The Magdalena Curse

by F. G. Cottam

  ‘I swear not to tell.’

  ‘Elizabeth Bancroft is being monitored. I’m a member of the monitoring panel. We do not believe this is the first instance of its kind.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  Cawdor sipped beer. It was tepid from the grip of his hand and the warm taste of it made him wince. ‘He’s a very special boy, you know. He’s destined for great things, for noble achievements.’

  Mrs Mallory smiled again. ‘He is unless he’s stopped,’ she said. She leaned forward. He found that he could look her in the eye now. He had never been remotely this close to a woman so beautiful. But they had a shared purpose, they were allies and if they were not quite equals, she nevertheless needed and had asked for his help. ‘Buy me that drink, Andrew, and I’ll tell you what it is I would like you to do for me in the morning,’ she said.

  Later, on the walk home, it occurred to him that he had not asked to see her professional credentials or even proof of her identity. He should have done, of course. His own professional caution should have prompted the request. But he wasn’t a professional any more, was he? His professional life lay in ruins thanks to the Bancroft sorceress and her dark ability to influence the police into pursuing inquiries that were really none of their concern. Anyway, he did not doubt Dr Mallory was who she said she was. She knew too much about the circumstances of the case to be anything else. She knew too much about the character of Adam and the specifics of the relationship the boy enjoyed with his father. And her words had throughout possessed the authentic ring of truth.

  He had taken the wrong approach with the Bancroft woman. His efforts at intimidation had been crude and ineffective, largely the brainchild of that witless drunk Tom Lincoln. Tom blamed his drunkenness on an incident involving Margaret Bancroft that he’d witnessed when little more than a child himself. And Dr Mallory was mistaken. The Bancroft women were witches. But you could not blame a trained psychiatrist for her scepticism. And his own approach had involved too much beer and mischief and been too much influenced by an ancient grudge. Dr Mallory’s forensic approach was a much cleaner and more effective way of getting Adam out of Elizabeth Bancroft’s clutches. The only slightly weird bit about it was how exact her prediction was of when the boy would awaken the following morning. She gauged it to the minute and announced it with the flat emphasis of fact.

  Oh, well. She was part of that monitoring panel and perhaps they monitored Adam Hunter’s sleeping patterns. He was glad he was going to play such a crucial role in rescuing such a singular child. Dr Mallory was right, there was something redemptive about it. He slithered home along the packed, snowy pavements of the village, thinking about this. His car was laughed at by the more macho staff members at the school. He drank much more than was good for his liver. He lived in a modest home and the gossips at the Black Boar thought it was amusing to raise questions about his sexuality. But he was about to do something significant and worthwhile.

  When it was done, he would think of some way to take his revenge on Elizabeth Bancroft. He owed it to his ancestry. Once he was sacked, he would have the leisure time to dream up something hurtful and foolproof. It was true what they said. Every cloud had a silver lining. He was off to try to get a good night’s sleep in his little rented flat. Once upon a time the Cawdor name had been one of prosperity and standing in this part of Perthshire. But the family had been cursed and traduced by the Campbell sorceress as he was being now by her descendant. Lavinia Mallory had laughed at the notion of witches and would no doubt laugh at the idea of curses too. Analysis and rationality were the bywords of her discipline, and psychiatry provided her with a very decent livelihood if her wardrobe was anything to go by. Of course she would dismiss the notion of malignant magic. He knew better. He would help her, nevertheless.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Mark Hunter knew his son was missing when he saw Adam’s Meccano construction lying abandoned on the sitting-room floor. Adam never neglected any novelty and the Meccano was certainly that. Hunter had never known him play with the stuff before. He picked it up too stunned in the moment to imagine doing otherwise. He carried it in the cradle of his hands back up the stairs. And he opened the door on an empty bed, still warm, in an empty room.

  The grief in the roar that left his lungs woke Elizabeth like the prod of a tender wound. She rose and flung the covers back and ran out to the source of the sound. He turned to her. He had the complex thing Adam had built the day before held tightly to his chest. She was vaguely aware that she was naked. But she had the feeling that beyond the tears filming his eyes, Mark was seeing only Adam’s absence from their visible world.

  She needed to take charge. He was strong in other circumstances. He knew only one fear in his life, one loss. And it had happened now and he was unmanned by it. She walked across to him. She wrenched the childish object out of his grip. She slapped him hard across the face, again and again, until the glaze of shock left his features. She could not afterwards have counted the blows. She gripped a fistful of his hair and pulled at his head until his eyes met hers. Eventually they did so. And the pain in them was a torment to her and her heart was cleaved for him. But she had to be strong for both of them until he discovered again the will to act.

  ‘You have a sword.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  ‘You own a sword. You were given it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Fetch it now and sharpen it, Mark. Hone the blade. Make it keen. We’re going after her and we’re going to save your precious son and she is going to die.’

  The words had their effect. His posture was suddenly less abject and his focus clarified. He let out a shuddering breath and breathed in again normally. Strength and resolution returned to the set of his jaw. She did not think she had ever seen so much guilt and fear in a man’s expression. He held Adam’s duvet in bunches in his clenched fists. But he had regained a sort of composure.

  ‘Did anything arrive for me yesterday?’

  ‘A parcel did,’ she said. ‘I had to sign for it. There was some tax I had to pay on it too.’

  ‘Good. I’ll need that as well as the sword. We need to go now, right away. The snow is falling and covering any tracks.’ He finally noticed her. She was shivering, it was cold in Adam’s room. ‘You’d better get dressed,’ he said. He lost the focus again momentarily. He looked at the bits and bobs of Adam’s life on the window sill, the books and toys and models there. The grief hitched and hovered, poised like some breaking tidal wave of emotion in his chest. But she knew that there wasn’t time for this. There just wasn’t. She untangled his hands from the bedding and hauled him with all the naked strength she possessed away from the empty room.

  He sharpened the edge of the sword with a whetstone as they walked. She thought that in his greatcoat and boots, he looked like someone might on their way to Moscow in Bonaparte’s misguided winter of invasion. The breath plumed out of him in the white and grey world and the metal glittered in his hands with malice as they followed a set of fading tracks through the downward-leading wilderness. The tracks petered out to nothing on a lane a mile and a half from the house. Hunter continued to look around. The sword was in his belt. He examined the ground with his eyes in the steadily falling snow, absently tearing tape and brown wrapping paper from the thing the FedEx truck had delivered the previous morning. Elizabeth could see no point in this examination of the terrain. There was nothing to look at, the snow blanketed the world and made it featureless.

  ‘Are you learning anything?’

  ‘The stride of the man who took my son puts his height at about five-ten. He doesn’t weigh above eleven stone. He was wearing street shoes and they had leather soles. It was not one of her retinue.’

  ‘It was definitely a man?’

  Hunter nodded. The object he had been sent was revealed now in his hand. He looked at it and then put it and the litter that had wrapped it into separate coat pockets. ‘His car was parked here. It was
a small vehicle with a short narrow wheelbase and tyres ill suited to the ground. Know anyone who drives anything like that?’

  ‘My mother does.’

  ‘Your mother didn’t take him.’

  ‘You’re sure it was a man?’

  He smiled at her. It was an expression without mirth or very much hope. ‘Mrs Mallory doesn’t do treks through winter country. It’s been a long time since she was an outdoor girl. And she doesn’t have size nine feet. Adam followed those feet, stepped into their impressions as I’d taught him to, to save on the effort of pulling his feet free of snow still fresh and unpacked. There’s a kind of intimacy about the practice, if you think about it. He went with someone he trusted.’

  Elizabeth nodded. Of course he had. He would not have gone otherwise, or there would have been a struggle, which would have alerted them. The trail went cold here. They would have been moving again, had it not.

  ‘We should go back for the Land Rover,’ Hunter said. ‘Now we know which road they took, we need a vehicle.’

  ‘We don’t have a clue as to which way to go.’

  Hunter pointed south along the road. ‘They went that way. If we knew who he’d gone with, we’d have some clue as to their destination.’

  Elizabeth did not think this necessarily followed. She did not wish to erode any hope he held. But if this was Mrs Mallory’s work, and it was, the abductor would be following her instructions rather than acting according to habit or character. ‘Should we call the police?’

  ‘Of course we should. We’ll do it the minute we get back to the house.’

  The climb back was hard. The hill was steep and the snow heavy. Elizabeth had never known a fall like it in November. She expected that the coming winter would be long and severe. For Mark Hunter, she feared it might become unbearably cold and desolate. But the arduous test of the climb back to the house was at least a good thing. It would dissipate Hunter’s physical energy. Whether he knew it or not, he needed that. And she did too. The only way of enduring a crisis like this was incrementally, measuring what you did moment by moment, avoiding speculation and fighting the onset of panic and despair with calm deliberation. It was her ordeal as well as his, she thought, as she climbed in Hunter’s wake, in his steadily ascending footsteps. She did not need the tears pricking her eyes to tell her that. As she had come to love the father, so she had come to love the son. Adam was remarkably gifted, as his sad and obnoxious maths teacher had pointed out. But he was also sweet-natured and funny and astonishingly brave.

  ‘Mark?’

  He stopped and turned. She stood up to her knees in snow on the steep incline, her breath panted out in plumes of frozen air, her eyes an intense green against the white landscape, staring out at him from the scarf wrapping her face against the cold. ‘I think I know who took him. I think it was Andrew Cawdor.’

  They increased the pace of their climb. Hunter started to rush. Elizabeth could keep up, just. She had been born here. If Cawdor had taken Adam there was hope. However misguidedly, he had his best interests at heart. They would be on their way to a ferry terminal somewhere. The possibilities were pretty varied. They could be on their way to Germany or Holland or somewhere in Scandinavia. They could be headed to Ireland or the Isle of Man. But their progress on the initial section of their journey, by road, would be slow in such hazardous conditions. And whatever tale Adam had been spun to part him from his father could not be sustained once a port came into sight. He could not be abducted unwillingly. He was too big and strong to be easily subdued by Cawdor and far too conspicuous.

  The phone was ringing when they got back to the house. It was Sergeant Kilbride and his tone was sombre when he asked Hunter could he please speak to Dr Bancroft.

  ‘We have found a body,’ he said.

  Her eyes were on the dead hearth, the unlit fire, its cold ashes flat against the grate. She closed them. It could not be Adam. Kilbride would have broken the news face to face to his father. There would have been a patrol car outside the house. He would have been told in person, that was the protocol and it never altered. ‘Go on.’

  ‘It’s Andrew Cawdor,’ Kilbride said. ‘We’re still awaiting formal identification. Mrs Blyth has agreed to come from her weekend place in Buckhaven for that. She hasn’t arrived yet. But it’s him.’

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘The driver of a gritting lorry saw his car in a drift on the Fort William road and thought to do the Good Samaritan routine. Poor man got the shock of his life.’

  ‘Was Cawdor alone?’

  ‘Aye, he was very alone and very dead.’

  ‘Was there any sign of anyone having left the scene on foot?’

  Kilbride let out a sigh. ‘There was no sign of anything like that. There were no footprints and there was no physical sign of a disturbance of any sort. And some very experienced men attended the scene. It was bizarre, but it wasn’t murder, Elizabeth. It was suicide.’

  ‘Carbon monoxide?’

  ‘No. He didn’t gas himself. I misjudged the man. When we met him, I thought he had quite a lot of self-regard. His choice of clothes and general demeanour with us certainly suggested as much. But he must have loathed himself.’

  ‘How did he choose to die?’

  ‘He bled to death,’ Kilbride said. ‘He bit out his own wrists and bled to death.’

  She put Hunter on to Kilbride to report Adam’s abduction. Kilbride accepted that it was a case of kidnapping without any reservation. Like any good copper he knew the territory and the people on it and he was fully aware of the colonel’s background and capabilities. He listened without comment to Hunter’s account of what they had found that morning and then said, ‘The car is still at the scene. I’ll have a dog tracker team go back there. The dogs are good over snow, the spoor strong, as you probably know, Sir.’

  ‘Yes,’ Hunter said. He knew the policeman was a friend of Elizabeth’s and knew the man was trying to keep the pessimism out of his voice. But he wasn’t really succeeding. The signs were ominous and he was too experienced an officer not to see them.

  ‘We’ll need something carrying Adam’s scent. Probably easier if we get that from the school.’

  ‘It’s Sunday, Sergeant.’

  ‘And this is a small community, Sir. We can get keys from the caretaker or there’ll be a set at the fire station in the village. Is there anything there?’

  Hunter coughed to clear his throat and fought to restrain himself. ‘His PE kit,’ he said. ‘It’s in a bag in his locker.’

  When the conversation was concluded, Hunter had to go outside for a few minutes. He went out of the kitchen door. He felt properly grateful for the way Elizabeth had brought him back to himself after the discovery that morning, but he needed a moment now. His heart was heavy and his conscience burdened him with a weight he could not carry. He could not escape the conviction that he had condemned his son. His blundering at Magdalena and his arrogant dismissal of the curse in the years that followed had finally robbed his son of his chance at life. It was his fault. He was entirely to blame. Adam’s face, under its halo of curls, painted itself on his mind and he sank to his knees and wept as he had not wept even at the graveside on the awful day when his wife and daughter were buried together. He had needed to be strong then. He had needed to be strong for Adam. Now Adam had gone, and with him had gone the source of his strength.

  Elizabeth watched Hunter through Adam’s bedroom window. She wanted to go to him, but there was no consolation she could offer. Despair would hit and sometimes engulf him in waves. In these awful circumstances, that was inevitable. But he was a strong man with a formidable will and, until confronted with the proof that hope was futile, he would just have to endure periods like this. Whatever he was feeling now and however bad the eventual outcome, he would not give up until he found his son.

  She looked around the room. She had come up here not out of any morbid desire to surround herself with Adam’s keepsakes, but because her intuition insisted the
re was some clue, some key she had missed that was important in the resolution of all this. She looked at his posters and his painted Airfix kits and PSP player, at the spare Duracells and the Hot Wheels cars and the boot-sale dice in their leather cup and the general clutter on his shelves. She looked at the spines of his Eye Witness books about Brunel and the Titanic and Ancient Rome and the Apollo moon landings. There was something here. She was sure there was. But wherever the clue lay, she had not discovered it yet.

  She looked down out of the window. She was relieved to see that Hunter was back on his feet, wearily dusting the snow from his knees, wiping his eyes. She would go out to him now.

  ‘Adam is alive, Mark.’

  He smiled at her. She thought the effort terrible. ‘Why do you think that? You’re familiar with her curse concerning my son. Why would you imagine there are grounds for hope?’

  ‘I’m not blinded by sentiment. I think he’s alive only because Adam is the bait. She promised she and I would meet. Why would I risk going otherwise? And she wants revenge on you for the slight of Magdalena. She wants to lure you to her too.’

  ‘Isn’t the curse revenge enough?’

  ‘No. Not for her, it isn’t.’

  ‘What do you propose we do?’

  ‘We do the hardest thing of all, for a man like you. We wait. We wait for her call. And, believe me, she will call.’

  He thought she was scarier in the flesh than in his dreams of her. In his dreams he had only overheard her and seen her from a distance. In the flesh, she was three-dimensional and he could smell her scent. There was the brown stain between two of her fingers. There was the hard glitter of the stones set in her rings and on the necklace around her throat. There was the audible clack of her high heels on the stone of the floor whenever she got up and moved. There was the sculpted thickness of her crimson lipstick. They were sharing a small room and she kept staring at him in a way that made him feel uncomfortable at first and then really frightened.