Dying Fall

farewell.’
    ‘Hail and farewell,’ answer the others.
    Ruth raises her eyes to the sky, surprised by the sudden sting of tears. The druids are walking down the hill now, Tim, Nelson and the other mourners following behind.
    One of the robed figures stops beside Ruth. ‘A beautiful service.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Did you see the birds flying across the sun?’
    Ruth looks sceptical. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me that it was a sign of something.’
    ‘Everything’s a sign of something,’ says Cathbad.
    *
    Cathbad’s fall to earth had been cushioned by a stall selling giant slush puppies. Tim, racing to the scene, described his horror at seeing Cathbad’s face covered by a virulent crimson liquid that seemed mysteriously to be full of ice.
    ‘Poor soul,’ said a voice in the crowd. ‘His blood’s frozen from being so high.’
    ‘Bollocks,’ said Sandy, pushing his way through the throng. ‘It’s one of those bloody silly kids’ drinks.’
    Cathbad had opened his eyes, blinking back chunks of strawberry-flavoured ice. ‘Kate?’
    ‘She’s been found,’ says Tim. ‘Safe and sound.’
    ‘Thank the gods,’ said Cathbad, closing his eyes again.
    The police think that Sam drugged Kate, leading to a heavy sleep behind a giant statue of Dora in Latin America. His threat to throw her from the Big One was an attempt to scare Ruth into dropping her investigation into King Arthur’s bones, but as the police rushed to the Pleasure Beach he must have known that the game was up. Maybe he just wanted one more laugh, waving to Ruth as the roller-coaster began its journey into the sky, grinning behind his Simon Cowell mask. Maybe he was planning to jump himself. Police found a suicide note at his house, alongside instructions on how to look after his dog. Like Pendragon, Sam hadn’t forgotten his faithful familiar. But, unlike Pendragon, Sam hadn’t taken the fateful plunge but had allowed himself to be taken away by the police, where he is currently in the process of convincing them that he’s insane.
    ‘Perhaps he always was mad,’ said Elaine. ‘It’s hard to tell, isn’t it?’
    Sam’s fingerprints were on the paper knife, and that same evening he confessed to the murders of Clayton Henry and Dan Golding. Elaine was in the clear and appeared desperate to talk to Ruth. That first night, Nelson had whisked Ruth and Kate to his mother’s house, where Maureen looked after them, sure that Ruth was frantic with worry about her ‘lovely boyfriend Cuthbert’. Ruth
was
frantic with worry, but once she knew that Cathbad was in no danger (the fall had left him with nothingworse than concussion and two cracked ribs), she felt a kind of mad exultation. Kate was safe. She hadn’t been kidnapped or killed or thrown from the highest roller-coaster in Britain. She was safe with her mother – and her father. That night, Ruth had sat watching Kate as she slept, feeling guilty happiness at the thought that Nelson was sleeping under the same roof. He hadn’t been able to make too much of a fuss of Kate under his mother’s eagle eye (besides, he was on the phone to Sandy for most of the evening), but that didn’t matter. For that one short night, they were all together.
    *
    When Ruth drove back to Beach Row the next day, Elaine was waiting for her. Ruth remembered the other time that Elaine had turned up at her door, full of tales of King Arthur. Except that she had left out the most important fact: the identity of Mordred.
    ‘I didn’t know,’ she said to Ruth, who was trying to contain Thing’s frantic welcome. Nelson had been over the night before to feed the dog and take him for a walk but Thing clearly seemed to feel that he had narrowly escaped abandonment yet again. In fact, it took Ruth several minutes to feed Thing and get Kate settled with juice and her toy cars. By that time, Elaine was already ensconced on the sofa.
    ‘You must have had some idea,’ said Ruth.
    ‘I didn’t. Honestly. I thought Guy was the Arch Wizard. I really did. That’s why I was so scared. I didn’t even know that Sam was in the White Hand. I thought he was quiteboring actually, always going on about the war and all that. I thought he was just an anorak, quite sweet but dull, you know.’
    But what better indication of fascist sympathies, thinks Ruth, than an obsession with the Second World War? After all, hadn’t Sam’s first words to her been about Adolf Hitler? And, when she met him at the library, he had