Tower of Silence (24 page)

‘None of it was your fault,’ he said at once. ‘It’s the law of something-or-other–something metaphysical. Cause and effect. A butterfly beats its wings in Japan, and because of it an earthquake occurs on the west coast of America.’

And because a poor mad creature beat the wings of her own insanity against the walls of her own prison, you’re here with me now
…

As Patrick stopped speaking Emily had the sudden feeling that a different atmosphere had crept into the warm sitting room. It was very quiet. There was a faint, rather comforting crackle from the fire, but other than that nothing stirred. And yet the impression that there had been a shift in the atmosphere–even that a third, unseen presence had walked in and sat quietly down with them–persisted.

It was early evening, the hour of dusk, which you hardly noticed in a city or a town, but which had a personality all its own out here. At times in Inchcape, Emily had sometimes felt very close to the invisible powers that had once roamed the earth; she had had the odd feeling that
it would not be so very difficult to reach out and scoop up some of those powers, and use them to make things happen…

But even if I knew how to do that, I don’t think I’d dare, and all I can do is keep him talking about what’s just happened.

In an entirely ordinary voice, she said, ‘How did Christabel kill those people? That music teacher and the others? What did she do to them?’ Because there’s that scarred face, that torn-out eye—

Patrick said slowly, ‘I always knew how, but until today I never fully understood why.’

He looked across at Emily as if trying to assess how much to tell her, and Emily said impatiently, ‘If you don’t tell me I’ll have nightmares anyway and they’ll probably be worse for not knowing.’

‘OK. Well, then, before the chlorpromazine kicked in, Christabel said, “They were ogres, those people I killed. I recognised them. I know all about ogres and I knew I had to kill them. First I had to cut off their feet so that they couldn’t run after me, and then I had to cut off their hands as well, so that they couldn’t snatch me up. And then they were dead and I was safe. And if I hadn’t done that they’d have eaten me up.’”

‘Oh God, that’s dreadful,’ said Emily, horrified. ‘She really did that? Hands and feet—’

‘Yes.’

‘What–what about her damaged face?’

Patrick appeared to think about this for a moment, and then he said gently, ‘One of her victims fought
very fiercely. She clawed and bit. And Christabel was–injured.’

Emily stared at him and then said, ‘Oh. Oh, yes, I see. Not an animal at all? A human,’ and tried to think if this was better or worse. ‘I’m desperately sorry for the people she killed,’ she said, after a moment. ‘And for their families if they had families. But I can’t find any blame for Christy.’

He looked at her with a kind of affectionate exasperation. ‘Oh, Emily,’ he said, and there was a soft note in his voice that Emily had never heard him use before. ‘What a nice child you are,’ he said, and Emily could have hit him. ‘You think the best of everyone, don’t you?’

‘Well, but the thing is that Christy never forgot what happened to her, did she?’ said Emily. ‘She never forgot how she lay among all those poor mangled bones, with the vultures–the other girl called them ogre-birds–swooping around her. Waiting to eat her up.’

‘No.’

‘Could she have been helped? When she was young–before she started killing people?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Perhaps. We’ve come a long way in understanding the mind over the last fifty years. But the odd thing here is that there are two sisters who have never met one another, and although Mary knew about Christabel she thought Christabel was dead—’

‘And Christabel didn’t even know of Mary’s existence—’

‘Precisely. But both were childhood killers,’ said Patrick. ‘
Vicious
childhood killers. That’s the curious part.’

‘They inherited something from the parents? Some weakness?’

‘Sometimes there are tendencies within a family to certain mental conditions,’ he said. ‘Schizophrenia can certainly run in families, although it’s unusual for it to present in children. Christabel was only nine when she first killed. It’ll make some interesting research, now that we know who Pippa really is. And they’re both delusional, that’s another thing linking them. In fact, in Mary’s case, the paranoia symptoms are classic. She thought her dead sister was encouraging her to kill first their parents and then other people she thought had injured her.’

Emily waited again, hoping he would go on, but he did not. He stood up and said, ‘My poor child, I’m doing it again, aren’t I? Boring you with my work.’

‘I’m not bored.’ But he doesn’t really believe that, she thought bleakly. I’ve lost him. We shared an intimacy for the last half-hour–he talked to me and listened to me–but it’s gone because he’s remembering that I’m just Don Frost’s girl. Emily, who visits one of his patients, and has offbeat hairstyles. In a minute he’ll say something agonisingly polite, and I’ll very nearly hate him. No. I won’t.

As she stood up to go with him to the door, the afghan slipped from her shoulders and dropped to the floor. Patrick bent down to pick it up.

‘It’s beautifully warm, this,’ he said.

‘Yes. It was my mother’s.’

‘You looked so cosy in it, curled into the chair. I expect you were cold with the shock of everything, weren’t you? Did you take that sedative I gave you?’

‘I’ll take it when I go to bed.’

‘Don’t forget.’ He put the afghan across her shoulders, pulling it around her neck, doing it in the manner of an indulgent parent or uncle wrapping an untidy child into its warm coat before sending it out to play in the snow. It meant that his arm went round her shoulders. Emily bit her lip and stared at the floor, because his touch was so absolutely electrifying and she must not let him see, she utterly and completely must
not
—

But why not? whispered the sneaky little voice, and something inside Emily suddenly said, Oh, sod all this pretence! and she stepped forward, into the curve of his arm, at the exact moment that his arm came more tightly round her.

Something flared in his eyes, and he gave a kind of helpless groan and pulled her hard against him, and if she had ever had any ideas about the gentleness extending to other areas of his personality she had been wrong, because he was kissing her as if this was an emotion that had been banked down for years and centuries, and he was taking her face in his hands as if he wanted to learn her, because it might be all he could ever have, all he ever dared have, of her…

When at last he released her Emily gave a half-sob, and stepped back until she was level with the sofa and held out her hands to him.

Come onto the sofa with me now, Patrick, or come upstairs to bed with me
…

He did neither. That small act broke the spell. It
bloody, sodding-well shattered the miracle, and it splintered the spiralling passion, and Emily could not
believe
she had been so fucking stupid, she absolutely could not believe it—

‘Jesus God, Emily,’ he said, and the faint trace of Irish was more strongly marked than she had ever heard it. ‘Oh God, Em, I’m so sorry—’

‘But I wanted—’

‘No, you didn’t want, and even if I did—’ He took her hands. ‘Of course I want you,’ he said. ‘I want you so much it’s torture. It’s killing me. I want all of you–you’re sweet and lovely and funny and clever, and I love your mind and I love everything about you, but–you’re Don’s daughter—’

Emily lost her temper. ‘I’m not a fucking child!’ she yelled. ‘I’m twenty-sodding-one, and I’m nearly twenty-bloody-two, and I was at Durham University for two years until my mother died and dad was in bits all over the place so that I had to take a sabbatical to put him back together–you didn’t know that, did you? No, I didn’t think you did! And I do want you, I want you in bed,
now
, or on the floor or anywhere you like, I don’t much mind, and I’ve been trying not to say any of this for weeks, and now I
have
said it, and you’ll probably hate me and avoid me for the rest of my life, and I wish I could say I don’t care, but I do, I care so much it hurts, and I can’t help any of it!’

She ended on a half-gasp, and they both stood in bewildered silence, staring at each other. Patrick was breathing hard, as if he had been running, and there was a blank, stunned look in his eyes as if someone had
hit him and Emily loved him so much she wanted to fold her arms round him and take away the blankness, and shut out the world for ever.

He said, with a kind of helpless irrelevance, ‘I didn’t know you were at Durham.’

‘Well, I was.’ Emily sat down on the settee where, three minutes earlier, she had thought they would be together. ‘I expect I’ll go back to finish off next year.’ She would not look at him again, she simply would not. ‘I suppose you’d better go, hadn’t you?’ she said at last. ‘I don’t expect there’s anything more to be said, really.’

‘It wouldn’t do, you know, Em.’ He thrust the fingers of his hand through his hair in the familiar, impatient gesture. ‘I’m not believing this is happening,’ he said. ‘I can’t begin to think how I’m going to walk away from you—But you must believe that it would never work.’

‘Yes, I see that,’ said Emily. ‘And it’s all right, truly it is.’ Focus on practicalities. ‘Dad will be home soon,’ she said. ‘It’d have been awful if he’d caught us together, wouldn’t it? French farce stuff.’ That was better, that was lighter. Very nearly flippant.

It seemed to strike the right note, because Patrick said, ‘Yes, of course. I’ll phone you, though. Later this evening.’

‘There’s really no need.’ This was terrible. They were talking like awkward strangers, just as if they had not, a few minutes earlier, been pressed so tightly together that they had both been able to feel one another’s hearts and bodies and longings…She said, ‘Will you be all right?’

‘No,’ he said, and then, very softly, ‘Because–now I’m in a place where light is muted, and where the opposing winds batter, and the hellish hurricane never rests.’

‘The
Inferno
,’ said Emily, after a moment. ‘You remembered it.’

‘Yes. And I’ll phone you anyway, Emily.’

‘Yes, do,’ said Emily politely, and waited until he had gone before she burrowed under the afghan rug and howled her heart out.

As Patrick went back to Moy, he was struggling to bank down the memory of the moment when he had pulled Emily against him, and when he had tasted her mouth and when he had wanted her so overwhelmingly that it had been a physical agony to detach himself from her.

But it would not do. There were seventeen years between them, and it would not do. She would go back to Durham University as she had said–he ought to have guessed that, of course; he thought he had hurt her by not doing so. He wondered what she had been reading. But she would go back and she would graduate, and Don Frost would show everyone the graduation photograph because he would be so proud of her, and Patrick might send a letter of congratulation or a card. And whatever she did afterwards, there would be scores of young men around who would want to go to bed with her because she was an original, she was
sui generis
, and although none of the young men would ever completely appreciate her, she would probably sleep with some of them, and then she would end up marrying one of them, and there would
be more photographs to be shown–wedding ones this time–and Patrick would send a gift, and in the end life would go quietly on.

Except that he had meant it about the light muting and the opposing winds battering. He had gone down into the modern-day equivalent of Dante’s hell, and there would never be any colour or any light or any joy in the world ever again.

Krzystof waited until Selina March was out before making a further search of Joanna’s things in the hope of finding a clue to her whereabouts. He thought this might be due to some deeply buried subconscious instinct at work–something that was warning him not to trust anyone, and reminding him that it was from this house–Miss March’s own house–that Joanna had vanished.

‘The mythical Hungarian sixth sense being dusted down and trotted out for an airing?’ Joanna would have said, but Krzystof thought it was nothing to do with sixth sense: it was more to do with common sense. And maybe it was a little to do with the fact that he wanted to look into all the other rooms in Teind House, as well. For what? said his mind. Halfwit members of the March family, kept chained in the attics, Mrs Rochester fashion, for the last forty years? Low-browed gentlemen
with courtly manners and unfortunate habits when there’s a full moon? Now you really
are
becoming Hungarian.

Miss March did not seem to go out very much at all, but this morning she was apparently going on a little shopping expedition with her friend the schoolmistress–incredibly people up here still used expressions like ‘schoolmistress’–and Emily-the-elf would be coming later on to help with the ironing. ‘Monday is wash day, of course, and so Tuesday is always what I call
linen
day. Ironing, of course, and checking the laundry inventory, and then folding everything away in the airing cupboards.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Krzystof, who was used to either himself or Joanna flinging washing into the machine whenever the linen basket was full, turning the dial to a vaguely appropriate setting, and forgetting about it.

‘And I do hope, Mr Kent, that you won’t think me discourteous for leaving you alone, but I promised to help with the setting up of a little local history project for the schoolchildren.’

‘Of course not,’ said Krzystof. ‘That sounds rather an interesting thing to be doing. Are you an expert on local history, Miss March?’

But Miss March, it seemed, had only the most amateurish of knowledge. It had been Great-uncle Matthew who had been the real scholar. He had been very interested in local history during his life, and after his death Miss March had donated some of his notes and manuscripts to Stornforth library.

‘There is a very good library in Stornforth, and also
a bookshop that stocks books and leaflets about the area. And the thing is that Miss Laughlin would like to study them and make notes, and this is the only day that both she and the librarian can be free. They have asked me to be there as well, because I am familiar with my uncle’s work. We made the arrangement two weeks ago, you see.’

Clearly she felt that some enormous social transgression was being committed, and Krzystof said, ‘Please don’t worry about leaving me on my own. I was thinking of going into Stornforth later today, in fact. I could give you and your friend a lift if you want.’

But Miss Laughlin apparently had her own car, although it was extremely kind of Mr Kent to offer. Er–was there any news of Mrs Kent?

‘No, nothing,’ said Krzystof. ‘I drew more or less a blank at Moy, but I thought I’d talk to the Stornforth police again. I think they’re still treating Joanna’s disappearance as just another runaway wife, and I’d like to put a few squibs under their—Under their chairs,’ he amended.

This was not very well received. Miss March asked, worriedly, whether Mr Kent was sure it was advisable to harry the police who would certainly be doing all they could. Great-uncle Matthew had always said, and Aunt Rosa and Aunt Flora had agreed, that the police were a fine body of men. ‘And I believe the Stornforth police are
very
conscientious. I’m sure they will be doing all they can to find your wife.’

‘Yes, but it won’t hurt to just give them a nudge,’
said Krzystof. ‘You go off on your expedition, Miss March.’

‘We shall be back by lunchtime,’ said Selina. ‘Unless Miss Laughlin suggests we have some lunch in Stornforth. She might very well do that, you know.’

This was said with such careful off-handedness that it was immediately clear to Krzystof that lunch in Stornforth with Miss Laughlin represented quite a spree. He wondered whether to suggest he meet up with them and treat them to a meal somewhere–the odd, mild little lady had been very kind, and it would be a small thank you–but decided that the prospect of lunch with a man might panic her and spoil her morning. Still, Stornforth was only a small market town; he might bump into them, and the thing might arrange itself naturally.

So he said, ‘I’ll be fine. Enjoy your morning. I’ll be back sometime this afternoon.’

He waited until she had finally left the house, carefully wrapped up against the autumn weather–‘so chilly at this time of year, and my friend likes to drive with her car windows open’–and had disentangled an umbrella from the old-fashioned stand near the door. ‘And
do
take one if you go out in the rain, Mr Kent, there are several always here. I usually take the
red
one, so cheering to have a red umbrella in the rain, I think.’

‘You’d better take it today,’ Krzystof said, reaching down and handing it to her. ‘It looks as if it’s going to pour down.’

At last Miss March had gone, in a dither of scarves and red brolly and exhortations to make sure he had his
front-door key with him in case they missed one another later. Krzystof stood for a moment, feeling Teind House sink back into its silence, but as he crossed the hall to the stairs he was aware once more of the house’s unquiet atmosphere swirling around him. It was as if Selina March’s absence had released the ghosts; as if, once she had gone, those ghosts took the opportunity to creep from their shadows, and check that their erstwhile charge was being faithful to her upbringing. Ah yes, the two great-aunts might be saying, drawing inquisitive housewifely fingers across ledges and surfaces to check for dust, and peering into store cupboards and larders; ah yes, she is not neglecting her stewardship of the old place. All is well. Great-uncle Matthew probably sneaked into the little room that Miss March called the study, and leafed through housekeeping accounts, the desiccated old miser. Krzystof had not much liked the sound of Great-uncle Matthew.

As he went past the smugly ticking grandfather clock in the hall, he wondered if Joanna had picked up the lingering echoes of Miss March’s lonely childhood and the shades of the omni-powerful triad of Great-uncle Matthew and Great-aunts Rosa and Flora, and whether she would use them in a book sometime or other. There was a good deal of the vampire about most writers; an inbuilt compulsion to assess or dissect newly met people in case they could be made use of. Before they were married Joanna had explained about this trait, half humorously, half apologetically, and had said that there was not much she could do about it; it was an inescapable
by-product of writing fiction, and it was to be hoped Krzystof understood and did not mind. Krzystof had replied that he entirely understood, and that he would not mind living with a vampire in the least; in fact quite the reverse, because there might be times when it would prove intriguing.

And yes, Joanna would certainly have heard the echoes inside Teind House.

There was nothing in the least suspicious to be found inside any of the rooms, and if Joanna had left any clues for Krzystof to find they had long since been cleared away. Krzystof, his heart beating guiltily, peered into all of the bedrooms and opened cupboard doors, and found nothing, except evidence of Miss March’s conscientious housekeeping.

That left the laptop. Emily had said, on that first morning, that she did not think Joanna would have gone away and left the laptop behind, and she was perfectly right, of course. Joanna might just conceivably leave the other things behind, but she would never, not if she was eloping with the richest lover in five continents, not if hell froze and Armageddon was imminent, have left Teind House without taking the laptop with her.

He set it on the bed and lifted the cover, his hands unsteady. He flipped the boot-up key, and the screen flickered into life, and he scanned the file headings. After a moment, he keyed into the folder that Joanna had labelled ‘Preliminary Notes’.

If looking through Joanna’s clothes had felt intrusive,
this was a million times worse. It was like eavesdropping on her innermost thoughts. I’m sorry, my love, said Krzystof silently to his wife’s photograph. But if this is the way of finding out what happened to you, it’s got to be done.

The notes were short and a bit scrappy, but the theme was more or less formed, and he saw at once that Joanna had abandoned her usual format of murder/inquiry/suspects/detective. It looked as if she had even abandoned her beloved Inspector Jack Tallent, whose private life was a complexity of slinky females, and his sidekick the stolid Sergeant Prinkworth, who had no private life outside the Metropolitan Police Force at all.

Instead she seemed to be drafting a synopsis for a rather dark, rather brooding story with, at its centre, a flawed and haunted heroine who had suffered some kind of loss or tragedy in her life, and must uncover the truth about that loss and confront the ghosts who clawed at her mind before she could find some peace. This was puzzling, because so far as Krzystof knew Joanna had a contract to deliver a new Jack Tallent book in six months’ time.

But here, in what seemed to be a draft for the opening chapter, she had written:
Never having been told the truth was a great part of the problem, because the truth festered beneath the pretence, and any child would have sensed something out of kilter within the family. Most children would probably have sensed, as well, that there were parts of the past that had been sealed away, and might have come to see those years as dark forbidden chasms which must never be approached for fear of falling over the rim. ‘There are some eyes that can eat
your soul,’ one of the younger and more fanciful of the aunts said once, and the phrase, in all its surreal horror, stuck. It was the stuff that nightmares were made on, and in the end it was pointless because the secrecy defeated and distorted its own ends
…

It was a reasonable opening, with a hook in the first sentence to snag the reader’s imagination and draw him or her in. What slightly puzzled Krzystof was that it read as if Joanna was planning a ‘dark journey to the centre of the soul’ type of book, and while she would probably make a competent job of it–if the use of the word ‘competent’ was not to damn with faint praise–it was by no means her usual style. Krzystof read on.

For a child to have stumbled on that small, largely incomprehensible fragment of the story was at best unfortunate, at worst, damaging. The trouble was that there was no one who could be asked for the truth–there was no one who could be approached, and even if there had been it was doubtful if the truth would have been told. And so the barely understood secret became woven into childhood nightmares and childhood fears, and in the end it called the poor mangled ghosts out of their uneasy resting places…At times, the pretence spilled over into ordinary life
…

There was a rough synopsis of events–Joanna seemed to be intending her heroine to tell her story from early childhood onwards, describing key incidents along the way. There were scrappy references to whispers and to the pursed-lipped conversations of older family members when she was six and seven–there was a note about the child listening unseen to a conversation at some family
gathering, which she had not, at the time, understood, but which, Krzystof supposed, was intended to indicate to the reader a little of what lay ahead.

There are some eyes that can eat your soul
…Yes, a child, overhearing that, would interpret it literally; not understanding that it was intended to convey a specific character trait or one of the hungers that sometimes erodes the human psyche.

He scrolled the screen down. There was the discovery of a scrapbook of press cuttings when the heroine was ten; Krzystof understood that this would be the girl’s stumbling on the fragment of the old tragedy, whatever the tragedy might be. He considered it doubtfully, because this finding of old newspaper articles smacked of the ‘device’, the too-slick, too-convenient trick to further a plot or engineer a situation. It was not like Joanna to make use of that. But perhaps in the context—She’s arguing out her plot, thought Krzystof. She’s talking into the computer to see if she can reach a credible story.

The notes ended abruptly, with the heroine deciding to ferret out the truth about her family’s past. No, it was not Joanna’s normal stuff by a very long way, in fact it was verging on Gothic romance. Krzystof exited the file and logged off thoughtfully, closing the laptop’s lid and putting it back in place.

It was interesting and vaguely thought-provoking, but it did not seem to provide any clue to Joanna’s state of mind before she disappeared, or to what might have happened to her.

Or did it? As Krzystof donned a jacket and hunted
for his car keys, something was tugging at the back of his mind, and he had the feeling that there had been something in the roughed-out notes that he had missed. Some kind of sub-text that he should have been able to read.

But even if he was right about that, would it have led him to where Joanna was now?

He drove away from Teind House, his mind still sorting through what he had read, but he could not fasten onto anything of any significance. The best thing to do was to put the whole thing to one side and see if his subconscious could make something of it. He concentrated on looking for the Stornforth sign, which was three-quarters hidden from view by an overhanging tree. He had missed it on his first journey, and had had to retrace his steps. No, here it was. Sharp turn right.

He glimpsed the Round Tower’s brooding shape in the driving mirror as he turned. Mary Maskelyne had mentioned the tower: she had said Joanna had seemed interested in it. That was probably true. Joanna would have been attracted by the place; she would have absorbed its faintly eerie atmosphere delightedly through every one of her senses and she would probably have tracked down a few local legends about it.