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So it was better that Oliver was currently away on a book-buying
expedition–there had been the promise of a very nice early copy of Marlowe’s
Jew of Malta
in an old house where someone had lately died, and a rumour of some warmly romantic letters from Bernard Shaw to Mrs Patrick Campbell which one of the theatrical museums might like. Godfrey was hopeful that both possibilities would materialize. He would enjoy seeing the professor’s discoveries.

He was glad he had taken the little gift to the cottage. The unknown Miss Weston might find it bleak coming to a strange place on her own, and the first night in a new place was always lonely. Godfrey had said as much that afternoon to the young work-experience boy they had at Quire, and the boy had stared at him with what Godfrey felt to be quite unwarranted scorn. But that was youth for you. They had no romance in their souls. They stared at you with that curled-lip contempt, and sometimes they said things like, ‘What is your problem?’ or, ‘What part of “I won’t do that” didn’t you understand?’, which Godfrey never knew how to answer.

He closed the curtains, hoping Charity Cottage’s new tenant had liked his little gift, and hoping she was able to sleep on her first night there.

Either the memory of that well of terror in the cottage’s kitchen, or the recurring image of the dark blue car, or possibly a combination of the two had prevented Antonia from sleeping.

At half past midnight she gave up the struggle, and went downstairs to make a cup of tea. The kitchen was shadowy and cool, but if the clutching fear still lurked, it lurked very quietly. Good.

She paused to look out of the window for a moment, remembering how, not so long ago, she had been deeply afraid to look out of her own window in the middle of the night. But nothing stirred, and the parkland was a smooth stretch of unbroken sward, the trees bland and unthreatening. A large, dark-furred cat appeared from their shadows, considered the night landscape with the unhurried arrogance of its kind, and then padded gracefully across the park, vanishing into the night on some ploy of its own. The kettle boiled, and Antonia made her cup of tea and took it back upstairs.

It was probably madness to unlock the small suitcase, and take the five-and six-year-old sheaf of curling newspaper cuttings from their envelope, but there were times when you needed to confront your own madness. Sometimes you could even pretend to relive the past and sidestep the mistakes.

She spread the cuttings out on the bed and looked at them for
a long time. The wretched gutter-press had dug up a remarkable variety of photographs to illustrate their articles. It was anybody’s guess how they had got hold of them but the sub-editors, predictably, had chosen the worst and the best.

Seen in smudgy newsprint, the boy called Don Robards who had stared up at Antonia from a hospital bed–the boy who had discovered something so appalling within his world that he had not wanted to live in that world any longer–looked impossibly young. Antonia’s own image, next to it, appeared sharp and predatory by contrast. Did I really look like that in those days? Do I look like it now? Might anyone here recognize me?

She thought this unlikely. She had not deliberately tried to change her appearance, but the years had pared the flesh right down, and the once-long, once-sleek leaf-brown hair was now cut short and worn casually. People might remember Don though; he had been very good-looking.

Some of the sub-editors had slyly positioned Richard’s photograph on the other side of Antonia’s, so she was shown between the two of them. The message was unpleasantly clear: here’s a woman with two younger men in her toils, and look what happened to them both. One of the tabloids had called Antonia a Messalina, and it was probably the first time in recorded history that a tabloid had used an early Roman empress to score a point.

Richard, too, looked soft and defenceless in the photo–it was a shot that had been taken at the piano, head and shoulders only, but it was well-lit, emphasizing his fragile-looking bone structure and luminous eyes. It was a false image, of course; beneath the translucent skin and the Keats-like air of starving in a garret, Richard had been as tough as old boots, and had a gourmet’s delight in good food and wine. It had been one of his quirkier pieces of luck that the calories were burned up by his amazing energy and that he remained thin.

Antonia traced the outlines of the frozen black-and-grey images with a fingertip. I miss you so much, she said to Richard’s photo. I still can’t believe I’ll never see you again.

Beyond the crowding memories, she was aware that it was raining heavily. She could hear it lashing against the windows and wondered vaguely if the large black cat had found shelter. But she only accorded the rain a small part of her attention. Her thoughts went deeper and deeper into the past; a ribbon of road unwound in front of her, and she was pulled helplessly along it. It was a road that was five years long, and it echoed with the clang of a heavy door being locked at precisely the same time each night. It was a road deeply shadowed by bars of moonlight that fell on exactly the same place on a bare floor every night. Between midnight and two a. m. had been the worst hours. They still were. She glanced at the time. Quarter past one.

She stood up and pushed the envelope of cuttings back into her suitcase, locking it with the tiny padlock. Stupid to take such needless precautions, but she was not yet used to taking her privacy for granted.

It occurred to her that so far from her original concern that the residents of Amberwood might seek her out to tell her their dreams and cure their phobias, if they discovered she was a convicted murderess who had served five years of an eight-year sentence, they were more likely to lynch her or revive the medieval custom of ducking her for a witch in the village pond.

Godfrey Toy was charmed to meet the new tenant of Charity Cottage on the very morning after she had moved in, and delighted to invite her into his little office. It was a good thing he had had a new visitor’s chair delivered only that week. (A really good soft leather it was as well, in a rich dark brown. It had cost just a tad more than perhaps he should have spent, but there had been no need for Professor Remus to use words like squander or wastrel.)

Godfrey had been hoping Miss Weston would turn out to be a pleasantly gossipy lady with whom he might form a friendship. He did not often travel outside Amberwood, but he liked meeting people and hearing about their lives and work and families.
Sometimes he imagined himself with a family: a distant cousin had just had a baby and Godfrey was going to be its godfather. He had already chosen a silver porringer as a christening present–late eighteenth century it was, and he had had it engraved since you should not stint on these things–and he was visualizing being called Uncle Godfrey, and planning trips to wherever children liked to go these days. Quire’s work-experience boy, Greg Foster, had said, when Godfrey asked, that kids mostly liked computer games and burger bars and boy-band concerts, which had rather disconcerted Godfrey who had been thinking more of the pantomime at Christmas and the zoo in the summer.

But although Miss Weston was perfectly polite, thanking him for the box of groceries and saying how friendly it had been to find them at the cottage on her arrival, she was very reserved. So Godfrey, who would not have pried if his soul’s salvation depended on it, talked about Quire House and the Quire Trust for whom he and Professor Remus worked, and how they both lived over the shop, so to speak.

‘I have the first-floor apartment, and the professor has the second. He’s younger than I am and more active, so he doesn’t mind the extra flight of stairs. We’ve been here for five years now.’

He thought there was a reaction from Miss Weston at the mention of five years, and he instantly regretted his words. But surely she was unlikely to know what had happened here five years ago. He had vowed not to fall into that way of thinking: ‘Ah, that was something that happened before the tragedy,’ or, ‘That came the year afterwards,’ as if the thing itself was an unpleasant milestone.

So Godfrey went on talking, saying Miss Weston must please have a look round Quire; it was such an interesting place. Here were some leaflets they had had printed–nothing very grand, of course; the Trust had not the largest of budgets, but they had done what they could.

‘Thank you very much.’

And, said Godfrey, when Miss Weston had settled in, perhaps she could come to the flat for a proper visit. Out of museum hours. A glass of sherry one evening, or afternoon tea one Sunday.

Antonia, who had not drunk sherry or anything approximating it for five years, and who had become used to the barely digestible tea brewed in the vast urn by whichever prisoners were on kitchen duty, said, gravely, that that would be very nice.

It was ironic to think that once she would have accepted Dr Toy’s modest invitation with pleasure. She and Richard had enjoyed meeting new people, and Richard, with his enquiring mind and his lively sense of humour, would have loved Godfrey Toy’s cherubic donnishness. He would have loved Quire House as well, and he would have enjoyed the little legend that its first owner, the precentor of the nearby cathedral, had called it Choir House, but some Victorian postal official had spelt it wrongly in the records so it had metamorphosed to Quire.

Trying not to think about Richard, Antonia put the leaflets in her pocket, and wandered through the rooms, which were light and spacious, polish-scented and attractively arranged. Some of the furniture looked as if it was quite valuable, and there were several displays of really beautiful old glass and chinoiserie. It’s that narrow world from another era, thought Antonia, but I find it alluring. If I came across a time machine now, what would I do? Set the dial to the 1890s, and press Start without thinking twice about it? Travel back to that narrow undemanding life? She frowned and moved on, looking at the other displays.

The old watermill she had noticed on the way here had been treated to a display all by itself. It was called Twygrist, and there was a neat little account of how farmers had brought their grain to be ground by the miller. The Miller of Twygrist. It had a faintly sinister ring, although Antonia supposed it was only on account of the grisly ogre’s chant about grinding men’s bones to make bread. Literature had not always been kind to millers, of course, depicting them as apt to sell their daughters into that peculiar servitude where the spinning of straw into gold was obligatory.
Someone had drawn a careful diagram of how the Amberwood mill had worked, and rather endearingly studded it with tiny men and women in what looked like the working garb of the Victorian era.

There was no mention of Twygrist’s age, but Antonia thought it could be anywhere between the compiling of the Domesday Book and the Regency craze for fake-Gothic. However old it was, it had the appearance of having grown up by itself out of the ground when no one was looking.

But to balance that, there was a pleasing little story of how a memorial clock had been put onto Twygrist’s north wall in the opening years of the 1900s, to commemorate a Miss Thomasina Forrester, and how a tiny trust fund existed to pay for the winding and maintenance of the clock. ‘And even today,’ ran the careful lettering beneath the photographs, ‘the Forrester Clock of Twygrist is faithfully wound every Wednesday morning, and the post of Clock-Winder still exists, and is in the gift of the local council, although very much regarded as a family appointment and frequently passed from father to son.’

There again was the touch of Middle England or even Middle Earth. Clock-winders and a lady whose name might have come straight out of Beatrix Potter.

Quire House itself was documented in an orderly fashion. The precentor who had built it in the eighteenth century had, it seemed, needed a large house for his eleven children. Luxurious tastes and uxorious habits, thought Antonia. That’s another entry on the debit side of those days. No convenient birth pill or condoms on supermarket shelves, least of all for churchmen and their spouses.

She moved through to the back of the house, to a music room overlooking the gardens. As she went in, a large black cat with a white front like an evening shirt appeared from nowhere and jumped onto a spinet at the far end, regarding her with lordly indifference. ‘I suppose it was you I saw from the cottage window last night,’ said Antonia softly, and put out a tentative hand. ‘You
looked like a ghost in the moonlight. There’s nothing ghostly about you today, though.’

The cat twitched an ear, leapt down from the spinet, good-manneredly accepted a caress, and vanished through the half-open French windows, leaving Antonia to walk round the room on her own.

There was a framed charcoal portrait on the wall near the spinet, with a neatly printed card underneath explaining that this was Thomasina Forrester in whose memory Twygrist’s clock had been installed (see the display in the drawing room and please ask for help if you need it). There was a photograph of the clock which Antonia thought very ugly, but she studied the sketch of Thomasina with interest. She was firm featured, dark browed and quite large boned. But there’s something slightly unpleasant about the eyes, thought Antonia. A squint? Almost a leer? She certainly wasn’t a lady you would have cared to cross. But probably the artist was an amateur, and the eyes hadn’t quite worked out or had been smudged.

She turned back to examine the spinet, and glanced at the music on the stand. The quiet room and the gentle scents of Quire House whirled crazily into a sick distortion and Antonia thought for a moment she was going to faint. She managed to reach a low window ledge and sit down, feeling deeply grateful that no one else was looking round Quire this afternoon, because if she was going to pass out with such dramatic suddenness, she would prefer to do so without witnesses.

The music on the spinet was a piece Antonia knew very well indeed. It was one of Paganini’s
Caprice Suites
: the series of twenty-four complex violin solos composed in the early 1800s, and adapted and transcribed for the piano since then by more than one eminent composer.

It was the music Richard had been playing on the night he died–the night that Don Robards had finally tipped over the edge of sanity. The sight of it plunged Antonia straight back into the five-year-old nightmare.

If she had arrived home at her normal time on that never-to-be-forgotten evening, she might have been able to save Richard, but she had stayed late at the hospital to help Jonathan Saxon with some reports for a budget meeting, and he had suggested a drink at the nearby wine bar afterwards.

‘If you feel like giving Richard some excuse, we could even have dinner at my flat. I’m a very good cook. I’d impress you.’

‘You do impress me,’ said Antonia. ‘But not in the way you want. And no, I don’t feel like giving Richard some excuse and having dinner at your flat. But a drink on the way home will be very nice.’

And so they had the drink, and when Antonia left the wine bar she had been light-hearted from the wine. Jonathan might flirt extravagantly, but it was never offensive or sexist, and he was very good company.

It had been a few minutes after nine when she got home, and discovered that the glass in the front door had been smashed and the lock broken.