by F. G. Cottam
He showed no trepidation climbing up the stairs. Elizabeth supposed he had inherited his father’s courage as well as his physical endurance. But perhaps that was actually doing the boy an injustice. His demons might not be his own, but the fortitude he had shown in dealing with them surely was. She tucked him in and kissed him on the cheek. He turned his head and closed his eyes and she looked above where he lay at the shelf of books there.
He had almost the complete set of the Eye Witness series. She saw the one about the Titanic, which had photographs of the vessel taken by a submersible, quiet and still and gravely enormous in the fathomless depths to which it had sunk. She saw the one about the Apollo space missions, which had a picture of a cold and pitted moon on its cover. She looked at his other bits and pieces; the toy cars and discarded batteries and the Swiss Army knife and a set of fake joke-shop teeth and a tarnished leather cup with a pair of antique ivory dice he must have bought with his pocket money at a car boot sale. A sudden and intense feeling of anger overcame her then. This boy had been robbed of the right to dream with the happy freedom other children did. A vital part of him had been stolen. She shivered, though it was warm in the Hunter house. And she turned and left as Adam descended into what she hoped would be a deep and untroubled night of sleep.
She switched on the computer downstairs just to catch up on her email. She was pretty tired and thought she would not be long in following Adam up to bed. She had been sent something by the British Library late the previous afternoon. It was an addendum to the document they had dispatched her already. She opened it. It wasn’t very long. She printed it off and took it into the sitting room to read.
I write this only because I fear my time is short and wish to die with my conscience clear and no secret unrevealed and festering to trouble my immortal soul. I have said that the witch Ruth Campbell was removed from the scaffold and dealt with according to the protocols laid down by Bullock in his urgent missive from the Fens. And this was eventually so. But I was guilty of perjuring myself in my previous account of the event. I told the truth. But I did not tell the whole truth about what did occur.
The corpse of the Campbell woman had been taken from the gibbet and buried a full week by the time Bullock’s letter came to me. It was plain from the contents that we were obliged to carry out the distasteful ritual of disinterment. It was done on my part with a heavy heart. My instinct was to leave the dead to lie in peace. But Bullock’s instructions were most emphatic and precise and I dared not fail in their execution.
We were compelled to sever the head from the body. An axe had been procured with which to carry out this grisly necessity. A stout veteran by the name of Jones had volunteered to deliver the blow. He had never used so cruel an instrument on flesh. But clearance had been his civil occupation and left him facile with an axe between his hands. She looked like sleep when we removed the winding sheet. Jones touched the blade to the spot to true his aim before raising the axe. The keen edge of the blade pricked the skin of her neck and her eyes opened with a start. She snarled as Jones dropped the axe in shock and she sat upright and naked pale. She spoke my name. I drew my own sword and cut off her head with a single clean stroke. And the head did speak then from the floor, cursing me. And only after did the witch perish and with the two parts of her bloody and at peace in their final mutilation.
I believe that in the time of her trial, grief for the creature with which she had cavorted made her indifferent to her own fate. But it would have come to what remained of her mind in time that she had not died on the gallows. She would have crawled from her grave and resumed her mischief. What we did was fully justified by need. But the cost to me has been a heavy one. I am visited by the black visions that precede a seizure of the brain. That was her curse. I pray only it is fatal when it comes. I would not be left a dribbling fool enduring only as a burden to my wife.
My affairs are settled and my widow will not want for comfort. My children are grown and fair. I am content I did my duty to the Commonwealth, the Lord Protector and my God. I do not indulge the sin of feeling pity for myself. I have lived through a great and eventful moment. I would have been spared the revelations of these last few weeks, but cannot in truth complain about my lot. Nothing matters more than I face my Maker with my conscience unsullied and the last of the words committed here are written now in the belief I do.
In God and in His truth,
Josiah Jerusalem Smith.
Cleaver Square was suddenly more salubrious than the streets he had just risked. No one haunted the pavements. He made for the Prince of Wales pub. There was music playing inside. It was Duke Ellington, ‘Take the “A” Train’. The pub was very hot and crowded and it was a jostle to get to the bar. When he did get there and had been served a pint of beer, he looked around. He thought that maybe he had stumbled into a stag party or a themed night. But there were too many women present for a stag do. Most of the men were wearing black tie. The women, for the most part, had on cocktail frocks and more make-up than he could remember having seen slapped on since the early 1980s, when he had been a callow youth. There were pillbox hats and hats with veils and elbow-length gloves. People were smoking in the pub and they were not doing it furtively. The air was bitter with smoke. Almost everyone seemed to be drunk.
‘What’s your story, pilgrim?’ the man next to him at the bar said.
Hunter didn’t like conversations casually struck up in pubs with strangers. He didn’t particularly like being called pilgrim, either. But he decided on the path of least resistance. He could not afford to be conspicuous.
‘Just fancied a pint,’ he said. ‘And I wanted to get out of the rain.’
The man smiled. His teeth were discoloured. Hunter noticed that the collar of his dress shirt was rimed with dirt and the satin lapels of his jacket greasy in the light from the bar. ‘You’re telling me you came in here on the off-chance?’
Hunter took a sip of his beer. It tasted brackish. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
But the fellow seemed momentarily to have forgotten him. Two men over by the entrance to the Gents had begun to fight. They were clumsy and inept and it went straight away to the floor where they bit and gouged in a tangle of limbs. Hunter’s new acquaintance pushed his forefinger and thumb into his mouth and let out a piercing, celebratory whistle. But the combatants were becoming exhausted and feeble, already spent. One of them started to vomit copiously, and the other tried to escape his grip and scramble out of range of the bucketing puke.
The whistler at the bar remembered Hunter. And he remembered what Hunter had just said to him and frowned. ‘No one comes in here on the off-chance, pilgrim,’ he said.
‘Are you telling me this place is a private club?’
The man opened his mouth to reply and then hesitated because a woman behind him was now tapping him on the back. Hunter looked around him at her. She wore thick foundation that failed to conceal acne scars and eye shadow so deep it made the sockets they shaded into blue caverns. And blue was the wrong colour. Her eyes were brown. ‘He says it’s fifty,’ she said.
‘It’s forty,’ the man said back to her.
‘He says it’s fifty now.’
‘Forty’s my limit. Offer him a hand job to make up the difference. A blow job, if he says no.’
She pouted and turned and walked unsteadily away. Hunter had time only to see that the stockings were laddered above her red stilettos before she disappeared in the throng. He put down his glass.
‘Leaving already, pilgrim?’ his new friend said.
‘Out of my league,’ Hunter said. ‘This place is far too sophisticated for me.’
If anything it was raining harder when he got outside. He looked around. Cleaver Square wasn’t square at all. It was a quite narrow rectangle. Most of its houses occupied two long Georgian terraces that faced one another on either side of the strip of gravel between them and the trees surrounding it. The square was dark as well as wet, the gravel puddled, the trees tall and drippi
ng gloomily. But it was not difficult as he walked to identify Mrs Mallory’s address. He had Adam’s detailed description of its façade and Green Man door knocker. When he saw that, he saw also that the houses to either side of hers were both for sale. He was not surprised at this. She had been in London for a while. It must be tough to be a next-door neighbour of the hottest, coolest party hostess in town.
Her house was dark. His instinct told him that she was not at home. He had known she was there at her home a dozen years ago at Magdalena. He felt her absence from this place now as surely as he had felt her presence then. Of course it was possible she could be at one of the darkened windows, receded just far enough into the shadows around her to be invisible. She could be watching him. But he did not think she was. He felt afraid of what he was going to find in the house. But Mrs Mallory tonight was doing her own fearful business somewhere else.
Hunter made his observations without pausing or even appearing to look towards the address he intended to enter. The garrulous loser who had spoken to him in the pub could be outside it now, just as curious as to what he was doing in the neighbourhood as he’d been about his presence in the Prince. There could be alert eyes on the other side of the square. These handsome houses were obvious targets for burglary, given the sink estate poverty that pervaded elsewhere in Kennington. He did not have a convenient set of keys conjured into existence by his erstwhile ally Miss Hall. He would have to scale the wall at the far corner of the terrace and steal through a series of gardens to reach the point where he could get through a back door or window. He was well qualified for this sort of work. But you were only ever successful at it if you were extremely careful. The weather was on his side. The rain meant thick cloud cover and that meant no moon. He had gained the end of the terrace. He looked around once more and prepared to climb.
Because the house was dark it would have to stay that way. His eyes would have to adjust and a meagre pen light was all he could risk beyond his night vision. He doubted Mrs Mallory subscribed to the local Neighbourhood Watch scheme. She wasn’t really the type. But he would have bet the people living on the other side of the square in the houses facing hers did. He stood in her kitchen and waited for the darkness around him to clarify into something more detailed and paler. When it did, he looked at a room that never properly functioned. The glass-fronted cupboards were empty of provisions. There was a light sheen of dust on the hotplates. The sink too wore a patina of dry neglect. He did not open the fridge because he could not risk the brightness of its interior bulb. But his hunch was that it would contain ice cubes, champagne, white wine and possibly vodka. There would be no food. What Mrs Mallory’s guests consumed came from an outside caterer. Just as she wasn’t much of a neighbour, he did not suppose she was much of a homemaker either.
Her drawing room wore the chill of a mausoleum. There was a waxy smell of polished furniture and the bulk of the concert grand with the bronze bust of Brooke on top of it. He thought there were poets whose themes were far better suited to her character and inclinations. Eliot and Yeats were much more her style. In the pale cast of streetlight through the window he could see the spot where she had stood for her Dietrich moment. Or perhaps it had been her Garbo moment. That would surely have been what Lucien Hope had in mind. Fashion stylists thought in visual clichés. They referenced everything. But the effect of the photograph had been to out-glitter either star, in truth. There was still a single rose petal curled and atrophied like a withered fingernail on the floor.
Her library was his real destination. That was the focus of the house in the dreams that tormented his son. And he was intent upon it. But curiosity took him firstly up the stairs. He knew from her keep in the Tyrol that she did sometimes sleep. He climbed the uncarpeted steps with practised stealth. He was beginning to appreciate the incredible power of seduction she possessed. The house was dismal with menace in her absence. Her willing presence was all that must make it tolerable for her guests. More than tolerable, they found it thrilling. She dazzled and toyed with them. He climbed. When he reached the landing he sniffed the chilly air. Perfume betrayed her. He followed the scent of Jicky cologne into the open-doored maw of a spacious room. Her spoor was here. Her cold intimacy lay about the place in strewn underwear and rumpled sheets. The curtains were closed in heavy velvet folds and he thought he could risk his pen light. Its thin beam fingered gossamer negligees and brassieres filigreed with lace. She wore only black or ivory against her skin and favoured silk and satin. He went over to the bed and pulled off the wrinkled counterpane. There was no odour of sex. Yet she attired herself at night in a manner bound to stir arousal. Did she have lovers? Perhaps she lived in the night-time on the memory of sex. There was a bedside cabinet from the top of which rose the acrid odour of a heaped ashtray. He squatted down and opened the cabinet door. Ampoules of some clear liquid sat in a neat row in a wooden rack beside an old-style steel and glass syringe. There was no blood on the needle.
There was a high double-fronted wardrobe against the wall opposite the bedroom window. Its doors wore a lavish walnut burr. When he opened it, the space within was hung only with dresses. She must keep her coats elsewhere, he thought. And her accessories, her shoes and gloves and bags and scarves. All of her dresses were black and when he stretched with his pen light to look at their labels many of them rustled with sewn beads and brocade. There were no real surprises. She favoured Chanel and Dior and Schiaparelli. He sniffed at the fabrics, but they were not musty and old. And there were some of the newer couture names Lillian had liked to spoil herself buying when the money from the books had started coming in. Mrs Mallory sometimes wore Katharine Hamnett and Bill Blass. It was just the colour, or lack of it, that never varied.
He walked into her bathroom. Here the smell of perfume was stronger. What looked at first in the darkness like an open door leading off somewhere else was in fact a full-length mirror. The mirror was disconcerting. Hunter did not want to dwell on what its depths might reflect. He took in soft white towels folded over a chrome rail and a large bathtub veined in purple marble. From the sink, there was the rhythmic lisp of a dripping tap. On a shelf above the sink there were nail clippers, tweezers and an uncapped Chanel lipstick with a waxy peak that looked black in the absence of light. It would be red of course. Mrs Mallory habitually wore red on her lips.
It was time to face his demon. It took him about ten minutes to pick the lock securing the library door. It was a complex mechanism and it did not help that he was rushing things. Where calm deliberation was called for, he was now edgy. She could always come home. He looked at his watch but his watch had stopped. He remembered his grope through the canvas labyrinth in Magdalena, where his watch had also stopped. Then, Mrs Mallory had distorted time, Miss Hall had told them. While he blundered in that dark limbo with Peterson, Rodriguez had been given the leisure to gnaw his hands to the wrists. Hunter’s own hands were not so steady now as they had been when he’d held them out to discourage the crack addict from the thought of attacking him in the street earlier in the evening. And the palms were sweating. He wiped them on his thighs, crouched before the lock and heard its final click of release and rose and opened the library door.
The seated creature of Adam’s dreams was enormous. Its stillness on its wooden throne added to the impression of its size. It looked somehow poised and alert. It was clothed in the same grey uniform it had worn when he glimpsed it in the staff car in the film of Mrs Mallory in that summer in Berlin. He closed the library door softly behind himself and studied it. He approached it. And then it shifted and moved and he was not in the least surprised. He would hear the strain of the leather that shod its huge feet as it rose and the stiff boots took its weight and it strode forward, covering the distance between them. Dread engulfed him and he tensed and reached for the weapon he did not possess. But the impression of movement had been caused by the beam of a car headlamp on the street outside, travelling through the square and sweeping through the closed drapes over the library win
dow. It was no more than a trick of the light. Hunter swallowed and came closer to the beast. Adam was right. Its boots were of grotesque size. So were its hands, sheathed in leather gauntlets and maintaining a firm grip in death on the carved arms of its throne.
And it was dead, wasn’t it? ‘Mr Mallory, I presume,’ Hunter said. But the bravado felt entirely hollow and he dreaded the reply his crass jibe might just have provoked. None came. The yellow eyes in the creature’s great head stared glassily at nothing. Its long jaw was set in a mocking leer. Instinct told him not to turn his back on it. But he would have to, if the library was to reveal its secrets to him.
Her desk was an antique item of the roll-top sort and it was locked. But unpicking this lock was the work of only a moment. He revealed a clutter of papers and books. The books had been written by hand rather than printed. Scribes had done the work. Two of them were bound in what he strongly suspected was human skin, dried and cured for the purpose. He sighed to himself and opened one of them. Its pages were filled with runic symbols, some antique language he did not understand but suspected he had heard spoken by the vessel she had made his son when her curse was inflicted and he dreamed on her behalf.
The papers were sketches of colossal public buildings. There were figures in them drawn to show their oppressive, monumental scale. Hunter recognised none of them. There were sketched symbols too, motifs that were subtly reminiscent of the swastika and SS lightning strikes, of the brutal iconography of a time she no doubt remembered with nostalgic fondness. And he knew why it was he did not recognise the buildings. None was from the past. He thought of what Lucien Hope had said about Mrs Mallory’s soirées. He was looking at the blueprints for the future she planned.
