Serpens is not in any state to fault the plan. ‘So the fire destroys the evidence?’
‘Right.’ He wags a finger. ‘But we should take care.’ He points to the body. ‘First off we pour half this bottle into Mr Heartbreak. Then we make it look like he fell. We crack his head on something — in the same place where you hit him. That way any autopsy will find the injury is what they term “consistent with the fall” and not with you whacking him.’ He grins. ‘Finally, we soak him in the last of the voddie, light our bonfire and run.’
Serpens looks disturbed but nods his agreement.
‘Okay, let’s get it done. Help me sit him upright.’
Timberland’s body is heavy and cumbersome. It makes sickening cracking and gassy noises as they pull it into a sitting position. Musca tilts the head back, pulls the lips apart and pours vodka down the dead man’s throat. Serpens wants to throw up.
‘Best let some of that settle for a minute,’ says Musca. ‘Or else it’ll just come straight back up.’ He leaves Serpens holding the corpse while he turns on the gas, heats the beans and makes the toast. ‘All done. Let’s move him to the drawers there, in the wall opposite the cooker. Open the bottom one. We can make it look like he slipped and cracked his head.’
Serpens flips it open and takes a deep breath. The two men struggle again to lift the body. Timberland was smaller than both of them but he’s like a rag doll and weighs a ton. Finally, Musca takes him under the arms, slides him backwards and drives the back of the skull down on to the bottom drawer.
He lets the body fall and stands back to admire his work.
A little vodka has spewed out of Timberland’s mouth, on to his shirt front and on to the floor. Apart from that it’s perfect.
‘Finale time. You ready?’
‘Guess so.’
Musca takes the open bottle of vodka and pours it over the head and chest. He lays the empty near the hands. He turns off the gas under the beans to extinguish the flames. When he’s sure it’s out he turns it on again and cranks it up high.
He gives Serpens a look, takes the carrier bag that he brought with him and unscrews the other bottle of spirits. He douses the corpse again and the cooker then points to the door. ‘Best stand outside.’
They step out of the Camper into the cold barn and the yellow paraffin light. Serpens watches Musca pour the last of the vodka on to the floor of the van and return the empty to his carrier bag. ‘Three, two, one.’ He strikes the match. Lets it catch, then throws it on to the floor near the corpse.
‘Run!’
They sprint like scared kids through the barn and out into the surrounding field. From the safety of the darkness, they see flames building. The old wood begins to crack in the rising fire. Suddenly, there is a guttural thud. The cylinder explodes.
The barn’s rafters splinter and fall in. A scream of nesting bats scuttle skywards away from the spiralling orange flames.
63
Caitlyn knows about women who’ve been held captive for years. Imprisoned in cellars. Even locked in wooden crates. She knows of their horrors because Eric told her all about them. Said it would teach her to be careful — remind her to stay safe. The unlearned lesson chills her. Maybe others have suffered her fate, entombed in a thick stone wall, where you can scream your lungs out and never be heard.
Eric’s warnings drift back to her. The horror stories he’d thought would keep her safe. Teenager Danielle Cramer from Connecticut, kept in a secret room under a staircase for a year. Nina von Gallwitz, held for 149 days until her parents paid out more than a million Deutschmarks to get her back. Fusako Sano from Japan, kept captive for ten years. An entire decade.
She can remember them all. All their faces. And they were the lucky ones. Eric showed her the long list of Dutch, American, English and Italian women who had not been so fortunate. Ones who had been taken, held and killed, even though ransoms had been paid.
His words come back and haunt her. ‘They take you for sex, for money, for torture, even to get revenge on you or your parents. These are dangerous people, Caitlyn. Some of them are insane enough to take you just to become famous. Whatever you do, don’t mess with our security.’
But she had done. She screwed up and she can’t make it good. She wants to cry. Wants to sob her heart out. But she doesn’t. She won’t. She tells herself that she never cried during thirty-nine days of Survivor and she sure as hell isn’t going to start now.
Caitlyn tries to think of something different. She recalls her time on the reality show. The welcome party, the first tasks, the guys who were hot for her. Thirty-nine days, twenty competitors, fifteen episodes that made her a household name. Once she swam naked during the live telecast. It gave the censors a fit. Damned nearly got the whole series scrapped. But it was a ratings blockbuster.
She’d do it again. Any time. Shock and glamour have become her middle names. It almost makes her smile. Even in this dusty crevice of a prison she can still taste the sweetness of her old life — the money, the fame, the controversy caused by her wild spirit. But for how long? she asks herself. How long before the whackballs holding her send her mad?
64
Gideon is down to the last two tapes.
He’s watched close to forty and despite the thunderstorm raging in his head, he’s determined to view the last of them before turning in.
He slides one into the player and watches his father appear on screen. The young professor doesn’t look much older than Gideon is now. After a few seconds, Marie Chase can be heard behind the camera: ‘I think it’s working, Nate. Yes, yes, the red light is flashing. You can start when you want.’
Nathaniel takes a breath to compose himself and brushes a straggle of windblown hair from his face. He’s wearing a thick blue fleece, dark pants and walking boots. There’s snow on the ground and an all-too-familiar backdrop. Stonehenge. ‘I take you back almost five thousand years,’ he announces, sweeping his hand across the landscape. ‘Back to the days when our ancestors dug this circular ditch, some three hundred feet in diameter, twenty feet wide and up to seven feet deep.’ He squats on the ground and places his hands in a furrow where the ditch had been. ‘Beneath this spot, archaeologists found the bones of animals that died two hundred years before this ditch was even dug. Why did our forefathers put them there? Why use a pile of old bones to line a new ditch? The answer of course is that these bones came from special sacrifices to the ancient gods.’
Gideon smiles. His father the self-publicist had been well known for spicing up dull university lectures with his own home movies. On the screen, the young professor leaves the ditch and as he walks the circumference of the stones expounds a now familiar theory about the discovery of more than two hundred human skeletons on the site. ‘The seventeenth-century historian John Aubrey found these burned human bones in fifty-six different holes. Were they too offerings to the gods? Was Stonehenge both a crematorium and a temple, a ritual slaughterhouse for celestial gratification?’
Having just read the diaries from a decade later, Gideon finds it strange to watch his father pose the questions in such a sceptical tone. Stranger still to think of what might actually be true. The tape rolls on to the final stage of development: ‘Some three thousand years ago, unknown hands moved these bluestones from the Preseli Mountains. We still do not know how they achieved such a feat. They were erected as a circular monument, the entrance aligned towards sunrise at the summer solstice.’ Nathaniel walks to the bigger sandstones, his hand stretching to the skies. ‘These giant sarsens, some more than three times my height and weighing as much as forty tons. Stood on their ends by incredibly talented ancient builders, they were capped with horizontal sarsens using sophisticated mortise and tenon joints, a technique that seems way before its time.’ He walks deeper into the circle. ‘Here in the heart of the henge, a horseshoe-shaped arrangement, five pairs of standing sarsens with giant horizontal caps — the trilithons.’