The rain had slowed things a little, but he’d welcomed it nonetheless, because pelting rain would discourage any night-time visitors to the place to drink and have sex among the stones. It would also delay any pursuers, if they’d been clever enough to work out where he might head with his captives. Even as he considered this, he knew that McNab had been nearest to his own way of thinking, and McNab was close to death in the back of the van.
He turned off the narrow road and dimmed his lights, then did a three-point turn and reversed. The track led into woodland, mature enough to shield his presence until daylight at least. Raindrops still pattered the roof from the overhead branches, but the clouds hadn’t parted to allow the moon to shine through. Perfect.
He shut off the engine and doused the lights.
Excitement beat in the nerve at the corner of his mouth as he opened the back door.
McNab was aware he lay with a woman, but in his dreamlike state drifted between pleasure at this, and horror. At its worst moment, the nightmare had him coupling with Iona as a corpse – or was he the corpse and she the living being? At times almost lucid, he fought his way towards the surface and knew that he was in a drugged state. At that moment he knew himself capable of something terrible in his anger. When the drug reclaimed him he was almost grateful.
But its power was lessening and reality returning.
He rolled off the woman, his head sent spinning by the movement. Instinct took his finger to seek for and find a faint pulse in her neck, although her skin was clammy to the touch. The moving darkness told him he was in the back of a vehicle, probably the van that had sent him off the road, and he was seized again by the claustrophobic memory of the sinking car and the weight of the water crushing the air from his lungs.
McNab forced himself to breathe in the stale air, to attempt to slow his heartbeat which seemed to have an erratic life of its own. He began to feel around the surfaces for a weapon of any kind, knowing that his best weapon would be surprise.
The pig still lay on top of the woman. He considered whether the dead weight might have suffocated her and there would be no need to inject her further. As he stood by the door studying them, he knew instinctively that the man was conscious.
‘If you move, even a fraction, I will inject her foot with a fatal dose.’
The pig had heard him, because his breathing changed, a little, but enough.
The van dipped as he entered, and her arm dropped free of her body and hung there. He could feel the pig tense, though he strove hard not to show it.
His own movement was swift and practised and the needle found an entry point behind the right knee. The man tried to wrench the leg back, but too late.
He exited and re-locked the door. Unsure how much he had managed to inject, he would have to wait.
McNab writhed on the floor, his arms and legs knocking against the bed and a chair. Much better to be shot or knived than to be rendered useless by this creeping sensation as the drug overtook him. He began to thrash, not from choice because his body was no longer his own. Then it came again, that sense of freedom and oblivion. A place where he no longer cared, about himself or anyone else.
A man, arms and legs outstretched within a circle. Lines from the head, feet and hands criss-crossed to make a five-pointed star. The image symbolized many things. Man’s place in the universe, Jesus’s death on the cross. The head, pierced hands and feet, were the points on the circumference of the circle, within the sacred pentagram.
He had kept the single point at the top. There was nothing sacrilegious in his offering. Those who had died sacrificed themselves to the common good.
The man he placed to the north, the woman south of the central stone, their fingers touching. Their moans as he impaled them were only a whisper on the wind that had sprung up after the storm. He stood for a moment before photographing the scene. In that moment the hidden moon chose to show herself, casting her rays over his handiwork.
It seemed to him that his work had been sanctified.
She stumbled as she reached the summit, dreading what she would find there. Moonlight encased the stones, the circle reflected by its light so that it appeared to dance with energy. An aurora borealis of stone.
Approaching, Rhona encountered such a powerful force of energy that she was stopped in her tracks. As a scientist she had no evidence to believe in the energy lines that such places signalled or created, but she felt it now, or else her fear fuelled it.
As she stepped inside the circle, the central stone seemed to shimmer. Then she saw them. The image that Magnus had first shown her, only doubled.
Two naked bodies. Male and female. Spreadeagled within the circle, fingertips touching.
It was a scene from heaven. Or a scene from hell.
As she sprang through the stones, she tripped, caught by a wire strung out between them. She fell, hitting the ground hard enough to drive the breath from her body, the torch flying ahead to bounce and extinguish. As she struggled to rise, the weight of a man’s body drove her flat against the ground, his hands on her shoulders.
He bent his face to hers. ‘You worked it out.’ He sounded surprised.
Rhona tried to draw breath. ‘The police are on their way.’
He gave a harsh laugh. ‘They won’t get here in time to save you, or them.’
Rhona let her limbs go lax. There was no point in physically fighting him. She had to engage him, delay him, until Bill and Magnus arrived. It was an old trick but, played well, might yet win the game.
His hands moved to encircle her neck.
‘Tell me why your mother killed herself.’
His hands faltered then tightened their grip on her throat.
‘That bastard,’ he motioned to the pale, lifeless form that was McNab, ‘killed her.’
‘Your mother tried to save you from your father.’
His laugh came from hell itself. ‘I did what he asked. That night. I did what he told me.’
Rhona had no idea what he meant, but kept on, nonetheless.
‘You did it to save her,’ she tried.
‘No, to please me.’
His fingers tightened and she choked, trying to drag in air. Even as she strove to remain conscious, she could see, in her mind’s eye, the marks of his fingers on Iona’s pale throat.
Focussed on her neck, he’d forsaken her hands. Rhona withdrew McNab’s scissors from her pocket and thrust them into his side with as much force as she could muster.
She felt the points pierce the cotton of the T-shirt, then his skin.
He grunted, the force and power she’d used impacting. Reaching for his side, he loosened his grip on her neck.
Coughing and spluttering, Rhona attempted to scramble out of reach. He grabbed at her leg to pull her back, and she twisted round and lashed out. The scissor points sliced down his cheek. He screamed an obscenity and threw himself, full bodied, at her.
It was what she’d hoped for.
As he fell, she aimed the point at his neck.