The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  Elizabeth frowned, trying to remember. ‘Something about being safe when the current was strong.’

  ‘I thought it was a metaphysical remark, or some Conradian metaphor to do with a river or something. Major Rodriguez had this poetic side to his character. But I now think he was speaking literally. Miss Hall had ambushed Mrs Mallory. As a magician, she was nothing like a match for her. But she had stacked the odds. Electricity robs Mrs Mallory of her power. I’m sure of it. I think there was a charge running through the chair she sat in and Rodriguez only saw the distress or pain she was suffering and switched it off.’

  ‘Then why did she do what she did to him?’

  ‘He had a gun trained on her. And she took exception to the rosary he had draped across its barrel.’

  Elizabeth pondered on what she had just been told. ‘That’s why she has the electric chair. I think I can work out for myself why she has the guillotine.’

  ‘That was the information provided in Bullock’s letter from the fens to Jerusalem Smith. To kill them you need to cut off their heads.’

  Elizabeth frowned. ‘My own mother is a bone magician and she will die in her bed. Or, God forbid, in a row of her runner beans. I strongly suspect that Lillian could have been one too. And forgive me for reminding you, but she died in a car crash.’

  ‘Your mother has only ever used her powers for good,’ Hunter said. ‘Lillian lived her life oblivious of hers. The thing we call Mrs Mallory has confounded nature and consorted with God knows what dismal creatures. She is greedy and cruel and self-serving and has used her gift to make herself into something other than merely human.’

  ‘Why would she keep the things that can make her weak and kill her so close to home?’

  ‘In tribute to them, perhaps,’ Hunter said. ‘Or maybe she had those instruments put there in defiance of them. The place I went to is a sort of repository of her life. She has stayed there. But I sensed only ever briefly. The bed was barely slept in. She doesn’t live there. There will be nothing so hazardous to her in the Georgian house my son dreams about.’

  ‘There are no Georgian houses in Havana or Cape Town. And in Aberdeen and Edinburgh our Georgian houses are granite and we do not paint them cream,’ Elizabeth said.

  Hunter shrugged. ‘She’s in Boston, then, like I said a moment ago. Or she’s in Philadelphia.’

  ‘She’s much closer to home, Mark. Miss Hall gave you the biggest clue of all when she told you Mrs Mallory likes to party. What is the party capital of the world?’

  Hunter sipped coffee and grimaced. ‘London,’ he said.

  ‘London is where we will find her.’

  He did not comment on this last remark. But he thought it more likely than not. And the plural was not lost on him.

  When Adam got up and had eaten his breakfast, his father took him out to walk in the snow. The boy had dreamed again and wanted to unburden himself. Before they left, after lacing on his boots, Hunter took the sled from where it hung on a hook in its cupboard near the door. He never forgot that Adam was a boy and that boys like to play, Elizabeth thought. He was a good father and he loved his son. She realised then how much he must miss the daughter he had lost and never talked about. Not for the first time, she was aware that Adam was all that Mark Hunter had. If Adam died, she knew then with certainty that his father would not survive the loss. They would both perish.

  It was Friday morning. She called the locum to make sure that everything was alright at the surgery and with her patients. The snow would be keeping most of them out of harm’s way but someone might have had a fall and the winter killer, flu, was always a possibility in so cold an autumn as this was proving to be. He responded to the call cheerfully. There were no tragedies or catastrophes she need concern herself about. Curious after her initial shock, she then went to the shelf in his study where Hunter kept Lillian’s collection of children’s books. She wanted to take a closer look at Walter the Wolf. She had been dismayed and horrified by Judge Smith’s account of the beast with which her ancestor had consorted. And her mother had said she possessed occult powers of her own. And of course, there was her appearance. But she had never knowingly entertained a lupine thought in her life. She didn’t think she had even seen a real-life specimen at the zoo.

  Lillian could not blame an illustrator for the appearance of her fictional creature. She had done the illustrations in this series herself. Walter was ugly and scary. His insecurity made him a liability in social situations. His anxiety to pass as human was a theme running through the stories. It was intended to be humorous. But Elizabeth did not think it was funny at all. Children invested the characters they read about with their own generous instincts. Elizabeth thought Barney the dinosaur a total wuss but children adored him. The Thomas the Tank Engine stories were enduringly popular despite the catty, spiteful and peevish natures of most of the trains involved in them. Children were forgiving of the fiction they read.

  With Walter, there was a lot to forgive. His teeth were a jumble of fangs that meant that he dribbled when he tried to drink from a cup and drooled, struggling to grip a knife and fork between clumsy paws when he ate. Because his coat of coarse hair was more than adequate to keep him warm, he sweated excessively when he assumed the conceit of human clothing. Despite his desire to pass, Walter was not keen on personal hygiene and this was the bit that the children probably loved, Elizabeth thought. He would go to comic lengths to avoid a bath or shower and used cologne to cover the resulting stink. He lived grandly on an inherited hoard of gold coins he would retrieve from a chest buried in his back garden when he needed money to spend. He resided in a grand Georgian house in Cleaver Square in Kennington on the south side of the Thames in London. There was a pub in the north-west corner of the square but Walter was banned from that. Lillian did not bother to say for what. It was probably just expedient to ban her character from the pub, Elizabeth thought. Pubs were an environment young children knew little and cared less about. Their interiors were a slog to draw, with all that detail.

  Walter’s big secret was cannibalism. He was partial to eating other wolves. It was inferred that he had eaten his parents prior to leaving home. He maintained the pretence that his favourite meal was mozzarella pizza. But what he really liked was wolf. Dog would do at a stretch and, from time to time, he made do with strays. These were never drawn by Lillian. Elizabeth thought her too shrewd to run the risk that the victims might look cute, thus upsetting her young readers and alienating them from horrible, creepy Walter.

  His saviour was Miss Kutznetsov, his vampy Russian housekeeper. Lillian had written these stories a full decade before the Eastern Europeans began to come in numbers to Britain to work and live. So Miss Kutznetsov’s nationality was a novelty rather than a cliché. She kept Walter calm and civilised when his lupine instincts threatened to overwhelm him (and her). She did it by playing the piano for him. More than any other music, Walter’s anxieties were eased by listening to her play Mahler in the drawing room of his grand and spacious home.

  Elizabeth replaced the books. She was pretty sure that Cleaver Square was a real place. She had read an article once she vaguely remembered about someone famous who lived there. The similarities between Lillian’s books and Adam’s dreams were too striking for them to be coincidental. Adam must surely have read the books. Either he had stored these stories somewhere in his subconscious mind and they were inspiring and influencing the dreams he had. Or they were Lillian’s clue from the grave as to where they would find the sorceress tormenting her son. Mallory as a name was a long way from Kuznetsov. But Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was a long way from the present day. Elizabeth would have bet there and then that Mallory had been Kuznetsov once.

  She switched on Hunter’s computer and did a Google search. Cleaver Square’s famous resident was the actress Greta Scacchi, who had lived there for a time in the 1980s. The pub on its north-west corner was called the Prince of Wales. The Richardson gang had used it as their local when they were the south of
the river rivals to the Kray brothers’ gang on its northern side in London in the 1960s. Despite this dubious distinction, the Prince of Wales looked very picturesque in the picture she found. The square itself neigh-boured a couple of Kennington’s more notorious sink estates. But it was early Victorian and quite grand and architecturally intact. There was no grass on the tree-lined square itself. Perhaps unusually for London, it was surfaced with gravel.

  Hunter and Adam returned. Hunter made them all lunch. The substance of Adam’s latest dream did not seem to have troubled him as much as some of the others had; he did not look so pale and tired at having endured it. The tobogganing would have put some of the colour back in his cheeks. But he had not dreamed, Elizabeth did not think, of the house in Cleaver Square. She did not want to ask him and thereby force him to relieve the dream for the second time in a day. She would wait to ask his father about its detail later, when Adam had gone to bed. Then too, she would tell Mark Hunter what she thought she had learned from Lillian’s books. She felt very comfortable in the Hunter house. She had thought she might feel embarrassed in the morning after the passion of the previous night. But passion was understandable when two people were attracted to one another. It was human nature. Some of it had been sexual and some of it seeking comfort, and wasn’t that always the way? She did not feel embarrassed about it at all. She was glad it had happened.

  It was about four o’clock in the afternoon and a powdery dusk was putting its blush on the snow outside. Adam was hunched over the chessboard with his father. Elizabeth was making coffee, having mastered the complex machine men of a certain type always seemed to think essential if you wanted to brew it properly. She was thinking about Cleaver Square. She thought the name itself quite sinister. It was the Cleaver part of course. A cleaver was what a butcher used to chop his meat. And a memory hit her with such force and vividness that she gasped aloud and dropped the glass coffee jug to explode on the stone floor. ‘Oh, God,’ she said. ‘Oh, God.’ She brought her hand up to her mouth to stifle the sounds of her own mounting panic and horror. Hunter rushed into the kitchen and skidded on shards of shattered glass. Her hand was trembling, the fingers shaking where she held them over her face. She had to get a hold of herself. She did not want her obvious distress to frighten the child. She closed her eyes and opened them again and focused on the darkening snowfield through the window. Hunter put his hands on her shoulders from behind her and she grasped for them.

  ‘I’ve remembered something, from Grozny,’ she said.

  Adam walked into the kitchen, a bewildered look on his face at the crunching sound his shoes were making under him.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ Elizabeth whispered.

  She cleaned up the mess with Hunter’s help and made more coffee. Gradually, her composure returned to her. Later they went to the Black Boar for dinner. It was Elizabeth’s suggestion, an attempt to break the monotony of the white world that had surrounded Adam. He was not yet fit for school in her estimation, but he needed social stimulation and the large dining area of the child-friendly pub early on a Friday evening was a lot better than nothing. She didn’t want him to feel trapped by his nightmares. She didn’t want him to think he was somehow under siege, she thought, reminded with a shiver of dread of the memory dredged up from Grozny again.

  Hunter had looked uncomfortably at his son when she had suggested dinner at the pub. She saw the tightness of anxiety in his expression. But Adam was enthusiastic enough. He rode shotgun in the Land Rover on the way there by special request. His father barrelled and churned through the snow at the wheel and Elizabeth saw the chance to break the somewhat sombre mood that seemed to have settled on the adults, if not the boy.

  ‘Do you think your dad a better driver than Jeremy Clarkson, Adam?’

  ‘Of course I am,’ Hunter said, getting it straight away. ‘He’s not a driver at all. He’s light entertainment. Apparently, he’s only got a provisional licence.’

  ‘He’s a brilliant driver,’ Adam said, outraged.

  ‘And your dad?’

  ‘Good,’ Adam said. ‘But to be perfectly honest with you, he is a bit of a show-off.’

  The atmosphere had lightened immediately and it stayed that way unforced throughout their meal. Adam was exhausted, though. Elizabeth assumed that had probably been Hunter’s intention in taking him out for their long adventure earlier in the day in the snow. He fell asleep across the back seat on the drive home. Hunter looked at him in the cabin mirror and turned the heater down as soon as he went off. The heat was soporific. There was a definite plan here, Elizabeth thought. It was why Mark had insisted Adam have a pee, whether he needed one or not, before they set off back to the house.

  ‘You’re good at fatherhood.’

  ‘Thanks.’ He glanced at her. ‘Do you mean that?’

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘Because I don’t think you could pay me any greater compliment.’

  She thought about his medals. She thought about the line from Eliot he had quoted to her back when they had been strangers. She did not speak again until they had returned to the house and he had carried Adam upstairs to bed and they were sitting in opposing armchairs with the large whisky he had poured for each of them.

  ‘Why doesn’t Mrs Mallory just kill you, if she thinks you are a threat to her?’

  ‘You have to remember what she said about her curse. When I begged her to lift it at Magdalena? She said her curse makes the world a more interesting place.’ He sipped whisky. ‘She’s enjoying herself, toying with us. She doesn’t think me a threat at all.’

  ‘She tried to kill you in Austria.’

  Hunter shook his head. ‘A member of her retinue tried to kill an intruder using the dogs that guard the place. It wasn’t personal. If it had been, she’d have succeeded.’

  ‘I think I know where to find her.’

  ‘You told me, Elizabeth. You think she’s in London.’

  ‘I think I know specifically. The clue is in Lillian’s books.’

  Hunter seemed to ponder this. He reached forward to the grate and poked at the fire until the logs flared and crackled, burning with fresh vigour. ‘Tell me about what you remembered today from Grozny,’ he said.

  The Russians had got her out. A platoon of terrified conscripts commanded by a grizzled veteran of the First Afghan War had braved the bombardment to reach her in the cellar where the shocked remnants of her Red Cross unit had taken refuge. The others had opted to stay. Two were Russian nationals and the third an Italian burns specialist in his early thirties. Staying seemed the safer option than going. But Major Oblensky’s platoon did not give her the choice. Her fiancé’s death was terrible publicity. She did not think they had any particular regard for her life. But they did not want her to lose it now, in this savage battle on Russian soil with the world watching so intently.

  The only aircraft flying in Chechnya were fighters and fighter bombers and helicopter gunships. Their first objective seemed to be to get her away from the danger posed by snipers, by stray shells and rocket salvos and friendly fire and minefields. They took her in a flatbed truck to the dense forest region in the low hills to the south-east of the besieged city. She was too stunned by the fact and manner of Peter’s death to have much curiosity about what they intended to do with her eventually. Grief-stricken as she was, it was a relief to get away from the pulverising violence of the bombardment. In the forest the sound of whimpering civilians trapped in their subterranean shelters was replaced by birdsong and only the wind moaned, through the snow-laden branches of the fir trees.

  It was December and bitterly cold. They sheltered in a cabin made from logs with an iron stove at the centre of its single room. The wooden walls were soot-blackened and the window smeared with filth, and in the fuggy warmth of this retreat the men of the platoon would smoke and drink incessantly in the evenings, playing cards or swaying cross-legged on the floor as they sang their lachrymose marching songs by the light of hurricane lamps. And Elizabeth would d
rink with them. They had risked their lives for her, however unwillingly. She needed the company and she craved the anaesthetic of potent drink.

  Modesty obliged that she dig a latrine for herself a fair distance from the cabin. She tried to use it only during the day. There were the sounds of predatory beasts in the forest at night and she naturally feared them. Wolves she feared the most, because their numbers had grown so exponentially since the end of the culls that had controlled them in the old Soviet days. It was a hungry winter. The bears were safely asleep in hibernation. But the wolves of the forests were emboldened. She had gone to use her latrine early one morning when the event her memory had so successfully and for so long repressed took place.

  She was careful about her route. The forest was not only thick but featureless in the sense that every aspect of it looked the same. There were no fallen trees, or streams to act as landmarks or guide her. There was snow on the ground and there were the trunks of trees. Around two of these on the way to her latrine she had tied narrow lengths of surgical tape. Their pale pink was vivid in a hoop against the dark tree bark and signalled her path. Except on this particular day, the second loop of tape was missing. It was alright, because it had not snowed in the night and she was able to follow the impressions left on the ground the previous day by her own feet.

  She had just finished when she sensed that she was not alone. She felt cold, even colder, as though she crouched in the cast of a malevolent shadow. She stood erect and turned and saw it. It stood hugely on a small rise a few feet behind her. It wore a long leather greatcoat above scuffed and enormous Cossack boots. A piece of surgical tape ran taut in the grip of its black gauntlets. Under its peaked cap, it wore the snout and jaw of a wolf and it leered at her and the bright yellow pupils of its eyes gleamed as if with glee. And it let out a low grunt of feral appreciation, cloudy and stinking, expelled into the frozen air. And then it grinned at her.

  Elizabeth fled this impossible vision. They found her two hours later in the snow hole she had scraped from the frozen ground in her terror. Panicked, she had become lost. She was no longer conscious when they recovered her. Later, before she expunged this experience entirely from her mind, she was grateful it was Russian soldiers she had been among. They knew better than any army in the world about the treatment of hypothermia.