by F. G. Cottam
Hunter nodded. He was drenched, dripping on to the flagstones, cold in the chill of the room. He could feel the pull of her gaze. It was very strong. He looked around the room to avoid it. One of the pictures on the wall to her rear showed Butch Cassidy, seated in an ornately carved chair with claws for feet. He wore a three-piece suit and a bowler. It was a detail from the famous Wild Bunch group portrait taken at Fort Worth in Texas in 1901, seven years before the shoot-out in San Vicente in Bolivia that killed him.
‘Did you come here merely to look at my things?’
‘I’ve told you, Mrs Mallory. I came here to ask you to lift your curse on the child I have not yet fathered.’
She pulled heavily on her cigarette. Its tip glowed fiercely and faded in the gloom. ‘Then look at me.’
He looked instead over to the piano. The bust was of Rupert Brooke.
‘I knew him.’
‘That’s impossible.’ Hunter needed to be careful. He had almost met her eye in his surprise at this outlandish claim.
‘I met him in Berlin in 1912.’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘I’m not a liar.’
And he did not want to provoke her. ‘What was he like?’
‘He was talented and beautiful and very full of himself.’
‘And he died young.’
‘So he did. But with no assistance from me.’ Mrs Mallory chuckled, throatily. It was a coarse sound. It frightened Hunter. He sensed that the veneer of her was very thin indeed. He did not wish to see what it was that lay beneath it.
‘I comforted him,’ she said. ‘He had recently broken up with his sweetheart.’
‘Katherine Cox,’ Hunter said. He could not imagine this woman giving comfort to anyone.
‘You would know, of course. You are a lover of poetry.’
The invitation to look into Mrs Mallory’s eyes was really compelling. The curiosity to see their colour and shape and judge their expression and mood was almost overwhelming in its strength. He heard her grind out her cigarette.
‘I’m no lover of Brooke’s poetry,’ he said.
‘Frances Cornford famously summed up Brooke in a couplet I’m sure you have heard. She said that he was magnificently unprepared for the long littleness of life. The syntax is very elegant, is it not? But Brooke did not endure a long life, Captain Hunter. And neither will your son.’
He looked at her. And the trap sprung, she smiled. And it was a very familiar smile to Mark Hunter. For Mrs Mallory wore Lillian’s face. She cocked her head in a mannerism wholly familiar. ‘Come here,’ she said, in Lillian’s voice. ‘Come here and kiss me, Mark.’
He found his feet moving him forward on the smooth flags. He clenched his fist tighter around the shard of glass concealed in his left hand and felt the grinding bite of pain as its edges pierced his flesh. But the sensation did not unlock his gaze. Of course it didn’t. The ruse was wholly inadequate. This creature’s will had been strong enough to compel the slow agony Rodriguez inflicted on himself. Pain did not break her spell.
Her features changed as he got closer. She became more herself. She took off the hat and shook out her hair and it was black in sinuous tresses against the alabaster of her facial skin. The bones under the skin sharpened to give her a sculpted look. Her eyes became a cool, appraising grey in her cruel, beautiful face. And still he could not look away from her as she grinned and the talons her fingers had become reached out for him.
‘No!’
Her gaze flicked past him and that did break the spell. Hunter lifted his shirt and pulled his pistol from where he had thrust it in his belt and cocked the hammer.
‘No!’
He put a bullet in her right eye and when she slid to the floor he put another in her left temple and saw her head jerk as the round hit the floor and ricocheted off it back into her skull. Two shots, double tap. It was the classic drumbeat of SAS execution. Some habits he would never break. He straightened and levelled the pistol at Miss Hall, who had closed the distance very quickly from where he had first heard the shout behind him at the entrance to the room. She must be one of those nimble fat people who were implausibly light on their feet, he thought. And she had said no, and he had disobeyed her. He saw that her lips were pulled back from her big yellow teeth now in a gargoyle snarl. She had claimed to be more good than bad. She did not at that moment very much look it.
‘I have six bullets left in the magazine of this weapon. A blind man could hit you from here. Take another step and I swear to Christ I’ll empty my gun into you.’
He thought she flinched at the mention of a Christian God. But it could have been his imagination. He felt tired and overwrought and angry. It was a severe effort of will not to pull the trigger, not to have the whole grotesque experience he had endured end neatly and conclusively. Miss Hall stood there in a black oilskin, an enormous shape, dripping rain on to the umber flagstones where it gathered and pooled underneath her, the colour of blood.
‘Have you the remotest idea of what you have done?’
‘I’ve put an end to something evil. I have got rid of something bad. I’ve ended it.’ He meant the curse.
Miss Hall shook her head. ‘On the contrary, you have started something,’ she said. ‘Because of you, it now begins.’
He half sensed he heard the Rottweiler stir of life in the corpse to his rear. But when he turned she was dead, a thin, lifeless thing, her mesmeric eyes dim behind their closed lids. She had not shown the stubborn reluctance to die of her acolytes at the compound. But he had no time to wonder about that now. He kept his gun on Miss Hall until he had skirted warily around her and reached the door.
‘What an ingrate you are,’ she said, spat after him. ‘And what a fool you are too.’
Outside, the storm vented its fury on the pale little settlement of Magdalena. Hunter opened the palm of his left hand and pried free the glass embedded there in his flesh. He held his hand out palm up and let the deluge rinse it clean. Lastly, he looked up, drawn by a light Miss Hall must have switched on in the spacious drawing room for which Mrs Mallory would never again have a need. He saw her bulky silhouette framed by one of the windows. She seemed to be swaying rhythmically from side to side. He wondered, was this some ritual of grief for her dead adversary in their incomprehensible game? He did not really care to know. It was his ardent wish never to encounter the woman again. He turned and walked on the way out of the town, towards the forest and the camp and to the border and then, blessedly, to home.
Elizabeth Bancroft had her head in her hands. ‘Mark?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why do you think your execution of Mrs Mallory unimportant?’
He was silent before answering. ‘Because it has not lifted the curse,’ he said.
‘Have you ever regretted that you felt obliged to kill a woman?’
‘What makes you think she’s the only woman I’ve killed?’
‘I think she is. Have you ever regretted her execution?’
‘Not for a single moment, Elizabeth. And nor would you have, had you observed the manner of Major Rodriguez’s death.’
Elizabeth sat back in her chair. ‘I use the term execution. I could equally say murder.’
‘You can play all the semantic games with me you want, Doctor Bancroft. I’ve no objection, so long as you fulfil your duty of care to my son.’
She groaned to herself. He was as stubborn as she was. But locking horns was no way to progress. ‘Okay. When exactly did you become aware that this supposedly moribund curse was a live danger to your son?’
He did not answer. Instead, he got up and went out of the room. She waited. She poked in a desultory way at the enfeebled fire. She stopped, only fearing that she was accelerating its death. The night was not warm and they might be up yet a while in it. He returned. He had something flat and rectangular wrapped in tissue paper in his hands. He sat and handed it to her and she revealed the item. It was a framed watercolour. It depicted skaters on a frozen pond. The ice
of the pond had been rendered in a way that made it dance and shimmer with winter cold and the blue weals of the skaters’ blades upon its surface.
‘It’s exquisite,’ Elizabeth said. She looked for a signature, but could see none.
‘He signed them on the reverse side,’ Mark said. ‘He was a self-deprecating man. At least, he was except in battle. In battle, he was bold.’
Elizabeth flicked the picture over in her hands. ‘He sent you this?’
‘No. Peterson was long dead by the time it was sent. I’ve no idea who sent it. I received it a week or so before Adam’s dreams began.’
‘Is it valuable?’
‘That’s hardly the point.’
‘Is it?’
‘Dead painters are not prolific. They’re collectible. Daniel Patrick is very collectible. It’s probably worth thirty or forty thousand pounds.’
Elizabeth sighed. ‘This is way beyond me, Mark.’
‘Just help my son.’
She paused. The telephone rang. Hunter made no movement to answer it.
‘Aren’t you going to get that?’
‘No. I’m not. You can get it for me if you wish.’
She plucked the old-fashioned receiver from its cradle on the table between them. ‘Hello?’ She listened. And then she held out the white ivory of the instrument to Mark Hunter.
He shook his head. ‘I’m taking no calls tonight,’ he said.
‘You might want to take this one, Mark,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s a man, wishing to speak to you. He says his name is Mr Mallory.’
Chapter Four
He took the phone from her. She got up and went to check on Adam. It required nerve to do so after the ordeal of her last audience with the boy. But she did not feel she could eavesdrop on Mark’s conversation with the cold caller. He had confided much in her but had done so through choice, not circumstance. He deserved his necessary privacy now. And he needed no distractions. The call, unexpected, might be vital. The stakes, she knew, were very high. She had believed that after her ordeal earlier in the night in Adam’s bedroom. What Mark had told her only reinforced the conviction. And she had a duty of care to her patient. His father had been right to remind her of that. Mark Hunter was an attractive man and his mystery compelling. But he was not really the point. The boy was the point. He was tormented and she wanted and needed to do everything she could to ease his torment and then rid him of it for good. So she climbed the stairs, filled with trepidation that became a sort of dread as she ascended and the strength and safety of Mark’s orbit, the mundane sanity of the sitting room, the fading comfort of the fire, all receded further from her. She stopped outside Adam’s door. She could hear nothing from within. She extended her fingers towards the door handle. It was iron and tarnished with age and felt icy to the touch. She was not sure if that was just the chill of the fear she felt. She was not sure of very much at all, just then. Downstairs, she could hear Mark’s raised voice as he made some emphatic point to his caller. The substance of the call was genuine. He would have hung up straight away on a crank. And Elizabeth was certain he had mentioned the name of Mallory to no one since his confession to his dead wife on his return from Bolivia a decade ago. That was the only certainty in her mind, as Elizabeth pushed the iron door handle down and entered Adam’s bedroom.
He slept soundly with his duvet pulled up around the knuckles of the small fist he held to his face. His expression looked untroubled. The temperature in the room seemed normal. It was cold, but no colder than it should have been in Scotland in the late autumn in an old stone house high on a remote hill. By the light on the landing, through the open bedroom door, she looked at his things on their shelves; at his collection of Alex Ryder novels, his jigsaws and assembled Airfix kits, a scale model tank that worked by remote control, and his Eye Witness series picture books on the Titanic and the Victorians and the Glory of Ancient Rome. There was a jar of marbles and some AAA batteries and half a tube of Maynards Wine Gums. It was the innocent paraphernalia of a ten-year-old boy. And she thought that Mrs Mallory, whoever or whatever she was, must be a creature of infinite cruelty and spite. And she wondered, was the caller on the phone downstairs claiming to be a widowed husband or a motherless son? She did not think he would claim to be Mrs Mallory’s father. Mark had put the woman’s age at about thirty-five. But listening to his description of her, Elizabeth had suspected she was a great deal longer in the tooth than he supposed.
She thought his powers of description extraordinary for a common soldier. But then he had not really been a soldier of the common sort. None of them had – not him nor Rodriguez nor Peterson. Special Forces required special men and they had all clearly been remarkable in their way. And the experience he had survived, and they had not, had been extraordinary. It had been, too, an awful ordeal, she thought. Looking at the sleeping boy she wondered, what dawning horror had compelled a man with Captain Peterson’s store of cynical courage to take his own life with such bleak haste?
Elizabeth felt relieved that Adam slept with such serenity. But she also felt a growing sense of anxiety at a detail Mark had related in his account. He had described something. And it had brought to mind a thing both fearful and familiar to her. His description left her feeling the need to travel to somewhere she knew very well and study the thing afresh. She did not want to confront it. It was a thing that had stirred uneasiness in her all her life. But she felt she had to. She could not practically do so of course until tomorrow. But as soon as she could tomorrow, she resolved, she would. She became aware the conversation downstairs had stopped. She took a last look at her patient, at his beautiful head serene on the pillow. She smiled and whispered a brief blessing over him and turned and left the room.
‘Husband or son?’ she asked Mark as she entered the sitting room.
‘How is Adam?’
‘He’s sleeping peacefully. Well?’
‘Whoever he was, he did not persist with the pretence, once he knew he had my attention. He was a messenger. He called himself an emissary, but he was just a messenger with an appetite for pomp.’
‘Emissaries usually represent people of great importance, don’t they?’
‘Or people of great self-importance,’ Hunter said.
‘Well, Mark. Are you going to tell me?’
‘Is it too late, do you think, for a drink?’
She smiled at him. ‘In this country you will learn, if you stay, to think that a redundant question.’
Her emissary had claimed to speak on behalf of Miss Hall. She was in Switzerland, and she wanted urgently to see him.
‘Our encounter took place over a decade ago. And she speaks of urgency?’ Hunter had said to the self-styled emissary.
‘She knows what is happening to your son, Colonel Hunter.’
‘Then she will know how reluctant I am to leave him.’
They had kept up. They knew about his elevation in rank. But then, somehow they knew the unlisted phone number too.
‘She is dying, Colonel Hunter. That is why it is so urgent that you come. And I am instructed to promise you this. Your son will not dream in your absence in Switzerland.’
‘She can stop it?’
There was a pause. ‘She can delay it. She can defer it, Colonel Hunter. And you will come. We both know you have no choice.’
‘Don’t I?’
‘You love your son. You love him very much. And he is all you have left.’
The fire had pretty much died. Elizabeth shivered and sipped at her whisky. ‘What time will you leave?’
He looked at his watch. Friday had gone. It was just after 2 a.m. on Saturday now. ‘She has requested I attend an audience arranged for Monday evening. I can get a flight from Edinburgh to Geneva on Monday morning. If I take an early flight I’ll have plenty of time. But first I will have to arrange care for Adam. I cannot possibly take him with me. I have seen what these people are capable of. Miss Hall might well be dying. The man on the phone might well be her emissary, and she may b
e gravely ill as he says. But even if that is true, I cannot take Adam with me. These people possess great and malevolent powers and I don’t want him exposed to the risk of the terrible things they can do.’
‘He’s already a victim of what they can do,’ she said.
‘At a remove, yes, he is. But I don’t want him anywhere near them physically.’
Elizabeth thought. ‘I can’t stay with him in the day, Mark. I have a practice to run, patients to attend to. A disproportionate number of them are elderly and isolated. And it would take me a few days at least to organise a locum. But I do know of two very good agency child minders. One of them could prepare his meals and get him to school and back and launder his clothes. One of them at least is likely to be available. If you are prepared to pay for her services, I will stay here with Adam at night until your return.’
‘You’ll really do that?’
‘As you said yourself, I have a duty of care.’
‘A duty you would be exceeding, Elizabeth, and by some distance.’
She smiled. ‘As you’ve also said, I have no social life to speak of. It isn’t as though I’d have to rearrange my diary.’
‘I should not have commented on that,’ he said. ‘It was very tactless of me.’
‘But accurate,’ she said. ‘You should be content to take advantage of the fact. Anyway, if I’m honest I’m very pleased to be able to help. He is a sweet boy and if I can comfort and reassure him in your absence I’ll do it gladly.’
He linked his hands and looked down at his glass on the table between them and blinked.
‘You’ll pay for a child minder?’
He nodded. It had been a stupid question. But that was not what had silenced his voice. She realised he was too overwhelmed by gratitude and relief to say anything. He had invested hope in this Switzerland trip. For a moment, she glimpsed the depth of the agonies he was suffering on behalf of his troubled son. She stood and walked round the table that separated them. She lowered her hand to where he sat and cupped the back of his head and stroked downward to his collar. She knelt in front of him and took his linked hands in hers and pulled them gently apart and held them. His hands were warm. She could feel their strength. She could feel the circular ridge of scarring on his left palm where he had pressed a shard of headlamp glass into the flesh, spellbound a decade ago.
