Sometime in the middle of the night we stopped at a service area. The parking lot was crowded, with the usual cadre of smokers huddled by the entrance. Adrian filled the tank while I went inside to get us some coffee and food, along with a couple of bottles of cheap red wine and a can of Foster’s. When I returned, Krishna was still snoring softly.
“Christ.” I shook my head and handed Adrian a bacon sandwich wrapped in cellophane. “I want whatever she had.”
“I was thinking of waking her.”
“That’s a terrible idea.”
Adrian mused on this, then nodded. “I suspect you’re right.”
He cranked the Rover’s heater, pulled away from the gas pump, and found a parking spot near the motorway ramp. “Do you think you could drive in a bit? I need to rest, or I’ll drive into a truck myself.”
“Yeah, sure. Want to switch now?”
Adrian took a bite of his sandwich, grimacing. “I’ll get us past the next few miles, where it’s narrow. We can switch after that. It’s a fairly easy stretch after that for a short while. Just remember to wake me before Exeter.”
There was hardly any traffic now. The snow had stopped, though a steady wind continued to blow gouts of white across the roadway. The landscape was mostly flat: I could see a far-off wind farm, lines of towering electrical pylons, a scatter of village lights. The clouds had pulled away, revealing an obsidian sky and a few stars.
“Look,” said Adrian. He slowed the Rover, rolling down his window to point something out.
Above the horizon hung a three-quarter moon that cast a radioactive brilliance across the blue-white plain. In the near distance, several distinct shadows appeared to hover above the ground—a trick of the lunar light. Adrian pulled the car onto the shoulder, turned off the ignition, and stepped outside.
I remained where I was while Adrian stood with his back to the vehicle, anorak flapping in the wind. After a minute he turned and beckoned to me. I retrieved the wrench and warily joined him, my boots crunching on brittle, snow-covered grass.
“What is it?” I asked.
Adrian said nothing. I stared across the plain, to where the hovering shadows resolved into blocks, dead black against the snow. Even from here I could see how huge they must be.
I turned to Adrian in amazement. “Is that Stonehenge?”
He nodded, the skin beneath his eyes glistening. “It is.”
“Have you ever been there?”
Adrian wiped his eyes. “Many times. It was easier twenty years ago. Poppy said they used to camp out under the Heel Stone. But it’s better like this, from a distance. I think so, anyway.”
He turned and walked back to the car, calling out to me, “Ready to take over?”
I stood for another minute in the cold night, staring at the eerily moonlit panorama, and then returned to the Land Rover.
I hadn’t been behind the wheel in months. It felt good, even as I tried to remember to drive on the opposite side of the road. Beside me Adrian slept, his head pillowed against his backpack. Krishna continued to snore in the jumpseat. I popped the can of Foster’s and took a sip, balanced it on the seat beside me.
Adrian was right: The brakes were shit. Fortunately I didn’t have much cause to use them. Outside, the moonlit plain stretched like the landscape of a dream. Adrian slept with his head thrown back and his mouth open, lank gray-streaked hair falling across his eyes. His breath came in quick shallow bursts, as though he were racing across the snowy fields that surrounded us, the last of the Focalin sparking in his brain.
I thought of Poppy lying on the couch with a spike in her arm, her preternaturally peaceful expression, no evidence of a struggle. Despite what Adrian had insisted about her relationship to heroin, maybe she had, in the end, welcomed the chance to go out on a wave of oblivion. I might make the same choice.
I looked at Adrian and tried to imagine him as a sixteen-year-old, seduced by a beautiful woman twice his age, someone he’d known and trusted since infancy. He looked younger, with his mocking smile gone and that sardonic laugh silenced. His sleeping face tugged at my memory, the same way that Morven’s had when I first met her. Some long-ago photo of his father, Leith Carlisle, as a young man, or maybe a photo of the young Adrian I’d glimpsed somewhere—the Dunfrieses’ flat, Krishna’s—without registering who it was.
In the road ahead of us, several inches of snow had drifted. I downshifted to ease the Rover through the patch, glancing into the rearview mirror.
Krishna stared back at me, her teeth bared. Her dark eyes had sunken into a Medusa’s face and black tendrils wormed across her naked scalp. I gasped and slammed on the brakes, remembered too late to yank on the handbrake. The Rover skidded several feet before coming to a halt just inches from a ditch. I whirled around to see Krishna reaching to grab Adrian’s hair.
“What the hell?” I snatched her wrist and yanked her away from him. “What the fuck are you doing?”
For an instant I thought she’d spit at me. She seemed to think better of it. She looked quickly out the window, then slouched into the jumpseat. “Where are we?”
Adrian muttered and turned in his seat, pulling his coat over his head. I waited until his breathing slowed, spoke his name softly several times.
“Adrian? You awake?”
He seemed to be back down for the count. I let the Rover idle and turned back to Krishna.
“What the hell’s going on with you and Adrian?”
She stared at me obdurately and said nothing. After a minute I grabbed my bag and began to dig through its contents, holding pill bottles up to the dashboard light until I found the Solpadol. I held up the bottle so Krishna could read the label.
“These’ll help you sleep.”
“I don’t want to fucking sleep.”
“Really? You feel like walking back to London?”
I cocked a thumb at the car door. Krishna ground her teeth, then leaned forward to look at the bottle. I poured three pills into my palm and held them out to her. Her eyes narrowed.
“How do I know that’s not a roofie?”
“You just saw the bottle.”
“Yah, but you could have put something else in there. You take one.”
“I’m driving. Last chance…”
I started to withdraw my hand. Krishna grabbed it. “Anything to drink?”
“No.”
She gave me a half nod and swallowed the pills.
I waited a few minutes, debating whether I should try to find out if she knew anything about the Dunfrieses. I decided against it. Krishna was too much of a loose cannon; given her constitution, I hoped three downers was enough to put her out. If this was some sick lovers’ quarrel, I didn’t want to hear about it. If it had something to do with the three corpses back in London, the Solpadol might buy me a few hours until I could figure a way out of this mess.
When Krishna’s eyes reached half-mast, I put the Rover back into gear and began to drive once more. It wasn’t much later that Adrian stirred, yawning, and turned to me.
“Everything all right?”
“You missed the excitement. Krishna woke up and tried to throttle you.”
“Really?” He didn’t sound surprised.
“Yeah. Is there something going on with you two?”
“No. She’s a high-strung lass, that’s all.”
I could hear the lie in Adrian’s affected drawl, and felt a pang of unease as I caught the faintest trace of the spoiled-fruit scent that had signaled damage when I first met him in Krishna’s flat.
“I gave her a few Solpadol to knock her out.”
“You’re a human pharmacy. Her, too. Actually, I’m surprised you didn’t have to use a tranquilizer gun.”
He peered over his seat at Krishna, sleeping with her fingers pressed against her mouth. Tenderness mingled with desolation in his expression. I quickly looked away as he turned to me and shot me a smile as false as his tone had been.
“Shall I drive? You should rest for a bit. You look knackered.”
“Yeah, sure.”
We traded places. I wedged myself against the door with my bag in my lap, so that I was facing him. I had no intention of sleeping: I trusted Adrian about as far as I could throw him. But the soft rumble of wheels on the snow-covered road and the monochrome world outside conspired to do me in. I zoned out. If any dreams broke through the wall of exhaustion that surrounded me, I never knew.