Tower of Silence (25 page)

Would she have latched onto the tower as a base for a plot? Had it been at the heart of that curious, uncharacteristic synopsis? It would be quite atmospheric to have a murder in a place like that, of course. Mystery writers were always looking for unusual venues where corpses could take up residence.

But this line of thought brought Krzystof back to the curious fact that Joanna, who had made her name by writing jigsaw-puzzle whodunnits, and who was committed to delivering a new Jack Tallent novel in time for publication next November, seemed to have been setting out not a straightforward detective story, but something quite different.

An introverted child who believed that there were people with eyes that could eat your soul, who suspected that there were dark chasms within her family, and that within those chasms were the mangled ghosts of the past.

He drove on towards Stornforth, his mind working.

Selina had a very pleasant and very useful morning in Stornforth.

First, there had been the library, where she had been received with flattering deference. The McAvoy papers, said the librarian, producing the box for Selina and Lorna Laughlin to sift, were regarded as an extremely good source for students of the area. They were always happy to make them available to genuine enquirers.

The McAvoy papers. Great-uncle Matthew would have liked to hear his work called by so scholarly a name. He would have been pleased to think of the fruits of his work filed in the library’s reference section, labelled and docketed in such seemly fashion, and even, it seemed, now destined for immortality on computer.

Lorna Laughlin was pleased with the results of their morning’s work. They had found some interesting snippets
of little-known legends about Inchcape which the children could trace back–things like the ancient record of Henry the Minstrel–‘Blind Harry’–visiting Inchcape’s monastery and being paid the sum of two shillings for singing to the community on Twelfth Night in 1485. Great-uncle Matthew, conscientious as always, had added a note to say that the entry for this payment could be seen in the monastery rolls which were preserved in the museum.

And there was the tale of how the famous Stone of Destiny–the
Lia Fail
–had come through Stornforth on its way to Scone in AD 840, nearly five hundred years before the English stole it and took it to Westminster Abbey. Lorna thought this would be a very good inclusion in the project, since it would bring in several aspects of history. Great-uncle Matthew, a stickler for accuracy, had pointed out the improbability of the Stone’s ever having rested at Stornforth, but even he had gone on to note down the prophecy supposedly affixed to the Stone, and translated by Sir Walter Scott as,

‘Nice,’ Lorna said, pleased. ‘The brats can take in some seventeenth-and eighteenth-century border ballads along the way; in fact we might even make it the basis for a little end-of-term play. I’ll bet Emily Frost would help with that. She’s amazingly good with the
children, and she was reading history at Durham until her mother died.’

This came as something of a shock to Selina, who had been assuming that Emily had simply left school the instant it was legally permissible and had drifted around doing nothing ever since. It was rather upsetting to find she had so misjudged the child; she would try to find a tactful way of making it up to her. But Lorna’s idea about the children’s play was a good one, and Selina offered to help in any way she could. Costumes, perhaps; she had always been a reasonable needlewoman.

They did stay out for lunch, so it was as well Selina had mentioned the possibility to Krzystof Kent. Lorna insisted on taking them to the Stornforth Arms, where Selina had something called Coronation Chicken which sounded fairly traditional, and turned out to be chicken pieces in a tomato-flavoured sauce, flanked with a jacket potato and some sprigs of broccoli. There was apple tart and ice-cream to follow, and then a cup of coffee. It was nice to be out like this, watching all the people coming and going, although it was a pity the Stornforth Arms played pop music so loudly all the time.

It was quite late when they set off again, and they were a little delayed by Selina’s having left her umbrella in the Stornforth Arms and having to go back for it. And then Lorna took a wrong turning which was something to do with a new one-way system and delayed them even more, since it involved driving round Stornforth three times more than they had expected, and then taking a road that wound around the northern outskirts.

‘Magical mystery tour,’ said Lorna, frowning at the road-signs. ‘I do wish they’d give you better warning when they change the road systems. Oh, wait though, isn’t that the road that goes out to the old infirmary? Yes, it is. Oh good, then I know where I am now.’ She swung the car ruthlessly into a different lane, and said, ‘Now we’re on our way home.’

‘Now we’re on our way home,’ Great-uncle Matthew used to say, on the rare occasions when Selina was allowed to accompany him into Stornforth. This was not something that happened very often, but after both the aunts were dead and Selina had left school, there were sometimes calls to be made at the various stores in Stornforth which delivered provisions to Inchcape.

Selina kept an inventory of the store cupboards because Aunt Flora had said it was the correct way to run a house. Even though the interfering old trout was dead it did not mean that Selina had to disobey her training, and three or four times a year she went into Stornforth with Great-uncle Matthew when he attended his hospital governors’ meetings. He was very conscientious about the meetings, and arranged his activities around the dates because he said people depended on him.

They did not drive to the little market town because Great-uncle Matthew had never learned to drive and did not approve of cars anyway, so they caught a bumbly country bus that left Inchcape at half past eleven, and rattled and bounced across the moors and finally disgorged its passengers at Stornforth bus station forty-five
minutes later. Uncle Matthew usually waited for a lift from one of the other governors which he had arranged beforehand, and Selina was free to sample the muted delights of Stornforth’s hectic metropolis by herself. These consisted of a cup of tea and a poached egg on toast at the little coffee shop near the bus station, which Great-uncle Matthew said was ample nourishment at lunchtime, and then the delivery of the quarterly order for what Aunt Flora had called dried goods to Mr Mackenzie, whose shop smelt pleasantly of tea and coffee beans and raisins, and who had huge tubs containing flour and sugar and sago and pudding rice.

Twice a year a visit to O’Donnell’s drapery was incorporated into the expedition as well. O’Donnell’s smelt of bales of cloth that prickled Selina’s eyes, and it was where she bought new tea cloths or sheets for the house, and knitting wool and patterns for her winter jumpers, and sometimes a new summer outfit. It was nice to go into the shops like this, and it was always a busy day when the orders were delivered to Teind House the following week, what with waiting for Mackenzie’s van to come. Mr Mackenzie’s nephew drove the van and helped to carry the things in; he was learning the business from the bottom up and one day he would be Neil Mackenzie of Mackenzie’s. Selina always gave him a cup of coffee, and they talked while he drank it; he told her how he was learning about profit-and-loss accounts, and how to distinguish between good quality tea and what used to be called floor-sweepings, and how he hoped to go to Kenya next year, to see the coffee plantations. Next time she was
in the shop he would show her the different coffee beans and how they were ground up in a little machine.

Great-uncle Matthew thought it was a waste of milk and sugar to be feeding tradesmen cups of coffee, and he was annoyed when, one month, Selina washed her hair on the night before Neil Mackenzie’s visit and he could not get into the bathroom to pare his corns, but Selina went on making the coffee and hearing about the profit-and-loss and the coffee beans.

Great-uncle Matthew did not come with Selina to Mackenzie’s or O’Donnell’s, of course. He went straight off to the hospital, where he had his lunch with the other governors, which would be considerably more than poached egg on toast. But he did not like going in shops, although he occasionally bought shirts and collars at Stornforth’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters, and twice a year he went to the wine merchants. He would not permit Selina to buy alcohol, just as he had never permitted the aunts to buy it. He made a lengthy business of choosing sherry and port, sampling the wine merchant’s stock in the tiny taster glasses provided, and tsk-ing over the shocking way prices went up every year.

Selina was just seventeen when she discovered that Great-uncle Matthew had been sampling other things than wine on his monthly visits to Stornforth.

It happened by the purest chance, and if it had not been for Selina’s having turned her ankle on a bit of uneven paving stone, and being helped to hobble into a chemist’s shop in Malt Street by a concerned passer-by, she might
never have known about the tall thin house standing in the alley.

The chemist’s shop was not Timothy White’s in Market Street, which was where Selina usually bought aspirin and bismuth and the senna pods without which Great-uncle Matthew’s life, viscerally speaking, would have been unendurable. It was a small, rather dark little place with huge glass bottles filled with coloured water taking up the windows, and a dusty sign saying that prescriptions were dispensed here. But the chemist was helpful and concerned; he applied arnica to the ankle and bound it with a crêpe bandage, and after a little while Selina tested it and thought she could walk as far as the bus station. She had done all her errands, and she was due to meet her uncle, she said. It would not do to be late.

‘If you turn left as you go out of my shop and keep going along Malt Street,’ said the chemist, ‘and then go through Farthing Alley, you’ll come to the bus station in five minutes. It’ll be a sight quicker than going all round through Market Street.’

Selina had not known about this short cut. She thanked the chemist for his kindness, and wondered if she was expected to pay for the arnica and the crêpe bandage. It was a situation where the wrong thing might easily offend. So she said, ‘While I’m here, could I buy some really nice men’s shaving soap? For a Christmas present.’ The soap would do for the vicar; Selina never knew what to buy for him.

The chemist was pleased at the request. He helped Selina to choose a box of gentlemen’s soap called Spruce
which smelt like a pine forest in winter, and wrapped it up in a neat little parcel for her. When Selina paid for it the arnica and the bandage were not mentioned, so she thought she had balanced things out nicely.

She made her way to the bus station, taking the short cut the chemist had described, and it was just as she was halfway along Farthing Alley, which was not quite an alley but not quite a street either, that she saw Great-uncle Matthew. He was coming out of a tall, slightly seedy-looking house with furtively curtained windows and he was in company with another man whom Selina recognised as the other governor who usually gave Uncle Matthew a lift to the hospital meetings. They both looked a bit flushed of face and bright of eye and they were laughing together in a sly way that was so completely unlike Great-uncle Matthew that Selina had to look twice to make sure it was not his double.

But it was not. He was wearing his dark overcoat and the paisley scarf he had put on that morning, and carrying the rolled-up umbrella with the horse’s head handle. As she watched, the other man said something, fruitily, jokingly, and pointed, and Great-uncle Matthew looked down, and fumbled with a button on his trousers, and they both laughed again.

Selina was not entirely clear what the house with the peeling façade might be, but whatever else it was, it was certainly not the boardroom of Stornforth’s Hospital governors.

She thought about the house and Great-uncle Matthew’s curious behaviour all the way home on the jolting bus,
staring through the window so that she would not have to look at him, so that she would not keep seeing that sly gleam and that furtive buttoning of his trousers.

Great-uncle Matthew did not think that Selina had balanced things out nicely by buying the Spruce soap from the unknown chemist’s shop at all.

Once they were home and Selina had made a pot of tea, he asked to see a list of her purchases and the receipts, just as he always did. He took them off to his study to check, and was shocked to his toes at the cost of the Spruce soap. He came into the kitchen where Selina was seeing to the fish they were having for supper, because Great-uncle Matthew could never stomach a large supper after eating lunch in the hospital dining room. While Selina was trimming runner beans to go with the fish, he told her she had wasted good money buying such rubbish.

‘I thought I ought to buy something in the shop as a thank you. I thought it would do as a Christmas present for the vicar. And the chemist was so nice, and so helpful. There was the arnica and the crêpe bandage as well. He didn’t charge me for either of those.’

Great-uncle Matthew hoped not indeed. If Selina must needs go stravaiging about Stornforth, falling down in the street, it was only Christian for her to be helped. He would call at the man’s shop the next time he was in Stornforth and thank him personally. That was all that was required, and there had been no need for Selina to go spending money like a drunken sailor.

As he went out of the kitchen, he said, apparently as an afterthought, that it was to be hoped that Selina was not making herself cheap by running after the vicar, as her Great-aunt Flora used to do.

When it was the Stornforth day again, he went off on the eleven-thirty bus as he always did, carrying the leather briefcase he always carried, dressed in his familiar overcoat and the paisley scarf. (Preparing to unbutton his trousers inside that slummy-looking house…?)

There was some cold lamb left over from Sunday’s lunch, so Selina minced it for shepherd’s pie. The dish could stand on the marble slab in the larder, and the potatoes could be added and crisped in the oven for supper later on. Great-uncle Matthew liked shepherd’s pie.

She made herself an early lunch, and washed up afterwards, and then she went upstairs and put on her school mackintosh and a felt hat with a deep brim. The Stornforth buses came through Inchcape several times a day: she would easily catch the two o’clock one.

It felt exciting in a peculiar and slightly disturbing way to be doing this: to be going secretly into Stornforth, and to be wondering what she was going to find inside the seedy old house in Farthing Alley. She kept her mackintosh well buttoned up and her hat pulled down, but even if anyone she knew saw her there was no reason why she should not be in Stornforth.