It could have been the wind, of course, but it looked to Lynley as if she'd been crying. He said, “So what are you doing here, Miss McCallin? You must know that your presence—”
“I wanted to see the place where his fantasy died.” The wind had loosened hair from her plait, and wispy tendrils of it blew round her face. “He'd say, of course, that his fantasy died on Monday night when he asked her to marry him. But I don't think so. I think as long as Nicola walked the earth, my cousin Julian would have held on to his obsession of having a life with her. Waiting for her to change her mind. Waiting for her to—as he would say—really see him. And the funny thing is, if she'd crooked her finger at him just the right way—or even the wrong way, for that matter—he would've interpreted it as the sign he was waiting for, proving to him that she loved him in spite of everything she said and did to the contrary.”
“You disliked her, didn't you?” Lynley asked.
She gave a short laugh. “What difference does it make? She was going to get what she wanted no matter how I felt about her.”
“What she got was death. And she can't have wanted that.”
“She would have destroyed him. She would have sucked out his marrow. She was that sort of woman.”
“Was she?”
Samantha's eyes narrowed as a gust of wind spat chalky bits of earth into the air. “I'm glad she's dead. I won't lie about that. But you're making a mistake if you think that I'm the only person who'd dance on her grave, given half the chance.”
“Who else is there?”
She smiled. “I don't intend to do your job for you.”
That said, she stepped past him and walked off down the path, taking the direction he himself had traveled from the northern boundary of the moor. He wondered how she had come to be on the moor at all, as he'd seen no cars parked on the verge when he'd turned off the road. He also wondered if she parked elsewhere either out of ignorance of the presence of the hard-packed little plot of land behind the drystone wall or to hide her knowledge of the plot's existence.
He watched her, but she didn't turn back to see if he was doing so. She must have wanted to—it was human nature—and the fact that she didn't spoke worlds about her self-discipline. He himself walked on.
He recognised Nine Sisters Henge by the separate stone—the King Stone, he'd been told—that marked its location within a thick copse of birches. He came at the monument from the opposite side, however, and didn't realise that he was actually upon it till he circled the copse, took a compass reading just beyond it, reckoned that the stone circle had to be nearby, and turned back to see the pockmarked monolith rising beside a narrow path into the trees.
He retraced his steps, hands shoved into his pockets. He found DI Hanken's posted guard a few yards from the site, and he admitted Lynley to it, allowing him to duck beneath the crime scene tape and approach the sentry stone alone. Lynley paused by this and examined it. It was weather-worn, as one would expect, but it was man-worn as well. At some time in the past, indentations had been carved into the back side of the enormous column. They formed handholds and footholds so that a climber could ascend to the top.
To what use had the stone been put in ancient times? Lynley wondered. As a means of calling a community to assemble? As a lookout post for someone responsible for the safety of shamans performing rituals within the stone circle? As the reredos of an altar for sacrifice? It was impossible to say.
He slapped his hand against it and went under the trees, where the first thing he noticed was that the birches—growing so thickly together—acted as a natural windbreak. When he finally made his way into the prehistoric circle, not a breath of air was stirring.
His first thought was that it was nothing like Stonehenge, which was when he realised how firmly the word henge was rooted in his mind with a particular image. There were standing stones—nine of them, as the place name suggested—but these were far more roughly hewn than he'd expected. There were no lintel stones as there were at Stonehenge. And the external bank and the internal ditch that enclosed the standing stones were far less distinct.