“We should do more to celebrate our patron saint’s day. There aren’t enough of us who take a pride in being English. Look at all this glorious countryside. Doesn’t it stir something in your soul, Ruth?”

Gerald Cooper, fifty-one years old, a former Lieutenant Colonel in the Royal Engineers who three years ago resigned his commission to run his own business, guides the Citroen along the A4 with the air of a nobleman beginning a survey of his vast estates. Although he’s everything Kerrie said he’d be — genial, well-mannered, considerate and reliable — I find his overt patriotism and dearly held conservative values too reminiscent of the stepfather whose Christian name he shares to feel any real sense of comradeship towards him. Then there’s the fact that he’s taken complete charge of the day’s itinerary, relegating me once more to the role of a supporting player.

“I don’t know, I think we’re too diverse to call ourselves a nation,” I submit. “The area where I’m living now has nothing in common with the Home Counties. It’s different for the Scots and the Welsh. They’re more, what’s the word...homogenous?”

“So a shipyard worker from Clydebank can identify with a crofter in the Outer Hebrides? What about the Shetlanders? They don’t consider themselves Scottish at all.”

“Yeah, but we’re only talking about a few thousand people.”

Gerald has an answer for that, too. But then he would. He’s one of those men who simply must have the last word.

We pass the turn-off for Newbury, continuing west towards Hungerford and Marlborough. With another seventy miles to cover before we arrive in Glastonbury, I estimate that by then we’ll have been travelling for something like four and a half hours. It’s shaping up to be another exhausting day.

At least I’m mostly in my own clothes. The short-sleeved turquoise top with the black trim that complements my new hair colour so beautifully belongs to Kerrie — as does the small silver crucifix she fastened around my neck before we set off — but the leather jacket, jeans and ankle boots are mine. I’d rather look like a throwback to the Woodstock generation than have Gerald wondering if he’s been saddled with a bit of a tart.

The road becomes narrower after Hungerford, stretching through lush pastures bathed in spring sunshine and separated by ever more extensive tracts of woodland. This, my tour guide pronounces, is the heart of ancient Wessex, the one Saxon kingdom to hold out against the Vikings.

“Under Alfred the Great’s descendants it went on to form the nucleus of what would one day be called England,” he explains, as if it hasn’t crossed his mind that I might already know all this. “The north continued to be farmed by Danish settlers, which is why the accent in your part of the world is so different from ours. In Durham and Northumberland the Scandinavian tongue also took on elements from Scotland because that region was much closer to the border and subject to periodic invasions. Hence the Geordie way of speaking, which the rest of the country finds so impenetrable.”

Like so many other people with only a superficial knowledge of the north-east’s history, he’s mistaken on almost every count.

“You’ve never been to Carlisle, have you? It’s much closer to Scotland than Newcastle, eight and a half miles as opposed to nearly seventy,” I point out. “And their accent certainly doesn’t struggle to be understood. Geordie’s hard to get to grips with because that part of the north-east kept more of the original Anglian dialect than anywhere else. The Danes never settled in any numbers north of the Tees. You can tell by the place names. They wanted northern Northumbria — which, by the way, went as far as Stirling in those days — to be a buffer state under a client king. The border between England and Scotland wasn’t fixed at the Tweed until the eleventh century. In fact you could argue that Scots is an offshoot of Geordie, not the other way around.”

“I stand corrected,” smiles Gerald.

“Yeah, well I was born in County Durham. We only moved to Kent when I was twelve.”

“Kerrie told me. You’ve packed a lot into your young life. Will you stay in the north now that you’ve, uh…what’s the current idiom, returned to your roots?”

“I don’t think so. There aren’t too many job opportunities up there since the docks closed. Not that I see myself driving a fork-lift truck or working a crane!”

“No, somehow I can’t picture you in a boiler suit.”

Though just how I’ll escape from the Gladstone is a problem to which there appears to be no obvious solution.

At a village called Beckhampton we take the Devizes road, crossing the lonely Wiltshire Downs before descending to the greener, more thickly populated land to the south. As we come closer to our destination it doesn’t comfort me to remember that Egerton and de Monnier were there less than a week ago.

Left the metropolis for deepest Somerset, called HQ to report ‘mission accomplished’ and received orders to head north without further delay.

What mission? Who gave them their orders?

Which other shadowy organisation is involved in all this?

She has friends in the highest of high places.

And presumably the influence that goes with those connections. Influence over the local police force, perhaps.

Who is Yvette de Monnier? How deeply was she involved in the conspiracy to hide the truth about Sarah-Jane Collingwood’s disappearance? If she knew the girl had become a kuzkardesh gara, what was she doing asking questions in Bywell?

I’ve never told Peter, but some of the words…well, they spoke to me. I wanted to go out and repeat them to every woman I saw. I still do. And it’s not just me, either.

I give an involuntary shudder.

“Are you cold?” asks Gerald.

“No, it’s just...oh, I don’t know...”

“Everything’s going to be fine, Ruth. I promise.” He indicates right to overtake a farm vehicle. “Look, we’re only three or four miles from Trowbridge. We’ll stop there for a bite to eat. You’ll feel a lot better with something inside you.”

He’s right, I suppose. It’s never a good idea to go sleuthing on an empty stomach.

Or investigating a murder.

Glastonbury isn’t quite the tourist trap I expected. The shops huddled around the market cross at the bottom of the High Street have their share of windows filled with knick-knacks, herbal remedies, tie-dyed full-length skirts and occult literature, but the town seems half-hearted, if not embarrassed about cashing in on the celebrity it acquired during the short-lived hippy era. The only accommodation on offer is provided by a pub that looks to have been built as a coaching inn, whilst the limited number of spaces in the car park we use outside the entrance to the thirty-six acres of grounds surrounding the remains of the Benedictine Abbey, beneath which King Arthur is said to have been buried, is a barometer of how many visitors Britain’s ‘first Christian sanctuary’ attracts. Yet it’s a nice enough little place to spend an hour or two, with the gaps between the buildings opening up interesting views of the hills crowding in from the east and rising abruptly to the famous Tor.

It definitely doesn’t deserve to be sullied by the kind of tragedy Yvette de Monnier brought about in Northcroft.

The map we find in the abbey gift shop shows us that Chalice Lane runs along the far side of the park bordering the southern edge of the grounds. The weather has clouded over, but it’s warm enough for me to take off my jacket and carry it over my arm. I thought about putting my hair up until Gerald pooh-poohed the suggestion, saying it might make me look too much like a plain-clothes policewoman.

“We ought to come across as just an ordinary couple on a mission of mercy,” he told me.

“A couple?”

“It’s easier than inventing other reasons for us being together, particularly as you’re wearing a wedding ring. I hope that’s not a problem?”

No problem at all. How could it be?

As we begin the short walk along Magdalene Street I link arms with him. It’s not an empty gesture; I want him to know I’m taking this part seriously.

After a few yards he points towards the traffic lights ahead.

“If there’s a newsagent’s up there we’ll call in and pretend we’re lost. It’s a good way of testing the water. You can gather quite a lot of information from studying the reactions to a few well-chosen remarks.”

“Did they teach you that in the Army?”

“I’m an avid reader of detective stories.”

“Who’s your favourite?”

“That’s a tough one…but if you’re putting me on the spot I’ll have to say Sexton Blake.”

Gerald’s cheerful, confident smile allows me to forget the unsavoury nature of our business here and drift into a jazz-age fantasy where we’re investigating nothing more sinister than the theft of a diamond necklace. Give me that and I’d happily tag along as his sidekick — or anything else, for that matter.

“So if you were him, I’d be...?”

“Tinker.”

I think that’s what they call having your bubble pricked.

The only shop on the corner of Chalice Lane is a general dealer’s, fronted by trestle tables set out with trays of fruit, vegetables and flowers. At the sound of the bell the proprietress, a thickset woman in her forties, turns from filling the shelf to the right of the counter with tins of pork luncheon meat and corned beef, and flashes us both — but especially Gerald — a bright, gap-toothed smile.

“Hello!” she chirrups. “Nice weather for the time o’ year, ennit?”

“It certainly is,” replies Gerald. “Let’s hope it’s a sign that we’re in for a decent summer. The last two haven’t been much to write home about. Now, I was wondering if you could help us. We’re looking for Chalice Lane.”

From his inside pocket he produces a business card, which I assume is intended to satisfy her that we’re not debt collectors or Social Security snoopers.

“Oh, well this is the start of it, so you’re in the right–“ She breaks off, scowling at the unshaven, mop-haired individual in late middle age who shambles through the door. He’s dressed in a frayed sports jacket with a newspaper and a bottle poking from one of the pockets, a grubby grandad vest, worn grey flannel trousers and mud-encrusted tennis shoes. “What you doin’ ‘ere, Daniel Butleigh? What you got behind your back?”

He brandishes a bunch of daffodils, their stems tied with an elastic band.

“Well, I was goin’ to give these to you, Jane me lover, but you bein’ in one o’ your moods I reckon this fair young damsel should ‘ave ‘em instead.” He bows theatrically in front of me, his eyes fastened on my bosom. “Cause if that en’t a sight to make a statue weep...”

Gerald takes a step forward, but I lay my hand on his forearm.

“It’s all right, darling,” I assure him, accepting the proffered blooms while doing my utmost to keep a straight face.

“Those ‘ad better not ‘ave come from my stock,” the shopkeeper warns Butleigh.

“No, they’d better not,” I say, backing her up.

“Course they didn’t,” he protests. “I got ‘em from the churchyard.”

Jane and I turn to one another, open-mouthed.

“Have you ever...?” she gasps.

“I don’t know how he has the nerve,” I fume.

“Well, since I’m not appreciated ‘ere I reckon I’ll be off to Wearyall Hill,” announces Butleigh. “No better way to spend an afternoon than sittin’ on the grass with a crossword, a drop o’ cider an’ a pasty.”

“I hope you fall asleep an’ it rains an’ you catch your death o’ cold, you smelly old bugger,” Jane calls after him.

“And you can take these with you,” I add, thrusting the flowers into his hands.

“The Dwyers,” Gerald reminds me.

Butleigh spins in the doorway, his inane expression gone.

“You know ‘em?”

“As a matter of fact we don’t,” says Gerald.

“You keep it that way, my friend. For your good lady’s sake, you keep it that way.”

“What the devil do you mean by that?”

Butleigh doesn’t stay to elaborate. Gerald starts to stride after him, then reconsiders when he sees me shaking my head.

“So what did he mean?” I ask Jane.

“Oh, don’t you take any notice of ‘im, me dear. He’s well known round ‘ere for spreadin’ stories. En’t none of ‘em ever been worth listenin’ to. I reckon it’s all that scrumpy ‘e drinks. Rots the brain as well as the guts.”

As soon as we’re back outside I light a cigarette. Gerald looks around for Butleigh, but there’s no sign of him.

For your good lady’s sake…

Egerton said Helen Sutton was suffering from some kind of mental illness, one that remained dormant in her brain until she received the casket. What he didn’t tell me was how such an affliction could be passed from one person to another.

…then Helen said summat to ‘er, must’ve been in French ‘cause I never understood a word of it, and yer know what, the frog went down like a sack o’ taties.

That was the trigger. But how exactly were de Monnier and the others infected to begin with?

I push back my fringe, then take a paper tissue from my bag to wipe the perspiration from my hands. Gerald’s expression shows that he’s aware of my unease.

“If you’d rather not do this…”

I manage a stoical smile.

“And tell Kerrie I was put off by what some drunken layabout said? Come on, let’s get it over with.”

33 Chalice Lane is part of a two-storey pre-war terrace, each house sharing with one of its neighbours a covered passageway leading to the garden at the rear. An apple tree grows in the centre of the Dwyers’ front lawn; the grass around it needs cutting, but there are no signs of outright neglect. A squeaky gate seems to be the only other matter requiring attention.

Gerald stops a few paces from the door.

“You don’t have to come in with me,” he says. “I’m sure Jane wouldn’t mind if you waited in the shop.”

“But I might.”

“Still…”

“You heard what she said. The guy’s a nutcase. Besides, I’ve invested too much in this to back out now.”

“I appreciate that, Ruth. But I feel responsible for you.”

“Yeah, well I’m not used to placing myself under someone else’s protection.”

He looks me straight in the eye.

“In view of what happened yesterday evening, you’re having it none the less.”

His paternalism makes me want to lock antlers with him — then I recall that he’s the stag and I’m now a doe.

Yet if a doe submits unconditionally to a dominant male, a girl who has her head screwed on tightly enough can use her surrender to gain the upper hand.

“I’m sorry, I know this isn’t a game. And I admit I feel a lot safer for having you around. Kerrie knew what she was doing when she took you on board, she really did.”

“I’ll whisk you out of there at the first hint of trouble,” he promises me.

“I know you will,” I smile.

Job done. I’ve accepted Gerald as my knight in shining armour, and in return we’ll have no more nonsense about me hiding in a corner shop. To seal the bargain I slide my fingers through his as we wait for someone to answer the door.

After about thirty seconds an elderly gentleman with thin white hair opens it as far as the security chain will permit.

“Mr Dwyer?” enquires Gerald.

“Who wants to know?” croaks the old man in a mild Welsh accent.

“My name’s Gerald Cooper, and this is Ruth, my wife.”

“We have some news for Susan,” I add. “I assume you’re her father.”

He nods, but at the same time his expression darkens. Convinced that he’s going to tell us either that she’s dead or has disappeared under mysterious circumstances, I move even closer to the man at my side.

“What kind o’ news?”

“I’m afraid someone she was acquainted with has passed away,” says Gerald.

“Oh. Well, I’ll have to see then, won’t I? Wait there, I shan’t be a tick.”

Dwyer shuffles back along the hallway and begins climbing the stairs one by one. It looks as if he’ll be gone for more than a tick, and quite a few tocks as well.

“He doesn’t seem particularly dangerous,” I remark as I disengage my fingers from Gerald’s, then take my vanity case from my shoulder bag and begin checking my make-up.

“He isn’t. He’s scared.”

“Of us?”

“Of his daughter.”

I find that hard to believe. If Susan had posed any kind of threat to the general public, surely de Monnier would have taken steps to isolate her.

Dwyer admits us a few minutes later. He explains that Susan is willing to talk to me, but not my husband. Gerald bridles at this, and I have to swear to him that I’ll call for help the moment I feel threatened. If I was the heroine in a fairy tale he’d be scaling the castle walls long before the evil prince had a chance to seduce me. Feeling his eyes trained on my back, I follow the directions to Susan’s room.

I knock and go in, leaving the door ajar. The first thing I notice is the canvas leaning against the wall to my right. Although the picture it will eventually hold has only been sketched in pencil, I can tell immediately that it’s an accurate representation of the mosque Helen Sutton photographed fifteen years ago.

“It’s unfinished. Rather like me.”

The woman occupying the chintz armchair by the window is, as I expected, in her middle thirties. Her dark hair is brushed forward into a shoulder-length bob, which helps soften her angular features. The jacket and skirt she’s wearing look to be made from a similar material to the velvety fabric Kerrie and I found in Northcroft. But it’s her ebony lips and bejewelled, black-nailed hands that obviate the need for any clarification of her statement.

The casket was sent to Helen as a trigger…it was an instruction to turn herself into a kuzkardesh gara and begin spreading the infection around.

Susan Dwyer’s transformation has been halted in its early stages. That must be what Egerton and de Monnier came here to achieve, possibly by confiscating the implements Susan needed to complete it.

But how were the seeds of her desire to become one of those monstrosities sown?

She beckons me across but doesn’t rise from her seat. As if the very air she’s exhaling may be contaminated, I edge towards her.

“Where do you live, Ruth Cooper?” she asks me, letting an arm fall theatrically over the back of the chair.

“We’ve travelled up from Cosham, near Portsmouth.”

“Have you indeed? That’s quite a long journey. I don’t think you came all that way just to give a complete stranger news of Helen Sutton’s death.”

My eyes widen, but only a little. She could have heard it from Egerton and de Monnier.

“How did you know it was Helen?”

“First tell me the real reason for your visit.”

“Fair enough.” I reach into my bag for one of the copies Kerrie and I made of the four names and addresses in Helen Sutton’s notebook and hand it to her. She reads it, showing no perceptible reaction. “The source where I found that list contains a photograph of the four of you, taken in the summer of 1964. There’s another, of Sarah-Jane looking very different...”

Susan’s brows lift a fraction of an inch, and for the first time I notice the tiny black gemstones fixed to them, separated by gaps so small each line forms what could easily be mistaken for a single pencilled arch.

Just like Suki Tatsukichi’s.

“You don’t have to be circumspect,” she scolds me. “We both know what she is. What I almost became.”

“I’m sorry, that wasn’t very tactful of me. I–“

She waves my apology away.

“Sarah-Jane is a kuzkardesh gara. The movement was founded in the first decade of this century by an Austrian woman named Chrysanthemum von Witzleben. It’s a sisterhood modelled on a community she came across whilst on an archaeological expedition in what was then Chinese Turkestan.”

“So where were the photographs taken?”

“Southern Bucovina. It’s part of Romania now, but before the First World War it belonged to the Austrian Empire. The area was sufficiently remote for Frau von Witzleben to establish her hive without fear of it coming to the attention of the authorities.”

Bucovina, eh? Never heard of it, but that’s nothing a half-decent atlas won’t put right.

“Isn’t Romania a communist country?”

“How and why we came to be in Bucovina is classified information. Although I feel no loyalty towards the people who sent us there, I’m not willing to break the law for someone who for all I know could be a secret agent herself.”

“I understand.”

“Do you?” Susan points to the edge of the bed and waits for me to sit, watching the way I cross one thigh over the other, rest my bag against my right hip and use my other hand to push my fringe away from my forehead. Although each of these movements has become second nature to me, I feel more self-conscious about performing them than at any time since I became female. It’s as if she knows I haven’t always been a woman, and is ticking a series of mental boxes to see how well I’ve adjusted to the change. “Who do you think those women are?”

“They’re obviously a religious group of some sort. An Islamic sect, maybe?”

“You couldn’t be more wrong. They don’t believe in any kind of supreme being. Their faith, if that’s what you want to call it, is in the power of the universal female mind.”

It’s the kind of half-baked mystical claptrap I ought to have foreseen. But I won’t get Susan to tell me very much by laughing in her face.

“What does that mean in practical terms?” I ask.

“A group intelligence. It operates at a subconscious level, so that each kuzkardesh gara has the same set of attitudes, values and preferences as the others in her hive. In every way that matters, they function as a single organism.”

A single appearance, a single set of opinions, a single purpose. They’re a totalitarian regime, a religious cult and a zombie plague all rolled into one.

Egerton wasn’t making any of that up. But it still strikes me as something you’d only expect to find in an episode of Doctor Who.

“I’m not sure I follow you. How can that happen? What’s the mechanism that brings it about?”

Susan shakes her head. She might be a Geography mistress trying to explain the principles of Central Place Theory to a class of remedial twelve year olds.

“You’re looking at it from the wrong angle, Ruth. A collective subconscious is the default condition for every sentient species that evolves. The idea of individuality is an illusion, a survival technique Homo sapiens developed during the transition from a hunting and gathering society to one based on agriculture, when instead of living in extended family groups women were confined to small, isolated farms. But as that’s a comparatively recent departure from the norm it can be eradicated fairly easily. All most of us need is something to kick-start the relevant mental processes.”

Half-baked mystical claptrap dressed up as science. All bases covered.

“Why do they shave their heads?” I’m curious to know.

“The universal mind is by definition egalitarian.” She toys with the strands falling across her left ear, grimacing with distaste. “Hair grows in idiosyncratic ways. It serves no purpose other than to feed the chimera of selfhood.”

“And the black make-up and tattoos?”

“They draw attention away from the other aspects of a woman’s appearance, and so act to level the playing field, as it were. A plain face like mine is enhanced, a beautiful one disfigured.”

Enhanced? Who are you trying to fool?

I still don’t know why this coven of witches has got de Monnier and the spooks at the MoD in such a tizzy. Maybe it’s time I changed tack.

“How long were you out there?”

“Just under a fortnight altogether.”

“The thing is, I can see how an impressionable young girl like Sarah-Jane Collingwood might fall for this ‘universal mind’ stuff if she’d been indoctrinated in it for months,” I argue. “But to make that kind of decision after what, a few days?”

“There was no ‘decision’, Ruth. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t experience an epiphany when you lose your individual awareness. It still feels like being you. What’s changed is that your emotional and psychological responses are now identical to those of every other kuzkardesh gara. Imagine living in a street where everyone starts the day with a cup of tea except you, who always have coffee. One morning you walk into the kitchen and instead of coffee you make tea, because that’s what you prefer first thing. You don’t suddenly think of yourself as a tea drinker. You just like tea, the same as your neighbours.”

Epiphany…

Didn’t one of the Sawdons use that word when we were talking to them in Bywell?

Hell’s teeth, what did they actually say?

No doubt I’ll remember later on. But first there’s another line of enquiry I have to pursue.

“Then tell me why it took more than fourteen years for it to work on you and Helen Sutton. And how the two visitors you entertained last Tuesday were able to stop your conversion halfway through.”

Her mouth curls in a mocking smile.

“Do you know why I agreed to talk to you? It wasn’t to answer your questions but to warn you that humanity is fighting a losing battle. The genie is out of the lamp, and no one is going to put it back.” Abruptly, her expression turns blank. She raises her chin, as though she’s listening to a conversation in the next room. “You struggle against us now, Ruth Cooper, but that which is within you may not be gainsaid. One shall be all, then all shall be as one.”

Susan’s voice has become so chilling that I have to call on every ounce of resolve I possess not to jump up and run from the room.

“What are you talking about?” I ask her.

“You have heard but not understood. Dig beneath the illusion of selfhood and all will be made clear to you.”

The illusion of selfhood.

The Sawdons used that phrase as well…

“What about men?” I ask in an attempt to change the subject. “How do they fit into this twisted utopia?”

“They are necessary to perpetuate our species, and to provide for us when we’re carrying and raising our children. In return we pleasure them, in ways most have never dreamed of.”

She begins licking her black lips. She couldn’t look any more reptilian if her tongue shot out to capture a passing insect.

“I’ve had about as much of this as I can stomach,” I spit at her. “Your dad’s frightened to death of you, and now I know why.”

Susan lifts off her wig. Her hairless scalp is perfectly smooth, apart the row of livid purple scabs going back from the centre of her forehead.

“You know nothing,” she hisses. “You are not even aware of your own potential.”

She begins to rise from her chair. I stand at the same time, backing away from her.

“What potential?” I can’t help asking.

“That is not for Susan Dwyer to say. She is incomplete. She peers through the veil of individuality.”

Her hand moves to my right cheek. I push it away angrily, accidentally knocking over a waste basket in my hurry to leave. Slamming the door behind me, I scuttle down the stairs.

Gerald is waiting in the hallway. I lose my footing and feel myself fall forwards, but he’s there to catch me.

“Are you all right, Ruth?”

“Just get me out of here,” I growl into his shirt.

I’m lighting up even as he turns the latch. Just as it did in Bywell, the feeling that I’m completely out of my depth enshrouds me like a fog.

All most of us need is something to kick-start the relevant mental processes.

In Helen Sutton’s case it was the casket.

But who sent it to her?

And why did de Monnier leave it lying around in 6 Redheugh Close for four and a half months?

Not much dust. That means whoever it was, they were here fairly recently.

She didn’t.

The intruders who filled that crate with sandbags and pushed it against the door weren’t burglars at all. They broke in to put the casket back.

Just in time for Kerrie Latimer to find it.

But why, for heaven’s sake? What has Kerrie to do with any of this?

We’re too close to a result to allow anyone to cock things up.

Cunningham knows.

And I bet he could also tell me why Sarah-Jane Collingwood and the others were taken to Bucovina fifteen years ago.

At the front gate Gerald turns to me.

“It might be best to get it out into the open now,” he suggests, and for a moment all I want is for him to take me in his arms again and just hold me for a while.

“We can talk in the car,” is all I trust myself to say.

“You look as if you could do with a stiff drink.”

I let the cigarette fall to the pavement and grind it out with my heel. What I need is a ride back to Northcroft so I can forget about all this crap and get on with the rest of my life.

The genie is out of the lamp, and no one is going to put it back.

Yet if I walk away now those words might haunt me to the grave.

Or until I suddenly find I’m wearing black lip gloss and nail varnish…

“Do you know where Bucovina is?” I ask as we walk back along Chalice Lane.

“I’m not sure. In Eastern Europe, by the sound of it. Why?”

Full stop. Period. Punkt.

Because someone out there has discovered a new kind of consciousness, one that can be transmitted into a person’s mind and change them into a being that can no longer be thought of as fully human.

And they want to make us all the same as them.

“That’s where they went, Susan and the rest of them,” I reply. “It was one of the few things I could get out of her that made any sense.”

Yep, even as the end of the world hoves into plain view the lies just keep on coming.