A Dark Dividing (46 page)

If Floy had administered a shock to his twenty-first-century reader by naming Matt Dancy as Tansy’s abductor, he had kept the biggest shock of all to the very end.

Double whammy, thought Harry, staring down at the closing pages of
The Ivory Gate
, reading for the fifth or sixth time how Tansy and Anthony had taken a final journey together, not quite hand-in-hand into the sunset, but not far off.

It was a journey Tansy had never thought to make and it was a journey she would never, left to her own devices, have made. But Anthony had wanted to do it; he had wanted to chase away any lingering ghosts for them both so Tansy had agreed.

They had travelled on a train, which was an adventure all by itself, and at the station they had hired a pony and trap—Tansy had been proud of Anthony, who knew about things like this, and who knew that even though you paid people for this kind of journey you always gave them a penny or two over the cost. The man had doffed his cap as they got down, and said, Bless you, guv, you’re a toff.

The trap had taken them through the winding lanes with fields on both sides, and along to the four cross-ways with the little pointy signpost so that if you were a stranger you would know which road to take. They slowed down to take the left-hand road, and Tansy caught sight of the church across the fields.

There were a lot of trees now—tall dark shapes standing up against the sky, like sentinels guarding the way to the past… Because the past is a place you should never seek to enter: you should leave it alone and you should leave its ghosts to walk their sad dusty mansions by themselves…

But there was one mansion that you would never be able to leave alone, because your mind would pull you back to it over and over—

The trap jolted its way around the last curve of the road, and there ahead of them, brooding on its hillside, was the place where Tansy and Anthony and the other children had lived for all those harsh, sad years.

Mortmain House.

Mortmain House…

Harry closed Floy’s book and sat motionless for a long time. So Floy had known about Simone’s nightmare mansion. He had known about the place Simone had photographed when she was a child. And Viola and Sorrel had been real people, and Matt Dancy had been real, as well. What about Tansy? Had Tansy been real?

After a moment he reached for the phone and dialled the number of Simone’s flat. It was annoying to find that she was not in, and it was impossible to explain all of this to an answerphone. In the end he simply left a message saying he had disinterred some quite interesting information about the Bloomsbury house, and perhaps they could meet for a drink so that he could tell her what he had found.

R
OZ SUPPOSED IT had been a bit childish and a bit melodramatic to scrawl that macabre message on the photograph of Mortmain House, but it had given her a good deal of satisfaction to do it. You had to seize opportunities as they arose and the opportunity that had arisen to get inside the stupid pretentious gallery and deliver a psychological blow to Simone had been too good to ignore.

She had gone out to Thorne’s on her next off-duty day, deliberately waiting until late morning when the streets would be crowded and she would be unnoticeable. She still had Rosie’s cunning to draw on if the occasion required it!

She had consulted the
A
-
Z
to find the exact location of Thorne’s, but in the end it was quite easy. It was quite a busy area, and there were a lot of shops and little restaurants and coffee places, which was good because it meant no one would give Roz a second look. The house, when she found it, was nicer than she had expected it to be: one of the elegant Georgian buildings you saw in the classier parts of London. That would be down to Angelica Thorne, of course, although Roz did not care to think how the little whore had got her claws on the money!

The gallery itself was pretty much as she had expected: meaningless, over-priced pictures and photographs pretending to be great art. But what she had not expected was the huge surge of emotion that engulfed her when she saw Simone. It was just after one o’clock, and Simone came out of Thorne’s and went quickly along the street. She was wearing a long dark-coloured trenchcoat and she had wound a vivid amber-coloured scarf around her neck. The sunlight caught her hair so that it glinted with red lights like copper wires, and she walked with an eager step as if she found life good and as if she expected good things to be waiting for her everywhere.

Roz stared at her from the half-concealment of a shop doorway, and felt as if something had slammed a clenched fist into the pit of her stomach. This, then, was how Sonia would have looked if she had lived to grow up. This was what Sonia would have grown into. For a moment Sonia was with her again, in that cosy world they had shared, all-in-all to one another, as they had been since Sonia was a baby. Roz had seen to Sonia’s every need during those years, teaching her all her lessons, protecting her from a world that might have been cruel to her, devising exercises to help strengthen her legs and her back—Sonia would never have been able to walk with Simone’s happy hopeful step, of course.

She had returned to Thorne’s the following day, doing so in the afternoon this time, moving from shop to shop, buying a newspaper in one place, having a cup of tea in another, but keeping Thorne’s in her sight all the time. The lights were on inside the place until quite late, and it was just on seven when she began to think she really could not linger very much longer. And then Angelica Thorne—unmistakable figure to anyone who had ever read a newspaper or watched TV!—came out, leaving the street door unlocked. Roz had time to notice that Angelica was dressed up like a Piccadilly tart, but she gave Angelica only the most cursory of glances, because her heart was pounding with sudden anticipation. Was Simone in the house on her own, then? It seemed probable. Angelica hailed a taxi—no tubes or buses for
that
lazy little madam!—and Roz walked briskly across the street and stepped inside the door of the gallery. If anyone was there she would say she was looking at the pictures—Oh—Was the gallery not still open to the public at this hour? And even if Simone saw her it would not matter, because Simone had never seen Roz.

But everywhere was quiet, and after a moment Roz went up to the second floor. And there, facing her, had been the monochrome photograph of Mortmain House and whatever else you might want to say or think about Simone Anderson—Simone Marriot—you would have to admit that she had captured the exact atmosphere of despair and secrecy of the place.

She had felt Sonia’s presence as she rummaged in her bag for her lipstick and wrote that message—
The Murder House
, with, beneath it,
Sonia
, like a signature. That would make the bitch writhe! Roz had felt very close to Sonia in that moment; fanciful and stupid, of course—Sonia was dead, and the bitch who had killed her was walking freely about London, carving out a career for herself, making friends, making money. The unfairness of it welled up in a scalding hurting flood, because this murderous harpy had gone unpunished for too long. Retribution, remember that? Thou shalt give life for life, that was what the Bible said, clearly and unequivocally, and it even dotted the
i
’s and crossed the
t
’s by adding that you could take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth and a hand for a hand if you were so inclined. Roz had learned it all in her aunt’s house, and it was a good feeling to know she had Old Testament approval for what she was doing.

But when you boiled it down what she was planning was an execution, perfectly justified. Simone had killed Sonia, she had committed a murder, and people who committed murders must forfeit their own lives.

You cannot murder a ghost, but nor can you ever really escape a ghost, either.

Simone had tried very hard not to think about the ghosts while she was away from London, and on the whole she was pleased with the results of her trip. She had discovered a working Arkwright loom in a very good museum near to Preston and the curator had been helpful about letting her photograph it. She had stayed in the area for a couple of days, booking into a small pub, and the curator had taken her out to dinner on the second night.

Next morning she had driven back through the Midlands, just because it was a different route, enjoying the glimpses of the old iron and steel foundries from the motorway. It had been raining quite heavily with a misty drabness everywhere so that Simone had the feeling of having stepped back into a Lowry painting. Rain and greyness and the feeling of a treadmill—clocking-on at eight and clocking-off again at five, part of a huge relentless machine…

On an impulse she had taken the motorway exit into Stoke-on-Trent: sometimes called the Potteries, home of good china and ceramic—Wedgwood and Royal Doulton and Minton—but also home of Anna of the Five Towns. She had wandered around for the better part of the afternoon, and got several terrific shots of old kilns and cooling towers.

Delaying reaching home? her mind had said, sneakily, at one stage. Putting off the time when you have to go back into Thorne’s, and when you have to wonder who left that message on the Mortmain shot? Of course not. Liar, said the voice. You know what you’ve got to do when you get home, don’t you? I’m not listening, said Simone to the voice.

She reached London in the early evening, and drove straight to Thorne’s. There was no on-street parking, but there was a narrow side street a few yards along where you could sometimes get a space in the evenings if you were lucky. Simone got one tonight and carried her cameras and light-meters and tripods into the main gallery. She unlocked the street door, remembering to disable the alarm when she got in, and then locked the door behind her.

There was a message on her voice-mail from Harry Fitzglen. Simone had forgotten what a nice voice he had. He was phoning to let her know that he had found out one or two intriguing bits of information about a previous owner of the Bloomsbury house. He thought she would be interested in what he had found—was there any chance of them meeting for a drink to talk about it?

There was no reason not to respond to this call, which was a business thing as much as anything else. Simone was still keen on the idea of a display showing the Bloomsbury house’s past; potential customers would like it and it would make a good talking point for casual callers. She scribbled down Harry’s number; she would definitely phone him in the morning. It was rather a friendly thing to come home to his voice and his invitation.

She went slowly back downstairs. What now? Should she simply leave her stuff here and go home? There would be a lot to do tomorrow—she was interested to see how the Arkwright loom shots had come out on the film. She ought really to go straight home and have something to eat and an early night. Stupid, said her mind: you know quite well what you’re going to do now. Why don’t you just get on with it? Simone frowned, and then after a moment went across the main gallery to the back of the building.

The Bloomsbury house had a big square kitchen which was slightly below ground level, so that even on a sunny day it was rather dark. At this time on an autumn evening it was very dark indeed. Leading off the kitchen, down six shallow steps, was an old larder, and it was this larder that Simone had annexed for a darkroom. It was a cool oblong-shaped place, windowless and with a stone floor and unplastered walls. There was a deep old sink at one end, and wide, marble-topped shelves all round the walls which had probably been used for storing churns of milk and wheels of cheese. It meant there was masses of room for the enlarger and the guillotine that Simone used for cropping and trimming prints, and for the stop-bath and the baths for developing fluid and fixer. The renovations had had to include new electrical wiring, which had been expensive and messy, but it had meant that power and light could be installed in the scullery. If you had wanted a tailor-made darkroom you would not have got one much better than this.