JACK OF ALL TRADES.
CHAPTER 1.
LITTLE ENGLAND.
'Pastoral. Wicked!'
There was something perfectly natural about seeing an anachronistic 1960s London police box standing in the middle of an English field in the early years of the twenty-first century. The solid blue oblong was as bright as an eye against the interlocking fields of green and gold, the little frosted windows glinting like diamonds in the early-morning sun. It looked as if it had always been there, but the crushed grass underneath spoke of a recent arrival. What summer breeze there was pulled the last murmurings of the box's advent high over the downs and into the cloudless infinity of the sky.
The couple that emerged from the box surveyed the land intently. The man was small, somewhat shabbily dressed, and inconsequential but for his eyes, as dark and unfathomable as the deepest well. His companion, a girl in her late teens, wore a short pleated skirt over dark tights, a narrow-striped T-shirt, and a badge-festooned jacket, the word ACE! prominent on her back. Her long hair was pulled into a ponytail behind her head. Just as she slipped a pair of mirror shades over her eyes she sneezed.
'Aw. Hay fever,' she exclaimed. 'I hate hate the countryside. the countryside.
Always have done.'
'Really?' asked the man with a rich roll of the tongue as he closed the police box's door behind them, ignoring his young friend's abrupt change of mood. 'This is one of my favourite places on Earth.' He stooped and retrieved something from the ground, then straightened himself up, beaming. 'Look, Ace!' Between his fingers he held a four-leaved clover. 'Now that's got to be a sign of something, surely?'
'I don't believe in all that. And neither should you, Professor.' She paused, and looked around the lush green vista. In the distance, on the faraway rolling downlands, she could just make out a chalk horse carved into the hillside.
'The West Country, right?' she asked.
The man nodded. 'Wessex,' he announced grandly. 'Over there is Thomas Hardy country,' he said, pointing with a ruler-straight arm. He turned. 'The Isle of Avalon is somewhere over there.' He gestured again. 'And that is the way to Camelot.'
The girl smiled as if at a recent memory. 'Great. And I'll bet it's three miles from the nearest pub, but when we get there they'll all be out playing cricket, or something.'
'More like two hundred yards,' said the man. 'But we're not going there yet.' He paused, gnomically. 'A military campaign is only as good as the intelligence reports it is based upon.'
For the first time, the girl looked worried.
Russ Sloper placed the last milk bottle on the doorstep and shivered despite the rising sun. This was normally Daniel Cottle's round and, frankly, he was welcome to it. Sloper wasn't one to trust innuendo and rumour over logic - for that reason alone he preferred broadsheet newspapers to the tacky tabloids of his colleagues - but the village of Hexen Bridge was different. No small area could produce so many stories and legends if there wasn't at least a grain of truth in them.
Sloper walked back towards the float, the empty milk bottles chinking against the plastic carrier. Behind the cottages and terraces of orange-yellow stone the faintest sounds of early-morning movement could be heard: water running in bathrooms, radios being switched on in kitchens.
Somewhere a car engine was being coaxed into life.
Best get out before he actually saw any of them.
The village was a maze of tiny lanes, surrounding an ancient green and a duck pond. To the north and east rose great chalk hills variously patrolled by sheep and cows; to the south, trailing gently out of sight, was a ring of woods and a crazy paving of small fields. The main road out of Hexen ran to the west, just wide enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic. Not that the roads bristled with many cars, even during the holiday season. Somehow, people knew.
Everyone knew about Hexen Bridge. knew about Hexen Bridge.
Sloper manoeuvred the float towards the west road, feeling the tension fall from his shoulders as each second took him further from the damned village. He began to hum under his breath, a tuneless conglomeration of sound to help block out the whine of the milk float's electric engine. Even after all these years, he'd never entirely got used to the noise. Still less the gentle ribbing he received when he arrived anywhere in his car. 'Left your float behind, have you, Russ?' went the cry. It hadn't been funny the first time. It was almost enough to - He slammed on the brakes as a couple appeared around a bend in the thickly hedged lane. 'Watch out!' he shouted, just missing them.
The float came to a halt, and Sloper jumped down. 'You OK?' he asked the short man.
'I am, thank you,' said the man with just a little dignity.
'Never walk with your back to the traffic,' Sloper scolded, though realising that at this time in the morning his float had probably been the first vehicle they would have encountered.
'Ah,' said the man solemnly. 'I take your point.'
'Fancy a lift?' Sloper asked, in a calmer voice.
'That's very kind of you,' said the man, jumping into the front of the float next to Sloper. 'I've only been on one of these once before, and that was many years ago.' The girl positioned herself on the edge of the seat more gingerly.
Sloper regarded the couple for a moment. The man didn't look attractive or daring enough to be eloping with this young thing, but she seemed to be close to school age. Still, there was only a week or so of term to go, and Sloper remembered bunking off lessons when the fine weather arrived. She was pretty, this girl, although she studiously avoided eye contact.
Perhaps they were on holiday. Whatever. That was their business. They were walking away from Hexen Bridge, and that was good enough for Russ Sloper.
You not from round here?' he asked, hoping to strike up a conversation to while away the journey back to the dairy.
'No,' said the man. 'We've only just arrived. We want to visit a library.'
'Tourist brochures, a bit of local history, that sort of thing,'
said the girl, piping up brightly. 'Isn't that right, Professor?'
'Professor, eh?' inquired Sloper. Writing a book or something?'
'Perhaps,' said the little man. 'I'm usually known as the Doctor. "Professor" is just an irritating affectation my companion has picked up.'
'Then you're not a professor?'
'Yes and no,' said the man, as if that was answer enough.
'I'm Ace,' said the girl.
'I bet you are,' said Sloper with a chuckle.
Ace glared at him. Her eyes spoke of things that Sloper could never imagine. Sloper shivered. It was his turn to avert his eyes.
Sloper suddenly remembered an Asian kid he'd got to know at school. The boy had turned up one term, exotic and alien, and calm, despite the bullying. With his faraway look he made Sloper feel mundane and trivial. So did this girl.
'Are you all right?' asked the Doctor.
'Fine,' said Sloper. 'Just glad to be away from Hexen Bridge.'
'Ah,' said the Doctor. 'Why am I not surprised to hear you say that?'
Ace glanced at a passing road sign. 'That village seems very isolated,' she announced. 'Miles from anywhere.'
'I've often wondered about that,' said the Doctor.
'Don't wonder too hard,' said Sloper. 'I'll happily drop you off at the library in town but, if you want my advice, you'll have a much nicer holiday if you stay there. Hexen's good for nothing.'
And with that, and despite the sun rising into the azure sky, Sloper lapsed into brooding silence.
A magazine can tell the observant many things about the person who is reading it. This particular magazine was a music-and- fashion monthly, one of hundreds that cluttered the newsstands and kiosks of Britain. Its garish, brightly coloured cover was in stark contrast to the drab, grey formalism of the Daily Telegraph Daily Telegraph that lay on the plastic-topped table. Nails painted bright red grasped the pages of the magazine tightly. that lay on the plastic-topped table. Nails painted bright red grasped the pages of the magazine tightly.
The summer sun nervously pulled itself above the brow of a solitary hill, blinding the train passengers with its unexpected brilliance. The girl cursed under her breath, swayed slightly as the carriages clattered through a series of tightly positioned points, and lifted a pair of vampish plastic sunglasses from her handbag. She had put the bag on the aisle seat next to her to discourage anyone from sitting there.
Personal space is very important to the average train user, and it was particularly, obsessively, important to Nicola Denman.
She glanced back at the magazine, but she had lost the thread of the article on the Star Jumpers' comeback tour.
She picked up the bottle of mineral water, but the taste was bland and insipid. Then the sun lost itself in the clouds again, and Nicola removed her glasses, and shivered.
Anyone in the train compartment with an active imagination, and too much time on their hands, might have paused to wonder at the way in which the girl and her bearded companion seldom made eye contact. They talked to each other in snatched bursts of clumsy embarrassment.
'I still don't know why you made me come,' said Nicola, stopping abruptly as if the danger of initiating a proper conversation was too horrible to contemplate. Her voice was soft and singsong, cut through on occasions with a strong, nasal Scouse inflection.
'You're not staying in the Pool on your own,' said the man flatly. 'If I've told you once I've told you a million times...' He paused, aware that he was raising his voice. Again.
'But, Dad...'
Her voice faded away as the train entered a tunnel and the compartment was, momentarily, plunged into darkness. By the time the train emerged a silence had settled between them, Nicola's father turned his attention to the Telegraph's Telegraph's article on the new Home Secretary's latest crackdown on youth crime. article on the new Home Secretary's latest crackdown on youth crime.
'I'm twenty, for goodness' sake,' exclaimed Nicola suddenly.
'I can look after myself.'
'Then act your age and stop sulking.'
Nicola Denman recoiled as if struck. Her father glanced up and saw that her eyes were swollen and red, as if on the verge of tears.
'I'm sorry,' he said.
'It's OK,' replied Nicola. 'I just hate travelling.'
'Remember that holiday on the Isle of Man?' asked Denman. 'You must have been about eight.' He stared at the countryside that passed, a blur through the carriage window.
'You were so bored. Your mother and I were at our wits'
end...'
Denman gave Nicola's hand a pat of reassurance, but she withdrew it quickly. You made me behave by threatening me with Jack i' the Green.' She paused for a moment, but the giddying momentum of her words carried her on. 'You said that Jack took all the bad little girls to Hexen Bridge to do terrible things to them.'
Denman's face was like thunder. 'You mark me well, Nicola Denman,' he said. 'The last thing I need right now is mockery.'
'I was just saying -' she replied, but was cut short.
'Well, don't,' don't,' he snapped. 'This reunion is important.' He stared out of the window again. 'We've been trapped by the past for too long.' he snapped. 'This reunion is important.' He stared out of the window again. 'We've been trapped by the past for too long.'
The library was a modern slab of a building, coloured concrete offset by large windows and an overfussy entrance.
It stood, awkwardly, halfway between its former location in the centre of the town and the new estate that was eating into the green land to the east. As a consequence, only the truly dedicated sought it out, a line of miserable-looking old people passing through to read the newspapers.
'Why are we here, Professor?' asked Ace.
'Well, I like books, and...' The Doctor affected bafflement at Ace's question.
'You know what I mean.'
'Why,' the Doctor shrugged, 'does there have to be a reason for everything?'
'Where you're concerned there is,' said Ace. She ran a few paces in front of the Doctor, and turned to face him, both hands out in front of her. 'Whoa,' she said, stopping him in his tracks. 'C'mon. Spill the beans.'
'Here...' The Doctor held out his hand. In it was a crumpled, yellowing piece of card. The writing on it had almost faded , but the top line was still visible: HEXEN BRIDGE SCHOOL REUNION - 14TH JUNE.
'You went to school here?' asked Ace, incredulous.