The Sinful Stones Page 6

  No, St Bruno. So this was where he’d got to. The Yard had missed him, and the anecdotes of his legendary ambition and stupidity were growing tired. He was the one who had been persuaded by some meth-drinking scholar to forge T. S. Eliot’s Fifth Quartet, Stoke Newington. And had almost made a killing in the Mall by offering tourists very convincing invitations to a Buckingham Palace Garden Party at ten guineas ago. And when that collection of Cape Triangular forgeries had fetched such a packet, had attempted to cash in but had spoilt his chances by producing a stamp much more like the real thing than the original forger had ever achieved. And. . .ah! He must have recognised Pibble in the Refectory, and passed the word on.

  That made two of them. Rita, loopy. And Bruno, a classical numbskull. Add the stolid look of most of the green-clad brethren, and the mysterious stir in the breakfast room when Brother Servitude referred to Pibble’s cleverness, and Sister Charity to the Great Dane’s …

  “It can’t be coincidence,” he said out aloud.

  The echo of the vault agreed with him just as a brown-habited Virtue swept past on some errand. Pibble couldn’t remember his name—or his property, rather—but the man looked piercingly at him and said with desperate emphasis “Twenty-eight separate planets!” and then strode on.

  So Sir Francis had made his last home on an island of idiots, and a Paradise of thieves. (Bruno wasn’t the only ex-con; there was also the lock-picker.) Ali, well, it wasn’t as much of a coincidence as all that: you’d need idiots if you wanted adherents who’d wear their very bones away building this crank cathedral. And like as not you’d find some of them coming out of prisons. Many criminals are rickety on their intellectual pins, and many are really only happy (if you can call it happiness) when every moment of their day is shaped by a prison-like discipline, such as the gospel of stone provided. It would be interesting to know how the original contacts were made by which the Community stocked itself with the weak in the head and the soul. And whether anybody ever got away.

  Stifled with a sort of claustrophobia of the spirit, Pibble pushed open the gate into the outside world.

  3

  The world was all cloudscape, enormously blue and silver under the big wind. A day for kites.

  Father had understood how kites worked, in theory, and had insisted that it was cheaper to make them than to buy the one in the Post Office window; but he’d never contrived one which actually flew. Pibble saw him now, in his plus-twos, fussing with a string and struts and referring to the diagram in the BOP, then walking confidently off while small Jamie, knees tickly with the autumn dew on the grasses, unwound the cord. Father held the contraption high and cried “Now!” and Jamie plunged off into the wind through the cloying grey tussocks of the Common, and the cord shifted its angle as the kite rose and rose, and Father (too far off now to shout with his weak lungs) would signal to him to loose more cord the moment he turned, and the kite at once staggered, swirled, recovered for an instant as Jamie checked the run of the cord, and then dived headlong. Meanwhile the Buchan boys, smaller than Jamie and unaided by their father, had their Post Office kite steeple-high and dallying with the breeze.

  Just so, now, a column of gulls dallied half a mile away to the north. There the island rose to a headland in whose crook sat a dark, plump cottage. The birds were excited; making all due allowances for anthropomorphism, Pibble could still hear that in their distant squealing. There must be something on the beach below—perhaps even a stranded whale, which the Community could trundle back into its element. Worth a visit anyhow for a copper out of his element and with fifty minutes to waste. He picked his way along the path towards the cottage between rasping strands of heather. The heather covered about two thirds of the island in big blotches separated by coarse grassland; from the helicopter it had looked as if a camouflage artist had painted it over.

  This path also had been rolled smooth, but longer ago, judging by the fresh growth on it; as he came nearer to the cottage Pibble saw why. The grass of the headland was pocked with rectangles, like the graves of giants—there had been a village here, but all the houses were gone. Not fallen, but carefully removed, stone by stone, and rolled down the path. Only the cottage still stood.

  From its door a lean collie lunged yelping the moment Pibble’s bare feet chinked one granite splinter against another; but the dog was tied to the doorpost with a long cord and Pibble was able to circle out of reach. The door was propped open with a hay-rake, but no face peered out of it.

  The path became rougher beyond the cottage, but more worn with use; it curled round the shoulder of the headland, then dipped to a hidden inlet. Pibble left the path and picked his way between mushroom-shaped tussocks until he reached the edge of the near cliff and could see across the inlet to the far higher cliff of the headland beyond. Against that granite wall the wind hurtled, made visible by the gulls that rode it; they dashed so fast towards the rock that he expected to see each bird end as a mess of blood and feathers there, like a moth on a windscreen, but then the upthrust wind flung them skywards to join the column; the motion was like that of those trick toys which dash for the edge of a table, feel the fall with their extra wheel and dart away. Exhilarated, Pibble stepped to the rim of his own cliff and looked over.

  There was no beach in the inlet, only rocks; and no whale, only a squat, dirty fishing-boat, almost as round as a coracle. The brown sail was down but not tidied away; the part aft of the mast was open and full of a jumble of nets and rigging and oddments; on the deck in front of the mast two women sat with their backs to him, engaged in some repetitive task—ah yes, they were gutting fish and tossing the offal overboard for the gulls to scoop up and bear away. These must be the Macdonalds. They didn’t wear the uniforms of the Community, but grey jerseys, tweed skirts, and brown scarves over their heads.

  Pibble sat on the cliff edge for five minutes, thinking of nothing much but watching the balanced and predatory scavengers, the marching sky and the sea. The waves beyond the inlet came shoreward with a stodgy motion, breaking into fringes of white along the tops, steep-sided. They were not very big but looked uncomfortable for sailing on, and he was thankful there was a helicopter to take him to the mainland. When sitting made him cold he started back along the path.

  Again the collie lunged, and again Pibble skirted round, thinking how lucky he had been to meet the affable Brother Love in the night, and not this demented guardian of bothies. His circle took him off the path at a point where the grass seemed almost downy beneath his soles; he was too early for his tryst with sinister Brother Providence, and he was also bored by the idea of going back along the same path that he’d come out by, so he decided to work his way along the cliff-tops and revisit his midnight crony.

  But over the first low ridge the grassland became heather, through whose intertwined growth he began to pick his way. Each step under the billowing habit had to be a high-arched circle and then a cautious feel for the crumbly ground below. The cliff-top was a series of undulations, so that sometimes he was only a few feet above the sea-slimed boulders and sometimes leaning into the wind on a bleak ridge. The half mile to the harbour took him nearly forty minutes.

  At last the heather became grassland again, a scrawny shoulder littered with boulders; from beyond it came the steady clink of hammers on stone. Pibble picked his way to the ridge expecting the grass to slope down to the cliffs above the harbour; instead he peered over a sudden drop into a huge bite that had been torn out of the hill-side—the quarry from which all those monstrous stones had been hauled to make the ugly edifice on the eastern horizon. A gang of green-clad brethren were on the floor of the quarry, chipping systematically at two big slabs that had been prized from the quarry face at a point where the granite was so fissured as to provide the beginnings of squared-up masonry. The process looked laughable, until Pibble remembered Mary’s slides of Mycenaean stonework, which for eighteen months she’d managed to show to almost everybody who’d set foot
in the house—and still thrillingly impressive, even through the lens of a Ewell sitting room. Those palaces had been compiled by methods such as this.

  At the lip of the quarry was a timber construction: the chute by which the boulders, once shaped, were lowered to the quay before being hauled on rollers up to the buildings. And, true to the Community’s style, the chute was so sited that if a rock came loose in the slings it could do nothing but rocket, first bounce, into the lap of the launch. Pibble wondered whether the brown-habited engineer now bent over one of the outboard motors even looked up when the stones were slid down; or did he toil on, secure in the faith that He hath given His angels charge?

  Pibble shifted to his right to examine the cause of a movement on the quay, part-hidden by the bulk of the chute. Next moment he was shouting to the stonemasons below and pointing beyond them. They looked up, and then in the direction of his gestures, but already he was running along the lip of the quarry—running so fast, with the skirts of his habit yanked up to his hips, that he almost fell headlong over the true cliff and hurtled down to the shed roof a dozen feet below. Here the quarry floor on his left was barely lower than the hillside, so he jumped down and ran for the chute. The stonemasons were staring at him, like a theatre queue at a busker—staring at Pibble and not down to the quay, where Sister Rita lay supine under the snarling jaws of Brother Love.

  “Come on!” he shouted, and balanced himself on the chute. It was as steep as the pitch of a slate roof, and longer than he’d expected, but he launched himself down it in an unslowable, wallowing run.

  Above the slamming of his feet on the splintery timbers he heard the clink of the stone-hammers beginning again. He almost made it. But trying to brake a few feet from the bottom he lost control; his legs shot forward and the side of his head hit the rim of the chute with a pain so fierce that he never noticed the ragged planks scraping at his buttocks through habit and pants. “Go limp!” his training cried, but before his panicking limbs could obey they were sprawling out across the flagstones.

  Blinded with pain and dizziness he rose to hands and knees and groped for the edge of the quay. His head felt too hurt to raise, but he willed his eyes to open and found a grey-green plain in the middle of which a crimson dome glowed. Then another glowed beside it, then a third, as the blood fell in slow drops from his nose on to the algae-mottled stone. He stood up and walked, weaving like a drunk, towards the dog and the girl.

  She lay as still as a corpse but he could see the living tension in her terrified shoulders. The hound’s forelegs bestrode her, its lips grinning above the reef of creamy fangs, its hackles raised like a Huron haircut. This time, groggy with his tumble and confident in last night’s acquaintanceship Pibble wasn’t in the least afraid.

  “Good dog,” he said, in a sturdy, policemanlike voice.

  At once the picture changed. The Great Dane faced round at him with a deep snarl, half-crouching for the spring. Pibble stood his ground and said, cooingly, “Come here, boy.” The dog threw back its head and emitted a long pulsing bowl. Pibble took a step nearer. The dog leaped towards him, snarling, and he backed off, arms raised to cover his face and throat. The dog, still snarling like a power saw biting into old elm, swirled back to the unmoved body of Sister Rita and stood guard again.

  “Take it easy, Love sweetie,” said a plummy tenor voice.

  The hackles dropped at once. The fangs vanished into amiable jowls and dewlaps. The stump of tail wagged gaily. Brother Love pranced sideways like a puppy, reared and put his forefeet on the shoulders of the brown-habited Brother who had been working at the engines of Truth and was now standing placidly on the quay, while the dog revelled in a thorough slobber.

  When at last he fended the animal away Pibble saw that it was the helicopter pilot who had flown him over yesterday, a heavy-faced man with a film-director’s crew-cut and a quick, meaningless smile. At Oban he had been affable, a little cringing, a little nervous about the unexpected passenger. Here he seemed almost childishly cocky, as though the touch of the island granite gave him power.

  “You needn’t have scampered like that, my old officer,” he said. “You only got yourself all nasty and sweaty and then came a positively terrifying cropper. Love’s trained to a hair, you know. He doesn’t miss a trick. Not like our little Rita here. Up you get, Rita darling, and try not to come nosing round my little boat again, not without being asked.”

  Sister Rita shuddered, twisted over on to hands and knees, and crawled across the quay to where Pibble stood swaying with pain and panic. Reaching him she wound her arms round his hams and laid her head softly on his hip.

  “My Saviour!” she breathed.

  “Take the gentleman up to Brother Patience,” said the pilot, raising his eyes in silent-film despair. “He’s got a splinter or two in his tenderest places, I’ll bet.”

  “Your Highness is wounded!” said Rita. She rose to her feet in anguished concern.

  “Don’t dilly-dally on the way, my duck,” said the pilot. “Back you come, straight to your old Brother Tolerance. You’ve got a whole dice to cut, haven’t you, before you can throw for a fresh square, stead of which you take it into your pretty little noddle to come nosing round my boat.”

  “I’m all right,” said Pibble. “I just got banged about a bit. But is she in a fit state … I mean oughtn’t you …”

  “I got salt in my upper cylinders,” said the pilot with bitchy patience. “I know the valves are my brothers and all, but if I let ’em corrode there’s a sweet lot of regrinding before they’ll run again.”

  “Forgive the blunt talk of our peasants,” said Rita sweetly. “They know no better.”

  Pibble started to protest again, but the pilot rounded on him, spitting slightly with the emphasis of his rage.

  “And a fat lot you care for my old chopper,” he said, gesturing towards the mysterious shed. “Oh, so I’m going to ferry you back and forth on my own wings, am I, after you come smarming over here getting me into trouble with my mates, and then not letting me alone enough to get on with my maintenance to keep her up to licensing standard? You want the rotors to flop off half way home, do you, so that you can swim the rest? That the sort of death you fancy? Well I don’t!”

  “Come,” sighed Rita. She offered Pibble her arm and began to lead him towards the cliff path.

  “Don’t you forget to come back and cut your dice, Rita,” called the pilot maliciously. “The stones are your brothers, eh, ducky?”

  “The stones are my brothers,” said Rita in her other voice and drew her arm quickly out of Pibble’s, as a child shudders away from a spider in the bath. Where a small track led up to the quarry from the main path she paused.

  “I must cut my dice,” she said dully. “This time I must cut it square, and then I can begin.”

  “Won’t you take me to Brother Patience first?” said Pibble. “He said so.”

  He nodded down to where the pilot was still standing watching them from the quay, one hand on the hound’s magnificent brindled shoulder. The stance and habit, helped by distance, made the pair of them look like a Victorian study for a painting of St Francis.

  “There are so many rules in the top of the box,” said Rita sadly. “I can never understand them all at the same time.”

  But she turned from the quarry and walked up the steep path. Pibble was oppressed by the responsibility of knowing that the pressures of the Community, however well-intentioned, were exactly calculated to increase the havoc of her mind. Her sad personality wavered like a bat down the dark crevasse between her own fantasy and Father Bountiful’s.

  “How long have you been on the island?” he asked.

  “Time and times and the half of a time,” she said.

  “How did you come?”

  “Brother Servitude brought me. He found me deep in sin. I lived deliciously in Babylon, arrayed in fine linen, and the kings of the earth co
mmitted … committed … I can’t remember the words … I’m so hungry.”

  This was a third voice, the voice of a small girl whining about something real. And a real voice too, neither the dismal imaginings of the Apocalypse nor the bright never-never Regency of the Children’s Library bookshelf. He slowed his pace only partly because the hip that he had battered unaware in his fall had begun to ache. Hell, he thought, three days compassionate leave for urgent family reasons, and you land yourself with a loopy responsibility like this. Serve you right, Pibble, for wangling the system. Now you’re going to drive poor Mary mad by wasting a fortnight’s free evenings typing out an elaborate report on the Community and sending it off to all the authorities you can think of who might conceivably do something for the island’s Sister Ritas—not that they will—if ever there was a haven for sleeping dogs it’s Whitehall. All you’ll achieve is to ruin the remnant of your career with a reputation for crankiness, while poor Rita and St Bruno and the other defenceless minds and hearts …

  The memory of that curious flurry in the breakfast room when his own intelligence had been canvassed reminded him of the mouldy oatcake in his pocket. He fished it out and offered it to Rita. She whisked it into her own pocket with the quick snatch of a shop-lifter, then glanced round the wind-swept landscape with furtive eyes. Her left hand moved to brush back a tendril of dark hair, and in the movement a corner of oatcake slid between scarcely parted lips. Pibble gave her time to suck, rather than chew, it away before he asked his next question.