The Start of the Story

Chapter 1

1

AUGUST 1958

The elderly lady sighed as she pulled herself out of the taxi. ‘Just you wait here for me, Dennis,’ she said to the driver, tugging a bedraggled bunch of flowers out after her. ‘Don’t you go leaving me.’

Dennis, looking only slightly less bedraggled than the flowers, and infinitely less fragrant, sniffed. ‘Well, hurry up, then, Doris. Nobody likes hanging about out on these moors. You never know what’s coming for you.’

The road stretched long and grey, draped over the moors like a tired python. Doris looked up and down it, at the lack of anything bar some sad heather still waving its purple in the breeze and a couple of yellow gorse bushes doing their best to enliven the landscape. ‘There’s nothing coming for you, Dennis Slaithwaite,’ she said, very definitely. ‘Nothing except your ma with a rolled-up copy of News of the World . Now, you be quiet and wait here. I’ll be nobbut a minute.’

Brandishing her bouquet as though it were a cudgel with which to keep anything untoward at bay, Doris picked her careful way out across the moorland, following a path that only existed now somewhere in the depths of memory. Clouds followed her, tracking her progress as a little heap of shadow, until she stopped and looked down.

‘There you are,’ she said gently. ‘Well, my loves, I’ve come to say goodbye. Off to live with my sister, for my sins. Or hers. I’m not quite sure which one of us is going to suffer most, but there you go. Anyway. I’m heading off to Nantwich.’

Stiffly, as though the weight of her seventy-odd years had congregated in her joints, she bent and laid the flowers on the stone that lay in the heather at her feet.

‘I’m the last that remembers you,’ she said quietly. ‘The others have all gone now. Apart from that Elsie, but she’s halfway round the twist, she’d not know you from Pat Boone any more. So it’s only me.’

The stone remained unimpressed and continued in its flat, mossy horizontality. The bells of heather flowers dangled around it, past their best now and fading rapidly into withered brown fists. Doris regarded them with sympathy. What was it that Mr Churchill had said, back in those dark days of the war? ‘When you’re going through hell, keep on going?’ Something like that, anyway.

‘Keep on going, my lovelies,’ she said quietly, more to herself than to the stone. ‘I hope you find happiness, wherever you are. If nobody remembers you now, at least you’ll know that we knew you once.’

She reviewed that last statement. It didn’t sound very pithy, for last words in such a momentous situation, but she was tired and Dennis had started beeping the taxi horn at her, and she’d still got to finish packing up her things and put butter on the cat’s paws. She really couldn’t think of anything else to say. So, with a small shrug and a settling of her shoulders, Doris turned and began trudging her painful way back towards the road.

Over on the stone, a breeze moved the flowers and revealed a card. It was printed in pastel colours, with pictures of Tinkerbell from the Peter Pan film. On it, in a somewhat shaky hand but with impeccable calligraphy, were the words ‘ For the little people’.

Now

‘There’s a man to see you, Rowan.’

Chess barged her way into my office again, despite all my best efforts to train her to at least knock gently first. Well, I say office , it was a back room in the local library. Chess was my assistant. Well, I say assistant , she was the secretarial equivalent of a back room in the local library. Small, dark and hopelessly inadequate for the task in hand.

‘Um? Did you get details?’

‘Tall. Man. Irish, or something, he’s got an accent anyway.’ Chess stared over my shoulder at the laptop screen. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Typing up the notes from the last few days’ interviews. These have to be transcribed straight away, before I forget. And I actually meant details like – why does he want to see me?’

‘Dunno.’ Chess further illustrated her unsuitability by perching herself on the corner of my desk. ‘Doesn’t it drive you mad? All these people telling you fairy stories?’

‘No. It’s my job. Can you go and find out what the man wants, Chess, please?’

But it was too late. The door was already opening and a scruffy dark head emerged into the gap. ‘Hello? Anyone in?’

Chess raised her eyebrows at me. As she’d got her hair tied back into a ponytail so tight that their starting position was somewhere towards the top of her forehead, the raising took some effort.

‘That’s the man,’ she hissed at me.

‘I gathered,’ I replied, dryly.

‘And you’d be…’ the man flapped the door so that he could stare at my nameplate ‘…Dr Rowan Thorpe?’

I just blinked. Who, my entire posture said, would be sitting in an office with someone else’s nameplate on the door? It clearly said it with some force, because the man cleared his throat.

‘Er,’ he said. ‘I was expecting a bloke, y’know.’

‘Well, you got me.’ I sounded waspish. But then, I generally sounded like that these days; only one step away from a yellow and black jumper and sitting in an irritated fashion on a fruit bowl. ‘And who are you?’

He ignored my question, sliding himself through the gap between the door and the frame in one smooth ‘nobody ever tells me to go away’ move. He was wearing black from head to foot, and a grin that was nine tenths easy charm and one tenth determination. ‘So, you’re the folklorist?’

I sighed. ‘One of them, certainly.’ I elbowed Chess in the leg. She was transfixed, staring at our visitor.

‘She doesn’t like people in here,’ she blurted, swivelling away from me. ‘Gets really cross at interruptions.’

‘And yet, here I am,’ the man said, still cheerful.

‘It’s not the being here that’s concerning me,’ I carried on, poking Chess quite vigorously now, out of sight of our visitor, ‘so much as the why .’

I wanted Chess to show him out. I rolled my eyes at her, then at the door and then nodded at our visitor, but she was blithely oblivious to subliminal messaging. ‘Do you want a coffee?’ she asked.

‘That…’ The man began removing his long black coat. Underneath, he wore a black sweater and black jeans – he looked as though he’d come dressed as a shadow. ‘…would be very nice, thank you.’

‘Chess,’ I hissed, trying for reproach.

‘Oh, it’s okay, I was going to make you one too.’ Chess levered herself off the corner of my desk and, pausing only to trip over the rip in the carpet, exited. As she shut the door behind her, one of the screws holding my nameplate on pinged loose and I heard the thud as it slid sideways.

The man draped his coat over the back of the chair opposite my desk and sat down, uninvited. Then he put his elbows on the desk, rested his chin on his hands and eyeballed me.

‘You’re not what I expected.’

‘No. You thought I was a man, for a start. Now, can we go back to who you are and why you’re here, please? I’ve got work to do.’ I angled my head towards my laptop screen. It, sensing that something was up, had also gone black.

‘I’m Professor Connor O’Keefe,’ he said, as though that were all I ought to need.

‘How lovely for you.’ I was so waspish now that my voice almost knocked itself against the window. ‘Congratulations.’

I got another flash of the dark smile. ‘And I’m a historian.’

I felt my shoulders rise as the tension crept up my spine, stiffening my back and making my neck muscles rigid. Historians and folklorists. It was like Montagues and Capulets, Mordor and the Shire. We practically had scarves and team songs. We were, in short, natural enemies.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ I said, pretending a smile. ‘Still, we can’t all be on the right side, can we?’

The easy charm slipped a fraction and a flash of dejection crossed his face. ‘Ah, come on, now. We don’t have to turn this into a fight, do we?’

He had big brown eyes and the kind of cheekbones and stubble arrangement that would get him almost anywhere, especially in the world of history where they liked their professors to look as though they could be fronting a TV show about castles, complete with trying on armour and standing on battlements looking sexy. The charming smile and the Irish accent wouldn’t do any harm either. And what did I have? A too-short haircut, a complexion built from cheap food and an office behind a photocopier. And Chess.

Standing on battlements looking sexy was not in my repertoire. Sitting behind a desk being annoyed was, however, right up my alley. ‘As I still have to be told what this is, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you.’

Professor Connor O’Keefe leaned back on the chair and chewed at his lip. ‘And that’s awkward, now. I was hoping that you’d have been brought up to speed,’ he said. ‘I’m here working for the university. We’re surveying on a site up on the moors.’

I still failed to see what any of that was to do with me and said so. I kept my voice and eyes steady, he needn’t think a whimsical tone and puppy-dog eyes would cut any ice with me, and he was clearly beginning to see that this might be the case, because he’d folded his arms and gained a more combative expression.

‘I’m interested in this location.’ For a second he leaned behind him and pulled an old paper Ordnance Survey map from a pocket. It was so creased that it took both of us to spread it out on the desk. ‘There’s a marker – we think it might be Roman. Possibly even pre-Roman. So I’m here to have a bit of a poke around.’

I looked at the site he tapped. It took me a few seconds to work out where it was, upside down and with the major towns folded underneath, but once I got my eye in I felt my shoulders rise even higher. Any more tension and you could have played me like a harp.

‘Oh, no,’ I said. ‘You can’t disturb that. That’s the Fairy Stane. And it’s not a marker, it’s a rock.’

And not just a rock, I thought, but wouldn’t add. I didn’t know this man and it was none of his business anyway. My emotional entanglement with a stone slab was almost inexplicable even to me and I certainly wasn’t going to go into detail with a cocky professor who dressed like a vampire and smiled like a film star.

Connor O’Keefe sighed. ‘Oh, I am so going to regret any of this,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Look. We think there might be some important lettering on the underneath. I’ve been doing some research and the thought is that there could be an undiscovered Roman town nearby, close by the Roman road that crosses the moor. That stone could give us an idea of location. Or it may even mark the site of an Iron Age boundary as it lines up with some other potential markers.’

Dark eyes swung up to meet mine. ‘So we’re thinking that we raise the stone and see what’s on it,’ he went on. ‘I proposed a short dig and someone at the university said that it might be an idea to run it all past you first. As you’re apparently interested in the site too,’ he added, but in a way that indicated that my work could, in no possible way, be as important, life-altering or destiny-fulfilling as his.

‘No,’ I said.

‘I’m sorry, what?’

‘I said, no. No, you can’t lift that stone. As I said, that’s the Fairy Stane. I’ve been recording stories based in that part of the moors, and it’s vital to my work that the stone remains in situ.’

Connor O’Keefe bit his lip again and rolled up the sleeves of his jumper, as though he were preparing to go into the boxing ring. Although, given the symmetrical perfection of his face, I doubted he’d ever been closer to boxing than the day after Christmas. ‘“Fairy Stane”? What’s that about?’

I leaned forward across the desk, putting my elbows on the crease that concealed Pickering and Thornton le Dale.

‘There’s a legend around the name,’ I began conversationally, slightly encouraged by the tinge of nervousness in his voice. ‘“Stane” is dialect for “stone”. It’s the Fairy Stone, and the legend is that underneath it is the door to fairyland. If the stone is moved, the Little People will escape and wreak havoc in the world.’

There was a momentary silence and then he burst out laughing. ‘Oh, come on, now! You’re not after believing any of that, are you?’

I didn’t smile. Instead I just sat, arms still outstretched almost protectively over the location of the stone on his map, and waited. Then I said, in my calmest, steadiest voice, ‘It’s not a question of belief. It’s a question of lore. Our local folklore says that that stone must not be moved.’ Then I pulled my arms back and dragged the map back into a rough approximation of the shape it had been when he’d brought it out. It was as close as I dared come to saying ‘so there’. Historians and folklorists might be at loggerheads, but that was no reason to degenerate into playground talk.

Connor sat silent for a moment. I was holding the scrunched-up map out towards him, but he didn’t take it. He chewed his lip again and seemed to be inwardly considering several options, one of which appeared to be poking me in the eye. I kept the silence. I absolutely was not going to apologise or explain.

This was my territory, and that was my stone.

Eventually Chess broke our impasse by bursting in again, this time bearing three mugs of coffee. ‘Here we go,’ she trilled, oblivious to the atmosphere.

Connor stood up, swept his coat from the back of the chair and shoved the map back into his pocket, all in one move. ‘Sorry,’ he said to Chess, passing her on the only piece of floor large enough to accommodate two standing people. ‘I’ve got to run. Next time, eh?’

Then he winked at her, glowered briefly at me over his shoulder, and left.

I resisted, with the greatest difficulty, the urge to throw my mug at the closed door.