Ancient Images (25 page)

    She'd seen similar figures, apparently intended to rob the faithful of any pleasure in sex, on other Norman churches. She went to the corner and surveyed the corbel, where there were several other figures: a man with a chipped erection and a mouth stuffed with wheat, a face with hands pulling its lips wide to let out a grotesquely long tongue, a woman holding what Sandy hoped were two fruits in front of her chest to feed a pair of fleshless canine figures, which were biting and clawing at them. Sandy turned away, and a voice above her said conversationally, "Miss Allan."

    Lord Redfield was leaning out of an upper window of the palace, his large flat face almost bored, his eyebrows slightly raised, creasing his forehead. "Still getting the lie of the land?" he said.

    "You did say I could go where I liked. I saw your chapel from the tower and thought you wouldn't mind."

    "Nor do I. Steep yourself in our history by all means. You've done the tower, have you? I'm impressed."

    "It took something out of me, I'll admit. I wouldn't call it your main tourist attraction."

    "It was never meant to be. It was strictly for those with sufficient of our strength. I hope you will excuse me now if I leave you to your delving," he said, and closed the window.

    Sandy strolled back to the door of the chapel. There was no handle, only a rusty keyhole. One push told her that the door was locked. She supposed she could ask for the key, except that it seemed clear Redfield would have offered it to her or had the door opened for her. It was the family chapel, after all, hardly a public place. Perhaps he wouldn't mind if she looked in the windows, but she went round to the side of the chapel away from the palace, just in case.

    Beyond the first window, over which a man squatted with his penis in his mouth, she saw dark pews stained by the afternoon light and standing on a rough stone floor. Through the next window, beneath a figure which appeared to be splitting itself open from anus to chin, she could see more pews and a corner of the altar. Between this window and the one nearest the altar, mossy steps led down under the chapel.

    If she wasn't meant to enter the chapel, she could scarcely expect to go into the vault. She went to the top of the steps and shaded her eyes. The nine steps led down to an iron gate, so elaborate that she could see nothing beyond it. She listened for a moment in case anyone was nearby, then she picked her way down the softened slippery green steps.

    Gripping both uprights of the pockmarked arch, she ducked close to the iron tracery of the gate. Apart from the stirring of her own blurred shadow in the dimness beyond it, she could see nothing she could put a name to. She ventured forward another inch, and her foot skidded off the lowest step.

    She flung up a hand to protect her face, and inadvertently elbowed the gate. It groaned and swung inward. She hadn't thought to search for the bolt, taking it for granted that the gate was locked. Now she saw that part of the tracery was in fact the bolt, pulled back just short of the socket in the wall. She glanced up the steps, past the top where blades of grass trembled, and cupped her ear. The field was quiet as the clouds sailing by. She stooped under the arch, feeling as if she was being made to bow to all the Redfields, and stood waiting for her eyesight to catch up with her.

    Now that the gate was open, the vault was less dark. Beyond the fat gray pillars that supported the ceiling, which was so low she thought the present Redfield might have to duck if he ever went in there, she could see memorial plaques set in the greenish walls. She began to read the plaques to her left, starting with the first that didn't look too overgrown to decipher, inscribed to the memory of a fifteenth-century Redfield. She read four plaques before she admitted to herself she had been mistaken to suspect what she had half suspected. There was no pattern to the dates of death- nothing like the regularity of which "The Lofty Place" had made so much.

    She read one more plaque, to be absolutely certain. There was no need for her to venture into the darker reaches of the vault, which must extend beyond the chapel, toward the fields of wheat. The faint stale smell must be the smell of moss or something else that had grown in the dark, and the muffled hollow rustling had to be the wind in the grass at the top of the steps.

    She was on her way out when she noticed that a shift in the light had made another plaque visible, close to the gate. It was so old that it had cracked from corner to corner. She crossed the floor, the stones of which felt swollen, and squinted at the inscription. The plaque was so overgrown that most of the carved letters were stuffed with moss, which she thought must be one source of the smell of stale growth. She'd assumed that a shadow was making the diagonal crack appear wider than it was, but in fact it was wide enough to slip her fingers through. Strings of moss glistened between its lips. She moved aside a little so as not to block the light that was reflected from the nearest pillar, and squatted down to bring her face closer to the plaque. Eventually she managed to distinguish the date of death, which suggested no more of a pattern than the other carved dates had. "Sorry to bother you," she murmured, and grasped her knees to push herself to her feet, her dangling handbag nudging her like an old dog. Cramp in her thighs arrested her in a curtsy halfway to standing, and so she had time to see what she hadn't realized she had already glimpsed through the crack.

    It was only a hole, a large hole that seemed to extend back further than would have been necessary to house a coffin. Presumably there had been a coffin which had rotted away at some time in the past. No doubt the far end of the niche had collapsed with age too, Sandy thought, trying to massage the cramp from her thighs so that she could move away. The object she could just make out beyond the crack must be a tangle of roots, and of course it wasn't really stirring. Roots must have broken through the collapsed wall of the niche, another proof of how fertile the soil was, and over the years they'd formed a scrawny shape that looked crouched, about to leap. Though her thighs were still aching, she had unlocked her muscles sufficiently to be able to stagger to her feet-but she staggered so badly that she needed to support herself, and the only support within reach was the plaque.

    She felt it give way. Perhaps the moss hid other cracks in the stone. The plaque was about to fall to pieces, opening the niche. She wavered backward, bumping into the pillar, before she realized that she hadn't felt stone giving way, only its pelt of moss. She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand, roughly enough to steady herself, and then she marched toward the steps. A face loomed out of the darkness above her, inside the arch.

    Her legs jerked together, bruising her knees, and she almost fell headlong. She retreated a few inches and saw that the face was a carving. "Panicky bitch," she snarled. It looked at least as old as anything in the vault, probably older. It was so eroded that she couldn't tell if it was meant to be a hungry face composed of wheat, or overgrown by it, or turning into woven stalks. It looked dismayingly threatening and primitive, and far more like the sketch Charlie Miles had made for her than the coat of arms carved above the Redfield mantelpiece had.

    She hurried to the steps and closed the gate behind her, and saw its vague shadow flood across the stone floor like an upsurge of soil. She scrambled to ground level, wondering why the rustle of vegetation had seemed louder in the vault than in the open. Just now she was more concerned that Lord Redfield might think she had been out of sight for too long. Once she was past the chapel she could see nobody watching, but that didn't make her feel less watched.

    

    

    She walked quietly back to the town, through the teatime streets and into the hotel. Roger must have arrived; the receptionist was opening her mouth to say so. "Cook was wanting to know-was

    "Has anyone been asking for me?"

    "Cook has, to know if you'll be-was

    "You know what I mean. Has anyone been here looking for me or left a message?"

    "I'd have said if they had," the receptionist said huffily. "But I need to let cook know-was

    "I expect I'll be having dinner," Sandy said, and trudged up to her room. Could the girl have been instructed to withhold any messages to her or even to tell callers that Sandy wasn't staying at the hotel? Could Roger have already been and gone, having been told she'd left or had never been there? She mustn't grow paranoid, it was only her period thinking for her. Most likely Roger had been delayed and had failed to let her know, or perhaps the receptionist at Staff o' Life wasn't prepared to accept messages for her. Now Sandy thought about it, it had been somewhat cheeky of her to assume that anybody would.

    She dialed Roger's number and listened to the ringing until her head began to throb. She considered driving back to London, leaving a message at the hotel in case he was on his way, but even if she set out now she would have to drive most of the way in the dark. She went downstairs to apologize to the hotel receptionist for having been brusque with her, and couldn't bring herself to say she had changed her mind about dinner.

    Dinner ended with bread pudding that tasted strongly of the Redfield special, and after that she felt too heavy even to dream of driving home. She went out to walk off her meal. The night had closed down like a lid, and the streets were illuminated by lamps of a kind she hadn't seen since early childhood, bolts protruding from both sides of their necks. The Staff o' Life complex was lit and rumbling. In the pubs, and in some of the houses, she heard snatches of folksong above the tuneless continuo of the wind. The light from a bedside lamp hovered on the ceiling of a child's bedroom, and a woman was humming a lullaby. In another house Sandy heard a shot, a scream, the Vaughan Williams melody of a Staff o' Life commercial. Out beyond the northern edge of town, where the tower soaked up the night, the fields were pale and restless.

    Back at the Wheatsheaf she stood under the awning and gazed along the main road, hoping dreamily to see headlights that would prove to herald Roger's arrival. She felt too sleepy to be discontented. She didn't know how long she had been standing there when the receptionist approached her. "I'll be locking up when you're ready, Miss Allan. Nobody's come for you or called."

    "Well, that's men for you," Sandy said as they went into the hotel.

    The girl gave her a look so placid it was beyond interpretation. "What does your man do?"

    "Writes."

    "And you too?"

    "No, I'm from television," Sandy said, disconcerted to realize how long she had had to be wary of saying so. She thought she could be open here, but she changed the subject anyway. "He'd have to come along that road from London, wouldn't he?"

    The girl locked the front doors and withdrew the key with a loud rattle. "Aye, that's the only way, the Toonderfieldroad."

    Sandy faltered, her mouth tasting suddenly stale. "Which road did you say?"

    "The road through Toonderfield."

    "Where's that?"

    "Toonderfield? Why, you came through there yesterday. It's the edge of Redfield, past the Ear of Wheat as far as the wee wood." The girl stared at her, the iceberg of a countrywoman's contempt for urban ignorance just visible in her eyes, and snapped the key ring onto the belt of her uniform. "You'll see it when you leave," she said.

    

    

    So Giles Spence had died on Redfield land. That needn't seem sinister or even very surprising, Sandy told herself as she brushed her teeth. Lampooning the Redfields hadn't helped his film, and so he'd come back. It seemed clear that Lord Redfield had waited to be sure that she wasn't aware of it before he would discuss Spence's first visit, but after all, Redfield had been protecting his family from suspicion. Or perhaps she was being too suspicious, and he genuinely didn't know where Spence had died, given that he himself had been barely out of his cradle at the time. As for Spence, if he'd driven off in a rage after having failed a second time to shake the Redfield poise, the copse beyond the humpbacked bridge was a likely spot for him to have lost control of his car.

    She unbolted the bathroom door and padded to her room. The wall-lamp by her door had died; the glass bud among the wooden leaves was gray as a parched seed. The other lamps illuminated sheaves that were printed on the wallpaper, all the way along the uninhabited corridor to the empty stage of the landing. She wondered where the staff of the hotel slept; wherever it was, she couldn't hear them. They wouldn't be able to hear her, but why should that worry her? She let herself into her room and locked the door. Toonderfield might be a contraction of Two Hundred Acre Field, she thought as she brushed her hair. The insight made her feel sleepily contented, not least because it seemed self-contained, a bit of information that was already tidying itself away at the back of her mind. She stood up from the stool in front of the dressing table and stretched and yawned, and was ambling to the bed when she heard a sound beyond the window.

    She parted the thick curtains and opened the window wide, and leaned out to see what the regular sound might be that made her think of pacing claws. The streetlamps sprouted from their plots of light, but otherwise the street was deserted. Of course, the hotel sign was making the sound, ticking as it swayed in the wind.

    She closed the window and the curtains, and climbed into bed, catching hold of the light cord to let herself down into the dark and sleep. She must have been exhausted last night not to have heard the restless sign, the wind blustering at the window. The weight of tonight's dessert sank her into sleep.

    Silence wakened her. The wind had dropped. At some point, she realized, she'd heard the rumbling of lorries from Staff o' Life. Lying under the quilt in the midst of the silence, she felt peaceful and warm and safe. She listened to the muffled noises of the hotel sign, which sounded even more like the pacing of an animal now that there was no wind to blur them-but if there was no wind, the sign shouldn't be making a noise.