Nyctophobia (10 page)

I returned to the house. The bricks around the door were warm beneath my hand. The temperature in the darkened back part had to be much lower. I thought it would probably be ideal for storing wine, and we could put Darrell’s wedding-gift cabinet in there. Mateo had amassed a good cellar, but at the moment it was still stored at his head office in Madrid. I followed the edge of the building until I reached the border of light and shade. Surprisingly, there were windows at the rear the same as those on the front, but very much smaller, so that the house appeared to be a distorted mirror image of itself. They faced into the narrow alley formed by the sunless cut of the mountain, and were blocked with interior shutters of dark green wood.

I still couldn’t get inside. I was growing tired of Rosita’s delaying tactics – I’d become sure by now that she was doing it deliberately. I couldn’t imagine that there was anything she didn’t want me to see. It was about ownership and power; if I couldn’t get into all of the house, she’d still be in control somehow. Of course, I couldn’t tell Mateo this because it would play into his old-school beliefs that two women left alone would end up fighting. I had a suspicion he believed that all we talked about was men when he left the room.

The alleyway between the rear wall of the house and the cliff face was only just wide enough to enter sideways. By sliding myself in, I could reach the back window. There was a gap in the centre of it, just where the shutters met, so I pressed my face close and cupped my hands around my eyes, trying to see in. It took a minute to adjust but soon I could make out the interior.

It was decorated, but had fallen into disrepair. I had an impression of browns and greys, an old-fashioned gate-leg table with a filthy green baize cloth, a vase of tall, dusty peacock feathers, some overstuffed armchairs with tattered antimacassars. A tall mantelpiece of pale marble, a gilt mirror with diseased mercury-glass, more clocks – the room was a stunted, shallow mirror image of the one on the sunlit side. But I saw a spot where we could put a wine cabinet, beside the fireplace.

Something puzzled me. Why would servants want to live in a dark, miniature version of their master’s house? Perhaps it had been a misguided attempt to make them feel more at home. I couldn’t imagine the number of unthinking slights and small cruelties they put up with, but then I came from a time when the very idea of servants was regarded as distasteful and demeaning.

I suddenly noticed that the birdsong had died away in the garden. Perhaps the house blocked sound from this side. I was about to move my face away from the glass when something flashed across my vision. A moment later it had gone, or at any rate, stopped.

Then I became aware of it.

Someone standing in the dark, to the right of the fireplace, keeping very still, as a child might do when it tried to hide. I felt sure I wasn’t imagining it, a tall shape, vaguely human in form, but when I looked again it was gone and there was only a darker shade among the others, and I could only assume I had somehow managed to cast a shadow into the room.

Except.

Except the peacock feathers in the vase on the table were still faintly waving in the sudden passing movement of the dead air.

Yeah, right,
I thought. The movement had to be caused by a draft under a door, a crack in a window. The house was airy. Perhaps even in those closed, claustrophobic apartments something was bound to move.

It was ridiculous that we couldn’t get in there. I decided that if Rosita wouldn’t give me the keys, I’d have a locksmith remove the locks from the doors. I remembered her warning that the unusual behaviour of the light would play tricks on me, and stormed back inside the house, dusting myself down. Mateo was just descending the stairs.

‘Is there anyone else here, apart from Rosita and Jerardo?’ I asked.

‘No, of course not,’ he replied. ‘Why?’

‘It’s just that – I thought – it doesn’t matter.’ I pushed the idea away and smiled sweetly instead. ‘Is Bobbie settling in okay?’

‘She’s going to be fine. She’s already talking about taking trips into the countryside with you, so you must have made a good impression.’

‘She’s adorable. She seems very bright for her age.’

‘Trust me, she is. But you have to watch out for her – she’ll run rings around you if you let her.’

I remembered myself at that age and smiled. ‘I can handle it.’

He looked at me for what seemed like a moment too long, as if he was about to question my reply, then headed into the drawing room.

I thought about the other side of the house and for a brief moment an old fear rose inside me, urging me to run away. Like a cliff edge that would draw a vertigo sufferer toward it, the darkness moved a little closer, demanding investigation. I knew that if I didn’t deal with the problem at once, a black iceberg of fear would rise up and stay there.
Do something positive.
I headed to the kitchen, where I found Rosita preparing lunch.

‘Senora Delgadillo, I’m going to make a study of the house, and I need a full set of keys to the other rooms,’ I said firmly. ‘I must be able to open every door.’

‘I’m afraid that is not possible,’ Rosita replied without looking up.

‘Why on earth not?’

‘Some of them are lost.’

‘You mean you haven’t been inside at all?’

‘We restored the rooms after the soldiers were garrisoned here during the war, then we closed them up. I told you, there was a full set of keys but some went missing.’

‘Well, how many rooms are sealed?’

‘The ones on the first floor. I can probably find the keys to the ground floor rooms.’

‘Very well, I’ll start with those.’ According to the floorplan, there were rear stairs leading up to the rooms above. ‘I’ll find a locksmith to deal with the others.’ I held out my hand.

Rosita looked at the outstretched palm before her, then went back to kneading dough. ‘I’ll look for them after lunch, and speak to Mr Torres.’

‘Senora Delgadillo, Mr Torres is my husband. You don’t need to get his permission.’

‘I’ve always got permission from the master of the house,’ said Rosita stubbornly.

‘You have a mistress too. I’d like a full set of the remaining keys, as soon as you have a minute to find them.’

I turned and walked out of the kitchen, but could feel a tic in my neck, my pulse rising in anger. The last thing I wanted was to start playing games with this woman. Of course, it wasn’t about her at all. I know that now.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Architect

I
T HAD BEEN
arranged that Bobbie would take lessons from a woman who lived in Gaucia. Her name was Julieta Cortez. She was a schoolteacher in her mid-thirties, and had been made redundant after the local school reduced its size two years earlier. The plan was that she would come to the house every other day for four hours, and that in between these times she would Skype Bobbie with assignments and Q&A sessions. I agreed to supervise Bobbie’s coursework and tests to make sure she had done everything.

The plan was to try out the system until the mid-term break and if Bobbie hated it or slipped behind in the curriculum, or felt the need to go to a school to be with children of her own age, then she could be boarded at the coast earlier, in Estepona. It had been Bobbie’s decision not to board, but she agreed to go if homeschooling proved too difficult.

Julieta could not have looked more Spanish if she tried. She was pretty, with large dark eyes, but thin and sallow, as if she had never sat in the sun, and wore dark loose clothes, greys and browns, or sometimes deep greens. Like Rosita she rarely seemed to smile, but was always courteous and pleasant. On the rare occasions that she did find something funny her laughter seemed forced, as though she was laughing because others expected it of her. I worried that there wouldn’t be enough joy in Bobbie’s life, and then I worried about myself. I was sure I’d miss going out for a drink with the girls. Back in London, a few of us had met up every Thursday night. Somehow it didn’t turn out that way; I hardly missed them at all.

It seems strange to say this, but there was always the house, the way it hurled sunlight so extravagantly into every room, making everything sparkle and come alive. It made up for so much that Bobbie and I always seemed to be laughing about something. At least it did in the early days, when I refused to believe what was happening.

I’m getting ahead of myself, and this has to be laid out clearly.

Bobbie arrived in September and a few days later I set out to make an inventory of the contents of the rooms. Rosita insisted she was still having trouble finding the keys to the servants’ quarters, and I hadn’t yet been able to track down a locksmith in Gaucia. Celestia told me that they usually had a man drive up from the coast, but he was on holiday. As a result, I had no choice but to accept Rosita’s promise that she was looking for the remaining keys. After all, I couldn’t imagine why she would want to delay opening a few poky derelict rooms.

I started making notes on the main drawing room, and soon spotted another anomaly. The house appeared to have been constructed according to strict principles based on pairs, twins, opposites and doubles. For every statue there was a matching one, every chair was one of two, every ornament had its mate, every tile and section of cornicing had its opposite number. This determined symmetry had a curiously calming effect, as if it was impossible to find anything alone and out of place. I could only assume that the architect had planned this, too.

Mateo announced that he would be making an extended trip to Madrid and Jerez, to work out the terms of a new deal with the Tio Pepe company, and why didn’t I make a start on the book now that we were all fully settled in the house?

On the following Thursday morning he drove to the airport in Malaga for the first flight off the stand, and dropped me off in Gaucia. The town was hot and silent, as always, with only a few women passing me on their way back from the bakery with their daily breadsticks. Celestia was not yet in the square – she rarely got up before ten – so I had coffee alone at Eduardo’s café while I waited for the library to open.

Finally, a short but rather handsome young man in heavy black-framed glasses came past to unlock the doors of the small white library building, and ushered me inside. He told me in impeccable English that his name was Jordi, he ran the library every day except Sunday and Monday, and he would help me by translating anything I needed. He also suggested that if I was looking for a Spanish tutor he could probably teach me as he wanted to improve his English. It was a small library in a small town, and he was bored. I asked him if he had any books or documents on houses in the area.

‘We keep most of the records for the region, but there are gaps,’ he replied. ‘Many of the people here are, well, private. They don’t want everyone to know their business. There are basic documents required by law, and others of regional interest.’

I looked around the half-empty, spider-infested shelves. We were alone in the building. ‘Who comes here?’

‘Tourists, mostly. We keep old magazines and crime novels. That’s what most of them leave behind when they go home – paperbacks and a bottle of sun oil. What are you looking for?’

‘Documents relating to a building called Hyperion House. It might have been listed as an observatory.’

He smiled in recognition. ‘Many people around here know of it, but not many have ever been there, or been inside.’

‘Why not?’

‘The family was not
simpatico
. If people took pictures they broke their cameras.’

‘You mean recently?’

‘No, no – a long time before I was born. The old stories, they get embellished and retold. Let me see what we have.’

He climbed a lethal-looking wooden ladder to the upper half of the hall’s only records case and descended with several ringbinders that had clearly lain untouched for several years. ‘You can have a look in these,’ he suggested. ‘If you have no luck there are others we can search, but they are kept in the annexe beside the remains of the convent, where the older documents are stored. Nothing will be in order anymore. Nobody’s been in there for years.’

I took the folders to a table and set to work. My first find came half an hour later, a general entry in a description of the region from an English magazine called
Spanish Traveller
, dated 1967:

‘The Hyperion Observatory was designed at the very end of the Victorian architectural era by the astronomer Francesco Gabriel Condemaine, but did not complete construction until 1912. Condemaine was a brilliant engineer and considered the house his greatest achievement. Its fixed telescope operated until 1938, when it was removed by soldiers representing Spain’s Nationalist Party. The house is privately owned and not open to visitors.’

It appeared I was wrong about the telescope and that there had been one after all. I checked my iPad to see if there were any articles on Francesco Condemaine and came up with a few brief entries that mostly repeated each other’s information. One was on a website called
Spiritual Senses
that seemed mainly to be about astrology, not astronomy;

‘Francesco Gabriel Condemaine – b.1887 – d.1917

The Anglo-Hispanic architect/astronomer understood that good architecture could improve the lives and maximize the happiness of every social class. A firm believer in the power of sunlight to restore mental health, he was employed by in the Welfare Department of the Spanish government to redesign the Santa Isabel State Mental Hospital in Marbella, creating large windows that would admit more light and fresh air to patient’s rooms. Construction of the hospital ran over-budget, and further plans were shelved amid controversy and accusations of misappropriated funds. His only realised project was the Hyperion Observatory in Andalucia, Spain, which is privately owned. Condemaine was killed at the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917.’

Another appeared in an online data entry assembled by the University of Malaga, which I was able to run through a translation app: