The sixty-year-old takes off his brown-framed reading glasses and places them on the antique desk. The matter in hand is pressing but it can wait until the floor show outside is done.
The pheasant’s humble harem break from their feeding to pay the cock the attention he craves. He stomps out a short, jerky dance and leads the buff-brown females towards a stretch of manicured privets. Chase picks up a pair of small binoculars that he keeps by the window. At first he sees nothing except grey-blue sky. He tilts the glasses down and the blurred birds fill the frame. He fiddles with the focus wheel until everything becomes as sharp and crisp as this chilly summer morning. The male is surrounded now and warbling short bursts of song to mark his pleasure. Off to the right lies a shallow nest at the foot of the hedge.
Chase is feeling sensitive, emotional. The display outside his window touches him almost to the point of tears. The male with its many admirers, at the peak of life, vibrant in colour and potency preparing to raise a family. He remembers those days. That feeling. That warmness.
All gone.
Inside the grand house there are no pictures of his dead wife, Marie. Nor any of his estranged son, Gideon. The place is empty. The professor’s days of plumage-spreading are done.
He puts the binoculars down beside the fine casement window and returns to the important paperwork. He picks up a vintage fountain pen, a limited-edition Pelikan Caelum, and savours its weight and balance. One of only five hundred and eighty ever made, a homage to Mercury’s fifty-eight-million-kilometre orbit of the sun. Astronomy has played a vital role in the life of Nathaniel Chase. Too vital, he reflects.
He dips the nib into a solid brass antique inkwell, lets the Pelikan drink its fill and resumes his chore.
It takes Nathaniel an hour to finish writing on the fine cotton-blend paper that bears his own personalised watermark. He meticulously reviews every finished line and contemplates the impact the letter will have on its reader. He blots it, folds it precisely into three, places it into an envelope and seals it with old-fashione d wax and a personalised stamp. Ceremony is important. Especially today.
He places the letter in the middle of the grand desk and sits back, both saddened and relieved to have completed the text.
The sun is now rising above the orchard at the far side of the garden. On another day, he’d walk the grounds, perhaps take lunch in the summerhouse, watch the wildlife in the garden, and then enjoy a mid-afternoon snooze. Another day.
He opens the bottom drawer of the desk and pauses as his gaze falls on what lies in there. In one determined move, he takes out the First World War revolver, puts it to his temple and pulls the trigger.
Outside the blood-spattered window, pheasants squawk and scatter into the grey sky.
3
Gideon Chase quietly puts the phone down and stares blankly at the walls of his office where he’s been reviewing the findings of a dig at a Megalithic temple in Malta.
The policewoman had been clear enough. ‘Your father is dead. He shot himself.’ Looking back, it’s hard to see how she could have been any clearer. No wasted words. No hyperbole. Just a verbal slap to the guts that sucked his breath away. Sure, she’d thrown in a ‘sorry’ somewhere, murmured her condolences, but by then the twenty-eight-year-old’s brilliant professor-in-waiting brain had shut down.
Father. Dead. Shot.
Three small words that painted the biggest imaginable picture. But all he could manage in reply was ‘Oh.’ He asked her to repeat what she’d said to make sure he’d understood. Not that he hadn’t. It was just that he was so embarrassed that he couldn’t say anything other than ‘Oh.’
It has been years since father and son last spoke. One of their bitterest rows. Gideon had stormed out and vowed never to talk to the old goat again and it hadn’t been difficult to keep to his word.
Suicide.
What a shock. The great man had wittered on all his life about being bold, daring and positive. What could be more cowardly than blowing your brains out? Gideon flinches. God, it must have been ugly.
He moves around his small office in a daze. The police want him to travel over to Wiltshire to answer a few questions. Help fill in some blanks. But he’s not sure he can find his way out of the door, let alone to Devizes.
Childhood memories tumble on him like a row of falling dominoes. A big Christmas tree. A melting snowman on the front patch of lawn. A pre-school Gideon coming downstairs in pyjamas to open presents. His father playing with him while his mother cooked enough food to feed a village. He remembers them kissing under the mistletoe while he hugged their legs until they had to pick him up and include him. Then comes the thump. As a six-year-old, enduring the pain of his mother’s death. The silence of the graveyard. The emptiness of their home. The change in his father. The loneliness of boarding school.
He has much to think about on the journey south to Wiltshire, the county where his mother had been born, the place she’d always lovingly called ‘Thomas Hardy Land’.
4
Few know of its existence. A secret vault of cold stone, scaled to epic proportions by prehistoric architects. A place unvisited by the uninitiated.
The Sanctuary of the Followers is an unseen wonder. It is the size of a cathedral and yet a mere bump in the turf on the fields above, almost invisible to the human eye. Below ground, it’s the jewel of an ancient civilisation, the product of a people whose brilliance still baffles the greatest brains of modern times.
Fashioned three thousand years before Christ, the place is an anachronism, a vast temple as out-of-time, breathtaking and impossible as the Great Pyramid of Giza.
Buried in its subterranean tombs are the architects of both Stonehenge and the Sanctuary. Their bones rest in the midst of more than two million blocks of stone, quarried from the same sources. Just as the Giza monument was a near-perfect pyramid, the Sanctuary is a near-perfect semi-sphere, a dome arcing over a circular floor, a cold moon sliced in half.
Now footsteps resound through the Descending Passage as though rain is falling into the cavernous chambers. In the candlelight of the Lesser Hall, the Inner Circle gathers. There are five of them, representatives of the giant trilithons sited inside the circle of Stonehenge. All are cloaked and hooded: a sign of respect for generations past, those who gave their lives to create this sacred place.
Upon initiation, Followers become known by the name of a constellation that shares the initial letter of their own first name. This shroud of secrecy is another age-old tradition, an echo of an epoch when the whole world was guided by stars.
Draco is tall and broad and exudes power. He is the most senior, the Keeper of the Inner Circle. His name comes from the Latin for ‘dragon’ and the constellation that almost three thousand years ago cradled the northern world’s all-important pole star.
‘What is being said?’ He gives a flash of perfect teeth beneath his hood. ‘What are they doing?’
The ‘they’ in question are the police, the Wiltshire constabulary, the oldest county police force in the country.
Grus, a thickset man in his early fifties, pounces. ‘He shot himself.’
Musca paces thoughtfully, candles casting spectral shadows on the stone walls behind. Although the youngest of them all, his large physical presence dominates the chamber. ‘I never expected him to do this. He was as devoted as any of us.’