thing after the drive. It’s freezing outside.’
‘Didn’t I tell you to bring your young woman along, boy?’
Ethan imagined a wagging finger, and remembered Christmases long gone. ‘Why didn’t you bring that chum of yours from school?’ ‘Where’s your sister?’ ‘Where’s that girl I’ve heard so much about?’ ‘Where’s that wife of yours?’
Yes, Ethan thought: where is my sister? Where is that wife of mine? A verse of Byron’s that had been used in Abi’s funeral service drifted through his mind.