An old, high
brick wall, topped with broken glass, seems endless until the massive
ornamental wrought iron gates appear.
I stop, more
out of mild curiosity than anything else to read the nameplate and plaque. I
wasn’t expecting to find anything here
at all, except perhaps a village in the Sussex countryside, with the improbable
name of Palastow.
The name sends a mild shock wave through me, but it
quickly passes. My first reaction is to think it’s just coincidence, it has to
be. I read the sign again - Badger’s Holt, not Badger’s Sett but Badger’s Holt
- just as I’d written it. Then I read the plaque and the sense of déjà-vu becomes
almost overwhelming. This is how it always begins.
I try to recall that November night, when it all
started - the search for the truth, facts, motives and identity of the
perpetrators of that tragic death – before and after I started to write about
it. A search that somehow I’ve become lost in. Facts that are now hopelessly entwined
with fantasy.
For a moment I imagine I know what the buildings look
like inside the grounds, past the
screening trees, too quickly dismissing the thought as ridiculous, because
surely I want to believe otherwise, that it was all true, that I’ve been here
before and it’s not just in my imagination. Isn’t that why I’m here? Drawn by an invisible hand or perhaps that
phantom phone call. To finish my manuscript,
find out how it ends, whether it’s real or not?
Could it all be just a dream? I look at the dashboard of the old
Volkswagon, and read the trip milometer, which registers over two hundred miles.
Caressing the familiar old steering wheel I feel reassured. Nobody dreams about old Volkswagons or
driving two hundred miles from Somerset to Sussex via SE London.
In my pocket
the key to Clare’s Ferton place is reassuringly still there.
It’s hot for so early in the year, more like
midsummer There’s an enigmatic feel about the place, oppressive, threatening
but beautiful. Perhaps it’s the wall or
the surrounding woodland that gives it that air of foreboding. The heat haze
shimmering above the tarmac of the narrow country lane, adds to the eerie
mystique.
I pull onto the grass verge and get out to stretch my
legs, let the old girl cool down for a bit. Good place for a sandwich and
coffee. Clouds of insects dance beneath the trees. I try to regain some sense
of rationale by a few moments quiet reflection.
A car approaches in the distance. I feel uneasy -
that this interruption is also going to be a part of my manuscript rewriting
itself again. New chapters in another world, another dimension - that what
happens next won’t be a surprise.
The car is a
black Mercedes. I should have known. As it gets closer, I try to look unconcerned,
sandwich in one hand coffee in the other. It slows down and I already know it will turn
into Badger’s Holt. There are five occupants, four men and a girl. Clare is
sitting in the back seat between two of them. She looks frightened but otherwise
just as I knew her; the pale, fine featured face framed by her shoulder length
dark hair; the brown eyes that haunt my dreams and always will.
For a moment I imagine she sees me, recognises me. Then
she’s hidden from view. The offside rear
passenger and driver stare at me with baleful, suspicious glares as the gates
open. The car disappears almost silently into the grounds, gates closing behind
it.
I know they are John Steier’s hired thugs, and wonder
if they’ve been forewarned to expect me to show up somewhere along the line. For
the moment it doesn’t matter. They’ve unwittingly brought Clare back to me, or
closer at least. It’s a start.
I convince myself again that they’re not just
creations of my imagination - Carl’s sister Clare, John Steier, known as The
Godfather and all the others. That we really were here before, Clare and me -
the last place we came to, before she disappeared from my life.
Only Carl
himself, whose coldness I can still feel is my bedrock in reality - a cruel
irony, that the dead can be so alive but the living shrouded in such mystery. The
truth is somewhere on the other side of this wall. Somehow, if not through
these gates then there lies another way to get there.
There was a time once when life seemed much simpler,
before I’d been drawn into this strange
twilight world, neither author nor subject and yet somehow both - together but
inseparable like Siamese twins.
to be cont...
Copyright Harry Hunt 2013
