Peter Robinson: A Necessary End

Then the four CID men trudged upstairs and PC Telford ushered a brace of wet, frightened demonstrators up after them.

"Zoe! Thank God you're all right!"

Paul and Mara stared at the slight figure in the glistening red anorak. Her ginger hair was stuck to her skull, and the dark roots showed. Rain dripped onto the straw mat just inside the doorway. She slipped off her jacket, hung it next to Paul's and walked over to hug them both.

"You've told her what happened?" she asked Paul.

"Yes."

Zoe looked at Mara. "How was Luna?"

"No trouble. She fell asleep when Squirrel Nutkin started tickling Mr Brown with a nettle."

Zoe's face twitched in a brief smile. She went over to the bookcase. "I threw an I Ching this morning," she said, "and it came up 'Conflict.' I should have known what would happen." She opened the book and read from the text: "'Conflict. You are being sincere and are being obstructed. A cautious halt halfway brings good fortune. Going through to the end brings misfortune. It furthers one to see the great man. It does not further one to cross the great water.'"

"You can't take it so literally," Mara said. "That's the problem. It didn't tell you what would happen, or how." Though she was certainly interested in the I Ching and tarot cards, herself, Mara often thought that Zoe went too far.

"It's clear enough to me. I should have known something like this would happen: 'Going through to the end brings misfortune.' You can't get any more specific than that."

"What if you had known?" Paul said. "You couldn't call it off, could you? You'd still have gone. Things would still have worked out the same."

"Yes," Zoe muttered, "but I should have been prepared."

"How?" asked Mara. "Do you mean you should have gone armed or something?"

Zoe sighed. "I don't know. I just should have been prepared."

"It's easy to say that now," Paul said. "The truth is nobody had the slightest idea the demo would turn nasty, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it when it did. There were a lot of people involved, Zoe, and if they'd've all done the I Ching this morning they'd've all got different answers. It's a load of cobblers, if you ask me."

"Sit down," said Mara. "Have a glass of wine. Did you see what happened to the others?"

"I'm not sure." Zoe sat cross-legged on the carpet and accepted Paul's glass. "I think Rick got arrested. I saw him struggling with some police at the edge of the crowd."

"And Seth?"

"I don't know. I couldn't see." Zoe smiled sadly. "Most people were bigger than me. All I could see was shoulders and necks. That's how I managed to get away, because I'm so little. That and the rain. One cop grabbed my anorak, but his hand slipped off because it was wet. I'm a Pisces, a slippery fish." She paused to sip her Barsac. "What'll happen to them, Mara, the ones who got caught?"

Mara shrugged. "I should imagine they'll be charged and let go. That's what usually happens. Then the magistrate decides what to fine them or whether to send them to jail. Mostly they just get fined or let off with a caution."

Mara wished she felt as confident as she sounded. Her uneasiness had nothing to do with the message Zoe had got from the I Ching, but the words of the oracle somehow emphasized it and gave her disquietude a deeper dimension of credibility: "Going through to the end brings misfortune. It furthers one to see the great man." Who was the great man?

"Shouldn't we do something?" Paul asked.

"Like what?"

"Go down there, down to the police station and find out what's happened. Try and get them out."

Mara shook her head. "If we do that, it's more likely they'll take us in for obstructing justice or something."

"I just feel so bloody powerless, so useless, not being able to do a damn thing." Paul's fists clenched, and Mara could read the words jaggedly tattooed just below his knuckles. Instead of the more common combination, LOVE on one hand and HATE on the other, his read HATE on both hands. Seeing the capitalized word so ineptly tattooed there reminded Mara how hard and violent Paul's past had been and how far he had come since they'd found him sleeping in the open, early the past winter on their way to a craft fair in Wensleydale.

"If we had a phone we could at least call the hospital," Zoe said. "Maybe one of us should walk down to Relton and do it anyway."

"I'll go," Mara said. "You two have had enough for. one night. Besides, the exercise will do me good."

She got to her feet before either of the others could offer to go instead. It was only a mile down to Relton, a village high on the southern slope of Swainsdale, and the walk should be a pleasant one. Mara looked out of the window. It was drizzling lightly again. She took her yellow cyclist's cape and matching rainhat out of the cupboard and opened the door. As she left, Paul was on his way to the fridge for another beer, and Zoe was reaching for her tarot cards.

Zoe worried Mara sometimes. Not that she wasn't a good mother, but she did seem too offhand. True, she had asked about Luna, but she hadn't wanted to go and look in on her. Instead she had turned immediately to her occult aids. Mara doted on both children: Luna, aged four, and Julian, five. Even Paul, just out of his teens, seemed more like a son than anything else at times. She knew she felt especially close to them because she had no children of her own. Many of her old schoolfriends would probably have kids Paul's age. What an irony, she thought, heading for the track — a barren earth mother!

The rain was hardly worth covering up for, but it gave an edge to the chill already present in the March air, and Mara was glad for the sweater she wore under her cape. The straight narrow track she followed was part of an old Roman road that ran diagonally across the moors above the dale right down to Fortford. Just wide enough for the van, it was dry-walled on both sides and covered with gravel and small chips of stone that crunched and crackled underfoot. Mara could see the lights of Relton at the bottom of the slope. Behind her the candle glowed in the window, and Maggie's Farm looked like an ark adrift on a dark sea.

She shoved her hands through the slits in her cape, deep into the pockets of her cords, and marched the way she imagined an ancient Roman would have done. Beyond the clouds, she could make out the pearly sheen of a half moon.

The great silence all around magnified the little sounds — the clatter of small stones, the rhythmic crunch of gravel, the swishing of her cords against the cape — and Mara felt the strain on her weak left knee that she always got going downhill. She raised her head and let the thin, cool rain fall on her closed eyelids and breathed in the wet-dog smell of the air. When she opened her eyes, she saw the black bulk of distant fells against a dark grey sky.

At the end of the track, Mara walked into Relton. The change from gravel to the smooth tarmac of Mortsett Lane felt strange at first. The village shops were all closed. Television sets flickered behind drawn curtains.

Just to be sure, Mara first popped her head inside the Black Sheep, but neither Seth nor Rick was there. A log fire crackled in the corner of the cosy public bar, but the place was half-empty. The landlord, Larry Grafton, smiled and said hello. Like many of the locals, he had come to accept the incomers from Maggie's Farm. At least, he had once told Mara, they weren't like those London yuppies who seemed to be buying up all the vacant property in the Dales these days..

"Can I get you anything?" Grafton called out.

"No. No, thanks," Mara said. "I was looking for Seth. You haven't seen him, have you?"

Two old men looked up from their game of dominoes, and a trio of young farm labourers paused in their argument over subsidies and glanced at Mara with faintly curious expressions on their faces.