Spider Light (38 page)

Antonia had left the kiln door open, because she could not bear to lose the thin light that came down from above. She had no idea what she would do when the light started to dim, but for the moment at least she could see where she was. She managed not to look at the sad huddle of bones near the oven door, and was convincing herself that even when the light began to fade, there would be moonlight. She was not sure how she would manage to sit in the pitch dark with human remains so close, because she was afraid she would start to hear them creeping towards her…Stop it, Antonia!

She was not especially conscious of hunger, but she was by now very conscious of thirst which was what she had dreaded. Her watch said it was three o’clock. At this time of year that meant about two more hours of daylight, or maybe a bit less. Would anyone miss her? What about the police? And Jonathan–what about him? Had he arrived as promised, and was he instigating a search? Surely he would not just drive away when he found the cottage empty? But would a search come out here? Mightn’t they assume she had killed Greg Foster, and then run away? In which case, Amberwood was the last place they would search.

She had reached this point in her reasoning when she became aware of a shift in the rhythm of the clock’s beating. Had it slowed down? It had not stopped, that was for sure. Antonia could still hear it and she could still feel it, hammering relentlessly along its mechanism, like the beating of a fleshless fist on the inside of a kiln door…She glanced at the thing on the ground.

The clock’s rhythm had definitely changed. It was quickening–so much so that it almost sounded as if someone was winding it forwards.

Winding it…Someone was winding it!

Antonia dived for the kiln and scrambled inside, tearing her hands and legs in the process, but hardly noticing. She straightened up inside the shaft again, and turning her head up to the light, shouted at top of her voice. ‘Help! I’m trapped down here!’

Her words echoed sickeningly in the enclosed space, and showers of soot fell onto her. She shouted again. ‘Is someone there? Please–can you hear me? I’m shut in down here!’

Another moment for the echoes to die away, and then the light overhead shifted slightly, as if something might be blocking it out. A voice–a voice that Antonia dimly recognized, called, ‘I’m here. I’ll get you out. Are you all right?’

‘Never better. For God’s sake come down to the kiln room and get the doors open!’

‘I’m on my way,’ said Kit, and this time Antonia heard the clang of ladder rungs. There was a long silence during which she had time to imagine half a dozen disasters, and then came the sound of the steel doors being pulled open.

As Kit appeared in the doorway, Antonia said, ‘Thank God for memorial clocks,’ and to her fury, began to cry.

Godfrey Toy was almost beside himself with delight. Antonia was safe and sound–all thanks to that nice Kit from the library–and although Godfrey had not got all the details yet, it had been all to do with winding the old Twygrist clock. Kit, it seemed, had been amazingly good, dragging Antonia out of the grisly kiln
room, and phoning police and ambulances and whatnot. He had phoned Quire House as well–they had all been there when the call came, and Godfrey thought he had never seen anyone move as fast as Oliver and Jonathan Saxon. Out of the house and into the car inside minutes: Oliver had not even paused to put on a coat, and Kit told Godfrey it had been Oliver who got to Twygrist ahead of anyone else. Godfrey was still considering this, not daring to hope that it meant anything, but hoping all the same that it might.

After the phone call, he had scurried round Quire, putting a large pot of coffee to filter in Oliver’s kitchen, and then dashing down to his own flat to gather up a few snacks for them all to eat while they talked. Antonia could not have eaten for at least twenty-four hours, and there would be all kinds of things to hear about. It sounded as if quite a lot of people would be converging on Quire. Godfrey himself and Oliver and Antonia, of course. Dr Saxon and Kit Kendal. Inspector Curran, and perhaps Sergeant Blackburn as well. He counted up the numbers in his head, and made a few more sandwiches.

‘Dear God,’ Oliver said when Godfrey eventually staggered up the stairs with his tray, ‘are you feeding the starving tribes of the world?’ but Godfrey said breezily it had been a long and worrying twenty-four hours, and Antonia had better be fed after her ordeal. Oliver merely said, ‘Smoked salmon sandwiches and chicken vol-au-vents. Oh, and vichysoisse. I see.’ Godfrey explained that the soup was for Antonia and the salmon needed eating up anyway.

Antonia devoured the soup and the sandwiches, and thanked Godfrey. Even like this, white-faced, and exhausted-looking, there was still a light in her eyes. She had, it seemed, already made a full statement to Inspector Curran, who was seated at the table with Sergeant Blackburn, but there were still a lot of questions and answers.

‘She was hiding in the cottage’s attic, of course,’ said Antonia. ‘I locked all the doors but she was already inside.’

‘I should have thought you could have made a better search,’ said Jonathan to Inspector Curran. ‘Or were you treating Dr Weston as the tethered gazelle for the hungry tiger?’

‘Jonathan, I’ve been called many things in my time, but—’

‘Actually, it’s usually a goat they tether, I think.’

‘Well, at least you substituted gazelle for goat.’

They grinned at one another, and Godfrey saw that they had the ease of long and familiar friendship, and felt exceedingly glum. He risked a quick glance at Oliver, but the professor’s expression was unreadable.

‘You weren’t the tethered anything,’ said Inspector Curran. ‘We simply didn’t expect the killer to still be around.’

The killer. Antonia shivered, and then said, ‘Do you know who she is? I thought all the time it was a man, but just before she knocked me out, she spoke to me.’

‘If you could remember the exact words, Miss Weston.’

Antonia said, ‘She said that what she was doing was for Don–to punish me for killing Don.’ She looked round the room. ‘I did kill Don,’ she said, defiantly. ‘The charge was perfectly justified and the verdict was right. But he had just killed my brother and I thought he was going to kill me as well.’

Jonathan started to say something, but it was Oliver who said, ‘Self-defence. And if you’ve just seen someone you love very much brutally killed—’

‘I didn’t actually see it happen,’ began Antonia.

‘Don’t be so incurably honest. Inspector, you were about to tell us if you know who this woman is. Presumably she killed Greg Foster, as well?’

‘We’re working on that assumption,’ said Curran in answer to Oliver. ‘We aren’t absolutely sure who she is yet, but we do know Don had a sister.’

‘A sister? Are you sure? He said he had no family at all,’ said Antonia. ‘I thought–we all thought–he was completely on his own.’

‘I’m sure,’ said Curran. ‘There’s a sister. Donna.’

‘Will you be able to find her?’ asked Antonia. ‘To–to question her?’

‘We’ve found her already. We haven’t questioned her yet, but we will.’ Curran looked at Antonia. ‘We don’t always get things right, Miss Weston, and we didn’t with this. Your attacker talked about punishing you for Don Robards’ death, but to my mind you were punished very heavily for that. An eight-year sentence, wasn’t it?’

‘Yes, but I only served five.’

‘Whatever you served, I’m very sorry indeed that you had to go through this second ordeal in Amberwood.’

‘It allowed Kit to play knight errant,’ said Antonia, and Kit, curled into a corner of the window seat, Raffles next to him, both of them eating sandwiches with industrious pleasure, smiled.

‘Did the woman think Antonia would suffocate down there?’ asked Oliver. ‘Did she know the old drying floor was concreted over?’

‘No idea yet,’ said Curran. ‘I’d guess that she did think Miss Weston would suffocate, though. It was only because of Twygrist’s tumbledown state that you didn’t actually do so, Miss Weston.’

‘The chimney shaft,’ said Antonia, remembering. ‘Part of the brickwork had fallen away. I tripped over some of the bricks while I was down there.’

‘Yes. We’ve still to examine the place more closely, but it’s a fair bet that the collapse of the bricks allowed air down into the room.’

‘Well, thank God for a collapsed chimney,’ said Jonathan.

‘How about the body Antonia found in Twygrist?’ said Oliver. ‘Is it ever likely to be identified?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. It’s a very old skeleton. Eighty to a hundred years old, forensics think. A man in his late thirties or early forties. There’s a slight depression to the skull, and that’s the only clue to what might have killed him. They think, though, that he was a sufferer from…’ He frowned and reached for his notebook.

‘He suffered from acromegaly,’ said Antonia.

‘Yes, that was the word. I’d never heard it before.’

‘It’s quite rare,’ said Antonia. ‘But it’s a chronic condition that causes enlargement of the bones of the hands and feet–quite often the head and face as well. Sufferers used to become grotesquely misshapen, and often unnaturally tall. I don’t know a great deal about it, but I think they can deal with it very early on nowadays so you hardly ever see it any more. It comes from an excessive secretion of something within the pituitary gland–I’ve got that right, haven’t I, Jonathan?’

‘Near enough. The reverse side of its coin is dwarfism, of course. But in the good old, bad old days, people ascribed all kinds of menace to the poor sods who had it. They thought of them as unnatural–creatures to be feared. Sometimes the condition brought about swelling of the soft tissues as well, including the tongue, which made speech difficult. That would add to the sinister air of it all. If the skeleton was a hundred years old, that means he lived in a time when he could have suffered one of two fates. He could have been exhibited as a freak, or–more probably–been shut away somewhere.’

‘Latchkill,’ said Oliver softly.

‘Yes, that’s more than likely. It’s not so long since it was known as giantism.’

‘Blunderbore or Pantagruel, and seven-league boots, or the blood-sniffing lament of Child Rowland approaching the Dark Tower,’ murmured Godfrey, and then turned fiery red, and apologized.

‘Well, whatever he was or wasn’t, and wherever he came from,’ said Curran, ‘we’ll make sure he has suitable burial in the churchyard.’ He stood up. ‘Miss Weston, I’ll let you know what happens with Miss Robards.’

‘I’d have to give evidence, wouldn’t I?’

‘I’m afraid so. Is that all right?’

‘Yes,’ said Antonia. ‘But whoever it was–Donna Robards or someone else altogether–I think you’ll find she isn’t fit to stand trial.’

‘Will you come back to the hospital?’ said Jonathan to Antonia, as they left Quire House. ‘To work, I mean.’

‘I don’t know. Would it be possible?’

‘I think so. The board’s talking about expanding my department–making a full-time drug rehabilitation unit. They’ll need someone to head that–maybe undertake some research as well. I could probably swing it your way.’

‘I don’t want anything swung my way. I’d rather get things by my own efforts.’

‘You would get this by your own efforts. You’d be a good person for the job. Are you going to try for reinstatement?’

‘I don’t know.’ Antonia did not say she was afraid of doing this, because a refusal would be too much of a blow.

‘You could start getting back into things with the new unit,’ said Jonathan.

‘Prove myself all over again, and then go cap in hand to the GM? “Please let me be a doctor again.”’

‘Don’t be so spiky. I’m trying to help you.’

‘I know you are. I’m sorry. Can I think about it?’

‘Yes, of course. You aren’t going to stay here though, are you?’

‘I’ll have to stay for a bit longer.’

‘Why? The police investigation’s wound up. What is there to stay for?’

‘Oh,’ said Antonia vaguely, ‘loose ends to tidy up.’

Antonia finished reading the faded writing, and felt the past brush against her mind all over again. For several moments she was unable to speak. So, after all, Daniel, you were with me, and after all, you did save me. You had a part in arranging for that dreadful, blessed, old clock to be installed and looked after, and it sounds as if you also created the Clock-Winder position. Did you have
a feeling it would be needed one day? It’s a pity you can’t know how very much it was needed, Daniel, or that in a future you couldn’t possibly have envisaged, it meant I escaped from Twygrist and from Donna Robards.

Daniel was becoming shadowy now–Antonia recognized this without sadness, but she rested her hand on the letter for a moment. Trying to keep hold of the past, Antonia? No, I’m letting it go. But I’m glad that I touched that past once or twice. Thank you, Daniel. I hope you went to Ireland and to Bryony who lived there. I think you probably did, somehow.

She withdrew her hand from the letter and smiled at the man seated across the table. ‘Oliver, you’re brilliant to have found this.’

‘I am, aren’t I?’ He did not exactly smile back, but somehow a smile seemed to be between them.

‘Kit Kendal thinks the first Clock-Winder was a several-times great-aunt–he thinks her name was Ellen, but he isn’t absolutely sure,’ said Oliver. ‘I told you the Clock-Winder appointment was virtually hereditary, didn’t I? I didn’t know the first incumbent was female, though. Nice that, isn’t it? Women’s equality as far back as the beginning of the nineteenth century.’

‘I wouldn’t have thought you were a particular supporter of feminism.’

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been able to find out anything about Ellen Kendal yet, but I think the Maud mentioned in Bryony’s letter could have been Maud Lincoln.’

‘The miller’s daughter,’ said Antonia. ‘Was she?’

‘The records do show that George Lincoln had a daughter named Maud.’

Maud. Had she been the withdrawn creature in Latchkill, about whom the day book had recorded that she pressed into the ground as if afraid of the light?

‘How about Bryony?’

‘I shouldn’t think we’d ever trace her,’ said Oliver. ‘There’s no surname or address to start from.’

‘No, of course not,’ said Antonia, but to herself she thought she might see if there had ever been any record of a Bryony Glass who had lived somewhere near to Connemara.

‘If I can find out anything more, I’ll let you know,’ said Oliver.

‘Would you? I’d like to know about them.’

‘I’d like to know as well. More wine?’

‘Please.’

They were facing one another across the table at the cottage’s comfortable heart. Antonia had lit an old oil lamp she had found in the back of a cupboard, and the curtains were drawn against the night. Raffles, who had wandered in with Oliver, had found his favourite place by the radiator.

Antonia was not quite sure how this evening had come about. Oliver had phoned earlier in the afternoon to say he had found Bryony’s letter tucked in a box. He had been looking for something else at the time, he said, but as was so often the way…

Anyway, would it be all right if he walked down to the cottage later that evening so she could see it? Antonia had said, yes, of course, and managed not to ask if he could bring it down there and then.

He had somehow ended in staying to dinner. Antonia had put together a halfway reasonable meal from odds and ends in the fridge, at which point it had turned out that Oliver had brought some wine, a wedge of beautifully creamy Brie, and a box of luxuriously out-of-season strawberries and raspberries.

‘Peace offering,’ he said.

‘Thank you very much. But it truly wasn’t necessary.’

‘I thought I’d like to do it anyway.’ He set the box on the kitchen table. ‘I’m behaving a bit like Godfrey, aren’t I?’

‘Bringing extravagant food? Yes.’ Antonia smiled. ‘Is Godfrey all right? He was dreadfully upset by it all, wasn’t he?’

‘He’s recovering. I think he was secretly planning a crusade to prove your innocence,’ said Oliver. ‘But if so, you spiked his guns by telling us all that you were guilty as charged. Are you always so defensive?’

(‘Don’t be spiky,’ Jonathan had said.)

‘I thought I’d better clear the air,’ said Antonia.

‘Saxon offered you a job at your old hospital, didn’t he?’ he said abruptly.

‘Yes. Heading a project to expand the department–they’d like a proper rehab centre for drug users. How did you know?’

‘He told me he was going to.’ Oliver’s tone was devoid of expression. ‘He said it in a rather challenging way. Shall you accept the offer?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Can struck-off doctors be reinstated? I’m sorry if that sounds a bit…’

‘It doesn’t sound a bit anything,’ said Antonia. ‘It’s nice and direct. Doctors can be reinstated, but it really comes down to whether it’s thought to be in the public interest to let them loose on patients again. I don’t think they’d let me loose,’ she said. ‘Whatever the rights or wrongs, I really did kill Don. I was beside myself with grief for my brother, and I was frightened to death of Don on my own account. A lot of high-minded stuff was talked at the trial–the sanctity of human life, and the trust that patients have to have in doctors–but it’s all perfectly true.’ She paused. ‘I’d like to go back to psychiatric medicine but I don’t think I could bear it if they refused to reverse the original decision.’ It was odd she had not been able to say this to Jonathan, but could say it to Oliver.

‘What will you do?’

‘I like the idea of being involved in drug rehabilitation,’ said Antonia. ‘There are all kinds of areas I could work in without needing to have my licence restored. And I could still be involved with the victims. It would be a compromise, but I think I could be quite useful.’

‘Does the compromise have to be London again?’

They looked at one another. ‘No,’ said Antonia at last. ‘It doesn’t have to be. There are several very good hospitals around here.’

‘Good.’ He refilled the wine glasses. ‘You do know you could have this cottage for as long as you want?’

‘Could I? Along with the ghosts?’ Antonia had no idea why she had said this.

‘Everyone has ghosts, Antonia. But after a while they can be lived with.’

‘I know that. And there aren’t precisely ghosts in this cottage,’ said Antonia. ‘But—’

‘But there are pockets of something a bit odd, aren’t there?’ he said. ‘Especially the part where the kitchen goes through into the old outhouses.’

‘Yes.’ Antonia looked up at him. ‘You know about it?’

‘Of course I know. Why wouldn’t I?’

‘I didn’t think anyone else would understand.’

Oliver seemed about to reach for her hand, and then thought better of it. But he said, ‘I understand all about ghosts. And there’s the same feeling of–of oddness in parts of Quire House. Unhappiness–something stronger than unhappiness, even. But I don’t know any more than that.’ He looked at her very intently. ‘Do the ghosts matter? Or can they be lived with?’

The ghosts. Richard and Don. Oliver’s wife who had died at Twygrist. Daniel Glass, and Bryony who had written that letter to him from her raggle-taggle Irish idyll. The body of the man in the kiln room. And poor sad Maud inside Latchkill…

Antonia said, very carefully, ‘Yes. Yes, I believe the ghosts can be lived with,’ and saw with delight he was reaching for her hand, and this time he was not going to think better of it…

They said there was always one thing you forgot when you killed someone. Always one mistake you made.

Donna had not thought she had made any mistakes–she had had five years to make sure that mistakes would not happen, but…The Clock-Winder. The one thing she had not thought about–had hardly even known about. But if it had not been for that young man–another young man for Weston to get her
claws into!–Antonia would have died in Twygrist. She ought to have died: Donna had wanted her to die alone and in the dark.

Instead the bitch was free, the police had discovered Donna’s existence, and she was being questioned. They had turned up at her flat, hammering on the door, giving her no chance to escape, or even to think.

Now she was locked up in this appalling interview room, with everything she said being recorded on a machine, and with serious-faced men and women asking her questions. Why and when and how? Then breaking off to give her a rest, not because they wanted to, but because it was the law, and then beginning it all over again.

And then, quite suddenly, Donna saw something she had not seen before. If she told these people the truth–everything–she would clear Don’s name. Everyone thought Don had killed Richard Weston that night, and only Donna had known he had not. But she could put that right. She could exonerate her beloved boy. A huge wave of delight surged up inside her. She would do it. She would make this sacrifice for Don’s memory.

Most likely it would mean prison, but she would bear it. Once she had vowed to wait as long as it took in order to be revenged on Antonia Weston: she would wait twenty years if she had to, she had said. That still held good. Because even if she did have to wait twenty years, one day she would be free, and on that day…

On that day she would begin a whole new plan for Antonia Weston’s punishment.

As Godfrey pottered around his flat, he saw, from his windows, the lights shining in the cottage’s sitting room. He was pleased that Oliver seemed to have stayed with Antonia for the whole evening. She might have cooked a meal, perhaps, and they would have enjoyed eating it together. Oliver had taken a bottle of wine, and fruit and cheese.

He went into his bedroom to get ready for bed, and he saw the lights of the cottage’s sitting room dim to a soft amber glow, as if the two people in there had thought it might be rather nice to sit together in the firelight. Godfrey, who had a strong sense of propriety, drew his curtains very firmly at this point. He would not have dreamed of doing anything so intrusive or impolite as staring at the cottage, to see if a bedroom light went on.

But he could not help hoping very strenuously that a bedroom light did go on and, as he got into his own bed, he was smiling at the thought of Oliver and Antonia together in the firelight.