Simply Heaven (55 page)

And he’s right there in front of me. Hands raised like Christ blessing Rio.

Shit, shit, shit
.

I try south. And he’s there as well. Leaning against the wall, arms folded, like an actor waiting to play Hamlet.

And he’s coming up behind. He’s behind me. Behind, and to the left, and to the right.

I don’t even think. Barely register that of course, it’s not one, it’s three, that they’ve been tagging me since I left the bedroom, that I’m not being hunted, I’m being
herded
. I skid round and run up the Eastern corridor, into the unused part of the house, the abandoned wing. Hear them pause and whisper. It’s a dead end up here. The house comes to an end with a huge oriel window overlooking the formal gardens. I must find somewhere to hide. I have no alternative. I must find an earth somewhere and wait until they pass.

Doors: locked, locked, locked. My every muscle aches with tension. My hair sticks to the back of my neck. I tiptoe along, now, try each door in turn, feel dust on handles that haven’t moved in decades.

They have started walking. Just walking, as though they know that there’s no escape, that they have no need to rush.

And finally, some give. I hold my breath. Push the door open as silently as I can and enter a tiny bedroom, ugly, the proportions all wrong: long and narrow like another corridor. It’s deep in fust and dust and unmoving air. A bed. A couple of chairs. Some large black screen-like object, the size of a door and thick, like it’s padded in some way, leaning against the wall, pointless. And, out of place in this house of antiquities, a built-in wardrobe, floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall.

I close the door behind me, quietly, quietly. Tiptoe over the carpet and pull the wardrobe door open.

Weird. It’s full of fur coats. Full-length fur coats, motheaten, green to the touch.

I slip inside and crouch behind them.

Footsteps. They’re here.

They enter the room, treading carefully as though nervous of falling in the dark. They don’t switch on the lights. Of course they don’t. There are no lights.

Then I catch a flash of torchlight through the crack in the wardrobe door. They’ve come equipped. Jesus.

I shrink against the back of the wardrobe, and a protrusion from the wall digs into my side. Crazy, stupid: the instinctive reaction of an animal at bay.

The door clicks shut.

‘Are you sure she came in here?’ Hilary’s voice, muffled through the fur.

Another voice answers. It takes me a moment to recognise it. ‘Of course. It’s the only one that’s open.’

‘You don’t think, while you were … she might have …?’

‘No.’ She sounds slightly irritated. ‘No, she won’t have. She’ll be here.’

It’s Mrs Roberts. The faithful servant, helping out in the hunt.

‘Gone to ground,’ says my mother-in-law, and laughs.

A moment’s silence, then all three laugh together.

I close my eyes.
If you exist, God, if you exist, help me now
.

Mary raises her voice. ‘You might as well come out, now, Melody dear,’ she says. ‘We can do it the hard way or the easy way. It’s up to you.’

I don’t move a muscle. Barely even breathe. I’m not going to make it easier for them. Whatever way we do it, it’s going to be hard on me. A bit of me is going:
Come on, Melody, they’re just trying to put the wind up you. It’s another of Mary’s little games. Scare me into hysterics and deny that they were ever there
.

And the rest knows that the game has stepped up another level. That I’ve been underestimating them all along. That the easy way is already over and now they’re going to play hard.

An exaggerated social sigh: Mary’s, but coming from Hilary’s lungs. ‘Well, it seems we have to pause to draw,’ he says. ‘Roberts. If you’d be kind enough to cover the door, in case she breaks covert …’

‘Ar,’ says Mrs R. Jesus. I hear her make her way back across the room, heavy-breathing as she goes. I don’t know what to do. I’m cornered, like a rat in a trap.
Think, Melody
. I have nothing to defend myself with. A green silk slip and some mouldering mink. Why did I leave the bedroom? How could I have been so …?

Because you’re stupid and you deserve to die. You should have left when you had the chance
.

I feel about me as they start to search the room. It’s not a big room, not by Bourton standards. It’s about half the size it should be, on this floor. I’ve got less than a jiffy. I start to grope about the wardrobe. Maybe there’s a hatpin, a brooch left in one of these stupid old-lady coats. Something – anything. I’m not going down without a fight.

They’re taking their time. That’s for sure certain. Enjoying themselves. They’re doing things at their leisure: relishing it.

‘Where, oh, where can she be?’ asks Hilary. ‘Could it be behind the curtains?’

A swish and a giggle as the curtains are thrown back. A bit more light, now. I can see my arm, my naked thigh.

‘Could it be under the bed?’ asks Mary.

‘Poke about and see,’ says Hilary.

There’s the sound of thrusting: breathing like someone’s bent over and using their muscles. Horrible. Hopelessly, I push myself further back against the wall. Feel, again, that object dig into the small of my back. Right down by the hip: something angular, something that shifts, ever so slightly, as I move against it.

‘Where can she be?’ asks Mary.

They’re toying with me. They know already. It’s obvious. They want to extract the max.

It moves again: more this time. Suddenly, I realise that it’s not just the knobble that’s moving, but a section of the wall against my back. Just a slight shift, but enough to make me realise, suddenly, what lies behind. Of course. That’s why the proportions of the room are all wrong.

‘Well,’ says Hilary, ‘there’s only one place she can be.’

Torchlight plays suddenly, brightly, across the crack in the door in front of me. I hear them cross the room: neat, crisp footsteps.

Scrabbling behind me, I grasp what’s been sticking into me and feel it. It’s a latch. So far down the wall that no casual observer would spot it, but a latch none the less. Beneath my fingers I identify the smooth length of iron that holds the door to, and the vertical lifter, which has been what’s been digging into me.

It’s a priest hole. It must be. Rufus said they were here, and I’ve found one. Sanctuary.

The torches pause at the door. Whispers: ‘Give it to me. No, let me. I want to. You promised I could …’

I don’t waste any more time. Grasp the lifter and push upward. For one sweaty moment it resists – God knows how many decades since the last time it moved – and then with a little click it lets go of the latch and the door swings back. Carries me on its momentum, tumbling head-over-legs into a darkness so total it wraps itself around me like velvet. Darkness that’s dry and musty and smells faintly of – what? Vinegar? White spirit? Rot?

Carpet beneath me. I bump against a piece of furniture, crouch, in the black. No time to close the door: the wardrobe is coming open. All my will to control my breath. If they don’t hear me, maybe they won’t see the aperture, will think themselves mistaken.

A giggle, again – Hilary, this time: high-pitched, like a schoolboy in the thick of some act of random cruelty.

I see a hand – bleached, fingers grotesquely long in torchlight shadows – reach out and push the coats apart. Three silhouettes move forward to fill the gap, then suddenly, with a flick of a wrist, their faces are lit from below, wide-eyed and grinning like jack-o’-lanterns.

‘Boo,’ says Mary.

I don’t reply.

‘We brought you your handbag, Melody, dear,’ she says. ‘We won’t be needing it any more.’

‘Sorry, old girl, and all that,’ says Hilary, ‘but family comes first.’

‘They’re not your family, Hilary,’ I say.

‘Yours neither,’ he says.

He takes a step into the wardrobe, grasps the top of the dwarf door leading to my hideout. Holds out my bag at arm’s length and hoicks it, disdainfully, into the void behind me. ‘Goodbye,’ he says. ‘No hard feelings.’

‘Are you crazy?’

Mary looks at me pityingly. ‘You never really did understand our ways,’ she tells me. ‘I’d like to say it’s been a pleasure, but of course, I really don’t like to tell more lies than strictly necessary.’

Hilary yanks at the door and it bangs to. The darkness snatches at me, grips the back of my neck, crushes my chest. And on the far side of the wooden panel, I hear something that makes my eyes flare with fear.

I can hear sounds of strain, groans of exertion, and I hear the scrape of another panel, sliding into the place. I know what that big heavy screen was, propped up against the wall.

It was soundproofing.

Breath. Whooping. Frayed. In, in, in, in, my chest tight like a drum. Sounds of a wolf, snarling, hands clutched at my throat.

Black. It’s black. Eyes goggling, desolate search for some tiny source of light, some pinprick of comfort. Black. The world, gone. Silence. All silence, just the sound of my breath.

All states pass. All states but death. As my awareness begins to return, I understand that I am crouched on my haunches, hands, stiff like coral, either side of my face, and that I am rocking, back and forth, back and forth, like the porcelain mandarins in the Chinese Drawing Room. My skin feels stretched from the screaming, and my teeth are dry like bones.

Panic. You’re panicking.

It’s dark. It’s so dark. They left me in the dark. I don’t know what’s in here with me
…

I can hear it. Breathing. A tiny part of my wit knows that it’s only me who breathes here in the dark, that the rustling is my own scant clothing, but my mind is filled with zombies and vampires and stalking assassins. I see nothing, but I see things with red eyes, I see tall dark figures in fedora hats, I see Mary, crouched in a corner, fingernails filed to points, laughing at me.

It’s cold. I think it’s the cold that brings me to my senses. In the dark time has no relevance; I have no idea how long has passed. But I run my hands over my upper arms and find them covered in goosebumps, and it brings me sharply back to my mind.

I am in a sealed room, I know that. On the far side of three layers of wood, and felt, and heavy lead, fur coats hang forgotten, warm, deadening to sound. It’s colder here than in the main house: this unused wing, this unused room, are permeated with the cold of decades. The cold of neglect; the cold of seclusion. It’s beginning already to seep into my stomach, chill me from the inside out.

You’re not dead yet. Do something
.

Rufus. I want my Rufus.

He doesn’t know you’re here. Do something
.

I can hardly bear the fear. I must explore this dark space on hands and knees, feel my way into – what? Cobwebs? Fungi? Mantraps?

All I know is that I’m pressed against something solid, and wooden. It feels warm against my back in comparison to the floor. Of course. Under the carpet is the unforgiving stone flooring of the sixteenth century.

Better hope the carpet’s not fitted.

As if the cold is my only enemy.

I feel behind me. I am leaning against a desk, or a dressing table. Probably a desk: it has that solidity.

Your bag. You’ve got a lighter in your bag. Where did they throw it? Where did it go?

I don’t want to move. It’ll get me. Whatever it is, it will hear me and get me
.

‘Shut it, Melody,’ I say, out loud, as loud as I can to vanquish the demons.

The walls soak up the sound. It’s almost as though they were sucking. Nothing comes back.

I am already dead
.

‘Stop it,’ I repeat. ‘Stop it, you can’t afford to do this.’

But I can’t move.
It’s somewhere out in front of me, waiting. I’ll crawl across the floor, feel my way right towards it, and I’ll put my hand out in the darkness and I’ll feel its leathery skin, feel it shift as I touch it. I can’t. Safest to stay here
.

‘Move it, you silly bitch!’ I shout at myself. ‘Stay here and you’re dead for sure. Come on! Just fucking move!’

Warm wood under my hands, then the yawning space where the kneehole is, then more, an arm’s length further on; enough to throw me off my balance, force my hand on to the floor once more.

Giant footfalls. Stamping towards. I know they’re no more than the rush of my pulse, but the noise freezes me to the spot, has me gasping again.

I want to scream.

It won’t do you any good. No-one will hear you
.

Let me out. Let me OUT.

I dig my fingers into the carpet, haul my soul back into my body.

I remember the bag flying somewhere over my head. For all I know, I changed position five, ten times while I panicked. All I can do is feel my way, cover every inch of the room until I find it.

There must be lights. There must be a light switch by the door
.

Don’t bet on it. In a priest-hole?

And I don’t know where the door is.

The carpet is gritty under my fingers, as though the fabric of the building has been crumbling on to it, unswept, over the years. Something crunches under my palm – crisp going to wet – and I stifle a shriek of disgust
. I’m not up to this. I’m not. Let me die now. Just let me get it over with
.

Get a grip. You’re a Katsouris. You’ve got more spunk than this.

Following the line of the wall, I encounter a chair – wooden, simple in design – and some sort of chest tucked into the corner. Then – strange – what feels like an old suitcase, cast roughly up against the wall. It’s soft and slumped in the middle, and it takes me a moment to identify what it is. Maybe there will be clothes inside. Something I can put on.

They’ll have rotted away by now, if the state of the case is anything to go by. I’m not trying anything until I can see it.

Oh God, Rufus. He thinks I’ve gone. He doesn’t know I’m still here. He’ll come back, and he’ll think I’ve left. He’ll think I’ve left him, like I did once before. Just like Lucy left Edmund
.

I reach the next corner. Turn it and run into a small cupboard. Short legs, square, simple toggle catch on the door. A bedside cabinet. Which means – yes – that there’s a bed.