Spider Light (27 page)

Godfrey and Oliver had continued to work amicably together–although Oliver had become more distant, and less patient when Godfrey got into a muddle, which he sometimes did. The workings of the Quire House Trust was one of the things that muddled Godfrey most of all, because balance sheets sent him into a panic, but he did know that after a couple of years the Trust started to show a small but acceptable profit.

And presently, little by little, it began to seem as if life was not quite so anguished.

But since Amy’s death, Oliver had never, so far as Godfrey knew, spent any time alone with a lady, or even met one for so much as a cup of coffee.

Until Antonia Weston came to Charity Cottage.

Antonia spent what was left of the afternoon piecing together the notes she had made on Latchkill. It was infuriating that there was no exact date on the notes about the woman who had shut her eyes against the world and crouched in a corner. Antonia would have liked to tie them into Daniel’s letters but it could not be done.

Eventually she set the notes aside, put some chicken in the oven to cook, and went upstairs to wash her hair. This last was nothing to do with Jonathan’s arrival tomorrow; it was simply that it was a long time since she had been taken out to dinner, and she might as well look halfway decent. She would wear the autumn-leaf outfit she had bought on that first day of freedom in London; the fabric was silky and expensive-looking, and it would look terrific.

Her hair was dry by this time and pleasantly scented with shampoo, and she sat down at the kitchen table to eat the chicken. She was still enjoying the novelty of being able to eat what she wanted when she wanted. It was raining quite heavily outside, but the cottage was warm and snug. Or–was it? What about that shadowy corner of the kitchen? It was still there, that patch of fear and despair, and it would not take very much for it to rear
up into a solid wall of suffocating panic. Once upon a time, someone had crouched in that corner.

‘…
pressing against the ground, and scrabbling at the floor…afraid of the light above the ground.’

Antonia frowned, and carried the dishes over to the sink. While she washed up, she half listened to the seven o’clock news headlines on the radio, and she was just drying her hands when she caught a sound from beyond the kitchen window. Probably it was only the rain splashing down the gutters or her own imagination.

No, there it went again, and it was not imagination at all; it was a definite sound. A footstep. And then the brush of someone pressed up against the window. If I opened the curtains now, thought Antonia, her heart thudding, what would I see? Don Robards, his eyes dead and staring as they had on the night I killed him?

The sounds would be from the radio, though. She switched it off, and silence closed down. For a few minutes nothing stirred. It must have been the radio after all. She reached for the kettle to fill it for a cup of coffee.

From somewhere inside the dark night beyond the cottage, unmistakeably and clearly, came the sound of a too-familiar piece of music. Paganini’s
Caprice
.

Somewhere very close, someone was playing Richard’s death music.

Antonia was so furious she did not stop to weigh the danger. Anger swept over her in a scalding flood–how dared this madman taunt her with Richard’s music.

She wrenched the kitchen door open and the cold night air rushed straight at her. The music stopped, and there was nothing except the sound of the rain falling, but Antonia stayed in the doorway, scanning the darkness, beyond caring if the prowler could see her. After a moment the music came again, and this time she could hear that it was thin and tinnily mechanical. A battery-operated CD player? A Walkman? At least that proves it isn’t a ghost, she thought.

The rain was quite heavy and it was difficult to see anything except the shape of the trees fringing the cottage and the thick hedge separating it from Quire Park. But the music was very close, and it filled the night with its prancing beckoning cadences. Richard used to say this particular piece might even be regarded as a skewed salute to the sinister legends threading through musical history. The faceless demons and devils who had danced jeeringly through the Middle Ages. The Hamlin Piper charming the rats away from the town, or the Black Man of Saxony beckoning children into his master’s lair. Antonia had liked listening to Richard in this mood, but she had always maintained a pragmatic outlook.

She glanced round the room, and then pulled on the jacket which had been lying over a chair. Was the mobile phone in the pocket? Yes, it was. She reached for a pewter jug from the dresser–it was small but very solid and it would make a reasonable defence weapon if necessary.

She started to go out and it was only then, when the darkness came up to meet her like a thick wall, that fear came scudding in, so that she paused, and cast a longing glance behind her at the warm safety of the cottage’s kitchen. Wouldn’t it be better to lock all the doors, and dial 999? But that doesn’t mean you’d be safe, said a horrid little voice inside her mind. Because he gets in when he wants, remember? Even a locked door doesn’t keep him out. So hold on to that burst of anger, Antonia, and let’s try to get some concrete evidence this time, something that will stop Sergeant Blackburn
and
Oliver Remus thinking you’re delusional. And if this twisted creature pounces, smash that chunk of pewter down on his head, and
then
you can dial 999.

On the crest of this thought she stepped determinedly outside, making sure to close and lock the door, and drop the key into her pocket. Several layers down she knew this to be pointless; the intruder must certainly have a key, but she did it anyway.

As the lock clicked home, there was a darting movement and the impression of a dark-clad figure going towards the trees,
taking the music with it. Towards Quire House, was it? Yes. And there were lights on in the upstairs rooms, which meant Godfrey and the professor were within yelling distance. This made Antonia feel so much safer that she took a deep breath, and then went out into the rain-drenched night after the music.

Beneath her resolve she was still very frightened, but this entire thing was starting to take on a dream-like quality. Antonia found herself wondering if any of it was actually happening, or if she was asleep and dreaming it all.

The dark figure ahead of her looked real enough. He was going swiftly along the footpath with the high hedges on each side. The tinny music was tangling eerily with the night and Antonia remembered Richard’s theory again. Out here, pragmatism was not so easy, the rain itself was starting to turn into the dancing feet of the demons who had pranced through the legends.

But this was a flesh and blood man, and there was nothing other-worldly about any of this. As he vanished around the curve in the path, the music momentarily fainter, Antonia stopped, and reached into her pocket for the pewter jug, because if he had some idea of hiding and leaping out at her…

No, it was all right. The music was moving away, towards Quire House, and she went on again. As she came out onto the main driveway, she saw him ahead of her. He stopped and glanced back as if to be sure she was still following, and then he ran towards Quire’s main entrance, vanishing inside.

Antonia took a deep breath, and went across the lawn in pursuit.

Quire’s main door was partly open, which was unexpected. What now? thought Antonia, glancing uneasily about her. Is this a trap, and do I walk into it, like one of those wimpish horror-film heroines going artlessly into the dark spooky old house?

Quire was not especially spooky but the ground floor seemed to be in near-darkness, and the person Antonia had been following might very well turn out to be the chief villain in this particular scene. And if there was not the throbbing organ notes of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue for atmospheric background, there was a piece
of music composed by a man whose contemporaries had believed him to practise devil-worship.

What if this madman belonged to Quire itself? How possible was that? Nice little Godfrey Toy with his white-rabbit scurryings and his eager, elderly-cherub face? Oliver Remus, with that impenetrable reserve but sudden disarming smile? But Antonia thought that although she could believe a great many things, she could not believe that.

The music was still faintly discernible, and she stood very still, trying to sense exactly where it was coming from. The hall was in shadow, but there was a faint spill of light from the two narrow windows on each side of the main door. There must be a security light on somewhere, because it was not as dark as she had expected. But as her eyes adjusted, she saw the light, whatever it was, came from a room at the far end of the hall.

The music room. Of course it would be the music room. Then this is certainly where I go bounding up the stairs to hammer on Godfrey Toy’s door, to tell him there’s an intruder and please call the police at once.

She began to move cautiously across the hall, and she was almost at the foot of the stair when the
Caprice
suite faded and then cut off altogether. There was the faint scrape of something–a window opening?–and then nothing. Antonia hesitated, and looked towards the music room. The door was wide open and from here she could see that the narrow French windows were wide open as well.

It might be another trick, but Antonia did not think it was. She thought the man had got her out here, and then slipped out into the night. But was he hiding somewhere outside, waiting for her to retrace her steps? She sent a hesitant glance to the stair, wondering if she could still go up there and tell Godfrey or Oliver Remus what had happened. Would they believe her? It was unlikely they had heard the music–Quire was a solidly built house. Would it be better to simply beat a discreet retreat? But the prospect of walking back to the cottage through the dark was a bad one. Antonia
did not think she could do it; the scalding anger that had driven her earlier had drained away, and she was too frightened of what the darkness might hold.

It was then that she saw that something was lying on the floor of the music room, half under the spinet. It was a coat, lying on the silky Indian rug, but Antonia stared at it, because there was something wrong about it–something that was starting to send unpleasant flurries of nervousness through her stomach. In another minute she would make sense of this, she would understand what it was she was seeing, although surely it was only a coat that had slipped off a chair back or been forgotten by its owner. But it was odd that the careful Godfrey Toy had not tidied it away before going up to his own flat for the night. It was even odder that he had apparently left the main door open.

The arms of the coat were flung out at right angles, and there was a smudgy blur of paleness just above the collar. That’s the part that’s wrong, thought Antonia, and a sick coldness began to steal over her. She already knew what was wrong, and somewhere near her a small scared voice was whispering over, and over, ‘Oh no, oh no…’

The coat had not been flung down or forgotten by its owner at all. Its owner was still wearing it; there on the floor of the lovely room. There was blood on the front of the coat, and some of it had seeped out onto the silky rug–Godfrey Toy was going to hate that, because he loved Quire and its beautiful things and he would hate having the Indian rug ruined by bloodstains.

Antonia fought incipient hysteria, and glanced towards the open windows, and then back to the shadowy hall. Was the music-maker still in here after all, watching from some dark corner, gloating? No, she had no sense of anyone’s presence. She forced herself to go nearer to the dreadful thing lying by the spinet. There was a bad moment when her mind rebelled, and when she thought–but I’m a psychiatrist, I can’t do anything about this! I need to call for help–paramedics, hospital…But what if a spark of life still struggled to keep going, and what if it was a
question of a few minutes pressure on a wound making the difference between life and death? Instinct kicked in, and she bent down to feel for a pulse.

The pale smudge resolved itself into a set of features and she knew, even with the dreadful glazed eyes, even with the fallen-open jaw, who this was. Quire’s sullen, eighteen-year-old work-experience boy. Greg Foster. There was no pulse beating at his neck, but Antonia forced herself to open the blood-soaked coat to feel for a heartbeat.

He was dead and beyond all help, and whoever had killed him had stabbed him in the heart with a long-bladed kitchen knife. Exactly as Richard had been stabbed in the heart five years earlier.

The sheet music for Paganini’s
Caprice
was lying next to him, spattered in his blood.

Godfrey Toy had written and posted a careful description of the cookbook for the BBC, had quoted a sale price that might be thought reasonable but not greedy (although there was no knowing what the BBC’s yardstick might be), and had diligently locked up all the rooms.

After this, he had taken the cookbook to his flat because although it had been lying innocuously in the stock cupboard for quite some time, it would be just the way of things for it to be filched in the way the jewellery and snuff-boxes had been filched, or for a fire to break out, or even for Raffles to choose it as a dinner plate for a newly captured or messily half-eaten vole. The possibilities were disastrous and numerous.

He thought it not improbable that the BBC would want to know if the recipes were still viable, so he was going to spend the evening in a modest culinary experiment. He took a quick survey of his pantry, and chose something called Friggise of Chicken. Friggise sounded a bit aggressive and slightly Anglo-Saxon–the kind of word you might hear pugnacious twelve year olds shouting at one another–but of course it was a derivative of fricassee.

He had most of the ingredients in his larder, and with it he was going to have something called a Drunken Loaf: a concoction involving butter, cream and cheese, all of which might admittedly be a touch high on calories and cholesterol. Still, there was red wine in the chicken, which was supposed to be good for the arteries. There was actually also a drop or two of red wine in the loaf as well, in fact not to put too fine a point on it, there was half a bottle. Godfrey thought he might be a bit potted when he had eaten all this. Just a bit.

He was in the process of slicing mushrooms when somewhere downstairs in one of Quire’s rooms, somebody screamed.

Godfrey dropped the mushrooms, and in a dither of panic, took up the poker and went scurrying down the stairs. The scream had come from the back of the house, and most likely there was a perfectly mundane explanation for it, but you could never tell.

On the half-landing he collided with Oliver, coming down from the second floor.