Spider Light (25 page)

As she pushed the door wide, no longer worried about being heard, the voices of the music demons were all around her, laughing and jabbing into her mind, urging her on, saying,
Go on, Donna, go on…Let’s do it, Donna, let’s do it…

The man reacted at last. As the door crashed back against the wall, he stopped playing and turned his head. Donna could see him outlined against the uncurtained bay window. Incredibly he was still seated at the piano, not even bothering to stand up: simply sitting there, waiting and watching her.

He said, quite coolly, ‘I suppose you’re after money. The desk’s by the window, and there’s plenty of cash in the drawer. Take it and get out.’

The sound of that cool, unafraid voice in the dark room sent bitter fury boiling up. Out of the scalding waves of pain and
anger, came a voice that screamed at this smooth-voiced pianist, that it was not money she was here for, it was justice and punishment.

The sound of this shrill voice filled the room. The man stared at her uncomprehendingly for a moment and then said, ‘Oh God, you’re high on drugs or something, aren’t you?’ and the pity in his voice slammed into Donna’s mind like a blow. The voice screamed again, shouting that she was not high, she was not some squalid drug addict. But somewhere under the screaming was another voice, saying don’t lose your cool, Donna, stay with the plan.

The plan. Donna snatched at the word and held onto it like a talisman, and the out-of-control voice shut off. In two bounds she was across the room, the knife lifted high above her head. It came down in a sizzling arc, printing a razor-line of brilliance on the dark room, and it came down on the man’s neck exactly as she had planned. He half fell back against the piano with a cry of pain and shock. Aha! you weren’t expecting that! Blood spurted from his neck, coming at Donna like a fountain warm and thick. Disgusting! You hadn’t allowed for the blood, had you, Donna? You forgot it would shoot out like that. You’ll have to burn every stitch of clothing you’re wearing, and bath and wash your hair a dozen times tonight to get rid of the smell and the feel—Stop that! Never mind about the blood, you need to find out if he’s dead, that’s what you need to find out now.

He was not dead. Dear God, he’d had a six-inch blade driven into his neck, and he was still alive! He had fallen to the floor, clutching at the piano as he went, bringing some of the furniture down with him, but he was still moving, flailing at the air, grabbing at a small side table and overturning it, clutching at the edges of the piano. Nothing for it, then, better stab him again. She bent over him, and brought the knife down a second time and this time it went in deeper. Donna felt the scrape of bone. Collarbone? Breastbone? Oh, who cared what it was, and who cared that the knife, Antonia Weston’s own knife, had embedded itself so deeply in bone and flesh.

‘This is Antonia’s punishment,’ said Donna, staring down at the blood-soaked figure on the floor. ‘She’s taken Don away from me, so I’m taking you away from her. She’ll find you dead, and she’ll go through agony, and it’ll serve her right.’

He struggled again, but it was a poor weak struggle now. Why wouldn’t he die! The knife was still sticking out of his neck but he had managed to grasp the handle, his fingers were curling around it. Donna backed away at once, because supposing by some faint chance he managed to get sufficient purchase on the knife to pull it free and managed to struggle upright and attack her? She remembered the paperweight, still in her pocket, and began to reach for it. If he really did start fighting her she would bring it smashing down on his skull and that would finish him off. It would make it even more shattering for Antonia Weston when she found him.

The knife came free with a wet sucking sound, and dropped harmlessly to the floor. The man’s head fell back, there was a rush of exhaled air from the torn windpipe, then he was dead.

It was an extraordinary moment. Seconds earlier he had been alive, the blood pumping out everywhere–oh God, yes, she was covered in it–and then quite suddenly he was nothing. Empty.

Donna could not stop looking at him. It was remarkable to realize you had taken the life of someone without knowing anything about him. He was dark and thin-faced and quite slightly built. His skin had the translucent pallor of someone who spends a good deal of time indoors.

Had he and Antonia been married? How long had they been together? Donna straightened up, for the first time looking around the room which was not entirely dark due to a street lamp outside. She had a sudden deep need to know more about this man, about the kind of life he and Antonia had had. She stared about her: at the furnishings and the things on the high narrow mantelshelf over the fire.

Then she saw one of the pieces of furniture that had been overturned was the chair the man had been sitting in. She saw it
was not a conventional piano stool, or even an ordinary dining chair. It was a wheelchair. The man she had just killed had not been a coward or disdainfully contemptuous of a house-breaker. He had been a cripple. Probably he had heard her from the moment she had broken the glass of the door, and had gone on playing in the hope that she would take whatever valuables she wanted, and go away leaving him unharmed. You heard of people doing that: you even heard of them pretending to be asleep when burglars got into their bedrooms, because they were afraid of confronting the burglar.

Well, I’m sorry, Mister Whoever-you-were, said Donna to the dead remote features, but it’s too late for regrets. I’d probably have done all this even if I had known–although I might have done it a bit differently.

She stepped carefully back from the mess of blood, removing the thick socks when she got clear–she was pleased she had remembered about those–and went into the hall. It was then that she heard the crunch of footsteps on the gravel drive outside, and she stopped, her heart skipping several beats. Was it Weston coming back? Donna had not heard a car or the garage being opened or closed. She was momentarily angry with herself for not being more aware.

She glanced at her watch. Nine o’clock. It could only be Weston, coming home for that meal the musician had been going to cook for her, but that Weston would not now eat. Donna hesitated, looking towards the oblong of pale light that was the bungalow’s front door. Half of her wanted to stay and hide somewhere so she could witness Weston’s agony, but the other half knew she must not risk it.

A shadow moved just beyond the door, and Donna darted back to the kitchen. Back door? What do I do if there isn’t one? But there was a half-glazed door that opened onto a paved area beyond the kitchen. Locked? Yes, but the key was in the lock. She turned it, and stepped out into the cool night air, and as she did so, she heard someone tread on the broken glass and push open the shattered front door.

Donna went around the far side of the bungalow, skirted the edge of the lawn, hopped over the low wall, and was back out on the street and walking towards her car.

She made herself an enormous greasy fry-up when she got back to the flat, and drank most of a bottle of wine. After this she went to bed, and slept until the alarm woke her at half past seven. The radio came on with the alarm, and the seven thirty news contained an item about the violent murder of Richard Weston, the wheelchair-bound brother of a doctor of psychiatry at a big North London hospital.

Donna stared at the radio. The musician had not been Weston’s husband or boyfriend at all. He had been her brother. From out of the confused tumble of her thoughts, she heard the newsreader say that the body of a second man–believed to have been the murderer–had been found next to the body, and that Dr Antonia Weston, was being held for questioning in connection with this second death.

It was only then that Donna realized Don had not come home last night.

Antonia was grateful when a thin morning sunlight eventually filtered in through the cottage’s windows, because the night had seemed endless. She got up and went into the kitchen, discovering Raffles composedly seated on the windowsill outside. Invited in, he padded round the kitchen a couple of times, paused rather dubiously at the corner Antonia thought of as the haunted corner, then came back to accept a saucer of milk.

‘So you know about the ghost, do you?’ said Antonia to him. ‘But it certainly wasn’t a ghost who left that grisly hangman’s noose here for me to find yesterday.’

She waited until nine o’clock and then phoned Jonathan Saxon, who had better be told that she had used his name and department to the local police yesterday. It was annoying to find that she ended in telling him more than she had intended.

‘So there’s some weird character playing sick jokes,’ he said, thoughtfully.

‘Yes, and I don’t know if I need a psychic investigator or a psychiatrist, or even a private detective. I don’t even know if I simply need a smack in the face.’

‘I don’t know about the psychic investigator or the private
detective,’ he said. ‘But the psychiatrist we can manage. Shall I come up there to hold your hand?’

For a perilous moment, Antonia thought she might burst into tears. So she said, very sharply, ‘Certainly not. I don’t need anyone to hold my hand.’

‘Antonia,’ he said, with extreme patience, ‘my clinic finishes early tomorrow–I could drive up then and stay until the following day. You can pour it all out and have a beautiful psychotic crisis.’

‘It really isn’t—’

‘And I’ll behave like a maiden aunt,’ said Jonathan. ‘I’ll come to the cottage, and we’ll go out to dinner somewhere. But I don’t need to stay at the cottage; if there’s a pub in the village I’ll book in there for the night. Does that persuade you?’

‘There is a pub in the village,’ said Antonia slowly.

‘Ah. Oh well, I was afraid there would be. But you’re calling the tune, so the pub it shall be, although I will continue to hope, like a languishing nineteenth-century swain. You can give me a lock of your hair to wear next to my heart. But before giving me that, give me the directions to your haunted cottage–Yes, I have got a pen, I’m in my office, what do you expect?’

Antonia gave suitable directions.

‘OK, I’ve got all that. And I’ll be with you tomorrow evening as soon after six as I can manage. All right?’

‘All right,’ said Antonia and rang off. An apology to Dr Toy and Professor Remus for yesterday’s melodrama had better be part of today’s agenda–she would walk across to Quire and do that now, before she got cold feet.

Godfrey Toy had been exceedingly busy since breakfast, on the track of a seventeenth-or eighteenth-century cookery book. Somebody from the BBC–actually the BBC!–had written to Quire House to ask about availability and cost of authentic recipe books. It seemed a television programme of eating habits down the ages was being envisaged, and they wanted bona fide recipes for it. There was no guarantee the programme would actually be
made, they explained politely; this was just preliminary and very tentative research.

But Godfrey, reading this letter, had instantly renounced his plan for a scholarly best-seller about Bernard Shaw, and thought he might instead make his mark on television. (‘And now here is our resident specialist, Dr Godfrey Toy, who is going to tell us how people lived and ate in the eighteenth century…’)

He abandoned the tedious task he had assigned to the morning (cataloguing some early editions of Byron’s poetry which he himself had bought because he had liked the binding, but which Oliver said would never sell), and scuttled hither and yon to see what Quire’s current stock had in the way of cookery books. It was not something they would normally deal in, but Godfrey had a feeling there was just the thing somewhere, and it turned out he was right. There, neatly reposing on a back shelf, was the
exact
book, published in 1725 and beautifully divided into different dishes for the seasons of the year, according to your standing in life.

There was a recipe for Lenten Pottage which Godfrey thought sounded shockingly dreary, but then there was a really lavish one for lobster, although it was unnecessarily explicit, telling how to prevent the live lobster from trying to climb out of the vat of boiling water while you were cooking it. Godfrey, who normally enjoyed lobster, shuddered, and turned the page to an entry for Sod Eggs, which would probably cause some ribaldry if it were to be included in the programme. But on closer inspection Sod was a corruption of the word seethed or boiled, and the dish itself was a tarted-up version of boiled eggs.

It was at this point that Antonia Weston arrived, apparently to apologize for the fracas of yesterday. This threw Godfrey completely, partly because he had not expected to see her, but also because it was a touch difficult to know what to say to someone who seemed to have suffered such a bizarre hallucination. It was even more difficult to adhere to Oliver’s edict about not letting Miss Weston get her hands on any more of Quire’s archive material. Godfrey
thought he would not actually mention this, in fact he thought he would give her the cardboard folder of stuff on Latchkill, and be blowed to Oliver.

It was worth risking Oliver’s annoyance, because when he handed the folder to her, she smiled and it was the genuine smile that Godfrey had hoped to see. Because he loved seeing her smile like that, he told her about the TV request for the cookbook, and read out a recipe for Mumbled Rabbit, which explained that in order to properly mumble your rabbit, you had first to chop it very finely, and then stir in a bundle of sweet herbs.

She enjoyed the recipe; she said he had cheered up her morning, and promised to let him know how the Latchkill papers turned out. After she left, Godfrey happily wrote to the BBC about the cookbook, describing it in sufficient detail to whet their appetites, but not actually giving away any of the recipes. This done, he felt that he could tackle Lord Byron after all, so he summoned Greg Foster to help him, because he could never remember how you found files on the computer.

Carrying the folder back to Charity Cottage, Antonia was aware that she was smiling inwardly at the prospect of entering Daniel Glass’s world again. It was like travelling to the comfortable house of an old and dear friend, and realizing you were almost there.

But spread out on the gateleg table, the papers Godfrey Toy had found did not look as informative as the first batch; they looked to be mostly elderly account books.

A real historian would have said this was primary source stuff and the basis of good research, but Antonia could not get much of a buzz from household bills and the buying of oatmeal (Freda Prout and her seven a.m. porridge again), or scrag-end of mutton and haricot beans.

She paused over what appeared to be a household inventory, clipped to a note in rather laboured writing, that said, ‘Dear Miss Bryony, here is the listing for the things I told you of. Peaches in brandy, preserved pears, goose-liver pâté, Camembert cheese
and Brie.’ This last had been originally spelled Bree, and then crossed out.

‘Also there were some pickled walnuts and a bottle of French brandy, so you will see what I mean when I say that young madam was playing fast and loose with my stores,’ finished the note, and signed itself, ‘Respectfully yours, C. Minching (Mrs)’.

The note was brittle and faded, and it gave Antonia a feeling of reaching out to touch a fragment of the past. She wondered who among Amberwood’s cast of characters might have been having illicit orgies on preserved peaches and pickled walnuts, and passed on to a list of medical supplies. From the look of this, Freda Prout had held to her belief in hyoscine as a sedative, but there was also a fragment of what looked like some case notes, recording several doses of chloroform administered to a patient resident in one of the private rooms.

And that, infuriatingly, was all there was. Antonia read it several times, as if doing so might cause the rest of the notes to materialize.

Afraid of the light above the ground. Or–afraid of the vast and threatening open spaces that exist above the ground? Agoraphobia? Was that what had afflicted this unknown patient? Was there a connection to Charity Cottage–had it been an acute level of agoraphobia that had left that frightened imprint there? The same person? If so, it was no wonder Antonia was so deeply affected by it.

She replaced the photocopied sheets in the folder. What next? Oliver Remus had probably put her on the banned list as far as Quire’s intriguing cellars went, but there was no reason why she could not see what the local libraries had in the way of archived material.

Antonia had to make a conscious effort to leave the cottage for the journey into Amberwood Magna and the library. In the end, she took Daniel with her, and got through the short drive by imagining how he would have reacted to the volume of traffic on today’s roads. Would he have found it exhilarating or merely
noisy? At least he would not have known what a terrible driver she was.

The library was a nice old Victorian building in a corner of the little market town’s square, and once inside Antonia felt safer. The first floor had been made into a small coffee shop. She thought she would make notes until lunchtime, and then study them over coffee and a sandwich.

This part of Cheshire seemed to have quite a lot of interesting snippets of history. Antonia went carefully through all the indexes, but the only thing vaguely connected to Quire House or Latchkill was a listing for some church records of St Michael’s Church, spanning the period between 1883 and 1899. Worth a look? Yes, 1899 had been the date on Daniel’s angry letters to Latchkill’s matron. Antonia asked for the records at the librarian’s desk.

‘I think there’s restricted access to those particular books,’ said the librarian, who was a youngish boy with a face that for some reason reminded Antonia vaguely of Raffles. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

Restricted access. It sounded more like something you would encounter in a traffic system. Antonia said, ‘I don’t want to take anything away. Just to look at it and make some notes. If they’re the original records, I’ll be careful with them.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ said the boy, sounding genuinely so. ‘But you’d need what we call a private research card.’

‘Well, could I get one?’

‘I can give you an application form, and you can fill it in now, but then we’d have to send it to our County headquarters. And they’re inclined to be long-winded. It could take at least a fortnight for it to come through.’

Antonia said, ‘Oh, but—’ when a man’s voice broke in.

‘Put Miss Weston’s request on my research card, would you, Kit?’

Antonia looked round sharply.

‘Have this one on me, Miss Weston,’ said Oliver Remus.

The annoying thing was that the professor merely scribbled a
signature, nodded an acknowledgement, and appeared to consider the matter closed. Antonia managed an awkward, ‘Thank you very much,’ to which he responded with a brusque nod, and then went to sit at a distant table, appearing to become instantly immersed in some research of his own.

Well, bother him and his cool disapproval.

But the records from St Michael’s Church, when they were brought, were disappointing. There were columns of births and marriages and baptisms, all recorded in a clear, graceful hand, which Antonia found rather depressing. When it came to the reckoning, was this the sum total of a life? Neat lists of names and dates? Daniel, thought Antonia, if you’re somewhere in here, I’m not finding you, and I’m not finding Latchkill either.

There were several references to the Forrester Benevolent Trust being administered, but on closer inspection these were little more than lists of payments made, or dates of meetings. These entries were in a thin spidery hand, with a signature at the foot of each page–the Reverend Arthur Skandry, who had, it seemed, been the incumbent of St Michael’s Church from 1896.

Arthur Skandry, had visited Latchkill Asylum quite frequently. He had recorded these visits diligently–so diligently that Antonia, who half an hour earlier would have traded, Faust-like, with the devil for anything about the place, found her attention wandering, until an entry for September 1899 snapped her concentration back into place. Skandry had spent time in something called Reaper Wing, ministering ‘to the poor unfortunates incarcerated there, bringing a little calm to their agitation after a recent thunderstorm, to which most of them had assigned the old pagan beliefs…’

But other that this, there was nothing of much interest. Antonia was closing her notebook, when a shadow fell across the table and Oliver Remus said, ‘I’m sorry to interrupt your work, Miss Weston, but the library closes for lunch and they’ll need to lock everything away.’