Thorn (34 page)

Oliver began to wonder if this husky-voiced lady was mad herself, or only a bit drunk. This was the party season, after all. He said, ‘I'm sorry, I don't think—'

‘It's
ancient
history,' said Juliette. ‘But I suspect that Dan was planning a book about it. In fact he half admitted it, now I come to think back.'

‘Ah.'

‘It's quite a good story,' said Juliette, cheerfully. ‘And so long ago that it wouldn't hurt anyone if it was resurrected. Sybilla was the Regency one, you know, and they shut her away in an attic for chopping up her husband with a meat axe. I daresay it was what they did in those days. Shut mad people in attics, that is, not chop them up. She lived until she was eighty-five, but of course her husband died there and then.'

‘Well, yes.'

‘And then Lucienne, the Edwardian one, was locked up in Thornacre too. Dan was fascinated by that.'

‘Fascinated by Thornacre?'

‘My dear, riveted by it.'

‘The Thornacre that was in the news a couple of months ago?'

‘Yes. Too dreadful for words, wasn't it? And now, d'you know, there's my cousin Imogen there as well. It really seems as if—'

‘You've got a cousin in Thornacre?'

‘Yes, poor darling, she—' Juliette broke off abruptly and Oliver caught the sound of a door bell being rung peremptorily at the other end. ‘Oh, bother,' said Juliette, crossly. ‘Oh,
isn't
it infuriating when people arrive early!
Frightfully
bad etiquette. Listen, Oliver, are you sure I can't scoot across to you? Or you could come here. There'll be dozens of people wandering in, and you'd be very w—'

Oliver said firmly that he had a great deal to do, and rang off before he could get dragged into any alarming situations. It was only then that he saw two things amongst the jumble of papers on his brother's desk.

One was the
Women in Business
article on Thalia Caudle. He glanced at it briefly, saw the photograph and registered that Thalia had left London.

The other was the AA guide, which was lying on the desk, with slips of paper marking two of the pages. Oliver hunted in his battered briefcase for his glasses because the AA print was very small. The first marker was in the listings of towns, under the Ts, and the entry for a place called Thornacre in Northumberland was circled in pencil. A pencil mark also indicated the Black Boar Inn in Thornacre, and in the margin the approximate mileage from London, 350/375 miles, and next to it ‘7 hours? 8?'. What looked like stopping-off places had been underlined: Leicester Forest East and Woodall on the Ml, and Scotch Corner on the A1. Oliver pushed his glasses back on the bridge of his nose thoughtfully. These were exactly the kind of notes you would make if you were contemplating an unfamiliar journey, and earmarking somewhere to stay when you got there. He turned to the other marked page, which was the map for Northumberland, and saw that the route out of London all along the motorway and the A1 had been lightly traced, right up to the tiny village near England's bleak north-eastern edge. Thornacre.

That was circled in pencil as well.

It was almost eleven o'clock when Oliver put the phone down. There was no record of Dan having booked into either of the two inns in Thornacre, and no record of him at any of the adjacent villages either.

This had taken an hour to discover, and after that Oliver had phoned several of the hospitals, and then the police. No, they said; no accidents involving anyone of Dan's description had been reported over the last four weeks. Yes, they could be absolutely sure; these things were all stored on computer now, sir, and it was just a question of calling up the information.

Oliver, who distrusted computers as much as he distrusted most machines, thanked the duty sergeant and said he did not think he wanted to make an official report of a missing person yet. Very likely his brother had been called away and he would hear from him shortly. The duty sergeant said this happened all the time and wished Oliver a happy Christmas. At least he had not said have a nice day.

Oliver assembled some kind of meal from the tins in the kitchen cupboards, made black coffee and reviewed what he knew.

Dan had left his flat at least a month ago, although from the look of the things Oliver had found, he had not intended to be away for very long. Toothbrush, flannel and sponge and shaving things had gone, and Oliver thought a couple of jackets were missing as well. As to shirts and underthings, he had no idea, but the weekend case Dan used when he came to Oxford was nowhere to be found. The food in the fridge was the kind that would have kept for several days – say a week at least. The bacon had been a vacuum pack and the cheese was in an airtight container. Milk and eggs had been delivered. Oliver began to form a picture of Dan going away, perhaps for a weekend or three or four days, intending to come back to food and fresh milk. He had not bothered to let his agent know, and he had not done things like turning off the water which Oliver thought he would have done for a longer absence.

What else?

He had not gone in his car. Oliver had checked the mews garage earlier on, and Dan's old Escort had been there. This might not mean anything because the car was so ramshackle it might be out of commission. Dan could have gone somewhere by train or plane or boat, or he could have gone off in someone else's car. He could have hired a car – the AA book suggested that he had been planning a road journey. But that, and Juliette Ingram's reference to Thornacre and the Ingram family, were the only clues so far. Was the fact that Thalia Caudle had recently left London connected? Oliver re-read Dan's article with more attention, and saw this time that the magazine was dated the end of November, which fitted, more or less, with the date when the post had begun to pile up. He remembered how Dan had gone to Thalia's flat for dinner and not returned until the next morning.

It was possible that Dan had gone to Northumberland and Thornacre to research a book, quite possibly the one about the Ingram ladies. Oliver could accept this, and he could also accept that his brother might have gone off with Thalia, although she did not look to Oliver like someone Dan would have forsaken the world for. What he did not believe and could not accept was that Dan would go away for longer than a week without taking his manuscript. He might have done it if the book was finished and submitted to a publisher, but it was plainly not finished.

With a feeling that he was committing the worst intrusion yet, Oliver hunted about for his glasses all over again, picked up the thick wad of manuscript, poured a large measure of Dan's whisky, and sat down in the armchair to read.

He saw at once what Dan had tried to do, and he thought on balance that he had brought it off. There was the right flavour of Gothic darkness about the writing, and the peppering of clues on the original legend. There was the dark romance of crumbling old castles as well, and of wicked stepmothers and helpless heroines and swelling menace. Dan had romanticised his Rosamund a little – Oliver thought that like most writers Dan had been a bit in love with her – but there was nothing seriously wrong with that.

It was the depiction of the evil Margot that disturbed him most. Oliver read on, his critical faculties to the fore, hardly aware of the house settling into silence all around him. Twice he got up to refill his whisky glass, and once he made another mug of coffee. Each time he did this, he passed the desk with the magazine article on Thalia Caudle. It was not a face for which you would count the world well lost, but it was a face that might well tempt you to a brief madness.

It was not until he came to the chapter where Rosamund was carried with grim ceremony into the haunted lunatic wing of the old asylum that Oliver felt the strands and the clues mesh. Dan had called the place Thornycroft Hill. It did not take much of a leap to link Thornycroft with Thornacre.

He picked up the AA book again.

Oliver spent what was left of the night wrestling with the warring logic of what he had pieced together, and when he drove out of London at first light, he still had no idea whether logic or panic or some other emotion altogether had dictated his journey.

The length of the journey would have been daunting at any season but it was a nightmare prospect on Christmas Eve. Dan or somebody had calculated it to be seven or eight hours, and Oliver thought he could not possibly reach Thornacre before nightfall. Even following the sketched-out route which Dan might or might not have followed, Oliver knew perfectly well he would get lost several times. The notion of a train on Christmas Eve had only to be briefly examined to be discarded, and in any case he would need a car at the other end. It would have to be attempted. He had no idea what he would do if his car broke down halfway there.

In the event, the car behaved properly, and Oliver did not go too far out of his way too many times. This was largely due to the greater part of the journey being on the motorway. He stopped at the places that Dan had jotted down, which were quite well spaced out, and gave thanks that although the skies were leaden and menacing, no snow was falling.

He booked into the Black Boar as the church clock was chiming six o'clock that evening. He was stiff from the long drive, and he felt grubby and crumpled, but there was a sense of achievement at having reached his destination.

The Black Boar appeared to be the traditional oak-beamed, inglenook-fireplaced inn. Charles II had hidden here, Elizabeth I had slept here, and Walter Scott had written something here.

‘At separate times, of course,' said mine host with the automatic geniality of one who produces this epigrammatical gem for all newcomers.

‘Of course.' Oliver signed the book and was shown to a chintz-curtained, flower-papered room on the first floor.

Dan's hero, Adam Cadence, had stayed at a similar place in one of the later chapters, when he was trying to find the captured Rosamund. Dan had described it in detail and it had a good deal in common with the Black Boar, although there was no decadently luxurious four-poster here as there had been for Adam, and there had not been an Egon Ronay recommended sign outside either. But the room he was shown to was clean, the bed was comfortable and the sheets were lavender-scented, with a white honeycomb quilt. There was a pleasing scent of old timbers and wood smoke, and a printed notice on the dressing table informed Oliver that dinner was served in the dining room between seven and eight thirty each evening; bar meals were available in the Oak Bar, breakfast was between eight and nine, and please not to use all the hot water when bathing because they were not on mains out here and hot water sometimes ran a bit low.

Oliver washed, pulled on a clean shirt and sweater, and went down to the bar. Seven o'clock. He would have a drink and something to eat, and mingle with the locals in the hope of finding out a bit about Thornacre. From there he would lead up to questions about lone visitors to the area. In such a small place, a single man would surely not have gone unremarked.

He had the curious sensation that Dan was quite close to him.

T
he Black Boar's meals fell a long way short of those enjoyed by Dan's hero. Oliver, dining off something called Chicken a la King, which was served in a peculiar brown dish, and which, as far as he could see, was glorified chicken soup out of a tin, remembered with regret Dan's description of the candle-lit dining room where Adam Cadence had partaken of a gourmet meal washed down with a very good vintage Bordeaux. Afterwards he had talked the manager's daughter into joining him in the four-poster by way of diversion until it was time to set off for the castle keep and fair Rosamund. Dan had been quite graphic over the sexual athletics in the four-poster; Oliver felt he was learning a good deal about Dan that he had never suspected.

After the chicken, he went through to the public bar. The local beer was so fierce it would have peeled varnish from wood, but the locals were amiably disposed and apparently perfectly ready to discuss Thornacre. This slightly disconcerted Oliver who had expected them to be evasive after all the publicity.

But whatever else Thornacre might be it was certainly not an embarrassment, in fact the drinkers in the bar vied with one another to tell the quiet, rather shy young man about Thornacre's history. Of course, there was a good deal as hadn't come out in the investigation by Professor Rackham, they said.

‘What kind of things?'

Things that had happened in the past, said the drinkers. How in Victorian times the place had been the official workhouse, serving about seven parishes in its heyday – and the treatment the poor inmates were given a shame and a disgrace by all accounts, what with the beatings and the starvings and all manner of cruelties.

Somebody said sagely that the workhouse side had been a cover-up; his grandfather always used to tell how
his
grandfather said that the real purpose of the place was to supply little children for prostitution. ‘Used to come up from London and walk through the wards – paupers' wards they called them – and pick out the prettiest of the little girls and carry them back to London.'

‘Stews,' said Oliver without thinking.

‘Beg pardon?'

‘Stews. It's a Victorian word for sleazy back-street brothels. So Thornacre acted as a supply-house for that trade, did it? Do have another drink, by the way.'

Everyone had another drink, the young man clearly being able to afford it despite his rather worn corduroy jacket, and as the decibel level increased and the beer went round again, the tales grew wilder.

It had been a place for those blokes who dug up corpses and experimented on them – anatomists, that was what they'd been called. Burke and Hare and them. Edinburgh was only an hour or so's drive away, after all. No, said someone else, that was all wrong; the real truth was that Thornacre had been run by a Nazi spy gang during the war. Oh yes, they did have spies over here in the war, ain't you ever heard of the fifth column? The speaker glared truculently at his audience, most of whom had received his remarks with raucous and derisory hoots. He stuck to his guns and said belligerently that it was all very well to laugh but on dark nights you could still hear the screams of the poor tortured victims who had been imprisoned there, always supposing you were inclined to be sensitive to that kind of thing, and always supposing you actually ventured up the hill at night in the first place.