Death of an Adept

Chapter Nineteen

"NOEL , why do I have the feeling I'm being set up?" Harry Nimmo asked bluntly, the following morning.

His voice sounded tinny and slightly distanced through the Cessna's headphones. Carlisle lay behind them, and the sprawl and smokestacks of Merseyside smudged the horizon off their port wing as they headed across Liverpool Bay, making for the Cumbrian coast. It was just past ten in the morning.

McLeod cast aside a droll glance at the leather-jacketed man in the pilot's seat.

"Feeling paranoid this morning, Harry?"

"Well, you haven't really told me why you seconded my services for this jaunt," Harry replied. His gaze continued to rove ahead and to the sides for other air traffic, this close to the busy air corridors around Liverpool. "I'm glad to do it - but you could've taken the train down and back in a day, or even flown commercially in and out of Chester and hired a car, or had someone meet you from Conwy. Is this something to do with what happened at Callanish?"

"Now I know how you earned your silk," McLeod quipped. "This is what I get for trying to fool a wily Crown barrister."

"That doesn't answer my question."

McLeod had the grace to grin.

"Fair comment, Counsellor. This does have to do with the Callanish incident. We think we may have located the chap Peregrine sketched at the site. And to answer your next question, yes, I'm hoping you may be able to render similar service, when we go out to where he lives."

Harry's capable hands tightened on the steering yoke, though his eyes did not cease sweeping the skies before them.

"I was afraid of that."

"Afraid of what? That it will happen again? I'd think you'd be almighty curious."

This comment elicited a darting side-glance.

"I suppose I am," Harry conceded. "At least if it happened again, I might be more sure of my ground."

"In what way?" McLeod asked.

Harry's forehead furrowed between sunglasses and Starship Enterprise baseball cap.

"I suppose I'm concerned because up until recently, I'd never considered myself to be particularly impressionable - quite the reverse, in fact. So maybe you can appreciate how strange it seemed, suddenly to find myself having a - a visionary experience, I suppose I have to call it. It's something I never expected to happen. I'm still not quite sure what to make of it."

"What do your instincts say?"

"I'm not sure I dare trust my instincts anymore," Harry said frankly. "They've always stood me in good stead - that's part of what makes me good at what I do - but I keep asking myself, Did that really happen, or was it just my imagination playing tricks on me?"

"Which are you more inclined to believe?"

Harry allowed himself a short, mirthless laugh. "I wish I knew. Oh, I've never had any trouble accepting that there's more to reality than meets the eye. If I've learned nothing else, working with you these last couple of years, it's the fact that, as the bard says, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"There are, indeed," McLeod agreed.

"But up until Callanish, all my experiences with paranormal matters had been secondhand, purely supportive," Harry protested. "And I'd been willing to accept all of that on faith. Since Callanish, I can't help but wonder, Why now?"

"Well, people develop their potentials in different ways, and at different rates," McLeod ventured. "It could simply be that you're a late-bloomer. Or it could be that these talents of yours have been lying dormant until such time as they were needed."

"Implying that I'm going to need them now?" Harry retorted. "I'm not sure I like the sound of that."

McLeod chuckled, shaking his head. "All part of the game, Counsellor. Just keep reminding yourself that psychic talents are merely another aspect of human nature, and subject to development like everything else about being human."

"Right," Harry muttered. "I'll tell myself that, the next time I pick up something and it gives me a psychic bite!"

They touched down soon after at an airstrip near Conwy. Inspector Davies was waiting there to give them cordial welcome, leaning on the open door of a police Land Rover as they buttoned up the plane and came crunching across the new snow of the parking apron. Davies in person was dark and energetic, with a firm handshake, humor in his blue eyes, sharply defined features, and the spare, wide-shouldered stature that had made his forebears masters of the longbow in ages past.

"Good to meet you in person at last, Inspector McLeod." The lilting accents of the Welsh valleys sang in his pleasant tenor. "Mr. Nimmo, I hope you won't be bored coming along on our little outing."

"Nary a chance," Harry replied, with a glance at McLeod. "Working with the inspector is never boring."

Davies chuckled as his sweeping gesture invited them to pile into the Land Rover.

"So I gather. His reputation goes before him - all of it good, I hasten to add!"

McLeod took the seat beside Davies, Harry installing himself behind McLeod, both of them buckling up as the Welsh inspector started the engine.

"As you can't have missed as you came in, we've had a fair amount of snow in the last few days," Davies informed his visitors, as he set the car in gear and eased it off the parking apron. "Half of Gwynedd is under snow right now. Since the cottage your man Evans calls home is deep in the country, I thought I'd better drive you there myself. You'll see what I mean when we get there. Mr. Nimmo, there's a file folder on the seat beside you. Would you hand it up to the inspector, please? That's what we've got on your Griffith Evans."

With a muttered "Thank you," McLeod took the file Harry passed forward and opened it on his lap, adjusting his aviator spectacles with an absent gesture as he bent to inspect a booking photo of Griffith Evans. Davies said nothing as he negotiated the slip roads leading back to the highway; but as soon as they had joined the A470, tires hissing on the wet pavement, he glanced over at McLeod - now deeply immersed in perusing the rest of the contents of the file folder - then at Harry in the rearview mirror.

"You're lucky the weather held this morning," he said to Harry, making congenial small talk. "Flying can be nasty, this time of year. Now me, I'm a bit of an angler so. Never had much of a head for heights, do you see? One day I mean to venture up to Scotland and try my hand at salmon fishing. But in the meantime, our own Lake Bala gwyniad are nothing to complain about, for all they're not so large as their Scottish cousins. I think you call them Powan, elsewhere."

"I've never fished in Wales," Harry allowed, "though I did come here on holiday once, when I was a lad. Is there good fishing around here?"

"Aye, you can get the odd fighter…."

The late morning sky wore a steely shade of blue as Davies drove them south along the wintry wildness of the Conwy Valley, wittering away about Welsh fishing, with the hoary crags of the Cambrian mountains barricading the sky to the west. Leaving his companions to their piscatorial discussion, McLeod gave his full attention to the file in his lap.

There wasn't much to it: besides the booking forms and a computer-generated rap sheet, just a sparse handwritten account of the disturbance which had led to Evans' arrest two years before. He had later been released, the charges dropped.

The facts surrounding the case, however, were sufficient to pique McLeod's interest, for the police photograph was a close match to Peregrine's sketches. To begin with, the incident had taken place at an ancient ring of standing stones known as Druids' Circle, located a few miles to the west of Conwy itself. A local group of latter-day Druids had obtained permission to hold an assembly there in honor of the summer solstice - not a New Age festival cum rock concert such as periodically marred similar gatherings at Stonehenge, but a solemn and dignified attempt to re-create aspects of ancient Druidic practice, in conjunction with a traditional bardic eisteddfod.

The celebration had been proceeding harmoniously until Griffith Evans intruded on the scene. His scathing denunciation of the group and their practices had provoked a confrontation that might have ended in a brawl had the police not stepped in - a new wrinkle on an old theme, for the disruption of non-mainstream religious gatherings usually sprang from the self-righteous objections of those outside such traditions. Evans' objections came from within.

"I gather that this Evans presented himself as some kind of arch-Druid in his own right," McLeod remarked, continuing to skim the report. "Claimed he was empowered to make judgements on the validity of what was being done. According to this, he didn't take exception to what your local folk were doing because they were pagans, but because they weren't pagan enough!"

"Aye, queer, isn't it?" Davies returned with a wry grimace. "But you get nutters at both ends of the spectrum. Still, the incident was unusual enough to stick in my mind - and Evans is a distinctive-looking old bird. Then, when your fax came through, and I saw the artist's sketch…"

"I really do appreciate your passing on the word," McLeod said. "Do you know if Evans had any followers?"

"None that we were able to trace," Davies replied, turning off onto a B-road. "Frankly, I'm inclined to believe he was acting entirely on his own. But that didn't stop him from trying to demonstrate his authority."

"By wringing the necks off a pair of pigeons as a blood sacrifice to the old gods?"

Davies gave a shrug. "Don't ask me to explain; I just report as I find. The fracas broke out when some of the members of the other group tried to stop him. At that point, it seemed a good idea to take Mr. Evans into custody, for the benefit of all concerned." Davies shook his head. "I've seen fundamentalist Christians and Jews, and fundamentalist Muslims and Hindus, but the one thing I don't think I ever expected to see was a fundamentalist Druid!"

"Fanatics come in all varieties, I suppose," McLeod said neutrally.

"Was this the only incident of its kind that Evans was involved in?" Harry asked from the back seat.

"This and that Stonehenge arrest that's listed on the rap sheet," Davies returned, "and to the best of our knowledge, he hasn't caused any trouble since. Since I wasn't sure this is the man you're after, I only ran him through our local records; but what he might have been getting up to outside our jurisdiction is something else again."

After another mile or two they slowed almost to a halt before an un-signposted break in the trees that flanked the west side of the road. Shifting into four-wheel drive, Davies swung the Land Rover ponderously off the tarmac onto what proved to be a snow-covered, tree-flanked track scarcely wider than the vehicle, showing no sign of recent passage save for deer and rabbit spoor.

A silence born of more than snow seemed to muffle the vehicle as they penetrated deeper into the wood. Harry released his seat harness and leaned forward to peer between the two front seats as the rutted trail plunged them along an overgrown obstacle course of thickets and boulders, with here and there a haphazard bridge of planks laid down across a shallow gully. The temperature seemed to drop, even though Davies had not touched the thermostat control on the vehicle's heater.

"Watch the deer!" Harry warned, bracing himself as Davies braked hard for a five-point stag that suddenly bolted across their path and bounded from sight among the trees. "Wow, what a beauty! But I see what you mean about this Evans character not wanting anything much to do with the rest of the world."

"Aye, how'd you like to be the postman in charge of delivering his mail?" Davies quipped.

McLeod was too preoccupied to do more than shake his head. The density of the surrounding woods, even in winter, seemed to absorb the rumble and crunch of the Land Rover's tires on the icy ground, leaving behind a lurking hush pregnant with hostility. The atmosphere became more oppressive, the further they proceeded. Convinced that more was at work here than the forces of nature, McLeod surreptitiously reached into the inner pocket of his jacket and slipped on his Adept ring.

"How much farther?" he murmured.

"Not far," Davies replied.

The trail carried on in a succession of zigzags, darker and darker as they meandered through increasingly dense stands of bare, ice-laden trees. When they rounded yet another left-hand bend in the track, they emerged without warning into a brighter patch of broad, snow-covered clearing. Only at second glance did McLeod and Harry spot the freestone cottage set far at the other side, overshadowed by a glowering ridge of high ground.

Squat and graceless, the cottage might have been rough-hewn from the rock of the valley wall, even remaining a part of it. Its window recesses were small and skewed, and seemed to brood like so many deep-set eyes from beneath the low slate roof. The chimney canted slightly, suggesting that the house itself had fallen victim to subsidence in the past.

"Not exactly a stately home, is it?" McLeod murmured.

"I certainly wouldn't want to live here," Davies said. "Evans has got his own electrical generator - it's housed in that shed you can see from here - but that would seem to be his sole concession to twentieth-century living. The phone company won't run a line all the way out here, and I'm not even sure he has indoor plumbing."

They parked the Land Rover at the edge of the clearing and got out.

"There's no smoke rising from the chimney," Harry observed, "and no noise coming from the generator. Call me a pessimist, but I don't think there's anybody home."

"Then nobody's going to mind if we take a look around," Davies said, blowing on gloved hands. "We'll announce ourselves first, for the sake of form."

The air seemed unnaturally still as they approached the cottage. Though the cold was bitter, and McLeod was three-quarters convinced that the place was unoccupied, he found himself unbuttoning his overcoat to allow access to the Browning Hi-Power he had clipped inside his waistband before alighting from the plane. Harry kept looking around suspiciously. Davies apparently was experiencing a similar case of nerves, for he gave McLeod a thumbs-up sign as he spotted the butt of the Browning, though he himself appeared to be unarmed.

"Mr. Evans, are you there?" he called, hammering a gloved fist on the door. "Mr. Evans, it's Inspector Davies and Inspector McLeod from the police. We'd like to have a word with you."

There was no response from inside. Davies raised his voice and shouted again, with no better results. Turning to McLeod, he cocked an eyebrow. "Well, what do you think?"

"I think," McLeod said pointedly, "that after coming all this way, I would hate to leave without at least checking to make sure Mr. Evans isn't lying dead of a heart attack on his own kitchen floor. Or he could have perished from the cold.

After all, as Harry pointed out, I don't see any sign of chimney smoke, do you?"

"How very right you are," Davies concurred with aplomb. "I wonder whether he might have left a spare key under the mat."