This, I knew, was Conrad’s Force, and the light of the Saros was at the top of it.
I knew now that Shafeen and Nel hadn’t abandoned me. They were waiting, like the faithful friends they were, at the meeting place we’d arranged last night: the packhorse bridge at the top of Conrad’s Force, which was the closest place to the lake that you could drive a vehicle. Shafeen and Nel were going to borrow a Land Rover to bring them to lunch and leave it there as my getaway car. Nel, who was full of surprises, already had her licence. (She’d passed her test on her seventeenth birthday and her dad had given her a brand-new Mini tied up with a big red bow.) On the map in the estate room the bridge had looked so close to the lakeshore. But what we hadn’t appreciated was the sheer height that those little jagged lines on the map had represented. I had expected some little ornamental fall like you see in public parks. This was the real deal, as high as a building, and as fierce as a flood. The bridge was close to the lake as the crow flies. But I wasn’t a crow. I was going to have to climb.
I got myself as close to the falling water as possible, right at the edge of the spray. It was impossible to stand in the full force of the falls without the water beating me back down, so I sought out rocks and footholds up one side. I knew that Henry had to follow me – he couldn’t let me go now, knowing what I knew. But it was a relief to me that, because he was climbing too, at least he couldn’t catch me with his vicious fishing hook. He’d have to abandon the rod and use both hands.
That climb was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done. My hands and feet were like ice. I cut them often on the rocks and tough gorse of the falls and didn’t even notice – my flesh was so cold it neither bled nor hurt. The wetsuit restricted my movement but it protected me too – not just from the water but from the sharp rocks. Henry was slower than me; I was smaller and lighter and I was no longer wearing my fishing gear. His sodden clothes must have been dragging him down, his heavy boots slipping on the rocks in a way that my bare feet did not. In some ways I had the advantage and it was a good job – if Henry got a hold of me before I reached the others, I’d be finished.
Fear spurred me on, but I had to force myself to climb carefully. If I went too fast, and slipped and fell, I would end up in Henry’s clutches. And then, as I climbed higher still, I realised that I had bigger problems than just Henry: the falls were so high that, if I tumbled now, I would die anyway; no one could survive such a fall. A phrase stuck in my head – the STAGS school motto, of all things: Festina Lente. Make Haste Slowly. I forced myself to find good footholds on the rocks and careful handholds gouged in the freezing mud, not easy with the icy water beating in my face. As I climbed ever upward I thought of the salmon Henry had told me about, relentlessly hurling themselves up the steepest of waterfalls, struggling upstream to reach their breeding grounds and keep their species going. The fish would do anything to survive.
And so would I.
At last I was at the top of the falls and I saw the packhorse bridge, only seen before as a tiny black arc on a map in the estate room, the size of a sliver of fingernail, but now a massive stone rainbow spanning the river in the moonlight. The bridge was the endpoint – the source of that bright star-of-Bethlehem light. As soon as I’d reached the top of the falls, just as we’d planned, the light from the Saros clicked off, and there was just the moonlight.
Henry scrambled up behind me and I turned to face him. The stag at bay, I thought, seeing him standing knee deep in the swirling water. Henry’s torch was long gone and it took my eyes a minute to adjust. He was soaked and breathing hard, his trademark hair silver-pale in the moonlight, his eyes mercury-bright. I wanted to lead him away from the noise of the fall, but he stood on its very lip. We’d have to shout at each other to be heard, but that could work out well for the plan.
He spoke first. ‘I would have spared you, Greer,’ he called. ‘You were going to be the only one we left alone. I even talked to the others about it. I thought you understood. I thought you loved Longcross.’
‘I did,’ I said. I had to keep him talking. ‘I do.’
‘Then Perfect saw you in the library last night, with the game books –’
‘So he did see us,’ I exclaimed, before I could stop myself.
‘Of course,’ said Henry. ‘He’s a gamekeeper. Tracking animals is his job.’
I didn’t rise to the insult, and he went on. ‘I knew you’d gone over to their side, the side of those who don’t belong, who think they can be like us but never will be. The side of the Savages.’ He shrugged. ‘No matter. The game books will be gone by tomorrow. We’ll just have to keep them somewhere else. Can’t leave evidence lying around now, can we?’
‘Why didn’t Perfect just use the gun on us then?’ I asked. ‘He could have taken out all three of us, problem solved.’ I knew the answer, but I wanted Henry to say it.
‘Oh, Greer, you still don’t understand, do you? Even you, my clever little scholarship girl. It has to look like an accident, don’t you see? How do you think we’ve managed to get away with it for so long? Because they always look like accidents. Even the deaths.’
I was already shivering and didn’t think I could get any colder, but it turned out I could. His words gave me an extra chill. ‘So there have been deaths then?’
‘Of course there have been deaths.’ He sounded surprised I would even ask. ‘Quite a few over the years. Terrible “accidents”, all of them. All from families who wouldn’t be able to stand up to us. The son of some tin-pot African royal family. They wouldn’t dare to go up against the British establishment. We had a scholarship girl once before too; she was one of the deaths. Her family was too poor to pay for an enquiry. Dr Morand fills in the death certificates, and my father squares things with the police commissioner and the coroner. They all come for the shooting, you know.’
‘Of course they do,’ I said bitterly.
‘It was easier in the old days. My father, my grandfather, his grandfather.’
I swallowed. All those blond boys in the silver frames on the piano. All of them grew up to be murderers. ‘Just how long has this been going on?’
‘Conrad de Warlencourt started it. When he came back from the Crusades. I guess he just missed killing the savages. So he found more savages to kill on his own doorstep. And then he found like-minded people to carry on the tradition. Tradition’s so important, isn’t it, Greer? You need continuity, and order. I think Conrad would like it that you will meet your end here, at Conrad’s Force. His own waterfall.’
My body started to shudder uncontrollably. ‘So I am to die now?’
‘Oh yes, I think so,’ he answered, just as if I’d asked him whether he thought it would rain later. ‘I was even considering sparing you – this morning when I saw you kill that fish. I thought you could be a Medieval after all. But then I saw the wetsuit, and I knew you’d prepared yourself against me. Under the clothes you were a Savage all along, through and through.’
‘Are you going to make my death look like an accident too?’ I said, teeth chattering with cold and fear.
‘Naturally. It’s harder now, of course. In the feudal days no one would even challenge us. Much harder now. More agencies asking more questions. DNA, post mortems – all that technology you people love so much. But we’re still able to convince the police. A gentleman’s word still counts for something at Longcross. A terrible fall, and a drowning. Case closed.’
He took a step towards me, away from the lip of the waterfall.
What a Sherlock Holmesian time we’d had of it, my fear-crazed mind thought. The Hound of the Baskervilles. The Loch Ness film. Then this ending, a tussle between two mortal enemies on a waterfall.
‘Have you seen Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows?’ I asked, playing for time.
‘What do you think?’ he said, his predator’s eyes on me.
‘It’s not a great film,’ I said. ‘And it’s not super-faithful to the books. But there’s one bit that is. Sherlock and Moriarty are in Switzerland, and Robert Downey Jr – he’s Sherlock Holmes (bear with me, I was doubtful too – but he’s actually good) – he lures Moriarty to the head of the Reichenbach Falls. Well, they have this tussle and they both go over the edge together.’ I was babbling, and backing away, and Henry was creeping towards me like that game you play in primary school, when you try to move without anyone seeing you. ‘And Watson, who is played by Jude Law (again, you wouldn’t pick him for it, but he’s really OK too) goes back to London all sad, and they actually have Sherlock’s funeral, and then Watson is writing up Sherlock’s last adventure, and he types “THE END”. And then the doorbell goes and it’s the postman, so Watson leaves the room, and when he comes back, it turns out that someone has typed a question mark so that it says “THE END?” And Watson smiles. Because that one little bit of punctuation, that question mark, tells him that although the bad guy is dead, the good guy survived. And you, Henry, are the bad guy.’
Henry just shook his head and kept on coming. ‘You’ve just demonstrated the problem with living your life through screens,’ he called over the sound of the rushing water. ‘Children nowadays spend four hours a night online. They live in headphones, cut off from the world. No one can eat a meal without taking a picture of it. No one can enjoy a concert without filming it or meet a so-called celebrity without taking a selfie. You don’t even have to retain your own memories any more; Facebook does it for you. Everything has to be recorded; people experience life through a screen the size of a playing card, instead of living it. And for what? Not everything is a movie, Greer.’
‘Not everything,’ I agreed. ‘But this is.’
In a much louder shout, directed to the packhorse bridge where I could see the Saros 7S’s little red recording light, I yelled, ‘Did you get all that?’
‘Oh yes,’ shouted Nel from up on the bridge. ‘We got it.’
Shafeen and Nel stood up and leaned over the parapet. Nel had the Saros in her hand and turned the torch beam full on Henry. The water swirling around our ankles turned to white milk.
She tapped the phone and held it high. It began to speak, in Henry’s voice. ‘Of course there have been deaths. Quite a few over the years. Terrible “accidents”, all of them. All from families who wouldn’t be able to stand up to us.’
Henry held his hand high, just as I’d done when I’d reached my hand out of the lake. But he wasn’t asking for help. He was commanding. ‘Give me that thing,’ he said, low and deadly, like a furious teacher confiscating something from an errant child. The force of his personality was such that I almost expected Nel to drop the gadget into his hand.
But she just shook her head. ‘Wouldn’t do any good,’ she said. ‘You could take this phone from me, but the video’s already been uploaded to the Saros Orbit. It’s a satellite storage system, totally secure.’
‘Isn’t technology wonderful, when you find the right application for it?’ called Shafeen.
Henry should have been beaten. He should have been deflated. He should have broken down, and sobbed, and begged us not to go public. But he did none of these things. He drew himself up, more powerful than ever, his eyes shining with this freaky, almost religious light. ‘You can’t win,’ he said. ‘You can’t upset the order.’
‘Oh yeah?’ said Nel. That girl was a badass. ‘One touch of this screen and this video will be uploaded to YouTube, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and Instagram. By morning your confession will have gone viral. You’ll be an Internet sensation. It’s over, Henry. Your world is over. We’re in my world now.’
Henry backed away towards the lip of the falls, as if seeking to put some distance between himself and these terrible new words. But he was still defiant. ‘The order will go on, even without me,’ he cried.
Shafeen called back, grim, mocking. ‘There’s a new order now,’ he said.
I think I’ll remember the next few seconds for as long as I live. People say the end of a life slows down, as if it’s playing in slo-mo, and I’m here to tell you that’s perfectly true. I turned my head to Shafeen when he shouted from the bridge, and that took my eye off Henry long enough for him to back right up to the edge of the falls. Then, and only then, did I process what Henry had said.
Even without me.
I knew what he was going to do.
I spun around, my wet hair stinging my face like a whip, and half waded, half stumbled to him as fast as I could, the water impeding my progress like quicksand, my own voice, loud in my head, screaming ‘NO!’
I’ll swear on my life, forever afterwards, that my fingertips caught at Henry’s, linked, slipped and lost him. I saw him for a second, an hour, a lifetime, suspended in space: immensely strong, immensely powerful. For one split second our eyes met and locked, his gaze undefeated. Then, his arms flung out like a cross, he tipped back over the lip of the falls.
Suddenly I was back in Paulinus quad, dropping a coin down the medieval well. The coin was falling down and down into the darkness, and I was waiting for it to hit the surface of the water. Henry and the coin falling together. At Conrad’s Force, too, time stretched out to infinity, and the roar of the waterfall was so loud that we couldn’t even hear when Henry hit the rocks below.