Peter's ears picked up something above the crackling of the flamesa harsher sound, familiar. It took him some seconds to recognise that it was the escalating drone of a vehicle with its engine running then being revved up.
'Christ, the bastards are still there.' He gripped the window ledge. 'They've got a vehicle!'
Then he saw it; an outline that was suddenly revealed in the smoky darkness as a burst of flames swept the circle of yellow light beyond its original perimeter. A Land Rover, a squat rugged vehicle that was even now beginning to move off, edging its way back into the shadows, the darkness swallowing it up as though evil was deliberately hiding evil. Then it was gone, its engine receding as it clipped down the slope of the hill beyond the stone circle.
Peter and Janie stood watching in silence. The dawn came and the fire began to die down as it met with the resistance of damp undergrowth, billowing its smoke and thickening the fog so that eventually they could see nothing at all.
'That was a Land Rover without a doubt,' Peter muttered at last. 'Which rules out a lot of things and makes a mockery of all our theories. I'm afraid we jumped to too many conclusions.'
'Like what?' She looked strained and white in the grey light. Her hysteria had gone, simmered to a fear that was gnawing away inside her like a malignant growth.
'Well, certainly neither the Wilsons nor those two poachers possess a Land Rover. I guess that narrows the field. I'll have another chat with Calvert, but first I want to go up to the circle and have a look round. It'll be full daylight in twenty minutes or so.'
Then I'm coming with you,' she said.
'You don't have to. . . '
'I'm coming, and don't try to stop me, Peter.' She glanced at the alarm clock on the bedside table. 'It's barely half past seven. We can be back in time to get Gavin up for school, if he's well enough to go.'
'All right.' He began to get dressed. 'I don't expect there's much to see, but I'd like to take a look before I talk to the police.'
It was noticeable as they began the steep climb up to the circle that the cloud was beginning to lift; a freshening westerly breeze was dispersing it as though the evil was gone and the mantle that had cloaked it was needed no more.
'Ugh!' Janie shivered. 'I get the feeling that the cloud came down this last couple of days to screen whatever evil was taking place.'
'That's nonsense.' He stopped, then scanned the horizon through the patchy wisps of remaining mist. 'Hey, look, up there by the forest!'
She followed his pointing finger and caught her breath at what she saw. 'Deer! Peter, there must be fifty or sixty of them.'
The distant herd was grazing close to the edge of the big wood. A majestic looking male of the species stood some distance from the others, head erect, alert: the guardian on watch, scenting the air for the slightest sign of danger.
'They're absolutely magnificent,' Janie breathed, and for one brief moment the nightmare of Hodre was forgotten. 'Oh, look at that one on the right, it appears to be limping. It's injured.'
Sure enough, the beast in question was having difficulty in walking, taking jerky, uncertain steps, staggering, almost falling. Then suddenly the grazing animals were tense, heads up, looking towards their leader. The danger signal, obeyed in unison; they retreated, and the trees swallowed them up. There was just one stragglerthe cripplebut it made it to safety.
'They're nervous about something,' Peter muttered. 'Edgy as hell. We're a good half mile from them, but that buck spotted us and he wasn't taking any chances. In all probability the fire has upset them. They smelled the smoke and they're frightened of being caught in a forest fire. Anyway, we'd better get a move on.'
A few minutes later they reached the stone circle, a charred smouldering area of blackened pine skeletons. Even the topmost branches of the pines beyond the reach of the leaping flames were withered and drooping, the tree-trunks were now pillars of charcoal, and the ground beneath them was deep in flaked ash.
'How awful!' Janie wrinkled her nose and coughed. She backed away, smelling a stench more acrid, more nauseating than the stink of burned undergrowth, one that rasped in her throat and doubled her up in a spasm of retching. 'Whateverwhatever is that smell, Peter?'
'I don't know . . . ' That was true to start with anyway; it took several seconds before he came up with the answer. Then he looked away so that Janie would not see the expression of revulsion on his rugged features. There could be no mistake. It was the stench of burned flesh!
'What is it, Peter?'
He didn't answer, just poked at the ashes with a length of broken branch and stirred up a cloud of fine dust; he touched something solid and pushed hard at it, forcing it up to the surface.
Janie's scream of terror shattered the stillness of the smoky atmosphere and echoed across the valley below. She recoiled, wanting to hide her eyes so that she did not nave to look, wanting to flee blindly down the steep hillside. But for some inexplicable reason she stayed. And she looked.
There was no mistaking the partially incinerated animal corpse, the blackened smouldering flesh and bared bone, the patches of hair that had somehow only been singed in the inferno. Ash spilled from an open gut, like a taxidermist's burst specimen. Janie tried to tell herself that it was that rabbit or hare which she'd seen hopping about the fields, that it had somehow been trapped by the blaze and burned alive. Or a fox. But in the end every avenue was a dead-end, every alternative an excuse, a lie. There was only one feasible explanation, only one possible answer.
'It'sit's Snowy Only when she made this final analysis from the volume of ridiculous possibilities which she tried to force her brain to accept without success, was she able to turn her head away. 'Oh, how terrible!'
'Yes, it's Snowy.' Peter jabbed his stick into the embers. 'No doubt about that. I guess I didn't look very hard for him yesterday. The rope must have snapped under the weight of his body and it's only coincidence that his corpse got burned. At least he was dead, he didn't suffernot in the flames, anyway.'
'You're lying!' Her accusation was bordering on hysteria again, her features deathly white, her usually immaculate denim suit crumpled and smeared with ash. 'You know damned well you didn't find the cat here yesterday, Peter, because it had disappeared. There's not enough undergrowth beneath these trees to conceal a mouse. Whoever committed this terrible atrocity took the mutilated cat and then brought it back here to burn it when they started the fire. Can't you see that, or are you going to offer some other feeble excuse to try and blind me from the truth? D'you think anything human could have done this? Well I don't; it was some kind of blood sacrifice by whatever still exists in this stone circle!' Her voice trailed off. She was breathless and shaking, wide-eyed, glancing about her as though she expected some evil entity to rise like a phoenix out of the ashes and claim her.
'Druids don't go about in Land Rovers.' He tried to laugh, but it was a pathetic attempt, a smoke-dried cackle that sounded eerie in the early morning stillness. 'And whoever is responsible for this outrage used a Land Rover. Unfortunately the ground is too hard to leave tracks, but at least we've got something to go on. Let's get back. The sooner I speak to our friendly local bobby, the better.'
Gavin insisted on going to school. White-faced, with deep lines gouged beneath his eyes, he had the appearance of one who was either ill or suffering from lack of sleep. Yet he was adamant about attending school, and was already dressed when Peter and Janie got back to the cottage.
'Where've you been, Mum?'
'Nothing to worry about, Gavin.' Janie busied herself tipping cornflakes into cereal bowls; she spilled some because her hand was shaking. 'There was a heath fire up on the hill last night. Fortunately it didn't get very far because the ground was too wet.'